Friedrich Nietzsche was, doubtless, one of modern philosophy’s most influential thinkers. His philosophical touchstone, also motif, albeit warped with fantasy, not only provides the precept and percept to unmasking the root motives that contextualise conventional Western religion, morality, including theology, but they have also more than something in them to deeply influence generations of intellectuals — from philosophers, poets, novelists and playwrights to psychologists, among others.
Nietzsche’s raison d’etre of his own brand, or verve, of philosophical certitude and thought underscored his expression that ‘God is dead’ — the fulcrum that determines intellectual agenda, long after he had imprinted his name in letters of gold… on the sands of time. For an unrelenting foe of nationalism, anti-semitism, including power politics, it was a travesty of history that Nietzsche’s philosophical genius, and name, were invoked by Fascists, most notably the perfidiously digressive Nazi propaganda machine, to foster the ideologies, or fanatical appui, he had detested with all his mind, heart and soul.
Nietsche [October 15, 1844-August 25, 1900], was born in a small hamlet in Prussian Saxony. His early childhood was focused on imbibing the essentials of Lutheran Pietism. His paternal grandfather, a publisher in his own right, had published books defending Protestant values. So, it was not without reason that the Nietzsche household was influential. Nietzsche’s father was pastor at Rocken, under the order of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after whom Nietzsche was named.
Sadly, Nietzsche Senior died when his brilliant son was but just five summers old. This was precisely the reason why Nietzsche had to spend most of his early childhood among women. Yet, in the final analysis, which isn’t exactly in tune with Freudian belief, Nietzsche didn’t fancy feminism — or, its primary foundation.
Nietzsche was an inveterate, skilful learner. He was destined for fame from an early age. He went to a boarding school, on a scholarship and, from there, to the prestigious University of Bonn. His electives? No prizes for guessing: theology, and classical philology. Not all was hunky-dory for Nietzsche though, notwithstanding Bonn’s academically stimulating milieu.
Nietzsche, ever the inveterate rebel, got himself sandwiched between his two leading classics professors, and their famous, acrimonious quarrels. He felt lost, desolate. Naturally, his fertile mind thought of a way out — music. He wrote a host of compositions, under the prosilient influence of the noted German composer, Robert Schumann. And, soon after, in 1865, he successfully ‘sought’ his transfer to that great place of learning, University of Leipzig, where he joined his old classics professor, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl — from Bonn — who had accepted an appointment there.
It was just the right time for Nietzsche’s classy revelation of mind and matter to blossom forth. He prospered under Ritschl’s temporal tutelage, and, in the process, became the only student ever to publish in Ritschl’s scholarly journal. Two years later, Nietzsche began his military service. However, within six months after he had enrolled, he had to opt for sick leave. Reason? He sustained a serious chest injury while mounting a horse. A blessing in disguise, perhaps. He resumed his studies, in Leipzig, and discovered Arthur Schopenhauer’s classical philosophy. Schopenhauer’s wisdom was to Nietzsche what penicillin was to Alexander Fleming. That’s not all. Nietzsche was soon to meet the great operatic composer, Richard Wagner. He also began his lifelong friendship with another fellow classicist, Erwin Rohde, the acclaimed author of Psyche.
In 1869, Nietzsche became a professor in classical philology, in Basel, Switzerland. This was paradoxical, because he had not completed his doctoral thesis, or the basic proviso of a German degree. What won him that exalted chair was Ritschl’s unparalleled praise, a deep respect for his ward’s limitless talents. As destiny deemed Nietzsche was soon conferred the doctorate without examination and appointed extraordinary professor. He became a Swiss citizen.
Then the turbulence, in his life, began.
In 1870, after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Nietzsche contracted dysentery and diphtheria, while accompanying a transport of the wounded. It enfeebled his health permanently. His friendship with Wagner, though ambivalent, began to wobble. It came to a pass when Nietzsche could no longer bear with the composer’s redundant exploitation of Christian themes, juxtaposed with his own medley of chauvinism and anti-semitism. The two genii broke off finally — come 1878.
If 1872 marked Nietzsche’s ‘emancipation’ from the trappings of classical scholarship, by way of the publication of his debut work, The Birth of Tragedy, a book of profound imaginative insight and fusion with Apollonian and Dionysian elements. Sadly, Nietzsche’s appalling health only brought in its wake both isolation and creativity. In 1877, Nietzsche gave up his professorial duties and set up a home with his sister, Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche. A year later, his aphoristic work, Human, All Too Human, appeared, all right, but his failing physical attributes began to hold doubts whether Nietzsche himself had any intrinsic interest in his life per se.
The genii cannot accept any ‘intellectual quarantine.’ Nietzsche was no exception. His masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was published between 1883 and 1885, in four parts. A literary and philosophical tour de force, in biblical narrative form, it celebrates the essential of the essentials, the sentient of the sentients of Nietzsche’s monumental mental chemistry and alchemy of thought, analyses and mature philosophy. It was also the fount, the well-spring of Nietzsche’s vision. It was this sublime design, and flow, that urged him to write, and write prolifically, with a new-found iota of sublime understanding of the origin and function of values in human life.
