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

Nietzsche could think only in this way because in his isolation he lacked all reflection; for this reason his ideas were only nuances of what had worked itself to mastery of the spiritual life of the nineteenth century. He also lacked any understanding for the connections between his ideas and those of the scientific outlook of his age. What for others is the result of certain assumptions stands isolated in his system of ideas, and in this isolation grows to an intensity which gives entirely the character of forced ideas to his favorite points of view. His completely biological understanding of moral concepts bears this character. The ethical concepts should be nothing but expressions of physiological processes. “What is morality? A human being, a nation which has suffered a physiological change, senses this in a community feeling, and interprets it in the language of effects and according to the degree of their knowledge, without noticing that the seat of the change lies in the physical. It is as if someone were hungry and thought that he could satisfy his hunger with concepts and customs, with praise and with blame!” (Nietzsche's Works, German Edition, 1897, Volume XII, p. 35) Such concepts, firmly established as the natural scientific world conception, work upon Nietzsche as forced ideas, and he does not speak about them with the security of the knower who is in the position to measure the extent of his ideas, but rather with the passion of the fanatic and the zealot. The idea of the survival of the fittest in the human “struggle for existence,” quite familiar in the Darwinian literature of the last century, appears in Nietzsche as the idea of the “superman.” The struggle against “the belief in the other world” which Nietzsche wages so passionately in his Zarathustra, is only another form of the struggle which the materialistic and monastic study of nature wages. What is fundamentally new in Nietzsche's ideas is only the tone of feeling in him, which is linked with his reflections. And the intensity of this tone of feeling is to be understood only when one agrees that these ideas, tom, from their systematic connection, work upon him as forced ideas. Thus the frequent repetition of these reflections, the unmotivated manner in which certain thoughts make their appearance, are also to be explained. We can observe this complete lack of motivation particularly in his idea of the “eternal return” of all things and events. Like a comet this idea appears ever and again in his works during the period between 1882 and 1888. Nowhere does it appear in an inner connection with that which he brings forth otherwise. Little or nothing is produced to give it foundation. Nevertheless, it is held up everywhere like a gospel to call forth the deepest emotions of the whole human culture.