Originally Posted by
lazybones
Nietzsche: IEI
- from The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche (Translated by James Luchte): pp. 97-98 [Lyrics (1869-1888) - Autumn]:
Autumn
This is Autumn: it will break your heart!
Fly away! fly away! --
The sun crawls upon the mountain
And climbs and climbs,
And rests with each step.
How the world became so withered!
Upon tired straining threads
The wind sings its song.
Hope flees --
He laments her.
This is the Autumn, it will break your heart!
Fly away! fly away!
Oh, fruit of the tree,
You shake and fall?
What secret
Did the night teach you,
That icy horror covering
Your crimson cheeks? --
You are silent and do not answer?
Who still speaks? --
This is the Autumn, it will break your heart!
Fly away! fly away! --
'I am not beautiful
-- So speaks the star flower-- ,
But I love man
And comfort humans --
They shall now see the flowers,
And will bow down to me
I see it! And break me--
The memory will
Sparkle in their eyes,
Memory, more beautiful than me
I can see it and so I will die.' --
This is the Autumn -- it will break your heart!
Fly away! fly away!
- from The Untouched Key by Alice Miller; pp. 75-78 [PART TWO/Friedrich Nietzsche: The Struggle Against the Truth – A Mistreated Child, a Brilliant Mind, and Eleven Years of Darkness]: The need to share my findings with others was not my only motive in writing about Nietzsche. My work with the Nietzsche material had made me realize that society’s ignorance about the injuries inflicted on children represents a great danger for humanity. Sentences from Nietzsche’s writings could never have been misinterpreted in support of fascism and the annihilation of human beings if people had understood his words for what they were: the encoded language of the child who was forbidden to express his true feelings. Young men would never have been willing to march to war with his words in their pack if they had known that his ideology promoting the destruction of morality and traditional values such as charity and mercy stood for the raised fist of a child starved for truth who had suffered severely under the domination of hypocrisy. Since I myself had witnessed the way the deadly marching of the National Socialists in the thirties and forties was indirectly spurred on by Nietzsche’s words, it now seemed to me worth the trouble to find and call attention to the genesis of these words, thoughts, and feelings.
Would Nietzsche’s ideas have been useless to the Nazis if people had understood their source? I do not doubt it. But if society had understood, then the ideas of Nazis would also have been unthinkable or at least would not have found the broad acceptance they did. The simple, commonplace facts of child abuse are not given a hearing; if they were, the human race would have greater understanding and wars could be prevented. Only if they are presented in a disguised, symbolic form can they arouse great interest and an emotional response. For the disguised story is, after all, familiar to most of us, but its symbolic language must guarantee that what has been repressed will not be brought to light and cause pain. Therefore, my thesis that Nietzsche’s works reflect the unlived feelings, needs, and tragedy of his childhood will probably meet with great resistance. The thesis is correct nevertheless, and I will offer proof in the pages that follow. My proof can be understood, however, only by someone who is willing to temporarily abandon the adult perspective to gain insight into and take serious account of the situation of a child.
Which child are we talking about? The boy who learns in school to suppress his normal, human feelings and always act as if he didn’t have any? The little boy who is trained day after day by his young mother, his grandmother, and his two aunts to be a “strong” man? The very little boy whose beloved father “loses his mind” and goes on living with the family for eleven months in an unstable condition? Or the even younger child who was punished most severely and locked in dark closets by the father whom he loved and was occasionally allowed to play with? It is not one or another but all these children rolled into one who had to bear so much without being allowed to express any feelings or, indeed, even to have any feelings. He was not supposed to cry, to scream, to be in a rage. He was only supposed to be well disciplined and to do brilliant work.
Friedrich Nietzsche survived this childhood; he survived the more than one hundred illnesses in one year of secondary school, the constant headaches, and the rheumatic ailments, which his biographers have assiduously listed without searching for their cause and which they finally attribute to a “weak constitution.” At the age of twelve he kept a diary, the kind an adult might have kept, written in a well-adjusted, reasonable, well-behaved way. But in adolescence his once suppressed feelings burst forth, resulting in works that would deeply move other young people of later generations. And then at age forty, when he could no longer bear his loneliness and, since he was not able to see that the roots of his life history went back to his childhood, he lost his mind and everything became “clear”: historians locate the cause of his tragic ending in a venereal disease he supposedly contracted as an adolescent. The outcome is in keeping with our moral standards: the just, though delayed, punishment, in the form of a fatal disease, for having visited a prostitute. This is similar to the present attitude toward AIDS. Everything seems to turn out for the best, and hypocritical morality is restored. But what those who raised and taught Nietzsche actually did to the boy did not happen so long ago that we can no longer find out about it. Young graduate students can uncover the story, read the letters from his sister and others, write dissertations about their findings, and reconstruct the situation that gave rise to his later works, such as Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, and Thus Spake Zarathustra. But this can be done only by students who were not mistreated as children or who have worked through their mistreatment and therefore have open ears and eyes for the suffering of battered children. Their research is not likely to be greeted with enthusiasm by their professors. If they can persevere in their research nonetheless, they will produce evidence that the crimes committed against children have serious effects on all humanity. They will also be able to illustrate the unexpected ways in which these effects occur.
