The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Friedrich Nietzsche's Personality and Psycho-pathology

[ 1 ] "Just as the psychological processes go parallel to the brain's excitations, physiological psychology goes parallel to brain physiology. Where the latter does not yet offer sufficient insight, physiological psychology may provisionally investigate the psychic phenomena purely as such, but always guided by the thought that for these psychic phenomena, too, at least the possibility of a parallelism to cerebral processes must be demonstrated." Even if one does not necessarily subscribe to this sentence by Theodor Ziehen (cf. his "Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie", p. 2), one must admit that it has proven to be extraordinarily fruitful for the method of psychology. Under the influence of the view which he expresses, this science has arrived at truly scientific findings. But one must also be aware of the significant light that the observation of pathological phenomena of the soul throws on the connection between psychological phenomena and the corresponding physiological processes. The pathological experiment has rendered the greatest service to both psychology and physiology. The abnormal facts of mental life enlighten us about the normal ones. However, it must seem particularly important to follow the abnormal phenomena into the areas in which the activity of the soul increases to the highest mental achievements.

[ 2 ] A personality such as Nietzsche's offers special points of reference for such an examination. A morbid core in his personality prompted him again and again to go back to the physiological basis of his ideas. He alternately struck all tones, from poetic diction to the highest peaks of conceptual abstraction. He speaks out with all acuity about how his way of imagining is connected with his physical states. "In 1879 I resigned my professorship in Basel, lived like a shadow in St. Moritz for the summer and the next winter, the sunniest of my life, as a shadow in Naumburg. This was my minimum. In my thirty-sixth year I reached the lowest point of my vitality - I was still alive, but without being able to see three steps ahead of me. 9The Wanderer and his Shadow: was created during this time. Undoubtedly, I understood shadows back then ... The following winter, my first Genoese winter, that sweetening and spiritualization, which is almost conditioned by an extreme poverty of blood and muscle, gave birth to the 9Morning blush. The perfect brightness and serenity, even exuberance of spirit, which the said work reflects, is not only compatible in me with the deepest physiological weakness, but even with an excess of pain." "In the midst of the torments brought on by three days of uninterrupted brain pain and laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectical clarity par excellence and thought things through very cold-bloodedly for which, in healthier circumstances, I am not a climber, not refined, not cold enough. My readers may know to what extent I regard dialectics as symptoms of decadence, for example in the most famous case: the case of Socrates." - (Cf. M. G. Conrad: "Ketzerblut", p. 186, and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche: "Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches" II, I, p.328.)

[ 3 ] Nietzsche regards the change of his modes of conception almost as the result of the variability in his physical states. "A philosopher who has gone through many states of health and continues to do so has also gone through just as many philosophies: he cannot help but transform his state each time into the most spiritual form and distance - this art of transfiguration is philosophy." (Works, Volume V, p.8.) In his memoirs "Ecce homo", written in 888, Nietzsche speaks of how his illness gave him the impetus to develop an optimistic view of the world: "For take heed: the years of my lowest vitality were when I stopped being a pessimist: the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement." (Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, "The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche" II, I. p. 338f)

[ 4 ] The most contradictory aspects of Nietzsche's world of ideas appear comprehensible from this point of view. His physical nature moved in contradictions. "For one has, provided that one is a person, necessarily also the philosophy of one's person: but there is a considerable difference. With the one it is his defects that philosophize, with the other his riches and powers." (Works, Volume V, p.5.) With Nietzsche himself it is alternately the one and the other. As long as he was in full possession of his youthful strength, he took the "pessimism of the nineteenth century as a symptom of a higher power of thought, of a victorious fullness of life"; he took the tragic knowledge that he found in Schopenhauer as "the most beautiful luxury of our culture, as its most precious, most noble, most dangerous kind of waste, but nevertheless, due to its abundance, as its permitted luxury." He could no longer see such a permitted luxury in the tragic realization when the morbid got the upper hand in his life. That is why he now created a philosophy of the highest possible affirmation of life. He now needed a world view of "self-affirmation, self-glorification", a master morality; he needed the philosophy of the "Eternal Return". "I shall come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent - not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: - I shall come again eternally to this same and blessed life, in the greatest and also in the smallest." - "For the earth is a table of the gods, and trembling with creative new words and gods' throws: 0, how should I not be eager for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings, - the ring of the Second Coming?" ("Zarathustra", III. T.) The uncertain information we have about Nietzsche's ancestors unfortunately makes a satisfactory judgment about how much of Nietzsche's spiritual peculiarity is due to inheritance impossible. It has often been wrongly pointed out that his father died of a brain disease. He only contracted the disease after Nietzsche's birth as a result of an accident. However, it seems not unimportant that Nietzsche himself points to a morbid element in his father. "My father died at the age of thirty-six: he was tender, amiable and morbid, like a being destined only to pass, - more a kindly reminder of life than life itself." -(M. G. Conrad, "Ketzerblut", p. 179.) When Nietzsche speaks of something decadent living in him alongside something healthy, he himself evidently thinks of deriving the former from his father, the latter from his mother, who was a perfectly healthy woman.

