- from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For Everyone And No One by Friedrich Nietzsche (Translated with an Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale); p. 81 [[ZARATHUSTRA’S DISCOURSES (Of Chastity)]: I love the forest. It is bad to live in towns: too many of the lustful live there . . .
Do I exhort you to kill your senses? I exhort you to an innocence of the senses.
Do I exhort you to chastity? With some, chastity is a virtue, but with many it is almost a vice.
These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.
This restless beast follows them even into the heights of their virtue and the depths of their cold spirit.
And how nicely the bitch Sensuality knows how to beg for a piece of spirit, when a piece of flesh is denied her.
Do you love tragedies and all that is heartbreaking? But I mistrust your bitch Sensuality.
Your eyes are too cruel for me; you look upon sufferers lustfully. Has your lasciviousness not merely disguised itself and called itself pity?
And I offer you this parable: Not a few who sought to drive out their devil entered into the swine themselves.
Those to whom chastity is difficult should be dissuaded from it, lest it become the way to Hell – that is, to filth and lust of the soul.
- pp. 78-79 [ZARATHUSTRA’S DISCOURSES (Of the Flies of the Market-place)]: Where solitude ceases, there the market-place begins; and where the market-place begins, there begins the uproar of the great actors and the buzzing of the poisonous flies.
In the world even the best things are worthless apart from him who first presents them: people call these presenters ‘great men’.
The people have little idea of greatness, that is to say: creativeness. But they have a taste for all presenters and actors of great things.
The world revolves about the inventor of new values: imperceptibly it revolves. But the people and the glory revolve around the actor: that is ‘the way of the world’.
The actor possesses spirit but little conscience of the spirit. He always believes in that with which he most powerfully produces belief – produces belief in himself!
Tomorrow he will have a new faith and the day after tomorrow a newer one. He has a quick perception, as the people have, and a capricious temperament.
To overthrow – to him that means: to prove. To drive frantic – to him that means: to convince. And blood is to him the best of all arguments.
A truth that penetrates only sensitive ears he calls a lie and a thing of nothing. Truly, he believes only in gods who make a great noise in the world!
The market-place is full of solemn buffoons – and the people boast of their great men! These are the heroes of the hour.
But the hour presses them: so they press you. And from you too they require a Yes or a No. And woe to you if you want to set your chair between For and Against.
Do not be jealous, lover of truth, because of these inflexible and oppressive men! Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man.
Return to your security because of these abrupt men: only in the market-place is one assailed with Yes? or No?
The experience of all deep wells is slow: they must wait long until they know what has fallen into their depths.
All great things occur away from glory and the market-place: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the market-place.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung by poisonous flies. Flee to where the raw, rough breeze blows!
- p. 80: They think about you a great deal with their narrow souls – you are always suspicious to them. Everything that is thought about a great deal is finally thought suspicious.
They punish you for all your virtues. Fundamentally they forgive you only – your mistakes.
- from THE UNTOUCHED KEY: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness by Alice Miller; pp. 99-110 [PART TWO—Friedrich Nietzsche: The Struggle Against the Truth (A Mistreated Child, a Brilliant Mind, and Eleven Years of Darkness)]:
FASCISM (The Blond Beast)
It is not my intention here to explain Nietzsche’s life in terms of his childhood but rather to understand the function of his philosophy in his struggle against the pain stemming from his childhood. His formative experience consisted in contempt for the weak and obedience toward those wielding power. This seemingly innocuous combination, familiar to so many of us from childhood, is the nucleus of every fascist ideology. As a result of having been treated brutally in childhood, fascists of whatever stamp will blindly accept their leader and treat those weaker than themselves brutally. The fact that this behavior can be accompanied by a longing for the release of creative powers that the methods of “poisonous pedagogy” suppress in every child is to be seen very plainly in Nietzsche and others and also in certain statements by C. G. Jung. The human being’s need to live and to be allowed to develop freely is coupled with the former persecutor’s introjected voice. Just as the child’s cries were once smothered by the principles of “poisonous pedagogy,” so too the call to life is smothered by the brutality of fascism. The introjected system allies itself with the child’s own wishes and leads to destructive ideologies that can have a fascination for anyone who experienced a cruel upbringing. Thus, it is not Nietzsche’s writings that are dangerous but the child-rearing system of which he and his readers were the product. The Nazis were able to transform what seemed to be his life-affirming philosophy into a death-affirming ideology because it was never in its essence separate from death.
