Karl Jaspers’ Nietzsche: An Understanding of His Philosophical Activity is a comprehensive philosophical study of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought, originally published in Germany in the mid-1930s. The English translation, prepared by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz, appeared in the late 1960s and was reissued in a Gateway Edition in 1979 by Regnery/Gateway, Inc., South Bend, Indiana, by arrangement with Walter de Gruyter, Inc. The copyright for the English translation is held by the Arizona Board of Regents, dated 1965.
“He is the most distinguished exponent of the philosophy of Existenz.”
The work is structured as a scholarly interpretation rather than a conventional biography or a simple exposition of Nietzsche’s ideas. Jaspers, a German philosopher associated with the philosophy of Existenz, approaches Nietzsche as a thinker whose philosophical activity must be understood through careful study of his entire corpus, including both published works and posthumous fragments. The book includes extensive quotations from Nietzsche’s writings, with the translators noting that parenthetical references to the edition prepared by Nietzsche’s sister were omitted because “no one who needs a translation could possibly make any use of these references.”
The book is divided into three main books: the first dealing with Nietzsche’s life, the second with his basic thoughts, and the third with his philosophy as a whole. The translators incorporated fine-print material into the body of the text and made specific translation decisions, including rendering Dasein as “existence” while leaving Existenz untranslated, following the example of Professor L. B. Lefebre. The translation was a collaborative effort: Wallraff translated Book Two, Chapters 1, 2, and 5, and all of Book Three, while Schmitz translated the remainder, with each checking the other’s work. Professor Babette Luz read and emended the typescript and translated and renumbered the index compiled by Dr. Maria Salditt.
The book first appeared in Nazi Germany, a fact that bears significantly on its composition and purpose. Jaspers prepared the work in independence of the political situation, offering what he considered an objective interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. However, he also intended, in 1934-35, “to marshal against the National Socialists the world of thought of the man whom they had proclaimed as their own philosopher.” This dual purpose—both philosophical interpretation and political resistance—shapes the book’s approach and content.
Context
The intellectual and historical context surrounding Jaspers’ study of Nietzsche is essential for understanding its significance. When the book first appeared in Germany in the 1930s, Anglo-American philosophers were barely aware of existentialism. Typical history-of-philosophy texts never mentioned Pascal and Kierkegaard, and philosophers regarded Nietzsche as a poet and seer, turning him over to literati or, in Germany, to the National Socialists who claimed him as their own philosopher. Jaspers himself was scarcely more than a name in the English-speaking world at that time.
The translators note that the English Channel remained a greater barrier to communication of ideas than the Atlantic Ocean. Since Kierkegaard became available in English and Nietzsche was “absolved from his guilt by posthumous association with the Nazis,” existentialism appeared as the chief alternative to analytic and linguistic philosophies. This context explains the translators’ efforts to make Jaspers’ work accessible to an English-speaking audience that was only beginning to engage with existentialist thought.
Jaspers’ own philosophical positions, as described by the translators, are crucial for understanding his approach to Nietzsche. Jaspers is characterized as skeptical where others are credulous and credulous where others are skeptical. He insists that one chief reward of practicing scientific method is direct acquaintance with science’s limits, and that knowledge of these limits discloses philosophy’s area. Against rationalists and empiricists who stress clarity, Jaspers insists that clarity is a scientific ideal unattainable in matters that matter most. He agrees with Kant that where determinate knowledge is impossible, indeterminate thought takes over; clear and distinct ideas of the world as a whole, spirit, or God are impossible, and the Cartesian criterion is inapplicable.
Regarding consistency, Jaspers, like F. H. Bradley in Appearance and Reality, delights in contradictions that reveal the limits of “understanding,” inviting “reason” to transcend the given. This explains his admiration for Nietzsche despite discovering innumerable contradictions in Nietzsche’s thought. For both Jaspers and Nietzsche, philosophy is not academic correctness but a vision one lives by, as Socrates lived by his, refusing at the cost of his life to violate his principles. Philosophical knowledge transforms the knower basically; a man’s philosophy is constitutive and regulative, determining his experienced world and his nature.
The book’s original context in Nazi Germany is particularly significant. Jaspers wrote the book in independence of the situation, offering objective interpretation. But in 1934-35 he also intended to marshal against the National Socialists the world of thought of the man whom they had proclaimed as their own philosopher. He quoted Nietzsche’s statement “We are emigrants…” and sympathetic comments about Jews, though these were omitted from the book as not pertinent to its main concerns. The original plan included a chapter of quotations from Nietzsche’s “mistaken naturalistic and extremist pronouncements” as evidence of aberrations; the result was devastating, and Jaspers omitted it “out of respect for Nietzsche.” Such aberrations “amount to nothing” when one reaches the understanding this book provides. Jaspers concluded that Nietzsche could not really become the National Socialists’ philosopher, and they eventually abandoned him.
Structure of the Book
The book is organized into three major books, each addressing a distinct aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophical activity. The first book, “Nietzsche’s Life,” examines the biographical foundations of his thought. The second book, “The Basic Thoughts of Nietzsche,” presents and analyzes the fundamental concepts of his philosophy. The third book, which completes the work, addresses Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole, synthesizing the earlier material into a comprehensive interpretation.
Book One begins with an examination of Nietzsche’s appearance, including analyses of his photographs and handwriting. Jaspers draws on Klages’ analysis of Nietzsche’s handwriting, which finds in it “something extraordinarily luminous and bright” with a “pronounced lack of warmth,” “something transparent, immaterial, crystalline—the extreme opposite of cloudiness, fluidity, and undulation,” and “something remarkably hard, sharp, and of glasslike brittleness.” The handwriting reveals “sublime sensitivity, irritability, and a rich emotional life,” though “incapsulated within the organism of its possessor,” and attains “the clearest possible organization,” revealing a simplification that projects a “virtually naked framework of letters.”
The book then addresses Nietzsche’s fundamental trait as an exception, detached from all actual existence—vocation and society—finding neither marriage nor pupils or followers, creating no sphere of activity, and wandering aimlessly. Jaspers identifies the crisis in Bonn in 1865 as the first distinct crisis in Nietzsche’s life, which induced him to set out resolutely on his destined path. Nietzsche became aware that his student existence could never provide true fulfillment, and he was confronted by an Either/Or: to drift with life or accept the extraordinary as having valid claims for every day.
The course of Nietzsche’s development is traced through his writings. His youthful writings contain seeds of later thoughts, including the Philologika (three volumes). The earlier writings include The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations (1871-76), posthumous fragments on the Greeks, addresses Concerning the Future of our Educational Institutions, and notes for “We Philologists.” The works between 1876 and 1882 include Human, All-Too-Human, Mixed Opinions and Maxims, The Wanderer and his Shadow, The Dawn, and The Gay Science (Books I-IV).
Book One also examines Nietzsche’s friendships, particularly with Rohde, Wagner, and Overbeck. The friendship with Rohde is traced from its beginnings through its gradual dissolution, as Rohde’s prudence became “conscious respectability” and his elemental feeling died. The Wagner friendship is examined in detail, including Nietzsche’s veneration of Wagner beginning with The Birth of Tragedy (1871) and continuing through Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), followed by his later pamphlet against Wagner’s art in 1880. Jaspers argues against one-sided interpretations: Nietzsche’s criticism existed implicitly from the beginning, written down as early as January 1874. The separation from Wagner was a fateful event for Nietzsche, not for Wagner.
