Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote her study of Nietzsche from an unusual vantage: she knew him personally, read portions of the manuscript aloud to him in the autumn of 1882, and built the finished book around the conviction that a thinker’s system is at bottom a self-confession. Carl Konegen published it in Vienna, with two portraits and three facsimiles of Nietzsche’s handwriting. It moves through three movements—his nature, his transformations, and what she calls the “system Nietzsche”—and quotes extensively from his letters, aphorisms, and poems to make its case.
The book rests on a single guiding idea, one Nietzsche himself supplied. Every great philosophy, he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, has been the self-confession of its author, “a kind of unintended and unnoticed memoir”; Salomé takes him at his word and reads the works as the record of a life that thought and wrote only for itself—”Mihi ipsi scripsi,” as he set down on finishing a book. Her method follows from this. She deliberately sets aside both theoretical refutation and outward biography, since Nietzsche outwardly experienced almost nothing, and instead traces the main traits of a spiritual individuality. His value, she insists, lies not in theoretical originality but in the intimate power with which one personality speaks to another—in what can be refuted but never killed.
From the Parsonage to the Professor’s Chair
The Self as the Hidden Text
Lou Andreas-Salomé opens her study with an epigraph and a dedication to “an unnamed one,” then lets Nietzsche’s own letter stand as preface. Her guiding claim arrives immediately: Nietzsche repeatedly wrote “Mihi ipsi scripsi”—I wrote for myself—and the phrase is not a pose but a diagnosis. His thoughts came clothed in a living shell; he thought and wrote only for himself because the subject was always himself, his own being translated into thought. She sets his poem “Bitte” beside this: the speaker knows many minds but not his own, his eye sits too near him, and he wishes he could take a middle distance from himself—farther than his nearest friend, though not so far as his enemy.
The Biographer’s Task
If a biographer’s business is to explain the thinker through the man, Salomé argues, no case demands it more than Nietzsche’s, where the outer intellectual work and the inner life coincide. She cites his own demand that a philosopher’s system be tested against his personal records, and the aphorism from Jenseits von Gut und Böse declaring every great philosophy the self-confession of its author—an unintended, unnoticed memoir. This was the idea behind the sketch she read aloud to Nietzsche and discussed with him in October 1882, containing the first part and sections of the second; the third, on the “System Nietzsche,” did not yet exist. Over the following years she expanded it alongside his rapidly successive books, publishing portions as essays in the Vossische Zeitung, Freie Bühne, Magazin für Literatur and Der Zeitgeist.
Against Theory and Mere Biography
She deliberately limits herself to the main traits of his spiritual individuality, refusing both theoretical treatment and personal biography. To test Nietzsche as a theorist would disappoint, she says; his value lies not in theoretical originality nor in what can be dialectically grounded or refuted, but in the intimate power with which one personality speaks to another—what may be refuted but not killed. Nor would starting from outer experience help, since outwardly he experienced almost nothing, as he himself confesses in the preface to the Genealogie der Moral. His aphorism collections amount to one great memoir.
The Stranger Among His Praisers
Though often named, Nietzsche remains nearly unknown in his spiritual individuality. As his small readership swelled into a following, isolated ideas were torn from context and turned into catchwords for movements and parties far from him—bringing rapid fame while obscuring what was unique. Many praise him with naive credulity, recalling his bitter word: “I listened for an echo and heard only praise.” Scarcely one has followed this solitary, secret, uncanny spirit, who believed he bore something monstrous and collapsed under a monstrous delusion. He stands among his praisers like a stranger, with Zarathustra’s complaint that all speak of him by the fire but no one thinks of him.
The Basel Years
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844, the only son of a preacher in Röcken near Lützen; the family later moved to Naumburg. He was schooled at Schulpforta, then studied classical philology at Bonn under Ritschl, following him to Leipzig in autumn 1865. There came his first personal relation to Richard Wagner, whom he met in 1868 at the house of Wagner’s sister, Frau Professor Brockhaus. In 1869 the university called the twenty-four-year-old to the chair vacated by Kiessling; Leipzig awarded him the doctorate without prior promotion. Besides university lectures he taught Greek in the highest class of the Basel Pädagogium, where Jacob Burckhardt and Mähly also taught, and he gained great influence over his pupils—Burckhardt said Basel had never had such a teacher. Burckhardt belonged to his closest circle, with the church historian Franz Overbeck and the Kant philosopher Heinrich Romundt; Nietzsche lived with the latter two in a house nicknamed “Die Gifthütte” after the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. Toward the end of his Basel stay he lived with his only sister Elisabeth, nearly his own age, who later married his youth friend Bernhard Förster and went with him to Paraguay.
