Nietzsche and the Nietzschean 8420627941, 9788420627946

Citation preview

Ernst Nolte

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Spanish version by Teresa Rocha Barco

alliance Editorial

Original Title: Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

All rights reserved. On conformity with the expressed in the article. 534-bis of the current Penal Code, those who reproduce or plagiarize, in whole or in part, a literary, artistic or scientific work posted on any type of support without the required authorization may be punished with fines and imprisonment.

© 1990 by Vcrlag Ullstein GmbH Propylane Vcrlag - Frankfurt/M-Bcrlin © Ed. cast.: Publishing Alliance, SA, Madrid, 1995 John Ignatius Luea Street, 15; 28027 Madrid; telephone. 741 6600 ISBN: 84-206-2794-1 Legal deposit: M. 1.654-1995 Printed in Closas-Orcoyen, SL PolígonoIgarsa Paracuellos de Jarama (Madrid) Printed in Spain

INDEX

Introduction .................................................

..................................9

About the literature on Nietzsche ....................................

The life of Nietzsche

23 29

.................................................

29 The years from Basel 39 The sea change: 49 Early life as an anchorite and crisis

Young years and student days .............................................

to 1876 .................................................. .... 1876-1879 .................................. .................. around Lou von Salomé .. 57 The time of

... 66 The projected 76 The turn towards 85 Crumbling, madness,

Zarathustra .............. ................................................................

«capital work» .................................... ............... praxis ................................ ..................................... death ..... ......................................... 98

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

......................................... 105

Antiquity as a paradigm and as the past ..................... Orient .................. ................................................................

and Christianity ................................... ......... Reformation ................................... .......

105 Judaism and the ..... 115 Platonism, "morals" 127 Catholicism, Renaissance, 137 Illustration and

science .................................. ................................. Revolution .................. .................................................. Socialism ..................................................

149 The French 158 .................................. 169 7

index

8

........ 184 Emancipations and Modernity as «global degeneration» of humanity .................................................. ............................. 192 The «good The Germans and the German Reich ............................................

Europeans» and the future of superman .......... ..... 199 The concept of annihilation and the "party of life" ............... 206 Life and knowledge; truth and lie .................................. 213 .....227

NIETZSCHEANISM UNTIL 1914 ........................................

Disciples and followers in the environment of the Nietzsche-Archive ... 227 Socialists, .................. 235 Nietzsche in philosophy anarchists, feminists ............................. and science ............................. ................. 243 Nietzsche'sinfluences in literature ............................ ............ 251 Publicists and essayists .................................... abroad .............. .................................................

and a Nietzschean .................... war» ............ ..................... 285 In nd ic eonom on st ic o ........................................................................

................................. 260 Nietzsche 270 Benito Mussolini as a Marxist 279 Nietzsche, Marx and the «European civil

295

INTRODUCTION

In May 1888, nine months before the final breakdown of his health, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to his childhood friend Paul Deussen, as well as to all his acquaintances, that the Danish writer Georg Brandes was giving a course on "the German philosopher Frie drich Nietzsche" at the University of Copenhagen, adding: "The room is always full to the brim. More than 300 listeners. The big newspapers report on it. Sic incipit gloria mundr»1. The "incipit" was underlined. Obviously, the philosopher had been looking forward to an event like this for a long time. His acquaintances, on the other hand, may have received the news with surprise and discovered a contradiction that is difficult to understand when they recall what Nietzsche had told them earlier about his "blue solitude" and his contempt for everything related to journalism. Although only this insignificant hint of his fame came to Nietzsche'sknowledge, his comment would soon prove indisputably true. Already in the 1990s, when, sunk in the torpor of his conscience, he ended his days at his mother'shouse in Naumburg or in the building

1 KGB, LO, 5, p. 307. The translations of texts from Nietzsche'sworks that are already published in Alianza Editorial (translator: Andrés Sánchez Pascual) have been taken from said Spanish version, but respecting only Nolte'sunderlining. The rest are the responsibility of the translator. (Translator'snote). 9

10

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

He emerged from the "Nietzsche-Archive" in Weimar under the care of his sister Elisabeth, a large number of articles and some books about him were published, and his death in August 1900 opened, as it were, the floodgates: the articles and the There were already countless books and Nietzsche also became the subject of regular courses in German universities, such as those of Leipzig professor Raoul Richter, who in 1903 published the "15 lectures" he had taught at that university. However, among all these books, studies and university courses, the theme "Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism" cannot be found, as far as I know. In the first place, then, the question of what this "and" of the title means, must be asked, since obviously from this the distinctive characteristics of this university course can be deduced.

This "and" cannot mean that it should be primarily about the relationship between Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism. It is true that the phenomenon as such was not unknown to Nietzsche: already in 1877 he heard of a circle of his admirers that had formed at the University of Vienna, and a few years later he discovered, with visible satisfaction, that a writer named Paul Lanzky addressed him with the treatment of "admired teacher". Early in 1887 he came to the singular conclusion that in all the radical parties, that is, among the Socialists, the Nihilists, the Anti-Semites, and the Christian orthodox, he enjoyed a strange and almost mysterious authority. But even so, there were only a very few "admirers" with whom he came into contact or heard of, and his rejection was almost always very blunt, as in the case of the young poet Hermann Conradi, about whom he wrote in October 1886 to his publisher Constantin Georg Naumann: «Such twenty-four-year-old poetasters are the last readers I wish for myself»5.

Nietzscheanism is a phenomenon only of the 1990s and after. However, already in 1893 this term is perfectly applicable to a man like Franz Mehring, and in the year 1902 Achad Haam, one of the most important figures of the incipient Zionism, could write an article on "Nietzscheanism and Judaism" that it turns against Nietzschean tendencies within Judaism. It would be equally impossible to understand the "and" in such a way that Nietzscheanism would have to be the main thing and that Nietzsche would appear 2 Ibt'dcm,47s. 'KGB, n, J, p. 260.

Introduction

11

be solely as its promoter. The extent of this concept is certainly difficult to determine. It obviously includes the pioneers and enthusiastic followers of Nietzschean thought, but should it also include those who blame themselves for a manifestly erroneous interpretation, for example in their understanding of the concept of "immorality", and exclude those who valued the possibility of tively to Nietzsche, but did not want to be considered something like his "disciples" or his "followers"? Even the border with the so-called «history of reception» is, ultimately, difficult to trace, and often precisely the manifestations of its followers cannot be separated from its relationship with the polemics of its adversaries. Now, a history of reception would be as much an impossible

undertaking, and it is no coincidence that up to now this type of study only exists in the form of bibliographical attempts: the author would have to be familiar with all the philosophical bibliography. and literature of the world, and the Hungarian language was to create as few difficulties for him as the Russian. If, on the other hand, the concept were given its strictest meaning, limiting it to the group of those who can clearly be considered as "disciples", there would be the danger of forming a cabinet of curiosities and walking around without judgment within it. of him as long as evaluation criteria were not developed from Nietzsche himself. For all this, I am not going to base myself on either the broadest or the most restricted of possible concepts, nor am I going to make «Nietzscheanism» the main question. As for the length of time, I will confine myself to the period up to 1914. After the outbreak of the First World War things take on a different aspect: the "Zarathustra" in the assault baggage of numerous German soldiers, the propaganda of the allies against the supposed forerunners of German imperialism, or postwar writings such as Emst Bertram Nietzsche' (published in 1918), would form part of a new and much larger chapter. Rather, the "and" is intended to express the following: I aspire to find a way of seeing things that does not make Nietzscheanism appear as a mere oddity, that conceives Nietzsche himself fundamentally as a "contemporary"; a treatment, then, that is synchronous or "epochal" and that does not interpret Nietzsche diachronically, that is, through the centuries of Western history, as an interlocutor of Heraclitus, Plato and Descartes. As a philosopher and philosophically Heidegger has interpreted him above all: for him they a

12

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

tes, not only all the Nietzscheans, but also much of the work of Nietzsche himself. The task I set myself is much more modest: I want to study Nietzsche, the contemporary of the Bismarck era and of the European fin de siécle, in a historical way. This means paying special attention to his concrete opinions regarding the phenomena of his time, and with it the "contradictions" that can be discovered in these opinions. Precisely these contradictions must be considered especially revealing, since in them an essential characteristic of the society in which Nietzsche lived is revealed. But in this respect it is not lawful, on the other hand, to overlook the fact that Nietzsche also saw himself in contradiction with this society as a whole, and that this opposition was closely related to ideas that were not simply the ideas of his contemporaries, but have a general character, that is, philosophical. As inappropriate as limiting Nietzscheanism to the narrowest circle of enthusiasts would be to understand Nietzsche solely as a product of his time. Henceforth Nietzsche must be considered as an "intellectual." Here, too, a distinction can be made between a broad and a narrow concept. If an intellectual is anyone whose life consists essentially in the activity of the understanding, because, as a result of favorable circumstances, he can dedicate himself primarily or exclusively to this activity, or because he earns a living from it, if therefore he The opposite is bodily labor, labor "with the sweat of the brow," so all philosophers since Thales and Parmenides and, in even more remote times, members of the priestly classes were intellectuals; then, without a doubt, today the majority of the population of some advanced countries would have to be directly includ In the strictest sense, on the other hand, essayists and editorial writers are considered intellectuals, especially those who call themselves "progressive intellectuals"; as a general rule, a professor would always object to being subsumed in this concept. Here, too, an "intermediate" meaning must guide us. Plato and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Descartes, Kant and Hegel were not, in this sense, "intellectuals." They liked to give voice themselves (as Thomas Aquinas did in a special way) to the objections against their own ideas, but the dispute always meant a refutation of the contrary and, therefore, an exposition of their own doctrine. on the world and on man. Philosophers (one could say so, keeping away all pejorative resonances) were-

Introduction

13

Until Hegel they were "doctrinal theologians", that is, they developed theories about the world as a whole, about its foundation, that is, God, or matter, or chance, and about its culmination: man, almost always analyzed in his essence. timeless and from time to time in the development of its history. Those who ask themselves the essential questions regarding the world, man and history, but who do not give an answer on the basis of a doctrine, but rather, on the contrary, for them the questions are more important, should be called intellectuals. that the multiple and diverse attempts to answer; those for whom man and history are more disturbing problems than the world in the sense of cosmos and the foundation of the world in the sense of God. I cite as an example Alexis de Tocqueville and his question: «Oü allonsnous done?». A certain restlessness and an ever new "problematizing" are, then, the characteristics of intellectuals understood in this way; they set a B and a C against every A, because the world does not appear before them in a transparent order, but as an extraordinarily diverse, difficult to understand, often distressing, set of facts and evolutions. Thus, these intellectuals have in common with authentic philosophers the dimension of asking questions, and should not be confused with members of "intellectual professions"; but they lack that inner security that characterizes all philosophers, however much they differ from one another in the content of this security. In order to make a broader determination and to delimit Nietzsche more precisely, we will undertake a comparison with Marx (or rather: with Marx and Engels), sometimes explicitly, almost always implicitly. There are no direct relationships between the two, not even mutual acquaintance, or at least neither of them ever mentioned the other. At the beginning of the year 1868, the young Nietzsche wrote to his friend Carl von Gersdorff telling him that he had just read a little book from which he had drawn some ideas regarding the position of the sociopolitical parties, although it is, he says, a suspicious doctrine that it tastes “veryacid to reaction and Catholicism”, namely a little book by Josef Edmund Jórg, from which, according to him, also radiates “theirrational greatness of Lasalle”4. But not only for Nietzsche was Marx still, or again, a stranger, despite the fact that

the first volume of Capital had already been published. In the year 1871 he re Nietzsche to that "head of international Hydra" that so frightened 4 KGB, 1,2, p. 257.

14

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

It had become especially visible during the government of the Paris Commune5; but Nietzsche does not seem to have noticed this man who was then frequently mentioned for the first time in the European press, and indeed as "the great leader of the International." And vice versa, although Marx reported in 1876, on his way through Germany to Karlsbad, of a "comic party for the state musician Wagner" held in Bayreuth6, with all the young professor from Basel, who at that time passed for being the most witty of all Wagnerians, he was not struck by it, it seems. However, there are a large number of facts that indirectly relate the younger to the older. Thus, both had a common adversary in the nontenured Berlin professor Eugen Dühring, against whose sometimes considerable influence on the newly emerged Social Democratic Party Friedrich Engels wrote the so-called Anti-Dührittg, and with whom Nietzsche clashed throughout his life. calling him "anarchist" and "insidious". But Nietzsche also knew Gottfried Kinkel'sson, who lived, like Marx, in London emigration, and for a while there were even wedding plans between Nietzsche and a daughter of Alexander Herzen, the best known of all emigrants at the time. and Russian revolutionaries. Even more curious is that Nietzsche could say that the former Hegelian Bruno Bauer had become a "Nietzschean"7 at the end of his life: it is already known that Bruno Bauer had been something like the mentor of the student in the early 1940s. you Marx. Objectively, at first sight it is difficult, of course, that there could be a more resounding opposition: think of the "aristocratic radicalism" of Nietzsche, in his contempt for the masses, in his concept of "slavery" and "last man" , or even in the term "blonde beast", on the one hand, and in the Marxian expectation of a "proletarian revolution" and of a classless society made up of free and equal men, on the other. However, there are essential coincidences: for example, the animosity against the "philistines", that is, against the narrow-minded professional or man in the street, the demand for the "total" or "complete" man, the criticism of the monetary economy and, above all, the orientation towards Greek Antiquity. As proof, here are some quotes: 5 KGB, II, 1, pp. 203 ss. b MEW, t. 34, p. 23. 7 KGB,is, 5, p. 370.

Introduction

15

A letter from the year 1884 is finished by Nietzsche with the following stanza, which is not only intended as a joke: Isn'the world more and more in decline? All the Christians are engaged in dealing, the French become more profound, and the Germans: every day more superficial8 Marx had written forty years earlier, in his article on the Jewish problem:

'Whatis the profane cult of the Jews? The trick. What is your profane God? The money. Well then, the emancipation from dealings and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism [that is, from the “Christian”and capitalist mode of production] would be the selfemancipation of our time»9. In Nietzsche, the demonstrations against the haste and restlessness of modern existence are legion. But the young Friedrich Engels spoke out no less firmly against the "vortex" of the competitive economy and against the profound immorality of the dissolution of society in a world of atoms10.

In his 1872 lectures on 'thefuture of our schools',Nietzsche speaks contemptuously of the exclusive specialist, akin to the factory worker who throughout his life does nothing but a certain screw or maneuver; Marx writes in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts about the fate of the worker, saying how he is "reduced spiritually and bodily to the category of a machine and converted, from a man that he was, into an abstract activity and a stomach"11. The paradigmatic character that Greek antiquity has for Nietzsche (despite the parenthesis of his second period, the "positivist period") is still as evident during his last years of life as in his earliest beginnings; but in Marx one should not forget certain manifestations of his supposedly "idealist" or "preMarxist" period that can support the thesis that his "classless society" is nothing more than a Greek "polis" on a world scale and without slaves. For example, when you write that in Greece the res publica

8 KGB, ID, 1, p. 564. 9 MEW, 1 .1, p. 372. 10 MEW, 1 .1, p. 504; t. 2, p. 257. 11 MEW, supplementary volume 1, p. 474.

16

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

it was the true private matter of citizens and one does not hear that Greek or Roman politicians had passed exams12. Marx and Nietzsche were both enlightened bourgeois, or better, men of culture oriented to classical Antiquity and coming from the philosophy of German idealism; although they became detached from this philosophy, and therein lies their fundamental coincidence. Hegel would not have allowed either of them to pass for 'philosopher',and in this sense they can be called 'intellectuals'according to the above definition. But not only at first glance, but also at last, the differences are great. Marx and Engels, born in 1818 and 1820 respectively, after a brief period of insecurity made a discovery that gave them a new security and identity: the discovery of the historical importance of the industrial revolution and, with it, of the "proletariat." ; Thus, equipped with the Hegelian concepts of "realization" and "dialectic," they were able to predict an imminent revolution that would lead history to its culmination and that would have as a consequence the transformation of all men into full men, as well as an endless flowering. pair of art and culture. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer'sheir, was alien to these concepts, and for him the threat to art and culture from Modernity was much more than a brief phase of darkness before a splendid dawn. For this reason he could have been an intellectual to a much greater extent than Marx and Engels. But, once again, what is truly significant is that he too tried to achieve security, a doctrine and a "praxis", which ultimately led him to the idea of a future of "lords of the earth", of "supermen". and of a "party of life": an image as utopian as it was (as long as it is taken seriously and not reduced to a few progressive clichés) the Marxist vision of men who, freed from the abyss of misery and degradation, are directed towards the «Kingdom of God», in which there are no lacks or worries; of men freed from submission to the division of labor and who can therefore live without state impositions and in a transparent interrelationship. It is easy to see where the greatest chances of effectiveness lay. Marx'sdoctrine could be related to a reality that would also have existed and would have become great and powerful. a MEW, 1.1, p. 253.

Introduction

17

although Marx and Engels had never lived, namely with the workers'movement, in its first European form. But it was the Marxist doctrine that gave this movement, which otherwise would have been nothing more than a simple trade union movement, an objective determined by universal ideas, an "international mission", thereby promoting its unity, which, on the other hand, it always remained incomplete and precarious. Only in this way could the consequent synthesis between the labor movement and the "bourgeois", "progressive" intelligentsia, which Marx and Engels had anticipated in their persons and which could also be called the "security-seeking" or "utopian" intelligentsia, have been reached. Only in this way did the concept of "bourgeois" become a polemical instrument through which the self-criticism immanent in the system would lead to an appropriating total negation. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, there were no "natural" followers, so to speak. In his youth he himself was the follower of a great artist who wanted to be a cultural renovator and a unifier of the people, namely Richard Wagner; but in fact Nietzsche'sinfluence remained limited to a small circle of 'liberatedmen of culture',and only shortly before his final collapse he enumerates specific social groupings which were to win

him 'millions'of followers and which were to lead the way. their struggles: the His was also a real model, as was to be shown later, precisely in its failure, but at that moment it was nothing more than a simple fantasy to which hardly any content of reality corresponded. Except in very special and unforeseeable circumstances, how could a thought that, in an “epochof the masses”, operated with such a scandalous concept as that of the “wretched”*14 , and which seemed to reject it, have had political effects? all the "emancipations"? And yet Nietzsche foresaw the time of great wars, to be waged "in the name of philosophical principles," more successfully than Marx, for whom the pressure of economic development seemed to be so overwhelming in the near future that the already untenable dominance of a few capitalist magnates would have to be overcome in a simultaneous revolution of the developed peoples of the West. It is true that one also finds in Marx allusions 15 KGW, VIH, 3, p. 456. 14 “Schlechtweggekommene”=those who are not and have not been lucky and feel it, furthermore, like this (Note Je the translator.)

18

Nietzsche and nictzscheanism

and approaches of another type, such as when in 1848 he postulates a world war so that the revolution can break through, or when in his last years he differentiates between three different types of revolution (the English, the German and the Russian) whose mutual relations remain confused. . Even more important is the fact that the third volume of Capital, published after his death, produced a very different image of the future from that offered by the first: it was no longer a question of the joint struggle of the exploited proletarians. of all developed nations, but of the uprising of backward peoples against modern peoples, big "capital investors," including their worker-favored welfare islands. But this volume and that approach were barely taken into account by Marx's supporters, and the optimistic-idyllic idea prevailed. Nietzsche not only turned out to be the best prophet, but in fact "his" party, that of the civil war, was also created later, the one that he had conceived as the "party of life" and which in reality deviated so far. spectacularly of his ideas that could even be refuted with his quotes. But without certain manifestations of Nietzscheanism, that party would not have become what it was, just as the labor movement would not have been what it was without Marxism. But this course is not entitled "Marx and Nietzsche." The issue of the relationship between these two "intellectuals" (who represent the internal typological contradictions in the most remarkable way) can only be for us a matter of background and an ultimate perspective. It is not lawful for us to lose sight of those thinkers who were Nietzsche'strue contemporaries, that is, the contemporaries he knew, who influenced him, and with whom he argued. Here we must first mention Eugen Dühring, about whom Nietzsche spoke very unfavorably in his writings and from whose works, however, he had extracted and elaborated much longer excerpts than from any other author, as evidenced by his posthumous legacy; there is also Gustav Teichmüller, who for some years was Nietzsche'scompanion in Basel and from whom Nietzsche borrowed the concept of "perspectivism"; there is Eduard von Hartmann, with whose concept of "world process" Nietzsche polemicizes again and again; there is African Spir, whose book Thought and Reality Nietsche borrowed from the Basel University Libra Finally, it is not lawful for us to completely disregard those "figures around Nietzsche" to whom Erich E Podach has dedicated an informative book: Peter Gast and Bernhard Forster, the husband of

Introduction

19

sister Elisabeth; Erwin Rohde and Julius Langbehn; but above all Richard and Cosima Wagner, as well as Jakob Burckhardt, with whom Nietzsche had not only a real relationship, but also a somewhat ideal relationship, as those "insane notes" of early January 1889, in the that their most secret desires and their most palpable failure come to light. There is a "key phrase" of Nietzsche that could be added to the title of this university course as a motto and as an interpretive requirement. It is found in a letter addressed to Heinrich Kóselitz, whom Nietzsche gave the artistic name of "Peter Gast", and it reads as follows: "Think that I, since 1876 and from various points of view, both physical and mental, have been a battlefield more than a man»15. This is, in my opinion, an infinitely more accurate and revealing expression than that much more famous phrase, according to which he, Nietzsche, would not be a man but rather dynamite. And it was by no means a passing outburst. A year later, in August 1883, Nietzsche wrote to Franz Overbeck: «In the meantime, I continue to be the personified fight, as

always: reading the requirements of your dear wife I had the same impression as if someone were exhorting old Laocoon to dominate his snakes»16. It was not mere charlatanism when Nietzsche attributed to himself "the greatest breadth of soul" and when he pointed out as his torture and as his luck17 that he had settled in all corners of the modern soul: in fact, practically all the factors and phases of European history. they faced each other18 within this singular man in a struggle that, moreover, was divided among many different people and groups, and almost all of them Nietzsche dedicated radically opposed judgments. The

hypothesis that the harshness of this struggle was one of the causes of Nietzsche'sfinal collapse is not without foundation, even though doctors are right when they say that madness cannot be the result of purely spiritual causes. I therefore place the main part of this course under the heading: «Nietzsche as 'battlefield':the harrowing confrontation with the factors and phases of European history». Twelve topics are dealt with under this heading, such as «Platonism, morality and Christianity 15 KGB, m , 1, p. 230. 16 Ibid., 425. 17 KGW '.VUU .p .453. « KGW7, VIIU .p . 104.

Nietzsche and the Nietzscheanisnian

20

mo”, “Enlightenmentand science”, “Socialism”,“TheGermans and the German Reich”, “Emancipationand Modernity as 'globaldegeneration of humanity'”,etc. In the section dedicated to "Nietzscheanism," Nietzsche's judgments on these realities are reviewed again, almost always in a very general way, and distributed among different people or tendencies. The weakness, or better, the limited nature of this approach resides in the fact that it does not deal with philosophical themes, that is, with topics such as: "becoming and being", "subject and thing", "time and eternity". Everything truly philosophical will appear only on the margin, although to the most disturbing philosophical question for Nietzsche himself we will dedicate the twelfth and last class of this main part: "Life and knowledge, truth and lie." But precisely because in Nietzsche philosophizing can be disassociated from his life less than in any other thinker and because for him the truth was something "that tears piece by piece from the heart and that for each victory is avenged with a defeat"19, his biography must occupy a place in this book, and an important place at that. I therefore place it as "Part A" before the main part and dedicate ten lectures to it in this course. Certainly, it could be objected that this life passed without extraordinary events, like the life of a "cabinet sage", totally unknown to the general public, who played no role in politics and was not even intimate with anyone. important personality of intellectual life, with the sole exception of Richard Wagner. But already his contemporaries saw, shortly after 1890, a profound symbolism in this life, probably due above all to his end in madness, which suggested comparisons with Holderlin and Lenau. For small circles, the "hermit of Sils Maria" had meanwhile, already before 1889, become an almost mythical figure, and the change from the Wagnerian who was in his splendid and brilliant youth to the "positivist" of the second This period, the 'enlightenment'period, constituted (not only for Richard and Cosima Wagner themselves) an intriguing puzzle. It is true that it could be said that the life of Eugen Dühring, for example, was more eventful and spectacular: the loss of his sight when he was barely thirty, the influence on the Social Democratic Party of his ideas on the "free society" of the communes, his public actions after being dismissed from teaching by the university, the "student movement" that from them

19 KGB, ffl, 5, p. 250.

Introduction

21

turned out. But precisely this comparison makes the decisive difference visible; In Eugen Dühring everything was clear and unequivocal: his criticism of the "guild scholars", the Enlightenment character of his "philosophy of reality", his fight against the Judeo-Christian tradition, the enemy of life, his racistly oriented anti-Semitism. Dühring fought battles, but he was not himself a battlefield, like Nietzsche. For this reason, a collection of his statements on classical antiquity, on the Reformation, on socialism and on the

German Reich would be a kind of epic: the equivalent in Nietzsche, on the other hand, is more like a drama. "Part C" of this college course is devoted to "Nietzscheanism," and at eight classes it is the smallest. It is divided according to groups of people of different types: "Young people and enthusiasts in the circle of the Nietzsche-Archive", "Socialists and anarchists", "Essayists and writers". If this is an inconsistent structuring, it shows that "Nietzscheanism" does not interest itself. But the penultimate theme is: "Benito Mussolini as a Marxist and as a Nietz Schean", and the final consideration is entitled: "Nietzsche, Marx and the European Civil War". With this I connect with the first and last of my works. This course is not, therefore, a routine exhibition, neither objectively nor subjectively.

ABOUT THE BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUT NIETZSCHE

The alienated or dead Nietzsche was also a "battlefield": from the beginning there were violent struggles for his "image" and for his inheritance. The central person in all this was his sister Elisabeth, who today is almost generally regarded as an ambitious and greedy forger, but whose merits in relation to Nietzsche'swork are undoubtedly very outstanding. She was the founder of the "Weimar tradition," which had its headquarters in the NietzscheArchive. Against this tradition stood from the beginning the 'Basel tradition',centered around the last and most worthy of Nietzsche's friends, Franz Overbeck. Disputes over the copyright of the letters Nietzsche had written to Overbeck soon arose; the controversy widened, and after Overbeck'sdeath there were even legal proceedings. But also in Weimar itself violent dissensions took place. The Archive was the center of «Nietzscheanism», but very soon there came to sharp confrontations between Elisabeth and various «publishers» of the works, such as Fritz Kogel and the Homeffer brothers: Elisabeth had entire volumes of the first edition of the archives destroyed. complete works, fired his rivals, got Maximilian Harden'sZukunft magazine as a forum for expression, but was vigorously attacked even by laymen like Rudolf Steiner. Under his aegis the three editions of the complete works that existed before the First World War were published: 23

24

Nietzsch and Nietzscheanism

1. The "Grossoktavausgabe" (GOA) ("Major octave edition"), published from 1894 by the CG Naumann publishing house in Leipzig, in Roman script. Shortly after, its counterpart in Gothic script followed, with total equivalence of volumes and pages: the «Kleinok tavausgabe» (KOA) («Edition in minor octavo»). In the "First Section" you can find the works published by Nietzsche himself, in eight volumes; the «Second Section» includes, in volumes IX to XVI, the «posthumous works». The «Third Section» is the smallest and contains two volumes of «Philological». The most important, by far, are volumes XV and XVI: E can. In a way, the latter, as Nietzsche's"major work", is a "creation" of Elisabeth and her collaborators, who selected posthumous fragments according to criteria of content, first assembling them in a relatively small tome of 483 aphorisms, and later in its definitive conformation, with 1067. This version is found in the third edition of the complete works of the pre-war period, the so-called «Taschenausgabe» (TA) («Pocket Edition») in 11 volumes. Here the posthumous fragments do not occupy a separate place, as in the GOA, but are added to the corresponding works. This is also the hallmark of the most monumental edition, the Musarion edition ("Musarion-Ausgabe"), which appeared between 1920 and 1929 in 23 volumes, edited by Nietzsche'scousins Richard and Max Oehler, as well as by Friedrich Würzbach, the president of the «Nietzsche- Society». In the first volume are the "youth works", which appear neither in the GOA nor in TA. The most ambitious enterprise of the interwar period, the "Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe" ("Complete Historical-Critical Edition") of all the works and letters at the CH Beck publishing house in Munich, begun in 1934, was not completed. five volumes of works and four of letters; some cover up to 1869 and others up to 1877. All the manuscript material is reproduced with great precision, and all the childhood poems are included. Actually, the temporal determination of the different fragments was already possible with the GOA and with the "Musarion-Ausgabe"; Thus, even before the World War, one could be convinced that the final aphorism of The Will to Power (No. 1067) came from the year 1885, while most of the other aphorisms belong to the years 1887 and 1888. But the real crux of the matter lies in the question of whether it is even admissible to compose with Nietzsche'sposthumou

About the bibliography on Nietzsche

25

We do not know what decision the "Complete Historical-Critical Edition" of Beck would have reached on this, but after the Second World War one of his editors, Karl Schlechta, pronounced a resounding no. In his edition, "Works in Three Volumes", which appeared in 1956 in Munich, the previous Will to Power is undone and the fragments are placed in the chronological sequence of the posthumous ones. In the "Supplementary Philological Report" to the third volume, Schlechta reports on the deletions and falsifications that Elisabeth Fórster Nietzsche had carried out on the letters; those data caused a sensation. Despite the justifiable indignation, one should not lose sight of the fact that the later Nietzsche'sinvectives against his mother and sister, in part frankly riotous, would surely have been destroyed, as well as probably other letters and manuscripts, if Elisabeth hadn't convinced her mother and relatives to transfer the copyright to her. The most recent, and surely definitive, edition is the "Kritische Gesamtausgabe" ("Complete Critical Edition") by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin 1967ff. (from Gruyter). The different sections are strictly ordered from a chronological point of view, and the «Works» are again separated from the «Posthumous» (both: KGW). The letters section (KGB) also contains the letters addressed to Nietzsche. The most accessible and manageable is the "Kritische Studien ausgabe" (KSA) ("Critical Study Edition") in 15 volumes. It maintains a relationship with KGW similar to that of KOA with GOA, but it does not follow its numbering of volumes and pages. The first six volumes comprise the works, volumes 7 to 13 the posthumous ones. Volume 14 is a "Commentary" of more than 700 pages; Volume 15 contains a "Chronicle of the Life of Nietzsche," a "Concordance" with KGW, and the "General Record." The edition of the letters, in 8 volumes, corresponds to a «critical study edition», let'ssay, of the «complete letters», which only contains, however, Nietzsche'sown letters. With the sudden death of Mazzino Montinari in 1986 a new situation was created, the consequences of which are still not very foreseeable. Montinari (together with Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Heinz Wenzel and Emst Behler) was also the architect of the two most important undertakings at the moment in «Nietzsche- research»: the Nietzscbe-Stu dien, of which 17 have been published. volumes from 1972 to now (de Gruyter), and the "Monographs and texts for the investigation of Nietzsche" (also in de Gruyter). In this collection has appeared, among other things, the only work on the theme "Nietzscheanism" th

26

I donate here: Richard Frank Krummel'smonumental two-volume bibliography, Nietzsche and the German Spirit (Berlin/New York 1974 and 1983, Volumes 3 and 9 of the "Monographs and Texts"). A suitable little book as an introduction and first orientation, but which also cites a considerable number of titles on «Nietzscheanism», is that of Peter Pütz: Friedrich Nietzsche, Stuttgart, 1975, 2nd ed., (Metzler Collection). Along with short expositions, the fundamental hallmark of the book are extensive bibliographies ordered by themes.

Regarding the life of Nietzsche, it is still necessary to mention, first of all, the book by Elisabeth Fórster-Nietzsche: The life of Friedrich Nietzsche,

in three volumes (I, II, 1 and 11.2), published in 1895, 1897 and 1904 respectively. Much better known than this was the popular two-volume version: Young Nietzsche, 1912, and Lonely Nietzsche, 1913. Overbeck's counterpoint is the book by Carl Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck, and Friedrich Nietzsche. A friendship, 2 volumes, Jena, 1908 (Eugen Diederichs). A curiosity in this book are the numerous gaps (the majority corresponding to Gast'sletters to Overbeck) that its text had to leave "as a consequence of the Jena court ruling." The most extensive and recent biographies are: Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biography, 3 volumes, Munich 1978/79 (continuation of a work by Richard Blunck)1; Wemer Ross, The fearful eagle. Life by Friedrich Nietzsche, Stuttgart, 1980 (DVA), Munich paperback, 1984 (dtv).

A compilation of Nietzsche recollections from different people is found in: Sander L. Gilman (ed.), Meetings with Nietzsche, Bonn, 1981. Instructive regarding Nietzsche'senvironment and already mentioned: Erich F. Podach, Figures around Nietzsche, Weimar, 1932. The figures of: the mother, Erwin Rohde, Elisabeth and Bemhard Fórster, Peter Gast and Julius Langbehn are treated. The book belongs to the Basel tradition and is highly critical of Elisabeth Fórster-Nietzsche. Introductory and comprehensive on the subject of Nietzsche as a philosopher: Eugen Fink, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, Stuttgart, 1986, 5* ed. (1st ed. 1960)2.

