At the risk of repeating what I've said in an earlier post, I feel it's important to respond to an email sent to me by an angry young man who suggests that rudeness is a worthwhile price to pay for sincerity and authenticity and that great artists can not only be excused their bad manners, but also their cruelty towards others.
Amongst those he calls upon to support this argument is Nietzsche ...
Now, it's unfortunate that there are still readers of the latter who refuse to acknowledge that central to his ethics and the cultivation of the self are what he terms the four cardinal virtues: honesty, courage, magnanimity, and, finally, politeness [1]. This last virtue being just as crucial as the first and neither compromised nor negated by it.
In other words, being honest with oneself doesn't justify being impolite or ill-mannered to others and moving beyond good and evil doesn't mean behaving in a boorish or brutal manner. And whilst it's true that Nietzsche rejects the Christian virtue of pity [Mitleiden] and speaks of the
positive role that cruelty has played in the formation of man (often
using Grausamkeit as synonymous with Kultur), so too does he privilege
terms such as benevolence [Wohlwollen] and joy [Freude].
Ultimately, Nietzsche is a eudaimonic philosopher (if of a rather unusual kind); i.e., one concerned with promoting (and enhancing) the happiness and wellbeing of man as a species. This is particularly evident in his Epicurean mid-period works, wherein he writes, for example, of those little,
daily acts of kindness that, although frequent, are often overlooked by
those who study morals and manners; the smiling eyes and warm
handshakes which display what he terms politeness of the heart [2].
And so, whilst it's true that, for Nietzsche, what are virtues in one may be vices in another (and vice versa), I can't imagine him ever being anything other than courteous in his own life. Thus, whilst he repeatedly encourages everyone to become what they are, that means giving style to the chaos within and listening to one's intellectual conscience; it surely doesn't mean becoming coarse, crass and crude [ungehobelt].
In conclusion ... Being rude, lacks discipline; it's base and lazy behaviour. Politeness is an acknowledgment of the other person's uniqueness of being; their starry singularity. My angry young correspondent would thus do well to remember that spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing.
Notes
[1] These four cardinal virtues are found in Daybreak, §556. Five years later, Nietzsche provides a modified list consisting of courage, insight, sympathy, and solitide; see Beyond Good and Evil, §284. Although he continually supplemented this list and substituted terms, he never made rudeness a virtue.
[2] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), I. 2. 49.
This phrase, politeness of the heart, was earlier used by Goethe who saw it as closely allied to love. It was also used, in 1892, by Henri Bergson in a lecture to students. For Bergson, kindness of the heart helps evoke a better future by creating the conditions in which positive change can unfold (we are tempted to call it a form of grace). Bergson also spoke of politeness of manners (i.e., everyday courtesies) and politeness of spirit (compassion or empathy).
Just like the relentlessly self-contradictory blogger (:-)) himself, Nietzsche was a writer of considerable complexity and equivocation and indeed, I believe, a supreme ironist, as his crucial aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil (no.47) makes clear, which refers to religious propositions that 'are so extremely ANTIPODAL to my ears and habits of thought, that in my first impulse of rage on finding them, I wrote on the margin, "LA NIAISERIE RELIGIEUSE PAR EXCELLENCE!"—until in my later rage I even took a fancy to them, these sentences with their truth absolutely inverted! It is so nice and such a distinction to have one's own antipodes!' Given that Nietzsche not merely delights in but commends as the province of distinguished minds a propensity for self-inversion, it is, if not entirely fruitless, something of a fool's errand to mine his thinking for 'doctrine' or stable positions of any kind. In the same work (No. 230), Nietzsche also links honesty to the cruelty (hardness, severity, sharpness) of what he calls the 'intellectual conscience', for which he says, instead of cruelty, we might instead say 'extravagant honesty'. At the very least, this extravagant cruelty/honesty complicates any picture of amiable politesse he might be thought to be purveying.
ReplyDeleteI would also highlight (not to 'prove' a thesis, but to stress again Nietzsche's propensity for equivocation and reversals), his fascinating rhetorical irony in 'On the Use and Abuse of History for Life', which tops off a superlative critique of Hegel and dialectical historiology:
'And shall we not call it unselfishness when the historical man lets himself be turned into an "objective" mirror of all that is? Is it not magnanimity to renounce all power in heaven and earth in order to adore the mere fact of power? Is it not justice always to hold the balance of forces in your hands and observe which is the stronger and heavier? And what a school of politeness is such a contemplation of the past! To take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything--makes one gentle and pliable. Even if a man brought up in this school should show himself openly offended, one is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the artistic sense of ira et studium [anger and spirit/partiality/passion] though it is really sine ira et studio [without these things].'
Such peaceful and civilised objectivity is really a form of pseudo-humanity for Nietzsche; such a school of politeness is really a school of resentment. To be human, and even über-human, is to be partial, angry, spirited, suffering and irredeemably subjective. If there’s any ‘position’ in the Untimely Meditations, that is probably it, though it amounts to no more than a recipe for a kind of perspectival imperfection.
In a nutshell, though I think Nietzsche might have been discombobulated by seeing Jimmy Porter on the stage, I don't think he’d have resented him or sought to put him down. If anything, I suspect he’d have smiled ironically under his mouth-disguising moustache on the ever-decreasing circles of Porter’s pathos.
PS 'When good friends praise a gifted person he often appears to be delighted with them out of politeness and goodwill, but in reality he feels indifferent.' (Human All Too Human). Or, politeness is not necessarily all it seems, since it is often part of a persona.
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