Suffering as Companion and Destiny
Two fateful traits dominate his development, growing more pronounced toward the end and wearing a double face—outwardly a life-fate, inwardly a willed necessity. His physical suffering mirrored something deeply inward so immediately that he took it as a serious friend and companion allotted to him. In a letter of condolence from Sils-Maria in late August 1881 he confesses that hearing of others’ suffering grieves him, whereas for him suffering and privation belong to the matter itself, not to the unreason of existence.
The Philological Quarrel and Its Defenders
The argument opens mid-struggle. An opponent—v. Wilamowitz—had attacked The Birth of Tragedy in a pamphlet called Zukunftsphilologie! (Berlin, 1872), judging it from a narrowly philological standpoint and never doing justice to the book’s individuality. Defenders stepped forward. Richard Wagner, the artist to whom the book was above all addressed, answered in an open letter to Nietzsche printed in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on 23 June 1872; Erwin Rohde, who had already given the fullest proofs of his deep knowledge of Greek antiquity, took the opponent’s own ground in his polemic Afterphilologie. Sendschreiben eines Philologen an Richard Wagner (Leipzig, 1872) and rejected his objections and accusations point by point. Wilamowitz replied with a duplicate, Zukunftsphilologie! Zweites Stück (Berlin, 1873). A Latin tag—quae philologia fuit—introduces the claim that all philological activity should be enclosed by a philosophical worldview in which everything individual evaporates as something contemptible and only the whole and unified remains.
The Two Art-Drives
Nietzsche’s years-long enchantment as Wagner’s disciple is explained: Wagner wanted to realize within Germanic life the same ideal of an art-culture that Nietzsche had conceived within Greek life. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics added only an intensification of this ideal into the mystical—an accent most clearly felt when comparing “Socrates and Greek Tragedy” with its expansion in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. There Nietzsche traces all art-development to two opposed “art-drives of nature,” named after the Greek art-deities: the Dionysian and the Apollinian. The Dionysian is the orgiastic element—blissful ecstasies, mingled pain and pleasure, joy and horror, the self-forgetful intoxication of Dionysian festivals—in which ordinary bounds are destroyed, the individual seems to merge with nature’s whole, and the principium individuationis is broken; the way to the mothers of being lies open. Its essence is approached via the physiological phenomenon of intoxication; its art is music. The Apollinian is the form-creating drive, embodied in Apollo: measured limitation, freedom from wilder stirrings, wise calm—the deification of the principium individuationis, whose law is the individual, that is, keeping its boundaries, measure in the Hellenic sense. Its power shows physiologically in the beautiful semblance of the dream-world; its art is the plastic art of the image-maker.
The Origin of Attic Tragedy
In the reconciliation and union of these initially warring drives Nietzsche recognizes the origin and essence of Attic tragedy—fruit of the reconciliation of both art-deities, equally Dionysian and Apollinian. Arising from the dithyrambic chorus celebrating the god’s sufferings, it is originally only chorus, whose singers, transformed by Dionysian excitation, felt themselves servants of the god, satyrs, and as such beheld their master Dionysos. With this vision the chorus’s state attains Apollinian completion. Drama as “the Apollinian embodiment of Dionysian insights and effects” is complete; the chorus parts are the womb of the actual drama—the Dionysian element—while dialogue forms the Apollinian component: from the scene the heroes speak as Apollinian appearances in which the original tragic hero Dionysos objectifies himself, mere masks behind which the god stands.
Masks of the Dionysian Self
The passage closes by anticipating that at the book’s end we shall see how Nietzsche, in his own peculiar way, later presented his developmental periods and changes of conviction as if they were not immediate expressions of his spirit but arbitrarily held masks, “Apollinian semblance-images,” behind which his Dionysian self remained eternally the same—causes of this self-deception to be recognized at the end. Nietzsche’s significance as assigner of the Dionysian is characteristic of his whole spiritual type: as philologist he sought a new access to the ancients; as philosopher he made this interpretation the foundation of his first unified worldview; across all later transformations it resurfaces in his last creative period—transformed, since its connection with Schopenhauer’s and Wagner’s metaphysics is torn, yet unchanged in that wherein his own hidden soul-stirrings already sought expression. The ground: in the intoxication of the Dionysian he felt something homogeneous to his own nature—that mysterious essential unity of woe and bliss, self-wounding and self-deification, that excess of heightened feeling-life in which all opposites condition and devour one another.
