Revisiting Nietzsche

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, February 15th, 2003

There is a phenomenon that I call conceptual paralaxis – which is the detachment of the axis of the theoretical conception from the axis of the actual existential perspective of the thinker. The examples of this phenomenon are just so plenty in the last centuries that it does not seem exaggerated to see in it the most general and permanent trait of modern thought. In this trend, ideas become the fictional rationalization with which an intellectual strives to camouflage, legitimize or even impose as universal law an inaptitude for self-knowledge, for bearing with moral responsibilities, of taking a stand as a man before life.

In European cultures, or even in the US, this alienating impact is weakened by the residual blockage of the Classic and Christian tradition. But, in a country like Brazil, psychologically defenseless between the jelly-walls of a prolix and shallow culture, any author who makes any noise in the world acquires the dimension of a demiurgic potency, to be worshiped with reverential fear. The author’s greatest fragilities go unnoticed and any attempt of pointing them out is condemned as megalomaniac pretension or as insolent blasphemy.

A particularly desperate case is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who is venerated by so many in this country, maybe because they find in him something of a monument to their own alienation.

The other day I was talking to a friend who is an anthropologist. I was reminded by her that not long ago in USP (University of São Paulo), nobody in her department was accepted as a grown up if they could not classify, in a glimpse, the cultural phenomena as Apollinean or Dionisian – a Nietzschean distinction that is treated as if it were science in Ruth Benedict’s book “Padrões de Cultura” (Cultural Patterns).

Shall we see what this distinction is worth?

In “The Birth of Tragedy”, Apollus, god of cosmic light and order, is the lord of appearances, of the visible universe. Dionisus, chaos and haziness, is cause and origin, the dark and fecund reality under the Apollonian veil. So says Nietzsche, but in the real world things sometimes are like that, sometimes not. Sometimes, it is the chaotic appearance of phenomena that hides a deeper order, which evades the sight of the common mortals, but that reveals itself to those Schiller called “sons of Jupiter”. Indeed, in the Greek myth the contrast Apollo-Dionisus expresses the dynamic tension of the two poles of chaos and order, appearance and reality, in continuous rotation and interchange on the world’s stage. The comprehension of every mythological or religious symbolism relies on a certain sense of inversion. A symbol, by definition, does not have one direction only. It can always transform into its opposite, accordingly to the sphere of being to which it is applied in a certain context. Because of this, and this only, the symbol is an evocative and generative force. That is why the symbol cannot be imprisoned in fixed conceptual framework. It is, as properly said by Susanne K. Langer, a “matrix of possible intellections”. By making a static identification of order and surface, chaos and depths, Nietzsche artificially eliminated that tension, freezing the opposites in immutable roles. He degraded the symbol into stereotype. He transmuted gold into lead.

The worst is that he falls for that precisely at the moment he is protesting against rationalism and calling for the return of the myths as a renewing force of civilization. Neutralizing the tensional inversions, locking the opposite pairs in the fixed cell of a static one-to-one correspondence is the highest sterilizing rationalism. In this case, it is totally involuntary. Nietzsche simply did not know what he was doing.

By abhorring dialectics, by preferring to show off catching static oppositions instead of searching for synthesis, and at the same time trying to dig out language effects from the vocabulary of traditional symbolism – where nothing can oppose anything definitely because everything is appearance in never-ending metamorphosis, what Nietzsche did was a grossly linear metaphysics camouflaged under a cloak of falsified symbols. Into these symbols, the reader then projects the most beautiful dialectical subtleties, which, of course, are not there. The reader mistakes the Greek Apollus and Dionisus for Nietzsche’s, the symbol with the stereotype and sees in the latter the depth of the former. Good for Nietzsche, bad for the reader.

The fetishist substantialization of the opposites is just one among the many mental tics that, in Zaratustra’s author, try to make up for the lack of authentic philosophical intuition. The worst is this: he mistakes the emphatic reiteration of an accident for the definition of an essence and he proceeds to make deductions by way of a consequencionalism that is furiously mechanical. Thus, he transforms the most banal problems into unsolvable dilemmas that seem to him to be tragedie, not noticing that a tragedy that is fabricated with verbal hyperbolisms is not a tragedy, but a farce.

In “The Gay Science”, after showing that much of what man does is based upon the survival instinct, he concludes that such instinct is the “essence” (sic) of the human animal and then reduces all the other human attributes to disguises of the survival instinct. This instinct, though being common to all animal species, cannot be the essence of any of them in particular. If it was, in the others it should be merely a quality or accident, which would result in saying that only one species survives by instinct and the others, just by habit, by chance or to be cheeky. It is unnecessary to say that the other species do not agree at all with this thesis.

The best in Nietzsche are his pejorative psychology notes, that he takes from the observation of himself but projects with adolescent confidence upon Socrates, Jesus Christ, the whole of Humanity. One of such notes is the resentment of the sick against the healthy. But why should such diagnosis be applied more properly to Socrates, an old strong soldier, than it should to Nietzsche himself, a chronic patient who could barely get out of bed?

Translation: Fábio Lins - Proof Reading: Jacqueline Baca