The book addresses Nietzsche’s illness, including the circumstances of his breakdown. On January 8, 1889, Overbeck arrived in Turin to take Nietzsche home after letters indicating insanity had induced psychiatrist Wille to request action. Overbeck found Nietzsche “cowering in the corner of a sofa,” who rushed to embrace him violently, then sank back in twitches, uttering “sublime, wonderfully clairvoyant” things about himself as successor to the dead God. Nietzsche became increasingly demented until his death in 1900. The illness was likely an organic brain disorder, probably progressive paralysis, not inherited.
Book Two, “The Basic Thoughts of Nietzsche,” presents the fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It begins with introductory considerations on Nietzsche’s philosophizing, establishing that his positive expressions become questionable when stated directly, while his searching and experimenting establishes an extraordinary claim to possible Existenz. The book addresses the collapse of naive philosophy, which could represent God, world, and man without distinguishing rationality from historicity. After naiveté collapses, disturbing skeptical questions arise: What is man? What is truth? What do history and the present age signify?
The book examines Nietzsche’s discontent with man, his sorrow over men, and his longing for genuine human possibilities. It addresses the basic question “What is man?” and Nietzsche’s critique of morality, including his denial of the sense and validity of the inner moral demand to act in conformity with the moral law. The book presents Nietzsche’s conceptions of man, including the superior man, the superman, and the various types that populate his philosophical landscape. It examines Nietzsche’s views on scientific and philosophic truth, the theory of exegesis (truth and life), honesty and its self-limitation, justice, the will to truth and its self-overcoming, the dissolution of reason, and the transcending breakthrough.
Book Three synthesizes the material from the earlier books into a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole. This final book addresses the significance of Nietzsche’s thought for philosophy and for the modern age, examining how his ideas cohere despite their apparent contradictions and what his philosophical activity means for those who would understand him.
Main Arguments
Jaspers’ central argument is that Nietzsche’s thinking must be understood as a unified philosophical activity despite its apparent contradictions and lack of systematic form. Nietzsche’s exuberant language conceals a basic conceptual structure that must be laid bare. Merely repeating Nietzsche’s language is senseless since readers can read Nietzsche directly; instead, one must disclose the “skeleton” to comprehend logical relations and cognitive limits, laying groundwork for genuine creative criticism.
The presentation must be well-documented throughout. While convenient to make Nietzsche’s thoughts appear coherent, this loses the stimulating resistance of their inconsistency. Bringing thoughts together so they complement, contradict, and incite one another works best when every step is supported by direct quotation. Jaspers argues that Nietzsche-literature justifiably abounds in quotations, but citations must bring out something new rather than presenting a mere chrestomathy of beautiful passages. Thoughts must be placed in proper contexts even when Nietzsche didn’t explicitly emphasize their relations. Arbitrarily chosen quotations only dazzle without clarifying.
Jaspers argues that when Nietzsche’s thoughts are brought together, friction reveals self-criticism contained in his thinking. One may argue forever about specific utterances, but this only uses him as a conversation topic. Critique becomes possible only when dissonances, boundaries, and abysses emerge within the entire movement of his thinking. Nietzsche himself carries out this critique, for critique belongs to the essence of his truth—a truth constantly surpassing and driving itself onward.
A central argument concerns the dependence of understanding on the nature of the interpreter. Jaspers argues that understanding Nietzsche reveals what kind of person one is. Nietzsche seeks not merely readers but readers who belong to him. Gaining philosophical truth differs from acquiring scientific knowledge. Scientific understanding is sharable, acquired through training and industry. Philosophical truth involves self-realization, awakening, discovering oneself through discovering being. If truth depends on conditions in the truth-seeker, the age-old question of communication arises, jeopardizing unequivocal communication and truth itself. Truth exists only in communication and is unavoidably public like language.
Nietzsche demands much from those who would understand him. He finds it “impossible to teach the truth whenever the way of thinking is base.” Understanding requires being “the victim of the same passion” and experiencing “brightness and fire and dawnings of day” within one’s soul. He speaks of understanding him as “a mark of distinction which has to be earned,” wants thoughts fenced in “so that pigs and dreamers will not break into my gardens,” foresees dangers from “intrusive admirers,” and derides “Zarathustra’s ape.” One has right to Nietzsche’s thoughts only insofar as one is of the same rank.
Jaspers argues that Nietzsche’s thinking rests on awareness of spiritual privileges, knowledge of incommunicability of what is final, and sensitive heed to autonomous existence of others of his rank. Each individual must ask: Who am I? Can I understand? Do I have a right to participate? No answers exist—only through association with Nietzsche can one attain elevation of soul that cannot be planned.
Regarding morality, Jaspers presents Nietzsche’s denial of the sense and validity of the inner moral demand to act in conformity with the moral law. Nietzsche impugns the unconditionality of morality on two bases: morality as alien to reality (there are no moral facts; morality is a misconstruction, a “moral interpretation of phenomena”) and morality as contrary to nature (“morality for morality’s sake” devaluates actuality, which is essentially immoral). However, Jaspers notes that this attack presupposes a knowable reality and the absolute value of that reality (“nature”), both of which Nietzsche cannot maintain since all reality is itself interpretation.
Jaspers identifies the double circle in Nietzsche’s thought: morality as a product of immorality (morality comes from the will to power; it is “a special case of actual immorality”) and the derivation of the critique of morality from the highest morality (the truthfulness demanded by morality finally calls morality itself into question). This “self-overcoming of morality” occurs only in moral men. Morality places “around its own neck the noose with which it can be strangled.”
Nietzsche’s demands are elucidated in four directions: the individual in opposition to the universal (championing the individual as a single being who knows he is part of the entire chain of humanity); the innocence of becoming (annihilating morality in order to liberate life, regaining “complete irresponsibility”); creation (the highest demand, involving evaluation, faith, love, annihilation, and communication); and man as his own creator (man is free and develops himself, with no absolute values that must be created, involving a “transvaluation of all values” and Pindar’s demand: “Become what you are!”).
Jaspers argues that Nietzsche rejects freedom in relation to transcendence. His freedom is rooted in one’s self without God. It is negative (discarding the past) and positive (creation). Nietzsche asks “Free for what?” and insists on a “sacred selfishness” that obeys the highest commandment, contrasting it with the mere “selfishness of a cat.” He calls for an “experimental morality” and a “substitute for morality through the will to our goal.”
Regarding truth, Jaspers presents Nietzsche’s theory of exegesis: all knowledge is interpretation of being by a living, cognizing subject. Truth is not independent, unconditioned, absolutely universal, but inextricably involved with the living subject and his constructed world, which changes temporally. “Truth is the kind of error without which a definite species of living being cannot live.” Falsity of judgment is no objection—repudiating false judgments would repudiate life. “There are many kinds of eyes… and hence many kinds of ‘truths.’ It follows that there is no truth.” Truth must be created, not discovered—a process of conferring and actively deciding.
Jaspers presents Nietzsche’s views on the will to truth and its self-overcoming. The will to truth derives from morality. Nietzsche questions this will itself, asking “What does all will to truth signify?” This reversal coincides with “the death of God” and “self-annulment of morality.” “All great things destroy themselves through an act of self-annulment.”
Key Concepts
Existenz: Jaspers uses this term, left untranslated, to refer to the mode of being that is genuinely human—the self that is not merely an object of scientific study but that which each person must realize through their own freedom and decision. Nietzsche’s philosophizing is understood as an appeal to Existenz, a call to authentic selfhood that transcends mere empirical existence.
The Exception: Nietzsche’s fundamental trait is being an exception—detached from all actual existence, vocation, and society. He finds neither marriage nor pupils or followers, creates no sphere of activity, and wanders aimlessly. Being an exception is substantive and positive; it characterizes all of Nietzsche’s philosophizing.
