The thinker – and similarly the artist – who has put the best of himself into his work, experiences an almost malicious joy as he watches the erosion of his body and spirit by time. It is as if he were in a corner watching a thief at his safe, while knowing that it is empty, his treasure being elsewhere.
Human, All Too Human, ‘From the Souls of Artists and Writers’, Section 209
‘To Malwida von Meysenbug
Lugano, Sunday morning [13 May 1877]
Human misery during a sea journey is terrible, and yet actually laughable, which is how my headaches sometimes seem to me when my physical condition may be excellent – in brief, I am today once more in the mood of serene crippledom, whereas on the ship I had only the blackest thoughts, my only doubts about suicide concerned where the sea might be deepest, so that one would not be immediately fished out again and have to pay a debt of gratitude to one’s rescuers in a terrible mass of gold … I was wearing my strongest glasses and mistrusted everyone. The customs boat came laboriously by, but I had forgotten the most important thing, which was to register my luggage for the railway journey. Then began a journey to the fabulous Hotel Nationale, with two rogues on the coach box, who wanted to force me to get off at a miserable trattoria; my luggage was continually in alien hands, and there was always a man gasping under my suitcase ahead of me … The arrival was awful and a whole retinue of hoodlums wanted to be paid off … I crossed the Swiss frontier, in a downpour of rain, there was a single flash of lightning, followed by loud thunder. I took it as a good omen.’
*
He had misread the runes. Once back in Switzerland, there was little to exercise his self-mocking humour. The mild climate of Italy had failed to effect the hoped-for magic on his health, and while the sociability in the Villa Rubinacci had been agreeable and intellectually stimulating, it had not resulted in a book. With the Untimely Meditations’ failure either to bring about a revitalisation of German culture or to sell (the greatest number sold being about ninety copies of ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ to the captive audience of thousands at the inaugural Bayreuth Festival), he wrote to his publisher Schmeitzner, ‘Shouldn’t we consider the Untimely Meditations finished?’1 Schmeitzner objected, but Nietzsche had moved on from the Meditations’ original and rather fussy list of topics and was concentrating on the new book that had its beginnings back in Klingenbrunn when he was taking his brief respite from Bayreuth. The titles ‘The Ploughshare’ and ‘The Free Spirit’ had evolved into Human, All Too Human, subtitled A Book for Free Spirits. He described it as a monument to a crisis. Its subject is the human condition. Reason is its lodestar. The language is not violent, didactic, boastful or obscure but personal, lucid and elegant. It is probably his most lovable book.
Everywhere he looked, he saw the inadequacies of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism to fill the void left by the collapse of traditional ways of thinking. A clean start was needed, ‘free of phantoms and a hermit’s shadow play’. Free, in his case, of nostalgic glorification of the culture of ancient Greece, of Schopenhauer, of Wagner, of division of the world into will and representation. The book would mark his development from philologist and cultural commentator to polemicist. It was not a book written for philosophers. It was a book for enquiring spirits willing to examine cultural, social, political, artistic, religious, philosophical, moral and scientific questions free from preconceptions, assumptions and all the other fictions that had been used over the ages to limit real freedom of thought. He would survey the phenomenal world with Voltairean eyes, accepting that the noumenal world is not only inaccessible but also of no everyday significance to man. He would be the spirit that has become free in the taking possession of itself, the heir to the Enlightenment. He blared his intent on the title page by dedicating the book to Voltaire. It was a showy act of defiance against Wagner.
He divided the book up into sections:
Of First and Last Things
On the History of the Moral Sensations
The Religious Life
From the Souls of Artists and Writers
Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture
Man in Society
Woman and Child
A Glance at the State
Man Alone with Himself.
