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

Who Am I? (a brief autobio with existentialist musings)

I am a wanderer and a mountain climber…I do not like the plains, and it seems I cannot sit still for long. ~Zarathustra (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Third Part, “The Wanderer”)

Welcome, fellow cyber-wanderers! Let me introduce myself to you: I am Peregrine – or at least, I wish to be.

Peregrine is for me what Zarathustra was for Nietzsche, what Socrates was for Plato, what Christ and the Buddha and a host of other ideals/idols are for people today. Sometimes these idols spring from real personalities; sometimes they are fabricated, wholly or partially, consciously or unconsciously, from the imagination of individuals or entire communities.

To re-name oneself, to re-make oneself, to become one’s avatar: what an enticing, liberating idea! To break free of identity chains – of nationality, gender, body, even species! – and soar untethered through thought-space with a global, cosmic perspective: what a boon! What a thrill!

I do think this is possible and desirable – to an extent. And yet, those very tethers of identity and particularity also ground us, holding us like sweet Terra’s gravitational pull, keeping us from hurtling, Sandra-Bullock-like, into an existential void of infinite possibilities. You may think you glide unbiased in clouds of cool objectivity, but look down! – and behold the flaming tiger beneath you.

We are all terribly, wonderfully, vitally biased.

And so, while I attempt to soar as Peregrine, I won’t deny my identities and biases, and I’ll mention them when I see fit. For now, let me say this: I am a graduate student of philosophy in the Bay Area of California, hoping to one day teach philosophy and continue writing about the deep questions of life. I am also a lover of imaginative or speculative fiction; I’ve written a fantasy adventure novel for young adults (presently unpublished), sci-fi short stories, and fantastical poetry – some of which I hope to share with you on this blog, in addition to my philosophical musings.

Finally, a word about the name “Peregrine.” Having studied and taught foreign languages in the U.S. and abroad, I take a special delight in etymology – the origins of words – and in
the multiple meanings that might hitchhike on a single word. On one hand, “Peregrine” evokes the swiftest animal on Earth: the peregrine falcon (its aerial dive has been clocked at 242 mph). For its excellence, its majesty, its Olympian perspective, I consider it a more-than-worthy alter-ego, an ideal “Patronus” or “daemon” (nods to J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman).

On the other hand, the falcon itself is so-named because the Latin peregrinus means “traveler” or “wanderer.” This matches my love of traveling – I’ve lived in Mexico, Spain, and China – and it hearkens back to my favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who often referred to himself and any free spirit, philosopher, or knowledge-gatherer as a “wanderer” (the word in German is the same, just capitalized and said with an awesome accent 🙂 ). I identify strongly with the metaphor of the wanderer, tied closely to the “labyrinth-walker” who searches for ways of happiness and truth through the puzzling maze of existence, leaving behind a thread of silver reflections, cautious of the minotaurs called Ignorance and Akrasia (the Greek term for lack of discipline or willpower).

As the wise philosopher Gandalf the Grey 
once said, “Not all those who wander are lost.” Actually, I often do get lost in labyrinthine problems of the universe and everyday life, but it seems that the tiger I ride catches sight, occasionally, of that dazzling, elusive prey called Truth and Happiness, and (in rare, wondrous moments) gets close enough to touch their tails. Will it ever capture them? No, these sublime beings are not the kind you can catch for good – not the kind you’d even want to catch for good. For if you did, then what? Back to your dim room and your gray couch with ultimate truth and bliss in your belly? Back to Netflix, perhaps?

And so I say: Viva the Hunt!

~Peregrine

The Tiger Beneath: Our Enigmatic, Evolving Nature

I suppose I should begin by demystifying – but only a little! – this blog’s title: “Upon the Back of a Tiger.”

