Typically, I began on entirely the wrong track. I also discovered that I was on the wrong road. The autobahn from Berlin on a boiling hot summer day was a torrent of roaring flashing metal and when it all eventually became too brutal, I took a turning into the countryside, and after an hour or so of far gentle motoring we found a fine walled medieval town.
It was late afternoon when we arrived, and in a leafy square in its centre beside an enormous church was a small hotel which had a room. A crest on the wall of the house declared that it was built in 1558, and in the alley beside it called the Judengasse were two more plaques, one ancient and triumphant; the other, rather more modern and regretful, both commemorating the clearing of the town of its Jews: the first time in 1494; and the second in 1933.
After dinner it was too late to do more than walk around the market square, and go to bed; but the next morning after breakfast I walked out into the sunshine to smoke a cigar, and outside the front door of the hotel I found a sign. It said: To the Nietzsche house.
This town is Naumburg, in Sachsen-Anhalt, and here Friedrich Nietzsche (pronounced almost exactly like a sneeze: N'eetchah) one of the most influential of all Europe's philosophers, lived for his early and part of his adult life. It was he who first declared that God is dead. Although many scientists have since claimed priority, Nietzsche was the first to put his signature to this fateful slogan. And he was not a scientist.

Nietzsche's Gift

In German gift means poison. By a curious transformation of sense, in English it means almost the exact opposite: a favour or a kindness. I had long ago forgotten all about Nietzsche, and I could certainly never have remembered that he had lived in Naumburg - or, even if I had, where to find such an out-of-the-way place. Later that morning, however, more out of curiosity, I walked around the corner to his house, now a town museum, and with the help of the friendly young custodian, began to read his books. Within an hour I knew that I had actually been on the wrong track for weeks. Many believe that Nietzsche's philosophy poisoned the whole of the 20th century, caused the collapse of the old moral order, and the emergence of a new virulent brand of corrupt and murderous politics. His particular brand of poison was not only his announcement of the death of God. It included his equally damaging declarations that morality is decided only by power; that the fundamental purpose of life, first and last, is the will to power; and that the weak are the victims of their own weakness: not to be pitied, but reviled.

The Philosopher King

Nietzsche fits no single category. He was dramatic, passionate, profound, poetic, intensely provocative, musical, contradictory, maddening, all-embracing. Above all, he was immensely prolific, so prolific that we cannot truthfully say that these ideas are all that he wrote. But it is certainly in the form of these powerful ideas that he is understood. "I have laid my hand," he also wrote, most famously and alarmingly, "on the next thousand years"! Which all goes to show that small towns do not necessarily produce small thinkers.
If his real meaning was understood correctly, then without doubt he helped to bring hopelessness, misery and death to many millions. The causes of both the First and Second World Wars have been laid at his door. He appears to demand that power should develop its own morality, without regard for ordinary human feelings, emotions, aims, and certainly without regard for God. Many clearly still believe that he is right. Walking into the town later that day I found a sticker on a lamppost, its ink still fresh, demanding that people use violence against their government, and insisting that "this is the only argument it understands." If the first form of argument is always to be violence, the world is definitely not going to improve very much.
Against the weight of this hard opinion, it is hard to appeal for a kinder view of Nietzsche. But it is also true that he died comparatively young, of a degenerative illness which may or may not have been syphilis he contracted as a youth. He certainly died very miserably mad. But he was the brilliant son of pious Protestant family, appointed professor of philosophy at Basel in his twenties; and, given this background and the nature of his times, it is just possible that he intended to develop a very different programme, one which he never finished. He was intellectually active for only 16 years. In the final analysis, everything depends on what he meant by power.
Unfortunately, he never made this clear. Darwin's argument that animals struggle everywhere for survival impressed him deeply. Of the possibility that he had deeper basis for his faith, more definite and more real than the conventions of religions that he declared must be swept away, one clue remains. He was always able to make statements startlingly at odds with his public image as the enemy of God. He wrote, for example: "The kingdom of Heaven is not something "up there". It is a condition of the heart. It does not arrive according to some calendar, so that one day it will be there when the day before it was not. It is a transformation of the senses of the individual. It is something that comes, at times, and at others is not there."
And this is approximately where I had started: over a month before.