- from The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness by Alice Miller; pp. 78-85:
FAMILY LIFE
In my search for the facts about Nietzsche's early childhood I learned the following:
Both parents were the children of Protestant ministers and numbered several theologians among their forebears. Nietzsche's father was the youngest child from his own father's second marriage; when, at age thirty, he married a seventeen-year-old woman, he also took in both of his older, unmarried sisters and, later, his mother. Friedrich was born a year after the marriage, in 1844. When Friedrich was two, his sister was born and soon after that a brother, who died at the age of two shortly after the death of the father. According to reports, the father was a warm-hearted and feeling person who from the first loved his son very much and frequently had him by his side when he improvised at the piano. This important experience and the warmth the father may have shown his son probably played a role in enabling the boy to experience strong feelings in spite of his rigorous upbringing. Despite his affection, however, the father strictly forbade certain feelings and severely punished his son for expressing them. There are reports of temper tantrums, which stern measures soon put to an end.
His father, when he had time, liked to spend it with his oldest child, once the boy had learned to talk a little. It didn't disturb him either when Friedrich came into father's study and watched him "quietly and thoughtfully," as the mother writes, while he was working. But the child was completely spellbound when his father sat at the piano and "improvised." Already at the age of one, little Fritz, as everyone called him, would then sit up in his carriage, listen, quiet as a mouse, and not take his eyes off his father. Otherwise, however, he was not always a well-behaved child in those first years. If he didn't get his way, he threw himself to the floor and furiously kicked his little legs in the air. His father must have taken very energetic measures against this behavior, yet for a long time the boy was still stubborn and recalcitrant when he was denied something he wanted, although he no longer rebelled but withdrew silently into a quiet corner or to the privy, where he vented his anger by himself.
Whatever a biographer may mean by "venting" here, the feelings that had to be eliminated in the privy are unmistakably present in the philosopher's later writings. We mustn't forget that a grandmother and two young aunts also lived with the family. In addition to their charitable activities and their help with the household, they were mainly concerned with the upbringing of the first-born child. When Friedrich was scarcely four, his father died after eleven months of suffering from a serious illness, probably the result of a brain tumor, which his son later referred to as "softening of the brain." The family perpetuated the story that the father's illness was caused by an accident, a version of events that somewhat lessened the shame that a brain disease may have caused them. The actual medical diagnosis is not completely clear to this day.
It is difficult for us as adults to imagine how a child of four feels when his beloved father, his closest attachment figure (which his mother at that time was not), suddenly becomes ill with a brain disease. At the very least Neitzsche must have been highly perplexed. His father's previously more or less predictable reactions were so no longer; the great, admired, and clever man had suddenly become "stupid." His family was perhaps embarrassed at the answers he gave to questions. Possibly the boy too was scornful, but he had to suppress his scorn because he loved his father. We can assume that this same father, who disappeared so soon as his son's companion, was proud of the child's intelligence. But as the father's illness progressed, the boy could no longer tell him things or ask him questions, no longer use him as a point of orientation or count on his response. Yet despite his condition, the father was still present.
Soon after the death of his father, Nietzsche's little brother died too, and now Friedrich was left as the only male in a household of women -- his grandmother, two aunts, mother, and younger sister. This might have turned out well for him if one of these women had treated him with tenderness, warmth, and genuine concern. But they all tried to outdo one another in teaching him self-control and other Christian virtues. The originality of his imagination and the honesty of his questions were too much for their sense of morality, and so they attempted to silence the child's curiosity, which made them uncomfortable, by strict supervision and a stern upbringing.
What else can a child, so completely at the mercy of a regimen like this, do except adapt and suppress his genuine feelings with all his might? That is what Friedrich did, and he soon became a model child and a model pupil. One biographer describes a scene that clearly illustrates how extreme the boy's self-denial was. Caught in heavy rain on his way home from school Nietzsche did not quicken his pace but continued to walk slowly with head erect. His explanation was that "upon leaving school one must go home in a calm and mannerly way. That's what the regulations require." We can imagine the training that must have preceded such behavior.
The boy observed the people around him and could not help but be critical; however, he was forced to keep such thoughts to himself and do all he could to suppress them, along with any other impious thoughts. In addition, he constantly heard the Christian virtues of neighborly love and compassion being preached all around him. Yet in his own daily experience no one took pity on him when he was beaten; no one saw that he was suffering. No one came to his aid, even though so many people around him were busy practicing the Christian virtues. What good are these virtues, the little boy must have kept asking himself. Am I not also the "neighbor" who deserves to be loved? But even questions such as these could have provoked more beatings. What choice did he have, then, but to keep his questions to himself and to feel even more alone with them than before because he could not share them with anyone?
But the questions did not go away. Later, much later, after Nietzsche finished his schooling and had nothing to fear from the authorities -- in this case his professors -- because he had become a professor himself, the questions and repressed feelings broke out of the prison where they had been locked up for twenty years. In the meantime, by finding an ersatz object they gained social legitimacy. Nietzsche did not direct his criticism at the real causes of his rage -- his aunts, his grandmother, his mother -- but at the values of his chosen field, philology. Still, this took courage, for they were values that had until then been held sacred by all philologists.