[ 5 ] In Nietzsche's mental life there are a number of traits bordering on the pathological, reminiscent of Heinrich Heine and Leopardi, who also have much in common with him in other respects. Heine was tormented from a young age by the darkest melancholia, suffered from dream-like states; and later he also knew how to draw ideas from the most miserable physical condition, from increasing infirmity, which are not far removed from those of Nietzsche. Indeed, one finds in Heine a forerunner of Nietzsche in terms of the juxtaposition of an Apollonian or calmly contemplative view of life (cf. "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psycho-Pathological Problem", above, p.127) and a Dionysian-dithyrambic affirmation of life. And Heine's spiritual life also remains inexplicable from a psychological point of view if one does not take into account the pathological core in his nature, which he inherited from his father, who was a degenerative personality that crept through life like a shadow.

[ 6 ] The similarities in the physiological characters of Leopardi and Nietzsche are particularly striking. The same sensitivity to weather and season, place and environment is found in both. Leopardi sensed the slightest changes in thermometer and barometer readings. He could only produce in summer; he moved around, always looking for the most suitable place for his work. Nietzsche speaks about such peculiarities of his nature in the following way: "Now that I read the effects of climatic and meteorological origins from long practice on myself as on a very fine and reliable instrument and, on a short journey already, say from Turin to Milan, physiologically calculate the change in the degrees of humidity on me, I think with horror of the uncanny fact that my life, except for the last ten years, the life-threatening years, has always taken place only in wrong and to me downright forbidden places. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia in general, Leipzig, Base], Venice - just as many places of misfortune for my physiology ..." For both Leopardi and Nietzsche, this extraordinary sensitivity is linked to a disregard for all altruistic feelings. For both of them, enduring people is part of the overcoming. From Nietzsche's own words we can see that his fear of strong impressions before traveling, which are too much for his sensitivity, instills in him a distrust of selfless instincts. He says: "I reproach the compassionate that they easily lose their shame, their reverence, their delicacy before distances." For Leopardi, too, it was certain that it was rare to find a tolerable person; he confronted misery with irony and bitterness, as Nietzsche made it his principle: "The weak and the wayward shall perish: first sentence of our philanthropy. And they should also be helped." (Works, Volume VIII, p 218.) Nietzsche says of life that it is "essentially appropriation, violation, overpowering of the alien and the weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at the mildest, exploitation". ("Beyond Good and Evil", § 259.) Likewise, for Leopardi, life is an incessant, terrible struggle in which the one crushes the other.

[ 7 ] The extent to which both of these thoughts are pathological is evident from the completely irrational way in which they come about. They are not driven to the idea of the struggle for existence by logical considerations, such as the national economist Malthus and the philosopher Hobbes, or by careful observations such as Darwin, but by the highly heightened sensitivity mentioned above, which is the cause that every external stimulus is answered as a hostile intervention with a violent defensive effect. This can be clearly demonstrated in Nietzsche. He finds the idea of the struggle for existence in Darwin. He does not reject it; but he reinterprets it in a way that corresponds to his heightened sensibility: "Assuming, however, that this struggle exists - and indeed it does occur - it unfortunately turns out the other way round than the school of Darwin wishes, than one might wish with it: namely to the disadvantage of the strong, the privileged, the happy exceptions. Species do not grow in perfection: the weak always become masters over the strong, - that makes, they are the great number, they are also smarter ... Darwin forgot the spirit (- that's English!), the weak have more spirit ... He who has the strength renounces the spirit." (Works, Volume VIII. p.128.)