Among Friends: an Epilogue
Each section consisted of numbered aphorisms or aphoristic paragraphs. ‘Of First and Last Things’ begins robustly by pointing out the congenital defect in the fundamental thinking of all previous philosophers: they saw human nature as an aeterna veritas, an eternal truth. Man hovered before them as something unchanging through all turmoil, a secure measure of things. But everything the philosopher asserts is basically no more than a statement about man observed throughout a very limited time span.2 Man has evolved. There are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Everything essential in human development occurred in primeval times, long before those four thousand years with which we are more or less familiar. Man probably hasn’t changed much more in these years. But the philosopher sees ‘instincts’ in present-day man and assumes that they belong to the unchangeable facts of human nature. On this basis he takes them to provide a key to the understanding of the world in general.3 But understanding of the world is not to be reached through anthropomorphism or homocentricity.
Religious, moral and aesthetic sensibilities belong only to the surface of things, though man likes to believe that they touch the heart of the world. This is because they are the things that give meaning to his life, making him deeply happy or unhappy. So he deceives himself in the astrological delusion, believing that the starry sky revolves around his own fate.4
The origin of metaphysics and culture lies in dreams. Primordial man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams. This is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams, man would have found no occasion to divide the world. The separation into body and soul is connected to these ancient beliefs about dreams. So is the assumption of a spiritual apparition; that is the origin of all belief in ghosts and probably also in gods.5
Metaphysical assumptions are passionate errors of self-delusion. Nevertheless, Nietzsche is willing to concede that there might be a metaphysical world as one can hardly dispute the possibility of it. But even if the existence of a metaphysical world were demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge: more useless even than the knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.6
The sections on logic and mathematics read like a non-mathematician’s revenge: logic rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world.7 The same applies to mathematics, which would certainly not have originated if it had been known from the beginning that there exists no exactly straight line in nature, no pure circle nor any absolute beginning.8 We remember Nietzsche’s abysmal school reports for mathematics at Pforta as he tells us that the laws of numbers were invented on the basis of the initially prevailing error that there are various identical things, but actually nothing is identical. The assumption of multiplicity always presumes that there is something which occurs repeatedly. This is erroneous. We invent identical entities and unities that do not exist. In another world, a world that is not our idea, the laws of numbers are completely inapplicable. They are valid only in the human world.9
The section entitled ‘On the History of the Moral Sensations’ comes with warnings. Psychological observation must be the basis of free thought. Mankind cannot be spared the horrible sight of itself on the psychological operating table, with its knives and forceps.10 He reinforces this warning by referring to La Rochefoucauld: ‘That which the world calls virtue is usually nothing but a phantom formed by our passions to which we give an honest name so as to do what we wish with impunity.’11 Man the super-animal (‘Das Über-Tier’) wants to be lied to. Social instincts grew out of shared pleasures and a common aversion to danger. Morality is an official lie told to keep the super-animal in order.
‘A Glance at the State’ observes that government by the ruling orders imperils freedom and verges on despotism; but when it comes to the masses, one must accustom oneself to this regrettable necessity as to an earthquake. Here he quotes Voltaire: ‘When the populace becomes involved in thinking, all is lost.’12
The intentions of socialism cannot be faulted but the whole of the old culture has been built on force, slavery, deception and error. As products and heirs of the totality of this past, we cannot repudiate ourselves, and we may not wish away a single part of it. ‘What is needed is not a forcible redistribution but a gradual transformation of mind: the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone, the instinct for violence weaker.’13
He writes on religion with adamantine self-confidence. Here he treads far surer ground than science, statecraft or mathematics. His scriptural aphorisms ring with Biblical cadences.
He takes specific verses from the Bible and delights in demolishing them. St Luke chapter 18, verse 14, for example, reads: ‘For every one that exalteth himself shall be abased and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’ Nietzsche writes, ‘Luke 18, verse 14 improved: He that humbleth himself wants to be exalted.’14
Belief in ‘the higher swindle’ that is religion, and that includes belief in the ideal, is in danger of being replaced by a blind belief in science which, through its promise of certainty, is becoming elevated to the status of religion. The man who wishes to attain freedom of spirit must apply analytical and critical interpretation to religion, science and the ideal. Free spirits of this kind do not yet exist but one day they will: Nietzsche describes them coming slowly towards him, emerging like phantasmagoria out of the mist of the future. Wanderers upon the earth, they know themselves as travellers to a final destination that does not exist. But this does not blight their lives; on the contrary, their liberation lies in taking pleasure in uncertainty and in transience; they welcome the mysteries of every new dawn for the evolution of thought that it will bring.
