Stephen Dedalus famously says in Ulysses, ” A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

This post looks at a mistake I made in an online talk, and it considers what it means exactly for an error to be a “portal of discovery.”

I was re-reading Nietzsche the other day, and I came across a line in Thus Spake Zarathustra that has always been one of my favorites: “Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood […] Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart.”

And when I read this, my heart fell, because I recalled that I misquoted this line in a talk I gave for the Global Blake Network last year, discussing Nietzsche and William Blake. At around six minutes into the talk, I suggest that there are similarities between Blake and Nietzsche not only in content but in their styles, and I say,

In addition to their disorienting, defamiliarizing techniques, Nietzsche and Blake are both masters of the aphorism, and Nietzsche says that he who writes in aphorisms wants to be read in the blood, understood on a a visceral level.

Typically, I double check all of my quotations before I give a talk, but because my script did not place these words in quotation marks, I skipped right over it. I guess I thought I was paraphrasing Nietzsche’s line, rather than directly quoting it, but I felt very confident that it was “read in the blood.” That’s how I’ve remembered it over the years since I first read Zarathustra at nineteen, which is now more decades ago than I’d care to say. Just goes to show how much you can trust memory.

So here we have a mistake. Not a terrible one, because I was just paraphrasing really, and I’ve captured the spirit of Nietzsche’s remark, and, in the context I was using it, the exact words don’t change the point I was making (if we want to be pedantic, Nietzsche’s quote technically didn’t use any of the words in this post because he was writing in German).

But still, it’s a mistake that speaks to my sloppiness. I feel embarrassed that I made it. I worry what it says about my credibility: if I got this obvious quotation wrong, what else did I get wrong? An audience is therefore justified in being skeptical about my conclusions (of course, I think we should all be skeptical about all conclusions, so in theory I should welcome this kind of suspicion).

That anxiety over getting things wrong is an important point: when Stephen Dedalus declares his famous quotation — and, in context, he’s acquitting Shakespeare of the charge of having made a mistake by marrying Anne Hathaway — he really has himself in mind, and he’s trying to convince himself that his own mistakes aren’t really mistakes. The reason he has to convince himself, of course, is that he feels embarrassed and ashamed. Most notably, Buck Mulligan has reminded him that morning that he “killed his mother” by refusing to kneel and pray at her deathbed when she asked him. Stephen needs no reminding: he’s still dressed in black, mourning her many months later. He probably wonders if going off to France had been a mistake, and if staying in the Martello tower with Mulligan is a mistake, or if his many debts have been mistakes (he’s thinking about debt just before the “portals of discovery” quote). Maybe his whole idea of becoming an artist is a mistake.

[Sidebar: I’ve always been unsure who pays rent for the Martello tower. Stephen claims in Chapter 1 that he himself pays it — and it seems that many readers take him at his word here — but in real life, it was Oliver St. John Gogerty (upon whom Buck Mulligan was based) who paid the rent. In Chapter 2, Stephen recalls that he owes Mulligan “nine pounds,” in addition to a bunch of clothes he’s borrowed. Although Stephen sees Buck Mulligan as a “usurper” for demanding the key from him, it seems likely to me that Mulligan is actually the one paying rent, and *Stephen* is the moocher. I dunno, am I missing something? Is this yet another “portal of discovery” I’m making? Back to the post]

I think our culture does us a great disservice when it encourages us to feel dumb for having made a mistake. Why are schoolchildren reluctant to volunteer to answer questions in class? Many reasons, but one commonly cited reason is that they don’t want to get the answer wrong, and feel stupid or embarrassed or get made fun of.

But this point of view is entirely backwards: learning can only happen by being wrong, and by finding out you’re wrong (which is the only way to start being right). Human knowledge only advances by showing where previous thinkers were incorrect, but each of those errors were necessary steps. Sometimes it takes the smartest person in the room to make an astounding error that propels further discovery. In my own life, I never learned more about writing than I did as a grad student, when my dissertation advisor made revision suggestions to almost every sentence of my first draft of my first attempt at a scholarly article. I guess we could quibble about whether suggestions for revisions of style count as “errors,” but it sure felt like errors to see the page filled with red. But by george, I studied every last one of those suggestions and reverse engineered the reasoning behind each one. They were portals of discovery, alright.

