4.1 A Life in Self-Contradiction

The tragedy of Nietzsche’s life and person is his failure of self-overcoming. While he feels the upward and downward forces upon his soul, and while their opposition is the well-spring of his thinking, his comprehension of these forces is so radically deficient that he can never master them. In his works, notebooks and letters Nietzsche constantly testifies to his inner conflictedness, but when interpreting this it is invariably the downward force of anti-transcendental anti-philosophy that has the final say. And since anti-philosophy is relativism, this means putting ever-changing opinion in charge of psychology – not as chaos exactly, for opinion may have some stability, but it remains opinion and not knowledge, and as such cannot provide the sense that is required by philosophical psychology. Thus Nietzsche, who already as a child sets out to make sense of himself and his life, is never able to do so. Despite all his particular insights into his own psyche he cannot bring them into a whole, and therefore finds himself forced to invent a pseudo-unity of conflicts – a psyche ‘rich in contradictions’ as he says, just like Dionysian Life. He cannot ‘overcome himself’ because he does not understand what this means – the downward force of his self-assertion obstructs the possibility of a real self-understanding. He attempts, in vain, to convince himself that the prison-house of his egoism is the ultimate arena of freedom. His soul longs to fly into the heights but he stubbornly, obtusely, miscomprehends the nature of this longing. Although he calls himself an ‘aeronaut of the spirit’ he insists on remaining tethered to ‘the earth’, which he claims to be the one and only reality. This is the story of his life from childhood to breakdown – his tragic euphoria, reaching a peak in the final months before his collapse, attests to nothing else.

‘The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and enjoyment’, Nietzsche declares in The Gay Science, ‘is to live dangerously’.[1] This is a statement of Nietzsche’s psychology, indeed of his gospel. Perhaps ‘fruitfulness’ and ‘enjoyment’ are not immediately convincing as applying to a gospel message, but if Nietzsche’s gospel is thoroughly secular they may be appropriate terms. And many commentators have in fact taken Nietzsche in this way.[2] The question may then be posed as to whether Nietzsche’s own life, and in what degree, is a practical realization of his gospel. He believed it to be – within limits, because he did not claim perfection for himself. Did he exaggerate, however, both his ‘fruitfulness’ and his ‘enjoyment’? Does one say that of course Nietzsche’s life was fruitful, simply by virtue of his works, in the composition of which he was ‘living dangerously’? And does one add that of course, being conscious of the power of his writings, he ‘enjoyed’ producing them and contemplating their impact? Observations like these do not add up to much. Nietzsche’s problem being nihilism – the collapse of meaning – the idea that a solution can be found in ‘dangerous living’ does not qualify as serious unless ‘dangerous’ is understood. We know that many Christians have ‘lived dangerously’, paying for it dearly and willingly, but in all probability Nietzsche would say that they neither ‘enjoyed’ their existence nor were ‘fruitful’. Or would he? And if he would, does his gospel message reduce to psychological banalities or tautologies, because one ‘enjoys’ the existence one chooses?

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche declares that ‘every great philosophy has been a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’.[3] In any case Nietzsche wrote his life and personality into his philosophy more than anybody else has ever done.[4] He often speaks of his mission, his path, the stages of his development, and his sufferings on behalf of his mission. He does not want his person to recede behind his teachings, but thinks it a matter of the first importance to know who he is. And while he wants others to know this, he first has to search it out and know it himself. In the years 1875-77 Nietzsche came to feel that he had misunderstood himself, and gone astray on his path, due to his ‘Wagnerian delusion’. To his friend Marie Baumgartner he wrote in August 1877 that for ten years the theme of his life had been ‘thirsting for myself’ – that he had such difficulty in finding himself was not Wagner’s fault, but he had allowed himself, so he now believed, to be seduced by ‘romanticism’ in the style of Wagner. Thus he had to return to himself and start over again, re-connecting with his authentic instincts. Despite his restless self-questioning, Nietzsche was convinced that deep-down he was sound and healthy and would eventually find his way – his errors and delusions, he felt, helped him in this. With Thus Spake Zarathustra he believed he had finally found himself, and in subsequent works he attested to himself. His last book was his autobiography Ecce Homo of late 1888, where he presented his work as finished and his self-becoming as completed; the final chapter, entitled ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, ends with the line ‘Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified’. With this Nietzsche’s euphoria reached its highest point short of the insanity which soon set in. 

Nietzsche began telling his own life-story already as a boy. What is more remarkable is his sense, at this early age, of what properly belongs to a life-story – it is especially instructive, he remarks at the beginning of a substantial fragment ‘From My Life’ that dates from his fourteenth year, ‘to observe the gradual development of the heart and the understanding, and thereby the almighty guidance of God.’[5] There is a decidedly melancholic tone to this fragment as he remembers his father, who died when Nietzsche was not yet five, the death of his infant brother the following year, and his family’s subsequent removal from the village of his birth – Röcken – to the middle-sized town of Naumburg. ‘From childhood on I sought solitude’, he writes, ‘and felt happiest when left undisturbed to myself’. And he adds, almost uncannily in view of his later development: ‘The free temple of nature is where I usually found the truest joy. A storm always made the most beautiful impression – the cracking thunder and bright shuddering lightning increased my reverence for God.’[6] Between 1858 and 1868 there are autobiographical sketches – some of considerable length – where he records the progress of his mind, his musical interests, his literary productions and family events. At the end of his long 1858 fragment he attached a poetical reflection: ‘Life is a mirror/To recognize oneself in it/I would like to name as the first thing/For which we strive’.[7] He was already coming to see himself as a problem and question not to be solved easily – his philosophy would be the path towards a solution, while by the same token his self-discoveries would be the basis of his philosophical activity.

What then is the problem of Nietzsche’s life? Yet there is a preliminary question: what is meant by such a problem? In Nietzsche’s case one could say it is the problem of how he comes to recognize his ‘destiny’, and works to fulfil this. It makes all the difference, however, whether one takes this problem as a purely psychological one, pertaining to Nietzsche’s opinions and feelings about himself, or as a structural problem relating to human existence as such. It is true of course that in Nietzsche’s life and personality there is much to learn about the psychic conflicts of human beings generally. But if these conflicts do not pertain to the ontology of human existence they are material for psychological rather than philosophical inquiry. Moreover, analysis of these conflicts will be superficial if bound by Nietzsche’s own understanding. Some Nietzscheans take their master’s self-attestations at face value. Even Sigmund Freud – definitely a non-Nietzschean – reportedly said that Nietzsche had a ‘more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live’, a significant judgement but one which should not be uncritically accepted.^[8] The vitality and ‘fertility’ of Nietzsche’s lifelong self-examination makes it all the more necessary to address the philosophical decision which was the problem of his life. Nietzsche the son of a Protestant pastor, the gifted thinker and writer, the professor of classical philology, the friend of Richard Wagner and colleague of Jacob Burckhardt, the musical philosopher, the lonely philosopher, the sick philosopher – these and much more are external elements of Nietzsche’s life but not its substance, not its meaning, which is, over and above all these elements, his struggle with philosophy. Precisely this struggle, however, is strictly unintelligible from the perspective of modern philosophy, which by psychologization evacuates it of true philosophical import. This is because modern philosophy annuls the idea of Absolute Truth and everything connected with it in favour of a relativistic concept of truth and the idea of man as the ‘intelligent animal’. From this point of view a ‘decision’ on philosophy can be nothing but an opinion, and the struggle with philosophy a conflict of opinions – above all there can be no transcendental forces which attract or repel the soul to or from philosophy. Thereby the defining thread of Nietzsche’s life will be passed over or suppressed in favour of a series of external or psychologized ‘internal’ events and circumstances.

There can be no such thing as a philosophically neutral biography or autobiography, because something must always be presupposed as to the nature of man. On the other hand biography is individualizing rather than abstract – its task is to show how the universal comes to expression in the particular. Of course, there is no compulsion on the biographer to make the universal thematic – one can tell the story of a life in terms of facts and incidents without explicit philosophical comment. One can do this also in the case of Nietzsche; it has been done, and such undertakings are not uninstructive. But Nietzsche himself saw his life as a fatality – the fate of humanity was revealing itself in him, in such a way that the decision for humanity’s worth or otherwise, for the possibility of ‘greatness’ as he liked to put it, was reflected by, and even depended upon, his own decisions in the course of his life. One need not accept Nietzsche’s view of himself as the ‘great redeemer’ who will divide history in two; nevertheless his life does exhibit, in exemplary fashion, the opposing forces of modernity – forces manifested at the social, political and cultural levels but at bottom spiritual. Nietzsche does not simply theorize about modernity but embodies it, so that what he said of Wagner applies even more to himself, namely that the labyrinth of modernity can be read from his own soul.[9] He is ‘self-contradictory’ in the manner of modernity, for the meaning and truth which he cannot help wanting and assuming, he simultaneously and reflexively denies. He is a ‘modern man’ because he cannot find a ‘way out’ of this contradiction and wonders whether any way exists. At the same time the interest of his biography depends on the fact that he is not an abstraction. The reality of biographical individuation means that the way Nietzsche lives out the spiritual conflicts intrinsic to modernity is unique. He offers us his thoughts or ideas, which as such are general, and he offers us his life together with his own reflections thereon, in a remarkable synthesis of philosophy and autobiography. It would mean passing over the intentions of Nietzsche if one were to disregard the personal character of his writings. He says ‘Ecce Homo!’ – one must indeed ‘behold the man’, in that spirit of reverence which, without always displaying it himself, he values so highly.

4.2 Home and Homelessness

According to Plato, ‘the most authoritative part of our soul can properly be said to lift us from the earth towards our home in heaven, for we are creatures not of earth but of heaven, where the soul was first born’.[10] Of course Nietzsche repudiates ‘heaven’; in Ecce Homo he claims that even as a child religious sentiment was foreign to him. He makes his prophet Zarathustra preach a gospel of ‘the earth’. Yet despite describing his philosophy as ‘inverted Platonism’ Nietzsche never seemed to feel that ‘the earth’ was truly his home. Nietzsche’s early letters, and many testimonials to his earliest years, show him with a strong attachment to home and family; yet also, not unusually for individuals of his social and educational station in the Germany of his time, with a sensation of spiritual or metaphysical rootlessness. In 1859, aged fourteen, he composed one of his most well-known early poems ‘Without a Homeland’ – in part it runs ‘Nobody may dare/ To ask me/ Where my homeland is/ I am truly not bound/ To space and fleeting hours/ I am as free as the eagle!/ Heidideldi!’[11] Around the same time, he wrote in a fragment intended for a novel: ‘An inward feeling of home is given to all human beings, and it is good if we can preserve in our innermost heart what is dear and precious to us but also become master of this mood. We are pilgrims in this world and have our home everywhere and nowhere’.[12] Homelessness would remain a permanent theme for Nietzsche, for he would come to think of it as an effect of the Death of God, with the loss of ‘our home in heaven’ producing in modern Europe general disorientation. Nietzsche was losing his Christian faith at the age of fourteen, but already at this early age had come to understand the fundamental issue confronting him, and confronting modernity, as religion itself, or metaphysics (idealism, supernaturalism, transcendentalism). If Christianity was falling because of its lack of authority, what else must fall for the same reason? And what belongs to ‘the earth’ exactly? It is reported that Anaxagoras, asked whether he had no concern for his fatherland, pointed to the sky, and that the cynic Diogenes, asked what city he came from, replied ‘I am a cosmopolites – a citizen of the world’. But Nietzsche did not come to feel at home anywhere, whether in nature, Life, or ‘the heavens’.

Nietzsche says repeatedly that homelessness is the general condition of modern European man, at least of its enlightened representatives. In Book Five of The Gay Science he explains that his ‘secret wisdom’ is intended for those Europeans of his day who are ‘homeless in a distinctive and honourable sense’ – those unable to believe in the ideals of the day, among which he mentions progress, equal rights and the ‘religion of pity’.[13] At the same time he does not point to any new ideals that could provide such people – ‘good Europeans’ as he calls them – with a new home. The Last Men of Thus Spake Zarathustra seem homeless – and perhaps are ‘good Europeans’, because as post-religious hedonists they do not identify with any cultural tradition. But the radical homelessness Nietzsche speaks of, and which he feels so acutely within himself, is nihilistic homelessness – he feels detached not only from all historical culture but from ‘universalistic’ culture as represented by classical philosophy, Christianity, and other religions. And he feels not only without a home but – again in a way characteristic for modernity – without hope of ever finding a home and without belief that any home could exist for someone like himself.

