I heard the most accurate words about him from a graduate of an Orthodox gymnasium: “I was always taught that illness is a punishment, suffering is a punishment, and, in the end, life itself is a punishment. And now I read Nietzsche and understand: illness is a challenge, suffering is a challenge, and life is a challenge.”
Nietzsche as a philosopher is interesting because he literally teaches to live. In what other philosophical books do you find such practical advice as in Zarathustra and Ecce homo? Up to which diet to choose and which climate to prefer. However, Nietzsche’s advice is by no means aimed at giving a person the opportunity to live calmly and comfortably. “The secret of reaping the greatest fruits and the greatest pleasure from existence is called: it is dangerous to live! Build your cities near Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your equals and with yourselves!”
For Nietzsche, life is not something in which you need to get comfortable, but the scenery of human formation and cognition, and at the same time – the object of a passionate love game and struggle. “Life has not disappointed me! On the contrary, from year to year I find it more true, more desirable, more mysterious – from the very day when the great liberator dawned on me: the idea that life is destined to be an experiment of the cognizer, and not a duty and not a misfortune. Although life was not too generous to the one who sang it like that. Nietzsche was completely alone, lived far from relatives and friends, was very ill and seriously ill, published books at his own expense, but at first they did not find any response. And when the confession finally came, Nietzsche could no longer even comprehend it – he had lived the last ten years, being insane. His short journey was indeed an “experiment of the knower”, moreover, an experiment with a tragic outcome. And yet, with this experiment, Nietzsche paved many new paths for humanity. His intuition often anticipated modern postulates of psychology. For example, the idea that our “I” is not at all something integral and monolithic, but rather serves as an arena for the struggle of conflicting impulses, many of which are not even realized by us. His name is associated with the challenges that Nietzsche threw to humanity – with the idea of the superman, the death of God and the “revaluation of all values.” The Superman is not a superman from comics or a representative of some higher caste or race of people (“the boundaries between races, nations and classes are absurd: there is only a hierarchy of personalities, but it is a hierarchical ladder of incredible length”). The Superman is the one who, having experienced the death of God in himself, did not fall into nihilism, but was able to become a free creator of new, life-affirming values. And to affirm life is, according to Nietzsche, to live dangerously, in constant becoming. “Man is a rope fixed between the beast and the superman, a rope over an abyss. It is dangerous to cross, it is dangerous to be on the way, it is dangerous to look back, fear and stop are dangerous. The great thing about man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”
IGOR EBANOIDZE is a literary critic, essayist, translator and publisher of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
His view of the world
Trust instincts, distrust systems: “I distrust all systematists and shun them. The will to the system is a lack of honesty. The most cruel retribution awaits the one who makes life easier for himself by avoiding his main business.
“And everything that can go must go through once again. Shouldn’t we always return?” Then we should live in such a way that we want to return to this life forever, despite all its hardships.
What are we suffering from?
“Every art, every philosophy can be considered as a healing and auxiliary means of an increasing or descending life: they always presuppose suffering and suffering. But there are two types of sufferers: firstly, those suffering from the excess of life, who want Dionysian art, as well as tragic understanding and the tragic panorama of life, and, secondly, those suffering from the impoverishment of life, who from art and philosophy want peace, silence, smoothness. sea, or intoxication, convulsions, deafness. <…>
The one who overflows with life – the Dionysian god and man – can afford not only the contemplation of the terrible and problematic, but even a terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decay, denial – with him evil, senseless and ugly appears as if permitted, just as it appears it is permissible in nature, due to an excess of generating, restoring forces that are capable of creating a flourishing fruitful land from any desert. On the contrary, the most suffering, the poorest in life, most of all needs meekness, peacefulness and kindness – what we today call humanity – both in thoughts and in actions, and, if possible, God, who would be exclusively God for the sick. , a savior <...> – in a word, we need some warm tightness that protects from fear and confinement in optimistic horizons, which contributes to stupefaction.
F. Nietzsche “Nietzsche contra Wagner”. Complete Works (Cultural Revolution, 2009).
His dates
- October 15, 1844 Born in the family of a rural pastor in Saxony.
- 1869 Without defending a dissertation, he became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel.
- 1869-1876 Years of close association with the composer Richard Wagner.
- 1879-1889 Refuses the professorship due to illness, wanders alone through boarding houses in Switzerland, France and Italy, where he writes his main works.
- 1882 Close friendship with Lou von Salome. After a dramatic parting with her, he writes the first part of the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
- 1889 Friends receive notes from him signed “Dionysus” and “Crucified”. A friend takes him to a psychiatric clinic; Later, his mother takes him to her home.
- August 25, 1900 Died in Weimar.