The Poet-Prophet-Sage: Nietzsche and the Roles of a Philosopher

Reading the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is sometimes like groping through an obscure, dismal cavern, stumbling over stalagmites of might-worship and elitism, bashing your head against stalactites of misogyny and misanthropy, when suddenly you find yourself in a chamber of glittering insights and inspirations, precious beyond words, so beautiful they summon tears. And the frequency of these brilliant epiphanies makes you stagger onward, even as you curse the blindness, the narrowness, the hollowness of certain claims in the cavern.

Here is one of my favorite Nietzschean gems – a passage I return to when regret, self-doubt, and despair cloud my perspective:

“And so onwards along the path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence! However you may be, be your own source of experience! Throw off your discontent about your nature; forgive yourself your own self, for you have in it a ladder with a hundred rungs, on which you can climb to knowledge… You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through – attempts, false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your love and your hope – into your goal, with nothing left over… Do you think this kind of life with this kind of goal is too arduous, too bereft of all comforts?  Then you have not yet learned that no honey is sweeter than that of knowledge, and that the hanging clouds of sadness must serve you as an udder, from which you will squeeze the milk to refresh yourself. Only when you are older will you perceive properly how you listened to the voice of nature, that nature which rules the whole world through pleasure. The same life that comes to a peak in old age also comes to a peak in wisdom, in that gentle sunshine of continual spiritual joyfulness; you encounter both old age and wisdom on one ridge of life – that is how nature wanted it. Then it is time, and no cause for anger that the fog of death is approaching. Towards the light – your last movement; a joyful shout of knowledge – your last sound” (Human, All Too Human, Sec. 292, Trans. Marion Faber).

There are many profound philosophical and psychological points to be made about this passage; here, I simply want to address its style and aim, its “spirit.” If you were nursed philosophically on the homogenous, low-fat milk of, say, Descartes, Locke, and Kant, you might wonder if such a passage even qualifies as philosophy. Are there really arguments here? If there are, they aren’t presented in a very systematic, enumerated, careful, clean-cut way. And what’s with all the pathos and poetry? – the passionate, unprofessional exclamation marks, the abundance of fatty, sensory-rich metaphors, the poetic word-bursts (as opposed to complete sentences), the ardent desire to inspire, the shameless sundering of the veil of objectivity to reach out and address the reader directly? These features would seem to belong more to the spheres of literature, religion, and self-help psychology than to cool, calm, Apollonian philosophy.

And for many centuries, those spheres have indeed assumed the mantles of poet, prophet, and sage, even as philosophy cast them aside. Among modern philosophers, and especially contemporary ones in academia, one is hard-pressed to find such roles fulfilled or even pursued. It seems that many of them follow (blindly, perhaps?) in the footsteps of logic-idolizers like the early Wittgenstein, whose austere, ultra-systematic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus sought to purge philosophical discourse of anything that smelled of mystical incense, of metaphysical “nonsense.”  David Hume – another of my favorite philosophers – was also possessed by this inquisitorial spirit, distrustful of anything too speculative or artful in philosophy (though occasionally, he, like Wittgenstein, was struck by the lightning of the literary Muse).

Indeed, a deep mistrust of art, passion, and preaching has gripped the philosophical zeitgeist, and for good reason. Such tools have been wielded to erect much error and delusion throughout history, to the detriment of philosophical and scientific progress. And while these tools are forged in the multi-forked, erratic flames of subjectivity, philosophy and science have for a long time focused on that which is icy, objective, enduring, and universal.

But as Hume himself argued, an understanding of the subjective powers at play in the human psyche is vital for ethics, metaphysics, and any field of philosophy or science. After all, philosophy isn’t just “wisdom” floating among the clouds of abstraction like an escaped balloon; it is the “love of wisdom” (philo-sophy), held tightly or loosely by evolved, embodied animals who are driven by conscious motives and unconscious instincts, none of which can materialize or be rationalized with the magical wand of sheer logic. In fact, Nietzsche contended that logic or mathematics is yet another construct of the mind: an inventive interpretation and extrapolation of reality, like art.

Art can easily falsify, yes; but it can also illuminate and elucidate. It has the ability, like Galileo’s telescopic lens, to bend the fuzzy starlight of experience to give us a sharper, clearer picture of reality; not all bendings are distortions. And if pathos – a-logical (not illogical!) feelings and drives – lies at the core of who we are and why we act, shouldn’t the philosopher be human enough, be “real” enough (to use contemporary patois) to express such pathos and appeal to it, without compromising truth or sliding into sloppy thinking?

Friedrich Nietzsche, despite some monstrous missteps, shows the way in this difficult, but possible, dance of passion and intellect. Many philosophers write of goodness, beauty, and other human treasures in a disinterested, reporter-like manner, and succeed in making us think of existential truths; Nietzsche makes us feel them, deep in our veins, bones, and intestines, thus reconciling content with style. Ironically (though not surprisingly, given his religious upbringing), the one famous for attacking Christianity and declaring God’s death is one of the most spiritual, prophetic, even “mystical” philosophers I’ve encountered. Like the Hebrew prophets, he vehemently challenges the status quo and harnesses poetry to paint the way to a brighter tomorrow: in his case, a healthier, smarter, freer, nobler humanity. He is not content merely buzzing around as a worker bee, dispassionately gathering the honey of knowledge; he has dared to amuse, advise, and inspire his readers, making them taste how sweet that honey truly is.  

~Peregrine