Tag Archives: Nietzsche

On Being Sullen

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Having been told that I often seem sullen, I decided to look up the word and find out a little more about it. It’s a derivative of the Latin solus, as are English words like “solitary,” “solitude,” “solo” and “sole.”

Sullen doesn’t always just mean morose, though that is the sense in which we most often use it these days; and I am pretty certain that was the sense in which the word was directed at me. It’s associated with mourning — “sullen black,” in the words of a remorseful Bolingbroke at the end of Richard II, just after he announces the gloomy fate of Exton: “With Cain go wander through shades of night,/ And never show thy head by day nor light.” The sullen mood takes us well to the east of sunlit Eden, and seems often to arise from a sense of having been wronged, or at least a sense that things have gone terribly wrong.

So in some twentieth-century English translations of the Book of Kings, Ahab retires in chapter 21 to his palace in Samaria and, “sullen and angry,” takes to his bed and refuses to eat: Ahab had tried to negotiate a land swap, but “Naboth the Jezreelite had said, ‘I will not give you the inheritance of my ancestors.’” (Ahab’s wife Jezebel will soon fix that.)

Wycliffe makes Ahab dyspeptic (“having indignation, and gnashing on the word which Naboth of Jezreel had spoken to him”), but if we are not going with “sullen” we should prefer the King James rendering of the Hebrew adjective (sr or sar) here as “heavy,” and remember that “sullen” can connote heaviness. The sullen person carries a weight, or is likely to sink or feel weighed down, like the bride in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. “The sullen passage of thy weary steps” is the apt phrase. (That’s Richard II again.) He or she can be obstinate, stubborn and unyielding as well. So can sullen animals. Daniel Defoe writes of a bull that is “sullen, untractable [sic], and outrageous,” and in the 17th century we find a horse described as “sullen” and in need of the spur.

But the story about “sullen” that interests me most begins in the 14th century. That’s when we first find “sullen” applied to those who deliberately keep to themselves – “a soleyn by hymself” (as a line in Piers Plowman has it) — because they are averse to society or disinclined to be social. This sullen character is a melancholic, the predecessor of the early modern misanthrope — and maybe a remote ancestor of Henry David Thoreau or a great-great-great uncle of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. I’m not going to try to put the whole family tree together here, but I think it’s fascinating to consider the emergence of this solitary figure and follow his adventures in the modern period.

It’s also worth noting that here we have the most radical use of the word “sullen,” in the sense that it connects us with the word’s roots in the condition of solitude or going solo.

This sullen one separates himself from the madding crowd, or withdraws far into himself. Even in a crowd, he can sink into his sulk. Of course, deliberately keeping to oneself and withdrawing into solitude can carry a cost. The 19th century critic George Bancroft wrote disapprovingly of Byron and other romantic poets who through “sullen misanthropy” had divorced themselves from “the haunts of man” and squandered their gifts; and in another post I’ve written about the pain that Zarathustra feels as he takes leave of his friends and returns to his mountain haunt at the behest of his mistress, The Stillest Hour. The recognition that a sullen disposition can be painful or damaging is hardly unique to the 19th century: even in the medieval poem Richard the Redeless we find logic splitters that are “so soleyne and sad of her wittis” that they can’t reach conclusions.

Sullen withdrawal and the solitude it can bring is not, however, just a way of absenting oneself, and it’s not always confounding. Maybe that’s obvious, but how often do we appreciate the illuminations that gloom can bring? A sullen turn of mind is a special kind of about-face, away from sociability and cheery outward show — to face oneself. The sullen figure (at least the one who interests me most) takes his solitary way, not just out of Eden or the haunts of men, but into himself and into the human interior.

To be sullen in this sense is not just to play solo, but to play with solitude itself. So Dr. Johnson thought the epithet “sullen” could not be applied to the trumpet, but he never heard Chet Baker. Ingmar Bergman writes in his autobiography that as a child he was “considered sullen and too sensitive”; but in his mature years, as Dorthe Nors notes in a recent essay, he became a master of disciplined solitude. “In my solitude,” Bergman writes, “I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity” — and for Nors that excess, that overflowing of humanity, is the wellspring of artistic creativity. It is not just self-imposed exile, but an encounter.

