By Michael F. Duggan
One hundred thirty six years ago last week (January 3, 1889), the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, collapsed in a street in Turin. He had been acting in an increasingly erratic manner for a few weeks. The most commonly told version of his collapse is that, in a scene reminiscent of one in Crime and Punishment, Nietzsche bolted across the Piazza Carlo Alberto, and then, in tears, threw his arms around the neck of a horse that was being beaten by its master. If true, his last sane (or first insane) act, was one of compassion.
He was taken home in a state of unconsciousness, and when he awoke, he was never the same, other than in a few fleeting moments of lucidity and memory. For a number of days he was delusional and manic, singing, dancing, and loudly playing the piano in the house of his landlord. Leading up to his collapse, he he had written a series of letters (including ones to Cosima Wagner and Otto von Bismarck as well as a number of friends), famously signing them “Dionysus” and “The Crucified.”
Franz Overbeck, a friend who had received one of the letters, took him (and likely saved him from legal trouble) to a sanatorium in Basel. His breakdown was diagnosed as “paralysis progressiva.” Today it would probably be called a psychotic breakdown. He was moved from Basel to a facility in Jena, closer to his mother and sister. His condition reached an intensified state of incoherence and hallucinations before, as Julian Young notes, lapsing into “catatonic withdrawal degenerating, [and] eventually, into a vegetative state.”
As Nietzsche biographer, R.J. Hollingdale observes:
“He took eleven years to die, and in that time he became a figure of legend: living, yet dead, existing in a world beyond human reach, he excited to a dangerous degree the myth-making powers of a nation increasingly addicted to fantasy and irrationalism. The Nietzsche for whom the Nazis built a museum at Weimar was, in all strictness, a madman: the Nietzsche of the last eleven years, transformed from a rational philosopher and writer of genius into a man without qualities upon whom any characteristics might be put.”
Over the course of 1888—the year leading up to his collapse–he had written five lucid, but increasingly excited (Dionysian) books. The man who had begun his career writing as a rational (Apollonian) and fairly dry academic, had become a drunken poet.
At the same time, he was working on what he characterized as his master work, The Will to Power (faithful selections of which were published in English as Writings from the Late Notebooks, 1885-1888 in 2003). Unfortunately Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche, his sister and a vulgar proto-fascist, got hold of these, and after one of the most infamous hatchet jobs in literary history published them in unrecognizable form, grotesquely misrepresenting her stricken brother’s ideas. And so the advocate of aristocratic individualism became a patron saint of the Nazis (even though he hated German nationalism, mass movements, grandstanding thugs, and had called antisemitism “scabies of the heart”).
But even with the historical record largely corrected over the past 80 years, we have to be careful about Nietzsche. He is as dangerous as he is interesting. He was a sick man for most of his life, and at the end, he was mentally ill before becoming vegetative. Still his ideas should be read and evaluated on their merits rather than psychologized on the basis of his descent into madness..
To introduce him even into informed conversation is to risk a fight or outright dismissal by people who have only glimpsed his oeuvre or have internalized the lingering rumors (there is a New Yorker cartoon from the 1950s in which a man tells a bartender “At my first mention of Nietzsche, stop serving me”). But the fascination about him has also persisted. He is like a figure out of romantic fiction: one of the greatest minds of the 19th century and one of the most striking original thinkers of all time who was also the living embodiment of the mad philosopher (a title he shares with Diogenes of Sinope). He is the embodiment of the insane genius, and if often blamed as a font of the chaos of the 20th century (Bertrand Russell lumps Nietzsche among the “angry men” of the 1890s, along with Ibsen and Strindberg, even though he spend the entire decade in a vegetative state).
Nietzsche fails as the basis for a political or programmatic thinker. As Thomas Hardy writes (with a fair amount of reduction), Nietzsche “insanely regarded life as a thing improvable by force to immaculate gloriousness, when all the time life’s inseparable conditions allow only for clumsy opportunities for amelioration by plodding compromises and contrivances.” Sure, but that is only a part of him, and there must be more to life than “plodding compromises and contrivances,” malicious irony, and “the intrinsic crookedness of things.”
Like many idealists who take their ideas to logical absurdity, Nietzsche still has something to offer in terms of prescribing a basis for living in a world without intrinsic values or meaning. A liberal-minded reading of his ideas is that we should seek to be our best selves–actualize our intrinsic qualities as best as possible in a fleeting life–and live as nobly as possible amidst life’s imperfections. Even if the eternal recurrence of the universe is not literally true, the past still exists in a certain, perhaps literal, sense, and therefore, insofar as it is in our power to do so, we should strive to make our lives monuments for eternity.