Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM. - Philologist and philosopher, b. at Röcken in Saxony on 15 Sept. 1844, d. at Weimar on 25 Aug. 1900. A doctor and professor of philology (1869) at the University of Basel, he left teaching in 1879 for reasons of health. In fact the nervous illness (cerebral paralysis) from which he suffered grew progressively worse, despite the various health resorts he frequented, and culminated in a state of madness (Turin 1889), from which he never emerged.

His literary activity comprises three phases, corresponding to the periods of his formation, rebellion and spiritual decadence, and of his cultural relationships.

1. 1866-72: philological studies. Besides the history of the Greek poets (Theocritus, the lyric poets, the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, posthumous material on the history of rhetoric and of rhythmics), N. worked with great success on the textual criticism of the Lives of the Philosophers of Diogenes Laertius, which he published in the Rheinisches Museum of 1868-70, demonstrating that its sources are discernible and reconstructible and allow the work of the earlier historians to be recognized, he gave form to his own classical historiography in two fundamental works: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1871, ed. at Leipzig, in 1872, 1878) and Über die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (posthumous).

N.'s thesis is that in the formation of Greek civilization two elements contend for spiritual dominion, the Apollonian, contemplative and dreamy, and the Dionysian, titanic and barbaric, the first of which prevails in the dialogue, the second in the chorus of the tragedies. But since these have a choral and musical origin, they therefore have the Dionysian cults as their first source. The same happens in philosophy, where the Heraclitean and sophistic tendency is Dionysian, but with Socrates an Apollonian attitude asserts itself, which according to N. is inferior.

2. 1873-79: critique of culture. Just as classical philology appeared to N. to need renewal with Dionysian lights, so the Germanic culture that had created it appeared to him backward-looking and insufficient after the war of 1870-71, and he devoted himself to carrying out its critique and to exalting whoever could save it from decadence. Thus were born, from university lectures, the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, four essays: David Friedrich Strauss (ibid. 1873) reconstructer of « philistine » morality and of historico-religious criticism; Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Geschichte für das Leben (1874), a critique of traditional, erudite, hypercritical historicism; Schopenhauer als Erzieher (ibid. 1874), in which he was the first to recognize in the philosopher of pessimism a master of human redemption; and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (ibid. 1876), dedicated to illustrating the anti-bourgeois and ultra-romantic genius of the great musician with whom, however, a break occurred.

Human, All Too Human contains the revision of decadent Enlightenment values: futurism, the moral sense, religiosity, the artistic-literary conscience, high and popular culture, the commercial world, the education of women and children, statism, solipsism. N.'s philosophy in this period is no longer simply Dionysian-sophistic, but an aestheticizing irrationalism; artistic creation saves man, through its pathos, from the pessimistic reality of existence and substitutes for it an inner image as vision and dream of the beautiful. The Apollonian element thus gained the upper hand even in N. But he sought a practical affirmation of it, he demanded of it a solution for life.

3. 1880-88: doctrine of the « superman » and of the will to power. Despite the progress of his illness, he meditated and drafted a series of works conceived systematically, though almost all in the form of aphorisms: Morgenröthe, Gedanke über moral. Vorurteile (Chemnitz, 1880-81: the title recalls a theosophical work of Jakob Boehme); Die Wiederkunft des Gleichen (1881), a sketch of ideas set out in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (ibid. 1881-82: 2nd ed. enlarged, 1887: the title alludes to troubadour culture and has a prologue and an epilogue in verse); Also sprach Zarathustra, « a book for all and for none »: N.'s masterpiece, a poem in prose and verse in four parts (the first three published at Chemnitz in 1883-84, the fourth in a few copies in '85 and added to the others in 1892), is his only organic work after the Geburt d. Tragödie (the title derives from the prologue of the Arabic text of the « Gospel of the Infancy », according to Cod. orient. Laur. 32 of Florence); Jenseits von Gut und Böse, « prelude to a philosophy of the future » (Leipzig 1885-86), a philosophical commentary on Zarathustra; Zur Genealogie der Moral (ibid. 1887), with which the author came to approach positivism. From Sept. 1886 to March 1888 he worked on the great work Der Wille zur Macht, « essay toward a transvaluation of all values » (in four books: European nihilism; Critique of the previous supreme values; Principle of a new determination of values; Race and education of the race); it remained in a fragmentary state and was published posthumously in 1902.

