Nietzsche

A Beginner's Guide

Robert Wicks

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780741703
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Discover the truth about the much-misunderstood thinker Often quoted yet highly divisive, Nietzsche remains an enigma long after his death. This clear primer moves deftly through the controversy to examine the philosopher's work in the context of his tumultuous childhood and Christian upbringing. Discussing his infamous declaration that God is dead, his posthumous association with Nazism, and his criticisms of conventional morality, this book is the ideal introduction to the much debated thinker and his extensive legacy.

1

The churchyard echoes of Röcken

From Jerusalem to Athens

If, as a Friedrich Nietzsche aficionado, one makes the “honored birthplace” pilgrimage to the German town of Röcken, one will be struck by the unassuming plainness of the roadside village. Röcken, located in the pastoral farmlands south of Leipzig, is a town too small for most maps: the village’s more expanded name is Röcken bei Lützen (Röcken near Lützen), and one will inevitably make one’s way first to Lützen. After passing through this moderate-sized community, a small cluster of buildings will soon appear alongside the main road, and if one’s eyes are keen, one will pick out a church building nestling among them. It was in this churchyard that Friedrich Nietzsche played as a boy, and it was in the large house next to the church – the one designated for the pastor and his family – where Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844. Today, over a century and a half later, it is maintained as a historical site.

Nietzsche’s childhood was steeped in Lut heranism. His great-grandfather was a Lutheran minister, as were both of his grandfathers, as was his father. Little Nietzsche imagined that he would become a minister as well. One can imagine the youngster peeking through the doorway as his father gave his Sunday sermons, and maybe, as any child in such circumstances might, playing around the pulpit during the quiet countryside afternoons. The intimacy of the humble church and its surroundings is distinctive, and during the off-hours, the child could only have made himself familiar with every inch of the church’s interior, which was situated literally in his family’s backyard. In a real sense, Friedrich Nietzsche began his life in church.

Although Nietzsche’s childhood appears to have been predominantly happy, it was also unforgettably stamped with death. When Nietzsche was approaching his fifth birthday, his father died from a brain ailment, and within only six months, the life of Nietzsche’s younger brother, Joseph, who was only two years old, was ended by sickness as well. This was a terrible time for Nietzsche, as his own reported nightmares confirm.¹ Throughout his life, death’s shadow followed Nietzsche in the images of his father and little brother.

With the death of Röcken’s pastor, the Nietzsche family moved to the nearby city of Naumburg, where Friedrich lived with his mother, his sister, his two aunts, and his grandmother, until he entered the prestigious Schulpforta boarding school at the age of fourteen. It is fair to say that Nietzsche’s dramatic loss of significant male figures within his household at an early age, side-by-side with an overdetermination of living female figures, had a formative and lasting influence on his psyche.

The academic atmosphere at Schulpforta was disciplined and cloisterlike, and in a broad sense, Nietzsche’s environment did not radically change: Schulpforta opened his imagination to the Greek and Latin classics, but he remained in the Christian rural world and continued to be nurtured on Lutheran values – ones which soon became amalgamated with affectionate feelings for his German homeland. During these teenage years, Nietzsche and a few of his friends formed a tiny club which they named “Germania,” the activities of which included a fateful subscription to a contemporary music periodical.

Through the club’s subscription to the music journal, the Zeitschrift für Musik, Nietzsche became familiar with the compositions of Richard Wagner (1813–83) – a composer whose works embodied many of the religious and cultural themes that captured the young Nietzsche’s heart, and for whom Nietzsche would develop a tremendous admiration in the years to come. Although he would never compare to Wagner as a composer, Nietzsche was not without considerable musical sensitivity, and by the time he reached his late teens he was writing music that could be played or sung respectably in church. Many of his compositions were stylistically reminiscent of those by Robert Schumann (1810–56), and can easily be mistaken for them by the naïve ear. At this time in his life, Lutheranism, choral and piano music, academic studies, and Germany, all coalesced within Nietzsche’s mind.

