Thus Spoke Nietzche...

An insurmountable barrier separates the master race from the race of slaves. The laws of Manu even forbid a Chandala to drink water from the same well as his master: he must make do with a muddy puddle, with scraps from the rich man’s table. Indians completely understood this, while Europeans forgot it. The master is obsessed with the quest for knowledge and power; he transforms and shapes his existence in accordance with his own understanding of it. The slave has just one role: unquestioning obedience. Two races exist on Earth. The first are almost animals, fit to be kept in a zoo. And the others? No, and no again. Of course, they are not the bosses of today – civil servants, industrialists, society buffoons – but true aristocrats of the spirit who know the meaning of the circular movement of time. They are beyond our comprehension, even my comprehension… This is no longer the realm of philosophy, but of prophecy. I don’t want to debate the matter – that would be absurd; I am called to prophesy about the Superman…

In the winter of 1882, a prematurely aged man sat in a dingy room in a Ligurian boarding house, rocking to and fro as he gazed through thick spectacles at a manuscript. He had spent the last ten days writing it, hardly leaving his room except to dine. Only work distracted him from the stabbing pain in his head, which denied him sleep, despite doses of morphine, veronal or tincture of hemp…

At dinner, this eccentric retired professor sat with his landlady and fellow-lodgers, a Jewish family from Hamburg. He assured them that soon his books would be famed throughout the civilised world. The Jewish watchmaker had read some Spinoza, so he smiled condescendingly; his daughters giggled at the bombastic old man with long, bushy moustaches like Frederick the Great.

Yet it was Friedrich Nietzsche who would be proved right after he was dead. His name would indeed become famous, and his ideas influential in a way that might have thrilled or appalled him. Like Machiavelli, his name has become synonymous with amorality and tyranny – yet others herald him as one of the greatest philosophers or libertarians of all time… So who was Nietzsche? He was born into a Protestant pastor’s family in the Saxon town of Röcken on October 15, 1844. Since this coincided with the name-day of Prussia’s king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he was christened accordingly. The pastor had served at court before illness compelled him to rusticate, and his son was the repository of all his hopes. Though the pastor died five years later, his widow Franziska succeeded in giving her firstborn son a fitting education. She appreciated his sensitive, restless spirit, though she never shared his intellectual interests. He displayed literary and musical talent, composing poetry, sonatas and chorales and writing his autobiography by the age of twelve. At the same age, he began to have the migraine headaches which were to torment him all his life.

Immersed in high culture and his own imagination, Nietzsche always felt alienated from his peers. They cared nothing for Homer or Aeschylus, or dreams of heroic exploits, only for news or gossip. One episode from his schooldays encapsulates Nietzsche’s attitude to the quotidian view, and his own exceptionality. When his classmates scoffed at the story of the ancient Roman hero Gaius Mucius Scaevola – refusing to believe that anyone would have the courage to thrust his hand into a fire – Nietzsche took a burning coal from the stove and laid it on the palm of his hand to prove them wrong.

For Nietzsche, the burning question was: “Ist die Veredlung möglich?” – Is it possible to make people noble?

After finishing school in 1864 he attended lectures on philology and theology in Bonn, where he lost his faith in Christianity. Thereafter he concentrated on classical philology and moved to the University of Leipzig, where he fell under the spell of Schopenhauer and had a series of articles on Diogenes Laertius published

in the Rheinische Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift.

In 1867, Nietzsche volunteered for a Prussian artillery regiment – a quixotic decision that was almost immediately frustrated by a riding accident that left him unfit for military service. Thanks to his professor at Leipzig, Nietzsche was offered a professorship of classical philology at Basel University, before even obtaining a doctorate or teaching certificate.

Everyone predicted a brilliant future for him and students flocked to his lectures. Yet Nietzsche could not resist a final attempt to win martial glory. Although he had renounced his Prussian citizenship after moving to Basel (and remained stateless for the rest of his life), he still managed to serve as a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War – if only for a week – witnessed blood and suffering, and himself nearly died of dysentery and diphtheria. Some biographers believe that he also caught syphilis – perhaps the cause of his later insanity.

