J.B. Pick
Nietzsche & the Nature of Undistorted Perception
Nietzsche,
says Thomas Mann, was born to be a psychologist. He is right. Nietzsche
was not only the most acute psychologist of the European disease, and a
classic victim of it himself, he was a psychologist of a new kind. W.W.
Coupe has pointed out that “Nietzsche’s precursors did not question
the existing values, but only laid bare the subterfuges, intellectual and
practical, by which those who professed to acknowledge these values
managed to avoid living up to them. Nietzsche’s task was to subject the
values themselves to a destructive criticism.” But it is through
psychological penetration rather than abstract reasoning that he deploys
this criticism, and the peculiar character of his genius lies in the cold
and sparkling passion with which he does it.
A few quotations will give the flavour of his insight. First, the
fruits of self-observation:
“Everything in the world displeased me: but what displeased me
most was my displeasure with everything.”
“We get on without our bad conscience more easily than with our
bad reputation.”
“He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby as
a despiser.”
“‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done
that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually, memory
yields.”
And now the generalised penetrations which follow from such
analysis:
"One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to
vanity, average ones to habit, and petty ones to fear."
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies to truth than
lies."
"... to judge is identical with being unjust."
"Man ultimately finds nothing more in things than he himself
has laid in them!"
"Ideals are lies that have been blessed."
"We take it as a principle that only individuals feel any
responsibility. Corporations are invented to do what the individual has
not the courage to do ... The huge machinery of the State quells the
individual and makes him decline to be anserable for his own deeds."
"Science - the transforamtion of Nature into concepts for t he
purpose of governing Nature."
How is it, then, that such a psychologist should have come to exalt
the will-to-power? For it is the will-to-power which gives the clearest
manifestation of the ego's dominance in European consciousness. And it is
this dominance of the egoistic will which Nietzsche himself so acutely
analysed. How is it that a psychologist who perceives so sharply that
extreme actions are the impatience of vanity should make statements so
extreme that by his own analysis they must stem from a pride soaring
towards the insane? How is it that such a psychologist can demonstrate at
times an insensitivity bordering on blindness, and can adopt poses close
to charlatanism?
Nietzsche's dilemma was this: If all idealism is a choice between
self-deceptions, if all values are manifestations of the ego's will to
impose fictions upon reality, then what is left to a man but the assertion
of life itself, meaningless or not, as a value, and the affirmation of the
right to make your own values within that frame? The intensity of this
assertion approaches hysteria.
Nietzsche was of necessity torn between a will to affirm naked
life, as opposed to that consciousness which insists upon the imposition
of fictions upon life, and a knowledge that consciousness itself - sharp,
articulated consciousness - is his only weapon. He writes: "For let
us only put the question in all sincerity, "Why will you not deceive
yourself?" ... Such a question might be a Quixotism, a little craze
of enthusiasm; but it could be something worse, a principle hostile and
destructive to life. The 'Will to Truth' might well be in disguise a Will
to Death. There is no doubt that the truthful man ... affirms ... another
world than the world of life, and must he not by that very fact deny this
world - our world?"
But what is Nietzsche's world?
There is a distinction to be made between intellect at the service
of the willing ego and intellect as a simple perceiver of things as they
are. For the ego cannot be responsible for the analysis of the ego. If
there were no witness to observe the workings of the will in its efforts
to dominate a recalcitrant world - or, to put it another way, if the
intellect were never free - then to note the falsifications of one's own
behaviour, one's own lies and evasions, would be impossible, and
Nietzsche's life-work demonstrates that such 'noting' is not only possible
but can be continuous.
Although Nietzsche sought salvation in assertion of the
will-to-power, his actual salvation could only lie in discovering the true
nature of that witness which his own work clearly shows to be capable of
perceiving things as they are.
The witness is that faculty which sees when it is allowed to see.
the secret of Nietzsche's insight, when he is authentic, is that he
observes precisely those moments of falsification when the will refuses to
allow the witness to see what is presented to it, and insists on intruding
opinion and prejudgement. What is then seen becomes what the ego has
already decided shall be seen.
To see things as they are is to see without distortion, and to see
without distortion means the avoidance of choice as reality presents
itself. Perception without distortion results in knowlege. 'Knowledge'
acquired through distorted perception is not knowledge. Most of us experience undistorted perception only in
flashes. To experience undistorted perception continually is to be in the
state called wisdom, reached as the result of a growth of inner being.
Inner being grows as the result of a continual series of undistorted
perceptions.
What criticises? What observes? Only by attending alertly to his
own responses can a man dissipate the confusion that normally exists
between hasty opinion and intuitive perception. In hasty opinion there is
a sense of abrupt assault on the person, statement or phenomenon presented
to us, the abruptness being due partly to 'hastiness' itself, and partly
to a seldom-confessed emotional animus. In intuitive perception, on the
other hand, there is something which, although much swifter than haatiness,
is of another nature entirely, and has no trace of abruptness. I mean immediacy
of response, which is accompanied by no emotional animus whatsoever.
The man about to react with a hasty opinion feels rising within him
a mood which could be expressed "I don't agree with that", or
"I agree with that", or "I like that", or even
"Stupid fool!" The man whose perception is immediate sees
"Yes, this is so," or "No, it is not," and that, for
the moment, is all.
The difficulty of perceiving and accepting the difference between
the two responses arises only because people prefer to blind the eye which
is capable of seeing "This is so" the better to satisfy the
sensation of "I don't agree with that!"
