What makes a man a hero: the moral life of Friedrich Nietzsche.(Philosophy & Ideas)

IT COST HIM TO TRAVEL: one day in the train and three to recuperate. He never visited Paris or London or Brussels, never went west to Madrid or Lisbon. He endorsed Herder's claim that German was Greek, but made no effort to cross the Balkans to the land that gave form not only to civic liberties but also to the even more potent derivative concept of unenslaved inner freedom: the closest he came to Greece was the temple of Paestum, south-east of Sorrento, which he saw in the spring of 1877, or on the boat trip he made from Genoa to the ruins of Sicily. He never visited Mozart's Prague, which was a day's journey from Dresden: it was too far east. Nor did he pay much attention to that other German culture which had its capital in Vienna.

What moved him was an instinct for the issues of glaciers and mountains, the language of the spring wind, and stark shadowless sunlight. "Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains" (Ecce Homo). Lucid effort had to go into the election of a place: "I can't allow myself to commit an error with regards to the weather. Do you know that the error of last winter (Santa Margherita and its dampness) very nearly cost me my life?" The wanderer above the clouds was forever on the lookout for a place where he could rediscover Goethe's great secret of living at peace with the world. There he might find the one place he could write, or take out his notebook and walk, as he did between Santa Margherita and Portofino where "the bay of Genoa sings the last notes of its melody".

No great traveller, our Herr Quidam was no adventurer either: while he was turning the pages of Revue des Deux Mondes, Rimbaud was running guns in Harar. Nietzsche was incapable of "adding up" his dangers, as one of his later admirers Andre Malraux did; but then Malraux sagely contrived to end his days as cabinet minister and museum director. In the age of Pierre Loti and the great "exotes", the first Thomas Cook excursions and the first travel magazines, Nietzsche followed a different schedule, attracted by the pagan springs of "the old diluvian Europe" and his whim of setting up house in Tunis, Corsica or Spain.

The axis of his world was the bar of the Alps: on one side the matriarchal North, from Naumburg down to Basle, the fogged Wagnerian landscape he grew to loathe; on the other the Ligurian and Piedmontese coast of Italy and France: Genoa, Turin and Nice, which he visited every year from 1883 until 1888. Zarathustra "stole up on [him]" on the bay that stretches all the way from Santa Margherita to the promontory of Portofino, convincing him in a cold and damp albergo, with the high tide surging below his window and keeping him from sleep, "that everything decisive comes about 'in spite of'". Out of gratitude, he hoped to bestow immortality on the village of Sils Maria ("perpetual heroic idyll": July 8, 1881): it should perhaps be considered as the furthermost salient of the Germanic world on the Latin, an Alpine balcony perched over the Mediterranean. This" was where "all fifty prerequisites for [his] meagre life" were united, where the idea of eternal recurrence was born one day in the woods beside the lake of Silvaplana "6000 feet above the sea and higher still above all human things" (September 3, 1883). Two tracks in his life met there: the trail above Rapallo and the forest road through the Engadin.

For all his poor arithmetic, Nietzsche was heroic in his isolation, and he knew it. The note of scorn in his writing is unmistakable: scorn for others who lacked, in his eyes, the courage to live their separateness. That was his self-mastery, which is to say morality. Being isolated meant getting to observe the doings of the domesticated. His was the condescension of the Cynic philosopher, trampling on the pride of property-owners with--as Plato remarked of the first cynical philosopher Diogenes--another kind of pride. It gave Nietzsche the urge to rush into the temple and overturn the money-changers' tables, which is what his writings eventually accomplished, though the columns of the temple ultimately fell in on Europe itself. "We Europeans confront a world of tremendous ruins": his proclamation was a prophecy too, and one heard by a political agitator called Adolf Hitler, who promised a Munich audience in 1926 that he would complete "the task which Christ began but did not finish".

Nietzsche even anointed himself with the ointment of greatest value when he claimed, in one of his letters: "now I am, with great probability, the most independent man in Europe". This remote descendant of Samson who blustered like the Baron Munchhausen could never decide whether life was tragic or just a game. "The problem of the actor has troubled me for the longest time" (The Joyful Science). He certainly hated the thought of life being reduced to the playing of a role--"to a comedy of existence ... 'become conscious' of itself"--when what goaded him was the absoluteness of truth. To think all the world a stage was to despair of it; and Nietzsche despaired of it so much he proposed its total reinterpretation: the world could be justified "only as an aesthetic phenomenon". Which is to say: by restaging it!

WHAT NIETZSCHE SOUGHT was a spendthrift moral economy, one that turned not on the calculus of virtues and just deserts but on the individual acting without a regard for consequences. Truly good deeds had to exist, like love, beyond the law. "O all you glances of love, you divine moments! How quickly you died!" (Zarathustra) True virtue was instinctive and profligate: "it is of the essence of the rich spirit to squander itself carelessly, without petty caution, from day to day." Predictability made him shudder. Hegel's "partnership-project" for self-realisation was anathema to him, even if much in his life seems to follow Hegel's speculations to the letter. Commercial society was an aggregate of individuals, but once equipped with a bureaucracy and regulatory organs it evicted the outstanding individual; in a society of self-proclaimed selfhoods the truly individual life was impossible.