‘Dual value response’ - A new key to Nietzsche?
By Colin Wilson
Introduction
Colin Wilson is the internationally renown author of such classic texts as The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel, The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, and other works such as Chords & Discords: Purely Personal Opinions on Music, Introduction to the New Existentialism, Poetry & Mysticism, New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution. He has also written novels, works on crime, and studies on a vast range of figures from Rasputin to Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Hesse and others.
Our monthly essay, “Dual Value Response”, is from his work The Bicameral Critic and is reprinted with kind permission by the author. If you wish to respond to this essay, please visit our discussion board.
‘DUAL VALUE RESPONSE’ –
A NEW KEY TO NIETZSCHE?
BY Colin Wilson
‘I must, I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet - a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce, and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.’
The quotation, oddly enough, is by Bertrand Russell, from a letter written to Lady Constance Malleson in 1918; he was having a love affair with her at the time, which may explain the uncharacteristically romantic tone. It has always struck me as one of the most Nietzschean sentences written in the twentieth century. It also helps to answer a basic question about Nietzsche: why his work has shown such extraordinary vitality since his death in 1900. All philosophers who are worth anything keep trying to say that ‘essential thing’: that feeling of the infinite world of objective meanings that surrounds us, waiting to be gathered like apples in an endless orchard. But philosophy attempts to say it by circumscribing a subject, plodding around it like that greedy peasant in Tolstoy’s ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ And when he has finished, he is breathless and exhausted, and the ‘thing’ remains unsaid. This is the challenge of Nietzsche. There is something about him that cannot be pinned down. Eminent interpreters have been trying for years: George Brandes, A.R. Orage, Karl Jaspers, Walter Kaufmann, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger probably comes closest to the essence of Nietzsche; not in that monstrously prolix book, which loses the essence in comparison with Plato and Descartes, but in some of the shorter pronouncements, such as the essay ‘Nietzsches Wort “Gott ist tot”’ in Holztvege. For Heidegger allows us to see that what fascinates him about Nietzsche is also what fascinates him about Hölderlin - something elusive, but oddly real - something like a smell or taste, or that madeleine dipped in tea that reminded Proust of his childhood. ‘Knowledge is in essence the schematization of chaos’ says Heidegger in his book on Nietzsche. But in that case, is the aim of philosophy really knowledge? We can agree that the aim of physics or chemistry is ‘to know’, for when I know something about nature, it gives me power over nature, or rather, an aid to power, just as a railway timetable gives me an aid to travel. But I am a living being, in continual direct contact with the world, with ‘life’, and philosophy is basically my attempt to adjust to the world, to my own life. A baby’s problem is not simply to know his mother, but to suck her milk. The philosopher’s problem is not simply to know 'life', but to get to grips with it. And by that, I do not mean 'commitment’ to some merely human problem. I mean in the sense that Russell meant, somehow contacting the ‘breath of life, fierce and coming from far away', and the 'fearful passionless force of non-human things’. For it is this actual contact that gives the philosopher what he needs most - his vision, his feeling of direction and meaning. Philosophy cannot operate in vacua, because, unlike science, it does not have a clear and well-defined object. Its ‘object’ is illuminated by flashes of vision, by a sense of wonder.
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Nothing is harder to grasp than this. For after all, when a philosopher has written a book, it looks like a book on physics; it seems to be full of ‘propositions’ that relate to the ‘real world’, and so on. It is only when you examine it more closely that you realize that its ‘content’ is much closer to the content of a poem or a symphony, that it suggests a way of seeing, of feeling, and not ‘knowledge’ at all. What is a symphony for? It is designed to put you in a certain mood, to mould your feelings; but not in the same straightforward way as a cigarette or a glass of whisky. It aims to cause you to ‘open up’, so as to change your normal relation to the world around you, to see things you hadn’t noticed before, to experience a sense of mystery and excitement. And ideally, to an intelligent reader, a volume of philosophy does exactly that. Philosophy is very closely related to music; and hardly at all to physics. Jaspers remarked in an essay (‘On My Philosophy’) that Nietzsche became important to him ‘as the magnificent revelation of nihilism and the task of going beyond nihilism’ - a strange-sounding remark if one thinks of Nietzsche as the philosopher of the ‘breath of life’, of the Dionysian upsurge of vitality. And Heidegger also lays emphasis on Nietzsche’s nihilism, his anti-metaphysical trend, in the essay ‘Nietzsche’s Wort “Gott ist tot”’. How is it possible for two ‘existential’ philosophers to regard Nietzsche as primarily a nihilist? What is nihilism anyway? The Russian