Nietzsche's productivity was increasing at a phenomenal rate throughout this period. In 1887, he finished On the Genealogy of Morals, and finally, in 1888, he finished no less than five books --- The Wagner Case, The Antichrist, The Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and Dionysus Dithyrambs. His correspondence throughout the period speaks of his bad health and the often intricate strategies he had concocted --- particular cities, seasons, restaurants, hotels, etc. --- to improve himself. He was acutely aware of the fact that his health inhibited his work. He also discussed at some length his various projects of re-publishing his early works, with long interpretive prefaces. In a letter to Franz Overbeck (dated March 24, 1887, Nice) he shared the "comic fact" that "I have an 'influence,' very subterranean to be sure. I enjoy a strange and almost mysterious respect among all radical parties." But then he goes on, "everything in my life is so uncertain and shaky, and always this horrible health of mine! On the other hand, there is a hundred weight of this need pressing upon me --- to create a coherent structure of thought during the next few years --- and for this I need five or six preconditions, all of which seem to be missing now or unattainable."
By the summer of 1888, Nietzsche's mind began to break. His appearance began to drag and his letters began to show some incoherence. In the first few days of January 1889, he sent off a burst of terse notes to his oldest and best friends --- to Cosima Wagner, "Ariadne, I love you." (signed "Dionysus"); to Franz Overbeck, "Although till now you have had little faith in my ability to remain solvent, I still hope to prove that I am a person who pays his debts. --- For example, my debts to you both . . . I am just having all anti-semites shot." (signed "Dionysus"); and to Jakob Burckhardt, "Actually, I would much rather be a Basle professor than God; but I have not ventured to carry my private egoism so far as to omit creating the world on his account." (signed "Your Nietzsche") On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche wandered into a square in Turin, Italy, and embraced a mistreated horse, pulling a public conveyance. It is not clear whether the horse had fallen, but it is clear that Nietzsche fell and momentarily lost consciousness. His lifelong friend Overbeck rushed to rescue him and conveyed him, in a state of complete mental collapse and incoherence, to Basel and then to his mother, in Naumburg. Nietzsche's care eventually fell to his sister (after his mother's death in 1897) and he lived with her until his own death on August 25, 1900. [There is evidence in correspondence that Nietzsche had already dreamed about the embrace of a horse in the previous May. It is also true that Dostoyevsky's character Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment, which Nietzsche had read) dreamt of throwing his arms around a mistreated horse. Hence, it is somewhat possible that Nietzsche "orchestrated" this final moment in his dramatic autobiography. In the early faze of his madness he remained physically and vocally active; he had simply passed beyond what Chamberlain calls "[that] restraint which distinguishes between what is appropriate in life and what is theatre." The journey back to Basel was made difficult by the fact that Nietzsche "would keep singing, incomprehensibly talking to strangers, removing his clothes, falling into a rage, weeping." Overbeck hired a psychiatric nurse to help.]
[For a touching account of Nietzsche's demise, read Leslie Chamberlain's final chapter, "Collapse into the Beyond," in Nietzsche in Turin. The correspondence is available in Christopher Middleton's Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. The numerous haunts that Nietzsche orchestrated as weapons against his bad health during the 1880s are nicely documented in David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates's book The Good European.]
A little more than one year after its publication, On the Genealogy of Morals was summarized in Ecce Homo. "Regarding expression, intention, and the art of surprise, the three inquiries which constitute this Genealogy are perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far." "The truth of the first inquiry is the birth of Christianity . . . out of the spirit of ressentiment, not, as people may believe, out of the 'spirit'." "The second inquiry offers the psychology of conscience" which Nietzsche sees arising in the instinct of cruelty (not far from Freud's conclusion). "The third inquiry offers the answer to the question whence the ascetic ideal," for which Nietzsche suggests that "man would rather will even nothingness than not will."
In his first essay, Nietzsche expanded upon the thesis which he already stated in Beyond Good and Evil that the origin of the concept "good" lies in the qualities of an aristocracy. Granting that historians, philosophers, and theologians have constantly attempted to reconstruct our concept of "good" on all manner of grounds, Nietzsche continued his life-long project of understanding our philosophical origins in primordial natural history. [One might remember, for instance, Plato's notion that "good" is the central Idea, analogous to the sun within the realm of appearance.] We must therefore try to imagine the general struggle of primordial humans in which powerful leaders must have arisen above the rest and, compelled by their own will to power, excelled in diverse ways. The psychological strength of such people must have meant substantial self esteem for them; and that in turn must have led them to believe that they were good --- indeed, exemplars of "the good."