But Nietzsche also attacked values that once were dear to him although not respected by those around him -- for example, the "truth," symbolized in the person of Socrates. In the same way that a person going through puberty must first reject everything he once loved in order to establish new values for himself, Nietzsche -- who never revolted during puberty, who at the age of twelve made agreeable entries in his diary -- now at twenty-five set out to attack the culture he had grown up with, to mock it, to make it seem absurd by standing it on its head. He did this not with the methods of a growing adolescent but with the highly developed intellect of a philologist and professor of philosophy.
It is all too understandable that his language became forceful and impressive. It was not empty talk that seized upon trite revolutionary slogans but a combination of original thoughts and intense feelings, rarely found in a philologist, that had a direct impact on the reader.
We are accustomed to thinking of Nietzsche as a representative of late Romanticism and seeing the influence of Schopenhauer on his work. Which people influence us as adults is no accident, and Nietzsche's description of the euphoria he felt when he opened Schopenhauer's major opus, The World as Will and Idea (1819), and began reading indicates that he had good reason for discovering in Schopenhauer a world intimately related to his own. If he had been allowed to speak freely in his family as an adolescent, it is possible that he would not have needed Schopenhuaer or, above all, the Germanic heroes, Richard Wagner, and the concept of the "blond beast." He would have found his own discriminating words with which to say: "I can't bear the chains that shackle me day after day; my creative powers are in danger of being destroyed. I need all my energies to rescue them and to assert myself in your midst. There is nothing I can confront you with that you would understand. I can't live in this narrow, untruthful world. And yet I can't leave you. I can't get along without you because I'm still a child and am dependent on you. That's why you have so much power although you are essentially weak. It takes heroic courage, superhuman qualities, and superhuman strength to crush this world that is interfering with my life. I don't have that much strength; I am too weak and afraid of hurting you, but I despise the weakness in me and the weakness in you, which forces me to pity you. I despise every form of weakness that interferes with my life. You have surrounded me with restrictions; prisoner that I am of school and home, there is no free space for me except perhaps in music, but that is not enough for me. I must be able to use words. I must be able to shout them out. Your morality and your reason are a prison for me in which I am smothering to death, and this at the beginning of my life when I would have so much to say."
Words such as these got stuck in Nietzsche's throat and brain, and it is no wonder that he suffered continually from severe headaches, sore throats, and rheumatic ailments as a child and especially during his school days. What he was not allowed to say out loud remained active in his body in the form of constant tension. Later he could direct his criticism against abstract concepts such as culture, Christianity, philistinism, and middle-class values without having to worry that someone might die as a result (all well-brought-up children are afraid that their angry words might kill those they love). Compared with this danger, criticism of society in the abstract is harmless for an adult, even if society's representatives are outraged by it. An adult is not facing them like a helpless, guilty child; an adult can use intellectual arguments to defend himself and even to make attacks -- methods not usually available to a child and not available to Nietzsche as a child.
And yet Nietzsche's accurate observations concerning Western culture and Christian morality as well as the vehement indignation they aroused in him do not date from the period of his philosophical analysis but from his first years of life. It was then that he perceived the system and suffered under it, simultaneously as slave and devotee; it was then that he was chained to a morality he despised and was tormented by the people whose love he needed. Because of his brilliant intellect, the perceptions he stored up at an early age have helped many people see things they have never seen before. The experiences of one individual, despite their subjectivity, can have universal validity because the family and the child-rearing methods minutely observed at an early age represent society as a whole.
- from The Untouched Key by Alice Miller (1988/1990); pp. 85-91 [PUZZLEMENT]: Along with its positive side, however, Nietzsche's manner of "mastering" his fate as a child had a devastating and disastrous effect because he used what had caused him the most trouble -- his puzzlement -- as a weapon against the world. In the same way that he became thoroughly puzzled -- first by his father's terrible illness and later by the unbearable contradiction between the morality preached to him and the actual behavior of the attachment figures in his family and in school -- he sometimes puzzles the reader, probably without knowing it. I had this feeling of puzzlement when I recently began reading Nietzsche again after three decades. Thirty years ago I would surely have disregarded my puzzlement because my only concern then was to understand his meaning. But now I let myself be guided by the feeling. As a result, I realized that other readers must have felt the same way, even if they did not use the word puzzlement and attributed their feelings to their own lack of education, intelligence, or depth. Blaming ourselves is exactly the reaction we learn as children. If the grown-ups (who are supposed to be more clever than we are) self-assuredly assert things that are inconsistent, contradictory, or absurd, how can children raised in an authoritarian way be expected to know that what they are hearing is not the ultimate wisdom? They will make every effort to accept it as such and will carefully conceal their doubts from themselves. This is the way many people read the writings of the great Nietzsche today. They blame themselves for their puzzlement and show Nietzsche the same reverence he must have shown his ill father as a child.
