Walking the Tightrope

Lest we think that Nietzsche was so caught up with Becoming in the Now that he left himself ungrounded, Rudiger Safranski , as usual, offers an insightful but less considered influence during this period.   Nietzsche teaches "be truthful to the earth".   By this he means that metaphysics has its basis in tangible biology. “The metaphorical style of presentation in Zarathustra only hints at its biological contents.   In his notebooks from the period of Zarathustra , Nietzsche was more forthright.   He wrote that the 'goal' was the ‘evolution of the entire body and not just the brain’.   Overt references to the specifics of the physical evolution of man would have been ill-suited to the pathos of Zarathustra's speeches.   Ought Zarathustra to have said something about, for instance, the quantity of hair, musculature, arm length, or head size of the Übermensch ?   This would have been unintentionally comical.   In matters concerning the physical ap...

Even though, in my opinion, the Ubermensch and self-overcoming take center stage in Zarathustra , R. J. Hollingdale stresses the underlying importance of will to power and eternal recurrence throughout the work. “Between The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche arrived at the hypothesis that all actions are motivated by the desire for power. Employing Schopenhauer's terminology he called this principle the 'will to power', and by means of it he now tried to give a picture of a possible reality deprived of all metaphysical support. “The will to power is introduced in the chapter called 'Of the Thousand and One Goals' : hitherto there have been many peoples, consequently many 'goals' - i.e. moralities; the reason each people has had its own morality is that morality is will to power - not only power over others but more essentially power over oneself.” ( Hollingdale , page 158) This is echoed by Walter Kaufmann : “Nietzsche first speaks of t...

Note: As the heading of this post implies, this is the inspiration for the title of this blog. I had the tightrope walker of Zarathustra in mind when this attempt at philosophic biography began in 2008. For me, this singular metaphor represents, as much as any other possiblity, the essence of Nietzsche’s life and philosophy. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is different from most of Nietzsche’s previous philosophic works. For one thing it is presented in chapters, not in aphorisms. For another, like his series of lectures entitled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions back in 1872, it is a kind of parable, a story with fictitious characters used to metaphorically express his philosophy. It is not a detailed style of philosophic inquiry, as much of his earlier work. Nevertheless, various rational concepts are advocated, and contemporary European culture is critiqued and found irrelevant due to the “god is dead!” proclamation. It is noteworthy that Zarathustra himself is first mentioned ...

Fritz continued his nomadic lifestyle while completing Thus Spoke Zarathustra . In February 1883 he moved to Genoa where he stayed until May when he moved to Rome. This was followed by stays at Bellagio, Italy then at Sils-Maria in June. There he wrote Zarathustra Part II before going to Naumburg in September followed by Basel then back to Genoa by October. He wrote Part III in Genoa in January 1884. It was published in March. From April to June, Fritz lived in Nice for the first time. After a six-month circular 1884 journey that took him to Sils-Maria, Zurich, and Menton, France , Fritz returned to Nice at the beginning of 1885. He wrote Part IV at that time. The writing of Zarathustra obsessively consumed his life and, with each successive part, Nietzsche thought he had a completed the whole work. But, he kept adding new material from numerous journal entries he kept beginning in 1883, at one time considering a total work of half a dozen sections, but he ended with four. Part III...

“Nobody at this low point in his career, and probably not even Nietzsche – who felt that from the euphoric heights of Orta and the Monte sacro in early May he had been precipitated by mid-November to the dark depths of the ‘abyss’ – could guess that within a few weeks he would rebound and reach a new zenith in an astonishing ‘eruption’. But this is what happened. It was a triumph of will power, of Selbstuberwindung (self-overcoming), as he called it, and it offered dramatic proof that, as he had written Franz Overbeck, the ‘watch-spring’ of his overly tensed, ‘machine-like’ brain had not snapped and that he still possessed enough of the magic powers of the alchemist to be able to transform the ‘dung’ of misfortune into verbal ‘gold’. “Climatic factors again played a major role in this amazing resurgence. During the first two weeks of January 1883 Rapallo was so lashed by wintry gales and rain that never in his life had Nietzsche felt so frozen as in his small, seaside albergo . H...

“From Leipzig, where the first wintry snows were already falling, Nietzsche took the train to Basel, to ‘help’ Franz Overbeck celebrate his forty-fifth birthday on 16 November. He told his Basel hosts that his ‘idyll’ with Lou Salomé was finished, without explaining what had gone wrong. Lou’s health was so fragile – like his own – that she was as ill-suited to look after him as he was to take care of her. ‘Now I am going into complete solitude,’ he had abandoned as hopeless his short-lived endeavor to ‘return to the world of men.’ “If Nietzsche heard the nasty rumor that was already circulating in Basel’s academic circles – about the ‘mistress’ he had brought back from Italy and whom he had been ‘sharing’ with a friend of his in Leipzig – it was certainly not from the Overbecks. But what infuriated Nietzsche was to discover that his sister Elisabeth, in her righteous zeal as the self-appointed guardian and preserver of her brother’s ‘sullied reputation’, had taken it upon herself to ‘s...

So, for a few days after Tautenburg, Fritz was alone with his mother in the family’s Naumberg home. By this time he had apparently completed putting Lou’s ‘A Prayer to Life’ to music. He probably played his composition for his mother on the family piano. Franziska probably took some interest. This was the first new music from her son since a piano duet he composed as a wedding gift for a lady friend in early 1873. Nine years had passed.  It was good to hear him being musically creative again. For the sake of propriety, Fritz told his mother his time in Tautenburg was spent with Elizabeth and a prospective pupil. It was a complete charade. Fritz loved his mother as dearly as his sister, who he was upset with at the moment. During these days, he doubtlessly considered how to “pitch” the (in his mind) pending intellectual threesome to his mother, so Christian she had married the minister that fathered him. Of course, Fritz’s mother, Franziska, loved her son too. She felt he was...