Yet Nietzsche was convinced of the healing, transforming nature of war. “Love peace as a means leading towards new wars. Moreover, a short peace is better than a long one. They say that a good cause hallows any war. But I tell you that a good war hallows any cause. You ask me ‘What is virtue?’ Virtue is bravery.” So Nietzsche wrote in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), which he dedicated to Richard Wagner. Its theme was the dichotomy between the rational Apollonian basis of European culture and Dionysian revelry, and a great devastation to come…

While Wagner greeted it with enthusiasm, Nietzsche’s colleagues and students were irritated or baffled by its pathos and arrogant tone; one professor wrote a critique which made the book notorious in philological circles. In response Nietzsche snapped: “Philology is the aborted foetus of the goddess Philosophy, conceived with a cretin. The goal of Science is to annihilate the world. Science has demolished Art.” Reflecting on The Birth of Tragedy, he formulated the existential paradox, “The stronger man’s will to live, the more terrible is his fear of death.”

His circle of friends and interlocutors shrank as he came into conflict with his professional milieu: once he had quarrelled with someone he never sought reconciliation. Eventually he even fell out with Wagner and his wife

Cosima, who had defended Nietzsche against all others.

In Human, All-too-Human (published in 1878), Nietzsche berated everything that was dear to them – Schopenhauer, German Romanticism and national mythology – and Wagner replied with sarcastic ridicule. Some discern a personal motive for this rupture – namely that Nietzsche fell for Cosima, who condescendingly regarded him as a mere eulogist of her husband’s genius – while Wagner himself disparaged Nietzsche’s attempts at musical composition, telling him to stick to philology…

In 1882, Nietzsche fell in love with Lou von Salomé, a St Petersburg-born beauty who also captivated his friend and fellow philosopher, Paul Rée. Each promised her his hand but she rejected them both, instead proposing a ménage à trois, exclusively for “the study of the natural sciences and of philosophical investigations.” Mad with jealousy, Nietzsche again proposed and was again rejected. His sister, Elizabeth, was appalled by von Salomé’s “complete amorality” and did her best to end their relationship.

Afterwards, Nietzsche was to say: “If I’d been God, I would have created Lou von Salomé differently.” As his thwarted efforts to pursue a military career had given rise to a fervent passion for war, so his rejection by von Salomé inspired Nietzsche to embrace sexual chauvinism, in the infamous words of his alter-ego Zarathustra: “When you go to a woman, don’t forget your whip.” How different this was from Nietzsche’s own weakness and frailty…

Each personal defeat was accompanied by crippling illness. In one year alone he suffered 118 attacks of migraine, semi-blindness or violent stomach attacks. If this wasn’t enough, there was the example of his father, who died in his early thirties, completely insane. As Nietzsche wrote to one of his few constant correspondents, Franz Overbeck: “A decade of illness, more than a decade, and not just the sort of illness to which doctors and medicines owe their existence. Does anybody really know what has made me ill, what has kept me for years near to death and craving for death? I don’t think so. With the exception of Richard Wagner, no one has yet come to meet me with a scintilla of passion or suffering, in order to find a common language with me; thus even as a boy I was alone, and at forty-four I’m still alone. This terrible decade that now lies behind me has given me ample opportunity to taste what it is like to be so very much alone, so isolated; to taste the solitude of the sufferer who lacks even the wherewithal to resist or defend himself.”

Since 1879 – when he quit his chair at Basel – Nietzsche had been a wanderer, eking out a peripatetic existence from Swiss boarding houses to Italian ones, from one friend’s house to another’s, from his younger sister (who learnt by heart every word he had written without understanding any of his ideas), to his mother (who loved him as he was but still didn’t understand him).