Nietzsche called Human, All Too Human a monument to a crisis: not only was it the crisis of an ideological breach with Wagner but also the crisis of disgust at his past ten years of dusty scholarship. Looking back, he felt angry that he had been propelled too soon into a calling he was not suited to: philology had given him a feeling of emptiness and hunger that he had only managed to satisfy through Wagner’s opiate spell. But a musical opium dream was no way to assuage reality. Human, All Too Human marks the start of his philosophical journey in search of the free spirit, the man whose existential hunger can be satisfied despite the absence of the ideal, or the divine, and even despite his own susceptibility to sublimity in music.
Human, All Too Human is the first book written in Nietzsche’s aphoristic style of numbered sections. Driven to write in this staccato way by his appalling health, he had turned his affliction into an advantage. Through writing, he had learned that the aphorism is a provocation, a springboard, a stimulus to further and deeper questioning. The book marks the beginning of his emergence as a truly original stylist, and thinker.
*
He sent the completed text of the first volume (there would be one more) to his publisher Schmeitzner in the middle of January 1878. With it came a list of detailed instructions. The book must be published in time to honour the centenary of Voltaire’s death on 30 May. It must not be advertised in any way. It must be published pseudonymously so that those factions that had already taken sides for or against Nietzsche would not be prejudiced for or against the book. The name of the author to appear on the cover must be ‘Bernhard Cron’. Nietzsche included a biography of the fictitious Cron to be printed in the publicity material.
‘Herr Bernhard Cron is, so far as is known, a German from the Russian Baltic provinces, who of late years has been a continual traveller. In Italy, where among other things he devoted himself to philological and antiquarian studies, he made the acquaintance of Dr Paul Rée. Through the latter’s agency he came into contact with Herr Schmeitzner. As his address for the next few years is subject to constant changes, letters should be forwarded to Herr Cron’s publisher. Herr Schmeitzner has never seen him personally.’15
Schmeitzner refused absolutely. A book of aphorisms by Herr Bernard Cron would attract no attention at all, while a volte-face by the author of The Birth of Tragedy was an event. He wrote bracingly to Nietzsche, ‘Whoever allows himself to speak in public is obliged also to contradict himself in public, as soon as he changes his opinions.’16 Schmeitzner ordered a print run of a thousand copies, disregarded Nietzsche’s ban on advertising and priced it at ten marks. This made it the most expensive book in his catalogue, an indication of high expectations.
Nietzsche’s name appeared on the title page, voluntarily shorn of the title Professor, of which he had once been so proud. In late April Nietzsche sent out twenty-eight complimentary copies. Paul Rée’s came with the inscription, ‘All of my friends are in agreement that my book was written by you or originated from your influence. And so I congratulate you on your new authorship! … Long live Réealism!’
Jacob Burckhardt liked the book. He called it a sovereign publication that would increase the amount of independence in the world, but he and Rée were the only enthusiasts. The other recipients of complimentary copies were the close circle who had followed Nietzsche into the Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian labyrinth. They variously felt betrayed, baffled or repelled. Rohde asked, ‘Can one remove one’s soul and suddenly replace it by another? Can Nietzsche suddenly become Rée?’ It was a question that was also puzzling the rest of the faithful few who had bravely supported The Birth of Tragedy. ‘I want no adherents,’17 he answered sternly when they expressed their doubts.
An anonymous correspondent sent him a bust of Voltaire from Paris with a note saying, ‘The soul of Voltaire pays his respects to Friedrich Nietzsche.’18 Maybe it came from the beautiful Louise Ott, whom he had fallen in love with during the Bayreuth Festival. They were still keeping up a wistful correspondence following her return to her banker husband in Paris. Or maybe Wagner had arranged to have it delivered from Paris. He was fond of a joke.
