Ideas
The human question-mark. "Tell me what you need, and I'll supply you with the right Nietzsche quotation," a German satirist once quipped. Today, Nietzsche continues to be misread and misappropriated. Edward Skidelsky on the life and work of a thinker who, more than any other, succeeded in defining our disturbed modernity
Published 17 June 2002
Nietzsche: a philosophical biography
Rudiger Safranski. Translated by Shelley Frisch Granta Books, 412pp, £25
ISBN 1862075069
Zarathustra's Secret: the interior life of Friedrich Nietzsche
Joachim Kohler. Translated by Ronald Taylor Yale University Press, 336pp, £19.95
As he was leaving his lodgings in Turin on 3 January 1889, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche caught sight of a cabby beating his horse. Forgetting his former invectives against pity, he ran across the street and, weeping, threw his arms around the animal's neck in an act eerily reminiscent of a scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. He then lost consciousness and had to be carried back to his room. When he awoke, he was no longer himself. He composed a series of letters to the crowned heads of Europe, announcing his arrival as Dionysus. "Sing me a new song," he wrote to his friend Peter Gast. "The world is transfigured and all the heavens rejoice. The Crucified."
Nietzsche was taken away to a clinic in Jena. He lived on - at first muttering and singing, then silent - for another decade. Yet although Nietzsche was oblivious to the world, the world was no longer oblivious to him. His publishers shrewdly discerned in the spectacle of the mad philosopher the most marvellous marketing opportunity, and quickly reissued his works. Within a few years, he had graduated from obscurity to Europe-wide fame. His sister, Elisabeth - described by him as an "anti-Semitic goose" of "unfathomable vulgarity" - was soon in on the act. By means of selective editing and outright forgery, she succeeded in presenting her brother as a champion of the German nationalism he so despised. In the archives she established at the Villa Silberblick, Weimar, the prize exhibit was Nietzsche himself. Visitors would be taken up to look in reverent silence at this martyr of the human intellect. It was a spectacle of grotesque irony. Wilhelmian Germany was exacting unconscious revenge on its fiercest critic.
It was inevitable that Nietzsche's first disciples, legatees of a century of Romanticism, would interpret his madness as the final seal of genius. Like Lear on the heath, Nietzsche had broken through to a reality too vast and terrible for rational comprehension. "How do we know," wrote Isadora Duncan in 1917, "that what seems to us insanity was not a vision of transcendental truth?" Nietzsche's detractors agreed that his madness and philosophy were connected, but reached a less flattering conclusion. Max Nordau's Degeneration, first published in 1892, dismisses Nietzsche as a lunatic and a sadist. His writing is "no ecstatic prophesy, but the senseless stammering and babbling of a deranged mind".
After the Second World War, admirers of Nietzsche sought to distance him from the irrationalist rhetoric of his early disciples. Such misguided adulation had, in their view, led to his disastrous appropriation by the Nazis. "Nietzsche's thought," wrote R J Hollingdale in his influential 1965 biography, "is not irrational at all." Nietzsche's insanity was simply a misfortune, of no philosophical significance one way or the other. But this is too easy a solution. His descent into madness was not sudden but gradual. Evidence of it is visible in his last published work, Ecce Homo, which contains chapter headings such as "Why I am so clever" and "Why I write such excellent books". And why draw the line there? Ever since his retirement from Basel University, Nietzsche's behaviour had been increasingly erratic and unconventional. Was madness not perhaps the hidden germ, the daemonion, from which his clairvoyant insight sprang? How could he have found the audacity to posit reason as questionable, had he himself not placed one foot outside its bounds? This is how Thomas Mann understood Nietzsche. His Adrian Leverkuhn, a Faustian composer loosely modelled on the philosopher, deliberately infects himself with syphilis in order to reach ever greater heights of creativity. Mann saw in Nietzsche's fate a metaphor for the tragedy of German culture in the 20th century.
A hundred years after his death, the dilemmas posed by this "human question mark" remain as vexed as ever. Nietzsche has a notorious capacity to lend himself to almost any interpretation. Marxists, nationalists, rationalists, irrationalists, fascists, liberals, existentialists, deconstructionists, and even Christians, have all at some point claimed him as their own. "Tell me what you need, and I'll supply you with the right Nietzsche quotation," quipped the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky. Nietzsche's writings are uniquely protean; they resist attempts to reduce them to a doctrine. You grab hold of what you take to be the essence of his thought, only to find that he has moved on, like a lizard, leaving you with a discarded tail in your hand. Attempts to discuss him as though he were a conventional philosopher, intent on building up a unified system of thought, are marred by the same "gruesome earnestness" and "clumsy importunity" that Nietzsche himself regarded as philosophy's principal vice. "I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them," he wrote. "The will to system is a lack of integrity."