To understand the transformations that occurred in Nietzsche’s life once he entered college, we can reflect for a moment on some of the Christian ideas with which he grew up. One of the first that was impressed upon him – one not unique to Christianity, and which is at least as ancient as the Egyptians and their pyramidic tombs – was the concept of a world “beyond” the earthly one we inhabit, conceived of as a place to which people’s souls travel after their mundane death. Immediately after his father’s funeral, Nietzsche received a benevolent letter from a Lutheran pastor assuring him that his father, now standing before the throne of the Heavenly Father, continued to look down upon him from the higher world, wishing him well. At a very early age, he was impressed with the concepts of God, death, and the afterlife.

Another religious idea that entered Nietzsche’s highly reflective mind, and which appears significantly in his later writings, is the persistent question of why a Heavenly Father would allow not only his own father to be taken from him, but also his innocent two-year-old brother. Christians have struggled to find an adequate solution to this “problem of evil,” and witnessing the death of his younger brother only made the problem more dramatic for Nietzsche. From an early age, he was exposed to questions surrounding the meaning of life, of death, and of the world itself, all set within the atmosphere of accepting the existence of a morally good, all-seeing being called the “Heavenly Father” who was defined by his own fatherly elders as the object of unconditional love. In sum, Friedrich Nietzsche grew up as a Christian, and his personal life was marked by tragic events which eventually led him to question the Christian outlook and valuation of life, including the idea that the cosmos is, at its core, morally and good-naturedly constituted.

In 1864, when he entered the University of Bonn as a theology and philology student at the age of nineteen, life changed for Nietzsche. Not only was he situated relatively far from home for the first time, his university studies in philology also took a deep hold upon him. These drew his scholarly interests further away from the study of biblical texts towards that of the Greek and Latin classics – a field into which he been initiated at Schulpforta. Nietzsche was reborn in Bonn, for he loosened the bonds of the church-related world he inherited from his father and his rural upbringing, and soon developed what turned out to be a lifelong affection for Athens and Rome, always set in an uneasy and ambivalent contrast to Hebraic and Arabic Jerusalem. It is well-known that Nietzsche ranted against Christianity at the end of his career, but his attitude towards Middle Eastern culture in general was less cut and dried: while scorning institutionalized Christianity and its roots in Judaism, Nietzsche discerned important virtues in both the Hebrew Scriptures and in Christian asceticism, and he later chose as the figurehead for his own philosophic vision the character of Zarathustra, the Persian prophet of Zoroastrianism. The prophetic Nietzsche derived much of his historical inspiration from the Middle East, despite his condemnation of the highly institutionalized European Christianity that later prevailed closer to his home in Germany.

Despite the various doctrinal changes that were to characterize his philosophical thought, Nietzsche’s love of music remained rock-solid, and in Bonn he developed his artistic interests, along with his attraction to the classics. Nietzsche studied with a biographer of Mozart, Otto Jahn (1813–69), who was the same age Nietzsche’s father would have been, and who had been academically trained by Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), a well-known philologist of the time. Lachmann specialized in the Roman philosopher Lucretius (98–55 BC), and in the study of “textual recension” – a genealogical dimension of philology which determines the original authorship of texts by comparing and contrasting secondary and derivative versions. This idea of “genealogy” would later become central to Nietzsche’s own philosophical style. Nietzsche was also taught by Friedrich Ritschl (1806–76), a specialist in the Roman classics, who was particularly expert on the Roman comic poet Plautus (254–184 BC).² All of these subjects – classics of tragedy and comedy, genealogy, music, philology – remained with Nietzsche for the rest of his scholarly life.

During his university studies in the mid-1860s, Nietzsche made the momentous encounter, either through the legacy of their books or in person, of two of the most influential figures of his life – the recently deceased Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and the still living Richard Wagner (1813–83). Both men became his heroes, but sharing the fate of many heroes and idealized father-figures, they were to be replaced by others whom he grew to idealize, ultimately being unseated by the notion of a larger-than-life, super-healthy type of Nietzsche’s own creation. In the end, as we shall see, having become disillusioned with existing examples, Nietzsche became his own teacher, and styled for himself his own ideal in the form of the superhuman, or Übermensch – a super-healthy, super-strong, and yet far from supernatural type. As the years went on, he tended to measure famous individuals against this idealization, offering his applause for Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Dostoevski, Thucydides, and the Sophists, while at the same time roasting characters such as Rousseau, Hugo, Sand, Michelet, Zola, Renan, Carlyle, Mill, Eliot, Darwin, and Dante.

