![]() ![]() Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) |
German philosopher and critic of culture,
who influenced a number of the major writers and philosophers of the 20th
century Germany and France. Friedrich Nietzsche's most popular book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883-1885), in which the ancient Persian prophet tells the world that
God is dead, went ignored at the time of its appearance. Full of
provocative ideas, Nietzsche was a master of aphoristic form and use of
contradictions. Before and after the rise and fall of the Nazis, he was
widely misrepresented as an anti-Semite and a woman hater, and many
philosophers found it difficult to take his writings seriously. Like
the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche often contradicted himself. But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: 'Could it be possible! This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!' Friedrich Nietzsche born in Röcken, near Leipzig, the son of Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and Franziska (neé Oehler), a devout mother with profound Christian faith. His father died – mad; the diagnosis was softening of the brain – in 1849. Franziska lost her youngest son in 1850 and moved her family to Naumberg, where Nietzsche spent the rest of his childhood with his mother, sister, father's mother, and two aunts – they all pampered him. Nietzsche
began to write of his intellectual maturation from an early age. In one
of his 1884 journal entries he wrote: "When I was twelve years old I
conjured up for myself a marvelous trinity: God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Devil. My deduction was that God, thinking himself,
created the second person of the godhead, but that to be able to think
himself he had to think his opposite, and thus had to create it.—That
is how I began to philosophize." (Comic Relief: Nietzsche's Gay Science by Kathleen Marie Higgins, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 158) During
his high school and college years, he penned nine autobiographical
sketches. At
the Pforta school, an elite boarding school, Nietzsche discovered the
philosopher-poet Friedrich Höldering, virtually forgotten at that time.
He wrote an essay on him and was given a low grade for it and adviced
by his teacher "to stick to poets who are healthier, more lucid, and
more German." (I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux, Tim Duggan Books, 2018, p. 32) After years of self-scrutiny Nietzsche
refused to take communion, to the shock of his mother. "My dear old
Fritz is a noble person, despite our differences of opinion," she wrote
to her brother Edmund. "He truly interprets life or, more accurately, time and
appreciates only the lofty and good and despises everything crude. Yet I am often worried about this dear child of mine." (Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rüdiger Safranski, translated by Shelley Frisch, Granta Books, 2002, p. 44) Rejecting his father's faith, Nietzsche became a lifelong rebel
against Christianity. "The very word "Christianity is a
misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on
the cross. The "Gospels" died on the cross." (The Antichrist by F. W. Nietzsche, translated from the German with an introduction by H. L. Mencken, Alfred A. Knopf, 1931, p. 11) Nietzsche was brought up by pious female relatives. He studied
classical philology at the universities of Bonn (1864-65) and Leipzig
(1864-68), and became at the age of 25 a professor at the University of
Basel, Switzerland, but he had not finished his dissertation or
postgradual thesis. Among his acquaintances there was Jakob Burckhardt,
the
writer of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).
Although Burckhardt was a neurotically private person, they enjoyed
each other's company and often walked out of the town to take meal and
some wine. In October 1867, Nietzsche entered the military service. He learned to ride, but in March 1868 he had a serious riding accident, injuring his sternum. Nietzsche took morphine to manage his pain. During the Franco-Prussian he served briefly as a medical orderly with the Prussian army. Nietzsche's military career was short: he contracted dysentery and diphtheria and was hospitalized. In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy). He diagnosed in it human beings as subject to unconscious, involuntary, overwhelmingly self-destructive Dionysian instincts. According to Nietzsche, against this tendency the Greeks erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian principle. Nietzsche considered reality as an endless Becoming (Werden).
