Friedrich Nietzsche
(Gesundheit!)

A funny thing happened on the way to the 20th century - in philosophy, that is. Between 1801 and 1900, you had some of the most famous philosophers in history and whom everyone agrees are the most important in the world. The trouble is you can't understand what the heck they meant until you first read books about what they meant. In fact there are many more books about what the philosophers were writing about than the books the philosophers actually wrote.

There is, though, some purpose to reading books about the philosophers first. Read their own books, and you'll end up getting stuck. You might even be tempted to think the philosophers have no robes and are only praised by elitists lagabouts who haven't seen a Super Bowl since 1975.

For instance, consider Friedrich Nietzsche, who some argue is the most important philosopher of the 19th century. But try turning to what Friedrich said in his famous Also Sprach Zarathustra:

Three metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwells: for the heavy and the heaviest longs its strength.

"What is heavy?" so asks the load-bearing spirit; then kneels it down like the camel, and wants to be well laden.

Now it is true that Zarathustra (the "th" is pronounced as a "t") is written as a parable and so maybe it's not supposed to make sense. But go hunt for other quotes of Friedrich's, and you wonder if he spent his time writing for fortune cookies. Here's some of Frederich's more famous sayings:

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

So what, as Flakey Foont asked Mr. Natural, does it all mean?

Friedrich was born in 1844 in a town called Röcken bei Lützen. His father, Carl Ludwig, was a Lutheran minister and suffered from migraine headaches. Carl died when Friedrich was five. Friedrich also had migraines, and it was a given he would follow Dad's footsteps. Or at least that's what his mom, Franziska, wanted.

So Friedrich enrolled at the University of Bonn in 1864 but soon transferred to the University of Leipzig because one of his major professors had taken a job there. Friedrich had also decided he didn't want to become a preacher and started studying languages instead.

It was also at Leipzig that Friedrich first met the 51 year old Richard Wagner. Richard was one of the most popular composers of the time and had already written some of his most famous operas: Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Das Rheingold, Tristan and Isolde, and he was working on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. He was also about to be bailed out of his debts by King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Friedrich was actually himself a good musician and played the piano with considerable skill and even composed music. But he preferred quiet study rather than spending long hours practicing.

At the University, Friedrich was recognized as a superior student, and before he graduated he was offered a job as professor of philology - that is, the study of languages - at the University of Basel. His first papers were philological, but after a brief interval, Friedrich began to branch into philosophy.

Like all German students, Friedrich read a lot of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. Immanuel believed that morals and reason were one and the same, and hence a moral society was a rational one. Arthur - pronounced "Artur" without the "h" - was noted for his - quote - "darkly pessimistic" - unquote - outlook for culture and society.

Friedrich, though, didn't like Arthur's pessimism. So he wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where he argued that the reason no one had ever created great things like the Greeks was because nowadays people were spending too much time looking at nice statues and reading writers like Plato and Socrates. This part of Greek culture Friedrich dubbed the Apollonian after the Greek god Apollo.

But Friedrich warned there was not enough emphasis on making whoopee like the Greeks did at the Festival of Dionysus. This side of Greek culture he commonsensically called Dionysian. You needed both, Friedrich said, to accomplish what the Greeks did. Some biographers think Friedrich's health problems were because he added Dionysian studies to the Apollonian.

Almost all of his fellow professors at Basel thought Friedrich was nuts and didn't like him. The one exception was the prestigious Jacob Burckhardt, who was a professor of art history. But academic advancement was largely determined by your fellow faculty members and one friend wasn't enough. So hints were dropped that Friedrich should leave the university. This at least would let the school hire a real professor. And to make it possible for Friedrich to clear out, the university granted him a modest pension. That way, his colleagues felt, he could write all the Schwachsinn he wanted and leave them alone.

For the next decade Friedrich spent his time writing about what he considered the solution to the world's ills. But a modest pension wasn't really enough to get by on, and one way out was to visit his wealthy friends Richard and Cosima Wagner who by that time were really sponging off King Ludwig II (once Cosima drove to the Treasury where she loaded up her carriage with sacks of coins). The Wagners seemed to combine both the Apollonian and Dionysian which led Friedrich to think Wagner was of a superior nature - a veritable Superman - or as Friedrich put it (he did speak German after all), an Übermensch.

The concept of the Übermensch has gotten Friedrich in a lot of hot water. He brings up the word in - yes - Also Sprach Zarathustra where he wrote:

The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth.

I teach you the Übermensch: He is that lightning, he is that frenzy!

I teach you the Übermensch: He is that sea, in him can your great contempt be submerged.

It's no surprise, then, that people have been trying to figure what the heck Friedrich meant. And the concept of the Übermensch has been blamed for the acts of some of the most despicable people in the world. On the other hand, some of Friedrich's admirers argue that Friedrich did not necessarily mean there were really people who were superior to the hoi polloi. Instead they say Friedrich was speaking metaphorically - as one modern philosopher put it - "to symbolize creativity incarnate".