Socrates and the Theoretical Man
The sharpest contrast to the Dionysian and its art-culture is the theoretical man estranged from all intuition, baptized with the name of Sokrates.
The Friend as Perfecter
Behind the friends’ theoretical agreement lay a deeper difference of feeling, hidden under the shell of shared thoughts. One type of thinker looks down on the human being in himself with superiority and strangeness, draining away part of his energy and with it his egoism; in its place stands a deep, pure, unbounded goodness whose expressions contrast sharply with the cold sobriety of his thinking. Nietzsche was the opposite: a soaring self-love that projects itself into its own cognition-ideals until it almost confuses itself with them, confronting the world with the enthusiasm of an apostle and convert. What came naturally to Rée was for Nietzsche the complete opposite of his own nature—and precisely for that reason he over-praised in Rée what was hardest for himself, because in such self-compulsion lay the inner meaning of his transformation. He calls him “my dear friend and perfecter,” asking how he could endure without seeing his own nature in a purified metal and an elevated form—he who is himself a fragment and only rarely gazes into the better land where whole natures walk. Yet this self-disregarding devotion is only the path by which he struggles through to a new self within a new worldview: the suffering state in which he reshapes the adopted foreign seed into his own living spirit, the birth pangs of a new creation.
From Warrior to Wanderer
The history of how Nietzsche develops in this transformation and again leaves it is essentially a history of inner experience and soul-struggle. From Menschliches, Allzumenschliches into the moved joyful mood of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, he sought in series of aphorism-collections to erect the “image and ideal of the free spirit.” His titles are never accidental but images of inner processes, symbols. At the end of the seventies he wrote on the title page of the second work: Der Wanderer und sein Schatten. Out of the heat of first passionate struggles he has entered the solitude of himself; the warrior became a wanderer who, instead of attacking the abandoned spiritual homeland, explores the land of his voluntary exile to see whether the stony soil might be cultivated. Loud discord with the opponent has dissolved into stillness of dialogue with himself: the lonely one listens to his own thoughts as to a polyphonic conversation, living under their ever-accompanying shadow. Still they appear dark, monotonous, ghostly, growing threatening as shadow-shapes do when the sun sets—but not for long, for his nearness gradually strips away all shadow: what was colorless theory receives sound and gaze, shape and life. He breathes life into it, choosing the darkest thought-shadows to nourish with his own blood until they transform into his living self, his double-self. Step by step he goes the way to himself, becoming at home in his new skin, like a wanderer who after hard toil finally comes home. He no longer wants to reach the same goal as Rée; he wants his own—audible in letters where he still admires the theoretician: “I admire ever more how well-armored your presentation is on the logical side. Yes, such a thing I cannot do; at most sigh or sing a little.” In such singing and sighing his own genius pressed upon his consciousness as the gift for the most glorious lamentations and victory-hymns, the creative gift of transforming even the ugliest thought into inner music. The musician in him merged, a single tone, into the new great melody of the whole—subordinate to the thinker, which enabled him to sing and sigh of his new truths and raised him to the first stylist of the present.
The Dawn That Has Not Yet Shone
Morgenröthe is not merely a pale, cold, backward-shining light of Enlightenment; behind it rises a warming, life-generating sun. Nietzsche still stands in the grey twilight of dawn, but his eyes are already yearningly fixed on the bright glow on the horizon. As motto he placed on the title page the words of the Rigveda: “There are so many dawns that have not yet shone!”—without daring to believe he himself was called to kindle such a light. The book contains “Thoughts on Moral Prejudices,” seemingly still belonging to the dissolving, negating spirit of the preceding works; but already a dreaming, hoping spirit hovers over it, pondering how to arrive at new value-judgments out of all prejudices, how to become a creator of new values. A quoted passage asks: when finally all customs and morals on which the power of gods, priests, and redeemers rests are destroyed, when morality in the old sense has died—then what comes? The collapse of the old is no longer an end but an outlook, a beginning: “Something is still coming—the main thing is still coming!”
