True Pride

Friedrich Nietzsche, aged 18

In my last I meant to say that God whether existent or not can provide a focus for the spiritual life. I mentioned atheist Sam Harris approvingly for demonstrating that the separate “I” is an illusion: there is only the One. In his own words, “Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.”

Which might lead to the conclusion that the problem is “ego”, and that spiritual life is about effacing the self. In a recent post, “The Trip”, I noted that you cannot safely cross the road without a vivid sense of “I”. The pronoun refers to body and mind together as a single unit. Too often we carelessly think the “I” refers merely to consciousness, particularly self-consciousness. In its Latin form “ego” is too often a shorthand for “egotism”, which in turn is intended as “arrogant selfishness”. Thus it is easy to get confused when we want to look into it seriously.

So I want to leave that contentious pronoun, whether in Latin or English, and talk about a different word. Pride, I say, is an essential spur to proper human behaviour, more important than any set of rules, any commandments instilled upon the impressionable child. More reliance is placed on pride, for good or ill, as a guide to action than reason, laws or even the preservation of one’s own life. This is particularly true of the male psyche. When pride is shattered, it’s like having no backbone, becoming a jellyfish. The growing child seeks a role model for what to be proud about. This is where everything can go well or badly. “WoodsyBit Moss”, in a comment on my last, mentioned “false-pride, ego and love for my country”. It seemed like a meaningful coincidence, for I’d already been brooding about notions of “good pride” and “bad pride”. I found them to have too many Christian associations.

So I shall speak in praise of true pride, proposing it as a human birthright. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t mention pride, but is focused instead on my “rights”, defined in terms of how others must treat me. It says nothing about how I should treat myself. So here goes.

As a singular instance of Everyman, I was born black, white, able-bodied or otherwise, into a good or bad family; or perhaps was left to my fate as a foundling, floating among the bulrushes—or abandoned in a dumpster. That is to say, the dice were loaded from the start, I didn’t arrive by choice. What then can I do? Cringe and find a hole to hide in? No, here I am, there’s a space in this world for me, body and soul. Only I can claim it. I am to fill my space completely. This is true, that is to say healthy pride which leads me on to my fate; perhaps to enter Europe from Africa or Syria and get drowned in an overloaded boat.

False pride is to see myself as superior, to encroach, to exceed my space and stifle others with my overweening. Or else it is to adopt a false humility. Worst of all is to be neutered, a nothing. It might be genuinely helpful to be told that God loves me, but only if the teller feels this love personally in his or her heart. Such a person would show it by loving me for being whatever I am. And I suppose what people hate about religion is the scarcity of such a person. Many are those who will quote Jesus while leading you blindly into the very ditch he warned them against.

This pride I speak of is “the true beginning of spiritual life” because we need to know it is possible to be profoundly self-sufficient. Possible and necessary too, for no one person can show me the way. On this basis every religion falls. I almost feel that this point is the foundation of Nietzsche’s philosophy; perhaps not so much in his major works but the project he spoke of in his last book Ecce Homo as The Revaluation of All Values. He lost his sanity before he could write it.

As a young man Fernando Pessoa was much impressed by Nietzsche. Here is an entry describing a disorienting loss of ego, from The Book of Disquiet—fragment 262 in Zenith’s translation:

Fernando Pessoa as a young man

Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.

I always think, I always feel, but there’s no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I’m falling from the trapdoor on high through all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous, empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world—houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

And amid all this confusion, I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a god who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

If only I knew how to think! If only I knew how to feel!

My mother died too soon for me to ever know her . . .

The piece is dated 1st December 1931. As his translator says, “No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper.”