Lyn Gallacher: This music is by Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous and infamous philosopher who's the subject of today's Book Talk. I'm Lyn Gallacher. Welcome to the program.

We're talking to distinguished Princeton University philosopher Alexander Nehamas about his classic text, Life as Literature. It's a classic because it gives a rare insight into Friedrich Nietzsche's writing by seeing it as literature. And as Nietzsche's life becomes a metaphor for any life lived as art, it makes suffering not look quite so bleak. This analysis is based on Nietzsche's last and most autobiographical book Ecce Homo, or How to Become What One is. It's a book that was written just before Nietzsche himself descended into madness.

So Life as Literature begins with suffering which is inevitable because the world, in Nietzsche's view, is not made specifically for human beings, we just happen to be here. Alexander Nehamas:

Alexander Nehamas: Nietzsche thinks there is no real reason why, it just so happens that life is a pretty miserable situation. So what are we to do with the suffering that we have, a suffering that we have in life that is inevitably a part of life is as much part of the material out of which we can construct a meaningful life as the good parts that also are, if not inevitable, at least likely to happen to us during the course of our life. So both good things and bad things are more or less inevitable and more or less without meaning in themselves. The only meaning that they have is the meaning that you give them, and out of them we can construct something that, in a strange way, justifies and redeems the suffering, because if a life is created that is worthwhile, then the suffering that is a part of it is itself justified in so far as it's part of that worthwhile life.

Lyn Gallacher: Suffering is bearable if it is kind of meaningful, in a way, though. We need to be able to feel that we can organise a small part of it and give ourselves some kind of control and not be quite so much of a victim within the meaninglessness.

Alexander Nehamas: That's a very important point. What he says at the end of The Genealogy of Morality, which is one of his great books, is that human beings do not mind suffering, people even look for suffering if it's going to be a means to accomplish something. What we really mind is, as he puts it, the meaningless of suffering, that we seem to suffer for no reason, and the great religions come into the picture and give a reason to suffering. In particular, Christianity says that the reason that we suffer is because we are sinners. Nietzsche says, no, there is no general reason why we people suffer, but individual people can use their suffering to make up something worthwhile of themselves, and at that point they give it a meaning. Its meaning is the contribution that it makes to their lives.

So, take Nietzsche himself as an example; he says in his autobiography, 'Look, I couldn't spend more than a few hours at work every day because I had those horrible migraines, my stomach could not tolerate any food, I was constantly nauseated, blind, I could hardly see anything,' and yet he doesn't complain about that, he finds ways in which he can use those very features which one might consider bad things about his life to his advantage. For example, he says he learnt how to think about things very quickly because he didn't have very much time when his mind was clear, and the fact that he thought about them quickly gave him a completely new and different perspective from people who have the luxury, so to speak, to think about them for a very long time. He goes on to say, well, to think that no one can deal with deep questions quickly is very silly. He said it's like a deep issue, it's like a cold bath; quickly in and quickly out. The cold water makes one fast.

Lyn Gallacher: And you can return to it. You don't need just one dip.

Alexander Nehamas: You can return many, many times, precisely, and precisely because you return to it at different times, you can see it from different points of view because in the meantime you've learned other things, you've changed your point of view. For him, looking at things from many points of view is the most correct way to think about what objectivity is. For him, objectivity, getting something right, is not to see it from some completely impersonal point of view without any human interest or human idiosyncrasies; it is to look at it from as many human points of view as possible. So you can see in a funny way how his epistemology, so to speak, his theory of what it is to know things, is itself connected to his very, very personal idiosyncratic characteristics, like his health. That's something that he constantly comes back to, that our physiology is crucial to the nature of our ideas.

Lyn Gallacher: Is another model for understanding and taking control of our suffering in a small, kind of confined way, apart from the way Nietzsche did it in his life...is art another role model? Is that what artists are doing in a small way, when they construct a picture or write a book or do a sculpture? Are they, in fact, setting out some kind of explanation of who they are within the confines of that particular artwork?

Alexander Nehamas: He doesn't talk explicitly about that but one could extrapolate from various things that he says and also take his thoughts further than he himself may have taken it which, of course, he would urge us to do...the way I see this is that every time that an artist or whoever constructs a work of art, they also construct, at the same time, a character who is expressed in that work of art. That character is not necessarily reflective of what the artist himself or herself actually felt at the time that the work was created, but rather the kind of person who might have reasonably produced the work of art in question, and that character will necessarily have experience of the suffering or adversity that is necessarily expressed in any work of art, because no work of art is simply a hymn to joy; even Schiller's Hymn to Joy suggests that the joy follows upon very horrible things.

