PHIL304: Existentialism

Still is the bottom of my sea: who would guess that it harbours such sportive monsters.
(Nietzsche, 1883-1885/2005, p. 101)

The human is a rope, fastened between beast and Übermensch - a rope over an abyss.
(Nietzsche, 1883-1885/2005, p. 13)

In the normal course of development, an individual goes through a stage of being meaningfully mirrored by significant others, usually parents. Lacan, and after him Winnicott, called it "the mirror stage". Failure at this stage may lead to a fragile ego-formation with lifelong consequences. If a person has not learned how to internalise the "mirrored self", he might not benefit from it even if a meaningful mirroring is offered later in life. Such a person might become a kind of solitary island, beyond reach. Nietzsche once compared himself to the wounded and abandoned archer Philoctetes, and wrote to Heinrich von Stein, after his visit to Sils-Maria: "you may have come far too close to finding Philoctetes on his island".

The early death of his father shattered Nietzsche's childhood, not only because of the loss of a male figure with whom he could identify, but also because his contrary emotions could not be contained. These continued to flood his conscious and unconscious self, creating mayhem. Moreover, he was not given a chance to experience realistic, age appropriate disappointment, and this left him with a persistent tendency towards idealisation. His young, widowed mother, who had to care for three young children, was not able to give this highly intelligent, sensitive boy the "mirroring" and containment that he needed. A vital part of Nietzsche's soul seems to have died then, and he carried this sense of deadness throughout his life. "As my father I have already died", he lamented in Ecce Homo. He learned how to retreat behind a barricade of lofty solitude and construct an invisible world of the ideal. As a young boy, he wrote short plays and poems, and paraded toy soldiers in honour of a small porcelain squirrel, which he called King Squirrel I. Whilst creating a kind of "Über-squirrel" can be seen as age appropriate in the case of a child, Nietzsche's tendency to erect altars and worlds before which he could kneel persisted well into adulthood. I would argue that the Übermensch may be a culmination of this tendency towards idealisation. It could also have been a product of psychotic imagination, a kind of delusional idea. Initially, delusional constructions may serve an apotropaic function by warding off the impending disintegration of the self. Yet, ultimately, psychotic constructions destroy the self and reality. As De Masi has convincingly argued, they present themselves as saviours but in the end they become the inner tyrants that colonise the ego, luring it into the delirious joy of an omnipotent pseudo-paradise. These fantasies thus serve only to lead the person further into the labyrinth of the Unconscious, where the thread of reason can be irretrievably lost.

Nietzsche's urge to idealise reached its apogee with Wagner, who, instead of containing the idealising projections and allowing them to dissipate naturally, fuelled and used them for his own narcissistic needs. This pattern recurred in the encounter with Lou Salomé who, ironically, later advised Freud on the psychopathology of narcissism. Nietzsche "created" his Wagner and Lou Salomé, at huge cost to himself. Subsequently, he withdrew from the world and lived the rest of his life in radical solitude and "off his own fat". There was no-one who could contain his powerful, contrary emotions and refuel his self-love, and there was no-one for whom he could do the same either. He never developed any intimate relationship or shared his life with anyone, and his resignation from teaching at the age of 35 deprived him of any subsequent human interactions of a potentially rewarding kind. His life consequently became an emotional desert.

Idealisation is not about seeing the best in another person, but about constructing what is not there; in essence, it is a refusal to engage with reality. Unless deconstructed by timely devaluations, idealisations have a depleting effect on the self, which is then left with "bad internal objects". These can turn into monsters, either to be fiercely fought against or to be projected onto the external world. In his "transvaluation of all values", Nietzsche claimed that an exceptional man, standing beyond good and evil, was entitled to the sacrifice of the mediocre others.

In a private note of 1884, he proposed:

And, disturbingly:

Nietzsche's concept of the "slave morality" of the weak, as opposed to the "master morality" of the strong (see first essay in On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887/1994), may well have been the result of splitting and projection, so that "the ill-bred" and "the herd" became the carriers of what he resented in himself. The attempt at emancipation from traditional morality ultimately led to further alienation - both from himself and from the world. The phantasm of the Übermensch, instead of being a rainbow-bridge over the abyss, became the abyss itself. In Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard recognised the danger of the fantastic: "The fantastic is generally speaking what carries a person into the infinite in such a way that it only leads him away from himself and thus prevents him from coming back to himself. When emotion becomes fantastic in this way, the self is simply more and more volatilized. ... The person whose emotions have become fantastic ... in a way becomes infinitized, but not in such a way as to become more and more himself, for he loses himself more and more".