The present & Amor fati

According to Epictetus, the goal of the discipline of desire was that we not be frustrated in our desires, nor fall into that which we had been trying to avoid. In order to realize this goal, we had to desire only that which depends upon us—that is, the moral good—and flee only from that which depends on us: in this case, moral evil. That which does not depend on us is the realm of the indifferent: we must not desire it, but we must not flee from it either, for if we do we risk “falling into what we are trying to avoid.” Epictetus, we noted, linked this attitude to our consent to Destiny.

Marcus Aurelius takes up this doctrine point for point, yet in his writings its implications and its consequences appear more clearly and explicitly. Above all, the discipline of desire in Marcus is related first and foremost to the way in which we are to greet the events which result from the overall movement of universal Nature, which are produced by what Marcus calls the “exterior cause” (VIII, 7):

Rational nature (that is, the nature peculiar to human beings) follows the path which is appropriate to it… if it has desires and aversions only for that which depends upon us, and if it greets with joy all that common Nature allots to it.

What is thus allotted to human nature is nothing other than the events which happen to it (III, 16, 3):

The proper characteristic of the good man is to love and to greet joyfully all those events which he encounters (ta sumbainonta), and which are linked to him by Destiny.

We have already seen that, for the Stoics, what is present for me is that which is currently happening to me: in other words, not merely my current actions, but also the present event with which I am confronted. Here again, as in the case of the present in general, it is my thought and my attention which singles out from the flux of things that which has meaning for me; at which point my inner discourse will declare that such-and-such an event is happening to me. Moreover—whether I know it or not—the overall movement of the universe, set in motion by divine Reason, has brought it about that I have been destined, from all eternity, to encounter such-and-such an event. This is why I have translated the word sumbainon (etymologically “that which goes together [with]”), which Marcus customarily uses to denote that which happens, by the phrase “the events which we encounter.” To be still more precise, one would have to translate this as “the event which adjusts itself to us,” but such an expression cannot always be used. This is, however, precisely the meaning which Marcus gives to the word sumbainon (V, 8, 3):

We say that events are fitting to us (sumbainein), just as masons say that the square stones they use in walls or in pyramids “fit each other” (sumbainein), when they are well-adapted to each other in a given combination.

The imagery of the construction of the edifice of the universe is reinforced by that of weaving. The interweaving of the woof and the warp was a traditional, archaic image, linked to the figure of the Moirai, who, as early as Homer, spun the destiny of each human being.11 The three Parcai, named Lachēsis, Clothō, and Atropos, appear—first in the Orphic Derveni papyrus,12 and then in Plato13 and the Stoics—as the mythical figures of the cosmic law which emanates from divine Reason. The following is a testimony to the Stoic doctrine:14

The Moirai (or “Parts”) are so named because of the process of separation (diamerismos) which they carry out: Clothō (“the spinner”), Lachēsis (“she who distributes the lots”), and Atropos (“the inflexible one”). Lachēsis is so called because she distributes the lots which individuals have received according to justice; Atropos [gets her name] because the division of the parts is unchangeable in any of its details, and is immutable since eternal time. Finally, Clothō is so named because the distribution takes place in accordance with Destiny, and that which occurs reaches its end in conformity with what she has spun.

Another testimony gives voice to approximately the same representations:15

The Moirai get their name from the fact that they distribute and assign things to each one of us…. Chrysippus suggests that the number of the Moirai corresponds to the three times in which all things have their circular movement, and by means of which all things achieve their completion. Lachēsis is so called because she attributes to each human being his or her destiny; Atropos is so called because of the immutable and unchanging character of the distribution; and Clothō is so called because of the fact that all things are woven and linked together, and that they can travel only one path, which is perfectly well-ordered.

The “events which I encounter,” and which “adjust themselves to me” have been woven together with me by Clothō, the figure of Destiny or universal Reason (IV, 34):

Abandon yourself willingly to Clothō; let her weave you together with whatever event she pleases.

Marcus Aurelius is fond of mentioning this interweaving:

This event which you are encountering… it happened to you; it was coordinated with you; and was in relation to you, since it was woven together with you, from as far back as the most ancient of causes (V, 8, 12).

So something has happened to you? Good! Every event that you encounter has been linked to you by Destiny, and has, since the beginning, been woven together with you from the All (IV, 26).

Whatever happens to you has been prepared for you in advance from all eternity, and the interweaving of causes has, since forever, woven together your substance and your encounter with this event (X, 5).

While this motif is strongly emphasized by Marcus, it is not absent from Epictetus’ sayings, as recorded by Arrian (I, 12, 25):

Will you be angry and unhappy with what Zeus has ordained? He defined and ordained these things together with the Moirai, who were present at your birth and wove your destiny.

