Copyright 1996, 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College
"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the
memory of something tremendous --- a crisis without equal on earth,
the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was
conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded,
hallowed so far. I am no man; I am dynamite." (Nietzsche, Ecce
Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny," aph. 1.)
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Roecken, Saxony. Both sides of his family had long connections with the Lutheran Church. His father, in fact, was a Lutheran pastor and his mother's father was a country vicar. Nietzsche had one sibling, his sister Elizabeth, who was born on July 10, 1846. Three years later, when Nietzsche was not quite five years old, his father died of a congenital brain disease. From this time onward there was no male influence in Nietzsche's childhood; he was raised, in the company of his sister, by his mother and various female relatives, establishing the grounding of the suspicions he later harbored toward women.
By the age of twelve, Nietzsche was already missing school days because of his health, complaining of headaches and pains in his eyes. As we shall see, these problems followed him throughout his life. Nietzsche was decidedly intellectual and mixed little with other youths. His diary, in 1856, proudly reviews his musical and literary accomplishments. Nietzsche continued his interest in music throughout his life. The culmination of his early education is a six year period at Schulpforta, from 1858 to 1864, where he receives a brilliant classical education. Schulpforta was the most famous Protestant boarding school in Germany at the time.
Nietzsche's university education began at the University of Bonn, in October 1864, where he continued his classical studies and began a program in theology; however, he was disgusted by the Roman Catholic population of Bonn, which turned him sharply away from any further interest in theology. Within a year, committed to classics, he moved to the University of Leipzig, in order to follow his professor, Friedrich Ritschl. Another student of classics, Erwin Rohde, left Bonn for Leipzig in order to follow Ritschl, and Rohde proved to be one of Nietzsche's lifelong friends. In Leipzig, Nietzsche read Schopenhauer's book The World as Will and Idea and it had a deep impact on him. This was to seal any thought of theology behind him and create a confusion of interests between philosophy and classics that would last through the next decade. Nevertheless, by 1866, he was already writing essays on classical literature, and an approving Ritschl was getting them published in prestigeous journals.
Nietzsche's education was briefly interrupted, in October 1867, when he went into military service, entering the cavalry. Within the year, however, he received an injury while mounting his horse; and he returned to Leipzig after a lengthy illness. In Novemeber 1868, still in Leipzig, Nietzsche had his first meeting with Richard Wagner, the man who would exercise an enormous influence on the rest of Nietzsche's life. Nietzsche and Wagner discussed Schopenhauer and music. Nietzsche and some friends had already been in possession of a piano score for Wagner's newest opera, "Tristan and Isolde." Always quick to identify an admirer, Wagner was very warm toward Nietzsche and expressed an interest in seeing him again.
By February 1869 Nietzsche was offered the position Extraordinary Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. And, in May, he removed to Basel, where he met two more of his lifelong friends --- Jakob Burckhardt, a famous historian of Greece and the Renaissance, and Franz Overbeck, a liberal minded theologian and church historian. Nietzsche was just 24 years of age.
Nietzsche hurried to renew his acquaintance with Richard Wagner, who was living in Tribschen, near Lucerne and not far removed from Basle. Wagner was living with Cosima von Buelow, the daughter of Franz Liszt and estranged wife of conductor Hans von Buelow. Cosima was 36 years younger than Wagner and a bright, intellectual woman. She and Wagner adopted Nietzsche. His visits increased to the point where he was spending every weekend in Tribschen. In his letters, he made it clear that life at Tribschen was independent and free, beyond ordinary moral codes, and incredibly stimulating, musically and intellectually. The impact of this period with Wagner and Cosima cannot be underestimated. They were people, artists and intellectuals, far removed from the Prussian Lutheran world of Nietzsche's youth, people who were pushing at the very limits of what was possible in human life. Nietzsche was doing work on Greek tragedy and he was beginning to draw comparisons between Wagner and the Germanic Spirit, on one hand, and Aeschyllus, Sophocles, and Hellenism, on the other.
Nietzsche's teaching career at the University of Basel lasted from its inception in the fall of 1869 until the end of spring term in 1879. In reality, however, it was much shorter than ten years, being interrupted by numerous leaves of absence for personal and health reasons. It was not only Nietzsche's health that interferred with his work at Basel; it was also his rapidly growing disillusionment with classical philology. Even while being promoted to Ordinary Professor of Classical Philology, in 1870, he was coming to the realization that "no radical truth is possible [in the universities]" and that his real goal was a "scientific and ethical education of [his] nation."