My Students' Problem

To mark the end of our long year of work together I had asked my senior ethics students to write an essay, of any length, about anything that worried or disturbed them. To my very great astonishment what most of their essays revealed was a deep need to believe in some fundamental purpose of life, even a spiritual purpose. None believed that science allowed this. All-powerful, all-encompassing, science stands in the way of their hope for the future, the present - even of their belief in themselves.
Since I had unintentionally prompted these revelations, I felt a serious responsibility to reply to them. In two hurried days I wrote, eventually, a twenty page reply, hoping to have it ready before the end of the year. It was not ready in time, and the very kindest of my critics has told me since that it is anyway hardly readable: although acknowledging, I think a little more generously, that attempting to compress three thousand years of philosophy into twenty pages is not so easy.

A Simpler Solution

I agree. I was in too much of a hurry to respond. Some of those essays had been painful to read. But Nietzsche now showed me that what I was trying to achieve in response was anyway wrong, for I was attempting to show that science is not justified in denying a purpose to life. Sooner or later any teacher of ethics has to agree with this or not. I believe that, as a matter of fact, most do. I do not, but I had never before been tested to explain precisely why. And the Devil, as anyone will tell you, is in the details.
For the next month on most days I found an hour or so to work a little more on my scientific proof that science is wrong - also intending, incidentally, to reduce the twenty pages to ten, to five, even four, for my kindest critic also told me that this would be the absolute maximum that any student would want to read.
It was during this time that I also visited Ravensbruck. In fact I visited it twice. The first time again had been almost an accident. It was a few miles up the road from where I was staying, and I felt I should see it. After I had recovered from the shock, the second time was intended to be more deliberate. It was only even more dispiriting. KZ (Konzentrationlager) Ravensbruck was the main Nazi concentration camp reserved exclusively for women. Tens of thousands of women died there. They came from all over Europe. Hundreds came there pregnant. Their babies, one of the camp doctors reported, were born "rosy and healthy", and died within weeks, their mother's bodies being already too exhausted to feed them. This was the saddest place I have ever been in my life. Throughout both visits I stayed dry-eyed, but I was reading William Styron's terrible book Sophie's Choice, for the first time a few days later, it is mainly about Auschwitz, and after an hour or so all at once I began to weep like a child. For long slow minutes I was unable to explain my grief or take a full breath.
The consequence of both incidents was to show me that my aim was wrong. You cannot prove to science that it is mistaken. Science is proof. In science if you prove something right or wrong, it simply becomes another part of science. You may of course claim that the methods of proof used in science cannot themselves be proven to produce truth, or that they are otherwise imperfect. But statements like these would be philosophy.

The Two Horses

It often seems tome that science and philosophy are like two horses. Both pull societies powerfully along, but with very different temperaments and abilities. Science is all about proof: about showing that certain facts are more elegantly connected by this or that relation. But there are always some facts which cannot be proven, they can only be known. On a dark wet night it is as hard to tell one horse from another as sometimes it is to see the difference between science and philosophy. But philosophy is really about all those facts or ideas that can be known, but not proven. Ravensbruck, for example, was supposedly an outcome of science. But it was really more an outcome of philosophy.
Although you will find that many people believe the opposite, philosophy is actually much more powerful than science - not least because it is far more difficult to control. People may know facts to be true, not because they have been proven to be true, but because they have been told that they are true. Ravensbruck was run by people - lots of fairly ordinary and actually quite uninteresting people - who had been told it was their duty to break down the personalities and resistance of the women who were sent there from all over Europe. They did this through humiliation, hunger, exhaustion, isolation, torture, and finally through death, philosophically.
And this is why Nietzsche was - and why he still is - hugely important. Not only do few students read all that their teachers may write, many people never really read all the books of even very famous authors. They know the titles. They believe they know what the books have to say. Sometimes it may be only what the titles seem to say.
I had been attracted to Nietzsche in my youth by the wonderful titles of his books ("Thus Spake Zarathustra" is a wonderful title, so is "Beyond Good and Evil") but I never read him properly because I was never sure that I understood him. Now, sitting on his quiet leafy veranda, rereading his books, I began to realize that this probably was exactly why he had been so influential.
It seems highly likely that outside his own personal or professional circle no-one read his books completely. But he was enormously clever at these hugely dramatic titles. What an ad-man he would have been! The audience this talent alone won him made him a leading figure in the greatest change in philosophy of the last thousand years. Let us first understand what this change was.