It’s Lonely at the Top – Nietzsche, Mother Teresa and Non-Coercive Leadership

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I returned to my old paperback copy of Zarathustra recently, this time in connection with some work I’ve been doing on the topic of non-coercive power, or what I have been calling the power of asking. I’ve been developing some thoughts around this mantra: The power of asking will always be greater than the power of command. So it seemed to me I ought to come to terms with or at least try to deepen my understanding of what Nietzsche says in this book about command, or coercive power.

I was specifically interested in the pronouncement made in “The Stillest Hour” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part 2, chapter 44):

‘…You are one who has unlearned obeying: now shall you command!’
‘Do you not know who is most needed by all? The one who commands great things.
‘To accomplish great things is difficult: but more difficult is to command great things.
‘That is what is most unpardonable in you: You have the power and you do not want to rule.’

It’s a chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that has attracted a lot of important commentary, from Jung’s seminars on Zarathustra in the 1930s to Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign seminars in 2001-2. It’s a crux, a point of departure, and it’s also a spot where I might have to take my leave of Nietzsche. How are we to read the injunction here to “command” anew, or to “rule” according to one’s “power”, after one has “unlearned obeying”?

It’s an easy rhetorical move to make, from obeying to commanding, but it seemed to me it also might involve a serious misstep — to unlearn obedience, only to take up, or institute, command.

Put aside for the moment the questionable judgment of “what is most needed by all,” and the ethical as well as the political consequences that judgment, or others like it, could have and historically have had. I am equally wary of the emphasis here on doing and commanding “great” things, or at least wary of misreading it. The pursuit of “great things” (Großes) tends to invite and encourage, or at least excuse, all sorts of abuses.

To wield coercive power, to direct or to command great things may indeed be difficult, even more difficult than doing great things; but it is harder still, I think, and it is really the more urgent project, to unlearn obedience and command and to learn, instead, the practice of non-coercive power.

If that means scaling down from great to small, then I’m happy to start small and, if need be, stay small. I’m not suggesting we stop dreaming and doing great things, taking on big challenges, imagining great enterprises, but in most cases I am inclined to urge and apply something like the rule of Mother Teresa: “don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love…. The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.” (That much misquoted line, by the way, is from her “Instructions to the M.C. Sisters,” October 30th, 1981, as cited by Brian Kolodiejchuk in Come Be My Light.)

Here, I imagine, Nietzsche might wish take his leave of me, or at least Nietzscheans and devout Catholics alike will cry out in exasperation or horror at the unholy coupling I’ve just imagined. But I suspect that when all is said and done, these two points of view can be reconciled, or at least they are not so far apart as they may at first seem. Consider, just for starters, the answer Zarathustra receives when he objects that he lacks the lion’s voice for command: “Thoughts that come on dove’s feet guide the world.’”

More on that another day. Here I want only to point out the thing that was on my mind this morning: that is Zarathustra’s sadness as he takes leave of his friends at the close of the second book. My Stillest Hour, Zarathustra’s “terrible mistress” — “or something,” which speaks to him “voicelessly” — has “ordered” him to to leave. He obeys. Yes, obeys; he announces at the start of the chapter that he is “unwillingly obedient,” unwillig-folgsam. He comes to his friends deeply troubled and unhappy; and after he has recounted the conversation with his mistress he is overwhelmed:

when Zarathustra had spoken these words, the force of his pain and the nearness of the parting from his friends overwhelmed him, such that he wept loudly; and no one knew how to console him. That night, however, he went away alone and left his friends.

Zarathustra will “go as a shadow of that which must come: thus will you command, and thus lead the way.” But to command and to lead he must “mellow.” As his mistress tells him, his fruits are ripe, but he is not ripe for his fruits: “so,” she continues, “you must go back to your solitude.” To deprive himself of all human society may, in fact, prepare Zarathustra to command great things; but it’s painful to leave his friends. So painful that he weeps — loudly.

Exile may be the price Zarathustra must pay to overcome himself and lead the way. It’s lonely at the top, and Zarathustra’s mountain is no exception. But it’s also worth reminding ourselves of less romantic and heroic ideas of what it means to lead.

Unlearn obeying and then, the most difficult thing of all: unlearn command. If we practice non-coercive leadership, we can learn to create and share power with others, without reverting to command or obedience, and without taking our leave of those we love.

A Mark I Once Made

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I’ve owned this old paperback copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra since the late 1970s. Ever since then, it has been my constant companion.