revolutionary Pisarev stated its credo; ‘What can be smashed should be smashed,’ which sounds like Nietzsche and his hammer; but Pisarev was talking about the political institutions of Tsarist Russia, and Nietzsche was not remotely interested in this kind of nihilism. The nihilism of Turgeniev’s Bazarov consists largely in atheism and materialism a la Büchner, and Nietzsche's atheism (if that is what it was) has nothing in common with Büchner’s. The ‘God’ who was dead was closer to Blake’s Old Nobodaddy. So what precisely does it mean to call Nietzsche a nihilist? What Nietzsche wanted to ‘smash’ is stated clearly and repeatedly in his work, in The Antichrist for example: ‘All these great enthusiasts and prodigies behave like our little females: they consider “beautiful sentiments” adequate arguments, regard a heaving bosom as the bellows of the deity, and conviction a criterion of truth’. What is being attacked here is German romanticism - Schiller, Jean Paul, et al. - with its ‘Kantian’ moral tone and Rousseau-istic gush. If this makes Nietzsche a ‘nihilist’ then Jane Austen is a nihilist for satirizing the same kind of thing in Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen's mockery sprang from a firm sense of reality; so did Nietzsche's philosophizing with a hammer. People who dislike Nietzsche - Bertrand Russell, for example - dislike him because they do not share his sense of reality. When they attack him, they have the relatively easy task of pointing out the contradictions inherent in his ‘irrationalism’, and the potentially dangerous nature of his superman doctrine. People who admire Nietzsche - including Jaspers and Heidegger - share his basic intuition; they do not object to his ‘contradictions’ because they can see how each opinion was an expression of this basic intuition. In some cases, the expression was more careless or bad-tempered than in others; hence the ‘contradictions’.
Now if that is true, then real understanding of Nietzsche can only come from a grasp of this basic intuition. And in order to define this, we must speak of a psychological phenomenon which, as far as I know, has never been described in standard textbooks. I have called this, for want of a better term, ‘dual value response’, and it has some relation to the religious conversions described by William James. A situation that has aroused a neutral or negative reaction quite suddenly arouses a very positive response; black becomes white, as it were. It is most typical of poets and mystics, but I think that everyone experiences it at some time. Yeats describes such an experience in the poem ‘Vacillation’; it took place in a London teashop:
While on the shop and street I gazed/My body of a sudden blazed;/And twenty minutes more or less/It seemed, so great my happiness,/That I was blessed and could bless.
If we choose to take a reductionist viewpoint, we can, of course, dismiss this as a mere ‘feeling’. I shall try to show that it is, in fact a perception of value, and can be analyzed precisely in phenomeno-logical terms.
Nietzsche was unusually subject to ‘dual value response’, perhaps because of his invalidism. A man whose health never fluctuates seriously takes up a certain attitude towards the world - what he enjoys, what is a nuisance - and maintains it year in and year out, until it becomes a habit. The invalid swoops up and down like a swallow; in the morning, life seems a burden; by evening he feels magnificent, and life is self-evidently good.
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The exact mechanism of this becomes clear if we consider how we make our moment-to-moment judgments on situations. Let us take a hypothetical situation. I am on holiday, and my car breaks down in a lonely place. My first response is gloom, for there is no 'positive side' to this situation, no ‘bright side’ to look on. This is 100 per cent nuisance. Another car comes along. My spirits rise. The motorist offers to take a look under the hood. He says that it could be a broken pump, which is fairly serious; my spirits sink. Then he notices that the lead is off one of the spark plugs; the trouble may be less bothersome than I thought; my spirits rise. Perhaps the absurdest thing is this: that if I succeed in effecting some kind of repair, and I drive on, I may find that I feel much happier than I felt before the breakdown - an absurdity because I had nothing to worry about then, and now I know that I may have to spend an hour hanging around at the next garage. Obviously, our ‘value response’ to things that happen to us is, to some extent, quite arbitrary. ‘An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered,’ says Chesterton, ‘an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.’
Why is this? Because our ‘responding mechanism’ has the power to change focus. It is as if I possessed a sort of combination of telescope and microscope. I can cither look at a situation ‘from a distance’, to get the over-all effect, or I can focus upon some minute particular. I change focus as I need to. For example, if I am in process of changing the spark plugs, and I drop the spanner in the deep grass, I switch instantly from my over-all view of the whole job to this smaller problem of finding the spanner. But in switching to the smaller task, I must not lose sight of the larger one. If I glance up from my search for the spanner, and see that the car is running away downhill because I forgot to leave it in gear, I realize that I have made a fundamental mistake - of forgetting the general in order to concentrate on the particular.
