“In Emerson we have lost a philosopher,” Nietzsche writes, lamenting that “such a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit” never had “gone through some strict discipline, a really scientific education.” By contrast,, “Schopenhauer as Educator” might also have been titled “Schopenhauer as Philosopher.” To consider Emerson and Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer together is to consider the difference between a philosopher and an intellectual.
Emerson is the first American intellectual. By ‘intellectual’ I don’t mean a clerk, a Hegelian ‘knowledge-worker’-cum-bureaucrat, the sort of professor Nietzsche despises. I mean a secular preacher, a professor in the literal sense, one who makes a living using knowledge to persuade. Earlier Americans had had of course engaged in intellectual pursuits, but they had day jobs: Jonathan Edwards a clergyman; Franklin a printer and politician; Jefferson a politician and so-so farmer; Adams an attorney and politician, and so on. Emerson is the one who goes on the lecture circuit.
Typically, an American intellectual might also be described as an American mind stocked with German ideas. Emerson was that, too, and again a pioneering one, serving much the same function in America as his friendly acquaintance Carlyle served in England: an introducer of German philosophic themes and preoccupations to a decidedly untranscendental public. If the Germans may be said to have continued and transformed Rousseauian spiritnednes or thumos in modern philosophic thought, such cultural middlemen as Emerson and Carlyle brought that spiritedness out of the Continent, roiling bourgeois waters, for better or worse, ever since.
Nietzsche dismisses Carlyle as garrulous, confused, preeminently a man of indigestion—that is, a man who mixes nihilism and Christian nostalgia, a man who needs a faith, an Everlasting No followed by an Everlasting Yea, a man who lacks the strength to make himself his own end. Emerson does not lack that strength. Finding even Unitarianism insufficiently latitudinarian, he writes that Jesus “saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of the world” (“An Address”). The Church distorted this teaching with its claim that Jesus was God, come to earth unique in his divinity. Thus “men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” (Nietzsche will say, famously, He is dead, meaning something like what Emerson means.) Make yourself “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost” (thus far, Hegel); “all men have sublime thoughts” (Hegel democratized).
Emerson calls his countrymen to thumos. Not ‘Know thyself’ so much as ‘Trust thyself’ is his motto: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” and if your innermost promptings be Satanic, then say with Milton’s spirited Satan, “Evil be thou my Good.” Nietzsche read “Self-Reliance” as a youth, and found a rhetorical strategy to last a lifetime: “The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines,” an instance of thesis-antithesis dialectic borrowed from the Germans. Reject the “miscellaneous popular charities” of the compassion industry; that portion of the Rousseauian project has outlived its usefulness. “Power is, by nature, the essential measure of right” because self-sufficiency, not dependence upon God or men, frees us to receive the “immense intelligence” of the over-soul, a being bearing no small resemblance to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. “God will not make himself manifest to cowards,” and “the reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.” Genius is not imitative but “intellect constructive” (Hegel, again); Nietzsche will call this “the plastic power.” Nature only seems stable. “The universe is fluid and volatile, a rapid efflux of goodness [there, the Rousseauian core of ‘Germanism’] executing and organizing itself”; this “eternal generator” is the one thing lasting, and needful.”
Unlike Hegel, Emerson’s immanentism is not discursive; it issues in silence, not speech. (Well, in principle, at any rate. The peripatetic lecturer deserved as much as anyone the wisecrack aimed at Carlyle, that he preached the doctrine of silence in twenty volumes.) Nor is this immanentism logical; Nietzsche was right to find Emerson unscientific, and it is inconceivable that he would write a Logic. His experimentalism (the “endless seeker with no Pack on my back”) evokes Rousseau’s solitary walker, not Hegel’s end-of-history sage. Emerson wants the home libre to be footloose. The eternal generator is “superior to knowledge and thought,” forever “creat[ing] a life and a thought as large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that which is made instructs how to make a better” in eternal progress. This raises the question of whether the eternal generator is conscious or not. If not, can it be said to be superior to all its creations? Nietzsche was right to find Emerson not quite a philosopher.
