ALTHOUGH NIETZSCHE spent most of his career in solitude, he was not one of those hermetic thinkers whose universe wholly consisted of a lonely self with grandiose ideas. He was in the constant company of the great (and some not-so-great) thinkers of his times and of the past. He knew them only through their words, through books and reports, but he was actively engaged with them, even if the engagement was decidedly one-sided. Although he was certainly no “humanist” in the usual sense, Nietzsche delighted in understanding and writing about other people. His most brilliant and biting comments, observations and essays involve a keen insight into people, both as individuals and as types. He wondered what made people “tick,” and he rightly suspected that what they thought and said about themselves and their ideals was almost always misleading, mistaken, or just plain fraudulent. In Ecce Homo he wrote that “a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings,”1 but this claim has not always been taken as seriously as it ought to be. Philosophical doctrines carry a strong sense of universality and necessity, while psychological analyses remain inevitably bound to the particular contingencies of a personality or a people. But Nietzsche was suspicious of claims to universality and necessity, and he almost always preferred the witty or dazzling or even offensive psychological insight to the grand philosophical thesis, for example, his comment that Socrates was ugly,2 that Kant was decadent,3 that moral leaders are resentful,4 and “How much beer there is in the German intelligence!”5
Nietzsche saw himself as a diagnostician, and his philosophy consists to a very large extent of speculative diagnoses, concerning the virtues and vices of those whom he read and read about, whose influence determined the temper of the times. His central strategy, accordingly, was the use of the ad hominem argument, a rhetorical technique often dismissed as a “fallacy,” an attack on the character, the motives, and the emotions of his interlocuters rather than a refutation of their ideas as such. Of Socrates, he writes, “[W]e can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation.”6 Such ad hominem arguments pervade Nietzsche’s writings. Indeed, much more of Nietzsche’s work is devoted to his “skirmishes” with other thinkers than we are usually led to believe, and one might well plot the course of his philosophy by tracing it through his various comments, caustic and otherwise, about other people. With that in mind, we decided to present a short catalogue of those figures on whom Nietzsche lavished the most (though not always the most flattering) attention.
Many years ago, Crane Brinton organized his early book about Nietzsche under the twin titles, “What Nietzsche Loved” and “What Nietzsche Hated.” To be sure, Nietzsche would disapprove of such dichotomous thinking; nevertheless, it is hard to think of this most passionate thinker without thinking in such personal and vehement emotional terms. Nietzsche loved and hated throughout his career—mainly people he knew only through their writings. And to make matters ever more complicated, he both loved and hated some of the same people. The phrase “mixed feelings” has never been more appropriately employed than to describe Nietzsche’s attitudes toward his closest competitors, particularly Socrates, who was (at one and the same time) both Nietzsche’s role model and nemesis.
So here are Nietzsche’s two “Top Ten” lists, the first his favorites, his role models, his heroes; the second, those he attacked and sometimes despised. Our strategy follows that of Nietzsche’s own occasional groupings of “exemplary men.” Our task is complicated by the fact that Nietzsche is prone to bursts of enthusiasm that suddenly disappear without a trace. For instance, in an early essay he says of Montaigne, “I know of only one writer whom I would compare with Schopenhauer, indeed set above him, in respect of honesty: Montaigne.”7 But immediately afterward, Montaigne virtually disappears from Nietzsche’s view. Schopenhauer, of course, works his way from the “best” list to the “worst” list in the space of a few short years. Despite these peculiarities of his assessments, here are Nietzsche’s “best” and “worst.”
The Best:
| Socrates | Dostoyevsky |
| Zarathustra | Emerson |
| Spinoza | Homer |
| Goethe | Jesus |
| Wagner | Shakespeare |
| Kant | Sophocles |
| Schopenhauer |
Runners-up:
| Apollo | Heine |
| Dionysus | Thucydides |
| Luther | Darwin |
NIETZSCHE’S “BOTTOM TEN”
The Worst:
| Socrates | Descartes |
| Plato | Luther |
| Saint Paul | Mill |
| Wagner | Carlyle |
| Kant | Euripides |
| Schopenhauer |
Runners-up:
| Hegel | God |
| Darwin |
To say that Nietzsche admired Socrates may seem rather surprising, in light of the fact that he devotes much of The Birth of Tragedy and several long sections of his later works to criticizing him. In Birth he accuses Socrates of “murdering tragedy.” In his essay “The Problem of Socrates”—in Twilight of the Idols, one of his last books—he declared Socrates to be no less than an enemy of life itself. Nevertheless, Nietzsche saw Socrates as one of the decisive figures of Western thought, and this is evident even in his first book. He describes Socrates as “the one turning point … of world history,” suggesting that Socrates saved humanity from extinction.
For if we imagine that the whole incalculable sum of energy used up … had been used not in the service of knowledge,… universal wars of annihilation and continual migrations of peoples would probably have weakened the instinctive lust for life to such an extent that suicide would have become a general custom and individuals might have experienced the final remnant of a sense of duty when … they strangled their parents and friends.…8
And then, “… it must now be said how the influence of Socrates … again and again prompts a regeneration of art.”9
To understand Nietzsche’s mixed feelings about Socrates, one thing we should do is distinguish between Socrates and Socratism (much as one might distinguish between Jesus and Christianity, between Marx and Marxism). Socrates as a person is perhaps Nietzsche’s closest companion, from his first writings to his last: “Socrates, to confess it frankly, is so close to me that almost always I fight a fight against him.”10 But this intimacy, when it does not breed contempt, often warrants ridicule. “A married philosopher belongs in comedy.… [T]he malicious Socrates, it would seem, married ironically just to demonstrate this proposition.”11 Socratism, by contrast, is the commitment to relying on reason to a degree that Nietzsche considers absurd. Socratism, with its preference for abstract categories that are much more orderly than our experience, also tends toward Platonism, the judgments that life on earth is deficient and that perfection must be sought in another realm. Nietzsche had many harsh words for both of these ideologies. (Socrates is known to us primarily through Plato’s dialogues, in which he is the primary protagonist. Although the Socrates of the dialogues is modeled on the historical Socrates [Plato’s real teacher], Plato probably extrapolated beyond the original Socrates’ teachings when he made his character Socrates a spokesman for his own ideas. Nietzsche sometimes takes pains to distinguish Socrates and Plato. However, the two thinkers’ views are related, and at various times they both defend positions that Nietzsche attacks.)
Nietzsche (like Hegel before him) delighted in comparing Socrates to Jesus, predictably to the detriment of Jesus:
Above the founder of Christianity, Socrates is distinguished by the gay kind of seriousness and that wisdom full of pranks which constitutes the best state of the soul of man. Moreover, he had the greater intelligence.”12
It is amply clear, reading through Nietzsche’s many comments about Socrates, that his primary attitude toward the great unpublished Greek thinker was envy. But envy is in itself something of a mixed emotion, combining grudging admiration with resentment. Nietzsche envied Socrates’ remarkable influence, both in antiquity and throughout the long history of Western philosophy. He envied Socrates’ talent for attracting and mesmerizing students. He also envied Socrates’ ability to refuse discipleship and the fact that he so successfully forced his students to think for themselves. He even envied Socrates for his buffoonery. How Nietzsche would have loved to share in that joie de vivre, and how ironic that Nietzsche’s harshest accusation should be that Socrates hated life.
Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra features the famous Persian prophet Zarathustra, or Zoroaster. Nietzsche’s choice of Zarathustra as his primary spokesman is often considered a bit capricious. Nietzsche preaches against the twin concepts of good and evil that Zarathustra introduced into Western religion and philosophy. Thus the use of Zarathustra is in part ironic.
However, Nietzsche knew and thought a good deal about the Persian prophet and his teachings, and he himself commented on his readers’ failure to consider his relationship to the ancient philosopher:
I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth … Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. But this question itself is at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than any other thinker … what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker.… The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.13
Nietzsche suggests that Zarathustra’s great achievement was not making the particular distinction between good and evil, but to embark on the process of making such discernments. Being subtle and honest, Zarathustra would have moved beyond his own dichotomy of good and evil. Unfortunately, as Nietzsche sees it, Zarathustra’s descendants—adherents of the great religions of the West—latched on to his moral categories and used them moralistically. They failed to follow Zarathustra in the practice of examining and reexamining one’s situation and formulating new distinctions.
Yet in his own time, claims Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s morality has reached a point of self-overcoming. The honesty that drove Zarathustra and continued to be cultivated in subsequent religious traditions has led to the death of God and the current crisis of values. Zarathustra has evolved into the opposite of a moralist—into Nietzsche himself! Zarathustra, in other words, is more than a fictional spokesman for Nietzsche. He is a true kindred spirit.
One might think that Spinoza, a heterodox Jew whose philosophy was dedicated to the love of God and who wrote in the most inelegant, geometrical style, would be as far from Nietzsche as any philosopher of modern times. And yet, in a postcard to a friend in 1881, at the height of his powers, he enthusiastically declared:
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his over-all tendency like mine—namely to make knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness … is now at least a two-someness.14
Nietzsche reaffirms this judgment in other contexts. “When I speak of Plato, Pascal, Spinoza, and Goethe, then I know that their blood rolls in mine.”15 And once again, he lists “my ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe.”16 Although he was not always generous toward his precursors, Nietzsche describes Spinoza as “the purest sage”17 and a genius,18 his work is “a passionate history of a soul”19 written in a “simple and sublime” manner.20
These two lonely, exiled philosophers do share a surprising number of outlooks in common, several of which Nietzsche mentions in the longer passage above. Spinoza, like Nietzsche, also celebrates (what Nietzsche calls) amor fati, “the love of fate.” Elsewhere Nietzsche recognizes another commonality between Spinoza and himself, their repudiation of pity.
For this overestimation of and predilection for pity on the part of modern philosophers is something new: hitherto philosophers have been at one as to the worthlessness of pity. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant—four spirits as different from one another as possible, but united in one thing: in their low estimation of pity.21
Even theologically, Nietzsche sees the thinker as his compatriot, for he thinks that his theology commits Spinoza to denying the legitimacy of guilt and moral condemnation. In a note, Nietzsche contends that Spinoza’s “rejection of moral value judgments … was one consequence of his theodicy!”22 In Genealogy Nietzsche suggests that Spinoza himself was aware that he had little room in his philosophy for “the sting of conscience,” even though he wanted to maintain it.
[T]eased by who knows what recollection, he mused on the question of what really remained to him of the famous morsus conscientiae [the sting of conscience]—he who had banished good and evil to the realm of human imagination and had wrathfully defended the honor of his “free” God against those blasphemers who asserted that God effected all things sub ratione boni [for a good reason] (“but that would mean making God subject to fate and would surely be the greatest of all absurdities”). The world, for Spinoza, had returned to the state of innocence in which it had lain before the invention of the bad conscience.…23
Nietzsche’s enthusiasm, of course, is not unqualified. Spinoza’s description of making peace with fate, which he describes as “the intellectual love of God,” strikes Nietzsche as too abstract in tenor to do justice to real lived experience. Nietzsche considers this an example of a common problem in Western thought, philosophical “vampirism”: “[W]hat was left of Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei, is mere clatter and no more than that: What is amor, what deus, if there is not a drop of blood in them?”24
Nietzsche is hardly alone among his contemporaries in considering Goethe one of the luminaries of German culture, but he surpasses most of them in his enthusiastic praise.
Goethe—not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance.… He bore its strongest instincts within himself … he disciplined himself, he created himself.25
Goethe is the last German for whom I feel any reverence.26
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died a dozen years before Nietzsche was born, was the exemplary figure of the German man of letters. As a young poet, he became well known as one of the “Sturm und Drang” generation, defending a new humanism in Germany. A follower of Herder, he became an ardent defender of German culture. He served as a government minister, practiced law, traveled widely, published popular novels (The Sorrows of Young Werther), inspired romanticism, retreated to classicism, and in his last decades composed the greatest literary work in the German language, his man-meets-devil play, Faust. He was, perhaps, Nietzsche’s only real rival for geniuslevel mastery of the language, and his multicareer life and many-genre writings surely appealed to Nietzsche’s perspectivism and his view that one should say yes to life. Nietzsche also saw Goethe as one of those rare figures who was consciously setting the stage for the future, a European and not merely German future. Among the many figures Nietzsche cites as examples of “higher men,” Goethe is mentioned most often (by far). If there were to be a German Übermensch, Goethe would be the top candidate.
But as so often, Nietzsche shows his admiration by making a target of Goethe—mainly by directing humorous barbs at the concept “the Eternal Feminine,” Goethe’s principle of feminine purity that provided salvation to the protagonist of his play Faust. Zarathustra’s speech about the poets, discussed above in chapter 2, includes some quips about this formulation. Pursuing the theme that the poets lie too much, Zarathustra remarks that
“… we do lie too much. We also know too little and we are bad learners; so we simply have to lie. And who among us poets has not adulterated his wine?… And because we know so little, the poor in spirit please us heartily, particularly when they are young females. And we are covetous even of those things which the old females tell each other in the evening. That is what we ourselves call the Eternal-Feminine in us.… When they feel tender sentiments stirring, the poets always fancy that nature herself is in love with them.…”27
But this is very mild criticism, particularly coming from Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s criticism is blunted by his inclusion of himself among the besotted. Moreover, the target of Zarathustra’s sarcasm is probably not Goethe but the vision that the German populace had in mind when it took up the expression “Eternal-Feminine.” This term was used to endorse a prudish ideal of women’s social role, typified by some very smug and empty women who considered themselves the “saving grace” of of their husbands, according to Carol Diethe. She points out that Goethe was similarly critical of this ideal and “levelled his own critique at society by making the outcast child-murderess Gretchen his ideal,” an irony “lost on a society obsessed with its own need to divide women into categories as ‘Eves’ and ‘Madonnas.’ ”28 The only sense in which Nietzsche criticizes Goethe himself is that he popularized a term that ultimately became a weapon in the hands of self-righteous prigs.
Perhaps the best-known hero in Nietzsche’s life—and his best-known target—was Richard Wagner, the great opera composer. From Wagner, Nietzsche probably absorbed more than he acknowledged, despite his insistence on his gratitude. The tremendous freedom with which Wagner reworked historical materials and advanced modern mythology, the search for perfect devotion that provided his leading theme, the vast scope of Wagnerian opera—all these were inspiring to the young philosopher. It was also through Wagner that Nietzsche deepened his appreciation for Schopenhauer, and it is not coincidental that he ultimately rejected both men at about the same time. Yet even long after Nietzsche’s disillusionment with the composer, he still praised Wagner’s psychological savvy. Nietzsche opens Nietzsche contra Wagner with a passage from The Gay Science, which he now entitles, “Where I Admire.”
