Nietzsche

Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

Walter A. Kaufmann

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400849222
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy.
Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas. Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the "will to power" was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation. He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity.
Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker. Featuring a new foreword by Alexander Nehamas, this Princeton Classics edition of Nietzsche introduces a new generation of readers to one the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker.

PART

I

Background

A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!!!

—XVI, 318.

1

NIETZSCHE’S LIFE AS BACKGROUND OF HIS THOUGHT

Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.—LETTER TO HIS SISTER, June 11, 1865.

I am impassioned for independence; I sacrifice all for it … and am tortured more by all the smallest strings than others are by chains.—XXI, 88.

I

Nietzsche’s family background offers a striking contrast to his later thought. It is tempting to construe his philosophy as a reaction against his childhood: his attitudes toward nationalism, Luther, Christianity, small-town morals, and the Germans may seem easily explicable in such terms. Yet this approach, while frequently adopted, bars any adequate understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The thought of a philosopher may be partly occasioned by early experiences, but the conception of strict causality is not applicable here. A problem, once suggested, carries its own impetus; and the thinker is driven on by it to new problems and solutions. To understand these, we must follow the development of his thought—and that is best done separately from the survey of his life, as any joint treatment will almost inevitably suggest a false notion of causal relationship between life and philosophy.¹

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, in the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15, 1844. His father, Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran minister and the son of a minister, was thirty-one, and his mother, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, was eighteen. His paternal grandfather had written several books, including Gamaliel, or the Everlasting Duration of Christianity: For Instruction and Sedation … (1796). Many of Nietzsche’s ancestors had been butchers; none of them seem to have been Polish noblemen, as he believed. His father christened him Friedrich Wilhelm after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, on whose birthday he was born. The king became mad a few years later, and so did Nietzsche’s father. Nietzsche later shed his middle name, along with his family’s patriotism and religion, but in January 1889 he, too, became insane.

In an early autobiographical sketch Nietzsche wrote, “In September 1848 my beloved father suddenly became mentally ill.” When Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche published this sketch in her biography of her brother (1895), she changed the wording to read, “… suddenly became seriously ill in consequence of a fall.” In fact, the doctor’s diagnosis was softening of the brain (Gehirnerweichung), and after Ludwig Nietzsche’s death in 1849, his skull was opened, and this diagnosis was confirmed. Nevertheless, most experts agree that the philosopher’s later insanity was not inherited.

In January 1850, Nietzsche’s widowed mother lost her youngest son, born in 1848, and moved her family to Naumburg. Here Nietzsche spent the rest of his childhood as the only male in a household consisting of his mother, sister, father’s mother, and two maiden aunts.

In 1858 he entered the old boarding school of Pforta on a full scholarship. For six years he was subjected to the exacting discipline and traditions of the school which Klopstock and Novalis, Fichte and Ranke, as well as the brothers Schlegel, had attended before him. He did exceptionally good work in religion, German literature, and classics, and poor work in mathematics and drawing.

In 1861 he wrote an enthusiastic essay on his “favorite poet,” Friedrich Hölderlin, “of whom the majority of his people scarcely even know the name.” Hölderlin had spent the last decades of his life in hopeless insanity, but sixty years after Nietzsche wrote his essay, Hölderlin was widely recognized as Germany’s greatest poet after Goethe. The teacher wrote on the paper, “I must offer the author the kind advice to stick to a healthier, clearer, more German poet.”

The medical records of the school contain an entry, recorded in 1862: “… shortsighted and often plagued by migraine headaches. His father died early of softening of the brain and was begotten in old age [actually, when his father was fifty-seven, his mother thirty-five]; the son at a time when the father was already sick [most experts deny this]. As yet no grave signs are visible, but the antecedents require consideration.”

In 1864 Nietzsche graduated with a thesis on Theognis. Before he left for the university of Bonn, he stated in his curriculum vitae that Plato’s Symposium was his Lieblingsdichtung.

At Bonn he joined a fraternity but soon found himself revolted by its lack of sophistication and the very unclassical, beer-drinking patriotism of his fraternity brothers. He made a quixotic attempt to raise their level to his own—and then resigned. It was also as a student at Bonn that Nietzsche, in June 1865, wrote his sister a letter that is noteworthy because it anticipates the temper of Human, All-Too-Human and the other works written after the break with Wagner.

… As for your principle that truth is always on the side of the more difficult, I admit this in part. However, it is difficult to believe that 2 times 2 is not 4; does that make it true? On the other hand, is it really so difficult simply to accept everything that one has been brought up on and that has gradually struck deep roots—what is considered truth in the circle of one’s relatives and of many good men, and what moreover really comforts and elevates man? Is that more difficult than to strike new paths, fighting the habitual, experiencing the insecurity of independence and the frequent wavering of one’s feelings and even one’s conscience, proceeding often without any consolation, but ever with the eternal goal of the true, the beautiful, and the good? Is it decisive after all that we arrive at that view of God, world, and reconciliation which makes us feel most comfortable? Rather, is not the result of his inquiries something wholly indifferent to the true inquirer? Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth—even if it be most abhorrent and ugly. Still one last question: if we had believed from childhood that all salvation issued from another than Jesus—say, from Mohammed—is it not certain that we should have experienced the same blessings? … Every true faith is infallible inasmuch as it accomplishes what the person who has the faith hopes to find in it; but faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth [ein Jünger der Wahrheit], then inquire.

At first Nietzsche had studied theology and classical philology, but in 1865 he gave up theology and followed his favorite teacher, Friedrich Ritschl, to Leipzig.

