Life Sentences (11 page)

When one is in pain, its bearer grows restless. Perhaps my hip, my catarrh, my fever will feel better in another room, downtown, in the mountains, at the beach. And Nietzsche needed woodland shade to walk in, good air, quiet circumstances, abstemious quarters in expensive resorts. Thunderstorms unnerved him. Lightning made him seek his covers. Heat was the worst, unless it was the cold. He was always seeking solace somewhere else, though travel itself seemed to bring on migraines and seizures. The seizures were unexplained but serious and frequent. Sometimes, instead of a fit, he’d faint.

“During the past year,” he wrote to his sister as 1879 drew to a dreary close, “I had
118 serious
nervous-attack days. Lovely statistic!” (Cate, 296)

Diets would do the trick, Nietzsche was told, and they nearly did him in.
Mann ist was er isst
, the saying goes, but a man is also his illnesses. When he vomited blood, quinine was prescribed. He had “chronic stomach catarrh,” specialists decided, so his rectum was flushed every morning with cold water. He ate nothing but small helpings of meat accompanied by Carlsbad fruit salts, and at evening a glass of wine while the leeches were drinking. This folly went on until another physician altered the menu. It was impossible for Nietzsche to read for any unbroken length of time, and equally hard for him to have an extended thought. Tramping through the woods, or hiking up hills, was supposed to be good for you, and I imagine Nietzsche’s increasingly epigrammatic style appealed to the trudging mind, while his habit of hyperbole suited the mountain views. While reading him, I think we have to remember his steadily worsening physical condition, and understand how longing for a life of healthy and happy exertion might furnish his philosophical notions with
their favorite imagery. His style reflected the fact that he scribbled on scraps, or dictated to friends. He wore optimism like a fur coat against the cold, and, in his search for a satisfactory communal life, grew increasingly solitary.

Although Nietzsche’s first essays and meditations were written in better health and circumstances, his later ones were done in defiance of his doctors’ ultimate orders to avoid reading, writing, and “every form of extreme physical and intellectual exertion.” But for this patient, writing was breathing and had to be done, no matter the pain and damage.

Nietzsche’s first major work,
The Birth of Tragedy
(1872), was a shrewd mix of philology, philosophy, and literary criticism. Although it would be less obviously about its author than most of the work to follow, Nietzsche begins being Nietzsche here. German intellectuals had been infatuated with Greece since the 1760s, when Johann Winckelmann published his first adorations. This strange man’s idolatry was fed by the fact that he never visited Greece himself, but saw Athens only from the ruins of Rome, and it was encouraged by the profitability of his relationship with a fellow to whom history assigns the name Cavaceppi, a notorious “reconcoctor” of antique statues. The art world’s subsequent romance is investigated by E.M. Butler in her definitive study
The Tyranny of Greece over Germany
(1935). What the Germans believed they adored were chalk white statues of ideally formed men and women who stood on their pedestals and pretended to be gods, each serene as a frozen lake, each perfected figure formed by a Greek master. What they also claimed to admire were the Greek philosophers and the Classical world of reason, harmony, and proportion, as reverentially depicted by the Renaissance painters: clusters of toga’d gentlemen reclining on stones or standing on white steps, conversing among pale columns in view of regimented groves, debating the nature of the right life. However, what they were actually admiring—Nietzsche included—were mostly marble Roman copies of Greek bronzes; copies, moreover, made by the imagination, since the originals had long since
been smashed to bits or melted down to rescue the metal. When it was rumored that the sculptor Myron had done a discus thrower … lo! a discus thrower appeared.

But when Nietzsche studied the Greek tragedies (for, after all, they
were
originals, even though a great number of these plays were also missing), what he saw were satyrs and bacchantes, furious women and horny men engaged in usurpation, revenge, and adultery; and what he read in those Greek texts was of a world that included drunken revels and much frenzy, pleasure taken in prowess of every kind, pain from the malicious blows of fate, constant conflicts of interest, not lives of rational detachment but lives of passionate commitment.