There is a musician who, more than any other musician, is a master at finding the tones in the realm of suffering, depressed, and tortured souls, at giving language to every mute misery.… He draws most happily of all out of the profoundest depth of human happiness, and, as it were, out of its drained goblet, where the bitterest and most repulsive drops have finally and evilly run together with the sweetest … Wagner is one who has suffered deeply—that is his distinction above other musicians. I admire Wagner wherever he puts himself into music.29
Similarly, he comments in Ecce Homo: “I think I know better than anyone else of what tremendous things Wagner is capable—the fifty worlds of alien ecstasies for which no one besides him had wings.… I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life.”30
In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche described Immanuel Kant (along with Schopenhauer as “tragic” and as having “tremendous courage and wisdom.”31 In The Gay Science Nietzsche praises “Kant’s tremendous question mark that he placed after the concept of causality.”32 Although Nietzsche often castigates Kant in the harshest terms, there is no denying Kant’s greatness or stature in the world of German thought. He had a profound influence on Goethe and Schopenhauer, two of Nietzsche’s early heroes, and it was said then (as it is still said now) that no philosophy following Kant could possibly avoid the monumental arguments of his three great Critiques, in which the whole of human reason had been mapped out and boldly defended.
As perhaps the most original and illustrious philosopher that Germany had ever produced, Kant attracted Nietzsche’s admiration. But put his views together with the fact that he had a reputation as a rather bourgeois professor and a good citizen and civil servant with pedestrian tastes in art, and Kant provides an excellent target for some of Nietzsche’s most vicious attacks. We will consider the specific Kantian views that inspire Nietzsche’s ire in our account below of Kant as a target.
Nietzsche discovered Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy while he was still attending the university, and Schopenhauer was the topic of one of his Untimely Meditations. Although Nietzsche ultimately turned on Schopenhauer, he never really shook off the Schopenhauerian view of the world, and some of its components remain at the center of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The will to power, for example, is unmistakably presented as a variation on Schopenhauer’s Will, particularly when Nietzsche speculates that the Will (to power) is the drive behind all living things, even the world.33
Schopenhauer postulated that the world “in itself” that Kant had theorized is a dynamic, unruly force that manifested itself in the world of our experience. This fundamental reality, the will, is in continual conflict with itself, and this conflict is manifested in the tensions among phenomenal entities, evident in the food chain as well as war and hostility. (Although Nietzsche’s conception of will to power resembles Schopenhauer’s Will in certain respects, Nietzsche presents this notion as an improvement on Schopenhauer’s idea, as we will discuss below, in chapter 7.)
Inevitably, according to Schopenhauer, beings within the world suffer, for they are expressions of a suffering will. Human beings suffer not only by virtue of being in tension with other beings, but also because their lives are a series of desires, each of which seems important while one is conscious of it but becomes unimportant when fulfilled. Aesthetic experience, the contemplation of beauty and awesome forces in the world, provides occasional respites for the turmoil caused by our desires, but these are just temporary. The only ultimate end to suffering in life is an inner act of resignation, a conscious decision based on one’s intellectual awareness that pursuing one’s desires is unfulfilling. Although resignation solves the problem, this route is rarely taken. The only ones who silence the will within themselves through resignation are the great saints of every tradition.
Schopenhauer was no saint. He was a lively, sometimes overly aggressive man with strong passions and strong dislikes. Nietzsche’s vehement ad hominems are modeled on Schopenhauer’s prose. Nietzsche admired Schopenhauer’s cantakerousness, his independence of thought, his willingness to go against the grain of the then prevalent German idealism (although, technically, he still fell within its territory). In particular, Nietzsche admired Schopenhauer’s atheism, his willingness to construct a worldview that took blind impulse, not a benign God, as the cause of the world. “This is the locus of his whole integrity; unconditional and honest atheism is simply the presupposition of the way he poses his problem.… Schopenhauer’s question immediately comes to us in a terrifying way: Has existence any meaning at all? It will require a few centuries before this question can even be heard completely and in its full depth.”34
Nietzsche is effusive in his praise for Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whom he describes as “the only psychologist.… from whom I had something to learn.” Nietzsche claims “he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life.…” He applauds Dostoyevsky, “this profound human being,” for his discovery among Siberian convicts that they were “very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out of just about the best, hardest, and most valuable wood that grows anywhere on Russian soil.”35
Nietzsche seems clearly to have read Notes from Underground and The Idiot. Walter Kaufmann, the scholar responsible for rescuing Nietzsche from his reputation as a proto-Nazi in the English-speaking world, suggests that Nietzsche’s vision of Jesus owes something to Dostoyevsky’s characterization of Prince Mishkin, the “idiot” of the novel of that name.36 Similarities in portrayal also suggest that Nietzsche may have had Raskolnikov, the antihero of Crime and Punishment, in mind when he wrote the sketch called “The Pale Criminal,” which appears in the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Kaufmann points out, however, that this sketch appeared in 1883, yet Nietzsche reports to Overbeck in a letter of February 23, 1887, that he had only just discovered Dostoyevsky. We might also add, as tragic irony, that Nietzsche’s final collapse in Turin, his hugging of the horse being beaten, is reminiscent of Raskolnikov’s dream of similarly protecting a horse in Crime and Punishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the only American to make the list. Although philosophically one of the “Transcendentalists” and the heir of Kant and Hegel, Emerson was also a powerful voice for American individualism. His essay “Self-Reliance” had already become one of the most celebrated pieces of American nonfiction and obviously struck Nietzsche’s fancy as well. Emerson is Nietzsche’s precursor in directing attention to the historical Zarathustra (or Zoroaster). Some of Nietzsche’s most renowned ideas were developed from important themes in Emerson’s essay, such as the “over-soul” (which Kaufmann observes is reconfigured in Nietzsche’s “Übermensch”), self-reliance, Emerson’s “Joyous Science” (which may have been a factor in Nietzsche’s titling his book The Gay Science), the importance of attending to the details of one’s experiences, the cyclical rhythms of time, and even the death of God. Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” includes such passages as,
Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.…37
We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought.… The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology.38
Like Nietzsche, Emerson had religious motives for rejecting orthodox theology. Perhaps this is the most fundamental reason for Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the Transcendentalist.
Nietzsche no doubt knew as much as anyone about the great ninth-century poet and epic storyteller, and it is evident that the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer’s famous “children” (as Socrates calls them in the Symposium) are never far from Nietzsche’s mind and mythology.
Nor is Jesus ever far from Nietzsche’s mind. Together with Socrates, the first (and Nietzsche says “only”39) Christian provided the paradigm that Nietzsche sought to follow throughout his career—not just a philosopher, not just a moralist, but a true revolutionary, a voluptuary, a sterling example (if only for “the few”).
Nietzsche finds Shakespeare an intriguing psychological case, as well as a psychologist of remarkable sensitivity and courage. He remarks in Ecce Homo, “I know no more heart-rending reading than Shakespeare: what must a man have suffered to find it so very necessary to be a buffoon?”40 Nietzsche particularly admires Shakespeare’s willingness to probe the full range of human character without compromising his vision to pacify moral sensibilities. In this respect, Nietzsche identifies with Shakespeare, whom he took to share many of his own insights about the tragic dimensions of human experience. Of the playwright’s Julius Caesar he remarks,
I could not say anything more beautiful in praise of Shakespeare as a human being than this: he believed in Brutus and did not cast one speck of suspicion upon this type of virtue. It was to him that he devoted his best tragedy—it is still called by the wrong name—to him and to the most awesome quintessence of a lofty morality. Independence of the soul!—that is at stake here. No sacrifice can be too great for that: one must be capable of sacrificing one’s dearest friend for it, even if he should also be the most glorious human being, an ornament of the world, a genius without peer—if one loves freedom as the freedom of great souls and he threatens this kind of freedom. That is what Shakespeare must have felt.41
Similarly, Nietzsche envisions Shakespeare as having the kind of insight that he described as Dionysian.
