Between Gibran and Nietzsche

Among the writers of the Arab East there is none for whom circumstances so smoothed the way to attain the fame that Gibran attained, in his lifetime and after his death.

Yet Gibran's works have not received from writers and scholars an attention commensurate with their author's fame. His English books have not yet been favored with anyone to translate them into Arabic correctly. Nor has it been granted Gibran that anyone should study his works in a deep critical study worthy of publication.

It has been said that Gibran modeled himself on the Englishman William Blake in his poetry and his drawings; and no one has undertaken to debate this claim, showing it true or false. And I once heard the man of letters Bishr Fares mention the book The Prophet in a lecture of his, saying that it would place its author in the ranks of the world's men of letters were it not for a manifest imitation in it of Nietzsche's book entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra.

The lecturer pointed to this imitation as a thing taken for granted. Did he, one wonders, go back to the two books of Nietzsche and Gibran, and was the second's imitation of the first made plain to him — or did he rely on what he had heard on the matter from some of those who have not studied it?

This is what I shall try to answer in the following inquiry:

Nietzsche is a link in the chain of philosophers and thinkers who appeared in western Europe during the nineteenth century. He was born in Germany and moved from there to Italy and Switzerland. From his tenderest years he began to dream of the theories on which he later built his writings — the most important of them, indeed the summation of them all, being the theory of the Superman.

The pivot of this theory is that nations become great through their individuals, not through their mass. For this reason the Greek people is counted the greatest people of history, because it was able to beget the largest number of geniuses. The duty of mankind, then, is to strive to create surpassing geniuses.

"I would have you bridges over which one crosses to the Superman. The Superman — the surpassing man — is the goal of humanity. Man must surpass man. What have you done in the cause of surpassing yourselves?"

Nietzsche looked at the people around him and saw them all alike in weakness and paltriness, resembling one another like grains of sand; he condemned their stagnation and cried out at them: All beings have created things higher than themselves — and you, will you go against the current and carry life backward? What is the ape in the eyes of man? An object of mockery and contempt. So is present-day man, beside the Superman, an object of mockery and contempt.

But how is the creation of the Superman to be accomplished?

The means, in Nietzsche's view, is clear and possible: that men cast off their present standards and traditions; that they repudiate the doctrines that have bequeathed them weakness, abjection, and paltriness; and that they adopt new standards of living and of thinking.

They preach mercy and pity. But Nietzsche proves to them that pity is barren and charity a humiliation, and the seekers of mercy a weak, loitering folk. He would have them strong, too proud to solicit pity.

They preach the equality of men. But Nietzsche denies equality, and proclaims that men differ in their worth — and that they must differ, so that from among them may come forth the surpassing one who has no peer.

They live a life of artifice and sham — far from nature, far from the earth, despising the body, gazing toward what lies beyond life. And he would have them return to the earth and be faithful to it; love life, and nature, and strength: "I conjure you, my brothers, be faithful to the earth, and believe not those who teach you of heavenly joys."

Nor is he content with demolishing the old; he enumerates the virtues that must be formed in the people that strives toward the highest goal.

The general mark of the Superman's forebears is, first, overflowing health — health of soul and body, an extraordinary strength, bodily and mental — accompanied by a marvelous strength of will that enables its possessor to create and to accomplish the greatest deeds; that enables him to defy death itself.

Says Zarathustra: "I hate the death that comes like a thief. The death I want is the one that comes when I want it."

The will to power is the pivot of the Superman doctrine, and on it rest all the distinguished qualities with which the surpassing ones are adorned.

This is a fleeting glance into the book Thus Spake Zarathustra, which runs to some four hundred close-printed pages. Where, then, does Gibran stand in relation to this book?

Gibran's circumstances differ manifestly from Nietzsche's circumstances. He did not live in a philosophical milieu like the one that surrounded his German colleague. But he passed in his life through sufferings and experiences that produced a continuous evolution in his temper and in his writings.

He began his writing career a lyric poet, addressing the night and the wind and the soul, and singing of the rain, the wave, the flower, and beauty. Yet his first writings, for all their tenderness, are not free of revolt and wrath against tradition, whose trace we find in The Broken Wings and in some of the essays of A Tear and a Smile — and this before he knew Nietzsche. Then we see him, after his reading of Thus Spake Zarathustra, bring out the book The Tempests, a collection of essays in which the influence of the philosopher of power shows. He opens it with the essay of "The Grave-Digger," who buries the heaped corpses of men — that is, their superstitions and their delusions — as Zarathustra did when he buried the corpse of the fallen rope-dancer:

And in "The Decayed Teeth" he assails pity as Nietzsche assailed it, and addresses men with sarcasm: "I used to pity your weakness, sons of my mother; but pity multiplies the weak and increases the number of the idle, and profits life nothing. Today I have come to see your weakness, and my soul shudders with disgust and shrinks in disdain."