Nietzsche believed in X-raying expressions of the ascetic ideal — the analyses and evaluation of the fundamental cultural values of Western philosophy, religion and morality. The ascetic ideal, according to Nietzsche, was and is born when suffering becomes endowed with ultimate significance. The Judeo-Christian tradition, for instance, Nietzsche observed, made distress bearable by deducing it as god’s intent and as a frame of recompense.
Nietzsche’s etymological approach to the interpretation of morality was centred on the distinction between good and bad — of something descriptive in terms of a historical genealogy of master and slave morality. Nietzsche called the devaluation of the highest values posited by the ascetic ideal, nihilism. He often thought of his writings as a struggle with nihilism, religion, philosophy, and morality, from which he developed his original theses vis-à-vis perspectivism, the will to power, eternal recurrence and the Superman.
Nietzsche had confrontational annotations on the nature of the will and free will. Yet, the point is his views hold substantial weight. He not only prophesied and provided belligerent patronage to the ‘new-fangled’ groundswell of non-libertarian dissent shielded by certain philosophers — the view that free will is discordant with ‘determinism’ and that there is no reliable interpretation of free will external to the causative imperative. Yet, the fact is his theory of the will has garnered support from new postulates on the will in empirical psychology. Nietzsche was, doubtless, a philosophical naturalist. He thought of his hypothetical ‘wilful’ undertakings as traversing in consonance with experiential analysis. It would, therefore, be apt to call him the ‘first psychologist,’ who also foresaw certain outcomes specialists in the field only began to distinguish several decades later.
It goes without saying that Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, who had enormous control over her brother’s literary estate, was instrumental in refashioning Nietzsche’s works, thanks — ironically — to her greedy psyche. She committed perfidy and forgeries and misled generations of commentators and scholars. With her fanatical enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler, Elisabeth also linked Nietzsche’s name with that of the Fuhrer in the public mind and imagination. This, in more ways than one, ‘fulfilled,’ rather unscrupulously, Nietzsche’s paramount, and polemical, credo in his writings, that castigated, refuted, wanton acts, or purposes — that knowledge from no point of view is as incoherent a notion as seeing from no vantage point.
Nietzsche ridiculed Darwinism and German nationalism. But, denouncing certain ideals, Christian, or people, that had influenced him most, was also a habit with him. He was, for the most part of his tragic life, what with his shunts to mental asylums, and back, overwhelmed by madness. For one primal reason: he did not retain a strong enough impression of the disparity between the external world and his own fantasies. Nietzsche carried his own sense of ‘psychic inflation’ with Zarathustra and produced delusions of grandeur and psychosis too. However, what was so special about him was his psychological perceptualisation, including his first ‘rusting’ of the savage god, in the primeval forests of the unconscious. A signal ‘spark,’ that appealed to none other than psychologist extraordinaire, Carl Gustav Jung.
A simple man, said Nietzsche, has his place; but, not on the throne. His virtues are, therefore, necessary to society, as those of the leader. Nietzsche laid emphasis on industriousness, thrift, regularity, strong conviction, among other elements. He opined that a finer man has a divine right to rule. This need not necessarily mean that a mediocre man cannot become ‘perfect:’ of perfection only as an instrument. “A high civilisation,” Nietzsche observed, “is a pyramid; it can stand only upon a broad base; its prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity.” Rings a bell. Right?
Nietzsche was far ahead of his time. He once wrote: “My time is not yet; only the day after tomorrow belongs to me.” For one inescapable reason: Nietzsche had the audacity, and voice, to question conventional, even traditional, wisdom. He sat alone, on lonely heights, and from there came his inspiration. As he himself wrote, in his brilliant, poetically licenced, literary prose:
I sat there waiting — waiting for nothing,
Enjoying, beyond good and evil, now
The light, now the shade; there was only
The day, the lake, the noon, time without end.
Then, my friend, suddenly one became two,
And Zarathustra passed by me.
Nietzsche believed that without good birth, nobility was impossible. He argued that passions become powers only when they are selected and unified by some great purpose — one that also moulds a plethora of desires into the power of a personality. He wrote: “Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but the soil of his plants.” Nietzsche underlined that energy, intellect, and pride, made the Superman. The final patent of nobility, he argued, was a purpose — a resolve for which one will do almost anything except betray a friend.
When the crippling blow came, on January 3, 1889, in the form of a stroke, Nietzsche went into a rage. He regressed into a state of quietude, peace and also a web of composure. And, in one lucid moment, he whispered: “Ah! books… I too have written some good books.” A year-and-a-half later, he was no more. Yet, the ‘tipping point’ that Nietzsche carried with him, to a world beyond, was his originality — not the presages of his awesome thoughts that were more than misunderstood by most and even confused by some others.
It sums up Nietzsche — the philosopher supreme — who paid the ultimate price for being a genius.
— First published in Madras Courier