1 Spanish translation exists in Alliance Editorial, 4 vols., Madrid, 1981 ss.. (N. de The t.). 1 Spanish translation in Alliance Editorial, Madrid, 1966. (N. de la T.).

About the bibliography on Nietzsche

Very early and very late philosophical interpretations can be read in extract in: Alfredo Guzzoni (ed.), 90 years of Nietzsche'sphilosophical reception, Königstein/Is. 1979. Here one finds the article by Georg Brandes, "Aristocratic Radicalism" (first published in 1890 in the Deutsche Rundschau magazine) already at the beginning. Also represented are, among others, Alois Riehl and Hans Vaihin ger. In the third part there are excerpts from works by Sartre, Foucault, Dante, etc. Among the "standard works" I will cite: Charles Andler, Nietzsche, his life and thought, 3 volumes, Paris, 1958, 4.* ed. (1.* ed. 1920ff.). First of all, the chapter of volume 1 entitled «The precursors of Nietzsche» is important. It speaks above all of Germans like Goethe, Hólderlin and of course Schopenhauer, and of Frenchmen like Pascal, Stendhal and Larochefoucault; contemporaries such as Teichmüller and Spir are hardly mentioned, if at all. Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche. Philosopher - psychologist - antichrist, Darmstadt, 1982 (original ed.: Princeton, 1950). The author, a German who emigrated after 1933, defends Nietzsche, as an enlightened man and a follower of Goethe, against Elisabeth Fórster-Nietzsche, who falsely turned him into a "proto-Nazi". Of a contrary opinion is: Emst Sandvoss, Hitler and Nietzsche, Göttingen, 1969. Considered, but questionable its completeness on the subject of politics in Nietzsche: Henning Ottmann, Philosophy and politics in Nietzsche, Berlin/ New York, 1987 (de Gruyter, "Monographs and texts for the investigation of Nietzsche", volume 17). Finally I will cite the "great interpretations." I say "great" because they come from relevant thinkers (and this is also true of Alfred Baeumler, who was by no means just a National Socialist) and because essential possibilities of interpretation are articulated in them. These are: Ludwig Klages, Nietzsche's Psychological Findings, 1926. (The "will to power" is excluded as it is considered a foreign body.) Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche, the philosopher and politician, Leipzig, 1931. (The "eternal return" is rejected as incompatible with the "will to power".) Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche. Introduction to the understanding of his thought, 1981, 4.* ed., (de Gruyter), 1.'ed. 19365. 'Spanish translation in Ed. South American, Buenos Aires, 1968. (N. of the T.).

28

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols., Pfullingen, 1961. (Nietzsche as «consumer of western metaphysics»). Throughout the course, only exceptionally will we make bibliographical references. For all practical purposes as far as bibliography is concerned, Pütz'slittle book is sufficient. In it there is also information for those who want to know the many thousands of titles of the complete bibliography on Nietzsche.

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE

Years of youth and student days Whoever wants to write or relate the biography of a man will do well to remember one of Goethe'smost famous poems: the one entitled «Protowords. Orphically»1. The first stanza is quoted very often; Goethe titled it "Daimon": As the day you were bestowed on this world, the sun rose among the greeting of stars, and immediately and later you grew one day and another, according to the law according to which your entrance was; that'show you have to be, you can'tescape from yourself; thus said sibyls and prophets; no time and no power shatters a coined form that evolves alive.

I am not entering into the question of whether Goethe really allowed himself to be guided here by the ancient belief in the determination of human destiny according to the position of the stars, or whether he rather had in mind above all the genetic inheritance of the human being as he formulated it elsewhere: «From my father I have the physical constitution, the most 1 The translation of this poem has been taken from Jo sé MaríaValverde. (Note of the

translator.) 29

30

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

serious about life; of the little mother, the happy nature and the pleasure of tabulating». Today it might seem more appropriate to start from that other determination of the human being that we can call the social: the determination by the activity and the environment of the family in which the child is born, by the landscape, the lineage and the nation within which the family lives, by religion and the social group or "class" to which it belongs. Obviously, this mark can be of very different intensity. Extreme forms are, for example, on the one hand the children of the orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, who in their dark clothes and with their coarse shoes present a rather strange appearance to the visitor, and yet seem to be happy. in his total harmony with his parents and his ancestors. On the other hand, the children of a family of diplomats with a markedly liberal orientation constitute a paradigm, since they will always differ very clearly, even from their classmates in a German institute, in terms of their critical or distanced position with respect to the national tradition, and also in its facility to change residence without problems. In the case of Nietzsche, on the father'sand mother'sside the main distinguishing feature of this 'socialdetermination'was typical of a Protestant parsonage in central Germany at the time. Both of Nietzsche'sgrandfathers were clergymen: Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche (1756-1826), at the end of his life superintendent in Eilenburg, doctor of theology and writer with a ChristianEnlightenment spirit; David Emst Oehler, pastor in Pobles, not far from Leipzig. They were, however, the first theologians of their respective families; his ancestors had been mostly petit bourgeois, but his grandfather'smother on his father'sside had come in the fifth generation from a clerical family. Of the older generation, especially important to the young Nietzsche was his grandmother on his father'sside, Erdmuthe Krause, sister of a general superintendent who had first been a preacher at Naumburg Cathedral and then Herder'ssuccessor in Weimar; According to a legend, undoubtedly false, it would have been praised by Goethe and, in any case, it would represent an immediate link with the world of Weimar classicism; he lived until 1856. We must also mention his grandfather on his mother'sside, David Emst Oehler, son of a poor weaver from Zeitz who married the daughter of a landowner; In the large parish estate of Pobles, not far from the scene where the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig took place, the young N

Nietzsche'slife

31

The environment was therefore strongly Protestant and Central German, and belonged to the so-called "genius corner" of Germany; Apparently, there was a distant kinship with Richard Wagner, with August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, with Gneisenau and Pufendorf. Nor can a certain similarity to Marx, whose ancestors included entire lines of rabbis, be overlooked here; An essential difference undoubtedly resided in the fact that in the case of Marx we find ourselves with a secularly enlightened father, while in Nietzsche'sfather even the Christian-Protestant family tradition had been strengthened. (Mere fantasy was the claim so popular with the mature Nietzsche, that his ancestors would have belonged to a lineage of Polish nobles named Nietzky.) The aforementioned father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, born in 1813, is often described as a clerical figure with a refined, tender and musically gifted spirit. In his young years he had been educator of the princesses at the ducal court of Altenburg, and in 1842 he obtained by order of Frederick William IV the position of pastor in Rócken, near Lützen. For his royal protector he felt deep gratitude and veneration. On his first visit to neighboring Pobles he met Franziska, daughter of pastor David Emst Oehler, the sixth of eleven children, who was only seventeen at the time. The marriage was celebrated on October 10, 1843; A year later, on October 15, 1844, the first child was born, who received the name of Friedrich Wilhelm, since the royal benefactor was celebrating his birthday that same day. The intensity of the father'sfidelity and even affection for the King was overwhelmingly revealed in March 1848. When news of the events in Berlin reached Rocken, and especially of the offensive spectacle to which The king had been subjugated, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche broke down in tears and retired for long hours to his study room without taking any food. A year later he died; to this day it is not clear whether the cause was a brain condition (probably hereditary) or, as Elisa l>eth Nietzsche always assured, a fall down the stairs. The young Friedrich Willielm retained a great admiration for his father throughout his life; Apparently his death was the first great misfortune that affected the already very serious and thoughtful boy. It is perfectly credible the story that is told that, already at the age of one year, the boy would remain spellbound looking at his father when he improvised on the piano. In the first of the numerous memoirs that Nietzsche wrote, he says the follow

32

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Following regarding the year 1858: “Butsuddenly the sky darkened; my dear father became seriously ill... Finally, after a long time, the horrible thing happened: my father died... All joy had ended; pain and sadness came to take their place»2. Not so reasonably plausible is, on the other hand, a story that, according to the sister'saccount, would have taken place in Naumburg at the beginning of 1851, but to which a certain amount of internal truth can still be attributed: a certain day, after After the school closed, there would have been a heavy downpour and all the children would have run home. Only the young Nietzsche would not have quickened his pace, and when his mother'ssurprised question why he had let himself get drenched in the rain, the boy would have replied: "But mother, in the school code of rules it says that the students have to go home quietly and civilly." If, then, one wanted to characterize in a few words the "daimon" who ruled Nietzsche'slife from its earliest beginnings, perhaps one would have to say: an extraordinarily gifted boy, in a rigorously legitimist environment such as that of the Protestant rectories in the area Saxon-Thuringia. From this it is easy to derive the nickname of "the little Pastor" which was soon given to him due to his impressive speeches and "preachings", and also linked to this the naturalness of his desire to one day become a Protestant pastor. But the father'sdeath was a stroke of fate, a coincidence that cannot be deduced from the daimon'spremises, unless the hereditary foundation that would have determined the diseases and the final dementia of the father is seen in the father'sbrain disease. your son. Not in vain the second stanza of the "Protowords" is titled "Tyche, the random", and in it it is said: But the strict limit haphazardly outlines something that changes and marches, with us and around us; You won'tstay alone if you become

more sociable and work in the same way as any other...

These social relations, this environment of the present that at each moment is co-determined by chance, would depend for Nietzsche from then on on the direction of the «daimon». In April 1850 he moved with his mother, his sister Elisabeth, two years older. 2 Historical-critical complete edition, "Jugendschriften", 32.

Nietzsche'slife

33

young than him, his grandmother Erdmuthe and his two aunts Auguste and Rosalie, his father'ssisters, to live in Naumburg. The small town still offered a completely medieval image: in the evenings the gates of its walls were closed. Nietzsche thus grew up in a purely female environment, and the sister early began to collect her brother'spoems and essays. A close friendship linked him with Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug, who came from the "more worldly" enlightened bourgeoisie: music and classical literature were the air that was breathed in their parents'homes. Nietzsche studied for a few years at the Naumburg Cathedral Institute; he perceived the political events of the "Age of Reaction" marginally at best. Still, in the Crimean War of 1853-55 he and his friends sided with the Russians and against the Western powers, as befitted the Prussian tradition; In 1856 the young Nietzsche wrote to Elisabeth: "In the station restaurant I read many things in the Berlin newspaper about the emperor'sson"3, that is, about the son of Napoleon III, who had just been born. In 1858 he moved to Schulpforta with a grant from the Naumburg city council. The famous «princely school» located not far from Naumburg, with a long tradition, was a «State- school» of humanistic-theological education that only revealed small traces of that «collegialism» about which the young man had complained so much. File you. But the strict time planning and, in general, the discipline to which the 180 "inmates" had to submit, to whom 12 teachers taught their classes, remained severe and monastic; To be allowed to make the most insignificant purchase, the twenty-year-old had to send a written request to his mentor. Obviously, Nietzsche considered this

way of life vexatious; Thus, in February 1860, he wrote to Wilhelm Pinder: «Our life in Pforta is nothing more than a continuous remembering and waiting»4. But he received an excellent philological training, and no doubt the "spirit of 1848" still lives on among the professors. A whole torrent of own essays and poems was running parallel to the academic activity. Cui was intensely friendly with Pinder and with Krug; Very often one finds in his letters the formula: «nostra semper manet amicitia». Among his friends from the same Pforta, Paul Deussen and Cari von Gersdorff stand out; both remained linked to Nietzsche during } KGB, 1 ,1, p. 5.

4 Ibid., 92.

34

Nietzsche and nictzscheanism

you all your life The longing for friendship and its cultivation were always characteristic of Nietzsche; therein lay one of his differences with respect to Marx,

who for his part had only his family and Friedrich Engels. Among Nietzsche'sfirst literary productions, it is worth mentioning play three, all of them from the year 1862: «Napoleon III as President»5. This essay is a singular praise of "genius." A "dominant genius" has the right to seize the government of a state that finds itself in unworthy hands. Nietzsche mentions here many names that will not appear again in his later works: Louis Blanc, Ledin-Rollin, Cavaignac. He calls Napoleon III "a hope of the poor, of the peasants of France" who would have been "enchanted" by him. He even mentions in a positive tone the confiscation of the assets of the House of Orleans. There is not the slightest correspondence with Marx'shatred of "Boustrapa" here. «Fatum and history»6. Here the young Nietzsche pronounces himself in favor of a "freer point of view" with regard to the judgment on religion and Christianity. Where can one find solid foundations in the "sea of doubt"? Most people would not have understood, according to him, that all of Christianity is based on (mere) assumptions. So you have to ask yourself if perhaps the human being is nothing more than an evolution of the stone, mediating plants and animals. That, in any case, in the struggle of the individual will against the general will, the fundamental relationship between destiny and history would also be outlined. Referring to Emerson, who continued to be one of his favorite authors until the end, Nietzsche spoke out against the power of the habitual and the daily nature of human relationships; a "superior flight of ideas" would be possible and necessary in his opinion. From this he deduces a very determined «political» position: «That is why it is nonsense to want to instill in the whole of humanity with stereotypes, so to speak, a special form of State or society: all social and communist ideas fall into that same category. mistake". Free will, as that which is free from ties, in the event of becoming the sole ruler, would make men "independent gods"; but free will is as unimaginable without destiny as the spirit without the real or the good without the bad. «Well, only from *4

5 Musarion-Ausgabe, 1,52-57.

4 Ibid., 60-66.

Nietzsche'slife

35

Contrast, property is born. A daring speculation will be linked to this: perhaps free will is nothing but the highest power of fate. The world could be imagined as a movement forward towards an "immense ocean in which all the levers of development meet again together, fused, all in one." Even more interesting is the fragment «On Christianity»7, from April 1862. «That faith makes happy does not mean anything other than the old truth that only the heart, and not knowledge, can make happy. That God has become man indicates only that man must not seek his happiness in the infinite, but must found his heaven on earth; the illusion of a superterrestrial world had led the spirits of men to a false position with respect to the terrestrial world: that illusion was the product of the childhood of the peoples. Amid great doubts and struggles, humanity becomes virile: it recognizes in itself "the beginning, the middle, and the end of religion." Here the influence of Feuerbach can be clearly recognized, and some passages from his letters from this period to Krug and Pinder also sound Feuerbachian. It is evident that, under the influence of the philosophy of his time, Nietzsche carried out, without apparently hard internal battles, the farewell to the extremely powerful original force of his youth. This too is a coincidence with Marx. But there is another: neither of them loses the "religious" or "idealistic" impulse. Proof of this is the poem "To the Unknown God", written shortly before finishing high school and, therefore, leaving Schul pforta: One more time before I go and direct my gaze forward I raise my hands alone towards you, towards whom I flee, to whom in the depths of the heart I festively consecrate altars so that always your voice calls me again...8

In September 1864, shortly before the end of his twentieth year of life, he left the boarding school with a final certification that only for the

7 Ibtdem, 70s. * Ibid., 254.

36

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

low performance in mathematics was not outstanding. As the first place of studies he chose Bonn. This, too, implied a similarity to Marx, and not merely an external one. Regarding the high expenses of the son, his mother manifests himself in a very similar way to that of Marx'sfather twenty years before: Nietzsche received an amount of 40 thalers per month; his mother was granted in 1849 a widow's pension of 30 talers and a child allowance of 16 talers a year (!); a small inherited fortune explains the surprising difference. Nietzsche's was not, however, as romantic as Marx'scareer, despite the fact that he entered the 'Franconian'students'association; very soon he put aside theology and devoted himself to philology, which in Bonn was marked by the dispute between professors Ritschl and Jahn. Nietzsche did not initially take sides with either of them, but devoted himself basically to detailed philological work whose most important fruit was the studies on Theognis ("Theognidea"), on an author, then, who probably represents the most resounding aristocratism among the writers of antiquity ("The many are bad"). But already then one can also find brusque expressions against "the priests" as a whole. Especially marked was Nietzsche'sanimosity towards Catholicism in Bonn; consequently, he went to work for the “GustavAdolf Association”. However, when what was in the foreground was the aesthetic point of view, his opinion was very different, in such a way that he said of Cologne, for example, that the city, with its sublime cathedral and its countless churches, caused a remarkable impression9. What most readily refers to and anticipates his later philosophy are some passages from his letters, such as this one addressed to Elisabeth: «Is it a question, then, of getting an idea about God, the world and reconciliation in the that one is as comfortable as possible? Does it not happen rather that for the authentic investigator the result of his investigation is frankly indifferent to him? Do we seek with our research tranquility, peace, happiness? No: only truth, even if it were horrifying and ugly to the max»10. The future is even clearer in a fragment of a letter addressed to von Gersdorff on 7.4.1866 in which Nietzsche recounts a storm, and then continues: «What did I care about man and his restless desire! What did I care about the eternal "you must", "you must n 9 KGB, 1,2, p. 37.

10 Ibid., 60

Nietzsche'slife

37

tad, the hail, the unleashed forces, without ethics! How happy, how powerful they are, pure will without the confusion of the intellect!»11. Here the influence of Schopenhauer, whose book The World as Will and Representation had been known to Nietzsche shortly before, can be perceived with great clarity. A no less important divergence with respect to the Hegelian Marx involved the personal acquaintance of Richard Wagner in November 1868, facilitated through the mediation of Mrs. Brockhaus, sister of the composer. In any case, this already happened in Leipzig, where Nietzsche had moved following his teacher Friedrich Ritschl. Here he also revealed, in 1866, his great interest in the German civil war, with different positions with respect to Bismarck, but basically always within the spirit of liberalism and "forty-eight". In this one could see a highlight of the «tyche». However, what Goethe introduces in the third stanza remains alien to him, namely "Eros, love": It won'tbe late! [= the flame that ignites]... and there is good in such a sweet and fearful complaint. There are many common hearts merging, but always the most noble is consecrated to the unique Being.

It seems that Nietzsche only knew "eros" in the form of sex and that the syphilis infection, which Thomas Mann would make the starting point of Doctor Faust, could well have been caught in a Leipzig brothel. But a kind of passion was his friendship with Erwin Rohde, in which even homosexual resonances can be perceived from our current mentality. However, this "enlightened" mentality is in all probability false, since Nietzsche could speak contemptuously to Rohde of the "repulsive greed of carnal love,"12 and Richard Wagner apparently sensed no concupiscence when Nietzsche writes to him referring to «her very dear to me is posa»13. Nietsche quickly became Ritschl'sfavorite student and his career was only briefly interrupted by military service (volunteering for a year in Naumburg, from 11 lbidem, 121s.

a KGB, II, 1, p. 62. 1} Lbidem, 142.

38

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

the autumn of 1867 until the spring of 1868), which Nietzsche carried out without resistance and even with some enthusiasm, but which had to be concluded prematurely due to a serious equestrian accident. Taken together, his university studies at Bonn and Leipzig signified a "Greek" age through and through; This sentence from a letter to von Gersdorff can be considered typical: «... is it perhaps happening here that because of “Christianity” there was a tear in human nature, which the people of harmony did not know?14 . In this orientation towards Greek antiquity, too, he was in complete agreement with Marx, as has already been said. Of the philosophers of his time, he read Friedrich Albert Lange and Eugen Dühring, that is, two thinkers who were linked to the incipient workers'movement; He agrees with Lange first and foremost in his view that metaphysics must be placed side by side with poetry and religion, and that the physical goal has so little to do with what is "true or self-existent" » such as religion and art15. Thus, more or less at the end of his studies, Nietzsche was already very far from the "daimon" of the family tradition. But the next high point of the "tyche" could well be an event that Nietzsche communicated to his friend Erwin Rohde in January 1869 with great excitement and under strict secrecy: it seemed that he was to be called to the University of Basel through Ritschl. Thus, at the age of 24, he was lucky enough to achieve what Marx also aspired to, but which, due to a sudden political change, he could not achieve, namely, a university professorship. Notable, however, is the fact that a short time before the youthful professor of classical philology was still toying with the idea of studying chemistry together with Rohde and throwing philology where, according to him, it belonged: in the storage room where the old furniture of our ances But, on the other hand, how could anyone have expressed himself in a more "classical" way than Nietzsche did (once again in internal consonance with Marx) at this threshold of his life: "May Zeus and all the muses preserve me from being a philistine, an anthropos ámousos, a man of the herd!»16. He was indeed released from it, and in Basel, where he arrived in April 1869, the highest peak of the "tyche" awaited him: his close friendship with Richard and Cosima. “*KGB, 1,2, p. 210. 0 Ibid., 269. 16 Ibid., 385.

Nietzsche'slife

39

Wagner; a culminating point that, it is true, already contained within itself the failure of a professional career that had begun in such a glorious way.

The Basel years up to 1876 The fact that Nietzsche was called to a university at the age of 24 and only later was awarded the degree of doctor without examination or defense of any thesis— since his publications in the Rheinisches Museum were considered more than sufficient— was not entirely complete. extraordinary at the time, but it was enough to give him a reputation for precocity and genius that went beyond the circle of his acquaintances. Basel in the sixties was a city of 30,000 inhabitants and, as in Naumburg, its doors were closed every afternoon, so it is to be assumed that traffic through its streets would have ceased if it had not already been directly prohibited. His republican-patrician-bourgeois circumstances were, however, a strong counterpoint with respect to Naumburg and Prussia in general. Their own university, a pride for this small community, was in danger. Since 1833, and as a result of the cantonal division into Basel-city and Basel-region, the city was certainly in financial distress and the ruling families had made the considerable sacrifice of introducing progressive taxes in favor of the university, since the Basilian radicals were gaining ground and were "progressive" enough to carry out their transformation into an industrial school. In 1869 there were just over a hundred students among the four faculties, but in return some very important professors who were now Nietzsche's companions: Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Ludwig Rütimeyer.

Nietsche now withdraws from the association of Prussian subjects, but will never acquire Basel, or rather Swiss, citizenship; He is thus a man without a State, without a "homeland", in the Swiss expression: the same as Marx. Every morning he gives his lessons in front of seven listeners, but in addition to the eight hours at the university, he has to give another six hours of class at the "Pedagogium", that is, the highest level of the baccalaureate institute, and this additional occupation he takes it very seriously (as does Jacob Burckhardt), so his students are enthusiastic about him. At the end of May 1869 he delivered his lesson

40

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

inaugural on «Homer and classical philology». His philhellenism is obvious: "Hellenity" is not an outdated point of view. Of course, classical philology is in itself contradictory: it is at the same time a science and the possibility of the highest formation. In a purely scientific procedure "the marvelous educational essence and,

indeed, the authentic fragrance of the atmosphere of Antiquity would be los Therefore, Nietzsche proclaims the full interpenetration and fusion of both elements as a goal, and risks the surprising sentence: «phi losophia facíaest qme philologia fuit». But the little relationship that all this had with a "critical philosophy" in the Kantian sense can be easily deduced from the most profound and emotional experience that he had to live in his first years of university: the friendship with Richard Wagner and Cosima von Bülow, who in the mid-1870s and after overcoming numerous difficulties would become Cosima Wagner. In Tribschen, near Lucerne, on the shores of the Lake of the Four Cantons, Richard Wagner (who after his revolutionary beginnings and after long years of emigration was now a protégé of the young Bavarian King Ludwig II) had had a refuge built for himself. of category, and Nietzsche visited here for the first time on May 15, 1869, on the occasion of a rather vague invitation that Wagner had made to him when they met in Leipzig. Close and friendly relations very quickly resulted from this, which also included abundant correspondence. Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult,was only seven years older than Nietzsche; He was in the house when Siegfried, Wagner'sfirst son, was born on June 6, 1869. The atmosphere of spiritual elevation and isolation from the normal world that reigned there is well described in Nietzsche's letter to Rhode of September 3, 1869: "My dear friend, what I learn and observe, hear and understand there, is irrelevant." cryptible. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Aeschylus and Pindar are still alive, you can believe me»18. In all, up to the Wagners'departure for Bayreuth in 1872, Nietzsche made no fewer than 23 visits to Tribschen; at Christmas 1869 he stayed there for even a whole week. In the case of Marx, an equivalent experience is lacking because, although he was a great reader and admirer of Aeschylus, he had no special interest in music. (A distant analogy represents at most 17 Musariott-Ausgabe, II, 6. '*KGB,n , 1, p. 52.

The life of Nietzsche

41

his relationship with Heine in Paris, and more or less comparable are also the poems of youth, which in both were "romantic"). Not surprisingly, Nietzsche only followed the political events of his day in a marginal way. Thus, at no time does he mention, for example, the congress of the (First) International, held precisely in Basel in September 1869; about the Vatican Council he only makes a pejorative observation from time to time; In the autumn of 1870, he made a singular erroneous judgment when he said that Prussia was becoming more and more an enemy of culture because machinations in favor of the Catholic Church were being set in motion from Berlin19 (precisely, then, during the early of the "cultural struggle", which will be mentioned later, at best, indirectly). But Nietzsche was undoubtedly still a German patriot at this time, just as he was in 1866: the renewal of German culture through the total Wagnerian artistic work in the spirit of the Hellenic was, as is known, his greatest hope. For this reason he participated in the Franco-German war as a volunteer, specifically as a nurse, receiving strong impressions on the battlefields of Wórth and Metz; but his war experience barely lasted more than a week, since at the beginning of September he became seriously ill. In the winter semester of the academic year 1870/71 he was again in Basel. There he attended Jacob Burckhardt'scourse on historical greatness, later published under the title "Considerations on Universal History" ("Weltgesichtliche Betrachtungen"). For a time he was relatively familiar with him (who was much older), with whom he agreed in his distrust of Prussia and, later, also in his negative opinion of the "present German war of conquest." Around the same time Marx wrote his anti-Prussian pamphlet 'TheCivil War in France'. 1871 is the year in which The Birth of the Tragedy of the Spirit of Music appears, where a series of preliminary works come together. He is deeply impressed by a political event or, for Nietzsche, much more than political: the "fire of Paris." Elisabeth Forster Nietzsche offers in her biography a melodramatic description of the horror that this caused Nietzsche and Burckhardt in common, but be that as it may, Nietzsche writes on May 27, 1871 to Wilhelm Vischer-Bilfinger (who as a member of the government wit 19 Ibidem, 155s.

42

Nietzsche and the nietzscheanistno

In these cases, it was the person who had processed his call to the university) the following: «The news of the last few days has been so terrible that I can no longer reach a bearable mood. What does one mean as a man of letters in the face of such an earthquake of culture! How insignificant one feels. One dedicates his whole life and his best strength to better understand and better explain a period of culture; what a profession this is, when a single fateful day turns to ashes the most valuable documents of such periods! This is the worst day of my life»20. And still on June 21, when the newspapers had long since reported that the Louvre had not been destroyed and that much more blood had been shed in "Versailles" than in the communes, he continues to speak in the aforementioned letter to von Gersdorff from the "international hydra head" and ends with these words: "But even in my greatest pain I was not able to throw a stone at those criminals, who for me were only the bearers of a general guilt! about which there is much to think about!”21. Thus, a point of extreme opposition between Nietzsche and Marx soon manifests itself; Despite the fact that in both cases the fundamental impulse is the same, the "culture of the future" which is critical of the present, their concrete location was completely different: music and Richard Wagner on the one hand, industry and the proletariat on the other. But along with The Birth of Tragedy, we must mention another event of the year 1871 to which one of his biographers22 attributes "catastrophic consequences" for Nietzsche, despite the fact that at first sight it seems an insignificant episode (and from today's perspective hardly credible, for 'oldfashioned'):-the failure of his attempt to transfer to the chair of philosophy— that of Gustav Teichmüller, who had been called up by the University of Dorpat— and at the same time bringing Erwin Rohde to Basel as his successor. (Instead of Nietzsche, a now practically forgotten man was named, a future Nobel laureate, anyway: Rudolf Eucken.) On January 2, 1872, The Birth of Tragedy appeared in bookstores; its publisher was Emst Fritzsch of Leipzig, who also published the works of Richard Wagner. The title vignette showed Prometheus released (in a very similar way to the case of the doctoral th 30 Ibtdem, 195. 21 Ibid., 204. 22 CP Janz, oc, 1,406.

Nietzsche'slife

43

Marx). It was, indeed, a brilliant work of youth in which the germ of almost all the fundamental points of Nietzsche'slater thought can already be found. But despite its genius impulse, The Birth of Tragedy is a synthetic work in which various motifs are intertwined in a not entirely convincing unity. Three main levels are clearly distinguished: The first is philological or Hellenic, already prefigured in Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Jakob Bachofen: the confrontation of Dionysus, the god of drunkenness and "Bacchic delirium", with Apollo, the god of proportion and form, or of "dream", as Nietzsche says. From the conjugation between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the Greek tragedy arises, where the greatness of the hero is attested by his fall. The second level is the Schopenhauerian. The Dionysian is equated with "will" and "music," the Apollonian with "illusion" and "savior." The greedy and fatal "will" finds its salvation in the disinterested contemplation of art. The third level is the authentically Nietzschean and contains an internal contradiction. The Dionysian is shown in the music of Richard

Wagner as a pleasant unity of the whole, which makes the "principium individuationis" vanish and which also overcomes in human life all barriers of caste and social class, freeing men from their alienation in everyday life, on the surface of reality. But, on the other hand, this "foundation of nature" is reconceived as something terrible, in the face of which the human being, the original unity itself, finds its liberation in the world of beautiful appearance, of art, which of course it is plastic and formal, that is to say, "Apollonian." In the second part we will return to this "metaphysical aspect" of The Birth of Tragedy; Here it is enough for me to illustrate it by means of some quotes: «In accordance with this knowledge, we must conceive the Greek tragedy as a Dionysian chorus that is discharged again and again in an Apollonian world of images... The Greek knew and felt the horrors and terrors of existence: in order to be able to to live had to place before them the resplendent dream-creature of the Olympians23. «Here nothing reminds us of asceticism, spirituality and duty: here only an exuberant existence speaks to us, even more, triumphant, in the

23 KGW, III, p. 58s.

44

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

that everything that exists is deified, whether it is good or bad»24. «Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only is the alliance between human beings renewed: also alienated, hostile or

subjugated nature celebrates its reconciliation festival with its lost son, ma Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid, hostile delimitations that necessity, arbitrariness or “insolentfashion” have established among men are broken»25. It is very curious how this last quote coincides with some expressions of the young Marx that also speak of a liberation of nature; It seems then that from this idea of the breaking down of barriers, of the liberation of slaves, a philosophy of history similar to that of Marx would have to result. But precisely the "philosophy of history" of The Birth of Tragedy has a very different character, and in the framework of our general approach it is of greater interest than the "metaphysical" aspect. What is truly great and paradigmatic is for Nietzsche the tragedy itself or, more precisely, the period in which its existence was possible, that is, that of a great human life in which the fight of the gods is realized as a myth, in such a way that that life knows the meaning of life and offers a "unity of style" in all its manifestations. This paradigmatic life of ancient Greece ended, however, with Euripides, who brought the bourgeois spectator to the stage, and above all with Socrates, in whom instinct became critical because in him the logical nature, "through a super fetation , had an excessive development as in the mystic instinctive wisdom has it»26; Socrates was the one who brought rationalist optimism and dialectic to the world, in such a way that he made possible the appearance of the «profound illusory representation... that, following the thread of causality, thinking reaches the deepest abysses of being, and that thinking is capable not only of knowing, but eve While it is true that this contempt for conscience and enlightened optimism is totally in line with Schopenhauer, with all Nietzsche formulates some of its "political" consequences with greater causticity than his philosophical teacher; Nothing could be in a sharper contrast to Marx'sconvictions: the 24 Ibidem, 3 Os. 25 Ibid., 25. 26 Ibid., 86. 27 Ibid., 95.

The life of Nietzsche

45

Belief in the "earthly happiness of all" is part of a general culture of knowledge, and although this "Alexandrian" culture of ours ultimately requires a class of slaves in order to exist, in its optimistic view of existence it denies the need for such a social estate; Nietzsche refers directly to the socialist movements of his time when he says: «The “primitivegood man” claims his rights: what paradisiacal prospects!»28. And yet, despite this abysmal opposition between the Hegelian and the follower of Schopenhauer, the starting point was the same: classical Hellenity, which will be universalized by Marx while Nietzsche precisely wants to retain it, that is, recover it, and concretely through the total artistic work of Wagner as the foundation of a new German culture.

It can probably be said that the months following the publication of The Birth of Tragedy were the happiest time in Nietzsche'slife. Thus, on June 24, 1872, he wrote to Richard Wagner: «Ah, admired teacher, I am so happy today! I have escaped from a grave danger in my life: that of never having entered into relations with you or having seen Tribschen or Bayreuth... A telegram just arrived from Munich now also gives me the hope... of living a summer with greater richness and fullness. And all thanks to you! How could I thank him!»29 *. And in a letter addressed to Carl von Gersdorff on July 20/21, one finds the sentence: «I arrived in Basel as cheerful and happy as a boyfriend»31'. But the battle had already begun around The Birth of the tragedy, which would have serious consequences. On May 26, a review by Erwin Rohde appeared in the Nord deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung that was very positive but also very general.

Four days later, the pamphlet of a young Schulpforta graduate sees the light of day: Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Móllendorff's"Philology of the Future", a study that undertook the task of exposing numerous philological flaws, but which was ultimately going through a deep and worldviewing irritation, so to speak, to the point that in the end he addresses Nietzsche with this exhortation: "Let him gather his tiger feet and panthers, but not the philological youth of Germany!" 28 Ibtdcm, 119. 29 KGB, II, 3, p. 16. 50 Ibid., 28s.

