The Portable Nietzsche (3 page)

When Nietzsche resigned from the university in 1879 he claimed ill health, which was true enough, and he obtained a pension. Clearly, however, he also felt that his further development called for a break with his academic career as a professor of philology.

Instead of returning to Germany, he spent most of the rest of his active life in Switzerland and Italy—lonely, pain-racked writing. In 1882 he thought for a short while that he had perhaps found a companion and intellectual heir—a Plato who might fashion his many stimulating suggestions into a great philosophy: a young woman, born in St. Petersburg in 1861, unquestionably of extraordinary intellectual and artistic endowment. But Lou Salomé, who was later to become Rilke's beloved, and still later a close friend of Freud, was then, at twenty-one, much more interested in another young philosopher, Paul Rée. Her walks and talks with Nietzsche meant less to her; but he never found another human being to whom he could expound his inmost ideas as in those few weeks.

After Lou left he made his first attempt to put down his philosophy—not merely sundry observations—in one major work:
Zarathustra.
He still did not proceed systematically, and though the style reveals a decided change from the essays of his first period and the aphorisms of the second, it is less philosophic than ever. Rhapsody, satire, and epigram predominate; but Nietzsche's mature thought is clouded and shrouded by an excess of adolescent emotion. Nevertheless, despite the all-too-human self-pity and occasional bathos, the book is full of fascinating ideas; and probably it owes its unique success with the broad mass of readers not least to its worst qualities.

The book consists of four parts, originally published separately, and more were planned. But Nietzsche came to realize that this style was not adequate for his purposes, and he returned to his earlier aphoristic style, though with a difference.
Beyond Good and Evil
, his next book, is much more continuous than appears at first glance; and the
Genealogy of Morals
is composed of three inquiries which might well be called essays.

All the while, Nietzsche assembled notes for a more comprehensive work which he thought of calling
The Will to Power
. But he never got beyond those notes; and the work later published by his sister under that title is nothing but an utterly uncritical collection of some of Nietzsche's notes, including many he had already used, often with significant changes, in his later works. This fabrication, though it certainly contains some highly interesting material, must by no means be considered his last or his main work.

In 1888 Nietzsche dashed off a brilliantly sarcastic polemic,
The Wagner Case
, which was followed by a hundred-page epitome of his thought,
Twilight of the Idols
. Then he gave up his intention of writing
The Will to Power,
decided to write a much shorter
chef-d'œuvre
instead, under the title
Revaluation of All Values
, and completed the first of four projected parts:
The Antichrist.
No sooner was this finished on a high pitch of rhetoric than he turned around and, on the same day, wrote the relatively calm preface for
Twilight of the Idols;
and, still in the same year, one of the world's strangest autobiographical works,
Ecce Homo
. On Christmas Day, 1888, he completed
Nietzsche contra Wagner
—and less than two weeks later he broke down, insane.

His madness was in all probability an atypical general paresis. If so, he must have had syphilis; and since he is known to have lived a highly ascetic life, it is supposed that, as a student, he had visited a brothel once or twice. This has never been substantiated, and any detailed accounts of such experiences are either poetry or pornography—not biography. Nor has the suggestion ever been disproved that he may have been infected while nursing wounded soldiers in 1870.

It was only after his active life was over that Nietzsche's real career began. When he died in 1900 he was world-famous and the center of a growing literature, of controversies in periodicals and newspapers—an “influence.” He has been discussed and written about ever since, in connection with Darwin, Schopenhauer, psychoanalysis, modern German poetry, World War I, Spengler, Christianity, Tolstoi, the Nazis, World War II, existentialism—and whatever else was needed to fill hundreds upon hundreds of volumes about him.

Nietzsche's impact is as manifold as his prose, and most interpreters select a single strain or style, whether for praise or blame, quite unaware that there are more. It might be best not even to think in terms of “influence”—a word that simplifies the multifarious complexities of history after the manner of Procrustes. In any case, no other German writer of equal stature has been so thoroughly opposed to all proto-nazism—which Nietzsche encountered in Wagner's ideological tracts, in his sister's husband, Bernhard Förster, and in various publications of his time. If some Nazi writers cited him nevertheless, it was at the price of incredible misquotation and exegetical acrobatics, which defy comparison with all the similar devices that Nietzsche himself castigated in the name of the philological conscience. His works were rejected as a series of poses; parenthetical statements were quoted as meaning the opposite of what they plainly mean in context; and views he explicitly rejected were brazenly attributed to him.

This process was greatly aided by Nietzsche's sister (of my
Nietzsche
)—but also by his love of language. He could not resist a
bon mot
or a striking coinage, and he took delight in inventing better slogans and epigrams for hostile positions than his opponents could devise—and in breathing a new and unexpectedly different spirit into such phrases. Witness “the will to power,” “the overman,” “beyond good and evil,” and dozens more.

Or consider a
bon mot:
when Nietzsche said, “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does,” he was of course thinking of the ethics of Hume, Bentham, and Mill, not of English cooking, coal fires, or Cromwell. Yet the remark may conceivably have contributed, however indirectly, to Hitler's happy misconception of the English as essentially effete and hedonistic, which so fortunately aided his defeat. Speaking of influence here is sheer naïveté.