This sensation is not for him absolute at a personal level – if he disbelieves in the possibility of home, that is to say of a ‘real’ home for ‘liberated’ spirits, he knows that he has been formed by his ancestral culture. Insofar as he is ‘human-all-too-human’ Nietzsche is German, Thuringian, son of a Protestant country pastor, grandson of Protestant pastors etc. He grew up in Naumburg, receiving his secondary education at Naumburg Gymnasium and the prestigious Pforta boarding school just outside of the town. His paternal grandfather was the author of nine theological books and possessed an honorary doctorate from the University of Königsberg. Nietzsche was middle-class. Notwithstanding the early loss of his father he did not have an unhappy childhood. His letters and other documents clearly show that he valued very highly his home-life, family and friends. Although his correspondence with his mother and sister dropped off in the last few years before his breakdown, there are more than three hundred surviving letters from Nietzsche to his mother, with more than two hundred and fifty addressed to his mother and sister jointly; more than two hundred are addressed to his sister. Nietzsche lived with his sister in Basel for several years, and regularly visited his mother in Naumburg.  He had a wide circle of friends with whom he kept in close touch.

Nietzsche was ‘lonely’ nonetheless. ‘At an absurdly early age, at seven’, so he wrote in Ecce Homo, ‘I already knew that no human word would ever reach me’. And with typical defiance he continues by asking ‘has anyone ever seen me saddened on that account?’[14] The honest answer to this last question is ‘Yes indeed! And very often.’ Nietzsche’s letters, fragments and published works frequently confess to his suffering from solitude. But it is also true that he revelled in this solitude, because it allowed him to search himself out and cast off that which did not truly belong to himself. He sought solitude, but he was not by nature unsocial or unfriendly – rather did he ‘feel lonely’ in the midst of company, and in ‘the world’ as such. He felt most acutely the absence of any kindred mind, although from time to time – delusively, he would later judge – he imagined he had found such. From his schooldays onwards he had a succession of special friends with whom he shared a devotion to things of the spirit – literature, music, philosophy. Rarely do we find in his letters signs of frivolity or interest in trivial things. The expression ‘life-seriousness’ (Lebensernst), which he took to using in his university years, fits his temper very well. As a child of primary school age, due to his moral strictness he was known to his fellow pupils as ‘the little pastor’. He did not react well to vulgarity around him, and at bottom this reflected his judgement that ‘the world’ is vulgar.[15] There was a certain ‘lightness’ to him as well, however, which people found extraordinarily attractive. Especially young people developed a kind of awe of him, wanting to be near him, where they felt the breath of freedom. This applied, and to some extent still applies, to people who knew him only through his books, for he seemed to speak to them personally, to open himself up to them. He was polite, proper, even formal sometimes, but friendly and helpful. He was not closed off from people, but, as many who knew him commented, there was a strange reserve to him too, suggestive of something hidden.

When Nietzsche tried, as he constantly did, to understand his sensations of solitude, detachment and removedness, according to his own philosophical tenets he had just one explanation.  He recognized that to others he may appear aloof, as if resting in some Beyond, but he believed destiny had brought him to a unique ‘absorption, immersion, penetration into reality’, so that at the right time he ‘may bring home the redemption of this reality’.[16] Nietzsche felt he was carrying around something within himself not discernible, comprehensible or communicable to the great majority of human beings, something of momentous significance that will ‘divide history in two’. At least this was the way he felt from 1882 onwards, and he had been working up to this for some years before. The feeling was so overwhelming for him that he found it very difficult to be with people who knew nothing of it. But even in solitude he found it hard to live with this feeling. Despite his ‘confessions’ in his books and letters he still felt that for the most part he was not understood or taken seriously. So that his ‘associations with people’ should be manageable, both for them and for himself, he employed ‘masks’, which would vary according to the situation. One of these, perhaps the most frequently employed, was ‘mediocrity’, which, he says in The Wanderer and His Shadow, ‘is the best mask the superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, that is to say the mediocre, it will not seem a mask – and yet it is on precisely their account that he puts it on – so as not to provoke them, indeed often out of benevolence and pity’.[17] Thus Nietzsche would slip a mediocre comment or judgement into his conversation, to put others at ease – he intended to deceive them, but for pragmatic purposes and a sense of good manners rather than out of ‘playfulness’ or delight in falsity. Of course the question can and must be put as to who Nietzsche was without his masks. In the Nietzsche commentary of the late twentieth century the idea became popular, through the influence of postmodernism, that there is no answer to this question, which, it is said, simply highlights Nietzsche’s critique of ‘the essential self’ – opening the way to a post-metaphysical pluralist view of identity. But although Nietzsche sometimes speaks in ways that suggest this attitude, it belies his life-long search for self – unless, that is, one understands the point of this search to be the discovery that its object does not exist, or (which comes to much the same thing) one takes the ‘real self behind the mask’ as a ‘liberating’ empty space, like the ‘creative Abyss’ of Stirner.

Notwithstanding Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysics, he differs from his relativist admirers precisely by his interest in who he is essentially. What confounds him is his rejection of any metaphysical or theological solution to this problem. According to his own precepts he is left, for the purpose of self-definition, with the resources of ‘the earth’ and his own ‘will to power’. And he could do nothing with these resources except to magnify his ego in the direction of self-divinization. This was his contradiction: while in his heart he could not accept the belittlement implied in the idea of man as ‘the intelligent animal’, while he wanted and demanded more, he did not admit a right to it except, by default, in the fanciful form of the Superman, who as a hyper-natural man both is and is-not this ‘intelligent animal’. Nietzsche’s concern with his own person and ‘status’, always strong, reaches a peak of superbia in the period after Zarathustra. At this point nearly all his old friends, if not quite abandoning him, stopped taking him seriously as a philosopher; mostly they pitied him, fearing a complete breakdown in his mental condition. Some of his friends, indeed, and in the early period of his reception not a few critics, linked his mental collapse to his chief philosophical teachings, and if over time this talking-point has tended to drop away there is an undeniable congruence between Nietzsche’s late philosophy and his late self-presentation. As early as 1874, however, Cosima Wagner wrote to Malwida von Meysenbug that ‘I have serious concerns about Nietzsche and believe only a good marriage can save him. His letters are dreadful and the fate of Hölderlin hovers before my eyes.’[18] Meysenbug shared Cosima’s concerns, and many others who knew Nietzsche felt the same, especially after 1883. Putting aside ‘psychiatric’ issues in the narrower sense, however, the question is surely legitimate as to whether Nietzsche’s philosophy – more precisely his anti-philosophy – played a decisive role in the destruction of his self.[19]

Perhaps Nietzsche admitted to himself that he had not achieved the pinnacle of Life-affirmation that he attributes to his Zarathustra. Nevertheless he did see himself as a prophet, as bearing within himself the ‘tragic insight’ that alone can give meaning to the human race – when, that is, this race ‘overcomes itself’. His identity, then, is as a ‘child of the earth’ rather than of the ‘starry heaven’ of theology and metaphysics – he is an ‘earthling’, or simply a vector in the movement of Life, and since Life is reality he is reality, and as such true and healthy. Was he like this really? It is not easy to say, because there is a certain formulaic character to the terms of his philosophy. How can one decide whether Nietzsche’s own life testifies to his ‘absorption, immersion, penetration into reality’? One might think the opposite, and he admits it can easily seem the opposite. He was self-assertive in his writings, but in private life quiet and retiring. Of course he was chronically ill, which curtailed his social activities. While avoiding the social round, he always enjoyed intimate company based on what he felt to be philosophical common ground. He felt a need for solitude, but at the same time suffered from it, so that he visited others and invited visits. None of this is unusual – one cannot read his true self from it. Nietzsche understood that this self was hidden – what ‘he was’ stayed ‘between himself and Life’. Part Three of Thus Spake Zarathustra suggests he felt ‘married to Life’ in a kind of ‘secret marriage’, sealed by the ‘wedding ring of rings’ – his affirmation of the eternal recurrence. Yet he proclaimed his identity, especially towards the end, as if his ‘task’ required him to be recognized.

This Life to which he was ‘married’, and which filled him with ‘joy’, still left him lonely – because of its absurdity, meaninglessness, and indifference to him. It was his pride, however, to look the Abyss in the face. The Abyss, indeed, was his ‘home’ if anything was, but as with so much else in Nietzsche he had to square the circle here, to make the most radical kind of homelessness a sensation of home, or to exhilarate in homelessness. Life, a force which ‘cares’ for nothing except power, cannot embrace Nietzsche in its ‘comforting arms’ – the thought would have been revolting to him – but at best assimilates him to itself, as one more current of energy. Perhaps Nietzsche would grant the dignity that Pascal accords to ‘the thinking reed’ man, namely awareness that Nature must crush him, but he could not admit, as Pascal does, being ‘frightened’ by this. Amor fati allows only for the indifferent acceptance of annihilation, the consolation being pride in the strength to live by this principle. Pascal felt the cosmos to be alien to him because he, the thinker, was confronted by the eternal muteness of matter. Nietzsche could never take this attitude, which implies a separation between man and world that he regards as idealist. Rather does he think it a test of strength to be ‘at home’ in the Abyss and ‘love’ it. Yet the Abyss cannot in all strictness be called ‘the world’ – there is for Nietzsche no ‘world’, no cosmos ruled by the logos, which can provide man with a home. What he describes in the Parable of the Madman is not so much a meaningless world as that which, subsequent to the Death of God, supersedes the world: the Abyss, where ‘there is no more up and down’.[20] Still, whether Nietzsche fully affirms this his fated dwelling place may be doubted. In Part Four of Thus Spake Zarathustra, ‘Zarathustra’s shadow’ pours out his heart: ‘Where is my home? I ask and seek and have sought for it but have not found it. Oh eternal Everywhere, oh eternal Nowhere, of eternal – Vanity!’[21] Zarathustra’s response is to tell his shadow that he is suffering from a bout of weakness. Nietzsche had no other reply.

4.3 Friendships

Nietzsche had a talent for friendship. People liked him and wanted to know him. He was certainly not an extrovert, and could sometimes be reserved, but he was not socially awkward; he could even be a ‘facilitator’ in social situations, for he took pride in his mastery of civil social intercourse. Evidently able to sum people up and see some way into their inner-states, he often ‘made a connection’. Ida Overbeck, wife of his friend and one-time housemate Franz Overbeck, met Nietzsche at a Swiss resort some years before she knew her future husband. In later memoirs she recalls: ‘He tended to avoid encounters and conversation but if such did occur he surprised one by his warmth and seriousness. One immediately felt called upon to communicate to him something of importance to oneself.’ Warmth and seriousness – this says a lot about him. And she adds, registering what many others also felt, ‘In Nietzsche’s presence I had the feeling of a puzzle, a mystery’. She remarks too – this is an aspect of his ‘mystery’ – that ‘Nietzsche’s winning manner included a touch of femininity’.[22] The popular image of Nietzsche, derived from a superficial knowledge of his writings and over-used quotations, is of a hyper-masculine figure. But while averse to any denigration of masculine virtues, he could not abide common masculine vulgarity. In his first year at university (in Bonn) he was so shocked by the drinking-culture of the student fraternity he had joined that he indignantly resigned from the society. Later he experienced many embarrassing moments when exposed to the notoriously coarse humour of Richard Wagner in his home. While the ideal of the ‘warrior’ did appeal to Nietzsche, at a practical level the ideal of ‘the gentleman’ meant more to him.