In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the external nature of things.… Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence … he is nauseated.42
Shakespeare combines this Dionysian insight with the Apollonian power to create beauty through his plays. In this respect, Shakespeare manifests the rare achievement that Nietzsche attributes to the greatest Greek tragedies, of wedding the Dionysian and Apollonian principles in works that grappled with the meaning of life.
The depth of Nietzsche’s admiration for Shakespeare is evident in Zarathustra’s speech “On Poets,” where he alludes to the playwright in a way that contrasts with his lampoon of Plato considered above. “Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed.”43 The line recalled is Hamlet’s to his Stoic friend, Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”44 Zarathustra’s comment is a tribute to Shakespeare at Plato’s expense. While Plato considered philosophy superior to poetry, Zarathustra suggests just the opposite when he alludes to Shakespeare. He implies that the Bard was a seer who recognized much that the West’s great philosophers fail to notice.
In Nietzsche’s eyes, Sophocles was the most illustrious of ancient Greece’s three great tragedians (Aeschylus and Euripides being the other two). Sophocles is best known for his three Theban plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Nietzsche admires Sophocles for many of the same reasons he admires Shakespeare. Sophocles was willing to look into the abyss of the human soul, and to respect the nobility of those individuals who do not operate within the conventional moral sphere, and whose destiny is therefore tragic.
Sophocles understood the most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, as the noble human being.… The noble human being does not sin, the profound poet wants to tell us: though every law, every natural order, even the moral world may perish through his actions, his actions also produce a higher magical circle of effects which found a new world on the ruins of the old one that has been overthrown. That is what the poet wants to say to us insofar as he is at the same time a religious thinker.45
Somewhat surprisingly, Nietzsche contrasts morality and religion in this passage. The moral order, particularly as it is articulated in the Christian schema, attempts to rationalize abominable suffering, usually as something deserved as a consequence of sin. Nietzsche finds this “moral” interpretation of suffering hideous, treating the cruelest fates as simple matters of moral bookkeeping. Sophocles’ vision, by contrast, involves an outlook that Nietzsche associates with sincere religious reflection on the problem of evil. Such reflection is characterized by a humane and respectful attitude toward those who suffer, and a sense of the nobility of suffering human beings, who can love their lives despite the pain involved. Nietzsche sees Sophocles as one who took such an extramoral perspective on humanity and as an exemplary because he was profoundly humane.
One is hard put to list mythological figures as personal heroes, but given Nietzsche’s lack of interpersonal intimacy with virtually all of his favorite figures, one might say that the Greek gods were as close to him as most of his flesh-and-blood contemporaries. Apollo, the Greek god of flocks, healing, justice, music, archery, and light, figures centrally in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and the “Apollonian” remains a paradigm for him throughout his career. To be sure, Nietzsche is better known for his celebration of Dionysus, and it is Dionysus he identifies with toward the end of his life; but it would be a mistake to think that he thereby rejects Apollo, or more generally the ideals of clarity and precision. It is the Apollonian in balance with the Dionysian that is responsible for the greatness of Greek tragedy.
Dionysus was the Greek god and inventor of wine, a substance often celebrated but rarely touched by Nietzsche. He surrounded himself with maenads (“wild women” in more colloquial English) and was famed for his orgiastic rites. Dionysiac (Orphic) cults were numerous in early Greece and had a significant influence on the thinking of Pythagoras and Plato. More importantly for Nietzsche, Greek tragedy evolved out of the Dionysian festivals. Dionysus, who had been plucked unborn from his dead mother and raised in Zeus’s thigh, who had been torn to pieces by the Titans in Hera’s jealous rage, who had been transformed into a kid and raised by nymphs, represented just that illogical fluidity that Nietzsche saw as the essence of the Dionysian, the drunken sense of merging with the whole, “the Bacchanalian revel” that Hegel before him had also celebrated. “[I]t is only in the Dionysian mysteries … that the basic fact of the Hellenic instinct finds expression—its ‘will to life.’ ”46
In light of the uninhibited frenzy associated with Dionysus, it may seem odd that Nietzsche praises Luther in connection with this Pagan god. Nevertheless, Luther is one of the Dionysian heroes of The Birth of Tragedy. “So deep, courageous, and spiritual, so exuberantly good and tender did this chorale of Luther sound as the first Dionysian luring call breaking forth from dense thickets at the approach of spring.”47 Although Nietzsche’s later assessments of Luther are more mixed, he continued to display considerable appreciation for the artistic Luther, not only as composer of chorales, but as translator of the Bible. He considered Luther an exemplary writer, although his own sense of rivalry is also evident.
[I]t is my theory that with this Z[arathustra] I have brought the German language to a state of perfection. After Luther and Goethe, a third step had to be taken—look and see, old chum of mine, if vigor, flexibility, and euphony have ever consorted so well in our language.… My line is superior to his [Goethe’s] in strength and manliness, without becoming, as Luther’s did, loutish.48
Nietzsche valued Luther for his assertion of German culture as well as the artistic merits of these achievements. He tended to praise Luther more as a cultural hero than a religious one. Nevertheless, Nietzsche also displays consistent admiration for Luther’s courage as it was revealed in the actions that launched the Protestant Reformation. In particular, Nietzsche points to Luther’s willingness to destroy even the Church, an institution he had loved, in order to be true to his intellectual conscience.
Nietzsche’s discussions of the Reformation itself are mostly critical, and given his Lutheran upbringing, he was explicitly rejecting Luther’s Church when he abandoned Christianity. Yet Nietzsche continued to employ phraseology from Luther in his own discussions of human liberation, suggesting continued acknowledgment of his own indebtedness even when he could no longer follow Luther’s belief. For example, Luther describes the arrival of God’s grace in the soul in terms of affirmation and negation. At the height of despair, the sinner’s soul discovers “deeper than No, and above it, the deep, mysterious Yes.”49 Nietzsche uses the same terminology in describing the faith that grounds his own opposition to Christianity.
[W]e have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it—precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright: for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We—do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, friend! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by—a faith.50
Nietzsche’s images of the overflowing soul and of the simultaneously cruel and creative hammer were also used earlier by Luther. Perhaps it is not unfair to say that Nietzsche followed Luther in what he saw as Luther’s greatness.