[ 8 ] To a certain extent, there is no doubt that heightened sensitivity and the urge to direct one's observations preferably towards one's own personality are mutually dependent. All-round healthy and harmonious natures such as Goethe, for example, even find something questionable in extensive self-observation. Goethe's view is in complete contrast to Nietzsche's way of thinking: "If we take the important word: know thyself, we do not have to interpret it in an ascetic sense. It does not mean the heautognosy of our modern hypochondriacs, humorists and heautontimorumenes; it simply means: pay some attention to yourself, take note of yourself, so that you become aware of how you stand in relation to your peers and the world. No psychological torture is needed for this; every capable person knows and experiences what it means; it is good advice that is of the greatest practical benefit to everyone ... How can we get to know each other? Never by observation, but by action. Try to do your duty, and you will immediately know what is in you." We now know that Goethe also possessed a fine sensibility. But he also possessed the necessary counterbalance: the ability that he himself described most aptly in relation to others in a conversation with Eckermann on 20 December I 829: "The extraordinary things that excellent talents achieve require a very delicate organization so that they may be capable of rare sensations... may be. Now such an organization is easily disturbed and injured in conflict with the world and the elements, and he who does not, like Voltaire, combine with great sensibility an extraordinary toughness, is easily subject to continued sickliness." Natures like Nietzsche and Leopardi lack this toughness. They would lose themselves completely to their impressions, to the stimuli exerted on them, if they did not artificially close themselves off from the outside world, indeed, if they did not confront it with hostility. Compare the overcoming that Nietzsche needed in dealing with people with Goethe's pleasure in this contact, which he describes with the words: "Sociability was in my nature; that is why, in many undertakings, I gained associates for myself and made myself their associate and thus achieved the happiness of seeing myself live on in them and them in me."

II

[ 9 ] A highly conspicuous phenomenon in Nietzsche's intellectual life is the doubling of self-consciousness, which is always latent in his work, but at times emerges clearly. The "two souls dwell, alas! in my breast" borders on the pathological in his case. He cannot bring about a balance between the "two souls". His polemics can hardly be understood in any other way than from this point of view. He almost never really hits his opponent with his judgments. He first constructs what he wants to attack in the strangest way and then fights against a delusion that is very far removed from reality. You only understand this when you consider that he is basically never fighting against an external enemy, but against himself. And he fights most fiercely when he himself has at some other time stood on the standpoint that he sees as the enemy's, or at least when this standpoint plays a decisive role in his mental life. His campaign against Wagner is only a campaign against himself. At a time when he was being tossed back and forth between conflicting circles of ideas, he half-involuntarily aligned himself with Wagner. He became personal friends with him. Wagner grew immeasurably in his eyes. He calls him his "Jupiter", at whom he breathes a sigh of relief from time to time: "A fruitful, rich, shattering life, quite different and unheard of among middle mortals! That is why he stands there, firmly rooted by his own strength, with his gaze always above and beyond everything ephemeral, and untimely in the most beautiful sense." (E. Förster-Nietzsche, "Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches", II, I, p. 16.) Nietzsche now formed a philosophy within himself that he could say was completely in line with Wagner's artistic direction and view of life. He identified completely with Wagner. He regarded him as the first great innovator of tragic culture, which had once experienced a significant beginning in ancient Greece, but which is said to have been pushed back by the clever intellectual wisdom of Socrates and the one-sidedness of Plato and only experienced a short-lived revival in the age of the Renaissance. What he believes to have recognized as Wagner's mission, Nietzsche makes the content of his own work. In his "Nachgelassene Schriften", however, one can see how he completely represses his second self under the influence of Wagner. Within these writings, there are statements from the time before and while his enthusiasm for Wagner, which move in the completely opposite direction of feeling and thinking. Nevertheless, he forms an ideal image of Wagner that does not live in reality, but only in his imagination. And his ego is completely absorbed in this ideal image. Later, the circles of imagination appear in this ego, which form the contrast to Wagner's way of looking at things. He now becomes, in the true sense of the word, the fiercest opponent of his own world of thought. For he is not fighting the Wagner of reality; he is fighting the image he had previously formed of Wagner. His passion, his injustice, is only understandable when one sees how he becomes so fierce because he is fighting something that he himself believes has ruined him, that has led him astray from his true path. Had he, like another of Wagner's contemporaries, trained this objectively determined time. He says: "Turning my back on Wagner was a fate for me; to like something again afterwards was a victory. Perhaps no one was more dangerously attached to Wagnerianism, no one fought harder against it, no one was happier to be free of it. A long story! - Do you want a word for it? - If I were a moralist, who knows what I would call it! Perhaps self-conquest. - What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time within himself, to become "timeless". With what, then, does he have to pass his hardest test? With that in which he is the child of his time. So long! I am as much the child of this time as Wagner, that is to say a décadent: only that I understood this, only that I resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted it." (Werke, vol. VIII, 5. ,.), he might have become its opponent later on. But he would have approached the whole matter in a calmer, more coolly considered manner. He also realizes that he does not want to get away from Wagner, but only from his own "I", as it is expressed in a