46

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

A few days later, Richard Wagner took sides in favor of Nietzsche with a letter against Wilamowitz in the Norddeutsche Allge meine Zeitung, but probably all he succeeded in doing was reinforcing the impression among many that Nietzsche had unacceptably mixed science with art. art. Of great scientific weight was, in October, Erwin Roh'sreply to "Pseudo-philology", which sought to demonstrate the existence of serious faults in the aggressor, but which overall can be said to be too far away. the defensive. This (only apparent) "dispute of philologists" ended the following year with a second pamphlet by Wilamowitz, the "Philology of the Future. Second part". It was by no means a triumphal song, but the future pope in the field of ancient philology energetically reaffirmed his conviction that he had defended the spirit of science against a wandering poet and mythologist. However, it soon emerged that Wilamowitz had not just spoken for himself, but had articulated a widely held opinion. Ritschl, much to Nietzsche'sdisappointment, spoke with extreme reserve; Usener, in Bonn, with total rejection. On July 7, 1872, Nietzsche wrote to Rohde: "I seem to have been sentenced to death by the guild"51. In the winter semester no students showed up. Nietzsche'scareer as a philologist had come to an end before it bore the fruits expected by everyone, and especially by Ritschl. But Nietzsche had important compensations. At the end of 1872 he was allowed to be Cosima's"gentleman" on the way to a benefit concert (in favor of the Bayreuth theater) by Richard Wagner in Mannheim, and in Basel he gave a lecture to almost 300 spectators. very successful "On the future of our schools", about which Jacob Burckhardt was very complimentary. But already in the spring of 1872 he made his last trip to Tribschen: Richard and Cosima Wagner moved to Bayreuth. In the meantime he had made a new friend in the figure of Franz Overbeck, a theologian who in 1873 published a kind of declaration of war against theology under the title: "On the Christian quality of presentday theology." The familiarity was not long in coming, and for quite some time the two bachelors lived together with a third party, Heinrich RoIbid _

,

19.

The life of Nietzsche

47

mundt, in the so-called "Baumannsholle". During his first stay in Bayreuth, in 1872, he became acquainted with Malwida von Meysenbug, who had played an important role in the proto-history of the "emancipation of women" and, as educator of the children of Alexander Herzen, represented for Nietzsche a link with that revolutionary emigration in London of which Marx was also a part. Meanwhile, since 1873 it was possible to verify a serious worsening of his state of health, and for some time the doctor forbade Nietzsche to read. In spite of everything, just now comes the fruitful time of Untimely Considerations. In August 1873 the first was published: "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer", an attack as violent as it was sarcastic against who had been the pioneer of Biblical criticism in Germany but who meanwhile, especially with his book The Old a new faith, he had become a defender— normal and "recib-pleaser"— of progress. But by no means would Nietzsche find only approval: the "frontier messengers" such as Gottfried Keller and Carl Spitteler were very negative. However, because of this writing "there was talk" more about him than because of the "Birth". At the end of February 1874 he followed «On the usefulness and disadvantages of history for life». This meditation, too, was an attack, specifically an attack on the "culture of science" in the form of historicism. The story is subordinated to "life", of which an "unconditional love" and the "mysterious atmosphere" of a mythical atmosphere are part. Hegel'sand Eduard von Hartmann'sconcept of the "universal process" also implies, according to Nietzsche, a destructive historicism for life, and the final question is at the same time a warning call: "Is it life that is to govern? about knowledge, or knowledge about life? The month of October 1874 was the date of publication of "Scho penhauer as an educator". Here his orientation towards «genius», metaphysics, religion and art is still very clear, since Nietzsche only sees one mission for man: «to promote within us and outside of us the generation of the philosopher, the artist and the holy [of “thoseno longer-animals”32], and thus contribute to the perfection of nature»33. 523 52 KGW, is, l,p. 376. 53 ¡bidet». 378.

48

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

But around this same period, very serious doubts can already be found in the unpublished notes about the paradigmatic character of the Hellenic and even about Wagnerian music. From 1873 dates the curious brief writing «On truth and lies in an extramoral sense». During his second stay in Bayreuth, in August 1874, Nietzsche is very ill and ends up getting involved with the teacher in a serious dispute about the evaluation of Brahms, which Cosima manages to arbitrate only with great effort. His state of health worsened even further afterwards, and his incipient estrangement from Wagner was surely one of the causes. Thus, in the fourth and last of the Untimely Considerations, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," which was published in July 1876 on the occasion of the opening of the festival theater, it is possible to perceive between the lines all kinds of strange tones and nuances. . His personal assistance caused him deep disappointment, added to his continual headaches; he would later write that "all the idleness of Europe" had gathered at that opening act. It is not unreasonable to suppose that he would have felt abandoned by Richard Wagner, the same one who celebrated his moment of glory as a monarch. But it would be superficial to see in it the definitive explanation of such an important event in the history of the spirit as the split between Nietzsche and Wagner. The stomach and head ailments continue to worsen. Nietzsche is forced to apply for a longer leave, which is granted for the time between October 1876 and September 1877. Filled with concern, Nietzsche recalls his father'sfate. Thus, it is legitimate to also quote the fourth stanza of Goethe's"Protowords", which bears the title "Ananke, necessity": they conform to duty, will and whim. Free in appearance, after the years we are more tied than in the first beginning.

In Goethe the last stanza follows, "Elpis, hope." And surely it can be said that Nietzsche also placed great hopes in the stay in the south to which Malwida von Meysenbug had invited him. But certainly this hope was no longer the same as Goethe expressed in the words: M C.P. Janz, o. c., 1,720.

The life of Nietzsdie

49

But such borders, such bronze walls, such hateful gates, open...

for only later may he have satisfied her, in such a case, with his demanding sense of philosophical mission; In any case, this stay could not be turned into a mere vacation due to illness. An essential transformation had already been announced in Nietzsche. A letter in which he writes to his maternal friend Marie Baumgartner, from Lorrach, dates from July 1875, telling her that at that time he was cultivating a science that deserved to devote time to it, the ""theory of commerce and business and the development of world trade” including the political and social economy»55; together with Gersdorff he read in October 1875 the Psychological Considerations of an anonymous author who was a listener of his university courses, a young man of Jewish origin named Paul Rée; And precisely with this Rée, as well as with another student named Albert Brenner, Nietzsche decided to spend his stay in the house of Malwida von Meysenbug. Was a change in the making in Nietzsche similar to the one that Marx had brought about in the years 1843/44? When he traveled to Geneva in April 1876, he wrote to his sister: «My first bow was to Voltaire, whose house in Femex I visited»35 6. In the midst of disappointment and illness, Nietzsche'ssecond period had begun, the period of Human, all-too-human, the Nietzschean period of the Enlightenment and "positivism." ,

The sea change: 1876-1879 At the time of his sick leave in 1876 Nietzsche still had a nice house in Basel together with his sister; in Sorrento he found a kind of family that was perhaps more suitable for him than his natural family; That is why expressions such as "ideal convent" and "school of educators" occurred to him; Rée even invented the fictitious image of an «invisible Church... with you as ponti/ex maximus, Pope, prior»57. In this sense it is perhaps legitimate to speak of a "community phase" of Nietzsche

35 KGB, n , 5, p. 82. 36 Ibid., 146. ”

KGB, II, 6/2, p. 769.

50

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

and to think of the corresponding ideas of the young Friedrich Engels, who was certainly familiar with CXven and Fourier while Nietzsche had apparently not read a single line of these 'earlysocialists'.Afterwards he would live again in a modestly furnished room, this time before the city gates of Basel; In 1879, after his definitive abandonment of teaching, he would first choose Naumburg as his place of residence, where he wanted to rent a tower of the city fortress and work a lot in the garden. But none of this could be accomplished: his provisional stay within his "natural family" would precisely coincide with the lowest point of his health up to then. Only with the journey south at the beginning of 1880 did the era of the "lonely Nietzsche" begin, but also that of the thinker who had found his "living space": the Upper Engadine, Venice, Genoa. Extremely sensitive to changes in the weather, it survives here in furnished rooms and most of them without heating in winter. A new spiritual change is glimpsed with the writing, or rather, with the dictation of Aurora throughout the year 1880; now one of the fundamental characteristics will be his inner isolation as a result of the distancing on

the part of Rohde, Gersdorff and other friends, whose causes have to do with the publication of Human, All Too Human. In the first place we must follow one by one the seasons and the environments.

He arrived in Sorrento at the end of October 1876 and there his last meeting with Richard and Cosima Wagner took place. Apparently, on this occasion Wagner warned him against Paul Rée. He was the son of an "Ostelbier" (East Elbe landowner), a Jewish landowner from Stibbe in West Prussia, and already for that reason a figure worthy of attention. His Psychological Observations, which had been published in 1875 by the Duncker publishing house in Berlin, came, according to the title page, 'fromthe posthumous bequest of * * *'.It is a collection of aphorisms assembled in chapters under titles such as: «On human actions and their motives», «On books and writers», «On women, love and marriage», «Essay on vanity». In the tradition of the French 'moralists',an attempt is made to 'unmask'human beings by reducing apparently selfless actions to selfish motives. I cite three examples: «Whoever comes out in defense of his friends is normally only defending his honor, that of being their friend»38. "Beautiful women are proud of their 3 3® P. Rée, Psychologiscbe Beobachtungen, Berlin, 1875,21.

Nietzsche'slife

51

conquests, disgusted by their virtue»39. «Only a small number of clerics are more concerned with the content of religions than with that of their salary, and more with the divine tribunal than with the consistory»40. In 1877 he published, this time under his own name, a book entitled The Origin of Moral Sensations at Emst Schmeitzner'sChemnitz publishing house. Nietzsche received a copy with the curious dedication: "To the father of this writing, with all the gratitude of his mother." It is evident, then, that there had already been a great deal of mutual influence. Once again, what is characteristic is the exaltation of the role of egoism. According to Rée, this, in the same way that rivalry, is in men, by virtue of their intellect, much stronger than in animals. There

is no "free will" and therefore no "responsibility"; but this does not mean that the administration of justice becomes superfluous, since the elimination of what is harmful is its legitimate task. But the desire for prestige and vanity are not something purely negative, since they make possible the development of industry, science and art. Thus, it is true that progress and civilization are realities, but precisely both are linked to the primacy of egoism. Curiously, Rée does not relativize, on the other hand, the concept of «disinterested knowledge», but for him it even constitutes the true distinguishing mark of man, who is peaceful by nature, while all desire has a warlike character. In this sense, the book'sbelonging to the Enlightenment trend is indisputable, despite the denigration of "reason" in it (the same applies to many works of the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century). The hostess, Malwida von Meysenbug, was then well known for her book Memoirs of an Idealist, which Nietzsche had read with enthusiasm. She could hardly have been repulsed, therefore, in the face of her lively description of the eve of the 1848 Revolution, of the living conditions of leftwing emigration in London, and of the activities of Alexander Herzen. But Malwida was at the same time an enthusiastic Wagnerian, and for many years she would continue to be for Nietzsche an element of indirect contact with Bayreuth. Only towards the end of Nietzsche'sconscious life did the break with it also occur; and Nietzsche unfairly described her then with these derogatory words: «spoiled... she sits... like a ridiculous little pythia on her sofa»41.

in Ibtdem, 69. 40 Ibtdem, 126. 41 KGB, m , 5, p. 471.

52

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Malwida has described Nietzsche'ssojourn in the additional volume that he later published under the title: The Twilight of the Life of a

idealistic. They lived in a German-run boarding house in the middle of a "vineyard"; on the first floor were the rooms with a terrace for the three men, on the second floor were the rooms of Malwida and her maid as well as a large room for common use; from the terraces one had "the most splendid view of the Gulf of Naples and Vesuvius, precisely at that time very agitated, which in the evenings gave off columns of fire"42. Life had been organized in a pleasant way. In the mornings each one dedicated himself to his own occupations. In the afternoon the collective walk took place, "often passing peasant farms, where gentle girls in merry gathering danced the tarantella", not artificially, as now for tourists, "but in an original way, moved by the natural grace and modesty»43. (One would have to place next to this Friedrich Engels'saccount of his walk through rural France in the revolutionary year of 1848, and we would have an antidote to the exclusive descriptions of misery favored by the socially engaged writer.) .) In the evening, lively conversations and joint readings were held in the common room. Particularly profound was the impression made on the small group by Nietzsche'scomments on his manuscript of Burckhardt'scourses on Greek culture; in addition, Voltaire, Diderot, Larochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, etc. were read.

This was the environment in which the foundations of Human were laid, not too human. In the summer of 1877 Nietzsche continued the work at Rosenlauibad, not far from Grindelwald. In the fall I was back in Basel for the start of the semester. Here he received a letter from Viennese admirers who were later to play almost without exception a great role in Austrian literary and political life: Victor Adler, Heinrich Braun, Engelbert Pemerstorfer, Siegfried Lipiner. Garnishing it with a few grains of salt, it could be said that what would later become the directive of "Austromarxism" was anointed here antefestum with a drop of Nietzschean oil. At the beginning of January 1878, the text of Wagner'sParsifal came into Nietzsche's hands. Nietzsche spoke to Reinhart von Seydlitz very negatively *41 42 Malwida von Meysenbug, Memairen einer Idea listín,and its addition: Der Lebensa bed of an idealist, Berlin, 1881, II, 236. 41 Ibid., 237.

Nietzsche'slife

53

tively on him: here he sensed, he said, the "spirit of the CounterReformation... no meat and too much blood"44. Through Elisabeth Nietzsche, he sent Cosima a comment from Dr. Otto Eisner in which he made a comparison with Calderón's"autos sacramentales". Cosima replied irritably that just the opposite was true. That for Wagner no dogma had validity; that bread and wine did not turn into blood, but the opposite occurred45. At the end of April 1878 he saw the light of the Human world, too human, and not in the printing house of Wagner'spublisher (Fritzsch), but in that of Emst Schmeitzner, from Chemnitz. The hostile connection of this book with Parsifal would be stylized by Nietzsche himself later, but more truth can be attributed without fear to the version that says that the mutual sending of both works was simultaneous. The reaction of almost all friends and acquaintances was negative. Richard Wagner put the book down after a quick glance, so that he might preserve the beautiful impression of the earlier writings. Cosima wrote to a friend that, unfortunately, in Nietzsche a process had been going on for a long time '...against which I have fought to the best of my ability. Many things have contributed to this pitiful book. Finally, Israel was added in the figure of a certain Dr. Rée, very dapper, very cold, in a way absolutely captivated and subjugated by Nietzsche, but actually more astute than him: on a small scale, the relationship between Judea and Germany»46. Rohde (who had married a short time before) was very puzzled: "Is it possible to shed one'sown soul like that and put a different one in its place? Instead of being Nietzsche now suddenly becoming Rée?»47. Nietzsche'sstudent Adolf Baumgartner wrote to Jacob Burckhardt that he was 'astonishedat the possibility of such absurd discourse... [Nietzsche] thinks he comes especially close to the truth when he tramples on his best sentiments and presents them as reminiscences of some legendary animal age»48. At first glance, it is possible to venture a simple thesis in the face of

44 KGB, E , 5, p. 300. 45 KGB, 1 .15, p. 80. 44 Ibtdem, 84. 47 KGB, II, 6/2, p. 896. 48 m , 1 .15, p. 88.

54

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Human, all too human: Nietzsche recovers, so to speak, the cultural-historical phase of the European Dustration, becomes a "freethinker", burns everything he had venerated and venerates what for him had been worth burning. Indeed, in many turns he speaks like a normal Enlightenment and in some even like the practical Enlightenment Marx: poets and artists, he says, recall a more ancient age of man,49 and the activity of the genius is not essentially different from that of the man. scholar, but genius, in its opposition to the careful and modest spirit of science, is, as it were, an enemy of truth50; men can and must consciously decide "to manage the Earth economically as a whole...and...this new conscious culture kills the old"51. Democracy and a future European League of Nations are now judged positively, the modern army is considered a living anachronism; «slave» is no longer the one who with his additional work ensures the existence of the «liberated men of culture», but the one who does not have at least two thirds of his time for himself52. Questions that until then were considered the most important— for example, why does man exist? What fate awaits him after death?— are now described as mere "curiosities." Man is rather an insignificant little drop of life in

the universe, an insignificant boil on Earth. Thus, genius as the point of view of culture, slavery as its essential basis and the transcendence of the world through art and metaphysics are now thrown into the abyss and replaced by assent to mass scientific culture. , as well as by the self-conformism of man, etc. But the following must be taken into account: it is true that in The Birth of the Tragedy Nietzsche energetically declared himself

“antienlightenment”,- but he did not do so from a Christian or ecclesiastical point of view; his "romanticism" belonged, in a broad sense, to Dustration, or in any case was inconceivable without it; so that even then, before any influence from Rée had been able to take effect, it was possible to note the preparations for the change. Thus, at the beginning of 1873, he mocked Eduard von Hartmann's concept of the «universal process»: «Man and the “universalprocess”! T

*K G B ,

IV, 2, pp. 30s.

50 Ibtdem, 372s. 51 Ibtdem, 41. 52 Ibtdem, 235s.

Nietzsche'slife

55

glue and the universal spirit!»53. And earlier, in the spring of 1872, he wrote: «All affection, friendship, love is at the same time something physiological. None of us knows how deep and how high the pbysis reaches»54. Half Schopenhauerian and half Enlightenment (and here, too, there is no pure contradiction) was that fragment of 1873, "On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense." Particularly revealing is an aphorism from the spring of 1875: “Livingin the mountains, traveling a lot, changing places quickly: in this one can already compare with the Greek gods. We also know the past, and almost the future.

KGB .m , 1, p.

2% w Ibid . , 85 Ibid., 307. 86 Ibid., 311. 87 Ibid, 314s.

64

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

sche, as in the aforementioned case of Gast? But Lou was destined to become in later life the mentor and lover of Rainer Maria Rilke and a close confidante of Sigmund Freud; Nietzsche had stumbled upon, then, one of the most interesting women of Modernity. Was she, so to speak, Nietzsche's"last chance"? Be that as it may, he now feels definitely destined for solitude. Nor was the death of Richard Wagner on February 13, 1883, surely unimportant in this regard. Nietzsche sends a letter of condolence to Cosima, calling her "the most admired woman in my heart"88, but receives no reply. To conclude, I take a quick glance at Aurora and The Gay Science. Aurora still moves completely along the paths of Human, too human. The "humiliation of the human being" continues: Nietzsche assures that, like the ant and the earwig, man will not ascend at the end of his "earthly path" to familiarity with God and eternity; that men

are installed in their own web, in a way not unlike spiders; that they cannot absolutely trap anything other than that which allows itself to be trapped precisely in its grid; in other words: that there is no "intelligibility of the world" and no qualitative difference between a rational being called man and "the" irrational living beings89. But the contrary voice is also clearly perceptible, for example in the praise of the beauty of the high Catholic clergy, from which it is easy to deduce the postulate of the creation of a «superman». And a new tone is perceived in a sentence like the following: «We thinkers are the ones who have to first establish the good taste of all things, and if necessary to decree it»90. With regard to consciousness, he manifests here an ambivalence similar to what can be seen in Marx: on the one hand it is rejected as insignificant, but then it reappears, nevertheless, as the foundation without which nothing could be exposed or shown. In La gaya ciencia, phenomenalism and perspectivism stand out even more strongly. But that they rest on despair is nowhere more clear than in the poem from the "Songs of Prince Vogelfrei" addressed "To Goethe": 88 Ibtdem, 330. 89 KGW, V, 1, pp. 48s., 108. 90 Ibiden, 300.

Nietzsche'slife

65

The imperishable is only your image, tricky god, furtive poet. The wheel of the world, turning, wanders from goal to goal; Necessity calls that the resentful, the fool calls it play. The imperious game of the world mixes being and appearance, the eternally foolish mixes us inside. And the "contrary voice" is no longer something secondary here, since its tones have become not only more mournful but also more demanding: at least for now, any military-based culture would be, according to Nietzsche, far above any pretended culture. industry; there is an aphorism expressly dedicated "In honor of the religious homines", and in another place it is said that also "we", the atheists and anti-metaphysicians of Modernity, still kindle "our fire" in the light of the Christian faith, which was also Plato'sbelief, namely, "that God is truth." What will happen, he wonders, when it is verified that precisely this belief becomes more and more incredible?91.

In the context of the conclusion that something completely new must be found if we do not want humanity to succumb, there also belongs the most quoted aphorism in La gaya ciencia (#125), that of "The mad man" who runs with a flashlight in the midday light and shouts: «I am looking for God... We have killed him»; but this formidable event would not yet have penetrated the ears of men. But precisely from the verification of the "formidable", from the lack of escape, results the way out, namely, the way towards the theory of the eternal return of all things; where it is most clearly explained is in aphorism 341, «The heaviest load»: «Let'sassume that... a demon... told you: "To the eternal hourglass of the

91 KGW, V, 2, pp. 101-1 81,268,258s.

92 Ibid., 158s.

66

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

existence will be turned around again and again, and you with him, corpuscle of dust! Would you not lie down on the ground, gnash your teeth, and curse the devil who spoke to you thus? Or maybe you have ever had the experience of a formidable moment in which you would answer: "you are a god and I have never heard anything more divine"... Or how would you have to laugh at yourself and at life to not want nothing more than this eternal confirmation and ultimate corroboration?»93 *5. And in the next aphorism, 342, Zarathustra is mentioned for the first time. Can Nietzsche remain "enlightened" for long, when he calls on an ancient prophet to announce a completely new theory, never heard of before, which claims of course to be the exact opposite of all hitherto known religion? On February 1, 1883, Nietzsche wrote to Gast: «But perhaps you are interested in knowing what to write and prepare for printing. It is a very small book: about a hundred printed pages. But it is the best of mine, and with it I have removed a heavy stone from my soul... The book will be called: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A book for everyone and for no one»94. And Gast answers on April 2, after having read the first proofs: «This book is to be wished the divulgation of the Bible, its same canonical authority, its retinue of commentaries on which this authority partly rests. sa...»95. This is a striking parallel to what Friedrich Engels wrote (and propagated) in 1867 after the first volume of Capital was published, which was "the Bible of the working class." This was, so to speak, "Nietzsche'srise to millennium perspective," the beginning of the Zarathustra age.

The time of Zarathustra Bible — end of the millennium: the history of humanity divided into two halves. These are the turns with which Nietzsche and Peter Gast try to interpret the new, which in the case of Zarathustra is presented as a poetic production at the same time. It is very strange that Nietzsche seems to have no idea that this separation of history 93 Ibid., 250. * KGB, III, 1, pp. 320s. ”

KGB, III, 2, p. 360.

Nietzsche'slife

67

of the world in two great halves, the "prehistory" and the "true history" that will soon begin, had already been realized by Marx and, basically, by practically all the socialists; that it had been a natural thing for Marx to span millennia ('class society'with its 'Asiatic'ancient,'feudal',and 'bourgeois'modes of production); and that Friedrich Engels had called El capital the "Bible of the working class." This surprising coincidence could be seen as something like an "imitation" that lacks the awareness of its character as such; but in that case it could also be said that Marx imitated Hegel and Saint-Simon, and that these in turn, with slight modifications, borrowed their concepts from the Christian theology of history. For the rest, Nietzsche was by no means lacking in the consciousness of representing a "contrary movement," and if this fact had been brought to his attention, he would probably have said that socialism belonged in its depths to the group of things against which he was fighting, that is, the bourgeois world, and which, if ever put into practice, would not exactly mean a new beginning. But, be that as it may, it is necessary to verify first of all this coincidence in the "great statements"; and it will be fair to say that Bismarck was as alien to "big approaches" as were all the other statesmen of his time, including Disraeli and Gladstone, though certainly both had broader perspectives. that the founder of the Reich

German. It is all the more surprising that there should be an essential difference at the same time. Nietzsche had taken a great deal of interest in the events of 1866, and even in those of 1870/71, albeit partly with a negative view of them. More or less at the end of his conscious existence, in 1888/89, he will again refer in a relatively concrete way to German politics, but between 1872 and 1888 no political events or processes appear appreciably in his books or letters. . He mentions the "war" in Tunisia, but only because it makes his trip to North Africa impossible: the gradual dismantling of the "cultural struggle" in the German Reich is never mentioned, let alone Bismarck'snew tariff policy ; neither did the consolidation of the Third Republic in France after long years of instability draw his attention; Despite his stays in Italy, a word is never said about the alleged parliamentary revolution of 1876 or about its consequences; does not even seem to have realized the new imperialism of the Western powers or

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

68

from the beginning of German colonial policy. It is clear that this cannot be the mere ignorance of an enemy of the press wholly dedicated to philosophical and musical "culture", since in the 1980s Nietzsche regularly read the Journal des Débaís. Surely all this type of thing was for him "little politics" that did not have to interest a thinker. Very different had been the attitude of Marx and Engels towards the politics of their time. They were both journalists in their own way, and that forced them to some extent to deal with daily events; but concrete politics also plays an enormous role in his letters. Obviously, this difference has to do with the fact that for Marx and Engels the subject (or instrument) of their "great politics" was something palpable and involved in very clear struggles, while for Nietzsche this drive towards praxis existed, but he had nothing to lean on: "So far (I have) not a single disciple"96. The author of Human, All Too Human could still claim that he was carrying out a work of enlightenment and improvement of conditions in the circle of "free thinkers"; but the creator of the "Zarathustra" had to become more and more aware of that lack. The first part (as well as the following ones) is sent to the printer as such, by itself; the long delay until well into the summer of 1883 was due to Teubner being fully occupied with a charge of 500,000 songbooks. How much Nietzsche longed for a word of sympathy and encouragement from "his fellow men" is shown, for example, in a letter to Jacob Burckhardt, in which he says: "Dear Mr. Professor, lately all I miss is a conversation with you! ... You know how much I appreciate and respect you, don'tyou?»97. But when Jacob Burckhardt read the first part of "Zarathustra" he asked Nietzsche— as the latter, deeply disappointed, would tell Gast in writing— whether he would not try drama98. This first part begins with practically the same words with which La gaya ciencia had ended. «When Zarathustra was thirty years old

he left his homeland and the lake of his homeland and marched to the mountains»99. * KGB. m ,

1, p. 506.

97 Ibid. * Ibid., 515. » KGW, VI, 1st floor 6.

Nietzsche'slife

69

Then there is a reference to the aphorism "The Mad Man." Zarathustra is on his "descent" (= descent from the mountains) with a saint and wonders in amazement: "Is it possible! This old saint in his forest has not heard yet that God is dead!»100. From the comprehension of the death of God, the prodigal of the superman immediately results, which here is clearly conceived as a stage in the evolution of the species: «And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people: I teach you the superman. Man is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome it?. All beings have hitherto created something above god themselves: and would you be the ebb of that great tide, and recede to the animal rather than surpass man? What is d monkey to d man? A ridicule or a painful embarrassment. And that is exactly what man should be for his person: a mockery or a painful shame». A mere declaratory sentence regarding the "saint" is not linked to this, but a sentence of reprobation: "I adjure you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth... Now the most horrible thing is to commit an offense against the earth! and appreciate the entrails of the inscrutable more than the meaning of it!». But Zarathustra does not find approval in his listeners, but: "all the people laughed at Zarathustra." Now follows the speech on the «last men», which we will address in detail later: «I am going to talk to you about the most despicable: the last man...». All this is found in the "Zarathustra Prologue." "Zarathustra's speeches" are followed to the end, among others: "Of the three transformations", "Of the despisers of the body", "Of war and the warrior people", "Of the market flies", «Of chastity», «Of old and young women», «D d son and dd marriage», «Of the virtue that makes gifts». It is about peculiar “theoriesof virtue”, or an “antimoralmorality” that is “enlightened”and “antienlightened”- at the same time: “Myself has taught me a new pride, and I teach it to men : to stop hiding your head in the sand of celestial things, and to carry it freely, an earthly head, which is what creates the meaning of the earth!»101. «You say that the good cause is the one that sanctifies even the war? I tell you: the good war is the one that sanctifies every cause»102. 100 Ibid 'o*Ibidem 102 Ibid

,

,

,

fes. 32s. 55.

70

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Sentences like this, easy to quote, are found at every step. The most frequently used is probably this: «Are you going with women? Don'tforget the whip!»* 105. (But this is said by an «old woman»). The final sentence also refers to the superman: «Dead is all the gods are there: now we want the superman to live»104. With this he has taken, once again, a new path. "Freethinking" is not completely abandoned, but it can be said that in the "superman" the "genius" of the youthful age has risen again, transformed, and that in the "last man" he is reprobated again, and even more decisively, the for some time praised modern mass culture. Perhaps the best way to understand Nietzsche'sthird period is to see it as a radical return to the first. mere. But first we have to continue with the life of Nietzsche. In the summer of 1883 he found himself in Sils-Maria for the second time. In July the writing of the second part of the "Zarathustra" takes place, again within a period of a few days, but this time on the basis of extensive notes. Premonitory is the following expression from a letter to Gast of July 13: «At that time the idea came to me that I would probably die of a similar explosion and expansion of feelings»105. And he even writes: «The curious danger of this summer is called for me... madness»106. But even more curious are the extremely harsh judgments about his intimates (or former intimates), which raise the question of whether it is no longer possible to record an "imbalance of mind" very close to the limit with the pathological; thus, for example, in a letter to Georg Rée about Lou: "That skinny, dirty, smelly monkey with her false breasts: a fatality!"107; and shortly after to his mother: «You just don't understand at all the disgust I have to endure for being so closely related to beings like you!»108. And yet, one also finds (to anticipate something) over and over again testimonials of a deeply emotional and moving desire for friendship and adhesion towards other human beings; This is especially the case in the context of Heinrich von Stein'svisit to Sils-Maria 101 lbidem, 82. 1W lbidem* 98. 105 KGB, UI. 1, p. 397. 106 lbidem* 435. 107 lbidem* 402. 108 lbidem, 469.

Nietzsch'slife

71

in the summer of 1884. About him he writes to Overbeck: «He is a magnificent human specimen... At last, at last a new human being of mine and who instinctively feels great respect for me! It is true that I still trop wagnetisé, but, through the rational discipline that he has acquired together with Dühring, very prepared for me. At his side I constantly felt with the greatest clarity what is the practical task that is part of my vital task: if I had enough young people of a very certain quality!»109 *. And to Heinrich von Stein he dedicates one of his most moving poems, "From High Mountains": Oh youthful yearning, which misunderstood itself! Those whom I longed for, To those who I imagined similar to me, changed like me, Growing old has driven them away from me: Only the one who transforms remains related to me. Oh noon of life! Second youth! O summer garden! Restless happiness to stand and peek and wait! I wait impatiently for friends, prepared day and night, To new friends! Come! It'stime! It'stime!1,0

Back to the year 1883. In autumn 111 Elisabeth is engaged to Dr. Bernhard Forster; Nietzsche is thereby pushed into close kinship with the practical-political branch of anti-Semitism, of which a rather subtle version he had already known in the case of Richard and Cosima Wagner, without his own having manifested rejection signs. Forster, too, was a Wagnerian, and was probably the first to "present [Nietzsche] before his audience with very emphatic expressions" in lectures, as Nietzsche himself told Overbeck in March 1882. 112 But Forster had also been a Wagnerian. , together with men like Otto Boeckel, Theodor Fritsch and Liebermann von Sonnenberg, one of those "seven Germans" on whose initiative in April 1881 Bismarck was presented with a petition in IbiJem, 531. " ° KGW, VI, 2, p. 255. 1,1 KGB,m, 1, pp. 564ss, 112 Ibid., 180.

72

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

tude with 267,000 signatures in which the limitation of the immigration of Jews was requested and their exclusion from positions of authority, as well as their registration113. Forster was not only a Wagnerian and an anti-Semite, but also a naturist who relentlessly fought against vivisection and in favor of vegetarianism. Their different aspirations converged in the condemnation of the "adoration of the golden calf", and in this mammonism he saw the root of all modern evils, a mammonism whose most important champions were for him the Jews. He was thus much closer to the "first socialism" than to the conservatives, and this was especially evident in his rejection of the "erroneous and fatal right to property." For this reason, it was only consistent when, like Fourier and Cabet, it entertained the idea of founding a colony on the other side of the sea that knew neither property rights (on land) nor the various phenomena of decadence of Modernity. His thoughts soon turned to Paraguay, and there he wanted to build a "New Germania" "so that, in case this Germany between rocks and seas ever falls into the hands of the Russians, the Jews or the Romans, the ideal Germany lives on." rejuvenated and full of strength to welcome again the great thoughts of German culture and continue them in honest work»114. At the time of his betrothal, he had already made the first practical preparations, having been fired from his teaching post for his anti-Semitic propaganda; the name "Paraguay" was now to appear again and again in Nietzsche'sletters, until the end of his conscious life. Nietzsche'sfiancé, or husband, of his sister was by no means personally disliked: it reminded him, in a practical and cruder way, of his earlier efforts for a new German culture under the auspices of Richard Wagner. But at the same time (and perhaps precisely because of this) he did not hesitate for a moment to reject his brotherin-law's ideas and plans. The winter of 1883/84 was spent by Nietzsche, until April, in Nice. Here he received a visit from Joseph Paneth, a friend and student of Sigmund Freud, from which it may be legitimate to conclude that the subsequent approximations between Nietzscheanism and Freudianism were not merely casual. In January 1884 the third part of the "Zaratustra" was ready. Peter Gast pronounced himself as follows about her 115 cfr. la figura de B. Fórster, en: Erich F. Podach, figures around Nietzsche, Wei mar 1932,125-176. 114 ¡btdem, 140.

