The German Genius

Nietzsche was leaving his twenties, he seems to have felt an urge to strike out on his own. Or was it that Wagner, although used to associating with geniuses—Heine, Schumann, and Mendelssohn—refused to acknowledge that quality in Nietzsche? Wagner’s wife, Cosima, observed that Nietzsche was “undoubtedly the most gifted of our young friends, but the most displeasing…It is as if he were resisting the overpowering effect of Wagner’s personality.” 38
    There was no decisive act of breakage and, at the Bayreuth Festival in 1883, Wagner confided to Nietzsche’s sister: “Tell your brother than I am quite alone since he went away and left me.” Nor did Nietzsche turn his back on Wagner right away. Two of his own books were devoted to the composer, The Wagner Case and Nietzsche contra Wagner while the title of a third, Götzendämmerung ( Twilight of the Idols ) was a clear echo of Götterdämmerung . 39
    A complicating factor was the philosopher’s bad health. Nietzsche experienced chronic problems with his eyes, ferocious migraines, and terrible stomach upsets that caused him to vomit “in embarrassing circumstances.” Since he would succumb to tertiary syphilis at the early age of forty-four, these symptoms are usually assumed to be the first signs of onset. Another symptom may well have been his idiosyncratic lifestyle: he lived alone and moved from rooming house to small hotel in Switzerland, Italy, or France, devoting six to ten hours a day to walking in the open air, returning to his room only to write, eat, or sleep. The books that he composed in this way are now among the classics of philosophy, with a style all their own. Nietzsche was not concerned to give an overarching argument in the manner of Fichte or Hegel. He saw it as his task to offer startling, short, pithy insights in prose that is regarded as among the best German there is (“incandescent”). 40
    “W EEDS , R UBBLE AND V ERMIN”
     
    Nietzsche made the sharpest of breaks with Schopenhauer. There was no “other realm” for Nietzsche—he came to believe that this world that we experience is the only reality there is. (This is worth bearing in mind in all that follows: in modern German history the division between irrationalism and rationalism is sometimes too sharply drawn.) “The apparent world is the real world,” said Nietzsche, and it was occupied by “weeds, rubble and vermin.” 41
    His best known affirmation is that “God is dead,” from which two important things follow. One, there is no transcendental realm; and two, our morals and values cannot stem from the other realm. Morals must have their basis in this world since there is nowhere “else” they can come from. Socially and historically, human beings create their own moralities and values, and the “ideal” is nothing but “a figment of the human imagination.” He agreed with Schopenhauer that living things are basically selfish and will always seize what they want and then defend their possessions to the death. This is what he called “life-assertion,” for him the most fundamental instinct of all, meaning that “the war of all against all” is the natural order. Civilization emerged from this war of all against all, in which, over the millennia, “the strong eliminated the weak, the healthy the sick, the clever the stupid, the competent the incompetent.” Everything basic developed out of this struggle, but then came a crucial change. Two or three thousand years ago, in various parts of the world, there arose a generation of people who invented morality. “They taught that the powerful should not take what they wanted but should voluntarily submit to law.” 42
    Nietzsche picked out in particular Socrates and Jesus. Between them, he felt, they had reversed the process that had distinguished humans from other animals and made culture possible. Their influential—but to him perverted—doctrine succeeded because it suited the interests of the majority, the masses, the “ungifted.” In doing this, Socrates and Jesus, he thought, did their best to inhibit the natural processes of the onward march of civilization and were jointly responsible for decadence and decline. 43
    From such a starting point, Nietzsche embarked on a wholesale critique of contemporary culture. For him it was self-evident that mankind’s institutions, our arts and sciences, our philosophy and politics—as they have grown since Socrates and Jesus—have developed on the basis