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“The Life of Nietzsche”

The Birth of Tragedy is not a typical work in philology. It does not, for instance, present a classical text in its vernacular and interpret it; instead, around a philological theme, namely the birth of tragedy out of music and chorus, it builds a discourse derived from various sources such as modern philosophy and literature and keeps certain issues and problems of the modern age both in the background and the foreground. Some of the issues and notions Nietzsche brings forth in this book are the Apollonian, or principle of individuation, and the Dionysian, the state of intoxication (or the state where there is no individuation), dream and illusion, ecstasy and ecstatic experience, image-symbol relationship, art and creativity, plastic art and musical art, poetry, music and language, tragic culture, the tragic and tragedy, spectacle and how it is experienced, science and knowledge, Socrates and rationality, the relationship between art and science, truth and truthfulness, and the phenomenon of Wagner. Moreover, Nietzsche wrote two short essays in this period, which, though unpublished, develop parallel insights along with those of The Birth of Tragedy: “Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” addresses the question of truth within the context of language, and “On the Pathos of Truth” is concerned with how we relate to what we call truth, that is, the experience of truth. In other notes of this period, Nietzsche deals with issues of culture and its make-up and brings out further insights on culture in general, and, in particular, on tragic culture in ancient Greece.

When this book was first published, the community of philologists condemned it; one of the first to criticize it and reveal its philological shortcomings was Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who later became a renowned philologist. Nietzsche's friend Rohde engaged in a polemic with Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, but Wagner was compelled to save his own face. These polemics revolved on the facade of Nietzsche’s work, namely the developmental-historical origin of tragedy, which is of minor significance compared to the major insights of the book. One such insight is the value and truth of the Dionysian and the ecstatic experience both for culture and for the individual; another one is the significance of art and creativity along with other human experiences. Yet another one is the importance of dealing with suffering, loss and death so as to retain a balanced existence in the world. During the polemics, Nietzsche kept silent; he must have been grateful to his friends who came to his defense, but not enthused by the way they had shown their support. However, The Birth of Tragedy had other shortcomings, some of which Nietzsche later noted himself and outlined in a new preface when the book was republished in 1886: the book was written under the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner (some of Nietzsche's insights are masked by the language of Schopenhauer), and the last ten sections, for the most part, repeat the ideas and insights of the first fifteen sections, in addition to wantonly glorifying Wagner. Erwin Rohde later wrote and published a book on ancient Greek culture called Psyche. But, by this time, they were no longer friends, and neither The Birth of Tragedy nor Nietzsche’s name is mentioned in his work.

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Next came the four Untimely Meditations (published 1874-76, German title Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, literally ‘observations not conforming to the times’) in which Nietzsche critiques the modern age in its various aspects. After having developed an interpretation of ancient Greek culture, he would use the expectations of Dionysian-tragic wisdom as a barometer to appraise the modern age. In first meditation, David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer, he exposes modern cultural philistinism and modern complacency; modern man, he claims, is content with the information he receives from newspapers, his encyclopedic knowledge and with his operas; on account of these, he acts and feels like his culture is the best possible culture. In short, he is not a creative being, nor part of a creative culture which expects creativity from individuals. Nietzsche, on the other hand, posits the value of style and unity of style in the domain of culture; it is in this context that he critiques David Strauss as a writer. In the second meditation, On the Uses and Disadvantages for History for Life, Nietzsche re-evaluates the overestimation of the historical and the historical sense and posits, next to the historical, the relevance and significance of the unhistorical; this meditation is insightful regarding the intra-dynamics of the historical and the unhistorical, memory and forgetting. In the third meditation, Schopenhauer as Educator, the issues of education, learning, and knowledge are brought forth in relation to the life and works of Schopenhauer, whom Nietzsche praises as honest, cheerful and steadfast. As opposed to prescriptive learning, Nietzsche proposes an education based on ‘knowing oneself’ and explores its possibilities in the dynamics of culture where one would find its archetypes. In the final meditation, Wagner in Bayreuth, Nietzsche points to the importance of the phenomenon of Wagner and the spectacle of Bayreuth as a locus of culture where it can transform itself through the symbolic significance of a great artistic event.