Nietzsche'slife

73

perhaps you will be revered and will have to be revered more than the founders of Asian religions, and I hope in a less Asian way and manner»115. Apparently, Nietzsche took such expressions seriously, and even exaggerated them in sentences like this: "... if I don'tget entire millennia to make their supreme vows in my name, in my opinion I will have achieved nothing"116 ; or like this: «Whoever does not bless existence because something like this Zarathustra is possible in it, he lacks everything, hearing, understanding, depth, training, taste and, in general, the nature of a “selectman”» 117 18. This second sentence is from a letter addressed to Helene Druskowitz, a radical forerunner of the emancipation of women who, despite this, at least for a certain time, found dealing with Nietzsche more profitable than with his co-religionists . Of course, she probably would have been more reserved if she had known what Nietzsche was writing to Elisabeth around the same time: "Everything to do with the enthusiasm for 'women's emancipation'has slowly, slowly in the account that I am his "black beast". In Zürich, among the students, great anger against me. For Also

here his desire for effectiveness, for "praxis," is manifest. In the summer of 1884 Nietzsche meets again in Sils-Maria. At this time he was certainly less well known in Germany than, for example, Malwida von Meysenbug; however, it already represented something of an attraction for foreigners. Süs wasn't,of course, a lonely little mountain town out of the world, as it were. It is said that in a single day, 900 vehicles passed by the Hotel Maloja, including 500 stagecoaches and carriages. Nietzsche complains about how hot and crowded the dining room of the hotel "Alpenrose" is, at whose table d'hôtehe takes his main meal for some time. His apartment is a private room in the home of the Durisch family, a room that is more than humblely equipped and in which he supplies himself with things from Naumburg at night, mainly ham. In a letter to Overbeck dated July 23, 1884, he complained: "The nights, all alone in my cramped and humble little room, are hard to crack"119.

KGB, m , 2, p. 420.

1,6 K G

B .m , l.p . 506.

117 KGB, III, 3, p. 84. 118 Ibtdem, 49. 1,9 KGB, m , l,p. 514.

74

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

In the winter of 1884/85 he is back in Nice, the "noisy and disgusting French city"120 which he, however, appreciates for its climate. The eye ailment reappeared with more force, and he had to limit reading and writing as much as possible. He finishes the fourth part of "Zarathustra", but finds no publisher; He has come into conflict with Schmeitzner, among other things because of his commitment to the anti-Semitic movement. Finally he has 40 copies printed on his own. On May 22, 1885, Richard Wagner'sbirthday, Bemhard and Elisabeth Forster were married. Nietzsche hesitates to travel to Naumburg, but sends a very cordial congratulatory letter to his "dear, dear flame." The second part of "Zarathustra" is largely a mere continuation of the first part, for example in the chapter "On Tarantulas": "You preachers of equality, the tyrannical insanity of impotence is what in you cries out for “equality”:your most secret tyrannical desires disguise themselves, then, with words of virtue! ... That is a people of a bad nature and origin; from their faces look the executioner and the bloodhound»121. What is new is the appearance of the concept of “willto power”: “Inall the places where I found living beings I found will to power; and even in the will of the one who serves I found the will to be lord»122. Only in the third part does the doctrine of eternal recurrence

gain a prominent place, especially in the chapters "On the Vision and the Enigma" and "The Convalescent", to which Heidegger has dedicated a profound interpretation. I am satisfied with a single quote: «From this gate called Moment a long, eternal street runs backwards: behind us lies an eternity. Every one of the things that can run, mustn'they have ever walked that street? ...must we not all have already existed? And to come again and run down that other street, forward, ahead of us, down that long, horrendous street: don'twe have to go back forever?»123. Zarathustra is expressly designated by his animals, the eagle and the serpent, as the "master of the eternal retu

The theories of the will to power and the eternal return must therefore be seen as a unity, albeit an enigmatic unity. If the *125 120 /CGB,ÜI,3,p. 10. m KGW, VI, 1, p. 125. m Ihidern, 143p. 125 Ibid., 196.

Nietzsche'slife

75

«Nietzsche'sphilosophical problem» can be located somewhere, it is here. Nothing really new is found in the fourth part, but it is noteworthy that «The second song of the dance»124 from the third part is repeated and is thus especially highlighted: Oh man! Pay attention! What does the deep midnight say? "I slept, I slept, I woke up from a deep dream: the world is deep And deeper than the day has thought. Deep is your pain pleasure, deeper even than suffering: pain says: pass! but all pleasure wants eternity, he wants deep, deep eternity!”

This is difficult to interpret. But what is absolutely certain is that only a philosopher and a "metaphysician" can speak in this way. The shape of the "Zarathustra" as a whole certainly makes a rather strange impression on us today. An analogue in his time is, first of all, Carl Spitteler'sepic Prometheus and Epimetheus. a metaphor. It has been affirmed over and over again that the "Zarathustra" was born under the influence of said prose poem, but this thesis is not very convincing. In any case, Nietzsche dictated to an acquaintance in the summer of 1885, during his fourth stay in Sils-Maria, a series of aphorisms in which no "Zarathustra tone" was any longer perceived. And in the already mentioned letter to Elisabeth of May 7, 1885, he writes: «You are not going to believe that my son Zarathustra expresses my opinions. He is one of my preludes and between-acts...»125. More and more frequently Nietzsche now speaks of the "major work" that he still has to write, and until well into the autumn of 1888 all his thoughts and plans are oriented to this "major work", to which he almost always gives the title of the will to power.

124 Ibtdem, 281s.

125 KGB, III, 3, p. 48.

76

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

The projected “capitalwork”: "The will to power." «Revaluation of all values» In his last years, from 1885 to 1888, nothing essential in Nietzsche'slife changed; his places of stay are already happening in an almost routine way: the winter of 1885/86 he spends again in Nice ("A room without a stove facing north: usually blue fingers. What I will not have frozen already in the seven winters of my stay in the south!")126; before moving to Sils he spends May and June (among other places) in Leipzig, where he has a last and disappointing reunion with Erwin Rohde; During his stay in Sils, at the beginning of August 1886, Beyond Good and Evil was published. Prelude to a philosophy of the future, which for the most part is based on the material that Nietzsche had prepared in the summer of 1885 for a new edition of Human, All Too Human. There is nothing to indicate that Nietzsche was conscious in naming Feuerbach'sFundamentals of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) after its resonances,127 and in their content both works are really very far apart. Again Nietzsche had to bear the costs of publication personally, specifically at the CG Naumann press in Leipzig, later to become famous as the publisher of the major octavo edition (GOA); the rights to the remaining works were reacquired by Fritzsch von Schmeitzner, so that the first three parts of Zarathustra could now be published in one volume. In Sils Nietzsche had much contact with Helen Zimmem, whom he, with a mixture of antipathy and admiration, described as "the model of a literary woman... Naturally Jewish"128; an important reaffirmation of his personal dignity was for him a review of Más allá of good and evil in the Bern newspaper Der Bund published by J. V. Widmann, in which the following could be read: "Here is dynamite"; in the winter and early spring of 1886/87 he was back in Nice, where this time he did have a room with heating; here he read Dostoevsky and instantly recognized his importance, much as he had done with Stendhal before; an intermediate stay at Chur was spent, like a normal professor, working in the libraries; It was at this time that the definitive break with 128 KGB, ID, 3, p. 294. 127 Cir. KGW, VIII, 1, p. 269. 128 KGB, III, 3, pp. 2I3s.

Nietzsche'slife

77

Erwin Rohde, who had been disrespectful about Hippolyte Taine, an author highly appreciated by Nietzsche; Later, in Sils-Maria, Nietzsche was deeply shocked to learn of the early death of Heinrich von Stein; in July the genealogy of the moral. A polemical writing, which is published in the fall; throughout the winter of 1887/88 he was again in Nice, and then, at the beginning of April, he left for two months, first to Turin, which filled him with admiration: «A capital of the seventeenth century... without any petty his slum»129 *. Here he dedicated himself to the «Wagner Case». The period from June 6 to September 20 is your last stay in Sils-Maria.

A biographical change makes itself felt first of all in the sharpening of his complaints, as well as in his negative selfassessments. Thus, he writes to Overbeck about «the impracticality of my nature, my blindness, on the other hand my anguished, helpless, out-of-town character, which is a consequence of my health... And to all this is added this predominance of painful days, or at least dark ones, not to mention the desperate boredom into which the one who is discouraged from “distractingthe eyes” falls» 150. He complained to Erwin Rohde in one of his last letters: "I am already 43 years old and I am still exactly as alone as I was as a child"151. His mother has to listen: «Nothing is sick, only my dear soul»132. To Overbeck he makes the highly revealing observation that his "extreme dependence on meteorological influences" should perhaps be attributed to "a certain general exhaustion" partly hereditary133. A later statement by Rohde, in a letter addressed to Overbeck, regarding the meeting in Leipzig is especially moving: «...an indescribable atmosphere of strangeness surrounded him, something that filled me with concern at the time. There was something about him

that I hadn'tknown before, and there weren'tmany things that distinguished him As if he came from a country where no one else lives»134. With all of this go hand in hand testimonies of the highest sense of 129 KGB, III, 5, p. 285. TM KGB, is, 3. p. 116. 1,1 KGB, III, 5, p. 195. 02 Ibid, 258. ,,J Ibidem, 347. KSA, 1.15, p. 159.

78

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

own dignity: "Among the living as among the dead I have no one to whom I feel close"135. Thus, it is not surprising that the first beginnings of his international fame, which were now beginning to be noticed, were taken by Nietzsche quite naturally, as something that belonged to him. The first letter he receives from Georg Brandes (Morris Cohen) dates from November 26, 1887; In his reply, Nietzsche spoke very positively about the characterization that Nietzsche made of his doctrine, calling it "aristocratic radicalism"; This would be "the most intelligent expression I have so far read about myself"136. He was delighted with the news of Brandes'suniversity courses in Copenhagen; there was scarcely an acquaintance whom he did not infor But much more important than all this biographical data is his work, and especially his projected "capital work." We must first take a quick glance at the two writings published at this time. Those points that we will still have to occupy in the second part, as a general rule I simply paraphrase them. The prologue to Beyond Good and Evil contains one of the nottoo-frequent remarks on the basic nature of European society, and makes it clear that Nietzsche turns in equal measure against the two phenomena hitherto regarded as mutually exclusive. mortal enemies, namely, against Christianity and against the "democratic enlightenment." Plato'sinvention of pure spirit and of good in itself would be, for Nietzsche, the worst and most dangerous of all mistakes, but the fight against it and against the Christian Church as "Platonism for the people" would have created a magnificent tension. of the spirit, which European man certainly feels as a "painful state"; Thus, Jesuitism and the democratic enlightenment would have emerged as attempts to loosen the bow, and the latter, with the help of the freedom of the press and the reading of newspapers, would have in fact achieved that the spirit no longer felt so easily at home. himself as "pain"137. Therefore, Nietzsche is here very far from all "biologism", as far as in that phrase from "Zarathustra", according to which the spirit would be life "that cuts itself a Paradoxically, however, the main objective of this writing 1" KGB, III, 3, p. 223 * * KGB m, 5, p. 206. U7 KGW, VI, 2, pp. 4s. *

» KGW, VI. 1, p. 130.

Nietzsche'slife

79

To follow in the footsteps of Human, all too human, is precisely to unmask and make the "spirit" understood as the philosophers'desire for truth fall from its throne, that is, as a symptom of decadent life; in this Nietzsche proceeds at times already with harsh accusations, but at times also with an understanding that tries to see one'sown desire for truth— that is, the desire to unmask the "truth" of all previous philosophy— as a level and higher consistency.

The first section is entitled: «Of the prejudices of the philosophers». I quote literally a characteristic passage: «In the “initself”- there are no “causal bonds” nor “necessity”,nor “psychologicalnon-freedom”, there the “effectdoes not follow the cause”, there no “law”governs. none. We are the only ones who have invented causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, coercion, number, law, freedom, motive, purpose; And whenever we fictitiously introduce this world of

signs and intermingle it, as if it were an “initself”,- in things, we continue to act in the same way that we have always acted, namely, in a mythological way»159. This seems to be an extreme "subjective idealism", a fictionalism and relativism, and possibly even solipsism, or also a Cratylus-like Heraclitism, who wanted to point at "things" - continually changing - only with his fingers, because words were not fit for flow. But perhaps this conception can be reconciled with neo-Kantianism, and certainly with the "perspectivism" of African Spir and Gustav Teichmüller, who, moreover, were very far from Nietzsche in terms of their basic conception; On the other hand, it cannot be reconciled with that idea of the "Dionysian" world where "the eternally foolish" mixed us inside.

This becomes evident in the second section, «The free spirit», where it is said: «The world seen from within, the world defined and designated in its "intelligible character", would be exactly "will to power" and nothing more. than that»* 140. This is the approach of German idealism and Schopenhauer, which leads to a cosmology, that is, to the opposite of subjective fictionalism. In the third section, "The religious being", one can see with special clarity the orientation towards Antiquity and the reference to political phenomena of the present: according to Nietzsche, in the tremendous inversion of

m KGW, VI, 2, p. 30. 140 Ibid., 51.

80

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

all the previous values contained in the formula "God on the cross", the oriental slave would have taken revenge on Rome and its aristocratic and frivolous tolerance; a movement against aristocratic morality would also be the last great rebellion of the slaves that would have begun with the French Revolution141. Here are a series of basic concepts of Nietzsche'slate philosophy in illuminating association: revaluation, revenge (ressentiment), slave rebellion, as well as the parallelism between Christianity and the French Revolution. cease.

I quote another passage from the sixth section, "We the learned", which possibly implies a synthesis between fictionalism and cosmology and which, in the face of philosophers like Kant and Hegel, who would no longer be more than a kind of workers , says: «But the authentic philosophers are men who give orders and legislate: they say “soit should be!”, they are the ones who determine the “towhere” and the “whatfor” of the human being... His “to know” is to create, its creation is to legislate, its will to truth is: will to power»142. How can the reader not think here of Plato'sphilosopher-kings? But they knew the ideas that existed by themselves, and above all the "idea of the good." Are Nietzsche'sphilosophers to be political rulers of the world in the style of Alexander the Great or Caesar? Or does his "will to power" reach the depths of the contradictory character of being and is it really, therefore, knowledge of what "is", of what, independently of all the "fictions" of ordinary men and of science, is it? The genealogy of morality is even tougher in polemics, as its subtitle already implies. With extreme harshness Nietzsche combats here the "morality of compassion", in which the will turns against life and turns into nihilism, the last disease of European culture. Nietzsche'sobjective is to question the value of the evaluations of this morality of compassion, that is, to unmask them as symptoms of a decadent life. "Life" will sometimes be conceived in a vitalist or biologist way, but at other times also, unequivocally, as "culture." It is especially curious that for this he resorts to one of the favorite authors of his youth, Theognis, whose aristocratism he radicalizes through an etymological thesis to the point of turning it into 141 Ibid., 65. " Ibid. 149.

Nietzsche'slife

81

a racist doctrine: malus (bad) would come from metas (black, dark colored)143. But for him the greatest power of the anti-aristocratic revolution is here Israel, as the classic representative of "revenge"144. In this context, Nietzsche gives shape to one of his most controversial concepts, that of the "blond beast": "It is impossible not to recognize, at the base of all these noble races, the animal of prey, the magnificent blond beast, which wanders greedy for booty and victory; from time to time that hidden base needs to be vented... the Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese aristocracies, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings - they all agree on such a pressing need»145. How is this expression to be understood? Certainly not "racistly" as a praise of Germanhood, nor of Aryans either; First of all, one must pay attention to the word "base", and probably it would be well to bring up the chapter of "Zarathustra" entitled "Of the tree of the mountain", where it is said of the tree that the more it wants to rise towards the height and towards the light, all the more strongly must it tend its roots towards the earth, towards the dark146. Reference should also be made to the concept of «greater breadth (of soul)», and at the same time to its opposite concepts of «sand», «last men» and «chinery». In any case, it cannot be ruled out that he is referring to the presence of the "jungle" as the basic condition of "culture"; but it could also be one of those simple biologisms that Nietzsche commits over and over again. The "struggle", on the other hand, is essential; a legal arrangement that would be a means against all indiscriminate struggle, "according, for example, to Dühring'scommunist pattern", would be "a principle hostile to life, an attack on the future of man, a sign of fatigue, a winding road to nothing»147. Extremely curious is how positively Nietzsche speaks in other passages of "illness", which he considers, so to speak, as the foundation of existence! of the human being as a "sick animal"; she differentiates him from other animals, she, it would be said, constitutes his "transcendence" and makes him what he is: "He, the great experimenter with himself, the discontent, the dissatisfied, the one who fights fo

M1 Ibidón, 277. 1+4 Ibid., 282s. M5 Ibid., 289. 144 KGW, VI, 1, p. 47. M7 KGW, VI, 2, p. 329.

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

82

the last dominion against the animal, nature and the gods: he, the one not yet vanquished, the eternally-future..., so that his future implacably gnaws at him like a spur in the flesh of each present... »148. How could an absolutely healthy "blonde beast" be this magnificent animal and, precisely because of this, "sick"? The blond beast would be "determined," like all animals; but the human being is for Nietzsche "the animal not yet determined"149, and therefore is not an animal. Therefore, here too the contradictory nature (real or apparent) of Nietzsche'sexpressions is revealed. Thus, for Nietzsche "the ascetic ideal" and its main representative, the priest, would have had a destructive effect on "racial health and vigour, especially in Europeans"150, and yet from his exposition it is indisputable to deduce that there would never have been such a thing as 'Europeanhistory',or 'spirituality',or 'refinement',without the ascetic priests and the 'weak',his equating the 'weak'with the 'herd'being in this an absurdity. new contradiction. Apparently Nietzsche had the impression that the aphoristic mode of his earlier philosophizing was not sufficient to make the internal coherence of his thoughts clear, and from mid-1885 he spoke again and again of his projected "major work" which, to be sure, it would not be any "system" in the sense, for example, of Hegel, but neither would it be a collection of loose statements and reasoning merely inconsistently held together by more or less haphazard titles. He wrote to Fritzsch at the end of 1886: "I need now, for a long, long time, a deep tranquility: because I have before me the elaboration of my entire system of thought"151. He rejects a financial participation in Operation-Paraguay, as was his sister'swish, with the following argument: «If everything continues as well as it started, in the next few years I will have finished a fundamental thing in my life, and then I will need a lot of money for the printing press...»152. In Beyond Good and Evil he already announced this capital work: "The Will to Power", in four books w* KGW, 11.2, p. 385. /CGW',VII, 2, p. 121 1.0 KGW, VI, 2, p. 410. 151 KGB, by, 3 , p. 2 9 . 7 152 KGB, m, 5, p. 395.

Nietzsche'slife

83

In the fragments of the years 1885-1888, of which there is now a complete edition and which maintains the original order, it is possible to observe in detail the planning of this capital work with its various vacillations and deviations; one cannot fail to notice that the title "The Will to Power" is the one most frequently mentioned, and that Nietzsche wants to establish a connection with the theories of "his perman" and "eternal return", as well as with the concept of «revaluation of all values». In what follows, I will sketch only superficially some of the main stages. In fragment 35 (41), from the summer of 1885, one of the numerous title models (to which almost without exception "by Friedrich Nietzsche" is added) reads: "Noon and eternity. Prophecies of a future man. The titles of the four parts are: Of the hierarchy. Of the lords of the earth. From the ring of rings. Of the new die.

It is evident that here the eternal return occupies a central place153. Fragment 38 (12) of June-July 1885 is that long aphorism that Elisabeth places at the end of her (second) edition as «number 1067»: «And do you also know what “theworld” is for me? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end... this Dionysian world of mine of eternal self-creation, eternal self-destruction... this world is the will to power: and nothing more! And you yourselves are also this will to power: and nothing else!»154 The sketch of the title belongs to the same period: «The will to power. Attempt at a new interpretation of all events»155. From a notebook of 1885/86 that cannot be dated exactly comes a title that still sounds very "Zarathustrian": "The eternal return. Zarathustrian dances and parades. First part: the divine feast of the dead». The title of one chapter reads: "The city of the plague", another: "The great offering of thanks and death to the dead god". At the end it appears: «Death of Zarathustra», and as a fourth part: «We, who make solemn promises»156. None of it developed. Immediately afterwards one can read untitled plans of "four books", which by all conjectures would have obtained the general title of "The Will to Power"157.

'»KGW, Vn, 3, p. 256. 154 lbtdem, 3, pp. 338s. 155 lbtdem, 349. 2. KGW, V m 1. p. 126. 3. lbtdem, 127 ss. ,

84

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

A long fragment, "European Nihilism", is dated exactly («Páramo de Lenz, June 10, 1987»), in which we find the strange phrase: «Existence without meaning and without goal, but inevitably recurring, without an end in nothingness: "the eternal return". This

is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the “meaningless”) eternally»158. Nietzsche is, then, according to his own manifestations, the true nihilist. How, then, is the struggle against nihilism to be possible at the same time? Notebook Mo XVII 3b, which covers the period from the end of 1986 to the spring of 1987, contains extensive drafts that are surely part of "The Will to Power." In them there are two particularly noteworthy phrases that establish a connection between the will to power and the eternal return: «To print the character of being in becoming: this is the highest will to power»; and: «The fact that everything returns is the most extreme approximation of a world of becoming to one of being: culminating point of meditation»159. In fact, since Elisabeth Nietzsche based her edition on it, the most important draft is the one from March 17, 1887: The Will to Power. Essay of a reassessment of all values. First book: European nihilism. Second book: Critique of supreme values. Third book: Beginning of a new assessment. Fourth book: Breeding and breeding160. In Montinari 7 (64) it reads: «[+ ++] of all values». "Breeding and breeding" does not appear in the other drafts. From the beginning of 1888 comes the outline of the title: «Revaluation of values. Book 1: The Antichrist. Book 2: The misosophist, Book 3: The immoralist, Book 4: Dionysus." Obviously, he continues to refer to the "capital work." Below is a detailed "record" (in all 372 titles) for two books which, however, hardly correspond to this plan. In any case, in the very next era, Nietzsche plans again and again under the heading "The Will to Power." The clearest of all is that of "Sils-Maria, last Sunday of August 1888." Its main title is: «The will to power. Essay of a revaluation of all values». Four books are planned: «What is truth?», «Procedence of values», «Fight of values» and «El gran noon»161.

158 ¡btdem, 215-221. 159 Ibid., 320. 160 KGW, VID, 1, p. 326. 161 KGW, HIV, 3, pp. 101-1 337s.; also: VIO, 1, p. 252.

Nietzsche'slife

85

And this long and intensely cherished plan seems to have been abandoned overnight by Nietzsche at the beginning of September 1888. On September 7, he writes to Meta von Salis saying that his "Revaluation of All Values" would be published the following year. and that, for example, his first book would be called "The Antichrist"162. One might think that this subtitle simply became the main title. But as soon as Nietzsche arrives in Turin at the end of September, it is possible to record (according to his own descriptions) a radical improvement in his health that is linked to frankly euphoric states. What he writes now, especially The Antichrist and the Twilight of the idols, is possessed of an accusatory tone that is even more sharp than that of Beyond Good and Evil, and even that of Genealogy of Morality itself,'but above all: now it seems that he considers the "Antichrist" as the totality of the «Revaluation», as the totality of the «capital work». It is impossible that this "capital work" can continue to be philosophical in the sense of before. Rather, it seems that Nietzsche is now trying to take a step towards "praxis," which already happened for Marx in the mid-twenties of his life: a step that was, at the same time, the immediate prelude to his "collapse." We will dedicate ourselves to this attempt and to this collapse in the last epigraphs of this biographical part.

The turn towards "praxis": 1888 With his arrival in Turin on September 21, a surprising change took place in Nietzsche'shealth: no more complaints, frankly euphoric expressions about his own state of health, about the city and its inhabitants, about the treatment he received. it is dispensed... Thus, for example, to Gast on October 30: «I just looked in the mirror: I had never looked like this. An exemplary good humor, well fed and ten years younger than allowed... In my trattoria I undoubtedly get the best morsels there is: I am always told what is especially accomplished at that moment... Here the sun it comes out day after day with the same implacable fullness and clarity: the splendid slenderness of the tree in fiery yellow, the sky and the great river of a tender blue, the air of the greatest purity: a Claude Lorrain as he had never dreamed of seeing it. ...In all respects I find this worthy of 142 142 KGB, m , 5, p. 410s.

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

86

live... My room, prime location in the center, sun from early to late afternoon, views of palazzo Carignano, piazza Carlo Alberto and, beyond, the green mountains: 25 francs per month with service, included boot cleaning. In the trattoria I pay 1 franc and 15 for each meal and I add, which is certainly an exception, another 10 cents. In exchange I get a very large portion of minestra, either dry or in bouillon...»16* . From here he sends Malwida von Meysenburg at the beginning of October The Wagner case, recently published, and calls this writing a "declaration of war in aesteticis" -, he also announces the completion of his "Revaluation of all values" , which was to be "the greatest philosophical event of all time." Understandably, Malwida, the faithful Wagnerian, does not exactly react to this with enthusiasm, and Nietzsche in his reply calls Wagner a "clown" and a "genius of lies," while considering himself a "genius of lies." truth»164. In another letter he openly attacks his former friend and benefactor for her "idealism", which for him would be nothing more than "insincerity turned into instinct"; Na calls Wagnerian music "plague" and attributes a "disgusting sexuality" to it. The last lines to Malwida are signed by «the “immoralist”» (inquotation marks, anyway) and are intended to prove that «Nietzsche est toujours háissable» (Pascal!), since he — he says himself— he had been unfair to her, no doubt, but since he had suffered from an excess of honesty that autumn, it was a real relief to be unfair. In this way, a very old and for Nietzsche very valuable relationship comes to an end; On his birthday, October 15, he only receives a single congratulatory letter: that of Peter Gast. Among his new relationships it is worth noting, along with the one he has with Georg Brandes, above all that of August Strindberg, which, however, does not go beyond a few letters.

Even more than in all the other periods of Nietzsche'slife, in this one the work is interesting for its own sake, but this work now acquires a different character, which later manifests itself also in very strange outlines of letters, such as those addressed to the emperor William II and Bismarck. The Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with the Hammer did it.

, M KGB, III, 5, pp. 460s. Ibid ., 452. 165 Ibid., 46}.

Nietzsche'slife

87

I had already written essentially during the previous months; in the first place he thought it would bear the harmless title of "Idleness of a Psychologist": the provocative final formulation, laden with allusions, must be attributed to a Peter Gast invention. At times it reads like a continuation of Human, All Too Human. However, a new sharpening of the tone cannot be missed, especially in the prologue that he wrote on September 30, 1888: "This little writing is a great declaration of war." In it, idols are played with a tuning fork; above all — as is said almost openly — to the most noble idol of all, hitherto called God. «Turin, September 30, 1888, the day on which the first book of the Revaluation of all values was finished». But first Socrates is once again the object of his attacks, and now he is reproached not only with his "superfetation of the logical", but also with "the confessed debauchery and anarchy of the instincts", as well as his "rickety malice". The center of the book is possibly the short fragment entitled "How the 'realworld'became a fable. History of an error", where the progress of the Platonic idea of a "true world" accessible to the wise and the virtuous passes through its Christian and Kantian modifications until it becomes Enlightenment skepticism and then the desire to "eliminate" this world. Then follows point 6: «We have eliminated the true world: what world is left?, perhaps the apparent one?... No!, by eliminating the true world we have also eliminated the apparent one! [aside:] (Noon; instant of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; culminating point of humanity; 1NCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)»166. Next, a simple and problematic fundamental idea becomes a theme: morality as counter-nature. Here extremely violent attacks are launched against Christianity: the Church would not have wanted spiritualization, but rather the annihilation of pride, the desire for domination, greed, its praxis would be hostile to life, life would end where the "Kingdom of God" begins. God". It is not necessary to discuss here the question of whether this is correct (St. Thomas Aquinas) or whether it is original (Dühring); the decisive question is whether it is really Christianity that Nietzsche is referring to at the end of the day. In fact, it should be evident that he refers to "the good men", to the "reformers of humanity", and that he equates these men with the anarchists and with the socialists, 166 KGW, VI, 3, p. 75.

88

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

They are apparently considered as forms of manifestation of a moral desire for improvement that extends to the ranks of the liberals, and even of the conservatives: the Christ and the Antichrist would be in equal measure décadetits; the condemnation of the "world" by the Christians and the disapproval of "society" by the socialist workers would correspond to each other, and the idea of the final judgment would come as much from ressentiment as from the will to revolution167. Here we now have to introduce in broad strokes a reflection with which I will return to link more extensively in the systematic part. The same goes for the citations that will be offered in this section: they will be taken up again later and, as a general rule, they will be offered again in a more complete way. "Reformer of humanity": this is what the entire "party of the movement" or the entire left claimed to be in the 19th century: "progress", "progrés", "improvement" were for them at the same time realities and goals. With a different concept of time, the majority of this party conceived the movement of history as «evolution», and from this they derived their specific political demands: extension of the right to vote, progressive increase in the standard of living through free trade. , fight against those who selfishly clung to unjustified advantages, to "privileges", such as the socalled "feudals" or even the national Churches. It was difficult for the privileged to object to this; at most things like that the corresponding «legal situation» was a precious asset, that the «privileges» were necessary for the performance of tasks of vital importance or that traditions are essential. But on the whole, these 'conservatives'behaved in a re-active way, so it was easy to call them 'reactionaries'But. in the actual process of this 'reform'the conservatives, or lories, found much to criticize; things that not only seemed evident to themselves: this process supposed, in effect, the dissolution of beneficial and protective ties (for example, those of the great family, the town or the hamlet), it implied loss of orientation and depersonalization , caused an increase in anonymity. The radical current within the "movement party", for its part, was characterized by two precise things; first, because he considered that broad reforms could be achieved for all at a very near date: all men would be wealthy if the privileged did not

167 Ibid., 127.

The life of Nietzsche

89

monopolize the sources of wealth; second, because it placed precisely the principle of community or equality at the center: "The head that criminally rises above the people, that one falls for the ax of the people", sang the German artisans who emigrated to Switzerland during the thirties. Therefore, the new — entrepreneurs and the market economy— are placed at the same level as the old: the feudal latifundio, which for its part had already been undergoing profound changes for some time, and the rural community, with its economy of self-sufficiency and satisfaction of needs was little restricted at first; thus the entrepreneur'sprofit was characterized as 'exploitation'in exactly the same way as the peasant serf's tribute to his feudal lord. The «first socialists» saw the solution to all difficulties in the industrial-agricultural communes of a maximum of 2000 inhabitants each, in which there would be progress without

traumas and no exploitation, since they would be autarkic and selfmanaged, thus creating "complete men" who would not be subject to any perennial division of labor. This meant a point of contact with the criticism of the «reactionaries», but at the same time a coincidence with the «progressives». In this sense, it was a very favorable and convincing position, in which the desire for a protective community, criticism of the present and a confident hope for the future were united. But it could not be hidden that this program was basically idyllic and extremely reactionary: it was directed against the basic tendencies of Modernity towards the expansion of the playing field of the economy, towards social differentiation and new fundamental developments, and would end up destroying all given, since it would atomize nations and the world into countless selfsufficient and autonomous units such as (tendentially) existed in the Middle Ages. For this reason, together with this "communal socialism" with its idea of "phalansteries" or "villages of unity and cooperation", a "State socialism" soon appeared, especially in France, which sought to complete the processes of concentration in industry. and create a state economy that would be more productive than the previous competitive economy. More compatible with this than with the first program was the idea of the definitive revolution that would lead to a "very different" and much better situation: the idea, then, of a "normative" revolution. Various combinations of these projects were possible; the most successful of these, by far, was Marxism. In contrast to communal socialism, Marxism affirmed the «development of the fo

90

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

productive forces” by means of “capitalism”,adopting, however, the originally “reactionary”concept of “alienation”,that is, of both internal and external impoverishment; it exploded the narrowness of state socialism and awaited the world revolution as salvation and transition to a "completely different" situation. It was also very strong in criticizing the present from the point of view of the masses and of morally sensitive intellectuals, but it was much more imprecise than communal socialism in terms of the concrete configuration of the future: the maxim of a familiar character. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is obviously much easier to implement in small communities than in large ones. In the eyes of its opponents, communism must have appeared as a great threat, since it heralded the imminence of a revolution that could hardly be anything other than bloody. But how can one even imagine a comprehensive project of annihilation? Because the truth is that, in fact, there were many, many heads that rose "criminally above the people": all the businessmen, all the jurists and bureaucrats, all the independent peasants, all the army officers, but also all scientists and professional artists, since each of them would have to be assigned a body job in the future and there would be no "professionalization": the architect would only work half the day at the drafting table, and during the second The second half would be a carter, said Friedrich Engels in the "Anti Dühring", implying that he was much less far from his youthful "Owenian" dreams than he himself probably thought. But Marx found a brilliant way out: that annihilation, which would have to meet with almost insurmountable resistance when trying to abolish the existing upper and middle social classes, would be accomplished by history itself, that is, by the laws of capitalist production: in the end, and even in a foreseeable time, there would only exist a small group of "capitalist magnates" compared to the vast majority of proletarians without possessions, and "the ax of the people" would not be the guillotine, but the simple and harmless putting in common service of their assets in accordance with the “expropriationof the expropriators”. This image of history had a great attraction also - and precisely - for intellectuals, since it made possible the harshest criticism of the present without any reactionary nostalgia, it seemed to be found in the Enlightenment tradition and converted the most powerful of all forces, that is, to "histor

Nietzsche'slife

91

who wished to put a moral world in the place of the immoral world of the present. But weighty counterarguments were also possible: that this description of the course of history was wrong because it was founded on a mere extrapolation of present trends, and that therefore the generalized fear of annihilation was inevitable; that the idea of the suppression of money and private ownership of the means of production was fatal because it was basically archaic; that, despite all the fine words, a genuine "culture" would be ruled out in a state of uniform and homogeneous satisfaction of needs. Therefore, the most important of all questions had to be: was a counter-radical program possible? Would this program have to be, because it is radical, also a program of annihilation? Could you lean on all those who had been deprived of their right to social existence: aristocrats, businessmen, the "middle classes," the liberal professions, farmers, Christian churches, Orthodox Jews, Jewish financiers, and others? , artists, scholars? All this supposed, in fact, a large number of very different human beings, politically distributed in many parties and associations and to which, in the end, we also had to add a part (the "professionally committed") of the industrial proletariat. Taken together, these many millions of human beings made up 'theliberal system',and in some regions of the world this was so strong that the revolution of a 'militantworkers'party'had no a priori chance. In other regions of the world, however, this system was weak or underdeveloped. But nowhere did it come to form a unitary party, let alone a worldview party, such as Marxism. And, above all, around 1885 he could not offer anywhere a project of annihilation that corresponded to that: what happened, rather, was that the confidence in the «differential meltoration», referred to precisely to the poorest social layers. If a party with a world vision and an annihilation program were to be formed, then it would also have to turn against numerous opponents within the system itself who would support the enemy and contribute to its emergence, in extreme cases against all the "moralists", the "good men". and the "emancipated". I maintain the thesis that Nietzsche was the first who, in his late philosophy, made just this attempt to found the "party of counter-annihilation", and consequently tried to make the leap to "praxis".