An alternative strategy is to interpret Nietzsche's writings as an expression of his inner life. The unity we must seek is not intellectual, but psychological. Only by treating all his pronouncements as confessions of one and the same basic urge can we put an end to the Babel of interpretations. This is the strategy of Joachim Kohler's Zarathustra's Secret, originally published in 1989 but only recently translated from the German. Zarathustra's secret turns out to be (unsurprisingly) homosexuality. Nietzsche could not muster the courage to declare his proclivities openly, but neither could he suppress them altogether. So he sublimated them into his rhetoric of pagan virility and into his powerful critique of Christianity. "The hidden yearning nestling behind Nietzsche's hatred of morality and of secrecy had as its goal the world of handsome, healthy bodies in a reborn antiquity," writes Kohler.
Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to find anything in the way of hard evidence concerning Nietzsche's sexual preferences. Even Sigmund Freud, not normally known for his caution in drawing inferences, baulked at Nietzsche. "One cannot investigate a person unless one is aware of his sexual constitution, and Nietzsche's is a complete enigma." Kohler does little better. As in popular exposes of Jack the Ripper, his case is built up of hints and insinuations, accompanied by an extravagant use of rhetorical questions. For example, Kohler attaches great significance to a month that Nietzsche spent in Messina, Sicily, not far from the gay colony at Taormina. All that survives of this trip are four unremarkable postcards. Yet under Kohler's fertile gaze, these postcards open up to reveal a maelstrom of sexual activity. Nietzsche's presence at the colony in Taormina quietly becomes an established fact. He finally emerges as Andre Gide's "great precursor in eroticis, alongside Oscar Wilde".
But this distortion of the historical record is less significant than the interpretive error that accompanies it. Nietzsche's vision of classical antiquity certainly carries a homoerotic charge; he may also, less certainly, have been an active homosexual. But both these suppositions taken together do not warrant the conclusion that gay desire constitutes the secret "core" or "essence" of his philosophy. It was one of Nietzsche's central doctrines that the human personality contains no permanent core or essence, that we are at each moment what we make of ourselves. Nietzsche's philosophy is not a confession, but a creation, an attempt to fashion out of the impoverished material of his "first" nature a nobler and more powerful "second" nature. "My humanity," he wrote in Ecce Homo, "is a perpetual self-overcoming."
The error of Kohler is to interpret Nietzsche as simply another Gide, who sought in the Mediterranean and in classical antiquity liberation from the restraints of the puritan north. This is far too simple. For all his muscular rhetoric, Nietzsche was not a philosopher of sexual liberation. His references are never to the real, physical body, but purely to an ideal body. The classical idols that populate his work are ultimately nothing but expressions of his own creative will. They do not seek physical realisation; they are consummated in prose. To interpret such passages literally is no less crude a mistake than to interpret his political pronouncements literally. In spite of everything, Nietzsche remained very much a child of German idealism.
Rudiger Safranski's biography, also translated from the German, is on an altogether higher plane. This is a history of Nietzsche's inner life; events and relationships enter into it only in so far as they influenced the course of his thinking. If Kohler tries to reduce Nietzsche's second nature to his first, Safranski goes to the opposite extreme. He ignores Nietzsche's first nature altogether, concentrating entirely on the endless process of self-invention that constituted his second nature. Nietzsche's outward life - the conventional scaffolding of dates, places and occupations - is relegated to an appendix. The effect is dizzying: everything solid dissolves into a seamless web of thought.
Safranski is frustratingly ungenerous with one of the basic pleasures of biography - gossip. By the end of the book, we are desperate to see Nietzsche as others saw him, rather than as he saw himself. The few glimpses Safranski gives us are comically deflating. Whereas Nietzsche viewed himself as "a man in whom the questions of millennia have been resolved", to his mother he was "nothing but a failed professor who travelled restlessly from place to place in poor health and had yet to find a wife". The comedy of Nietzsche's life resides in the discrepancy between these two perspectives. Yet it was a comedy to which he himself was entirely oblivious. He had no humility and no sense of humour - these were perhaps his two greatest shortcomings.
The basic drama of Nietzsche's life, according to Safranski, was the drama of disillusionment. His imagination was never conventionally religious, but it was always powerfully mythopoeic. As a 17-year-old, he sang the praises of "profound men who, carried away by the soaring of their unbridled fancy, claimed to be the envoys of the highest gods". But he swiftly realised that modern science no longer grants licence to the mythological imagination. The world it portrays is dead, silent, devoid of meaning. We have entered, in the words of Nietzsche's favourite poet, Holderlin, the "night of the gods". Nietzsche's youthful philosophy is a passionate protest against the death of the mythological imagination. Myth, in his view, is the foundation of culture. In its absence, culture disintegrates, and humanity is left with no higher goal than continuous material enrichment. This prospect, which Nietzsche saw foreshadowed in the figure of Socrates and brought to fruition in the work of the English utilitarians, filled him with despair.
