5,475 words
Chapter 8
ICE AND HIGH MOUNTAINS
Nietzsche as Meta-philosopher
[M]any disapprove of all philosophers, because their aims are not ours; they are those whom I call “strangers to us.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
Nietzsche is a meta-philosopher. He writes philosophy about philosophy, and about what it means to be a philosopher. While the philologist’s adopted discipline is never far from Nietzsche’s frame of reference, it is the specific subject of the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, entitled On the Prejudices of Philosophers. He is somehow both respectful and scathing of his fellow philosophers, appreciative of their efforts but also aware of the fact that they, like him, are human, all-too-human:
In the philosopher… there is nothing whatever impersonal; and, above all, his morality bears decided and decisive testimony as to who he is – that is to say, to the order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relative to one another.
If there was a bridge between Nietzsche the writer and “Nietzsche” the written corpus, that bridge would be philosophy. And that philosophy was very much in the German Romantic tradition, meaning that Nietzsche’s relationship with the lady philosophy was always likely to be amorous. Look at the flirtatious opening line to Beyond Good and Evil; Supposing truth to be a woman… But philosophy is also a symptomatology; Nietzsche believed that philosophy is healthy and benefits a healthy society, but if a society is already sick, philosophy will just make it worse. Medical metaphor is never far from Nietzsche’s style, and he often sees himself as the “physician of culture”.
Nietzsche’s own sickly nature is inextricably linked to his work. His extreme myopia was perhaps the reason for his often aphoristic style. His migraines kept him in darkened rooms and pain for considerable periods. But even sickness is a part of life, and one which Nietzsche utilises for his own life’s work:
In the midst of the agony of a headache which lasted three days, accompanied by violent nausea, I was possessed of a most singular dialectical clearness, and in absolutely cold blood I then thought out things, for which, in my more healthy moments, I am not enough of a climber, not sufficiently subtle, not sufficiently.
Not enough of a climber. Nietzsche often tramped the slopes of Sils-Maria, rejoiced in the cold still air, the “ice and high mountains”. All of my best ideas, he writes, were won by walking. But along with perambulation it is as well to have inspiration. Nietzsche found his in a second-hand book shop.
There’s more to life than books, you know.
But not much more.
The Smiths, Handsome Devil
While at university in Leipzig in 1865, aged 21, Friedrich Nietzsche entered a second-hand bookshop, and what he found there was to have a profound effect on both his life and his work. He picked up a copy of a book unknown to him, The World as Will and Idea (also translated as The World as Will and Representation) by Arthur Schopenhauer. Years later, Nietzsche was to write that “I don’t know what daemon whispered to me, ‘Take this home…'”. But take it home he did, where “I threw myself into the corner of a sofa with my new treasure, and began to let that dismal genius work on me.”
Nietzsche, despite his basic disagreement with Schopenhauer’s pessimism, had found a philosopher for whom:
[P]hilosophy offers an asylum to mankind where no tyranny can penetrate, the inner sanctuary, the centre of the heart’s labyrinth: and the tyrants are galled at it.
The episode of the second-hand bookshop, and Nietzsche’s resultant fascination with the book he purchased, right down to the binding and lettering (Heidegger would experience the same spell, cast on him by Husserl’s Basic Problems of Phenomenology), is a reminder of how philosophy books – and books in general – find their way into our lives. Rather than draw up a grand, technocratic study plan for your introduction to philosophy or, worse, let a university allow/force you to read an ethnically cleansed philosophy curriculum, let a second-hand bookshop or charity shop or thrift store be your library, and let Nietzsche’s amor fati, the love of chance, be your guide.
As for Arthur Schopenhauer, he would loom large in Nietzsche’s value-system throughout the pastor’s son’s life. Schopenhauer’s central notion of “will to life” (Wille zum Leben) is intimately related to Nietzsche’s central concept of “will to power” (Wille zur Machen). Schopenhauer, for all Nietzsche’s disagreements with him, remained a crucial influence after the momentous visit to the Leipzig bookshop, and Nietzsche would return often to his spiritual mentor.
The state obviously has a special fear of philosophy, and will try to attract more philosophers, to create the impression it has philosophy on its side…
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
Schopenhauer as Educator is one of the early essay collection, Untimely Meditations, and it is the first work in which Nietzsche fully engages with what philosophy is and therefore what the philosopher is – and could be, should be. It is the first real instance of Nietzsche’s belief that he himself was a valid area of inquiry, that the philosopher should be neither the antiquarian specialist nor the sceptics he sees around him.