Although admitting my perplexity helped me recognize these connections, I do not consider my feeling to be simply a personal matter. I found a passage by Richard Blunck -- who devoted himself to Nietzsche's life and work for forty years -- that indirectly confirms my own impression. Since a large portion of the material Blunck had collected was destroyed in the war, he himself never published the major Nietzsche biography he had planned but left further work on it to Curt-Paul Janz. I found these words by Blunck in the introduction to Janz's first volume:
Those who come across a book of Nietzsche's for the first time, the way we did forty years ago, immediately sense that more is required to understand it than the intellect, that more is involved here than following someone's thinking from premise to conclusion and from concept to concept in order to arrive at "truth." They will feel that they have wandered instead into an immense field of force that is emitting shock waves of a far deeper nature than can be registered by intellect alone. They will be struck less by the opinions and insights expressed than by the person behind these opinions and insights. Readers will often react defensively to them if they have something to defend, but they will never again be entirely able to escape the man who expressed them. If readers pursue these ideas that confront, sometimes even assault, them in the form of commanding sentences, then they will soon have the feeling that they are in a labyrinth in whose intricate passageways they find not only immeasurable riches but also the threatening visage of a minotaur who demands human sacrifice. They will believe they are encountering the truest of truths, which go to the heart of things, only to have these truths cancel themselves out in the next book and to feel themselves thrust into a new passageway of the labyrinth. Still, if they have an alert mind and not merely a groping intellect, they will never lose the certainty that Nietzsche has brought them closer to life and its secrets than has any other thinker. Despite the contradictory character of his views and positions, a more profound and elevated intellectual force is communicated that is not confined to positions and truths but constantly both ignores and transcends them in the service of an authenticity that knows no law other than itself and the eternal flux of life with all its transformations and creativity.
Such authenticity, however, does not consist in collecting knowledge and ordering things in a rational manner, little as it can do without these processes, but is a feature of the ethical personality, of the heart's courage, and the dauntless and indefatigable nature of the mind. It must be lived and suffered if it is to attain that intellectual force which Nietzsche's work demonstrates. And it is because his authenticity -- in combination with a great receptivity to all aspects of the European intellectual tradition as well as a critical grasp of this tradition, in combination also with a profound understanding of human nature and a prophetic farsightedness and clarity of vision -- is apparent to an extent unequalled in the history of Western thought that Nietzsche's life and work affect us so powerfully. Spurred on by this authenticity, he waged a single-minded, unwearying struggle against an age that was sinking deeper and deeper into hopeless dishonesty, a struggle against his own happinest, against fame, and even against his tender heart. This was an undertaking whose purity and necessity cannot be obscured or cancelled out, no matter how ambiguous or even dreadful its effects.
Because of his own upbringing, the author of these lines, who actually was very close to the truth, got caught in the labyrinth he refers to and was unable to track down its biographical origins; and if he had dared to do so, his life and work in the Third Reich would surely have been jeopardized. For Nietzsche was very much in vogue when Blunck was doing his work in pre-World War II Germany. His glorification of the "barbaric hero" was taken literally and was lived out with all its horrible consequences. But the very way the National Socialists adapted Nietzsche's ideas and formulations for their own purposes shows how dangerous it can be to view the last links in a biographical chain in isolation while remaining uninterested in and blind to the earliest links in the chain.
Today Nietzsche's biographers emphasize again and again a closer connection between his life and thought than biographers of other philosophers do. Yet Nietzsche's biographers rarely refer to his childhood, despite the fact that without understanding this crucial period a life remains an enigma. The two-thousand-page biography by Janz, which appeared in 1978, devoted less than ten pages to Nietzsche's childhood (not counting a genealogical history). Since the importance of childhood for later life is still a very controversial subject, biographers have done little investigation in this area. Nietzsche scholars search in his work for connections to the history of philosophy rather than to his life. His life, his illness, and his tragic ending, to say nothing of his work, have never been examined in the light of his childhood.
And yet today it seems to me a simple matter to recognize that what Nietzsche wrote was his hopeless attempt, which he didn't abandon until his breakdown, to free himself from his prison by expressing his unconscious but present hatred for those who raised and mistreated him. His hatred, and his fear of it, became all the more vehement the less he succeeded in becoming independent of its objects, his mother and sister. It is a known fact that his sister altered many of his letters for publication, that she intrigued untiringly to the detriment of his true interests and did not rest until his relationship with Lou Andreas Salome was destroyed. Both mother and sister needed Friedrich's dependence on them until the very end. Since the perfectly raised child had learned at an early age not to defend himself but to struggle instead against his true feelings, the grown man was unable to find his way to real liberation. His writing kept alive the illusion of liberation because on a symbolic level he actually did take steps in the direction of truth and freedom. He took them in his life as well but only insofar as they did not involve the members of his family. After he became ill, for instance, he had the courage to give up his professorship in Basel to have more freedom to criticize the academic system. He was then free to write what he needed to say instead of having to conform to the demands of the university. But this was still an ersatz solution as long as he was unable to recognize his idealization of his parents, who were responsible for his suffering. For his true feelings (of anger, fear, contempt, helplessness, the wish to be free, destructive rage, and desperate dependence on his persecutors), originating in childhood, gave him no peace and kept demanding new ersatz objects.
