The great Friedrich Nietzsche
Introduction
Talking about Friedrich Wilhem Nietzsche is talking about an undeniably peculiar philosopher. Full of fervor by philosophy from a very early age it was, however, precariously fed by its predecessors. The German had certain training deficiencies with respect to what the vast majority could understand that it is a philosopher to use. Clarify this is important before addressing the main theme of our reflection. Nietzsche knew Plato, Aristotle or Hellenistic schools, although other authors read them rather little. Such is the case, for example, of Kant or Spinoza (although the latter, in our opinion, has exerted more influence on the philosopher of the suspicion that is usually attributed to him. But this is another matter). It was Schopenhauer who completely marveled and finally marked the vivacious Nietzsche when he was only twenty -one years old:
«Nietzsche is fascinated, he feels an almost joyful emotion. Schopenhauer condemns life, but the sentence is pronounced and driven with a verb so burning that, in this condemning work [the world as will and representation], life is still what is there and admires […] her soul is filled: He has found a true thinker, a truth;Your truth. This truth is hard, but what does it matter?".
However, his library reveals to us that he was also a great lover of literature. He was fascinated by literary criticism. Consequently, he built his thought on some bases that are not conventionally philosophical, so to speak. So, if we want to find the predecessors of Friedrich Nietzsche, it is necessary to undertake a detailed tour of writers both from previous and contemporary times to himself. Many were the ones who penetrated the German: Montaigne, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Leopardi … In this essay we will study the influence of Henri Beyle (1783-1842). Better known for his pseudonym "Stendhal", he was one of the first and most important representatives of the French realistic novel. It is relevant because it was capital, as we will see, in the building of the Nietzschean philosophy. All his works had an undeniable value for Nietzsche and had both their ideas and their style.
It was in the summer of 1878 when Nietzsche read the German translation of the Histérature Anglaise of the philosopher and confessed disciple of Stendhal, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-1893). There he found an enthusiastic comment about Beyle, who was qualified as "a psychologist capable of an" Analyst Intime "". This is the first approach that Nietzsche had with the figure of Stendhal. In this same work we find the following passage:
«Only a man undertook him, Stendhal, thanks to a way of seeing things and a singular education, and even today most readers find his paradoxical and dark books. His talent and ideas were premature;The admirable divinations of him were not understood, the deep words of him launched when he passed, the surprising accuracy of his annotations and his logic. It was not seen that, under the appearance of the conservative and the man of the world, he explained the most complicated internal mechanisms […] No one has taught better than him to open his eyes and see, see the men around us and the current life […].
These words undoubtedly marked Nietzsche, who began to read many of Stendhal’s works voraciously from 1879, at which time he had not yet written or Aurora (1881), nor Gaya Science (1882), nor did he speakZarathustra (1883), works with which the philosopher began to acquire solidity. Stendhal’s direct reading absolutely fascinated Nietzsche. So much so that, in a letter addressed to his most faithful and constant friend, Franz Overbeck, dated February 23, 1887, the following words expressed excited:
«From Dostoevski I did not know the name until a few weeks ago […] A casual bars (Zufälliger Griff) in a book store put my work in my eyes L’Esprit Souterrain, newly translated into FrenchIt happened to me with Schopenhauer when I was twenty -one, and with Stendhal when I was thirty -five!) The affinity instinct (Verwandschaft) (or what name will I give you?) He let his voice heard right away, my joy was extraordinary: I have to ride my knowledge of Rouge et Noir de Stendhal to remember an equal joy. (There are two stories, the first, properly a piece of music, of a very strange music, very little German; the second, a great boast of psychology, a kind of self-carnium of the γνώθι σαυτόν ».
Passion, love, vanity, "beauty as a promise of happiness" are themes that we find next to the Nietzschean notes of Stendhal’s reading, mainly in the posthumous fragments of 1880, destined to constitute the plot of the "philosophy of the philosophy of thefuture". Stendhal appears at a time when Nietzsche’s philosophy is not entirely configured;His thought still had to grow and consolidate. After reading Le Rouge et Le Noir, he will affirm Stendhal that he is a great show of psychology, an author in constant state of psychological self-observation. Stendhal’s influence on Nietzsche can be appreciated, for example, in the concept of "passion for knowledge" that we find in Aurora or in the very idea of "gaya science", which Nietzsche will set in 1881 after reading L ‘Amour and memories of a tourist, where the Frenchman says something like: "If the trip teaches us something is that true wisdom is nothing other than a recipe to do everything more jovial for the saddest animal on earth".