Yet Gibran stops at the limit of revolt and demolition, and lays down no doctrine of his own for building, as Nietzsche did. Hence we see him in his remaining works swerve away from him visibly, and return to the idealist bent that had appeared in his first writings, where in A Tear and a Smile he sang of love and hymned beauty, and believed, like the mystics, in the soul's emanation from the Universal Spirit and its return to it in the end.

The mystical bent grew stronger in him by degrees and crystallized in the book The Prophet, which shows us the summit of the spiritual growth of which he dreamed. And this is the book in which they allege that he imitated Nietzsche.

The book runs to a hundred-odd pages; Gibran put it in the mouth of a prophet called Almustafa, as Nietzsche's book was put in the mouth of an Eastern prophet, Zarathustra. The author of Gibran's biography, Mikhail Naimy, has pointed to the resemblances between the two books in three places. The first is that Almustafa and Zarathustra both spread their teachings among men and then return to their solitude. In fact, Gibran's prophet delivers his sermons all at once, just before his final return to his birthplace; whereas Nietzsche's prophet comes down from the mountains to pour out the treasures in his heart, then goes back to solitude to gather new pearls, and returns to scatter them among men a second time.

The second place is that each of them, shortly before his going, addresses the sea and dreams of going down to it. But Zarathustra's return to the sea symbolizes the sufferings he must undergo to reach the highest degrees of happiness and growth — he says, "the greatest mountains have their source in the sea" — whereas the return of Gibran's prophet to the sea means mystical union: the return of the spirit to its source, the return of the drop to the sea and of the partial spirit to the Universal Spirit, "a boundless drop in a boundless ocean."

The third place: that each of them promises his companions to return to them when they deny him or forget him.

Zarathustra does in fact return to them, descending from the mountains in which he had settled. But Almustafa adds, saying: "another woman shall bear me." His return to his companions thus means the reincarnation of his spirit in a new body, and points to the doctrine of transmigration in which Gibran believed.

So where Naimy sees a place of resemblance, we see in fact places of difference.

And if we alleged that Gibran took from Nietzsche his style, so rich in images and symbols, we should again be wrong. For he began his writing life with this poetic style —

much broken into cadences and refrains, teeming with fancies and novel similes — the style by which Gibran was known, and of which he was the first pioneer in Arabic.

Nietzsche, indeed, is fonder of the symbol than Gibran. In his book are metonymies and symbolic phrases which he never tires of repeating, and by which he intends particular things: the "noonday sun," by which he signified ripeness, or the fullness of knowledge; his animals — the serpent, symbol of wisdom; the lion, symbol of strength; the eagle, symbol of loftiness. And there are other symbols in his book which space does not allow us to mention.

In it, too, are tales and dialogues, and a wild, violent imagination, and obscure songs like the murmuring of revelation, which he molds into burning, feverish phrases and hurls forth like volcanic lava. For all this we find no counterpart in the calm, poised style of The Prophet, which runs like gentle streams of silk.

With Gibran, imagery is a means of clarifying the idea, not of veiling it, as with Nietzsche. He says in the chapter on love: "You cannot separate the just from the unjust, nor the good from the wicked. Whoever among you would lift the axe against a tree to fell it in the name of justice must first examine its roots. Verily I say to you, he will find the good roots and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, entangled together in the silent heart of the earth. And as a single leaf of the tree does not turn yellow but with the knowledge of the whole tree, so no one of you commits a crime but by your hidden, common will."

The book of The Prophet is sermons on various subjects, fortified with parables and figures. Nietzsche's book, on the other hand, is the story of Zarathustra — the tale of his struggle, his experiences, and his meditations on the mountain heights, where the ideas ferment in his head, and he comes down to spread them among men because he loves them, because his soul is heavy-laden with its fruits.

And here is a specimen of the splendid songs that reveal to us Zarathustra's inner self — a piece distinguished above the others by its clarity: "The Night Song":

"It is night: all the gushing fountains lift their voices, and my soul too is a gushing fountain.

"It is night: all the songs of lovers awaken, and my soul too is a lover's song.

Within me is something that will not be stilled and will not accept stilling — something athirst to break forth.

Within me is a thirst for love, which speaks the language of love.

Light am I. Ah, would that I were darkness. How great is my loneliness in this light that floods me. Would that I were dark as the night; then would I fling myself upon the breast of the light and drink of it what I would; and then would I bless the star and the firefly, and rejoice in what they give me of their light.

But I live in my own light. I drink of my own flame. I do not know the happiness of taking, for I have known nothing but giving."

This song reminds us of some of Gibran's songs outside the book The Prophet; for that book, in its mold and its style, shows Gibran's liberation from Nietzsche's influence. As for the differences between them in subject matter, I shall take those up in another inquiry.