Category: Thought

The Letters of Simone Weil

Simone Weil is probably my favourite thinker, alongside Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. What makes her work so brilliant is the way she manages to combine a real earthiness of focus on real problems and real solutions with an understanding that the reason why we care is because what is at stake is nothing less than the soul. Writing during the Second World War and passing from pacifism to accepting violence in battling Hitler, she has a great deal to teach us as we go through yet another time of suffering and mass slaughter. With her eye on human dignity and the way that humans get caught up in violence, revenge and justifications for murder that cannot handle scrutiny, she is essential reading.

But, as hinted above, Weil was also a thinker who could and did change her mind. One of the most striking things about her is that she had a religious awakening at the beginning of the 1940s with an intensity and results that went far beyond even Tolstoy’s. As a result, there are almost two ideas of Weil in competition with one another. The one I’ve preferred – the heroic woman who in spite of physical frailty and constant headaches (she is almost a mirror of Nietzsche, with an almost diametrically opposed philosophy: “even when he is expressing what I myself think, I find him literally intolerable”) – worked in factories and on fields, and even volunteered with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War to get close to the working class so she could truly understand the struggles they faced.

What best encapsulates this Weil is her riposte to Simone de Beauvoir when the latter once said in conversation that the main thing in life was finding meaning. Weil immediately countered by saying that it was obvious de Beauvoir had never been hungry.

But then there is another Weil, the one after her conversion. She has not abandoned her practical concerns, but the balance has shifted. To a sceptic, this Weil deserves de Gaulle’s remark, made when he came across her while they were both working in London on the war effort – “elle est folle!” (“She is mad!”). The soul is now key, the solutions to our human problems seem considerably less practical, a little less rooted in the world. This is ironic, because her most beautiful book, The Need for Roots, stems from this period. Still. It is this Weil that made the extraordinary choice to die through voluntary starvation mixed with tuberculosis, denying to eat anything more than the rations allowed her had she lived in France. Such a decision certainly would not be compatible with her earlier views and is only dubiously compatible with her later ones. That this happened is amazing, nevertheless.

Reading her Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker translated by Richard Rees is interesting first of all as an encounter with the person behind the thoughts. Do we find more continuities or discontinuities here between the Weils above? Readers hoping for such will be disappointed. Although the letters have a kind of internal coherence between time periods, the lack of annotations is unhelpful given the casual reader’s knowledge (or strictly speaking, lack thereof) of Weil. To give an example, her correspondents are rarely introduced. Some of them, when googled, draw a blank too.

For those trying to create a full picture of Weil, this book is not entirely sufficient. Its subtitle, “windows on a thinker”, is quite apt. We are peering into Weil’s world through various windows, but at no point can we shuffle backwards to get a good view of the house itself. We have biographies for this, of course, but it is still something of a disappointment. The book is short –  just under two hundred pages – so there was certainly scope for adding more missives. One glaring, if certainly deliberate omission, is the Letter to a Priest (Édouard Couturier), which is published separately. Reading the selected letters, we are suddenly thrown from an atheistic, if sympathetic, to an obsessively religious Weil who is mentioning God at every turn, without the key stopping points in between. It’s certainly jarring.

Still, we get our windows. Let’s peer in. We begin with various letters to schoolchildren she had once taught, filled with advice (“suffering doesn’t matter, so long as you experience some vivid joys. What matters is not to bungle one’s life. And for that, one must discipline oneself”) and a deep understanding of the political challenges of 1933-34 when the National Socialists had just gained power in Germany and Soviet influence on French communist agitators was growing. Various letters to trade unionists detail her understanding of the effects of factory life upon the individual, in particular the loss of dignity caused by repetitive work and constant submission.

In the letters describing her factory experiences, what is most impressive is her curiosity. “Because I don’t feel the suffering as mine, I feel it as the workers’ suffering; and whether I personally suffer it or not seems to me a detail of almost no importance. Thus the desire to know and understand easily prevails.” Her curiosity strikes us, as does a certain raw honesty, perhaps naivety. Weil had what today we might call “no filter.” The longest series of letters, to “B”, a factory manager, ends because Weil shares her delight at the victory of the French left in the elections of 1936, which unsurprisingly her correspondent does not.