Could Nietzsche produce any evidence for this scenario? In fact, he believed that etymology would reveal this in all languages. A thorough study of the evolution of terms would demonstrate relationships between 'good' and 'noble' as well as between 'bad' and 'simple' or 'plebeian'. Certainly, history itself suggests little doubt that our earliest times were universally dominated by powerful and often egoistic, cruel men. An interesting additional insight, however, is Nietzsche's idea that "a concept denoting political superiority always resolves itself into a concept denoting superiority of soul." It is not surprising, then, that a priestly class emerges and that the discussion of "good" and "bad" becomes confusedly combined with a discussion of "pure" and "impure". There are obvious problems for Nietzsche with the emergence of the priestly class since it means a transfer of energy from the essentially physical application of strength to the application of mental strength. However, Nietzsche adds, "it is only fair to add that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil."
This discussion tips the balance away from the epoch of good and bad to what Nietzsche calls "the slave revolt in morality." Here begins the era of jealous hatred focused on the self-asserting aristocracy. All the excellence of powerful noble souls is branded "evil" and the situation of the common (herd, slave, etc.) is branded "good". "The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values." (#10) As Nietzsche added, "The 'well-born' felt themselves to be 'happy'; they did not have to establish their happiness artificially by examining their enemies, or to persuade themselves, deceive themselves, that they were happy (as all men of ressentiment are in the habit of doing)." Ironically, 'bad' and 'evil' pretend to be opposites of the same word 'good'. But, as Nietzsche emphasizes, they are opposites of two entirely different concepts of what is good.
Ultimately, the problem with the era of ressentiment is the "diminution and leveling of European man." Becoming timid and common succeeds in becoming our highest value. But this has profound consequences. "Together with the fear of man we have also lost our love of him, our reverence for him, our hopes for him, even the will to him. The sight of man now makes us weary --- what is nihilism today if it is not that? --- We are weary of man."
Having established the evolution of moralities from master-morality to slave-morality, hence the origin of our present system of "good and evil," Nietzsche turned to the associated issues of guilt and bad conscience. At the beginning of the second essay, he takes a very original approach to the idea of being human in the moral sense. "To breed an animal with the right to make promises --- is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?" In fact, we can speculate that the earliest humans lived "hand to mouth" and remembered little. One must have memory if one is going to make promises that have value. So becoming responsible to others involves developing memory and, probably also, becoming more uniform with (more like) others. Here lies the evolution of what we call conscience.
This discussion sets the entire tone of the second essay. It is a radically original re-thinking of human natural history, something that we are not seriously interested in doing, usually, given our position in cultivated societies. On the contrary, we tend to assume that humans have always been "cultivated" in some sense so we unblushingly use cultivated characteristics as descriptors when pondering evolutionary causes. There is a remarkable similarity between Nietzsche's visions of these primordial processes and Freud's (later) development of human psychology.
Considering the need to produce memory in man, it is all-too-easy to just say that memory must evolve. How was this evolution actually achieved? What forced it to happen? According to Nietzsche, we cannot hide from the fact that it was largely achieved by inflicting pain, indeed, great pain. Much of this was achieved in the context of transactions --- creditor and debtor. In this sense, perhaps, all morality really flows out of the primitive economic relationship between the powerful creditor and the weak debtor. In partial evidence for these ideas, Nietzsche sites ancient laws that allow the creditor to remove limbs or other bodily parts as payment. Nor should we simply interpret all of this in terms of mere physical equivalencies. Humans have always enjoyed --- maybe, in fact, celebrated --- the opportunity to bring pain, often great pain to others.
