Insomnia | Essays

Introduction to Ecce Homo

By Michael Tanner

Ecce Homo is the title of Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography. Almost certainly it is the most bizarre example of that genre ever penned. Its oddness begins with the title, which is a clear reference fo St John's Gospel, where it is narrated that Pilate brought Jesus out with his crown of thorns for the Jews to see, and said to them: "Behold the man!" So Nietzsche is evidently comparing himself to Christ, and whether seriously or in jest, the comparison remains equally blasphemous. But the subtitle is bewildering, and in a particularly Nietzschean way: one needs to read the whole book to see what it means and then to read Nietzsche's other books to see what it really means.
   "How one becomes what one is." Immediately several questions spring to the reader's mind. For instance: how could one fail to be what one is in the first place? So how can it make sense to say that one becomes what one is? And supposing that is what happens, can Nietzsche really tell us how it comes about, as his subtitle promises? And why "what one is"? Is it significant, as one uneasily feels it must be, that Nietzsche says "what" rather than the more expectable "who"? Thus in a state possibly of outrage and certainly of puzzlement, one moves on to the contents page where more surprises are waiting: the first three chapters are called "Why I am So Wise", "Why I am So Clever" and "Why I Write Such Good Books"; the remainder are the titles of almost all of Nietzsche's books, except for the last chapter, "Why I am a Destiny".
   Either, one suspects, this is a joke of a rather heavy-handed "Teutonic" variety, or Nietzche's madness, which is usually thought to have begun pretty abruptly early in January 1889, was actually under way while he was writing this book during the autumn of 1888. Neither of these suspicions is without foundation, but there is more to it than that. Though Nietzsche had no idea that this was to be his last book, indeed was full of plans for further ones, he seems to have felt that a point had been reached in his life and his work where a retrospective celebration was in order. By this time in his writing he was more fascinated than he had ever been by the possibilities of parody, and the traditional form of autobiography must have been enormously attractive. For what are autobiographies, in general, but prolonged celebrations of the achievements of their authors? The very idea of writing one's autobiography could be said to be megalomaniac; one is assuming that one's life is either sufficiently exemplary or sufficiently idiosyncratic to be worth retailing for general consumption. The lack of explicit self-congratulation that is one of the conventions of the form is merely a device for getting readers to note how modesty, too, is a quality the author has, besides all the others that emerge from his accounts of his actions and sufferings.
   It isn't in the least surprising, then, that once Nietzsche had realized that the genre could so readily be adapted with mischievous intent, he should embark on it. And his mood during that whole year tended to be euphoric. It is a mistake to claim, as commentators often do, that it was an exceptionally prolific year; by Nietzsche's standards it wasn't. If one counts the titles of the books he wrote, or in two cases self-cannibalized, during 1888, the tally is indeed startling: The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Dithyrambs of Dionysos, Nietzsche contra Wagner and Ecce Homo itself. But none of them is very long, three in fact are of moderate pamphlet-length and all of them together are shorter than, say, The Gay Science or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But they are all characterized by an intensity remarkable even for him, and usually, too (The Antichrist is the exception), by almost unrestrained ebullience. Extravagant in mode as they are, their extravagance is frequently of a parodistic variety. The brevity with which Nietzsche performs only adds to the effect of laughing seriousness -- something Nietzsche had very often preached, but never before succeeded in practising so continuously and with so little sense of strain.
   In one of his most famous passages, "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth" in Twilight of the Idols, he manages to produce a history of Western philosophy which is both hilarious and unnervingly accurate. Nietzsche divides up the history of the concept of the "real world" into six stages, characterizes each of them in a couple of lines and then adds a parenthesized ironic commentary on the progress of the idea. Not only that, but the whole section is integrated into his own philosophy, so that as the "real world" disappears Zarathustra makes his debut. But marvellous as that section is, the whole ninety pages of Twilight of the Idols is on the highest level, an amazing condensation of his mature views, and one of the most exhilarating intellectual and literary achievements I know of. The state of inspiration which he claims, in Ecce Homo, to have been in whilst writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra is far more plausibly attributable to him, in my view, during this last year of his sane life. And by the time he began to write Ecce Homo, he seems to have realized that some peak had been reached. For along with the high spirits, the manic self-celebrations, the parodistic orgies, there is a tone of elegy which consorts extraordinarily well with those other tones, producing an effect of a kind that is uniquely moving, especially when one knows that total and permanent breakdown was imminent.

