Sunday 15 August 2021

Han Ryner contra Nietzsche: Four Texts (1904, 1922, 1928)

Draft translations of:

1. From “Quelques philosophes,” Prostitués: études critiques sur les gens de lettres d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Société Parisienne d’édition, 1904), pp. 325–34.

2. From “Suite de l’Histoire de la Sagesse,” La Sagesse qui rit (Paris: Monde Moderne, 1928), pp. 153–4.

3. From Des diverses sortes d’individualisme (Paris: Fauconnier, 1922), pp. 18–21.

4. From ibid., pp. 29–30.

Han Ryner critiques Nietzsche from an individualist-anarchist perspective. His characterization of Nietzsche as a “Hegelian” is strikingly odd; perhaps he means what we would by “idealist.” In the first text, Ryner argues for the incoherence of the Overman-ideal in light of the “eternal return.” In the third, he suggests that the master is slave to his slaves’ image of himself. In the fourth, he offers a pacifistic sort of self-mastery as an alternative reading of Nietzsche.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

Notes in square brackets are mine.

 

1

“Three metamorphoses of the spirit,” says Zarathustra, “do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child” [1].

The camel is “the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwelleth.” Doughty and devoted, he calls for the most torturous rules, the heaviest burdens and, “when laden, hasteneth into the wilderness”; “But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.” “I will,” he roars, and fights against the dragon called “Thou Shalt.” He shreds aged morals, crushes “old values.” But, having answered “a holy ‘Nay,’ even unto duty,” he becomes a child for the “holy ‘Yea’” which creates “new values” [2].

Nietzsche’s philosophy does indeed begin as a liberator. This hero wishes to free us not only from “every master who cannot laugh at himself,” but even from our own past; from any personal continuity; from the naïve and tyrannical fear of contradicting ourselves [3]. Not content to deliver the individual from the “herd instinct,” he liberates him from any concern for harmony in life or in thought. He is not satisfied with having told him to be himself. He calls him to be the self of the minute, not of yesterday. With a proud and somewhat sneering joy, he proclaims: “my to-day refuteth my yesterday” [4]. The lion roars: “Live in the joy of this moment!”

To free the individual is not enough for Nietzsche. He also delivers the universe. He delivers it from God, who is “dead”; he delivers it from causality and from finality.

But soon he will turn from a destructive lion into a child who plays “the game of creation,” forging chains for the world and the individual just as heavy as the old [5].

Moreover, despite his rough efforts and his lyrical triumphs, he never frees his own thought as completely as did Descartes or Kant. Not for a second does he escape Hegelianism, which seems to him an unavoidable necessity of all German thought. Nor does he extricate himself from Darwinism. His detailed explanations, whether he is seeking the “origin of conscience,” the “origin of logic,” or any other genesis, make use of natural selection as an agent whose existence and importance no one would dare deny. It is true that he reproaches “English Darwinism” [6], for who knows what “odour of humble people in need and in straits” [7].  For him, the German Darwinist, the Darwinist of a victorious place and a gloriously expansive time, the struggle “turns everywhere on predominance, on increase and expansion, on power, in conformity to the will to power, which is just the will to live” [8]. But this critique, which narrows the theory, which perceives only the joyous and conquering form of combat and ignores its painfully defensive form, does not seem very successful to me. The mechanism of the world is for Nietzsche what it was for Darwin. His incomplete dynamic, which only accounts for action and not for resistance, does not explain this mechanism as well.

Nietzsche, having found in Hegelianism and Darwinism the limits to his destructive power, turns to reconstruction. He presents a universe that seems entirely new to him; a universe he believes to be the work of his “own will,” and which he calls his “own world.” In reality, he is aided by Hegel and Darwin, the only apparent survivors of the intense struggle for life that various doctrines had waged within him. Even they are not entirely alone; certain materials come from farther afield, and also the elegance of certain curves. The names of Plotinus and Plato have the right to an inscription on this composite edifice.

So Nietzsche would create; and he, who roundly criticized the notion of sacrifice, would love his creations better than himself. “Do I then strive after happiness? I strive after my work!” [9] He would create two doctrines above all: the doctrine of the Overman, and the doctrine of the Great Return.

