The German Genius

of false values. It was now our task, he said, beginning with himself, to reconstruct our world. “It will be the biggest break, the biggest watershed in the whole of history so that, throughout the future, all time will be reckoned as being either before this event or after it.”
    His purpose was to render human beings wholly spontaneous, to make them as free and unself-conscious as animals and to realize that they were discordant beings, not harmonious ones. 44 The unrepressed and uninhibited life would be for him superior to what had gone before and, to reflect this brave new world, he minted a new name for those who lived in this way— Übermenschen (supermen). The Übermensch would be free to take full advantage of the fact that there is no soul, no God, no transcendental realm, no world other than this . “There are no rewards other than the joy in being. The meaning of life is life.” 45 Life assertion became the task of superman, the supremely valuable activity. The will to live, to assert one’s presence in the world, to sweep aside all obstacles—Nietzsche called this “the will to power” and we can see clearly how this turns Schopenhauer on his head and comprises the radical mutation of the notion of Bildung. Since the noumenal realm doesn’t exist, our “oneness” with it cannot exist either, and therefore our compassion that arises from it, and forms the foundation of morality, cannot exist either. Morality stems from self-interest, and there is absolutely no place for compassion. 46
    In working against Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also—naturally—drew away from Wagner. This shift surfaced spectacularly in his attack on Parsifal , which he denounced as “An apostasy and reversion to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideas…”
    In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, incurably insane, and was nursed for the next eleven years by his sister Elisabeth, who was to doctor his manuscripts and create her own controversy. Until that point he had never really settled in his own mind his attitude to his former friend. Just before his mental collapse, he had been quietly playing Wagner on the piano, but he was full of bitterness.
    Only nine days after the composer’s death in 1883, Nietzsche confided in a letter to a friend, “Wagner was by far the fullest human being I have known.” However, he went on, “Something like a deadly offence came between us; and something terrible could have happened if he had lived longer.” 47
    Details about this “deadly offence” emerged only in 1956, when correspondence first came to light between Wagner and a doctor who had examined Nietzsche. 48 It related to a consultation Nietzsche had in Switzerland in 1877. The doctor, a passionate Wagnerian, examined Nietzsche and found his health poor—indeed Nietzsche was at risk of going blind. This was when Nietzsche and Wagner were still friends and so, following the examination, Nietzsche wrote to Wagner, reporting the diagnosis, but also enclosing an essay on The Ring , which the doctor had written and given to Nietzsche, on the understanding that it would be passed on. Wagner replied to the doctor, thanking him for the essay, but also raising the matter of Nietzsche’s health, apparently referring to the belief, common at the time, that blindness was caused by masturbation. The doctor, in his reply to Wagner, behaved extremely unprofessionally, confiding that, during his examination, Nietzsche told him he had visited prostitutes in Italy “on medical advice.” (This was sometimes recommended then as treatment for chronic masturbation.)
    Even at this distance, the set of events is shocking; how much worse it must have been then. It is now known that the details of this exchange circulated during the Bayreuth Festival of 1882, coming to Nietzsche’s own notice later that same year. He confessed in a letter that an “ abysmal treachery” had got back to him. More than one observer has concluded that this episode helped to unbalance Nietzsche. 49
    It is a story that diminishes two great men.

Physics Becomes King: Helmholtz, Clausius, Boltzmann, Riemann
     
    F or a whole year, beginning in February 1840, Julius Robert von Mayer (1814–78) served as a ship’s physician on board a Dutch merchantman to the East Indies. 1 The son of an apothecary in Heilbronn, Württemberg, Mayer graduated in medicine from the University of Tübingen in 1838 and enlisted as a ship’s doctor with the Dutch East