Nietzsche’s life affords many examples of ‘dual value response’, two of which are particularly striking. The first is described in his letter to Carl von Gersdorff. It took place in the year 1866, when Nietzsche was 21, and often in a state of fatigue and depression. Climbing a hill called Leusch, he took refuge from the rain in a peasant’s hut, where the peasant was slaughtering two kids, while his son looked on. Nietzsche was not fond of the sight of blood. But ‘the storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable sense of wellbeing and zest’. He added: ‘Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers, without morality. Pure will, without the confusions of intellect - how happy, how free.’
The second experience occurred in 1870, when he was serving in the ambulance corps during the Franco-Prussian war. He had been in the cavalry, but a fall from a horse had caused severe complications. One evening, after a hard day’s work with the wounded, Nietzsche was walking along the Strasbourg road, alone. Cavalry came up behind him; he drew under a wall to allow them to pass. It was his old regiment; as he watched them pass, he experienced again the sense of tremendous exaltation. Later, he told his sister that this incident was the origin of his philosophy of the will of power: that as he watched these men riding to battle, perhaps to death, he realized suddenly that 'the strongest and highest will to life does not lie in the puny struggle to exist, but in the Will to war, the Will to power’.
Both are clear examples of sudden and total change of focus, from a state of fatigue and self-pity into a state of exaltation. What happens is, to some extent, explained in William James's important essay ‘The Energies of Men’:
Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.
He goes on to point out that when mental patients sink into a condition of depression and exhaustion, ‘bullying treatment’ often works. ‘First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief.’
Now James is obviously right to emphasize that what we are dealing with here are underground energies, invisible reserves way below the surface of our conscious awareness. Being so far below the surface, they are not available for conscious inspection. When a crisis is forced upon us, our first response appears to verify the certainty of being close to exhaustion, ‘the extremity of distress’. The gauge seems to register an empty fuel tank. And then, abruptly, the needle swings back to indicate ‘full’. The gauge was telling lies. We had reserve energy tanks, and the emergency has caused them to connect up.
All this has obvious implications for morality. For what, on the whole, is our definition of evil? ‘Evil is physical pain,’ said Leonardo; we associate it with the cruelty, the oppression of the weak by the strong. If you saw an old lady with arthritis walking painfully upstairs, and you set your bulldog on her, that would be cruel. But suppose the emergency made her skip upstairs like a goat, and the arthritis vanished? . . . The whole business of the ‘dual value response’ introduces an ambiguity into matters of morality. Yeats’s wise old Chinamen, in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, look down on the tragic confusion of history, but their ‘ancient glittering eyes are gay’. Unlike Arnold Toynbee, they arc not appalled by ‘the cruel riddle of Mankind's crimes and follies’.
Bertrand Russell’s response to this kind of Nietzschean philosophy is whole-hearted condemnation. Nietzsche was a sick weakling who had compensatory fantasies of power. . . . But it is all rubbish and double-talk. Good is good and bad is bad, and if Nietzsche cannot tell the difference, that is because his romanticism made him incapable of thinking clearly. . .
Nietzsche’s reply would be that it is Russell who is not thinking clearly, or rather, who misunderstands the nature of philosophical thinking. Thinking is not a linear process that could be carried out by an adding machine; it depends upon insight, and insight depends on an upsurge of vital energy. It is true that it can occur without; something may 'dawn on you' for no particular reason; but a problem is more likely to be solved in a flash of vitality than not. Current thinking on the nature of the insight process - in Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, in Bernard Lonargan’s Insight, in Maslow’s Psychology of Science, in Koestler’s The Act of Creation - is wholly on Nietzsche’s side. Husserl’s phenomenology had established the same point in the first decade of this century, but was not generally understood then. Perception is intentional, a reaching out, not a passive process. But philosophical thought is a process of perception, and therefore depends upon the drive, the energy behind it. It also follows that under-energized thought will actually falsify the objects of perception. To put it another way, thought requires a bird’s eye view, and a bird requires the lifting power to hover in the air. A worm’s eye view is not necessarily false, but it is a close-up, and its perspectives are distorted.