Every being must “overcome itself,” create a superior being; and “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman” [10]. Man must create the Overman. One will easily see that this is simply an audacious application of Darwinism to the future. For Nietzsche, man is a sort of Overape: “What is the ape to man? A laughingstock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Overman: a laughingstock, a thing of shame” [11]. There is also a Plotinian residue in the idea of this tendency to create something better than oneself. Nietzsche, a myopic Plotinus, seems to see regression’s first step in God. He does not go beyond that. However, the Overman would only be the immediate end of man, not the ultimate end of the universe. He must also be overcome; and even what he creates must be overcome. Nowhere in Nietzsche do I see why this movement should stop, nor where it should stop. Now, Nietzsche cannot avoid the difficulty by asserting infinite progress. For him, eternity is not a straight line. According to the doctrine of the Great Return, we shall return to the very spot at which we stand, and at which we have found ourselves an infinity of times.

Only two solutions remain. Either progress is merely apparent and the Overman, who, after so many centuries, leads back to man, the Overman, as much a past as a future, is at the same time an Underman. His advent is a matter of indifference; and Nietzsche is wrong to sacrifice himself to him.

Or the curve of existence really does strive towards some nobility sighted at the extremity of its axis or at one of its foci. The trajectory has one end which is attained or approached. But only some Plotinian rhythm can explain how it could then continue to a sort of contrary perfection. Would this end not be the resurrection of the God who is dead, and His enrichment through the gift of all creatures? Then, in His turn, this generous God, made of all our generosities, would spend himself in creation; would spend himself unto death. His birth and his death would be the two extremities of the great axis or, if you prefer, the two foci of the ellipse.

The theory of the Overman only retains its originality for as long as it remains an incomplete and truncated thought. Darwin, a savant who wished only to explain the past, knew the dynamism of secondary causes better than Nietzsche. Plotinus, who spoke of eternity, saw it more fully and more clearly.

Nietzsche is not only the poet of the Overman: he is also the poet of the Great Return. We must sing eternally “the song, the name of which is ‘Once more,’ the signification of which is ‘Unto all eternity!’” [12]. For every joy wills itself and, in willing itself, wills every condition that permits its birth. In vain, pains flee into infinity, attempt to lose themselves in nothingness. Their frantic course runs towards renewal by the dogged efforts of joys that will the very same at the very same place. Victorious joys enrhythm the world. “Joys all want eternity—Want deep, profound eternity!” [13] And Nietzsche, “ardent for Eternity and for the marriage-ring of rings—the ring of the return,” sings his love in a vertiginous dance [14].

Thereby the universe, just delivered from causality, from order, from end, is now in the grip of a stronger necessity and in the bonds of a cyclical continuity.

And the dragon “Thou Shalt,” shredded by the lion, is resuscitated in the child’s caterwauling. We no longer live for the joy of the moment but in order to “overcome” ourselves; to desire and to bring about our own “decline”; to surrender ourselves to the future and to the creation of the Overman. Nietzsche requires that we love the universe, that we love ourselves, at the present moment, at the moments that led to it, and at the moments to which it leads; he wills that we love it, this moment, not once, but an infinity of times: today, and in the bottomless past, and in the bottomless future: for all “profound eternity.”

For this conception, which may shake with terror, or paralyze with indifference, may also exalt with drunken joy. It is above all in the manifestations of this joy that Nietzsche’s powerful originality bursts forth. Originality of a poetic rather than a philosophical order. He repeats things he has already said, but in new accents. His song is always bellicose and orgiastic. Others have accepted the universe for its necessity, or have smiled at its harmony. He wills it frantically for the joy of the now; for the joy of yesterday; for the joy of tomorrow. Instant and eternity, powerful spirits, go to his head and besot him. Others have lauded the universe in long and placid Apollonian chants; he exalts it in the frolicking disorder of a Dionysian dance.

A dance! For him, dance is the most intense symbol of joy and the most precise rhythm of truth. Of the philosopher he writes: “the dance is his ideal, and also his art; in the end likewise his sole piety, his ‘divine service’…” [15]. His Zarathustra: “Goeth he not along like a dancer?” [16] Does he not declare: “beyond all heavens did I want to dance”? [17] And again: “Only in the dance do I know how to speak the parable of the highest things” [18].

