PHIL304: Existentialism

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

German philosopher and critic of culture, who influenced a number of the major writers and philosophers of the 20th century Germany and France. Nietzsche's most popular book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), went ignored at the time of its appearance. Full of provocative ideas, Nietzsche was a master of aphoristic form and use of contradictions. Before and after the rise and fall of the Nazis, he was widely misrepresented as an anti-Semite and a woman hater, and many philosophers found it difficult to take his writings seriously. Like the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Nietzsche often contradicted himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche born  in Röcken, near Leipzig, the son of Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and  Franziska Nietzsche, a devout hausfrau. His father died –  mad –  in 1849. Franziska lost her youngest son in 1850 and moved her family to Naumberg, where Nietzsche spent the rest of his childhood with his mother, sister, father's mother, and two aunts.

Nietzsche began to write of his intellectual maturation from an early age. During his high school and college years, he penned nine autobiographical sketches. After years of self-scrutiny Nietzsche refused to take communion, to the shock of his mother. "My dear old Friz is a noble person, despite our differences of opinion," she wrote to her brother. "He truly interprets life or, more accurately, time and appreciates only the lofty and good and despises everything crude."

Rejecting his father's faith, Nietzsche became a lifelong rebel against Christianity. "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross," he wrote in  Der Antichrist (1888). Nietzsche was brought up by pious female relatives. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn (1864-65) and Leipzig (1864-68), and became at the age of 25 a professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Among his acquaintances was Jakob Burckhardt, the writer of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). During the Franco-Prussian was he served briefly as a medical orderly with the Prussian army. Nietzsche's military career was short: he contracted dysentery and diphtheria.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy). He diagnosed in it human beings as subject to unconscious, involuntary, overwhelmingly self-destructive Dionysian instincts. According to Nietzsche, against this tendency the Greeks erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian principle.

Nietzsche considered reality as an endless Becoming (Werden). Apollinian power is associated with the creation of illusion – the plastic arts deny the actuality of becoming with the illusion of timeless beauty. Dionysian frenzy threatens to destroy all forms and codes. Only the Apollinian power of the Greeks was able to control the Dionysian flood. But all illusions are temporary, and in his "experimentalist phase" (1878-1882) Nietzsche saw that the loss of Apollinian spell will make the return to Dionysian actuality even more painful. But it must be noted, that the Dionysus whom Nietzsche celebrated in his later writings, was the synthesis of the two forces and represented passion controlled. In the earlier work he favored perhaps more Apollo. His thesis, however, was, that it took both to make possible the birth of tragedy. Later in life Nietzsche addressed Cosima Wagner as "Princess Ariadne" in his letters to her, and declared that the author of them is the god Dionysus. In Cosima's view, there was an affinity between the young Nietzsche and King Ludwig II of Bavaria; she found striking parallels of temperament, and even their eyes were similar.

At Basel Nietzsche had become a close friend of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and the second part of The Birth of Tragedy deals with Wagner's music. Nietzsche called the composer "Old Minotaur." In History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell remarked: "Nietzsche's superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek." By the end of the decade, Nietzsche became interested in the French enlightenment, which ended in 1878 his friendship with Wagner and his wife Cosima. The composer despised the French and searched acceptance in Germany. Also Nietzsche did not accept the rising Wagnerian cult at Bayreuth, especially with its anti-Semitism and Cosima's authoritarian attitude in interpreting the composer's intentions. "Madame Wagner," said Bernard Shaw, "is a clever stage manager; but one of the faults of her qualities is to conceive a dramatic representation as a series of tableaux vivants, and to invent attitudes for people instead of continuous and natural action."

Nietzsche gave up Prussian citizenship in 1869 and remained stateless for the rest of his life. In 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship – or was forced to give up his chair – due to his headaches and poor health. He wandered about Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, living in boardinghouses, and producing most of his famous books.

Nietzsche respected that sincere and "genuine Christianity" which he considered "possible in all ages" – but Wagner's Parsifal with its sickly Christianity clearly did not seem to him belonging in that category. In Bayreuth Nietzsche had became increasingly aware of the impossibility of serving both Wagner and his own call. "What did I never forgive Wagner?... that he became reichdeutsch," Nietzsche wrote disillusioned. Since their disastrous meeting in Sorrento in 1876 the composer had been for him the epitome of that decadence against which his Superman fought. When Wagner had confessed to him the ecstasies that he had experienced when he thought of the Holy Grail and the Eucharist, Nietzsche was appalled, it had been the last straw. In the essay 'Der Fall Wagner' (1888, The Case of Wagner) he even asked, "Was Wagner a German at all?" and answered his own question by claiming that he was the natural son of his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, a Jew. "Now we can understand his antipathy towards the Jews."

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), the talented and spirited daughter of a Russian army officer, became Nietzsche's most painful love. "... I lust after this kind of soul," Nietzsche wrote to her companion Paul Rée; actually he needed a young person around him who is intelligent and educated enough to serve as his assistant. "From which stars did we fall to meet each other here?" were Nietzche's first words when he saw her at Saint Peter's Basilica.

