Blogging Nietzsche—Nietzsche's Poetry: "To a Friend of Light"
In this installment of my philosophical analysis of Nietzsche’s poetry, I look at Nietzsche’s poem “To a Friend of Light” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning, and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 12):
12. To a Friend of Light
If you want to spare your eyes and your mind,
follow the sun from the shadows behind.
From Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Republic, Book VII) onward, through the Age of Enlightenment, right up until the present day, light has been seen as a metaphor for knowledge. Many words in English still retain this connotation to this day, such as the word “enlightenment” itself and the word “illumination.” Light—especially light from the sun—may refer metaphorically to human reason, as for Plato and for later rationalists such as René Descartes. Or it may refer to the scientific revolution that took place during the Age of Enlightenment, the origin of modern science as we know it today.
In contrast, the metaphor of a shadow represents a state of ignorance, of darkness, of mere illusions, again stemming from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in which prisoners chained to a wall staring at shadows flickering in the darkness mistake their shadowy illusions for reality.
Nietzsche, fully aware of the conceptual dichotomy between the dual metaphors of sun and shadow, playfully inverts the expected relationship between the two: between sun and shadow, between light and darkness, between knowledge and ignorance. Nietzsche is highly critical of the notions of objective knowledge and rationality that began with Socrates and Plato. According to Nietzsche, the supposedly “objective” truth and knowledge, represented metaphorically by the sun, are problematic because the very notion of truth itself is already deeply metaphorical. Our concepts, our descriptions, our words and terms, our mental images, and all of our abstract representations are merely metaphors for reality, not the crystal-clear and illuminating windows into reality that rationalists and scientists in the Western philosophical tradition have historically taken them to be.
Moreover, the notion of objective knowledge, historically, gave rise to the joint notions of a universal human nature and of an objective morality (of which Nietzsche is equally critical), culminating culturally, Nietzsche claims, in the rise of Judeo-Christian morality and the various philosophically grounded theories of morality—whether Kantian/deontological morality, consequentialism/utilitarianism, Aristotelian virtue ethics, or any other normative ethical or moral theory.
The unfortunate consequence on relying of the notion of objectivity, for Nietzsche, is that doing so tends to obscure and repress our true nature as embodied, physical beings with a strong sense of individuality and with immense creative powers to define and create our own meaning, purpose, and metaphors artistically as authors of our own lives. Falling back on universal concepts, rationalistic knowledge, or objective morality is, for Nietzsche, generally weak and herd-like, a kind of fear-based denial—a kind of lying to ourselves—about the type of beings we really are: embodied beings who have our own individual perspectives but with no clear or objective window into reality in itself. So for Nietzsche the metaphors of light and the sun—and the enlightenment views about knowledge and morality that stem from them—do not have positive connotations. Quite the opposite: they are distractions preventing us from relying on our own individual perspectives and individual strengths, and on our artistically creative powers of interpretation, meaning, and authorship for our own lives.
All of that having been said, the meaning of the two lines in this short poem, and its rather ironic title “To a Friend of Light,” should now be easy to see. Nietzsche is not praising those who walk in the sunlight (i.e., those who bask in the supposed light of universal and objective knowledge, truth, science, or morality). He thinks that the sunlight itself is blinding to the knower, obfuscating a deeper notion of truth that is more individualistic, creative, personal, and rooted in our unique and varied perspectives. So the title of this poem is addressed to those who futilely set their sights and aims toward the light, deceiving themselves all the way into thinking that the light of the sun represents genuine objectivity and universality, that it is something transcendent above and beyond our meager human metaphors—the metaphors invented by what refers to elsewhere as “clever beasts who invented knowing” (Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”). Nietzsche is trying to show followers of the light everywhere—philosophers, religious believers, moralists, rationalists, scientists, and mongers of hegemonic culture alike—that their journey toward the sunlight is ultimately a futile one that strains the eyes and the mind with its blindingness, not a light of illumination but a false light of deception that we have taken (or mistaken) for reality.
Instead of advising us to join the herd in following the light as Plato might have done, Nietzsche admonishes us to spare our eyes and our minds by remaining behind in the shadows—those murky places of individuality, of metaphor, of artistic expression, and of mere illusions (our individual illusions!) of which Plato was so critical in the Allegory of the Cave. But those shadows are not mere illusions for Nietzsche as they were for Plato. For Nietzsche the shadows are paradoxically more real, more authentic than the supposed light (false light) that is wrongly presumed to generate the shadows in the first place. The shadows represent not ignorance of the truth (for all objective truth is a form of lying, according to Nietzsche, and, as such, there simply is no objective truth) but our embodiment, our physicality, our individuality, our inner drives and desires as biological beings, our metaphorical and artistic expressions, and our will to power and strength that had been repressed culturally and philosophically for thousands of years by the supposed “light” (in irony quotes) of philosophical rationalism and Judeo-Christian religion and morality.
The strong individual for Nietzsche is not the person with the fortitude to stare futilely into the (false) light of the sun, blindly marching toward some imaginary phantasm of illumination that we have inherited culturally from Western philosophy and Western religion. The stronger person is the person with the courage, the individual strength of character, and the authentic sense of self to remain comfortably within the shadows of individuality without the false light of the sun to guide him or her; in other words, someone who is truly self-reliant in every sense of the word and comfortable with there being no objective light to guide the way—in knowledge, in morality, in values, in purpose, or in our individual beliefs. In the shadows, you must rely only on yourself and on the pattens you create in the flickering remnants of sunlight that perhaps was never really there in the first place.
For Further Reading:
Republic by Plato
Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes
The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