The book had arrived at Wahnfried on 25 April. The dedication to Voltaire aroused feelings of surprise. After a quick look through it, Wagner decided it might be kinder to the author if he didn’t read it. Cosima, however, did. She observed in it ‘much rage and sullenness’, and something even worse than the influence of Voltaire, namely a microcosm of the whole Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe. Paul Rée was Jewish, a fact she had sniffed out within minutes of making his acquaintance in Sorrento. Cosima’s explanation for Human, All Too Human was that ‘Finally Israel intervened in the form of a Dr Rée, very sleek, very cool, dominated by [Nietzsche], though actually outwitting him – the relationship of Judea and Germany in miniature.’19 And she made the dramatic gesture of burning Nietzsche’s letters.
Wagner himself responded publicly to the book in Bayreuther Blätter, the newspaper-cum-propaganda sheet that he had succeeded in setting up. When Nietzsche had turned down the editorship of the paper, Wagner had appointed Hans von Wolzogen in his place. He was an anti-Semite and a second-rate intellectual who had wormed his way into Wahnfried by means of building a showy villa nearby and plying Wagner with flattery. Though Nietzsche famously despised newspaper culture and had rejected the post, he was jealous of von Wolzogen’s editorship. It was a powerful position.
Wagner’s article was ostensibly one in a general survey of the relation between art and the public in Germany. In fact it was a defence of himself and of Schopenhauerism, of the concept of the metaphysical and, above all, of the idea of artistic genius, of which he considered himself the prime European example. He deplored the rise of the model of scientific knowledge with its heavy emphasis on chemistry and unintelligible equations. He blamed this for the spread in sceptical intellectuality. Repudiation of metaphysics had led to questioning the very notion of all things human, including genius. Such a denial of genius’s privileged access to the mystical inner essence of reality was nonsense. Scientific thinking was incapable ever of achieving comparable intuitive connection to the human spirit.20
Nietzsche, who had not yet discovered Wagner’s horrible correspondence with his doctor, did not respond publicly. He merely noted privately that the article was vindictive, hurtful and badly argued. It made him feel as dislocated as a piece of luggage posted from an ideal world. He suffered a prolonged health crisis for the rest of the year. When he could manage it, he jotted down repudiatory material, which would appear in ‘A Miscellany of Opinions and Maxims’ and ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, becoming the second part of Human, All Too Human. The writing was a frustrating and distressing business:
‘All of it – except for a few lines – was thought out on walks, and it was sketched in pencil in six small notebooks; the fair copy made me ill almost every time I set about writing it. I had to omit about twenty longish thought sequences, unfortunately quite essential ones, because I could not find the time to extract them from my frightful pencil scribblings … In the interim the connections between thought escape my memory; I have to steal the minutes and quarter-hours of “brain energy” as you call it, steal them away from a suffering brain.’21
Following his year of paid leave, he had returned to Basle to attempt teaching again. He felt that he could not carry on his life without feeling that he was doing something of practical use.
There was a new physician in Basle, Rudolf Massini. Consulting with Dr Eiser, he opined that dementia paralytica should not be discounted. He predicted probable blindness and he forbade all reading and writing for several years. Massini might as well have pronounced a death sentence.
*
It had been comparatively easy for Nietzsche to continue teaching while he had Johann Köselitz to read and write for him and Elisabeth to keep house, but Köselitz had moved on to pursue a career as a composer in Venice and Elisabeth was no longer prepared to fly to his side.
She had been affronted at the outright anti-Christianity of Human, All Too Human. The book brought shame on the family. Now her brother was talking of giving up his professorship, a step that would leave him poor and without status. It would quench the bright lustre reflected from the professorship onto his mother and herself. This would not improve her marriage prospects in Naumburg’s repressive, patriarchal and, above all, conventional society.
It was time to change alliance. Borrowed radiance might be recovered from a different source, from Wagner and Cosima, whose star was at the zenith. Ever since Nietzsche had introduced Elisabeth to Cosima at Tribschen, she had been making herself useful in many little ways. Both women were intensely bourgeois and intensely religious. Both were equally repelled and wounded by Human, All Too Human. Cosima wrote to Elisabeth telling her frankly that she found the book intellectually insignificant and morally lamentable. The style was at once pretentious and slipshod. Cosima believed that on almost every page she could discover ‘superficiality and childish sophistry’. Nietzsche’s treachery was absolute. He had left them to fly into a ‘well-fortified hostile camp’, i.e. Jewry.