As we shall consider in the next chapter, a little self-knowledge can be a dangerous thing. But Nietzsche becomes what he is, the subject of his own enquiries, a self-absorbed psychonaut, a psychologist of himself whose work – as summed up in the autobiographical Ecce Homo – will not be without the cost of dissent.
It is the dissenting Schopenhauer that fascinated the 21-year-old Nietzsche. If he places him in a triumvirate of heroes along with Hölderlin and Goethe, it is as much due to Schopenhauer’s swimming against the Hegelian currents of the time. Also, Schopenhauer’s tendencies to mysticism and Orientalism cannot be discounted in their effect on Nietzsche, whose own later work took on Buddhist overtones, and an attraction for the collection of ancient Sanskrit hymns present in Schopenhauer’s work, the Rig Veda.
But Schopenhauer also revered conceptual plains and cities which would become sacred places for Nietzsche, sunlit uplands both intellectually and literally. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, praises the Greeks for “the remarkable accuracy of their eyes”. What did those eyes see?
In other ages the philosopher is an accidental solitary wanderer in the most hostile environment, either slinking through or pushing through with clenched fists. With the Greek however the philosopher is not accidental…
Nietzsche, Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks
Nietzsche’s reverence for the Greeks as thinkers is central to his work, and revolves around the inextricable natures of their culture and the power of speculative thought. And the relationship between Greek society and the philosopher it produces is a reciprocal arrangement, a virtuous circle. The culture that produces Greek philosophy is also the recipient of the advantage that philosophy brings by virtue of a civic nationalism now long gone. Nietzsche writes: “[T]he philosopher protects and defends his native country. Now, since Plato, he is in exile and conspires against his fatherland.”
Certainly, it is hard to envisage many philosophers in a Western country protecting or defending the fatherland, or even being able to refer to it as such. And this is because modern culture, such as it is and like its avuncular mentor, science, has no need of philosophy, or so it thinks. Actually, it simply has no conception of what it might do with philosophy, as it lacks the strength Nietzsche has already said it requires to produce the discipline. Modern Western culture is weak, materialistic and shallow. It privileges the body over the mind, and even that not in a healthy, not in a Greek way, but as a thing to be adorned and gratified. Get a tattoo, not a liberal education in the style of the classical quadrivium. No culture means no innate style. Nietzsche is in no doubt as to the entry requirements for philosophy: “First acquire a culture; then you shall experience what Philosophy can and will do.”
In an image which will return to Nietzsche, philosophy is now for the solitary wanderer. Philosophy is not there for culture’s entertainment. She arrives only when bidden, and will not attend where she does not find a suitable audience, not one that is distracted by science and its technological gewgaws.
Nietzsche is best known for his later work, The Birth of Tragedy aside, but what of his earlier forays? How does what came before shape what comes after? Nietzsche always seemed prematurely old, but what of the young man?
The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil…
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Students and critics of Nietzsche have tended to concentrate on later works: the bombastic Thus Spake Zarathustra, the iconoclastic The Antichrist, and the riddle of Beyond Good and Evil. But even though Nietzsche himself wrote in the autobiographical Ecce Homo, in the wonderfully titled chapter Why I Write Such Excellent Books, that “I am one thing, my writings another”, it is hard to think of a philosopher whose later work was so much a product of his early life, his reading, his diarising and juvenilia, his love of music, his spiritual loneliness, and his devotion to, among others, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Hölderlin, Byron and, of course, Richard Wagner.
Nietzsche’s early work, then: his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, the early “academic” essays, including Nietzsche’s inaugural presentation at Basle University (and an excuse for not visiting the Wagners one Christmas), Homer and Classical Philology, and the four essays that comprise Untimely Meditations (also often translated as Thoughts out of Season). This is the period during which Nietzsche processes the classical world and takes up his position accordingly.
That which arrives in time arrives not to abide, but to pass on.
Martin Heidegger, Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?
Stressing the importance of Nietzsche’s youth and early manhood risks falling into the error biographer Julian Young finds in Ronald Hayman’s book on the philosopher’s life, that of being too eager to get Nietzsche onto the psychoanalyst’s couch. But the loss of Nietzsche’s father when he was only six, and the leaving of the familial home – Der Vaterhaus – at Röcken, followed by his relocation to Pforta (the German equivalent of England’s public school, Eton) and a chain of educational institutions, combined with a religious belief he would famously renounce, combine to show a boy constantly leaving the scenes of his life. The figure of the wanderer would become a trope for Nietzsche as, later in life, he wandered stateless around Europe.
