By Jorge Luis Borges
02-11-1940
Glory is always a simplification and sometimes a perversion of reality; there is no famous man who is not a little slandered by his glory. For America and Spain, Artur Schopenhauer is primarily the author of Love, Women and Death: a rhapsody made from sensational fragments by a Levantine Publisher. Of Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s rebellious disciple, Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara, London, 1905) has already observed that he was the worldwide victim of the phrase “blond beast” and that everyone attributed his renown and limited his work to a gospel for bullies. Despite the years that have passed, Shaw’s observation has not lost its validity, although it must be admitted that Nietzsche has consented to and perhaps courted this misunderstanding. In his final years he aspired to the dignity of a prophet and knew that such a ministry is incompatible with a reasonable or explicit style. The most famous (not the best) of his books is a Judeo-German pastiche, a more artificial and far less passionate prophetic book [original in English] than Blake’s. Parallel to the composition of his intended public work, Nietzsche pointed out in other notebooks the reasoning capable of justifying this work. These arguments (and all sorts of related meditations) have been organized and edited by Alfred Bacumler and comprise two volumes of four hundred and five hundred pages each. The general work is titled – somewhat awkwardly – The Innocence of Becoming and was published in 1931 by Alfred Kröner. “In published books,” writes the editor, “Nietzsche always speaks before an adversary, always with reluctance; the foreground predominates in them, as the author himself has declared. On the other hand, his unpublished work (which covers from 1870 to 1888) registers the background of his thought, and for that reason it is not a secondary work, but a capital work.”
This fragment -1072 of the first volume- is a pathetic testimony of his loneliness: “What do I do when I smudge these pages? Watch over my old age: record for that time, when the soul cannot undertake anything new, the history of its adventures and sea voyages. In the same way I reserve music for the age when I am blind. “
It is common to identify Nietzsche with the intolerances and aggressions of racism and elevate him (or denigrate him) as a precursor of that bloody pedantry; let’s see what Nietzsche – a good European, after all – thought about such problems around 1880. “In France – he notes – nationalism has perverted character; in Germany, spirit and taste: to endure a great defeat – indeed, a definitive one – you have to be younger and healthier than the victor.”
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