Lyn Gallacher: And the litmus test of whether or not you've been successful in writing yourself though the work that you produce is whether or not you would do it all again. Is that right?

Alexander Nehamas: That is the idea of eternal recurrence, which I think has caused more problems for Nietzsche and people who want to like Nietzsche than almost anything else in his work. He keeps talking about the eternal recurrence and never explains it very well, and most people usually take it as a view about what the physics of the world are about. The idea is that people think that what he said was that the world itself repeats itself infinitely many times, so that the infinite many cycles of world...each one is completely identical to the other one, so that I have done everything I have done before, this interview has already occurred infinitely many times in the past and will occur again infinitely many times in the future, and every time it occurs no one will know it has occurred before or that it will occur again, or at least no one will remember it anyway. That's a pretty difficult view to accept, and it was alright to attribute it to Nietzsche when most people thought he was crazy anyway. By contrast, I think people now are beginning to think, and many do think, that what he meant by it is; what if someone comes to you and says, 'You will have to live again, exactly the way you have lived up to now.' Because, in fact, you have no other choice; if it's going to be you, it's going to be the same life that you had because a different life would be a different person. You don't have a choice about that.

So what if somebody told you that you were going to live again? How would you feel about it? It's only if you can say, 'I would be delighted to do it. I would be happy to do it. I would want to live through every single event that has constituted my life, the good and the bad together, because altogether the life is worthwhile.' And if I'm happy at the prospect of doing it all over again, then my life is, to that extent, justified. You know, when we think about things and we say, 'Oh if only I was 16 again with all the knowledge I have now, how differently I would have done that.' Well, Nietzsche says, 'Look, if that's what you think, then your life is a failure, and furthermore, if you're 16 again you'd be exactly as you were when you were 16. You couldn't have the knowledge you have right now and also be the 16-year-old that you used to be.' You would have to be exactly the same and, in fact, you'd do the same things all over again that you did, so the only way to accept your life is by accepting it exactly as you have made it; that part will never change.

Lyn Gallacher: It is such a challenging question. As you were speaking, I'm thinking, 'Would I do it, would I do it?'

Alexander Nehamas: It's extremely difficult, and it's not even clear that anyone could accept it, but I think that what he has in mind...I think it's actually a really incredibly bracing idea...is every now and then in our life there comes a moment where we are so happy at what we are doing that we feel as if it's all been worth it. Now, five minutes later, that feeling may go, and we say, 'My God, who am I, and what have I done, and why have I wasted my life?' But there are those moments, and it's those moments that he's looking for. I don't know that anyone could possibly accept this kind of experiment, or this kind of idea, of living one's life all over again in exactly the same way every time that, so to speak, it comes up because we are very often unhappy and since, as Nietzsche says, there is suffering in life, while in the midst of suffering when things are horrible, I will not be saying, 'Oh I wish it were the same,' because I'm not liking the suffering in question. The question is, once I make something of that, once I manage to get everything to fall together and see myself focused on one thing, working for it, enjoying working for it, looking forward to what it is I will accomplish, enjoying what it is I'm doing this very moment, then it seems to me there are those rare (of course) occasions when I can actually say, 'Yes, I would do it again.' And as Nietzsche says in the passage I was referring to before, he imagines a demon who comes and asks you that, when you are in your 'loneliest loneliness', as he puts it. He says you have two choices; either to fall down and gnash your teeth in despair, or to say to the demon, 'You are divine, you are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine than that.' So it's either total elation or, whether you know it or not, total despair, because either you accept everything about your life or nothing. It's a fairly extreme view, there's no question about it.

Lyn Gallacher: And you say that, at the end of his life, Nietzsche, despite his misery, came to that state of being himself, that just before he went completely mad he said, 'Yes, I would do it again.'