Nietzsche’s youth was exemplary, and he was a supreme student. Many of his juvenile writings and diaries remain, along with letters, and show the type of questioning of the world that could never be satisfied by his chosen subject, philology. When Nietzsche underwent his short but personally impactful military service as a medic in the Franco-Prussian war, he wondered aloud what would happen to philologists if they trained them as hard as soldiers. The contrast between action and the dryness of academic study would never leave him.
When he found his surrogate parents, Richard and Cosima Wagner, he was spellbound, and Wagner’s attempts to re-found Greek culture in the total work of art gave Nietzsche the father’s blessing he was never able to have, and inspired him to write his first major work.
An artist of union is what we should welcome in every province of the universe.
Goethe, Elective Affinities
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, was written in 1872 under the spell of Richard Wagner, and may be read in concert with The Wagner Case, the first essay in the Untimely Meditations of 1876, An Attempt at Self-Criticism a retrospective look at Birth written in 1886, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, one of Nietzsche’s last works before his descent into madness in 1889, and the essay which details Nietzsche’s disillusion with the composer.
The Birth of Tragedy concerns Greek tragedy considered as a result of the worldview of the Greeks, and the complementary opposition between the gods Apollo and Dionysus, the former representing the plastic arts, and the latter music and tragedy, “the Apollonian dream artist [and] the Dionysian ecstatic artist”. In order to manage the “terrors and horrors of existence”, the Greeks had to “place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians”. Death was everywhere for the Greeks, and its terrible shadow needed to be chased away with bright sunlight. Nietzsche was fascinated by the myth of Silenus, the satyr hunted by Midas in a wood and questioned as to the greatest good in life. The goat-man answers that never to have been born is best, or at least to die soon.
Having warned against psychoanalytic interpretations of Nietzsche’s early life, I will not dwell on a Freudian reading of Birth, except to say that there is a clear analogue between consciousness and the Apollonian, and the unconscious and the Dionysiac. Thus, Nietzsche writes that “we have come to interpret Greek tragedy as a Dionysian chorus which again and again discharges itself in Apollonian images”. We are reminded of Freud’s insistence that the unconscious stratum of the mind can only be accessed by reading the presentation of its activity in the conscious mind.
Nietzsche is, however, writing not only psychologically and culturally, but also metaphysically. Birth introduces one of his most consistent themes, that of the fallacious belief in the existence of another world ‘behind’ the real one, with Plato being his main target. There are two worlds posited by man – largely due to dreams, upon which Nietzsche will expand in the later Dawn – and much philosophy follows suit, which may be one of the greatest of philosophy’s historical errors. It also leads, in Birth, to Nietzsche’s criticism of Socrates as the destroyer of myth and promoter of a ruinous positivism, a curse which will flower fully in Beyond Good and Evil and elsewhere in the later work.
But Birth also sets up the great phenomenological project Nietzsche bequeaths to Husserl and Heidegger. If there are two worlds posited, and if this is a world-historical blunder, what can Nietzsche formulate that would be reductive enough to mend the rift in the lute? What is Nietzsche’s ground-note for the work ahead? As so often when he wanted to ground his thought, Nietzsche returned to Greece.
There are opponents of philosophy, and one does well to listen to them…
Nietzsche, Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks
The “academic” essays sum up Nietzsche’s fascination with the classical world of the Greeks. Homer and Classical Philology was Nietzsche’s inaugural address at Basle University, where he was offered the chair of philology at the astonishingly young age of 24 on the basis of a half-finished doctoral thesis. Homer was the cultural backbone of classical Greece, and Philology partly deals with the intense debate concerning whether Homer was one poet or the result of many transmitting an oral tradition. For Nietzsche, this academic battlefield is largely irrelevant, and he intimates that academic time is better spent on understanding the culture that both produced and assimilated the name of Homeros:
The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has no connection either with the conception of aesthetic perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an aesthetic judgement.
The “academic essays” are important to remind the student of Nietzsche that he was himself a brilliant and accomplished scholar. His reputation, which lasted throughout his life, as a first-rate teacher can be seen, as well as the foreshadowings of the later corpus.
For Nietzsche’s next work, he moved from the Hellenic world he loved so much into one for which he had a far more skeptical and critical eye, as shown by the essay collection, Untimely Meditations, in which the “physician of culture” took the temperature of German culture.