- from The Untouched Key by Alice Miller; pp. 91-92 [HIS MOTHER]: In several letters to Nietzsche's friends after the philosopher had completely lost his mental faculties, his mother describes the condition of the patient for whom she has sacrificed herself and whom she takes care of like a little child. In one letter she writes that her son uttered terrible screams although he had a cheerful expression on his face. We can't be sure how reliable this information is because mothers frequently interpret a look on a child's face in keeping with their own wishes. But if his mother's observation was correct, then the explanation may be that, in her presence, the very little child was allowed to scream loudly for the first time in his life and that he was enjoying the tolerance he had finally won from her. For we can scarcely conceive of someone screaming without a face racked with pain.
There are women who can be kinder to their children if the children are no longer capable of thinking (that is, of being critical), as the result of mental illness or a brain disease, for example. Although not yet dead, the children are helpless and totally dependent on the mother. If such a woman was brought up to fulfill her duty above all else, she will feel good and noble if she sacrificed herself for her child. If she had to suppress her own criticism as a child, it will make her angry the moment her son or daughter expresses criticism of her. She feels less threatened, on the other hand, by a handicapped child. In addition, her self-sacrifice is respected and admired by society. Thus, it is very likely that Nietzsche's mother -- who was only eighteen when he was born and is described as cold, stupid, and disinterested even by sympathetic biographers -- actually did sacrifice herself to look after her son in his last years when he no longer recognized his friends and could barely speak.
- from The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche (Translated by James Luchte); p. 161 [To Richard Wagner]:
To Richard Wagner
You are hurt by every fetter,
Restless, unfree spirit,
Always triumphant and still bound, more and
More nauseated, destroyed, until you drink
The poison from every balm --
Woe! You too kneel at the cross,
You too! You too -- Conqueror!
Always I stand before this spectacle,
Breathing prison, sorrow, resentment, and tomb,
Between consecrated clouds and church smells
Strange to me, sad and frightening to me.
I danced, throwing the fool's cap into the air,
Then I jumped away!
- from The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness by Alice Miller; pp. 93-98: It would take a very careful reading of Nietzsche's letters to relate the individual episodes in his life to his childhood. In addition, the actual facts would have to be sifted from his sister's numerous falsifications. I can imagine that anyone who is not afraid of taking on the task of establishing the connections to his childhood would discover much that is new. One might look into the question, for instance, of whether Nietzsche's relationship with Richard Wagner, who was thrity years his senior, was not a repetition of the repressed tragic experience with his father, who had taken ill so suddenly. This conjecture seems justified by the fact that his initial admiration and enthusiasm for Wagner, beginning about 1868 and nurtured at Wagner's home in Bayreuth, so quickly turned into disappointment, rejection, and radical estrangement. Nietzsche's break with Wagner culminated in 1882 when Wagner wrote Parsifal, which in Nietzsche's eyes "betrayed" the old Germanic values for the sake of highly suspect Christian ones. Not until then did he become fully conscious of weaknesses in Richard Wagner, weaknesses he had previously overlooked in his idealization of the older man.
I have searched in vain in the extensive secondary literature about Nietzsche for information describing how the highly intelligent four-and-a-half-year-old child reacted to his father's fatal brain disease that lasted nearly a year. For lack of any indication in his youth, I turned to his later life and looked for clues there. I believe I found them in Nietzsche's relationship with Richard Wagner. However great the disappointment in Wagner's work may have been for the mature Nietzsche, it would never have provoked such an extreme degree of mockery and contempt (especially since Wagner hadn't done anything to alienate Nietzsche personally and was even very fond of him) if Wagner's personality and music hadn't reminded him of his father and of the misery of his early childhood.
From the mid-1870s, Wagner's entire work and the Bayreauth atmosphere, in which Nietzsche had previously felt at home, struck him as a gigantic lie. The one thing he could not deny was Wagner's dramatic gift, although he did not compliment Wagner with this admission, for he defined the psychology and morality of an actor in the following way: "One is an actor by virtue of being ahead of the rest of mankind in one insight: what is meant to have the effect of truth must not be true.... Wagner's music is never true. But it is taken for true; and thus it is in order." Wagner's music, according to Nietzsche, contained the pretense of sacred, noble, great, and good feelings, the hoax of pseudo ideals that have little to do with the authentic feelings of real people, such as Nietzsche found embodied in Bizet's Carmen (1875), with its ambivalence and its "killing for love." He saw Carmen several times with great enthusiasm, experiencing it as a liberation from the lie that had afflicted him not only since his younger years with Wagner in Bayreuth but even since his childhood. And now his attack against the fatherly friend he once admired, Richard Wagner, turned into a total one: he no longer saw anything good in him and hated him with all his heart like a deeply wounded child. His hatred was nourished by despair and grief over having let himself be deceived for so long, for admiring someone for so long whom he now considered contemptible. Why didn't he see through the weakness behind the facade sooner? How could he have been so mistaken?
