Who Was Friedrich Nietzsche?

22 mins read

A.C. Grayling

Around the name ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’ plays a romance of genius and madness, of profound insight and philosophical revolution. His writings have the vatic character of the Old Testament prophets – deliberately so: his longest book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, is cast in the form of a revelation brought down from the mountains by a seer. It does not impugn the originality and power of Nietzsche’s thought to say that he was a dramatist of ideas as much as a philosopher. Indeed in utterance, in appearance and in biography he is the paradigm of thinker as lightning flash, deliberately shocking those who encounter him, either into outrage or into a different way of thinking.

Nietzsche was born near Leipzig in Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died of a brain disease in his mid-thirties, when Nietzsche was aged five. He had a brother who died in infancy, and a sister, Elisabeth, two years younger, who came to play a significant role in his posthumous reputation.

Because his father had been a state employee (pastors were on the public payroll) Nietzsche was given a scholarship to the prestigious Schulpforta school at Naumburg. There he studied classical and modern languages and music, fell in love with the then little-known poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and first came to hear of Richard Wagner. At Bonn University he studied theology and philology, at first thinking of becoming a pastor. To the great disappointment of his mother and sister he lost his faith as a result of reading David Strauss’ Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Instead he devoted himself to classical philology as a student of Professor Friedrich Ritschl at Leipzig University, and there acquired a passion for philosophy as a result of reading Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

In 1867 Nietzsche volunteered for a year’s service with a Prussian artillery division. He was a good horseback rider, which in the eyes of his superiors was the chief qualification for being an officer. This might have been his fate had he not had an accident while leaping on to his horse one day, serious enough to invalid him for many months. He therefore returned to his studies, and soon afterwards met Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, who were to exert a great influence on him.

Nietzsche’s teacher Professor Ritschl held him in high esteem, and helped him secure the chair of classical philology at Basle University in 1869 at the amazingly young age of twenty-four, even before he had been awarded a doctorate. At Ritschl’s instigation the University of Leipzig gave Nietzsche an honorary doctorate to somewhat regularize matters.

Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture was on Homer, though the dissertation he had been writing but never finished was an examination of the sources used by Diogenes Laertius for his Lives of the Philosophers. Richard and Cosima Wagner lived not far away at Lucerne and he became a regular visitor at their house, there meeting Franz Liszt among others.

At Basle Nietzsche became acquainted with the great historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt, and with two others who exercised an influence on his thinking, the theologian Franz Overbeck, who remained a lifelong friend, and a Russian philosopher called Afrikan Spir.

During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 Nietzsche served as a medical orderly in the Prussian army, falling ill in the harsh conditions of the war zone and perhaps contracting syphilis at a brothel frequented by troops. This is hypothesized as the source of the ill-health that was his chronic lot thereafter, and his madness in the last decade of his life, ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’ being a consequence of syphilitic infection.

In 1872 Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy, his first book. It was very poorly regarded by the academic community because it failed to observe the standard protocols for a work of scholarship – which Nietzsche did not intend it to be, in any case: he was a speculative and polemical philosopher, and this book set out his stall in that respect. He tried to transfer to the philosophy faculty, but without success. During the early part of the 1870s he wrote the essays published in book form as Untimely Meditations, including one on Wagner, though by 1876 his admiration for Wagner had begun to cool because he was surprised and disappointed by what he saw as the false glamour of the Bayreuth Festival and Wagner’s self-promotion.

In 1879, too ill to maintain his teaching duties at Basle, Nietzsche retired. He had just published a book of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human, and now took himself to Italy and the south of France in the wintertime, and to Sils Maria in the Alps in the summers, devoting himself to writing. Between 1879 and 1888 he produced a series of major works, Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner, Ecce Homo, The Antichrist and Nietzsche contra Wagner (all 1888), together with draft materials for a book he proposed to call The Will to Power. In these years he was assisted by a secretary, Peter Gast (pseudonym of Johann Heinrich Köselitz), who was partly subsidized by Nietzsche’s friend Paul Rée.