The Foreword strikes a sombre, portentous note, of a kind familiar from many of Nietzsche's writings when he is concerned with the complete neglect that he suffered from his contemporaries, especially in his own country. The idea is given out here, and recurs as a leitmotif throughout the book, that the world is owed a reckoning by Nietzsche, since the effect he is about to have on it will be so cataclysmic that we must know what, and/or who, has hit us. While there can be no doubt that this claim of Nietzsche's is partly pathological -- that he truly thought that he was about to achieve something earth-shattering -- it also makes perfectly good sense insofar as the challenge that he presents us with, if we take it seriously, must radically alter our lives. And because, at this stage in his work, he identifies himself with the books he has written -- or at least does that for some of the time -- he feels that it is imperative that we understand him, if only so that we shall not confuse him with other life-changers who want us to know what they are like so that we can be like that too. Hence the cardinal significance of the closing words of the Foreword, quoted from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you..." This is perhaps Nietzsche's most succinct statement of his revulsion at the idea of living one's life by modelling it on what someone else said or did. One becomes what one is by not being anyone else -- something that is in any case impossible, but that has not deterred most people, including all admirers of Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, a book for which Nietzsche felt especial distaste, from making the attempt.
   If we take this as the major theme of Ecce Homo, a lot that seems absurd, exaggerated or merely false becomes, at the very least, highly interesting. For the book becomes an attempt to demonstrate, in a variety of more or less shocking ways, how Nietzsche contrived to achieve an independence of spirit in the face of a series of strong temptations to capitulate to powerful influences. Above all it tries to show how he practised a kind of systematic ingratitude towards those great figures who meant most to him, and how this is the only way of taking them completely seriously -- whereas the usual view is that to take someone seriously is to allow them to dominate one to a degree that involves abandoning oneself, if only for a time. What commands admiration even in the shrillest passages of Ecce Homo, as in the other late works, is the candour with which Nietzsche exposes his own failings in this respect, while still turning them to positive account. How, in other words, does one turn discipleship into apostasy, while not betraying what one has been? As he puts it in the profound words of section 6 of the chapter on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he, who to an unheard-of degree says No, does No to everything which one has hitherto said Yes, can none the less be the opposite of a spirit of denial." It isn't surprising that he doesn't give a straightfoward answer to that question, but proceeds by considering the major figures in his development, figures who are, as always, personifications of attitudes to life which Nietzsche-Zarathustra (the predominance of Zarathustra in the book is partly the result of a degree of identification which Nietzsche had not previously allowed himself) has to take with all the seriousness due to his most dangerous opponents. Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Socrates, Christ make their final appearances -- though the manner in which they do shows that, if Nietzsche had continued to write, he would still have been preoccupied with them, since at least in the case of the last three, their seductiveness is something that one can never safely say one has conclusively overcome.

It is Richard Wagner to whom Nietzsche most obsessively returns in Ecce Homo, no doubt because he is the only major figure in Nietzsche's demonology with whom he had had a personal relationship, and one which Nietzsche was never inclined to devalue. The most lyrical passages of the book are expressions of what the relationship had meant, and therefore are all the more poignant because it had been essential to his spiritual well-being to terminate it. Section 5 of "Why I am So Clever" is the most compressed statement in Nietzsche's works of the complexity of his feelings about Wagner:

I offer all my other human relationships cheap; but at no price would I relinquish from my life the Tribschen days, those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime incidents -- of profound moments ... I do not know what others may have experienced with Wagner: over our sky no cloud ever passed.