For the Stoics, events were predicates, as we saw in the case of “walking,” which is present to me when “I am walking.” If, then, an event happens to me, this means that it has been produced by the universal totality of the causes which constitute the cosmos. The relationship between myself and such an event presupposes the entire universe, as well as the will of universal Reason. We shall have to examine later whether this will defines the event in all its details, or merely gives it an initial impulse. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that whether I am ill, or lose my child, or am the victim of an accident, it is the entire cosmos which is implicated in the event.

This interconnection or interweaving—the mutual implication of all things in all things—is one of Marcus’ favorite themes. For him, as for the Stoics in general, the cosmos is but a single living entity, endowed with a unique consciousness and will (IV, 40):

How all things cooperate to produce everything that is produced; how everything is linked and wound up together

in order to form a “sacred connection” (IV, 40; VI, 38; VII, 9).

Thus, each present moment, the event which I encounter within it, and my encounter with this event, imply and potentially contain all the movement of the universe. This notion is in agreement with the Stoic conception of reality as total mixture, or the interpenetration of all things within all things.16 Chrysippus used to speak of a drop of wine which first becomes mixed with the entire sea, and thence is extended to the whole world.17 Similar world-visions are not, moreover, out of date: Hubert Reeves, for example, speaks of E. Mach’s notion according to which “the whole universe is mysteriously present in each place and at each instant of the world.”18 I am not trying to claim that such representations are based upon science; rather, they are based upon an original, fundamental, existential experience, which can be expressed in poetic form, as it is in these verses by Francis Thompson:

All things

Near and far

Are linked to each other

In a hidden way

By an immortal power

So that you cannot pick a flower

Without disturbing a star.19

Here again, we encounter the fundamental intuition of the cohesion and coherence of reality with itself, an intuition which led the Stoics to perceive love of self and accord with oneself in each movement of a living being as much as in the movement of the universe as a whole, or in the perfection of the sage. This is what Marcus expresses in passages like the following (X, 21):

The Earth loves! She loves the rain! And the venerable Ether? It loves too! The World, too, loves to produce that which must occur. And I say to the World: I, too, love—along with you. Don’t we say: “such-and-such loves to happen”?

Everyday language, which could use the verb “to love” to signify “to be accustomed to,” is here congruent with mythology, which gives us to understand, in its allegorical way, that it is characteristic of the All to love itself. What Marcus is alluding to here is the grandiose image of the hieros gamos between the sky (or Ether) and the earth, such as it is described by Euripides:

The Earth loves! She loves the rain, when the waterless field, sterile with dryness, needs moisture. The venerable Sky, too, when filled with rain, loves to fall upon the earth, by the power of Aphrodite.20

This myth allows us to glimpse that such self-love is not the solitary, egoistic love of the Whole for itself, but rather the mutual love, within the Whole, of the parts for each other, of the parts for the Whole, and of the Whole for the parts. Between the parts and the Whole, there is a “harmony” or “co-respiration,” which puts them in accord with one another. Everything that happens to the part is useful for the Whole, and everything that is “prescribed” for each part is, almost in the medical sense of the term, “prescribed” (V, 8) for the health of the Whole, and consequently for all the other parts as well.

The discipline of desire therefore consists in replacing each event within the perspective of the Whole, and this is why it corresponds to the physical part of philosophy. To replace each event within the perspective of the Whole means to understand two things simultaneously: that I am encountering it, or that it is present to me, because it was destined for me by the Whole, but also that the Whole is present within it. Since such an event does not depend upon me, in itself it is indifferent, and we might therefore expect the Stoic to greet it with indifference. Indifference, however, does not mean coldness. On the contrary: since such an event is the expression of the love which the Whole has for itself, and since it is useful for and willed by the Whole, we too must want and love it. In this way, my will shall identify itself with the divine Will which has willed this event to happen. To be indifferent to indifferent things—that is, to things which do not depend on me—in fact means to make no difference between them: it means to love them equally, just as Nature or the Whole produces them with equal love. It is the Whole which, through and by me, loves itself, and it is up to me not to destroy the cohesion of the Whole, by refusing to accept such-and-such an event.

Marcus describes this feeling of loving consent to the will of the Whole and identification with the divine will in terms of the need to “find satisfaction” in the events which happen to us. He writes that we must “greet them joyfully,” “accept them with pleasure,” “love” them and “will” them. The Manual of Epictetus, as written by Arrian, expressed this same attitude in striking terms which encapsulate the entire discipline of desire (chap. 8):

Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.