And the Adman Cometh

The power of Rome had depended on the discipline of its armies and a brutal but effective rule of civil law. No-one who asked a Roman soldier to explain the purpose of life would have received much enlightenment. But later in Europe in the Middle Ages the philosophy was developed that God gave lives purpose according to his will, directing them through his church. This philosophy supported, and in some sense depended on, immense social differences. Everyone depended on God, eventually, for their ultimate transcendent reward. To Nietzsche, as to many if not most social revolutionaries of his time, this was all self-serving rubbish. It served the interest of the priests and ruling classes, and kept millions in uneducated servile poverty. The great change that he certainly helped to bring about was its replacement by a philosophy that people should find for themselves a purpose in life, and also learn to direct society for themselves. The rewards they should look for should not be eventual and transcendent. They should be now, and real. Our society mainly depends on precisely these ideas.
The ad-man's method of announcing the first part of this philosophy is to say that God is Dead. The equally slick way to present the second is to say that the only purpose of life is the Will to Power. Nietzsche made both statements boldly, dramatically, powerfully (although his book of that title was produced after his death). He became both famous and reviled. And because people in general believed that this was all of his philosophy, we must accept that the KZ Ravensbruck, as well as many other horrors are indeed his memorials.
But Ravensbruck is not in our past. Its potential is still within us. Millions have acquired these ideas, and no argument can prove them wrong. If it were a scientific idea, it might proven right or wrong. But once a philosophy exists - so long as its outline and ideas are roughly confirmed by some aspects of people's lives - better still, if their lives can be made consistent with it - it will last for a very long time.
Frankly, I do not much care whether Nietzsche meant what most people suppose that he meant. But let us start by accepting the philosophy that he left with us as true: that God is dead, and that the only purpose of life is the will to get Power.