Alexander Nehamas: It's a wonderfully moving passage and a wonderfully moving moment if you read him. He composes this sort of autobiography, Ecce Homo, which is of course an allusion to Jesus, that's what Pilate said about Jesus. What he does is in the very beginning, before even a preface, he says that he writes this little piece on his 44th birthday, and he says what a wonderful year his 44th year has been, and then he says, 'It's the year when I wrote this and that and that book,' he mentions all the books that he read, and he says, 'On account of this, I am grateful to my whole life, and so I tell my life to myself.' And of course, just a few months later, he collapsed completely. But you see, what happened is that he is happy on the morning of his birthday because of everything that happened the previous year because of everything that happened to him before, so everything comes in together.

What he says when he gets into the book and starts thinking about it...for example, he talks about his attitude toward philology. He started his career not as a philosopher but as a professor of philology, and he didn't like it. He liked it at the beginning and then he found that it didn't satisfy his desires and his needs and his intellectual principles, so he gave it up. One thing you could say about that is, 'What a big mistake it was to be a classicist and a professor of classics for ten years or whatever, I'm so glad I gave it up.' He says, 'No, I had to be a philologist because if I hadn't learned how to read things as a classicist does-slowly, thinking about everything...I learned how to do things there and then I applied,' he says himself, 'the principles that I learned when I was a philologist to the way that I was doing philosophy. So, miserable as I was while I was a philologist, I still used what I had there for something extremely valuable to me,' and accordingly, philology itself is redeemed. So if you can think of philology as an aspect of suffering, so to speak, then you can see how its contribution to his whole life and to his philosophy redeems it and makes it no longer a bad thing at all.

Lyn Gallacher: So do you think, taken as a whole, Nietzsche can be a kind of guide to living, or is that just too simplistic a view?

Alexander Nehamas: In a sense he can be a guide, but he's not the regular guide. He's not the regular guide, the guide who says, 'Well now you do this and now you do that and now you do the other,' no, he offers himself as an example but an example of how somebody with his particular idiosyncratic features, in his particular situation, with his particular history, with his particular difficulties, with his particular friends, with his particular strengths-manages to put himself together. What he says, if he says anything to his readers, is, 'You have to do the same', but the same now is to take up your particular situations, your particular history, put those together and make something different than Nietzsche but something that really expresses yourself.

There's a wonderful little dialogue he has in The Gay Science between A and B, and A says to B, 'What? You want no imitators?' And B replies, 'Oh I want everyone to fashion their own example, as I do.' If you try to understand exactly what this says you see that, in a sense, to follow Nietzsche, to use Nietzsche as a guide, is precisely to become very, very different from him. You can't be exactly the same, you can't be even nearly the same, you have to be extremely different, but in being different, in organising yourself in your own way you are, in a sense, following his example, which is to form yourself as you can.

Lyn Gallacher: And that's perhaps why art works as an analogy.

Alexander Nehamas: Exactly, yes, perfect. Suppose that somebody comes up to you and says, 'How can I paint a great painting? What is it to paint a great painting?' Take one of Rembrandt's self-portraits, suppose that you think that's a great painting, and you say, 'That's what it is to paint a great painting,' and you hold up the Rembrandt self-portrait and you say, 'That is a great painting. Can you do that?' Now, what is the person who asked you the question supposed to do? Well, one thing they can do is make a copy of the painting, but in that case they fail; they have not produced a great painting, they've produced a copy of a great painting, which is of itself not a great painting. The only way they can answer the question they asked-how can I paint a great painting?-is to go away, to work very hard, and if they have talent and the luck and the perseverance, they will create a magnificent work of art which is going to be extremely different from the Rembrandt self-portrait but will, in fact, be a great painting just like, as we say, the portrait without looking like it at all. That's the paradox involved here. That's why art is such a perfect analogy for him because the originality in the arts is precisely what he considers the model for what it is to have a great human life.

But if Nietzsche has taught me anything anyway it is that we live in total and continuous uncertainty, that there are no foundations, there are no purely authentic stages, that no matter how much you dig and dig and dig into something, all you find is more and more and more, as he would call it, interpretations or masks, as he sometimes says. I would like to not think in those terms but to say more and more aspects. And that uncertainty is the condition in which we live from day to day. Nothing is certain, except perhaps that suffering will not be eliminated unfortunately, or fortunately, since it also is the cause of greatness.

Lyn Gallacher: And one of the neat little things that you did at the beginning of your book was you said that even saying that everything is an interpretation is an interpretation.