The Will to Power: This concept appears in Jaspers’ analysis as a universal doctrine that offers inspiration against nihilism but defeats itself by circularity. Morality comes from the will to power; it is “a special case of actual immorality.” All means to make mankind moral were fundamentally immoral (e.g., the pia fraus of Manu, Plato, Confucius, and Jewish and Christian teachers).
Eternal Recurrence: Jaspers presents this as a mystical experience of being expressed in the doctrine of eternal recurrence, which founders in paradoxes. It represents one of Nietzsche’s positive apprehensions, a doctrine that cannot be maintained as a rational proposition but expresses a profound existential insight.
The Superman: The superman is “my first and sole concern—not man… What I can love in man is this, that he is a transition and a decline.” Our task is “to create beyond ourselves!” This is “a substitute for the Godhead”: “God has died. Our desire is now that the superman live.” The image remains indeterminate; Nietzsche asks for “intensification of all contrasts and chasms, elimination of uniformity.” He nullifies even this thought: “On these [clouds] we place our gaily-colored balloons and then call them gods and supermen.”
The Superior Man: Nietzsche originally placed faith in the superior man—one who lays aside chains of religion, morality, metaphysics, attaining “separation of man from the brutes.” Superior men exist but are threatened: “downfall of superior men is the rule.” Only “those with iron constitutions, like Beethoven and Goethe,” stood firm. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, part four, superior men seek Zarathustra: kings, the “spiritually conscientious one,” the “magician,” the “last pope,” “the ugliest man,” the “voluntary beggar,” the shadow of the “free-thinker.” Each reveals greatness in inadequacy, but Zarathustra says: “You may verily all be superior men, but you are simply not lofty and strong enough—for me.”
The Will to Truth: This concept derives from morality. Nietzsche questions this will itself, asking “What does all will to truth signify?” This reversal coincides with “the death of God” and “self-annulment of morality.” The will to truth is both a stabilizing factor and paralyzing—”the feeling of laziness pleads the cause of truth.”
Self-Overcoming: This concept applies to morality and truth alike. The truthfulness demanded by morality finally calls morality itself into question. This “self-overcoming of morality” occurs only in moral men. Morality places “around its own neck the noose with which it can be strangled.” Similarly, the will to truth undergoes self-overcoming.
The Death of God: This concept is implicit throughout Jaspers’ analysis. The reversal of the will to truth coincides with “the death of God” and “self-annulment of morality.” “All great things destroy themselves through an act of self-annulment.” The collapse of the Platonic-Christian worldview produced nihilism.
Nihilism: Nihilism originates from the contrast between a venerated world beyond and the actual world. This exposes a dilemma: “You must either get rid of your venerations or—get rid of yourself.” A nihilist is defined as one who decides the world as it is ought not to be, and the world as it ought to be is non-existent. Nietzsche interprets the Platonic-Christian worldview as the source of this condition.
Transvaluation of All Values: This concept is central to Nietzsche’s demand for creation. There are no absolute values; they must be created. This involves a “transvaluation of all values.” Nietzsche makes Pindar’s demand his own: “Become what you are!”
The Labyrinth: This image represents the knower’s fate—no escape, annihilation by the Minotaur imminent. The independent philosopher enters the labyrinth, risking being “consumed little by little by the cave-dwelling Minotaur of his conscience.” A labyrinthine man “never seeks the truth but always only his Ariadne.” Ariadne represents death: “You are a labyrinth. Theseus has become lost in you.” Ariadne says: “That is my last love to Theseus: I destroy him.” Dionysus transcends both: “I am your labyrinth.”
“Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted”: This formula, taken alone, invites caprice and criminality. For Nietzsche, it represents emancipation of deepest human motives from fixed, untrue truths. Only “the concrete historicity of Existenz” is true. The statement means: “Now you must give the highest proof of being of a noble kind.” Only inborn nobility can give content to this negativity. As a short formula it is “of ruinous ambiguity”—it can mean sinking into “empty meaninglessness.”
The Innocence of Becoming: If we believe in morality, we condemn life, so we must “annihilate morality in order to liberate life.” Nietzsche seeks to regain “complete irresponsibility” and be “no longer ashamed of one’s self.” However, nothing follows from mere contemplation; man must will something.
Become What You Are: This Pindarian demand, which Nietzsche makes his own, is directed at the indeterminate source of my being. It can be misunderstood as a mere assertion of natural facts, but it is a call to self-realization through freedom.
The Great Reason of the Body: Nietzsche endorses “the great reason” of the body versus “little reason” of spirit. This is part of his attack on reason in its traditional forms while seeking “a more profound reason” through a new “gigantomachy” within philosophizing.
Plastic Energy: This concept appears in Nietzsche’s critique of historical science. Man needs both remembrance and forgetfulness; “plastic energy” determines how much history can be absorbed without being destroyed by it.
Themes
The Problem of Communication: A central theme throughout Jaspers’ study is the difficulty and necessity of philosophical communication. Nietzsche recognizes books’ opposite effects depending on soul’s rank: dangerous to base souls, heraldic challenge to lofty souls. “Our noblest insights must—and should!—sound like follies, and under certain circumstances even like crimes, when they surreptitiously reach the ears of those who are neither suited nor predestined for them.” The ambiguity is unintentional, inhering in communication because recipients differ essentially. Courageous truthfulness means risking ambiguity rather than willing it.
Loneliness and Friendship: Jaspers explores Nietzsche’s capacity for friendship and his profound loneliness. Nietzsche appears in awkward situations: attaching to people at random, inviting a scarcely known student on a trip (receiving open refusal), making a marriage proposal out of the blue, having someone look for a wife, approaching Rée and Lou. Nietzsche knew “the sudden madness of those hours when the lonesome person embraces anyone indiscriminately… only to push him away an hour later in disgust—disgust with himself.” The picture of Nietzsche as steel-hard hero is false. His heroism consists in his return after failure.
The inescapable contradiction is that Nietzsche laments his loneliness yet welcomes it. He writes: “The antinomy of my situation… consists in the fact that I feel that all the things which I need as a philosophus radicalis—freedom from profession, wife, child, fatherland, creed—are just so many deprivations.” Nietzsche explains loneliness through cognition’s nature involving estrangement, genuine communication requiring equal niveau, and the “eternal distance between man and man.” He quotes Goethe on losing the right to be judged by peers. He writes: “Incommunicability is in truth the most terrible of all forms of loneliness, and difference is the mask that is more iron-like than any iron mask. Perfect friendship can exist only inter pares.”
The Crisis of Modernity: Jaspers presents Nietzsche as a thinker who diagnoses the spiritual crisis of the modern age. Nietzsche sees “unspeakable poverty and exhaustion” in modern man, “gray impotence, gnawing dissatisfaction, busiest boredom, and dishonest misery.” The ice supporting us “has become so thin.” The disillusionment that follows the realization that there is no “universal organization” or “general welfare” demanding individual devotion leads to a loss of all values, as man ceases to believe in his own value without an “infinitely valuable whole working through him.”
