“Deep tension, stress, and illness, Nietzsche saw as preconditions for the activity of the mind. This should not be misconstrued as a ‘flight into illness’—as Nietzsche’s long, periodic bedridden spells and darkened chambers might suggest—but as a dangerous ‘experimental philosophy as I live it, even with the possibilities of the most thoroughgoing nihilism,’ for the sake of seeking knowledge.” – Siegfried Mandel
“[T]he total significance of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the historical battle between master and slave mentalities is nothing less than a radically simplified illustration of what transpires in the superior individual and what must split him into a sacrificial god and a sacrificial animal.” – Lou Salomé
I don’t know how it took 16 years of obsessing over Nietzsche and wishing I could read Lou Salomé’s thoughts on him to finally find out that she wrote an entire book on the man! And what a book it was! Damn, could she write! It was published in 1894, five years after Nietzsche’s collapse into madness and six years before his death. It gave me a whole new insight into his thoughts, philosophical transitions and the way he came to his psychological conclusions about human nature and philosophy. I read the Siegfried Mandel translation and his fabulous, in-depth introduction, contextualizing Nietzsche’s life and his relationship with his mother, sister, Paul Reé, the Wagners and of course Salomé herself.
What stands out for me the most in the book, and is at the core of it, is Salomé’s explanation of what Nietzsche meant by “What does not kill me makes me stronger” (or “…destroy me…”, as Mandel’s translation has it). I, like most, completely misunderstood it. First of all, he says “me” because he literally was referring to himself. It isn’t some absolutist claim that is meant to be applied to everyone. He was being as autobiographically pithy in a maxim as he possibly could be. Second of all, I always thought that, by “stronger,” he meant physically and emotionally stronger via overcoming (given overcoming is a cornerstone of Nietzschean thought), but that is completely wrong. What he meant by stronger was his strength (or sharpness) of mind, determination, intellectual thinking, life-affirmation and his assurance of immortalization through his ever-strengthening body of work. Salomé says that he took that maxim and “flagellated himself” with it, “not to the point of destruction or death but to a fever-pitch and a self-wounding he deemed necessary. This seeking of pain courses through the entire history of Nietzsche’s development and is its essential intellectual and spiritual source” (p. 14):
[H]is powerful nature was capable of self-healing and pulling things together, in the midst of pain and contradictions; healing was prompted by strivings for the ideals of knowledge. But after recovery was achieved, his nature inexorable again required suffering and battles, fever and wounds (p. 23).
Basically, he was constantly falling into sickly states. However, he did not allow them to be in vain. He’d use them to better understand himself and others in states of suffering, and in doing so, he’d be filled with the excitement brought on by new ideas, philosophical avenues and subterranean paths within his mind which he would have never discovered or ventured on otherwise. Salomé writes,
I recall something that Nietzsche told me which very appropriately expresses the joy that the seeker of knowledge takes in the vast breadth and depth of his nature; from it springs the desire to regard his life henceforth as “an experiment of the seeker of knowledge” (GS, 324). He said, “I resemble an old, weather-proof fortress which contains many hidden cellars and deeper hiding places; in my dark journeys, I have not yet crawled down into my subterranean chambers. Don’t they form the foundation for everything? Should I not climb up from my depths to all the surfaces of the earth? After every journey, should one not return to oneself?” (p. 22).
And so, by virtue of his new discoveries, he would begin intense contemplation of them, ceaselessly working through them in his writing, burning the candle at both ends, as he says in Ecce Homo (his autobiography), with his zeal and exuberance of life increasing and increasing as his inexorably ardent strength of will coursed through him and his mind soared heights he never could have imagined. And then, when the journey was over, out of sheer exhaustion, he would “return” to himself—and crash. He’d fall, bedridden, into severe migraines and fevers. He says in Ecce Homo that Human, All Too Human, which he says he wrote to help heal and overcome his sickly condition, was written between bouts of throwing up copious amounts of phlegm, which is the reason he had to write aphoristically, given he couldn’t write for very long periods of time, due to his horrible vomiting, migraines and eyesight. And then, in his newly sick feverish state (one bout almost killing him in 1879), new ideas would once again emerge, and it would all start all over again—a Nietzschean cycle.
And so, two things stand out emphatically: the close connection between the life of the mind and the life of the soul—the dependence of his intellect upon the needs and excitations of his interior being. And then the unique feature, that this close relatedness must always yield anew to suffering; the light of knowledge requires the high glow of the soul, each time. . . . suffering is natural and necessary to Nietzsche’s existence (p. 14).
Nietzsche believed, so says Salomé, that “a constant enduring and wounding may yield the greatest possession and creativity” (p. 18). This, she explains, is the crux of his view of “heroism as an ideal.” It is the demanding of more and more of oneself—no matter what the toll.
His illness necessitated taking himself as the material of his thought, as well as the submission of his self to a philosophical world-picture and the spinning out of it from his own inner being. If all this were otherwise, perhaps he would not have been able to accomplish things so individualistic and unique. And yet, one cannot help but look back with deep regret upon this turning point in Nietzsche’s fate and that uncanny compulsion toward self-isolation. One cannot escape the feeling that the greatness reserved for him passed him by (p. 56).