92

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

I will articulate this thesis from different points of view and with quotes taken mainly from The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, the last works of Nietzsche, written in the last months before his collapse: Who is to be annihilated? In some passages, it seems as if Nietzsche still thought the same as a vulgar enlightened man who wants to simply annihilate the priests and the Church of priests: « All the concepts of the Church are recognized for what they are, as the most evil fraud that exists, carried out with the purpose of devaluing nature, natural values; the priest himself is recognized for what he is, as the most dangerous species of parasite, as the true poisonous spider of life...»168. Poisonous spiders must be killed if you want to live. That Nietzsche seriously intended to pass into praxis is shown by the draft «Law against Christianity. Promulgated on the day of salvation, the first day of year one (September 30, 1888 of the false chronology). War to the death against vice: vice is Christianity. First article: vicious is any kind of contra-nature. The most vicious species of man is the priest: he teaches counter-nature. Against the priest there are no reasons, you have the prison... Third article zero: the accursed place where Christianity has nestled its basilisk eggs will be razed... Article five: the priest is ours tracksuit; he will be outlawed, he will be starved to death, he will be thrown into all kinds of desert... The Antichrist»169. But Christianity will also be attacked in its most intimate core, that is, in its concept of God: "The Christian concept of God— God as God of the sick, God as a spider, God as a spirit— is one of the most corrupted concepts of God that has been arrived at on earth... God, degenerated into being! the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and its eternal yes!... God, formula of all slander of the "beyond here", of all lies of the "beyond"! In God, nothingness divinized, the will to nothingness canonized!»170. To this corresponds in the positive manifestations of the same period an exaltation of the "miste 168 Ibid., 208. 169 Ibid., 252. 170 Ibid., 185.

The life of Nietzsche

93

rivers of sexuality» Dionysian171 and even «the intoxication of sexual excitement»172 unprecedented in the early days of Nietzsche. But Christianity will be understood first and foremost as the origin, as the origin of phenomena that, for the most part, tend to be described as not very Christian. Only in this way is it clear that Nietzsche is not speaking as an Enlightenment man, nor as an ancient Puritan who had liberated himself in order to be able to affirm his own sexuality (probably even homosexual), but as a philosopher of history and as the theoretician of a very special political party: «It is Christianity... it is Christian value judgments that every revolution only translates into blood and crimes! Christianity is a rebellion of everything that-crawls-on-the-ground against what has height: the gospel of the “vile”debases...»173. These vile ones are called by Nietzsche not infrequently the "good men", of whom he says in a posthumous note from his last period that they are "an absolutely harmful kind of man"; in their crusade "against evil" they would actually be acting at the service of the priests in their

particular fight against the powerful, the strong and the well educated; and in their effort to achieve equal rights they would also be at the service of the politicians of the revolution, that is, of the socialists as resentful men, against the rulers174. Thus Nietzsche is referring, probably even primarily, to anti-Christians and socialists:

«The global degeneration of man, to the point of lowering himself to what today seems to the socialist cretins and fools his “futureman” — his ideal! they say, in the man of the “freesociety”), this animalization of man until he becomes a dwarf animal endowed with equal rights and demands is possible, there is no doubt! Whoever has thought this possibility through to the end knows a nausea more than other men, and perhaps also a new task!...»175. ,

171 Ibiáem, 153. 172 Ibid., 110. 17} Ibid., 216 174 KGW, Vm, 3, p. 418. 175 KGW, VI, 2, pp. 129 pp.

94

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

The paradigm to which Nietzsche now turns is no longer preSocratic Greece, but the Imperium Romanum: 'Greatnumbers came to dominate; the democratism of Christian instincts won... Christianity was not “national”,it was not conditioned by race, it addressed itself to all kinds of disinherited from life, it had its allies everywhere»176. The enemy of accusers and moral accusations descends into a feverish accusatory tone, the panegyrist of the "innocence of what is to come" finds practically the entire history of humanity guilty (for Manu'smuch praised Code has resulted in will definitely be just as «priestly» as Mohammedanism): «the “equalityof souls before God”, that falsehood, that pretext for rancun of all those who have vile feelings, that explosive concept, which has ended up becoming Revolution, a modern idea and the beginning of the decadence of the entire social order, is Christian dynamite... I call Christianity the only great curse, the only great and most intimate corruption, the only great instinct for revenge, for which no means is quite poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small: I call it the only immortal dishonorable stain on humanity»177. How can one counteract this immense danger of humanity's fall into relaxation, this degeneration that leads to the "last man"? Where to find a lifeline against the joint action of such a large number of enemies? in ecce homo This is where Nietzsche answers most clearly: «Let us look forward a century, let us suppose that my attack against the millennia of unnaturalness and the violation of man is successful. That new party of life, which has in its hands the greatest of all tasks, the superior training of humanity, including the inexorable annihilation of all that is degenerate and parasitic, will make that excess of life possible again on earth. from which the Dionysian situation will also have to be reborn. I promise a tragic age: the supreme art of saying yes to life, tragedy, will be born again when humanity is aware of the toughest, but most necessary wars, without suffering for it. ..»178. In this way Nietzsche returns with his thoughts to the first 174 KGW, VI, 3, p. 230. 177 Ibidem, 250s. 178 Ibid., 311.

Nietzsche'slife

95

years of Basel, and there is no doubt that what he wants to save is still "culture", the greatness, the wealth of tensions of the human being; but now openly postulates civil war as a precondition for that salvation. With this he connects with an ideal and exemplary possibility of thinking, and postulates an ideal and exemplary way of acting as well. To the very convincing program of the socialists (who could appeal to Hegel and his concept of "realization" and yet was actually so far behind Hegel, and even all philosophy, in claiming to provide humanity with a happy existence). familiar with the style of a prehistoric species, and unable to hide his aversion to complexity, mediation, individual freedom and "greatness") Nietzsche wants to confront an equally radical and equally oriented program, for this reason , to «annihilation»: the program of a biological and «historical- philosophical» annihilation at the same time, which, although it is obviously linked by a causal link to that original program of social annihilation, at the same time is not , however, completely derivable from it. Thus Nietzsche becomes the prophet of a "world civil war", which in any case would first have to be a "European civil war": I know my luck. At some time, the memory of something gigantic will be attached to my name: of a crisis like never before on earth, of the deepest collision of conscience, of a decision taken, by means of a spell, against everything that up to that time. moment had been believed, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite»179. «I bring the war. Not between peoples... Not between classes... I bring war through all the absurd hazards of people, class, race, profession, education, instruction: a war as between ascension and decadence, between will to life and thirst for revenge against life, between honesty and malicious mendacity...»180. Certainly, here he is not referring to a simple "war of spirits", as some interpreters of Nietzsche want to present it today. In a late fragment it is said: «First you have to hang the moralists... Revaluation of all values: it will be something expensive so [in «hecatombs»], I promise»181. And right there are no less than five versions of an exceptionally specific postulate. 179 Ibid., 362. 180 KGW, VIII, 3, p. 451. 181 Ibid., 412s.

96

Niet2sche and Nietzscheanism

to: «The prohibition that the Bible makes, “youshall not kill!”, is naive compared to the seriousness of the prohibition that makes life decadent: “youshall not procreate”» 182. Even more crass is this expression of the «Antichrist» so frequently quoted: «The weak and ill-fated must perish: first article of our love for men. And furthermore, they must be helped to perish»183. But who is to wage this civil war? Nietzsche unreservedly excludes the "upper classes", in whose interest, it will be thought, this war would be, since in his opinion they would already be full of "bad instincts". And above all it excludes that great power to which, however, their hopeful glances had sometimes been directed (the "military State as the last means of preserving the great tradition"184, "a young prince, to the head of his regiments'185),that is, the Prussian Germany of Bismarck and the Hohenzollems; one of its last fragments, in effect, announces a "war to the death" against the Hohenzollem house (incidentally with an argument, among others, that coincides with Marx in its narrow-mindedness, although between the two there was the most abrupt contrast of content, still within a mere formal coincidence): these, the Hohenzollem, "since the days of Frederick the Great Thief" would have done nothing more than lie and steal, and today they would try to sow "among the peoples the unworthy if she lies of the dragon of nationalism» and «freeing black servants for love of “slaves”»186. On whom, then, does Nietzsche want to rely, if he does not want to do so on the "upper classes" of Europe or on the most powerful militarily state in the world? Are they ultimately mere fantasies with which no desire corresponds, not even any serious aspiration? It is true that Nietzsche during the last months of his clearly conscious existence was possessed of a feverish and practical zeal for activity in which, of course, one cannot fail to detect hints of his madness. Thus, on November 15, he wrote to his editor GG Naumann that as soon as Ecce Homo had taken effect he would have the "Revaluation" translated into seven major languages; what in

182 Ibídem,402,409s., 421s. I8} KGW, VI, 3, p. 168. [Missraten = malogrado.] KGW, Vm, 2, p. 430. 185 KGW, VI, 3, p. 209. 186 KGWVffl, 3, pp. 451,457ss.

The life of Nietzsche

97

the "Zarathustra" was written the destiny of men and that this book would spread in a few years in millions of copies; that the «Revaluation» was going to be an event like no other, and not precisely a literary one, but an event that would shake everything that exists187. He assures Brandes that, as a result of the "Revaluation", in two years the entire Earth would be suffering

with vulsions188; he writes to Guillermo II that there will be wars like never before; Bismarck already announces (in a draft probably never sent) his enmity. It intends to publish the "Anti Christ" in millions of copies, "as an edition for agitation"189; He wrote to Ferdinand Avenarais on December 22 that after the publication of Ecce Homo he counted his followers "by millions." One of his last notes reads like this: «It would be well to found associations everywhere to make a few million followers available to me at the right time. I consider it important to have in the first place the officials and the Jewish bankers: both together represent the will to power»190. Formation of a new party of millions, at the head of which would be "the officials" (evidently, throughout Europe) and "the Jewish bankers" (throughout the world, that is, in Europe and the USA)! It is really a program that contrasts the internationalism of the enemy with a different internationalism, and that names two specific social groups that, in fact, would be the first to see themselves annihilated by the "proletarian revolution" of Marxism. And yet, all that is forced and artificial about this project stands out, in the face of which the opposite conception of the uprising of the poor of the whole world against all the powerful is all the more convincing, albeit in their concrete perspectives of realization was possibly just as unreal and fantastic. And Nietzsche, who lately became the prophet of an unprecedented civil war and at the same time the protagonist of a "merciless" counter-annihilation, remained a philosopher in thought, and in his sentiments, the opposite of a philosopher. "annihilator". In the di tirambos a Dioniso, his last poems, there are some stanzas that are part of the greatest of philosophical language. 187 KGB, III, 5, pp. 487,491. 188 Ibid., 482. 189 Ibid., 500. KGW, VIII, 3, p. 456.

98

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

German between Hegel and Heidegger, and that configure the most extreme antithesis of political agitation: Necessity Shield! supreme star of being! to whom no desire reaches, to whom no dirty No, eternal Yes of being, I am eternally your Yes: for I love you, oh eternity! And according to a not entirely reliable but by no means implausible legend, the founder and agitator of the "party of life," the anti-pity party, as one might call it, threw himself on January 7, 1889, in full Turin street, around the neck of an exhausted cart horse and wept for the pain of the tortured creature. This was the defining moment of Nietzsche's'breakdown', the breakdown of a thinker who had probably long been suffering from serious physical illness, and who was really, surely not only for that reason, a 'battlefield',battlefield of feelings, of ideas, of historical realities. We shall dedicate the end of this biographical part to the question of which aspects of this internal struggle became especially evident after Nietzsche'splunge into the darkness of madness, and what kind of indications of it there could be.

Crumbling, madness, death The first statement of Nietzsche, extant only as a draft, which can be unequivocally described as a "note of madness" comes from December 30, 1888 and is addressed to Peter Gast. Among other things, it is said in it: «Then I wrote to the European courts, in a heroic-Aristophanic arrogance, a proclamation to annihilate the Hohenzollem house, this race of criminals and scarlet idiots for more than a hundred years; for this I disposed of the throne of France, including Alsace, declaring Victor Buonaparte, the brother of our Laetitia, emperor, and appointing ambassador of my court to my distinction

m KGW.Vl,3,p.

Nietzsche'slife

99

guided by Ms. Bourdeau...»192. Something like that is, in fact, unmistakable. Writing a proclamation to annihilate the Hohenzollem may still be taken as the expression of an eccentric imaginary life, but whoever speaks from his own "court" taking it as a fact and appoints "ambassadors" has crossed a limit. that possibly mind no longer allows turning back. However, such a letter can be daring with respect to the person who wrote it. Here the late Nietzsche'sFrancophile orientation and, in the final sentence, his aversion to the Triple Alliance stand out so clearly that their authenticity cannot be doubted. For the rest, it is also said in the writing: "German will be spoken at my court: for the supreme works of humanity are written in German." Obviously, the "Germanic" ideal of his early period has always been preserved, despite all the "anti-German" manifestations of late Nietzsche. The draft letter addressed to Gast and also the letter sent to Gast a day later are signed "Friedrich Nietzsche," or "Nietzsche." As a characteristic example of the somewhat later "notes of madness" I will for now only cite the letter addressed to Meta von Salis on January 3: "The world is radiant, for God is on Earth. Don'tyou see how all the heavens rejoice? I have just taken possession of my empire, I will throw the Pope in jail and I will have William, Bismarck and Stocker shot. The Crucified»193. This particular signature is very distinctive. Most of the madness notes are signed "The Crucified" or "Dionysus." Nietzsche now identifies himself with the god whose prophet he wanted to be, and at the same time with the Man-God whom he had attacked in the most violent way, considering him the manifestation of a radical and disastrous "revaluation of values." This may be a transgression, a nonsense, but in any case it is not a simple mental disturb Nietzsche'smadness was, at the same time, a revelation. A revelation also in the sense that the germ of this madness was already perceptible long before in the works and letters of Nietzsche, in such a way that all his thought had to be classified as the "thought of a madman"? In fact, since the early 1970s, one finds time and again references to profound shocks that obviously cannot be explained by a disease and manifestations of a “

KGB, nu.pp.565s. m Ibtdern, 572.

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

100

unusually exaggerated self-esteem, which some would take for pathological. Already the recasting of the third “Untimely”in 1874 caused Nietzsche such “fatigueand commotion of soul” that he felt “disturbed”194The. descriptions that he makes of himself as a "battlefield" and as the "half-tenant of an asylum, mentally ill" have already been mentioned, and also that of the "explosions of feelings" of which some day I was going to die. In the summer of 1883 he recognized the danger of "madness"195. As early as 1884, he was convinced that his idea of eternal return "divides the history of humanity into two halves" and that one day "whole millennia" would make their supreme vows in his name196. In February 1886, he expressed his fear that one day he would not be able to "continue to bear this alienation"197. In the year 1888 the frequency of such demonstrations increased. Nietzsche compares his state in February with that of "a bow drawn until it springs"198; in October, in a letter addressed to Hans von Bülow, he called himself "the first spirit of this age"199 and even, shortly after, the "first human being of all the millennia"200; We have already spoken extensively about his selfappreciation in recent months as founder and head of the «party of life». Great doubts must be raised by a manifestation contained in Ecce homo that the sister had hidden and that Montinari discovered: «When I look for the deepest antithesis of myself, the incalculable vulgarity of instincts, I always find my mother and my sister: to believe that I am related to such a lie channel would be a blasphemy against my divinity»201. The same is true of an epistolary twist (letter

addressed to C. Fuchs) of December 11: «Once the old God has been removed, from now on I will rule the world»202. There is, therefore, no sharp and sudden transition from normality to madness; Normality very soon opened up towards madness, let'ssay, and it was precisely in madness that essential features of Nietzsche'snormality came to light. Also here is given a marke KGB, H, 3. p. 257. KGB, UI, 1, p. 435. Ibidvm, 485, 506. m KGB, Ul, 3, p. 193. KGB, OI, 5, p. 242. 1.9 ibid., 449. 200 Ibidem, AND. 201 KGW, VI. 3, p. 266. 202 KGB, m , 5, p. 522.

The life of Nietzsche

101

Contrast with Marx and Engels, who were very far from what could be called the innate «tendency to madness» of the great artist, since their psychic balance as good bourgeois was never in danger. But in all of this, something of what I have called the forced and artificial nature of the Nietz Schean concept of counterannihilation is possibly also manifested. I now turn to analyze the "notes of madness"205. After a long "money request letter", which still seems to a large extent "normal" and which Nietzsche addresses to Andreas Heusler on December 30, the "insanity letters" begin, as has been said, with a draft letter of that same day destined for Gast. Stripping out three normal and routine communications to CG Naumann from January 1 and 2, the result is a total of 27 "insane notes" that Nietzsche wrote between December 30 and January 6. Three of them are addressed to Peter Gast and as many to Cosima Wagner; two to Jacob Burckhardt, Ruggero Bonghi, August Strindberg and Catulle Mendés; and a letter or draft was addressed to each of the following persons: Jean Bourdeau, Meta von Salís,Georg Brandes, Hans von Bülow, Paul Deussen, Malwida von Meysenbug, Franz Overbeck, Erwin Rohde, Carl Spitteler, Heinrich Wiener (counselor of the Reich court in Leipzig, who had written a review of The Case

Wagner), Cardinal Mariani and King Umberto of Italy. A note has "the illustrious Poles" as recipients. Eight in total bear the signature of "Dionysus", another eight that of "The Crucified", one "Nietzsche Caesar", another "Nietzsche Dionysus"; There are five unsigned, and only four are signed "Friedrich Nietzsche", "N" or "Nietzsche", including the first addressed to Gast and the last, dated January 6, to Jacob Burckhardt. It is probable that a number of notes have been lost, or even destroyed; In any case, it is striking that Nietzsche'smother and sister are not among the recipients.

That deification itself is a central theme is already clear from the smokes and from the short letter addressed to Meta von Salis. Self-identification with personalities long dead, or still alive, seems to correspond with such self-deification: "In Natalie lives her father, and this was me too" (to Malwida); «I am Prado, I am also the father of Prado, and I dare to say that I am also Lesseps» (to Jacob Burckhardt, January 6).

m Ibidem, 565-579.

102

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

The most important and revealing of these notes are the three di rigids to Cosima Wagner and the two to Jacob Burckhardt. The three communiqués addressed to Cosima come from January 3rd. The first says: "I am told that a certain jester [!] divine of these days has finished the Dithyrambs to Dionysus." The second and longest: «To Princess Ariadne, my love. It is a prejudice that I am a human being. But I have already often lived among men and I know everything that men can experience, from the lowest to the highest. I have been Buddha among the Indians, Dionysus in Greece: Alexander and Caesar are my incarnations, just like Shakespeare'spoet, Lord Bakon. Finally I was also Voltaire and Napoleón, perhaps also Richard Wagner... But this time I come as the triumphant Dionysus, who will make the Earth a festive day... Not that I have much time... The heavens rejoice at that I am here... I have also been hanging on the cross...» There is no signature here either. Third note: «This brief to humanity must be published by you [!], from Bay reuth, with the label: The Good News». If one adds to this a phrase that Nietzsche would say later in the Jena asylum: "my wife Cosima Wagner has brought me here"204, then there is no doubt that at the most intimate core of Nietzschean destiny lies a drama. love, a love drama, of course, which can hardly be understood in a "merely personal" way, but represents something like Nietzsche's struggle to reach the personal pinnacle of the highest culture. How important Cosima-Ariadna was to him can also be deduced from the first letter addressed to Jacob Burckhardt on January 4: «To my venerable Jakob Burckhardt. This was the little joke for which I forgive myself the boredom of having created a world. Now it is you - it is you [!] our great, great teacher, since I, together with Ariadne, have only to be the golden balance of all things... Dionysus». The second and last of the notes is by far the longest of all; I quote only a few sentences from her: «Dear Mr. Professor, after all, I would much rather be a professor at Basel than God, but I have not dared to take my egoism so far as to stop creating the world because of you. ... I... I thank heaven every moment for the old world, for which men have not been simple and calm enough... With cordial love [!], yours, Nietzsche». Postscript: «Tomorrow my son Umberto is coming with the

* * Erich F. Podach, Nietzsche'scollapse, Heidelberg, 1939, 94 and 122.

Nietzsche'slife

103

charming Margherita, whom I will receive simply in shirt sleeves. The rest for Mrs. Cosima... Ariadne... From time to time magical things happen... You can make any use of this letter as long as it does not diminish the respect that the Basilians have for me». For an overall assessment of these notes of madness, we must add, above all, a communication from Franz Overbeck. At Ja'sbehest cob Burckhardt, on the 7th Overbeck traveled to Turin, where that same day Nietzsche had collapsed — also physically — in the street,

after his extremely strange behavior in the previous days (loud shouts, wild dances and wild improvisations at the piano at all hours of the day and night) already disturbed his hosts, the Fino family, who were very fond of him. Overbeck recounts how, when he arrived, Nietzsche squatted on the sofa with the galley proofs of "Nietzsche v. Wagner in his hand, then approached him, bursting with tears, and then, as in a Bacchic delirium, convulsing jumps and strange improvisations at the piano, he began to expel from himself bits and pieces taken from the world of ideas in which he had lately lived';To all this, Overbeck continues, one could also hear from him, "in brief sentences expressed with an indescribably subdued tone, sublime, miraculously clairvoyant and ineffably terrible things about himself as the successor of the dead God"205.

Bearing all of the above in mind, the following could be concluded: Io) The center of Nietzsche'suniverse of ideas was made up of two things: negative theology, as manifested in the concept of the "death of God," and its corresponding positive theology of a "Dionysian" world, belonging entirely to the «more here», composed of quanta of power, which reaches its culmination in the «superman» and returns eternally. 2°) The most intimate nucleus of his feelings was the relationship with Cosima and Richard Wagner, which for him was never a mere personal relationship, but remained closely linked to that "greatness" of the human being that represented for him the highest thing that you can of sear.

3o) In his relationship with Jacob Burckhardt, the simplest of his feelings is revealed: the desire to be a "Basi professor". 3X0 Cari Albrecht Bemoulli, Franz Overbeck and Friednch Nietzsche, Jena, 1908, t. 2, p. 234

104

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

read", lead the life of a "liberated man of culture" and be able to "respect" such a life. 4th) Only in fourth place can we place what could be called the "political", including the prediction of the great civil war and the program of an essential annihilation. This desire for annihilation appears five times in total, but it refers exclusively to the Hohenzollems and antiSemites. In the penultimate sentence of the letter addressed to Jacob Burckhardt on January 6, it reads: "William, Bismarck and all anti-Semites, eliminated." Nowhere is there talk of annihilation of the weak, not even of the priests. It is true that Nietzsche says that the Pope must be "thrown in jail", but it is also true that he writes to (supposed) Cardinal Mariani, his "dear son", announcing that he will arrive in Rome on Tuesday to pay his respects to Your Holiness. The prevailing sensation is that Nietzsche, a "liberated man of culture" (a prototype of what Marxists tend to disparagingly characterize as "retired existence" or as a "little political spirit"), although he had to resolve within himself as on a "battlefield" all the conflicts of the modern world, he was finally forced, somewhat against his will, to predict the great world civil war and to create, for this civil war party , a model of annihilation that, in reality, was the countermodel of a different and older idea of annihilation. It was certainly not accidental or gratuitous that the end of Nietzsche'sconscious life very soon aroused great interest in many places. To some it seemed the refutation and even the punishment of their "atheism", to others it was a "sacred madness", but for almost all it was a symbolic fact that placed Nietzsche very close to Holderlin. Like Holderlin, Nietzsche lived for many years in the darkness of madness: first at his mother'shouse in Naumburg until her death, and then, from 1897, in the building of the "Nietzsche-Archive" in Weimar. under the guardianship of his sister. When he died, on Saturday, August 25, 1900, the funerals held in the Archive and his burial in the cemetery of his hometown, Rócken, were a living testimony of Nietzscheanism, and by no means the first. Thus, the third part of this university course could continue without interruption, but first we want to emphasize in greater detail how right Nietzsche was in calling himself a "battlefield" and how the times and factors of European history manifested themselves and settled their disputes in it.

NIETZSCHE AS "BATTLEFIELD"

Antiquity as a paradigm and as the past Christianity arose from the confrontation with Antiquity; Despite his victory, and because of it, he retained many aspects of himself. It is true that for the Fathers of the Church "the virtues of the pagans" were nothing more than "splendid vices", but it is also true that the papacy assumed in a certain way the succession of the Roman Empire; Latin remained the language of the Church at a time when the "popular languages" had been formed a long time ago; Christian philosophy is born from the appropriation of Greco-Roman philosophy. Thomas Aquinas considered himself, in a certain sense, a disciple of Aristotle, and Dante, in the first canto of the Divine Comedy, addresses the guide who offers himself to him in the dark wood and who gives himself to him. known as Virgilio with the following reverent words: «O degli altri poeti onore e lume, vagliami il lungo studio e'lgrande amore che m'hafatto cercar lo tuo volume...». The medieval Roman de la rose is full of older mythology; This demonstrates that the ancient tradition could also act within the Christian world as a potentially anti-Christian force, above all because of its different relationship with "the one here" and with sensibility; precisely for this reason a kind of pluralism already exists in medieval Catholicism: the ancient tradition could be considered both a preparation for Christianity and an opposition to it, and this second possibility 105

106

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

The "Renaissance" was not, therefore, something completely new, but with it the Greek tradition was accentuated much more, not least because of the consequences of the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in the year 1453. The Renaissance and the Humanism were already, in part, markedly "old", that is, concerned with what was more here and anti-clerical; Erasmus of Rotterdam, on the other hand, was also conciliatory in this respect and oriented himself, therefore, towards the "Adventist" position. In France Classicism, the Enlightenment, and even the Revolution were entirely on the model of Latin literature and Roman history; the repeated dedication to the Greek world was one of the fundamental hallmarks of German Classicism in a broad sense, which includes "Sturm und Drang" and "Romanticism." The meaning of that orientation was diverse; contact with a different and better world, criticism of the present, distancing from the predominance of French culture. As an illustration, here are some examples taken from the writings of Schiller, Goethe and Holderlin. 1. Friedrich Schiller: «The gods of Greece».

Faced with the prosaic truth of science and the prosaic life of the present, literary fiction and creation establish themselves as the highest form of truth: the concrete stands before abstraction, polytheism against monotheism, the affirmation of the senses. against the denial of sensibility, animism against disenchantment, myth against science. In another time, "the magical veil of poetry . . . still draped gracefully around the truth"; in Greece it was Helios who directed "his golden chariot," while today, according to the assertions of the wise, there is only a ball of fire that spins lifelessly; in antiquity the evohé of the jubilant bearers of the thyrsus announced the "great transmitter of happiness", Dionysus, while in the present life is no longer celebrated but death is evoked in the form of a "horrible skeleton". Discouragement and deification are the characteristics of the world in which the poet has to live; that is why universal history appears before him as a history of decadence:

All those flowers have fallen by the shuddering breath of the north wind, to enrich the one among all that world of gods had to be extinguished without feeling even for the glory of its artist.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

107

Similar to the dead swing of a pendulum clock, dedivinized nature slavishly complies with the law of gravity.

But precisely from this abysmal pessimism Schiller deduces a new and subtle task for literary creation, when he says regarding the gods: Disconnected from the flow of time, they float saved on Mount Pindó, what is to live immortally in songs has to perish in life.

As a theoretician, Schiller articulated his view especially clearly in the sixth of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the man. Here, too, the Greeks appear as a model, because they were free from modern division and did not know the opposition between individual and species. At present, on the contrary, human individuals are only fragments, and social classes as a whole can develop only a part of their natural dispositions. The "dissociative understanding" exerts its power, culture wreaks havoc. All dissociations and social divisions are valued negatively, also the distinction between State and Church. It is true that there was no other path to "progress," but that connection of progress with the negative need not be the last word. Schiller postulates, rather, recovering the "totality of our nature", destroyed by art, through a higher art. This is the fundamental concept of "German Idealism" from Schiller through Hegel to Marx: the future recovery, at a higher level, of the harmony and totality existing at the beginning. This implies a criticism not only of Christianity but also of the vulgarity of an Enlightenment understood as a mere culture of understanding. In the development of this idea, Schiller uses the concepts of «form» and «matter», from which he leads to a higher degree of abstraction in the following postulate: «From here arise two opposite demands for man, the two fundamental laws of the sensible-rational nature. The first demands reality absolute: man must transform everything that is mere form into a world, give reality to all its dispositions; the second demands absolute formality: he must eradicate from himself everything that is only world, and give harmony to all its variations; in other words: it must exteriorize everything internal and give shape to everything external. B

108

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

These commitments, considered in their most perfect realization, return us to the concept of divinity from which we started»1. This is why the «game impulse» is highlighted, in which the formal and the material impulse act at the same time: giving form to matter and form to matter. With this, aesthetic existence manifests itself as the supreme possibility of man, since beauty bridges the abyss between the senses and thought. Beauty is thus the result of a free contemplation that leads to the world of ideas without abandoning the world of the senses. In this, Schiller follows Kant, but not precisely the Kant of the resounding separation between "pure" and "practical" reason, but rather the author of the Critique of Judgment. The last concept that Schiller arrives at is that of the «aesthetic State», which means nothing other than the realm of aesthetic appearance, where only the ideal of equality can be fulfilled, «which the exalted (Schwdrmer) would like to see realized as well. in its essence»; Schiller, then, is equally directed against "Schwarmer"* and against "rational man": the higher synthesis, and with it "reconciliation", is possible only aesthetically, that is, in the world of art and not in the world of art. of politics, nor of science. Where and to what extent this "realization" is effected is in doubt in German Idealism, but the goal is always a "consummation" or "perfection," the character of which is ultimately determined from a theological concept. The spectrum ranges from an always incomplete "approximation" to the guiding ideal (Kant), through "absolute knowledge" limited to philosophy (Hegel), to the classic universal society of equals and free which, as such, would be irreversible and perfect (Marx). This conception is always universalist, even where,

as in the case of Fichte'sAddresses to the German Nation, it seems to turn 2. Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Ifigenia. What Iphigenia says about herself at the beginning of this drama, «... searching with her soul for the country of the Greeks», could be the motto of all German Idealism, although in this case she only refers to a specific person. But Goethe'sGreece is here not Schiller's, a country of harmony, nor Winckemann'sGreece, characterized by "noble simplicity and serene grandeur," but a country of horror.

1 Fr. Schiller, letter on the aesthetic education of man, en: Works in three

Batíden, 541. 0 * Schwdrmer: the exalted, the visionary, a typical figure of German romantic literature (N. déla T.) ,

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

109

res that only in Iphigenia were purged becoming "humanity". Iphigenia, when she can no longer evade the demands of King Thoas, who wishes to conquer the priestess of Diana, thrown by chance on the shores of wild Thrace, tells him: "You must know that I am of the lineage of Tantalus"; and before this story of brotherly hatred and infanticide, the "barbarian" only succeeds in saying: "Enough of the horrors!" With the appearance of Orestes, whom Thoas wants to see sacrificed to the goddess, the horrors also reach Iphigenia: her brother informs her of the death of her mother, which he has carried out by order of Apollo, and also warns her of the dangers. avenging spirits of the Erinnias, who have followed him ever since. Iphigenia is tempted to secretly flee with Orestes and take the sacred image with her, but she fears at the same time that the old curse will act eternally; so he sings the "Song of the Fates", which conveys an image of the Greek gods very different from the one that appears in the aforementioned work by Schiller:

Let the human race fear the gods! They hold power in eternal hands, and can use it however they please. Iphigenia decides to remain pure and truthful, that is, to be sincere with Thoas and thus make the ideal triumph over life, and in the end she only exhorts the king: «Make us perish, if it is lawful for you». Thoas'sresponse is first the response of "life" and its evidence:

Do you think that the rude Scythian, the barbarian, will listen to the voice of truth and humanity that Atreus, the Greek, did not hear? But Iphigenia refers to the ideal, since she was referring to what should be, and not to what is: Anyone born under any sky listens to it, anyone to whom the source of life flows pure and free from the chest... In the end, Thoas tears from his soul a "Go, then!" and, at Iphigenia'splea, he even manages to say a friendly "Goodbye!", with which he too accesses the realm of overcoming daily worries, precisely the realm of "humanity".

