Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

From Philosopedia.org

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (15 October - 1844 - 25 August 1900)

Nietzsche is the German philosopher credited with the phrase, “God is dead.” In fact, he wrote, “philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel ourselves irradiated by a new dawn by the report that the ‘old God is dead’; our hearts overflow with gratitude, hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment, and expectation. . . . You say you believe in the necessity of religion. Be sincere! You believe in the necessity of the police.”

“What is it: is man only a blunder of God’s,” he asked, “or God only a blunder of man’s?”

In his passionate opposition to Christianity, Nietzsche developed the concept of the Ubermensch (translated by some as “superman” and by others as “overman”). Since God is dead, in short, man is free to invent his own “values.” As to labels, he insisted, “There are no philosophies, only philosophers.”

Corliss Lamont wrote of Nietzsche,

One is repelled by the cruel, egoistic, hard-boiled sort of Superman that Nietzsche had in mind, but the idea of a new species beyond man is invigorating . . . an eventual Superman who will surpass present-day man as much as man does the highest species of animals.

Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (1889) suggests that atheism came instinctively to him. In The Gay Science (1882), a madman announces that “God is dead,” then realizes he has come too soon—for Nietzsche, the death of God is a liberating idea that sets man free to explore vast possibilities. However, as noted by George J. Stack, the consequences of the loss of religious faith in God will be a 100-year period of “nihilism.” Nietzsche called God (if conceived of as a “providential” being) “the greatest immoralist in deeds that has ever existed.” In 1887, he wrote The Genealogy of Morals. His The Antichrist (1889) expresses his various anti-Christian sentiments and ideas, finding that Christendom had a “vampiric” effect on the Roman Empire and castigating its reversal of the “noble” values of the Greco-Roman world.

In his The Antichrist, he wrote

So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is Truth?

As for Richard Wagner’s sentimental return to the Christian faith, Nietzsche passed up no chance to mock him. Joachim Köhler, in Nietzsche and Wagner (1998), found Nietzsche as anti-Semitic as Wagner. Both lived a comfortable bourgeois life but thought the bourgeois society would end in bloodshed and be replaced by warlike heroes who would be contemptuous of the masses.

Many of today's secular humanists shy away from Nietzsche, because he so inspired the German Nazis under Adolph Hitler and because of his condemnation of Mensch (Man). Thus Spake Zarathustra became a Hitler Youth motto. Although there is little if any reliable evidence to support Nietzsche’s alleged anti-Semitism, his sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche was outspokenly anti-Semitic. In presiding over his archives from 1900 until her death in 1935, through selective editing, outright forgery, and toadying to Hitler, she recast her “beloved Fritz” as a Teutonic superman, according to journalist Ferdinand Protzman.

Nietzsche’s philosophic views are discussed in Theories of Evolution (1984) by H. James Birx, who considers him a secularist but not a secular humanist. Bertrand Russell, himself a non-theist, denounced fellow non-theist Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche denied that he was a Social Darwinist, “this is precisely what he was,” Paul Edwards wrote in God and the Philosophers. Russell was also critical of other Social Darwinists and power-worshipers.

Nietzsche’s last eleven years were spent in total mental darkness, first in an asylum in Basel, then in his mother’s and later his sister’s care in Röcken, Germany, where he is said to have been fond of playing the piano and splashing in the bathtub. Joseph McCabe said of this period,

His mind gave way under the strain of his fierce indignation against stupidity and hypocrisy but the clerical charge that this mental unbalance may be traced in his works is ludicrous. They are masterly indictments of the developing faults of the new age which have so fatally revealed themselves since death. His chief mistake was to assume that Christianity had introduced humanitarianism into the world and to fail to hold the balance in his mind between the need for virility and the need to help the weaker members of society.

Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin (1998), a friendly work, mentions not only that Nietzsche’s father and grandfather were parsons but also that his mother’s father was a parson. She wrote that Nietzsche carried an umbrella when he went walking in order to shade his sensitive eyes from light. Children were known to have filled it with pebbles that showered down on his head when he opened the umbrella. She also notes that when he walked his steps were oddly short and high—his myopia made him afraid of tripping.

In 1865, taken by friends to a brothel, he may have infected himself with syphilis. In 1867 he was treated for a syphilitic infection. As to his last days, Chamberlain wrote:

As for the drama of ill-health, it never left him after he reached his mid-twenties. Even in childhood he had suffered headaches and myopia, and the weakness seemed to run in the family since it also afflicted Elisabeth, and their father Carl Ludwig, who had died at thirty-six of a brain disease. Nietzsche gave out never to know quite what was wrong with himself, though he suspected a hereditary problem and congratulated himself on surviving beyond his father’s age. Yet how can he not have known he had syphilis, with a scar close to his foreskin and a history, albeit brief, of treatment? He surely lied to Wagner’s doctor, Otto Eiser. The syphilis caught from prostitutes in his student days was complicated by diphtheria and dysentery contracted as a medical orderly in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Nietzsche was left with a delicate stomach and poor digestion and a recurring migraine, with constant vomiting and retching maximizing the pain in his head and the disruption [of] work. For days he could do nothing but lie in a dark room. . . .

From a clinical viewpoint, Dr. Archinto P. Anzil (The New York Times Book Review, 14 February 1999) has described the problem:

Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from a tertiary form of neuro-syphilis, namely, from general paresis of the insane or dementia paralytica. This is an inflammation of the brain tissue, i.e., an encephalitis caused by or at least etiologically related to the microbial agent of syphilis. A typical and early manifestation of dementia paralytica is the development of paranoid ideas, usually notions of grandeur: patients think of themselves as being one of the paramount historical figures of their time or of times past. Characteristically, Nietzsche, imbued as he was in classic pre-Christian antiquity, thought he was the god Dionysus. As for Carl Nietzsche, the philosopher’s father, he died of a stroke, a very common condition that as a rule has nothing to do with syphilis.

At the end, according to John Banville (The New York Review of Books, 13 August 1998),

His handwriting began to decay, to such a degree that only his mother could read his script. A fragment of one of the Dionysus Dithyrambs of this time comes through her: Lesley Chamberlain describes it, accurately, as being of “Rilkean purity and inwardness”:

Solitude is

Not pain but ripening–

For which the sun must be your friend.

The sun was the only friend left to him now. There was, as Kleist had said of himself, no help for him upon this earth. He suffered prostrating attacks of weeping, accompanied by trembling and facial grimaces. He hid in his room on the Via Carlo Alberto, watching the winter harden. Christmas came and went, and on January 3 in the Via Po he embraced a cabman’s nag and collapsed on the pavement. The police had already been called when his kindly landlord Davide Fino arrived. Nietzsche recognized him, and Fino brought him home, where behind the locked door of his room he raved and ranted and danced naked in the private bacchanal of his dementia.

(See Theories of Evolution (1984) by H. James Birx and a discussion of Nietzsche’s philosophy by Walter Kaufmann in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5. Also, see Gay Philosophers.)

{BDF; CL; DCL; ER; EU, George J. Stack; FFRF; JM; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}