The point is: our culture wrongly trains us to feel bad about making mistakes. And as a result of this cultural fear of errors, people have a tendency to double down on their faulty beliefs when others call them out — it’s as if admitting that you were wrong (gasp!) is one of the great crimes you could commit. The truth is exactly the opposite: intellectual honesty is one of the most important virtues, and it entails owning mistakes and wanting to correct one’s view of the world.

*

In terms of Nietzsche and his aphorisms, the situation is even more interesting because it has been argued that his writing invites misremembering. I was recently reading an introduction to Twilight of the Idols written by Tracy Strong (what a great name for a Nietzsche scholar). And he argues at one point that “Wanting to get [an aphorism] wrong is part of getting it right”! His example is another scholar who quotes the very famous “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” But, as Strong points out, this is a misquotation because it leaves out the opening of the sentence. The full aphorism is “From life’s military school — What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” That addition transforms the aphorism from a general statement — which is obviously not true in all cases…maybe not in many or even most cases — to an expression of military training, and it prompts us to consider it in light of Nietzsche’s references to war both literal and figurative, including his idea that “bad conscience” (Stephen Dedalus’s “agenbite of inwit”) is a result of warlike impulses being turned against the self, or his declaration that Twilight of the Idols itself is a “declaration of war” against the idols of philosophy.

It is here that Strong suggests that

Nietzsche’s sentences lend themselves to being wanted to be remembered […] without the shaping tone that gives thickness to an otherwise bald assertion. Therefore part of recovering the whole is remembering that one did not want to remember it. Wanting to get it wrong is part of getting it right. [emphasis in original]

This is really fascinating: the claim is that Nietzsche writes in a way that encourages us to misremember his aphorisms as more simplistic than they really are in context. This means that the misremembering — and striving against that misremembering — is part of our engagement with the aphorism. Essentially, we have to confront our mistakes and see how we got the aphorism wrong and how our mind wanted to get it wrong, which teaches us a lot about our mind. We have to enter those portals of discovery.

I’m actually reminded of a section of Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche characterizes intellectual work as entailing an attack on the tendency of the mind to simplify reality.

He describes a desire we all have to strive “for the apparent and superficial,” a desire with an

inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory — just as it involuntarily emphasizes certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the “external world,” retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate new “experiences,” to file new thigs in old files

[…]

This will to mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface — for every surface is a cloak — is countered by that sublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge who insists on profundity, multiplicity, and thoroughness, with a will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste. [emphasis in original]

Hence, Nietszsche believes that “in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty.”

Philosophy is a sublimation of our warlike impulses, a result of our desire to savagely attack the parts of us that want to simplify, to misremember the complexity of what we experience…and what we read.

This sort of attack on conventional reality, on our mind’s tendency to oversimplify reality in lazy ways, is a parallel to the way Strong claims we ought to confront our mind’s tendency to misremember Nietzsche’s aphorisms.

Here’s what Strong says about the way that Nietzsche’s aphorisms generate meaning:

To understand an aphorism one must take it into oneself so that it becomes oneself (think of this as incarnation) and ruminate on it, something for which, Nietzsche says, “one has almost to be a cow, and certainly not a modern man.” Aphorisms do not dominate or control their readers. One reads an aphorism: if it seems to be a truism, or patently false, or nonsensical, it is abandoned and forgotten, jogging perhaps only thoughts about the foolishness of those who would consider such a claim meaningful. If one is touched by it and responds, however, something is stirred. It is only at this point that exegesis begins, not as an attempt to determine what the aphorism means, but to describe the world to which one has responded through the aphorism.

Taking his later claims into account, about the way Nietzsche’s writing encourage us to misremember aphorisms, this struggle must entail confronting our misrememberings.

All of this is to say that our mistakes in reading Nietzsche are portals through which we discover greater meaning in his writings.

*

As a book about the “Fortunate Fall,” Finnegans Wake essentially advances the thesis that our mistakes are good things, because they provide us with opportunities to discover — not simply “learn not to make mistakes” but to discover specific things about ourselves and about the world, and grow in our understanding of both.

It’s worth reflecting on doorways in Finnegans Wake: while we can consider every experience to be a portal of some kind, leading us to new possibilities, mistakes are a special kind of portal that afford particularly valuable possibilities. We should all learn to love and cherish our mistakes.

