Solitude, gratitude

The correspondence of Nietzsche is not a philosophical correspondence as can be that of a Seneca or a Descartes. It shows man in his privacy, not the philosopher ; not the philosopher man as he manifests in the first person in the work, for example in the famous preface to the Cheerful Where the author announces that he is finally healed and that his book is the work of a valley. It is not that person who speaks here, or barely. At first glance, this collection of letters has little interest in annecdotal: postcards to his mother, his sister, his friends, exchanges of politeness with the distant friends who remained in Basel while he leaves to treat himself in Italy. If this correspondence (which must be noted the exemplary edition) can hold attention, it is for another reason: it gives to understand what it takes to be an author – namely the most extreme solitude. Far from the heroic thinker of Cheerful And great health, not to mention the future superman, three quarters of these letters contain nothing other than jérémiades: I am sick, I just spent three awful days, I am in an excruciating solitude – this is what Friedrich written on his postcards. The very last letter of the collection declares (December 29, 1879, to his sister): “ This year, I had 118 days of serious crises. Beautiful statistics ! Alarmed, well -intentioned friends, or the too loving family (mother and sister) pressed him to return to the country (Nietzsche then stayed in Italy). Impossible, he replied immediately. The reasons vary: the climate, the disease … the “ basilophobia (Repulsion for Basel !), He writes comically to Overbeck. Translate: loneliness is necessary for me to think and write.

In this this correspondence makes one think of that of Proust, saying perpetually in agony-too ​​tired to finish a letter-agony during which he works hard in his great work. In this volume, there is almost no question (outside the missives, always precise and meticulous, to its publisher) of the vast philosophical encyclopedia that Nietzsche wrote in these years 1875-1879: Human, too human. We therefore end up saying to ourselves that when we read “ I just spent two awful days “, You have to understand” I just gave birth to two pages ». Does this mean that this “ Discount disease “, According to the editor’s formula, is a cunning ? The very first letter of the collection, to Hans von Bülow, curiously associates these two words: Nietzsche complains, once it is not customary, to be in good health, while only cunning or the disease allowed him to escape his charge as a teacher to write his first works. Everything will soon manage and the disease allow him to take a leave and go into exile, put families and unwelcome from a distance. It does not seem to hinder intellectual production. Rather, and this is where the anecdote weaves a thread with the depths of Nietzschean thought, intellectual activity seems to be confused with the disease. Thinking is a disease, or at least a function of a disease, and it is this disease that, courageously and solitary, but complaintively, Nietzsche explores and experiences on itself.

Hence the other point by which this correspondence evokes Proust: friendship. We know that Proust reproaches Nietzsche, in Guermantes’ sidehis naive apology for friendship, “ of which all the effort is to make us sacrifice the only real and incommunicable part (other than by means of art) of ourselves, to a superficial self, which does not find like the other of joy in itself, but finds a confused tenderness to feel supported by external decrees, hospitalized in a foreign individuality where, happy with the protection which is given to him, he makes his well-being in approval. ». The truth is only found in itself, never in collaboration, conversation, not even encouragement. Because it is only of common notion by the thought which plunges into the heart of a lonely, selfish and egocentric self, yes (let’s leave the moral Indignant) and which will perhaps report from its solitude well of universal truths and useful to all.

In his own correspondence, however, we see Proust granting a great place to friendship. Mondanities, no doubt, which he needed to deceive his loneliness in the creation intervals, and also to nourish it. Now we have the feeling that Nietzsche, likewise, although with less frankness, practices this friendship at a distance and carefully keeps from proximity. In reality, he hardly needs others: neither glory nor encouragement. We never see him submit a page to anyone, asking for an opinion. Rarely, a reference. Does this mean, as the publisher thinks, that he already knows himself “ An exceptional thinker »» ? The idea still seems too worldly. What is certain is that he only needs to speak to someone, and more precisely to complain. Because to write and think you need loneliness, or loneliness is unbearable.

I would incline to think that this fragmentary form that Nietzsche himself attributed to his loyalty whose system makers would sorely lack, is rather due to this solitude of the design. The only work developed continuously and almost systematic, Morality genealogyemanating from conversations with Lou Salomé and the English psychologist Paul Rée.

It is also the breaking period: break with Wagner, soon with Paul Rée. Overnight, these venerated friends disappear, and this so defender man, champion of friendship, launches hostilities with the last violence, without a letter of notice. What happened ? It is not the correspondence that will teach us. The rupture is interior, and undoubtedly neither Wagner nor Paul Rée never knew the reason, which will not be delivered (directly to the public) until later, in the Against Wagnerand in the Morality genealogy For the second. An intellectual incompatibility emerged, as if the thought proceeded only, by violent ruptures, all the more violent as they were preceded by admiration affecting devotion, as evidenced by the letters to Wagner (as well as in Rée). This is why Nietzsche can without contradicting himself proclaiming his gratitude towards everyone while clear in an ever greater solitude. What the Cheerful will name “ Star friendships ». Sensitive souls – and first of all the victims of these disgreishes – may find matter in affliction, but everything happens as if the friend worked like a kind of inverted mirror of the thinker: when the portrait is ripe, it is good for the break, and Nietzsche is delighted with an envelope that has become too narrow. The thing is blatant in the case of Paul Rée, who also embodies the positivist trend of these years. Thus friendship would be to the philosopher what love, according to his master, quickly denied, Schopenhauer, is to humanity in general: a cunning of nature.

The reason for this voluntary loneliness would therefore be to be sought in the method, the famous method of suspicion: Nietzschean philosophy operates not by simple reasoning, but by affects and in particular by suspicion, accusation, and incrimination ; These trials, they are brought to themselves, but with such violence that they claim an outlet, a substitution self on which to direct these explosive conflicts, without resolution, without overcoming or hope of reconciliation-the “ great health Can’t pay for another price. Nietzsche says elsewhere (I do not know where) that everyone knows two or three truths about his friends, that he should not tell them at any price, under penalty of making deadly enemies … Truth and friendship do not mix. Perhaps he did not want to subjected his relatives to his loved ones directly ? The only people with whom he wanted to explain, he appointed them at the end of the first appendix to Human, too human : “ Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. It is with them that I have to explain myself, when I have long lonely, it is by them that I want to be given wrong or reason (…) – that the living forgive me if they sometimes seem to me like shadows, so they are pale and saddened, worried and, alas ! So eager to live ; While these appear to me so alive, as if, after being dead, they could never become tired of life again. But it is Eternal liveliness Who matters: what does the “ eternal life “, And, in general, life ! »»