It is not by chance that Thus Spake Zarathustra became Nietzche’s most famous work, for his puzzled readers at least found in Zarathustra’s way of speaking a frame of reference familiar to them since childhood: the rhetorical style of the preacher. How familiar, too, although clothed in novel words, was the struggle for life in the face of the deadening requirement to be obedient. Again and again Nietzsche circles around this dichotomy.
I pursued the living; I walked the widest and the narrowest paths that I might know its nature. With a hundredfold mirror I still caught its glance when its mouth was closed, so that its eyes might speak to me. And its eyes spoke to me. [Italics mine]
But wherever I found the living, there I heard also the speech on obedience. Whatever lives, obeys. [Italics mine]
And this is the second point: he who cannot obey himself is commanded. That is the nature of the living.
This, however, is the third point that I heard: that commanding is harder than obeying; and not only because he who commands must carry the burden of all who obey, and because this burden may easily crush him. An experiment and hazard appeared to me to be in all commanding; and whenever the living commands, it hazards itself. Indeed, even when it commands itself, it must still pay for its commanding. It must become the judge, the avenger, and the victim of its own law. How does this happen? I asked myself. What persuades the living to obey and command, and to practice obedience even when it commands? . . .
And life itself confided this secret to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this is one, and one secret.
“Rather would I perish than forswear this; and verily, where there is perishing and a falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—for power. That I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends—alas, whoever guesses what is my will should also guess on what crooked paths it must proceed.
“Whatever I create and however much I love it—soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it. And you too, lover of knowledge, are only a path and footprint of my will; verily, my will to power walks also on the heels of your will to truth.
“Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the ‘will to existence’: that will does not exist. For, what does not exist cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still want existence? Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but—thus I teach you—will to power.
“There is much that life esteems more highly than life itself; but out of the esteeming itself speaks the will to power.”
Thus life once taught me; and with this I shall yet solve the riddle of your heart, you who are wisest.
Verily, I say unto you: good and evil that are not transitory, do not exist. Driven on by themselves, they must overcome themselves again and again. With your values and words of good and evil you do violence when you value; and this is your hidden love and the splendor and trembling and overflowing of your soul. But a more violent force and a new overcoming grow out of your values and break egg and eggshell.
And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.
Let us speak of this, you who are wisest, even if it be bad. Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous. [Italics mine]
And may everything be broken that cannot brook our truths! There are yet many houses to be built!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
How wicked and hard a child must feel who remains true to himself and does not betray what he perceives and sees. How difficult and at the same time how essential it is to be able to say no.
With the storm that is called “spirit” I blew over your wavy sea; I blew all clouds away; I even strangled the strangler that is called “sin.”
O my soul, I gave you the right to say No like the storm, and to say Yes as the clear sky says Yes: now you are still as light whether you stand or walk through storms of negation. [Italics mine]
O my soul, I gave you back the freedom over the created and uncreated; and who knows, as you know, the voluptuous delight of what is yet to come?
O my soul, I taught you the contempt that does not come like the worm’s gnawing, the great, the loving contempt that loves most where it despises most. [Italics mine]
O my soul, I taught you to persuade so well that you persuade the very ground—like the sun who persuades even the sea to his own height.
O my soul, I took from you all obeying, knee-bending, and “Lord”-saying; I myself gave you the name “cessation of need” and “destiny.”
But the life the child seeks is fraught with danger, the loveliest fantasies dimmed by early experiences and threats.
My heels twitched, then my toes hearkened to understand you, and rose: for the dancer has his ear in his toes.
I leaped toward you, but you fled back from my leap, and the tongue of your fleeing, flying hair licked me in its sweep.
Away from you I leaped, and from your serpents’ ire; and already you stood there, half turned, your eyes full of desire.
With crooked glances you teach me—crooked ways; on crooked ways my foot learns treachery. [Italics mine]
I fear you near, I love you far; your flight lures me, your seeking cures me: I suffer, but what would I not gladly suffer for you?
