Blogging Nietzsche—Nietzsche's Poetry: "Ecce Homo"

Many know that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote an autobiography titled “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”). Lesser-known, however, is that Nietzsche also wrote a short poem of the same name (“Ecce Homo,” ‘Joke, Cunning and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 62, The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche):

62. Ecce Homo

Yes! I know now whence I came!
Unsatiated like a flame
my glowing ember squanders me.
Light to all on which I seize,
ashen everything I leave:
Flame am I most certainly!

While many of Nietzsche’s short poems are broadly autobiographical, “Ecce Homo” is more obviously and reflexively focused on Nietzsche himself. The central metaphor of this short poem is his comparison of himself to a flame, a rich metaphor worthy of exploration into its shades of meaning and possible referents.

How many of us can honestly say that we are “unsatiated like a flame,” as Nietzsche says of himself in the second line of “Ecce Homo”—relentlessly pursing the desires of our hearts? Many of us start out that way, burning with the wild flames of youth, unless and until those flames get extinguished by the disappointments and heartaches of life, the averageness and mediocrity foisted upon us by so-called “modern” man and “civilized” society. Sadly, many youths themselves never even learn to let their flames burn brightly in the first place, constrained from birth by their family, their religion, the cultural milieu they were born into, and by the superficiality of public life from their earliest days alongside others—in their schools and with their families and friends.

Some people, however, manage to keep the flames within their hearts alive, shielded from the harsh winds of the world and of others, still alive with the desire to consume and reshape the world in the image of our own hearts. Even when shielding our own flames from the wind, guarding our hearts with the walls we build around them brick-by-brick, our eternal flames stay lit, however much they waver on the precipice of extinction in the harshness of the reality of the world around us. Others, perhaps like myself and perhaps like Nietzsche, open the valve of their hearts, releasing the fuel necessary to allow our flames to burn at full strength, exhausting the fuel of our hearts in the attempt to feel the heat of the biggest possible flames. This may be the meaning of the third line of Nietzsche’s poem:

my glowing ember squanders me.

Having burnt up the life-giving fuel of our hearts in a blazing quest for passion and glory, all that remain are the embers testifying to the flames they once produced.

Fire—literal fire and the internal/eternal flame of the heart—consumes both others and its own fuel within, shining light and warmth on the coldness of human existence but with extinction as its only possible end, either in the short term for those who burn with excess or the long term for those who burn with moderation. Nietzsche explores this duality in lines 4 and 5 of “Ecce Homo”:

Light to all on which I seize,
ashen everything I leave.

Nietzsche is claiming, about himself in particular, that he shines light on the darkness of reality while consuming the world around him and everything he comes in contact with.

While this consumptive aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophical self-conception—shining light but destroying everything he touches—sounds at a glance like a negative quality, Nietzsche embraces both the metaphor and this aspect of his personality with vigor in the last line of the poem:

Flame am I most certainly!

This is because Nietzsche has declared himself to be at war (cf. Nietzsche’s autobiography, Ecce Homo) with many things that others take for granted and embrace so openly: Christianity with its fear-based suppression and power-hungry oppression of real human strength and individuality, the herd-like averageness of Christian morality, the hegemony of Western philosophical conceptions of the human person and human nature, naive scientism with its disregard for the uniquely human aspects of the human experience, and philosophical and religious escapism that Nietzsche thinks of as being at odds with the biological facts of our own human reality.

Nietzsche views himself as shining light on—i.e., revealing—the hidden splendors and strengths of humanity that have been lost or forgotten by the lion’s share of western culture, religion, philosophical thoughts, and morality—a return to the glories of past cultures with their unabashed love of individual and human strength, which Nietzsche himself reinterprets in an artistic sense, viewing himself and others as artistically creating subjects and authors of their own life stories. But in shining his light, Nietzsche also seeks to tear down these many icons of Western culture, consuming them in the process and transforming our picture of humanity from the universal and the objective to the particular and the subjective, to extinguish the last glowing ember and remnants of Western culture, religion, mortality, and philosophy, which themselves once consumed the human spirit not with a bright and dancing flame but with a dim and lifeless one.

In this short poem, Nietzsche is reaffirming his position as a destroyer of worlds—binging warmth to the cold, bringing light to the darkness, exposing the skeletons in the closet of Western philosophy and religion while also embracing the vigor, passion, excitement, and rebirth also associated with fire. Nietzsche seeks to be the catalyst for the phoenix of real human strength to rise from the ashes of Christianity, philosophy, morality, science, and a decaying Western culture unaware of its own imminent demise, already in ashes, as can be seen in the decline of the many once-strong pillars of western civilization—from religion to politics to education. All that remains of these once-proud institutions are their glowing embers, the last vestiges of modern man with his unbounded mediocrity and superficiality, unaware that their flames have already died out and their once-bright light has already faded from view—a new light, the light of the immoralists and the philosophers of the future, taking its place, illuminating and consuming, ushering in the next stage of evolution for us “clever beasts [who] invented knowing,” as Nietzsche once called us in an earlier work, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s).

Don’t be afraid to let your own personal flame burn bright and strong in the coldness of the human world and in the vast emptiness of the cosmic backdrop to our human sphere. Letting your individual flame burn bright may incinerate the decaying idols cherished by those around you, but you will shine light on the dark corners of humanity and bring inspiration to a world that knows only averageness and mediocrity, not the greatness of the individual human spirit that only you can reveal to them. People, however, are afraid of fire, despite its life-giving qualities, and they will either love and embrace or hate and try to douse the precious flame burning brightly within you—perhaps itself a consequence of the lingering embers of the human spirit even within those who don’t know how to fan their flame to maximum, a fear-based reactiveness to the flames in others, matching flame for flame in their own desire efforts to subjugate and destroy the flames of others instead of tending others’ flames and making all of humanity brighter together as a chorus of torches.

Guard your own flame but let it burn bright in a way that only you can, consuming the fuel of life and destroying the idols as necessary to let your own light shine and fan your flame, and hopefully the flames of others, into a raging fire of human spirit, the likes of which the world hasn't seen since premodern and preclassical times—the claims of Socrates and Plato with their Allegory of the Cave (Republic, Book VII), Jesus and Christianity with their attempted coup and monopolization of all things divine, science and philosophy with their hegemonic so-called “enlightenment,” and the dim light of human meekness and morality notwithstanding. It is, ultimately, up to you to decide whether the fire of your heart rages within, whether you protect it sheepishly and keep it hidden from others and from the world, or whether you let it be extinguished altogether—if it hasn’t been already.