It was for this reason that he sought the fellowship of the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was more than a mere entertainer. He was a creator of new myths; his music dramas were the sacred rites of a new religion of art. They would bring about both the re-enchantment of the world and the replenishment of a famished culture. Nietzsche was ultimately to be disillusioned by his new idol. At the first Bayreuth festival, in 1876, he observed with dismay "the pitiful assemblage of patrons and little patronesses . . . The entire idle dregs of Europe coming together, and every prince racing in and out of Wagner's house as though it were more of a sporting event." Wagner, it turned out, was just an entertainer, after all. Or - worse still - a magician, a conman, a purveyor of metaphysical solace to Germany's ruling elite. The new Romantic religion of art was nothing but a pious fraud.
Nietzsche was similarly disillusioned with his other idol - warfare. He initially greeted the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 with enthusiasm; he even went to the front to work as a medical orderly (he was sent back two weeks later suffering from dysentery and diphtheria). The war, he hoped, would introduce a tragic "Dionysian" depth into the banality of bourgeois life. However, he was soon forced to recognise that Germany's victory served only to further the aims of bourgeois society. The vulgar pomp of the new Reich failed miserably to realise his vision of a world reborn.
This pattern of alternate ecstasy and disillusion formed the basic rhythm of Nietzsche's intellectual life. Metaphysical binges alternated with sceptical hangovers. In more strictly philosophical terms, Nietzsche's development can be seen as an ongoing argument between Schopenhauer and Kant. Schopenhauer designated ultimate reality "the will". He pictured it as a blind, irrational energy, present in all things animate and inanimate, above all in music. It was from Schopenhauer that Nietzsche and Wagner derived their metaphysics of art. But Nietzsche was also decisively influenced by Kant, who had declared ultimate reality - the "thing-in-itself" - for ever beyond the bounds of human apprehension. All metaphysical systems, declared the neo-Kantian philosopher Friedrich Lange, are products of poetic fancy. Music brings us no closer than any other human activity to the mysterious thing-in-itself.
Nietzsche's intellectual career can be seen as an ongoing attempt to reconcile these two opposed perspectives. He wanted to hold on to myth, while at the same time acknowledging it clearly as myth. "The issue," as Safranski puts it, "is whether man can retain the ingenuity he employed in inventing an entire heaven of gods, or whether he will be left empty after attacking them. If God is dead because people have realised that they invented him, it is crucial that their power to posit divinity remain intact." This is an impossible demand. We are asked to believe X while at the same time knowing that X is false. The right hand must not know what the left hand is doing.
If Nietzsche himself came close to solving the problem, it was through the device of irony. He evolved a style of writing that allowed him to put forward grandiose historical and metaphysical visions in such a manner as to suggest that he did not entirely believe them. Irony, for Nietzsche, was a condition of intellectual honesty; earnestness, such as he found in Wagner, was the mark of fraudulence. "Mature manhood," as he put it in a memorable aphorism, "means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play."
Perhaps the most systematic defence of this "ironic" style of philosophising is to be found in Nietzsche's middle-period work Human, All Too Human. Here he argues for what he calls a "bicameral system of culture". A higher culture must give people "two chambers of the brain, as it were, one to experience science and the other non-science: lying juxtaposed, without confusion, divisible, able to be sealed off; this is necessary to preserve health. The source of power is located in one region; the regulator, in the other. Illusions, partialities and passions must provide the heat, while the deleterious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be averted with the aid of scientific knowledge."
Safranski places great stress on Nietzsche's "bicameral system of culture". This is part of his attempt to reclaim Nietzsche for liberalism, to defuse the irrational aspects of his vision by confining them to a limited and, as it were, "private" sphere. This is a subtle interpretation - too subtle, alas, to have registered with most of the early political disciples of Nietzsche. Ignoring his irony, they read his fantasies of grand politics as literal prescriptions. To what extent can Nietzsche be held responsible for their misunderstanding? Safranski shirks this question, but it is one that casts a shadow over any attempt to reclaim Nietzsche for liberalism. To point out that the Nazis falsified his meaning is correct but, as Derrida slyly notes, "one can't falsify just anything". Has anyone ever tried to fashion a murderous political ideology out of the writings of John Stuart Mill?
The truth is that the bicameral system of culture - another term for what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called the separation of realms - cannot be a permanent solution to the problems raised by Nietzsche. Great art cannot rest content within the parameters laid down for it by a liberal society. It aspires to be more than a source of private entertainment: it aspires to be a "critique of life" in all its aspects. Wagner knew this; so did Ruskin and Tolstoy. And what is true of art is all the more true of religion.
A liberal polity can accept art and myth only in a controlled, sterilised form, as a wildlife reservation in an otherwise regimented countryside. In Nietzsche, the aesthetic impulse burst through its tidy confines. Tired of pandering to the bourgeoisie, it dreamt of playing itself out on the great stage of world history. Who can say that the Nazis got it entirely wrong?
Edward Skidelsky is a lead reviewer for the NS
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