In these years he wrote his greatest books, each of which alienated him more and more. “I have inhaled the spirit of Europe – now I want to mount a counterattack.” The four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra were published between 1883 and 1885. The first was dashed off after fleeing from his family and von Salomé, in a near-suicidal frenzy. The final part was published at his own expense, in an edition of only forty copies, of which he gave seven away, having no one else to give one to…

Not one of his contemporaries understood Zarathustra – the magnum opus that reflected his entire inner world and existential credo. Yet only a few decades later it would be seen as the seminal expression of the zeitgeist of the twentieth century, and form the philosophical foundation-stone of Nazi tyranny.

In an idealized premonition of Hitler’s harangues about the Übermensch, Zarathustra addresses a crowd in a market-place, waiting for a rope-dancer to appear: I will teach you about the Superman. Man is something that must be overcome. What have you done towards this? All creatures always create something higher than themselves. And you – do you want to ebb amidst this flow? What is an ape, compared to Man? – shameful, piteous, misshapen. And Man, compared to Superman, is every bit as shameful, as piteous, as misshapen. You have come a long way from worm to Man, but you still have too much of the worm about you. Once upon a time you were apes – and see how much of the ape you have still within you…

The Superman is the meaning of the Earth. Just let your will say it, and Superman will be the meaning of the Earth. In truth, Man is a muddy stream. It is necessary to be the sea in order to absorb the muddy stream and yet remain clean. Behold, I am teaching you about the Superman – he is that sea, in which your great contempt is drowning. Not your sins, but your arrogance cries out to the heavens: the nothingness of your sins cries out to the heavens! But where is the lightning that will lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you must be inoculated? Behold, I am teaching you about the Superman: he is that lightning, he is that madness!

While Zarathustra spoke thus, someone shouted from the crowd:

“We have heard a lot about the rope-dancer – let us see him!”

And everyone began to laugh at Zarathustra…

The years that followed were the most terrible in Nietzsche’s life. He had said all that he needed to say, but no one wanted to listen to him. His writings became an anguished cry, verging on insanity. “In a state of rapture I observe the miracles that blossom under the sun’s burning rays: tigers, palm trees, rattlesnakes… In actual fact even evil has its future, and the hottest southern climes are not yet open to mankind… One day huge dragons will appear on earth… Your soul is so far from understanding greatness that the Superman with his kindness will frighten you…”

In Beyond Good and Evil he paraphrased the Apostle Paul: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”. In Ecce Homo he asked rhetorically, “Why is Friedrich Nietzsche so wise? Why is Friedrich Nietzsche so clever? Why has Friedrich Nietzsche written such good books?” But his few readers only shrugged or laughed...

New Year 1889 found Nietzsche in Turin, where he visited the library to read books that he couldn’t afford, and spent evenings improvising on the piano in his boarding house. On January 3, he went out for a walk and saw a coachman brutally beating an old horse on the verge of collapse. Nietzsche tried to intervene – and at that moment suffered an apoplectic stroke.

In the days that followed his friends received strange postcards. Nietzsche compared himself to a satyr, to the sun at midnight, to an androgynous deity from ancient cults. To Cosima Wagner he wrote: “Cosima, I love you. Friedrich Nietzsche.” To his pupil Peter Gast: “To my maestro Pietro. Sing me a new song. The world is bright and the heavens rejoice. Crucified.” Nietzsche spent the next decade moving from one clinic to another. He never fully recovered his sanity, but never lost touch with music, improvising on the piano through long nights, making strange, disturbing sounds…

According to Nietzsche, the process of thinking, of philosophical questioning, is characteristic of people only when they are ill, or suffer, or are conscious of being close to death. Life is transient, existence a perpetual challenge. This is true for all creatures – human or beast, irrespective of good or evil. If you don’t want to be a slave – of fate, of circumstances, of time, of pain or joy – you need to strive. Though stumbling and falling, you must move ahead…

And at the final moment of your earthly existence you should cry out, as he did:

“So that was life, was it? Well, then! Again, please!”