This entire attitude is admirably summed up in Marcus’ prayer to the World (IV, 23):

All that is in accord with you is in accord with me, O World! Nothing which occurs at the right time for you comes too soon or too late for me. All that your seasons produce, O Nature, is fruit for me. It is from you that all things come; all things are within you, and all things move toward you.

This brings us back to the theme of the present. A particular event is not predestined for me and accorded with me only because it is harmonized with the World; rather, it is so because it occurs in this particular moment and no other. It occurs in accordance with the kairos (“right moment”), which, as the Greeks had always known, is unique. Therefore, that which is happening to me at this moment is happening at the right moment, in accordance with the necessary, methodical, and harmonious unfolding of all events, all of which occur at their proper time and season.

To will the event that is happening at this moment, and in this present instant, is to will the entire universe which has brought it about.

Amor fati

I have entitled this section “amor fati.” Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in Greek, obviously did not use these two Latin words; what is more, they are not, as far as I know, used by any Latin writer in antiquity. The phrase is Nietzsche’s, and my intention in alluding to the love of Destiny of which Nietzsche speaks is to help us better to understand, by means of analogies and contrasts, the spiritual attitude which, in Marcus, corresponds to the discipline of desire. Nietzsche writes, for example:

My formula for what is great in mankind is amor fati: not to wish for anything other than that which is; whether behind, ahead, or for all eternity. Not just to put up with the inevitable—much less to hide it from oneself, for all idealism is lying to oneself in the face of the necessary—but to love it.21

Everything that is necessary, when seen from above and from the perspective of the vast economy of the whole, is in itself equally useful. We must not only put up with it, but love it…. Amor fati: that is my innermost nature.22“To wish for nothing other than that which is": Marcus Aurelius could have said this, just as he could have concurred with the following:

The main question is not at all whether or not we are satisfied with ourselves, but whether, more generally, there is anything at all with which we are satisfied. Let us suppose we said Yes to one single instant: we have thereby said Yes not only to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing is sufficient unto itself—neither in ourselves, nor among things—and if, just one single time, our soul has vibrated and resonated with happiness, like a stretched cord, then it has taken all of eternity to bring about that single event. And, at that unique instant of our Yes, all eternity was accepted, saved, justified, and affirmed.23For Marcus, as for Epictetus, there is no link between this loving consent to the events which happen to us and the Stoic doctrine of the Eternal Return. This doctrine asserted that the world repeats itself eternally, for the rational Fire which spreads throughout the world is subject to a perpetual alternation of diastoles and systoles, which, in their succession, engender a series of periods all of which are unique, and during which the same events repeat themselves in a completely identical manner. For the Stoics, the ideas of Providence and Destiny, together with the concepts of the complete interpenetration of all the parts of the world, and of the loving accord between the Whole and all its parts, were enough to justify that attitude of loving acceptance in the face of all that comes from Nature which constitutes the discipline of desire. Nietzsche, by contrast, links the love of Destiny to the myth of the Eternal Return. To love Destiny thus means to want that what I am doing in this moment, as well as the way in which I live my life, should be eternally, identically repeated. It means to live any given instant in such a way that I want to relive again this instant I am now living, eternally. This is where Nietzsche’s amor fati takes on a highly idiosyncratic meaning:

The highest state which a philosopher can attain: to have a Dionysiac attitude toward existence. My formula for that is amor fati….

For this, we must conceive of the heretofore denied aspects of existence not only as necessary, but as desirable: and not only desirable with regard to the aspects which have been approved up until now (as their complements, for example, or as their presuppositions), but in themselves, as the aspects of existence which are more powerful, more fertile, and more true, in which its will expresses itself most clearly.24As we shall see, Marcus did indeed consider the repulsive aspects of existence as necessary complements or inevitable consequences of the initial will of Nature. Nietzsche, however, goes much further: in fact, an abyss appears between his views and those of Stoicism. Whereas the Stoic “yes” means a rational consent to the world, the Dionysiac affirmation of the world of which Nietzsche speaks is a “yes” given to irrationality, the blind cruelty of life, and the will to power which is beyond good and evil.

We have wandered far from Marcus; yet this detour has perhaps allowed us to arrive at a better definition of that consent to Destiny which is the essence of the discipline of desire.

As we have seen, the exercises of definition of the self and concentration on the present, together with our consent to the will of Nature as it is manifested in each event, raise our consciousness to a cosmic level. By consenting to the present event which is happening to me, in which the whole world is implied, I want that which universal Reason wants, and identify myself with it in my feeling of participation and of belonging to a Whole which transcends the limits of individuality. I feel a sensation of intimacy with the universe, and plunge myself into the immensity of the cosmos. One thinks of Blake’s verses:25To see the World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Thus the self qua will or liberty coincides with the will of universal Reason, or the logos which extends throughout all things. The self as guiding principle coincides with the guiding principle of the universe.

