80
S. Afr. J. Philos. 2007, 26(1)
the first part of this excerpt, but what is one to make of his allusion to those instances
where these unusual individuals, as seekers after ‘exceptional knowledge’, are drawn
to the ‘mediocre majority'? His further reference to the free spirit's (possible) exclama-
tion, that ‘"the rule is more interesting than the exception - than myself, the excep-
tion!"’, followed immediately by the sentence ‘And he would go down, and above all,
he would go “inside”’ (Nietzsche 1966: 37), provides an important clue as to how one
should understand him here. After all, this remark echoes Zarathustra, in the Prologue,
who decides to go ‘down’ to the people, because he ‘loves’ them, with Nietzsche
(1984: 121-123) drawing an analogy between Zarathustra and the sun insofar as a
‘giver’ - whether it be the sun, brimming with light and warmth, or Zarathustra, over-
flowing with wisdom - has a need for those who would receive his or her (or its)
‘gift’.
Add to this the elaboration, in Beyond Good and Evil (1966: 35), on the ‘will to
knowledge’ as being underpinned by a more profound ‘will to ignorance’ 15- with
Nietzsche stressing that these are not opposites, but ‘degrees’ or ‘gradations’ of the
same thing - then it would seem to me that, for Nietzsche, even the exceptional indi-
vidual can only be truly such when not seen in isolation, but in close proximity to, and
even complex intertwinement with, the encompassing community - who needs the
wisdom imparted by the free spirit, and who is, simultaneously, needed by the latter
for his or her ‘completion’, in a sense.
In short: the singularity of the ‘free spirit’ can only become clearly apparent, not in
splendid isolation, but in relation to those from whom he or she differs - with all the
risks and dangers attendant upon such a relation, as Plato, in The Republic (Book VII,
516-518; 1991: 195-196) already suggested in the myth of the cave by intimating that,
returning to the community of cave-dwellers with news of the sun illuminating the out-
side world, poses grave risks for the newsbearer, who is likely to be incomprehensible
(and therefore ostensibly mad) to those who live in darkness. ‘Exceptional knowledge’
can therefore only be attained in this more encompassing context, and one is struck by
the ambiguity of the term, ‘knowledge’, as used by Nietzsche - sometimes to denote
what people erroneously regard as stable, conclusive, unshakeable ‘science’, unaware
of its mendaciousness, and sometimes - as in the case of the ‘great’ knowledge, attain-
able by the free spirit when he or she decides to ‘go down’ to the people - as ‘knowl-
edge’ that is reflectively aware of its artificial, constructed, provisional, revisable sta-
tus (Nietzsche 1966: 35-36).
While the free spirit is afforded greater knowledge in proximity to other people,
however, the opposite is apparently not true (Nietzsche 1966: 51):
Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a
mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, in-
terpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives... 16
In other words, the ‘place’ of the ‘free spirit’ in society is marked, perhaps only visibly
or perceptibly in retrospect, by the ‘mask(s)’ that he or she may be seen to be wearing
15 Here, again, Nietzsche may be seen as preceding a later thinker in a crucial respect; his ‘will to untruth’
or ‘ignorance’ anticipates Lacan's (1977: 3) assertion, that human knowledge has a ‘paranoiac’ struc-
ture. Lacan does develop the notion further, of course, in the context of his poststructuralist psychoana-
lytic theory (see in this regard Olivier 2004a).
16 This passage demonstrates Nietzsche's hermeneutic acuity: he is quite aware of the role of prejudice or
pre-judgement in all acts of interpretation (see note 7) - people who do not share the same ‘framework’
of pre-understanding as another (especially of someone who has gone out of his or her way to construct