It was this very book that first awakened me to the pleasures of reading philosophy and the possibilities of doing philosophy, when I was still innocent of all serious philosophy.

I do not know why I first bought the book — it was not exactly recommended reading in the public high school I attended — but I seem to remember that I first read Zarathustra on a hiking trip in the Black Mountains. I know that it was night and there was a fire burning.

Was it The Stillest Hour? I would like to think so. I was reading by candlelight, when the words of Zarathustra’s Prologue leapt out at me. I’d never read anything like this! Whose words were these? In an uncanny way they seemed to be mine — or at least I wanted them to be mine. I couldn’t say I understood them fully but knew those words to be true and I wanted to live their truth.

So I dripped wax on the page, to mark it.

zarawax1

I left my mark in wax — as if I could make these words my secret, as if sealing a letter with wax. A letter, but to whom? To Nietzsche? More likely to myself, promising I would return.

It was just the first, not the last time that the beauty, the passion, the madness and the truth of Nietzsche’s writing in Zarathustra struck me, stopped me in my tracks, overcame me. But I believe it was at that moment that I began to tell a new story about myself and about the world, or at least it was one of the first times I understood that I might have a story to tell. I was 17 years old.

Now, I have little claim on Nietzsche. I am not a professional philosopher and I am not a Nietzsche scholar by any stretch of the imagination. I once wrote a few words about Untimely Meditations in a review of a book by Bernard Williams; and when, in the 90s, I included Nietzsche in my Western Civilization courses I usually taught The Birth of Tragedy or The Genealogy of Morals. But curiously enough, I never taught Zarathustra or wrote about Zarathustra, which of all Nietzsche’s writings has arguably — no, undeniably — had the strongest claim on my life and my imagination. The book has done its quiet, subtle work in my life for nearly thirty five years.

“The dew,” Nietzsche writes, “falls upon the grass when the night is most silent.”

Only the Doer Learns – A Little Context

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A short while ago, I tracked down the source of a quotation that had been wrongly attributed to Kant and widely circulated online: “A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.” I found the sentence a pretty long way from any work by Immanuel Kant, in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality, and after reading the passage in question I remarked offhand that Castaneda seemed to channeling not Kant, but some mix of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Now my pursuit of another widely-circulated quotation — this one attributed correctly, it turns out, to Nietzsche — has brought me back to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Reading my old beat up paperback edition of Zarathustra again today only strengthened my conviction that Castaneda drew freely on Nietzsche as he created Don Juan; and it’s also brought me back to some consideration of how much gets lost when we allow philosophical quotations to stand for philosophy. That, as I noted in a previous post, is a growing tendency, driven by the boom in career, motivational and leadership literature and by social media.

“Only the doer learns” is how R.J. Hollingdale neatly renders Nietzche’s nur der Thäter lernt. The translation I’ve seen most widely circulated lately has a deliberately antiquated flavor: “the doer alone learneth.” Maybe that looks better as a tattoo, or a gamer’s motto. [Update 22 Feb 2015: since writing this post I have discovered that the brutal death metal band Emeth has a 2008 song called ‘The Doer Alone Learneth.’] I cannot even begin to imagine the various uses to which Nietzsche might be put nowadays. I can imagine, based on other forays I have made into the world of popular quotations, that “only the doer learns” is being traded as advice that one ought to learn by doing, jump right in, be a self-starter, take some measured risks. That, regrettably, is what the literature of success reduces philosophy to — formulas for jumpstarting your career and getting ahead. Let’s see if in the present case we can arrive at something a little more intelligent and nuanced than that.

Context helps. The line in question is from the chapter on “The Ugliest Man” in Book 3 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s been yanked completely out of context — as most of these popular and familiar quotations are — and I wonder how and why it ended up getting yanked.

Here, Zarathustra is passing through the valley the shepherds call Serpent’s Death, where he comes upon “something sitting on the pathway, shaped like a man and yet hardly like a man, something unutterable” and he is overcome by “the great shame of having beheld such a thing.” He blushes and turns away, but just as he attempts to leave a human voice rises up and puts a riddle to him: “What is the revenge on the witness?” And a few minutes later: “who am I”? At first so overcome by pity that he sinks to the ground, Zarathustra raises himself up and, standing again, replies: you are the murderer of God.

