102. Friedrich Nietzsche

Died on August 25, 1900

You may think what you like about Nietzsche's world view: the way he has become popular cannot be described as anything other than a profound aberration of our contemporary culture. A striking characteristic of almost all of his followers is their lack of objective judgment and their fluttering interest in the ideas of a personality whose personal destiny makes him interesting. Anyone who really reads Nietzsche's writings with understanding will above all realize that he is dealing with a man who was completely removed from the real life of the present, from the great needs of the time. Everything he came to know was based on the views he had acquired through a one-sided classical and philosophical, in some respects quite abnormal, course of education, to the exclusion of all experience of life, without any knowledge of the real needs of the present. He was preoccupied with himself and his thoughts and feelings in complete spiritual isolation. That is why he could only arrive at ideas that could be of interest as expressions of a strange individual personality, but to which no one else, in the true sense of the word, should profess to be a follower in the form in which he expressed them. Anyone who nevertheless presents him as a spirit that is characteristic of our time only proves that a lack of understanding for the actual needs of the present is also a characteristic phenomenon of this present for many people.

An examination of Nietzsche's development may confirm this assertion. He was born in Röcken on October 5, 1844. His father was a Protestant preacher. Nietzsche was five years old when his father died. He described him himself with the words: "He was tender, amiable and morbid, like a being destined only to pass by - more a kind reminder of life than life itself." - Nietzsche grew up in a pious Protestant family. He was a pious boy in the orthodox sense. We know from the biography provided by his sister that he was called the "little pastor" by his classmates because of his religious way of thinking. He spent his school years at the grammar school in Schulpforta, the model institution for classical education. At the universities of Bonn and Leipzig he devoted himself to the study of classical antiquity and became so familiar with the world of ideas of ancient Greece that this ancient culture appeared to him as an ideal of human development, as the epitome of everything great and noble. He later went so far in his appreciation of Greek culture that he praised the existence of slavery, a side effect of an early stage of education, as something particularly exemplary and valuable. At the end of his academic career, he became acquainted with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. The writings of the former and the personality of the latter had a downright fascinating effect on him. Due to his enthusiastic nature, sensitive to strong impressions, he was literally addicted to both spirits.

His appreciation of Greek culture, which he regarded as truly great only for the time before Socrates appeared, was combined with his unreserved admiration of Schopenhauer and Wagner. He now saw in ancient Greece a culture through which man was closer to the eternal powers of the world than was later the case. He said to himself: in these ancient times, people were completely under the spell of their original instincts and drives, they lived out to the full what nature had placed in them. Socrates turned them away from this culture. Socrates had one-sidedly cultivated the spirit, the mind. He had restricted people's primal instincts through thinking; virtue, which was thought out, was to take the place of fresh, primal instincts. Nietzsche believed that Schopenhauer's teachings justified this way of looking at things. For Schopenhauer also calls the human imagination, the mind, merely a result of the blind, unreasoning will that reigns in all natural phenomena. And in Wagner's music, Nietzsche believed he heard sounds that once again came from the depths of human nature, from which the education of the past centuries had alienated itself. He glorified ancient Greece from the standpoint of Schopenhauer's philosophy and at the same time celebrated Wagner's music drama as the rebirth of this lost culture in his first essay "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" (1872). In the following period, he undertook a campaign against the whole of modern education from this point of view in his four "Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtungen". In a Festschrift, which he wrote in 1875 for the performances in Bayreuth, he achieved the most extreme expression for this view of his.

At the same time, he also realized that he had become hypnotized by the influences of Wagner and Schopenhauer. He perceived the whole view as a foreign element that he had implanted in himself. He became the fiercest opponent of what he had previously advocated. He now fought for a strictly scientific view of life. By studying works written in the scientific spirit of the time, he was dissuaded from his earlier view. He had immersed himself in Friedrich Albert Lange's "History of Materialism", in Dühring's writings, and in the explanations of the French moral writers. Anyone familiar with these writings will see in the viewpoints Nietzsche professes in his works "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches", "Morgenröte" and "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" extreme conclusions from the ideas advocated by the aforementioned writers. Nietzsche now sees false ideals in the ideas he had previously taught, which shroud the sober, rational observation of things in a romantic fog. His antipathy towards Schopenhauer and Wagner grew ever stronger. In 1888, he wrote his essay "The Wagner Case", which ends with words like these: "Adherence to Wagner pays dearly. I observe the young people who have long been exposed to his infection. The next, relatively innocent effect is that of taste. Wagner acts like the continued use of alcohol. It dulls, it mucouss the stomach... . The Wagnerian finally calls rhythmic what I myself, using a Greek proverb, call 'moving the swamp'."

Once again, something gains a strong influence on Nietzsche. It is Darwinism. Here, too, he immediately advances to the most extreme conclusions. There is no doubt that a book published in 1881 by a brilliant natural scientist, W. H. Rolph, who unfortunately died young, "Biological Problems", gave him far-reaching inspiration. He was fascinated by the idea of the "struggle for existence" of all beings, which plays a powerful role in Darwinism. But he did not adopt this idea in its Darwinian form; he reshaped it in the sense in which Rolph had developed it. Darwin was of the opinion that nature produces far more beings than it can sustain with the available food. The beings must therefore fight for their existence. Those that are the most perfect, the most purposefully organized, remain; the others perish. Rolph is of a different opinion. He says: it is not the need of existence that is the driving force of development, but the fact that every being wants to acquire more than it needs for its preservation, that it not only wants to satisfy its hunger, but to go beyond its needs. Living creatures not only fight for what is necessary, they want to become ever more powerful. Rolph replaces the "struggle for existence" with the "struggle for power". Nietzsche now places this thought at the center of his world of ideas. He expresses it paradoxically: "Life itself is essentially appropriation, violation, overpowering of the foreign and the weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the very least, mildest exploitation." He transfers this idea to the moral world order. He combines it with a view that he had already adopted earlier from Schopenhauer's philosophy: that the masses of people are not important, that the masses are only there to make it possible for selected individuals, as serving beings, to climb the paths on which they rise to the highest power. History should not lead to the happiness of the individual, but should only be a detour to promote the power of a few outstanding individuals. On this detour, man is to develop into a "superman", just as he has developed from ape to man. In his half-poetic, half-philosophical work "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", Nietzsche sang the high song of this "superman". Once again, as in his youth, he finds a great error in the development of culture to date. The "superior type of human being has existed often enough: but as a stroke of luck, as an exception, never as desired. Rather, it has been feared the most, it has almost been the most fearsome; - and out of fear the opposite type has been desired, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick human animal, - ...." Nietzsche was now so hypnotized by his idea of the "will to power" that he became indifferent to everything else apart from the brutal struggle to suppress the weaker, that he saw in the Renaissance man Cesare Borgia, who spared no means, the model of a superhuman.

Under the influence of such ideas, Nietzsche increasingly drifted into a paradoxical world view that was far removed from contemporary culture. His position on the "workers' question" is characteristic. He says: "The stupidity, basically the degeneration of instinct, which is the cause of all stupidity today, lies in the fact that there is a workers' question. One does not ask about certain things. -- The worker has been made fit for military service, he has been given the right of coalition, the right to vote politically: what wonder if the worker today already feels his existence to be a state of emergency (morally expressed as injustice -)? But what do you want? asked again. If one wants an end, one must also want the means: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one drags them to herds." From Nietzsche's point of view, this is all consistent. However, those who see in this point of view not a highly interesting, extreme formulation of a dying world of ideas due to Nietzsche's personality, but a viable creed, must be blind to the demands of the present. A strange thinker died on August 25; not one of the leading spirits into the future.