The history of philosophy is the story of a secret and mad hatred of the prerequisites of Life…
Nietzsche, Posthumous notes
The first of Nietzsche’s essays in this collection was a savage critique of David Strauss, a fairly innocuous theologian who had attacked Wagner, causing the philosopher to react like a guard-dog. Strauss – who was puzzled to find himself under such vehement attack – was for Nietzsche a Philistine, and the catalyst for one of Nietzsche’s most succinct definitions of culture:
Culture is, before all things, the unity of artistic style, in every expression of the life of a people. Abundant knowledge and learning, however, are not essential to it, nor are they a sign of its existence; and, at a pinch, they might coexist much more harmoniously with the very opposite of culture – with barbarity: that is to say, with a complete lack of style, or with a riotous jumble of all styles.
The last sentence has much to say about our own “culture”.
The third Meditation, The Use and Abuse of History for Life, also has much to say to us, living as we are in a dangerous time of historical revisionism. Nietzsche is concerned to examine different critical approaches to history, recognising as he does its importance to a culture which wishes to thrive. Famously – and necessitated as much as any stylistic concerns by his lifelong weakness of vision – Nietzsche wrote much of his later work in aphorisms, and History contains one dazzling sentence to correct any academic temptation to see later generations as being wiser than their predecessors, and to emphasise that the student of history should not seek to teach the past: “As judges, you must stand higher than that which is to be judged: as it is, you have only come later.”
These works, then, lay the foundation for the later work of Friedrich Nietzsche. The lonely wanderer, once his schooldays were behind him, became more reclusive and withdrew more and more into himself, not – or not only – as a defence mechanism against a world in which he believed he was ‘untimely’, but because he knew that the grail of philosophy, the philosopher’s stone, lay within. And yet he longed to be a part of the world, and a heart-rending note from the 13-year-old Nietzsche’s diary shows a boy who, like all little boys, loved Christmas, the celebration of a god he would walk away from, as he walked away from everyone and everything else, including his sanity, but also the man he would become, who longed to unite himself with and take part in a world he was in but not of:
Christmas is the most blessed festival of the year because it doesn’t concern us alone, but rather the whole of mankind, rich and poor, humble and great, low and high. And it is precisely this universal joy which intensifies our own mood.
So, the past of the philosopher makes the future and, although Nietzsche reverenced the Greeks, his relationship with Plato supported his philosophy by his rejection of key Platonic ideas.
The real philosophers of Greece are those which came before Socrates (with Socrates something changes).
Nietzsche, Posthumous Notes
Nietzsche famously disagreed with Plato and, being who he was, elevated this metaphysical distrust into a conceptual fist-fight across the centuries. Despite Nietzsche’s love of the Greeks, he believes Plato betrays the tragic age by introducing a second, ideal world to fund and substantiate – and mystify and hierarchise – this one, an idea undoubtedly influenced by his reading of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche also blames Plato for his effect on morality. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche laments:
[T]hat of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man – how now? Might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts?
“The theoretical man”, perhaps, foreshadows our technocrat, the man without philosophical qualities, an unwitting product of a metaphysical choice made in an Athenian square.
Nietzsche’s fundamental disagreement with Plato is partly metaphysical, then, and partly moral, or at least concerned with morality. Plato’s theory of forms, via the delivery system of Neoplatonism, is a tributary which fed Christianity, and an ideal world – and its superiority to our degraded, second-hand mimesis of a world – becomes the metaphysical framework for Nietzsche’s nemesis, Christianity, which he calls ‘Platonism for the people’. But if Plato strove to understand if not the city of God, then at least his mind, then the metaphysical rock upon which Christianity built its project, is what Nietzsche blames for his scathing, scalding critique of Christianity in The Birth of Tragedy:
Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life.
Nietzsche’s rejection of the Platonic forms has much to do with his stated intent to say “Yes!” to life, and partly to do with a metaphysical property which the forms have, and which we can hear echoes of in other philosophical systems.
The temptation to posit a real, ideal world “behind” (as it were) the real one was noted by Nietzsche: Men of philosophical disposition are known for their constant premonition that our everyday reality, too, is an illusion, hiding another, totally different kind of reality.
Nietzsche will not accept the ability of philosophy to judge sub specie aeternitatis as long as philosophers are and must remain prone to making the Platonic error of introducing an ideal world to accompany the real one. This is psychologically and literally duplicitous.