Apollinian power is associated with the creation of illusion – the
plastic arts deny the actuality of becoming with the illusion of
timeless beauty. Dionysian frenzy threatens to destroy all forms and
codes. Only the Apollinian power of the Greeks was able to control the
Dionysian flood. But all illusions are temporary, and in his
"experimentalist phase" (1878-1882) Nietzsche saw that the loss of
Apollinian spell will make the return to Dionysian actuality even more
painful. It must be noted, that the Dionysus whom Nietzsche
celebrated in his later writings, was the synthesis of the two forces
and represented passion controlled. In the earlier work he favored
perhaps more Apollo. His thesis, however, was, that it took both to
make possible the birth of tragedy. Later in life Nietzsche addressed
Cosima Wagner as "Princess Ariadne" in his letters to her, and declared
that the author of them is the god Dionysus. In Cosima's view, there was an affinity between the young Nietzsche and King Ludwig II of Bavaria; she found striking parallels of temperament, and even their eyes were similar. At Basel Nietzsche had become a close friend of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and the second part of The Birth of Tragedy deals with Wagner's music. Nietzsche called the composer "Old Minotaur." In History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell remarked: "Nietzsche's superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek. This may seem odd, but that is not my fault." (Ibid., Routledge, 1972, p. 687) By the end of the decade, Nietzsche became interested in the French enlightenment, which ended in 1878 his friendship with Wagner and his wife Cosima. The composer despised the French and searched acceptance in Germany. Nietzsche did not accept the rising Wagnerian cult at Bayreuth, especially with its anti-Semitism and Cosima's authoritarian attitude in interpreting the composer's intentions. "Madame Wagner," said Bernard Shaw, "is a clever stage manager; but one of the faults of her qualities is to conceive a dramatic representation as a series of tableaux vivants, and to invent attitudes for people instead of continuous and natural action" (Wagner and the Art of the Theatre by Patrick Carnegy, 2005, p. 145). Nietzsche gave up Prussian citizenship in 1869 and
remained stateless for the rest of his life. In 1879 Nietzsche resigned
his professorship – or was forced to give up his
chair – due to his headaches, extreme eyeache, and poor
health. He often had to lie in a darkened room with the curtains drawn,
unable to read or write. Much of his life before the fatal years of
1889, Nietzsche wandered
about Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, living in boardinghouses, and
producing most of his famous books. When he was in an euphoric mood, Nietzsche could sing and dance naked in his room Zarathustra dances; his landlady, peeping through a keyhole, caught him once in the act. Nietzsche respected that sincere and "genuine Christianity" which he considered "possible in all ages" – but Wagner's Parsifal with its sickly Christianity clearly did not seem to him belonging in that category. In Bayreuth Nietzsche had became increasingly aware of the impossibility of serving both Wagner and his own call. "What did I never forgive Wagner? . . . that he became reichdeutsch," Nietzsche wrote disillusioned. (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann, fourth edition, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 38) The final break came after much anguish when Wagner told him about the ecstasies that he had experienced when thinking of the Holy Grail and the Eucharist. Nietzsche was appalled. (Nietzsche's Journey to Sorrento: Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit by Paolo D'Iorio, 2016, p. 32) In the essay 'Der Fall Wagner' (1888, The Case of Wagner) he even asked, "Was Wagner a German at all?" and answered his own question by claiming that he was the natural son of his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, a Jew. "Now we can understand his antipathy towards the Jews." (Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation by Joachim Köhler, 1998, p. 162) Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), the talented and spirited daughter of a Russian army officer, became Nietzsche's most painful love. "Give that Russian girl my regards if that makes any sense," Nietzsche wrote to her companion Paul Rée in March 1882, "I lust after this kind of soul. . . . Marriage is an altogther different story—I could agree only to a maximum of two years of marriage". (Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, p. 250) Their first meeting took place at the end of April in Rome. "From which stars did we fall to meet each other here?" were Nietzche's first words when he saw her at Saint Peter's Basilica. (Ibid., pp. 250-251) Possibly Nietzsche proposed marriage to her in matter of days. However, Nietzsche told Andreas-Salomé that Zarathustra had been conceived as an artistic substitute for the son he would never have. Nietzsche praised her poem, 'Hymnus an das
Leben' (1882, Hymn to Life), which he set to music. "The text, let it be
well understood, as there is some misunderstanding abroad on this
point, is not by me; it was the astounding inspiration of a young
Russian lady, Miss Lou von Salome, with whom I was then on friendly
terms. He who is in anyway able to make some sense of the last words of
the poem, will divine why I preferred and admired it: there is
greatness in them. Pain is not regarded as an objection to existence:
"And if thou hast no bliss now left to crown me—Lead on! Thou hast thy
Sorrow still." Perhaps my music, too, attains
greatness at this point." Maybe that my music is also great in this
passage. (The last note of the oboe, by the bye, is C sharp, not C. The
latter is a misprint.)" (Ecce Homo (Nietzsche's Autobiography), translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, The Macmillan Company, 1911, p. 98) In May 1882 in Lucerne,
Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche and Rée had a photograph taken of themselves,
Lou kneeling in a small cart and holding a whip over the two man-team pulling the cart. Nietzsche proposed to Lou again. 'Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!' Rejected by Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche withdrew into the existence of a tourist-scholar.
He spent summers in Switzerland and winters in Italy, and published his
major works in a period of ten years. Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) appeared first in three parts in 1883-1884 and was formally
published in 1892. Among his other works were Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), Götzen-Dämmerung (1889), and Ecce Homo
(pub. in 1908, written in 1888). Thus Spoke Zarathustra centered around the
notions of the will to power, radical nihilism, and
the eternal recurrence, which substituted the ordinary conception of
progress. Pain, suffering, and contradictions are no
longer seen as objections to existence but as an expression of its
actual tensions; there is virtue in one's own downfall. In a note
entitled 'Anti-Darwin' Nietzsche stated: "The domestication
(culture) of man does not sink very deep. When it does sink far below
the skin it immediately becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The
"wild" man (or, in moral terminology, the evil man) is a reversion to
Nature—and, in a certain sense, he represents a recovery, a cure from the effects of "culture." . . ." (The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, Vol. II, Books III and IV, T. N. Foulis, 1910, p. 158) "I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty,—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind. . . . " (The Twilight of the Idols Or, How to Philosophise with the Hammer, translated by Anthony M. Ludovivi, George Allen & Unwin, 1927, p. 251) In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in Turin,
Italy. According to the standard story he was found on the Piazza Carlo
Alberto, weeping and embracing a coach horse after seeing it whipped by
its driver – noteworthy, the horse did not appear
until 1900 as a part of the accounts of Nietzsche's breakdown.