The period from 1869 through 1872 was interrupted by military service as an ambulance driver in the Franco-Prussian War and by periods of sick leave, mostly spent in the Swiss Alps. Nevertheless, by January 1872, his first major book was in print. It was called The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and, as we will see, it was deeply confused with his spiritual and emotional relationships with Richard Wagner, Cosima von Buelow, and the so-called Wagnerites. In approaching the Greeks, Nietzsche had decided to free himself from the standard, indeed orthodox, assumption that the Greeks were a happy, simple people; and instead he assumed that they were suffering from pessimism and distrust of life. These were views of interest to Burckhardt and clearly related to Schopenhauer, but antithetical to classicists, like Ritschl. At first the work was entirely ignored by the scholarly world; then it was publicly censured by a philologist colleague at Bonn; Ritschl remained silent. Nietzsche himself, in later life, made reference to this book "dropping stillborn from the press." Meanwhile, the university began to take sanctions against him, restricting his teaching and advising students to study with others.
1872 begins the period of Nietzsche's productive life which was to end in late 1888 with his complete mental collapse. In very important ways, its beginning with The Birth of Tragedy was supremely important. First, this book developed themes and ideas that Nietzsche never left, which is not to say that he failed to redirect or revise them. Second, the book brought him firmly into engagement with the whole Wagnerian circle, an exciting and heady experience, though, again, something that he would have to dispose of eventually. And third, the critical treatment that he received at the hands of the university community, a community whose imagination and creativity he already doubted, set him off toward his own intellectual program, like a rocket escaping the earth's gravitational field.
Throughout the period from 1872 to 1888, Nietzsche's health continued to deteriorate. He was plagued by the severest of headaches, bad vision, fever, and diarrhea. He met these complaints with isolation, medications, treatments at spas, and long sojourns into the warmer climates of Italy or to the high-altitude air of Switzerland. In 1876, in fact, he was on leave of absence for the entire year. By 1879, he resigned his chair.
Meanwhile, from 1872 to 1876, he wrote four powerful essays, called Thoughts Out of Season, and established two more great friendships --- Peter Gast, a musician, and Paul Ree, a philosopher and writer on psychology. Both men eventually helped Nietzsche, whose eyesight was ever poorer, by taking dictation. Of greatest importance during this period, however, was the gradual dissolution of his relationship with Richard Wagner. In 1872, Wagner had moved from Tribschen to Bayreuth where he planned to build an opera theater that would become a worthy tribute to his life's works. In May Wagner's dreams were realized and he planted the cornerstone of the Bayreuth Theater. Nietzsche visited him, and it was then that he first met Malwida von Meysenbug, a truly amazing, revolutionary thinker in her own right, who remained a faithful friend to Nietzsche through the rest of his life.
In Nietzsche's mind, Wagner spent less and less time in Tribschen and more and more in Bayreuth, and that made all of the difference. Wagner's mind passed from the great ideals of Germanic myths and the saving power of music into the collective, wealthy world of German Christendom, where he expected to raise the necessary funds for this monument to his career. When Nietzsche met Wagner in Sorrento, in the fall of 1876, Wagner was full of his new composition "Parcifal," except that, from Nietzsche's point of view, Wagner was converting a fine classic myth of moral and psychological recovery into a pedestrian Christian extravaganza. Meanwhile, Nietzsche himself had been going in quite a different direction and was already working on his next major book, Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Nietzsche never saw Wagner again. Wagner died in 1883 and Nietzsche wrote to friends both that "Wagner was by far the fullest man I have ever known" and that "it was hard to be for six years the enemy of the man one most reveres." During Wagner's life, Nietzsche never published a critical word about him.
Human, All-Too-Human, I was published in 1878 and Nietzsche added to it in 1879 and 1880. In 1879 his health had become so poor and his resolve to free himself from all encumbrances had become so great that he resigned his position at the University of Basel, accepting a small pension on which he lived for the rest of his life. Part II of Human, All-Too-Human was appropriately subtitled "The Wanderer and His Shadow." The Nietzsche that we find in this book is really very different from the Nietzsche of Birth of Tragedy or of Thoughts. Schopenhauer's pessimism and metaphysics and Wagner's musical aesthetics and heroic mythology are gone. Nietzsche has turned to realism and science, to careful and scrupulous analysis and criticm of human life and institutions. What is man really? How do we uncover what man really is?
In 1881 came The Dawn: Thoughts on Moral Prejudices and, in 1882, The Gay Science. Nietzsche's thought was developing in an obvious path and it rang with increasing confidence. It is in the fourth book of The Gay Science that Nietzsche first pronounced the vision that "God is dead!"