In 1865, when still at the outset of his intellectual odyssey, the twenty-one-year-old Nietzsche came across Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which had originally been published forty-seven years earlier, in 1818. Schopenhauer achieved fame only at the end of his life, however, and his name was a new and fashionable one within academically-legitimated circles when Nietzsche discovered him for himself. Schopenhauer’s philosophy revealed to the still-impressionable Nietzsche a way to interpret the world that, despite having an atheistic twist, shared much of the Christian sentiment with which Nietzsche grew up, as well as the classical Greek philosophy with which he had become enamored. While retaining in substance the traditional Christian moral imperative to resist harming others, Schopenhauer advanced a metaphysical vision that was at odds with Christianity: in the place of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God at the ruling center of the universe, Schopenhauer substituted a blind, aimless, and fundamentally senseless energetic urge that he could describe as nothing more than the blind force of sheer “will.”

Schopenhauer did not explain this “will” in reference to physical forces. He turned the usual conception inside-out, and explained physical forces in reference to the manifestation of an essentially non-physical “will,” which he defined as the “inner” force that metaphysically underlies all things in the cosmos, just as one’s conscious will is the inner force that motivates and animates one’s observable bodily actions. Schopenhauer believed that if we direct our attention to the mental energy that we use, for example, to move our hand when we will it to move, then we can have an intuitive feel for the kind of energy that moves the universe, or, more precisely, obtain a bare sense of the energy which itself constitutes the universe. The energies of the universe flow through everything, so they flow through us. And according to Schopenhauer, our will is nothing more than a refined manifestation of this blind cosmic will.

Schopenhauer accounted for the evil in the world partly in terms of the nature of this universal will itself, which he described as a pure, aimless, raw striving. Contributing to this account, and completing the picture, is the constitution of our minds. For, given the kind of analyzing and systematizing minds we happen to have, we are obliged to perceive this universal will as an energy that manifests itself objectively as a world extended in space and time, and as filled with individual things. For Schopenhauer, the individual things in the world – among which are numbered our physical bodies – are images we have constructed for ourselves. He believed that our experiences of a world that contains inherently selfish, self-serving, competing, and violent beings, whether we realize it or not, is a grand construction of our own intellectual making.

Salvation – conceived of as akin to a spiritual salve for the world’s frustrating and self-conflicting nature – Schopenhauer discovered through artistic (especially musical), moral, and ascetic-religious-mystical experience. He argued that by listening to music, or by contemplating a painting or sculpture, we can temporarily lift ourselves out of our daily worries and our mundane way of intellectualizing and individualizing the world. He conceived of aesthetic experience as a balm for dissatisfaction, as a gaze at universality, and as a transcendence of the finite human condition.

Schopenhauer’s view appealed to Nietzsche, for it allowed him to hold on to his inherited Christian morality, while it also liberated him from an all-seeing watcher – not to mention a moral judge and executioner – in the heavenly skies. At this point, Nietzsche was less troubled by the effects of traditional moral values themselves, than by the super policing-force that allegedly enforces these values, namely, a powerful guilt-generating being called “God” who absolutely penetrates everyone’s mind and spiritual privacy. Schopenhauer’s philosophy had the merit of recognizing no intrusive God, even though it preserved Christian moral values. Schopenhauer also allowed Nietzsche to contemplate more clearly what must have been prodding at the back of his mind for years – the suspicion that in itself, the world might lack intrinsic meaning and redeeming value. This painful, and yet also potentially liberating, thought rose to the surface in Nietzsche’s reading of Schopenhauer, and it led him to confront – in a forceful, explicit, and intellectually sophisticated manner – the possibility that God might not exist.