These insights are very gradually becoming familiar to philosophers nearly a century after Nietzsche went insane. Nietzsche did not possess the concepts to undermine the currently accepted attitudes of his time. If he had bought and studied Franz Brentano’s Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, published in 1874, he might have realized the significance of the concept of intentionality; but that is doubtful, since Brentano himself did not grasp its full significance. (It was left for Husserl to develop it into a powerful philosophical tool.) Nietzsche was forced to attack the ‘linear’ philosophy of his time in the manner of a dive-bomber, swooping dangerously from above. This is the reason that Nietzsche’s work is fragmentary. It is not that his thought is disconnected; only that, since his own basic insight remains constant, he is always being irritated into pointing out the fallacy of current attitudes. It is an unsatisfactory way of doing philosophy; to begin with, it encourages a continual state of irritation or excitement, which is wearing for the nerves. A philosopher should start from ‘first principles’ and work outward, as Kant and Hegel do - as even Schopenhauer does. Husserl was luckier. He was also irritated by the psychologism, the relativism, the nominalism, that had permeated philosophy since Locke. But he demolished them with irrefutable arguments in the Logical Investigations, and laid his own foundations. Nietzsche completely lacked foundations in this sense. His work is a series of brilliant guerilla raids on enemy positions; but a guerilla is at a psychological disadvantage, being a man without a home, without an established position. The two polemics against Wagner are superb; but one can sense Nietzsche’s underlying envy of Wagner. Wagner had his Bayreuth, his Cosima, his disciples; he could get on with the business of creating, of building. And Nietzsche could only criticize, like a disgruntled reviewer. . . . Nietzsche’s fundamental insight was a feeling about human beings and their relation to the world, to ‘life’. It was a vision, in the sense that we speak of the vision of a painter or a novelist. Expressed in words, it was something like this: human beings are permanently ‘under the weather’, permanently unhealthy - a disease for which the complexity of civilization is partly to blame. Because they are so poor-spirited - human, all too human - their vision of the universe is also poor-spirited. Like one of James's neurasthenics, they stagger around in a state of self-pitying fatigue, permanently listless and miserable.
But the theory of meaning that I am propounding in this essay states that meaning is perceived correctly and objectively only when the mind can perceive it from a distance, from above, like a bird. And this in turn requires a certain energy - in fact, a tremendous energy and drive. Early space rocket engineers worked out that a space vehicle would have to travel at seven miles per second to escape the earth's gravity. And thought needs a comparable kind of speed and drive to escape its own limitations and to become objective. Or one might compare human thinking to an under-capitalized business that can never get clear of its debts. ‘Close-upness deprives us of meaning’, and human beings are permanently too close-up to their lives, to their trivial problems, to see things objectively. They need a touch of the frenzy of Dionysus to make them snap out of their neurasthenic state, to grasp their own possibilities and those of the world. . . . Nietzsche's philosophical books are a series of judgments on the nineteenth century from his own ‘bird's eye view’ - a view that struck most of his contemporaries as ‘ruthless’ and a little paranoid.
Nietzsche suffered under one tremendous disadvantage that has never been sufficiently emphasized by his biographers. Living in an age of Prussianism and prudery, he was unable to give sex the central place that it should occupy in his philosophy. D.H. Lawrence and Frank Wedekind were the first moderns to be able to do this.
We do not find much about sex in books on Nietzsche: a few paragraphs about Lou Salome, speculations as to whether he actually picked up a venereal disease from a prostitute. . . It was natural for Brandes and Orage to think of Nietzsche as the solitary thinker, brooding idealistically on Kant and Socrates and Wagner, and only occasionally wishing that he had a wife. . . But in this age of frankness, we know that sex occupies a central position in the lives of most human beings. In the mid-thirties, before the days of Kinsey, Abraham Maslow did a study on the relation between dominance feelings and sex in women. His conclusions, briefly, were that women fall roughly into three classes: high dominance, medium dominance and low dominance. Low dominance women actively dislike sex; it frightens them, and they regard the male sexual member as ugly. High dominance women, with rare exceptions (due to puritanical upbringing) love sex, tend to be promiscuous, masturbate, and regard the male sexual member as an interesting and delightful object. (Medium dominance women, predictably, share characteristics of both classes.) I am not sure whether anyone has done a comparable study on men, but I am fairly certain that it would turn up the same results: that there is an immediate, direct relation between male dominance and sexuality. And male sexual dominance differs slightly from its female counterpart in having an element of sadism. By this I do not mean a desire to cause pain; but the attitude of a cat towards a mouse, (i.e. the feeling that the mouse is both a plaything and a meal). Even the most highly dominant females, Maslow found, enjoyed having a more highly dominant lover; in fact, they could not give themselves completely to less dominant men. In one case, a woman would provoke her husband into a quarrel, in which he would treat her very roughly, after which, they made love. Female sexuality has a masochistic element; male sexuality has a sadistic element - the cat licking its lips as it watches the mice wandering innocently past. Even in the closest love relationship, this element remains.
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‘DUAL VALUE RESPONSE’ – A NEW KEY TO NIETZSCHE?