The German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine makes several of Nietzsche’s “exemplary men” lists, not least because he was one of the few scholars who anticipated Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” vision of the Greeks. He also admired Heine’s masterful use of the German language and his “divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection.” Heine exemplifies “the highest concept of the lyrical poet.” “I seek in vain in all the realms of history for an equally sweet and passionate music.”51
Besides explicit homage, Nietzsche indicated his admiration for Heine by further developing some of the poet’s ideas. One example is the notion of the death of God, which Heine considers in On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany. Walter Kaufmann speculates that Nietzsche may also have been inspired to formulate his doctrine of eternal recurrence because of a passage from Heine that appeared in Letzte Gedichte und Gedanken von H. Heine, a book that Nietzsche owned. Heine is also Nietzsche’s precursor in treating Judaism and Christianity as essentially the same. Heine wrote of the expressions “Jewish” and “Christian,” “both expressions are synonymous for me and are used by me not to designate a faith but a character.” Heine also opposed this Jewish-Christian character to the character of the Greeks, an opposition that anchors many of Nietzsche’s discussions of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Thucydides was Nietzsche’s “cure for Platonism,” first of all because he refused to “see reason in reality.” Nietzsche praised Thucydides for having to be read “between the lines,” a bit of good advice for readers of Nietzsche as well. He admired “that strong hard severe factuality” that could describe the horrors and human foibles of the Peloponnesian War without moralism or squeamishness. Unlike Plato, Thucydides had courage in the face of reality. “Plato flees into the ideal.… Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things.”52
Nietzsche’s relationship with Darwin is particularly complex. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection had been published in English in 1859 and its central thesis was well known by the time Nietzsche launched his writing career. In his early essay on David Strauss, Nietzsche praised Darwin’s “dangerous idea” that there is no fundamental difference between animals and human beings.53 Nietzsche complained that Strauss acquiesced to Darwin’s basic theory, even praising Darwin as “one of mankind’s greatest benefactors,” without noticing the frontal challenge to the moral worldview. This most astonishing idea, that there is no fundamental difference between animals and human beings, contradicted the popular vision that human beings were the apex (not just another ape) in the great chain of being and therefore worthy of special moral consideration and capable of moral responsibility in a way that animals are not.
Even Schopenhauer, who emphasized the similarity between the structure of animals and the structure of human beings, held to the view that human beings were of a different order than animals; indeed, human beings were the only form of life capable of reason and of resisting the will and gaining ethical insight. Of course, Nietzsche also thought that human beings can elevate themselves above the level of “beasts” through art, religion, and philosophy, even if he was skeptical that many human beings could or would do so.54 But the continuity of man and beast, the place of humanity within nature, is always central to Nietzsche’s thinking.
Nietzsche seems to be playing with Darwinian imagery in the speeches that Zarathustra makes about the Übermensch. “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman.…”55 Yet we have noted above that Nietzsche mocks those who accuse him of Darwinism. Walter Kaufmann observes, however, that “his own Zarathustric allegories had plainly invited such misunderstanding.”56 Nietzsche took issue with many aspects of Darwin’s theory of natural selection; nevertheless, in 1887 he describes Darwinism as “the last great scientific movement.”57
Socrates, more than any other figure, is the target of Nietzsche’s attacks. Nietzsche was obsessed with him. Socrates’ fame, his infuence, his buffoonery, all appealed to and appalled the shy hermit of Sils Maria. But despite Socrates’ evident joy in living, Nietzsche saw in Socrates a profound pessimism, the rejection of life. In Plato’s depiction of Socrates’ death, the condemned philosopher insists, “Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster” (Asclepius was the patron of physician, so Socrates was suggesting that death is a cure for life.). Nietzsche translates, “Oh, Crito, life is a disease” and asks, “Is it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully and like a soldier in the sight of everyone, should have been a pessimist? Socrates suffered life!”58
Because of this pessimism, Socrates developed a form of reason run wild, an “absurd” rationality that allowed him to abandon this world for another. Nietzsche thus accuses Socrates of being implicated in Euripides’ “killing” of Greek tragedy: “Euripides was … only a mask: the deity who spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but … Socrates.”59 And although Nietzsche considered Socrates the great buffoon, he was also the enemy of comedy—and of music, too. Plato’s portraits show Socrates famously banning the poets from his imaginary republic, and condemning flute-playing as licentious.
Yet in an earlier dialogue, the Phaedo, where we find Socrates in prison awaiting death, he decides to take up music as an act of piety toward an apparition that tells him in dreams to “practice music.” This reflects a glimmer of awareness, says Nietzsche, that rationality alone was not sufficient, but he adds, “It was his Apollonian insight that, like a barbaric king, he did not understand the noble image of a god and was in danger of sinning against a deity—through his lack of understanding. The voice of the Socratic dream vision is the only sign of any misgivings about the limits of logic.”60
Still, Nietzsche’s attack is mixed with unmistakable admiration. Socrates’ “logical urge,” he says, “in its unbridled flood displays a natural power such as we encounter to our awed amazement only in the very greatest instinctive forces.”61 Ultimately, Nietzsche sees Socrates as a marvel, despite his dubious legacy.
It is by no means easy to separate Plato from his teacher Socrates. Most of what we know (or think we know) of the latter we know through the former, and there is no doubt that Plato rather freely put words and ideas in Socrates’ mouth, dramatizing and systematizing his ideas, taking hints and suggestion from Socrates and spinning them into full-blown philosophy. But what Nietzsche knew about Socrates charmed as well as infuriated him, whereas with Plato there are only rarely any such indications of mixed feelings. Plato was the philosopher of hyperrationality, of the otherworldly. For Nietzsche, the Platonic Form of the Good was no different in kind than the transcendent Christian God (“Christianity is Platonism for the masses”).
Nietzsche claims not to be charmed by the elegance of Plato’s writing, much less by the dialectical experimentalism of his writing. (He also no doubt resented how much Plato had done for Socrates while Nietzsche had no such skillful marketer for his philosophy!) In Nietzsche’s view, the twists and turns of the dialogues were not ultimately different in their aim from Kant’s academic prose—to establish reason as a tyrant, dialectic as a form of revenge. However, Nietzsche’s own literary experiment, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pays homage to the dialogues through extensive parody. And although he wanted to “stand Plato on his head,” that very aim gives Plato pride of place in the tradition.
If there is a bull’s-eye in the target that Nietzsche pins on Christianity, it is Saint Paul, (Saul of Tarsus), not the founder of Christianity but certainly the greatest propagandist that Christianity has ever known. Nietzsche describes Paul as having “a mind as superstitious as it was cunning.”62 What Nietzsche despised about Paul, naturally, was his unflagging war against the instincts, against everything natural. “People like St. Paul have an evil eye for the passions: all they know of the passions is what is dirty, disfiguring, and heartbreaking; hence their idealistic tendency aims at the annihilation of the passions, and they find perfect purity in the divine.”63 Like all Christians, Nietzsche says, Paul spoke of faith but acted from instinct alone.64 Nietzsche attacks Paul for his “rabbinical impudence,” for his “logicizing” the Christian mysteries, for his “obscene” and “impertinent” promise of personal immortality as a reward for self-denial.65 “On the heels of the ‘glad tidings’ came the very worst: those of Paul,… the genius in hatred, in the vision of hatred, in the inexorable logic of hatred.” It was Paul, more than anyone else, who rejected and hated life, even the life of Jesus himself. “At bottom, [Paul] had no use at all for the life of the Redeemer—he needed the death on the cross and a little more.”66
Wagner was a problematic hero. He was arrogant in the extreme, egotistical, and irresponsible. Nietzsche’s “break” with Wagner is one of the most celebrated philosophical cat-fights in modern history. From admiring flunky to embittered apostate, Nietzsche did a complete one-eighty on his former hero; and if early in his career Wagner was one of Nietzsche’s major influences and role models, by the end of his career he was his bête noire, a sellout, a charlatan. Nietzsche came to consider Wagner, even at the pinnacle of his success, “in truth a decaying and despairing decadent, suddenly sunk down, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross.” Nietzsche confesses, “I was sick … weary from the … disappointment, about the universally wasted energy, work, hope, youth, love—weary from nausea at the whole idealistic lie.…”67
We have already considered some of the personal motives that figured in Nietzsche’s ending his friendship with Wagner. Here we will consider Nietzsche’s more philosophical criticisms, even if these, like all philosophical arguments, are, in Nietzsche’s opinion, an unconscious personal memoir.
