Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche’s Death” (1900/04)

Draft translation of “La Mort de Nietzsche,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1899–1901 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), pp. 185–91, dated October 1900. A eulogy of the recently-departed Nietzsche. As in “Nietzsche on the Mountain,” Gourmont is convinced of Nietzsche’s world-historical importance as early as 1900: so before Fascism, psychoanalysis or postmodernism.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

It is a non-event, since the man of the highest and freest intelligence of the century fell, ten years ago, into the deep shadows of unintelligence. A contrast that would enliven the discourse of a rhetorician: the very same by whom the mind was liberated has died the prisoner of stupidity, whether an unfortunate heredity is to blame, or whether Nietzsche abused his own intellectual energy. To endeavour to understand everything, to feel everything, to judge everything—and not according to the common principles of everyday philosophy, but according to personal and quite new ideas and methods—is not without its dangers. And it also happens that the bravest is seized by fear upon finding himself alone in his opinion. But what do causes matter, when that is a matter of an unending chain; when all is determined; when the genius of a Nietzsche, no less than the stupidity of the man in the street, are bound to a psychological state? And what does even that madness or that ultimate stupor matter if, throughout his years of activity, Nietzsche unleashed a superior intellectual force? Ought sickness lead us to disregard the forerunning years of health and vigour; or ought the smith’s wrist that softens and flops keep us from the fact that he, in the fulness of his virility, melted and mastered iron?

Nietzsche’s madness is an argument against neither his literary nor his philosophical genius. Philosophers, those eternal professors of philosophy poohpoohed by Schopenhauer and Taine, concede the first point, but not the second. And even when, persuaded by their personal experience that one can hardly be both a good thinker and a good writer, they accept the writer, proclaiming him a great poet, they still disdain the creator of values. They disdain him, or feign to disdain him. They understand one another: for Nietzsche is bothersome.

In an access of divine gaiety, that good-humoured fellow shook an old tree of beliefs; and down fell all the apples. Without inconveniencing themselves, the philosophers, face-down in the grass, bicker over the ripe fruit and, finding there the same food, swear that nothing has changed in the world of intelligence.

I do not believe so; I believe much has changed. From Nietzsche we have learnt to deconstruct ancient metaphysics edified upon a foundation of abstraction. Every one of the ancient cornerstones has crumbled to dust; and the whole house has come crashing down. What is freedom? A word. No more morality, then, unless aesthetic or social; no more absolute morality, but as many particular moralities as there are personal intelligences. What is truth? Nothing more than what seems true to us, what flatters our logic. As Stirner said, there is my truth—and yours, brother. The sun has ripened the Virgilian horse; and from his rotten flanks rise, singing and joyful, the swarm of new bees [1].

An enemy of Christianity, Nietzsche has, in a sense, reprised and seen through to completion the chief work of theology, which was the destruction of Reason. But he did not labour on behalf of belief, but on behalf of reason itself, become at last reasonable and human, from the moment she shed her clothing of cloud and the column where, like the Stylite, she passed her time in stupid pride, above life and reality. When Nietzsche is better known, apriorism will pass away. We will no longer be able to construct a syllogism based upon the abstract; we will no longer be able to posit as a principle the very conclusion to be reached. We must discover what good and evil—to use such words—contain; we must compile their history, trace their most distant origins. When we have found that “bien” was initially “bon,” what is favourable to sensibility; and “mal” what is “mauvais,” what causes a disagreeable sensation—then we may undertake the “genealogy of morals.” Everything becomes clear; and everything was obscure when we considered good and evil as absolute notions, innate in man’s mind, like the gifts, otherwise absurd, of a chimaeric deity.

Such analyses are dangerous to the average feebleness of common wisdom a serious man; and one who proves himself worthy of the name of man will take no notice of them. It is for societies to accommodate themselves to the discoveries of science, and not for science to make itself slave to mankind’s vain happiness. In fact, the happiness of societies may be founded on the most unexpected notions, provided they be precise and, above all, in accordance with the general sensibility of the race that wills to live. Cities founded on crime have risen to a magnificent efflorescence of strength and beauty.

Although dangerous, if you wish, Nietzsche’s ideas are liberatory. Their logic is a relief for the mind; it gives the mind a new facility in thinking and understanding; it is an inhalational delicacy on the menu of intellectual courses. Not, of course, for knackered or dried-out lungs. Nietzschean philosophy is not recommended to the sensible sort, or those in need of consoling beliefs. It is offered to the strong and not to the weak; to those who have no need to live upon the sugared milk of hope. But do the latter not have all those religions and sickly philosophies that they have extracted from clever men, almost like one extracts coal from vanilla or from indigo? They have the spiritism of Allan Kardec and the spiritualism of Mr. Boutroux; are they to be pitied? They are the devout of moral conscience; can one tire of the company of these professors of illusionism? Did not one of them, confiding in an investigator, recently say: “La raison doit finir, par avoir raison”? [2] These are such clever formulae, for which it is a pleasure to fall; how could a reasonable animal hesitate from this appeal to reason?

There is nothing wrong with all those who detest science, reality, the observation of historical or psychological phenomena obeying the voice of moral conscience, embracing this religion of rationalist idealism with an ardent faith. It is a career that requires no training beyond baptism; it cannot fail to be widely followed and even overcrowded.

How little intellectual progress there is! For thousands of years, mankind has revolved around the same illusion, like a drunken boat caught up in a maelstrom; and all those who wish to send the boat on its way, to wrestle it from the whirlpool, are treated as saboteurs by the old, hallucinating pilots, content to revolve round nothing. Nietzsche was one of those heroes who tried, with a violent yank of the tiller, to cut across the endless and merciless current.

Some days before his fall into unconscience, Nietzsche wrote to his friends—to Mr. Brandes, to Mr. Bourdeau—to tell them that he, the new Christ, had saved the world for a second time. Who knows? It may be true.

 

Notes

1. [See Georgics, 4.284–5.]

2. [“Reason is sure to end up being right.” A saying dating to 1797 at the latest.]