If, then, the self’s awareness is accompanied by a consent to events, it does not become isolated, like some tiny island, in the universe. On the contrary: it is opened up to the whole of cosmic becoming, to the extent that the self elevates itself from its limited situation and partial, restricted individual viewpoint, toward a universal perspective. Thus, my consciousness is dilated until it coincides with the dimensions of cosmic consciousness. In the presence of each event—no matter how banal—my vision now coincides with that of universal Reason.

When Marcus writes (IX, 6): “Your present inner disposition is enough for you, as long as it finds its joy within the present conjuncture of events,” the expression “is enough for you” has two meanings. In the first place, as we have seen, it means that we possess the whole of reality within this present instant. As Seneca said,26 at each present moment we can say, with God, “Everything belongs to me.” This, however, means that if my moral intentions are good in this present moment, and I am consequently happy, neither all the duration of life nor all eternity could bring me one iota more of happiness. In the words of Chrysippus:27 “If one has wisdom for one instant, he will be no less happy than he who possesses it for all eternity.” Elsewhere, Seneca28 writes: “The measure of the good is the same, although its duration may vary. Whether one draws a large circle or a small one does not depend on its shape, but on the surface which they enclose.” A circle is a circle, whether it is large or small. Similarly, moral good, when it is lived within the present moment, is an absolute of infinite value, which neither duration nor any other external factor can affect. Once again, I can and I must live the present which I am living at this moment as if it were the last moment of my life; for even if it is not followed by any other instant, I will be able, because of the absolute value of moral intention and of the love of the good which I have lived in this instant, to say in that very instant: I have realized my life, and have gotten everything I could have expected out of it.29 It is this that enables me to die. As Marcus says (XI, 1, 1):

The rational soul… attains its proper end wherever it achieves the limit of its life. It is not like the dance or the theater or other arts of that kind, in which all the action is incomplete if they are interrupted. On the contrary: the action of the rational soul, in each of its parts, and at whatever point one considers it, carries out for itself what it was planning fully and without fault, so that it can say, “I have reached my fulfillment.”

Whereas a dance or the reading of a poem reach their goal only when they are finished, moral activity reaches its goal in the very instant when it is accomplished. It is therefore entirely contained within the present moment, which is to say, within the unity of the moral intention which, in this very moment, animates my actions or my inner disposition. Once again, we note that the present instant can thus immediately open up the totality of being and of value. One thinks of the words of Wittgenstein: “If we understand by “eternity” not an infinite temporal duration, but a lack of temporality, then he who lives within the present lives eternally.”30

From:

The Inner Citadel The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Pierre Hadot 

Nietzsche A Philosophical Biography

 

Man, Nietzsche contended, is a being that has leapt beyond the "bestial bounds of the mating season" (8,432) and seeks pleasure not just at fixed intervals but perpetually. Since, however, there are fewer sources of pleasure than his perpetual desire for pleasure demands, nature has forced man onto the "path of pleasure contrivance." Man, the creature of consciousness whose horizons extend to the past and future, rarely attains complete fulfillment within the present, and for this reason experiences something most likely unknown to any animal, namely boredom.
This strange creature seeks a stimulus to release him from boredom. If no such stimulus is readily available, it simply needs to be created. Man becomes the animal that plays. Play is an invention that engages the emotions; it is the art of stimulating emotions. Music is a prime exam-ple. Thus, the anthropological and physiological formula for the secret of art: "Flight from boredom is the mother of all art" (8,432).

Not a trace remains of the pathos of art when it is viewed in this manner. Could the so-called secret of art be any more trivial? Must the ecstasy of enthusiasm for art be reduced to a flight from the unalluring desert of the ordinary? Is art being degraded to mere entertainment?
Nietzsche flirted with this demystifying viewpoint devoid of pathos. He sought to desecrate art, which had been sacrosanct to him, and to cool his fervor in "antiromantic self-treatment" (2,371; HHH Preface § 2) to determine "how these things look if they are turned around" (2,17; HH I Preface § 3). This process involves not only an inversion of the order of precedence of moral values but also a shift from a metaphysical to a physical and physiological oudook.

However, even "boredom" has its aura of mystery and is imbued with a singular pathos by Nietzsche. Boredom, from which art provides a refuge, becomes terrifying—the yawning abyss of being. When people are bored, they regard the moment as an empty passage of time.

