Ecce Homo

"Yes. Nietzsche particularly loves Heraclitus. Nietzsche comes to reject any notion of being: he regards the notion of being as one of the great fictions. The notion that there is such a thing as ‘being’ or moral truth or God — these are all fictions according to Nietzsche. So he loves Heraclitus whom he sees as this philosopher of change and flux, but that’s not the only reason that he loves Heraclitus: Nietzsche is also an advocate of Heraclitus’s belief in the creative tension that arises out of the clash and pull of opposites. Heraclitus writes, for instance, that “you must know that war is common, that justice is strife, that all things happen out of strife and necessity”, and “They do not comprehend how, in differing, it agrees with itself — a back-turning harmony, like that of a bow and a lyre.” Nietzsche really gets hold of this idea. In The Birth of Tragedy , one of Nietzsche’s earliest published works, all his classical training is brought to bear — it’s where he gives his analysis of what he calls the Dionysian and Apollinian forces. He comes back to The Birth of Tragedy later on in Ecce Homo when he’s reviewing his life’s work. In his essay in Ecce Homo entitled “The Birth of Tragedy” he writes that when he’s in the proximity of Heraclitus he feels ‘warmer and better than anywhere else’. It’s a relief that Nietzsche felt cosy somewhere: he didn’t feel cosy in many places. What does he love about Heraclitus? He loves Heraclitus’s affirmation of passing away and destroying, of which he says, ‘this is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy’ — the philosophy he explored and partially advocated in The Birth of Tragedy . He loves the fact that Heraclitus, as he sees it, says ‘Yes’ to opposition, to war, and ‘Yes’ to becoming. He loves Heraclitus’s repudiation of the very concept of being (again, this doesn’t take sufficient account of Heraclitus’s notion of the Logos, but that is also for another discussion). ‘All this’, says Nietzsche, ‘is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date.’ So, he sees himself in a Heraclitean tradition, and I think that’s one of the clues as to why Nietzsche experiments with style in the way that he does throughout his life, because his writing includes poetry, songs, aphorisms, and paradoxes, as well as more conventional essays. He’s always experimenting with style, just as Heraclitus was. Because Nietzsche saw himself as a philosopher of becoming, a philosopher of change, as he at least thought his hero Heraclitus had been, he thinks that his style has got to keep moving, it’s got to keep dancing. He’s got to keep experimenting and can’t have a fixed style because that would be to sign up to being, and he’s repudiating being. Nietzsche wants a style, or rather styles, of becoming. So Nietzsche’s style is absolutely an intrinsic part of his meaning here. The form is part of the meaning in just the way it was for Heraclitus. Nietzsche is interested in other Presocratics too, but it is particularly Heraclitus who inspires him. To get a sense of how the Presocratics went on inspiring people, in both form and content, have a look at Ecce Homo . It’s a wonderful work in many ways, and in the essay “The Birth of Tragedy” in particular it certainly gives you a sense of Nietzsche’s intellectual history. Well, that’s up to you! You have, in fact, given me a very Nietzschean view of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle that I personally don’t hold. For me, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are all extraordinarily radical, fresh thinkers. And, don’t forget Socrates got put to death for it. And near the end of his life Aristotle went into exile because he said he thought the Athenians were going to commit a second crime against philosophy and he didn’t want to give them the chance. Plato only got away with it because he lived outside the main centre of the city in a place called the Academy that had a sign over the door saying ‘Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry’ — a very good way of making yourself look like the strange man at the end of the pier who the politicians don’t need to worry about, because you’re just a harmless eccentric. I think they’re very unorthodox. But I completely agree with you that the Presocratics and the sophists at their best were extraordinarily innovative thinkers. What I want to get rid of is this notion that the people we term ‘ancient philosophers’ were like the 18th century sculptures of them — venerable sages with beards, éminences grises, figures of the establishment. They weren’t. They were absolutely non-establishment. They were genuinely radical. They got into trouble with the establishment again and again. They had books burnt, they had to go into exile, they got into real trouble. And many of them were young when they were writing: Zeno was 24 when he published his collection of forty paradoxes which contained the very famous paradoxes which say that motion is impossible. Motion, of course, depends on notions of time and space. Zeno argues that if time and space exist, they must be either finitely or infinitely divisible — but both the finite and the infinite divisibility of time and space are profoundly problematic, so motion can’t exist, it must be an illusion. There must just be motionless being, as Zeno’s teacher Parmenides had claimed. But is Zeno really arguing this or is he in fact being mischievous? Is he really saying that you actually can’t move away from me talking to you in the marketplace, or is he perhaps saying that maybe time and space do exist, but we humans have not yet found a way to articulate them without contradicting ourselves? (And we may wonder whether we have yet — certainly not to everyone’s satisfaction.) So perhaps Zeno is saying that we have not yet found a way to articulate motion. So, they were young, they were radical, they were fresh, they were extraordinary thinkers. Democritus, for example, said everything is just atoms and void and we can’t have direct access to it — and it’s not just that you don’t have direct access to all the atoms and void that make up that table, you don’t even have direct access to the surface of that table because the surface of that table is atoms and void floating off through air (itself comprised of atoms and void) and meeting the atoms and void coming out from your eye. It’s this sort of collision of the atoms and void in your eye and the atoms and void in the table, all altered by the atoms and void in the intervening medium of the air, it’s all this which gives rise to your sensation of looking at the surface of the table. But you don’t even know exactly what the direct surface of the table is like. Extraordinary stuff! He did all this without a laboratory. And he also said there were other worlds. Other worlds! Extraordinary. And we mustn’t forget Xenophanes, another one of my heroes. He questions the anthropomorphic nature of the Greek gods in a way which was immensely radical. He says each people depicts the gods in its own image. So Greek images of gods look like Greeks, but if you go to Ethiopia — a generic term for Africa — you’ll find that pictures of the gods there have dark skin and different features. And if you go to Thrace in northern Greece — this is my favourite — their gods have red hair and blue eyes. Brilliant! And he said if cattle and horses and lions could paint, cows and horses would paint gods looking like cows and horses. Given the pressure at the time to conform with the state religion, this is astonishing. So, to sum up, these are people looking at the world and thinking: is the world how it looks to me? Do I trust my sense data? Do I trust the appearances? Is reality actually something different from how things appear? I seem to see change and movement but perhaps everything is just stable, maybe there’s just one thing. I think I see colours, but Democritus tells me that colours don’t actually exist in objects themselves, it’s just atoms and void and the sensation of colour arises from the collision of atoms that we discussed before. Colour is what we would now call a secondary quality, so Democritus is prefiguring the great 17th century philosophers such as Locke. So, yes, the Presocratics are genuinely radical but, to go back to your question, I would say that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle don’t lose that radical nature. It’s Nietzsche who gives us this negative view of it all going horribly wrong when Socrates comes along: that philosophy was doing fine until Socrates. But I think Nietzsche is deeply unfair to Socrates and Plato, and in fact I think Nietzsche at least partly knows that, he is actually intrigued by Socrates and Plato, particularly Socrates, and keeps coming back to him."