It is hard to imagine Nietzsche as a married man. In any event he never married, and precious little information exists concerning his amorous inclinations. Two proposals of marriage from him are recorded – one at the age of thirty-one while still a professor in Basel, the other at thirty-seven while on his post-retirement wanderings. In the first case, out of the blue and after an acquaintance of just a few days during which he was never alone with the lady, he proposed by letter, unwittingly using as a go-between the man with whom she was conducting a secret love-affair. The letter of proposal is extant, as is the letter replying to the lady’s decline of the offer – both are models of good taste, although of course the offer itself was precipitate and inept. Whether such an impulsive action on the part of Nietzsche was altogether serious may be doubted, but this says something about his attitude towards marriage: notwithstanding his respect for civility he was never going to be absorbed into the conventional order of things. The second case was an oral proposal to Lou Salomé – a highly significant person in his life despite the short duration of their personal relationship (less than six months). He was again refused – twice it seems – but in this instance it is not certain whether Nietzsche had a ‘normal’ marriage in mind or Platonic co-habitation. After this, and pressed by family and friends, Nietzsche ‘considered’ marriage, reviewing a few ‘candidates’, but nothing came of it, and it seems to have been a side-issue for him.[23] The only other ‘romantic’ attachment for which evidence exists was a young French woman whom Nietzsche met at the 1876 Bayreuth Festival; it seems that, during the festival, ‘something happened’, which later gave rise to some rather intimate letters, but the lady, who happened to be a singer – she may have sung privately for Nietzsche at Bayreuth – was married and nothing eventuated. Although there has been speculation in recent years that Nietzsche was homosexual there is no evidence for this.[24]

Whatever the reasons may be, Nietzsche’s ‘affinity’ with women is noteworthy. In a number of cases he formed independent confidential relationships with the wives of men who were prominent in his life. The most important example is Cosima Wagner – indeed in the early period of Nietzsche’s friendship with Wagner he seems to have been more intimate with Cosima than with her husband, something that may be reflected in the disaster, from the point of view of the study of Nietzsche’s life and mind, of Cosima’s destruction (probably in 1909) of scores of letters from Nietzsche, so profoundly disappointed was she at his ‘betrayal’ of Wagner and herself.[25] Indeed Nietzsche may have regretted the collapse of his friendship with Cosima more than that with Wagner himself – she was in his mind even as he stepped over into insanity in early 1889, for he apparently said, upon being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, ‘my wife Cosima Wagner brought me here’, and he reportedly sent her a note, just a little earlier, saying ‘Ariadne, I love you’.[26] Then there was Frau Marie Baumgartner, thirteen years Nietzsche’s senior, married, and the mother of one of his students at the Basel Pedagogium (Gymnasium), who, to judge by her extant letters to Nietzsche, can be fairly said to have ‘fallen in love’ with him – Nietzsche’s letters in reply clearly show his embarrassment, but he did his best to sympathize with her earnest entreaties. Other important women in Nietzsche’s life include his ‘motherly friend’ Malwida von Meysenbug, who despite all frustrations remained loyal to him from 1872 until his breakdown and whose Memoirs of an Idealist had a strong effect on him at a turning-point of his mind (1876). There was also the aforementioned Ida Overbeck, and from the years 1883-88 Resa von Schirnhofer and Meta von Salis. Meysenbug, Frau Overbeck, Schirnhofer and Salis left valuable memoirs of Nietzsche, Salis also supporting the Nietzsche Archive financially after Nietzsche’s breakdown. Although Meysenbug, Schirnhofer and Salis (all unmarried women) were feminists of a sort, they did not let this interfere with their friendship with Nietzsche, whose anti-feminist sentiment rose to a height, and never declined, in the years after Zarathustra.

Of the many memoirs of Nietzsche left by his friends and acquaintances those from women are the most revealing – Franz Overbeck’s are a partial exception, but even he is somewhat guarded and stiff compared with the females.[27] Lou Salomé deserves first place among all memoirists, because she understood the unity of Nietzsche’s philosophy and personality – Nietzsche once said that she inspired him to Thus Spake Zarathustra, and for a short time he seems to have thought of her as his ‘heir’.[28] Published in 1894, her deeply sympathetic Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works identifies the originality of Nietzsche not in any theorizing but in ‘the intimate power with which one personality speaks to another.’[29] She saw something of the ‘hidden’ Nietzsche. For three weeks in the summer of 1882 the two spent ten hours every day alone together in the Tautenburg Forest ‘talking each other to death’ (as she put it in a journal entry of the time) on the topic of God.[30] A few years later her first book, The Struggle Around God, echoed these discussions. In her writings on Nietzsche Salomé presents him as a God-seeker who, feeling deprived of religion by the intellectual system of modernity, strove for a substitute, yet not of the usual secular kind; instead he could be satisfied by nothing less than a mystical self-affirmation that finally became an attempt at self-divination. Salomé understood that only because Nietzsche ‘believed in God’ could he take the Death of God so very seriously, so personally, and seek so desperately for a substitute in the Superman, then, finally, pathologically, in himself.[31] She recognized that Nietzsche’s thought cannot be separated from his biography, but that by the same token his biography is the story of his mind, the story of a questioning, doubting and hoping both intensely personal and exemplary for modern man. She was never a disciple of Nietzsche and she detested the cult, but she felt a kinship with the truth-seeker driven to explore the great mystery of Life. She pronounced his philosophy a failure, not because of its theoretical deficiencies but because what he wanted, above all what he wanted to be, was impossible. She also saw, however, that this failure is Nietzsche’s success, for by reaching for the impossible he laid bare the delusions of modern European culture in its intoxicated and chaotic self-affirmation.[32]

Cosima Wagner did not leave any recollections of Nietzsche – after 1878 she could not bear the thought of him. In 1877 however, in a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, she made such an apposite observation on Nietzsche that one has to regret the lack of any further testimonies from her. She wrote, about a year before the final collapse of Nietzsche’s friendship with both Wagners and in the context of several years of strained relationship: ‘I believe that in Nietzsche there is a dark creative substratum of which he himself is hardly conscious; it is from this that the important element in him springs, but then he takes alarm at it, whereas all he says and thinks, however luminous it may be, is not worth much […] Great thoughts come from the heart, says Vauvenargues, a dictum which may be applied to Nietzsche, for his great thoughts come to him, not from his brain, but from what? Ah, who can say?’[33] Indeed Nietzsche was not a theoretician, although he tried to be one. In his later years he came to wonder whether his ideas were communicable in prose, and whether he should rather have sung his philosophy. It was a certain kind of mood that he was trying to convey, a mood that can never be encapsulated by concepts and so can be neither refuted nor confirmed. Nietzsche’s thoughts do ‘come from the heart’. One can get nowhere with him if one fixates on his words and theories, and if one separates his philosophy from his person. But Cosima also saw that Nietzsche ‘takes alarm’ at what he discovers within himself. This happened when he recoiled from Richard Wagner, but self-doubt was a permanent feature of his mind which governed his philosophical experiment from beginning to end. Here too Nietzsche is exemplary. In an early work he confesses that in this age of the ‘weak personality’ he is an example of such.[34] So he is, if this is not contradicted by him also being strong.

Richard Wagner himself, who died in 1883, did not leave any written comments on Nietzsche, but abundant evidence reveals that the two felt a strong connection with one another in the years 1869-72, after which the relationship weakened, then soured, and from 1878 collapsed completely. That the two of them came together and for a time believed in each other so fervently seems fated, as does the breakdown of their friendship. For more than twenty years Wagner had been developing his own philosophical ideas explaining and reflecting upon his artistic work, but he knew his limitations; when he discovered Nietzsche, more than twenty-five years his junior, and came to know him intimately, this seemed to him providential – already a ‘Wagnerian’, Nietzsche could reveal, like nobody else, the philosophical meaning of Wagner’s music-dramas. A short time after his first visit to the Wagners at Lucerne, near Basel, in May 1869, Nietzsche had a room permanently put aside for him in the Wagner residence. In the period through to April 1872, when the Wagners moved from Lucerne to Bayreuth, Nietzsche visited them about twenty times, often with overnight stays. Suddenly he was dearer to Wagner than anybody else except Cosima, who herself became exceptionally fond of the brilliant young professor of philology.[35] However, while the mutual attraction between Wagner and Nietzsche is fully understandable, it could not last. What Wagner wanted – the charm of Nietzsche’s personal friendship aside – was a ‘brilliant disciple’, but it turned out that Nietzsche wanted Wagner to be his disciple. When he first became friendly with Wagner Nietzsche was twenty-four. At this time he was still working out his philosophical ideas, and in particular he had not yet developed the hostility towards the ‘religion of pity’ which became the hallmark of his mature thought; in the meantime Wagner, partly under the influence of Cosima, was moving in the opposite direction, towards the ideal of ‘ascetic redemption’ that would come to expression in Parsifal. The clash of philosophies was inevitable, and the two imperious personalities, each intent on ‘his own path’, could not remain in harmony.[36]

The catalogue of Nietzsche’s other male friends and associates includes many distinguished names: the philologist Friedrich Ritschl, the anthropologist Johann Bachofen, the historian Jakob Burckhardt[37], the Indologist and historian of philosophy Paul Deussen, the philosophers Rudolf Eucken and Max Heinze, the classicist Erwin Rohde, the philosopher-psychologist Paul Rée, the church-historian Franz Overbeck. Lesser-known figures, important for Nietzsche, include Heinrich Romundt, Carl von Gersdorff, Heinrich Köselitz, Carl Fuchs, Paul Lanzky, Reinhart von Seydlitz and Heinrich von Stein. From these and many other figures, some of whom had no more than passing contact with Nietzsche, there exists correspondence or recollections, making for a rather full picture of his life and greatly assisting the study of his mind. Much of this material was published before the First World War. The Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche republishes nearly all of it, with explanations and notes.

Studying the letters and testimonies of those who knew Nietzsche and were among the first to read his works, or who heard his ideas first-hand, is a good antidote to the mythologization, dogmatization, demonization, and even sanctification, that set in when, after his death, he became widely viewed as a ‘genius’ (perhaps an evil one) and ‘awesome cultural phenomenon’. It is not, of course, that initial impressions of a philosopher have any inherent authority, but freshness and naivety, especially in the case of someone like Nietzsche whose writings are untechnical, may make possible a grasp of basic issues before these become occluded by a ‘reputation’. Well before the publication of his first philosophical book The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 Nietzsche was recognized by nearly everybody who knew him as an exceptional mind. His family saw this, his schoolteachers too, and his university mentor Professor Friedrich Ritschl was so convinced of it that he elevated Nietzsche, just twenty-four and still without a doctorate, to the Basel chair of classical philology. Everyone could see that Nietzsche was ‘different’ – thus with hindsight it is easy to say that Ritschl should have known Nietzsche was not suited to an academic career and would not in the end accommodate himself to such. Academic life provided a structure, so it could seem on the surface that the ‘meaning’ of his life was settled; this did suit Nietzsche, but it was the ‘seeming’ that suited him, for he did not have to answer questions as to what he was. And from a very early date, probably even before taking up his post at Basel, he knew he was not at heart an academic. His closest friends – in the first years of his professorship these were Carl von Gersdorff, Erwin Rohde, Heinrich Romundt and Paul Deussen – understood that he was not a ‘normal’ academic. They all loved him, stood in a certain awe of him, and had confidence in him, but did not know quite what he was doing or going to do. Naturally they were full of praise for The Birth of Tragedy, without really understanding the work.

In his early Basel years the name ‘Wagner’ seemed an approximate answer to the puzzle, for Nietzsche told himself and others that his ‘task’ and Wagner’s were the same. For several years indeed, and having only just taken up his Basel post, Nietzsche contemplated resigning his position and putting himself at the disposal of Wagner as a full-time publicist.[38] This did not happen, but for a time Nietzsche was known mainly as a Wagnerian – especially so as he was not asserting himself in philology by scholarly publications. Through Wagner he made many contacts in the musical world, and one important long-term friend in Malwida von Meysenbug. It was possible, after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, to see Nietzsche as ‘the philosopher’ of the Wagnerian movement. Most of his friends, including Wagner and Cosima, had this attitude, but they were waiting for more contributions in the same direction, which did not come, at least not unambiguously – the Untimely Meditation Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, which appeared at the time of the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876, was Nietzsche’s Wagnerian swan-song.

Nietzsche’s friends, while recognizing the brilliance of his writings, were often critical of his mode of presentation, which even at this early point was quasi-aphoristic and not readily graspable as a continuous argument. The spirit of Nietzsche was very appealing to many people – Meysenbug told him that his 1874 Untimely Meditation Schopenhauer as Educator had become her ‘bible’ – but Wagner appeared unmoved by Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and after the 1876 Festival seems no longer to have had great hopes for Nietzsche, whom he now rarely saw. Nietzsche’s health problems – he took a year’s leave from the university in 1876-77 – were known to everyone, and the hope of the early 1870s was turning to pity. Then with Human, All Too Human in 1878 Nietzsche took off on a course nobody could understand except as a sign of deteriorating health. He became withdrawn and incommunicative, and started lashing out at people and causes to whom and to which he had previously been friendly. It was hard to see what he stood for any more. This tendency became more and more extreme, so that within a few years he was living in a world of his own. His old friends hoped he would come back, which he never did, while his few new friends had to treat him carefully, because he was extraordinarily sensitive to criticism.[39] In the end he had no real friends except his worshipful disciple Heinrich Köselitz and his old housemate Franz Overbeck, who while deeply fond of Nietzsche and genuinely respectful of his mind, treated him with caution and protectively.[40] In his last year of sanity Nietzsche affected an exuberance which was only a counter-measure against his crippling inner misery. It was a personal tragedy for a man who possessed, or had once possessed, such extraordinary qualities of intellect and character – yet a tragedy of his own making, which he himself drove along, as if the shattering of his self was the proper task and completion of his life.

