NIETZSCHE AND THE PRESENT
27
A strange, unbelieving belief-"I do not believe
it,
but one
must believe it"-became an unequaled power. But in each case, the
thinker's original meaning was perverted and effectively simplified.
Marx was not a Marxist, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche would abjure
the forms their influence has taken. Nietzsche frequently said as much.
He scoffed at the "apes of Zarathustra," he was terrified at the
thought that "unbidden and totally unfit men will some day invoke
my authority." In order to arrive at the fundamental truth of these
men, we must work our way through a jungle of misunderstandings.
These great men's motives and criteria of truth are disregarded in
all sorts of new orthodoxies. And indeed everyone who studies them
finds himself in danger of succumbing to seductions; at the very
source, he must separate the truth from the perversions in which it is
embedded.
It is just this that is so fascinating and terrifying in these think–
ers: their very errors were a kind of anticipation of what later came
to pass. Precisely where they were deficient in truth, they expressed
a reality of the age that came after them. They contributed ideas
which came to power, they furnished slogans and formulations of
faith.
But if we limit ourselves to this aspect of the three philosophers,
we shall deny ourselves the truth that is in them, a truth which is
still alive, which still has power to shake us and is therefore indis–
pensable. The critical study of those ideas which have enjoyed mass
influence teaches us to see their transience, to see the intellectual
trumpery in that conspicuous part of their work which is seemingly
easiest to understand, but which in truth and reality cannot endure.
All three men lived outside the world. Marx was an emigrant,
an unemployed philosopher supported by his friends, uprooted and
living in outwardly petit-bourgeois circumstances. Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche were conscious with their whole being that they were "ex–
ceptions," thrown back entirely on their own resources, cursed with
absolute solitude. Such was their sense of themselves: not as pro–
totypes, not as preparers of the way, not as representatives of any–
thing, but as men who call attention, remind, question, probe.
This is the amazing part of it: this life of Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche was abnormal and alien, it could not serve as an example;
they knew and wished it to be inimitable and unique-and yet it is