Nietzsche saw himself as the victim of a seduction that he must now unmask by every means at his command. He found Wagner's admirers naive and could not grasp that they continued to go to Bayreuth, where they allowed themselves to be hypnotized by a lie, after he himself had seen through it. The pain this caused him kept showing through in the aspersions he cast on Wagner: Nietzsche would have liked to save the world from a great deception and bring the Wagnerians to their senses; he would have liked to lead them back to themselves and their own genuine experiences the way Zarathustra did by refusing to have any disciples.
Although Nietzsche's attacks derived their intensity from his repressed rage against his father and other attachment figures from childhood, they did not display any weakness in logic that would reveal their real roots. What he wrote about Wagner and substantiated with examples was so convincing (although probably not for Wagnerians) that it retains its claim to objectivity quite apart from the subjective, highly emotional background of his observations. I believe that Nietzsche's keen powers of observation had their beginnings in his relationship with his father, to whose music the little boy listened with rapt attention, admiration, and enthusiasm. But his father was not only a musician who played the piano but also a pedagogue who approved of certain feelings (such as his son's enthusiasm for his playing) but severely punished the display of others.
Perhaps the boy succeeded in accepting his father's two different sides and in overlooking the punishment as long as he was allowed to be with his father, to listen to his music making and let the music become part of him. But when his father fell ill and the child felt suddenly and completely abandoned by him, overwhelming feelings of disappointment, rage, and shame at being seduced and then forsaken would have had to break through -- if the boy had not already learned that it was not permissible to show such feelings and if he had not been subsequently raised exclusively by women ("female Wagnerians") who condemned his feelings and kept them in the strictest rein. These feelings had to lie in wait for decades until they could be experienced toward another musician.
The sharpness and accuracy of Nietzsche's later observations about Wagner not only were unimpaired by his feelings but, on the contrary, seemed to be intensified by them. If it had not been made impossible for him to speak out, Nietzsche the child might have said: "I don't believe your music if you can also beat me and punish me for having genuine feelings. If your music is not a deception, if it really is expressing the truth, then I have every right to expect you to respect the feelings of your child. Otherwise there is something wrong, and the music I have absorbed through every pore is a lie. I want to shout it out to all the world in order to keep others -- for example, my little brother and sister -- from becoming the victims of your seduction. If your theology, your sermons, your words have been telling the truth, you would have to treat me very differently. You wouldn't be able to watch my suffering uncomprehendingly, for I am 'the neighbor' you're supposed to love. You wouldn't punish me for my tears, wouldn't make me bear my distress all alone without helping me, wouldn't forbid me to speak, if you were an honest and trustworthy man. After all that's been done to me, I think your ideas of goodness, neighborly love, and redemption are empty and false; everything I used to believe is nothing but theatrics; there is nothing real about it. What I experience is real, and what you have said must be able to be measured against my reality. But when the measurement is taken, your words prove to be pure play acting. You enjoy having a child who listens to you and admires you. It satisfies your needs. The others don't notice this and think you really have something to offer them. But I noticed. I guessed your state of neediness, but I wasn't allowed to say anything about it."
The boy wasn't allowed to say this to his father. But as an adult he said it to Richard Wagner. He wrote it in no uncertain terms, and the world took what he wrote seriously. Neither Nietzsche nor "the world," unfortunately, wondered about its source. Thus both missed the important point.
- from Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rudiger Safranski; pp. 245-248 [Lou Salome and the Quest for Intimacy]: Nietzsche entitled the fourth book of The Gay Science "Sanctus Januarius" in order to commemorate the exhilarating month of January (1882) he had spent in Genoa. The title also paid homage to the martyred Sanctus Januarius. In Naples, this saint is honored with many paintings and statues, which Nietzsche had first admired in 1876. This martyr, who is known in Naples as San Gennaro, was a man with striking feminine characteristics. He had a soft beauty and experienced periodic bleeding. Legend associated his martyr's blood with menstrual blood. Considered both man and woman, he became the saint of androgyny. In the subterranean chapel of the central church in Naples, which bears his name, the head of the decapitated martyr was preserved along with two vials of his blood, which was considered miracle-working. The poem that opens book 4 of The Gay Science is addressed to this femminiello, as he was also known in Naples:
With a flaming spear you crushed
All its ice until my soul
Roaring toward the ocean rushed
Of its highest hope and goal.
Ever healthier it swells,
Lovingly compelled but free:
Thus it lauds your miracles,
Fairest month of January!
(3, 521; GS Book 4)
When Nietzsche asked his friend Gersdorff to read book 4, which was dedicated to the androgynous martyr, he declared that his books revealed "so much about me, which a hundred letters of friendship would not be able to match. Read the Sanctus Januarius in particular with this idea in mind". Some interpreters have viewed this statement as an indirect confession of Nietzsche's homoerotic tendencies, and assert that it provides a key to his life and works.
