Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's latest novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that

attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

When someone told Friedrich Nietzsche that he had not understood a single word of Zarathustra, Nietzsche replied that “this was perfectly in order: having understood six sentences from it - that is, to have really experienced them - would raise one to a higher level of existence than ‘modern’ men could attain.” It was no better with those who claimed they understood what he had written. “Whoever thought he had understood something of me, had made up something out of me after his own image.” Nietzsche did not expect to be understood. “The time for me hasn’t come yet: some are born posthumously.” The confidence that he would eventually be understood was, at least in part, based on how he could write. After reading him, he insisted, “One simply can no longer endure other books, least of all philosophical works.” The right reader, someone “related to me in the height of his aspiration will experience veritable ecstasies of learning: for I have come from heights that no bird has ever reached in flight, I know abysses into which no foot ever strayed.”

What had Nietzsche learned from the heights he had reached and the depths he had explored? What had he written that no one then living could understand? That Europe, that is to say, the West, was being destroyed by its own history, or, rather, by what had become a wholesale dependence on what history - history with a capital H - was understood to mean. This was because of Hegel, who had tried to make sense out of all the wars and revolutions, all the chaos and misery, of human history, by showing that, instead of a ‘tale told by an idiot signifying nothing,’ history was really the struggle, the conflict, that, through the final stage of the French Revolution and the emergence of Napoleon, had brought history to an end. Everyone would now have equal rights and the promise of a comfortable existence.

Hegel thought this a triumph; Nietzsche thought it the end of civilization and the beginning of the age of barbarians. The end of history meant the “last man,” the man who has no aspirations, who spends his days acquiring wealth and his evenings seeking entertainment, the man always in a hurry, never satisfied, who thinks nothing more important than to live as long as possible the only life he has known. The end of history meant that everyone would live like an American.

History, Hegel’s History, had somehow to be replaced with a different understanding. In one of the first things he wrote, The Use And Abuse Of History, Nietzsche took aim at the catastrophic consequences of trying to judge the past from the point of view of the present. There is a line, more than one, that Nietzsche wrote that is impossible to forget. Nietzsche writes in a way that no one, certainly no philosopher, had written before, or that anyone has written since. When he criticizes the attempt of the present to judge the past, he does not simply say that the contemporary understanding of history is incorrect, he thunders, “Who compels you to sit in judgment?” You have to stand higher than those who came before you if you are going to judge them, but instead of standing higher, “you merely came after them.” When the present judges the past, “it only brings the past down to its own level.”

The kind of history Nietzsche was attacking is, we need to remind ourselves, the kind that is taught everywhere today, that kind that judges the past by what the present thinks important. Everything about the past, including especially those whose names are still famous, is examined to see how close, or how far, they were from what we believe, or, rather, know with absolute certainty, is morally right or morally wrong. For most of our present day historians, and others who try to teach about the past, this means equal rights for everyone and the absence of every kind of prejudice. Everyone today agrees that slavery is wrong; anyone who owned a slave in the past must have been a monster and a villain, even if, or perhaps especially if, they were, like Thomas Jefferson, devoted to the cause of human freedom and tried, in their lifetime, to abolish slavery in the states where they lived.

Nietzsche understood this, and condemned it for its obvious tendency to discredit any kind of human greatness. Instead of trying to diminish what a Caesar, or an Alcibiades, or a Julian, had done, to name three great men Nietzsche singled out, history should tell their stories. History should become, in a phrase he used, “monumental history.” What was important was the possibility of human beings who could become again great creators, men and women with the power to do great things. If you read the history of great men or great events, then, and only then, is there a chance that you will try to do something great yourself.

This concern with history and the various ways of understanding it, led Nietzsche to go back in history to the Greeks and how they understood the world. This attempt changed everything. Europe, the West, had not been advancing toward a higher civilization for the last two thousand years, as Hegel had insisted. It had been, with rare exceptions like the Renaissance, in a continual state of decline, a free fall from the height of the Greek experience. The Greeks had lived within a limited horizon, a closed universe, the sun, the stars, fixed in place; the earth, at the center, the home of the human being who, in the best case, developed his own specific excellence, his reason, to contemplate and understand the world in which he lived. Everyone is connected to everyone else in a city that honors those who have contributed to its greatness, a city in which no one thinks life worth living when they are no longer able to do their own, proper, work as a citizen. Rome, first as a republic, then as an empire, lost much of what Athens had. There was nothing like the same freedom of the citizen or the independence of human thought, but there was still the same belief that the world was the only important place for both gods and men.

Modern science changed all this. The world was no longer the only place there was. The earth was now seen as just one of an uncountable number of planets in a universe of no determinate size. Instead of dominant creatures whose lives were, or could be, of eternal fame, we were nothing but the temporary spectators of our own ephemeral dreams, unless of course we shared the belief in a heaven where, after death, we lived forever. The Christian belief, however, had vanished, even, and perhaps especially, among those who claimed it for themselves. The morning prayer, according to Nietzsche, had been replaced by the morning paper. There was no more reverence for the unchanging, the eternal, only an endless desire for whatever was changing, whatever was new.

The question was what could be done? How, as someone who studied Nietzsche with more than the eye of a scholar once put it, could antiquity be retrieved from the emptiness of modernity? Nietzsche’s answer was the “eternal return of the same.” He mentioned it first in that early writing of his, The Use And Abuse Of History, in a passing reference to Pythagoras, but that passing reference is the beginning, the foundation, of what would become the central teaching Nietzsche wanted to leave the world. According to the Pythagoreans, when an identical constellation of the heavenly bodies occur, identical events - down to individual, minute details - must repeat themselves on earth as well. Everything that happens, happens again. Julius Caesar will again be murdered, Christopher Columbus will again discover America, everything repeated, over and over again, the eternal return of the same endless repetition. What I am writing now I have written timeless times before, and will write timeless times again. Nietzsche develops this thought through the most important of his later writings, including especially Zarathustra, which he considered his greatest work.

The eternal return of the same changes everything. The world becomes again what it once was, the closed world of the ancient Greeks. Instead of infinity, endless time and endless space, the world is limited to the time of each of its same time repetitions, and the human being is again the central character in the comedy and tragedy of the world’s constantly replayed drama. Existence is no longer meaningless. This was Nietzsche’s great achievement, his message to the present and the future as to how the past should be understood. No one took it seriously, perhaps because no one really understood it. Nietzsche was aware of this. He did not expect anyone to believe what he was teaching. He did expect that, in time, perhaps another century or so, others, a few others, would discover, or rediscover, what he had written, and know how to read him the way he meant to be read. They would understand, as none of his contemporaries could, the real meaning of that marvelously seductive, and daringly mysterious, suggestion that he was one of those extraordinarily rare human beings who have been born posthumously.

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Saturday, April 13, 2024

D.W. Buffa

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