[ 10 ] He expresses even more clearly in the following words how he felt the division of his ego and the sudden contrast between the worlds of thought in his consciousness: "He who attacks his time can only attack himself: what can he see if not himself? In the same way, one can only glorify oneself in the other. Self-destruction, self-idolatry, self-contempt - that is our judging, loving, hating." (Works, Volume XI, p.92.)

[ 11 ] In the fall of 1888, Nietzsche could no longer come to terms with the content of his essay "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" other than to say that he had not meant Wagner at all, but himself. "A psychologist might add that what I heard in Wagnerian music when I was young has nothing at all to do with Wagner; that when I described Dionysian music, I was describing what I had heard - that I instinctively had to translate and transfigure everything into the new spirit that I carried within me. The proof of this, as strong as proof can be, is my writing 9Wagner in Bayreuth:: in all psychologically crucial places, only I am mentioned, - one may ruthlessly put my name or the word 9Zarathustra: where the text gives the word Wagner. The whole image of the dithyrambic artist is the image of the pre-existent poet of 9Zarathustra:, drawn with abysmal depth and without even touching Wagner's reality for a moment. Wagner himself had a concept of it; he did not recognize himself in the writing." (E. Förster-Nietzsche, "The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche", II, 1, p.259.)

[ 12 ] Nietzsche almost always fights against himself wherever he fights. When he fought fiercely against philology in the early days of his literary career, it was the philologist in him that he fought against, this excellent philologist who had already been appointed university professor before taking his doctorate. When he began his fight against ideals in 1876, he had his own idealism in mind. And when, at the end of his writing career, he wrote his unprecedentedly violent "Antichrist", it was again nothing other than the secret Christianity within himself that challenged him. He did not have to fight a particular battle within himself to get away from Christianity. But he only got away with reason, with one side of his nature; with his heart, with his emotional world, in his practical way of life, he remained faithful to Christian ideas. He acted as the most passionate opponent of one side of his own nature. "One must have seen the doom from close up, even better, one must have experienced it oneself, one must have almost perished from it, in order not to understand any more fun here, the free-spiritedness of our gentlemen natural scientists and physiologists is in my eyes a fun - they lack the passion in these things, the suffering from them." The conclusion of a poem from the summer of 1888, shortly before the catastrophe, shows how Nietzsche felt the conflict within himself and how he felt powerless to balance the various forces within him in a unity of consciousness:

"Now—
between two nothingnesses
curved in,
a question mark,
a tired riddle—
a riddle for birds of prey...
—they will already 'solve' you,
they are already hungry for your 'solution',
they are already fluttering around you, their riddle,
around you, hanged man! ...
Oh Zarathustra!
Self-knower!
Self-knower."