Nietzsche’s individualism—noise, agitation, tumult, orgy, rather than harmony—is less beautiful than Stoicism or Epicureanism. His metaphysic is the daughter of Hegel and Darwin; of Plato and Plotinus. But he declaims his thought in images so triumphant, he dances her to the rhythm of symbols so frolicking and vertiginous, that she seems the feverish creation of some unforeseen god, barbarous Bacchus, drunk on power, and drunk on drink as well. Now, his drink is not wine but who knows what formidable essence: of eternity condensed into an instant. And around this movement of the bestial god shimmers an ardent dazzle; around Nietzsche’s every movement—that Loïe Fuller of philosophy—circles, serpentine and sizzling, a melody of flames.

 

Notes

1. [Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, “The Three Metamorphoses.”]

2. [Ibid.]

3. [See the epigraph to The Gay Science.]

4. [Zarathustra, “The Tree on the Hill.”]

5. [Ibid., “The Three Metamorphoses.”]

6. The emphasis is mine in the case of the word “English.” In other quotations, the italics are Nietzsche’s.

7. [Gay Science, 349.]

8. [Ibid.]

9. [Zarathustra, “The Sign.”]

10. [Ibid., “Prologue,” 4.]

11. [Ibid., 3.]

12. [Ibid., “The Drunken Song,” 12.]

13. [Ibid.]

14. [Ibid., “The Seven Seals,” 1.]

15. [Gay Science, 381.]

16. [Zarathustra, “Prologue,” 2.]

17. [Ibid., “The Grave-song.”]

18. [Ibid.]

 

2

The dream of the Overman was necessary for the ailing Nietzsche. Similarly necessary for the lamentable invalid Lydwine, who so moved the admiration of the imbecile Huysmans, were the dreams of a material union with God [1]. Lacking a superior wisdom which would, like the energy of Epictetus the oak or the grace of Epicurus the rose, have bathed all existence in the nobility of light, Nietzsche’s real life was so little worth living. Rather than idealizing this existence with the beauty of a soul more irradiant every day, he fled his meagre reality for a supplementary life of dreams. The invalid, immobile in the depths of a wheelchair, dependent upon his entourage, embittered by suffering and irritated by incapacity, sought in speculation what he missed most painfully: power. Ignorant that true power, the generous, has no need of human material with which to transform itself into tyranny, he wed his dream to his dreadful malevolence. The sick often sink into sick dreaming; many slaves are dazzled by their slavish dazzle: megalomaniac neurasthenics who, too agitated and too feeble for the continuous effort of making themselves men, besot themselves on the puerile notion of becoming Overmen. Nietzsche’s success: an epidemic that strikes a great number of febrile and anaemic wills. But where can one find the individualism of the will to harmony today?

 

Note

1. [Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, transl. Agnes Hastings (London: Kegan Paul, 1923).]

 

3

When I say, “I am a living being,” and I ask myself what is most profound in life, if I were called Nietzsche or, twenty-five centuries earlier, if I were called Callicles, I should answer: “What is most profound in life is the will to power, the will to domination.”

“Wherever I found a living thing,” says Nietzsche, “there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master” [1]. But is it that all those who have answered “I am a living being,” all those who have taken the side of live and of profundity, give the same answer as Callicles and Nietzsche? No.

Others say: “What is most profound in life is the love of pleasure.” For simplicity of explanation, without concerning ourselves with details and without trying to classify according to the period or according to the stage of development, we shall call the individualism of the will to power “Nietzscheanism,” since Nietzsche is the most famous among this party; and we shall call the individualism of the love of pleasure “Epicureanism,” since Epicurus is the most famous among this tendency.

Those who say, “I want to be a man,” and who seek out what is most particular to man, what is most noble in man, are also divided into two tendencies. Some desires that reason rule; others, the heart.

Here too, for the sake of facility, without concerning ourselves with periods, we shall call those who think of following their reason “Stoics,” and those who think of following the whims of the heart “Tolstoians.”

So we see four very different kinds of ethical individualism, in the first respect, at least, between which many intermediary forms can be found. We can distinguish: will to power, will to pleasure, will to reason, will to heart.