This incident is quite typical, as far as I can make out for Weil. She puts in real effort in the letters first to make the manager appreciate the suffering of his workers, and how the workers’ lot could be improved without challenging the existing order (Weil was no fan of revolutions but expected revolutionary change to happen through achieving general consent to it): “It is very difficult to judge from above, and it is very difficult to act from below. That, I believe, is in general one of the essential causes of human misery.” She wrote articles for the factory newspaper, was a visitor there, and regularly spoke to B. She asked for such simple, practical things as an anonymous suggestion box for workers. This is what I mean when I describe Weil’s earthiness – real solutions to real problems.

For those of us familiar with Weil’s work on oppression, the letters contain much of the first germs of ideas regarding the effects of the work on people which later made their way into her essays: “my experience taught me two lessons. The first, the bitterest and most unexpected, is that oppression, beyond a certain degree of intensity, does not engender revolt but, on the contrary, an almost irresistible tendency to the most complete submission. … The second lesson is that humanity is divided into two categories – the people who count for something, and the people who count for nothing.” What they also do, quite clearly, is indicate her political leanings, or rather clarify her attitude towards things like revolutions, which are often only implicit in her other writings.

Further letters before the war detail a trip to Italy, where she met some fascists and had discussions with them to understand their views, which she condemned utterly (“if I had any choice in the matter I would prefer hardship and starvation in a salt-mine to living with the narrow and limited horizon of these young people”), and of course saw some old buildings and paintings. We see Weil’s mastery of languages as she quotes Greek, Latin, and Italian poetry to her readers. But one thing that is worth noting is that we get the odd, brief look at a Weil who could possibly be described as happy. For most of the remaining letters Weil is so full of self-loathing and guilt that her joy only comes through almost self-pitying laments: “Why have I not the n existences I need, in order to devote one of them to the theatre!”

By far the most interesting letter of this period was to the French writer Georges Bernanos, where she shares her experience in the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer. Fortunately, she was injured in an accident involving cooking oil (passion, seriousness, and a certain awkward incompetence seem to be the hallmarks of Weil), which almost certainly saved her life, given she would pick quarrels with people who, her own letters show, saw very little value in life and would easily and probably gladly have rid her of hers. But this letter, anyway, is a single, tantalising exception beside various reasonings on the war, only some of which are interesting.

The next series of letters concerns algebra, in particular as it was done in ancient cultures. Weil’s brother, André, was a famous mathematician (who lived to 92 – how much of Simone we likely lost…!) and she herself was at ease discussing the theories. It is not my area. But Weil’s interest is infectious, and like with Wittgenstein, maths is for Weil very much a mirror of the soul, or perhaps a key to it, but certainly not some irrelevancy. It made me think of a beautiful moment in her essay “Human Personality” where she says that perfection is impersonal, because a correct equation is always correct and undifferentiable, while an incorrect equation bears the mark of its writer in how exactly it is wrong. Although, again, some footnotes would have been helpful. Weil was not a systematic thinker, and wrote brilliantly on a whole range of subjects, but that means that specialist academics or your blogger are unlikely to be comfortable in every single one of the fields she was.

In 1942 we witness the aftermath of her religious awakening through a letter to a man wounded in the Great War, Joe Bousquet. I had a sense that something was off about Weil here, and sure enough it did not take many paragraphs for her to start discussing “the nuptial consent to God.” The problem is not God, but what comes after for Weil. If she was harsh to herself before, there is little forgiveness now. She talks about how daydreaming is an evil because it distracts us from the pain we need to reach God. And then, for those unaware of more indirect expressions of it, she states “my attitude towards myself… is… a mixture of contempt and hated and repulsion.”

Compare the above to a phrase only two years before: “there are so many modern people … in whom sadness is connected with a loss of the very instinct for happiness; they feel a need to annihilate themselves.” Weil has come to see, as far as I can make out based on the letters and her essays, that annihilation is precisely what we should aim for. I am not, all told, with her. I am not sure her recipients are necessarily either. But in the annihilation of her personality she found God waiting, so how are we to blame her? We must trust to her feelings, and the sense of a task from God that she gained, even if we struggle to follow her in her beliefs. But if we are reading her letters, we are probably at least slightly sympathetic to her.

The final section of the Selected Letters sees Weil go from exile in the United States to living in London. She regretted leaving Marseilles, where she had been after French capitulation, feeling too distant from the war. Unfortunately, she found work in London supporting the Free French unrewarding too: “The work I am doing here will be arrested before long by a triple limit. First, a moral limit; because the ever increasing pain of feeling that I am not in my right place will end in spite of myself, I fear, by crippling my thought. Second, an intellectual limit; obviously my thought will be arrested when it tries to grasp the concrete, for lack of an object. Third, a physical limit; because my fatigue is growing.”

