undertaken from my own perspective. The first section of Ecce Homo is entitled “Why I Am So Wise,” uttered in a complex tone. Didactic, a lesson on “wisdom,” concerning how I inhabited time: writing. What was “writing” and why did I do it? There will be some delay in getting around to my idiocy but you already have an inkling. It has everything to do with “inkling” (Ahnung) as a mode of thought in any case. “You,” I am talking to you and me—to the “self” I was in 1966, age twenty-one, and anyone else not put off by the second person. A decision was made or took place or was ratified during that year, a turn, and I am testifying in order to generalize to a “decision” theory for an image metaphysics. Dates: May 1966 / May 2011. Temporality is part of the enigma. In the cineplex watching Cameron’s Avatar through 3D goggles, when the auditorium filled with the drifting descent of glowing Woodsprites, I suddenly recalled a scene that happened in a Spanish olive orchard, May 1966. We all make decisions, choices, (mistakes) each in our own circumstances, conditions presented as situations. It was (retrospectively) a scene of decision. My decision is a way to think about decision itself, decision today and right now in your present circumstances, concerning some graphical interface for an online database. In this book I am playing avatar, belatedly.
Decision concerns event. There is an event to come but not directly so I will start with experience, to test knowing against living (knowing as living). Nietzsche was the philosopher I read in college. He posed the question that turned out to have set the agenda of my research career, speaking with the benefit of hindsight (but everything here is a delay, retrospeculative, aftering). There is a singularity in your life, Nietzsche advised, marking the intersection of the aphorism of thought with the anecdote of life. In my hands is Ecce Homo, the Walter Kaufman translation, the Vintage original, subtitled “How One Becomes What One Is.” Werde der du bist. It was his motto, adopted from Pindar, to acknowledge the antiquity of this imperative. There is an ambiguity that will have been important, whether “what” or “who” comes. I am testifying that I have learned there is no more important phrase than this one in the history of the Western tradition. Let this be the theme of our consultancy, this session between us, with regard to becoming what you are, and my imparting what I learned about it, as a kind of exit interview, a debriefing, now that I am bygone. You may be curious as well about this intersection and the convergence between thought and life, knowledge and experience, and how elders impart to youth useless counsel. Event includes the undergoing and the understanding.
Between the preface and the first numbered entry stands a paragraph designating the time of writing as a perfect day, Nietzsche wrote, everything ripening and not only the grape turning brown, when the eye of the sun fell upon his life. He looked back, looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. He buried his forty-fourth year on this day, buried because saved, rendered immortal, by the works published that year, such as Twilight of the Idols, in which he attempted to philosophize with a hammer. “How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and so I tell my life to myself” (Ecce Homo 221). Don’t I know that feeling, doesn’t any scholar, when the printed volume is in your hands? That is part of what should be understood, the materialization of that product, a text, and the experience of making such a thing (here we go again). The nature of any object may be approached through this one, to relieve the illusion of its solidity, isolation, fixity, in order to undergo the force passing through it, materialized there, for what we are tracking is this axis of attraction-repulsion organizing reality in electracy. This concerns you.
Nietzsche addresses us from a site in Switzerland, an Alpine valley known as the Upper Engadine where he summered in the years between 1879—1888. I have some experience of the setting because of the seminars I taught in Saas-Fee for the European Graduate School. Walking the trails through and above that valley reminded me of Nietzsche, and perhaps I could have imagined myself in his place, except that my body was free of the pain and suffering that tormented his existence. That and also not being burdened with genius you might add, except that part of what I learned concerns the unavoidability of what genius names, even for you and me. Ecce Homo is a consultation, a book of advice, to be shelved with other self-help works. It seems Nietzsche’s books were little known in his own day, and in fact one motivation for Ecce Homo was to rectify this obscurity, the invisibility that made it appear as if it were a mere prejudice that he lived.
Against his instincts and habits, it became necessary for Nietzsche to declare: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else” (217). We listen to his counsel, vouchsafed in the guise of prudence and self-defense, in the name of self-preservation. The addressees are former colleagues, that is, all of us who do little but thumb books, losing in the process our capacity to think for ourselves. When we don’t thumb, we don’t think. I don’t disagree with Nietzsche’s condemnation as I compose in free indirect discourse, erlebte rede, paperback propped precariously to leave hands free for keyboarding. Thumbing about sums it up. Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength, to read a book at such a time, Nietzsche advised, is simply depraved (253). What would he say about you, sound asleep? He speaks from experience, for he knows himself, on how one becomes merely a reagent, how one reads to ruin, to be merely a match that one has to strike to make it emit sparks (thoughts). But isn’t that an allusion to Plato?
Now I must quote, since he invokes the virtue that is our theme, prudence, which is another name for a problem, a guide to the art of decision and the relation of experience to knowledge, in the invention stream leading to electracy.
At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation—of selfishness. For let us assume that the task, the destiny, the fate of the task transcends the average very significantly: in that case, nothing could be more dangerous than catching sight of oneself with this task. To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side roads and wrong roads, the delays, “modesties,” seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. All this can express a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where nosce te ipsum [know thyself] would be the recipe for ruin, forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, mediocre, become reason itself. (254)
This is a saving caveat, since our prudence will be of this latter sort, found rather than planned. Our prudence is fatal.
No need to quibble about this terminology of “selfishness,” since “self” is rather what is exceeded, whether or not there is a unity or a measure guiding one’s becoming. Tradition supplies a family of terms, such as conatus, in Spinoza: the principle that to live is to strive to persevere in one’s own being. Nietzsche is an heir of this fundamental project, assigned various names by different thinkers (Entelechy, Monad, Dasein) and so are you, in your striving to become what you are. Striving. And this striving, does it not feel as though it has some direction? This direction is prudence, monitored by avatar. Nietzsche has a task, and this is a crucial point: the transvaluation of all values, aka the eternal return of the same, or the will to power. He gave this task to himself. The existence and nature of “task” is part of our consultation, but even more significant is the experience in which Nietzsche had the thought. It is an event much cited in anthologies and surveys. It is dated August 1881, penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.” That day he was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana, he relates; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei he stopped. It was then that the idea came to him (295).
A thought happens to Nietzsche. He has an idea. This is the event in question. He experiences a moment of insight, literally an “inspiration.” This is the point, this conjunction of experience and knowledge, which is also a possibility for you, and concerns the functionality of avatar. Right there, if we can zoom in and linger. Everything that we will have said concerns just this event, this quality of thought. I want to understand “what happened,” because to the extent that it is an event, it is not over yet, and never will be over. Nor can it be left to the few geniuses of history.
