Nietzsche's Rehab: On Freedom
And on shame, Navalny's death and being Kenough
Note: I’ll strive to mark every month with a post based on Nietzsche’s writing. Time will tell how long that would last 😌 Regardless, I hope these posts will make someone reconsider FN’s image in their mind✨
We’re still in The Gay Science territory because in all honesty I’m yet to find room in my reading schedule for (re)visiting his other writings, plus, in GS he’s most concentrated on self which I find particularly useful and which made this book my personal bible, in terms of how often I casually refer to it when in need of guidance.
And the passage I’d like to cover this time is probably my most favourite, as well as it is indicative of FN’s concise style. It closes Book III, the end of which is full of such sentence-long passages, and it also closes a sequence, which I’d add for context (for those that might mistakenly think that FN’s so called aphorisms are unrelated):
Whom do you call bad? — Those who always want to put to shame.
What do you consider most humane? — To spare someone shame.
What is the sign of liberation? — No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.
And in the original, too, because I find that German use of sich adds a subtler tone to the whole thing:
Wen nennst du schlecht? — Den, der immer beschämen will.
Was ist dir das Menschlichste? — Jemandem Scham ersparen.
Was ist das Siegel der erreichten Freiheit? — Sich nicht mehr vor sich selber schämen.
Also, I like the phrase “achieved freedom“ a tad more than “liberation“, which is, of course, the correct translation but I feel like it lacks the emphasis. The achievement part feels implicit, while it’s the key.
So, shame. That’s one tough topic. Especially if you try to separate it from guilt — what’s the difference? There are people that’d say the difference is in the source: that guilt comes from within, whereas shame is something imposed from the outside. Which has some merit, I guess, but then don’t we, as FN says, also shame ourselves?
Some would even argue that shame, when handled carefully, might even be productive. Here, for example, is a post from what I find is a fascinating series on Virtues — a concept I rediscovered for myself last year and which is now my private Roman Empire.
But I’m no philosopher and nothing bores me as much as delving into the abstracts of semantics.
So, back to Nietzsche.
Shaming myself has probably always being around in my mentality. For whatever, be it procrastination or saying something silly or letting trash pile up for two weeks in the corner of my kitchen. As that post on shame I linked above says, that’s the sort of shame that makes me put a label of being a f*ck-up on myself. Needless to say, a very unhelpful label. It squeezes something — probably, the metaphorical heart — in the chest, brings out some ugly sensation. Given that that’s the place of the — surprise, surprise — heart chakra, it’d be fair to say that shaming yourself stomps out your love of and for yourself, the only person that should always have your back. Not a great situation to find yourself in repeatedly.
And I have read something to this extent in different places, so no news really — all confirmation from different fields. But what I realised only recently — albeit it might be still not fully formulated in my head — is that on the way to stop shaming yourself for your actions you should first stop being ashamed of who you are.
I’d say the catalyst for this was Alexei Navalny’s death a month ago.
Damn, that hit harder than I ever expected it to. I’m not going to spell out all the thoughts that brought to my mind but one I would and it has to do with shame. I realised that latent in me laid shame (or at least discomfort, some default defensiveness) for being Russian these days; shame for being a Russian that’s almost given up on improving things and only doing some small bidding, like donations, towards some that are still fighting, and thus kinda shifting the onus on them. Shame for even trying to remain politically minded when it changes little or maybe even nothing at all.
After ditching my work to watch the funeral and then go lay flowers to a local memorial place, and watching Yulia Navalnaya’s video dedicated to Alexei and their love, it struck me that the biggest lesson and maybe even his testament is to believe and fight on. And be relentless in this fight. To grind and grind (I also wanna say, to be like water). And to do it with an open heart. It’s not all just about the virtues of courage and faith. They, I start to believe, are unsustainable on their own, if they aren’t based on love. You can’t be courageous out of spite, at least not sustainably. Look at Kremlin, it’s running on spite — there’s no courage, no single virtue there, really.
