Thus Spoke Nietzsche

by

Hugh R. Whinfrey

Friedrich Nietzsche was an intuitive philosopher, as opposed to an analytic philosopher. He wrote in riddles and aphorisms, intentionally forcing the reader to think. One necessarily needs a certain level of self-confidence in one's own mental abilities in order to 'understand' what he wrote.

Exactly what motivated Nietzsche to come up with his own philosophy is not only an interesting tangential question, but in his case turns out to explain much of the philosophy as well. The description of his method as 'intuitive' underscores its somewhat pragmatic construction.

This paper will trace in some detail the sequence of catastrophes that constitute Nietzsche's life, and then offer a short analysis of his philosophy in the context of his life. The motivation lies in explaining the philosophy by communicating the 'feeling' behind it, instead of through a dry analytical description.

Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, was born in Prussia in 1844 to a family that had at least three generations of respectable clergymen on both sides.¹ The locality was "a very nationalistic pro-German area."² The family claimed descent from a fugitive Polish count (pr. Nietsky), and the local population in general had a strong admixture of Slav blood.³ In Ecce Homo Nietzsche reflected on the times he had been mistaken for a Pole, and concluded that he belonged "to those who have only a sprinkling of German blood in them."⁴

When he was five, both his father and infant brother died. The result was a household of four adult women along with Friedrich and his younger sister Elizabeth.5 This is generally taken as the pivotal event in his life, and Nietzsche himself described his life from this point onwards as that of a "homeless wanderer."⁶

His brilliance in the local school led to his acceptance at the exclusive Pforta boarding school at age 14. Pforta counted among its philosophically prominent alumnae Fichte and the Schlegel brothers.⁷ While at Pforta he conducted, between 1860 and 1862, a small monthly intellectual forum, called "Germania", devoted to music and literature.⁸ Upon leaving Pforta, he enrolled, in 1864, in the University of Bonn intending to study theology and the classics.⁹

During his second term at the University in Bonn, Nietzsche was inspired by Professor Friedrich Ritschl to give up theological studies and concentrate on classical studies under him. When Ritschl moved to Leipzig University in 1865, Nietzsche followed him.¹⁰ In Leipzig, the main threads emerged which were to later characterize his philosophical works. In his studies, he was particularly taken with the pre-Socratic philosophers.¹¹ He discovered Schopenhauer. And through Ritschl, he was introduced in late 1868 to Richard Wagner, spending an evening with him in discussion of Schopenhauer and music at the house of Wagner's sister in Leipzig.

The Wagner association is generally taken as the central paradigm for Nietzsche's life from this point forward. The extent to which Nietzsche adapted himself to facilitate Wagner's influence remains curious. Nietzsche had been subjected to considerable pressure during his "Germania" days to take up adulation of Wagner, but had always remained impassive.¹² On the other hand, this meeting was actually requested by Wagner, after hearing from Frau Ritschl of Nietzsche's enthusiasm for his Meisterlied.¹³ Nietzsche's sudden attraction to Wagner in mid-1868 seems to be grounded in social contact with the sympathetic Frau Ritschl, with whom he engaged in some emotional intellectual argumentation over Wagner, however who took which side is unknown.¹⁴ At this same time in 1868 Nietzsche was busily freeing himself from Schopenhauer's metaphysics¹⁵, thus creating a hero-vacuum in his life.

Nietzsche evidences some adulation of the composer in a letter to Erwin Rhode dated approximately a month before the unexpected invitation to meet Wagner. In it Nietzsche wrote "one cannot be astonished enough at the significance that one single artistic disposition has in this man" and that "In Wagner, as in Schopenhauer, I like the ethical air, the Faustian odor, Cross, Death, Grave, and so on."¹⁶ On the other hand, while Nietzsche was a talented musician in his own right, his motives may have been mixed, as he wrote in the same letter "I have my sights on a woman of whom people tell me marvels, the wife of Professor Brockhaus, sister of Richard Wagner".¹⁷

Nietzsche's subsequent appointment as professor of classical philology at Basel University paved the way to the continuation of the relationship, as Wagner was then residing near Basel at Tribschen. He was welcomed by the Wagner household with increasing frequency, and the visits soon became the standard agenda for his weekends, continuing for twenty-three visits in all over several years.¹⁸ Wagner found a common ground with Nietzsche in both ancient Greece and Schopenhauer¹⁹, whose aesthetics were an object of intensified concern to him.²⁰ For Nietzsche, he "was essentially at home only in the rarefied atmosphere of the intellectual life"²¹ and Wagner provided the pinnacle of this.

The role of Cosima, Wagner's somewhat mysterious mistress seems vastly under-rated. She was nearly 30 years younger than Wagner, an illegitimate daughter of Lizst, married to the conductor Hans von Buelow, openly living with Wagner, and seven years older than Nietzsche.²² At Tribschen, "Cosima played the role of trying to draw Nietzsche into German nationalism and antisemitism. She was a virulent antisemite and her slogan was, 'burn Jews.'"²³ Nietzsche may have harbored a deep-seated romantic affection for her. He wrote to her in January 1889, on the edge of his final mental collapse, "Ariadne, I love you." and signed it "Dionysus"²⁴. His slavish adulation of Wagner does seem to contain an excessive element in which one cannot rule out an attempt to please her.

