Giving style to one's character.

[PDF] Now Nietzsche also speaks of self-overcoming in terms of what he calls 'giving style to one's character'. He complains that most people's characters have no particular style and by giving style to one's character he means not accepting oneself ready-made, just as you come from the factory. Certainly not accepting yourself as badly-made or half-made, as incomplete. By this sort of attitude he means an attitude of treating one's life and one's character as so much raw material. Usually, we think: well, here we are, with such-and-such character, such-and-such temperament, such-and-such characteristics, qualities, and what can I do about it? We think this is something given, we are landed with it for the rest of our lives. That if we, for instance, have a tendency to get angry quickly, then that's that, were landed with it for life. If by nature we are very sensitive, were landed with that for life. If we are shy, we are landed with that for life. Just as we are landed with being tall or short or fat or thin, healthy or unhealthy, and so on. But Nietzsche says, no. As you are now, as you've been handed to yourself by your parents and so on, your education, your general social conditioning, educational conditioning, this is not the finished product, this is just the raw material. This is where you begin, this is where you start. So Nietzsche says in effect that one should work upon oneself, create oneself like a work of art. Just as you can get a great lump of clay - all heavy and sticky and stodgy - and you can get your fingers into it, get your hands into it and start shaping it into something, in the same way you must behave with your own character, with yourself. Just see yourself as this untidy, shapeless, dough-like mass; that's you. And just, as it were, get your fingers, get your hands into yourself and start shaping yourself. Don't think that you're landed with this sort of mass, this sort of stodgy, dough-like stuff or heap for ever, indefinitely. Produce yourself like producing a work of art. Don't be satisfied with yourselves as you are.

And in this connection, in connection with this whole idea of giving style to one's character, Nietzsche is very fond of mentioning the great example of Goethe, the great German poet and dramatist and novelist and thinker and scientist and mystic. Nietzsche admired Goethe very much and he admired him most of all for this particular quality. If we read Goethe's life, if we read his conversations, we see that Goethe all the time was trying to make something of himself. He was trying to work upon himself just like he might work upon a poem or a drama or a novel or a scientific treatise, making himself better and clearer and more perfect and more balanced. This is what Goethe was trying to do through the whole of his long life, more than eighty years, and he succeeded. So that when the great Napoleon saw Goethe for the first time, what did he say quite spontaneously, when he was confronted by Goethe? And Goethe after all, politically, was nobody, he was just an ex-minister of a little tiny state in Germany; and there was Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe. But when Napoleon saw Goethe, well, Goethe wasn't impressed by Napoleon particularly, but Napoleon exclaimed of Goethe: 'Look, there's a man'. A very simple exclamation but full of meaning. 'Look, there's a man'. And this is what Goethe made of himself from this sort of bundle of passions and ideas. As a young man he was very turbulent and very wild indeed, quite a rake we are told. But from this rather unpromising raw material, he made of himself a man in the fullest and truest sense.

Now we have seen that Nietzsche arrives at the concept of the overman by a consideration of the general nature of the evolutionary process; by realising that all beings have created something beyond themselves and that man is no exception, that man must do likewise, man must do similarly. And the same consideration, we may say, enables Nietzsche to understand the nature of existence itself. Life, he says, is that which must always overcome itself. This is the very nature of life, not just of human existence, but life in general; that it is never satisfied with itself. It always wants to go beyond, always wants to go further. Life is that which must always overcome itself. Life is a process which continually at every stage transcends, goes beyond, goes above itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Buddhism and the Superman:

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Buddhism and the Superman.
2. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
3. The Superman, the Overman or Übermench.
4. Thus spake Zarathustra.
5. Man is something to be overcome.
6. Giving style to one’s character.
7. * The will to power.
8. The Higher Evolution and the Overman.

By Urgyen Sangharakshita.

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Dernière mise à jour:
04 avril, 2007.