Aphorism 146
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Many thinkers consider Nietzsche a psychologist. In fact, Walter Kaufman’s seminal biography of Nietzsche is titled “Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist”. And likewise many psychologists of the 20th century were influenced by him, such as Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget. Perhaps there is an inkling of crucial detail we can extract from one of these masters of human nature that will give us a clue as to how one might unpack Nietzsche’s aphorism.
It seems to me that what Nietzsche is referring to here may be something that Carl Jung later developed into what he called enantiodromia.
In Greek, the word means literally “running counter to”. Philosopher Alan Watts referred to Jungian enantiodromia by saying, “[…]the attainment of any extreme position is the point where it begins to turn into its own opposite.”¹
In the context of the Nietzsche's aphorism, the enantiodromia might be more readily considered in relation to Jung’s thoughts on the discovery of the shadow self — the shadow being that portion of our psyches our consciousness does not readily identify as being a part of the whole, and thereby being “unconscious”.
It seems, by my interpretation, that the shadow self within the context of enantiodromia is best understood as the unconscious polarity to that which is conscious, though, nevertheless, the unconscious is a vast unknown chasm that is not alone composed of the shadow, but, to Jung, the shadow was often seen as the gateway into a deeper discovery of our unconscious selves and the gateway to revealing the path to our greatest potential. If enantiodromia is real then we might make an inquiry into the unconscious by noting that which is consciousness and seeing if we cannot reveal to ourselves an emerging polarity to that which we have already accepted.
In this sense, it is enticing to fight Nietzsche’s monsters because, in our life’s quest to attain our subjective ideal of greatness, we will almost certainly be fighting monsters along the way and some of those monsters will almost certainly be within ourselves.
But, in the fighting of monsters and in the searching of souls, much may be found that we had not wanted to and, furthermore, what’s found might cause one to turn away from such discoveries altogether — a kind of “once bitten twice shy” scenario, although for many it seems more accurate to say “once bitten always shy” when discovering how often we are the primary contributors to our misfortunes in our lives.
In one’s quest for good, one learns of evil and if one refuses to pay mind to it, one might find, though by no conscious awareness of their own, that that evil has risen to the surface and manifested itself in a path to a different kind of greatness: and thus the monsters we become in our quest to right wrongs in the hopes of creating a world of righteousness.
To clarify, Nietzsche’s aphorism is pretty obviously a warning to the fighter of monsters and the searcher of souls. There is no better place to prepare one’s self for the fighting of monsters than to first search one’s own soul, to be weary of one’s unconscious motives because the last thing the fighter of monsters wants to have is an unconscious tendency for self-sabotage, for instance, or, even worse, to be carrying around some deep seeded resentment toward the world that might manifested itself in the gulags of Russia as you fight your way to “freeing” your people from oppression. As Jung pointed out in his book Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self: “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
It’s as if Nietzsche was warning that we might find great utility in the strength and power of one extreme so much as to be be enticed or, otherwise, fogged in our capacity to see the point at which “running counter to” our previously held mindset had reached a critical turning point and thereby spelling our own destruction if those worthy signs would go unheeded.
For, of course, the purpose of putting the aphorism to paper at all is to interject the warning into the readers consciousness so that once revealed the shadow may not sink back into the unknown.
In this sense, as we search and fight for good, we might ultimately find ourselves using the “tools” of the monsters we had set out to fight, and thus becoming a monster to a new hero. For, it is also the case that the enantiodromia presides not only over the psyche but in the interactions of the collective of psyches in our world. Furthermore, when a hero looks long into an abyss, the abyss also looks back into him, and, perhaps, that abyss in each of us learns how to undo the hero’s “hero-ness”, because even the worst tyrant believes himself to be a hero in disguise, if not an outright performer of good altogether.³
If you know anything about Nietzsche’s life you find out pretty quickly that he spent the vast majority of his life alone, not fighting any monsters other than through his books. He was very sickly and never would have been able to follow through with a debate or fight of any kind. That being said, for Nietzsche, many of the monsters he fought were within himself.