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In Basel, Nietzsche had met Paul Rèe, the author of Psychological Observations and Origin of Moral Feelings. He became friends with him and, during his leave from the University for one year (1876-77), traveled to Italy with him where they stayed with Malwida von Meysenbug in Sorrento. There they read (usually Rèe would read aloud to Nietzsche) the works of the French moralists such as Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld and Vauvenargues. Inspired by Rèe and the French, Nietzsche wrote aphorisms which were brought together and published as Human, All Too Human, I & II in 1886 (originally, there were three books: Human, All Too Human, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, and The Wanderer and His Shadow) and Daybreak (1881). In these aphorisms, Nietzsche expresses his thoughts on moral feelings, sensations and prejudices, and the nature of art and artistic production, among other issues. Some of the moral prejudices that Nietzsche reveals in these aphorisms are pity, altruism or selfless love, revenge, shame, and vanity. He expresses many other thoughts in these aphorisms, and this period can be said to be the experimental period. He himself describes this period, in retrospect, as convalescence, recovery from the romanticism and pessimism of Wagner and Schopenhauer, two of his primary and most significant influences. In 1879, Nietzsche retires from the University with a pension due to health reasons and will begin his peripatetic existence, wandering through Germany, Switzerland (especially the Upper Engadine region), the south of France, and various cities in Italy, writing, over the course of next ten years, some of the most groundbreaking philosophical works, all while suffering and overcoming the most agonizing, if not extremely debilitating physical conditions.

Relieved from academic duties, Nietzsche finishes the two books of aphorisms and starts a new book called The Gay Science (1882), another book of aphorisms, yet significantly different from the previous two; many thoughts and ideas Nietzsche had been living with are transformed in this book, while he also further explores the problem of aesthetics and the crisis of art. Nietzsche develops a different notion of knowing and learning here, which he calls la gaya scienza (a phrase adopted from the Provencal poets’ lo gai saber), and some of the themes and notions that become crucial to his philosophy make their first appearance in this book; namely, the death of God, amor fati, and the eternal return. Furthermore, it is here that Nietzsche, for the first time, calls morality problematic; what he calls morality will later be coined as the ‘morality of good and evil,’ the world-view or perspective which claims that there is only one truth or one true interpretation of existence. His more rigorous study of morality will come later; with The Gay Science, he is making preparations for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of which Nietzsche said, “among my writings - stands to my mind by itself. With that I have given mankind the greatest gift that has ever been made to it so far.” (Ecce Homo, Preface).




In the spring of 1882, Nietzsche met Lou Salome (who would become Lou Andreas-Salome in 1887 after marrying Carl Friedrich Andreas, a philologist) in Rome (at St. Peter's) through his friend Paul Rèe. Salome was part of a group of idealistic young women, called the ‘Roman Club', formed by Nietzsche's friend Malwida von Meysenbug. Lou Salome was an extremely bright, attractive, and enterprising young Russian woman, who was a student at Zürich University aspiring to be a writer and would later become the confidant and lover of Rainer Maria Rilke and friend of Sigmund Freud. Nietzsche, Rèe and Lou formed an intellectual bond which Lou called the ‘Trinity.’ The attraction of both men to Lou would create tensions in the ‘Trinity,’ and Nietzsche’s desire to live with Lou, to be her teacher and his expectations from her to bring him out of his hermit-like life style, remained unfulfilled. The disintegration of the ‘Trinity,’ aided in one sense by the intrusions of Nietzsche’s sister, would cause terrible suffering in him: “I am straining every fiber of my self-control, but I have lived alone too long, fed too long on my own fat, so now I am being broken as no one else could be on the wheel of my own passions” (Letter to Franz Overbeck, 25 December 1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, already conceived before the encounter with Lou, with whom Nietzsche discussed its central themes, would be written on top of yet another layer of suffering.




The eternal return, which is the fundamental conception of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), came to him as an insight by Lake Silvaplana in the Upper Engadine; he used to spend some of his time in this region while staying in a house in Sils-Maria (it has been made into a Nietzsche-Haus (there is another in Naumburg) and is open to the public). Of this insight, Nietzsche said: “this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, ‘6000 feet beyond man and time.’ That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me” (Ecce Homo). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a unique work in terms of both its genre and its depth and simplicity, and is one of the most inimitable poetic texts of the 19th century, while also functioning as a stunning and uniquely singular parody of the Bible. Here, Zarathustra, a type that Nietzsche reconstructs out of the historical figure Zarathustra, the ancient Iranian prophet and founder of Zoroastrianism, traverses the path of self-knowledge by teaching the eternal return and the Overman, the new meaning of existence, in order to overcome the morality of good and evil.