External events, as well as people's sense of self, become inconsequential. The phases of life lose their intentional tension and cave in on themselves like a soufflé removed from the oven too soon. Routines and habits that otherwise provide stability suddenly prove to be nothing more than façades. Finally, the eerie scenario of boredom reveals a moment of true feeling. When people find nothing to do with themselves, nothingness besets them. Against this backdrop of nothingness, art performs its task of self-stimulation—a virtually heroic enterprise, because people on the verge of a breakdown need to be entertained. Art steps in as a bridge to prevent succumbing to nihilist ennui. Art helps us live; without it, life cannot stem the onslaught of meaninglessness.

The formula of art as "flight from boredom" is rich in significance, assuming we take boredom to be an experience of nothingness. If we do so, however, we switch from the physiology of self-stimulation to the metaphysics of the horror vacui Nietzsche was a virtuoso of this leap from physics to metaphysics. He knew how to imbue his physiological disenchantment with a new metaphysical magic. For him everything was ultimately colossal.

Anything can take on colossal proportions—one's own life and perceptions or the world as a whole. Music is so attuned to the colossal power that it helps us endure despite everything. Colossal power became Nietzsche's lifelong theme.

from the book Nietzsche A Philosophical Biography
by Rudiger Safranski

Cioran on Nietzsche

Still young, we launch ourselves into philosophy, searching not so much for a vision as for a stimulant; we track down ideas, diagnose the delirium which has produced them, dreaming of imitating and exaggerating it. Adolescence delights in the juggling act of altitudes; what it loves in a thinker is the acrobat; in Nietzsche, we loved Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown-show, a real farmer’s market of the peaks…

His idolatry of power derives not so much from an evolutionist snobbery as from an inner tension he has projected outward, from an intoxication which interprets becoming and accepts it. A false image of life and of history was the result. But we had to pass through such things, through the philosophical orgy, the cult of vitality. 

Those who refused to do so will never know the relapse, the antipodes and the grimaces of this cult; they will remain closed off from the sources of disappointment.

We had believed with Nietzsche in the perpetuity of trances; thanks to the maturity of our cynicism, we have ventured further than he. The notion of the superman now strikes us as no more than a lucubration; it used to seem as precise as a given of experience. Thus the enchanter of our youth fades. But which one of him — if he was several — still remains? It is the expert in failures, the psychologist, an aggressive psychologist, not merely an observer like the moralists. He scans with the eye of an enemy and makes enemies for himself. But he draws such enemies out of himself, like the vices he denounces. Does he attack the weak? He is merely being introspective; and when he attacks decadence, he is describing his condition. All his hatreds bear indirectly on himself. His weaknesses he proclaims and erects into an ideal; if he execrates himself, Christianity or socialism suffers for it. His diagnosis of nihilism is irrefutable: because he himself is a nihilist, and because he avows it. A pamphleteer in love with his adversaries, he could not have endured himself had he not done battle with himself, against himself — had he not placed his miseries elsewhere, in the others: on them he took revenge for what he was. Having practiced psychology as a hero, he proposed to the enthusiasts of the Inextricable a diversity of stalemates.

We measure his fecundity by the possibilities he affords us of continually repudiating him without exhausting him. A nomad mind, he is good at varying his disequilibriums. In all matters, he has championed the pro and the con: this is the procedure of those who give themselves up to speculation for lack of being able to write tragedies — to disperse themselves in many destinies. Nonetheless, by exhibiting his hysterias, Nietzsche has spared us the shame of ours; his miseries were salutary for us. He has opened the age of “complexes.”

from: All Gall Is Divided

Burckhardt and Nietzsche

 Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle in 1869 at the astonishingly early age of 24; Burckhardt was fifty, and had been teaching at the university since 1844, the year Nietzsche was born; he had been Professor of History since 1858.35 From the start Nietzsche admired his older colleague enormously; in 1870 he wrote to a friend:

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure which I would have liked you above all people to have shared, of hearing Jacob Burckhardt lec- ture. He gave a lecture without notes on Historical Greatness which lay entirely within the orbit of our thoughts and feelings. This very unusual middle-aged man does not, indeed, tend to falsify the truth, but to concealments, though on our confidential walks and talks he calls Schopenhauer ‘Our Philosopher’. I am attending his weekly lectures at the University on the study of history, and believe I am the only one of his sixty hearers who understands his profound train of thought with all its strange circumlocutions and abrupt breaks wherever the subject fringes on the problematical.