Except for Heinrich Köselitz none of Nietzsche’s friends appraised his philosophical significance in a manner remotely consonant with Nietzsche’s own self-estimation. His rapid rise to fame in the 1890s, after his mental collapse, surprised all who knew him, even his sister, who, however, having adored her brother all her life, was more than willing to take advantage as custodian of his manuscripts, letters and other material – acting as High Priestess of the Nietzsche Archive for more than forty years. In the final period before his collapse Nietzsche still had supporters, but those who had known him best, and were most qualified to judge, could not endorse him as a philosopher. After Nietzsche’s breakdown, Franz Overbeck, personally sympathetic to Nietzsche though he was, refused to co-operate with Elisabeth on her project for publishing his Works, nor was he willing to hand over the letters from Nietzsche he had in his possession.[41] While rejecting all Nietzsche’s chief doctrines, and even, in retrospect, confessing that he should have recognized Nietzsche as mentally ill as early as 1884, he nevertheless insisted that Nietzsche’s failure no more tells against his voyage of thought than shipwrecks tell against sea-travel.[42] Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche’s bosom friend from 1867 through to the mid-1870s, was not unfriendly towards Elisabeth, and provided her with most of the letters he had from Nietzsche, but was sceptical about the value of his thought. In a letter to Overbeck of March 1895, agreeing with him on the merits of Lou Salomé’s recent book on Nietzsche, especially on her point that Nietzsche is significant mainly as a psychological problem, and unimpressed by the grandiose publishing project being undertaken by Elisabeth for the sake of the ‘substance’ (Sache) of her brother’s thought, Rohde declares: ‘The substance: but I say there is no “substance”, but only and absolutely a person and his ingenious self-presentation […] This is approximately the way Frau Andreas sees the matter, and in this she is completely correct.’ He continues: ‘Nietzsche’s literary outpourings are in the highest degree remarkable, but in no way are they fruitful […] It seems to me that behind the desperate darkness of all his expressions and moods there lies a pain and inconsolability compared with which Leopardi is gay and composed. This is so even where Nietzsche presents himself as cheerful and strong and “halcyonic”. I cannot look at these things anymore, sensations of wretchedness and grief overpower me.’ Rohde’s temperament was much less charitable than Overbeck’s, and after parting ways with Nietzsche around 1878 he developed a strong aversion to the ‘arrogance’ and ‘vanity’ of Nietzsche’s writings. Still, it would be fair to say that Rohde loved Nietzsche right up to the time of his own death in 1898.[43]

Nietzsche’s friendship with Heinrich Köselitz dates from 1876. But although none of Nietzsche’s other friends spent as much time with him over the next decade, the two never became ‘close’ friends. Köselitz was a musician, and music was the foundation of their relationship. What was decisive, however, is that at a time when Nietzsche was feeling unrecognized and unappreciated, Köselitz quickly came to idolize him as a philosopher. This led him to take on an informal role as Nietzsche’s assistant in the publication of his works – he would read and correct Nietzsche’s manuscripts, a task he would continue, after Nietzsche’s breakdown and death, in Elisabeth’s Archive. On various occasions the two lived together for short periods, or Köselitz would visit Nietzsche on a daily basis in a secretarial role. Much of the biographical literature on Nietzsche depicts Köselitz in a disparaging or at any rate condescending light, for he turned out to be a ‘failed musician’ and did not possess an outstanding intellect. But he had good will towards Nietzsche, and rendered him important services. While it could be said that he encouraged Nietzsche’s tendencies to superbia, these cannot be blamed on him. It is regrettable that Köselitz did not leave any memoirs of Nietzsche, but some insight on their relationship can be gleaned from the many letters between them as well as the letters of each to third-parties. Although Nietzsche was helped by Köselitz he also tried hard to be helpful to him, especially in encouraging his musical endeavours (to little avail). In the end Köselitz cuts a rather depressing figure, for he gave a good part of his life to Nietzsche without much recognition by posterity, at the same time failing in his own ambitions.[44] He undoubtedly would have been wounded, after taking up work in the Archive, to discover the many disparaging references to him in Nietzsche’s letters to others.

Nietzsche first met Malwida von Meysenbug, twenty-eight years his senior and a dear friend of the Wagner couple, in 1872 in Bayreuth – she already knew Nietzsche by reputation and had read The Birth of Tragedy with great excitement. In the same year they met again in Munich, where they attended a performance of Tristan. This meeting led to a close friendship, Meysenbug writing to Nietzsche only a month later that ‘our Tristan-days in Munich are for me an unforgettable memory and a consoling possession’ leaving her with ‘a deep motherly feeling that you can rely upon in all circumstances’; for his part Nietzsche, in a letter to Meysenbug a few months later, tells her that from the time of their first acquaintance he has felt for her the same complete trust ‘that in this world of mistrust I can feel only with my closest friends.’[45] What sparked a still more intimate friendship was Nietzsche’s reading, in Easter 1876, of the recently published German edition of Meysenbug’s Memoirs of an Idealist. This had a powerful effect on Nietzsche’s spirit, lifting him out of depression into a re-vitalized passion for his philosophical task – the letters between them around this time are remarkable documents. On Meysenbug’s prompting, Nietzsche took leave of absence from the university so that the two of them could live together for a year – it turned out to be a little over six months, in Sorrento and in the company of several others. Inevitably, Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Meysenbug faded, for in the end she was an ‘idealist’ and ardent Wagnerian.[46] In later years a sporadic correspondence between them continued, Meysenbug showing infinite patience and good will but Nietzsche, in his usual way, erratic and temperamental. In the last few years before his breakdown, especially just before the very end, Nietzsche became hostile towards her, mainly because she would not turn against the now-deceased Wagner. But she forgave him.[47] Having said to Nietzsche in 1876 that ‘you show humanity its sacred goals as nobody has done before, not even Schopenhauer’[48], she was deeply disappointed with the trajectory of his thought after his break with Wagner, but she had pity on him because of his illness and hoped for a spiritual and physical recovery. In her letters to Nietzsche after 1878 she did her utmost to understand him while never indulging his superbia or submitting to his harsh judgements on Schopenhauer and Wagner. In her view, what happened in the decade leading up to Nietzsche’s collapse was that ‘embitterment set in, throwing a dark shadow over everything that had once been dear to him, turning his love into hate and mercilessly destroying his previous ideals, putting him in contradiction with himself and forfeiting the beautiful clarity of his early work.’[49] She had a poor opinion of all Nietzsche’s writings from this late period.

Just why Nietzsche’s friendship with Paul Deussen failed is not immediately clear. Of all the friendships of his youth, one might think, this one ‘should’ have endured, for the two had much in common. They met as fellow pupils of Pforta and were close for five years at school, then spent a year together at Bonn University. Deussen had a passion for the life of the spirit unlike anybody else Nietzsche knew. And even though, like Rohde and Nietzsche, he became an academic, he had a genuinely Schopenhauerian detachment towards university life and the bourgeois world. He was a pathbreaker of Indological studies in Germany, which direction he took up under the inspiration of Schopenhauer. And he remained a Schopenhauer-devotee until the end of his life, bringing out a critical edition of Schopenhauer’s writings and founding the Schopenhauer Society, also editing its Jahrbuch. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, the problem with Deussen was that he was an ‘idealist’, a ‘believer’, in a way Rohde and Overbeck were not. When in 1877 Deussen sent Nietzsche a copy of his recently published The Elements of Metaphysics, Nietzsche replied, politely but pointedly, that it ‘conveniently summarizes everything I no longer believe to be true’.[50] Somehow Nietzsche came to think of Deussen as inferior in spirit and in need of instruction from himself. The truth of the matter is probably that Nietzsche felt irked by Deussen’s independent mind. However much he recognized Nietzsche’s ‘genius’, Deussen did not defer to him or profusely praise him as his other friends (for instance his other close school friend Carl von Gersdorff and later the young Rohde) tended to do. For a short period, much to Nietzsche’s disgust, Deussen took up theological studies at university, but he soon dropped these as he went over to Kant and Schopenhauer, then to Indian philosophy. It was not, by any means, that Deussen lacked the critical and sceptical mind required by a philosopher, but Nietzsche seems to have regarded him as insufficiently troubled by the Death of God and too ready to find ‘consolation’ in ‘idealism’. Deussen was not a distressed or tormented soul, and did not experience the Death of God in the way Nietzsche did – as an emergency, portending a catastrophe. At bottom it was not possible for Nietzsche to connect with people – or remain connected with them – who did not feel, or who he believed did not feel, as he did, and who, therefore, could not sympathize with his ‘task’. And this was nearly everybody. Often he would read into people a sympathy and mutual understanding that he later would decide was not there – the prime example was Richard Wagner, but his friendship with Rohde foundered for the same reason. In the case of Deussen, Nietzsche knew his temperament well, thus knew that no ‘ordinary’ sympathy on Deussen’s part could give him the fellow-feeling he wanted.[51] In 1875-78 Nietzsche and Deussen went their rapidly diverging ways on Schopenhauer – Deussen becoming ever more Schopenhauerian while Nietzsche was putting Schopenhauer – together with his devotee Richard Wagner – in the camp of ‘slanderers of Life’.

Following their years together at Pforta and Bonn Nietzsche and Deussen saw each other infrequently; then after Nietzsche’s early Basel period their correspondence also fell away without entirely ceasing. In September 1887, however, about fifteen months before Nietzsche’s breakdown, Deussen and his wife visited Nietzsche for a few days in Sils-Maria, which led to more frequent correspondence until the end. The memoirs of Nietzsche that Deussen published in 1901 are an important biographical resource, but the philosophical discussion he attaches is especially interesting, because Deussen, with his deep knowledge of Schopenhauer, understood the elements of Nietzsche’s thought with unusual clarity. Nietzsche’s writings, judges Deussen, give ‘a distorted image of life that represents no small danger to susceptible and inexperienced minds.’ At a philosophical level, he says, Nietzsche’s basic error, pervasive in modern culture, is to take what Schopenhauer calls ‘denial of the will’ as weakness: in reality, Deussen counters, it is ‘affirmation of the will’ that is weak, because this is an ‘anxious cleaving to one’s own ego and its interests’. Indeed, says Deussen, ‘will to power’ is properly understood not as affirmation but as denial: ‘Nietzsche rightly insists that the will break free from all fetters of illusion and superstition, from all traditions of religion and morality, to belong to itself beyond good and evil […] In the language of Kant he demands not heteronomy but autonomy of the will, i.e. he demands not affirmation but denial […] Man is a crossing, a bridge, man is something that must be overcome – so preaches Nietzsche, so before him preached all the great teachers of morality and religion […] Nietzsche’s Superman is a metaphysical timeless godly power which is latent in us all and can come forth in us all.’[52] Of course Deussen was being generous to the friend of his youth whom he still loved. But he did recognize the fundamental error governing Nietzsche’s thinking, while also seeing the other side of Nietzsche – the side which makes him a contradictory phenomenon and sets him against his own ‘Nietzschean’ age. 