Rée and Nietzsche both fell in love with same woman, the vivid and gifted Lou Andreas-Salomé, writer and later psychoanalyst, and friend of Freud and Rilke among others. Nietzsche proposed marriage to her a number of times, but his relationship with both her and Rée ended in bitterness as a result of her preference for the latter. It was a painful experience for Nietzsche, who blamed not only Andreas-Salomé and Rée but his sister Elisabeth, who had interfered because of her profound disapproval of Andreas-Salomé, whom she regarded as the type of modern woman that her conventional, indeed reactionary, attitudes could not tolerate. Nietzsche and Elisabeth had a difficult relationship at the best of times, but after this debacle he said that he felt a ‘genuine hatred’ for her.

Elisabeth later came to have a malign influence on Nietzsche’s reputation, in framing him as a sort of Nazi avant la lettre after his madness and death. She had married a zealous proto-Nazi called Bernhard Förster who had taken a group of blond blue-eyed Aryans to South America to breed a master race, a plan foiled by the almost immediate deaths of all of them from tropical diseases. Förster himself committed suicide in despair. Elisabeth, adopting the name ‘Frau Förster Nietzsche’, edited and published her brother’s works to give them the anti-Semitic, nationalistic, Nazianticipating twist she desired. But Nietzsche was emphatically against antiSemitism and nationalism, and his doctrines were not political but ethical, in ways described below.

Partly as a result of falling out with his publisher Ernest Schmeitzner (over Schmeitzner’s anti-Semitism, as it happened) and partly because his books sold hardly a copy, Nietzsche began publishing at his own expense. He printed forty copies of the final volume of Zarathustra and gave them away to friends and acquaintances. All through the final decade of his life, a richly productive one, he kept thinking and writing at a furious rate.

Nietzsche’s poor health had seen little improvement during this time, and he had become dependent on opium to combat his insomnia. By late 1888 he was concerning his friends because of the wild letters he sent them, and his claims to be descended from Polish nobility, whose aristocratic virtues had descended to him despite, he said, the interference of four generations of German mothers. In early January 1889 he suffered a total collapse of his mental health, and never recovered. He lived under the care of his mother and sister, incapacitated by madness and also, in the very final years, by a series of paralysing strokes, until his death in 1900. It is said that what finally tipped him into insanity was seeing a horse being mercilessly beaten by its driver; he rushed to protect the animal, throwing his arms about its neck and sobbing.

Nietzsche’s chief philosophical concern was ethics, and very much as it was understood by the philosophers of antiquity, namely, as an answer to the questions, What sort of person should I be? How should I live? What values should shape and guide my choices, my aims, my life? These questions are different from questions that are more narrowly about morals as such: What makes an action right or wrong? What are the principles of morality?

It might come as a surprise to some to see that ethics and morals, although of course intimately connected, are distinguishable in this way. Ethics is a more inclusive matter than morality; it concerns character whereas morality concerns actions. Our actions will mainly of course flow from our character, but the targets of enquiry in ethics (seeking answers to What sort of person shall I be?) and in debates about morality (What is the right thing to do in this case?) are obviously not the same.

Nietzsche thought that the values of Western civilization were wrong. He thought they had been distorted by the Judaeo-Christian legacy of moral thinking. His criticism was levelled not only at Christianity itself, but at those philosophers who accepted much of the moral outlook of Christianity while arguing for an independent justification for it that did not require a theistic grounding.

Accordingly his announcement in The Gay Science that ‘God is dead’ was not just an atheistic assertion, but a declaration that everything built on the foundations of theism had collapsed. If the entire culture and civilization founded on Christianity no longer has any basis, then a ‘revaluation of all values’ is necessary. The confusion and anxiety of life among the ruins of the demolished order are exacerbated by realizing that the order not only had no foundation, but was actually harmful: its morality undermined, indeed perverted, what humanity could be.

Putting this right is not an easy matter, Nietzsche said; but it has to be done. The first step is to understand what has happened. This is outlined in The Genealogy of Morals. It was once the case that what was ‘good’ was determined according to the self-evaluation of the noble, high-minded and powerful members of society, and what was ‘bad’ was associated with their opposites, the ‘low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian’. But this order was upended by ‘a slave revolt’ prompted by resentment, and the ‘good– bad’ contrast predicated on the aristocratic view was replaced by a new contrast, between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Pride becomes a sin, the good are those who are humble, meek and suffering – precisely the lot of those who had suffered enslavement or exile. It is good to be compassionate, and to have pity; self-denial and sacrifice are virtues – Nietzsche calls them ‘unegoistic’ virtues, so different from the assertion of the ego which is a noble virtue.