Speculations abound. The boy grew up without a father, surrounded by women. There are alleged indications of sibling incest in the early years. Did little "Fritz" perhaps even pull Elisabeth into his bed and wind up plagued by a bad conscience? Some researchers have traced Nietzsche's sexual secrets all the way back to his years in boarding school, citing the story of the decadent vagabond poet Ernst Ortlepp, who was famous and infamous around Naumburg. The students idolized Ortlepp, a shabbily clad genius who roved through the forests, nearly always inebriated, and on summer days recited and sang his poems under classroom windows. This unnerving man was notorious for his attacks on Christianity. He disturbed church services with loud interjections. His poem "The Lord's Prayer of the Nineteenth Century," which closes with the lines "Old time religion / Despised by the new era's son, / And comes the call throughout the earth: / 'Your name will have no holy worth' " (Schulte 33), was widely discussed. Nietzsche's poetry album from his years in Pforta featured several poems by the ostracized Ortlepp, who was suspected of pederasty. In early July 1864, Ortlepp was discovered dead in a ditch, and Nietzsche and his friends collected money for a tombstone.
In a poem called "Before the Crucifix," the eighteen-year-old Nietzsche portrayed this bizarre man as an intoxicated blasphemer who calls out to the man on the cross: "Come down! Are you just deaf? / You can have my bottle!" (J 2, 187). According to a biographical reconstruction by H. J. Schmidt, Ortlepp may have been the first Dionysian seducer in Nietzsche's life, engaging not only his imagination but also his sexuality. Nietzsche, who was both traumatized and exhilarated by this experience, as some surmise, never, in their estimation, got over this first molestation by Dionysus incarnate. They claim that this incident set the stage for his Dionysian experience, which he later alluded to, covertly and guilt-ridden, in Ecce Homo: "the absolute certainty as to what I am was projected onto some coincidental reality or other -- the truth about me spoke out of a dreadful depth".
If we are prepared to relate Nietzsche's alleged sexual seduction (perhaps even rape) by Ortlepp and the homosexual inclinations that were awakened (or intensified) in the process to these "dreadful depths," we will uncover further references to this experience throughout his works -- masked by encoded images and recollections. But if we were to do so, we would be reducing the immense range of life that inspired Nietzsche's thought to the secret history of his sexuality and making it the privileged focal point of truth. These days, sexuality is equated with the truth of the individual, which is arguably our era's most prominent fiction regarding the nature of truth. This fiction, however, was already being circulated back in the nineteenth century.
Nietzsche suffered from the brutality and veiled aggression of the sort of will to truth that judges people on the basis of their sexual history. Although he himself devoted considerable research to the subject of instinctual behavior, he considered it infinitely diverse. He approached instinctual behavior from a polytheistic perspective and did not subscribe to the unimaginative monotheism of the sexual determinists. It was none other than Richard Wagner who first offended and then "mortally" wounded him with this sort of psychology of sexualist suspicion.
In the early 1870s, Wagner gently counseled Nietzsche not to cultivate overly intimate friendships with men at the expense of women if he wanted to overcome his melancholy and dark moods. Wagner wrote to him on April 6, 1874: "Among other things, I found that I have never in my life had the kind of contact with men that you have in Basel in the evening hours.... What young men seem to be lacking is women: . . . it is a question of knowing where to find them without stealing them. Of course, you could always steal one if necessary. I think you ought to marry".
The Wagners were not the only ones on the hunt for a bride for Nietzsche. His mother and Malwida von Meysenbug went to great lengths to get him married off, and he did not always resent their interference. Sometimes he even sought help in finding a wife. Behind the scenes, though, Wagner often spread rumors and gossip, as Nietzsche probably learned much later, just following Wagner's death in early 1883. Even before then, the rumor was circulating that Nietzsche was an effeminate man and chronic masturbator, and it is quite possible that he had already caught wind of these rumors during the bittersweet summer he spent with Lou Salome in Tautenburg.
- from The Untouched Key by Alice Miller; pp. 98-99 [NIETZSCHE THE WOMAN HATER]: In contrast to the general validity of Nietzsche's censure of the Wagner phenomenon, of middle-class cultural values and Christian moral values, his ideas about "the nature of woman" often seem grotesquely distorted, but only if we are unaware of the actual women who gave rise to them. As a child, Nietzsche was surrounded by women intent on bringing him up correctly, and he had to use all his energies to endure this situation. He paid them back in later years, but only on a symbolic level, by attacking all women -- except his mother and sister. The women who actually caused his suffering remained unassailable, at the cost of the loss of objectivity.
Nietzsche's misogyny becomes understandable, of course, if we consider how much distrust must have accumulated in someone who was whipped so frequently as a child. But this doesn't authorize him as an adult to write in his blind and irresponsible rage: "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!" There is no doubt that Nietzsche was brought up according to the principles of "poisonous pedagogy" described extensively in my previous books. The documents I cite in For Your Own Good illustrate how children must be tricked, deceived, and manipulated to make them pious and good.
That is why Nietzsche was rarely able to show his discontent at his sister's manipulative and insincere behavior toward him, why he didn't allow himself to see her as she really was. If he ever did see the truth, he quickly retracted anything he may have said against her. Although he admitted on one occasion that he could not stand her voice, he immediately added that basically he had never really doubted her goodwill, her intentions, her love for him, or her trustworthiness. How could he, since he had only one sister and wanted to believe absolutely that she loved him and that her love was more than exploitation and a need to win recognition at any price. If he had been able to see the way the women in his childhood really were, then it would not have been necessary for him to generalize by making all women into witches and serpents and to hate them all.