The Meaning of History: Nietzsche is not a research specialist but “a seer.” History begins when the individual’s creative urge for liberation asserts itself against universally binding tradition. Prehistoric ages were determined by unquestionable custom; isolation was punishment. “It is free-thinking that makes history.” History is the process of taming man through metaphysical, religious, and moral errors. “Culture is only a thin apple peel over a fiery chaos.” Every superior culture began with barbarians. Nietzsche
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
The Book’s Entry into the English-Speaking World
The Gateway Edition of Karl Jaspers’ study of Nietzsche, translated by Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz, appeared in 1979, thirty years after its original German publication. Jaspers, born in 1883, had trained as a physician before turning to philosophy, and his major work on psychopathology informed his later philosophical investigations. He was a professor at Heidelberg until the Nazis removed him in 1937, and he was reinstated in 1945 before moving to Basel in 1948. The translators note that when the book first appeared in Nazi Germany, Anglo-American philosophers were barely aware of existentialism, and Nietzsche was typically dismissed as a poet or seer, left to the literati or claimed by the Nazis. The translators emphasize that Jaspers is skeptical where others are credulous and credulous where others are skeptical, insisting that the chief reward of scientific method is acquaintance with its limits, which discloses philosophy’s proper area. Against the rationalist demand for clarity, Jaspers holds that clear and distinct ideas are impossible for the matters that matter most, and he delights in contradictions that reveal the limits of understanding, inviting reason to transcend the given. For Jaspers, philosophy is not academic correctness but a vision one lives by, transforming the knower fundamentally. The translators made key decisions: they omitted parenthetical references to the edition prepared by Nietzsche’s sister, rendered Dasein as “existence” while leaving Existenz untranslated, and incorporated fine-print material into the body of the text.
The Prefaces and the Book’s Purpose
In the preface to the first edition, dated Heidelberg, December 1935, Jaspers observes that reading Nietzsche seems easy—every page is interesting and his language intoxicating—but extensive reading brings aversion to his seemingly contradictory judgments. Mere reading must be abandoned for study that amounts to appropriation through occupying oneself with the totality of intellectual experiences that make Nietzsche representative of our age. He becomes symbolic of humanity’s destiny as it presses toward its limits and sources. In the prefaces to the second and third editions, Jaspers notes the book is an unaltered reprint that combats misunderstandings and counteracts aberrations in the writings of a man on the verge of insanity. He reveals that in 1934-35 he intended to marshal against the National Socialists the world of thought of the man they had proclaimed as their own philosopher. He had planned a chapter of quotations from Nietzsche’s mistaken naturalistic pronouncements as evidence of aberrations, but the result was so devastating that he omitted it out of respect for Nietzsche. Such aberrations amount to nothing when one reaches the understanding this book provides.
The Method of Presentation
Jaspers argues that presenting Nietzsche’s thinking requires bringing out basic philosophical thoughts within a framework, despite Nietzsche’s non-systematic approach. No single thought receives a leading role, and Nietzsche’s exuberant language conceals a basic conceptual structure that must be laid bare. Merely repeating Nietzsche’s language is senseless, so one must disclose the skeleton to comprehend logical relations and cognitive limits. The presentation must be well-documented, bringing thoughts together so they complement, contradict, and incite one another, supported by direct quotation. Quoting resembles goldsmithing: properly setting gems so they mutually enhance each other, making the whole superior to its parts. When Nietzsche’s thoughts are brought together, friction reveals the self-criticism contained in his thinking, for critique belongs to the essence of his truth—a truth constantly surpassing and driving itself onward. A footnote acknowledges that quoting involves removing sentences from contexts, an act of violence, but what matters is avoiding arbitrary relations while each violation leads to more adequate acquaintance with Nietzsche’s totality.
The Dependence of Understanding on the Interpreter
Understanding Nietzsche reveals what kind of person one is, for he seeks not merely readers but readers who belong to him. Philosophical truth differs from scientific knowledge: scientific understanding is sharable and acquired through training, but philosophical truth involves self-realization and awakening. Truth exists only in communication and is unavoidably public. Two fundamental interpretations emerge: the doctrine of stages of truth corresponding to stages of human Existenz, and the doctrine of truth’s inescapable ambiguity. Nietzsche rejects the stages doctrine entirely—no one knows the stages, and ambiguity protects truth from appropriation by the unqualified. Nietzsche demands much from those who would understand him, finding it impossible to teach truth whenever the way of thinking is base. Understanding requires being the victim of the same passion, and he speaks of understanding him as a mark of distinction that must be earned. He wants his thoughts fenced in so that pigs and dreamers will not break into his gardens. One has right to Nietzsche’s thoughts only insofar as one is of the same rank, and each individual must ask: Who am I? Can I understand? Do I have a right to participate? Nietzsche recognizes that books have opposite effects depending on the soul’s rank: dangerous to base souls, a heraldic challenge to lofty souls. When Widmann called Nietzsche’s books dangerous and compared them to dynamite, Nietzsche let it pass, for this danger is necessary. What is needed is courage to acknowledge, think through, and say openly what we really know.
The Ambiguity of Nietzsche’s Appearance
Photographs of Nietzsche are disappointing at first sight, appearing as distorting mirrors, but with prolonged contemplation they reveal something. His mustache is an eloquent token of his penchant for concealment, and his visionary gaze suggests an aggressiveness that leads to clarity. Artistic portraits are unreliable masks reflecting the tastes of the time, though Olde’s etching of the paralytic is a truthful picture, agonizing to those who can truly see. A glance at Nietzsche’s handwriting seems to bring his personality directly before us. Klages finds in it something extraordinarily luminous and bright, transparent and crystalline, remarkably hard and sharp, formed and chiseled in every detail. He sees sublime sensitivity, severity, self-control, and relentless self-judgment, with an impetus striking ever anew in a thrustlike movement. One feels the spirit of fencing in the realm of thought, and despite a profile cut out of stone, it has something disquietingly unbounded and sudden. It is not the handwriting of a man of action, appearing almost fragilely delicate compared to Napoleon’s or Bismarck’s, expressing extreme spirituality and a creative capacity of almost unimaginable scope.
Nietzsche’s Fundamental Trait: Being an Exception
The text asks how a man must appear who, due to truthfulness and his conception of rank, finds himself in awkward positions, condemned to wear masks, and quickly disillusioned. This man develops something within himself not yet shared by others and can never find confirmation in the world. Even today, the picture of Nietzsche does not assume tangible form, yet we see him as the wanderer ascending to inaccessible mountains. Detached from all actual existence—vocation and society—Nietzsche finds neither marriage nor pupils, creates no sphere of activity, and wanders aimlessly. Being an exception is substantive and positive, characterizing all of his philosophizing. In Bonn in 1865, Nietzsche first experienced a distinct crisis that induced him to set out resolutely on his destined path. He became aware that his student existence could never provide true fulfillment. Life was neither a pastime nor following pre-established rules; he was confronted by an Either/Or: to drift with life or accept the extraordinary as having valid claims for every day. His innermost attitude became concentrated, though he did not yet know what provided the concentration. The process was inconspicuous, without pathetic accent or catastrophe. During this year, the course of his life became relatively certain: mere possibility gave way to an actuality that would drive him into his Existenz as an exceptional being.
The Course of Nietzsche’s Development
Nietzsche’s work is a single whole, but each writing has a characteristic place in a developmental process extending over two decades. His youthful writings contain seeds of later thoughts, and the Philologika shows his scientific work with beginnings of his philosophizing. The earlier writings include The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations (1871-76), expressing faith in genius and impending German culture. The works between 1876 and 1882 include Human, All-Too-Human, The Dawn, and The Gay Science, which are basically aphoristic in form.
Rohde’s Devotion and the Friendship’s End
Rohde positioned himself as the receiver and pupil, with Nietzsche as the giver and creative one. Rohde lamented his inability to join Nietzsche in fishing for pearls in ocean depths, instead amusing himself with gudgeons and other philological vermin. Their comradeship-in-arms against Wilamowitz was at its height when Rohde’s public support endangered his own academic career. Rohde was prudent toward Nietzsche’s extreme plans, and this moderation was instinctive. The friendship died without a specific event when Rohde’s prudence became conscious respectability. After 1876, Rohde’s letters became artificial, and his marriage coincided with the cessation of regular correspondence.