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In the next period, Nietzsche produces two works, namely Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which are his most developed critiques of what he called the ‘morality of good and evil.’ In the former, Nietzsche shows the conditions of morality or its make-up, whether they are found in our philosophical, religious, linguistic or scientific experiences, and paves the way to think ‘beyond good and evil,’ leaping over simple antithetical analyses and assessments. In Genealogy, Nietzsche dissects the soul configuration of the world-order shaped by morality and exposes its make-up as ressentiment, that is, rejection of, or contempt for that which is different or greater than one, bad conscience and guilt feeling, which is linked to the syndrome of crime and punishment, and the ascetic ideal which posits, as a value, the denial of the body, sensuality and sexuality. The three parts of the book make up a magnificent study of the soul, which could be called Nietzsche’s psychology.

It was also in this period and just prior to it (from 1883 – 1888) that Nietzsche wrote many of the notes which were subsequently gathered and published under the misleading title, The Will to Power. Power in Nietzsche’s thought is a broad notion and need not be confused with its common and everyday usage. With the notion of the will to power, Nietzsche tries to, on the one hand, link culture and life (or human being and cosmos) and, on the other hand, bring together, under one thought, various aspects of human existence, such as knowledge and art. Many other ideas are developed and explored in these notes as well, which illuminate Nietzsche’s philosophy and some of its main concerns. One such idea is perspectivism, which claims that our relationship to existence is essentially perspectival or interpretive. Another one is the notion of value which, in fact, can be traced back to The Gay Science. All the other notions, such as revaluation and transvaluation, are somehow related to the notion of value. However, what has been published as The Will to Power is not a work which Nietzsche fashioned as his other books, but notes edited and compiled after his death, and during the summer of 1888 his original philosophical project was abandoned and re-developed as Revaluation of All Values, for which Nietzsche’s outline was: Book 1: The Anti-Christ. Attempt at a Critique of Christianity. Book 2: The Free Spirit. Critique of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement. Book 3: The Immoralist. Critique of the Most Fatal Kind of Ignorance, Morality. Book 4: Dionysos. Philosophy of Eternal Return. Aside from the first book, this work was never completed, and the posthumously published notes, often referred to by people such as Heidegger as Nietzsche’s magnum opus, have since been republished by Cambridge University Press as Writings from the Late Notebooks and it is untenable to refer to them as a completed text – they cannot be seen in the same light as Nietzsche’s other works. Though an important and extremely valuable addition, they are and remain notes, many of which were further developed by Nietzsche in other texts.

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In the last period of his life as a writer, Nietzsche wrote, within the span of one year (in 1888), four short books which are highly polemical, temperamental, volatile, if not explosive, though some of his most eloquent and measured texts, where he truly accomplishes his goal of ‘saying in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book’. Twilight of the Idols is Nietzsche's critique of idealism and his re-evaluation of Socrates, one of his favorite themes; men such as Socrates, Goethe, Wagner, and others become masks or types Nietzsche uses to illustrate conditions of the soul and points to strive for. Anti-Christ is a vehement but insightful and sustained polemic against Christianity, and The Case of Wagner is his overall evaluation of Wagner where Nietzsche accepts his gratitude to the master and outlines his points of contention and what he sees as most problematic in Wagner as an artistic type. Finally, Ecce Homo, the last philosophical book Nietzsche wrote before he collapsed (his final text, rather fittingly, is actually the book of poems, Dionysos-Dithyramben), is a testimony to his life. In this autobiographical work, Nietzsche evaluates his life and his works; it is an honest, but also comic (Nietzsche with the mask of Aristophanes) appraisal of a man who knew his greatness and lived it to its fullest as a writer and a thinker.

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On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in a piazza in Turin. It is oft repeated that he saw a coach-driver beating his horse, threw his arms around the horse in tears, and collapsed; however, this is but another apocryphal legend that cannot be corroborated with absolute verity. Italian Nietzsche scholar Verrecchia investigated and disputed this tale, which was originally published in an Italian newspaper somewhat akin to the Daily News called Nuova Antologia. It was written on September 16, 1900, nearly one month after Nietzsche’s death, which means eleven years after the supposed incident occurred, making the account rather dubious (Verrechia, A. “Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin” in Harrison, T, ed. Nietzsche in Italy. (Saratoga: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 105-112). The journalist who wrote the article did not sign his name to it. It was an anonymous article. Yet, that article is not the most graphic account; the one which is most well known was written more than fifty years after Nietzsche died. It includes the violent thrashing of the horse, which the first article did not, Nietzsche’s wild embrace of the horse, and then, quite dramatically and as if Nietzsche possessed some uncanny degree of strength, it proclaims that after losing consciousness, Nietzsche sank to the ground still clutching the horse. This account “in almost identical words,” was repeated, Verecchia notes, by a serious philosophy professor in his book on Nietzsche. The story is more and more difficult to believe, less a true scene from Nietzsche’s life and more something out of Crime & Punishment. While two municipal guards may have seen Nietzsche embrace a horse and refuse to release it, the account is hardly that of the myth it has become. What is known is that Nietzsche collapsed in the piazza. When his friend Overbeck arrived sometime later, he escorted Nietzsche to Basel where he was kept in a psychiatric clinic for a week, then taken to the famous clinic in Jena where he would be close to his mother.

