Part III. Friedrich Nietzsche's Personality and Psychotherapy

The contradictory in Nietzsche's world of ideas is understandable from this point of view. His physical nature moved in contrasts. “Provided one is a person, by necessity one also has the philosophy of a person; yet there is a substantial difference. In the one instance there are his deficiencies, which philosophize; in the other, his riches and his strength.” (Nietzsche's Works, Volume V, page 5) In Nietzsche himself the two conditions alternated: one time the one, one time the other was dominant. As long as he was in full possession of his youthful forces, he considered the “pessimism of the nineteenth century as a symptom of a higher power of thought, a victorious fullness of life;” he considered the tragic knowledge, which he found in Schopenhauer, to be “the most beautiful luxury of our culture, its most costly, most aristocratic, most dangerous kind of waste, but always on the basis of its over-richness, as its permitted luxury.” He could no longer see such a permitted luxury in the tragic knowledge, when the morbid in his life held the upper hand. For that reason, from now on, he creates for himself a philosophy of the greatest possible life-affirmation. Now he needed a world conception of “ego affirmation, ego glorification,” a master morality; he needed the philosophy; of “eternal return.” “I shall return again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life, or to a better life, or to a similar life: I shall come back eternally to this identical, this self-same life in the greatest and also in the smallest.” “For the earth is a god's table, trembling with new, creative work and divine plans; Oh, how ardently I long for eternity and for the marriage ring of rings, the ring of the return!” ( Zarathustra, Third Part)