Overbeck’s Independent Loyalty
Overbeck’s relationship to Nietzsche was marked by a profound independence that stemmed not from seniority but from his own intellectual achievement. Though he knew and admitted that he ranked below Nietzsche, Overbeck held his place in Nietzsche’s world through his own merits. His radical truthfulness, comparable to Nietzsche’s, did not drive him to extremes but rather to a style of stipulations and reservations where nothing consequential was said, leaving dialectically unresolved contradictions. This is exemplified by a notation beginning “Nietzsche was not a great man in the true sense of the word” yet continuing “whether Nietzsche really may be a great man—something that I least of all can doubt.” His objectivity blocked access to Nietzsche’s ways, and his lack of passion produced a peculiar erudition that enabled him, as an unbeliever, to solve honestly the problem of teaching theology: he never spoke of convictions before students, limiting himself to historical-scientific statements. He helped Nietzsche with humility, received him with awe without real understanding, and coped patiently with difficulties. Neither curiosity nor obtrusiveness but unsentimental, manly loyalty bound them together.
Nietzsche’s Capacity for Friendship and Loneliness
Nietzsche often appeared in awkward situations: attaching to people at random, inviting a scarcely known student on a trip and receiving an open refusal, making a marriage proposal out of the blue, having someone look for a wife, approaching Rée and Lou. He knew “the sudden madness of those hours when the lonesome person embraces anyone indiscriminately… only to push him away an hour later in disgust—disgust with himself.” The picture of Nietzsche as a steel-hard hero is false. His heroism consists in his return after failure. His decisions relating to worldly activity became increasingly negative.
Two Levels of Discussing Loneliness
From a psychological critique, Nietzsche’s independence through will to truth gives him neither self-assurance nor certainty but makes him sensitive to inadequacy and baseness in others. He can live only among nobility, yet repeatedly encounters blindness and untruthfulness, leading to disillusionment and estrangement. His truthfulness brings everything to ruin by applying absolute standards. He severs relationships without positive effect, teaching only by challenging. He seems to love only himself, loving others as vessels for his own self. He yearns for love but fails to seize the moment of spontaneous response. He can be ungrateful and disloyal, as seen in his comments on Overbeck, his mother, and his sister. He holds fast only when others are patient, like Overbeck and his sister, or faithful disciples like Gast. The question arises: did Nietzsche suffer more because he did not love than because he was not loved?
From a task-oriented understanding, only one who does not believe in Nietzsche’s task can accept the psychological critique. Nietzsche gives himself to others when he sees in them a realization of his task, as with Wagner, but he cannot yield to human communication as such. This existential inadequacy results from the task of the exceptional man.
The Inescapable Contradiction
Nietzsche laments his loneliness yet welcomes it. He writes: “The antinomy of my situation… consists in the fact that I feel that all the things which I need as a philosophus radicalis—freedom from profession, wife, child, fatherland, creed—are just so many deprivations.” His destiny parts him from Wagner, whom he leaves, and from Rohde, who leaves him. He writes of his “entirely concealed life.”
Communication Through Task
Nietzsche sought friends who shared his concerns and disciples. He writes of longing for secret conference with Overbeck and Jacob Burckhardt, of finding nobody with the same “distress of heart and conscience.” His writings were “fishing hooks” and “nets” to lure disciples. He complains that in fifteen years not one person has “discovered” him, needed him, or loved him.
Reasons for Loneliness
Nietzsche explains loneliness through the nature of cognition, which involves estrangement; genuine communication requiring equal niveau; and the “eternal distance between man and man.” He quotes Goethe on losing the right to be judged by peers. He writes: “Incommunicability is in truth the most terrible of all forms of loneliness, and difference is the mask that is more iron-like than any iron mask. Perfect friendship can exist only inter pares.”
Illness and the Final Collapse
On January 8, 1889, Overbeck arrived in Turin to take Nietzsche home. Letters indicating insanity had induced psychiatrist Wille to request action. Overbeck found Nietzsche “cowering in the corner of a sofa,” who rushed to embrace him violently, then sank back in twitches, uttering “sublime, wonderfully clairvoyant” things about himself as successor to the dead God. Nietzsche became increasingly demented until his death in 1900. No ravings appear before December 27, 1888, when Nietzsche wrote of a “promemoria for the European courts” for an anti-German league. He became God, Dionysus and the Crucified; Cosima Wagner became Ariadne. The illness was likely an organic brain disorder, probably progressive paralysis, not inherited.
The illness had earlier breaks. After dysentery as a war nurse, stomach disorders recurred from 1873, with violent headaches, vomiting, paralysis-like feelings, and unconsciousness. In 1879 he experienced “118 days of serious attacks” and gave up his professorship in May 1879. By February 1880, Nietzsche was in the south, beginning notes for The Dawn. A profound transformation developed from August 1880 through 1882-83—the most profound change of his life.
Introductory Considerations on Nietzsche’s Philosophizing
Nietzsche’s positive expressions become questionable when stated directly, while his searching and experimenting establishes an extraordinary claim to possible Existenz. He philosophizes in a new philosophical situation created during preceding centuries. A naive philosophy could represent God, world, and man without distinguishing rationality from historicity, communicating values through images and concepts with serene directness. After naiveté collapses, such philosophy offers only retrospective aesthetic satisfaction. Once the unquestioned totality of God, soul, and world collapses, the distinction between rational universality and existential historicity becomes felt, producing disturbing skeptical questions: What is man? What is truth? What do history and the present age signify? Being is then present in historicity, searched for in the will to the future, as interpretation of the world at this instant, and as mystical unity of being.
These questions contain impulses toward positive results: love of the nobility of man, condemned to despair of realization; inexorable truthfulness that questions truth itself; and comprehension of historical figures that comes to grief upon history’s senselessness. The will to the future is expressed as “great politics,” rooted in the indeterminate concept of creativity; a universal doctrine of the will to power offers inspiration against nihilism but defeats itself by circularity; mystical experiences of being are expressed in the doctrine of eternal recurrence, which founders in paradoxes.
Nietzsche’s contributions can be grasped only by those who respond in kind. His thought appears empty to those seeking what is valid for all times, but fulfilling to those who participate in its movement. Negative developments convey more than positive statements when one’s feelings are inspired by Nietzsche’s original motives. Positive sayings carry one away when approached symbolically as signa. Negative sayings become tedious when no picture or symbol remains. He appears more truly himself in negations than affirmations. His ultimate goal is not clear, though the nature of his driving force is evident: he destroys confining horizons, offers unlimited space, teaches critical questions—but unlike Kant, his criticism does not set bounds to inquiry.
Introduction: Discontent with Man
Nietzsche is decisively concerned about man when all generally accepted truths seem untenable. He is spurred by discontent with man as he is and longing for genuine human possibilities. His love, when disillusioned, expresses itself as frightful denial, then reappears as passionate affirmation. Quotations express revulsion: “What arouses our repugnance today? . . . That such vermin as human beings can predominate and multiply.” “There they stand, unaware of their wretchedness.” “Fragments and limbs and revolting monstrosities—but no men!” “I should even refuse to inhale their breath.” “It is doubtful that a world-traveler has anywhere in the world discovered an uglier region than the human face.” The basis of this sorrow is love, expressed through Chamfort’s saying: he who does not become a misanthrope in forty years has never loved mankind.