110

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

So also for Goethe the Greek world is the paradigm of humanity, but not in its daily reality, but rooted in the almost superhuman purity of Iphigenia. 3. Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperion. Much more clearly than from Schiller'swork on the Greek gods, it follows from this unique "novel" of Holderlin that the experience or image of Greek antiquity can become the starting point for a wholly negative judgment of Modernity. nity, and especially from the Germans. In the last letter of the first volume ("Hyperion to Bellarmine") the "success of the ancient Athenian people" is described, whose gods remained "in the beautiful center of humanity" and did not know the deviation towards the extremes of the sensible and of the supersensible. These extremes are found, on the one hand, in the Orient, despotic and full of an "empty infinity", and on the other, in the North, where "mere understanding, mere reason" reigns. In Greece, by contrast, "nature (was) the priestess, and man her god." But today it has become extinct, the sky has become depopulated, and the earth has become almost an anthill. Despite this, Hyperion is filled with the hope that "the old truth will return in a renewed youth." The final sentence is a prophecy: "There will be only one beauty, and humanity and nature will unite in an all-encompassing divinity." It is from this point of view that one must understand the sullen statements in the penultimate letter of the second volume: «And so I fell among the Germans... barbarians from a long time ago... profoundly incapable of any divine feeling... artisans, you see , but not people, thinkers, but not people, priests, but not people, masters and slaves, young people and settled people, but not people: is it not like on a battlefield, in which hands, arms and any kind of limb are heaped, torn apart, one on top of the other, while the spilled life'sblood vanishes on the sand?" And then he speaks of the "dead order" of those "omnicalculating barbarians" and "Godforsaken", whose lives are "full of cold and mute discord", people who know no "enthusiasm". But it turns out that in the end it is less a question of the Germans than of the moderns in general, of whom, as enemies of art and enthusiasm, it is said: "Men are becoming more and more barren and coarse, they that, however, they all enjoyed a beautiful birth; the sense of the slave grows, and with it the courage of the brute; delirium grows with worries, and with abundance hunger and anguish grow

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

111

for maintenance; as punishment, all the gods and the prosperity of each year will disappear. When one keeps all this in mind and considers Nietzsche's relationship with Antiquity, and especially with the Greeks, then it becomes clear how deep his relationship was with the tradition of German Idealism; not unlike that of Marx, before the great carnival of socioeconomic writing and historical materialism, in which the clear lines of his youth faded and became hardly recognizable. But, as with Feuerbach in the case of Marx, in Nietzsche the pessimistic metaphysics of Schopenhauer is added from the beginning to this tradition, and the ideal of the present, characterized by the Wagnerian idea of the total work of art, later. ; in its subsequent evolution it seems that it meant a complete reversal of the idea that the Greek world belongs irrevocably to the past and that the choice of Antiquity as a paradigm supposes a useless rebellion against Modernity; but in the end a very singular and extreme return to the beginning will be imposed. Also in the young Nietzsche the idea of harmony occupies the central place: under the charm of the Dionysian “notonly is the alliance between human beings renewed: also alienated, hostile or subjugated nature celebrates its reconciliation festival with its lost son , the man»2; this is the gospel of universal harmony, that "resurrection of nature"5 of which Marx had spoken in his youth. But, following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche will also conceive the Dionysian foundation of the world as terrible, thus putting Greek life in extreme tension; Right from the beginning it narrates the story of Midas and Silenus, who points to non-being as an answer to the question of what is best for man. (Nietzsche does not mention that this response from Silenus appears, in the original Greek, as a mot to in the second volume of Holderlin'sHyperion.) The stress placed on the "curse of the people of the atrids" also belongs to this context; with this, «the magnificent Olympian figures of the gods» are revealed as an «illusion», but precisely from this he deduces the fundamental statement: «Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified»4. His negative judgment on Modernity is manifested in the attack J KGW, UI, 1, p. 25. 'MEW, complementary volume 1,538. * KGW III, 1, p. 43.

112

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

to Socratism, that is, to rational Enlightenment and its blunt claim to omnipotence, but also to the one-sided "Apollinianism" of science as a whole, characteristic of modern times. But even here a perspective of synthesis and reconciliation is offered in the figure of "Socrates dedicated to music", who at the end of his life understands that "there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished"5. In spite of everything, Nietzsche expressly claims for the Greeks "the dignity and the relevant place among the peoples that corresponds to the genius among the masses", and places special emphasis on presenting as "truth" the fact that "the Greeks, like a charioteer, hold ours and any culture in their hands»6. It is therefore not surprising that Nietzsche'sjudgment of the culture of his time is no less negative than Holderlin's:Nietzsche cannot perceive in it more than "desolation" and "exhaustion", more than "dust, sand, numbness, fainting»7. But his assessment of the Germans, unlike that of Holderlin, is totally positive, since, as a result of the person of Richard Wagner, he believes he recognizes in them the new Greeks: «Let no one try to weaken our faith in a renaissance already imminent of Greek Antiquity; for in it we find the only hope of a renewal and purification of the German spirit by the fiery magic of music»8. The "Hellenocentrism" of the young Nietzsche can also be abundantly documented from his letters. In December 1870, for example, he proposed to Rohde the establishment of "a new Greek Academy," and around the same time he wrote to Ritschl: "Total radicalism is needed here, an effective return to antiquity, even if one must reckon with it." the danger that in important points one can no longer feel the same as the old ones, and it must be confessed»9. So that the reference to the Greeks extends like an imperishable paradigm throughout the early work of Nietzsche, still without an express opposition to Christianity and Judaism, but with a coherence that sets him apart from Schiller, Goethe and Holderlin and that leads him to the approval of slavery. In one of the five proems that Nietzsche gave Cosima Wagner for Christmas 1872, the one that

5 Ibid., 92. 8 Ibidem, 93s. 7 Ibid., 127. 8 Ibid., 127. 9 KGB, II, 1, pp. 165ss., 173.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

113

When it comes to the Greek state, he says: «In order that there be a broad, deep and fertile ground for the development of art, the vast majority, at the service of a minority and beyond their individual needs, must submit as slaves. to the necessity of life. At their expense, because of their extra work, the privileged class must be removed from the struggle for existence, so that they create and satisfy a new world of needs. That is why we have to accept as true, even if it sounds horribly, the fact that slavery belongs to the essence of a culture; This is a truth, certainly, which no longer leaves any doubt about the absolute value of existence»10. Precisely herein lies Nietzsche'sprimordial and greatest difference from Marx, which stems, however, from a common foundation: for Marx, the future society is the universal "polis" without slavery; For Nietzsche, culture rooted in myth is the supreme truth of humanity, which can only be realized in a few and determined men by analogy with the Athenian polis. All this makes it all the more exciting to observe the change that took place in Nietzsche during the years 1874 and 1875. On the one hand, the original sentiments are now formulated in a particularly abrupt way: "The appearance of Christianity was the second great calabro: brute force there and rusty intellect here triumphed over aristocratic genius among the peoples. To be a Philhellene means to be an enemy of brute force and rusty intellect»11. The previous sentence is just another version of the same thing: «The political defeat of Greece is the greatest disaster of culture, because it gave rise to the horrible theory that one can only dedicate oneself to culture if one is armed, at the same time, up to the teeth and has gloved fists»12. But what he wrote shortly after sounds completely different: «This would indeed be a task: to demonstrate the irretrievability of the Greek world and, with it, also of Christianity and of all the foundations of our society and politics up to now» This is precisely what is always assumed in the period of Human, All Too Human, for example when he says that the more the power of religions and any kind of narcotic [drunk?] art declines, the more effort men will put into removes it 10 KGWU II.2, p.261. 11 KGW, IV, 1, p. 140.

in Ibid. I} Ibidem, 159.

114

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

tion of evil, "which is really annoying for the writers of tragedies"14. Now he considers the Greek evaluations as «prejudices»: «“Nobility and honor are given only in otium and bellum m so sounded the voice of ancient prejudice»15. One can also certainly observe the "opposite voice": "We have recolored things, we continually paint on them. But what can we meanwhile in front of the sumptuousness of color of that old teacher! I mean ancient humanity»16. From the point of view of his stance towards Antiquity, Nietzsche's last period began very early, and he did so in an accusing tone, blaming Christianity (and most of the times also Judaism) for the extinction of the Greek paradigm. and old. This is how it already appears in a fragment from the summer of 1880: «Christianity, thanks to its Jewish properties, has transmitted to Europeans the very Jewish malaise... it has made the Greek impossible in Europe»17. In that last age it seems that the affirmation that goes hand in hand with the denial of Jewish Christianity is transferred at times to the Romans and the Roman Empire, so that Nietzsche presents himself as the last accusing Roman, but, in a highly Instructive, he promises in the context of his prediction of the "match of life" that supreme art will be reborn through the affirmation of life, through tragedy. It is also said: «That is why the Greeks continue to be the first cultural event in history... Christianity, with its contempt for the body, has been the greatest misfortune of

humanity up to now»18. And Schiller'sattack on modern dissociation is radicalized by the thesis that the animal in man felt deified in the Greek gods and "did not rage against himself"19. Nietzsche'sorientation towards antiquity is in large part essentially decisive for his condemnation of Christianity and Judaism; Of course, this condemnation should not be confused with a negative judgment regarding all Christians and all Jews, but rather it has to do, curiously, with a very pronounced anti-anti-Semitism. So, the first thing we have to do is dedicate ourselves to the topic “Judaismand the Orient”.

M KGW, IV, 2. p. 107. 15 KGW, V, 2, p. 237. 16 Ibid., 173. 17 KGW',V, lp . 418s. 18 KGW VI, 3,143. 19 KGW, VI, 2, p. 349.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

115

Judaism and the Orient

Just as in his relationship with the Greek world, neither is Nietzsche'srelationship with Judaism aired as a mere evaluation of something past. The first was associated with Richard Wagner at the beginning, and culture and the question of the correct life permanently; The relationship with Judaism is from the beginning also a relationship with living men, it contains within itself a relationship with present-day Christianity, or implies it, and with this it necessarily comes into contact with the phenomenon of contemporary "anti-Semitism", which almost without exception it could be better designated as "anti-Judaism." I add the "East" because Nietzsche'shistorical position extends at some point to the ancient Indians and Babylonians; In general, however, for him, as for many of his contemporaries, the Orient and Judaism are more or less identical: Judaism is the Orient visible in the midst of Western peoples. This is also true of Eugen Dühring, despite the fact that he chooses a more general formulation: “All existing religion is Asiatism. But the best people have to develop their best selves. We must put an end to Asianism»20. Henceforth, a negative nuance will be understood in the concepts of "Asia" and "Asian"; Nothing else happens, as a general rule, with "Judaism"; also in Lessing, for the "noble Jew" Nathan got rid of precisely his specific Judaism and thus acceded to "humanity", within which Christians and Jews are essentially indistinguishable. Since 1945, and especially in the 1980s, it is very difficult in the Federal Republic of Germany to speak of the historical forms of enmity against the Jews without immediately appearing the name and symbol of "Auschwitz". But the enmity that the Jews, or their religion, encountered is so old and so universally widespread that an isolated event of the twentieth century cannot be immediately deduced from it without additional causes. The Bible already describes in the book of Esther a great persecution of the Jews and their reaction to it; Tacitus speaks of the "odium generis humani" with which the Jews or Judeo-Christians would be full; in Late Antiquity great persecutions and expulsions of Jews took place frequently. One might be inclined to think that what has al 20 E. Dühring, thing, Lebett and enemies, Leipzig, s/f, 236.

116

Nietzsche and Nietzscheantsism

gambling is a particular form of xenophobia and rejection of minorities by the majority, and that similar processes have taken place all over the world, wherever there have been easily identifiable minorities to whom the majority of the population has looked with distrustful or even envious eyes. This observation is correct in principle, and could be supported today with examples such as the fate of the indigenous people in Uganda or the fate of other minorities, although some contrary example can also be adduced. Now, the Jews were never just another "case" within the persecution of minorities in general. The Jewish religion was the origin of Christianity, and only by confronting its origin could it develop to what it has become. In that sense, the antagonism between the two was something totally natural; Already in the second century it took a sharp form with Marcion, for whom the God of love of the New Testament differs abysmally from the vengeful God of the Old. On the other hand, it could not be disputed that Jesus was a Jew, and that the Old and New Testaments form a whole as "Word of God." The relationship was thus ambivalent. The self-awareness of the Jews as a "chosen people" was partly accepted and partly rejected by the Christians. In fact, for many centuries religious enmity was more visible than religious kinship. In any case, Judaism is a very important phenomenon in universal history and not a mere minority. The second distinctive basic fact was the dispersion of the Jews after the decline of the Jewish state and especially after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 of the Christian era. In medieval Europe the Jews - partly freely and partly by force - generally constituted mercantile minorities, and were thus an essential element in the formation of the monetary economy and 'capitalism'. Thus, to the religious antagonism was added an economic one; in medieval persecutions both clan motives were intermingled. "Ghetto life" was also partly free and partly forced; it constituted the basic presupposition for an intense community life, which meant self-administration and, with it, maintenance of the unity of beliefs, customs and ritual, a unity that in Christian society had already clearly declined since the Reformation. The Enlightenment, in some of its most significant representatives, such as Voltaire or Holbach, was frankly "anti-Semitic", that is, antiJewish, but this represented only one more component of its war against Christianity and against the special position assigned to it. the «his-

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

117

sacred tone." The "philo-Semitic" branch of the Enlightenment also positioned itself clearly against Jewish orthodoxy and in favor of an "ennobling" or improvement of the Jews, that is, in favor of their absorption into the consortium of citizens. The French Revolution will bring "emancipation," but with the following reservation: "Everything must be allowed to the Jews as a person, everything must be denied to the Jews as a nation." The Enlightenment was therefore a tremendous problem for the Jews: as an advantage, it allowed them to free themselves from the constraints of economic and political activity; But it entailed as an inconvenience the loss of community cohesion, which it had been so difficult for Christians to renounce when they had to discard the idea of a confessional or Christian State. Thus, distinct factions soon arose within Judaism itself: Orthodox, "assimilators" (liberals), revolutionaries. Their counterpoint was the "anti-Semitism" among the majority population: the conservatives polemicized above all against the "dissolving" spirit of the Jewish literati and revolutionaries, against "the young Jewish Germany" around Heine and Borne, or the " Jewish revolutionary Las Salle»; the liberals branded the orthodox as a dead residue of a bygone universal situation and reproached them for their animosity towards the modern world, determined by Christianity and the Enlightenment: thus, for example, Bruno Bauer at the beginning, or even later, when he sympathized with the "social-conservatives" gathered around Hermann Wagener; the socialists turned against the "Jewish financial power" (above all against the house of Rothschild as a symbolic figure of "capitalism"), against the obsession with money and the spirit of usury: so Fourier and Proudhon, but also Karl Marx , for whom the current world would be "Jewish to its most intimate core", and the definitive meaning of the emancipation of the Jews would really be "the emancipation of humanity from Judaism"21. It would be inappropriate to clothe these "anti-Semitisms" with a moral anathema. They were integrated into world-historical discussions, and are only reprehensible if all historical conflicts are also reprehensible. It is significant that in these cases there was always conformity with the way of thinking of a part of the Jews themselves: for this reason there were conservatives of Jewish origin, such as Friedrich Julius Stahl, liberal Jews, such as Gabriel Riesser, or Jewish socialists 21 MEW, volume 2,116; tb. I take 1,377.

118

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Marx or Lassalle. The so-called Berlin dispute over anti-Semitism also belongs to this context. Heinrich Treitschke's1879 article, "Our Views," raised quite a stir, which is justifiable inasmuch as Treitschke, apparently sympathetically, had reproduced in it ideas culminating in the sentence: "The Jews are our misfortune." ». But this sentence, considered without prejudice, did not at all correspond in its generality to the opinion of Treitschke, which rather articulated itself in a much less showy sentence: "What we must demand of our fellow Israeli citizens is simple: they must become Germans, to feel purely and simply Germans, without prejudice to their faith or their old sacred traditions, which are honorable for all of us...». A man who passed for being one of Treitschke'sadversaries and an outspoken phil-Semite, Theodor Mommsen, basically said nothing but the same thing: «A Moses is no longer leading the Semites back to the promised land;... it is It is their obligation, as far as they can and without going against their conscience, to break down with a firm hand all the barriers between them and the rest of their German citizens»22. Treitschke and Mommsen, then, shared the same point of view regarding the real problem facing the Jews, namely, the question of whether they were a people or a mere religious denomination. But it was precisely Jews like Heine and Moses Hess who had emphasized the character of the people, even the race, of the Jews, and it would not be long before Theodor Herzl formulated his basic conviction thus: "We are one people, one people." If one takes into account how serious conflicts accompanied the gradual adaptation of one to the other, the laborious "recognition of mutual equality of rights" between Catholics and Protestants in Bismarck'stime, then the assumption that the " assimilation of the Jews" could have been carried out without resistance on both sides and without conflict. Once again, Theodor Herzl must be quoted when, in this sense, he wrote: on both sides we are at the most exposed points of the social conflict, and we will be its first victims if we do not decide soon to colonize Palestine and thus create a homeland. Following these words of Herzl, a social law could even be formulated, which would read like this: the more strange a minority is (and wants to be) and the greater its activity and successes, the more hatred it arouses, since it arouses conservative and egalitarian instincts. 22 W. Bohlich (ed.), The Berlin Anti-Seminilism Controversy, Frankfurt, 1965, 227.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

119

Same time; and all the more it offers itself, at the same time, to conscious political tendencies as a scapegoat and as a scheme of interpretation by which larger social conflicts can be explained. This is how the aristocratic-conservative orientation toward the past and the democratic demand for homogeneity, or at least proportionality, can come together in a highly explosive mixture; above all when the ideological search for a cause is added to this, a search that demands an intuitive explanation of the complex, of the opaque, of what is felt as a threat. For this reason the exorbitant thesis that it was "the Jews" who created the social abyss among the people was possible, although in fairness it could only be said that some Jews— such as Marx, Lassalle, and Hess— had represented in a particularly intuitive way that connection between «critical intelligence» and «labor movement» that was defining in fact for the ideological movement of socialism; just as other Jews, led by the symbolic figure of Rothschild, played an important role in the development of 'capitalism'Hence. the Jews were especially suited to a "collective indictment of guilt." But before 1918 anti-Semitism was by no means stronger in Germany than in France, Poland or Rumania; one could even say with good reason that it was subsiding, as assimilation was making great progress. Although it is also true that a special situation was created by the immigration of "Eastern Jews", whose exoticism has always caused assimilated Jews a lot of discomfort. Thus, one last prospect of confrontation between two emancipatory democratic movements under the battle cries of "full equal rights for the Jews" and "Germany for the Germans" was not to be excluded. But from Treitschke'sideas the second model could not be deduced. The so-called anti-Semitism, as a consequence of one of the great worldviews, had to first become genuine anti-Semitism, that is, the center of a specific ideology that evidently included a very peculiar "negative estimate" of the Jews, who were considered from this point of view as the creators of a monotheism hostile to life, as the creators of a culture-destroying capitalism and/or as the creators of a bloody concept of revolution. At this point we must take the example of Eugen Dühring, with which we return to the immediate proximity of Nietzsche. Dühring'sprovenance is indisputable from the left, from the pen

Nictzsche and Nietzscheanism

120

Enlightenment thought and the "spirit of 1848." Philosophy Course as configuration of life and as a strictly scientific worldview, published in 1875, claims to be a «doctrine of reality» on natural-scientific and markedly anti-ideological bases; Already in the prologue its practical (or presupposed) consequence is clearly manifested, namely: the fight against «corruption» and against the «pusillanimity of universal despair», a fight that anticipates the «noblest order» that will be it will be established after the "disappearance of the old spiritual regime." Within this ontology, to which the "anti-authoritarian" concept of a free society that gradually detaches itself from the "State of violence" belongs, there are manifestations such as these: "In today'ssociety and State, it cannot be avoided at all. way the growing influx of the Jewish element. A small town, in whose pre-history cruelty and crass selfishness had already been announced as a life program, with the impertinence and tenacity with which it was accustomed before the fall of its own State to parasitically nest in the body of other people. nations, has finally succeeded in seeding the entire world with his offspring. Being at once everywhere and nowhere at home, he plays in

modern cultural states the well-known, predominantly commercial and financial role»25. Hence, the Jews dominate the press, that their profitoriented thinking infiltrates even the sciences, that moral dissolution spreads around them, etc. According to Diihring, only socialism is capable of solving the Jewish problem, and here Dühring seems to be thinking of something like a provisional regulation of population quotas, which would offer favorable conditions for a total absorption of the Jews by the Jews. of the majority. But in later books and editions, such as the Examination of the thinkers in the sense of a heroic conception of life, which deals with the "value of life", or in his autobiography, Things, life and enemies, the tone becomes increasingly harsh, apparently due among other things to the experiences he had since 1877 with the "Jewish Social Democracy," and not infrequently it seems as if the Christian outlook on the world, hostile to life, his "veneration of nothingness," stemmed precisely from the "bad nature of the race." bean". Now there is talk that Hebrew egoism will only disappear from the scene with the Hebrews t This leads in fact to a demand for extermination, which is already manifested bluntly in the fifth edition of 1901 of the document entitled 2> E. Diihring, o. c., 390.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

121

«The Jewish question as a question of its racial nature and its harmfulness for the existence of peoples, for morality and for culture». This is already a genuine anti-Semitism, that is, an antiJudaism understood as the center of a worldview with which no Jew can sympathize, since as such a Jew, that is, on the basis of an inalienable biological quality, he is declared Without further ado, enemy, universal enemy. Only against this background can the complexity and ambiguity of Nietzsche'srelationship with Judaism and with the Jews be fully clarified. The first thing to do is to clearly distinguish between Nietzsche's position on the Jews and his position on Judaism. In itself this difference is not particularly relevant, since it is a known fact that there were anti-Semites who had Jewish friends and who later stood up for them. But in Nietzsche the difference is especially characteristic and symptomatic. It is beyond doubt that the young Nietzsche had "anti-Semitic biases." However, the connection of this with his aversion to money and the economy is very clear. He detested matters of money, as he wrote in a letter in 1865: "Why is there even this ex-growth?"24. Shortly afterwards, in a letter to his mother and sister, he describes the situation in Leipzig during the fair as follows: «Everything was plagued with horrible stupid monkeys and other merchants... Finally I found with Gersdorff a tavern where there is no need to taste melted butter and jewish faces, but where we are regularly the only guests»25. It may be a metaphor as in Toussenel'sLes juifs rois de l'époque,but it sounds different when he writes to Wagner that the German gravity towards life is threatened by burgeoning Judaism26. In relation to the dispute about the "Birth of Tragedy" another tone is perceived when he recognizes merits "to the Jew Bemays": "The Jews are in the lead here and everywhere, while the good German Usener remains, well commented , back in the fog»27. But Cari Fuchs likes it again 24 KGB1,2. p. 52. 25 lbidem, 125. 4 KGB, II, 3, p. 9. 27 lbidem, 97.

122

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

to talk about the "restless Jewish cultural mob" in the scrambled roost of Berlin28; and during a trip to the Alps he notes: «Unfortunately a Jew sets out tomorrow at the same time (five in the morning) as me...»29. However, Paul Rée'sJewish ancestry obviously did not prevent him from entering into close relations with him; in August 1877 he wrote to Siegfried Lipiner, whose epic poem "Prometheus Unchained" had made a great impression on him, saying that he had recently had some experiences that made him conceive great hopes precisely of young people of Jewish origin30. In his last period, positive manifestations of this type become more and more frequent, which most of the time are linked to other negative ones with respect to the Germans: that it is fantastic to see how that race has in its hands the European "intelligentsia" of the moment, heaven have mercy on European reason if it wants to withdraw Jewish reason from it, Jews are more interesting than Germans, etc.31; to Ferdinand Avenarius he expressed his great irritation at the "forgetfulness of Heinrich Heine" in the face of the "cursed wind of German delirium"32. And yet, an expression like "the horrible Jew Goldschmidt"33 escapes him again. What he writes about Georg Brandes also sounds ambiguous, to say the least: that he has once again expressed his contempt for all things German and that he is one of those international Jews who has genuine devilish courage in his body* 5024. That is why he does not One cannot ignore the "forced and artificial" nature of what he tells Brandes at the beginning of December 1888: that for the definitive blow against Christianity he absolutely needs the international power of the Jews, since the latter has an instinctive interest in annihilating Christianity. Christianity; or the forced and artificial nature of counting, together with the army officers, “theJewish bankers” among the command cadres of the future

Nietzsche thus has very clear manifestations of antiantisemitism, but the reasons he gives in these cases are often very peculiar. About Schmeitzner'sInternationaler Monatsscbrift 4. ¡bidem, 194s. 5. kgW, III, 4,1 50 KGB, II, 5, p. 274. KGB m. 3,214,249; m, 5 ,45s. 52 KGB, m , 5,359. 55 Ibtdetn, 50. M Ibid, 399. » Ibtdetn, 500ss.; KGW VIH, 3, p. 456.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

123

pronounced in January 1883 as follows: «For the first time for 6 years I have read something about myself without disgust. For the rest, the magazine reeks of Dühring and hostility towards the Jews»36. It is clear that he reproaches anti-Semitism for precisely the character that could be called "narrow-track socialist" (and which, by the way, Friedrich Engels also noted, although of course with other accents): for Nietzsche, the anti-Semitic movement would also lead "to earthquakes." and large-scale European anarchies” that he— Nietzsche

— foresees, and would look very much like a “struggleagainst the rich and against the hitherto means of getting rich”37. But even more often the reasons he gives for his anti-anti-Semitism are totally personal and pragmatic reasons: "Damn anti-Semitism spoils all my calculations of economic independence, students, new friends, influence, it has made me an enemy with Richard Wagner, it is the cause of my radical break with my sister, etc.»38. As the brother-in-law of Bernhard Forster, as the author of Emst Schmeitzner, as a follower (albeit a renegade) of Richard Wagner, Nietzsche had to remain in the eyes of public opinion as a sympathizer or follower of anti-Semitism, something that was unbearable for him, among other things. things because "without the Jews there would be no fame at all." However, he is surely not insincere or pragmatic when in a February 1886 letter to his sister he describes himself as "anti-anti-Semite and unrepentant

European"39. But anyone who tried to attribute to Nietzsche a positive relationship with Judaism as a historical-spiritual force would make a great mistake, although nothing definitive can be adduced in this respect either.

Judaism does not appear in The Birth of Tragedy and the other early writings; but from the fragments of that time it is clear that Nietzsche felt he was heir to that ancient tradition that accuses the Jews of an "odium generis humani" and that, through the mouth of Schiller, he had still lamented that the Greek world of the gods had to have been extinguished for the benefit of only one among all of them. Socratism is attributed a "miserable monism" *59 94 KGB, m, 1,317. 97 Ibidem, 355s. >8 Ibid., 493. 59 KGB, III, 3, p. 147.

124

Nietzsche and nietzscheanismc

ble»; this would mean the "victory of the Jewish world over the weakened will of Greek culture"40. Something future is anticipated when one speaks of the "unworthy Jewish topic of heaven on earth"41. For the young Nietzsche too, the fact that the Jewish national god, symbol of a people fighting under one banner, had become the god of the Germans signified a "non-national foreign yoke"42. But in the period of Human, All Too Human the change of accent also includes Judaism: Judaism is said to have contributed in an essential way to continually westernizing the West43; and in Aurora Nietzsche'sdescription of the Jews as the

people "who have stimulated more than any other people the fantasy of ethical sublimity and the only one who has succeeded in uniting creation, as the work of a sacred god, to the idea of sin as a violation of that sacredness»44. From time to time they even seem to sound markedly philosemite tones: when the universal culture dreamed of, or accepted, at that time by Nietzsche, becomes a reality, «then they will be called inventors and guides of the Europeans... then that seventh day in which the old god of the Jews can rejoice for himself, for his creation and for his chosen people: And all of us, all of us, want to rejoice with him!»45. But almost at the same time he also writes: «It had to be the Jews, the most hateful people that ever lived, who invented the extravagant phrase “loveyour enemies!”»46. The following proposition sounds entirely ambiguous: "The Jews are the moral genius among the peoples"47. The more clearly Nietzsche identifies "morality" as an enemy in his last period, the more determined his demonstrations against Judaism must become.

I quote a few: "The whole of European morality, the gulf between God and man, is Jewish"48. *

KGWUn,3.p. 80.

41 Ibid., 125. 42 Ibid., 104.

43 KGW, IV. 2, p. 321. 44 KGW,V, lp 61. 45 Ibidem, 182s. 44 Ibid., 248. 47 KGW, V, 2, p. 165.

* Ibidem, 554s.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

125

«In this reversal of values... lies the meaning of the people Jew: with him begins the rebellion of the slaves in morality»49. "The Romans were strong and distinguished as no one on earth had been so before... The Jews, on the contrary, were the priestly people of resentment par excellence, inhabited by an unequaled popular moral genius.... Which of them has won in the meantime, Rome or Judea?... In an even more decisive and profound sense than in the Protestant Reformation, Judea once again defeated the classical ideal with the French Revolution...»50 . «The Jews are the most remarkable people in universal history, since, faced with the problem of being or not being, they have preferred, with an absolutely disturbing conscience, to be at any price: that price was the radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, both of the inner world and of the entire outer world. The Jews are, precisely for this reason, the most fateful people in universal history: in their subsequent effect they have distorted the world in such a way that today even the Christian can have anti-Jewish sentiments without conceiving himself as the last Jewish con There can be no doubt: everything that Nietzsche says in the "Law against Christianity" about the priest as the protagonist of counternature and all the destructive demands that derive from it can also be applied to the Jews as the authentic creators of nature. moral, that is to say, of denaturing and, one could say, of rationalization. If one accepts terms like "Judain" and rubbish like "The hatred of the Jews was fed in the Jewish god", "The Caesar of Rome became an animal and God became a Jew"52, then it is difficult not to assent to the judgment of Franz Overbeck when he writes: «Nietzsche was a cordial enemy of anti-Semitism as he experienced it... That does not prevent his judgments of the Jews, when he speaks sincerely, from leaving all anti-Semitism far behind in severity. His antiChristianity is fundamentally based on anti-Semitism»53. And yet it doesn'tsound "insincere" either, at all, when Nietzsche includes the Jews among the "superior races," which even

5 KGW,Vl,2, 119. 50 Ibid., 300s.

51 KGW, VI, 3, p. 189s. » KGW, VI, 3, p. 238; VII, 3rd p. 27; VI, 1, p. 303. 55 Bemoulli, oct. 1,362.

126

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

in the most terrible situations they do not go so far as to have to hire themselves out like physical machines (that is, to become workers); or when he says that in Europe the Jews are the oldest and purest race, and that for this reason the beauty of the Jews is the greatest54. Occasionally he even puts the "great style" of the Old Testament, not only far above the style of the New, but also above all Greek literature. It is clear that different ways of thinking collided in this man and were articulated precisely in this clash, ways of thinking that are normally found only divided among different men. This is why almost any ideology, with a proper selection of its ideas, can easily build its "own Nietzsche."

Only now, at the end, can a glimpse of the relationship with the "East" as long as it is not identified with Judaism. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche did not miss the fact that, as Friedrich Creuzer had already shown, Dionysus came from the East, from Asia, and this allows him to draw a distinction between the Dionysian Greek and the Dionysian barbarian. . Outside of Greece, the core of the Dionysian festivals consisted 'ofan exuberant sexual indiscipline',in which 'thewildest beasts of nature'were unleashed; Compared with those Babylonian sakes and the regression in them of man to the tiger and the ape, the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks would have had the meaning of festivals of redemption of the world and days of transfiguration56. This is in keeping with the fact that Nietzsche speaks in a letter to Rohde of "the repulsive greed of carnal love" and, elsewhere, of the "disgusting secrecy" in which the generation of children takes place. But at the end of his life he sets Dionysus, as lord of the "mysteries of sexuality," up against the antinature of Christianity, so that one might ask whether the late Nietzsche, after all, he made the step from the Greek Dionysus to the Babylonian, or was compelled to do so.

A contradiction of another type is the one that occurs in the relationship with Indian religion, with which Nietzsche dealt very late. Evidently, the "Code of Manú", which he met through a

54 KGW VI, 1, p. 373; VII, 2, p. 70. 6.KGW, VI, 2, p. 70. * KGWUII, 1, p. 28. 57 KGB, n, 1, p. 62; KGW IV, 2, p. 421.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

127

French production, made a great impression on him in 1887/88. The extremely brutal measures that are taken in it in the interest of maintaining the purity of the Aryan race against the non-Aryan natives, the "chandalas", appear to him as laudable testimonies of an "Aryan humanity", like the exact counterpoint to a Christianity born of Jewish roots, the “antiAryan- religion par excellence”58. He especially applauds the division into castes that Manó undertakes, since it represents for him an appropriate mirror of the order of nature: «It is nature, not Manó, that separates the preponderantly spiritual, the preponderantly strong from each other. muscles and temperament, and third parties, who do not stand out in one thing or another, the mediocre; the latter are the great number; the former, the selection»59. It is an exact replica of the division into estates carried out by Plato in the Republic; Nietzsche appears here, therefore, as the quintessential Platonist among modern philosophers. But in a later fragment he writes that in the Aryan code of the purest race, in that of Manu, "Semitism," that is, the priestly spirit, is worse than anywhere else. The mere opposition between Judaism and the Greek world, between the "East" and classical antiquity was, therefore, clearly insufficient. What the Church Fathers called "Adventist" in antiquity was not overlooked by Nietzsche: "morality" already existed before Judaism and outside of it, Christianity already existed in a certain way before Jesus Christ, within the Greek world, in the figures of

Socrates and Plato. That is why our next topic will be: Platonism, "morality" and Christianity.

