Knowledge is a Rope
Knowledge is a rope, and you’re weaving a noose out of it. Leave some slack for the enemy. Nenia Campbell
This quote from Nenia Campbell, made me start thinking about people who know too much, or rather, knew things that they could not deal with. This quote made me think about two influential writers who could not cope with life in general. Both men were unquestionably brilliant, had profound insights into the human condition, and were very influential in their own field. One man was a philosopher, the other a poet. The two quotes below have an interesting common thread – a connection to art and beauty. The two men of which I am referring are Friedrich Nietzsche and Kahlil Gibran. Below are the two, eerily similar quotes:
Gibran wrote, “We only live to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.”
Nietzsche wrote, “We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.”
Both statements suggest that each man looked towards beauty and the arts as their refuge. Gibran died at the age of 48 from alcoholism. Nietzsche went mad, and died in Weimar, Germany at the age of 56. It strikes me as odd that both men praised beauty -yet this attraction, and or dependency, could not save them from an early death. What was it that made them so despondent?
Interestingly, both men never had a long-term partner (both proposed to a woman a number of times without success). Nietzsche proposed to a Russian student named Lou Salome only to be rebuffed; while Gibran proposed three times to his long-time patron and life-long correspondent, Mary Haskell, who was ten years his senior, to no avail. Both men spent a lot of their lives alone, as well.
I must say that I was shocked when I discovered that the author of “The Prophet”, Gibran, was a hopeless alcoholic. The Prophet, written in 1923, has never been out of print and has been translated into 100 languages. I have heard this passage from the book “Marriage” read at many weddings:
“Love one another, but do not make a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls…Let there be spaces in your togetherness.” And, from The Prophet is this beautifully mystical statement ‘on Children’:
“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”
Gibran was a poet loved by readers around the world – people found almost divine wisdom in his words. In fact, in the age of 1960’s counterculture, The Prophet was selling 5,000 copies per week! With nothing more than word-of-mouth, this book continues to sell well to this day. The driving force of the book is the universally accepted and perceived wisdom in the 26 prose, poem fables that make up the book. Yet with all these recognized words of wisdom we find an author that resorted to heavy drinking as a coping strategy for living. It seems counter intuitive, given my belief in the important power of wisdom in one’s life and feeling of contentment.
Then we have Nietzsche, living during the enlightenment which dominated the world of ideas during the 17th through to the 19th centuries. This was the period of the birth of the scientific method, the belief in reason and trust in man’s inevitable progress. Nietzsche was raised in a strict Lutheran household (his father was a Pastor) but his philosophical writings proclaimed that European and Christian civilization had lost its way.
Meanwhile thinkers of this age believed they could create a better society. Not so Nietzsche. He felt that inequality was the fruit of civilization…it encouraged men to compare themselves with others. The implications of age of the enlightenment was that it smashed the old values and myths, making them no longer tenable. Therefore, there was no longer an anchor in life, no God, and no absolute truth about man’s place in the universe. Nothing really mattered, and nothing we do is worth it – for Nietzsche, everything gives way to what he called the Last Man, the final stage of humanity.
His worldview now saw the universe as a neutral, uncaring place, and he believed the result of this realization would be the disintegration of traditional morality in Western society.
This knowledge brought Nietzsche to a bleak place. There was no longer a Big Picture… rather it all revolves around our inner life and feelings.
These ideas ushered in the artistic movement of Romanticism. In fact, Nietzsche’s writings were very much the harbinger of that movement that started in the late 18th century and went on to profoundly influence the arts, music and literature. The new emphasis was on inspiration, subjectivity and the primacy of the individual.
Romanticism
Liberty Leading the people… painting by Eugene Delacroix
It was no surprise that there was a reaction to the Enlightenment…and Romanticism was the response. The response incorporated a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, idealization and rationality. Romanticism rejected 18th century rational, scientific thinking and physical materialism. Instead it included 1) a deeper appreciation of the beauties of nature; 2) the exaltation of emotion over reason and the senses over intellect; 3) the examination of self and human personality including its moods and mental potentialities; 4) a preoccupation with genius, the hero and exceptional figures in general; 5) a focus on our passions and inner struggles; 6) a view of the artist as individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than formal rules and traditional procedures; and 7) finally, an emphasis on the imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience, and spiritual truth.
Romanticism also was keenly interested in folk culture, ethnic origins, the medieval era and all things exotic, remote, mysterious, occult, monstrous and diseased – there was even interest in the satanic. The Vicomte de Chateaubriand wrote of this obsession of the Romantic artists as world-weary, melancholy heroes suffering from vague, unsatisfied yearnings ‘the malady of the age’.
As they say, a picture is, sometimes, worth a thousand words. When I viewed a retrospective of Alex Colville’s work at the 2014 Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhibition, I left with a profound feeling of the angst related to the 20th century.
Pacific Man Gun Ocean Surf…. by Alex Coalville
For a person with weaker constitution, this angst could easily morph into a despondent and negative world view. In a related interview, Barbara Frum called his iconic paintings ‘eerie’ and ‘cool’ …the epitome of intellect over the emotional.