The Saint in Zarathustra loved mankind but now loves God: “I do not love man; to me he is too incomplete a thing.” Nietzsche wishes to remain in the world to serve man. Saints “wished to flee into a beyond instead of building for the future.” “Religiosity was a misunderstanding on the part of those higher natures who were tormented by the ugly image of mankind.” Disgust with man is the great danger—”
Philosophy’s Battle Against Science
Nietzsche argues that philosophy, pathetically mistaking itself for science, actually turned against science. Almost all philosophy since Socrates has waged “a battle against science”—the same battle later waged by the church. People wished to remain free to pursue their own “path,” hating science’s step-by-step procedure, tempo, unwillingness to conform, wait-and-see attitude, and the personal indifference of the scientific man. The entire history of philosophy is permeated by falsehood and forgery; apart from rare skeptics, an instinct for intellectual integrity fails to appear.
Nietzsche criticizes today’s “mishmash-philosophers” who consider themselves realistic or positivistic, and “philosophy reduced to epistemology.” These contemporary philosophers have been brought back under science’s jurisdiction though scientifically unproductive; nothing remains of philosophy’s true meaning. Science has recently caused an “inappropriate exchange of ranks”—merely learned men now play philosopher. The scientific man’s “declaration of independence” expresses a “plebeian instinct”: arrogant, he tries to lay down laws to philosophy. The specialist instinctively opposes synthesis; the industrious laborer opposes genteel leisure; the utilitarian rejects philosophy as refuted systems.
The Theory of Exegesis: Truth and Life
Nietzsche’s skepticism about any subsisting realm of truth developed this theory: All knowledge is interpretation of being by a living, cognizing subject. Truth is not independent, unconditioned, absolutely universal, but inextricably involved with the living subject and his constructed world, which changes temporally.
Truth as Illusion: The human intellect’s way of interpreting the world results from our specific kind of intellect; every kind of intellect has its own way of understanding. What we call the world results from accumulated errors and fantasies over thousands of years of moral, esthetic, and religious pretensions. “Truth is the kind of error without which a definite species of living being cannot live.” Falsity of judgment is no objection—repudiating false judgments would repudiate life. “There are many kinds of eyes… and hence many kinds of ‘truths.’ It follows that there is no truth.” The concept of truth is nonsensical; “true-false” relations exist only between living beings. Truth must be created, not discovered—a process of conferring and actively deciding.
Application: Truth must be communicable; universal communicability is unconsciously accepted as criterion. Verbal truth is “a mobile army of metaphors.” Communities condemn as “liars” those misusing accepted metaphors. There are forbidden truths threatening community continuance.
The Circle: When truth seeks to know truth, thought circles. Either self-overcoming is final (truth founders) or new mediated self-assertion arises. Nietzsche rejects both Cartesian fixed-point systems and ending all concern for truth. He accepts the second view: truth proceeds through self-reflection to Existenz, which confirms rather than destroys it.
Truth and Existenz: Nietzsche distinguishes universal illusion (indispensable to life) from illusion conditioning specific life kinds. He appeals to higher-rank life, rejecting inferior life. The “will to truth” is both a stabilizing factor and paralyzing—”the feeling of laziness pleads the cause of truth.”
Truth and Life-Forces: Three conditions that can destroy truth: (1) effectiveness—propaganda makes truth lose itself; (2) power—truth must attract force or perish; (3) belief—belief in truth is necessary but its criteria (happiness, martyrdom, virtuous conduct) are false proofs. “Blood is the worst possible witness to truth.” Nietzsche warns: “Beware of martyrdom.”
Awareness at the Boundary: Three steps: (1) pure truth assimilated; (2) compatibility with illusion makes life problematic; (3) all existence grasped through good will to illusion. Nietzsche demands loyalty to the earth, focus on nearest things—”food, place, climate, recreation”—and conscious affirmation of necessary illusion.
Honesty and Its Self-Limitation
Nietzsche simultaneously demands limitless honesty and sets limits to it. He speaks of remaining “hard, we, the last Stoics” when honesty tires, yet warns free spirits against honesty becoming “vanity, snobbishness and ostentation, our limit and our stupidity,” noting that “every virtue tends towards stupidity.”
The self-limitation of honesty has double meaning: (1) Life forces distinction between honesty with oneself and with others—”intentional dissimulation derives from a feeling for honesty with oneself”; (2) honesty with oneself becomes doubtful to the honest person. Honesty must be limited through tolerance toward “grand egotists” and because “it is not possible to live without lies.” Nietzsche claims “the things that are said against lying express the naïveté of the schoolmaster.” Truthfulness requires special conditions: being understood “inter pares” with cordial understanding; in strange situations one conceals oneself.
Nietzsche points to metaphysics of world as illusion: “truthfulness would be an unnatural tendency in a world that is essentially false.” Truthfulness serves “as a means to a special higher potency of falsehood”; “it is a ladder but not the ladder.” The truthful person “finally ends up realizing that he always lies.”
Justice
Truthfulness receives proper meaning from justice. Nietzsche calls justice “the sole goddess which we recognize as standing above us,” containing “the highest and rarest virtues.” He admits discovering he was “entirely wanting in… justice.” The just man wants truth “as a judge who orders and punishes.” Justice opposes convictions, giving “to everything… what is truly its own.” It demands that “even the evil, the unfortunate, or the exceptional man should be granted his philosophy.”
Justice is rare; the impotent misuse the word through resentment. True justice derives from active feeling, not reactive. Active justice remains “just even toward those who wrong him.” Only “superior strength can judge.” Justice becomes questionable when devoid of love: “the just are anathema to lovers.” Zarathustra seeks “justice that loves with discerning eyes.” Justice is also questionable existentially—all life involves perspectivity and injustice. “Justice, as pronounced from a historical standpoint… is a frightful virtue.” Juristic justice arises “among those of approximately equal power” as “requital and exchange.”
Nietzsche conceives metaphysical justice: Aeschylus sees “Moira enthroned as eternal justice”; Prometheus’s “active sin is itself the authentic Promethean virtue.” Heraclitus sees strife revealing “eternal justice”—”the strife of the many that constitutes eternal justice.”
Will to Truth and Its Self-Overcoming
The will to truth derives from morality. Nietzsche questions this will itself, asking “What does all will to truth signify?” This reversal coincides with “the death of God” and “self-annulment of morality.” “All great things destroy themselves through an act of self-annulment.”
Dissolution of Reason
Nietzsche attacks reason in four forms: (1) Categories are “illusions necessary for life”—identity, contradiction, ego are fictions; “knowledge and becoming are mutually exclusive.” (2) Reason is unnecessary, hazardous, impossible—”the irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence.” (3) No metaphysical reason permeates the world—”the only rationality known to us is the tiny bit that belongs to man.” (4) Traditional philosophy is rejected: Parmenides, Descartes, and Hegel’s “Gothic titanism.” Yet Nietzsche also endorses “the great reason” of the body versus “little reason” of spirit. His contradictions create ambiguity, but he seeks “a more profound reason” through a new “gigantomachy” within philosophizing.
Transcending Breakthrough
Nietzsche breaks the circle of truth’s self-destruction through a transcending breakthrough, where truth’s question becomes “the question of all questions,” identical with “the question of being for us.”
Truth and Life
Nietzsche suggests that if life depends on semblance, then truth becomes “a destructive principle, inimical to life.” Developing beings need “a protective, veiling cloud” of illusion; truth dispelling this cloud would destroy the germ of life. Nietzsche expresses indifference toward truth, questioning why “the absolute rule of the truth should be desirable.” He finds it sufficient that truth have “great power” with opposition, allowing relaxation through “consorting with untruth.” He claims “all knowledge of truth is unproductive.” Despite danger, Nietzsche accepts possible damage: “To be injurious and to destroy belong as much to the tasks of the philosopher as to be useful and constructive.”