Even before the end of the friendship, Nietzsche objected to Wagner’s notorious anti-Semitism, as well as to his German nationalism. In his later reflections on the relationship, Nietzsche saw these tendencies as basic factors in their eventual parting of the ways.
By the Summer of 1876, during the time of the first Festspiele, I said farewell to Wagner in my heart.… [S]ince Wagner had moved to Germany, he had condescended step by step to everything I despise—even to anti-Semitism.68
What did I never forgive Wagner?… that he became reichsdeutsch.69
Nietzsche also had major disagreements with Wagner’s theory of art. In criticizing Wagner, Nietzsche shows his sympathies for the classical aesthetic, which considers the ideal for an artwork to be the unified coordination of parts and the subordination of each part to the life of the whole. By contrast, Wagner (according to Nietzsche) writes music that is an “anarchy of atoms,” a chaos of musical elements rather than an integrated structure.70 Wagner’s music, far from achieving unified form, is designed instead to jar and jostle the contemporary audience, which is spiritually exhausted and seeks stimulation wherever it can be found. Because it provides a series of stimulating states without cohesion, says Nietzsche, Wagner’s music is decadent, like its era. Indeed, this music made the sick sicker, but it continued to be popular because contemporary tastes themselves were sick.
Nietzsche became convinced that Wagner was ultimately concerned not with creating musical beauty but theatrical gimmicks.
Was Wagner a musician at all?… As a musician … he became only what he was in general: he became a musician, he became a poet because the tyrant within him, his actor’s genius, compelled him.71
… his practice was always, from beginning to end, “the pose is the end; the drama, also the music, is always merely its means.”72
… he repeated a single proposition all his life long: that his music did not mean mere music … “Not mere music”—no musician would say that.73
Wagner was always eager for nerve-jangling effects, Nietzsche complained. He sought to make music “leap out of the wall and shake the listener to his very intestines.”74 He cast aside the aims of musical form and musical beauty, writing music that jumped from one dramatic event to another, without real coherence.
Wagner lost Nietzsche’s favor, ultimately, for the same reason that many became his heroes or objects of his derision: because Wagner, in Nietzsche’s view, failed to be true to himself. Wagner did not really respect his own talent. While he excelled as a miniaturist, a master of nuance, he preferred grandstanding. This preference eventually motivated him to abandon his integrity for the sake of the impressive pose, as his music-drama Parsifal illustrates. The libretto encourages mindless piety, in Nietzsche’s opinion, something that Wagner opposed no less than Nietzsche. It also presents a paean to chastity, a particularly ludicrous message coming from the likes of Wagner, given his adulterous relationship with Cosima and the several children they had before they were married.
Nietzsche was distressed by his break with Wagner throughout the remainder of his creative life. He makes too much of the reasons he had for rejecting Wagner, and the reader is painfully aware of his ambivalence. Even after the break, Nietzsche still admired much that he saw in Wagner, even if Wagner himself recognized it only inconsistently.
Let us remain faithful in what is true and authentic in him—and especially in this, that we, as his disciples, remain faithful to ourselves in what is true and authentic in us.… It does not matter that as a thinker he is so often in the wrong.… Enough that his life is justified before itself and remains justified—this life which shouts at every one of us: “Be a man and do not follow me …!”75
Nietzsche seems to be crying out: “See? I am a good friend, after all.”
Immanuel Kant is another of those great targets and stumbling blocks in the history of philosophy. Nietzsche recognized that Kant, who had died only forty years before Nietzsche was born, had already established himself as the greatest of German philosophers. Even the briefest overview of nineteenth-century philosophy shows clearly that Kant was the background against which all subsequent philosophers had to define themselves. Nietzsche had no hesitation. Kant is second only to Socrates (and Plato) in the number of times he is abused.
Kant’s philosophy can be crudely summarized in terms of three theses to which Nietzsche responds with particular hostility. First and foremost, there is his characterization of morality in terms of rational principles (“categorical imperatives”) that apply universally to “all rational beings.” Kant proposes such principles of reason in opposition to the “inclinations” (for example, emotions, desires, urges, drives, and instincts), which are of no “moral worth.” Nietzsche, by contrast, insists that morality can be understood only in terms of such “inclinations” and that these are always to be understood in terms of particular persons or people and are not matters of universal principle.
Second, Kant defends an elaborate and ingenious conception of reality as “phenomenon,” as “constituted” by our mental processes. But the “residuum” of such an analysis is the notion of reality independent of our experience, the world “in itself,” a notion that Nietzsche finds unintelligible. “The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it—a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.” Kant thus harks back to Plato: “At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.” (Kant was from Königsberg.) Nietzsche concludes: “The ‘true’ world—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!”76
Third, Kant believes that God exists not as a being who can be “known” but also as the organizing “teleological” (purposive) principle of the world. Nietzsche does not believe in God and he rejects the idea of a teleological organization of the world. Despite his recognition that Kant was a true revolutionary, Nietzsche also saw Kant as a backslider, who did not have the courage of his convictions:
[T]he old Kant … had obtained the “thing in itself” by stealth … and was punished for this when the “categorical imperative” crept stealthily into his heart and led him astray—back to “God,” “soul,” “freedom,” and “immortality,” like a fox who loses his way and goes astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!77
As always, Nietzsche’s attack is not without humor. Referring to Kant’s notoriously difficult style, Nietzsche notes: “Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfound the ‘common man’ that the ‘common man’ was right.…” This, Nietzsche submits, was “Kant’s joke.”78
Schopenhauer also suffered (posthumously) Nietzsche’s enraged renunciation. Although he had been Nietzsche’s early model of an “educator,” his guide to the future, Schopenhauer became the exemplar of that pessimism that Nietzsche struggled to reject, often with forced gaiety and the hollow “cheerfulness” that emerge as amor fati. In a late comment about Schopenhauer, Nietzsche comments casually that he was wrong “about everything.”
Nietzsche takes recurrent potshots at particular features of Schopenhauer’s thought. Although initially attracted to the concept of the will, Nietzsche became more and more uncomfortable with Schopenhauer’s insistence that we are all one; this was uncomfortably reminiscent of the religion that Nietzsche had discarded, as was Schopenhauer’s penchant for mystical language. The notion of a single will also trivializes the individual, in Nietzsche’s opinion; Nietzsche defends the importance of individuals, all the more as they are unique. He rejects Schopenhauer’s ethic of universal sympathy or pity (the German word, Mitleid, denotes both concepts) for the same reasons he considers pity worthless in any context. Schopenhauer’s promotion of asceticism and renunciation of the will eventually strike Nietzsche as being just as antilife as Christianity.
