Incompatibilities Between Superior Minds

It is curious to note some incompatibilities between superior minds. There seems to be an obscure element that, in some cases, forces their repulsion. I say this thinking of Pessoa and Nietzsche, or rather, of Pessoa towards Nietzsche. The Portuguese referred to the German as a mad ascetic admirer of force and domination. In other notes, the mention of Nietzsche is almost always loaded with a pejorative tone. The curious thing is this: as artists, there is much in common between the two. In the short essay entitled Apontamentos para uma Estética não Aristotélica (Notes on a Non-Aristotelian Aesthetic), Pessoa defends an aesthetic based on force, an aesthetic where the supreme degree of expression is reached through maximum power, an aesthetic in which the artist “forces others, whether they like it or not, to feel what he felt, that dominates them through inexplicable force, as the strongest athlete dominates the weakest, as the spontaneous dictator subdues the whole people (because he is the whole synthesized and therefore stronger than the whole summed up), as the founder of religions dogmatically and absurdly converts the souls of others into the substance of a doctrine which, at the bottom, is nothing but himself”. Nietzsche, a symbol of the power of expression, the progenitor of a work where exclamations leap out of the leaves like rockets, said that “the greatness of an artist is measured according to the intensity employed to achieve the great style.” It is a nice summary of Pessoa’s aesthetic theory. But still, incompatible…