The Breeding of the Sovereign Individual
Education, Nietzsche argues, is at bottom a mnemotechnics: a way of implanting a memory in the unpredictable will. To say “good” of oneself and affirm oneself with pride is a late fruit, one that hung bitter and sour on the tree for a long time. At the end of that enormous process, when society and its morality of custom finally bring forth what was only the means, the ripest fruit proves to be the sovereign individual, equal only to himself—the human being of his own independent, long will, who may promise. To this self-certainty corresponds a new kind of conscience, once man has outgrown the moral ideas handed down by his now superfluous educators, so that the old conscience has lost its root in him.
Will, Determinism, and the Freedom That Is Born of Necessity
Nietzsche’s theory of will fuses his earlier metaphysics with scientific determinism. As a disciple of Schopenhauer he distinguished the mysterious will “in itself” from the will as it appears to human perception, calling it free insofar as its ultimate grounds lie beyond all experience and causality, unfree insofar as its individual manifestation becomes perceptible only within the net of causal connection. After years of consistent determinism he still holds that the will earns its name only at the leading-string of determining influences. What he denies as a determinist regarding the will’s origin he relocates at its goal: a ripe, self-certain will, gradually created through long breeding by compulsion and external influence, becomes free in a sense the determinists miss—its actions can no longer be derived from a particular time and environment, but only from its own enormously grown, ruthlessly exploding strength. This freedom is no longer metaphysical, for it has become, the daughter of necessity and strictest conditionedness; yet something mystical clings to it, since it turns as an unconditional power against the very natural conditions from which it sprang. In his positivist period Nietzsche had valued the world of reality in its development, mocking metaphysicians for admiring everything finished while underestimating everything becoming; now he arrives at the same admiration of the finished, conceding the conditionedness of all things only because a significance surpassing all conditionedness is to reveal itself out of it. Hence he wants “strong and weak will” substituted for “free” and “unfree” will, and all psychology grasped as morphology and developmental doctrine of the will to power.
The Genius as Explosive and Squanderer
The man of will-power is always the supremely untimely one, in whom has become genius what was long prepared in humanity; in genius flows freely what humanity learned in servitude. Geniuses are explosives in which enormous force has accumulated; their precondition is that long has been collected and saved toward them, and that they master their time lies only in their being stronger, older, that longer has been collected toward them. The great man is an end; the genius is necessarily a squanderer, his instinct of self-preservation suspended by the overwhelming pressure of outflowing forces. In genius there emerges, at least in one direction, what should enable man to advance from his kind to an over-kind: a squandering wealth in whose gifts the whole past has been deposited and become fruitfulness. Imagine a genius possessing geniality in relation to the whole consciousness of humanity, so that whatever lived and worked in it streams out livingly—such a genius would be the image of the man from whom the overman is born, surveying the whole past and containing the whole line of man up to himself, so that in him the way and goal of humanity’s future must suddenly reveal itself.
The Arbitrary Treatment of Material
Nietzsche’s scientific hypotheses must not be taken theoretically; one must extract the original kernel from them. His basic question was never what the soul-history of humanity is, but how his own soul-history was to be understood as that of all humanity. Exact research plays no role beside his ingenious ideas, and could play none, since he was prevented from working scientifically. He admits as much: everything of his kind in nature and history speaks to him and drives him forward, the rest he does not hear; one hears only the questions one is capable of answering; he can take nothing from things but what already belongs to him. Through such arbitrary treatment of material he became more subjective in his conclusions than in the years when he restricted himself to inner experience. Now the inwardly significant became the outwardly lawgiving, and he himself the great violence-lord who forces all the past with his grace and disgrace until it becomes bridge, sign, and herald.
Master and Slave Morality as Inner Division
For Nietzsche’s soul-problem it matters less to fix historically the opposition between master-morality and slave-morality than to establish that man, as he has become from below upward, carries both opposites in himself.
The Riddle of the Shepherd and the Snake
The segment opens on Zarathustra’s meditation at the gateway of the moment, where past and future collide: everything that can run must run this long, dreadful lane again, and the spider in the moonlight, the moonlight itself, and the whispering “I and you” must all return eternally. The speaker softens his voice as he speaks, afraid of his own hinterthoughts. Then comes the tale of the howling dog that calls for help for a man—a young shepherd into whose throat a snake has crawled and bitten fast. The narrator tears at the snake in vain until a cry breaks from him: “Bite! Bite its head off!”—horror, hate, disgust, pity, all his good and evil crying in one cry. The shepherd bites as advised, spits out the head, and springs up no longer shepherd, no longer man, a transformed, illuminated one laughing as no man ever laughed. The hearers are asked to solve the riddle and read the face of the loneliest one.