Elisabeth supported this view wholeheartedly. She had started a correspondence with a leading anti-Semite agitator whom she had met in Bayreuth, named Bernhard Förster. His nationalism and anti-Semitism appealed to her far more than her brother’s Europeanism and Réealism. She had no intention of becoming a free spirit; on the contrary, she cherished every fetter that tied her to society and convention. Her brother’s circle in Basle had been liberally scattered with bachelors but it had proved romantically fruitless. Time to settle back in Naumburg and concentrate on her marriage prospects.
Without Elisabeth to keep house, Nietzsche withdrew from visibility. He sold his furniture and moved to simple lodgings on the outskirts of town near the zoological gardens. Bachlettenstrasse 11 meant a long walk to the university, but he still valiantly continued to make his way there to fulfil his teaching obligations. Living alone, ‘half-dead with pain and exhaustion’, he kept careful notes of expenses, and drew up a Pforta-like timetable intended to keep him intellectually productive and financially within budget for the next two hundred weeks.
On 2 May 1879, he officially resigned his professorship, citing ill health. He placed his hopes in his doctors being right when they said his teaching and writing work were responsible for his abysmal health. He himself had also been blaming the siren song of Wagner. ‘My very problematic thinking and writing till now have always made me ill; as long as I was really a scholar, I was healthy too; but then came music, to shatter my nerves, and metaphysical philosophy and worry about a thousand things which do not concern me at all …’22 Once the two loads were lifted, he would surely regain physical health.
On 30 June, the university accepted his resignation, granting him a pension of three thousand Swiss francs for six years. He had not continuously been resident in Switzerland over a period of eight years, and so he did not qualify to become a Swiss citizen. He welcomed his statelessness. This was the position from which to comprehend a universal morality, to reshape good and evil based on a new evaluation of life, free of any merely receptive borrowing. Maybe at last he had become a truly free spirit.
Thinking to emulate his childhood hero Hölderlin, he identified an old tower in the walls of Naumburg where he would live cheaply, while working as a gardener. But it took only six weeks to realise that a gardener needed a stronger back and much, much better eyes. And so began the years of his wandering.
1 Nietzsche to Ernst Schmeitzner, 2 February 1877.
2 Human, All Too Human, ‘Of First and Last Things’, Section 2.
3 Ibid., Section 2.
4 Ibid., Section 4.
5 Ibid., Section 5.
6 Ibid., Section 9.
7 Ibid., Section 6.
8 Ibid., Section 11.
9 Ibid., Section 19.
10 Ibid., ‘On the History of the Moral Sensations’, Section 37.
11 La Rochefoucauld, opening sentence of Sentences et maximes morales, referred to in Human, All Too Human, ‘On the History of the Moral Sensations’, Section 35.
12 Ibid., ‘A Glance at the State’, Section 438.
13 Ibid., ‘A Glance at the State’, Section 452.
14 Ibid., ‘On the History of the Moral Sensations’, Section 87.
15 Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon, p. 59. See also Förster-Nietzsche, The Life of Nietzsche, Vol. II, p. 32.
16 Ernst Schmeitzner to Nietzsche, quoted in Förster-Nietzsche, The Life of Nietzsche, Vol. II, p. 32.
17 Nietzsche to Mathilde Meier, 15 July 1878.
18 ‘L’âme de Voltaire fait ses compliments à Friedrich Nietzsche.’
19 Cosima Wagner to Marie von Schleinitz, June 1878.
20 Wagner published three articles on Publikum und Popularität in Bayreuther Blätter, August–September 1878.
21 Nietzsche to Johann Heinrich Köselitz (aka Peter Gast), 5 October 1879.
22 Nietzsche to Malwida von Meysenbug, 1 July 1877.