Carlos Fuentes - This I Believe - An A to Z of a Life

Yet the Nietzschean proposal is as difficult as the question he asks, once again, in The Gay Science: “What does your conscience say? You shall become the man you are.” The man you are, revealed or stripped naked in one step, through the movement from negation to difference, from reaction to action, from resentment to sentiment. To be the man you are requires gift, sacrifice, education, values. Of course this is true. But for Nietzsche, skepticism and disenchantment are also required. “There is no preestablished harmony between the development of truth and the good of humanity. ” When a person believes that everything has a purpose, in the end nothing has any purpose. There is no causal relationship between happiness and history. Objective history, in fact, tends to become “furious subjectivity” because while the hero may exhibit his greatness to his fellow man, his fellow man is unable to endure it, and the hero himself will be unable to maintain it. From here emerges the historical violence of the hero who feels he has been misunderstood by the citizens who do not understand him. The hero tyrannizes his fellow man because his fellow man neither comprehends nor appreciates the hero.

With Nietzsche, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic cannot be optimistic until history can prove it. Few other thinkers — perhaps no other — have been so frequently accused of saying things that they never said, and so frequently dispossessed of the things they did say. Nietzsche racist? “The place where the different races come together is the source of the greatest cultures.” Nietzsche chauvinist? “Greece is original because it did not close itself off from the Orient.” Nietzsche a Germanophile? “The military victories of the Reich do not imply German superiority in any sense. On the contrary, the deification of the German triumph may signify the death of the German spirit.” Nietzsche anti-Semitic? “For me it is a question of honor that it remain absolutely, unequivocally clear that I am opposed to anti-Semitism” (Letter 479 to Franz Over-beck). And while Wagner unabashedly wrote that racial mixing was “ignoble,” that Germany could only achieve purity by “liberating [itself] from the Jews,” and that “the Jewish race is the natural enemy of a pure and noble humanity,” Nietzsche breaks with Wagner, among other things, because the composer “was condescending to the Germans and became a German imperialist.”

I could continue with more of the distortions imposed upon Nietzsche’s thought, most specifically by his sister Elizabeth; Nietzsche would have been thrilled for her to have gotten lost in Paraguay forever but she returned to censure, ban, deform, and invent whatever her prejudices and phobias called for, taking full advantage of the reclusive nature and subsequent death of her brother. “I may be a bad German,” Nietzsche wrote to Over-beck, “but in any event I am a good European.”

There is no way that such a radical thinker, sometimes so contradictory and intolerant, could not incite scandal, opposition, and manipulation. In him I see not only the skeptic that rejects the facile temptations of history but also the living being who celebrates “the joy of affirmation” and who, in an oblique foreshadowing of Wittgenstein, tells us that when logic exhausts hope, a new form of knowledge emerges, one that calls for “the preventive virtue of art.”

According to the classification of Nicolai Hartmann, Nietzsche belongs more to the realm of the philosopher of problems than the philosopher of systems. In this he shares a bond with Plato, another philosopher that Wittgenstein clarified for me. And the problem that Plato elucidates for me is the literary problem of nomination (just like the problem of poetic language as the seashell where one can hear what logic does not utter in Wittgenstein, just like the understanding of art that one acquires when logic is exhausted in Nietzsche). Cratylus is perhaps the first work of literary criticism, and its central concern is a discussion about the meaning of names. Cratylus tells us that all things have their proper name, granted them by nature — that is to say, something inherent to the thing and independent of convention and nothing else. Hermogenes, on the other hand, asserts that names can only be the product of convention: the name that is given to a certain thing is the correct name; if that name is exchanged for a new one, then the new one will be correct. And that is not all: the same thing can be given one name by one person and another name by another person. Nothing is intrinsic to the name. Everything rests on convention.

Socrates supposes that there exists a legislator of names who grants names and distributes them according to the nature of things. But this law allows too many exceptions. The qualities of a human being, for example, may contradict the meaning of his or her name. And if the gods are the ones who give us our names, well, it turns out that we don’t know what the gods are called, or what they call one another. All we know is how we have chosen to name them: Zeus, Cronos, Hera. But all too frequently a name is a mask, most especially when the person who has it is the bearer of a secret. Hermes carries a message, he bears the power of language, he makes language circular, but that language may be true or false: the important thing is that language flows and moves, and that wisdom ( sofía ) is wise because it touches all that moves, swiftly baptizing all things. The purpose of the name is to indicate the nature of the designated thing in question. But the name belongs, in a broader sense, to the process of language itself — the formation of letters, syllables, nouns, verbs, and sentences. Can it escape nomination by bringing the flow of things into the flow of language? Can we be certain that a given thing has been given the correct name, one that denotes its true nature? Socrates warns that “it is possible to assign names incorrectly” and if this logic is taken a step further, it is also possible to create false sentences, false languages, verbs that disguise.

In the event that this is true, Socrates searches for another, more solid principle by which to name things, and this principle ultimately consists neither of knowing the natural or intrinsic name of a world in flux, nor of surrendering to the whim of nominal convention. Instead, his principle — lucid, human — truly consists of naming things according to the relationship that is established between them. While Socrates may reject Heraclitus’s “runny nose,” immersed in the interminable flow of all things, he also rejects pure nominal convention that is derived from an essence we do not know. It is with great liberty, great veracity, and great reality that Socrates proposes that when we name things, we observe the relationship between them, the manner in which things recognize and act among themselves. This is, in reality, the true name of things: their relationship.

The greatest living Spanish philosopher, Emilio Lledó, very astutely observes how the Platonic dialogues are a continual critique of language. In an earlier section I have alluded to the paradox of language as the expression of silence broken by animal sound — the moo or moan of the cattle whose etymology, as Erich Kahler tells us, is the very same as that of the word myth: moo, mutter, murmur, and mutism. The Greek verb muein comes from the same root, to close, to close the eyes, the same place where mystery and mystique come from. And that is how the process of language takes us from mu to mythos, according to Kahler’s linguistic process, which consists of giving a word its opposite meaning. The Latin mutus (mute) becomes the French mot (which means word), and the onomatopoeic moo, the unarticulated sound, becomes mythos— that is, word. In his New Science of 1725, Giambattista Vico, the philosopher of Neapolitan Spain asserts that we only know what we create, and the first thing we create is language, the basis of all human knowledge. The linguistic dynamic is a process of course and recourse (corsi e ricorsí) that allows us to understand the progression of history, descending from the darkness of its own origins and then, later on, ascending to the light of its own idea, which is its own necessity.