Part II. The Psychology of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psychopathological Problem

Nietzsche does not shy away from the worst contradictions, if it is a question of destroying the arrangement of ideas of any cultural phenomena. When in 1888 in his Antichrist he is occupied with representing the harm of Christianity, he contrasts this with the older cultural manifestations: “The entire labor of the ancient culture is in vain; I have no words to express my feelings about something so monstrous ... Why Greeks? Why Romans? All assumptions of a learned culture, all scientific methods, were already there; the great, the incomparable art of reading had already been established. This assumption of the tradition of culture, of the unity of knowledge, natural science in union with mathematics and mechanics, was already on the very best path; the sense for the factual, the ultimate and most valuable of all senses, had its schools; its old tradition had been established for hundreds of years! ... and was not buried overnight by an event of nature ...! But it was brought to shame by clever, secretive, invisible anemic vampires! ... One should just read any Christian agitator—St. Augustine, for example—to understand, to smell out, what unclean fellows have come to the surface.” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume VIII, p. 308). Nietzsche thoroughly despised the art of reading until the moment when he defended it in order to fight Christianity. Let us quote but one of his sentences about art: “I am thoroughly convinced that to have written one single line which deserves to be commented on by scholars, compensates for the service of the greatest critics. There is a deep modesty in the philologist. To correct texts is an entertaining task for scholars; it is a picture puzzle, but one should not regard it as something too important. It is too bad when antiquity speaks to us less clearly because a million words stand in the way!” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume X, page 341) And in 1882 Nietzsche's comments about the union of the factual sense with mathematics and mechanics, in his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Joyful Wisdom: “That only that world interpretation is right which allows counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, touching, and nothing further, this alone is stupidity and naivete, provided it is not insanity, or idiocy.” “Shall we really allow our existence to be degraded to a slavish exercise in arithmetic, and a parlor game for mathematicians?” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume V, p. 330)