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche praised her poem, 'Hymnus an das Leben' (1882, Hymn to Life), which he set to music. "Whoever can find any meaning at all in the last words of this poem will guess why I preferred and admired it: they attain greatness. Pain is not considered an objection to life: 'If you have no more happiness to give me, well then! you still have suffering ...' Perhaps my music, too, attains greatness at this point." Possibly Nietzsche proposed marriage to her, although according to some sources he never did so. However, Nietzsche told Andreas-Salomé that Zarathustra had been conceived as an artistic substitute for the son he would never have. In Lucerne Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche and Rée had a photograph taken of themselves, Lou kneeling in a small cart and holding a whip over the two man-team, who are pulling the cart.

Rejected by Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche withdrew into the existence of a tourist-scholar. He spent summers in Switzerland and winters in Italy, and published his major works in a period of ten years. Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) appeared first in three parts in 1883-1884 and was formally published in 1892. Among his other works were Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887),  Götzen-Dämmerung (1889), and Ecce Homo (pub. in 1908, written in 1888). Thus Spoke Zarathustra centered around the notions of the will to power, radical nihilism, and the eternal recurrence. Pain, suffering, and contradictions are no longer seen as objections to existence but as an expression of its actual tensions. In a note entitled 'Anti-Darwin' Nietzsche stated that "man as a species is not progressing." He substituted the ordinary conception of progress for a doctrine of eternal recurrence, and stressed the positive power of heroic suffering.

In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in Turin, Italy. According to the standard story he was found on the Piazza Carlo Alberto, weeping and embracing a coach horse after seeing it whipped by its driver – noteworthy, the horse did not appear until 1900 as a part of the accounts of Nietzsche's breakdown. Nietzsche lived first in an asylum and then in his family's care. It has been claimed that his insanity was probably due to an early syphilitic infection. Many scholars, including the novelist and biographer Sue Prideaux in I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (2018), have suggested that Nietzsche died of a brain tumor. During his final years in mental darkness Nietzsche was almost invariably gentle and pleasant, and in lucid hours he engaged in conversation. Nietzsche died in Weimar on August 25, 1900. No post-mortem was performed on his body. He was buried in Röcken next to his father.

After Nietzsche's death, his sister Elisabeth secured the rights to his literary remains and edited them for publication – sometimes in arbitrary and distorted form. Elisabeth had married in 1885 Bernhard Förster, a prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement which Nietzsche loathed. "For my personal taste such an agitator is something impossible for closer acquaintance," he wrote in a letter to his mother. In 1880s Elisabeth founded with Förster a German colony in Paraguay, which was meant for the "Aryans only." Förster killed himself 1889 when his hand was caught in the till. How much Nietzsche's illness – dementia paralytica or syphilis or brain tumor – affected his thinking and writing is open to speculations. In the second period of brain syphilis the patient often acts manic-depressively and has megalomaniac visions. During his own manic period in the 1880s Nietzsche produced Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science, and Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche believed that all life evidences a will to power. Hopes for a higher state of being after death are explained as compensations for failures in this life. The famous view about the "death of God" resulted from his observations of the movement from traditional beliefs to a trust of science and commerce. Nietzsche dissected Christianity and Socialism as faiths of the "little men," where excuses for weakness paraded as moral principles. John Stuart Mill's liberal democratic humanism was for him a target for scorn and he called Mill "that blockhead." His announcement of the death of God in The Gay Science can be interpreted religiously or atheistically: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him... What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?..."

According to Nietzsche, the other world is an illusion, and instead of worshipping gods man should concentrate on his own elevation, which Nietzsche symbolizes in the Übermench. The contrast of "good and evil" as opposed to that of "good and bad" Nietzsche associated with slave morality. He argued that no single morality can be appropriate to all men. The meaning of history was the appearance, at rare moments, of the exceptional individual. And by creating the figure of Zarathustra he presented the teacher of the coming superman.

First Nietzsche's works began to gain significant public notice by Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes, who lectured on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in 1888. The philosophers thoughts influenced among others Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Paul Sartre. Bergson, like Nietzsche, developed his own philosophy of the creative will. Although the Nazis used some of the philosopher's ideas, Nietzsche was deeply opposed to the collective tendencies that labelled National Socialism. Moreover, the Nazis were not good readers in general – they burned books.

Nietzsche rejected biological racism and German nationalism, writing "every great crime against culture for the last four hundred years lies on their conscience." Radical rightists, on the other hand, welcomed Nietzsche's view of "Herrenmensch," a new type of man who with his robber instincts was able to manipulate the masses and who was a law unto himself. Adolf Hitler kept a bust of him and in 1943 gave his works to Mussolini, who did not read them. When Elisabeth Nietzsche died in 1935, Hitler participated in the funeral ceremony. The Nazis built three years later a monument for Nietzsche.

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Source: Petri Liukkonen, http://authorscalendar.info/nietzsch.htm
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