Nietzsche never succeeded in throwing off either Schopenhauer’s influence or the entirety of his pessimistic worldview. Once again Nietzsche shows that he is never more opposed to anyone than those models whom he once embraced with enthusiasm. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche regrets that “the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer sticks.… to a few [of my own] formulas.”79
Nietzsche was not an epistemologist. While he had a great deal to say about the uses and nature of knowledge, he had little to say regarding the great debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the origins and justification of knowledge, and so his relation to Descartes is often ignored. He clearly rejected Descartes’s mind/body dualism. “[T]he awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and the soul is only a word for something about the body.”80 So, too, Nietzsche rejected Descartes’s demeaning of the senses, insisting that “we possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses.” He also delights in emphasizing the importance of the most undervalued of the human senses, smell: “What magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! The nose, for example … is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal.”81
As a defender of a naturalistic philosophy, Nietzsche rejects Descartes’s appeal to the supernatural to defend the most natural and ordinary beliefs (notably, the existence of the “external” world). “Descartes could prove the reality of the empirical world only by appealing to the truthfulness of God and his inability to utter falsehood.”82 But Nietzsche’s antipathy for the founder of modern philosophy goes deeper than this. Anticipating Freud’s discovery of “the unconscious,” Nietzsche praises
Leibniz’s incomparable insight … against Descartes—that consciousness is merely an accident of experience and not its necessary and essential attribute; that, in other words, what we call consciousness constitutes only one state of our spiritual and psychic world (perhaps a pathological state) and not by any means the whole of it.83
With Descartes, by contrast, “consciousness is tyrannized—not least by our pride in it. One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of man.”84
Ultimately, Descartes draws Nietzsche’s fire because of his rejection of not only the senses and the false separation of mind and body but his rejection of the body altogether. All of Descartes’s method can be viewed as aiming toward this conclusion:
There must be mere appearance, there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that which has being: where is the deceiver? “We have found him,” they cry ecstatically; “it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning the true world. Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies. Moral: let us say No to all who have faith in the senses.… And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!”85
If Lutheranism was deep in Nietzsche’s soul, it was also continuously stuck in his craw. Nietzsche’s critique of Luther focuses on the latter’s religious doctrines and the psychology they express—a belief in the depravity of human beings, the view that faith alone justifies existence. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche held that the only justification for existence is an aesthetic justification, yet his disagreement goes even deeper: “Faith is a profound conviction on the part of Luther and his kind of their incapacity for Christian works.…”86 If “faith makes blessed,” then, Nietzsche suggests, it occurs instead of virtue.87
Lutheranism, Nietzsche argues, is a religion for the poor in spirit. “The poor in spirit do not know what to do, and if one forbade them their prayer-rattling one would deprive them of their religion—as Protestantism shows us more and more by day.”88 And Luther’s Christianity, despite all of its claims to being a philosophy of love, is in fact the hateful invocation of a wrathful God.
As usual, Nietzsche’s arguments against Luther ultimately shift to the ad hominem:
Luther’s disposition was calamitously myopic, superficial, and incautious. He was a man of the common people who lacked everything that one might inherit from a ruling caste; he had no instinct for power. Thus his work,… without his knowing or willing it, became nothing but the beginning of a work of destruction. He unraveled, he tore up with honest wrath what the old spider had woven so carefully for such a long time.… He smashed an ideal that he could not attain, while he seemed to abhor and to be fighting only against the degeneration of this ideal.89
Foremost among Luther’s sins, in Nietzsche’s opinion, was his anti-Semitism, well documented in Luther’s writings, with such passages as the following:
What shall we Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews?… I will give my faithful advice. First, that one should set fire to their synagogues. Then break down and destroy their houses, drive them out of the country.90
Nietzsche’s response is to turn his sense of humor against Luther, in passages that initially seem to defend him.
“God himself cannot exist without wise people,” said Luther with good reason. But “God can exist even less without unwise people”—that our good Luther did not say.91
What afterward grew out of his Reformation, good as well as bad, might be calculated approximately today; but who would be naive enough to praise or blame Luther on account of these consequences? He is innocent of everything; he did not know what he was doing.92
This latter passage is particularly biting in light of the Scriptural report of Jesus’ prayer on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
Nietzsche may not have known Mill’s works in detail, but in many ways, apart from their very different styles and temperaments, they were kindred spirits. Mill was a strict empiricist and an uncompromising naturalist, as was Nietzsche. Mill decried the appeal of morals to heavenly, or a priori, standards. So did Nietzsche. Mill defended the sophistication of “quality” pursuits against the vulgar hedonism of his predecessor, Jeremy Bentham, the same argument that Nietzsche deploys against him.
Although Mill voices many of Nietzsche’s favorite themes, Nietzsche nevertheless makes his older English contemporary the target for his own displeasure with British utilitarianism and socialism. To Nietzsche Mill represents the cause of equal rights, a political formula that Nietzsche associated with promoting the lowest common denominator and the shackling of the independent spirit. Nietzsche also rejected the basic theoretical underpinnings of utilitarianism—in particular, the utilitarian presupposition that one should aim to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, which struck Nietzsche as absurd. Pleasure and pain are experienced together, and the most effective strategy for minimizing pain, blunting one’s sensibility, makes one ill-equipped to experience pleasure. “Man does not strive for pleasure,” Nietzsche famously quips; “only the Englishman does.”93
As usual, Nietzsche attacks with ad hominem arguments: the aspirations of utilitarians, particularly the goal of eliminating pain, are pipe dreams of “the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of themselves and weary,” concerned with “enduring the pressure of existence.”94 Nietzsche’s countertheses are evident enough, the will to power in place of hedonism, art and creativity in place of the general happiness:
“The general welfare” is no ideal, no goal, no remotely intelligible concept, but only an emetic.95
Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism—all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naivetés on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic consciousness will look down not without derision, nor without pity.96
Like Mill, Carlyle would also seem to be an ally rather than the butt of Nietzsche’s sarcasm, with his relentless attacks on hypocrisy, mob democracy, sham idealism, and mindless social legislation, not to mention his celebration of the individual, the strong leader, the hero, the Great Man. Like Nietzsche, he was also an admirer of Goethe and Schiller, a fan of German literature and language, and an explosive, passionate writer. Nevertheless, Nietzsche calls him “this unconscious and involuntary farce, this heroic-moralistic interpretation of dyspeptic states.” (Here we see Nietzsche, himself a medical wreck, criticizing a precursor for fighting against his physical frailties with words!) Furthermore, Nietzsche describes Carlyle as “a man of strong words and attitudes,… constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his capacity for it (in this respect, a typical romantic!).” He “drugs something in himself with the fortissimo of his veneration of men of strong faith and his rage against the less simple-minded.” Nietzsche vents spleen with a further ad hominem, one that recalls his spoof on the utilitarians. “Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty. Well, that is English.”97
Nietzsche curiously disdained the younger contemporary of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Where he celebrates the latter two, he abuses Euripides and considers his plays “degenerate.” Nietzsche even calls him “the murderer of tragedy.” He accuses him of being inspired by Socrates and (what is very different) of giving a voice to “civic mediocrity.” Nevertheless, what bothers Nietzsche about Euripides is not at all that evident, and his reasons are demonstrably dubious. Greek scholars have been quick to point out Nietzsche’s misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche’s preconceived prejudices towards those who in fact seem like kindred spirits is much in evidence.
Indeed, what Nietzsche rejects in Euripides are often just those themes which he himself so often defended, for example, Euripides’ more down-to-earth approach to tragedy and his penchant for deep psychological insights. And it is Euripides, above all, who presents us with the best single portrait of Nietzsche’s beloved Dionysus, in his play The Bacchae, but Nietzsche accuses “sacrilegious” Euripides of abandoning Dionysus, of reducing the tragic hero to a dying myth. (Perhaps that is the source of Nietzsche’s jealousy, one lover preempted by another.) To be sure, Nietzsche may have objected to Euripides’ defense of the status of women and repudiation of the glory of war. He also used a more vernacular vocabulary, which Nietzsche considered vulgar. On this last point, Nietzsche sides with his hero Sophocles, who complained that Euripides presented men as they are, not as they should be.
