Blogging Nietzsche—Nietzsche's Poetry: "The Wise Man Speaks"
Nietzsche has no use for crowds or conformity, as can be seen in his short poem “The Wise Man Speaks” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning, and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 49):
49. The Wise Man Speaks
Unknown to folks, yet useful to the crowd,
I drift along my way, now sun, now cloud
and always I’m above this crowd!
In the opening line of the poem, Nietzsche claims he’s unknown to folks. However familiar Nietzsche’s writing is to us today, Nietzsche’s books were not widely read or well-received in his own lifetime, a fact which he laments elsewhere in The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge:
“The philologists of the present age have proven themselves unworthy of being permitted to consider me and my book as one of their own. It is hardly necessary to affirm that, in this case as well. I leave it up to them whether they want to learn anything or not. But I still do not feel in the least inclined to meet them half way.” (Nietzsche, The Philosopher, No. 160, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s)
Nietzsche had a conviction about his own writing: however unknown or unaccepted he may have been, he had unique insights into philology and philosophy, and Nietzsche nonetheless had something to teach his intellectual peers, whether or not they accepted his work or listened to what he had to say. Hence he viewed himself, as the first line states, “Unknown to folks, yet useful to the crowd.”
As an interlude, I have to admit that I often feel exactly the same way about my own career as a philosopher. My take on philosophy as a discipline and as a whole is often ridiculed by other so-called professional philosophers in academia, whether in terms of my views on the overall trajectory of the history and future of philosophy, the seemingly random connections I make between various philosophers and thinkers, my views the relationship between literature and philosophy, and my willingness to bend and stretch and shape various thinkers’ words to fit my own philosophical agenda. Nonetheless, I try to provide an inspirational introduction to philosophy for my students, and I find myself rejecting anything that smacks in the least of philosophical conformity, and I’ve made it my personal and philosophical quest to rattle the cages of professional and academic philosophers, whether they listen or not, and “whether they want to learn anything or not,” as Nietzsche put it, explicitly in The Philosopher but metaphorically in “The Wise Man Speaks.”
Although Nietzsche is critical of the metaphor of the sun in many other places, not the least of which are his short poems “To a Friend of Light” and “Judgments of the Weary,” here Nietzsche invokes the image of the sun in a more positive light, not crawling his way out of the cave toward the sunlight as Plato described in his Allegory of the Cave (Republic, Book VII), but drifting along his way, “now sun, now cloud,” in a freeform and wandering manner that is far less linear and prescriptive. For Plato, sunlight is something to aim toward, sunlight being a metaphor for knowledge, universality, rationality, and objectivity. For Nietzsche, however, one should not merely aim toward the sun, but one should dance and wander in the sunlight, weaving oneself from cloud to sun and back again. Being in the sunlight, for Nietzsche, is not a matter of knowledge, but of artistry and art.
The protagonist in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is also above the crowd, except the crowd is still stuck in a cave of ignorance and shadows. The crowd that Nietzsche claims to be above is the crowd of philosophers, who he claims are just as weak and herd-like in their meek reliance on rationality and objectivity, and of the religious, who know only how to band together out of fear and of an unjustified moral superiority complex. So while philosophers and the religious faithful may claim to be above those stuck in Plato’s cave or above those nonbelievers supposedly destined for eternal damnation, Nietzsche is above that second type of crowd, which he finds just as problematic as the crowd stuck in Plato’s cave: the crowd of philosophical, religious, political, rational, and moral conformity.
I share Nietzsche’s sentiments about the danger of crowds. Every time I catch myself in a crowd, or even a group of more than two or three, I find myself drawn to being the outsider of the group, afraid of getting sucked into the conformity and groupthink of which Nietzsche was so critical. In a rare point of agreement between the ancient Stoics and Nietzsche, even Seneca was critical of crowds and their many dangers to one’s soul and philosophical wellbeing:
“Do you ask me what you should regard as especially to be avoided? I say, crowds; for as yet you cannot trust yourself to them with safety. I shall admit my own weakness, at any rate; for I never bring back home the same character that I took abroad with me. Something of that which I have forced to be calm within me is disturbed; some of those foes that I have routed return again.” (Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter 10: On Crowds)
Although Nietzsche is critical of the Stoics’ preference for taming the wildness within themselves, Nietzsche agrees that crowds are especially to be avoided, not just the literal crowds but the intellectual, philosophical, religious, and moral crowds especially. Crowds of these sorts will strip you of all your authenticity and force you into the realm of intellectual conformity and averageness from which you may never escape. This conformity and averageness is especially evident in the climate of contemporary academic and professional philosophy.
Professional and academic philosophy may breed philosophy teachers, journal article author, symposium-givers, and professors (or, more likely, cheap labor in the form of freeway-flyer adjunct instructors roaming from college to college like Satan in the book of Job, going to and fro wandering up and down the Earth), but it seldom breeds individuals and thinkers who are fully authentic, unique, and willing to break with the safety of their own numbers in the halls and meeting spaces of their own provincial philosophy departments—or in their lavish APA conferences and symposia with all the philosophical oneupmanship, glad-handing, and social posturing one would expect from those who frequent events.
Even scholars of Nietzsche, who should at least know better, somehow manage to suck the life and liveliness out of the object of their own veneration, endlessly quibbling over this or that quirk of Nietzschean grammar while missing the whole point of what Nietzsche was trying to us all the while. I’ve sat through many a dull lecture on Nietzsche in my days as a philosophy undergraduate and graduate student, and it was only later in life that I discovered just how entrenched professional philosophy is in the intellectual crowds that Nietzsche sought to rise above through his own authenticity and artistry of words, thoughts, and ideas, and just how lively Nietzsche’s thought and writing was and ought to be.
Almost by definition, the crowd doesn’t like to be transcended and will always try to drag and keep down those who would rise above them. As Plato might have said, the prisoners of the cave themselves will fight and claw at you to keep you from breaking free, drawing you back into their number from fear, from peer pressure, and by a twisted perversion of our own innate desire for belonging. The only way to break free, either from one’s chains in the cave or from the philosophical crowd lurking outside the cave in the sunlight, is to be willing to go it alone, to see yourself not as a philosopher but as above and beyond them, and to risk the ridicule of those who know only how to cower in the safety of their philosophical crowd, puffing themselves up in having sided with the majority, but cowering in fear all the while, never knowing what it’s like to be free and to let one’s mind, body, and heart truly soar among the sun and clouds, as Nietzsche said, “above this crowd.”
For Further Reading:
The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