After staying for fourteen months at the clinic in Jena, he was taken to Naumburg where his mother and sister took care of him. The mother died in 1897 and Nietzsche was under Elisabeth’s care until his death on 25 August 1900, at which point she inherited her brother's intellectual property. Nietzsche’s ‘madness’ though, as Blanchot noted, is altogether unique; in seeking, through reason, to affirm the Eternal Return, Nietzsche is ‘mad’ because our language cannot capture, or express such a thought. However, “in the silent language of his madness in which he seems to us to suffer the consequences of this passage to another language removed from the ordinary forms of temporality,” he is still mad, but it is a madness “in which the formulation of the return has always already engaged him. Mad? – But of a madness other than ours, other than his” (The Step Not Beyond, 40). As for the question of whether or not Nietzsche actually had syphilis, these claims have been vigorously disputed, in particular and at length by Richard Schain. It is improbable that Nietzsche ever had syphilis, but more likely suffered from “endogenous” psychosis (a schizophrenic disorder originating within the body, not from an outside agent); in a short paper, Dr. Leonard Sax argued that nearly all of Nietzsche's symptoms correlate in particular with meningioma (eye cancer) of the right optic nerve. Schain states that a “final diagnosis of chronic schizophrenic disorder . . . is perfectly compatible with all of the manifestations of mental disorder and physical dysfunction exhibited by Nietzsche” (The Legend of Nietzsche’s Syphilis, Schain, p. 103). At very least, it is important to take these other hypotheses into consideration and not continue to perpetuate the syphilis hypothesis as if it were an incontestable fact, as has too often been done; only with the exhumation of Nietzsche’s corpse will this long standing question ever be resolved with any certainty, but it is far too late for such an investigation.

In the early 20th century, Elisabeth was instrumental in distorting Nietzsche’s work, deliberately forging letters and altering other passages, struggling to mold Nietzsche into an icon for the German state through editing and publishing work to suit her framing of it. She tried to establish a relationship with the Nazis by such tactics as inviting Hitler to the archives. But contrary to common (dis)knowledge, Hitler, though he did read Nietzsche, read him sparingly (in the leading biographies on Hitler, mention of Nietzsche is incidental) and was more influenced by Wagner’s (who figures prominently in the biographies) anti-Semitic diatribes than by a philosopher whose contempt for the state and for his nation surely perturbed the fervent nationalist. Elisabeth, because her comprehension of Nietzsche’s work was extremely limited, hired Rudolf Steiner, the Goethe scholar and founder of anthroposophy, to give her private lessons, which proved fruitless. Steiner stated that she was “a complete laywoman in all that concerns her brother’s doctrine” and that her thinking was “void of even the least logical consistency.”

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It was not until just before World War Two, prior to Walter Kaufmann, George Bataille’s pioneering work in Acèphale would aid in emancipating Nietzsche from the stain of National Socialism, and give him back to the free spirits. Nietzsche, Bataille said, was “the least patriotic of all Germans, and the least German of the Germans.” The stateless individual, who always spoke against his nation and the fervor of nationalism, had finally been freed; the man who held the masses in contempt (fascism is only possible by turning individuals into a mass) and usually spoke on behalf of individuals (though community was important to Nietzsche as well, and individualism often a symptom of decadence in society) and for mixed breeding (he did at times also see this as a source of the 19th century’s spiritual confusion), found in Bataille a Dionysian spirit who wrestled his work from such incongruous associations and made it radiate and dance like an exploding star, spreading out and above the sordid domains in which it was but temporarily caught.

On September 24, 1886, Nietzsche stated in a letter that “people will be allowed to read [my work] in about the year 2000.” It has not taken that long to liberate his work from unjust and absurd correlations, but perhaps, in this new millennium, it is even freer of such associations, and we will be able to read and interpret this work with a greater degree of clarity. The great noontide may be at hand ~ has it not always been, eternally?

If you have any questions or comments, please contact the Executive Director of the Nietzsche Circle, Rainer J. Hanshe, at “ncinfo AT nietzschecircle DOT com.“