NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM. – Philologist and philosopher, born at Röcken in Saxony on 15 September 1844, died at Weimar on 25 August 1900. Doctor and professor of philology (1869) at the University of Basel, he left teaching in 1879 for health reasons. Indeed, the nervous illness (cerebral paralysis) from which he suffered grew steadily worse, despite the various health resorts he attended, and culminated in a state of insanity (Turin, 1889), from which he never emerged.
His literary activity comprises three phases, corresponding to the periods of his intellectual formation, rebellion, and spiritual decline, and to his cultural relationships.
1. 1866–72: philological studies. In addition to the history of the Greek poets (Theocritus, the lyric poets, the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, and posthumous material on the history of rhetoric and rhythmics), N. worked with great success on the textual criticism of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, which he published in the Rheinisches Museum in 1868–70. Demonstrating that its sources could be identified and reconstructed, thereby making it possible to recognize the work of earlier historians, he gave form to his own classical historiography in two fundamental works: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1871, published in Leipzig in 1872 and 1878) and Über die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen (posthumous).
N.’s thesis is that, in the formation of Greek civilization, two elements contended for spiritual dominion: the Apollonian, contemplative and dreamlike, and the Dionysian, titanic and barbarous. The former prevails in the dialogue, the latter in the chorus of tragedies. But since these originated in the chorus and in music, they therefore have as their first source the Dionysian cults. The same occurs in philosophy, where the Heraclitean and Sophistic orientation is Dionysian, but with Socrates an Apollonian attitude prevails, which, according to N., is inferior.
2. 1873–79: criticism of culture. Just as classical philology appeared to N. to require renewal through Dionysian illumination, so, after the war of 1870–71, the Germanic culture that had created it appeared to him antiquated and inadequate; he therefore devoted himself to developing its critique and exalting those who might save it from decline. Thus arose, from university lectures, the Unzeitgenüssige Betrachtungen, four essays: David Friedrich Strauss (ibid., 1873), on the reconstructer of “philistine” morality and of historical-religious criticism; Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Geschichte für das Leben (1874), a critique of traditional, scholarly, hypercritical historicism; Schopenhauer als Erzieher (ibid., 1874), in which he was the first to recognize in the philosopher of pessimism a teacher of human redemption; and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (ibid., 1876), devoted to illustrating the anti-bourgeois and ultraromantic genius of the great musician, with whom, however, a rupture took place.
Umano, troppo umano contains a revision of decadent Enlightenment values: futurism, the moral sense, religiosity, the artistic-literary consciousness, high and popular culture, the commercial world, the education of women and children, statism, and solipsism. N.’s philosophy in this period is no longer simply Dionysian-Sophistic, but an aestheticizing irrationalism; artistic creation, through its pathos, saves man from the pessimistic reality of existence and substitutes for it an inner image as a vision and dream of the beautiful. The Apollonian element thus also gained the upper hand in N. But he sought a practical affirmation of it and demanded from it a solution for life.
3. 1880–88: the doctrine of the “superman” and of the will to power. Despite the advance of his illness, he meditated upon and drafted a series of systematically conceived works, although almost all were in the form of aphorisms: Morgenröthe, Gedanke über moral. Vorurteile (Chemnitz, 1880–81; the title recalls a theosophical work by Jakob Boehme); Die Wiederkunft des Gleichen (1881), an outline of ideas expounded in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (ibid., 1881–82; 2nd enlarged ed., 1887; the title alludes to troubadour culture and the work has a prologue and an epilogue in verse); Also sprach Zarathustra, “a book for all and for none”: N.’s masterpiece, a prose poem 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), it 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 Böen, “prelude to a philosophy of the future” (Leipzig, 1885–86), a philosophical commentary on the Zarathustra; Zur Genealogie der Moral (ibid., 1887), with which the author came closer to positivism. From September 1886 to March 1888 he worked on the major work Der Wille zur Macht, “an essay on the transvaluation of all values” (in four books: European Nihilism; Critique of Previous Supreme Values; Principle of a New Determination of Values; Race and the Education of the Race); it remained fragmentary and was published posthumously in 1902.
In 1888 alone, sensing the imminent crisis, he composed and published frantically between Turin and Sils-Maria: 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 to philosophize with a hammer,” in which he aphoristically resumes his youthful critique of Greek philosophy and its modern imitations; the Antichrist, “an essay on a critique of Christianity” and on a new version of the Will to Power; Ecce homo, a concise history of his spiritual drama and literary activity (up to the Wagner affair). On these last pages, which appeared posthumously (Leipzig, 1908), his pen came to a halt.