In The Antichrist he indicates the value system that he opposes to the ‘slave morality’ introduced by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, by asking, ‘What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war; not virtue but fitness.’

Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was able to make good use of such passages, which if misread yield a sinister interpretation indeed. But put in juxtaposition to Schopenhauer’s views, one sees what he meant. Schopenhauer thought that the will to exist, which for him is the noumenon, the underlying reality, is doomed always to frustration, and is therefore the cause of the suffering that is ubiquitous in the world. Nietzsche insists instead that the will to overcome this frustration, to fight and conquer it so that one can live, create and succeed, is the ethical way. To strive and to desire, to wish to grow and expand, are worthy things; to be one who strives and thereby overcomes the barriers to growth and expansion is to be an Übermensch – ‘Superman’ in the sense of ‘superior man’ – and thus truly moral.

What this involves, said Nietzsche, is the affirmation of life, to be a ‘Yessayer’. The idea is to live as if one were going to live one’s life over and over again for ever – the idea of ‘eternal recurrence’, contemplating which makes us determined to live as affirmatively, positively and nobly as possible. But that is not to choose to live under any illusions: one has to be honest about what embracing life involves, for it involves suffering and loss, pain and grief too. It therefore also requires courage. These ideas occur variously in The Gay Science and Ecce Homo.

But there is a salve to the pain that we have to accept in embracing life and living it truthfully and courageously, and the salve – as Schopenhauer had argued also – is art: ‘We possess art’, Nietzsche says, ‘lest we perish of the truth.’ Art helps us to know ‘how to make things beautiful’, as either creators or enjoyers; as the latter we can be ‘poets of our lives’ and give ourselves satisfaction and style, treating our own lives as a creative work and giving it aesthetic value as part of its ethical character. And this requires that we be autonomous individuals, free spirits, rejecting the restrictions that society and conventional morality seek to impose.

Nietzsche did not present his views systematically, but through polemics and the use of tropes such as the contrast between the attitudes to life and art represented respectively by Apollo and Dionysus. In his early book The Birth of Tragedy – which he later came to think badly written and confused – he argued that both the order and rationality of the Apollonian and the instinctive, sometimes ecstatic and often chaotic nature of the Dionysian are essential for drama – indeed, that the tension between them is the source of all art. Whereas Aeschylus and Sophocles represent the high point of that fruitful tension, Euripides and Socrates emphasized the Apollonian over the Dionysian, rationality over feeling, and thus brought the great age of Greek culture to an end.

Some commentators see nihilism at the centre of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In light of the ‘affirmation’ and ‘eternal recurrence’ themes it is clear that he was not himself a nihilist: rather, he attacked both nihilism and pessimism as outcomes of the loss of faith in traditional theism-based morality when nothing is put in its place. ‘The higher species is lacking, i.e., those whose inexhaustible fertility and power keep up the faith in man,’ he wrote, ‘the lower species (“herd”, “mass”, “society”) unlearns modesty and blows up its needs into cosmic and metaphysical values. In this way the whole of existence is vulgarized: insofar as the mass is dominant it bullies the exceptions, so they lose their faith in themselves and become nihilists.’ His recognition of the problem that results from repudiating traditional values wholesale is precisely what makes thinkers like Heidegger see him as a nihilist, but that misses his point: he does not ‘devalue all values’ but ‘revalues’ them.

The ideas for which Nietzsche is best known – the immoralist, the Superman, the contrast between master and slave moralities, going ‘beyond good and evil’, ‘the revaluation of all values’, ‘philosophizing with a hammer’ (recalling Zarathustra’s ‘Smash, smash the old law-tables!’) – have been studied and sometimes appropriated and adapted by thinkers in both Analytic and Continental philosophy in the century after his time. As often happens with fertile and original thinkers, Nietzsche’s richly interesting views are open to anyone from any tradition of thought as a target for study and reflection; they repay both.

A.C. Grayling is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia and spent most of his childhood there and in Nyasaland. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London.

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