The friendship with Paul Rée lasted seven years (1875-82). For part of this time (after 1878) Rée seemed to be Nietzsche’s closest friend. Five years his junior, unmusical, unpoetical, unfriendly to romanticism, scientifically-minded and cynical, Rée was an important ingredient in Nietzsche’s ‘recovery from Wagner’. The anti-metaphysical Rée helped Nietzsche ‘bring down’ his philosophical aspirations to the ‘human, all too human’. In 1882 he fell out with Nietzsche over Lou Salomé, whom he wanted for himself, but by this time Nietzsche’s thought was taking a turn, towards Thus Spake Zarathustra, with which Rée could not sympathize at all. Fifteen years later, when Nietzsche was famous, Rée wrote in a letter: ‘I was never able to read Nietzsche. He is rich in spirit (geistreich) but poor in thought (gedankenarm). Everyone acts out of vanity, but his conceit is pathological, morbidly provoked. If he had been healthy, it might have caused him to produce something great […] In many cases there were brilliant and beautiful thoughts, but the primary result was pathological, an insane distortion. Not philosophy, instead – delirium!!’^[53] Salomé, whose friendship with Nietzsche also collapsed in 1882, after which she lived with Rée for several years, was far more generous in her judgement, but in some ways her verdict was similar: Nietzsche, she says in her 1894 book, ‘imagined he was carrying within himself something tremendous, and broke down under a tremendous delusion’.[54]]

Nietzsche’s brief friendship with the radical feminist Helene Druskowitz is also of note.  He got to know her in Zurich in 1884, when she was in her late twenties, and initially formed a high opinion of her philosophical ability. Druskowitz was one of the first women in Europe to obtain a doctorate, which she received from the University of Zurich in 1878 for a dissertation on Byron’s Don Juan. She was also one of the first people to write about Thus Spake Zarathustra. In a letter to his sister in October 1884 Nietzsche refers to her as his ‘new friend’, saying that ‘of all the women I know she by far has given the most serious attention to my books, and not in vain’, also calling her a ‘noble and upright creature’. In 1885 Druskowitz became one of the select few to receive a copy of Nietzsche’s ‘private’ Part Four of Zarathustra. But already in late 1884 she wrote to a friend that ‘Nietzsche’s posture of the prophet now strikes me as laughable. Who could deny that the man possesses richness of intellect and great stylistic talent? But he is not, as he takes himself to be, fit for the great philosophical problems.’^[55] Then in her 1886 book Modern Attempts at a Substitute for Religion she says in the section devoted to Nietzsche that notwithstanding his great poetical power ‘he has hardly treated any problem thoroughly’ and that in his works  ‘utterances of genuine wisdom are mixed together with useless bits of cleverness and doubtful sophisms, experiments of genuine intelligence with paradoxes and regrettable blunders.’[56] A few years later, in her book on Eugen Dühring, Druskowitz is still harsher in her language: ‘We fear that in the category of the “physiologically unfortunate” Professor Nietzsche himself will have to be included before all others, because he is losing touch with simple human feelings and natural thoughts, while enthusing in ever more empty yet dangerous paradoxes and indulging in ever more repugnant fantasies.’^[57] Nietzsche’s friendship with Druskowitz did not last beyond 1885; there is a rather annoyed draft-letter from Nietzsche to her of that year, while in a letter to Carl Spitteler in 1887 Nietzsche calls her a ‘little literature-goose’. Doubtless Druskowitz, a founder of the feminist magazines The Holy Struggle and The Call to Arms, would have thought it curious that Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century, could become a feminist icon.

4.4 A Philosophical Life?

The Death of God in the modern period has brought with it an emptying out of the concept of the philosophical life. The concept of wisdom has been emptied out, so that to even speak of a philosophical life seems strange, and probably suggestive of religion. To be sure, even at the time of Plato and Aristotle, when the word ‘philosophy’ first came into circulation, the idea of philosophy was contested. In Plato’s dialogue the Gorgias the ‘sophist’ Callicles takes issue with Socrates on the nature of philosophy, describing it as at best a useful tool, while Socrates insists that philosophy is the soul’s orientation to a supra-mundane realm of Truth in which alone human beings fulfill their nature. In the Western philosophical tradition it was the attitude not of the sophists but of Socrates and Plato that prevailed, reinforced and integrated into the belief-system of Christianity. Until modernity that is – when the sophists not only made a comeback but achieved complete cultural victory over classical philosophy. As for Nietzsche, he declares himself for the sophists, repudiating the Platonic conception of philosophy. Accordingly, if he were consistent, Nietzsche’s idea of the philosophical life would be the life led by ‘sophists’, that is to say a life in the service, through intellectual or theoretical activity, of affirmative, practical this-worldly goals. And if, as so many Nietzscheans have maintained, Nietzsche’s chief practical goal is overcoming a dogmatic cultural order in favour of a pluralist culture where subjectivity is freed for and by transgression, a Nietzschean philosophical life would not be very different from a Marxist, anarchist or liberal political-intellectual life, wherein an indispensable ingredient is the critique of old-style ‘dogmatic’ philosophy. By the same token, from the perspective of Nazi Nietzscheanism a philosophical life will be dedicated to Nazi ideology and politics – the point, likewise, being refusal of external (‘dogmatic’) in favour of self-created norms.

For all his praise of the ‘sophists’, however, Nietzsche’s philosophical life does not resemble their style of life. Nietzsche verbally disavows the Platonic ideal, but does not actually live by any this-worldly counter-ideal. Nietzsche likes to say that he is ‘incomprehensible’. He compares himself with ‘Heraclitus the Obscure’ – his wisdom is obscure and he is obscure, at any rate to those who are not his type of philosopher. He does not demonstrate, either in private life or in the public sphere, the ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ self-assertion of which the sophists approve – he does not strive for personal honour, reputation or power, let alone money or what he calls the ‘brown pleasure’ of ‘pleasure-lovers’[58], nor does he devote himself to politics or ‘the social good’. That Nietzsche lived a modest and retiring life is often mentioned in his favour, but does not necessarily testify to a philosophical life in the classical sense. Of course Nietzsche rejects the old formula of the philosophical life as the life of reason, because he takes the idea of reason as a ‘lie’ that serves Life-denial. On the other hand he lives ‘ascetically’, in a way broadly consonant with classical ideals of reason. And he lives like this self-consciously, not just as one possible but as the necessary and proper way of life for a philosopher. In The Genealogy of Morals he explains that ‘a philosopher avoids three glittering and loud things: fame, princes and women’, immediately adding that this and other ‘ascetic’ predilections of his kind of philosopher have got nothing to do with ‘virtue’; the impression of self-denial, he adds, is because the philosopher ‘cares about one thing alone’ – a ‘thing’ Nietzsche does not name but which for him can only be Life. [59] For Nietzsche, the philosophical life is the life devoted to Dionysian Life, that is, to ‘reality’ as he understands it – the life which instinctively enters into, merges with, and ‘affirms’ Life.

The classical tradition recognizes that the philosophical life is an ideal that in practice is never attained. The key, as Plato explains it, is the ‘turning around’ of the soul (‘conversion’) towards the Good and the True. And while it is love of wisdom, not possession of wisdom, that makes the philosopher, only a god could so love in perfect purity. According to classical assumptions, moreover, all human beings love wisdom in some degree, because qua human they are endowed with reason, which is directed to the Good and the True intrinsically. It would not be right, however, to say that all human beings, just by virtue of being human, live a philosophical life, which depends on a self-conscious orientation to the rule (victory) of reason. With Nietzsche this is not the situation: rather does he self-consciously and with vehemence reject the idea of reason. The difficulty is not merely that Nietzsche’s idea of the philosopher, thus of the philosophical life, is obscure – for Plato himself states that the ‘brightness’ of Truth makes the philosopher hard to see – but that his concept of philosophy, insofar as it goes beyond the Feuerbachian ‘denial of philosophy’, is of questionable intelligibility. One could say that Nietzsche’s affirmation of Life counts as philosophical because it is self-conscious and directed against what he takes as Life-denying ideologies. But unless any kind of stubborn self-assertion is to be judged philosophical, the validity of his ‘anti-Socratic’ resolve has to be assessed – this will decide the status of his concept of philosophy and accordingly his claim or aspiration to a philosophical life. Nietzsche’s ideal of ‘living dangerously’ does not have any determinate content: it could apply equally to Jesus, Socrates, Hitler and Stalin. But Nietzsche himself, in trying to estimate the value of different kinds of lives (including his own) does avail himself of standards derived from those classical traditions of religion and philosophy which he disavows – stripped of these standards he would be just a spruiker for Life, or a grandiose attention-seeker.

If, however, not all human beings live a ‘philosophical life’, it is nevertheless true that all live ‘under the sign of philosophy’. Of course to say this is to make a decision in favour of the classical idea of philosophy, for on the modern conception all that can be acknowledged is that human beings are ‘intelligent’ and can, within limits, decide how to live out their lives – they may decide, for example, to become ‘theorists’ in philosophy or some other branch of intellectual endeavour. From the classical point of view, however, which Nietzsche, despite his inner resistance, himself seems driven to, all individuals stand under the judgement of their conscience, even if in the deficient psychologizing mode which denies the transcendental significance of the same.[60] And individuals are beset by philosophy in different ways and degrees. Nietzsche is an extreme case, being at once in the grip of philosophy and struggling forcefully to release himself. This is not, to be sure, a ‘philosophical life’ as usually conceived, but may be just as instructive, or indeed more so, provided only that his life is understood as responding to the transcendental force of philosophy and not just to certain ideas, opinions, and psychological dispositions connected with what is called ‘philosophy’.[61] Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and other classical philosophers are not gods, and therefore not even they are ‘pure’ philosophers – nevertheless one can learn from them about the philosophical life. The poverty of Nietzscheanism, and the reason for its emptiness, is that it comes to Nietzsche having already decided against philosophy and attributing the same attitude to Nietzsche himself. This means that it can make nothing of his life beyond presenting him as an anti-philosophical hero.

Nietzsche’s life, especially as revealed in his letters, testifies to an ultimate failure just as surely as do his works. During the last decade of his sanity he did not experience genuine happiness but only a kind of euphoria built on delusion. And the tragedy is that he had more than an inkling of this himself, without being able to do anything about it. He had just one recipe for conquering his misery, which was to drive his euphoria to an ever higher pitch.[62] He was aware of his own rhetorical brilliance, and he clung to this, but he misunderstood what he was doing: in his anti-philosophy he thought he was conquering and smashing philosophy, but in reality he was testifying to the invincibility of philosophy. Nietzsche well knew that he was not an artist or poet in his own right. He wanted to be, and saw himself as, a philosopher, but at the same time he resisted philosophy with all the force he could command.

Nevertheless, if it were not for the real personal tragedy of Nietzsche, reflected and played out in his writings, he would not have the importance for philosophy that he does. He would not have achieved great things if he had continued smoothly on his Wagnerian ‘idealist’ course. His early The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations, remarkable as they are, would never by themselves have led to his present reputation, and what he had planned before his ‘turn’ was more of the same. The fact, however, that one side of Nietzsche turned against philosophy, and, representing the age, fought out in his writings a battle with philosophy which was a battle against his other, philosophical, side – this is what constitutes his importance and greatness, and this is what makes him a ‘martyr to Truth’. But Nietzsche is a ‘martyr to Truth’ in the proper and literal sense, and not in the spurious sense of his own anti-philosophical imagination, for a ‘smasher of idols’ cannot be a martyr to an idol. More particularly, Nietzsche is a ‘martyr to Truth’ because while denying individual ‘truths’ does not threaten the integrity of one’s own self, denying Truth as such is the great hubris, which calls down upon itself a terrible revenge. The life and writings of Nietzsche demonstrate this. He made the disaster of modern philosophy – the disaster of a culture which refuses, resists, and attempts to argue away Truth – into his own personal tragedy.

[1] GS no. 283 (KSA 3: 526).

[2] For example Walter Kaufmann, in a translator’s note to this aphorism (no. 283), writes: ‘This magnificent formulation is found only in this one place in Nietzsche’s works, but the idea is one of his central motifs.’ However, Kaufmann does not analyse this motif, just implicitly equating Nietzschean ‘dangerous living’ with rejecting Absolute Truth and Absolute Morality.

[3] BGE no. 6 (KSA 5: 19).

[4] The biographical literature on Nietzsche is extensive. The ‘standard’ biography, incorporating documentary material, is C. P. Janz’s three-volume Friedrich Nietzsche Biographie (1978), a sober work largely desisting from philosophical commentary; it has not been translated into English. This and all other biographies of Nietzsche draw from the early three-volume (untranslated into English) Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1895, 1897, 1904) by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, as from her shorter biographical studies Der junge Nietzsche (1912, translated as The Young Nietzsche in 1912) and Der Einsame Nietzsche (1913, translated as The Lonely Nietzsche in 1915). Elisabeth also included biographical material on her brother in the volumes of his correspondence she edited and in many other publications. Substantial extracts from these materials are reprinted in Gilman (ed.), Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, which also includes copious memoir material from Nietzsche’s friends, associates, and some who knew Nietzsche just in passing; some of these materials are translated in Gilman and Parent (eds.), Conversations with Nietzsche. An intelligent analytical introduction to Nietzsche’s life and personality is Book One of Karl Jaspers’ Nietzsche (1936). Many biographies of Nietzsche are highly romanticized and consequently uncritical of his philosophy.

[5] KGW I 1: 282

[6] KGW I 1: 288.

[7] KGW I 1: 311.