For the first time in my life I have enjoyed a lecture: and what is more, it is the sort of lecture I shall be able to give when I am older.36 In turn Burckhardt attended lectures of Nietzsche in 1872:

He is still in debt to us for the last, from which we awaited some solutions to the questions and lamentations that he threw out in such a grand and bold style ... He was quite delightful in places, and then again one heard a note of profound sadness, and I still don’t see how the auditores humanissimi are to derive comfort or explanations from it. One thing was clear: a man of great gifts who possesses everything at first hand and passes it on.

 They had in common their love of Schopenhauer: ‘The Philosopher’s credit has risen again these last weeks. Living here is one of his faithful, with whom I converse from time to time, as far as I can express myself in his language’ wrote Burckhardt about Nietzsche to a friend in 1870.

On the personal level, Nietzsche always maintained his admiration for Burckhardt, ‘our great teacher’: even after he left Basle in 1879, and as late as 1887, he continued to send him copies of his books from Untimely Essays (1873-6) to Human, All-too-Human (1879), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887). But Burckhardt’s letters of thanks reveal his increasing distance from Nietzsche’s philosophy.39 Nietzsche was oblivious of this change in the feelings of ‘my honoured friend Jacob Burckhardt of Basle’ to whom ‘above all Basle owes its pre-eminence in the humanities’ as he describes him in Twilight of the Idols in 1889.40 Indeed Burckhardt was one of the recipients of his strange messages from Turin, written in late 1888 as he descended into insanity:

To my most honoured Jacob Burckhardt.

That was only a little joke, on account of which I overlook the tedium of having created a world. Now you are - thou art - our greatest teacher; for I, together with Ariadne, have only to be the golden balance of all things, we have in every part those who are above us ...

Dionysus

His last letter to Burckhardt began:

Dear Professor, In the end I would rather be a professor at Basle than God;
but I did not dare to press my private egoism so far as to abstain from the creation of the world.

It was this letter, arriving in early January 1889, which caused Burckhardt to consult Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck, who had the final responsibil- ity of bringing Nietzsche back to Basle and committing him to medical care.

In old age Burckhardt liked to distance himself from the ‘publicity stunt’ that Nietzsche had become; in 1896 at the age of 78 he wrote:

Moreover, since the philosophical vein is entirely wanting in me, I recognized from the time of his appointment here that my relations with him could not be of any help to him in this sense, and so they remained infrequent, though serious and friendly discussions. I never had any dealings with him in respect of Gewaltmenschen, the power maniacs, and do not even know whether he clung to this idea at the time when I still saw him fairly often; from the time when his illnesses began I only saw him very rarely.

 But there is no doubt that in the early seventies the two men were very close. Both of them refer to the delight they experienced in finding someone who shared the same veneration for ‘the Philosopher’ as they both called Schopenhauer; each was profoundly affected by the same distaste for the growth of Prussian power and the cultural consequences of the triumph of Germany over France in 1870. And intellectually each influenced the other in a variety of ways.

At first impression it is the differences between the two which are most striking, to the extent that it becomes clear that each reacted against the other, and essentially found the other useful in the process of clarifying his own ideas. Nietzsche’s belief in Burckhardt’s agreement with him was of course unverifiable since the latter’s views were expressed only in lectures, whereas his own were published. Thus he could claim that Burckhardt had accepted the great contrast between the Apollinian and Dionysian aspects of Greek culture:

Whoever has investigated the Greeks, such as that profoundest student of their culture now living, Jacob Burckhardt of Basle, realizes at once the value of this line of approach: Burckhardt inserted a special section on the said phenomenon into his Culture of the Greeks.42 he wrote in Twilight of the Idols. But in fact, whatever may have led Nietz- sche to believe this, there is little reference to Nietzsche’s theories in the surviving manuscripts of Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek culture, either in relation to Greek religion and Greek morals, or in relation to tragedy.

And indeed the whole argument of The Birth of Tragedy, with its attempt to relate ancient tragedy to the modern music of Wagner, can scarcely ever have appealed to Burckhardt, whose musical interests lay rather with Mozart and Verdi, and whose silence about Wagner hides a profound distaste for him.

Nietzsche had claimed that he was the only hearer to understand Burck- hardt’s lectures on the philosophy of history. In the 1870s Nietzsche was indeed struggling to free himself from the historical vision of his age. But his famous essay ‘On the use and abuse of history for life’, publishedindependently in 1874 and two years later in Untimely Essays, is essentially a statement of rejection of all that Burckhardt had stood for in those lectures, even if at one point he refers to Burckhardt’s description of the Italian Renaissance with approval.44 The modem age is viewed as suffering from a surfeit of history, produced for entertainment, which leads to self- irony and cynicism; like the Roman from the imperial age, the modem human being continually has his historical artists prepare for him the festival of a world’s fair. He has become a spectator who strolls about enjoying himself, and he has been reduced to a condition in which even great wars and great revolutions can scarcely change anything, even for a moment...

