Walking the Tightrope

In the spirit of “eternal recurrence,” it seems fitting to follow the account of Nietzsche’s death with a look back at his youth.  The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche , written by Daniel Blue , was published in 2016.  It offers many insights into Nietzsche’s student years prior to his professorship at Basel.  Most of this information was previously unavailable to me when I started this philosophical biography back in 2008.  As such, it is a welcome resource peering into the formative years of his mind and personality. For all the discuss ion about the impact that the death of Nietzsche’s father had on his youth, Blue reveals that Nietzsche, being so young, barely knew his father.  The larger impact was made by the expectations Nietzsche’s family placed upon him in light of his father’s religious calling.  More specifically, it was Nietzsche’s mother who impacted his preschool youth more than any other singular force.  Blue’s discussion of this reveals ...

“For meanwhile the tightrope walker had begun his performance: he had stepped out of a small door and was walking across the rope, stretched between two towers, suspended over the street and the people. When he reached the middle of his course the small door opened once more and a fellow in motley clothes, looking like a jester, jumped out and followed the first one in quick steps.  “...he uttered a devilish cry and jumped over the man who stood in his way. This man, however, seeing his rival win, lost his head and the rope, tossed away his pole, and plunged into the depth even faster, a whirlpool of arms and legs.” ( Zarathustra , Prologue, 6)  “The examination at Jena was essentially similar to Basel, although there are more technical details of the examination given which add little to the total picture. A 'scar' on the penis was noted which had been taken by some to indicate prior syphilis although this is a totally unjustifiable assumption. The papillary asymmetri...

“On his 44th birthday (the 15th October) he wrote the short passage ’An diesem vollkommnen Tage’ which he placed between the Forward and the first chapter of Ecce Homo and which is in its exalted cheerfulness the most pathetic in his works:  ‘”On this perfect day, when everything has become ripe and not only the grapes are growing brown, a ray of sunlight has fallen on to my life: I looked behind me, I looked before me, and never have I seen so many and such good things together.  Not in vain have I buried my forty-fourth year today, I was entitled to bury it – what there was of life in it is rescued, is immortal.’” ( Hollingdale , page 194) Without question, while there are flashes of brilliance, the major works of 1888 are collectively of a different taste than his writings up through the Genealogy . One great controversy about Nietzsche pertains to exactly when his mental capacities were affected by his approaching insanity.  Was it a completely sudden occurrenc...

Note: The following excerpts are taken from Chapter 10 of Leslie Chamberlain's Nietzsche in Turin , which I have referenced before.  In this chapter, Chamberlain addresses the onset of Nietzsche's madness and specifically his Dionysus Dithyrambs - the final poems of his life. It affords us a glimpse into the intimate state of Nietzsche's mental decline with appropriate emphasis upon the neurotic obsession for all things associated with Richard Wagner that haunted Nietzsche's final semi-lucid days. It also serves to illuminate Nietzsche's (self-denied) mediocrity as a poet, his intensely felt isolation, his personal affinity (elevated valuation) for ancient Greek culture, and is additionally a reflection of Nietzsche's continuing undercurrent of eroticism. "Nietzsche's art, which had become the art of life, fought a tremendous battle with sickness.  He was like the outcast Trojan priest Laocoon , resisting the punishing sea serpents to the last breath...

The subtitle to Nietzsche's autobiographical work is “How One Becomes What One Is.”  It tells, in often satirical fashion, the story of Nietzsche's philosophical journey; the twists and turns, the mistakes and breakthroughs, that led him to write his 'great task' though, of course, he only completed the first part of the revaluation project.  The rest of it never came to fruition, buried as scattered and unripe thoughts and fragments captured in his private notebooks. These selections from the work should suffice to give readers unfamiliar with Ecce Homo a taste of its potent prose. “The last thing I would promise would be to 'improve' mankind.  I erect no new idols; let the old idols learn what it means to have legs of clay.   To overthrow idols (my word for ideals) – that is rather my business. Reality has been deprived of its value, its meaning, its veracity to the same degree as an ideal world has been fabricated ...The 'real world' and the ...