THE TRAGEDY of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life was that it happened to be a one-man show, a monodrama wherein no other actor entered upon the stage…
For it was voluntarily, in full lucidity of mind, that he renounced a secure existence in order to build for himself a life apart, doing so out of a profound tragical instinct. With unprecedented courage he challenged the gods, so that he might, in his own person, “experience the highest degree of danger it is possible for man to live through”. Hail daemons!
“The greatness of man; amor fati; never desiring to change what has happened in the past, what will happen in the future and throughout eternity; not merely to bear the inevitable, still less to mask it, but to love it.”…
With fire and sword he went forth to awaken the minds of men, an awakening as precious to him as is a fusty sleep to the vast majority of mankind. In his wake, as in the wake of the filibusters of old, churches were desecrated, altars were overturned, feelings injured, convictions assassinated, moral sheepfolds sacked; every horizon blazed with incendiary fires, monstrous beacons of daring and violence.
He was a member of no creed, had never sworn allegiance to any country. With the black flag at his masthead and steering into the unknown, into incertitude which he felt to be the mate of his soul, he sailed forward to ever-renewed and perilous adventures. Sword in hand and powder barrel at his feet, he left the shores of the known behind him and sang his pirate song as he went: I know whence I spring. Insatiable as a flame, I glow and consume myself. All I touch flashes into fire, All I leave is a charred remnant. Such by nature am I—flame…
What made of Nietzsche a prophetic figure and transformed his destiny into legendary wonder was the fact that his daemonic nature was given free rein; his intellectual passion was allowed to express itself without let or hindrance; and his elementary urge towards liberty could find a congenial outlet…
But Nietzsche expatriates himself and finds his true self, the “outlawed prince”, happy at having no home, no possessions, cut off for ever from the “parochial interests of a fatherland” and released from “patriotic strangulation”…
As he lay basking in the sun, his soul aflame with the brightness, he began to ask himself what it was that had so long cast a shadow over the earth, rendering mankind uneasy, depressed and pusillanimously conscious of sin; had deprived the loveliest, the most natural, the most vigorous things of their values; and, in its decrepitude, had robbed the world of its most precious possession, namely, life.
He came to see that the malevolent thing was Christianity with its belief in a life beyond the tomb; that this was the principle which cast a shadow upon the modern world.
For fifty generations it had served to dope and demoralise mankind, to paralyse all that had previously constituted the vital force of the universe. His future mission in life was to crusade against the Cross and reconquer the holy places of man’s realm, existence upon this earth…
[Nietzsche] wanted to be burned by the sun, not merely to be illuminated by it; clarity must have cruel teeth that bite; joviality must develop into a voluptuous orgasm. There arose in him an unquenchable desire to transform the delicate jingle of his senses into a veritable intoxication, to convert his dance into a flight and to raise his ardent realization of life to a white heat…
A great man is pushed and hustled and martyrised until he withdraws into solitude…Nietzsche’s collapse was a sort of carbonisation in his own flames…His words issued like hammer blows striving to demolish the edifice of established civilisation…
“AFTER THE NEXT EUROPEAN WAR, people will understand me.” Such is the prophetic utterance that shines conspicuously forth from among Nietzsche’s last writings.
No one felt so strongly as he that the old order was decayed and done with, and that, amid death-dealing crises, a new and mighty order was about to begin. Now at length we know it, as he knew it decades ago…
For independence exists only for the individual as a unit, it cannot be indefinitely multiplied among the masses; it does not grow out of books or out of culture: “there are no heroic ages, but solely heroic persons”.
It is the individual who achieves independence within the world, and for himself alone.
You can find these profound passages in Stefan Zweig’s — The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche
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