Or is it necessary to have a race of eunuchs to stand guard over the great historical world-harem? Certainly pure objectivity is quite becoming in eunuchs. It almost seems as if the task is to watch over history so that nothing will ever come of it but stories - but certainly no events!

Although Burckhardt might have approved of Nietzsche’s dismissal of objectivity, the main criticisms surely relate to Burckhardt’s pose of the connoisseur and dilettante, writing and lecturing for the general public.

Now picture to yourself the present-day historical virtuoso: is he the most just man of his age? It is true, he has cultivated in himself a sensibility so tender and sensitive that absolutely nothing human is alien to him; his lyre can echo in kindred tones the sounds of the most diverse ages and persons; he has become an echoing passivity whose resonance, in turn, has a resounding effect on other passivities of the same sort, until ultimately the air of an age is filled with the buzzing counterpoint of such tender and kindred echoes. Yet it seems to me that only the harmonics, as it were, of that original historical note remain audible: the harshness and power of the original can no longer be divined in the thin and shrill sound of the lyre strings. Moreover the original tone usually awakened deeds, difficulties, and terrors, whereas this pure tone just lulls us to sleep and turns us into gentle epicures. It is as though the Eroica symphony had been arranged for two flutes and were intended for the benefit of dreaming opium smokers.

Burckhardt well understood that this was a criticism of himself, and replied to the gift of the book with a characteristic defence of ‘amateurism’:

In the first place my poor head has never been capable of reflecting, even at a distance, as you are able to do, upon final causes, the aims and the desirability of history. As teacher and professor I can, however, maintain that I have never taught history for the sake of what goes under the pompous title of World History, but essentially as a propaedeutic study: my task has been to put people in pos- session of the scaffolding which is indispensable if their further studies of whatever kind were not to be aimless. I have done everything I possibly could to lead them on to personal possession of the past - in whatever shape or form - and at least not to sicken them of it; I wanted them to be capable of picking the fruits for themselves; I never dreamt of training scholars and disciples in the narrower sense, but only wanted to make every member of my audience feel and know that everyone may and must appropriate those aspects of the past which appeal to him personally, and that there might be happiness in so doing. I know perfectly well that such an aim may be criticized as fostering amateurism, but that does not trouble me overmuch.

 Indeed for Burckhardt amateurism was part of his historical ideal:

The word ‘amateur’ owes its evil reputation to the arts. An artist must be a master or nothing, and must dedicate his life to his art, for the arts, of their very nature, demand perfection.

In scholarship, on the other hand, a man can only be a master in one particular field, namely as a specialist, and in some field he should be a specialist. But if he is not to forfeit his capacity for taking a general view, or even his respect for general views, he should be an amateur at as many points as possible, privately at any rate, for the increase of his own knowledge and the enrichment of his possible standpoints. Otherwise he will remain ignorant in any field lying outside his own speciality, and perhaps, as a man, a barbarian.48 Nietzsche in fact had refused to accept the central conception of Burck-hardt’s lectures on history, though he borrowed his tripartite division: his own theory of history sees it as divided into three types, monumental (greatmen), antiquarian (facts) and critical (moral judgments). These categories are very crude and offer no great insight, except that his excessive emphasis on the first, which is concerned with history as the record of the actions of great men, shows that he already viewed history primarily as the arena for a display of the power of the Übermensch or the free spirit. Although Burckhardt had indeed tackled the problem of the Great Man in history, he saw history as concerned, not with individuals or facts or moral judg- ments, but with the three fundamental forces whose interaction shaped the development of civilizations. Nietzsche’s own theory was concerned with the uses of history for his philosophy of revolutionary change in society;

Burckhardt might set him thinking, but, from Nietzsche’s point of view, he belonged in the historicist culture which must be destroyed.

What united them most was their common rejection of certain funda- mental principles of historicism. They both dismissed the attitudes of the so-called professional scholars: while Nietzsche was provoking his col- leagues and calling for a new philology related to the needs of a new vision of the world, Burckhardt was finding himself more and more at odds with the historical perception of the ‘viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’.49 Burckhardt must have approved of Nietzsche’s dismissal of objec- tivity and historical neutrality as historical ideals. And behind this lay a common rejection of the importance of facts and events in history. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘The fact is always stupid and has at all times looked more like a calf than a god.’50 At precisely the same time Burckhardt was writing to a friend during the preparation of his lectures on Greek culture, and in relation to current political events:

To me, as a teacher of history, a very curious phenomenon has become clear: the sudden devaluation of all mere ‘events’ in the past. From now on in my lectures, I shall only emphasize cultural history, and retain nothing but the quite indispensable external scaffolding.