Unfortunately, the fact Friedrich thought Richard was an Übermensch indicates Friedrich was thinking in literal terms. But other than an Übermensch being someone who has better qualities than most other people, the debate still goes on as to what he meant. Certainly he did not think the concept justified child murder or genocide.

For what it's worth, Friedrich later decided Richard was not an Übermensch. Instead he concluded Richard was more of an entertainer whose music was merely an accompaniment to (ptui) theatrical performances. Friedrich wrote up his ideas about Richard, but while Richard was alive, Friedrich contented himself by making veiled illusions about jerks who thought themselves geniuses. Friedrich did make a presentation copy of Human, All Too Human to Richard. It was pretty clear who Friedrich was talking about, though, and soon he was persona non grata chez Wagners. So no more extended vacations with those lavish free meals at Haus Wahnfried.

In the meantime and living on his pension, Friedrich had a lot of time to think about how to fix Arthur Schopenhauer's rather negative philosophy. This wasn't easy because Friedrich more or less agreed with Arthur.

While he was thinking, Friedrich had noted that all societies claim they have an absolute fixed moral code. And yet none of them seem to agree just what that moral code is. The way out, of course, is to think your morals are the absolute and correct set and the others are wrong.

But Friedrich said, no. The reason no culture agrees on a set of morals is because moral codes are a product of the society. In short, they are fabrications. Western Civilization adopted the specific morals of Christianity, but that did not make the morals any less arbitrary or fabricated.

One attempt to show the arbitrariness of moral rules - although this was not Friedrich's tack - is to pick a sentence with the word "morality" and substitute the word "bigotry". For instance:

The judge said he would include his sense of morality in his ruling.

This becomes:

The judge said he would include his sense of bigotry in his ruling.

Or you can try:

No society can exist without a sense of its own morality.

And we have:

No society can exist without a sense of its own bigotry.

Notice that the new sentences not only make sense, but they really mean the same thing as before. In essence, Friedrich thought that one man's bigotry is another man's morality.

Christianity's teachings, then, were also a product of the time and place from which they arose. Not only that, Friedrich said - and this is what gets a wedgie in a lot of people's shorts - that Christianity was one of the worst sets of principles to adopt. After all, Friedrich said, Christianity's rules were morals - or rather instructions - for slaves.

Ha? (To quote Shakespeare.) How does Friedrich figure that?

Well, consider this. If someone strikes you on one cheek and you offer him the other, you are doing exactly what the masters would tell their slaves. Such a philosophy then leads directly to the idea that being servile is a virtue - the "meek shall inherit the earth" stuff. Not only do slave owners love such a philosophy, but the slaves themselves do so because its a way they rationalize and accept their helplessness. So what was really a sour grapes mentality for slaves ends up being something later generations elevate as absolute and fixed morality.

Actually Friedrich did not say it was not possible to live a Christian life but no one - particularly self-proclaimed Christians - actually did. Although Mark Twain did not really say "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian", Friedrich did say "The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding - at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." Actually what Friedrich wrote was "Das Wort schon ‚Christenthum‘ ist ein Missverständniss - im Grunde gab es nur Einen Christen, und der starb am Kreuz." The cynical may see this as Friedrich trying to cover his rosy red Hinterbacken as he did live where freedom of speech was a bit shaky and in what was nominally a Christian country.

Friedrich believed that moral codes have an even more negative effect on society. It created the concept of good and evil. Yes, the negative effect was creating the concept of good and evil.

How so? Well, by adopting the good/evil dichotomy, you then label yourself good and say that anyone who is different than you are is evil. But once you label someone as evil, you feel you can do whatever you want to them. This leads to "herd-morality" where the individual not only loses his individuality but also justifies violent mob action against minorities.

So when people go into spittle flinging diatribes that Friedrich was opposed to religion in general and Christianity in particular, they are correct. But Friedrich did not reject absolute truth. People should state the truth as it is, he said, and not show phony modesty or humbleness. Don't pretend you accept a set of morals but then go ahead and act to the contrary. If your country has no hesitation in annihilating a weaker adversary don't pretend you turn the other cheek. All you're doing is showing that you don't really accept your own moral code. Friedrich put all these ideas in a book On the Genealogy of Morality and even more people thought he was nuts.

Nuts of not, Friedrich's influence on 20th century philosophy was enormous. In fact, he is sometimes called an existentialist long before Jean-Paul Sartre denied he was one and then later said he was. And yes, Friedrich's basic philosophy - that there is no underlying code of morals and that the individual must learn to deal with the world on their own - is about as close as you can get to a definition of existentialism. But Friedrich never used the word.