“I am one thing,” writes Nietzsche, “my writings another.” The autobiographical Ecce Homo, however, seems to wed the two indissolubly. Whether Nietzsche died from a hereditary brain disease or tertiary syphilis, the rampant self-praise here has all the hallmarks of a last explosion of energy, like a dying battery. There is an aggressive narcissism to Nietzsche in this rather crazed self-appraisal which is missing from subsequent philosophy. The tribunal of reason sees this two-fisted, self-aggrandising style as anathema. But why? Why should a philosopher, a lover of reason, write to the dictates of etiquette, the niceties of stylistic and ideological protocols? Better to philosophise, as Nietzsche said he did, with a hammer. A hammer and, from time to time, science, which Nietzsche did not discount.
Human sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill everything to examine it.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
By the time he published Dawn, Nietzsche sees philosophy through the eyes of scientists, as a fantastic desire to “possess the tyrannical rule of the spirit”, to ride the tiger of decisive inquiry, to be the ones who say, “There is a riddle to be solved!” There is something to be learned from science, however, and the Nietzsche of The Gay Science calls again to his future philosophers:
But we, we others, thirsty for reason, want to look our experiences as fixedly in the eye as a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day after day. We ourselves want to be our own experiments and vivisectional animals.
As we have noted, however, and for the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil, science has long since usurped philosophy’s role:
Science is flourishing today and its good conscience shines in its face, while that to which the whole of modern philosophy has gradually sunk, this remnant of philosophy, arouses distrust and displeasure when it does not arouse mockery and pity.
We live in a post-Covid age which commands you to “follow the science”. While it is no surprise that politicians can be bought, we didn’t know that extended to scientists (as well as academics). And that is because both professions are revenue productive. This is not true of philosophy. We are unlikely to see a world in which the invitation to “listen to the philosophy” is extended. And this is because philosophy, which might be assumed to champion the truth, in fact saves its laurels for wisdom. In fact, Nietzsche presents a problem for truth.
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.
The Moody Blues, Nights in White Satin
Nietzsche is the writer who first destabilises the truth, and the echo of this will be heard in Derridean deconstruction. Echoing Pontius Pilate, Nietzsche gives a famous definition of truth which does not, which cannot define what truth is, is not by its very nature able to offer the solace definition provides:
What then is truth? A mobile host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms; in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.
This is Nietzsche’s clarion-call to precisely those philosophers he discovered in Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks, the loners and wanderers, the hermits and hermeneuts. These are the visionaries Nietzsche will later find in the ice-bound heights, the transboreans in the lands beyond the wind, exiled from cultures and countries who lack the health to support them, as stateless in philosophical terms as Nietzsche himself was in geographical terms.
Once again, as so often with philosophy as a search for an ultimate grounding, it is only as a range of effects that this grounding can be experienced. The Kantian noumenon, the Lockean primary quality, the Freudian unconscious, the cosmologist’s dark matter; all of these things cannot be accessed, and are only available to experience by a system of interlocking and inductive ciphers whose sum total is a truth which, although it cannot be proved, cannot be disproved, is an undisprovable, produced and perspectivised like an anamorphic picture. God is the best-known example. All the human – all-too-human, as Nietzsche will later show – can add to the tableau is the necessary function of spatio-temporality, in a rehearsal of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them – time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number… The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence, comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia’s fate and the wisdom of the wood-sprite Silenus: nausea invades him.
Man evades death, or at least consoles himself to its necessity, by retreating into religion, and the pastor’s son had much to say about this denial of life.
Dropped into a church
I passed along the way.
The Mamas and the Papas, California Dreamin’
In 1888, shortly before his complete mental collapse, Nietzsche wrote a book criticising Christianity, and by extension all religion. This short work was not published until 1895, by which time Nietzsche had been insane for six years, but it would go on to become something akin to the “dynamite” Nietzsche believed and wished his work to be. Nietzsche, for demonstrable reasons, is a writer often quoted out of context, but this book is more cohesive than his others, with their intentional lack of systematising, and has much to say to the West of today, embroiled as it is in a problem which could be described as religious. The book was The Antichrist.
Like much of Nietzsche, The Antichrist (or The Antichristian; the German title Der Antikrist signifies both) is worth reading through quickly and returning to at leisure. Familiar Nietzschean themes are present and correct: The Christian as homme de ressentiment; Christianity as the religion of pity (which Nietzsche despised); the church’s enervation both of pragmatic Rome and of a culturally vibrant Europe. Nietzsche also targets the psychology of Christianity as morbid, with “sombre and disquieting ideas… in the foreground.” Men of the Christian kind, he writes, “have a vital interest in making mankind sick.” Religion in itself, he writes, is the enemy of life and thought. “Theological blood is the ruin of philosophy.”