But how does the feeling of guilt arise? What is the "bad conscience"? In #16 and #17 Nietzsche produces an amazingly insightful conclusion. "All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward." This, in fact, is what begins the development of one's "inner life" or soul. The depth of one's inner life is a direct consequence of the magnitude of that instinctual life that no longer finds an external (outward) home. [Freud either came to the same conclusion or simply appropriated Nietzsche's idea.] The only remaining question is how to describe the instinctual life that turns inward. But however we describe it, Nietzsche sees it as the origin of "bad conscience." "This instinct for freedom forcibly made latent --- we have seen it already --- this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself: that, and that alone, is what the bad conscience is in its beginnings." What we are facing here is the terrifying turning inward of the will-to-power itself. When the whole of human energy can no longer push outwardly in every direction, it must turn upon itself. But to what uses will it be put there?
Nietzsche calls it an illness but observes that pregnancy is also an "illness." Thus, the inward journey does not necessarily lead to destructive results. Freud also see this as the energy that feeds guilt but imagines that guilt is a necessary component of healthy development. The individual acquires depth and complexity. Repressed energy can be sublimated, and most of the great works of culture are the results of sublimation. The problem with this "illness" is that it represents a terrible power, a power that can easily go bad --- for Nietzsche, that has indeed been the case.
From this basic idea, Nietzsche imaginatively reconstructs the process through which bad conscience ultimately inflated itself into the towering projected image of an omnipotent god before whom all are guilty. But this is not mere guilt; man suffers from "original sin". Existence itself has already made him worthy of guilt before such a projection, God. The psychic possibilities are almost unbounded and, as Nietzsche points out, even leads to that "paradoxical and horrifying expedient . . . that stroke of genius on the part of Christianity: God himself sacrific[ing] himself for the guilt of mankind." Here lies the very center of Nietzsche's complaint regarding Christianized European society. This is why Nietzsche has consistently held that this society represents a No-saying to life. It is, in his estimation, a psychic illness that, even with all its good cultural works, has nevertheless pushed man into a terrible madness. "In this psychical cruelty there resides a madness of the will which is absolutely unexampled: the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for; his will to think himself punished without any possibility of the punishment becoming equal to the guilt; his will to infect and poison the fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt so as to cut off once and for all his own exit from this labyrinth of 'fixed ideas'; his will to erect an ideal --- that of the 'holy God' --- and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own absolute unworthiness. Oh this insane, pathetic beast --- man!" The horror of all this is especially powerful precisely because Nietzsche has discovered its source precisely in the will-to-power itself, the very energy of life itself.
[There is an interesting difference between Freud and Nietzsche that can be seen clearly here. Nietzsche's sole metaphysical commitment is the singular will to power, out of which everything else is spun --- all the more horrifying, then, that the singular life force itself can become responsible for so great a psychic catastrophe. Freud eventually commits himself to a duality --- eros and thanatos --- a constructive force and a destructive force. For Freud, all organisms represent a balance of these two forces and the changing weight of one versus the other explains the birth-and-death cycle of all life. Because social life cannot afford the outward violent thrust of thanatos, much of its energy is turned inward and constructively used to adjust behavior through the developing mechanism of repression and sublimation. In the cultivated individual, neither eros nor thanatos emerges except in highly sublimated forms. But in Freud, this "cultivation" does not have to lead to disastrous consequences such as an excess of self-hatred. For Freud, the "discontent" attached to all civilization is the inwardly directed pain and frustration of natural instinctive energies that makes all the good works of civilized life possible. Nietzsche, I think, agrees that civilized life is good --- with all of its mysterious depth and complexity --- but sees the Christian era as far more disastrous to individuals by projecting self-inflicted pain into enormous proportions. Nietzsche and Freud, after all, were dealing with entirely different clienteles --- Nietzsche with German Lutherans in general and Freud with the more limited phenomenon of hysteria. Freud certainly saw religion as a neurosis but he never followed it out to the depth that Nietzsche did.]
The third and final essay, addresses the ascetic ideal as it occurs in Christian culture. Asceticism is a practice, that is, a carefully controlled mode of living. In that sense, Nietzsche sees it as an admirable application of the will to power. Considering Nietzsche's well developed dietary, climatic, and environmental strategies, one would have to say he was something of an ascetic himself. At the same time, however, asceticism represents abstinence from one or another aspect of a natural life. And for that reason, Nietzsche is always opposed. Examples include the artist, the philosopher, the scientist, and of course the Christian ascetic.