Well, Nietzsche said Stendhal woke up the kinship instinct in him. But what kind of relatives were Nietzsche and Stendhal? We believe that the most familiar we can find in both is the suffering of the same experiences;This is what makes them related people. How do the philosopher and the writer coincide? Basically in its confrontation, in its agonizing relationship with romanticism. Both one and the other have suffered romanticism, have problematized it and managed to diagnose what their ailments are. Both, this is important, have thought of romanticism as a disease ("evil of the century") and the task of healing of him have been proposed. This is what Nietzsche discovers in Stendhal: someone who has gone through the same experiences as him and who also shares the same will to heal them.
Now, do Stendhal and Nietzsche really think about romanticism in the same way? As we know, Nietzsche is raised through Wagner (German of the second half of the nineteenth century). On the other hand, in Henri Beyle, the figure that embodies the romantic ideal is Chateaubriand (French of the first half of the nineteenth century). A priori it might seem that it is not the same type of romanticism, but the truth is that there is some continuity between Chateaubriand and Wagner, glimpsed by Nietzsche himself. Let’s look at the Aphorism 370 of Gaya Science:
«What is romanticism? All art, all philosophy can be considered as a means of healing and helping the service of life that grows, that fights: they always presuppose suffering and beings that suffer. But there are two types that suffer, in the first place, those who suffer from the overabundance of life, who want a Dionysian art and also a vision and a tragic compression of life, and secondly those who suffer from the impoverishment ofLife, which with art and knowledge seek rest, stillness, the calm sea, the liberation of themselves, or drunkenness, seizure, anesthesia, madness […] ».
We see, therefore, how Nietzsche thinks romanticism in physiological enclave. The romantic, he tells us, uses art as a mode of calm or as a forgetfulness through alienation. So that the "Polish" understands romanticism as prefigured in Chateaubriand’s work is already prefigured. This leads us to think that, surely, Nietzsche Viera in Wagner to the late French romantic prototype. Consequently, he had the same idea of romanticism as Stendhal.
Chateaubriand has a very short novel, entitled René (1802), which is considered by many as the work in which we can glimpse the first indications of romanticism. René will be taken, protagonist of it, as an archetype. Who is René? René is a dissatisfied, a wandering walker. It is an alter ego of Chateaubriand himself, who suffers two great impacts before writing this novel. The first of these is the Enlightenment. In Memoirs of ourselves, he explains how the reason that has gradually dissolved his religious illusions;Through this he has discovered the mechanisms that produce them. Because of this, he has suffered a disenchantment of the religious world, which has precipitated a state of atheism and grief. The second impact was, without a doubt, the French Revolution. Chateaubriand was noble;From one day to another he is without homeland, he loses the citizenship letter and his own family. In the work, René loses any possibility of the future;He is irremediably a wandering, a stateless. It is also an alienated being, surprised from the society in which he lives. The world does not offer any attraction that encourages you to participate in it;He is unable to channel his passions. This inevitably flows into a replication of interiority, in a state of hyperconconsitance. Feel melancholy, loneliness and guilt for not being able to belong to the totality. So, could René (and Chateaubriand) be considered as the first modern nihilist? Is all this what, from the 80s, Nietzsche understands by decadent? We see in the René all the characteristics of the romantic prototypical being. Characteristics that also emerge in Stendhal and Nietzsche (Zarathustra), although these will try to overcome them and turn the ailments of the romantic hero into conditions of possibility of his character’s philosophy.
It is important to mention that René will appear in a greater work: the genius of Christianity. Thus, René becomes the ratification of the need to return to the cult of the Christian religion. The return to Catholicism is the only thing that can save us. "Every romantic ends up prostrated before the cross," Nietzsche will say. This is clearly seen in Chateaubriand, which has gone through nihilism and despair that it entails and needs to return to the channel of ancient traditions to find Consuelo. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that there is some continuity between the first French romanticism and Nietzsche’s romanticism that is thought through the figure of Wagner.
René exerted an undoubted influence on writers such as Lord Byron, Leopardi or Lamartine, among others. In 1804, Stendhal read the René and felt fully identified with the symptoms in him exemplified and, unlike the rest of authors, he saw in this identification a danger. From then on, he decided to consecrate his life to avoid the "evil of the century", to heal from him. To this, in 1811, he will call him "beylism", a kind of practical philosophy. Nietzsche realized that he was also a patient, he suffers from this "century disease". In the prologue to the first human part, too human tells us the following:
«You will also understand how many times, to rest from myself, to forget myself for a while, I have sought shelter somewhere […] and also why, when I have not found what I needed, I had to try it artificially, falsify itand imagine it properly […] maybe I could reproach in this regard too much “art”, too much falsification of the currency: for example, having closed my eyes knowingly and voluntarily before the blind will of morality of Schopenhauer, at a time in a time in a timethat I was quite insightful in morals;Thus, having fooled myself about Richard Wagner’s incurable romanticism, believing that it was a beginning and not an end […] ».
Stendhal, willing to heal the "evil of the century," novels wrote in which he directly made psychology of modern man. What exactly did he discover?
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