It hardly mattered whether Greek tragedy had grown from the antics of a goat god or not; the categories Nietzsche used to explain its origins were going to be in Nietzsche’s permanent employ, and shape his later, more developed view of life. There is, in culture itself, a persistent tendency to replace the natural world with a human one, and thus to downplay the animal in man, that part of him he shares with beets, beasts, stones, and stars. The Greek soul had been traditionally divided into three parts, two of which linked men with the plant and animal kingdoms, and these parts were regarded as lower than reason, often demeaning, sordid, and troublesome. Nietzsche cherished his own myth about animals. Because they had no memories of the past or expectations for the future, they lived fully and richly in the present, connected with all that went on in and around them, fulfilled by their instinctive functions, feeding on others, yes, but without malice and basically at peace with their own species as well as all others.

Human beings have to get drunk to recapture this basic state—that’s how bad off they are—or go to soccer matches, where they can lose their minds in beer and contribute to the madness of the crowd, or, perhaps, preferably, listen to music so intensely they become the undulation of the notes, rising and falling, filling and diminishing with them, even moving their limbs to the flow like weeds at the
bottom of a stream. “Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by; they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored.” “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in
Untimely Meditations
, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (1983).

Yet only a small fraction of a napping cat is asleep, the antelope are on high alert as they graze, the buffalo stands still to listen, the horse lifts its head to catch a scent, the wildebeest remember to be cautious approaching the watering hole, or be scarce at evening when the lions hunt; and they become a flash of fleeing limbs when smoke is smelled, or when a white hunter has sullied the air with his odor and dragged his ass, gun, and gear through the brush for a better shot. The community swimming pool is full of snakes and crocs. Every bird worries the whereabouts of its next meal, and pecks the dirt, bark, berry bush, or buggy air for protein. Alaskan flies can bite the flanks of a moose till it runs amok. Constant grooming is required to combat ticks, mites, lice, and fleas. Parasites luxuriate in the damp warm gloom of the guts. The glorious happiness of a mindless browse in the gentle sun is never to be enjoyed by these creatures; the peaceable kingdom is a world at war, at hunting and being hunted, at alarm and incursion, at lessons learned through pain and maiming, or death is else.

Nietzsche calls the immersed life of the beast Dionysian, while the Apollonian represents the specifically human, self-conscious, and hence detached mind of man. Even our digestion is supervised and medicated as if it were a colicky baby. Apollonian self-regard separates us from the world, which becomes pure appearance. It dams our urges until they form a lake, and then releases spurts as it deems reasonable. The Dionysian values identity, the Apollonian difference. The Apollonian likes the solitude and honor of the mountaintop, where his thought can see so far and delve so deep that those depths, when seen, see him; whereas the Dionysian prefers
the passions of the crowd, the openness of alcohol, the bestirring of a martial air, the camaraderie of song.

Greek tragedies, if generalizations so vast can be made, are more obviously built on the quite real conflict between tribal loyalties (the model on which feudalism is also based) and the more rational communities asked for by the city-state. If civil societies were to prosper, blood kinships had to be put aside, family ties loosened, roots uprooted, and habits of revenge relinquished. Between ties of blood and rules of law, there could be no compromise. That was the tragedy. The hero was torn apart (as Orpheus, Osiris, and Dionysius literally were) because the future could no longer contain the past, because justice had been removed from private hands, because shame stained only the slapped cheek, and birth could not assign your rank. Nietzsche is a man afloat, who fears the reef but seeks the harbor. In him, our contemporary conflicts are writ large, and their intractable contradictions are our tragic destination. The Apollonian ideal has no better representative than Immanuel Kant, whose dream of reason was of a kingdom made by individuals so rational and so morally secure they legislated exclusively for themselves, but did this only after determining what could consistently serve as a rule for all: anarchy as it was meant to be, the achievement of the autonomous individual. This ideal is exactly where the pagan arrow lands after its long flight from Socrates’ hand—at the feet of the ultimate self.