Will to Ignorance and Courage
The danger of truth grounds a “radical will to ignorance”: “There are times when blindness is necessary.” Nietzsche states, “Once and for all, there is much that I choose not to know.” Becoming what one is presupposes not knowing what one is. Science itself rests on “the granite foundation of ignorance”—the will not to know underlies the will to know. Genuine knowledge requires courage: “
World Rule and Great Politics
Nietzsche argues that for the first time in history, wars will be determined by the issue of world rule. The “age of national wars” belongs to the “whole entr’acte character typical of present European conditions.” He declares: “The time for little politics is gone: the very next century will already bring the struggle for world rule—the compulsion toward great politics.” Political thinking derives meaning only from this goal—”entering the battle for the government of the earth with good prospects”—and, spiritually, from “making ready that still distant state of things in which the good Europeans will take hold of their great task: the conduct and guardianship of the entire culture on the earth.”
Nietzsche’s Assessment of Nations
Nietzsche scrutinizes the “existential physiognomy” of nations. He judges some briefly: Americans are “too quickly depleted” and “merely appear to be a world power of the future.” England will not be strong enough to play its old role for another fifty years; “today one must be a soldier first if he does not wish to lose his credit as a merchant.” In France, “it is the will that is most seriously diseased.” Only Russia and Germany truly concern him from the standpoint of great politics.
Regarding Russia, Nietzsche discerns “signs of extraordinary strength”: “Signs of the next century: entrance of Russia into culture. A grandiose goal. Proximity of barbarism. Awakening of the arts, magnanimity of youth, and fantastic madness.”
Of Germany, he says with annoyance: “The Germans themselves have no future”; they “are of the day before yesterday and of the day after tomorrow,—they have no today.” Yet he also states: “The Germans are not yet anything, but they are becoming something… We Germans demand something of ourselves that has not yet been demanded of us—we demand something more!”
Two Possibilities for World Politics
Nietzsche projects two main possibilities: either the political disintegration of Europe expressing its declining destiny with new combinations for world government, or the political unity of Europe and world government through Europe. The latter dominates: “My concern is—One Europe.” Europe’s external fate is determined by its inner fate: “To compel Europe to decide whether its will to decline is really a ‘will.’ Prevention of the growth of mediocrity. Destruction rather than that!”
He sees the future European potentially as “the most intelligent slave animal, very industrious, basically very modest, excessively curious, spoiled, weak-willed,—a cosmopolitan chaos of affects and intelligence”; the danger is that “Europe will grow increasingly dull and the European man become increasingly insignificant.” Alternatively, the potential European is the “super-race” compared with races arising from “a milieu” and “a firmly imposed role.” He favors the “good European,” perceiving in the mysterious efforts of profound representative men their attempt to “anticipate the European of the future.” Nationalism as a dogma “actually demands narrowness.” He sees Napoleon’s greatness in conceiving “Europe as a political unity,” believes “the economic union of Europe will necessarily occur,” and perceives “the disappearance of nationalism and the creation of the European man.”
Alternative Possibilities
Nietzsche also imagines salvaging a remnant of culture: “Remove in good time what must be saved! And designate countries to which, because of a certain inaccessibility, culture can withdraw—Mexico for instance.” He considers a German-Russian alliance: “an alliance with Russia… because the accumulation of will-power seems greatest and least exhausted among the Slavs: a German-Russian world government is by no means one of the greatest improbabilities.” He sees “a more pronounced trend toward greatness in the feelings of the Russian nihilists than in those of the English Utilitarians… We need the most urgent cooperation with Russia… No American future!” Yet Russia may become a threat: “Russia must become master of Europe and Asia, it must colonize and gain China and India. Europe will be like Greece under the rule of Rome.” Russia and the Church “can wait.”
When his European consciousness strengthens, Nietzsche sees in Russia’s energy not only danger but the possibility of awakening Europe through resistance, wishing for “such an increase in the Russian threat that Europe would have to resolve to become threatening… by developing a will… a prolonged terrible will of its own that could set goals for millenniums to come.”
Fragmentation Possibility
Nietzsche also imagines the opposite of larger units: “The fragmentation into atomic political bodies is the most distant perspective of European politics still imaginable”—if petty states are swallowed by super-states, these by the monster state, which “finally bursts apart because, in the end, it lacks the girdle to encompass its body: the hostility of neighbors.”
Character of Nietzsche’s Visions
None of these visions points to future stability. Nietzsche pursues dangers to their final consequences, destroying the false security that universal goals assure world order. What becomes manifest is “the uncertainty of the direction of everything, not the certainty of a clear guidance.” His visions are “visions of a bottomless world”; he would not commit himself to any.
Spiritual Transformations of Man’s Nature
Nietzsche touches on technology’s effects: “In the new century man’s control of nature will probably give him far more energy than he can consume… Aviation alone will overthrow all our cultural concepts… An age of architecture will arrive when man will again build for eternity, as the Romans did.” Future institutions will include voluntary treatment of souls, remedies against boredom with lecturers, and festivals combining individual inventions. Dangers arise: “Life becomes increasingly burdensome, and we may well ask whether man’s inventive capacity will suffice” to meet the strain.
The Modern Greed for Money and the Struggle for Power
The modern greed for money is presented as a third picture of power’s operation in society. Its motive-force is not real need but a frightful impatience. The lust for power uses different means, but the same volcano continues to glow; what was once done for God is now done for money, providing a superlative feeling of power and an untroubled conscience. The struggle for power is waged not only against contemporaries but against the past as transmitted through historical tradition. A fundamental process in all history is the re-interpretation of traditional materials by the contemporary will to power. Anything existing, regardless of origin, is again and again deliberately seized by a superior power, construed, reformed, and put to some new use.
The will to power routinely disguises itself. In politics, the weak first require justice of the powerful. At a second stage, they request freedom, wishing to break away from authority. Finally, they speak of “equal rights,” meaning that so long as they are not dominant, they wish to prevent rivals from increasing their strength. The impulse to enjoy power activates lower classes and princes alike, but it prefers to assume the guise of right and virtue. When one enjoys power, he feels and characterizes himself as good, while others call him evil. The greatest conquerors have always expressed themselves in the pathetic language of virtue, surrounded by masses who would only listen to the most exalted language. The most effective concealment employed by impotence seeking power was the guise of slave-morality, which from its inception was essentially opposed to the morality of aristocrats. What determines the natures of men in any social constellation is not so much conscious choice of weapons as the implements of warfare unconsciously resorted to. The means man has discovered for giving himself a feeling of power practically constitute most of our cultural history.
The Strong and the Weak
This contrast has its point of departure in ambiguous standpoints implicit in current thought, especially that of the medical profession. Nietzsche fails to distinguish clearly empirical findings from obscure meanings conveyed by general notions: illness as a distinct, scientifically discoverable process versus illness in a merely dyslogistic and question-begging sense. He also fails to differentiate between types of reflexive behavior that can be called “sick” and “healthy,” so that one who is medically ill may be existentially sound, while one medically sound may be existentially ill. Systematic conceptual clarity was not his goal; verbal contradiction does not obscure his existential intuition but stands in the way of clarity of expression. His view confuses comprehensive interpretation of humanity with special knowledge of specific facts. Cultural types of an epoch are brought under the same categories as neurotic syndromes. Physiologico-psychological modes and existential modes merge without differentiation. Only in passing does he separate declining life he would have die out from existence valuable despite its decline.
The character structure of the weak is chaotic; of the strong, synthetic. The former is “the many-sided man, the interesting chaos”; the latter is one “in whom the different forces are resolutely yoked together in their pursuit of one goal.” The weak will grows out of a multiplicity of impulses; the strong will results from co-ordination under dominance of a single impulse. Among the weak, moderation is a consequence of inability; among the strong, it is delight in restraint, the exultation of the rider on a fiery steed.