The system of ideas that N. thus arrived at formulating has remained as classical as neo-humanism, and might be defined as an Orientalizing classicism (Apollonian-Zoroastrian) and a pragmatist skepticism. It comprises the following paradoxes:
1) Humanity’s true redemption consists in liberation from the ideas of collectivist or societal origin in which Socratism, Christianity, the modern bourgeoisie, and Western Kultur have run aground, and in dissolving the doctrine of civil progress to which they had entrusted themselves. In this dissolution it is discovered that a non-progressive natural law governs human life, and that this is the very law symbolized by the ancient myth of the eternal return of all things and all events, including personal ones, through cosmic cycles. The continuous and perpetually repeated identity of forms and acts deprives their apparent evolution and their presumptive appropriation by an epoch or a class of all meaning.
2) The one 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 magician of the Persian Zend-Avesta. The Nietzschean superman has nothing transcendent about him; he is the “meaning of the earth,” the very earthly, sentient consciousness of humanity that makes itself liberating; the liberation he produces has nothing anti-corporeal about it, but is the same will that asserts itself through its naivety and strength. This 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 they represent differences and oppositions marked by weakness and servitude, and entirely insubstantial conventional categories. The superman is the elect and ingenious man, the creative and revelatory artist, who conquers the average, or mediocre, man of the ordinary and neutral type. The morality he surpasses, on the other hand, is an illusory historical-social formation that seeks to conceal from him the healthy and living reality of existence.
3) Nihilism, or the nullity of the supreme values, a doctrine of Oriental origin but presented in N.’s time as the latest novelty of anarchist philosophers, is the consequence of the historical synthesis between Christianity and European thought. Modern Christianity, in fact, attributes absolute value to man, perfection to the world, to knowledge of values the meaning of adequate knowledge, and to religion the healing of what man despises in himself. Rationalist philosophy, for its part, makes this science of absolute values a system of categories commensurate with that conception of man and the world. But in both cases one encounters the problems of teleology: what purpose does all this serve?—and of relativity: how long does it last? The world of categories is relative to a world fabricated by humanity in becoming: the absolute of eternal recurrence is the annulment of this fiction. The relativistic pragmatism of Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophie des Alt-Ob (v.), his contemporary, coincides with the fundamental views sketched out for Volontà di potenza.
4) To recover their purity and authenticity, human values must be transvalued according to this new principle. By “will to power” (a concept contradictory in itself, because power, even in the scientific conception of potential force, Macht, is always an abstraction from the act), N. means the return of life toward the primordial, negative source (in the Schopenhauerian sense of the will) of acts—a return in which, as with historical-mystical reality in eternal recurrence, indeed identically with it, its entire genuine nature resides. The will to phenomenism (v.) of both the external and internal world: its theoretical forms are merely interpretations, in themselves unreflective and irrational, even when they assume intellectualistic aspects and posit in reason subject (v.), or of several subjects. The power thus acquired over one’s own sensibility generates in turn the conviction of truth as the persistence of hypotheses and the admission of an equivalent reality; but N. opposes the positivist theory that facts and causal and functional determinations should thus be identified: instead, in the formulation of being, the will to power is exalted, and with the idea of eternal recurrence one reaches the highest possible approximation to the idea of real being (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 nature’s intimate animator, its inner becoming, of which physical phenomena and laws are the manifestation, the symptoms. This will intrinsic to nature produces organic life; but not in the sense indicated by Darwinism, which links biological phenomena to an extrinsic utility and an apparent power (struggle for existence, survival of the fittest; conformism substituted for intellectual transformism): rather, in the sense of a finality consisting in the increase of power and in the triumph of what is stronger (individuation [v.]), individual (v.) and even at the sacrifice of the species. This is not progress, particularly not in the human species, nor of the latter in comparison with other species, but a search for the highest type of existence, up to genius. The more it is a “sublime machine,” the more destructive it is of other forms of individuation. The same principle explains the genesis of volitional values, unconscious affirmations of the power of individuals, and must establish the values of society and the State in favor of the stronger individual, the superman, artistic genius, and the superiority of race and culture.
These latter suggestions, subsequently placed at the service of Pan-Germanism, were instead directed by N. toward illustrating the contrast between the Dionysian-sophistic spirit that he objectively imitated and Christianity as an advocate of human weaknesses and 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 above all suggestive, through their 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., there 1912-14; id., N. giovane, Italian translation by E. Rigutini, Florence 1924; id., Das N.-Archiv, seine Freunde u. Feinde, Leipzig 1907; P. Deussen, Erinnerungen an F. N., there 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 development: Lou André-Salomé, F. N. in t. Werken, Vienna 1894 (French translation, Paris 1932); Ch. Andler, F. N., sa vie et sa pensée, 6 vols., there 1920-20; G. De Pourtalès, N. en Italie, there 1931. Doctrines: A. Riehl, F. N. der Künstler u. der Denker, Stuttgart 1897, Italian translation, Palermo 1912; H. Lichtenberger, F. N., Paris 1898; 12th ed., 1923; R. Richter, F. N., sein Leben u. t. 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. t. 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. V. ENOCH. Ital., XXIV, pp. 804-809, and Überweg, IV, pp. 716-20. Santino Caramella