Ideals only are alive when one can know the struggle and despair in keeping this fire alive; ideals and despair - or as Camus writes "there is no joy for life if there is not a despair for life".
The human condition is an art that can only be finely lived and studied if one is a lover of all that is of life and from life.
Nietzsche was such a person.
Would he have taken a different direction if someone offered him sedation, forgetfulness or resignation from what burned in him, the fire to question, and to keep questioning? For with each question came a million more questions. Plato writes that 'life without inquisition is not life at all.
Those that rebel, those that ask questions, discover the art of making fire, the Promethean artists, which in translation means "the first lesson". The first lesson Aeschylus would tell you is to "suffer into truth". Of course Shakespeare would tell you, "Pour on. I shall endure." and "Ripeness is all that matters".
Did Nietzsche have a mental breakdown?
Did the on-going aloneness and sadness add to his mental break down,
or for better or worse, did it influence his creativity?
And would he recant his nature and destiny?
"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, do you know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it. Has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
In man, creature and creator are united; in man there is matter, fragment, excess, clay, mud, madness and chaos, but in man there is also creator, sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divine spectator and the seventh day - do you understand this antithesis?"
from "Beyond Good and Evil" (Nietzsche).
Nietzsche had a million chances to be anyone else but him. We all have a million chances to hide and avoid, to forget and neglect, to lose ourselves in a million comfortable, mediocre and self serving life styles.
Nietzsche lived his life as he desired.
It was the life of "only a poet, only a fool", but what a rich life it was. Read his ideas, his mischief, his exploration, his rage, his tenderness and his longing.
He was in the life he wanted to be.
His whole life is one that seeks to build over or under the world of the nihilist.
Anyone who is concerned with heightening his perception or broadening the spectrum of LIFE and LIVING, even if not externally looking "busy" or "active", is internally eternally creative.
Life travels inward before it reaches the outside world of the other.
People that are in life create from their inner voice and therefore there may be times that they seem to be doing "nothing" because they are not socializing, making appointments or simply getting lost in the noise and haste of "getting on with life" rather than being in life.
They can be judged as being "shy" and moody" - another generalization for the "romantic artist".
But this is not the truth. The truth is that this spark keeps them alive, and the spark of rebellion and tenderness that they keep alive is not easily extinguished.
On the other hand we have the professionals, who are neither creators nor artists,
trying to impose patterns of behaviour, and "predetermined behaviour" at that, patterns of understanding and living upon something that they do not live or understand. The original thinker must be made to fit the mould of the hypothesis and theories of a proven and legalized "mediocre" dogma of knowledge. This becomes a straight jacket for the person who questions and continues to travel the road of their own and won nature and destiny.
Nietzsche was such a man and therefore I do not think for one moment that he would have recanted his existence and decision, so that he could be spared the despair that comes with ideals.
He truly was Heraclitan. Read his lectures on Heraclitus ('Pre-Platonic Philosophers - Lectures by Nietzsche translated by Greg Whitlock).
True creativity is always totally new and old. It seems to come from the deepest layers of mankind's experiences, questions, losses and tenderness. Our human condition makes each and everyone of us vulnerable in the scheme of time, seasons, and decay.
The original word for "destiny" in translation means "I have been stitched, to stitch up" and although there are some things we can influence, other forces in the life and the world influence us, and a lover of life is always in preparation for either their arrival or departure. The whole lesson of all the classical philosophers was to "learn to live well, so that you could die well".
Nietzsche was such a man in his life and in the fire of his creativity.
It seems inevitable that this creativity must be accompanied by pressure, tension, conflict, agon, and suffering, and as in a physical birth there exists the period of conception, development, incubation and birth-death (for one life begins, and another ends).
This conflict and tension shakes the creators balance and he cannot perform mindless and shallow tasks of accumulation and indifference. It is as if a gap grows within him and through this gap comes purely unconscious material which must be given form, shape and life; the courage of conscience and the ownership of the self!
To resist is impossible because the force of this tension within the pregnant creator is too strong - Nietzsche refers to himself as being "pregnant". Trying to put off this making, inventing, exploring and creating through mundane activity will not work either, for the more the repression of the creative urge, the stronger it become.
Creativity is carnivorous - when it smiles is when it is most carnivorous.
The creator submits to a form of mania, not Freud's disintegration of the persona, nor a narcissistic gratification ("I am bored with myself" Oscar Wilde) but rather ideals that bring devotion and commitment. It is a energy focused towards the journey of inquisition and seeking, not knowing what will be found or what labyrinth or abyss the navigator may fall into.
The best way to describe this "mania" is a "falling in love" but this is not a "lust for a love object", it is desire and passion for the moment, the world and deep eternity. "For I have never met a woman that i wanted children with unless it be this great woman Eternity".
The creator surrenders to this intuition, imagination and vision. This is the noblest human search for "truth and beauty" for even Nietzsche's teacher Burchardt writes, "Without art we would not know that beauty exists. It is through art that we see the sublime through music, literature or art. It is only through art that we experience something so beautiful and lasting".
Keats on the other hand writes, "Truth is beauty and beauty is truth and that is all you need to know", while Plato writes that "truth is beauty but ever so dangerous for the carrier of this truth and the receiver".
Have you ever wondered why any fascist country or dictatorship will make it their business to destroy all art that questions and seeks to put meaning and value into a robotic and subordinate existence?
How can something that is from the infinite and from the deep layers of our internal existence change the world of cement and organized might? It cannot. Butterflies cannot become eagles and eagles will not stay captive on earth for too long for they fret for the sky. Therefore creators of truth and beauty, of ideals and despair, cannot change a thing, not a single thing, nor do they want their thinking to have followers or to be used as a crutch. Nietzsche writes, "You may lean on me, but do not use me as your crutch".
All teachers and artists who teach man to question and keep questioning are silenced by the two institutes to which we send original thinkers with heart. They are either the madhouse or the slaughterhouse and the truth of the matter is that such a creator is a lover, a dancer and a seeker. And how the world of might, cement and organized man fears the "poet and the fool".
Nietzsche was such a man. Romanticising Depression
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