However, in 1882 Nietzsche's life took a dramatic turn that was destined to send his thought in even new directions and with even more violent resolve. Nietzsche fell in love, perhaps for the very first time, certainly for the last time. The woman was a young Russian aristocrat, Lou Salomâ. Lou was attending school in Rome and was an occasional visitor to Malwida von Meysenbug's home. Nietzsche's friend Paul Reemet her and fell in love with her. Eventually Nietzsche went to Rome to meet her. Nietzsche also found her brilliant and enchanting, a very different kind of woman, definitely more reminiscent of the Cosima von Buelow who he had known at Tribschen. Nietzsche, too, fell in love and awkwardly proposed marriage (through Ree). None of these proposals were accepted seriously by Lou; nevertheless, Nietzsche and Lou pursued a plan of living together through several months in the summer of 1882. That, however, was not to be. It may, of course, be that Lou's interest in living with Nietzsche was only marginal, but Nietzsche himself never had the chance to find that out. When his sister Elizabeth heard about the plans, she and Nietzsche's mother did everything possible to make it completely impossible. In the end, Lou wound up living with Nietzsche's friend Paul Ree, for a period of time, and Nietzsche wound up completely alienated from his mother and sister. Combined with his alienation from Wagner, this left Nietzsche without emotional support, clinging desperately to his correspondents --- Burckhardt, the Overbecks, Gast, etc. --- and bordering on suicidal depressions.
Amazingly, Nietzsche's recovery from this terrible period was coincident with the creation of his most imaginative and, perhaps, forceful work, the poetic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The first part of the book alone was written in just one month (January 1883) while Nietzsche was in isolation. In February, Wagner died; Nietzsche's isolation was increased. The book was subtitled "A Book For All and None."
Work on Zarathustra continued through 1884 and 1885, finishing parts three and four in those years, respectively. Isolation had now become a way of life for Nietzsche. Along with his ever deteriorating health, he was also plagued by the fact that his books, while published, were not getting distributed and, hence, were not getting attention. Nietzsche struggled to keep his thought moving and wrote to his few friends. But his letters of the period are full of unhappiness and frustration. His own appraisals of his work become increasingly moody --- sometimes it is trash and other times it is distilled brilliance.
In 1886, Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil, tackling the same material as Zarathustra but in a more systematic and more scientific style. Meanwhile, he purchased the copyrights for his earlier works back from the publisher and began re-publishing them independently with additions or, at least, new introductions. It was at this point, for instance, that he added Part V to The Gay Science. In 1887, he finished 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 Dionysos Dithyrambs.
The dizzy spiral of revolutionary thinking and terrible health ends. Nietzsche's mind has begun to break by summer 1888; his appearance begins to drag and his letters begin to show incoherence. A final letter to Burckhardt says, "In the end I would have much preferred being a Basle professor to being God. . ." On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche wandered into a square in Turin, Italy, and embraced a horse, standing attached to a cart. His lifelong friend Overbeck rushed to rescue him and conveyed him, in a state of complete mental collapse and incoherence, to his mother, in Jena. Nietzsche's care eventually fell to his sister and he lived with her until his death on August 25, 1900.
Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth had been married to a Nazi and had lived, for a short while, with him in Argentina. While he died there and Elizabeth returned alone to Germany, she continued some associations with his colleagues and was absorbed by much of the nationalistic and anti-semitic thinking of the era. Wagner and his associations had been somewhat infected with Nazi society. To make matters worse, all of Nietzsche's work, notes, and letters fell into Elizabeth's hands. While she prided herself as becoming the steward of Nietzsche's message and struggled to bring his greatest work, The Will to Power, to fruition it is doubtless that she misunderstood most of his thought and corrupted it with her own Nazi sentiments. Thus, even though The Will to Power had been outlined during Nietzsche's life and even though he wrote notes for extensive portions of it, it remains difficult to place its real significance in his life. It was more than ironic that the Third Reich adopted Nietzsche practically as their state philosopher on the basis of this book. Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for Germany and German nationalism, by the end of his mental life, and never subscribed to German anti-semitism either.
Sources:
J. P. Stern, in Friedrich Nietzsche (Penguin, 1978) and also a more extensive biographical study of Nietzsche by Janko
Lavrin, in Nietzsche: A Biographical Introduction (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971). Nietzsche's own most extensive
self-appraisal is in his book Ecce Homo.
A more extensive biography of Nietzsche and other study materials can be found at the Nietzsche WebSite.
Beyond Good and Evil in Relation to Nietzsche's Works
This book is the culmination of a series of three works by Nietzsche, beginning with The Gay Science, in 1882. After GS, Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, beginning in January 1883 and ending in 1884. Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche himself suggested, addressed everything in these works, "but better." The three works are crucial because they clearly define Nietzsche's mature thinking and advance far forward from the early works, such as Human, All-Too-Human. They also represent the last of Nietzsche's "systematic works" in which he thinks his way through the widest possible implications of his ideas. All succeeding works (1886-1888) deliberately confine themselves to specific topics --- Wagner, Christianity, or morality.