Alexander Nehamas: That's right, and then the question is, do you say to Nietzsche, 'Well, if that's interpretation too then you're wrong and I don't have to believe you.'? And Nietzsche would say, 'No, it doesn't mean that it's wrong, it means it's interpretation. If you want to produce a better one, go ahead and do so,' but certainly Nietzsche would say, 'You don't have to believe me.' That's one of the great things about him as a philosopher, for me, that there's very little 'have to' and 'should' in his work. No, you don't have to believe Nietzsche. Nietzsche doesn't say, 'I have an argument here that makes it necessary for you to agree with me.' He puts himself out and says, 'This is how I live my life best, from these ideas. Is it something that you find attractive or not? If you do, try to live by those ideas and see what you come up with. If you don't, go your way. You are not a person I want to talk to.' And that, now, of course, gives rise to the great charge of elitism in Nietzsche...that he doesn't care about people. In fact, in that respect, he doesn't. He thinks that there are some people who are capable of being individuals and there are many people who are not. And he also believes that his books are not going to help those who are not capable to be something that they can't, but he thinks that his books can help those who are capable and who are being held down, as he says, by the bonds of morality, of Christianity, or western metaphysics, or whatever your preferred term is for the oppressive forces, to go ahead and accomplish something that they might not have seen themselves capable of doing had they not read him.

Lyn Gallacher: And that's, in fact, why he does offer his thoughts so lightly and perhaps, as you say, obscurely and dismissively and elitistly (if that's a word) because he doesn't want to be one of those bonds of oppression, he doesn't want to reinforce the system that he finds objectionable.

Alexander Nehamas: Absolutely right. If you felt that Nietzsche has proved to me that I must lived my life this way, he is lost, he has lost the game. His game is precisely not to prove to you that that's the way the game should be played. His goal is to show you an attractive way the game is played, and to have you decide on your own whether you want to play the game or not. It's almost like someone coming to you to say to you, 'Look, you must be a great artist.' You can't say that to somebody. You may say, 'Look you must be an artist,' but you clearly can't say to somebody, 'You must be a great artist,' because being a great artist is not a question of obligation, it's a question of ability. Can you or can't you? If you can, you more or less will do so, if you have the ability. And what Nietzsche is saying is, 'That's all I'm saying.' Here is an instance of somebody who did become a great artist and in a very egocentric way he says, 'This is me. I did it myself and that's how I did it, and now see if you have the ability and the desire and the strength and the perseverance to do it also.' But what you come up with, no matter how you agree with Nietzsche's general values, will have to be something extraordinarily different from the specific things that he accomplished. That's why it's very frustrating and a little sad when you see all these people who read Nietzsche and start writing aphoristically or mouth his ideas without really understanding them anyway because they become caricatures of Nietzsche. It's like painting a copy of the Rembrandt rather than trying to do a painting of your own.

Lyn Gallacher: I know this is a bit of leap, but one of the writers who seems to have understood this is James Joyce. Is there a kind of a yesness in Finnegan's Wake?

Alexander Nehamas: There's certainly a kind of a yesness in Finnegan's Wake, as there is a yesness even at the end of Ulysses...after all, that's how it ends, with the word 'yes'. From what we know, I think Joyce was certainly aware of Nietzsche, like everyone in the beginning of the 20th century was aware of Nietzsche. But for me the great Nietzschean...and again I'm not quite sure how much he had read him, but whether he had read him or not, he certainly had similar ideas, is Proust. After all, In Search of Lost Time is a book that tells a story of a young man who wastes his time trying to become an author, and instead of trying to write his book goes to all those social occasions and runs around with his friends and spends time with his parents and has love affairs, and he's a snob and thinks about this and thinks about that, and wastes his time, until one day he realises that all those things that he thought were wasting his time were his preparation, his gathering material for the great book he is going to write. Then he announces that he will write this book. What will his book be? An account of all the stupid things that he did, all the time he wasted, all the silly relationships, his snobbery, his intellectual interests, his friends...in other words, the book that we have already read. He's going to write the book we have already read, which is a perfect example, in a way, of the eternal recurrence now, because we read this almost unending book and when we do come to the end we are told that we are at the beginning of a book that is going to be a repetition of the book we have just finished reading, which I think is a wonderful way to express part of the eternal recurrence.

Lyn Gallacher: The eternally recurring Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy and comparative literature at Princeton University, speaking about Friedrich Nietzsche. And Alexander Nehamas is the author of Life as Literature, which is published by Harvard University Press. And that's all for Book Talk today. I'm Lyn Gallacher.