Nietzsche
Two quotes from Nietzsche give some insight into what the enlightenment meant to his worldview:
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some
meaning in the suffering.”
And;
“He who has a why
to live can bear almost any how.”
The first quote has some Buddhist overtones. In Buddhism, desire and ignorance lie at the feet of suffering. By desire the Buddhists refer to craving pleasure, material goods and immortality, all of which are wants that can never be satisfied. One must transcend his or her desires to ultimately find peace…there must be a purpose to one’s life – that is the ‘why’ from the quote above.
Paradigm Shift
Nietzsche
For people in the 21st century it is almost impossible to fathom the implications of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, which postulated that the sun, not the earth, was at the centre of the universe. This idea had to antecedents in some ancient Greek writings, but they were not widely known. The common geocentric theory, which had prevailed for thousands of years, held that the Earth was at the centre of the known Universe – this was also Catholic Church doctrine.
It took the observations of Galileo and Kepler, using newly developed telescopes, to prove that Copernicus was correct. This belief ended up sending Galileo to prison. Meanwhile, as this new fact became accepted scientifically, the world was presented with a paradigm shift to trump all other paradigm shifts. The nature of the Universe had changed radically, and religious authorities were universally discredited. Christianity had taught that God had placed the earth in the centre of the Universe… giving mankind a special role to play. With this paradigm shift this role dissolved.
Galileo had helped to pioneer the scientific method. It was his observations of Venus that proved the planets orbit the sun. This approach led to discovery after discovery as the enlightenment era unfolded. This new age ‘upset the apple cart’ in discipline after discipline. The cool, rational scientific method destroyed the myths of the medieval and ancient world. Everything was open to question. Educated people abandoned God, rebelled against the Church and State, and authority was severely diminished. For some it was too much. Of the reaction to the enlightenment, Nietzsche proved to be prescient.
Nietzsche was profoundly aware of the implications of The Enlightenment. This knowledge must have haunted him, perhaps contributing to his late-life madness. It was he who saw that a secular world and values that were relative. As Tara Gold cites in his book ‘A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom’,
“Mistaking subjective values for objective truth leads to no good.” Instead of a new order, Nietzsche must have seen chaos, as the status quo was shattered. He famously wrote that “God is dead” … and believed that since there is no god, then everything is permissible.
What was it that drove Nietzsche to his madness? Many theories abound, including tertiary syphilis, a brain tumor, or bipolar disorder. What is known is that in 1898 he suffered two strokes leaving him partially paralyzed, and unable to speak or walk. In August of 1900 he contracted pneumonia, later had another stroke and died on August 25th.
Most observers suggest his breakdown was not connected to his philosophy. One thing is however clear, and that is that Nietzsche lost his ‘why’ to live. As he said, if you have a why (something absolute) then we can find a how to live. His knowledge became a noose …he left no slack in his beliefs except art which could not protect him from his truth, which were also his demons. To conclude he also once wrote: “In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.” Maybe this was a harkening back to his stable childhood with its comfortable truths?
Gibran
Unlike Nietzsche, Gibran was a poet and a mystic and is widely praised for his wisdom. Things of the heart were his pallet – a modern day Romantic with a capital ‘R’ and small ‘r’. Like Nietzsche he never had a long-term great love. He did however have a long-term patron and friend in Mary Haskell.
He once wrote: “Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.” His goal was self-knowledge…How did this mystic see himself? He wrote, “What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?”.
I think Gibran would have profited from reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau who famously coined the phrase ‘Noble Savage’, which he (the noble savage) contrasted with the “Man of Culture”. Rousseau believed that the more man deviated from the state of nature, the worse off they would be – a stark warning for our climate-ravaged 21st century world! Civilization, for Rousseau, distorted man’s natural instincts, and inclinations of emotions of compassion and empathy… he believed morality is innate when it is not imbued by societal values and religious beliefs. Rousseau wrote, “Men are wicked, yes, but man is good.”
When Gibran looked inward for self-knowledge, and outward for beauty neither gave him solace, or contentment. It is interesting to note that he was heavily influenced by the Bible, Friedrich Nietzsche and, the seminal, and most notable poet and artist of Romanticism, William Blake.
This makes it more apparent why he wrote so profoundly about the spiritual mysteries of life. From Blake he would have learned that the true God is the Human Imagination – Blake did not believe that we needed to be saved by Christ. What young poet could not be influenced by Blake’s line, “To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”?!
Gibran had similar insights about love, friendship, etc. but this knowledge only broke him. His search for “beauty” was futile…
It provided no slack for his angst. At 48 he died in Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centre New York, with no companion or lover by his side. His legacy is secure because of The Prophet… his romantic style helped the renaissance in modern Arabic literature prose poetry, in opposition to the classical school. In Western counter-culture circles, he is a god. Let us give him the last word: “When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.”
So in the end, did these two men die from knowing too much or did they become paralyzed by their personal despondency? We’ll never know.