The Real Dialectic and Experimentation
Nietzsche’s philosophizing is best understood as an experiment, a mode of being where his very possibility is his actuality. This experimentation is not a method but the form of his historical existence, a way of living that unifies his life and knowledge. This unity is achieved through a “real dialectic,” a process of thought that is distinct from traditional, systematic dialectics. Unlike the “hasty surveys” that produce a “circular arrangement of the husks of the conceivable,” Nietzsche’s thinking requires him to “actually live through the various positions with his whole being.” He takes a position with absolute assertion, only to undergo a profound doubt and transition to the opposite pole with equal vigor. The contradictions are real, not subordinate to a known synthesis, but terminate in a synthesis that is “existentially open.” As Nietzsche says, “A thinker of this kind does not need anyone to contradict him: he is capable of doing that himself.”
This real dialectic has four characteristics. It is self-related, an act of “overcoming” (Überwindung). It is substantial, connected to possible Existenz and distinct from intellectual arbitrariness. It is constructive in purpose, though it risks sinking into pure negation. And it has direction but no terminus, its substance lying in “being-on-the-way.”
Overcoming
Nietzsche must identify himself with what he speaks of, for merely conceived possibilities lack life. What becomes exclusive reality for others becomes for him “a mere moment in the movement” of his thought. Since he is “potentially anything, he is actually nothing.” He calls self-overcoming his “strongest characteristic,” knowing it springs from danger: “I need it most of all—I am always on the brink of an abyss.” Overcoming involves attack and experimental negation, but what is rejected must have been directly experienced and identical with his own being. He opposes those who “acquire one kind of disposition” for all situations. His goal is “to have circled the whole periphery of the modern soul, to have sat in every one of its nooks.” He confesses to being “the first consistent nihilist in Europe, the one who has already lived nihilism through to the very end,” and “At once a decadent and a beginning. . . . I am both.” He consciously withstands natural inclinations, playing affects against each other: “I have always played each one off against the others.”
Substantial Thinking and Constructive Purpose
Nietzsche refuses identification with the “Don Juan of Cognition” who lacks love for what he knows. His thinking is “substantial”—a constant movement of his whole nature requiring participation in everything he overcomes. The No is the path to a new Yes. He demands overcoming “everything Christian by what is more than Christian.” Self-overcoming serves “the development of ruling power.” Zarathustra’s first discourse presents the “three metamorphoses of the spirit”: bearing the heaviest burdens, release through sacred negation, and the attainment of new values through creation and sacred affirmation.
Endlessness and Logical Forms
Nietzsche affirms endlessness itself. As a young man he thought closed horizons indispensable; later he found in himself “a fondness for open horizons.” He feels himself “a bird intent upon distant shores,” experiencing “the homesickness of the homeless.” He warns: “We have abandoned the land and gone aboard ship! We have demolished the bridges behind us.” Nietzsche never methodically formulated his dialectic, lacking “conscious mastery of philosophical methods.” He asks whether opposites exist at all or are “mere surface evaluations,” defending himself “against all clumsy four-square oppositions”: “Only in the market-place do they pin you down with the question: Yes or No?” He rejects the “original sin of philosophers”—taking propositions absolutely. He states: “each of these, taken individually, is false and all of them, taken together, are true.” Yet he also says “there is no whole” and “there is no total process (conceived as a system) at all.” He rejects the system: “The will to system represents a lack of integrity” and “I am not narrow-minded enough for a system—not even my own system.” His aphoristic form was deliberate: “The aphorism and the maxim, in the use of which I am the first among German masters, are the forms of ‘eternity.'”
Communication and the Necessity of Being Masked
“Alone one is always in the wrong; the truth begins with two.” Peter Gast became a substitute for understanding, but incommunicability grows: “Our skepticism concerning the communicability of things of the heart is profound.” Only “something hard and fast, simplified” can be communicated—it must be “fixed up,” and what is said has already ceased to be true. He uses indirect communication, considering pseudonyms (the “free spirit,” Zarathustra, who “is not Nietzsche”). Everything deep loves masks: “Every profound spirit needs a mask.” The necessity of being masked affects the meaning of a thinker’s work. No thoughts that enter a work can convey truth itself. The lack of authenticity in everything determinate produces ambiguity in what is authentic; incommunicability creates loneliness that hides behind masks. A thinker who has allowed this boundary-experience to permeate his being is identifiable by “stigmata.” The hermit does not believe any philosopher has published his authentic and final views in books; indeed he doubts a philosopher could have final views at all. Perhaps all caves conceal deeper caves, and beyond all grounds lurks the groundless. Every philosophy is a foreground-philosophy; every philosophy conceals another philosophy.
Simile, Song, and Polemics
Communication extends beyond thought and exegesis. Simile and song became Nietzsche’s most genuine and final communication. His poems belong to his philosophizing as definitive fulfillment, arising directly from pregnant silence. Openness of being—deliverance from silence—appears in simile when “enhancement of life increases man’s power to communicate,” as with Zarathustra returning to his cave. Song surpasses simile. What remains when all else ceases is “that I must sing again.” In a later preface to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche confesses: “It should have sung—this ‘new soul’—and not have spoken!” Nietzsche employs polemics because vigorous attack increases chances of reaching people. His self-understanding clarifies his polemics’ meaning: not essentially struggling against deception and perversion, but struggling with the best. He only attacks victorious causes, only attacks when alone without allies, never attacks persons but uses persons as magnifying glasses for general critical situations. Wagner’s greatness is indicated by Nietzsche struggling against him throughout his whole life. Since what’s attacked is not to be annihilated but affirmed, the battlefield is basically Nietzsche himself; his opponents are forms he assumes.
What Nietzsche Is to Himself and Transcending Within Immanence
Nietzsche’s view of himself could never be unambiguous—both decisive self-certainty and constant dubiety appear. From early on he was conscious of a task that remained indefinite until after 1880, when it grew into inexorable service. In 1877 he realized his professorship must end: “I know and feel that there must be a higher destiny for me than is expressed to me in my so respectable position in Basel.” Later: “I did not understand myself, but the urge was like a command.” Nietzsche’s thinking reaches “Being” through a series of leaps: from near, actual occurrences to distant possibilities, then to the becoming of the natural world as a whole. These leaps, made within the world, replace the leap to transcendence. However, instead of proceeding from the self-being of Existenz toward transcendence, these leaps move toward the totality of immanent existence. This transcending fails to distinguish between objectively discoverable truth and illuminating truth. When these are confused, the thinker becomes enchanted by non-existent tasks pursued in self-deception. The superman becomes an ideal product of planned breeding: “Can you create a god? Then be quiet about all gods! But you are quite capable of creating the superman.”
Nietzsche’s Godlessness and Nihilism
Nietzsche’s atheism is neither a categorical denial of God’s existence nor indifference. His establishing that “God is dead” expresses profound shock. His “godlessness” seeks to suppress the leveling lie of pretended belief in favor of genuine commitment. He shows proximity to Christianity: “It is still the best bit of ideal life that I have ever come to know.” Nietzsche’s transcending appears as nihilism followed to the end—the creative nihilism of the strong, contrasted with the destructive nihilism of the weak. His godlessness conveys unspeakable torment: “you will never again pray… never again find peace in boundless trust.” He wished he might be mistaken: “Today my life consists in the wish that all things could be quite different from the way I see them to be.” True courage is “the courage of the hermit and the eagle which is no longer witnessed even by a god!” Nietzsche allows for the resurrection of the god he must deny: “