In the single year 1888, foreseeing the imminent crisis, between Turin and Sils-Maria he frenetically composed and published: Der Fall Wagner, a violent diatribe against his former defender, to which he added N. contra Wagner (ibid.), a selection of aphorisms from his other works adapted to the same purpose; Die Götzendämmerung (ibid. 1889), « how one philosophizes with the hammer », in which he sententiously takes up his youthful critique of Greek philosophy and of its modern imitations; the Antichrist « essay toward a critique of Christianity » and toward a new redaction of the Will to Power; Ecce homo, a synthetic history of his spiritual drama and of his literary activity (up to the Wagner case). On these last pages, which appeared posthumously (Leipzig 1908), his pen came to a stop.

The system of ideas that N. had thus come to formulate has remained classic like the new humanism, and could be defined as an orientalist classicism (Apollonian-Zoroastrian) and a pragmatist skepticism. It comprises the following paradoxes:

1) the true redemption of humanity consists in liberation from the ideas of collectivist or societal origin in which Socratism, Christianity, the modern bourgeoisie, Western Kultur have run aground, and in dissolving the doctrine of civil progress to which they had commended themselves. In this dissolution it is discovered that a non-progressive natural law rules the life of men and is the very one symbolized by the ancient myth of the eternal return of all things and of all events, even personal ones, through cosmic cycles. The continuous and perpetually repeated identity of forms and acts removes all meaning from their apparent evolution and from their presumptive appropriation by an epoch or a class.

2) He who can overcome, despise and dissolve the bonds of these human fictions is only the superman, a prophet acting toward other men, like Zarathustra, the magus of the Persian Zend-Avesta. The Nietzschean superman has nothing transcendent about him; he is the « meaning of the earth », the very terrestrial, sensible consciousness of humanity, which makes itself liberating; the liberation he produces has nothing anti-bodily about it, it is the very will that imposes itself with its ingenuousness and its strength. It is a form of neo-paganism, which is not, however, bound to the Manichaean dualism of good and evil, like that of the ancient Zarathustra, but is « beyond good and evil » insofar as these represent differences and oppositions marked by weakness and servitude and wholly inconsistent conventional categories. The superman is the elect, genial man, the creative and revealing artist, who vanquishes the average, or mediocre, man of the common and neutral type. The morality that he overcomes is instead an illusory historico-social formation that seeks to conceal from him the healthy and living reality of existence.

3) Nihilism, or the nullity of supreme values, a doctrine of Eastern origins but in Nietzsche's time presented as the latest novelty of the anarchist philosophers, is the consequence of the historical synthesis between Christianity and European thought. Modern Christianity in fact attributes to man an absolute value, to the world perfection, to the knowledge of values the meaning of adequate knowledge, to religion the healing of what man despises in himself. Rationalist philosophy in turn makes of this science of absolute values a system of categories commensurate with that conception of man and the world. But in one case as in the other, the problems of teleology arise: what is the purpose of all this? And of relativity: how long does it last? The world of categories is relative to a world feigned by humanity in the process of becoming: the absolute of the eternal return is the annihilation of this fiction. The relativistic pragmatism of Hans Vaihinger's (v.) Philosophie des Als-Ob, his contemporary, coincides with the fundamental views sketched out for the Will to Power.