Getting it

This, more or less, is the philosophy that many of my students believe in. Not all are appalled by it. Some accept it without too much anxiety as being just the way things are. But none know how to replace it with purpose. They do not know how to believe that life can have direction.
And this is a problem that has engaged many of the philosophical thinkers since Nietzsche, and the general trend towards just shrugging one's shoulders and saying: Well, that just the way life is. Tough luck! Get yours! is called existentialism. In fact, however, beginning to prove in practice that a life can have both direction and purpose is actually elementary. All we need to do is to show that the experience of life is not actually confined to the common levels of perception. If there is a possibility of other perceptions to be explored (and I mean without drugs, without mania, and without joining some mutually deluded cult), a purpose of life would be to take this direction.
The aim of my original reply was to show that throughout all religions, East and West, there has always been a tradition of attempting to persuade people to experience a better reality by moving their attention away from their feelings, by not allowing attention to be controlled by the emotions that feelings then produce. So powerfully liberating and emancipating are the experiences that result from this that at times in some religions these practices have been proscribed, even punished. In others they are central to faith. They are in fact the purpose for living.
Now if you are reading this - perhaps with some hope of finding help for your son or your daughter, or even to find your own purpose for living - you may already doubt. "Moving attention away from feelings"? What can this mean? Surely living is about having feelings? Surely to be without feelings is hardly to be alive.
Not so.
Not so because living is not about having feelings. It is about having attention. It is through our attention that we notice our feelings. Everyone at some time must have noticed being aware of very intense feelings - of anger, grief, happiness - but of also being separate from the awareness of them, as if watching oneself in a film. In such moments attention separates itself momentarily and spontaneously from feeling. This is the direction that we want to explore. It is the direction in which humanity has been slowly moving for thousands of years. If human life has a purpose, it could hardly be in a better direction than this one, away from all the anxieties, the pain and confusion of life, towards emotional and mental clarity.
Actually I think that Nietzsche wanted to say this all the time. Pulled down by illness, misery, and loneliness, he simply never had the time. All that he had time to write was: "The kingdom of God is a condition of the heart, an alteration in the senses of the individual, something that comes at times and at others is not there." We must also be prepared to find that this condition is from time to time difficult to achieve. But even so it is always most potent as an aim.
Many feelings are wonderful. They are exciting, invigorating, liberating. Hatred, for example, akin to love, is very liberating. You can do anything, untroubled by conscience, if only you hate enough. We want feelings like these over and over, become addicted to them. Others isolate, distort, and disfigure, torture. We dislike these feelings and try to avoid them. All these feelings have a common character. They control us. We need to learn - when we want to - how to put them aside.
The slightly idiot expressions on the portraits of saints, some of whom were very exceptional people, the enigmatic smiles of sculpted Buddhas - all are intended to convey the result of this achievement. It far more interesting than their frozen images might lead you to believe. By devoting their lives to it, some enduring terrible repression, many have shown that it is the most powerful, important, and also the most pleasurable experience that human beings can have. It is also very easy to try.

ICE

No completely general programme is capable of explaining to everyone where their feelings originate and why. This is for psychoanalysis, and courses of psychoanalysis tend to be expensive. Depression, too, taking the form of continual deep unhappiness and despair, must also be understood for what it is: an illness not caused by any external cause, but by mental or emotional exhaustion, by diet, by pollution, etc.
The worst mistake we can make is to blame our depression on some external cause: our job, our partner, the world. The best that we can do to help ourselves (but it is a very considerable help) is to recognize that there is no external cause, and to learn to separate our attention from it, as at least temporary relief. Permanent relief can be achieved by treating the internal cause: reducing exhaustion, changing diet or environment, and appropriate medical treatment.
But the traditions used in the past to clarify attention follow a common pattern. What we have to do with feelings is to identify them, contain them, and then eject them from our attention. To make it easy to remember, let us describe it by the neat acronym: ICE. In future, don't cool it, dude. Ice it. Here is how it works.

Lesson 1

Look at something, anything, near you, and tell yourself what it is: Identify it. I have just done this with something near me, a water bottle. I look at it and say: this is a water bottle (or, Well, well, a water-bottle!). Now pick up the object and hold it. Feel its texture, its weight; test its balance; look at its colours. Ask what it is that you could possibly do with it. In short, use all your senses to Contain this thing as completely as you can in your attention. Now, put it down. Notice that it is now quite separate from you. You have successfully Ejected it from your space. Turn away from it and forget its existence. It is after all completely unimportant. You do not need to remember it. You have now banished it from your attention.