What Weil wanted was “any really useful work, not requiring technical expertise but involving a high degree of hardship and danger.” She wanted to be parachuted into France, perhaps to sabotage something. It is from this period that her famous “Plan for an organization of front-line nurses” originates. This idea of unarmed women airdropped onto the front line to provide first aid, has a reputation for being silly and impractical (it was what prompted de Gaulle to call her mad), so I was interested to read it. The criticism, I think, is somewhat unwarranted. There is symbolic beauty in the idea of a group of angelic carers fighting ideologically against the beasts of the SS, as Weil is keen to emphasise. And as for the impracticality of providing first aid at the front and taking people’s last messages home, I’m not sure that’s entirely without its practical value, and certainly has some moral value. Regardless, she was unable to get it supported.

The war concern fades into the background with the remaining letters, which are for Weil’s family. These are some of the least pleasant to read in the whole collection. What I like about Weil, whether in her essays or in her letters, is her authenticity. She was terribly naïve at times, but always true and earnest.

In April 1943, Weil left her London lodgings to enter a hospital, and was later transferred to a sanatorium. “I cannot eat the bread of the English without taking part in their war effort”, she wrote. But, working with the Free French, she was working. It was just that her self-loathing meant that she couldn’t allow herself to believe that she had done enough.

What would be merely silly had it not killed her, becomes disgusting when we learn, in one of very few notes the editors provide, that Weil still addressed her parents as if she was living at her old lodgings. And the lies go further, with her pretending to a knowledge of the ongoings of London life, which was obviously denied to her in bed, and to a health denied her too. “There’s been a misunderstanding. There’s no change for me, and none in prospect, so far. I still live quietly in my room, with my books distributed between it and the office.” This is extraordinary stuff to read, less than a month before she died, from a woman who it seems was pathologically compelled to tell the truth.

Extraordinary, and utterly, crushingly, depressing. “Au revoir, darlings. Heaps and heaps of love,” her final letter ends. No doubt she lied to her parents out of a desire to conserve their happiness, already challenged by the war. But the whole thing is just too sad for words. Weil’s heroism, her bravery, her desire to help, are all annihilated by a self-loathing that allows her just to float away from the life she had once spent trying to improve for others, as if she had never cared about such things at all.

And so, finishing the Selected Letters, I must be honest and say that if anything they lowered my opinion of one of my few philosophical heroes. If before I had thoughtlessly accepted the hagiographic view of Weil, too angelic to live, accepting a self-imposed starvation out of a magnanimous love of her countryfolk, now I think of her sacrificing honesty, common sense, and her goals for ideas that are either incomprehensible or, when I can understand them, unacceptable. Her intelligence and passion are awe-inspiring, and my respect for them both only grew reading the letters. But it is only the early Weil whom I can anymore say that I like.

For more letters, I read some of Joseph Conrad’s here.

Alexander Herzen’s idea of Justice in My Past and Thoughts

Alexander Herzen was a radical socialist thinker of Russian extraction, best known for his newspaper The Bell. I have written about him and his thoughts on this blog before, after reading Aileen Kelly’s biography of the man, The Discovery of Chance.

Herzen was not just a radical thinker, he was also a talented writer, with his massive My Past and Thoughts as worthy a monument to Russia’s 19th century as anything by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev. This is a memoir, taking us from the author’s birth in 1812 to his later life in London. It is hard to find in English, and hard to find in a modern Russian edition too for the matter, but there are some old Oxford World’s Classics versions of the text for those who are willing to search them out or stumble upon them, the first of which, entitled Childhood, Youth and Exile, has prompted this particular post.

We may come to Herzen’s writings from different paths. Perhaps we want to see a different vision of Russia and its potential to the one we see in the religious nationalism of Dostoevsky, the ascetic pacifism of the later Tolstoy, or the wishy-washy liberalism of Turgenev. But there is a better reason to read this book and one that places My Past and Thoughts next to the great works of Russia’s 19th century – it is a brilliantly humane, sympathetic work that covers the ground the writers mentioned above occasionally seem not to know exists.