Nietzsche's book, The Birth of Tragedy, was published on the last day of 1871.²⁵ "It was his first book, it was sensational and scandalous, and it ruined him. His reputation as a scholar and philologist after that was tainted. Most people did not understand what the book was about. Only Wagnerians liked it. The academics called it sheer propaganda."²⁶ "Wagner and Cosima were, of course, enchanted by it."²⁷

Wagner was essentially trying to use Nietzsche as his propagandist.²⁸ Nietzsche responded handsomely. "The sections in The Birth of Tragedy from the sixteenth to the end--probably the worst thing Nietzsche ever wrote--are all Wagner propaganda added by Nietzsche after he produced the first 15 sections of The Birth of Tragedy; a kind of an afterthought to make Wagner feel pleased."²⁹

Equally as scandalous in academic circles was the view Nietzsche took of the Archaic Greeks. He represented them not as happy and cheerfully optimistic, as it was generally accepted, but as pessimistic and distrustful of life.³⁰ He rebelled even further by asserting that the tragedies of Aeschylus represented an attempt to overcome their pessimism with a brave affirmation of life despite its pain and evil.³¹ His immediate reward was that students refused to register for his classes.³²

Finally, the arrogance of The Birth of Tragedy was stunning. Nietzsche, at age 28, "clearly depicts himself as the superior successor to Socrates".³³ Nietzsche admired the personal bravery of Socrates.³⁴ He also adapted the Socratic method of teaching to his writings,³⁵ making his works difficult for readers used to logical exposition. His claim of superiority over Socrates was however based on his judgment that Socrates had disrupted the harmony of the Athenian soul, bring about the victory of logic over the Apollonian element of the mind.³⁶ "This disruption, he believed, led eventually to the rigid intellectual academic philosophy of German Idealism, and to unnatural excessive rationalization and repression in modern life."³⁷ Nietzsche was, of course, going to fix this disruption and restore the lost harmony to his world.

The dogma was that music transcended logic. The insight came from Socrates's recurring dream exhorting him practice music, which he finally does in his cell in the Crito.³⁸ Wagner was of course the pied piper who would fix everything. One needs a breathtaking amount of courage to dare to glimpse, even a for moment, the full extent of what Nietzsche thought the effect of a positive reception of his book would have produced. It prompts one to think of the Republic.

Wagner and Cosima moved to Bayreuth in Bavaria shortly after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy.³⁹ The physical estrangement only added to the disappointment of the book's reception. Disillusionment with Wagner mounted over the next several years for Nietzsche. Wagner's increasing antisemitism, the admission ticket to the 'inner circle' at Bayreuth, revolted Nietzsche.⁴⁰ "The last straw, however, was not antisemitism but Wagner's Parsifal. It is a Christian opera and goes back to Christian themes--yet Wagner was an avowed atheist. Nietzsche felt this was hypocritical and a "sell-out" because it was obviously written to attract the kind of audience that was attending the Bayreuth festival."⁴¹ Nietzsche spent the rest of his sane life trying to distance himself from Wagner. By 1879 Nietzsche had broken with Wagner, Schopenhauer, and the University of Basel, resigning his position, and went off to spend the next decade as a wandering philosopher.⁴²

There is much that can be made of the argument that there is significant continuity to Nietzsche's philosophy over his entire life, in the sense that Wagner had only a superficial influence on the end result. Nietzsche was already deconstructing Schopenhauer prior to meeting Wagner. However the depth to which Wagner had penetrated Nietzsche the individual can also be seen in an analysis of Nietzsche's musical compositions. Nietzsche composed both before and after the Tribschen period, but evidently not during it.⁴³ His compositions clearly parallel the literary evidence of the fluctuations in his feelings for Wagner, as evidenced by the Wagnerian traits Nietzsche reproduced in his music.⁴⁴ In the later 1870's it is clear that he was asserting his musical independence from Wagner.⁴⁵ That the Wagnerian traits did not persist does argue for the same effect in his philosophy.

Nietzsche's relationships with women were a continuing source of frustration to him. After Cosima, there was the happily married Louise Ott, of Slavic extraction, who had made a strong impression on him in 1876.⁴⁶ Then in 1877 he evidently fell in love with Mathilde Trampedach, from the Baltic provinces of Russia, who rejected his proposal.⁴⁷ Five years later he dared again to take another woman seriously - the Russian Lou Salome.⁴⁸ She was intellectually precocious and "emotionally retarded to the extent of accepting men's friendship without any sexual arriere-pensees or matrimonial designs."⁴⁹

Lou got much closer to Nietzsche than either his sister or his other long-time acquaintances and meant correspondingly much more to him.⁵⁰ The platonic affair ended in 1883, probably with a rejection of a marriage proposal. She subsequently co-habitated, platonically, with one of his friends.⁵¹ "His letters of this time show only too clearly the agonized brutality of a man whose highest hopes have been shattered."⁵²

Nietzsche, in response, wrote in a frenzy and produced the first three books of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 10 days each.⁵³ These three books are considered Nietzsche's finest work.⁵⁴ It is the work of a man struggling to logically consolidate the wrenching tragedies of his own life into a philosophical position that would allow him to go on in the face of a seemingly endless succession of utter betrayals by his loved ones. The enigma is that he had the will to go on, and this point did not escape him.