Nietzsche lived first in an asylum and then in his family's care, first
in Naumberg with his mother, and then he was brought by his sister to
Villa Silberblick. It
has been claimed that his
insanity was probably due to an early syphilitic infection. Many
scholars, including the novelist and biographer Sue Prideaux in I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
(2018), have suggested that Nietzsche died of a brain tumor. The
Nietzsche family was affected by a tendency to mental or neurological
instability. During his final years
in mental darkness
Nietzsche was almost invariably gentle and pleasant, and in
lucid hours he engaged in conversation. The musicologist August
Horneffer visited Nietzsche and described him as follows: "Although his
eyes were vacant and his features slack, and although the poor man lay
there with crooked limbs, more helpless than a child, a sense of magic
radiated from his personality, and his appearance revealed a majesty
that I would never experience again with any human being." (The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche: Ethics, Ontology and the Self by Nik Farrell Fox, Bloomsbury, 2022, p. 203) Nietzsche died in Weimar on
August 25, 1900. No post-mortem was performed on his body. He was
buried in Röcken next to his father. After Nietzsche's
death, his sister Elisabeth secured the rights to his literary remains
and edited them for publication – sometimes in arbitrary and
distorted form. Elisabeth had married in 1885 Bernhard Förster, a
prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement which Nietzsche
loathed. She founded with
Förster a German colony in Paraguay, which was meant for the "Aryans
only." Förster committed suicide in 1889 in a hotel room in San Bernardino. Elizabeth returned to Germany. How much Nietzsche's illness – dementia paralytica or syphilis or brain tumor – affected his thinking and writing is open to speculations. In the second period of brain syphilis the patient often acts manic-depressively and has megalomaniac visions. During his own manic period in the 1880s Nietzsche produced Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science, and Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche believed that all life evidences a will to power. Hopes
for a higher state of being after death are explained as compensations
for failures in this life. The famous view about the "death of God"
resulted
from his observations of the movement from traditional beliefs to a
trust of science and commerce. Nietzsche dissected Christianity and
Socialism as faiths of the "little men," where excuses for weakness
paraded as moral principles. John Stuart Mill's liberal democratic
humanism was for him a target for scorn and he called Mill "that
blockhead." (History of Western Philosophy, p. 689) The famous announcement of the death of God in The Gay Science can
be taken as a religious paradox, atheist provocation, or Mad Hatter's Tea Party type of stuff: "The madman
jumped into their midst and pieced them with his eyes. "Whither is
God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you
and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could
we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire
horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now. Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? . . .
Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition. Gods, too, decompose. God is dead, God remains dead. And we have killed
him." (The Gay Science; with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs, translated, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1974, p. 125) According to Nietzsche, the other world is an illusion, and instead of worshipping gods man should concentrate on his own elevation, which Nietzsche symbolizes in the Übermench. By creating the figure of Zarathustra he introduced the teacher of the coming Superman. A slave (Nietzsche associated slave morality with Judeo-Christian values) cannot be a friend of the Superman. "In woman, a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love." (Ibid., p. 83) Nietzsche argued that no single morality can be appropriate to all men. The meaning of history was the appearance, at rare moments, of the exceptional individual. "My first dose of Nietzsche shocked me profoundly. In black and white he had had the audacity to affirm: 'God is dead!' What? I had just learned that God did not exist, and now someone was informing me that He had died. . . . The day after I first started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra I had already made up my mind about Nietzsche. He was a weakling who had been freckless enough to go mad, when it was essential, in this world, not to go mad!" (Salvador Dali, in Diary of a Genius, foreword and notes by Michel Déon, translated from the French by Richard Howard, Picador, 1975, pp. 20-21) First Nietzsche's works began to gain significant public notice by Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes, who lectured on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in 1888. Nietzsche's thoughts have influenced, among others, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Paul Sartre. The Nazi propaganda took advantage of some of the philosopher's ideas, but Nietzsche himself was on the side of the few, in direct opposition to the mass psychology, which gave National Socialism the necessary base. Moreover, the Nazis were not inclined to reading as their leisure activity – they favored group meetings more highly and burned books. Nietzsche rejected German nationalism, writing: "Every great cultural crime of four centuries is what they have on their conscience!" (Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, translated with notes by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Michael Tanner, Penguin Books, 1992, p. 11) Radical rightists, on the other hand, welcomed Nietzsche's view of "Herrenmensch," a new type of man who is a law unto himself. (This was the idea tested by Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.) Adolf Hitler was photographed beside a bust of Nietzsche and in 1943 he gave the complete works of Nietzsche as a birthday gift to Mussolini, whose selectively copied terminology and ideas from the philosopher. When Elisabeth Nietzsche died in 1935, Hitler participated in the funeral ceremony. The Nazis built three years later a monument for Nietzsche.
Selected bibliography:
|