The Snake of the Eternal Cycle
The editor interprets: the snake of the eternally returning cycle is what Zarathustra redeems man from by biting off its head—abolishing the senseless and horrible in it and making man its master, the laughing overman. Here the spiritual significance of the Zarathustra figure for Nietzsche himself becomes fully clear, since it appears as bearer of the recurrence doctrine. Nietzsche believed he contained it within himself like a mystical being, yet distinguished from his natural human existence as Nietzsche; in his accidental temporal appearance, conditioned bodily and spiritually by circumstance, he regarded himself as a “decadent” like the others, worthy only to perish. Conversely he held himself the necessarily pathological medium through which the eternity of old times becomes conscious of itself—the incarnate genius of humanity, in whom the past solves the riddle of all future for the present. He felt himself sick in the birth-pangs of a superhuman being, perishing in favor of a highest new creation meant to redeem the world, quoting Zarathustra: the creator must himself be the child newly born and also will to be the bearer, with the bearer’s pain.
Creature and Creator
Zarathustra is thus the child and at once Nietzsche’s god, both the art-creation of an individual and the summing-up of this individual with the whole line of man. He is “creature and creator,” the stronger, more future one who towers over the suffering human Nietzsche-appearance—the “over-Nietzsche.” Hence it is not one individual’s experience that speaks from him but humanity’s consciousness from its remotest origins; hence his words: “I do not belong to those whom one may ask after their Why.” A wondrous play of thought arises in which Nietzsche and his Zarathustra ceaselessly pass into one another and again detach—transparent to anyone who knows how many small, purely personal traits Nietzsche secretly put into his Zarathustra, and to what visionary rapture this mystery heightened for him. This explains the unheard-of self-consciousness with which he speaks of his book, once bursting out that a book so deep, so strange, that six sentences from it understood—i.e., lived—raise one into a higher order of mortals.
The Work of the Superhuman
If his Zarathustra-poetry was for him the work through which a human became a superhuman, he may have thought his unpublished Hauptwerk “Der Wille zur Macht” as created, as it were, by the Zarathustra figure—by an eternal and free one to whom alone a “Umwerthung aller Werthe” can succeed, because he stands outside every time and influence, absolutely independent. Only thus is Nietzsche’s claim in “Götzen-Dämmerung” understandable: “I have given humanity the deepest book it possesses, my Zarathustra: I give it shortly the most independent one.” In the first case the superhuman is to have risen from the depths of Nietzsche’s humanity; in the second it already hovers freely creating above it. However mystically the figure is conceived in its world-significance, it closes strictly logically onto Nietzsche’s expositions on the nature of the genial, the free-willed, and the atavistic as future-conditioning. These theories all aim at the possible creation of a super-being; and it is interesting to trace how early related thoughts, carried over from his first philosophical period, worked through his positivist worldview, finally to be awakened to new life in his last philosophy. The genius of ethics and aesthetics already, in Schopenhauer, embraces the sense and essential ground of the whole world and repeats this in every such genius; but for him that ground means the eternally shining being, the metaphysical thing-in-itself, wholly detached from the factual developmental history of world and humanity.
Suffering as the Engine of Thought
Two fateful traits govern Salomé’s account of Nietzsche’s development: physical suffering and loneliness. She treats them not as accidents but as a double face—outwardly a life-fate, inwardly a willed necessity. His periodic illnesses, she argues, divided his existence into distinct lives, so that every recovery became a rebirth of himself and of the world around him, each thing returning “new to taste,” fresh with morning dew. From this she draws the book’s most striking claim: his thought did not merely accompany his suffering but fed on it. “What does not kill me makes me stronger” is read not as bravado but as a description of his method—a spirit that cuts into life through its own torment, that needs fevers and wounds the way other natures need calm. The excess of strength, as he put it, is the proof of strength, and that excess turns its sting against itself.