He found that the more he learned about himself, the more he realized everything that was within the literal monsters of the world, the Hitlers, the Stalins, the concentration camp guards, the sociopaths were also in him and that, with a slight change in his own history, he might very well have turned out to be a monster himself, or, furthermore, that those inclinations we are wont to believe that are so distant from our identity are actually lurking just below the surface, ready to sabotage ourselves or our loved ones often in the most petty, self-serving ways that we somehow still manage to justify and avoid responsibility for (aka “the shadow).
Another important point to this might be that we as individuals are not the best judge of our own moral or ethical “righteousness”. No person willingly holds an opinion about the world they know to be wrong; except that we all — every last one of us, including myself — hold opinions about the world that ARE wrong, and we — each of us, including myself — are not the best judge of what those opinions are and whether or not they will manifest themselves in the world in a way that will result in good. Because we all readily admit that we are not 100 percent right 100 percent of the time, and, yet, not one of us are capable of identifying a single opinion we willingly maintain and know to be wrong.
Just because our intentions are good does not mean that good will result.
In the case of the Nazis, sense they are easy to pick on, how does Hitler convince a nation to follow him when that nation is presumably filled with people that we have no reasonable cause to believe are any different than we are, or that we are somehow less susceptible to the things that they were. The best that we can say is if somehow the roles were reversed, that you and I would be no less susceptible to what the people of Germany were in the 1930s. True, only 30% of the population initially voted for Hitler, but complacency and passivity turned out to be quite useful for the goals of that 30% and, nonetheless, many people had no anti-Semitic inclinations at all and still found themselves murdering innocent people merely because they were told to — case in point: Adolf Eichmann per Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning.
To direct the above at Nietzsche’s aphorism, the abyss the German people looked into was the failures of their leadership and their nation as a whole in how the first world war concluded and how they were expected to compensate the world for that war. Hitler had already fallen into the abyss and he looked there and saw in the German people something that they wanted to believe about themselves. What it is that he saw there was a weakness, and there was a weakness there.
By y way of that weakness, Hitler convinced Germany that it should not be held responsible and that the finger should be pointed elsewhere. In this case, it was at something tangible but wholly delusional: at Jewish people, in particular, but also at the rest of Europe.
If, for instance, you want to believe there is something special about the Aryan race, and then you loose a world war pursuing that ideal and have everything taken from you as a result, you might become resentful — particularly if you are not inclined to learn from your mistakes, as is the case for all of us at one time or another. You might, even, become resentful enough to start another world war and search for a scapegoat, i.e. Jewish people, to explain away the fact that the Aryan race is actually pretty normal and not really special at all and the world doesn’t owe you shit.
Hitler convinced Germany they had started from a place that assumed they were gods, but no one who believes they are gods are likely to sit idly by and be told that they aren’t. And God’s tend to become quite wrathful when they don’t get their way. What’s worse is that it seems fairly difficult to avoid the trap of believing that you are a god or, in other words, that we too often believe those criticisms squared at us are somehow less relevant than those we square at others, despite the fact that our claims are rarely any better substantiated than those lodged against us. And thus we fighters of monsters become monsters ourselves under the false belief that we are somehow impervious to that which we despise in others.
On a side note: Sigmund Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones quoted Freud as saying of Nietzsche: “that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.” That’s a hefty statement to make coming from a man who possessed one of the most penetrating insights into human nature on the planet at the time; an insight that concerned a man who was half-blind, perpetually sick, and led a life often in severe and unabating solitude. It kind of makes one wonder what else might be holding us back that we have been too blind or weak to see, particularly when such insight can come from one who, by all outward appearances, is so weak himself.
Footnotes:
- quoted from The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
- quote from Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self, page 71
- It should be noted that Nietzsche wrote of enantiodromia several times, including at the beginning of the book containing the quote of which this essay was inspired, that being Beyond Good and Evil. Though I have not seen him refer to the phenomenon using the word enantiodromia.