“Away, pachyderms, away!” Nietzsche shoos ponderous Hegelians, who image that “the race is at its zenith.” Look around you, fools: Does this look like the apex of anything? What is needed first of all is not the knowledge culture but the knowledge of life, of instinct reawakened. Nietzsche is in this sense the Rousseau of the Hegelian Enlightenment.
Schopenhauer as educator means Schopenhauer as philosopher because a potential philosopher can only be educated by another philosopher. From Emerson Nietzsche borrows the advice of finding oneself by looking at what “you have truly loved up to now,” the piece of fatum that is above you, not within you, and of living courageously (later, “dangerously”) according to it. The spiritlessness of the late demi-Christianity is the enemy, as it is for Emerson. Nietzsche pushes beyond Emerson, however, in saying that philosophy is not an ascent from the cave but a descent into it, into the cave of solitude. In most times a philosopher finds himself alone—assuredly not on the lecture circuit—with “not a single companion truly of his own kind to console him.” The philosopher retreats from the tyrannies of public opinion to “the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart,” where lurks his greatest danger, the dragon of ressentiment, whereby bitterness against conformism enlarges into a melancholy metaphysic of ‘being’ and anti-appearance. (In The Gay Science Nietzsche says that the philosopher who rails against the mediocre, those stolid metronomes of the slow in spirit, has no right to philosophize—although it must be admitted that Nietzsche did his share of railing against the mediocre.) The real philosopher unresentfully “acquire[s] power so as to aid the evolution of the physis and to be for a while the corrector of its follies and ineptitudes,” to be a lawgiver and not a bureaucratic State-server, a Hegelian philosopher. (Schopenhauer, in the thumotic line of German philosophers, denounces Hegel as “a clumsy charlatan” who has spawned scholars “incapable of thinking, coarse and stupefied.)
Although many of the modern philosophers are philosophers of thumos, Nietzsche is preeminently so. “It is necessary for us to get really angry for once in order that things get better”; heroism not value-free social science, self-forgetting not (animal-like) self-preservation, will overcome the untenable tightrope-walker, Man. The intellectuals’ role is, first, to get out of the philosopher’s way by resisting the impulse to sink their sharp little teeth into everything great (recall Hegel: “Free man is not envious….”). Schopenhauer makes a fine object-lesson, here, writing in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, that the professors “are qualified for philosophy by the ministry, whereas I am simply by nature.” Second, they should try to cultivate a culture that will produce philosophers, artists, saints, rather than mere professors of philosophy, art, and religion. Intellectuals, don’t be a bunch of greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number, utilitarian-commercial-political-prettifying-scientistic, unerotic, unthumotic drones—a gaggle of polite Englishmen.
Reason may be cunning, but reason doesn’t rule nature, and nature is a blunderer, forever misfiring its precious philosophic arrows into the great swamp of the world. Under such conditions, a philosopher needs “an inflexible and rugged manliness.” He will be not merely a great thinker but a real human being. His freedom will be wonderful–in the Greek-philosophic sense—and perilous, to himself and others. His freedom from convention is also a debt, obligating him to do something with it. “Love of truth is something fearsome and mighty”: Does this not retain a sort of political ambition, indeed a supreme political ambition, that came to grief in those twentieth-century men who heeded Nietzsche’s call? It is true that Nietzsche might not have minded their coming to grief, but to come to grief without anything to show for it (did 1996 differ much from 1896?) might drive even Nietzsche to the melancholy of the labyrinth of solitude.
One last thing: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, despite their sharp differences, all express interest in Eastern (especially Hindu) thought—Nietzsche, for example, cites The Laws of Manu). Immanentism is their answer to ‘semitic’ creationism. Even this has been vulgarized, as ‘New Age’ drivel proliferates.
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