Does one or another of these forms of individualism strike us as decisively superior? Strike us as entirely complete? Does one fully answer our desires?

Nietzscheanism, the individualism of the will to power, at least when understood broadly, is only initially individualist. In past controversies, with the quantity of bad faith that even men of good faith bring to the discussion, I have sometimes refused Nietzscheans the name of individualists, since they refused me the title in question.

Essentially, there is a world of truth in the compulsion they display to refuse me the title in which they glory, and in the compulsion I myself display to cast them from the individualist circle.

I told them:

I refuse the name of individualist to those who do not respect every individual. Now, Nietzscheanism does not respect every individual. Nietzscheanism, as a master-morality, necessarily allows the existence of slaves. Nietzsche himself said insolently: “every strengthening and elevation of the type ‘man’ also involves a new form of slavery” [2]. And he asked the many: “Art thou one entitled to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.” Nietzscheanism crushes a certain number of individuals; in a certain sense, it renounces individualism [3].

But does the master himself remain an individual? The master depends upon the image his slave has of him; he remains master only on condition that he strike the mind of his slave either with terror or with love, and that he trick him. Does this necessity not make him dependent upon and slave to all slaves?

In Alfred de Vigny’s famous “overheard dialogue,” Napoleon I cries:

What fatigue! What littleness! Sitting! Always sitting! In full face for this party, in profile for that, according to their notions. To appear what they like one to be, and to guess aright their idiot dreams! […] To be master of them all, and not know what to do with them!—That is all, faith!—And after this all, to be bored as I am—it is indeed too bad! [4]

Augustus, one of the most skilled master-moralists, said on his deathbed: “Friends, applaud: the comedy is over.”

Do you believe a man who has played in a comedy all his life was a free man? Do you believe he was an individual? Nothing leads our thought astray like a lie. Who tries to speak with precision, who tries to speak his true thoughts, must take pains not to deform it in the expression. Do you not think that who decides to deform it in the expression will then deform it in reality? Do you not think that his lie will devour his truth, and that his mask will gnaw into his face?

If the individualist of the will to power inhabits the abstract, I do not know what he should become—Nietzsche never took part in politics—but if he inhabits the concrete, if he tries to live his doctrines, he shall become the most servile of men, the slave of all slaves.

Nietzscheanism does not satisfy me: for it renders me less individual than many a doctrine that does not think itself individualist.

 

Notes

1. [Zarathustra, “Self-surpassing.”]

2. [Gay Science, 377.]

3. [“Individualism,” Encyclopédie anarchiste, ed. Sébastien Faure, vol. 2 (Paris: La Librairie internationale, 1925–34), p. 999.]

4. [Lights and Shades of a Military Life, ed. Charles J. Napier (London: Colburn, 1850), p. 178. Lightly altered with reference to Vigny’s original.]

 

4

Even the Nietzscheanism we seem to have rejected wholesale can be defended. We repelled it because, historically, though Epicurus arrived at a thoroughgoing individualism, though great Stoics and big hearts have arrived at a thoroughgoing individualism, Nietzsche stumbled along the way. What keeps us from continuing down this neglected path? Had he not gone mad, for organic reasons, would he himself not have continued? Would he not have arrived at the mountaintop where Epicurus and Epictetus sit? Perhaps if Epicurus had gone mad at thirty-five, he would no longer have come to total truth; would have stayed mired in the marsh and in base pleasures. If Epictetus had died young or gone mad, would his reason have led him to the truth of the heart? If Tolstoy had died or gone mad too young, his heart would not have led him to the truth of reason.

Then let those who feel themselves increasingly drawn towards Nietzsche’s path finish the journey Nietzsche himself was unable to finish. There is a way of understanding the will to power which is very beautiful; indeed, there are many very beautiful and very thorough ways of understanding it. The will to power, an error if it must be exercised brutally upon other men, becomes a truth if this imperialism remains within myself; if it is I myself that I wish to dominate; that I wish to create. It also becomes a truth if I wish to exercise this domination over the nature of reality, and not upon my fellows. Those are two ways to continue Nietzsche; to complete him; to render him as fine an individualist as Epicurus or the great Stoics or big hearts.

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