You, whose coldness fires, whose hatred seduces, whose flight binds, whose scorn inspires:
Who would not hate you, you great binder, entwiner, temptress, seeker, and finder? Who would not love you, you innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner? [Italics mine]
Whereto are you luring me now, you never-tame extreme? And now you are fleeing from me again, you sweet wildcat and ingrate!
I dance after you, I follow wherever your traces linger. Where are you? Give me your hand! Or only one finger!
Here are caves and thickets; we shall get lost. Stop! Stand still! Don’t you see owls and bats whirring past?
You owl! You bat! Intent to confound! Where are we? Such howling and yelping you have learned from a hound.
Your lovely little white teeth are gnashing at me; out of a curly little mane your evil eyes are flashing at me.
That is a dance up high and down low: I am the hunter; would you be my dog or my doe?
Alongside me now! And swift, you malicious leaping belle! Now up and over there! Alas, as I leaped I fell.
Oh, see me lying there, you prankster, suing for grace. I should like to walk with you in a lovelier place.
Love’s paths through silent bushes, past many-hued plants. Or there along that lake: there goldfish swim and dance.
You are weary now? Over there are sunsets and sheep: when shepherds play on their flutes—is it not lovely to sleep?
You are so terribly weary? I’ll carry you there; just let your arms sink. And if you are thirsty—I have got something, but your mouth does not want it to drink.
Oh, this damned nimble, supple snake and slippery witch! Where are you? In my face two red blotches from your hand itch.
I am verily weary of always being your sheepish shepherd. You witch, if I have so far sung to you, now you shall cry.
Keeping time with my whip, you shall dance and cry! Or have I forgotten the whip? Not I!
It is permissible to hate and whip the serpent and the witch but not the mother, grandmother, or aunts. In any case, feelings of anger, outrage, and mistrust are unmistakably present here. They may also be directed at “the mob,” which has the same symbolic function as the serpent and the witch.
Is this today not the mob’s? But the mob does not know what is great, what is small, what is straight and honest: it is innocently crooked, it always lies.
Have a good mistrust today, you higher men, you stouthearted ones, you openhearted ones! And keep your reasons secret! For this today is the mob’s.
What the mob once learned to believe without reasons—who could overthrow that with reasons?
And in the market place one convinces with gestures. But reasons make the mob mistrustful.
And if truth was victorious for once, then ask yourself with good mistrust: “What strong error fought for it?”
Over and over again Nietzsche attempts to find his way out of the mists of confusing moral principles and attain clarity. But his speculating continually obfuscates the truth.
Do not let yourselves be gulled and beguiled! Who, after all, is your neighbor? And even if you act “for the neighbor”—you still do not create for him.
Unlearn this “for,” you creators! Your very virtue wants that you do nothing “for” and “in order” and “because.” You shall plug up your ears against these false little words. “For the neighbor” is only the virtue of the little people: there one says “birds of a feather” and “one hand washes the other.” They have neither the right nor the strength for your egoism. In your egoism, you creators, is the caution and providence of the pregnant. What no one has yet laid eyes on, the fruit: that your whole love shelters and saves and nourishes. Where your whole love is, with your child, there is also your whole virtue. Your work, your will, that is your “neighbor”: do not let yourselves be gulled with false values!
The call to war has essentially only one symbolic meaning for Nietzsche: it represents nothing other than declaring battle against the deadly coercion, lies, and cowardice that constricted his life so painfully as a child. But Nietzsche doesn’t say it clearly enough, he doesn’t reveal the source. That is why he opens the doors to a harmful use of his words.
A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty! [Italics mine]
Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune.
Where the state ends—look there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the overman?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
And the man who was dependent all his life on his mother and sister writes: “If you would go high, use your own legs. Do not let yourselves be carried up; do not sit on the backs and heads of others.” In his own mind, Nietzsche was not sitting on the backs of others, but in his life he allowed the person closest to him to sit on his back to the very end.
On January 14, 1880, he wrote to Malwida von Meysenbug: “For the terrible and almost unceasing martyrdom of my life makes me thirst for the end, and judging by several indications, the stroke that shall deliver me is near enough at hand to allow me to hope.” And in 1887 he said these significant words to Paul Deussen: “I don’t believe I’m going to last much longer. I’m now near the age when my father died, and I feel I’m going to succumb to the same affliction he had.”