This is why she refuses to see his individualism as mere self-sufficiency. The history of the “individual” in Nietzsche, she writes, is a history of suffering, and its content reads less as self-assertion than as self-endurance. The thinker who declared that he needed no one to refute him, since he sufficed for that himself, was describing a long and painful struggle with his own being. Her portrait is sympathetic without being sentimental: she sees the pathology inside the process, the way the force that healed him also called forth new sicknesses, so that health and illness condition each other within one and the same spiritual life rather than standing as master and tool.
The Circle of Transformations
The break with Christian faith stands at the origin of his changes, and Salomé treats it as characteristic rather than dramatic. Nietzsche always insisted that the Christianity of the parental parsonage had lain “smooth and soft” on him like a healthy skin, and that keeping its commandments had been as easy as following his own inclination. The dark instinct that drove him out awoke precisely in that feeling of being at home: his creative power depended on struggle and exaltation, so his heart had to inflict the separation on itself. She records his half-joking remark that when every combination has been run through, one might arrive again at faith—perhaps a Catholic faith—and the serious addition that “the circle could be more probable than the standstill.” That image of the circle governs her whole reading: his philosophy, she says, describes a circle, and at the end the man again approaches the boy, like a river flowing back to its source through many windings. It is no accident that his last period arrived at the doctrine of eternal recurrence; the symbol of the circle stands over the entrance to his works.
The same pattern shapes her account of his discipleship. In Wagner and Schopenhauer he found the redeeming figures his nature craved, and the early writings glow with a health and naivety that contrast sharply with what came later—he first understood himself in the image of his master. Then came the violent break, and the aphorism collections that followed. She is excellent on the psychology of conversion here: no one is less able to weigh justice calmly than the man just completing a change of conviction, and no thought is hurled further from us than the one we have just left in painful conflict. The hatred in those attacks on Wagner is the echo of an unforgettable love. Yet she also sees the heroism in it—his provisional selflessness toward foreign modes of thought, the way he abandoned himself defenselessly to circles where he was secretly an opponent, guaranteed his independence. “My writings speak only of my overcomeings,” he wrote; she takes the sentence as the key to the middle period, in which the warrior became a wanderer listening to his own thoughts as to a polyphonic conversation, and the repressed artist began again to sing and sigh—subordinate now to the thinker, and in her judgment making him the first stylist of his age.
The Labyrinth and the Dancing Star
Salomé’s Nietzsche is a “styleless,” unharmonious nature, and she turns this into an advantage: if one dared build an architecture after the soul’s fashion, the labyrinth must be the model—but a labyrinth in which the soul does not lose itself, rather pierces through its confusion to knowledge. Beside the wholly nocturnal person there stands, almost regularly, a light-soul, the negative shadow he casts, and the more tyrannical and dangerous the nature, the more radiant that shadow. The history of his development consists of the changing pictures of this inner rank-order, until in the last period dark-soul and light-soul become representatives of the human and the superhuman. Her analysis of the self-splitting at the heart of this process is the book’s most original piece of thinking: a single drive subordinates all others, but multiplicity is thereby reduced not to unity but to a deeper duality. The knower looks at himself as at a second being yet remains caught in his own being; he can split it but not reach beyond it. Knowledge divides rather than unifies—and the depth of the division creates the illusion that the goal of all his stirrings lies outside them.
Her treatment of the “female genius” belongs here too. Nietzsche, she notes, was inclined when he felt this most strongly to take the female genius as the actual genius, and she quotes his aphorism on spiritual pregnancy producing the contemplative character—the male mothers. What his superiority consisted in, she says, was meeting each seed-grain falling into his interior with the mark of true genius: new, driving, fertile soil of primeval-forest freshness.
What the Book Did for Nietzsche’s Reputation
Salomé wrote against a peculiar situation. Nietzsche was frequently named and scarcely known; as his small readership grew into a large following, isolated ideas were torn from their context and made catchwords of movements and parties far from him, giving him rapid fame while obscuring what was unique in him. Many praised him with naive credulity, and she recalls his bitter word that he listened for an echo and heard only praise. Her book is an attempt to answer that noise with the stillness of real attention—to show the solitary, secret, uncanny spirit who believed he bore something monstrous and collapsed under a monstrous delusion, standing among his praisers like a stranger. She deliberately declines to place him in the history of philosophy, reserving the systematic examination of his theories for a separate work, and confines herself to the portrait of a spiritual individuality. The wager is that this is where his importance actually lies: in the intimate power with which a personality speaks to a personality, in what may be refuted but not killed.