By the time he was thirty-five, Friedrich's health really began to fail. His migraines had gotten worse, and he lived in cheap boarding houses. Then in early 1889, a policeman in Turin, Italy, was called to handle some crazy German who was making a scene in the street. The usual story was Friedrich saw a tradesman maltreating his horse and tried to defend the animal. Whatever happened, the policeman sent Friedrich on his way.

Immediately Friedrich's letters became so odd that a friend went to Turin and took him back to Basel. Friedrich spent his final eleven years confined to a mental hospital where in 1900 he died at age 55.

In early biographies, the authors would wag a finger and cluck about Friedrich's sad fate. But what you should expect when you contract what the Germans called the French disease, the French call the English disease, the Dutch the Spanish disease, the Japanese the Portuguese disease, the Russians the German Disease by forsaking a moral code?

But of course, college professors have to make a living too, and so they have to publish papers about what Friedrich really died of. Since Friedrich has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent decades, we have to prove he didn't die of too much Dionysian living.

Instead in one recent medical article we read that the traditional diagnosis of Friedrich's demise is "probably incorrect" and it is "not compatible with most of the evidence available". Alternative diagnoses (note plural) such as a "slowly growing right-sided retro-orbital meningioma" are "more plausible". Of course, in the (ptui) popular press, a reporter gussied up this carefully worded opinion to where it is "almost certain" Friedrich died of brain cancer. And we read that the - ah - "other" disease was suggested by people who just wanted to trash Friedrich.

But as with so many "almost certain" diagnoses from over a century past, you can bet there are other ideas. Remember, both Friedrich and his dad suffered from headaches and health problems that were passed down through the family.

So a more recent review of the record has other physicians thinking Friedrich (and his dad) suffered from cerebral autosomal-dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy. Usually abbreviated to the mercifully more pronounceable acronym CADASIL, this is indeed a heredity condition characterized by, yes, migraine headaches and a series of strokes culminating in mental deterioration ending up as dementia. Friedrich's complaint fit the symptoms quite well. But of course, like what Friedrich meant in his philosophy, no on really knows what the problem was.

By the time Friedrich died he was famous largely because of the efforts of his sister, Elisabeth (the "s" is correct, not a misprint). She edited his writings and had them published. But there was one wee little problem. Elisabeth was not a nice lady.

In fact when Elisabeth took charge of her brothers writings, she had them edited to make him look like a venom-spouting proto-Nazi. That's because Elisabeth and her husband, Bernhard Förster, were venom-spouting proto-Nazis, and Elisabeth actually lived long enough to become a real Nazi.

Even today you can find people who talk about how (ptui) "revisionist historians" claim that Friedrich was not really anti-Semitic. This complaint is particularly vehement in anti-Semitic writings. Actually the truth is Friedrich was not only not an anti-Semite, he was strongly pro-Jewish and respected the culture and the individuals. You will, though, find some teachers that still teach gullible undergraduates that Friedrich was the direct enabler of the Nazis.

Actually if you don't want to be discourteous to a lady, you can argue the problem was really with Elisabeth's husband. Friedrich had even opposed the marriage precisely because Bernhard was such a rabidly anti-Semitic Arschloch. After Elisabeth and Bernhard married, they and a group of followers headed off to Paraguay to set up a colony of "pure" Germans. The effort - the colony of Nueva Germania was not crowned with success and after Bernhard, who was a real nutcase, killed himself in 1889, Elisabeth returned to Germany.

Elizabeth took charge of Friedrich's papers and forbade anyone else to look through them. She began to edit them in her and Bernhard's own image and - hey, presto! - we began to read about Friedrich the proto-Nazi.

The idea that a small band of idiots would seize control of a country that produced the likes of Mendelssohn, Leibniz, Heine, and Schiller was unthinkable in 1914. But by 1922, hard times had hit Germany and by 1933, Elisabeth was elated to find the new foamy-mouthed German chancellor was willing provide Government money to help support the archive of her brother's papers.

Yep, if Friedrich were alive, he'd have been rolling over in his grave.

References

Nietzsche The Man and His Philosophy, R. J. Hollingdale, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1965

"'Madness' of Nietzsche was cancer not syphilis", Robert Matthews, The Telegraph, May 4, 2003.

"What Was the Cause of Nietzsche's Dementia?", Leonard Sax, Journal of Medical Biography, pp. 47-54, 2003.

"The Neurological Illness of Friedrich Nietzsche", Acta Neurol Belg. D. Hemelsoet, K. Hemelsoet, D. Devreese. Vol. 108, Issue 1, pp. 9 - 16, March 2008.

"Friedrich Nietzsche", Encyclopedia Britannica

The Giants of Philosophy, Frederich Nietzsche, Richard Schacht, Charleton Heston (Narrator), Knowledge Products, 2006

Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language, Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006