With the German philosopher and Irish poet's around the corner, I find myself reflecting on how those two contrarians influenced me as a reader and aspiring writer, nearly 30 years ago!
I was deeply drawn, as a voracious, questing teenager, to the work/worldview of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche. I realize, to some, these two writers might appear to be worlds apart but, for me, they were so close as to seem twin souls.
Below, my deep dive comparing and contrasting those two enduring cultural figures.
The externals of their lives could not be more different. One was a celebrated wit and dramatist, the other a reclusive philosopher who lived and wrote in relative obscurity; yet to varying extents and with varying results, both thought of themselves as poets. Both also, in their ways, concerned themselves with founding a philosophy grounded in the art of living, turned to Ancient Greece for their aesthetic ideal, and considered contemporary France the heir to its sensual sophistication.
Natural born provocateurs, they were both incorrigible cultural agitators who reserved some of their most withering criticism for their ‘so-called countrymen’. Although contemporaries, they were probably unaware of each other, yet both came in their flamboyant personas and utterances to embody the tensions and antagonisms of fin de siècle Europe.
In literature, content tends to dictate form, so it is not without significance that Wilde and Nietzsche expressed themselves in similar fashion: in aphorisms, epigrams and maxims. These forms were practically invented by pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and mastered by French moralists. Vast thoughts could be carried condensed in these deceptively slight vessels.
Moreover, their pithy phrasing ensured that they were memorable:
Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks – and those who are addressed, tall and lofty,
Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra. Or in Twilight of the Idols he puts it this way:
Aphorisms, of which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.
As a stylist, Nietzsche felt he was so good he spoiled the tastes of his readers, since they could enjoy no one after him; and that, along with the poet Heine, he would be regarded as the greatest stylist in the German language (he later added Goethe to this exclusive list).
Wilde shared this incredibly high estimation of himself, once famously replying “Only my genius” to a US customs official’s standard question, “Do you have anything to declare?” In his long letter from prison, De Profundis, Wilde surveyed his life’s work approvingly: “I had summed up all systems in a sentence and existence in an epigram.”
But, braggadocio aside, it is astounding how nearly indistinguishable some of Nietzsche’s and Wilde’s aphorisms are – almost interchangeable in form and substance. For examples:
"What fire does not destroy it hardens.” Wilde
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Nietzsche
“The simple truth, is that not a double lie?” Nietzsche
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Wilde
“Public opinions exists only where there are no ideas.” Wilde
“To say it again, Public opinions, private laziness.” Nietzsche
“We possess art lest we perish of the truth.” Nietzsche
“The telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of art.” Wilde
“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.” Wilde
“Not to perpetrate cowardice against one’s own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterwards! The bite of conscience is indecent.” Nietzsche
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or nation.” Wilde
“Every great progress must be preceded by a partial weakening.” Nietzsche
These are heavy words lightly thrown, intended not so much to reveal the writer as to establish a persona. ‘Persona’ literally means to sound through (per meaning ‘through’ and sona meaning ‘sound’) because Greek actors spoke through a mask (which is what a ‘persona’ originally was). “Give a man a mask and he shall tell you the truth,” Wilde writes in his Platonic dialogue The Critic as Artist.
Nietzsche too, admits, “Every profound spirit needs a mask” and “talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.” Surprisingly, the seemingly disparate personas Wilde and Nietzsche created and sent out into the world came to spell out coherent (albeit fluid) philosophies. What’s more, these crowded personas share many key features.
Perhaps slightly begrudging Wilde his fame and posthumous status as a martyr, Shaw indulges in a hypothetical exercise: how would Wilde have been seen by posterity had he died before his tragedy (ie, his scandal and imprisonment)?
In Shaw’s estimation, “Oscar would still have been remembered as a wit and a dandy, and would have had a niche beside Congreve in the drama. A volume of his aphorisms would have stood creditably on the library shelf with La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims.”
What of Nietzsche minus his tragedy (i.e. if he had died sane)? That is hard to know, but he would still have cut a dashing figure in the annals of both literature and psychology, and had at least a niche beside modern philosophers too, judging by the controversy beginning to surround his name during his last pre-collapse year.
As extremists, both recognized that extremes are closer to one another than the middle path of moderation which so eluded them. Or, in Nietzsche’s words, “Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.” In Will to Power, he elaborates,
the spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises… we immoralists – we are the most extreme.
Both men were bewitched by extremity in this way, and, in seeing both sides of an argument at once, occasionally risked becoming philosophically cross-eyed. The result was ideas that sometimes not only appeared profoundly confusing, but confused.
In Schopenhauer as Teacher, Nietzsche had written, “I care for a philosopher only to the extent that he is able to be an example.” This is what emerges from the texts of Nietzsche and Wilde: each in their own unusual way managed to create of themselves a prodigious example, or a living sign, entrusting to posterity their peculiar personalities, of which their works are a part.
Focusing on Wilde the gifted storyteller and brilliant talker, Gide characterized him as “a great viveur… like the philosophers of Greece, Wilde did not write but talked and lived his wisdom.”
Concerning his interest in a writer or thinker (in this case, Nietzsche) critic Georg Brandes writes,
My first question is this: What is the value of this man, is he interesting, or not? If he is, then his books are undoubtedly worth knowing. Questions of right or wrong are seldom applicable in the highest intellectual spheres… We are not children in search of instruction, but sceptics in search of men.
This is a mature position to adopt towards both Nietzsche and Wilde. Certainly they are interesting, whether or not they were right or wrong. The question of their value is a larger one. Ultimately, these questing spirits, interrogating traditional answers concerning how we live and what we think we know, were both philosophers in the Socratic sense, in that they raised more questions than they answered.
Undoubtedly, we do not find them as outrageous as they were to 19th century sensibilities. Rather, in our age skeptical of absolutes and susceptible to a plurality of interpretations, we consider them contemporaries whose experiments with values mirror our own.
Even in their contradictory works we recognize, writ large, the wonderful and complex workings of the human psyche. Thus as agents of regeneration who live on in us, their currency renews their value, rendering them, at the very least, as relevant today as they were over a century ago.
© Yahia Lababidi
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