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Nietzsche’s Life and Works

With Nietzsche philosophy becomes dangerous again, this time with a difference. In previous centuries philosophy had been dangerous for philosophers; with Nietzsche it becomes dangerous for everyone. Nietzsche ended up by going mad, and this begins to show in the tone of his later writings. But the dangerous ideas started appearing long before he went mad, and have nothing to do with clinical insanity. They presaged a collective madness which was to have horrific consequences in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, and which shows ominous signs of recurrence today.

Nietzsche’s larger philosophical ideas are barely worthy of the name – whether he’s talking about supermen, eternal recurrence (the idea that we live our lives again and again throughout eternity), or the sole purpose of civilisation (to produce “great men” such as Goethe, Napoleon, and himself). His use of the Will to Power as a universal explanation is either simplistic or meaningless – even Freud’s monism is more subtle, and Schopenhauer’s less specific concept is more convincing. Like any good conspiracy theory, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the all-pervasive Will to Power contains the usual element of paranoia. But Nietzsche’s actual philosophising is as brilliant, persuasive, and incisive as any before or since. When reading him you get the exhilarating feeling that philosophy actually matters (which is one of the reasons why he is so dangerous). And when he used the Will to Power purely as an analytic tool, it enabled him to discover constituent elements in human motives which few had formerly suspected. This allowed him to unmask the values to which these motives gave rise, and trace the development of these values over a broad historical canvas, illuminating the very foundations of our civilisation and culture.

Although Nietzsche is not entirely free from blame for the dangerous nonsense that has been spouted in his name, it must be said that most of this is a travesty of what he actually wrote. He had nothing but contempt for the protofascists of his era, anti–Semitism disgusted him, and the idea of a nation of racially pure Germans becoming a master race would certainly have exercised his sense of humour to the full. Had he lived (and retained his sanity) until the 1930s, when he would have been in his eighties, he would certainly not have remained silent about the grotesque events taking place in his homeland – like some German philosophers of that era who claimed to be his successors.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born October 15, 1844, in Saxony, which was by this time a province of the increasingly powerful kingdom of Prussia. Nietzsche was descended from a long line of tradesmen, including hatters and butchers, but his grandfather and father were both Lutheran pastors. Nietzsche’s father was a patriotic Prussian who held his king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in high esteem. When Ludwig Nietzsche’s first son was born on the king’s birthday, it was obvious that he had little chance of being named Otto. By an utterly meaningless coincidence, all three men were to die insane.

The first to go was Ludwig, who died in 1849. He was diagnosed as having “softening of the brain” – and the autopsy apparently revealed that a quarter of his brain had been affected by “softening.” This diagnosis is no longer fashionable with the medical profession, but Nietzsche’s reputable biographers are convinced that Ludwig Nietzsche’s insanity was not inherited by his son.

Nietzsche was now brought up in Naumburg in a house full of “holy women,” which included a mother, a younger sister, a maternal grandmother, and two slightly loopy maiden aunts. This appears to have affected Nietzsche’s attitude toward women in later life. At the age of thirteen he went to boarding school at nearby Pforta, one of the top private boarding schools in Germany. Nietzsche, very much the product of his pious, mollycoddled upbringing, became known as “the little pastor” and carried off all the prizes. But he was so brilliant that eventually he couldn’t help thinking for himself. By the age of eighteen he was beginning to doubt his faith. The clear–sighted thinker couldn’t help noticing the square pegs in the round holes of the world about him. Typically this thinking appears to have been done in complete isolation. Throughout his life Nietzsche was to be influenced in his thought by very few living people (and not many dead ones either).

At the age of nineteen Nietzsche went to the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology, with the aim of becoming a pastor. His destiny had been mapped out long beforehand by the “holy women”; but already he was beginning to experience an unconscious urge to rebellion, which resulted in a transformation of his character. On arriving at Bonn the solitary schoolboy unexpectedly became a typical gregarious student. He joined a smart fraternity, took to drinking with his fellows, and even fought a duel (the usual artificial affair, which was stopped as soon as he had received his honourable scar – a slight nick on the nose, unfortunately later obscured by the bridge of his spectacles). But this was only a necessary phase. By now Nietzsche had decided “God is dead.” (This remark, now so closely associated with Nietzsche and his philosophy, was also made by Hegel some twenty years before Nietzsche was born.) At home during the holidays he refused to take communion and announced that he would not be entering the church. The next year he decided to switch to Leipzig University, where he would drop theology and concentrate on classical philology.

Nietzsche arrived in Leipzig in October 1865, in the same month that he celebrated his twenty-first birthday. Around this time two events took place which were to transform his life. While on a sight-seeing trip to Cologne, he visited a brothel. According to Nietzsche this visit was inadvertent. On arrival he had asked a street porter to lead him to a restaurant; instead the porter took him to a brothel. The way Nietzsche later related it to a friend: “All at once I found myself surrounded by half a dozen apparitions in tinsel and gauze, gazing at me expectantly. For a brief moment I was speechless. Then I made instinctively for the only soulful thing present in the place: the piano. I played a few chords, which freed me from my paralysis, and I escaped.”

Inevitably we only have Nietzsche’s evidence regarding this unlikely episode. Whether or not the visit was quite so accidental, and whether or not Nietzsche ended up only fondling the keys of the piano, it is impossible to tell. Nietzsche was almost certainly still a virgin at the time. He was an extremely intense young man as well as being inexperienced and gauche in the ways of the world. (Yet this didn’t stop him from making pronouncements about such matters. Despite his sexual status, he earnestly informed a friend that he would need to keep three women to satisfy him.)

On later consideration Nietzsche must have decided that he had been attracted by something more than the piano. He went back to the brothel and almost certainly paid a few visits to similar establishments when he returned to Leipzig. Not long after this he discovered that he was infected. The doctor who treated him wouldn’t have told him that he had syphilis (they didn’t in those days, because it was incurable). Even so, as a result of this incident Nietzsche appears to have abstained from sexual activity with women. Despite this he continued throughout his life to make embarrassingly self-revealing remarks about them in his philosophy. “You are going to see a woman? Do not forget your whip.” (Although it’s possible that, owing to the type of bordello he had visited in Leipzig, he thought it only fair that men should be equally armed for the fray.)

The second life-changing incident took place when he entered a secondhand bookshop and came across a copy of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. “I took the unfamiliar book in my hands and began leafing through the pages. I don’t know what demon it was that whispered in my ear: ‘Take this book home.’ So, breaking my principle of never buying a book too quickly, I did just that. Back home I threw myself into the corner of the sofa with my new treasure, and began to let that dynamic gloomy genius work on my mind…. I found myself looking into a mirror which reflected the world, life and my own nature with terrifying grandeur…. Here I saw sickness and health, exile and refuge, Hell and Heaven.”

As a result of these astonishingly prophetic sentiments, Nietzsche became a Schopenhauerian. At this time, when Nietzsche had nothing to believe in, he needed Schopenhauer’s pessimism and detachment. According to Schopenhauer, the world is merely representation, supported by an all-pervasive evil will. This will is blind and pays no attention to the concerns of mere humanity, inflicting upon its members a life of suffering as they strive against its manifestation all around them (the world). Our only sensible course is to lessen the power of the will within us by living a life of renunciation and asceticism.

Schopenhauer’s pessimism didn’t quite fit Nietzsche’s nature, but he at once recognised its honesty and power. From now on his positive ideas would first have to be of sufficient strength to go beyond this pessimism. The way forward lay through Schopenhauer. But most of all, Schopenhauer’s concept of the fundamental role played by the will was to prove decisive. This was eventually to become transformed into Nietzsche’s Will to Power.