Nietzsche's orientation, as he himself insisted once more in
Ecce Homo
, was fundamentally anti-political. His concern was primarily with the individual who is not satisfied with accepted formulas—ranging all the way from patriotism to Protestantism, and including everything that is in any sense, to use his own phrase, “party.” Any attempt to pigeonhole him is purblind. He celebrated reason, like some of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, and passion, like some of the Romantics; he is in many ways close to modern positivism, but the Existentialists recognize their own pathos in him; atheists claim him, and many Christians feel they understand him best.

The following reflections, far from classifying him, may help to define his unique achievement. He tried to strengthen the heritage of the Enlightenment with a more profound understanding of the irrational—something Hegel had attempted three-quarters of a century earlier, but metaphysically and rather esoterically. Nietzsche was determined to be empirical, and he approached his subject—as it surely should be —with psychology. Of this Hegel had not yet had more than an inkling, and the lack of any sustained psychological observation is one of the major shortcomings of his magnificently conceived
Phenomenology of the Spirit
. But Hegel's contemporaries had done little better: as psychologists, Bentham, Comte, and Mill were naive too. One could almost ask with Nietzsche himself (in
Ecce Homo
, in the chapter “Why I Am a Destiny”): “Who among philosophers before me has been a psychologist at all?”

If Nietzsche tried to deepen the Enlightenment with a psychology, he also attempted to harness romanticism: by substituting an understanding of the passions for a blind cult and by extolling the individual whose reason is a match for his passions. He ridiculed license as much—though not as often—as “castratism,” and he upheld sublimation and creativity against both. All his heroes were men of superior reason: passionate men who were the masters of their passion. The legend that Cesare Borgia was his idol is easily refuted by an examination of the few references to him in Nietzsche's works. Nietzsche preferred the Borgia (or, as he said,
even
Cesare Borgia) to Parsifal, which is scarcely high praise from Nietzsche. Nor is his declaration in
The Antichrist
that he wished Cesare had become pope. After all, the context leaves no doubt that this would have delighted the author only because it might have meant the end of the papacyl

This takes us to the third point: Nietzsche's uncompromising attitude toward religion. If one considers the history of modern philosophy from Descartes, it is surely, for good or ill, the story of an emancipation from religion. Or conversely: each philosopher goes just so far, and then bows to Christianity and accepts what becomes unacceptable to his successors. Descartes resolves to doubt everything, but soon offers proofs of God's existence that have long been shown to be fallacious. A similar pattern recurs in Hobbes and Spinoza, though they stray much farther from all orthodoxies, and, a little later, in Berkeley and Leibniz. Locke is an “empiricist” who cites Scripture to his purpose; Voltaire, an anti-Christian who accepts the teleological argument for God's existence. Kant sets out to smash not only the proofs of God but the very foundations of Christian metaphysics, then turns around and “postulates” God and the immortality of the soul, preparing the way for Fichte and idealism. Schopenhauer, finally, breaks with Christianity but accepts the metaphysics of the Upanishads from Hinduism. Nietzsche is one of the first thinkers with a comprehensive philosophy to complete the break with religion. Other equally secular philosophers of the nineteenth century who preceded him do not match the range of his interests and the scope of his vision. Before his time there were really but two modern philosophers who were equally, or almost equally, unchristian: Bacon (whose aphoristic experimentalism Nietzsche admired; but for all his programmatic pathos, Bacon had no comparable philosophy) and Hume (whose skepticism is an exercise in lack of pathos and intensity). Though Hume and Nietzsche are antipodes in temperament, they are in many ways close to each other in their thinking—and this leads us to the final point.

Nietzsche is close not only to the man who was the grandfather of so much in modern English and American philosophy, David Hume, but also to this modern philosophy itself. Occasionally he anticipated it by several decades, and it might still profit from his stimulation. Above all, however, Nietzsche is the last best bridge between positivism and existentialism, if we take both labels in the widest possible sense. Today German and Romance philosophy and Anglo-American “analysis” are completely out of touch with each other. Thus Nietzsche, once stupidly denounced as the mind that caused the First World War, might well become a major aid to international understanding: reminding Continental European and South American thinkers of the benefits of rigorous analysis, while at the same time summoning English-speaking philosophers to consider the “existential” implications of their thinking. In his irreverent exposés of metaphysical foibles and fables he yields to none. But he is inspired not by Hume's comfortable smugness, nor by Comte's conceit that he might revolutionize society, nor by the cliquish delight in sheer proficiency and skill that occasionally besets contemporary efforts. Instead he is motivated by an intense concern with the meaning of his thought for the individual. And thus he not only anticipates both modern “analysis” and existentialism, but he has much to offer each: above all, an approach to the other major strain of modern secular philosophy.

In sum: Nietzsche's challenge is twofold. He might conceivably come into his own by re-establishing some bond between what are now two completely divergent branches of modern thought, thus benefiting both. Meanwhile it is the individual reader whom he addresses. And he does not want to be read as an arsenal of arguments for or against something, nor even for a point of view. He challenges the reader not so much to agree or disagree as to grow.

W.K.

Strobl, Austria
February 1953

This includes the original titles and dates of publication of all of Nietzsche's books. The discrepancies between the figures here given and those found in most reference works are due to the fact that it has become customary to copy at least some of the dates from the bindings of various German collected editions. The dates on the bindings, however, refer to the approximate periods of composition. Most of Nietzsche's books were written during the year preceding publication; the outstanding exceptions to this rule are noted.