Over the last two years, my ruminations on ethics and philosophy of mind – the two branches of philosophy that have most hooked my imagination and intellect – have steered me into the dark, yet enlightening jungle of the unconscious: the wild, evolved, fiercely competing drives that run the show behind the sunlight of conscious desire. And having returned to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche after a long (all-too-long!) hiatus, I found this very idea cloaked in glorious, terrifying, dark-purple prose:

“What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger” ~“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (my emphasis)

What a fascinating, frightful image! What a penetrating insight! – a precursor to, and likely influence on, Freud’s theory of the unconscious. I feel the same shivers when I read William Blake’s iconic poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?… ~ “The Tyger”

Blake’s relentless round of unanswered questions, following this one in the poem, capture well the perplexity we face when confronting the dual nature of nature, echoed in the dual nature of humanity. What twisted desire, what divine split-personality would mold such a “monster” and then turn to make a lamb? Of course, the brambles of the problem wither a bit when viewed in the light of evolution – for indeed, the evidence suggests that no hand or eye framed the symmetry of this monster or any other. A “blind,” aimless, mindless Tetris game was the fearsome tyger’s “creator” (genomes that fit the Tetris environment actually go extinct instead of surviving and reproducing! – but you get the picture). Is such evolution by natural selection “immortal”? That is doubtful, I think: from the apocalyptic pronouncements of physicists and cosmologists, it appears that swelling, exploding suns and an ever-expanding spacetime will leave Life far behind in the dust, as dust (“and to dust you shall return” – Genesis got that much right!). We might comfort ourselves by speculating that Life will be reborn from its ashes in some new aeon or universe – but who knows? What does seem endless is the cosmic or multi-cosmic shuffling of matter, of which biological evolution is a brief episode.

Yet to call the tiger a “monster,” as I did above, is of course too simplistic. Nietzsche emphasized the dark, bloodthirsty parts of the unconscious, probably because many people in his milieu denied that such parts were so ingrained in the human psyche. But the greatest objection I have to Nietzsche’s philosophy lies in this: his blindness to, or pervasive silence about, the benevolent, prosocial, egalitarian drives that are just as fundamental to human nature as our “darker side.” What of the beauty of the sunset stripes, the warm fur and lick of compassion, the soothing purr of solidarity, the graceful dancing on padded paws? I wonder if this glitch in Nietzsche’s thought was due in large part (if I may psychoanalyze) to his circumstantial (and, to an extent, self-imposed) isolation and the rejection he felt from his academic contemporaries, romantic interests, and the rest of his society, not to mention the cruel hand that Nature dealt to his health. If only he had the chance to part from dark Dionysus and anal Apollo for a while, and devote more time to erotic Eros and friendly Philotes! If only he had met the primatologist Frans de Waal, whose studies of chimps and bonobos reveal how deeply evolved, how thoroughly “natural” our empathy, compassion, and pity really are (see, for instance, de Waal’s Our Inner Ape, which discusses at length humanity’s dual nature). If only Nietzsche had met the talking, empathetic ape Caesar in the recent Dawn of the Planet of the Apes! The philosopher who saw a “will to power” at the core of animality seemed to fall prey to what de Waal calls “veneer theory”: the mistaken view that compassion and civility are but a thin, artificial veneer or gloss that humans have brushed onto their biology, hiding a fundamentally selfish, aggressive, power-hungry nature.

No, the tiger beneath us is a multifaceted, enigmatic beast. It is indeed a dreamtiger, to use a fantastic term from my beloved Argentine author, Borges: an ever-morphing stream, an incessant squall, a Heraclitean fire “burning bright.” And the conscious self, riding for dear life on its back, thinks she endures despite the mercurial fire beneath her. But nay! – she, too, transforms: inevitably scathed and purified, disfigured and transfigured by the beast she rides, the changing rainbow hues of its striped fur bleeding into her own outfit, her own skin, her own “soul.”

Only to the extent that we pick out temporary patterns, and are ignorant of imperceptible changes, do we identify an enduring “nature” or “essence” or “identity” in ourselves or the tigers we ride.

My tiger has embarked on a hot pursuit of truth and phantasy, both of which liberate and delight my cerebral, neuronal, hormonal soul. Will you ride alongside me, even ahead of me, and see where this lustful wandering takes us?

Leave your own thoughtprints after my posts, and let’s stir up some lively discussions!

~Peregrine