Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, almost wholly neglected during his sane life, which came to an abrupt end early in 1889. ‘Nietzsche’ is the figure in whose name people of the most astonishingly discrepant and various views have sought to find justification for them. An excellent study (Aschheim, 1992) devoted to his impact within Germany between 1890 and 1990 lists, among those who have found inspiration in his work, ‘anarchists, feminists, Nazis, religious cultists, Socialists, Marxists, vegetarians, avant-garde artists, devotees of physical culture, and archconservatives,’ and it certainly does not need to stop there. The front cover sports a bookplate from 1900 of Nietzsche wearing a crown of thorns, the back cover one of him naked, with remarkable musculature, posing on an Alp. Almost no German cultural or artistic figure of the last ninety years has not acknowledged his influence, from Thomas Mann to Jung to Heidegger.
The story in ‘Anglosaxony’, to use the term in the title of one book about him, which traces his influence in the Western English-speaking world (Bridgwater, 1972), is similar. Wave after wave of Nietzscheanism has broken over it, though there have been periods when he was in abeyance, being seen as the inspirer of German militarism, and so to be vilified by the Allies. He was extensively, and most inaccurately, translated into English, or a language strangely connected with it, in the early years of the century. For all its archaizing grotesqueness, or partly because of that, it was the only translation of many of Nietzsche’s works for almost fifty years.
Then, when his reputation was at its lowest in England and the United States, Walter Kaufmann, an emigré professor of philosophy at Princeton, began retranslating many of the key works, and launched the enterprise with a book that had, for many years after its first appearance in 1950, a determining influence on the way Nietzsche was viewed (Kaufmann, 1974). Kaufmann presented a philosopher who was a much more traditional thinker than the one who had inspired anarchists, vegetarians, etc. To widespread surprise, and only slightly less widespread agreement, Nietzsche turned out to be a reasonable man, even a rationalist. Kaufmann sought to establish comprehensively his remoteness from the Nazis, from all irrationalist movements that had claimed him as their forebear, and from Romanticism in the arts. It became difficult, on this version, to see what all the fuss had been about. Thus began the academicization of Nietzsche, one philosopher among others, to be compared and contrasted with Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and other leading names in the Western philosophical tradition. Reassured by the breadth of Kaufmann’s learning, American philosophers, and then increasingly English ones, took him as a starting-point for their studies of Nietzsche on objectivity, the nature of truth, his relationship to Greek thought, the nature of the self, and other harmless topics, at any rate as treated in their books and articles.
Meanwhile in Europe Nietzsche, who had never been in disgrace there, became after World War II a continued object of study and appropriation for existentialists, phenomenologists, and then increasingly, during the 1960s and 1970s, a cynosure for critical theorists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists. When the latter two movements first gained a foothold in the United States, then took the country over, it was Nietzsche who once more was acknowledged as the major source of their inspiration. Some analytical philosophers, too, found that he was not so remote from their interests as they had assumed, and, in that reciprocal motion that is so characteristic of academic life, congratulated him on having had, in embryonic fashion, some of their insights, while at the same time reassuring themselves about those insights by invoking his authority. There is now a flourishing Nietzsche industry, and almost certainly more books appear on him each year than on any other thinker, thanks to the appeal he has for so many disparate schools of thought and anti-thought.
It is idle to pretend that he would have been entirely displeased by this phenomenon. During his lifetime (and unless I specify otherwise, I shall always mean by that the one that finished when he went mad in 1889, eleven years before his death) he was almost completely neglected, and though that did not make him bitter, as hardly anything did, it caused him distress because he believed that he had vital truths to impart to his contemporaries which they were ignoring at a terrible cost – one of his most accurate prophecies. But he would have looked with scorn on almost everything that has been written or done under his aegis, and the successful take-over by the academic world, though it cannot compare in horror with some of the other appropriations he has suffered, would have seemed to him most like a final defeat, because he wanted at all costs not to be assimilated to the world of learning, where everything becomes a matter for discussion and nothing for action.