The medical diagnosis of the disease that befell Nietzsche at the age of forty-five was “progressive paralysis,” and his biographers seem reassured when they “determine” that this later illness “had nothing at all to do” with the illnesses of his school days. And the 118 attacks in one year (1879) were apparently sheer “coincidence,” for in the opinion of many of his biographers, Nietzsche was perfectly healthy until the appearance of his progressive paralysis.
“WHY I AM SO WISE”
Sometimes Nietzsche’s words convey something that might be construed as delusions of grandeur and that the reader might easily find offensive. One author has referred to this as Nietzsche’s “God complex,” and there are passages in Ecce Homo (1888) and in the letters that actually point to such a complex. How are we to understand this “arrogance” on the part of a thinker as critical and self-critical as Nietzsche? Those who have read the diaries he kept from age twelve to fourteen will scarcely believe that those pages were written by the same person whose later writing they already know—not because the diaries are so childish but because they are so adult. In great part, they could have been written by his aunts, his grandmother, or his father—and in the same style. The writing is colorless and unassuming, as was expected of him. The feelings expressed strike one as inauthentic, weak, sometimes theatrical, but for the most part false. We sense that what the writer really feels must remain completely beneath the surface without being revealed by a sentence or even a single word.
But this boy, who at twelve wrote like an adult, was also capable of other things. What could he do with his sense of pride, with the certitude that he understood more than those around him? If Nietzsche had expressed his pride at that time, he would have been sinning against an important Christian virtue, humility. He certainly would have met with disapproval and indignation.
- from Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young; pp. 31-32 [Chapter 2—Pforta (New Friends)]: During his final months at school, Fritz recognised with sadness that with Wilhelm and Gustav bound for university in Heidelberg, which did not recommend itself to a philologist, his friendship with them was weakening. Two new friendships, however, were beginning to blossom in their place: first, as noted, with Paul Deussen, and soon after with Baron Carl von Gersdorff, the atypical product of a Prussian Junker household. At first Carl and Fritz were drawn together by a common interest in music, meeting each other for the first time in the Pforta music room. Carl was bowled over by Fritz’s piano improvisation, remarking that he ‘would have no difficulty in believing that even Beethoven did not improvise in more moving manner than Nietzsche, particularly when a thunder storm was threatening’. By the time they left school they had moved from the formal to the familiar ‘you’ (from Sie to du), then, even more than now, a major step in personal relations between Germans.
In 2002 a book appeared entitled Zarathustra’s Secret in which – undeterred by the complete absence of evidence – the author made the sensational claim that ‘Zarathustra’s’ (i.e., Nietzsche’s) guilty ‘secret’ was that he was ‘gay’. It is worth recording, therefore, that both Deussen and von Gersdorff were thoroughly heterosexual. And that Fritz himself, in his penultimate school year, was attracted to Anna Redtel, the sister of a school acquaintance, with whom, when she visited her grandparents in Kosen (between Pforta and Naumberg), he played piano duets. To her he dedicated a collection of his early compositions, lieder and piano pieces.
Fritz and his male friends wrote to each other in the most fulsome terms. They ‘miss’ each other ‘terribly’ and ‘long’ for the holidays when they will be together once more. And as was the fashion throughout late Victorian Europe, they constantly exchanged photographs of each other. Whereas a healthy modern schoolboy would likely have photographs of large-breasted film stars on his walls, Fritz decorated the walls of his room with photographs of his friends. [Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (25 vols.) ed. G. Colli and M. Montinaria (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975-2004). I.I 217. That he disclosed this in a letter to his mother and asked for a photograph of her to add to the collection indicates that no guilty secret was involved.]
Were these ‘gay’ relationships? They were not. Flowing expressions of undying love for one’s friend, though perhaps startling to someone brought up in the emotional constipation of today’s male-to-male communication, were a Victorian commonplace. Were homoerotic feelings involved? Quite possibly. For Victorian men who had spent their formative years in single-sex boarding schools which encouraged them to idealise the lives of Greek aristocrats, it was natural to reserve their most intimate and tender feelings for those of their own sex. And in this regard, Fritz was no exception. But if Nietzsche was ‘gay’ then so were the great majority of middle-class Victorian men.