Nietzsche’s insistence that the math of the classical world contained irrational numbers received small applause from his professional colleagues, and
The Birth of Tragedy
was bitterly attacked. Nietzsche, however, thrived on combat; he needed adversaries; it was necessary to his work that it be a way through a forest of ignorance; he was happy to let his enemies define him. Their protests energized him, proved him right. At the same time, Nietzsche reacted angrily to every caution he was asked to observe, to every mark of legitimacy he was expected to sport, to every kowtow he was required to perform. Because he had lost his father so early in
his life, Nietzsche was especially vulnerable to mentors and too passionate in his choice of them; however, they were never going to be around long. Hegel’s world-historical individuals, Carlyle’s heroes, and Emerson’s self-reliant pioneers were everywhere hoped for, worshiped, yet, with relish, after a time of glorious regency, overthrown. It would be Schopenhauer’s fate, and Wagner’s also. Nietzsche would eventually overthrow himself.

Cate carefully details the remarkable career of Lou Salomé (a nimble, bright, strong-willed, yet surprisingly frail young woman, who was also escaping her past), naturally highlighting Nietzsche’s “courtship” by omitting none of the affair’s inept convolutions (an intellectual
ménage à trois)
as Lou slips between the closing paws of Paul Rée (her positivist admirer, subsequently a suicide) and Friedrich Nietzsche (her other tutor—
le tiers
—and unhappy suitor) into the arms of a similarly futile and gifted swain (Friedrich Carl Andreas, her pathetic though scholarly husband, who threatened suicide if she didn’t wed him), then briefly allowing Rainer Maria Rilke (her spoiled boy poet) to climb into her bed before bounding on to Gerhart Hauptmann (the playwright for whom she was the “other woman,” and who orders a character in one of his dramas to kill himself, perhaps so the playwright wouldn’t have to), until finally—skipping a few beaux because she hid them better—she reaches Victor Tausk (fellow psychoanalytic student, soon, too, a suicide), and comes to rest in the company of Sigmund Freud (her teacher, colleague, and comforter), who, though ill of cancer, is charmed, wise, paternal … and appropriately famous.

This courtship, carried on at the level of eloquent adolescence by the principals involved—the beloved, her two suitors, fussy outraged mothers, nosy friends, a venomous sister—ends in misunderstanding, rumor, and scandal, with tankards of bitterness all around, although, as a consequence, Nietzsche is set free of Rée, Salomé, sister, and a score of illusions about his life, which would henceforth be increasingly solitary and unfettered, except for the constant company of all those passive emotions that he rejected as often and
as publicly as possible, though they privately clouded his every hour and darkened every memory. “My distrust is now so great: from everything I hear I feel a contempt for me” (Cate, 390).

With
Thus Spake Zarathustra
(1883–85) he would deny his demons. Emerson, one of the few of Nietzsche’s heroes whose clay feet aren’t eventually noticed, might have called Nietzsche’s books
compensatory
. The reader certainly bears a license from the philosopher to interpret his work in terms of his life, to inspect the perimeters of that single perspective with suspicious dogs, to confront the man instead of his ideas, and to employ the most outrageous rhetoric he can command in order to critique them. In the books of maxims and aphorisms that preceded
Zarathrustra
, as well as in those that would follow, Nietzsche used the same strategies in designing his attacks as you would for a war, because his was a philosophy of condemnation and exposure that defined its goals mainly by means of its oppositions. It did not tackle a problem; it assaulted solutions, and it did so principally by calling the solver’s character into question. Logicians call this fallacy, appropriately, the ad hominem—i.e., against the man instead of the argument.

Moreover, the weakness of any idea and moral practice lay in its origins. Like Marx and Freud, Nietzsche looked to see in what hovel the bad had been born; in what expensive college the good had got its education; what were the “real”—that is, original—sources of some term’s meaning, the reasons for this or that preference, this or that injunction, this or that exercise of power. As it had been, it still was. Logicians call this fallacy, appropriately, the genetic.

As if a crime had been committed (and Christian culture was a moral crime), the sleuth sought a motive: in the profits of the Church, the powers of the clergy, the persecution of heretics, the defense of dogma. If I tithed I was buying my way into heaven. If I was charitable, I sought favor or wanted to feel good about myself. If I turned the other cheek it was only for those above me and because I had to, while those below me I glad-handed and then struck with impunity. This maneuver is called the fallacy of the single cause. It
also accompanies the fallacy of the fatal flaw as customarily as bread does butter, and not just because a flaw in the infallible dims the diamond, but because, when many considerations support a conclusion, a weakness in one may not be critical, whereas, after the reasons have been reduced to a single straw, a little kink is sufficient.