When Nietzsche is at his most extravagant and perverse - praising
slavery, war or advocating immoralism - he is not saying "This is
so," but only "That will shock them!" Malice and vanity have distorted
perception to the point where it disappears. We are left with mere
assertion of opinion. Nietzsche, the arch-analyser of egoism and vanity,
because a classic victim of it. And yet, whatever flags he may wave or
kites he may fly, whatever poses he adopts, there is a point at which he
tests everything by his own criterion of authenticity. It it the operation
of his malice and the contortions of his vanity, after all, which give his
analysis the material to work on and the acuteness with which he is aware
of them which gives his work its cutting edge.
So that although we feel the emotional animus, his own awareness of
the difference between distorted and undistorted perception remains. This
awareness is due to hisextraordinary sense of focation. Even in the
madness brought on by thge physical disease which killed him there are
still moments when the lightning strikes and the whole landscape is lit up
by a wild unearthly glare.
The Chinese philosopher Ch'eng Hao observes: "The actual
condition of men is to have a blind spot, and this is the cause of their
inability to achieve the Tao. The trouble generally is that they are
selfish, and rely on the use of their intellect. Since they are selfish,
they are precluded from making their actions to be spontaneous responses;
since they rely on their intellect they cannot regard their intuitions as
something entirely natural."
Nietzsche would have appreciated the way in which Ch'eng Hao
associates selfishness and the use of the intellect, but he would have had
difficulty in understanding what the Chinese intends by 'intuition' and
'spontaneous response' and 'natural'.
He writes: "Reason is essentially an obstructing apparatus
preventing the immediate response to instinctive judgements: it halts, it
calculates, it traces the chain of consequences further." Thus he
contrasts reason with the 'spontaneous' and the 'natural' and denies that
it can be a part of the unity of nature itself.
The real question is: How is it possible for life and the
intellect, for the ego and the witness, to be reconciled - not merely in
abstract or theoretical terms, but in fact and experience?
Nietzsche feared to accept the existence of a witness apart from
the ego - to accept the existence, in other words, of a fundamental self
as distinct from the false self of the will - because to do so might force
him to accept an eternal order. He
preferred as a way out of his dilemma to project man’s will-to-power
into life itself, as if life could be held to share it.
Of course, he was aware that the term ‘will-to-power’ could be
interpreted as ‘will-to-be’, and that the actual desire for power over
others for its own sake is a pervesity peculiar to man.
Nietzsche’s perception of the contradictions within this
profoundly ambiguous universe led him to insist upon life as a value but
to attack that consciousness which, as it were ‘deliberately’ cuts
across it.
It seems to me that the contradictions are themselves the result of
a mode of perception peculiar to the willing ego which it is Nietzsche’s
own mission to expose, and are therefore to be reconciled only through
another mode of perception. This other mode of perception is possible to a man who lives
and acts from a state of pliable and alert awareness which asserts
nothing. A state of
pliable and alert aware enables the witness to perceive without
interference or pre-judgement, and so enables human nature to respond
intuitively to each stimulus as it arrives.
To say that such a mode of perception is possible would be to deny
the fact of undistorted perception - that is, of any perception whatsoever
of things as they are. Yet we
recognise many of Nietzsche’s own perceptions as being precisely that.
“Get your spiritual energies collected within,” says Hsiang
Shan, “then when there is a call for fellow-feeling you will have
fellow-feeling; when there is a call for being ashamed of evil you will be
ashamed of evil. Who is there
then can deceive you?” For
the answer to a consciousness in which contradiction is paramount is a
consciousness for which contradictions are subsidiary.
The ego does not respond to a call for fellow-feeling because the
ego is a creature of mood and self-will and no objective response is
possible to it.
There is no briefer, more exact statement of the reconciliation of
contradictions than that of Tao Te Ching: “Man follows Earth, Earth
follows Heaven, Heaven follows the Way, the Way is what it is.”
If man follows earth he accepts himself as part of the natural
order; but the natural order itself follows heaven; and heaven in turn
follows the Way, which is that upon which no comment is possible.
It is man’s secret that from within the heart of life and of the
natural order he can penetrate directly into the nature of the Way simply
by being aware of it while living it, without comment or distortion, so
that man, earth, heaven and the Way are as much a unity in experience as
they are necessarily so in fact. This
is what is meant by the criterion of ‘at once attaining to the sublime
and performing the common tast’ (a formula for the sage given by Fung
Yu-Lan in The Spirit of Chinese
Philosophy). Or to put it
another way, to be free in mind is to respond to circumstances as they
arise, so that event and response are one.
It was Nietzsche’s vocation to unveil all thos justifications
erected by the willing ego for its departure from the way of human nature;
to reveal the contradictions forced upon us by this departure.
It is the distortion of European consciousness itself which brought
us to the situation where a Nietzsche became necessary, and which forced
Nietzsche into his own perversions of thought.
And, of course, since the European consciousness remains perverse,
Nietzsche’s own final effort to force his way out of an impasse enabled
those who wanted above all to disguise the authenticity of his most
penetrating insights to set him up as another idol with which to deceive
people. It is one of the painful ironies in which Nietzsche’s life is so
rich that the man who wrote, ‘But the State lies in all the tongues of
good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies; and whatever it has, it has
stolen,’ and ‘Everything that a man does in the service of the State
is against his own nature,’ should be claimed by the defenders of the
state as one of their own.
His best insights are true perceptions and contained within a unity
which exists despite his denials. The
terrible nature of the illness from which he suffered would not allow him
the luxury of patience. If
there is no time for patience, there is no time for man.
Within his own consciousness was the experience of disintegration
and a despair continually overcome by an affirmation fanatical in its
intensity. His psychological
criticism remains valid, and even his extreme positive assertions, however
perverse, have force a prophesies. That
European consciousness which he analysed so thorougly has borne dreadful
fruit and its end may well be suicide unless it transcends itself.