[8] Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II, p. 344.

[9] CW Preface (KSA 6: 12): ‘Confronted with the labyrinth of the modern soul, where could one find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately, concealing neither its good nor its evil – having forgotten all sense of shame. And conversely: one has almost completed an account of the value of what is modern once one has gained clarity about what is good and evil in Wagner.’

[10] Plato, Timaeus 90.

[11] KGW I 2: 104-05.

[12] KGW I 2: 85.

[13] GS no. 377 (KSA 3: 628-31).

[14] EH ‘Why I Am So Clever’ no. 10 (KSA 6: 297).

[15] Remembering Nietzsche as a schoolboy at Pforta, Carl Gersdorff wrote not long after his death in 1900: ‘He attracted me by the free dignity of his behaviour wherein he immediately silenced any tone of vulgarity or foolish nonsense’ (quoted in Janz, Biographie I, p. 96).

[16] GM II no. 24 (KSA 5: 336).

[17] WS no. 175 (KSA 2: 627). An oft-quoted statement by Nietzsche on ‘masks’ occurs in Beyond Good and Evil (no. 40; KSA 5: 58): ‘Every profound spirit (tiefe Geist) needs a mask: more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is to say shallow interpretation of every word he speaks, every step he takes, every sign of life he gives.’ Although Nietzsche would presumably say that all human beings employ masks, it is significant that in this aphorism as in that from The Wanderer he speaks of what masks do for the ‘profound’ or ‘superior’ (überlegene) spirit. For Nietzsche, it is not simply that ‘everyone is different’ but the philosopher is different in a special way, which he marks by words like ‘profound’ and ‘superior’, and this difference creates special problems for the philosopher ‘living in the world’. Nietzsche often reverts to this problem of the ‘philosopher in the world’, but nowhere with such passion as in his 1874 Untimely Meditation on Schopenhauer, a work which in his late period he continues to stand by, maintaining (in a letter to Rohde at the end of 1882) that it gives ‘the key’ to his mission. Thus in one passage: ‘Philosophy offers man an asylum where no tyranny can penetrate, the inner sanctuary, the centre of the heart’s labyrinth: and the tyrants are galled by it. Here do the lonely men lie hidden, but here too lurks their greatest danger. These men who have saved their inner freedom, must also live and be seen in the outer world: they stand in countless human relations by birth, position, education and country […] so they are presumed to hold an immense number of opinions, simply because these happen to prevail: every look that is not a denial counts as assent, every motion of the hand that does not destroy is regarded as approval. These free and lonely men know that they perpetually seem other than they are.’ (SE no. 3; KSA 1: 354). The popular postmodernist view is that there is nothing behind the masks, that masks are variable, that the free spirit changes masks frequently, or that, if there is in fact something underneath, this is just the ‘secret’ – the nihilistic insight threatening to the unenlightened individual – that the supposed truth or essence is the Abyss. Pierre Klossowski, for instance, in his essay ‘The Euphoria of Turin’ (in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p. 224) says that ‘the mask hides the absence of a determinate physiognomy – and thus conceals Chaos, the richness of Chaos.’ Foucault likewise thinks to confirm Nietzsche as a relativist when he declares (The Order of Things, p. 385) that the Death of God signifies ‘the explosion of man’s face in laughter and the return of masks’.

[18] KGB II 7/2: 626).

[19] It is understandable when Nietzsche’s Basel colleague Julius Kaftan, a Christian theologian friendly to Nietzsche personally, judges as follows (Janz, Biographie Vol. II, p. 622): ‘The tragic destiny of his life is that he was godless, without God, that he lost God. For he was inwardly related to God, and only in God would he have found the rich spiritual life to form a great harmonious existence […] It was not just a sudden catastrophe when at the beginning of 1889 he fell into an insane megalomania. This had been prepared.’ It is not, however, only from a Christian point of view that Nietzsche’s ever-intensifying psychical isolation has been attributed to his avowed rejection of idealism and universalism. Thus the neo-Hegelian Arthur Drews writes (Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 293): ‘Since under the influence of positivism he rejected every metaphysical interpretation of the world and conceived the self purely empirically as his own unmediated ego, he permanently closed off the way to his true self. Instead of clearer, it became progressively darker around him, while at the same time he became ever more isolated as he hardened in his empirical ego and took this as the Absolute, in other words absolutized himself, broke all connections with others, and so lost himself in ever more dangerous and icy regions of thought.’ It is true of course that most anti-theological, anti-metaphysical and anti-idealist philosophers do not suffer mental breakdown. Nietzsche, however, attempted to carry the logic of godlessness to its bitter end, and loss of ‘identity’, at both the individual and cultural levels, is surely the end-station of this logic.

[20] GS no. 125 (KSA 3: 481)

[21] Z IV ‘The Shadow’ (KSA 4: 341).

[22] Ida Overbeck in Gilman, Begegnungen, pp. 79-80.

[23] In a letter to his sister on 25 January 1885 (during a period when she and other relatives and friends were attempting to move him to become active in searching out a wife) Nietzsche wrote: ‘Let me tell you a little experience I have had. As I was taking my usual walk yesterday, I suddenly heard someone talking and laughing heartily along a side path (it sounded almost as if it might have been you); and when this someone appeared before me, it turned out to be a charming brown-eyed girl, whose soft gaze, as she surveyed me, reminded me of a roe. Then, lonely philosopher though I am, my heart grew quite warm – I thought of your marriage schemes, and for the whole of the rest of the walk I could not help thinking of the charming young girl. Certainly it would do me good to have something so graceful about me but would it do her good? Would my views not make her unhappy, and would it not break my heart (provided that I loved her) to make such a delightful creature suffer? No, let us not speak of  marrying! But what you were thinking of was rather a good comrade […]. Do you really think that an emancipated woman of this sort, with all her femininity vanished, could be a good comrade, or could be tolerable as a wife at all? You forget that, in spite of my bad eyesight, I have a very highly developed sense of beauty; and this quite apart from the fact that such embittered women are repugnant to me and spoil my spirits and my whole atmosphere. Much intellect in a woman amounts to very little as far as I am concerned, for this so-called intellect, by which only the most superficial men are deceived, is nothing more than the most absurd pretentiousness. There is nothing more tiring than such an intellectual goose, who does not even know how tedious she is […] You can take my word for it, that for men like me, a marriage after the type of Goethe’s would be the best of all – that is to say, a marriage with a good housekeeper! But even this idea is repellent to me. A young and cheerful daughter to whom I would be an object of reverence would be much more to the point.’ This letter is not included in the Colli-Montinari edition of Nietzsche’s correspondence. It was printed in Elisabeth’s Friedrich Nietzsches Gesammelte Briefe V. 2 (1909) and is included in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (1921), translated by Anthony Ludovici; the above translation is Ludovici’s. 

[24] Joachim Köhler’s sensation-seeking Zarathustras Geheimnis (1989) does not uncover anything that leads to this conclusion.

[25] If this date of 1909, given by Elisabeth in her 1914 Foreword to The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence (p. x), is correct, it testifies to a remarkably long-maintained resentment on the part of Cosima (Nietzsche’s breach with the Wagner couple dates from 1878).

[26] Podach, The Madness of Nietzsche, pp. 182-213; Benders and Oettermann, Chronik, pp. 744-47; documents are reproduced in Volz, Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheit, pp. 392-404. This note is not extant – the only evidence for it is a letter from Heinrich Köselitz to Franz Overbeck on 20 April 1891 in which Köselitz says that Elisabeth reported that Cosima Wagner told her that she received it in January 1889. Three other incoherent notes to Cosima, all dated 3 January 1889, have been preserved; the longest is addressed ‘To Princess Ariadne, My Beloved’. In a late replacement sheet intended for the third section of the first chapter ‘Why I Am So Wise’ of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says that Cosima is ‘by far the noblest nature’ he has known and that he has always understood her marriage with Wagner as an infidelity against himself (KSA 14: 473).

[27] There are published recollections of Nietzsche from Lou Salomé, Malwida von Meysenbug, Helen Zimmern, Meta von Salis, Resa von Schirnhofer and Ida Overbeck. Franz Overbeck and Paul Deussen are the only men who left comparably substantial memoirs. Much of this material is reprinted in S. Gilman (ed.), Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, selections of which are translated in Gilman and David Parent (eds.), Conversations with Nietzsche.

[28] In a draft letter to his sister of late January 1884 Nietzsche declares that ‘only after my association with [Salomé] did I become ripe for my Zarathustra’, and that she is ‘the most talented and reflective creature one can imagine’.

[29] Lou Andreas-Salomé, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, p. 5. No other work on Nietzsche has the immediacy of this book, for instance in the following description (pp. 11-13): ‘To a casual observer there was nothing conspicuous about him: the well-dressed man of medium height, with brown hair smoothly brushed back, could easily escape notice. The fine, highly expressive lines of his mouth were almost fully covered by the great forward-combed moustache. He had a quiet laugh, a noiseless way of speaking, and a careful, reflective way of walking whereby he was slightly bent at the shoulders. One could hardly imagine him in a crowd – he made the impression of an outsider, a loner. Incomparably beautiful and nobly formed were his hands, to which one’s attention was involuntarily drawn and which Nietzsche himself believed to reflect his inner spirit. His eyes were revealing: although half-blind they did not possess that spying, squinting, and involuntarily intrusive character of many short-sighted people; they seemed more like protectors and preservers of a treasure, of a silent secret which no uninvited look should touch. His deficient eyesight lent a quite particular kind of wonder to his features, which reflected his inner world rather than varying outer impressions. His eyes looked inwards and at the same time – far over the nearest objects – into the distance, or better: inwardly, as into a distance […] A similar impression of something hidden and unenunciated was given by Nietzsche’s behaviour. In ordinary life he was of great politeness and almost feminine mildness, a constant benevolent evenness of temper – he took pleasure in noble forms of social intercourse.’

[30] Salomé’s entry for 18 August 1882, in Pfeiffer, Dokumente, p. 184; the full Tautenburg ‘Tagebuch für Paul Rée’ is printed in Pfeiffer, pp. 181-90.

[31] Thus Salomé writes in summation: ‘In the violent stirrings of his spirit, in which he believes himself to realize the heroic ideal of self-sacrifice and dedication, he brings a religious emotion to expression. Of all the powerful spiritual attributes of Nietzsche none is deeper, and more profoundly bound up with his whole spiritual constitution, than his religious genius. But under the influence of our time his religious spirit became oriented towards knowledge, and he was able to realize what he instinctively and so pressingly demanded only in a kind of sickness […] His entire development proceeds from his loss of faith, from the “emotion over the Death of God”, this tremendous emotion which echoes right down to his final work. The possibility of finding a substitute for the lost God in various forms of self-divinization is the history of his spirit, of his works, and of his sickness’ (Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, pp. 38-39). Although Salomé’s book on Nietzsche was widely read in the 1890s in Germany, it has been largely ignored by later Nietzsche-reception in Germany and elsewhere. In 1955, however, in a survey of the Nietzsche literature to that date, Karl Löwith wrote: ‘The book appeared in 1894, thus prior to the publication of Nietzsche’s self-presentation in Ecce Homo. The breadth and maturity of her characterization is all the more astonishing. In the fifty years since, no more probing work has appeared’ (‘Anhang’ to Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr, Sämtliche Schriften 6, p. 346, ET p. 196). After her marriage in 1887 to the orientalist Friedrich Carl Andreas, Salomé published under her married name. Following her 1894 book on Nietzsche, worked up from magazine articles of 1891-93, she took no further part in public discussions of Nietzsche. On the thirteenth of March 1891, having just read the first of Salomé’s articles (corresponding to the first chapter of her book), Rohde wrote to Franz Overbeck that ‘nothing has been written about Nietzsche which has greater sensitivity and depth of insight’, a judgement endorsed by Overbeck in his reply.