Lesson 2

Now suppose that you are feeling slightly disturbed, agitated, excited. To some extent or other this feeling currently is controlling your life. It will distort your thinking, interfere with decisions, separate you from your goals, even alter your physical presence. But please only try this first with a slight feeling. If you are wracked by love, screaming with rage, or snapping with tension, do not expect this to work at once. Go and break something or bite someone. Come back when you are a little more relaxed. If, on the other hand, you haven't actually got any slight feeling of disturbance, perhaps you could imagine some attached to a past situation, person, time, place.
First, then, Identify this feeling. Is it fear, anger, envy, frustration, lust, incompetence, loneliness, pride, resentment ...? Whatever it is you must give it a name. At the same time you could try to work out where it is coming from: Is it old or its new? Does it have connections with another situation, person, time, or place? Most feelings are linked with other feelings of much the same kind which may have very different, ancient, even childish, origins. This is why sometimes a minor irritation can cause a big explosion. All those feelings are linked together like sticks of dynamite, all connected by a single fuse.
Second, Contain this feeling. Let it fill you completely. Have no inhibitions, luxuriate in it, bathe in it, roll about in it as in a mud-bath, weep, and howl, and gnash your teeth. (By the way, did I mention that all this is best done in private? No? Well I had better add this now. All this is best done in private.) Ask yourself whatever could you possibly do with this feeling? Although it will appear that you are letting it dominate you completely, actually this is when you are in control of the feeling and not the other way around. Do you want to find out, even just for a moment, what it is like to be without this feeling and for your attention to be unaffected by it? Then,
Third, Eject it from your attention. No, don't then try to grab it back again, or let it come back to you. Nor need you use much force. Just push it into the airlock, close the door, eject it, and let it drift away out of contact. For at least a short time you should know that you can do without this feeling. Your attentions, life, goals, happiness, even your physical appearance, are no longer affected by it. Try to notice what this brief moment of cleared attention feels like itself. It should feel just like taking a quick breath of clean fresh air after escaping from a hot stuffy room. If you are lucky it will seem that you have just emerged atop a mountain; if you are even more fortunate, at the top of life.

Lesson 3

Remember that you can practise this anywhere. If you can forgo the howling, gnashing of teeth, etc., you can even practise ICE in public. It only takes a second or two to set the process in motion, a minute or more to experience a new clarity of attention. This will help you to survive and succeed in every department of life.
But do not expect everyone to welcome this! If you still wonder why so much effort is expended on persuading you that it is not possible to find a direction or a purpose in life, it is sometimes because many quite powerful thinkers have convinced themselves of this; but others may do so for older and far less respectable reasons. Perhaps from reading their history books they know, that when people have been freed from the tyranny of their anxieties, their fears, envy, hatred, and most of all - but most difficult of all - from their own self-pity, they become infinitely more difficult to control. Politically, economically, ideologically, they become infinitely more free as individuals. They may even: and to those who depend on fear for their control, this is the most frightening possibility of all - cease to be afraid.
And do I still say that this transformation is easy? No. I said that beginning to find this direction is ludicrously easy. It is like finding that a prison has an unlocked door. At first exploring beyond it is just like a game in which sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, without really understanding why. But after a time, if you persevere, not only do you begin to win more and more often, but your whole perception of your life - and your power to enjoy and to use life correctly - will begin to increase.
You can practise alone or with your family, even form your friends into your own group. Alternatively you can go back to your old religion with new enthusiasm. Alternatively again you can start to use your favourite place, or any old church, synagogue, mosque, or temple and go there to practise. But then go there alone. Many of these places were designed to help people to clear their attention of anxieties and fear, but are now empty most of the time. Visit your favourite places regularly.
At least once a day try to do this at a regular time: morning or evening, starting with your most troubling feelings, and then exploring further. It will soon become an almost automatic reaction to disturbing feelings. Once a week try to cleanse your attention thoroughly. Soon your perception - and your enjoyment - of life will start to increase. You will begin to feel the power of pure attention unclouded by feelings, undisturbed by emotion. It will show you that the world is bigger - and more friendly towards you - than you think. You may also find yourself enjoying that transformation of the senses that Nietzche calls the kingdom of heaven. Here there are no priorities at all. This is the reality that just is.
I believe that this pursuit of clearer attention, this opening of reality into a larger and more comfortable space for the mind and spirit, is a need as fundamental as the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. All over the world hundreds of millions of people are attempting to achieve it by using drugs, with a mega-billion dollar industry supplying them. But this is pure ignorance. It is like hitting yourself on the head with a brick. You can achieve much better in ten quiet minutes every day.