Schopenhauer also supported Nietzsche’s enthusiasm towards an assortment of non-monotheistic interpretations of the world – ones that included not only Schopenhauer’s particular brand of atheism, but also the more polytheistic and mythic worlds of ancient Greece with which he had been familiar. For at least the next seven years of Nietzsche’s development, the Greek mythical outlook stood side-by-side with Schopenhauer’s atheistic one, and Nietzsche’s philosophical reflections can be conveniently described during this period as fundamentally Schopenhauerian, and as displaying an increasing predominance of ancient Greek influence as time progressed. Soon, during the late 1870s, this amalgam was transformed by Nietzsche’s growing interest in the scientific, biological, and physiological perspectives that were gaining currency during the second half of the nineteenth century. The creative, imaginative, visionary, myth-loving artist and the cool, objective, reality-seeking scientist formed an unstable mix, as they combined and recombined continually within Nietzsche’s struggling and aspiring mind. The tension was paralleled by his efforts to interpret the world as a meaningful place which could ground a desire to live, side-by-side with a deep suspicion that, objectively considered, the world is intrinsically meaningless and life is without a point.

Nietzsche’s other hero during his early twenties was Richard Wagner. He had known of Wagner’s music as a teenager, and as he was about to complete his studies in classical philology at the University of Leipzig – the institution to which he had followed his teacher, Ritschl, in 1865 – he was personally introduced to Wagner. Partly on the basis of their shared enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, the two men struck up a father–son style of friendship (Wagner, like Otto Jahn, was born in the same year as Nietzsche’s father), and they remained in contact for the next decade, until Nietzsche’s growing anti-Christian view of life became incompatible with Wagner’s more traditionally Christian, albeit German-mythic, outlook.³ Wagner’s anti-Semitism also began to upset Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Schopenhauer also waned.⁴ Wagner also had become a cultural superstar by this time, while Nietzsche had remained an unknown.

Wagner loomed large in Nietzsche’s reflections to the very end, and until immediately prior to his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche continued to define himself against Wagner, fighting inwardly to avoid being eclipsed by his conception of the man. Their eventual differences notwithstanding, Nietzsche found in Wagner an intellectual equal, a musical superior worthy of respect, the embodiment of a social ideal (given Wagner’s fame), a substitute father-figure, and a person who helped channel his literary energies in a productive, if not competitive, manner.

One notable result was Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music, which integrated the themes that had been circulating within Nietzsche’s life – the meaning and value of existence, the Greeks, music, tragedy – and which concluded by celebrating Wagner’s music, alongside that of Bach and Beethoven, as the potential savior for Germany’s, and Europe’s, weakening cultural spirit. The book was rich in thematic material, and it stood as a tribute to his older friend. But Nietzsche paid a high price for his celebration of Wagner’s music and for his critique of contemporary German culture: the book’s grandiose aspirations, along with its imaginative style and scope, did little to enhance Nietzsche’s academic reputation as a classical philologist.

During their best times together, Nietzsche and Wagner shared a common intellectual ground in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer – a philosophy written with artists, ascetics, and mystics positively in mind. Schopenhauer’s views were somewhat ahead of their time for the nineteenth-century philosophical world, and it was uncommon for anyone to claim that even though the world was godless, salvation was possible through the arts, and especially through music, supposedly the highest art. Schopenhauer’s core assertion that the world is fundamentally absurd was a bold proposition for 1818, for such views did not become common currency until the next century, in the aftermath of the First World War. For Nietzsche and Wagner to read, moreover, that music was the highest, the most profound, and the art form most akin to the ultimate truth, must have been music to their ears.

Perhaps more significantly in relation to Nietzsche’s philosophical concerns, though, Schopenhauer believed that salvation from the world’s ills could be achieved by cultivating a level of expanded consciousness through which one’s finite individuality could be oceanically dissolved – a level within which one could identify oneself more broadly with the entire cosmos or, alternatively, feel oneself in unity with the heartbeat of humanity. This, for Schopenhauer, was the level of moral consciousness, where the pains and joys of other people become none other than one’s own pains and joys, and where the act of hurting another being becomes none other than the act of hurting oneself. This standpoint has noticeably Christian overtones, and prior to Schopenhauer, it was expressed memorably by the poet, John Donne (1572–1631) in 1624:

Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The churchyard echoes of Röcken
• 2 The worship of wildlife
• 3 God’s death
• 4 Dissolving the shadows of God
• 5 Nietzsche’s seduction of truth
• 6 Embracing life versus embracing existence
• 7 The contemporary shadows of Nietzsche
• Conclusion: Nietzsche, the jester of metamorphosis
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index