[32] Salomé, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, pp. 41-42. Like Nietzsche Salomé was never finished with the question of God, but she rejected his ‘new philosophy’, looking instead to developments in literature (Ibsen and Rilke) and psychology (Freud). She was neither metaphysician, theologian, romanticist or conservative, but she was unsympathetic to liberalism, democracy and feminism. The value of her response to Nietzsche, especially now that he has become thoroughly academicized, is to direct attention to the ever-present personal element in his writings. Her position as an independent female writer, not concerned to defend a ‘philosophical theory’ or patch of academic turf, was obviously relevant to her free approach to Nietzsche. She may be the most outstanding case of a phenomenon among those who knew Nietzsche personally – of being raised up by him to a level of philosophical consciousness that normally would be beyond them. Her 1894 book on Nietzsche, written under the inspiration of his friendship and originating in notes she took and discussed with him during their weeks together in 1882, is a masterpiece of philosophical psychology, whereas her subsequent publications, including her much later recollections of Nietzsche (in her posthumously published Looking Back: Memoirs, pp. 44-56), are somewhat pedestrian. She understood that only the whole Nietzsche is the real Nietzsche, and in her Tautenberg journal she succinctly stated the key to his thinking and being: while other intellectuals she knew possessed their work in impersonal objective fashion, Nietzsche (like herself, she says) is possessed by his work and task (entry for 21 August 1882, in Pfeiffer, Dokumente, p. 187). According to Salomé, Nietzsche’s response to the Death of God is the ‘ideal of heroism’, which he comprehends as ‘the good will to absolute self-annihilation’; he wants to sacrifice himself, and does sacrifice himself, to tragic knowledge, which for him is knowledge of the arbitrariness and meaninglessness of the world and of his own self. This is indeed the heart of Nietzsche: he is torn between godliness and ungodliness, and can resolve this only by intensifying his ungodliness under the imperative of his ‘god of knowledge’. He is pulled in opposite directions by ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, being unwilling to let go in either direction; but this is not the way he understands it himself, for he wants to divinize ‘the earth’ such that coming down from an imaginary heaven is the attainment of a new kind of godliness. Salomé sees that this as an existential contradiction irresolvable within the terms of Nietzsche’s thought and destructive of his personality. Unable to recognize any authority in heaven and certain only of earthly chaos, he was driven to divinize himself as the fount and measure of all reality. When reality refuted him the result was the superbia that ‘protected’ his self-image through self-annihilation.

[33] Cosima Wagner to Malwida von Meysenbug 17 April 1877, in KSA 15: 73-74.

[34] HL no. 10 (KSA 1: 324). In a letter of 14 August 1883 Nietzsche tells Franz Overbeck that he is ‘terribly doubtful’ of his ‘right’ to the goal he has set himself. Then in Ecce Homo he declares himself ‘too malicious to believe in myself’ (EH ‘Why I Am a Destiny no. 1; KSA 6: 365). In their memoirs both Franz Overbeck and Ida Overbeck remark on Nietzsche’s lack of self-confidence. (Bernoulli, Freundschaft I, pp. 273 f. & 245 f.) Few commentators, even hostile ones, have had the temerity to suggest that Nietzsche was not really a ‘strong’ thinker. The comments of G. K. Chesterton, however, ill-disposed to Nietzsche as he was, are not without relevance: ‘No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words; as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor […] Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce’ (Orthodoxy, pp. 190-91).

[35] In early January 1872, after perusing his advance copy of The Birth of Tragedy, Wagner wrote to Nietzsche that ‘I have never read anything more beautiful than your book’, adding ‘I told Cosima that you come right after her, and then nobody else for a long stretch’.

[36] There were nevertheless genuine feelings between Nietzsche and Wagner. They had in common a profound sense of mission, which they rarely found in anybody else, and this alone was enough to produce a sympathy between them. And notwithstanding Wagner’s love of fame and need for luxury of a kind, they both spurned the bourgeois world. They shared a sense of the mystery of Life; they both loved Schopenhauer more than any other philosopher, and with Schopenhauer they both believed in the need for ‘redemption’. It would be fair to say that the collapse of their friendship, brief though it was but so full of hopes, was probably the greatest human disappointment in the lives of them both. The aphorism ‘Star Friendship’ of The Gay Science (no. 279; KSA 3: 523-24), dating from 1882, conveys something of the way Nietzsche thought of Wagner (who is not mentioned by name) after they became estranged; it ends with ‘Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.’ About the time Nietzsche composed this aphorism he wrote to Elisabeth: ‘Those were the most beautiful days of my life, which I spent with [Wagner] in Tribschen […] But the all-powerful force of our tasks drove us apart and now we cannot return to one another, we have become strangers to one another. At that time, when I discovered Wagner, I was indescribably happy! I had long searched for somebody who was superior to me and could really see further than me. I thought I had found such a person in Wagner but this was an error. Now I can no longer compare myself with him – I belong to an altogether different rank.’ Lou Salomé reports that when in 1882 she and Nietzsche visited the Wagners’ former estate of Tribschen, at the edge of Lucerne, there were tears in Nietzsche’s eyes (Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, p. 87). Soon after Wagner’s death, Nietzsche wrote to Heinrich Köselitz (27 April 1883): ‘What recollections this news brought back to me! […] We loved each other and hoped everything for each other – it was truly a profound love, without reservations.’ And in Ecce Homo: ‘My intimate relationship with Richard Wagner has been by far the most profound and warmest of my life. I’d let go cheap the whole rest of my human relationships; I should not want to give away out of my life at any price the days of Tribschen – days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime accidents, of profound moments’ (EH ‘Why I Am So Clever’ no. 5; KSA 6: 288).

[37] There was never a real friendship between Nietzsche and Burckhardt, much as Nietzsche wished for one and at times imagined that one existed. In the early Basel years they were friendly colleagues but nothing more. They had a good deal in common philosophically, including a love of Schopenhauer, but Burckhardt disliked Wagner and Wagnerianism. The temperaments of Nietzsche and Burckhardt were incompatible. Nietzsche continued to solicit Burckhardt’s friendship and ‘recognition’ right through to his final Notes of Madness of January 1889, but Burckhardt kept him at arm’s length, increasingly so with the passage of time.

[38] A letter from Wagner to Nietzsche of 12 February 1870 is evidently a response to private discussions (or a non-extant letter) in which Nietzsche floated this idea. But although both Wagner and Cosima strongly opposed Nietzsche’s suggestion, on 24 January 1872 in a letter to Wagner Nietzsche declares ‘I experience my current existence as a reproach and in all sincerity ask if you can use me.’ And on 11 April 1872 Nietzsche wrote to friend Rohde that at Michaelmas he would resign his position to ‘travel around in the German Fatherland, invited by the Wagner societies of the larger cities to lecture on the [now planned] Nibelungen stage-festival.’

[39] A list of significantly disappointed friends would include Paul Deussen, Erwin Rohde, Richard Wagner, Cosima Wagner, Marie Baumgartner, Lou Salomé, Paul Rée, Heinrich von Stein, Paul Lanzky and Malwida von Meysenbug. On 26 October 1886 Nietzsche wrote to Reinhardt von Seydlitz: ‘This is solitude: there is nobody with whom I have my No and Yes in common.’ Again to Seydlitz on 12 February 1888: ‘When an animal is ill it crawls into its cave – so does the philosophical beast. So seldom does a friendly voice come my way. I am now alone, absurdly alone.’ Oddly enough Seydlitz, in the years 1885-88, was one of Nietzsche’s few Du-friends (although in these years their contact was almost entirely by correspondence). They had known each other through Wagnerian connections in 1876-78, but when Nietzsche broke from Wagner they lost contact until 1885, when Nietzsche visited Seydlitz and his wife in Munich; this seems to have been the occasion when they adopted ‘Du’ between them. Of course Nietzsche was on ‘Du’ terms with friends of his boyhood and youth like Deussen, Gersdorff and Rohde, but apart from Overbeck, who was Nietzsche’s housemate in Basel between 1870 and 1875, Seydlitz was Nietzsche’s only new Du-friend after his student years. Naturally Nietzsche could not use ‘Du’ with Richard or Cosima Wagner, nor with the much older Meysenbug, but he also did not use it with Salomé or Rée (although these two did use it between themselves). In mid-March 1885, in a draft-letter to his sister, Nietzsche wrote: ‘I am much too proud to believe that a human being could love me, which would presuppose they know who I am. Just as little do I believe I will ever love somebody, which would presuppose that – wonder of wonders – I discover someone of my own rank. Do not forget that I have great contempt and pity for people like Richard Wagner and Schopenhauer, and that I regard the founder of Christianity as superficial compared with myself. I loved them all before I comprehended what man is.’ Of note in this connection is Nietzsche’s claim in Beyond Good and Evil (no. 60; KSA 5: 79) that ‘loving human beings for the sake of God has been the noblest and remotest feeling attained to by men up till now’, because ‘love of man without some sanctifying ulterior objective is one piece of stupidity and animality more’. However, since Nietzsche adds that this noble feeling ‘goes beautifully astray’, he concluded that love of man has no foundation, whether in theological-metaphysical or naturalistic terms. This is not to say that Nietzsche was strictly without love, or that his love was just ‘stupid animality’; his life and letters suggest the contrary, but his philosophy limited his ability to love and receive love.

[40] Overbeck remained loyal to Nietzsche until the end, but although to some degree he had to ‘humour’ him, he never gratified Nietzsche by endorsing his self-estimation. Perhaps Nietzsche’s respect for Overbeck reflected his awareness that the latter could never be a ‘disciple’. From Overbeck’s extensive memoirs: ‘When I first made Nietzsche’s acquaintance I was thirty-three, seven years older than him. Due to this difference in age a friendship between us was hardly to be expected. Nevertheless this did occur. Very soon we put aside those things that separated us and developed that mutual trust which in the future held us secure against all we experienced of one another. I had much more to experience of Nietzsche than vice-versa, not only because my age made me “more finished” than he, but because I was deplorably lacking in ambition. Since Nietzsche burned with ambition this difference may have been the most difficult thing about me for him to overcome. On the other hand this probably made it easier for him to trust me without reservation. The degree to which he was my superior intellectually and morally, and especially in accomplishments, was never lost on me. From early in my association with Nietzsche I became his sincere and passionate friend, and even an admirer, but never, no more than any of his other friends, did I become his disciple. Nor was I ever in the position of denying my friendship with him. Nietzsche soon became for me the most extraordinary person I had come across on my life-path, and stayed that way too when the masses began to have their opinion about his extraordinary qualities. We were two scholarly natures who wanted more from ourselves – only thus can I comprehend our close friendship in the context of such enormously unequal gifts and equally great differences in temperament.’ (Gilman, Begegnungen, pp. 81-88, with omissions). A letter from Nietzsche to Overbeck of 14 November 1881 opens as follows: ‘My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and about which one can be sure only that it will one day capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbours to one another, and especially is it your hand that has done its best to keep me from ‘capsizing’! So let us continue our voyage for each other’s sake, for a long time yet, a long time!’

[41] Franz Overbeck’s unwillingness to co-operate with the Nietzsche Archive greatly irked Elisabeth. Her revenge was first to insinuate, in her Foreword to the 1901 edition of The Will to Power, and then, after Overbeck’s death in June 1905, to outrightly declare in a series of articles, that wilfully or through negligence Overbeck had been responsible for lost manuscript material for ‘The Revaluation’ which Nietzsche had with him in Turin at the time of his breakdown (see Hoffmann, Zur Geschichte des Nietzsche-Archivs, pp. 61-65). Elisabeth knew that the accusation had no substance, but it served her purposes, not only in blackening the name of Overbeck (who had supported Frau Nietzsche against her daughter and obviously had a low opinion of Elisabeth) but in covering for her brother’s missing ‘system’. Overbeck’s widow Ida brought legal action against Elisabeth, while Overbeck’s friend, successor in his Basel chair, and literary executor Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, rebutted Elisabeth first in a counter-series of articles and then in his two volume Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundshaft, which appeared in 1908. This work, of more than a thousand densely printed pages, is a compilation, with Bernoulli’s connecting narrative, of primary sources relating to both Overbeck and Nietzsche, providing a great deal of information not to be had from Elisabeth’s books; although substantial extracts have been reprinted elsewhere, it is still a basic tool of Nietzsche biography. At the time, Elisabeth was outraged, because Bernoulli published letters from Köselitz to Overbeck which made disparaging comments about her and the Archive, and Köselitz himself was embarrassed, because since 1900 he had been back in the Archive working with Elisabeth. With the support of Elisabeth, Köselitz took Bernoulli and his publisher to court, obtaining an order first to blacken out the offending passages (all Köselitz’s letters to Overbeck and reports taken from these) and then to leave these passages blank (a few copies of the unexpurgated text survived). It was a minor victory for Elisabeth and Köselitz, offset by the fact that the publicity created by this scandal increased the readership of Bernoulli’s book. As for Nietzsche’s letters to Overbeck, Elisabeth was still unable to get hold of them, for in his will Overbeck had instructed Bernoulli not to release them to the Archive. In 1916, however, through a peaceful agreement between the Bernoulli-Ida Overbeck camp and the Archive, they were published, together with letters in the reverse direction, under the joint editorship of Richard Oehler and Bernoulli (not under the auspices of the Archive).