So here we have Zarathustra, face to face with the ugliest man, who could not tolerate God’s witness: God pitied him. “His pity knew no shame: he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most curious, most over-importunate, over-compassionate god had to die….Man could not endure that such a witness should live.” Zarathustra replies:

“You unutterable creature,” he said, “you warned me against your road. As thanks for that, I recommend you mine. Behold, up yonder lies Zarathustra’s cave.”
“My cave is big and deep and possesses many corners; there the best hidden man can find his hiding place. And close by it are a hundred secret and slippery ways for creeping, fluttering, and jumping beasts.”
“You outcast who cast yourself out, do you not wish to live among men and the pity of men? Very well, do as I do. Thus you also learn from me; only the doer learns.
And first of all and above all speak with my animals! The proudest animal and the wisest animal — they may well be the proper counsellors for both of us!”
Thus spoke Zarathustra, and went on his way, even more thoughtfully and slowly than before: for he asked himself many things and did not easily know what to answer.
How poor is man! (he thought in his heart) how ugly, how croaking, how full of secret shame!
They tell me that man loves himself: ah, how great must this self-love be! How much contempt is opposed to it!
Even this man has loved himself as he has despised himself — he seems to me a great lover and a great despiser.
I have yet found no one who has despised himself more deeply: even that is height. Alas, was he perhaps the Higher Man whose cry I heard?
I love the great despisers. Man, however, is something that must be overcome.

To learn from Zarathustra, the Ugliest Man will do as he has done: he will live in his cave, far from the sight of men, beyond pity and morality, and beyond human language itself. He will live among the beasts and speak with the animals. That is the where Zarathustra’s steep mountain road leads.

I suspect that we are to hear some mockery in the maxim “only the doer learns.” So lernst du auch von mir; nur der Thäter lernt might be Nietzche’s aphoristic and bitterly ironic rendering of a passage in Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics 1103A) on the habit of virtue: “the virtues,” runs this famous passage from Book II of the Ethics, “we acquire by first having put them into action, and the same is also true of the arts. For the things which we have to learn before we can do them we learn by doing” [emphasis mine]. It wouldn’t surprise me to find Nietzsche roasting this old chestnut of moral philosophy even as Zarathustra turns morality and philosophy itself on its head.

Kant or Castaneda?

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Fernando J. Grijalva and I have never met, but I hope we do someday. We’ve shared ideas, disagreed, and exchanged views, entirely online, usually in 140 characters or less. I consider him an intellectual companion, a “co-learner,” to use the word Fernando likes to use. Yesterday we shared an error.

It started when Fernando posted this quotation, attributed to Kant:

I was intrigued, and wondered what word Kant used here for “lives,” since that word (which, along with the nominative form “life,” never fails to intrigue me) seemed to be the crux of the thought. So I went searching, and in my haste I thought I found it in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Instead, it turns out, my quick scan of the Google search results misled me. This morning, when I tried to pick up the trail, my search led me not to the German text of Kant’s Critique, but to Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality. Here is the passage in full. Don Juan is speaking:

‘I told you once that our lot as men is to learn, for good or bad,’ he said. ‘I have learned to see and I tell you that nothing really matters; now it is your turn; perhaps someday you will see and you will know then whether things matter or not. For me nothing matters, but for you perhaps everything will. You should know by now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it; and then he looks and rejoices and laughs; and then he sees and knows. He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows that he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he knows, because he sees, that nothing is more important than anything else. In other words, a man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly. Thus a man of knowledge endeavors, and sweats, and puffs, and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way part of his concern.’ (emphasis mine)

Reading this again after all these years – as a teenager I devoured Castaneda’s books, but as an adult I’ve never gone back to them – I am surprised and impressed by the power of Castenada’s writing; at the same time it’s hard to believe anyone ever mistook this stuff for anthropology.

While I wouldn’t put it past the writer who made Don Juan out of whole cloth to have channeled or lifted something from Kant, here he sounds more like he is channeling some mix of Erasmus and Nietzsche.

Quoted out of context, the line about the man of knowledge sounds like serious philosophy, but turns out to be pseudo-anthropological fantasy (which may, in turn, have something philosophically serious to offer). In context, it’s not quite the lesson in pragmatism Fernando thought it was. So, for now, unless someone can find the sentence in Kant, Castaneda should get all the credit.