4) In order to recover their purity and authenticity, human values must be transvalued according to this new principle. By "will to power" (a concept in itself contradictory, because power, even in the scientific conception of potential force, Macht, is always an abstraction of the act) Nietzsche means the return of life toward the primordial, negative source (in the Schopenhauerian sense of the will) of acts, a return in which, as for historical-mystical reality in the eternal return, indeed identically with it, lies its whole genuine nature. The will to power generates knowing as phenomenism (v.) of the world, both outer and inner: its theoretical forms are merely interpretations, in themselves unreflective and irrational, even when they take on intellectualistic aspects and posit in reason the unnecessary hypothesis of a subject (v.), or of several subjects. The power thus acquired over one's own sensibility in turn generates the conviction of truth as the persistence of hypotheses and the admission of an equivalent reality; but Nietzsche is opposed to the positivist theory that facts and causal and functional determinations are thus identified: rather, in the formulation of being, the will to power is exalted, and with the idea of the eternal return the highest possible approximation to the idea of real being is attained (which, however, is appearance in comparison with actual becoming). The will to power reveals itself in nature as the desire for force in act, Kraft; it is its intimate animator, the inner becoming, of which phenomena and physical laws are the manifestation, the symptoms. This will intrinsic to nature produces organic life; but not in the sense indicated by Darwinism, which ties biological phenomena to an extrinsic utility and an apparent power (struggle for existence, survival of the fittest; conformism substituted for intellectual transformism): rather in that of a finality consisting in the increase of power and in the triumph of what is stronger (individuation [v.]), indeed of the stronger individual (v.) and even to the sacrifice of the species. This is not a progress, particularly in the human species, nor of this species in comparison with others, but a search for the highest type of existence, up to the point of genius. The more this is a "sublime machine," the more it is destructive of the other forms of individuation. The same principle explains the genesis of volitional values, unconscious affirmations of power by individuals, and must establish the values of society and of the State in favor of the stronger individual, of the superman, of artistic genius and of the superiority of race and culture.

These last suggestions, later placed at the service of Pan-Germanism, were instead directed by Nietzsche to illustrate the contrast between the Dionysian-sophistic spirit he objectively imitated and Christianity as a promoter of human weaknesses and of subjection to traditional and intellectualistic powers. But it is doubtful whether, even by systematically composing the doctrine he outlined, he would ever have succeeded in coordinating its contradictions and paradoxes, which are suggestive more than anything else, by poetic efficacy, of a better evaluation of history and reality.

Biography: fundamental: E. Foerster, N., Das Leben N., 3 vols., Leipzig 1895-1904; 2nd ed. in 2 vols. ibid. 1912-14; id., N. giovane, Italian trans. by E. Rigutini, Florence 1924; id., Das N.-Archiv, seine Freunde u. Feinde, Leipzig 1907; P. Deussen, Erinnerungen an F. N., ibid. 1901; D. Halévy, La vie de F. N., Paris 1909; E. F. Podach, N.'s Zusammenbruch, Heidelberg 1930; id., Gestalten um N., Berlin 1932. On N. and Wagner: L. Griesser, N. und Wagner, Vienna 1923; K. Hildebrandt, N. und Wagner, Breslau 1924. On N.'s character: S. Caramella, in La cultura, 4 (1925), pp. 337-44; S. Zweig, Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, Leipzig 1928. On his evolution: Lou André-Salomé, F. N. in s. Werken, Vienna 1894 (French trans., Paris 1932); Ch. Andler, F. N., sa vie et sa pensée, 6 vols., ibid. 1920-20; G. De Pourtalès, N. en Italie, ibid. 1931. Doctrines: A. Riehl, F. N. der Künstler u. der Denker, Stuttgart 1897, Italian trans., Palermo 1912; H. Lichtenberger, F. N., Paris 1898; 12th ed., 1923; R. Richter, F. N., sein Leben u. s. Werk, Leipzig 1903; E. Zoccoli, F. N., Modena 1898, Turin 1901, Rome 1907; F. Orestano, Le idee fondamentali di F. N. nel loro progressivo svolgimento, Palermo 1902; R. M. Meyer, N., sein Leben u. s. Werke, Munich 1912; F. Chatterton-Hill, F. N., New York 1914; M. Castiglioni, Il poema eroico di F. N., Turin 1916; 2nd ed. 1924; E. Bertram, N. Versuch einer Mythologie, Berlin 1919; A. Wetter, N., Munich 1926; J. De Gaultier, N., Paris 1927; Ch. Lessing, N., Leipzig 1931; K. Jaspers, N., Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens, Berlin 1936; H. De Lubac, Le drame de l'humanisme athée, 3rd ed., Paris 1945, Italian version, Brescia 1950. See further indications in Enc. Ital., XXIV, pp. 804-809, and Überweg, IV, pp. 716-20.

Santino Caramella