(Works, Volume VIII, p. 369)

[ 13 ] This uncertainty about himself is also expressed in Nietzsche's reinterpretation of his entire development at the end of his career. His world view has one of its sources in Greek antiquity. It can be seen everywhere in his writings how great an influence the Greeks had on him. He never tired of emphasizing the greatness of Greek culture. In 1875 he wrote: "The Greeks are the only people of genius in the history of the world; they are also the best learners, they understand this best and do not merely know how to decorate and polish what they have borrowed, as the Romans do." Genius makes all semi-talented people subject to tribute: the Persians themselves sent their legations to the Greek oracles. - How the Romans stand out by their dry earnestness against the ingenious Greeks!" (Werke, Vol. X, 5.352.) And what beautiful words he found in 1873 for the first Greek philosophers: "Every nation is put to shame when one points to such a wonderfully idealized society of philosophers as that of the ancient Greek masters Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and Socrates. All these men are hewn entirely from one stone. There is a strict necessity between their thinking and their character ... Thus together they form what Schopenhauer, in contrast to the republic of scholars, called a republic of geniuses: one giant calls out to the other through the barren interstices of time, and undisturbed by wanton, noisy gnomes crawling away among them, the high conversation of minds continues... The very first experience of philosophy on Greek soil, the sanction of the seven wise men, is a clear and unforgettable line in the image of the Hellenic. Other peoples have saints, the Greeks have sages ... The judgment of those philosophers about life and existence in general says so much more than a modern judgment, because they had life before them in a luxuriant perfection, and because with them, unlike with us, the feeling of the thinker is not confused in the dichotomy of the desire for freedom, beauty, greatness of life and the drive for truth, which only asks: what is life worth at all?" (Werke, Vol. X, 5. 7ff.) Nietzsche always had this Greek sage before his eyes as an ideal; he sought to equal him with one side of his being; but with the other he denies him. In "Götzen-Dämmerung" (1888) (Works, Volume VIII, p.167), after describing what he wants to owe to the Romans, we read: "I owe the Greeks absolutely no related strong impressions; and, to put it bluntly, they cannot be to us what the Romans are. One does not learn from the Greeks - their manner is too foreign, it is also too fluid to be imperative, to be 9classical. Who would ever have learned to write from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans! ... The splendidly supple corporeality, the daring realism and immoralism that is characteristic of the Hellenes was a necessity, not a 9nature:. It followed, it was not there from the beginning. And with festivals and arts they wanted nothing more than to feel on top, to show themselves on top: they are means of glorifying themselves, of making themselves fearful under certain circumstances... Judging the Greeks in the German manner according to their philosophers, using the bourgeoisie of the Socratic schools, for example, to find out what is basically Hellenic.... The philosophers are, after all, the decadents of Greekness ..."

[ 14 ] One will only gain full clarity about some of Nietzsche's statements if one combines the fact that his philosophical thoughts are based on self-observation with the fact that this self was not harmonious in itself, but fragmented. He also brought this fragmentation into his explanation of the world. With regard to himself he could say: "Must we not admit to ourselves, we artists, that there is an uncanny diversity in us, that our taste and, on the other hand, our creative power stand for themselves in a strange way, remain standing for themselves and have a growth for themselves, - I mean to say, quite different degrees and tempos of old, young, mature, mellow, lazy? So that, for example, a musician could create things throughout his life that contradict what his spoiled listener's ear, listener's heart appreciates, tastes, prefers: - he did not even need to know about this contradiction!" (Works, Volume V, p.323.) This is an explanation of the artist's nature formed according to Nietzsche's own nature. We encounter a similar one in all of his writings.

[ 15 ] There is no doubt that in some cases one goes too far when one connects phenomena of mental life with pathological concepts; in the case of a personality like Nietzsche, it is evident that the world view can only be fully explained through such a connection. As useful as it may be in some respects to hold on to Dilthey's sentence ("Dichterische Einbildungskraft und Wahnsinn", Leipzig 1886): "Genius is not a pathological phenomenon, but the healthy, the perfect human being", it would be a mistake to cut off any such consideration, as has been provided here about Nietzsche, by such a dogma.