How to Become What One is Not: Creating a Persona

In caring and pitying my greatest danger has always lain.
(Nietzsche, 1883-1885/2005, p. 160)

I am one thing, my writings are another.
(Nietzsche, 1888/1986a, p. 69)

Nietzsche was not born hard; yet hard he always wanted to become. From an early age he had a profound capacity to identify with human suffering, and he also felt deeply his own pain and loss. This was to become his proverbial Achilles' heel. Whenever memories of his idyllic childhood (interrupted by the untimely death of his father) returned to him, he was overcome by self-pity:

We are devastated by the sight of the scenes of our childhood: the garden house, the church with its graves, the pond and the woods - we always see them again as sufferers. We are gripped by self-pity.

Several of Nietzsche's perceptive friends were able to catch a glimpse of his sensitive interior behind the mask of hardness. For instance, Meta von Salis observed: "He himself was tender, vulnerable, ready for reconciliation, shy about offending others", whereas "his task demanded hardness, forbade compromise, and brought himself and others pain and bitterness ... . He condemned a whole series of intense feelings not because he did not have them, but on the contrary because he had them and knew their danger". Another close friend, Resa von Schirnhofer, described him thus: "so unrestrained as a thinker, Nietzsche as a person was of extreme sensitivity, tenderness, and refined courtesy in attitude and manners toward the female sex, as others who knew him personally often emphasised".

Writing to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche let the mask of toughness slip:

This is the mistake that I perpetually make: that I imagine the suffering of others to be much greater than it is. From my childhood on, the proposition "my greatest danger lies in pitying" has confirmed itself again and again ... . It will be enough if, through the bad experiences I have had with pitying, I am stimulated to make a theoretically interesting alteration in the esteem that pitying enjoys.

Possibly in an attempt to overcome his own sensitivity, Nietzsche famously declared a war on pity. The German word Mitleid is ambiguous and can be translated into English as "compassion", "pity", or "sympathy", all of which differ in etymology and connotations. The English "pity" contains an element of superiority and contempt towards the pitied, whilst "compassion" is a feeling of empathy on equal terms. For Nietzsche, however, all "compassion" was "pity". Even though in compassion one regards another's suffering as one's own (Mitleid, like "com-passion", derives from "suffer with"), by wanting to relieve the suffering of the other one wants to relieve one's own. Hence, in Nietzsche's view, even compassion is ultimately egoistic.

Nietzsche also believed that one is existentially alone in suffering and that the so-called "benefactors" can only misread it, rendering the suffering shallow. Thus pity can make the sufferer feel even smaller and more worthless. Deep sorrow is beyond compassion and "the path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell". Hence Nietzsche's teaching to the preachers of pity: "share not suffering but joy!". In his heroic aristocratism, Nietzsche created a pathos of distance, designed to rise above sorrow. He sanctified pain as some kind of purifying force, stressing that "profound suffering ennobles; it separates". In order to endure pain, one can also try to purge the inner sensitivity that makes one vulnerable to it; one can become hard. The Übermensch, I would argue, was part of such a mission.

Nietzsche was fully aware of his psychological fragility. He wrote to Ida Overbeck on 14 August 1883 that "my soul was missing its skin, so to speak, and all natural protections". The only route to convalescence was "to develop a thick skin, the sole antidote to our massive inner vulnerability and capacity for suffering". Several of his acquaintances commented that he looked more like "a Prussian officer in civilian clothes" than a philosopher. The famous bushy moustache that overshadowed his sensual lips was part of a warrior's mask, designed to scare:

Knowing one's individuality - We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as if in its shade and feel safe there - he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, so that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent - and as such he will be treated.

Partially, Nietzsche succeeded in creating the impression of an "occasionally violent" warrior, but at the cost of even more loneliness. And loneliness was a hiding place he knew well. Throughout his life, he carried within him that deep sense of being alone in the world: "I have forty-three years behind me, and am just as alone as when I was a child". Sometimes, he protested, as to his sister Elisabeth in mid-1886:

Was I made for solitude or for life in which there was no one to whom I could speak? The inability to communicate one's thoughts is in very truth the most terrible of all kinds of loneliness. ... Deep man needs friends! All else failing, he has at least his god. But I have neither god nor friends! Perfect friendship is possible only inter pares! My health is really quite normal - but my poor soul is so sensitive to injury and so full of longing for good friends, for people who are my life. Get me a small circle of men who will listen to me and understand me - and I shall be cured!

Nietzsche understood the dangers of his inner polarisation. The need to suppress his vulnerable interior led to an excess of hardness in his writings, which in turn alienated many of his potential supporters. On 1 February 1888, less than a year before his total mental eclipse, he confided in his friend Heinrich Köselitz:

To lack not only health, but also money, recognition, love, and protection - and not to become a tragic grumbler: this constitutes the paradoxical character of our present condition, its problem. As for myself, I have got into a state of chronic vulnerability, against which, when my condition is slightly improved, I take a sort of revenge which is not of the nicest description, that is to say, I adopt an attitude of excessive hardness.

In attacking Schopenhauer's "morality of pity" and Christianity as a "religion of pity", Nietzsche vicariously attacked what was an integral and very precious part of himself. If the Übermensch was to be a "Roman Caesar with Christ's soul" that reconciled hardness with compassion, then, for Nietzsche the man, it failed to resolve his contrary emotions. It failed to cure his divided self. He signed his last letters of January 1889, heavily tainted with insanity, "Nietzsche Caesar" and "The Crucified". In the end, it was "The Crucified" that prevailed in the closing scene of his life drama.