"Zarathustra repudiated The Birth of Tragedy, repudiated the dualism of Apollo and Dionysus, or any dualism such as reason and the will to power, and made the will to power the basic and only urge of man."⁵⁵ His anger at the duality of emotion and logic, which he blamed on Socrates, and which was at the root of his inner conflict, was expressed in a return to the monism of the pre-Socratics. Zarathustra was Nietzsche's own Aeschylusian drama. On the surface, he was now playing the very role which he had earlier assigned to Wagner. Below the surface, he was just healing the pain.

Zarathustra closes with the notion of eternal recurrence. This notion is not intuitive, and buried within it is a vacuous expression of a teleological view of human existence. Nietzsche had the will to go on in his life, but he could not fully escape Socrates and now needed a 'purpose for living,' as a 'reason for living' was neither acceptable in theoretical terms nor extant in the context of his experiences. Eternal recurrence provided his answer to 'Why should one bother with life?'.

The final heartbreak of his life involved his sister Elizabeth. In 1884, a little over a year after Nietzsche's break with Lou, Elizabeth married the notorious antisemite Bernard Foerster, who had founded a German settlement in Paraguay.⁵⁶ Foerster was "even more typical proto-Nazi than the indubitably gifted Wagner."⁵⁷ Although Nietzsche alternately passionately loved and passionately hated his sister, she was devoted to him, which no other woman ever had been.⁵⁸ Nietzsche knew "that her character and outlook were basically opposed to what he wanted his own to be."⁵⁹ The disgust of his new in-law was compounded by the fact that Elizabeth, the only continuous companion of the lonely Nietzsche since his resignation from the University, was to be leaving Europe.⁶⁰

In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin, throwing his arms around the neck of a horse being flogged.⁶¹ He was taken back to Basel, and from there to the asylum at Jena.⁶² During the next ten years "he was essentially a vegetable."⁶³ He did have lucid moments, but "at no time could he be induced to discuss any of his works or ideas."⁶⁴ The disease was not paranoia and probably an unusual type of general paralysis, with syphilis highly suspected as the underlying cause.⁶⁵ He died August 25, 1900.⁶⁶

The fundamental tension in Nietzsche's life was between the humility required by his strict pietist Lutheran background and the necessary hubris of a late nineteenth century intellectual. Strindberg suffered from the same dilemma. The only point of reconciliation either of them hit upon was a psychotic Anti-Christ self-image.

The intellectual life was seductive to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer palliated his guilty conscience after dropping his theological studies. The guilt never went away however. Nietzsche found Wagner as a second palliative. It wore off also. He tried women as a palliative, deciding in 1874 to get married as soon as possible.⁶⁷ Nothing worked. He broke with Wagner over his scandalously un-Christian ethics. The guilt kept nagging at him. He tried the humble life as a wayward pilgrim to nowhere in particular. He was still not pure enough for love incarnate, Lou Salome, to want him. Then he finally faced his conscience and attacked, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, followed a year later by Beyond Good and Evil, followed a year later by The Genealogy of Morals were the results:

As long as the utility reigning in moral value judgments is solely the utility of the herd, as long as one considers only the preservation of the community, and immorality is sought exactly and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the survival of the community-there can be no morality of "neighbor love."⁶⁸

I take bad conscience to be a deep-seated malady to which man succumbed under the pressure of the most profound transformation he ever underwent-the one that made him once and for all a sociable and pacific creature.⁶⁹

Man, with his need for self-torture, his sublimated cruelty resulting from the cooping up of his animal nature within a polity, invented bad conscience in order to hurt himself, after the blocking of the more natural outlet of his cruelty. Then this guilt-ridden man seized upon religion in order to exacerbate his self-torment to the utmost. The thought of being in God's debt became his new instrument of torture.⁷⁰

The famous übermensch of Zarathustra is Nietzsche's only option. To resolve the guilt of being an intellectual he had to either become 'stupid' again or pursue the other extreme and overcome his conscience with his intellect, which is precisely his definition of an ubermensch. The above passages are simply Nietzsche's pep talks to himself as he strives to push his intellect towards the final coup d'etat.

Nietzsche, of course, did resolve the problem in the end. Whether his intellect actually executed the coup d'etat, or whether he sank the other way and scuttled his intellect entirely, seems really irrelevant as they both, in my opinion, paradoxically turn out to be one and the same thing. That he refused to discuss his prior intellectual activities in lucid moments during his vegetable phase evidences such.

The message of Nietzsche deals both with the limits of the intellect and the limits of Christianity, and is downright scary to anyone pursuing either to an extreme in the modern world. One does not need an intellectual analysis of his philosophy set against Darwin, Kant, Hegel, or Schopenhauer to understand this.

Seattle, June 1994

Endnotes

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