So, all of this to say that the lesson I learnt during the past month is to act from that space. I’m not doing it to topple Kremlin. I’m doing it for myself my people. For those thousands that showed up at Navalny’s funeral and buried his grave under a mountain of flowers. For those fewer thousands who showed up here, in Prague, at the voting station and voted Putin out by giving him a single-digit percent of votes.
And even outside of Russian context, I’ll be damned if I ever feel ashamed and uncomfortable about being politically-minded: about feminism, about capitalism, about climate, about consumerism, you name it. It’s complacency that got my country where it is now and is now dragging the rest of the world with it.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
The thing is that doing something is often inconvenient and uncomfortable, even if it only means going out of your usual way to lay flowers, and our society is increasingly being built around comfort. But that’s a discussion for another time.
Now that I’ve covered shame about being, I’d like to cover shame about doing.
And here, a footnote to the freedom passage in my book is helpful (exactly what I cherish my edition for, Walter Kaufman’s notes keep expanding the text), for it refers to a passage that closes out Book II of GS. It is a longer one, but boy is it relevant:
Our ultimate gratitude to art. — If we have not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming—then we have the sense of carrying a goddess, and feel proud and childlike as we perform this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon. At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves, and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom. Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap: we need it in relation to ourselves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above all things that our ideal demands of us. It would mean a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get involved entirely in morality and, for the sake of the over-severe demands that we make on ourselves in these matters, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We should be able also to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play. How then could we possibly dispense with art—and with the fool?—And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourselves, you do not yet belong with us.
[all emphasis is FN’s]
I guess it’d be fair to say that my musing above go counter FN’s point here. I am indeed trying to (re?)gain some moral seriousness and gravity, if only because I feel like it’s currently lacking and it’s a dangerous state of things. At the very same time, I concur with FN that a bit too many are afraid of slipping and falling, but my personal impression is that it’s all too semantic, “I shall watch my every word lest I, god forbid, offend someone (and lose my privileges)“: it’s either performative (proclaiming you’re all for human rights and at the very same time selling batons and rockets to oppressive powers), or probably genuine but, to my mind, superficial and also in a way oppressive, because no one can make an honest mistake in saying something that someone would deem inappropriate (and there’d always be that someone. Ressentiment is a b*tch, and FN has a lot to say on that, too).
Some time ago, during a cute Variety’s Actors on Actors session with Jamie Lee Curtis, Colin Farrell said something along the lines of: “There’re two things I can be certain of in being a human: I’m gonna die and I’m gonna make mistakes“. Which I feel is, in its own way, a rather liberating statement. It leaves some room for that play FN talks about. And my impression is such that too many people are acting as if none of that was so.
There’s too many aspects to cover for my liking in terms of the length of this piece, so back to shame. I feel like we have to get there, to that freedom, through morality, but genuine one, one based on virtues, not semantics. One based on faith and not on fear. And then we can start learning how to play and dance. Yes, our culture is ripe with self-awareness and irony, but it’s all in some sour way, not reinvigorating. Although lately the love for this kind of irony seems to be diminishing and we’d rather embrace being Kenough, dancing and pink in tow, and that’s a healthy thing, I guess. That’s exactly the dose of levity that we need to make life bearable these days. But we also need to fix it somehow, right?
Damn, I digress again.
All in all, don’t shame others and don’t shame yourselves. Find love for us all. Work on your heart chakra. Try to find that balance between honestly looking things in the eye and acting on that, and doing it with playful grace. Maybe thus we will have our chance at freedom.
It’s hard to figure out on your own, so that’s why I’d pick Navalny’s image as my guide (also, Kali, who’s admittedly more choleric but also more purifying—but that’s a story for yet another time). I’m sad that it took his death for, seemingly, so many of us to find ourselves and each other again, but what’s done is done. I do hope, however, to carry this feeling in me because I can already tell how good it makes us feel and how it puts us to work.
Those were bad times, those were good times.