An idealization, no doubt, but it would be a steely soul who queried it. It makes all the more dramatic, of course, the rest of the section, where Wagner is shown to have become what he was not, and therefore to be the antipode of Nietzsche -- though that is not how he puts it here; but that "[Wagner] became reichsdeutsch" is what Nietzsche says he couldn't forgive him. In other words, in this account, Wagner capitulated to the cultural pressures of the newly unified Germany, in all its loutish vulgarity, and allowed himself to be cast as its arch-representative in the arts.
   But the dialectic of Wagner's inverted progress, and thus of Nietzsche's relationship to him, is more complicated than that. For the delicatesse which he is supposed to have renounced was a Parisian affair and thus already a matter of décadence, so that even before he became corrupted by the Reich, Wagner was of the tribe of Berlioz and Delacroix, who had "a fond of sickness, of incurability in their nature, sheer fanatics for expression, virtuosi through and through ..." Décadence is, of course, one of the key terms in Nietzsche's later vocabulary, but the complexity of his feeling towards it is apparent both here, where he accuses Wagner of treachery towards it, and in the next section of the chapter, where he produces his most abandoned eulogy of Wagner the artist, in his ecstatic celebration of Tristan und Isolde:

I still today seek a work of a dangerous fascination, of a sweet and shuddery infinity equal to that of Tristan -- I seek in all the arts in vain. All the strangenesses of a Leonardo da Vinci lose their magic at the first note of Tristan ... The world is poor for him who has never been sick enough for this "voluptuousness of hell".

And more to the same effect.
   Now, in a spectacular and altogether characteristic move, Nietzsche claims that it is the very dangerousness of Tristan, and the fact that he is able to incorporate it without being corrupted by it, that makes Wagner "the great benefactor of my life". Having one's cake and eating it could go no further. What is still more remarkable is that, in this context, the feat is justified. Nietzsche is here demonstrating how he was able to take something with a seriousness which is simply beyond the grasp of most people, and yet still not take it ultimately seriously, and so giving us a purchase on his much self-celebrated "lightness", which elsewhere in his work can seem a sadly laboured affair. It is the high point in his work of that capacity for simultaneous celebration and critique which should exhilarate us as much as it obviously did him. And it is also the place where we can hope to grasp how the man who was so constant an exhorter to "self-overcoming" should also have been the man who incited us to "become ourselves".
   At Nietzsche's greatest moments he achieves an ecstasy which one would not have thought possible outside of a transcendental ideal in process of realization: the self, which we normally take as a given with which we have to live, making adjustments and modifications within fairly depressing limits, is revealed as something -- or rather, less than something -- capable of enourmous expansion and transformation through the absorption of experiences which mostly we attempt to suppress or deny. And even worse than suppression and denial is regret. At this final stage of his life as a writer Nietzsche is so intent on regretting nothing that he moves to the opposite pole -- but as he has so frequently reminded us in his later works, the "faith in opposite values" is largely chimerical, so that we find, to our initial puzzlement, that there is a strong if not pervasive tone of nostalgia, or something very like it, in these very last works. If it were nostalgia as we ordinarily think of it, Nietzsche would be performing a sleight of hand; for that kind of nostalgia is regret that the past is past. People are usually obsessed with the past, and in particular with their past, either because they wish it had been different or because they can't believe that things will ever again be so good. Nietzsche's concern with the past is a matter of delighting in its having been as it was, whatever that may have been, because it enables him to make the present so much better. Critical as he always was of the concept of redemption, he still writes on section 8 of the chapter on Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "On one occasion Zarathustra strictly defines his task -- it is also mine -- the meaning of which cannot be misunderstood: he is affirmative to the point of justifying, of redeeming even the entire past." And he goes on to quote one of the most celebrated but bewildering passages from that book, which concludes "To redeem the past and to transform every 'It was' into an 'I wanted it thus!' -- that alone would I call redemption."
   For a long time I felt that that last exhortation of Zarathustra was only inspiring so long as one didn't enquire too carefully what it meant. For clearly the past cannot be changed and redemption would seem to require that. But what can be changed is our way of looking at it, of evaluating it. Even then, a great deal of anyone's life might seem irredeemable, in that it was time wasted, or put to futile or bad purposes. In other words, to eliminate the concept of regret from our outlook, to purge ourselves of nostalgia and remorse, demands a transformation of consciousness which we can hardly give sense to. But that is precisely Nietzsche-Zarathustra's point. The change he demands is one which, in depriving us of our humanity, would enable us to become superhuman. And "there has never yet been a superman", Nietzsche tells us. Could there be, if this is the condition for its fulfilment? He is not concerned, in Ecce Homo, to answer that question. But what he does make vividly clear is the hopeless rut that we are all in if it can't be answered affirmatively.