Before we move into an account of his views, it is worth stopping briefly and pondering what it might be about his work that has proved so attractive to such diverse movements and schools of thought. Only later will a clearer answer emerge. But it seems, as a preliminary explanation, that it is precisely the idiosyncrasies of his manner that are first found refreshing. His books, after the early The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the Untimely Meditations (1873–6), are usually composed of short essays, often less than a page long and verging on the aphoristic, though, as we shall see, crucially different from aphorisms as normally composed and appreciated: that is, one- or two-line encapsulations of the nature of human experience, demanding acceptance through their lapidary certainty. The number of subjects discussed is vast, including many that it is surprising to find mentioned by a philosopher – such matters as climate, diet, exercise, and Venice. And often his reflections are in no particular order. That means that he is much easier than most philosophers to dip into, and his frequently expressed loathing of systems means that one can do that with a good conscience. Many of his quasi-aphorisms are radical in content, and though one may gain only a vague impression of what he favours, one will certainly find out a great deal about his dislikes, most often expressed in terms that are both witty and extreme. What he seems to dislike is every aspect of contemporary civilization, most particularly that of the Germans, and for the reader that is bracing. His underlying view that if we don’t make a drastically new start we are doomed, since we are living in the wreckage of two thousand and more years of fundamentally mistaken ideas about almost everything that matters – in, as it were, the decadence of what was anyway deadly – offers carte blanche to people who fancy the idea of a clean break with their whole cultural inheritance. Nietzsche was under no illusions about the impossibility of such a schism.
Even so, the variety of interpretations of his work, which far from diminishing as the decades pass, seems to be multiplying, though in less apocalyptic forms than previously, needs more explanation. It suggests to the outsider that he must have been exceptionally vague, and probably contradictory. There is something in both those charges. But they seem more impressive and damning than they are if one does not realize and continually keep in mind that, in the sixteen years during which he wrote his mature works, from BT onwards, he was developing his views at a rate that has no parallel, and that he rarely went to the bother of signposting his changes of mind.
What he more often did was to try to see his earlier works in a new light, surveying his career in a way that suggests he thought one could not understand his later writings without a knowledge of his previous ones, to see how he had advanced; and thus taking himself to be exemplary of how modern man, immured in the decaying culture of the nineteenth century, might move from acquiescence in it to rebellion and suggestions for radical transformation. In 1886 in particular, when he was on the verge, though he could not have known it, of his last creative phase, he spent a great deal of energy on his previous books, providing new, sometimes harshly critical, introductions to them, and in the case of The Gay Science writing a long, new, final book. No doubt this was part of his programme for showing that nothing in one’s past should be regretted, that there need be no waste. But many commentators have been led astray by assuming that it gave them licence to treat all his writings as though they had been produced simultaneously.
Another factor that has made for misreadings and shocking distortions is a consequence of the fact that, from 1872 at least but probably before that, Nietzsche must have spent most of his time writing. The tally of published books is impressive enough. But he noted down at least as much as he organized into books, and unfortunately much of this unpublished writing (the Nachlass) has survived. It would not be unfortunate if there were a universally accepted methodological principle that what he did not publish should under all circumstances be clearly demarcated from what he did, but almost no one observes that elementary rule. Even those who claim that they will do this usually slip into unattributed quoting from the immense Nachlass when it confirms the line that they are taking on him. What makes this a particularly dangerous way of proceeding is that on some central concepts, among which the Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence are perhaps the most important, his thought remained so undeveloped. Nietzsche was often so sure he had struck philosophical gold that he jotted down very many thoughts, but left them unworked out. This provides a commentator with the possibility of pursuing trains of thought that he is attributing to Nietzsche, unimpeded by definite statements. Some have even taken the view that the ‘real’ Nietzsche is to be found in the notebooks, the published work being a kind of elaborate – very elaborate – set of concealments. That absurd attitude is taken by Heidegger, who is thus enabled to peddle his own philosophy as deriving from and also critical of Nietzsche.
Like all his other commentators, I shall occasionally quote from the Nachlass, but I shall indicate when I am doing that. Nietzsche took great pains over the finished form of what he published, and he was the last person to think that style was an optional extra. Since he was a natural stylist, his jottings make more elegant reading than most philosophers’ finished products. But when one compares his published thoughts with his draft versions of them, the difference is striking enough to make anyone cautious of taking them as being on a par, one would have thought. I emphasize this point because, as we shall see, the manipulation of what Nietzsche wrote has been a major factor in myth-making about him.
None of this explains adequately how Nietzsche could come to be portrayed as the Man of Sorrows, or indeed in many other guises. For all his ambiguities and his careful lack of definition of an ideal, one would have thought there were limits to the extent of possible misrepresentations. All I can lamely say here is that evidently there appear to be no limits. If someone develops a reputation as vast as his rapidly became, once he was no longer in a position to do anything about it, it seems that he will be unscrupulously used to give credentials to any movement that needs an icon. Here, as in some other respects, he does with awful irony come to resemble his antipode, the ‘Crucified One’. Almost the last words he wrote were, ‘I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom: Listen to me! For I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!’ (EH, preface, 1). In the century since he wrote that, few of his readers, fewer still of those who have heard about him, have done anything else.