In Russia, Progress

The two sections in this book deal with Herzen’s youth and university years, and then his first experience of exile. There is a temptation, one I had to struggle with when writing about Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, just to write a blog post about how little has changed. But this is a terribly pernicious way of thinking that forces us into a kind of historical fatalism that is unworthy of us, and of the people whom we ignorantly aim to criticise. Still, I had to give a chuckle on reading this dialogue after Herzen has been led out onto the street following his arrest:

“Who is that?” I asked, as I took my seat in the cab.

“He is a witness: you know that the police must take a witness with them when they make an entrance into a private house.”

“Is that why you left him outside?”

When Russia’s secret police raided my flat, one joyous September morning in 2019, they did at least allow the witnesses to come in. I do not think they had any practical use, however, and the report that the officers drew up, sitting at the kitchen table, with me and my then girlfriend standing awkwardly in our pyjamas, bore little relation to the actual facts that they must have felt they had been dragged out of bed early for nothing. But the witnesses were at least allowed in the room, and therefore we must give progress its dues.

Justice and Humour

Moving on from this little joke, justice is a central theme of My Past and Thoughts. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it occupied the thoughts of a man who was exiled both within his country, ultimately ending his days alone far from it. In the work Herzen’s approach is twofold – the first is to draw our attention towards injustice, and the second is to remedy it, as much as he can. In this he might seem to be following those other Russian writers whose greatness we identify vaguely as being of a piece with their loosely defined “sympathy”, but I find Herzen’s treatment of the matter, and his heart, much more convincing. In this, perhaps, the autobiographical nature of his text is key.

The first thing that sets Herzen apart is his interest in systems. Dostoevsky liked to find sympathy for unlikely characters, but he was always careful to keep his magnifying glass focused on the ideological systems of the mind, not the practical systems that states live upon. Here is what Herzen has to say about an uncle:

“On his return to Russia, he was created a lord-in-waiting at Moscow – a capital which has no Court. Then he was elected to the Senate, though he knew nothing of law or Russian judicial procedure; he served on the Widows’ and Orphans’ Board, and was a governor of hospitals and other public institutions. All these duties he performed with a zeal that was probably superfluous, a love of his own way that was certainly harmful, and an integrity that passed wholly unnoticed.”

I hope readers have chuckled to themselves at this. My Past and Thoughts is one of the funniest books I have read, with a grand sense of comedic timing. But what does this paragraph say? It describes a man getting positions that aren’t right for him, thus causing havoc.

Let’s hear Herzen’s evidence on torture and the effectiveness of Russian state power:

“Peter III abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star-chamber.

Catherine II abolished torture.

Alexander I abolished it all over again.

Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.”

This is ridiculous, yet again. I am reminded of the satirist, Saltyakov-Shchedrin’s famous quote that “the strictness of Russian laws is tempered somewhat by the fact that obeying them is optional.”

But of course, Herzen was a man who experienced the justice system first-hand. For him, punishments were not optional. He does not merely laugh at the injustice or get us to laugh at it. Laughter breaks down our defences, and it is then that we are made to see the horror, that, “the Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence.”

Herzen himself is lucky, as the son of a nobleman. His time in prison is boring, but not overly miserable, though he struggles with the noxious gases floating through his cell. This is what a peasant has to go through:

“The enquiry went on just as enquiries do in Russia: the peasants were flogged on examination, flogged as a punishment, flogged as an example, and flogged to get money out of them; and then a number of them were exiled to Siberia.”

Statistics and Serfs

The Russian Empire was a country which was not working. One of the funniest sections concerns Herzen’s work on statistics for the remote town of Vyatka, now Kirov. The challenge in producing statistical analysis for the past ten years, as requested by the Ministry of the Interior itself, was that one also had to produce data for the past nine of those years where none actually existed. But once the determination to record things has taken root, there comes the matter of actually recording them correctly. I consider myself to be slightly poor at maths, but Herzen has convinced me I am at least better than a petty functionary in a remote province in the Russian Empire.

“Persons drowned: 2

Causes of drowning unknown: 2

Total: 4”

Or a particular favourite, “Under the heading ‘Morality of the inhabitants’ this was entered: ‘No Jews were found living in the town of Kay.’”

This is stupid. At another point, an old officer tells the story of the abduction and murder of a Moldavian woman, which was requested by his commander out of jealousy. The officer grabbed her and threw her over a bridge into a river, where she drowned. Herzen thinks of this neither as a funny story nor an example of the wondrous power of duty.