Terror's Seeds

There is a final reason why you should. The most disturbing puzzle to emerge from fifty years of study of places like Ravensbruck is that people let them begin. In a country in the grip of a system of terror such as Stalin and Hitler perfected, eventually no-one was safe. At their height of power thousands were being arrested, tortured, starved and murdered every day, and we should not pretend that we would have been braver at that time than anyone else. But such systems cannot develop their power all at once. Their usual method is to select some minority easily identified by the majority, and to declare that it stands in the way of justice, of progress, is poisoning or wrecking society, and systematically to humiliate and abuse that minority, and to notice how the majority reacts. When the majority shows its indifference, its approval, and even perhaps applauds, the next minority chosen will be more numerous, the restrictions on it more severe, the sanctions more brutal.
The usual explanations look far above the ordinary: to Germany's humiliation at Versailles, to the cruelty of the boyars and czars, the paranoia of both Hitler and Stalin. But these very general factors are all different. The puzzle is that the results were so similar.
I thought that I had achieved a minor triumph by pointing to the only common factor. Both Germany and Russia had begun to teach mathematics universally with a fearsome emphasis on its rigour and perfection, on the need to eliminate every weakness, every error, and every doubt, to sacrifice every other human consideration, in the achievement of the aim.
These ideals translate very readily into politics, and on a suitably massive scale. The SS was trained in this precisely philosophy, that they could and would overcome all resistance by the totally merciless 'clinical' use of power, whilst Solzhenitsyn has recorded the energy, the clarity of vision and boundless invention and inspiration of the engineering class in Russia, on whom the success of the early revolution depended, and who literally built the Soviet Union into a modern industrial state, equal in military power to the other powers, by using the 'science' of Marxist-Leninism - as it was called - to overcome every natural obstacle, including tens of millions of their own people, before they themselves were terrorized and then liquidated in their hundreds of thousands by Stalin.
This is a very general explanation, and I still think it true. But now I think we should look as well at a very common fact about ourselves. A government intending rule by terror can be rejected by the majority as soon as its nature is revealed. As a minority itself it will then be too weak to resist. But if it is not decisively rejected, soon the majority will be too weak to resist. The very first responses are therefore decisive. Why are they so often divided and confused?
I believe the reason is that we all have hurts hidden in us: resentment, anger, envy, shame, gnawing away in our depths. These are the seeds from which terror grows. When we see someone being singled out to be humiliated or hurt, especially when they have been identified as different, as a nuisance to society, a plotter, a wrecker, a deviant, an offence to God, they blossom at once in secret satisfaction that someone is receiving punishment for our hurt in the past.
This reaction is very difficult to prevent. The only sure way is for the majority to learn to eradicate the seeds. Without them they can protest effectively against government by terror. With them they become instead its accomplices, even its agents - until it turns, as eventually it will, on us - and they become the next victims. Any government that encourage disrespect of those who are different, is fundamentally terrorist itself. And this, of course, is why I believe that democracy is evolutionarily important. It is because democracy never attempts to destroy differences. It accepts them. It allows attention naturally to evolve. To prompt this evolution no drugs are required. Just ten quiet minutes a day will save your life. To save society just multiply your life by millions.

 

I want to acknowledge the article on Nietzsche's work by Professor Dr Ulrich Beer in the Rheinische Merkur of the 18th August, which I found on an opened page abandoned in this same Naumburg hotel. It contains this vital quotation. Only a lifelong scholar of Nietzsche might know it. I certainly did not. This is what I meant by a spooky intervention. Scholars also know it as the "ghost in the bookcase." Someone should really write a thesis on it although my point is, of course, that often you only notice these curious events - and that they are curious! - by being unusually attentive!

Colin Hannaford
Hanover - Berlin - Mecklenburg - Sachsen-Anhalt - Stuttgart, Summer 2000.
Partly revised Summer 2003-06-23

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