[42] Franz Overbeck in Gilman, Begegnungen, p. 210, and in Bernoulli, Freundschaft II, p. 231.

[43] Some idea of the early part of this friendship can be gained from two quotations, one from Nietzsche and the other from Rohde. In an autobiographical fragment ‘Retrospect on My Two Leipzig Years’, written in 1867 when he was not quite twenty-three and he and Rohde had known one another for about two years at Leipzig University, Nietzsche wrote: ‘Only in this single instance have I experienced friendship built upon an ethical-philosophical foundation […] We found common ground in irony and mockery at philological vanities. We were at loggerheads on many topics, but when the discussion penetrated into the depths all dissonance ceased.’ (KGW I 4: 527) This friendship was still strong in May 1874, as is attested by a letter from Rohde, who at that time held a junior academic post at Kiel. Rohde wrote to Nietzsche: ‘The older one gets – and already I feel that life is slipping away under my feet like sand – the more one feels the absurdity of a relationship through correspondence between people who, because they belong together, should spend this short and dubious life in personal contact […] Dear friend, I wish and yearn to hear from you often, much more often than happens. For you are courageous and active in hope, and carried upward by the spirit of music which lives in you. I crawl in the dust and live in a really miserable despondency through all the days and circumstances of life. It is not good to talk about this, and so, dear friend, I ask you, give me more often a token of your remembrance, of your loyalty to me, without which I cannot live and breathe.’ In fact Nietzsche and Rohde were in contact quite regularly, but Rohde was given to anxiety and depression. As fellow students in Leipzig Nietzsche and Rohde were called the Dioscuri. Karl Jaspers writes that the letters between the two from 1867 to 1876 ‘constitute an incomparable document of a youthful friendship on a high spiritual plane’; in his view, ‘the fact that this friendship did not remain constant was of fateful decisiveness for Nietzsche; but it became, at the same time, almost symbolic of the fact that Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility’ (Nietzsche, p. 60). The way Rohde was thinking of Nietzsche as they were already drifting part is shown in a letter he wrote to him in December 1879 upon receiving a copy of The Wanderer and His Shadow. Rohde testifies to the impossibility of their friendship: ‘It is so long since I have spoken to you otherwise than in my thoughts […] I think back to times long ago when we were together in Leipzig, of your evening improvisations at the piano, of many wonderful hours, then of our occasional meetings in Basel, of all the hours and days that we spent with one another in the shadow of Wagner […] I think of you always when I remember the best and purest and most decisive moments of my youth – and my youth really began with my twentieth year. I can never lose you, may you climb the most distant peaks of thought […] What kind of present you bestow on the few readers of your book you are hardly able to estimate yourself, for you live above, in your own spirit; we others hear such voices otherwise not at all, not spoken, not printed. So for me it is now as it always was when we were together: for a time I am raised up to a higher rank, as if I were spiritually ennobled […] All the best, my dear friend; you are always the one who gives, I am always the one who receives. What could I give you and be to you? If not to be your friend, who under all circumstances is devoted to you, and belongs to you.’

[44] Writing to his friend Cäcilie Gussenbauer in January 1881, as he was setting to work copying Nietzsche’s manuscript for Daybreak, Köselitz reveals his dedication: ‘If I put aside everything else this task will occupy me for 12 to 14 days. Perhaps you will reproach me and think that by undertaking this business I am carrying my self-sacrifice too far. But, my dearest, you do not understand. Nietzsche has priority in every respect. Nietzsche’s words have greater value for world history than anything I can do. Consequently, if I wish to give my life some real purpose, I must, where I can, place myself at his disposal.’ (in Podach, Gestalten um Nietzsche, pp. 79-80). Köselitz, however, could be critical of Nietzsche. On occasions he would pull Nietzsche back from unintelligent excesses, as when in a letter of November 1879 he reproached Nietzsche for a draft passage of The Wanderer and His Shadow which says that ‘the domestic animal which understood how to create itself a right within humanity is the woman’. Köselitz protests that ‘the comparison of women with domestic animals is shabby and unphilosophical […] Women have, precisely in intellectual matters, advantages which men could do well to emulate.’ Nietzsche took Köselitz’s advice and deleted the statement. On Nietzsche’s suggestion, in the 1880s Köselitz took the professional name ‘Peter Gast’; in the Nietzsche literature he is often discussed under this name. His only significant publication on Nietzsche is the Introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra, which appears in Volume 6 of Elisabeth’s Nietzsche’s Werke (1899), pp. 486-521.

[45] Malwida von Meysenbug to Nietzsche 26 July 1872; Nietzsche to Malwida von Meysenbug 7 November 1872. Nietzsche’s attraction to Meysenbug is not at all surprising in view of the way she spoke to him in her letters, even at the beginning of their friendship. For instance in her letter of  26 July, after confiding to Nietzsche her anxiety about the looming separation (by reason of marriage) from her foster-daughter Olga Herzen, she summons up themes at once Wagnerian and Nietzschean: ‘I have again looked into the essence of the world, whereby one can do nothing else except cover one’s head and keep silent, at the same time confirming the divinity of the tragic work of art as we experienced it together in Tristan. Like Tristan I tarried in the world-night, and what I saw there I can say to nobody. But I have felt with unmistakable certainty that only that tragic work of art can redeem us from the misery of the dismembered Dionysus. Therefore hail to the Master who created this work of art […] The only kind of blessedness that exists is the creative, and if returning to the Primal One is blessedness then it is so precisely because it is returning to the Primal Creative Force. I have always thought that Nirvana means something different to absolute Nothingness; it is the return to the Primal One, not to simple stillness but to deep contemplation and comprehensive creation. But I am starting to fantasize before you, which is a dangerous tendency of mine.’ Nobody else had ever spoken to Nietzsche in this way, not even Wagner or Cosima.

[46] After forming a close friendship with Richard Wagner in Paris in the early 1860s Meysenbug became like him a devotee of Arthur Schopenhauer and his doctrine of ‘denial of the will’. She understood Schopenhauer, Wagner and herself as ‘idealists’. In October 1874 Nietzsche sent Meysenbug a letter announcing his newly published Untimely Meditation Schopenhauer as Educator, the most ‘idealist’ of all his works, and announcing his plans for the upcoming period: ‘How happy I shall feel when I have at last unburdened my heart of all its negative hates and all its indignation, and yet I dare hope that in five years I shall be within sight of this glorious goal! Already at the present moment I am thankful to feel how very much more clearly and sharply I am learning to see things spiritually […] Provided that I am not led entirely astray in my course, or that my health does not break down, something must certainly come of all this.’ Looking back in her ‘Nietzsche’ essay of 1902, Meysenbug reflects (pp. 13-14) on how she felt about Nietzsche at this time: ‘Who could read this letter without being moved? Who, reading it then, could look otherwise than with joyful hope at this courageous fighter in the full power of youth, armed with the most magnificent weapons of the spirit, with great knowledge, totally without pedantry, with artistic feeling, himself musician and poet, entering the arena with such freedom and boldness – he himself a complete idealist – against dry rationalism and the cultural philistine?’

[47] Nietzsche’s period in Sorrento is known mainly through the vivid account in Meysenbug’s 1898 Der Lebensabend einer Idealistin (pp. 46-69 and reprinted in the 1985 Insel edition of Memoiren einer Idealistin, pp. 332-49).

[48] Malwida von Meysenbug to Nietzsche 13 July 1876.

[49] Malwida von Meysenbug, ‘Nietzsche’, in Meysenbug, Individualitäten, pp. 27-28.

[50] Nietzsche to Paul Deussen early August 1877.

[51] Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff 1 April 1874: ‘My writings are supposed to be so dark and incomprehensible! I thought that when one speaks about distress one would be understood by those who are in distress. Surely that is true. But where are they, who are in distress?’; Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck 12 October 1886, reporting on a letter he had received from Jacob Burckhardt: ‘I found Burckhardt’s recent letter depressing, even though he accorded me the highest distinction. What is that to me! I wanted to hear “that is my distress (Not)! that rendered me speechless!” In this sense alone, my old friend Overbeck, do I suffer from my ‘solitude’. Nowhere do I lack people, but people who have my cares in common! But that is an old story.’

[52] Paul Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche, pp. 100-107.

[53] Rée’s letter of November 1897 to an unknown addressee, quoted by the editor in Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, p. 163.

[54] Lou Andreas-Salomé, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, p. 7.

[55] Helene Druskowicz to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer 22 December 1884, in Krummel, Nietzsche und der deutsche Geist I, p. 54.

[56] Helene Druskowitz, Moderne Versuche eines Religionsersatzes, pp. 46-47. The Nietzsche section of the book is reprinted in KGB III 7/2: 502-11.

[57] Druskowicz, Eugen Dühring, pp. 61-62.

[58] GS Preface no. 4 (KSA 3: 351): ‘How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who love pleasure, our “educated” people, our rich people, and our rulers!’ Some Nietzscheans, nevertheless, find it difficult to accept that Nietzsche himself was not moved by politics, or honour (literary vanity), or at least by sexual pleasure. In view of the fact that Nietzsche disavows as delusionary any kind of transcendental motivations, the only other possible ‘Nietzschean’ explanation of the well-spring of Nietzsche’s personal life has to be the ‘feeling of power’ he derives from thinking and writing.

[59] GM III no. 8 (KSA 5: 354-55).

[60] Thus aphorism no. 2 of The Gay Science (KSA 3: 373), headed ‘The Intellectual Conscience’: ‘What is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgements and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress – as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower […] To stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvellous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing – that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody.’ Walter Kaufmann, in a note to his translation of this aphorism, comments: ‘Many interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought are invalidated by this very important and characteristic section’. But Kaufmann, who plays down the importance of Nietzsche’s contradictions, does not identify this aphorism for what it is, namely a prime exhibit of Nietzsche’s transcendental contradiction. Obviously, what Nietzsche means to condemn by ‘slack feelings in faith and judgements’ is slackness of conscience, and this does not accord with his own theme of ‘innocence’: the conscience of the philosopher cannot be subordinated to that ‘instinctive affirmation’ which is supposed to be constitutive of ‘gay science’.

[61] The question of whether Nietzsche leads a ‘philosophical life’ does not have a clear answer. He must lead such a life inasmuch as the questions of Truth and the Good are present to him and because in various ways he brings the resources of reason to bear on these. At the same time he leads an ‘unphilosophical life’ insofar as he has a distorted relation to reason, which latter is evidenced by both his spurious ‘critique’ of reason and the plain unreasonableness of so many of his statements and so much of his language. That Nietzsche’s relation to philosophy (and reason) is ‘double-headed’ does not, from the classical viewpoint, distinguish him from anybody else, for as the ancient Orphics put it, every human being is ‘a child of earth and starry heaven’. What is unique about Nietzsche is that his ‘two heads’ fight out a violent struggle against one another with such persistence, intelligence and self-reflectiveness. This is what makes Nietzsche’s writings illuminating – not because they present a ‘new philosophy’, or discredit or overcome ‘old philosophy’.

[62] There are few more tragic biographical spectacles than Nietzsche’s spiritual trajectory after 1882-83. Having talked himself into believing that Thus Spake Zarathustra was a decisive ‘revelation’ that would ‘change the calendar’, he immediately felt that this was not so certain, indeed that he had not yet succeeded in conveying his fundamental doctrines. All his writings from this date onwards have the character of a recapitulation without any development – this notwithstanding many pages of great insight and power. Above all Nietzsche does not confront and attempt to resolve the inherent difficulties of his ideas. From time to time, in his letters especially, he gives the impression of feeling his life to have been a failure – even if, almost in the same breath, he proclaims himself a world-historical redeemer. It is remarkable how many Nietzscheans, and ‘admirers’ of Nietzsche, hold up these final years as the heroic fulfilment of his ‘transgressive’ philosophical life. In fact these years testify to the unravelling of his life, in a way predictable from Thus Spake Zarathustra itself (if not much earlier). As was pointed out by Theobald Zielgler in 1900, the collapse of Nietzsche’s late promises (per ‘The Will to Power’) is at bottom a repetition of what happened in his early (1872) Basel lectures on educational institutions, when after all his negative critique (spread over five lectures) he became ill, and so could not provide what was supposed to be a closing address on his positive vision (Nietzsche, p. 193).