RONALD HAYMAN
37
away the key of the consciousness into which humanity was locked.
Kant apologised for having to abolish knowledge in order to make way
for faith; Nietzsche taught the truth that we have to live without truth.
While this insight looks forward to twentieth-century linguistics,
Freudian psychology is anticipated in his denial of the self as a
coherent entity. The Cartesian
cogito
had not only ignored the body in
deducing existence from cerebration, it had begged some important
questions:
Where does the concept
thinking
derive from? Why do I believe in
cause and effect? What gives me the right
to
speak of an "I," and even
of an "I" as cause, and finally of an "I" as cause of thought?
It
is
falsifying the facts
to
say that the subject "I" is a condition of the
predicate "think." A thought comes when "it" wants, not when "I"
want ...
I
t
thinks, but that this "it" is identical with the good old
"I" is at best only an assumption.
Indubitably, Freud was indebted to Nietzsche via Georg Groddeck,
but the essential point had already been made in the eighteenth century
by Lichtenberg and in May 1871 by a boy who was not yet seventeen:
"It is a mistake
to
say 'I think' ," wrote Arthur Rimbaud in a letter
to
Georges Izambard. "One should say 'I am being thought.' -Forgive
the wordplay.
I
is someone else." Without questioning the validity of
the insight, we should examine its neurotic roots. Leo Bersani has
suggested that Rimbaud's repudiation of the self that does the thinking
may be connected with his ambition to make poetry mean as little as
possible. Similarly Nietzsche's denial of the self may be connected with
his denial that it is possible to make objective statements about reality,
and both denials may stem from the neurosis that made him say no
to
everything, including his own desires. Rimbaud rejected his family, his
country, religion, society, and almost the entire history of literature.
Temperamentally, the placid Nietzsche could hardly have been more
different from the aggressive Rimbaud, but Nietzsche rejected his
family and his country, living outside Germany and irrationally
persuading himself that he was of Polish descent. He came to reject the
whole tradition of idealist philosophy from Plato to Schopenhauer,
and he exiled himself from society. In short, he rejected virtually the
whole of contemporary reality, compensating himself with a fantasy
about the future, but he would have been deeply mortified to realise
that his fantasy of the ()
bermensch
as a bridge to the future was onl y a
variant on Wagner's idea of Siegfried. On 25 January 1854, Wagner had
written to August Rockel that Wotan "summarises the intelligence of