“I was horrified by the childlike indifference with which the old man told me this story. He appeared to guess my feelings or to give a thought for the first time to his victim; for he added, to reassure me and make it up with his own conscience:

‘You know, Sir, she was only a benighted heathen, not like a Christian at all.’”

Serfdom is also an enemy here, and one that we will probably be familiar with at this point from the likes of Turgenev, whose criticism of the system in the Sportsman’s Sketches made him famous. However, what Herzen writes seems more direct because of its unambiguous basis in reality. We read of a serf whose devotion was great, but who once sold some of his master’s wood in 1812 – when he had no way of contacting his master under Napoleonic occupation – in order to avoid starvation. After Herzen’s uncle, whose serf he was, returns to his estate, he discovers the sale, nullifies the past service of the serf and removes him from his office, throwing him and his family into poverty. Yet what is the serf’s reaction? “The old man, now paralysed and walking on crutches, never failed to visit us, in order to make a bow to my father and talk to him” – about none other than his old master. This kind of innocent devotion, even after a terrible punishment, strikes us as insane. But it is the insanity of an awful system, and Herzen makes us well aware of it.

We learn the practical methods of serf control, things like the punishments a master could hand out, and the practicalities of exiling a peasant into the army. We learn how much money a servant is paid, for each role, as well. This kind of granular information, absent from the great novels of the period, fills their downtrodden, half-hidden from view characters with new blood.

What justice is within Herzen’s power to give?

So much for injustice, in all its varied forms – exile, bad governors, serfdom, inefficient and cruel government ministries – for I could go on but will not. Readers looking for continuity between the Russia of today and the Russia of the past may enjoy ample shocking stories of corruption and the impossibility of removing it, and the use of insanity as an excuse to remove problematic characters from view. But I said that Herzen’s intention in My Past and Thoughts is twofold – he also seems to aim at rectifying some of these injustices, or at least softening them.

This statement gives the best indication of what he means to do: “This publicity is the last paltry compensation to those who suffered unheard and unpitied.” He aims to make aware of the miseries of those whose names vanish from the record, whether serf or friend. Herzen dedicates a whole, lengthy chapter to Alexander Vitberg, an architect who found royal favour and then lost it, ending up exiled in Vyatka alongside him. He ends the chapter thus: “’Poor martyr,’ thought I, ‘Europe shall learn your fate – I promise you that.’” These and other phrases indicate Herzen’s feeling of duty towards his friends. “I should record here some details about Polezhayev,” – the emphasis is mine. Here are some others: “Kohlreif returned to Moscow, where he died in the arms of his grief-stricken father.” “After writing the preceding narrative, I learned that Sungurov died at Nerchinsk.”

Death, death, death. There are no happy endings here. Even those who survive, like the Polish exiles, are still victims of exile. But Herzen gives them a voice, an identity as individuals. Here is a touching moment from a parting visit to a Polish exile: “After dinner he came up to me with his glass in his hand, embraced me, and said with a soldier’s frankness, ‘Oh, why are you a Russian?’ I made no answer, but his question made a strong impression on me.” This is, indeed, a quote that makes you pause.

Herzen identifies the injustice of systems, but he never condemns groups. My Past and Thoughts is a collection of stories about individuals – corrupt governors, inane petty officials, heroic friends, desperate serfs – but not groups. He is aware, as some of us never are enough, that people are individual people, and it is as individuals that we must attempt to deal with him.

I quote at length a paragraph of his on the subject, to give a sense of how he writes, and his spirit:

“Nothing in the world can be more stupid and more unfair than to judge a whole class of men in the lump, merely by the name they bear and the predominating characteristics of their profession. A label is a terrible thing. Jean-Paul Richter says with perfect truth: ‘If a child tells a lie, make him afraid of doing wrong and tell him that he has told a lie, but don’t call him a liar. If you define him as a liar, you break down his confidence in his own character.’ We are told that a man is a murderer, and we instantly imagine a hidden dagger, a savage expression, and dark designs, as if murder were the regular occupation, the trade, of anyone who has once in his life without design killed a man. A spy, or a man who makes money by the profligacy of others, cannot be honest; but it is possible to be an officer of police and yet to retain some manly worth, just as a tender and womanly heart and even delicacy of feeling may constantly be found in the victims of what is called ‘social incontinence’”.