Nietzsche’s work is easy to take out of context because, with the aphoristic style of much of his work, there is often no context. Look at the booklet of “Nietzsche’s sayings” that Hitler had issued to his frontline troops. Nietzsche’s criticisms of the Teutonic “blond beast” and his ridicule of the “beerish” Germans were not included.
The aphorism is an art form; think of the miniaturism of La Rochefoucauld, Blake or Montaigne. There is something of the East about the form. But Nietzsche’s aphorisms were not, or not only, a stylistic nicety. The appalling myopia the philosopher suffered (along with a range of digestive disorders) forced him to write with his nose practically touching the paper. With every line he wrote threatening to bring on crippling migraine, much of his writing is correspondingly gnomic, pithy, aimed to inflict its wound locally. Even given this aphoristic style, however, it is still possible to quote Nietzsche out of context. Most people recognise “that which does not kill me makes me stronger”, from The Twilight of the Idols (and revisited in Ecce Homo), but not necessarily its parenthesised coda; ‘from the military school of life’.
Life itself did not disappoint Nietzsche, although some of the people he met along the way eventually would, not least his surrogate parents, Richard and Cosima Wagner.
Wagner’s philosophical thinking focuses on four interconnected topics: society, politics, art and religion.
Julian Young, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
Whether or not Richard and Cosima Wagner were surrogate parents and family for Nietzsche, the philosopher walked into a cultured Bohemianism which must have shocked and thrilled him. Wagner joined Goethe and Schopenhauer among Nietzsche’s personal pantheon. One of Nietzsche’s and Wagner’s mutual friends was Jakob Burckhardt, the famous Renaissance historian. Nietzsche certainly experienced a rebirth the effects of which stayed with him throughout his life.
Nietzsche’s essay in Untimely Meditations, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, is hagiography, and the very fact that Nietzsche was so open about his feelings would have added bile to the eventual irreconcilable rift in the two men’s friendship. Nietzsche called Wagner “the master”, and declared many times that he wished Bayreuth to be his life’s mission. Wagner enjoyed the attention from the up-and-coming academic, and was incensed when the exhausted Nietzsche failed to appear at the Wagner home, Tribschen, one Christmas. Nietzsche was to experience from Wagner what he had himself diagnosed in Bayreuth:
[T]he two sides of his nature remained faithful to each other, that out of free and unselfish love, the creative, ingenuous and brilliant side kept loyally abreast of the dark, the intractable, and the tyrannical side.
But at the time of Bayreuth, for Nietzsche, Goethe and Schopenhauer laid the foundation for the past, while Wagner was the future. More, he was the harbinger of the future, announcing the imminence of its fall via artistic philosophy. Wagner’s mission becomes messianic:
[T]his new art is a clairvoyante that sees ruin approaching – not for art alone. Her warning voice must strike the whole of our prevailing civilization with terror the instant the laughter which its parodies have provoked subsides.
The aftermath of the end of the affair included Nietzsche’s claim that Wagner had precisely become a parody of himself, when Nietzsche had wanted so much more than the all-too-human: “Wagner is most philosophical where he is most powerfully active and heroic.”
The superman, Zarathustra, Richard Wagner; these were Nietzsche’s three graces. Even after Nietzsche’s disillusionment (not helped by the Master’s spreading the idea that Nietzsche was myopic due to excessive masturbation) left him clearly still in love with Cosima, to whom he addressed some of his crazed letters during his final insanity. But the Tribschen years left a lasting mood within Nietzsche, and inspired his early work.
All psychology has hitherto remained anchored to moral prejudices and timidities; it has not ventured into the depths.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche is often called a psychologist and, indeed, he ends the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, the chapter we began with, as follows:
[P]sychology will again be recognized as the queen of the sciences, to serve and prepare for which the other sciences exist. For psychology is now once again the road to the fundamental problems.
Just as Freud believed that any theory of psychoanalysis must ground itself on knowledge of the self, so too Nietzsche felt the compulsion to introspection and self-knowledge, with all its attendant problems. For a while, around the springtime of post-structuralism, it was faddish to say that the relationship between author and text was contingent and of no more than passing biographical interest. This is a difficult position to maintain, and Nietzsche is perhaps the greatest example of the symbiosis between philosopher and philosophy, from his first book to his last.
But there is a cost to the self-examined life, although not set at the price Socrates paid: “Also this digging into one’s self, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start.”
Nietzsche was unafraid of looking inside himself, plumbing the depths. Can we say the same of ourselves?