As is well known of Nietzsche and is intrinsic to his life and impassioned philosophy, “Instead of seeking to yoke his drives, he gives them all possible free rein; the broader the fields they explore with all their senses, the more they serve the individual’s purpose—a drive for knowledge” (pp. 19-20). It is this striving that would lead him to one new phase in his philosophy after another, which is why we have an early Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy), a middle Nietzsche (the one of positivism found in the works he published between 1878 and 1882) and a late Nietzsche (post-1882), from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards (the Nietzsche who turns his back on positivism and relies more on emotions, passions, sensations and instincts). “Nietzsche’s uniqueness later was marked by his taking problems almost exclusively from the inner world and subordinating logic to the psychological” (p. 33), hence so much of his influence on Freud, whom Salomé worked with and also wrote a book about, and the title of Kaufmann’s classic 1950 book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Salomé explains that:
For good reasons Nietzsche did not enter philosophy by way of abstract academic specializations; he pursued studies towards a deeper conception of the philosophic life and its innermost meaning. And if we wish to designate the goal intended by the peregrinations and battles of his insatiable spirit, we may not find a more appropriate phrase than his longing to discover “a new, and hitherto undiscovered possibility for the philosophical life” (HATH, 261) (p. 37).
And so, “Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge culminates in a kind of personal thrall in which the concepts of madness and truth are inextricably entwined” (p. 99).
I hadn’t realized just how thoroughly Nietzsche had ripped himself away from positivism in his works after The Gay Science, despite me having read and studied them all thoroughly on my own and at an undergraduate and then graduate level. Salomé allowed me to see that the superiority of the overman isn’t merely knowledge-seeking to the ultimate extreme, no. It is even beyond that. It is the creating and expanding of the very parameters and possibilities of knowledge itself. That is what makes the labyrinth of Zarathustra, the knocking down and vanquishing of all the limiting walls of human reason, logic and rationality, dissolving them into a philosophical and mystical realm of infinite horizons unlike which the world has ever known, without the need to have to turn to a nonexistent god in order to do so, for Nietzsche remained thoroughly atheistic till the very end. He always remained searching towards the truth, using everything at his disposal to head fearlessly towards it, not blindly clinging to that which wasn’t there in the hope of having found it, as with theism.
One thing that greatly surprised me and gave me much pause is that it turns out Nietzsche’s eternal return (or recurrence) was not merely a philosophical construct and existential experiment for him. He believed it to be a fact of reality and was planning on taking a break from writing, to study the natural sciences for ten years at the University of Vienna or Paris, in order to then prove to the world using science that the eternal return is the actual state of things (in modern terms that would mean the Big Crunch causing the Big Bang, like a snake biting its tail). His illness didn’t permit him to do that, however, and, at any rate, when he realized he wouldn’t be able to prove the eternal return on empirical grounds (using physics experiments, like he was planning on doing), he accepted it on mystical ones founded on “an inner inspiration—his own personal inspiration” (pp. 131-133), despite the fact that, given all his suffering in life, the eternal return was something unspeakably terrifying to him:
Unforgettable for me are those hours in which he first confided to me his secret, whose inevitable fulfillment and validation he anticipated with shudders. Only with a quiet voice and with all signs of deepest horror did he speak about this secret. Life, in fact, produced such suffering in him that the certainty of an eternal return of life had to mean something horrifying to him. The quintessence of the teaching of eternal recurrence, later constructed by Nietzsche as a shining apotheosis to life, formed such a deep contrast to his own painful feelings about life that it gives us intimations of being an uncanny mask (p. 130).
And it is also in Zarathustra, the harbinger of the eternal return, where, Salomé explains, we find the evidence that Nietzsche saw his madness coming and walked directly towards it. That is his infamous “abyss,” where no one else may pass and where Zarathustra would forever be alone. “Quite early Nietzsche had brooded over the meaning of madness as a possible source of knowledge and its inner sense that may have led the ancients to discern a sign of divine election” (p. 145), that is, someone severe and worthy enough to be esteemed, followed and exalted. And so he affirmed his own madness, willing it within the realm of amor fati.
The picture of madness stands at the end of Nietzsche’s philosophy, like a shrill and terrible illustration of theoretical knowledge and of the conclusions drawn from it for his philosophy of the future, because the point of departure is formed by dissolving everything intellectual and letting drive-like chaos dominate. Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge, however, goes beyond the decline of the knower and conceives a revelation by life, inoculated by madness . . .
Madness was to bear witness also to the power of life’s truth through whose brilliance the human spirit is blinded. For no power of reason leads into the depths of life in its fullness. It does not permit a climbing into its fullness step by step or thought by thought . . . (p. 150).
For us, the outsiders, we can see that from then on Nietzsche was shrouded in the total darkness of night; he stepped into the most individual life of his inner experience before which the ideas that had accompanied him had to come to a halt; a profound and shattering silence spreads over these matters. Not only can we no longer follow his spirit into the last transformation, which he achieves through self-sacrifice, but also we ought not follow it. For in this transformation Nietzsche found proof for his truth, which has become completely merged with all the secrets and seclusions of his inwardness. During his last loneliness, he has drawn away from us and has closed the gate behind him. At the gate’s entrance, however, these words radiate towards us: “‘What hitherto has been your ultimate danger has now become your ultimate refuge. You are on your way to greatness, and that must be of greatest courage to you because there is no path behind you! . . . Here no one may sneak after you! Your own foot has obliterated the path behind you, and above that path is written: Impossibility’” (“The Wanderer,” Z, III) (p. 151).
And so Nietzsche’s final phase was complete isolation and separation from the herd through madness, lost yet found inside his own mind, just as he predicted in his Zarathustra. And with that, he answered the very question he asked Salomé about his very mode of overcoming one realm of philosophy in order to embrace and explore new truths:
Speaking to Nietzsche about the changes that already lay behind him, I elicited from him remarks he made half in jest. “Yes, things take their course and continue to develop, but where to? When everything has taken its course—where does one run to then? When all possible combinations have been exhausted, what follows then? How would one then not arrive again in belief? Perhaps in a Catholic belief?” And from the backward hiding place of these assertions emerged the added, serious words: “In any case, the circle could be more plausible than a standing still” (p. 32).