Conclusion

Herzen was, it is hard to deny from these pages, a thinker with the right spirit. In this first part of My Past and Thoughts, there is little philosophy, but there is the spirit upon which that philosophy will later be built. That spirit is enough. It is the spirit of love for one’s comrades and a recognition of the individual’s non-negotiable value and the importance of hearing about their lives, instead of deciding on the basis of their membership of arbitrary categories. Where other thinkers of the time were willing to allow for mass suffering to achieve some distant utopian goals, even condoning murder, Herzen always saw people, even his enemies, as people first. That makes My Past and Thoughts not only entertaining but a wise and worthy book too.

Ecce Homo and the Eternal Recurrence in Practice

I have spent the past two months reading Nietzsche. I had already read many of his works when at university, where I was lucky enough to have a teacher who seemed, with his dashing good looks and masterful command of the lecture hall, to embody Nietzsche’s idea of the superman himself. This time, however, I was reading them not for an essay, but for myself.

Nietzsche as self-improvement, as self-knowledge, is of course a dangerous path to follow. But I reasoned to myself that as I am no longer a teenager, I must be immune, or at least somewhat resistant, to the worst excesses of misinterpretation that people tend to employ as they let a cursory acquaintance with the philosopher allow them to be a complete asshole to everyone around them. Reading through Walter Kaufmann’s biography of Nietzsche also helped.

The last of Nietzsche’s works that I have made it to is his autobiography, Ecce Homo: How one Becomes What one is. I didn’t write about Nietzsche’s other books because I didn’t feel sufficiently confident in my grasp of them to write usefully about them. Check back in a few years, and maybe we’ll be there. Karl Jaspers used to tell people never to be satisfied with a passage of Nietzsche’s until they had found a passage elsewhere saying the exact opposite; this approach does not make for a decent blog post, but nor does resorting to rather weather-beaten interpretations that add nothing new. I would want to be able to go through Nietzsche with a knife (one of his favourite images is that of a vivisectionist), finding nuances in what at first seems absurd. This will take both time and living. And so, you are spared, for now.

Ecce Homo is not just an insane attempt at writing about oneself, it is also a fascinating attempt, I think, at putting into practice one of Nietzsche’s key ideas from his mature period – that of the eternal recurrence. That is the lens through which I will interpret the book in this piece, as a wilful struggle with his own history to say of every moment of it not just that it was worth it, but even that it was good. To affirm, where others would be resigned or even negative.

We begin with aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, also known as The Joyous Science. Here Nietzsche first suggests (“What if…”) the idea that things may run back on themselves in a loop. Here it is a mere thought experiment, but later on, Nietzsche even had plans of proving it scientifically and aimed to study seriously the natural sciences to find the necessary evidence. (Kaufmann notes that commentators seem unsure whether Nietzsche actually believed he had stumbled upon a secret truth of the universe, or whether it was and remained just an experiment. As far as I am concerned, it’s not important.)

Here is the aphorism in full:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

If life is repeated, over and over, exactly as it was, then that makes every action have unlimited significance. It also means that every action that we take out of cowardice, that we regret, will haunt us for the rest of time. But Nietzsche does not ask us to act differently, per se. He asks instead “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?” to withstand such a thought. The problem of cowardly actions is not as great as the problem posed by every minor, meaningless action, the ones that day by day cover our lives in sticky meaninglessness. The eternal recurrence is a demand primarily for a change in attitude. We must say to ourselves that everything that happens is just as we wanted it, and vest our actions with significance, affirming them for their essential value in making us who we are.

Growth, in modern-day parlance “personal development”, is everything to Nietzsche. And an attitude of affirmation (“the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained”, so he informs us of the eternal recurrence), where we desire everything that happens to us, joyous or sad, awesome, or awful, is most likely to lead to the achievement of our most full potential.

The Gay Science is, of course, not the only work of the eternal recurrence. Thus Spoke Zarathustra treats the theme in greater detail, and it returns, briefly, in some other of his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil, and in his notes. Here is an extract from Zarathustra which gives some indication of the creative process of reformulating one’s life into something one can affirm:

               I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future which I scan.

And it is all my art and aim to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance.

               And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also poet and reader of riddles and the redeemer of chance!

               To redeem the past and to transform every “it was” into an “I wanted it thus!” – that alone I would call redemption.

