100. Friedrich Nietzsche as a Poet of the Modern Worldview

The views currently circulating about Friedrich Nietzsche contradict his real relationship to the world-shaking ideas of the second half of the nineteenth century. Anyone who follows the threads that lead from him to the intellectual life of the last decades will not be able to see in him the finder of new views, but a mind that has made a personal affair of the heart what reason and the experience of others have produced. Nietzsche did not create new views himself; but he asked himself how he could live with those he encountered on his path through life. He thus made the ideas of the latest times his very individual destiny. And since he is a complicated nature, his experiences in the shafts of modern ideas are spiritual phenomena of rare interest. Nietzsche himself derived the complexity of his nature from his ancestry. What Goethe characterized as the deep tragedy of the human soul "Two souls dwell, alas, in my breast": it had come to Nietzsche as an inheritance. The healthy nature that suited his mother until her death had been transferred to him; but it had to contend in him with a "second soul" that came from his father, whom Nietzsche himself describes: "he was tender, amiable and morbid, like a being destined only to pass by, more a kind reminder of life than life itself."

Greece, Schopenhauer's world view, the art of Richard Wagner, the conception of modern scientific insight, the ethical ideas of the present: these were, one after the other, the spiritual elements that had an effect on Nietzsche's soul and whose effect is expressed in his works as a reflection of his unique personality. He did not profess to be one of those who could derive Greekness from a naïve way of life, from a childlike heart and a carefree imagination. Rather, the sunny art of ancient Hellenism must have grown out of the most painful experiences. It was not because life was easy for the Greeks that they sought a harmonious expression of it in art, but because they had the most bitter experiences of the misery and pain of existence, they needed an art that made this existence bearable for them. Life needs art that elevates the nothingness of existence to the contemplation of the divine. But this art, in Nietzsche's opinion, was lost to Greekism when it no longer strove beyond the purely human to the divine, but in Euripides was content with the sober imitation of the merely natural. Socrates became the seducer of Euripides and thus of original Greekness. With his bringing down of ideas from heaven to earth, with his "Know thyself", he killed the longing in the mind to go beyond the human to the superhuman-divine. The vain existence that art was supposed to transcend now became the object of art itself. Since Socrates and Euripides, the Occident has suffered from the inability to rise above the nothingness of existence. Renaissance culture was merely a temporary yearning to emerge from the general decline. -

The pessimistic wisdom of Arthur Schopenhauer must have made a deep impression on a mind that felt this way. Through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche found the basic mood of his mind, as it had arisen for him from his immersion in Greek studies, philosophically justified. And just as he found in Schopenhauer the wise man who gave him the reasons for his tragic mood, he found in Richard Wagner the artist who, as it seemed to him, created a new art out of the same mood. No longer one that reproduces an earthly, vain existence, but one that makes us forget the vain by conjuring up a divine again. Nietzsche saw Wagner as the restorer of a culture that Socrates had destroyed. He saw him as long as he only looked at the ideal image he had formed of Wagner. He transformed the real Wagner into the ideal image he needed in order to be able to bear the culture of the West, which he perceived as a phenomenon of decline. It was a tragic event in his life when he realized that his ideal image of Wagner had nothing to do with the real Wagner. He now became as fierce an opponent of Wagner as he had once been his supporter. Basically, however, he only became an opponent of his own ideal. He did not fall away from Richard Wagner; he fell away from the circle of ideas in which, at one point in his life, he had sought a way out of the basic mood of his soul towards the nothingness of existence.

Nietzsche now immersed himself in the reality of this existence itself in order to draw from it the happiness that an illusory ideal of art, which was supposed to lead beyond this existence, had been unable to bring him. He grasped the ideas of modern scientific thought; above all the comprehensive thought of development, which shows how perfection emerges from imperfection. Should a deepening of this idea not be able to make reality bearable in a completely different way than the ideas of an unreal divine that is only invented in addition to reality? Just as man has developed from creatures below him, so he can develop beyond himself to become a "superman". In this way, he conjures up from reality itself what artistic illusion should offer. Life is given a task that is firmly rooted in this life and yet goes beyond this life. How can we live with the modern idea of development? That was Nietzsche's personal question in relation to scientific thinking. It is possible to live with it because it gives us a life of pleasure, of infinite joy, through the idea of our own future development, through the view of the "superman". Friedrich Nietzsche sang the praises of this superman in his "Zarathustra". He became the poet of the modern world view. He became so because he experienced with his heart what the pathfinders of modern views experienced with their reason, with their heads.