Platonism, "morality" and Christianity

First of all, we must remember Nietzsche'sfundamental ideas, preferences and opinions that constitute, at the same time, his fundamental emotions and that he formulates with special nonchalance in his early letters. Facing a storm: «What did I care about the eternal “debes”, “youmust not”! How different the lightning, the storm, the hail, the 58 KGW, VI, 3, pp. 94pp. in Ibtdem,240. 60 KGW, VIH, 3, p. 178.

128

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

unleashed forces, without ethics! How happy, how powerful they are, pure will without the confusion of the intellect!»61 To von Gersdorff, on April 6, 1867: «... Is it perhaps happening here that because of “Christianity”there was a tear in human nature, which the people of harmony did not know about?»62 Thus, also for the young Nietzsche, man is the only being alienated from nature by ethics (= morality). But this alienation is historically versatile and does not exclude a "harmony" at certain times. Christianity means the breakdown of Greek harmony. Is it necessary to conceive it, then, as decadence? Or can it be regarded as a stage of development, that of the formation of differences, and thus constitute the basis for a future and higher type of harmony? The following question must have interested Nietzsche in particular: were not Christianity and morality foreshadowed precisely in the Greek world? In the "Birth of Tragedy" Socrates appears as the "superfetation of logic", as the champion contrary to instincts and the irrational, and Euripides is introduced as the enemy of tragedy, who leads the spectator to the stage to the normal man. But with Socrates his disciple Plato is closely linked. In fact, the confrontation with Plato, as with Socrates, extends throughout Nietzsche'sentire life, and certainly with great differences of accent.

First we must take a look at "Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks." In this essay, Nietzsche intends to write the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, of the great «prototypical» personalities, we would say. Nietzsche sees in the series of thinkers from Thales to Socrates a "Republic of genius" that did not yet know any conventions, "because then there was no class of philosophers or scholars"63, that is, a "high fantasmal conversation" in which one giant shouts to another through the empty interstices of time. But Plato'scondition was already 'bastard':Socratic, Pythagorean and Heraditean elements were mixed in his theory of ideas, and he himself as a person united disparate characteristic features. The authentic hero of Nietzsche is Heracitus with his "justification of becoming", of a becoming and perishing "without any moral attribution",

61 KGB, 1,2, pp. 12 ls. 62 Ibidem, 2\h. 63 KGW, in, 2, pp. 301s,

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

129

as it appears in the «play of the artist and the child»64, and with his doctrine of the unity of opposites, in which he transfigures the «good Eris» of Hesiod turning her into a universal principle: «Things themselves, in whose permanence and fixity the narrow head of man and beast believes [!], have no authentic existence, they are the flash and flash of drawn swords, the radiance of victory in the struggle of opposing qualities»65. But now it is seen that before Plato we must contrast Parmenides with Heraclitus, that Parmenides who rejected the world of becoming as false and who in "the cold bath of its terrible abstractions" came to attribute truth only to "being", to the indivisible unity, with which the world of the senses remained a mere appearance; thus sharply separated the senses and reason, and carried out «that completely mistaken separation of “body”and “soul”,which especially since Plato weighs like a curse on philosophy»66. What Parmenides invents and Plato develops is the idea that the most extreme abstraction of thought is precisely what manages to reach the supreme truth, a truth that is nothing more, for Nietzsche, than the palest, most distant generality, " the rigid calm of the death of the coldest concept, of a concept that says nothing but nothing: the concept of being»67. However, from this concept, the sensible world can be judged and discarded as "an objectification of the illogical and contradictory." But this is not for Nietzsche a "thing" or a "complex of things" but, as a later fragment puts it, "the tempting golden glint in the womb of the serpent vita"68. Thus, precisely in his relationship with Plato and Parmenides, the later Nietzsche is prefigured in the former, and it is highly significant that already in a fragment from the beginning of 1871 he says: "My philosophy is Platonism in reverse: the further one moves from what truly exists is better, there is more purity and beauty. Goal: a life And on this central point Nietzsche'ssecond period does not really mean a departure, but simply a change of accent. Thus, in La gaya ciencia it says that men aware of *4679 M lbidett, 324. 65 lbidem, 320. 46 lbidem, 337. 47 lbidem, 338. 68 KGW, VIII, 2, p. 12. 49 KGW, III, 3, p. 207.

130

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

today, the "atheists and anti-metaphysicians", among whom he counts himself, continue to draw their fire from the fire that has kindled an ancient belief, namely, "that Christian faith, which was also the belief of Plato, of that God is the Truth, that the Truth is divine»70. But precisely this was becoming more and more incredible, since it is no longer shown as divine but error, blindness, lies. From this point of view, Platonism appears as a double intermediate stage: as an intermediate step between Antiquity proper and Christianity, and as an intermediate step between Christianity and modern "freethought", which also desires the truth and which therefore that precisely leads to the knowledge of the mere existence of error, which is evidently related to both the terrible and the beautiful.

In Nietzsche'slast period, simple rejection and even insults of Plato predominate: now he is "the great bridge between corruption, who first misinterpreted nature in morals..., who with his concept of good already despised the Greek gods, someone who was already infested with Jewish hypocrisy»71. Opposite Plato, Nietzsche sets the example of the sophists and Thucydes, who did not flee from the ideal and who were not "judged" or "pre-existing Christians" like him72. Thus, Plato is for Nietzsche the creator of morality, that is, of the "falsification of all that is effective" and, with it, "the greatest malheur of Europe"73 74. Seen from this point of view, Christianity becomes becomes something pejorative: «Christianity is Platonism for the “people”»,it is said in the prologue of Más beyond the good and the map.

Nothing is easier to understand than this, since Christianity is the great basic fact of Western (and non-Mohammedan Eastern) history as well. Suppressed for centuries by the Roman Empire, but meanwhile spreading in it through all social classes, and definitively triumphant in the fourth century, Christianity — as the gospel of the poor, but also as the doctrine of the reign of

the Man-God Cris ascetically — although without considering, like many sects, to—

,

the

70 KGW, V, 2, p. 259. 71 KGW, VIII, 2, p. 246. 77 KGW, VIII, 3, p. 437. 73 KGB, m , 5, p. 9. 74 KGW, VI, 2, p. 4.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

131

body like a "tomb" - conqueredthe world in a way that can hardly be imagined more completely: in all cities and towns churches or chapels sprang up, every Sunday the songs of believers resounded, the doctrine of the fall of the first man for original sin and redemption was explained even in universities; From Scotland to Sicily, from the Pyrenees to the Dnieper, the unity of faith reigned, even if it was with adhesions and heretical episodes. But you didn'thave to pray on your knees five times a day like in Islam; Antiquity, and with it paganism, continued to live until the great Aristotelian synthesis of the work of Thomas Aquinas; neither before nor after could the Jewish origin be ignored; and it was not even possible in any way to perceive in the Christian world the so often sworn "peace on earth", but rather what there were were internal Christian wars and incessant disputes resolved by arms. Thus, the «Christian Middle Ages», also because of the existence of administratively autonomous cities, had more internal tensions than contemporary Mohammedanism, in which no authentic dogmatic differences were known, nor did it give rise to the separation of the Pope and the Emperor. radador; in the Christian world, moreover, "States" and "nations" were relatively developed as opposed to "TJmma" — (fundamentally) Unitarian— of the Mohammedan community of believers. These tensions led to the breakdown of unity, to the "separation of the Churches", and with it to the appearance of "Confessions". The competition between the different ways of claiming the truth favored the appearance of science, as the case of Pierre Bayle and John Locke clearly shows. Another consequence was the arrival of the Enlightenment, which wanted to be, above all, the definitive closure of the era of religious wars and "intolerance." From there arose both a metaphysical skepticism and new social religions. By the doctrine of the "three impostors" skepticism became the enemy of religion, and by the doctrine of the "three rings" the road to a "religion of humanity" was begun. Disbelief and skepticism slowly spread to the people: at the time of Nietzsche'sbirth and youth, "village life" was still completely Christian, as can be seen clearly and easily from the examples of Naumburg and Schulpforta. A history of the "secularization of Christianity" would practically coincide with a "cultural history of Europe" until the middle of the nineteenth century; in it, of course, "secularization" would mean "struggle against", although it would not necessarily have to be so, since there was of course also a

132

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

"Christian Enlightenment", side by side of course with Christian apologetics and a continuation of confessional struggles. Nietzsche'swork adopts a prototypical position in these confrontations, since he fought as resolutely as Christianity itself the "realization" of it, which was claimed to be, without exception, both by the Enlightenment and by liberalism and, above all, by socialism. As a "framework" for Nietzsche'srelationship to Christianity, I choose texts by three authors who are typical examples of authentic Christianity, sarcastic skepticism, and a tendency to "realization," respectively:

1. Blaise Pascal (Pernees, VII): "What chimera is this of man? What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm, trustee of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error: glory and shame of the universe. Who will put this mess in order? Nature confuses the Pyrrhonians and reason confuses the dogmatists. What will become of you, men who by your natural reason want to know what your true condition is? You cannot run away from one of these sects, nor can you survive without one.

Recognize, therefore, proud, the paradox that you are for yourselves. Humble yourselves, impotent reason; shut up, imbecile nature; learn that man infinitely exceeds man and hear from your teacher your true condition that you ignore. Listen to God!»75 2. Heinrich Heme ("Hymns to King Louis I"): In the palace chapel in Munich there is a beautiful Madonna holding little Jesus in her arms, delight of the world and of heaven. When Luis de Baviera saw the sacred image, he knelt down with devotion. and he stammered, happily enraptured: “

Mary, queen of heaven, princess without stain! 75 B. Pascal, Thoughts, Giraud, Paris, 1943,221.

Nictzsche as "battlefield"

133

Your court is made up of saints and your servants are angels. Oh, let the spring of your graces I got a droplet too! »

The mother of God moves immediately, and says to his son: "It is lucky that I carry you in my arms and no longer in my womb, if in my pregnancy there were

seen this fool would surely have given birth to a monster instead of a God.”

, Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity): "Religion, at least the Christian one, is man'srelationship with himself, or rather, with his essence, but his relationship with his essence as if it were something else. The divine essence is nothing other than the human essence, or rather: the essence of man freed from the barriers of the individual man, that is, real, corporeal, objectified, that is, contemplated and venerated as an essence different from him, own in itself. That is why all the determinations of the divine

essence are determinations of the human essence... An indeterminate being is a non-objectivable being, and a non-objectivable being is nothing»76.

«It is man who, without knowing or will, creates God in his image. This is confirmed above all by the development of the Israelite religion... the annihilating fire of anger in the vengeful inflamed eye of extermination-hungry Israel, in a word, Jehovah, Israel'sself, who, as the ultimate and Lord of nature, he is the object of himself»77. «...

Judaism is mundane Christianity; Christianity, spiritual Judaism»78. «... Homo homini deus est this is the fundamental practical principle, the crucial point of universal history»79. Nietzsche knew Pascal and Heine well, and Feuerbach at least in their fundamental features. To understand his position in front of the cris 76 L. Feuerbach, The Wesett of Christianity, Leipzig, pp. £, 70s. 77 lbidem, 199. 78 lbidem, 200. 79 lbidem, 390.

134

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Tianism (individual) psychological explanations are insufficient: it was not a sudden and painful separation from his "world of youth"; it is true that there was a time when he was known as "the little preacher", but it is not incredible, however, the affirmation of Ecce homo that even as a child he had not paid any attention to Christian concepts; and he had written long before that, as a recognized atheist, he had never taken it upon himself in Pforta to bless the table before eating80. Nor does his anger at "Naumburger virtue" explain anything sufficiently. In his first period one finds many more statements, without comparison, about the Greek world than about Christianity; In them, by the way, the negative judgment on

Socratism and Platonism suggests or implies a similar judgment on Christianity as well. Despite this, there can be no doubt that Nietzsche's"Christian sentiments" were powerful and that he always tried to do justice to Christianity; it would be time to recall, for example, his contemptuous judgment of the "repulsive greed of carnal love" in the face of friendship, or what he says about the "disgusting secret" of procreation and childbirth. The following aphorism from the summer of 1880 is charged with Christian sentiment: "If all the tears that are shed every moment on earth were to flow together, a great current would constantly flow through the 'meadowof evil'"81.This phrase from «David Strauss» about the modern scientist sounds very Pascalian: «The most terrible cliffs lie in wait for him, the heir of a few hours, and each step should remind him: what for? where to? where from? But his soul is inflamed with the task of counting the filaments of a flower or with crushing the stones on the road, and in that work he buries all his interest, illusion, strength and desire»82 *. In 1885 he pointed out as characteristic of the «Christian conception from which we all come» the idea of «a world that we can admire [!], that is appropriate for our impulses of veneration»85. The aphorism 350 of La gaya science: «In honor of the religious homines. The fight against the Church is certainly, among other things,... also the fight of the most superficial, amusing and trusting natures against the domination 80 KGWV1.3, p. 276; IV. 3, p. 466. 81 KGW, 1, p. 487. 82 KGW, ffl, 1, p. 198. w KGW, VIII. 1, p. 145.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

one of the most serious, profound and serene men, that is, of the most evil and suspicious... The common instinct of the people, their voluptuousness, their "good heart" rise up against him»84. What Nietzsche wrote to Gast in July 1881 agrees with this: «But [Christianity] is the best piece of ideal life that I have known... and I believe that I have never been unfaithful to it in my heart. After all, I am a descendant of entire generations of Christian clergymen»85. A consonance between regret and revulsion can be perceived in the "most serious parody" he says he has never heard, and which describes aphorism number 22 in the second part of Human, All Too Human: "At first it was absurd, and the absurd was in God, and God (divine) was the absurd»86. When he thinks of "perfect antagonists" he imagines in front of him Pascal, "the first of all Christians, because he unites wit, ardor and sincerity", and Fénelon, who is for him "the perfect and fascinating expression of the Christian culture in all its splendor»87. Nietzsche'sintermediate period is characterized, however, by his consideration of Christianity as a step prior to the Enlightenment, and because he understands morality primarily as the "ethics of customs," with no other negative nuance than that of denying "religiousness" bathroom» the «creative» capacity. Thus, in the second part of Human, too human Christianity is considered as the "balm" for the degeneration of the old civilized peoples, as the "evening sounds of good antiquity"; on the other hand, for the young barbarian peoples it has been poison, having implanted, for example, the doctrine of sin and damnation in the "souls of heroes, children and animals" of German antiquity88. But one would have to wonder if the more authentic Nietzsche-tone is not better perceived in this posthumous fragment from approximately the same period: "Christianity, as the great plebeian movement of the Roman Empire, means the exaltation of the base, uneducated, oppressed, sick , crazy, poor, slaves, old women, cowardly men, in general all those who would have had reasons to commit suicide but did not have the courage to do so...»89

Gjmo we have already seen in the biographical part, the fundamental idea M KGW V, 2, p. 268. 85 KGB, DI, 1, p. 109. « KGW, IV, 3, p. 24. 87 kgW,W, lp 165. KGWUV,3,p. 115. 89 KGW, V, 1, p. 382. "

136

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

it is from the late period that Christianity arises from the resentment of the decadent life; this, in turn, results from a "rejection of the world" that has its source in the hypothesis of "being" and that, therefore, constitutes at the same time an ascetic morality. In blatant opposition to the sentiments mentioned above, the following now holds: "Only Christianity, which is based on resentment against life, has made sexuality impure: it has thrown rubbish over the beginning, over the presupposition." of our lives»90. "Drunkenness" ("Rausch") had always been for Nietzsche the presupposition of art; The fact that he now gives "first of all" the meaning of "intoxication from sexual excitement" as the "oldest and most primordial form of intoxication"91, is only the positive expression of the same thesis. The protagonist of ascetic morality is the priest, and the doctrine of the "morality of customs" now continues to make the ascetic priest the "advocate for the sick flock," while, on the other hand, the objection appears again and again. that the "mediocre" are the healthy ones, and it is precisely the innovators who pass for the "décadents." But Nietzsche's"revaluation of all values" does not reach its ultimate expression where he emphasizes the importance of the weak for the exercise of spirituality and, in general, for the further development of life, but rather there where he equates Christianity with morality as a symptom of a decadent life and arrives at "anti-Christian" claims in the strictest sense: "The supreme law of life, formulated by Zarathustra, demands that one not have mercy on all the rubbish and rubbish of life; destroy what would only be an obstacle, poison, conspiracy and subterranean enmity for ascending life: Christianity, in a word... It is profoundly immoral to say: you shall not And yet, even in the "Antichrist," where the Christian concept of God is attacked with unparalleled severity and all-out war is declared on the priests ("God as the God of the sick, God as a spider, God as the spirit...", "Law against Christianity"), there are interpretations of Jesus and primitive Christianity that seem to reveal a deep sympathy: "The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart, not something situated "above from the earth” or that it arrives “afterdeath”... The “kingdomof God” is not something that is expected; it does not have a yesterday or a past tomorrow, it does not arrive in “athousand years”: 90 KGW, VI, 3, p. 154. * Ibid., 110. “KGW, VIII, 3, p. 402.

Nietzsche with the «Battlefield»

137

it is an experience in a heart, it is everywhere and nowhere... At bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross»93. It would also be a gross mistake to see Nietzsche engaged in the "imitation of Christ" and to interpret him as a mere fighter against the vulgarization of Christianity by the Church. Nietzsche also confronts the "holy anarchist" Jesus and calls him a "political criminal" whose language "would still lead to Siberia today"94. Nietzsche is an enemy of Christianity at its root, in its reality and in its consequences, and he despises it insofar as in Modernity it is nothing more than hypocrisy. A phrase from the "Antichrist" is very revealing, which has been little considered and to which we will have to return when we ask the question of what exactly are the reasons for Nietzsche'sanimosity against the "Deutsche Reich" of Bismarck and Wilhelm. II: «A young prince at the head of his regiments, magnificent as an expression of the selfishness and arrogance of his people, but confessing himself to be a Christian without any shame... What a monstrosity of falsehood must modern man be not to be ashamed, in spite of everything, of continuing to call oneself a Christian!»95

In spite of everything, as has been shown, this thinker was not alien to Christian sentiments: he would be completely insufficiently characterized seeing him as a simple follower of Feuerbach and Ileine, since in his thought there are also analogies with Pascal. If we now ask ourselves which of the contradictory feelings was the strongest in him, we will have to devote our attention to his relationship with Christianity in its concrete manifestations: Catholicism (that is, with the Middle Ages) and Protestantism (that is, with the Reformation). Thus it will be shown that Nietzsche'sgreatest admiration was for something that is temporarily very close to both one and the other and that, however, is opposed to both: the Renaissance.

Catholicism, Renaissance, Reformation For the numerous conversions of prominent personalities - from the cases of Adam Müller and Zacharias Wemer to those of the half-sister and half-brother of the Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm

9 KGW, VI, 3 ,205ff.

94 Ibid., 196. 9 Ibid., 209.

1J8

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

III— it can be seen that Protestants in the nineteenth century took a renewed and often nostalgic interest in Catholicism, and almost always at the same time in the Middle Ages. But the most impressive testimony is Novalis'swriting "Christianity or Europe"; We want to start this class with some of his paragraphs. «Beautiful and splendid times those in which Europe was a Christian country, in which ONE Christendom inhabited this part of the world conformed humanly... Without great worldly possessions, ONE chief directed and united the great political forces. There was a numerous corporation at the immediate disposal of anyone, which carried out its instructions and zealously tried to strengthen its beneficent power... With what joy did those beautiful meetings end in the mysterious churches, adorned with stimulating images, filled with sweet perfumes and enlivened by a sacred and sublime music... The wise head of the Church was rightly opposed to the impertinent development of human talents at the expense of sacred sense, and to untimely and dangerous discoveries in the field of knowledge... The princes resolved their dissensions before the father of Christianity, docilely placed their crowns and their majesty at his feet and, as members of that high corporation, even considered it an honor to end their days within solitary walls of convents dedicated to the contemplation of God. ... These were the beautiful essential features of authentically Catholic, authentically Christian times. Humanity was not yet mature enough, formed enough, for that magnificent kingdom... With the Reformation Christianity ended... Blood will flow in torrents over Europe until the nations are unaware of the terrible madness that makes them wander in a circle, until, shocked and pacified by sacred music, they do not approach the ancient altars, in a motley crowd, until do not undertake works of peace and with warm tears celebrate a great banquet of love, as a feast of peace, in smoky places chosen beforehand. Only religion can reawaken Europe and save the peoples, and visibly install Christianity with a new splendor on earth, in its former pacifying post... No one will protest against Christian and mundane coercion anymore, because the essence of the Church will be of authentic freedom and all the necessary reforms will take place under its direction, as peaceful and ceremonious processes of State». Nietzsche encountered Catholicism, and the Medieval still present in it, more often than the local Northerner used to.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

139

Thuringian or Saxon sickness. He studied in Bonn and lived for his last decade in predominantly Roman Catholic places. However, Catholicism was always alien to him and his statements in this regard can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It is December 1864 Nietzsche writes from Bonn to his aunts Friederike and Rosalie: «As you can imagine, because of the proximity to Cologne, Catholicism is predominant in Bonn, including Jesuitism, unfortunately. The Jesuits have a convent in the Kreuzberg, very close to Bonn... They seem to have a lot of influence over the students because of the so-called Marian sodalicios, who pursue the propagation of Catholicism and the elimination of Protestantism»96. Consequently, Nietzsche joined the Gustav-Adolf association for a time and expressed himself very negatively about the devoutness of the Catholic population of Bonn. Surely it is only aesthetic sentiment that I write about Cologne, saying that this city makes a sublime impression with its imposing cathedral and countless churches. A similar motive could be the one that leads him to dream of new «convents» or to address Richard Wagner calling him «pater seraphice». It is interesting, in this sense, his verification that the ancient musical drama has an analogue in the Catholic solemn mass and that only this conveys an idea of the ancient taste for theater in the time of Aeschylus97. The most peculiar manifestation, which betrays something like nostalgia, is from Nietzsche'smiddle period and is found in Aurora. It goes like this: «In this spirit and in alliance with power... [Christianity] has chiselled perhaps the most distinguished figures that there have been up to now in human society: the figures of the highest Catholic clergy, especially when they came from of a noble family... The beauty and powerful distinction of the principles of the Church were always the proof of the truth of the Church for the people; a temporary brutalization of the clergy (as in Luther'stime) always entailed a belief to the contrary. And this fruit of human distinction and beauty in the harmony of figure, spirit and profession, must it also go to the grave with the end of religions?»98. It is not to be excluded that precisely this aphorism must be counted among the starting points for the conception of the «superman». 96 KGB, 1,2, p. 26. 97 KW, m. 3rd p. 18; Otoño 1869. 91 KGW, V, 1, p. 56s.

140

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Nonetheless, an observer might have claimed as late as 1875 that Nietzsche felt like a good Protestant, albeit a curly secular one. Proof of this is his reaction to the projected conversion of Heinrich Romundt, the third inhabitant of the "Baumanns-Hólle", and his intention to become a Catholic priest: "Our good and pure Protestant atmosphere! Until now I have never felt more strongly my intimate dependence on the spirit of Luther... I am deeply ashamed just at the thought that I had anything to do with the Catholic, for me something fundamentally hateful»99. Corresponding to this is the positive observation regarding student associationism that he makes in the fifth conference on «the future of our educational centers», saying that it contained in itself «that German spirit, manly serious, firm and audacious, that spirit of a miner'sson, Luther, which the Reformation has kept healthy»100.

We are now going to recall, through some quotes from works from the 1970s, the atmosphere of educated Protestantism in which Nietzsche seems to still breathe in 1875. 1. Heinrich von Treitschke (German History in the Nineteenth Century, Part One, 1879, lss.): “ThenMartin Luther once again brought together enthusiastic men from all lines of the scattered people for the great enterprise. The seriousness of the German conscience led the secularized Church back to the sublime simplicity of evangelical Christianity; from the German spirit arose the idea of the liberation of the State from the power of the Church. For the second time, our people reached a culminating point in their morale, the most audacious revolution of all time began purely and simply. [Cfr. Novalis!] But the imperial power, one day at the head of the Germans in the fight against the papacy, disregarded both imperial and political reform. The imperial house of Habsburg was Roman Catholic, it led the peoples of the Roman Catholic south of Europe against the German heretics, and from then until its dark decline it was the enemy of all things German... The marrow of our spirit was Protestant...» Treitschke'saims were obviously the identification between Protestantism, the Prussian and the German, as well as the justification for the expulsion of Austria from the German League.

99 KGB, II, 5, p. 27s. 100 kgW, THE, 2, p. 241.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

2. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (The Last Days of Hutten, 1871) ("Trip to Rome"): I saw how the ruins of ancient Roman splendor serve as a bulwark for priestly power I saw a female you could make deals with, who was called the "universal church." Shall I say quickly and quickly what I saw on the Tiber? The Cloaca Maxima!

("Luther"): The more difficult the liberation is for a child of the earth, the more powerfully our humanity moves. In mortal anguish he broke the excommunication from the convent. Only those who can do nothing else do the greatest! In his soul they fight what was and what will be, a pair of wrestlers panting and locked tight. His spirit is a battlefield of two eras. No wonder he sees demons. (“FeveryNight.” Ignatius of Loyola) Dawn. Is the pilgrim'splace forded? When the rooster crowed, it ghostly disappeared! Is it true what I saw? It was a dream? Have I slept with the devil in the same room? No, it was true! No morning wind dispels a devoutly wild prayer...! [“Inthe book of the Bible your own son addresses you, oh noble one, in an undignified tone.

In the destroyed temples, which we re-consecrate, go up alone, oh goddess, to the altar..."] He is a visionary! full of self-delusion! but he'ssmart as hell at the same time! What folly and shame to deify a woman from Eve, the one who broke the apple! The exuberant Roman art clings closely to things, prostituting devotion with the ardor of the senses.

141

142

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

The dragon Roma, struck to the marrow, is made strong again by his wound, and, deprived of his head by the sword of truth, grows, rising, with a poisonous head ........

But in 1873 Nietzsche was already quite far from the fundamental beliefs of Protestantism, when he said of him that he believed he had purified Christianity, but rather what he has achieved with his introversion is to volatilize it and make it disappear from the world101. Treischke, for example, would never have been influenced by the anti-Protestant historical work of Johannes Janssen in the way that Nietzsche did in a letter to Peter Gast in 1879: "The falsified Protestant historiography, in which we have been taught to believe At this moment, it no longer seems to me that a national cause can be made, from north to south, of the preference of Luther as a person for Ignatius of Loyola. Luther'sdiabolical habit of insulting disgusts me too much, a horrible, arrogant, biliously envious custom; this man was not comfortable if he did not spit on someone»102. An observation like this cannot be due to just a momentary outburst. Nietzsche frankly turns Treitschke upside down when, in the third book of the "Gay Science," he says that the success of Luther'sReformation was a sign that Northern Europe had lagged behind the South. There is only one posthumous fragment from that period that sounds even harsher: «Luther unleashed his anger against the vita contemplative after having failed in the life of a monk and feeling unable to become a saint; Vengeful and ergotistic as he was, he sided with vita practica, with the peasants and blacksmiths»103. In the fifth book of the «Gaya science», added in the second edition of 1887, aphorism 358, entitled «The peasant revolt of the spirit», is the place where Nietzsche analyzes Luther'sReformation in more detail and negatively. In a way, he takes sides there with the Roman Catholic Church, which was "the last construction of the Romans", although not precisely from the Christian spirit. The church was something "other" and could afford the "luxury of skepticism and toleration" against w 101 KGW, III, 4, p. 298. 102 KGB, II,5 ,p . 451. 105 KGW, V, 1, p. 443.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

143

genuine indignation',simply because 'helacked any heritage of a dominant caste, any instinct for power'.He wanted to redo "that work of the Romans", but he only succeeded in starting a work of destruction. “Hehanded over the sacred books to everyone, with which they fell into the hands of the philologists, that is, those who deny all faith that rests on books. He destroyed the concept of "Church" by rejecting faith in the inspiration of the councils... He returned to the priest sexual relations with women: but three quarters of the respect that the people are capable of, and above all the woman of the people, is supported by the belief that an exceptional man in that respect will also be exceptional in others... "Each one a priest of himself": under such formulas and his peasant cunning Luther concealed an abysmal hatred of " superior man” and the dominance of the “superiorman” as the Church had conceived it...» The Reformation was, then, a «peasant revolt» that had as a consequence «the flattening of the European spirit, especially in the North"; it was the expression of a "plebeian spirit" that prompted "modern science," it is true, but modern science, like "modern ideas" in general, also belongs "to that peasant revolt of the North against the distrustful spirit of the South, colder and more ambiguous, which has its greatest monument in the Christian Church»104.

In any case, with these manifestations Nietzsche does not take sides with the Catholic Church, but with the Renaissance; In doing so, he joins the work of two authors he knew well, namely Jacob Burk Hardt and Count Gobineau. Burckhardt's The Culture of the Renaissance (1860) was a work Nietzsche was certainly familiar with, and he may also have been familiar with the historical scenes in Gobineau's The Renaissance (1877). Let us now turn our attention to both.

Jacob Burckhardt presents the Renaissance above all as the beginning of the modern age— that is, the age of individualism— which would include the "awakening of the personality" and its consummation: the Renaissance would have brought about the "resurrection of Antiquity." »and would have become capable, with it, of discovering the world and man. In all this, the Renaissance certainly signifies for Burckhardt a first phase of the Enlightenment, in which "secularism in spirit" and tolerance become visible - even in the face of Islam - faith experiences a profound upheaval, and the doubt ,

'«KGW, V, 2, pp. 100-1 284-2

144

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

universal. All of this is described in detail and plastically, without excluding contrary tendencies, such as the dominance of Girolamo Savo Narola in

Florence and the spread of superstition even among humanists. Of all this, we are only interested here in what Burckhardt says about the great political crimes and their perpetrators, especially about the two Borgias: Pope Alexander VI and his son César. The true objective of both, especially of Caesar, namely, the elimination of the numerous and small principalities and the formation of a unitary force— at least in the Papal States, but if possible in all of Italy—, enjoys the assent. of Burckhardt just as he enjoyed that of Machiavelli, as is

well known. But

Burckhardt does not approve of the means used to achieve this end, which he even describes as "satanic." «It is utterly horrible the way and manner in which César isolates his father, murdering his brother, his brother-in-law and other relatives and courtiers as soon as his sympathy with the Pope, or his position in general, makes him uncomfortable. Alejandro had to consent to the murder of his most beloved son, the Duke of Gandía,because he himself trembled at every moment before César»105. Burckhardt also alludes to the possibility that Caesar had been elected Pope after his father's death, and comes to the following conclusion: «If anyone had been able to secularize the Papal State, it was he, and he would have had to do it in order to continue dominating in it. If we are not entirely mistaken, this is the essential motive for the secret sympathy with which Machiavelli treats this great criminal; If it was not Caesar's,no one could be expected to "take the iron out of the wound", that is, to annihilate the papacy, the source of all interference and all the dismemberment of Italy»106.

Arthur de Gobineau makes appear in a very moving and plastic way in his "Historical Scenes" most of the great men and women of the Renaissance: Savonarola, Leonardo de Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Lucrezia Borgia, Alexander VI, Giovanni de Medici (later Leo X), Machiavelli, Julius II ("Giuliano della Rovere"), but also describes the peculiar "totalitarianism" of Savonarola's "Kingdom of God," the atrocities of the soldiery, and the atmosphere of science studies. the artists. I quote only a few paragraphs that deal with the Borgias, and especially with Caesar.

105 J. Burckhardt, DieKulturderRenaissance, 1860,143s. 106 Ibidem, 145s.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

145

Alexander VI tries to comfort his daughter Lucrecia, whose husband, Don Alfonso, has been assassinated by his brother César for political reasons: «No, my daughter, he is not a monster. It is a domineering nature that has no consideration when it comes to getting the victor's laurels in hard fight..... I like you like that, that'show you go back to being what you were. The little bourgeois widow has disappeared, and it is the queen, the lady, who is speaking to me!... How beautiful you are now, my daughter, beautiful as pride! You are the force! I no longer have to choose my words... Let the little spirits, those of the flock, be weak and consume themselves in musings. There is only one consideration that does you honor: your exaltation and that of the Borgia house!»

Machiavelli, in a monologue: «What a strangely horrible being!... Clever and cunning as the serpent, unfaithful as the cat, proud as the eagle... It does not surprise me that the alienated spirit of César Borgia us bring salvation one day! Salvation from the curse for countless crimes, and liberation from the swamp of blood and ignominy into which Girolamo'sbaleful goodness has plunged us!»108.