His friend Paul Deussen (1845–1919), who later acquired fame as one of the foremost translators and interpreters of Indian philosophy, had shared Nietzsche’s experiences at Pforta and at Bonn; but now he went on to Tübingen. Even so, he remained close to Nietzsche and shared the latter’s enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. It was in Leipzig that Nietzsche accidentally picked up a copy of Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in a second-hand bookstore—not to lay it down again until he had finished it. Deussen remained more faithful to Schopenhauer than did Nietzsche: he dedicated his System des Vedanta to the great pessimist who had been one of the first to try to draw the attention of Europe to the wisdom of the Upanishads; and Deussen crowned his monumental history of philosophy, which takes the reader from ancient India to modern Europe, with an elaborate presentation of Schopenhauer’s thought in which he found the ultimate synthesis of Orient and Occident. Though Nietzsche later outgrew his early infatuation with Schopenhauer, Deussen remained his faithful friend until the end.²

Less fortunate in this respect was Nietzsche’s friendship with Erwin Rohde (1845–1898). As fellow students at Leipzig they were drawn to each other by a common enthusiasm for ancient Greek culture and became the closest of friends. Professor Ritschl called them “the Dioscuri,” and they seemed inseparable. It was not a shift in interests that finally led them apart: Nietzsche never renounced “Dionysus”; and the work which later established Rohde’s fame as a classical philologist, Psyche, dealt with Greek conceptions of the soul in the same light in which the “Dioscuri” had approached antiquity at Leipzig—yet Rohde’s many pages about Dionysus were not to contain a single reference to the author of The Birth of Tragedy. It was a divergent development of character that precipitated the end of the friendship. Nietzsche’s publication of the enlightened and critical Human, All-Too-Human struck Rohde as a scarcely credible betrayal of their youthful and romantic Wagner worship. Later Rohde married and began to raise a family, while Nietzsche turned to Zarathustra. Now Rohde felt increasingly provoked by his friend’s excessive self-esteem, and some of his letters suggest that his annoyance may have cloaked doubts whether it was not he himself who had undergone a change rather than Nietzsche, whose fire seemed to feed on itself. Having settled down, the successful professor could not share the loneliness in which his uncomfortable twin conducted his persistent inquiries and uninhibited attacks in book after book. One of Rohde’s letters to Franz Overbeck, occasioned by the publication of Beyond Good and Evil, shows especially well how utterly unsympathetic Rohde had become. The final break, a year before Nietzsche’s collapse, was little more than a formality. But much later, when Nietzsche had become famous, Rohde made a belated and impossible attempt to make up with his former friend. He yielded to the insistent entreaties of Frau Förster-Nietzsche—who probably played on cherished memories—and, without actively collaborating, he gave his backing and sanction to her work. If this action was typical of others who had had no sympathy for Nietzsche in his later years, it seems clear that Rohde did not consciously betray a trust: he had never understood Nietzsche’s books after the break with Wagner. The professors at Basel, however, kept better faith with Nietzsche.

His call to the university of Basel came as a surprise to Nietzsche, who had not yet received his doctorate though he had published some fruits of his research in a scholarly journal. He had actually considered giving up philology for science when, on Ritschl’s recommendation,^2a he was appointed a professor of classical philology at Basel, and Leipzig hurriedly conferred the doctorate without examination. Thus Nietzsche was a professor at twenty-four, and his unusual success does not seem to have humbled him.

At Basel he taught for ten years, from 1869 till 1879, when he retired because of poor health. This illness may have been connected with his brief military service in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. His previous military training in 1867 had been cut short by injuries contracted through a fall from his horse, and by 1870 he was a Swiss citizen. When the war broke out, however, he volunteered for service as a medical orderly. While ministering—in a boxcar, and unrelieved for three days and nights—to six men who were severely wounded and also sick with dysentery and diphtheria, Nietzsche caught both diseases and, after delivering his charges to a field hospital, required medical attention himself. “Moreover”—he wrote his friend Gersdorff—“the atmosphere of my experiences had spread around me like a gloomy fog: for a time I heard a sound of wailing which seemed as if it would never end.” One gathers that he may have had a physical and nervous breakdown. Yet a month later he is back at the university in Basel, perhaps quite eager to drown in a double load of work his recent experiences and the uncomfortable knowledge that the war is still going on and that other men are still being maimed and disfigured in ways of which he has inextinguishable memories. Thus he plunges into two new lecture courses as well as seminars and the Greek lessons which he has agreed to give at the local Pädagogium. He also writes of committee meetings and a social life—and all of these matter much less to him than his work on his first book and his frequent visits to the house of Richard Wagner. The relation of a possibly incomplete recovery from his illness to the continued spells of migraine headaches and painful vomiting which made Nietzsche miserable during the next ten years has never been clarified conclusively. His last disease will be considered later.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. It was not what a university would expect from a young philologist who has yet to establish his reputation as a scholar: there were no footnotes, references, or Greek quotations; Schopenhauer’s philosophy had tinged some of the contentions; and the style was, where not beautiful, flamboyant. Moreover, as Nietzsche himself recognized in his preface to the second edition, he had weakened his case by appending to the fifteen sections which comprised his main thesis about ancient tragedy another ten which utilized these considerations for a poorly written eulogy of Wagner. This conclusion gave the entire work the appearance of a none too well considered but impassioned editorial. Among the many critics of the book who were entirely blind to its merits was Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1848–1931), who later became an outstanding philologist, though his translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles into colloquial German hardly demonstrate the most subtle understanding of tragedy. Rohde, then still Nietzsche’s closest friend, countered Wilamowitz’s criticisms with a deadly polemic to which Wilamowitz replied. All three pamphlets are nasty to the point of being funny.

Not entirely sympathetic with Nietzsche’s tone and quite contemptuous of Wagner, but nevertheless in accord with much that Nietzsche had to say of ancient Greece, was Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), who was Ni...