 At much the same time he wrote to a young historian:

I further advise you simply to omit the refuse of mere facts - not from your labour - but certainly from the presentation. One really only needs to use such facts as are characteristic of an idea, or a vivid mark of a time. Our nervous strength and our eyesight are too precious to waste on the study of external facts of the past,unless we are archivists, county historians or something of the sort.

This rejection of the tyranny of factual history was elevated by Burckhardt into one of the most powerful methodological challenges that positivist historiography has faced. In the lectures on Greek culture Burckhardt developed a formal rejection of the cult of the event:

One great advantage of studying cultural history is the certainty of the more important facts compared with those of history in the ordinary sense of narrated events - these are frequently uncertain, controversial, coloured, or, given the Greek talent for lying, entirely the invention of imagination or of self-interest. Cultural history by contrast possesses a primary degree of certainty, as it consists for the most part of material conveyed in an unintentional, disin- terested or even involuntary way by sources and monuments; they betray their secrets unconsciously and even, paradoxically, through fictitious elaborations, quite apart from the material details they may set out to record and glorify, and are thus doubly instructive for the cultural historian.

 Cultural history deals with phenomena which are ‘recurrent, constant, typical. It does not matter whether the stories which it uses are true, as long as they are believed to be true. And even a forgery is an important piece of evidence for the period that perpetrated it, since it reveals more clearly than a genuine article the conceptions and beliefs about the past of the age that created it. This principle of unconscious revelation through represen- tation derives ultimately from Schopenhauer’s conception of the world as representation; and it is one of the most powerful tools in the modern historian’s study of mentalities. As Burckhardt saw very clearly, it offers a solution to the sterile disputes of positivism as to whether a fact is true or false, and how such a proposition can be established: cultural history is primarily interested in beliefs and attitudes, rather than events - and false- hoods are therefore often more valuable than truths:

Even where a reported act did not really occur, or not in the way it is said to have occurred, the attitude that assumes it to have occurred, and in that manner, retains its value by virtue of the typicality of the statement.

It is this common attitude to the unimportance of the truth of events compared to the significance of beliefs or statements about events that seems to me to unite Burckhardt and Nietzsche as the founders of relativist and ‘post-modern’ historiography.

Apart from the creative enthusiasm which resulted from their meetings, undoubtedly the most significant specific idea about the Greek world that Burckhardt and Nietzsche shared was the belief in the importance of the ‘agonal’ aspect of Greek and (in Nietzsche’s case) modern culture. The realization that individual contest and the desire to be supreme lay at the centre of early Greek attitudes to the world is their joint discovery. Nietzsche seems to have realized the importance of the agon or contest, even before he arrived in Basle; but Burckhardt had already formulated it independently, and was busy working out in detail the consequences of this discovery for the understanding of every aspect of Greek culture.

 This is indeed the most important of all Burckhardt’s insights into the Greek mentality, and has proved continually fruitful in Greek history to the present day, where Greek ethical values are often seen as a conflict between competitive and cooperative virtues.56 It can also be said that the unorthodoxy of each contributed to liberating the thought of the other about the Greeks in this great creative period for both of them. Thus Nietzsche’s very critical approach to Socrates mirrors Burckhardt’s equally critical but ironic version of the standard myth. And both men share in very different ways a hatred of the Greek city-state and of Athenian democracy as destructive forces.

Oswyn Murray
Burckhardt - The Greeks and Greek Civilization

A great horde of worthless people

“A great horde of worthless people do in fact give themselves a deceptive air of modernity by skipping the various stages of development and the tasks of life they represent. Suddenly they appear by the side of the truly modern man - uprooted wraiths, bloodsucking ghosts whose emptiness casts discredit upon him in his unenviable loneliness. Thus it is that the few present-day men are seen by the undiscerning eyes of the masses only through the dismal veil of those spectres, the pseudo-moderns, and are confused with them. ... This, however, should not prevent us from taking it [proficiency] as our criterion of the modern man. We are even forced to do so, for unless he is proficient, the man who claims to be modern is nothing but a trickster. He must be proficient in the highest degree, for unless he can atone by creative ability for his break with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the past. To deny the past for the sake of being conscious only of the present would be sheer futility. Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow. It is a process of transition that forms the link of past and future. Only the man who is conscious of the present in this sense may call himself modern. Many people call themselves modern - especially the pseudo-moderns. Therefore the really modern man is often found among those who call themselves old fashioned”.

Nietzsche
The Gay Science