Nietzsche's position on the traditional problem of appearance and reality (the noumenal and phenomenal realms) is often called "perspectivism," a term that he himself uses. Unfortunately, from our point of view, this is a rather confusing term. In relation to Kant's division of the noumenal and phenomenal realms, we can see Nietzsche's position in the following way. Kant tells us that we cannot know the thing-in-itself (ding an sich), that is, an object in the noumenal realm. Nevertheless, Kant leaves it as though these things do exist and constitute reality; we just cannot know anything about them. Equally, Kant proceeds to develop his critical theory to understand a wide variety of synthetic a priori knowledge which presents the same level of certainty in our knowledge of the phenomenal realm as we formerly expected, resulting from understanding (metaphysically) connections between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. Thus, in a sense, while Kant apparently excludes the noumenal realm, it is not with much risk.
Almost a century later, Nietzsche's position regarding reality is substantially more risky! Nietzsche denies the noumenal realm completely. It is not merely that we cannot know these objects; they simply have no existence. All that exists is just the phenomenal realm, that which appears to us. Appearance is borne out of chaos. Furthermore, Nietzsche denies any commonly held "pure capacity of reason" which might construct a reliable synthetic a priori worldview. Thus, the world is what each individual makes of it --- hence, "perspectivism." Truth is an experiment. In fact, Nietzsche holds what can be called a naturalistic psychological view of humans and human knowledge. Ideas and language have evolved through the long natural history of human life. Ideas that we hold to firmly are those which have survived because they are useful. While we can recognize this, we cannot know why these ideas are useful. We cannot look behind evolution.
In trying to interpret Nietzsche, it is always important to return to this founding conception of the human predicament. There is no foundation of certain knowledge; there is not even any reliable system of judging truth and falsehood. The world is a succession of interpretations that we place upon experience as it comes to us. Many of these interpretations are influenced by evolution, by others around us, and by authorities. An honest, scientific (in the way Nietzsche uses the term) life submits these interpretational layers, these masks, to scrutiny. We do this to find the honest and coherent course, not to find a reality behind the masks. Philosophers, traditionally, have been mask-makers; Nietzsche's "free spirits" are, like him, ready to take the leap to become un-maskers.
When we consider morality, we must approach it from these founding ideas. Thus, without any of the regular noumenal characters, such as God or golden tablets of right-and-wrong, morality stands only as an empirical fact. Nietzsche's attempt, here, to understand the natural history of morals is his first attempt. A year later, he produced his On the Genealogy of Morals. The general idea is that distinctions like good and bad began in distant time and, for all intents and purposes, rested principally on "good" as the simple descriptor for anything noble. This was, of course, taken quite literally. That is, the noble person assumed that he was good, in the sense of exemplary. "Bad" was a word of lesser importance, for it simply aimed at other folk and commented on their pathetic state.
Social history, as we know, ultimately lead to a strong differentiation between the lowly peasants and the often extravagant nobility. In Nietzsche's mind, the peasant class, lead by the priests, inverted this value-relationship and turned it into a moralistic dichotomy. By declaring the poor and humble good, they made the nobility and the politically powerful evil. "Evil" is, of course, very different from "bad." How this inversion was built into a theology was made clear in the later book, though Nietzsche already saw, at this point, that the priests succeeded in capturing enormous power over people by convincing them that basic human interests -- like sexuality and satisfaction of hunger -- were essentially evils for which they must feel guilt.
It is the role of the future free spirit to think his (or her) way through and past such dichotomies, realizing the lack of any foundation for them. But what do we do when we find ourselves "in the open," without any morality that stands firm? Nietzsche clearly does not tell us what to do but he does tell us how it must happen. Life is directed by the will to power, and Nietzsche sees the will to power as expressed in self-overcoming. We must begin by placing ourselves in that existential situation where we really are free to move in any direction, where nothing is required. Then, we must struggle with ourselves and, in particular, with the multitude of emotions, intentions, aspirations, appetites, etc. This being must be shaped into something whole; it must be over-come in the positive sense of being brought into its own path, its own order. Free spirited life is dangerous and tough. The herd existence of conformity is secure and easy. What Nietzsche suggests, then, is a return to what is best in the idea of nobility. To ask, for oneself, "What is noble?"
A more extensive analysis of Beyond Good and Evil can be found under course notes for Phil 170 at the Nietzsche WebSite.
Return to contents of course notes.