Walking the Tightrope

After the initial slow response to The Birth of Tragedy , Fritz was pleased overall with the more immediate reaction to his lectures on education and his first two essays. The polemic on Strauss had garnered much criticism, which - increasingly - came to validate to him his critique of the "pseudo-culture" of contemporary Germany. He humorously labeled his critics "ink- slingers " and "ignoramuses." ( Cate , page 182) He did accept certain criticisms as constructive, however. His long-time academic friend, Erwin Rohde , wrote regarding the piece on history that he failed to develop “his arguments sufficiently, leaving the puzzled reader ‘to find the bridges between your thoughts and your sentences’. He advised his friend to read ‘the finest’ English essayists; for, notwithstanding their ‘dreadful common sense style’, they marvelously understood ‘the difficult art of logical exposition without resort to peremptory insistence’.” (Cate, page 193) Nietzsche’s ...

During the final three months of 1873, Fritz suffered from acute, nauseating headaches. He spent one day out of every three in bed, with the curtains drawn, unable work, teach, read by lamplight, and often unable to write at all. Yet with the assistance of friends he was able to conceive of and largely dictate a new essay which went beyond anything he had written or lectured on to date. The result was " History in the Service and Disservice of Life ", a work which contained the embryonic elements of most of his future philosophical system. He began by proclaiming the fundamental importance of studying history – but only in the context of what it can do for culture in the present. “…we need history, but not in the way the pampered dilettante in the garden of knowledge, for all his elegant contempt for our coarse and graceless needs and wants, needs it. I mean, we need history for life and action, not for the smug evasion of life and action, or even to gloss a selfish life and ...