              

The eternal recurrence is a creative act, where life is treated as an artwork. If everything experienced can be transformed successfully into a masterpiece, then that is enough – we do not ask questions about the experiences, we have eyes only for the work. Thus should we live, building a being of ourselves that makes use of everything that has ever happened to us, so that we could discard nothing, and everything – when experienced again – would appear to us joyfully, as a piece of the grand puzzle that is our developed self. 

Where, then, does Ecce Homo fit in? Written in a final burst of creativity, alongside The Twilight of the Idols, The Wagner Case, and The Antichrist, it was finished only a few weeks before Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Turin, allegedly after seeing a horse being beaten. It was almost as if he foresaw the end of his life and wanted to wrap it up nicely. Thus does it seem with hindsight, but it is more likely that he saw the end of a particular period of his authorship, and wanted to bookend it before carrying on. It is interesting to note in connection with this, for example, that The Antichrist is not given a chapter here, while all his other major books are. This is because itwas supposed to be the first volume of the epic Revaluation of all Values – it belongs to the new Nietzsche.

Ecce Homo is an autobiography, it is “one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written,” as Michael Tanner notes in my volume’s introduction. It ranges from “manic self-celebrations” to “parodistic orgies”, “high spirits”, and even “a tone of elegy”. Not only does it have a remarkable tonal range, but it is also full of outright lies about Nietzsche’s past which anyone can check up on with little difficulty. As a book, then, we oughtn’t go to it to work out what Nietzsche lived or even felt – we should go to it to see him crafting his life into something he can affirm. This is where its particular curiosity lies. After reading all of his other books, Ecce Homo is like seeing the practice of what had hitherto been simply theory.

The more we understand of his actual autobiography, the more challenging his interpretations of his life seem. The key moments – his friendship and break with the composer Richard Wagner, his unhappy three-way relationship with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée that cost him the friendship of both, his general ill-health, and his awful sister – are here transformed or disguised, so that saying anything negative about his life seems impossible.

Of Wagner, a man against whom he had written a book (The Wagner Case), whose Human, All too Human, was written after the crisis of their break, Nietzsche has only positive things to say. “Richard Wagner was by far the most closely related man to me… The rest is silence.” The reference to silence seems to suggest some resentment repressed, but Nietzsche does not stop here. Later on, he writes “I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life”. Why, how? Here he comes closest to expressing explicitly the project of Ecce Homo: “as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger”, he can do this. The praise of Wagner as a man contrasts with Nietzsche’s savagery about his work. But the friendship was what was lived, and it is the friendship that needs affirming. 

Wagner is that big dark spot in Nietzsche’s life without which he may never have become himself: thus, Wagner was necessary. Other things were too. “It is my sagacity to have been many things and in many places so as to be able to become one person – so as to be able to attain one thing. For a time I had to be a scholar”, he says of his work as a university professor. He thanks his own sickness for allowing an easy, natural break with Wagner: “it permitted, it commanded forgetting”. He even thanks “Fräulein Lou von Salomé”, a woman of “astonishing inspiration”. The reality of their friendship was much less fun, but Nietzsche, without giving details (in the case of Salomé, he definitely seems to prefer silence), does at least allow himself to mention one of his characteristic views: “Pain does not count as an objection to life”.

In the chapter “Why I am so Clever”, Nietzsche decides to really embrace his role as a life coach. He tells us in great detail all the important “little things” we need to thrive: “nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness”. We get a detailed description of what to drink and eat, of the importance of knowing “the size of one’s stomach”, and how to relax (walking). This may seem ridiculous to us in the era of self-help, but to his readers, this emphasis would have been scandalous, for the alternative sources of personal growth and development – “all the concepts “God”, “Soul”, “Virtue”, “Sin,” “the Beyond”, “truth”, “eternal life” – are chucked out as only getting in our way. Now, in exploring those things that made him healthy – in his sense of affirmatively-minded, rather than physically fit – Nietzsche is giving a formula for living so life can be affirmed.

To turn everything into a blessing, to respond creatively to absolutely every stimulus – that is how I understand the command of the eternal recurrence. The creative response, however, is not merely individual pieces of art, but a holistic picture of the entire self. Life as art – as one long unbroken masterpiece of affirmation and reformulation. Within Ecce Homo, we see both the attempt to make a life-picture, and we also see the individual works of art that burst out of Nietzsche’s receptivity, such as this poem he wrote about Venice after the experience of hearing lovely music:

Lately I stood at the bridge

in the brown night.

