Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, a book he wrote in 1888 and took only 3 weeks to complete,1 is a unique autobiographical work that is both a reaffirmation and self-celebration of his core ideas: the Eternal Return, the Death of God, the Overman and Amor Fati. There are extracts in this book where we find Nietzsche's self-importance and megalomania on full display. Take this statement as one example among many in the work.
I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous - a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 2004 ed.
Ecce Homo means, 'beyond the man' and in painting, depicts Christ wearing the crown of thorns. Nietzsche, it seems, felt himself to be on equal footing with Jesus Christ (he actually called himself the anti-christ and one of his books is named as such2). A bold statement, to put it mildly. Despite these self-aggrandisements, at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy is, paradoxically, a deep humility. Whilst most philosophers attempted to impose a new system of thought on a philosophical problem, be it Kant introducing Transcendental Idealism to recompense for what he felt were the deficits of pure Rationalism and Empiricism, or Frege introducing Sense and Reference to overcome ambiguities in the semantics of a sentence, Nietzsche was anti-systematic. That is, he did not believe a philosophical position held by a philosopher could alone be the ultimate explanation of our reality.
There is an important reason for this assertion. It is too great a task for any one person to create a system of thought that embodies the whole of our world if we do not know and cannot agree on ontology (our being), existence and what the world is and means. We do not possess objective truth to create a system of thought which accurately describes the world and its functions. Actually, it is not only that we do not possess absolute truth, we do not know what it is either. Absolute truth is undefinable, absolutely. To say otherwise, to believe a system of thought is completely true, is a position no person can intellectually afford to take. Put by the narrator Ishmail of Moby Dick, "because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty".3
The philosopher of science Karl Popper said we do not have the truth in our pocket4. This is the reasoning behind the title of this essay (it is a chapter title within Nietzsche's Ecce Homo). Nietzsche's wisdom stemmed from his recognising the lack of weight in his pocket. It was his own willingness to see the limitations of his philosophy and his intellectual powers that makes his philosophy so profound. It can therefore be argued Nietzsche wrote his autobiography with a sense of irony and self-mocking, as to be wise is to contradict what wisdom actually is, but in recognising the contradiction it elevates the level of thought to a higher plateau of wisdom. (I also believe it is a dig at Socrates, who famously stated, "I am wise because I know nothing"5. To state oneself as wise for knowing nothing and defining philosophical wisdom by this criteria is a systematic approach to philosophy).
This is not to be taken as a complete criticism of systematic thinking. In order to make sense of the world it is necessary to first impose constraints on it. However, there exists a fundamental flaw in creating a system of thought and fanatically adhering to it. When we create a new system we run the risk of embracing the simple rather than the complex, and this is a dishonest evaluation of what is inevitably an inherently complex subject: that of the structure of the world and the human place in it. For we have only made things simple out of our own rendition of what we think the world is through the implementation of a system. In economics the models we formalise dealing with utility make many assumptions about human behaviour and the world - the economist should not seriously think that these are accurate depictions of human behaviour or the actual economic landscape. Many failures in economic thought have occured through adhering too closely to constrained theory. As the economist Joan Robinson said in her book Economic Philosophy, economics is inevitably ideological6. It is therefore in our duty, as one aiming for intellectual honesty, to know that there are constraints with systematising, to know our belief is likely wrong, that we are placing thoughts on the world, rather than ascertaining what the world actually is.
Consider language. Language is an extremely powerful development in our human existence and some, like Steven Pinker in his book, The Language Instinct, argue it is what separates us sapiens from other animals7. However, as a tool for explaining the underlying essence of physical phenomena it falls remarkably short. For example, out of agreement between ourselves and societal norms, we say that a particular emotion we experience, which causes us to feel unpleasant, is termed 'anger'. However, it could be that the neurochemicals that engineered the state of 'anger' we experience could be termed something completely different. In this case the experience, the actual neurochemicals and molecules which bring the feeling of anger about, are the same. Yet, the tool by which we describe and name the experience is termed differently. For instance, in an alternative universe where all else remains equal, it could be called something like 'Blixer'. This is the fundamental limit of language. When Wittgenstein stated, "the limits of my language are the limits of my world"8, he meant it in the literal sense that language is only a tool that works well to describe some aspects of our world but is inadequate in discerning life’s inherent natural qualities. It is as if our fate is inevitably reduced to stabbing in the dark with a semi-sharp tool.
This is not the same as the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which refers to the idea that the particular language a person speaks influences their world view. Ted Chiang's Sci-Fi work, The Story of Your Life, (made into the film Arrival), explores this idea in a novel way. The short story depicts an alien race who arrive on Earth and their parting gift was offering their unique language to humans. This language had a particular essence and structure that enabled the individual who spoke it to see past, present and future9. In other words, in possession of such a language, time became an illusion - every sentence created was already seen, every word said was already heard, every event already known. This is not what Wittgenstein meant. Rather, whatever language we do speak will be its own limit on how we perceive and understand the world, regardless of the particular qualities of any specific language. The waterfall with its particular properties would be a waterfall even if there was no descriptive language to describe such properties. The fact there does exist such descriptive language does not render the waterfall 'more real'.
When I impose my system of thought on the world, it is in full consciousness that this system is flawed, that I am engaging in mere solipsism. We systematise so much. We demarcate between left and right. We do so to understand the world but to do so is to trade-off some other understanding. I am therefore human in that I am constrained*.
*I am aware of the hopelessness of both a metaphysical and physical definition of a human, especially one as limiting as this. Diogenes illustrated this aptly when Plato defined a human being as a featherless bird. Diogenes subsequently plucked a chicken and brought it to Plato’s Academy. He released it into one of the classes and declared, “Behold - Plato’s human being”10. I suppose I am only trying to iterate and emphasise what I believe is just one aspect of many that surmise our human condition; that of being limited by our own faculties.
1. 'Ecce Homo', Friedrich Nietzsche, 2004.
2.'Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ', Friedrich Nietzsche, 1990.
3. 'Moby Dick', Herman Melville, 2003.
4. 'Science and Absolute Truth', Karl Popper, 1974.
5. 'The Last Days of Socrates', Plato, 2011.
6. 'Economic Philosophy' Joan Robinson, 2021.
7. 'The Language Instinct', Steven Pinker, 2003.
8. 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus', Ludwig Wittgenstein, 2001.
9. 'Stories of Your Life and Others', Ted Chiang, 2014.
10. 'Sayings and Anecdotes with Other Popular Moralists', Diogenes the Cynic, 2012.