A passage in II.2 uses the word “mistakes,” as it describes the “royal pair” of HCE and ALP, who ” have discusst their things of the past, crime and fable with shame, home and profit.” They’ve discussed the past, in all of its cussing and disgusting nature, including the Original Sin that has motivated the entire text. “They are tales all tolled,” tolling like the bell at HCE’s Fall. “[W]hat a world’s woe is each’s other’s weariness waiting to beadroll his own properer mistakes.”

In the fallen world, there is such woe not only in our mistakes but in the weariness wherein we fixate on wrongdoing, just waiting to list out wrongs [the annotations say that a “bead-roll” is a “long list, catalogue (originally, of persons to be prayed for)”]. The “prayers” of the fallen world are our fixation upon sins, those of ourselves and others — with an implication that the wrongs of others are also our own or potentially our own, and that these wrongs that are proprius (Latin for “his own”) are also “proper”: appropriate and necessary, for they form the basis for learning and forgiveness. [Compare the “proper sins” of HCE in I.3]

Yet these tales are told. It’s all said and done, and, as Campbell and Robinson summarize this passage, HCE and ALP are each “willing to do penance.” He, the “backslapping gladhander, free of his florid future and the other singing likeness,” and she, “who tears up lettereens she never apposed a pen upon,” who tears up the Letter accusing him.

The passage ends, “Ough, ough, brieve kindli,” which is a variant of “Auch, auch, brav’ Kindli,” German for “that too, good little child,” even as it recalls Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle!” It is a reminder of the Fall, even as it comforts us as children who are bound to make mistakes. And it has always sounded in my ears as “Breathe kindly” — be good to one another — even as the word “brieve” is a writ of inquiry in Scottish law, reminding us of HCE’s wrongdoing.

*

So now let’s return to my mistake. I misremembered Nietzsche’s claim that writing in aphorisms and in blood means that one wants to be learned by heart…and I turned it into writing in aphorisms means one wants to be “read in the blood,” which I gloss as “understood on a visceral level.”

What does this mistake reveal about my mind? Well, one thing to note is that I’ve transformed “learned by heart” — which usually (and here, ironically) means to learn it word for word — into deeply understanding a text. So it means that my mind wanted Nietzsche to be talking about having a profound understanding of his words, something felt as much as intellectualized. That’s the Nietzsche that my mind wants, rather than the Nietzsche who merely wants someone to remember the exact words.

This mistake probably speaks to my tendency to read Nietzsche generously (too generously?), and it should prompt me to slow down and be more skeptical of some of the positive impressions of Nietzsche that I have. Where have I misread him or subconsciously downplayed some of his less savory characteristics? For example, I sometimes dismiss his misogyny as mere jokes that he might not completely “mean,” or as ironic exaggerations of his biases that he deliberately uses to discourage readers from idolizing him. I don’t often enough really reckon with the fact that he might have just had some bad views and may not have been self-critical about them. Similarly, while I’m often quick to point out that Nietzsche’s ideas are compatible with dialectical materialism, and that Nietzsche’s negative comments about socialism are almost never in terms of economics but in terms of a certain philosophical outlook (an outlook of utopian socialisms that even Marx rejected), I do not often enough grapple with Nietzsche’s negative comments about the working class, or condemnation of things like the French Revolution.

I guess, in a sense, I don’t “grapple” with these things because I tend to shrug and say that even very bright thinkers get things wrong all the time (errors being portals of discovery, after all….). But it would be a good exercise to think through where areas in Nietzsche I disagree with might inform the rest of his philosophizing in more substantive ways, and think through ways of refining my response to his ideas.

Interestingly — and ironically, given the exact words of the quote — I think my misremembering of Nietzsche’s aphorism does a better job capturing the spirit of his comment and the spirit in which he actually did want readers to engage with his work than the literal words that I couldn’t learn by heart. The process Strong describes of exploring an aphorism is much more than committing an aphorism to memory…it is exactly a process of reading “in the blood,” of understanding Nietzsche not merely in an intellectualized way, but in a visceral way, in a way that connects to one’s everyday life. Nietzsche literally said that he “wrote in the blood,” and my misremembering has translated that into saying he needs to be “read in the blood,” incorporated figuratively into the reader’s body.

So maybe I’m talking myself into thinking that this error is actually, in a roundabout way, correct!

And maybe that means I can say, along with Homer Simpson, “Marge, my friend, I haven’t learned a thing.”