Human, All Too Human 169Who is in the position, he asked, of enduring this "feeling above all feel-
ings? Surely only a poet; and poets always know how to seek solace"
(2,53; HH I § 33). Nietzsche, however, was not satisfied with this remark
about the solace of poets. After all, he was obsessed with truth, and
sought to have the wiH to truth triumph over illusion. He hoped to dis-
pense with aesthetic and mythic blinders in confronting the unendurable.
Hence, the very next aphorism begins with the question of "whether we
are capable of consciously remaining in untruth" (2,53f., HH I § 34). In
this context, "untruth" consists not only of abandonment to the beauti-
ful illusions of poets; just as false is a very real practical access that links
the sphere of knowledge to the interests of preserving individual lives.
Are there only two options—aesthetic and epistemic self-assertion, on
the one hand, and the despair of compassion, on the other?
Nietzsche attempted to explore a third possibility against the back-
ground of these options: calm, almost cheery naturalism. An essential
precondition is the willingness to shed the "emphasis" inherent in the
idea that we are "more than nature" (2,54; HHI § 34). This develop-
ment would represent a "cathartic insight" (2,54), which should not be
equated with Schopenhauer's denial of the will. Nietzsche now regarded
Schopenhauer's denial of the will as metaphysical violence. Nietzsche's
"cathartic insight" was not aimed at embodied being; it was a natural
instinct that ennobled man's nature. It did not involve metaphysical tran-
scendence of the world, dying of pity, or (at least for now) Dionysian-
orgiastic feelings of unity, nor did it entail blind self-assertion. All of this
was to be avoided. The third path of cheerful naturalism that hovered
over him was hoverìngm the true sense. The "old motives of more fierce
desire" had to be subdued, with the result that the soul, muted by the will
to self-assertion, lost some of its gravity and gained distance from the
tumult, "feasting one's eyes as in a spectacle, which in the past had
evoked only fear" (2,54). Nietzsche described the condition of a soul
that has been relieved in this manner as "that free, fearless hovering over
people, customs, laws, and traditional assessments of things" (2,55; HH
I § 34).