Caesar to Machiavelli: «Yes, Mr. Nicholas, on my coat of arms there is a dragon. I do not resemble, like the gloomy Duke of Milan, the wretched snake that chooses a suckling child as its prey. I am the hydra of Lema! Call me a monster, but at the same time the worst enemy of monsters. Not one of them will be left alive... The ruins of their nests will be the support of mine. And the day will come when from the Alps to the sea of Sicily there will be only one lord: me!» It is very curious that Nietzsche never quotes César Borgia before 1884, while Machiavelli appears much earlier, although he always does so in passing or in connection with questions of style. (An important statement about Machiavelli is found for the first time in Twilight of the Idols: Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli'sprince would be the closest to him because of their unconditional will "not to be fooled by anything and to see reason in reality: not in reason, and even less in morality»109. In a posthumous fragment from the spring of 1884 it is said about Caesar: «Incomprehension of the animal of prey: full of health, like César Borgia! The qualities of hunting dogs»110. Curiously,

107 A. Gobineau, The Renaissance. Historical Scenes, 1877.66ff. 108 lbidem, 86.

,w KGWVI,3,p. 150. 110 KGW, VII, 2, p. 17.

146

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

very close appears this annotation: «If you wanted health, you would suppress the genius. Likewise to the religious man. If I know I would like morality, likewise [the following in bold]: suppression of genius. The illness The crime. The vice. The lie and its cultural mission»111. From this it would follow that César Borgia, healthy as a beast, can never be a genius. But aren'there also criminals and depraved geniuses? The ambivalence of Nietzsche'sposition regarding the biological concept of "health" appears here as well. Shouldn'tmere health, as such, be the quintessential "anti-culture" thing? But Nietzsche, as a rule, conceives of 'health'as a 'superabundance of strength',which has nothing to do with health as an average value and from whose point of view health may even seem like illness. Thus, for example, aphorism 197 of Más allá del más good and evil says: «The beast of prey and the man of prey (for example, César Borgia) are radically misunderstood, “nature”is misunderstood as long as one continues to look for something “sick”at the bottom of those monsters. and tropical plants, the healthiest of all, or even a congenital “hell”in god. It seems that moralists hate the virgin sdva and the tropics... Why? In favor of “temperatezones”? In favor of temperate men? Of the "morals"? Of the mediocre?»112. It seems that Nietzsche would understand here «measure» and «moderation» — capital concepts of Greek Antiquity— as moderation of the “unspoiltSvatic” or the “tropical”in man, while a “moderationof the moderate” would imply as much as a decline or extinction into insignificance. But, according to the text, what Nietzsche asserts is the virgin Swat and the tropical as such, and it is this that he calls "health." A similar misunderstanding, to which Nietzsche himself gives rise, follows from the concept of the "blonde beast", which surely is not by chance that it appears temporarily close to the mentions of César Borgia, and which must be sought "deep down" of the noble races and not in their visible reality113. In the aphorism 37 dd Twilight of the idols ("Raids of an untimely") it is seen very clearly how and to what extent the critique of Modernity is for Nietzsche the center on which his high regard for the Renaissance revolves. It says there: "The truth is that we 1.1 Ibid., 16. 112 KGW, VI, 2nd floor 119.

•» Ibid., 289.

Nictzsche as "battlefield"

147

We would not place ourselves in fact, or even in thought, in Renaissance situations: our nerves, not to mention our muscles, would not bear that reality... Let us not doubt, on the other hand, that we moderns with our humanity so covered in cotton... we would provide Cesare Borgia'scontemporaries with a comedy that would make them die with laughter... The decrease of hostile instincts and those that arouse distrust — and in this would consist, in fact, our progress— represents only one of the consequences in the general decrease in vitality: managing an existence that is so conditioned, so late, is something that costs a hundred times more effort, more care. Here we help each other, here, to a certain degree, each one is a patient and each one is a nurse. This is then called "virtue"; among men who still knew a different life, fuller, more prodigal, more overflowing, it would have been given another name, perhaps “cowardice”,“meanness”,“oldwoman's morality”...»114. (Cf. Herder! Modernity as the sunset of the vital force!) In one of the harshest and most disproportionate attacks on Christianity in the New Testament, which includes aphorism 46 of the «Antichrist», César Borgia also appears as the opposite image of all this: «Just as we would not choose Polish Jews for our relations , neither would we choose “firstChristians” for it... Neither one smells good... Every book becomes clean when one has just read the New Testament: to give an example, I, immediately after Paul, I have read with delight that hilarious and petulant mocker that was Petronius, of whom one could say what Domenico Bocaccio wrote to the Duke of Parma about César Borgia: he tutto festo: immortally healthy, immortally jovial and well constituted»115. César is, therefore, the harshest opposition to the "little hypocrites" of the first Christian communities and their "Chandálico hatred" against the privileged, that is, against the representatives of an arrogant, manly, ingenious life. Not only the image of the "blonde beast" but also that of the "superman" is indisputably linked in Nietzsche to that of César Borgia. Thus, in Ecce homo he expressly says that the word "superman" serves to designate a type of maximum good education, in antithesis to the "modern" man, to the "good" man, to Christia 1.4 KGW ,Vl,l,p. 131. IU lbídern,2 2 ls.

148

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

other nihilists; that the concept has nothing to do with the "hero worship" of the "great forger" Carlyle: "And a person I blew into his ear that he should look for a Cesar Borgia rather than a Parsifal, did not believe the their ears»116. Towards the end of his career, in aphorism 61 of the "Antichrist", Nietzsche imagines a paradox with which he makes the most of a remark by Jacob Burckhardt, and which goes like this: "I see such a spectacle, so full sense, so prodigiously paradoxical at the same time, that all the divinities of Olympus would have had an excuse to laugh immortally: César Borgia as Pope... Do you understand me?... Well, that would have been the victory the one that today only I aspire to: with it Christianity was abolished!» And this paradox— the blond beast as head of the empire of the unnatural and, with it, as its selfdestruction— serves Nietzsche as the starting point for one of the most virulent attacks ever against a Protestant and the son of a Protestant pastor. as Nietzsche was, he directed against Luther and against the Reformation: «What happened? A German monk, Luther, went to Rome. That monk, who carried in his body all the vengeful instincts of a failed priest, was indignant in Rome against the Renaissance... [C. E Meyer!] Instead of understanding, with the deepest gratitude, the enormous event that had taken place, the overcoming of Christianity in its own seat, the only thing that his hatred knew how to extract from that spectacle was its own nourishment. A religious man thinks only of himself. What Luther saw was the corruption of the papacy, whereas it was precisely the opposite that could be touched with the hands: The old corruption, the pec original Christianity! But life! But the triumph of life! But the great yes to all lofty, beautiful, reckless things!... And Luther restored the Church: he attacked it... The Renaissance: a meaningless event, a great vain\ [because of the Reformation and the Germans]»117. But one is almost always in danger of being mistaken when one takes the rhetoric of Nietzsche'sbrilliant paragraphs and paradoxes too literally; almost always there are considerations in which another different point of view is expressed, another different feeling. Thus, in the posthumous fragments of the spring of 1888 there is a page entitled "Renaissance and Reformation"118 in which Nietzsche 116 Ibid., 298. 117 Ibid., 248. “

» KGW .VUU.pp^Ds.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

149

raises the question of what the Renaissance demonstrates; and he himself offers the following answer: «That the reign of the “individual”can only be short. The waste is too great; the very possibility of collecting, of capitalizing, is lacking, and exhaustion follows immediately». So in human life, it seems, "rise" and "decline" are not realities in the sense that one can be praised and maintained while the other is fought and rejected, but phases that are they prepare one from the other. As a species, the animal of prey remains the same for millennia, and precisely for this reason César Borgia cannot be the paradigm of man: this is how the conclusion deduced from Nietzsche'sstatements could be formulated. In this aphorism Nietzsche also maintains his

contempt for the Reformation, which continues to be for him "an arid and plebeian contrast" to the Italian Renaissance, although not last because the magical expression of "evangelical freedom" left all the instincts "that had reason to remain hidden" came out like wild dogs, so that "the stomach became the God of the 'free gospel'"and all desires for revenge and envy could be satisfied. Is it that there is also a kind of "blonde beast" (better: wild beast) at the bottom of simple, noble men, who have not been characterized precisely by the "pampering" received? In any case, according to Nietzsche, the Reformation is followed by an "ignoble kind of exhaustion," a general rucre in servitium. "The most indecent century in Germany has arrived." In fact, Nietzsche said practically nothing about the seventeenth century; the next period that arouses his interest is the age of the Dustration and of nascent science, a primarily French age.

illustration and science

"Enlightenment" is now a generally accepted concept; In the Federal Republic of Germany, too, it has long been regarded as a positive, rounded concept, often even meaning a unitary phenomenon. Originally, that word119 refers to a metaphor taken from nature: an overcast sky clears up, daylight takes the place of night. but already here 119 In German, «Aufklárung» (clarification or clarification), from the verb «aufklaren» (to clarify or clarify). (N. of the T.)

150

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

The first paradox of translation can be recognized: day is necessarily followed by night, clear day is soon followed by a gray day. The fundamental characteristic of the concept is, however, its presumable lasting character: the Enlightenment has to determine the entire future, and it will. Which in French is called "siécle des lamieres" or "siécle des philosophes” does not mean that this “century”wants to delimit a space of time, nor that these “philosophers”will ever be replaced by scientists or technicians. The obscurity overcome, but in its remnants still surmountable, is that of the Middle Ages, and above all that of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Voltaire wanted to “banish this plague from the world”, and evidently, forever as well120. Fundamental negative terms of the Enlightenment were above all: "prejudice" (or "superstition") and "privilege." Dogmatic differences, apparently the origin of the struggles between Catholics and Protestants, were considered "prejudices" in particular; "privileges" were prejudices and positions of power that had become obsolete, primarily of a religious nature, such as the income of bishops, which could often be called princely in comparison with the extremely meager salaries of rural priests. Fundamental positive terms were: 'reason' (whichwas often, and even most often, identified with 'nature'),'progress'science',In. fact, there was a close connection between the Enlightenment and the nascent absolutism, or else (in England) between the Enlightenment and parliamentarism, which was definitively prevailing; Certainly, in France there were also many enlightened supporters of the «thése nobiliaire», that is, enlightened people who were anti-absolutist aristocrats, like Montesquieu for example; In any case, the most important theoretician of absolutism was an Englishman, Thomas Hobbes. That of «Nature» is a concept as little transparent and consensual as that of «God»; "reason" obviously does not constitute the totality of man; "Prejudices" are by no means widespread only in the religious realm; as "privilege" any type of inequality can be understood and attacked.

Thus, the "Enlightenment" and the "enlightened" did not form a unit; a common characteristic of theirs was, in any case, their opposition to the faith of Revelation, to Christian "supematuralism"; in this sense, rationalism

can be understood as the fundamental character of the Enlightenment. But if reason is understood as the foundation of the world 120 In: “Thevoice of the wise and the people”.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

151

If not, then it is God: in that case what would have to be discarded would be only a "mystical" theology; As the maxim of all human actions, the principle of reason is doubtful and directly provokes the reaction of "irrationalism." As a precise counterpoint to the Enlightenment in all its shadows, only faith in miracles would remain. But if the Enlightenment claims to be an egalitarian cosmopolitanism and is understood as the unprejudiced recovery of original situations, then in the eighteenth century it was in stark opposition to all existing reality, including existence, almost always very aristocraticbourgeois, of the enlightened themselves. As a graphic demonstration, I will adduce some quotes from texts by authors who either Nietzsche knew or who adopt a pro-typical position. 1. Antoine, (Marquis de) Condorcet (Sketch of a historical picture of the progress of the human spirit, 1794): “Therewill come a time when the sun will shine only for free men, men who recognize nothing above them but their own reason; a time when only in history books and in the theater will there be tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments; in which no one will take care of them except to pity their victims and those whom they mocked... For this reason, it must be shown that these three types of real inequality [economic, social and cultural inequality] must continue to decrease without interruption, but without completely disappearing, since they come from natural and necessary causes, which it would be absurd and dangerous to want to eliminate; one could not even try to make its effects completely disappear without thereby opening up even more abundant sources of inequality and without becoming guilty of an even more immediate and disastrous attack on human rights121... And what a spectacle the image of a the human race freed from all chains, saved from the power of chance and the enemies of progress, advancing safely and capable along the path of truth, virtue and happiness; a spectacle that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice that still adulterate the earth and of which he himself is so often a victim»122.

Question: Isn'tCondorcet insinuating with this that from the heart 121 A. Condorcet, Sketch of a historical table of the progress of the human mind (1794), ed. bilingüe, W. Alff ed., Frankfurt, 1963,355s. m Ibídern,399.

152

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

Could greater inequality and more horrible crimes arise from the Enlightenment than those that arise from "superstitions"? In any case, the year his book appeared, he himself died as a Girondist on the guillotine of his fellow Enlightenment Jacobins. 2. Immanuel Kant ("What is Enlightenment?", 1784): «Enlightenment is the exit of man from his self-blaming minority. Minority is the inability to use one'sown reason without the guidance of another. Self-blame is that minority when its cause does not reside in an insufficiency of understanding, but in a lack of resolution and courage to use oneself without the direction of another. Know how! Have courage to use your own understanding! That, then, is the motto of the Enlightenment... It is so comfortable to be underage. If I have a book that thinks for me, a spiritual director who has a conscience for me, a doctor who establishes my diet for me, etc., I do not need to exert myself... [unlimited freedom is claimed in the public use of reason, but here too there is nothing more than a positive allusion to Frederick the Great]... Only he who, enlightened himself, does not fear the shadows, but has at hand, at the same time, a numerous and disciplined army to guarantee public peace, only he can say what a free State is not allowed to say: reason as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!» Question: Doesn'tKant associate too much the concept of "majority" with that of "autarky"? Doesn'the thinker of Modernity fall into antimodernity by negatively assessing, as it seems, "trusting oneself" (to the doctor, for example), something that with "progress" has to spread more and more each day? And, if criticism has its limits in citizen obedience, isn'tan enlightened free State self-destructive? 3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the arts and sciences, 1750): «Almighty God... deliver us from the lights and the disastrous arts of our parents and give us back ignorance, innocence and poverty, the only goods that can constitute our happiness and that are precious in your eyes». Question: Isn'the «anti- enlightenment» hidden, perhaps, in the Enlightenment itself, that is, in «primitivism», as one of its fundamental (and certainly more debatable) features? 4. Adolf, Baron von Knigge (On dealing with human beings, 1788, first edition): «Century of universal medicine, where do you want us to go? I see in spirit how universal enlightenment is spreading throughout all

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

153

estates, I see how the lazy farmer abandons his plow to teach the prince a lesson about the equality of classes and about the obligation to bear the weight of life as a community; I see how each one reasons against the prejudices that are uncomfortable for him... how property, the constitutions of States and their borders disappear, how each one governs himself and invents a system for the satisfaction of his impulses. Oh, enviable and golden age! We will all form a family, we will fraternally embrace the noble and kind cannibal, and when this well-being spreads, we will finally walk hand in hand through this life with the ingenious orangutan»123 425. Question: Shouldn'the enlightened person fear the most, precisely the most extreme consequence of the Enlightenment: the total deprivation of power to (universal) reason by individual impulses disguised as reason, that is to say? , anarchy? These examples could easily be expanded with many others taken from all areas of the Enlightenment, and in the end they would show the same thing: the Enlightenment is full of tensions and unresolved problems; concepts such as «rationality», «optimism», faith in progress, anticlericalism, bourgeoisie, primitivism, scientism, cannot each characterize it by itself. But it is certain that it was fundamental to the entire eighteenth century: the entire "party of the movement" referred back to the Enlightenment, but also the protagonists of the opposing party were largely enlightened aristocrats of the Anden régime, such as Mettemich for example. ; all "German Idealism" is marked by Enlightenment ideas, although he was highly critical of the vulgar form of the Aufklarichtl2A concept and his idea of harmony is among other things a correction of the (vulgar) Enlightenment. From the point of view of his position against the Enlightenment, it seems that Nietzsche'swork can be articulated with special clarity. In the words of Nietzsche himself (directed against the music of Richard Wagner), his first phase could be called the «last warlike and reactive gesture... against the spirit of the Enlightenment»125, the second would constitute the period in which Nietzsche as « illustrated» formulates a self-criticism 123 A. von Knigge, About dealing with people, Berlin, 1878, II, 2, p. 141 124 This word, composed of «Aufklárer» (= enlightened) + «Kehricht» (= barreduras), refers to those enlightened senarios or dogmatists who take the doctrines of the Enlightenment literally. In this sense, the Blochian expression «der “sektiererische Aufklaricht”» (Emst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt a. M., 1974, 22) is exemplary. (N. of the T.). 125 KGW, IV, 3, p. 87.

154

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

ethics of this type, and the latter would mean the recovery of the former in a much more radical way, although already "passed" by the latter. In principle this is correct, but many precisions must be made. In fact, the Euripides of the Birth of the tragedy is a paradigm of the ancient Enlightenment: with his critical thinking, with the clarity and skill of his conscience he tries to build the tragedy again on the basis of a consideration of the world, a moral and a non-Dionysian art; and precisely for this reason he destroys it. He brings the "enlightened masses" onto the stage and thus justifies "bourgeois mediocrity." To an even greater extent, Socrates is an "Apollonian," that is, a mutilator of existence. For him everything has to be reasonable to be beautiful, and since what is given is unreasonable, from this he deduces the intrinsic absurdity and abjection of it, which he wants to correct through dialectic. Thus, he is the prototype of the "theoretical man" who believes "that thought, through the guiding thread of causality, reaches the deepest abysses of being"; «the prototype of theoretical optimism that, with the marked belief in the possibility of scrutinizing the nature of things, grants knowledge the strength of a universal medicine, and sees evil in itself in error»126. This is precisely why it is he who founded an "Alexandrian" culture, a late culture that still dominates modern times because, in the place of the myth-oriented man who sees the world tragically and who possesses a universal image of himself in which all its eternal evils are included, it has placed abstract man, abstract education, abstract morality, abstract law, the abstract State; in other words, because it has produced the "abstraction of life." It is certainly very curious how Nietzsche nonetheless perceives in Socratism a certain "utility for life": without the twist that knowledge implies, there would perhaps be a "universal struggle for annihilation and a constant migration of peoples", at the end of which would appear a terrifying ethic of compassionate genocide127. A phenomenal form of that abstract existence, as "David Strauss" says, is "modern fair polychromy"128, the absence of that "unity of artistic style in all the vital manifestations of a people" which constitutes the essence of authentic "culture." Such an abstract man is above all the modern scientist, the representative of an "excited scientism, ha 126 kgW, III. ip .% 127 Ibid. ,2t Ibid., 158ff.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

155

bustling, boisterous»129 130. What Nietzsche criticizes as something inimical to culture is specialized modern science, for having separated from philosophy. For him, the road to barbarism is paved by those "cohorts of scholars and researchers" who work in something like a "scientific factory" and who seek to achieve mastery of "life" that makes it perish, even if, in one sense, they indulge in a blind collector'squest in historical science or produce a degree of insomnia in whose cruel light life languishes, as if, in another sense, they fabricate a "set of indigestible philosopher'sstones." The critique of science goes hand in hand with an even more universal critique of culture, which notes "the restlessness and confusion of the modern soul", which rejects "the magnificently contemptible monetary economy", and which declares in a Pascalian tone : «Never was the world more worldly, nor ever poorer in love and goodness»150. But is all this really "anti-enlightenment"? Didn'this kind of cultural criticism begin precisely with the Enlightenment and at its core? Wouldn'tSchiller have agreed with Nietzsche on all these points? Were not all the protagonists of the Enlightenment, in their own way, "liberated men of culture"? Didn'tmetaphysicians like Leibniz and Christian Wolff belong to the Enlightenment? Nor was the young Nietzsche a mere "anti-enlightenment"; it would be more correct to include him in the Enlightenment tradition of self-criticism. For this reason, it would perhaps be better to call Nietzsche's second period the period of his incorporation into an activist and practical current of the Enlightenment, one that renounces any type of metaphysics and metaphysical art — that is, the creator of meaning—, and that it tries to create a "reasonable world" insofar as it "proposes the real abolition of evil"131. Thus, Nietzsche now takes sides with the "modest" spirit of science, makes "historical philosophizing" his own, sanctions a "new conscious culture" that means the death of the old and, with it, the exemplary character of Antiquity. . He calls himself a "freethinker," talks about "we enlightened ones," wants to achieve a reduction in the "crushing weight of culture" precisely by means of science, constructs an entirely different, non-sociological concept of "slavery." », rejects genius as an enemy of the modest and cautious sense of science. criticize the trend 129 Ibtdem, 199. 130 Ibtdem, 362. 131 KGW ,N,2, p. 107.

156

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

to consider that entire sectors of the people are more brutish and worse than they really are; he places himself next to Socrates in the appreciation of small and close things, and he even seems to prefer Hel vétius to Kant. But above all, he endorses Condorcet'sidea of the future conversion of humanity into a happy unit: «What I fear as overpopulation of the earth, in a senile myopia, puts in the hand of the most optimistic precisely the great task: humanity must one day become a tree with many billions of flowers, all of which must become fruits side by side; and the Earth must be prepared for the nourishment of that tree... We must face the great task: a task of reason for reason»132. To this must be added — since all this goes hand in hand— his assent to the «democratization of Europe»133 and the «collapse... of the State»134. Nietzsche cites the creation of science as the greatest achievement of the Greeks, while their art seems superficial to him. And it always refers to Voltaire. And yet the question is legitimate whether, despite everything, within Nietzsche'sEnlightenment period one does not always perceive tones that refer to a deep crack within the Enlightenment or even signify a true "anti-Enlightenment" attack. . When he says that the world in general is not rational and not even human reason itself, when he characterizes reason as chance within chance and does not want to fundamentally distinguish men from ants or earwigs: in all these In some cases, one would have to think that it undermined the ontological foundation of the Enlightenment, although Helvétius had already done so with his reduction of judgment to feeling. With the unmasking of man,

with the reduction of the virtues to disguises of egoism, Nietzsche follows the same direction as the French "moralists." But the truly "Nietzschean" appears above all where it allows one to realize how much pain and sorrow his own "progressive" ideas inflicted on him, where he claims to give the future man a "double brain," one for science. and another for those ideas and convictions that are born from his “illogicalfundamental position before all things”135; or even where he considers a possible animali •» KGW, IV, 3, p. 272. ,M Ibidem, 309. ,M KGW, IV, 2, p. 515. m Ibidem, 47.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

157

tion of man to the simian. But the fact that in Aurora he speaks contemptuously of the "enlightened flatterer"156 and places the Enlightenment on the same line as Christianity, saying that it is a continuation of monotheism, with which it shares the "doctrine of of a normal man", and that in this way the Enlightenment can become the maximum danger for man himself - who is only the "undetermined animal", without infinite perspectives or horizons -, because in polytheism freedom is prefigured and variety of thought of man137. This anthropologically oriented critique is close to a sociological one that pits "Rousseau'spassionate half-lies and nonsense" against Voltaire's"moderate nature," thus driving a deep gulf between Enlightenment and Revolution. Aphorism 221 of the second volume of Human, Too Human is titled "The Dangerousness of the Enlightenment," and it says: "With all the half-mad, the theatrical, the animal-horrible, the voluptuous, particularly the sentimental and self-intoxicating, which together make up the substance itself." revolutionary and that in Rousseau it had become flesh and spirit before the Revolution: with all this the Enlightenment, with perfidious enthusiasm, crowned its fanatical head»138. From this would have arisen, for Nietzsche, a deep inversion, because nothing would be more foreign to the Enlightenment than a "violent and sudden nature." For this reason, what each man would have to do would be to purge the Enlightenment of this "impurity" and continue his work in himself, in order to quell the Revolution a posteriori at its very birth and act as if it had not happened. . But did Nietzsche really take that path in his later days, that of separating the reformist from the revolutionary of the Enlightenment and showing that the latter was his main interest? It is true that Nietzsche also at this stage sometimes spoke as if he were a vulgar enlightened man, for example when he said that when man becomes a scientist the end of priests and gods will come139. But even these expressions now sound so strident that it becomes inevitable to question whether Nietzsche has not sided with the Revolution, of course with a different revolution. Now he places "Jesuitism" and the "Democratic Enlightenment" on the same level as enemies of the "magnificent 1.6 KGW, V, 1, p. 310. 1.7 KGW,V,2, p. 168s. 138 KGW, IV, 3, p. 292. 139 KGW, VI, 3, p. 225.

158

Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism

sion" of Europe, now blames "freethinkers" for being part of the "levellers," now exclaims: "Oh, Voltaire, oh, humanity, oh, nonsense!" Now he once again dismisses the scientific man as an "ignoble type of human being," while the "objective man" is for him no more than a tool. What he now objects to Rousseau is "the color and the flattering retouching" under which "the horrible original homo natura text" would have to be interpreted again141. With all this, the entire Enlightenment appears at its base as a phenomenon of degeneration, of decadence, and Socrates is again for Nietzsche, just as in his youth, the symbolic figure: "Socrates was a misunderstanding: all the morality of improvement , also the Christian, has been a misunderstanding... The most dazzling daylight, rationality at any price, lucid, cold, farsighted, conscious life, without instinct, in opposition to instincts, all this was just a different disease. and in no way a way back to "virtue", to "health", to happiness... Having to fight instincts is the formula of the dé cadence. while life ascends, happiness equals instinct»142.

Enlightenment means, then, for both the young and the late Nietzsche, decadence, degeneration, danger for the future of man. Together with morality, Christianity, socialism and the "emancipation of women", it belongs to the phenomenon of the "global degeneration" of humanity, to whose interpretation we have to dedicate a special place. But first, we want to focus on the concrete phenomena and we ask, first of all, this question: decadence is fatigue, loss of instincts, sickness, but wasn'the French Revolution the strongest unleashing of instincts and passions? Would it not have to constitute a positive phenomenon precisely for the one who declared false its own claim to be a high point or even the practical fulfillment of the Enlightenment?

the french revolution No event in modern times divided Europeans as much before 1914 as the French Revolution. The Enlightenment, according to its own principles, wanted to be conciliatory and overcame 140 KGW, VI, 2, pp. 5,57,50. Hl Ibidem, 175. 142 KGW, VI, 3, p. 67.

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

159

close the cracks of religious wars; The French Revolution opened up new cracks of unknown depth until then, because by the radicalization of the Enlightenment struggle against the "priests and tyrants" it soon acquired the character of an ideological grouping, and with the slogan "peace to the huts, war on palaces' became rather quickly a party of a 'firstEuropean civil war'.When Louis XIV'stroops carried out their war of destruction in the RhinelandPalatinate, no inhabitant of the region sided with them; but when, at the end of 1792, the troops of the newly proclaimed French Republic occupied Mainz, associations to support the "liberators" quickly formed in the city, and in numerous parts of the Rhineland, as well as in Austria and elsewhere, they put themselves in "Jacobins" who felt much closer to their co-religionists in Paris than to the "tyrants" of their respective countries. When a state on the warpath finds collaborators and convinced supporters among its opponents, a situation of civil war is produced, even if armed units are not formed to join the state enemy and ideological friend. The very states at war become in a way parties in a civil war of a new type, in which one side stands for "revolution" and the other for "reaction."

But already from the beginning it was possible to verify the fact that this "reaction" was not so weak and helpless as supposed by those who did not want to see in it more than a conspiracy of frightened tyrants. The French emigrants from Koblenz constituted operational military units that were by no means composed exclusively of aristocrats, and in the Vendée it was largely 'the people'themselves who were fighting against 'theRevolution'. Even more important was the fact that the friends and enemies of the French revolt did not constitute fixed groups: when the reform of the French constitution became more and more radical, greeted at first throughout Europe with almost unanimous jubilation (for the events of 1789/90 did not mean anything other than the transformation of absolutism into constitutionalism), when the Jacobins finally executed the king and queen and passed to the time of the Terror of the years 1793/94, many of their supporters converted in opponents, but the loyalty of those who did not blame these events on Robespierre and his Jacobins, but on their opponents, and of those who secretly admired the work of the guillotine, was also consolidated. An essential change took place again whe

160 Nieczsche and Nietzscheanism

General Napoleon Bonaparte came to the fore, since many Jacobins then became opponents of the new military despotism, although only after Bonaparte'scoronation as Emperor did Ludwig van Beethoven desist from dedicating his Erot ca to the victorious general. Schiller and Klopstock were among those who changed their minds already under the impression that the dominance of terror caused them, Goethe had been skeptical almost from the beginning, but Kant and Hegel remained with minimal modifications in their first positive consideration, while Johann Gottlieb Fichte remained a Jacobin and a revolutionary well into the new century. Around the same time, however, former liberals such as Emst Brandes, August Rehberg, and Friedrich Gentz had long since become staunch opponents of the "despotic synod" of Paris and of the Napoleonic regime afterwards. As an illustration I am going to choose four texts, not in chronological order, nor strictly limited to the French Revolution, since most of the nineteenth century was convinced that French events had only been a case "of the Revolution." And 'the Revolution'was conceived of as something eagerly expected, or deeply feared, ever since the concept— not only because of the 'gloriousrevolution'of 1689 in England— had lost its former neutral meaning. 1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte ("Revindication of free thought before the princes of Europe, who have repressed it until now. Heliopolis, in the last year of darkness...", 1793, anonymous): «The times of barbarism have already passed, oh, peoples!, in which in the name of God they dared to announce to you that you were herds of cattle, which God had placed on Earth with the mission of helping bear their load to a dozen children of God, to serve as servants and servants for their comfort and, finally, to be beheaded. [Allusion to the horrors]... and we do not want to remind you of the even more bloody festivities that despotism and fanaticism united in this town, as is their custom; nor to remind you that these are not the fruits of free thought, but the consequences of the long previous slavery of the spirit; nor to tell you that nowhere is calmer than in the grave...»145. 7. Richard Wagner ("Art and Revolution", 1849): M> Fichtes Werke (Immanuel Hermann Fichte. ed.), Berlin (reprint), 1971, VI,

Nietzsche as "battlefield"

161

"Yes, we know that the old world falls to rubble, that a new one will arise from it, as the august goddess Revolution comes, bellowing, on the wings of storms... and where she treads her mighty foot she reduces to rubble what was built for millennia in fatuous delirium... But behind it, illuminated by soft rays of sunlight, a paradise of happiness undreamed of opens up... and exultant songs of jubilation of liberated humanity fill the air, still moved by the roar of the struggle... Among those heaps of documents and contracts, like withered plants, lie the hearts of living humanity and turn to dust in those modern torture chambers... Look, there are crowds coming out of the factories; they have created and produced the most splendid materials: but they themselves and their children are naked, cold and hungry, since the fruit of their labor does not belong to them, but to the rich and powerful, who considers the men and the earth. [Words of the Revolution:] «I am the life that eternally rejuvenates, eternally creative! Where I am not, there is death... All that exists must perish, this is the eternal law of nature, this is the condition of life, but I, the eternal destroyer, execute the law and create life eternally young... I want to destroy the domain of one thing over another, of the dead over the living, of matter over spirit; I want to shatter the violence of the powerful, of the law and of property... I want to destroy this order of things that separates pleasure from work, that makes work a burden, pleasure a vice, that makes some people miserable due to lack and others due to overabundance... From now on there are only two peoples: one, the one that follows me, the other, the one that opposes me... and the cry — that moves the sky— of “Iam a man! !" The millions, the living Revolution, the man turned into God, rush into the valleys and plains and announce to the whole world the new gospel of happiness»144. 3. Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790): «That is why egalitarians only change and pervert the natural order of things: they adulterate the edifice of society by placing in the air what the solidity of the structure would require placing in the foundations145... and so, in the course of Within a few generations, the community itself faded away, dissolved in the dust of individuality and 144 Richard Wagner, Dichtungen uttd Sdmften (anniversary edition), tomo 5, pp. 234-241. 145 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in Frunce, 1790,46s.

162

Nictzsche and Nictzscheanism

finally dispersed to the four winds... Society is certainly a contract... but one should not consider the State as a mere commercial contract for the traffic of pepper and coffee, cotton or tobacco, or other such base things, contract that can be closed for short-term interest and dissolved at the pleasure of the parties... it will become a community not only among the living, but among the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. Any contract of any concrete State is only a component of the great original and eternal social contract, which connects the lower natures with the higher ones and unites the visible world with the invisible146... As the colonists rise up against you, the blacks rise up against you. do against them. Troops again: slaughter, torture, gallows! Those are your rights as men! These are the fruits of metaphysical statements, made hastily and shamefully disproved147... I will never regard any nation in Europe as secure as long as there exists at its center a State (if it can be called that) founded on the principles of anarchy, which in reality it is an association of armed fanatics for the propagation of the principles of murder, robbery, rebellion, fraud, intrigue, oppression and impiety»148. [Comparison with Muhammad.] “Yourdespots rule with terror. They know that whoever fears God fears nothing else, and for this reason - through their Voltaires, their Helvetius and the rest of that infamous gang - they eradicate from the human spirit the only kind of fear that generates true courage... The The new Parisian school of death and barbarism, which has destroyed all the customs and principles by which Europe has hitherto been civilized, will also destroy that civilized mode of warfare which, more than any other, has distinguished the Christian world. . Such is the approaching golden age that the Virgil of your assembly has sung to his Pollio!... The associations of tailors and carpenters of which the republic is made up (that of Paris, for example) cannot be equal to the situation in which you try to impose them by means of the worst of all usurpations, a usurpation of the prerogatives of nature»149. [Referring to Mirabeau's"Discourse on Universal Peace."] 4. Joseph de Maistre (