It would be giving a grievously false impression of Ecce Homo to suggest that it is all on this solemn and imposing level. All told, it is Nietzsche's most mischievous book, in which along with self-celebrations which have led many readers to assume that he was already mad, there is an enormous amount of mockery, not least of the author. Often it isn't possible to say where mockery takes over; it is part of Nietzsche's "most manifold art of style" that one is unsure which style he is practising. But at the same time another of the pairs of "opposite values" that he routs in this book is that of seriousness and joking. For instance, there is no doubt that he means what he says in his stress on "the little things" as being of an importance that philosophers have never granted them -- climate, diet, digestion, when to read and so on. "The whole casuistry of selfishness -- ... beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto. It is precisely here that one has to begin to learn anew..." And he stresses that the organ he uses to come to his most important conclusions is his nose. "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" ("Why I am a Destiny", 1). This passage follows almost immediately on his writing:

I have a terrible fear I shall one day be pronounced holy: one will guess why I bring out this book beforehand; it is intended to prevent people from making mischief with me ... I do not want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon ... Perhaps I am a buffoon ... and none the less, or rather not none the less -- for there has hitherto been nothing more mendacious than saints -- the truth speaks out of me.

Yet in the next section he writes:

I am by far the most terrible human being there has ever been; this does not mean I shall not be the most beneficent.

His terrible fear that he would one day be pronounced holy came to pass at his funeral, when his friend, the composer Peter Gast, said "May your name be holy to future generations" -- a friend whom he praises extravagantly in the pages of Ecce Homo. The desperate jocularity of the book is justified; yet if it had been composed in uniformly serious tones it would have been no less misunderstood; no one knew better than Nietzsche that there is no insurance against stupidity. Therefore, it might be felt, he courted misunderstanding; the book has autobiographical passages which are easy to check up on and determine that they are false. It presents his life as if there had been a plan in it, which evidently there wasn't, and it alternates between the world-historical and the mundane in a way that was bound to offend its readers' taste, as it still does. But, Nietzsche would say, and almost does, so much the worse for their taste.
   And it is in fact the very notion of taste, allied to that of smelling, which Nietzsche makes greatest and most inspired play with. In celebrating his capacity for locating decadence, for castigating the Germans for their deep-seated vulgarity, for revelling in destruction as a prerequisite of creation, for knowing what has to be created, Nietzsche is relying throughout on his extraordinarily developed sensitivity to phenomena which none of his contemporaries was able to notice, partly because they knew too much and esteemed the wrong kind of knowing. That is why he advertises his ignorance, his long-time refusal to read, which had earned him ostracism from the cultural community -- the community of the "philistines of culture", bogged down in their specializations, "sick with this inhuman clockwork and mechanism, with the impersonality of the worker, with the false economy of 'division of labour'. The goal gets lost, culture -- the means, the modern way of carrying on science, barbarized." A great deal of Ecce Homo makes fun of the ghastliness of contemporary life, though time and again Nietzsche's almost boundless capacity for humour is overtaken by impatience at his fate in being ignored, and he is driven back to quoting Thus Spoke Zarathustra at its most portentous, even though "to have understood, that is to say experienced, six sentences of that book would raise one to a higher level of mortals than 'modern man' could attain to" ("Why I Write Such Good Books", 1). It is passages like that, and not the exuberantly auto-eulogistic ones, which are the most painful in the book. The tragedy of his life was that there were no means available to change people's taste, and without that he was bound to fail in his heroic endeavour, which lasted as long as he remained sane, and even for a few days after that, to make his contemporaries realize their plight. "My time has not yet come, some are born posthumously," he writes in the same paragraph as the previous quotation. And it is immediately followed by "how could I, with this feeling of distance, even want the 'modern men' I know -- to read me!" but of course, that is what he did want, for their sake rather than his. If he could return now, he would find that "modern men" are still what they were. They have still not understood that "I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher -- that is to say the extremest antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic philosopher" ("The Birth of Tragedy", 3). And in answer to the final words of the book: "-- Have I been understood? -- Dionysos against the Crucified..." the answer must be a resounding "No".

Cambridge, April 1991

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