From afar there came a song:

a golden drop, it swelled

across the trembling surface.

Gondolas, lights, music –

drunken it swam out into the gloom…

My soul, a stringed instrument,

touched by invisible hands

sang to itself in reply a gondola song,

and trembled with gaudy happiness.

– Was anyone listening?

Is Ecce Homo successful as the practice of some concept of affirmation, of laying the groundwork for life to eternally recur? We must ask late Herr Nietzsche, hurtling repeatedly back through his own life, to see what he thinks. As for us, there is enough here to see the book as a struggle to affirm that does not always work. Nietzsche successfully praises the friends who left him or whom he himself left. He finds such joy in certain moments that we can almost taste it – take, for example, the moment he completes the forward to The Antichrist: “The forward was written on 3 September 1888: when in the morning after this writing I stepped outside I found awaiting me the loveliest day the Ober-Engadin had ever shown me – transparent, glowing in its colours, containing in itself every antithesis, every mediant between ice and south”.

And yet, there is a lot of dissatisfaction here too. My book’s introduction by Michael Tanner notes the book’s parodistic elements, almost to excuse this. Any autobiography is self-centred and a little egotistical, so isn’t Nietzsche merely parodying that when he gives himself chapter titles like “Why I am So Wise”, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, and “Why I am a Destiny”? Yes and no. I don’t read this as a sign of his oncoming madness either. What we have here, however, is a struggle to justify himself against a world that just doesn’t seem to care about the way that he has completely overturned it. Yes, he says that some people are born “posthumously”, and he does praise Georg Brandes, the Danish academic who first started popularising him. But as for the Germans? All he heard were crickets, and it hurt him.

And so, he became more strident, his voice reaching a pitch that hurts to listen to, as if his assurances that he is perhaps the greatest human being ever to have lived is what was missing, the final push needed to convince people that they should take him seriously. “I come from heights no bird has ever soared to, I know abysses into which no foot has ever yet strayed, I have been told it is impossible to put a book of mine down”. “I am not a man, I am dynamite”. “I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie … My genius is in my nostrils”. Of course, I write my “ha!” in the margin at such things. And there’s no denying that these are fun, brilliant descriptions. But it’s also sad. This is the desperate yelling of a lonely man into the void.

Or, perhaps, not even a void, but something still worse. Because the other sign of Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction in Ecce Homo comes from his feeling that he is already being misunderstood, that he is about to be misunderstood in terrible ways. (As indeed he was, after his scummy fascist sister started controlling his memory and his works, peddling them to the Nazis as the supreme justification of their hate). The closer we approach the end of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, the more he begins his aphorisms with the question “Have I been understood?” And less, because of his increased desperation and extremity of imagery, can we say “yes” to him.

Let’s take one example from the final chapter, “Why I am a Destiny”:

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against  everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified… There will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.”

Here’s what Kaufmann, whose book saved Nietzsche from the Nazis for new generations, writes: “He speaks of “war” even when he is evidently thinking of strife, of “power” rather than “self-perfection”. This approach generally works with Nietzsche’s other books, like The Gay Science, but by the time we look at his later works, it really is impossible. In Ecce Homo, he seems to want violence, not just of the spirit to “overcome” itself, but also between individuals, countries, men and women. Is that what he really means here? He hated nationalism, especially German nationalism, he really seemed to think that only weaker people would seek power over others as a substitute for power over themselves. But that’s not obvious at all here.

Nietzsche’s ambiguity about violence coming from his outrageous language, (“I am a nuance”, from the chapter on Wagner, I can imagine him yelling at me), just demonstrates the degree that he felt frustrated with his work’s reception, no matter how much the rest of the book is an attempt to tell us that his life was great. As an attempt to write eternal recurrence, “the unconditional and endlessly repeated circular course of all things”, is still the way I would read Ecce Homo. That the attempt is not wholly successful should not distract us from the sheer weight of affirmation that we do come across in the book: “supreme affirmation born out of fullness, of superfluity, an affirmation without reservation even of suffering, even of guilt, even of all that is strange and questionable in existence.”

This is a positive message, and if we do end up reading Nietzsche looking for some suggestions on how to improve our lives, it is one of the best things to take away. That he failed is of no matter to us. He thought he still had time… Let’s hope we do.