Nietzsche criticizes Euripides for being like Socrates—too rational, too reasonable, too keen on finding explanations for the tragic and inexplicable. Reading Euripides’ plays, however, one is hard put to defend this accusation. What Nietzsche seems to object to most vehemently, however, is Euripides’ eliminating the chorus in Greek tragedy and, according to Nietzsche, replacing its mystical rumblings with rational explanations. This, Nietzsche claimed, amounted to abandoning the classic Hellenic tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian. The Athenian tragedy’s subtle response to the problem of evil, which depended on a balance of these principles, was undermined. Euripides’ move toward making Greek tragedy more rational was a pivotal step toward the destruction of Athenian culture, on Nietzche’s harsh interpretation.
It is really quite doubtful that Nietzsche read much Hegel, and he certainly did not read him carefully or sympathetically. Most of what he says about Hegel seems to come from Schopenhauer’s prejudices and via the interpretations of the “right” or conservative Hegelians, who had taken over Hegel’s legacy after the great dialectician’s death in 1831. (The “left” Hegelians, especially Bruno Bauer and young Karl Marx, had more important battles to fight.) The right-wing Hegel—as opposed, one could argue, to the real Hegel of the early antitheological writings and his great Phenomenology of Spirit—was profoundly but obscurely Christian. (This was the same Hegel that Kierkegaard in Denmark attacked, but from the point of view of a devout Christian.)
Nietzsche rejects the optimism of Hegel’s framework as well as its emphasis on the upward development of collective human self-consciousness (“Spirit”), and, like Kierkegaard, he attacks Hegel’s emphasis on the collective (as opposed to the individual) and his pretentious gloss on human history as “rational” and “absolute.” Nietzsche also objects to Hegel’s effort to systematize philosophy. But, as so often, Nietzsche approaches this nemesis with a mixture of admiration and contempt. He accuses Hegel of exerting “an almost tyrannical influence,”98 and he complains, in The Birth of Tragedy, that his own work “smells offensively Hegelian.”99
Nietzsche’s opposition to Hegel is qualified and intermittant. In one place he refers to “those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel.”100 Nietzsche even complained about Schopenhauer’s “unintelligent wrath against Hegel.”101 In The Gay Science Nietzsche describes Hegel as one of the great German philosophers, “the astonishing stroke of Hegel, who struck right through all our logical habits and bad habits when he dared to teach that species concepts develop out of each other.…” Hegel “first introduced the decisive concept of ‘development’ into science.”102 And yet, the overall verdict is decidedly negative. It is (what Nietzsche takes to be) Hegel’s warmed-over Lutheran collective spiritualism, his apparent contempt for the individual and the concrete details of individual life that provide Nietzsche with such a big, attractive target.
Darwin also makes both the “Best” and “Worst” lists (if only as a runner-up in both cases)—the “Worst” list because Nietzsche rejects Darwin’s model of natural selection, in particular its premise that species struggle for existence. In Twilight of the Idols he contends that this thesis “so far … seems … to be asserted rather than proved.” He acknowledges that such a struggle occurs in some cases, but he thinks these are far from typical. “The total appearance of life is not the extremity, not starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering—and where there is struggle, it is a struggle for power.”103
Nietzsche’s argument here is essentially the same as the one he uses against Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the “will to existence.” (There is some question as to what degree Nietzsche conflates Darwin and Schopenhauer.) The idea of a struggle for existence is at odds with Nietzsche’s own model of will to power, which explains the behavior of organisms on the basis of an inner drive to enhance their own vitality and to assert control over their environment.
But most important, Nietzsche has an ethical objection to the Darwinian worldview. Nietzsche argues that in those cases in which a struggle for existence does occur “its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin’s school desires.” Specifically, the result of this struggle is that the less complex forms, which Darwin claims are more common, prevail over the more complex. Nietzsche articulates this point in one of his notes from 1888: “The richer and more complex forms—for the expression ‘higher type’ means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest preserve an apparent indestructibility.…” In the human species, the dominance of the weak over the strong is the typical result of such struggles. Nietzsche concludes that the human species is certainly not progressing. “Higher types are indeed attained, but they do not last. The level of the species is not raised.”104 He is similarly skeptical of human progress in his early essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” with an obvious reference to Hegel: “the goal of humanity cannot lie in the end but only in its highest specimens.”105
Nietzsche’s notes sketch some biological arguments against Darwin’s account of natural selection, for example, the idea of transitional forms: “Every type has its limits: beyond these there is no evolution.…”106 He also questions the extent to which Darwin’s model attributes the success and failure of species to external conditions. “The influence of ‘external circumstances’ is overestimated by Darwin to a ridiculous extent: the essential thing in the life process is precisely the tremendous shaping, form-creating force working from within which utilizes and exploits ‘external circumstances.’ ”107 Again, Nietzsche favors the account that inner drives rather than outer pressures are decisive in determining forms of life. Nietzsche also defends Lamarck against Darwin, arguing that acquired characteristics can be inherited. Nevertheless, “the brief spell of beauty, of genius, of Caesar, is sui generis: such things are not inherited.”108
But ultimately, as one would expect, Nietzsche’s harsh criticisms are often no more than nuances and an advertisement for his own particular emphases: the will to power, the importance of the strong, not the “fittest.” “The weak prevail over the strong again and again,” he says, and thus evolution is not to be praised or trusted for the betterment of the species. But for the final blow, Nietzsche relies on the familiar ad hominem: “Darwin,” he says, “forgot the spirit (that is English!).…”109
God the Almighty, according to Nietzsche, has become God the petty, “some petty deity who is full of care and personally knows every little hair on our head.…”110 He has also become God the pitiful.
Thus spoke the devil to me once: “God too has his hell: that is his love of man.” And most recently I heard him say this: “God is dead; God died of his pity for man.”111
Regardless of whether or not Nietzsche believed in God, it is clear that he thought that the being that most people had come to believe in and pray to was not worthy of the name.
Nietzsche provides a variety of unflattering pictures of God, which describe him as dying because he was no longer godly. In Zarathustra the alleged killer of God, the Ugliest Man, insists:
“But he had to die: he saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man’s depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. His pity knew no shame: he crawled into my dirtiest nooks.… The god who saw everything, even man—this god had to die! Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live.”112
Another character, the Pope, who has been “retired” since God’s death, complains:
“He was a concealed god, addicted to secrecy. Verily, even a son he got himself in a sneaky way. At the door of his faith stands adultery.
“Whoever praises him as a god of love does not have a high enough opinion of love itself. Did this god not want to be a judge too?…
“When he was young, this god out of the Orient, he was harsh and vengeful and he built himself a hell to amuse his favorites. Eventually, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitying, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a shaky old grandmother. Then he sat in his nook by the hearth, wilted, grieving over his weak legs, weary of the world, weary of willing, and one day he choked on his all-too-great pity.”113
Zarathustra concludes that we are better off without such a deity.
“But why did he not speak more clearly? And if it was the fault of our ears, why did he give us ears that heard him badly?… There is good taste in piety too; and it was this that said in the end, ‘Away with such a god!’ Rather no god, rather make destiny on one’s own, rather be a fool, rather be a god oneself.”114
Zarathustra is not entirely opposed to gods, however. He tells an alternative story to the “twilight of the gods” (alluding again to Wagner’s title):
For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in a “twilight,” though this lie is told. Instead: one day they laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods themselves—the word: “There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me!”115