The life of Friedrich Nietzsche — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The life of Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche · en
What is the gospel of this ambiguous prophet? It is, he himself
declares, a long "Memento vivere." His own experience taught him
that the characteristic of life, in its highest moments, is to
be unimaginably alive. From a mere process it becomes a sudden
intoxication, and on the psychology of that intoxication, which is the
psychology of the artist and also that of the lover and the saint,
he has written pages which are a wonder of pure light. From this
standpoint he criticises justly the mechanical theory of adjustments
in which there is nothing to adjust, of adaptations in which there
is nothing to adapt, the whole _ab extra_ interpretation of life
popularised by Darwin, Spencer, and the English school in general. The
living unit is more than a mere node or knot in a tangle of natural
selection; it is a fountain of force, of spontaneity, constantly
overflowing. "The general aspect of life is not indigence and famine,
but on the contrary richness, opulence, even an absurd prodigality."
To live is for Nietzsche, as for the Scholastics, to be a centre of
self-movement. With the Pragmatists he asserts the primacy of life over
thought. But this tension of consciousness, this Dionysiac drunkenness,
is only a foundation, it is not yet a philosophy. Philosophy, or at all
events moral philosophy, begins with the discovery that there are other
people in the world. Your ego, thus drunken and expansive, collides
sharply with another ego, equally drunken and expansive, and it becomes
at once necessary to frame a code of relations, a rule of the road. Is
this force and spontaneity of the individual to flow out towards others
through the channel of domination or through that of love?