- from The Untouched Key by Alice Miller (Translated by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum); pp. 122-123: Every evening after saying his prayers and before going to sleep, the little boy tried to make himself remember not to think. This prohibition was directed against life, for the vitality of thoughts is destroyed if one is constantly checking and sorting them out to see if they are permitted or forbidden for the sake of adapting them to dogma.
[Nietzsche:] This ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life represents not only the highest insight but also the deepest, that which is most strictly confirmed and born out by the truth and science. Nothing in existence may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable -- those aspects of existence which Christians and other nihilists repudiate are actually on an infinitely higher level in the order of rank among values than that which the instinct of decadence could approve and call good. To comprehend this requires courage and, as a condition of that, an excess of strength: for precisely as far as courage may venture forward, precisely according to that measure of strength one approaches the truth. Knowledge, saying Yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and the flight from reality -- as the "ideal" is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness.
They are not free to know: the decadents need the lie -- it is one of the conditions of their preservation. Whoever does not merely comprehend the word "Dionysian" but comprehends himself in the word "Dionysian" needs no refutation of Plato or Christianity or Schopenhauer -- he smells the decay.
- from Zarathustra's Sister by H. F. Peters; pp. 20-21: To Elisabeth he [Nietzsche] confided that the real reason for his turning away from theology was his loss of faith. He had come under the influence of Schopenhauer, who taught what he had suspected for some time, that the world was not the creation of a divine being but the working of a blind metaphysical will, a force without purpose or direction. Christianity, like all religions, concealed the truth that life on earth was meaningless by holding out the promise of a life to come under the protection of a heavenly father. A hope that, alas, was not founded on fact but on faith -- blind faith. Once your eyes were opened to the reality of the human condition you could no longer accept the consolation of religion. You had to follow the commands of reason and of your own conscience.
These ideas disturbed Elisabeth, who went to church faithfully every Sunday, sang in the choir, helped in church socials, participated in collecting money for Christian missions abroad, and never once had questioned the tenets of her Protestant faith. But since she was used to accepting her brother's superior wisdom, she tried to follow him into the gloomy world he now revealed to her. Much to the surprise of her mother, she began to reflect a sad and mournful mien. Questioned by her mother why she was do depressed, she shrugged her shoulders and replied that Fritz had told her all life was suffering, an answer that no doubt puzzled the pious widow of Pastor Nietzsche who knew that her daughter had a naturally cheerful disposition. In her letters to her brother Elisabeth often referred to such misunderstandings between her and her mother.
Mama says that I have become too smart for my own good, but since I cannot forget my Llama nature, I am very confused and prefer not to think at all, because I am afraid all my thoughts are nonsense . . . however, one thing is certain: It is much easier not to believe than the reverse, and since what is difficult is probably true, I shall try my best.
- from Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth (1990/1991) by Alice Miller (Translated by Simon Worrall); pp. 17-19: In The Untouched Key, I discuss in detail the tragic fate of Friedrich Nietzsche. Using Nietzsche's example again, I would like to show what can happen to a person when his whole system of defenses suddenly collapses like a house of cards. This happens quite frequently, as the knowledge of mistreatment experienced in childhood does not allow itself to be suppressed forever. Because the so-called specialists -- the "professional helpers" -- have been taught, not only in their own childhoods but in their training, to ignore this fact and the truth of child abuse, they are completely oblivious to the fact that what they spend their days dealing with in their practices is nothing other than the effect of the traumatizations experienced in childhood.
Nietzsche's tragedy was certainly not an isolated case. Who does not know of similar ones? A defenseless child that is tortured and at the same time forbidden to defend itself, to cry, to scream, to rage -- to live. A child from whom only obedience and good behavior are expected. The only thing remaining to him, if he has the talent, is to develop a dazzling intellect. Life escapes him daily. Abstract thought offers a chance of survival. In the meantime, the body seeks to express its terrible distress in other ways than tears and screams. It produces an endless catalogue of symptoms, in the hope that someone will finally sit up and take notice and perhaps ask the questions: "What is causing you such distress? Why were you sick more than one hundred times in one school year?" But no one asks such questions. Instead, doctors continue to prescribe their drugs. Not one of them comes up with the idea that, perhaps, Friedrich's chronic throat infections are a way of compensating for the screams he is forbidden to scream. No one makes the connection between his persistent attacks of rheumatism and the almost intolerable muscular tension from which he suffers. How are his muscles supposed to relax, anyway -- when the hope that he might one day be able to give voice to the fear and fury stored in his body slips farther away with every new day?
As a grown-up man, Nietzsche is unable to find a female companion. Not surprisingly, after the disastrous experiences of his childhood, he can trust no woman. Though repressed, these experiences tick away in his body and soul like time bombs. Writing helps him to survive, but it cannot be a substitute for life. It can also not help him to discover the truth. The powerful feelings stored in his neck, head, and muscles have been blocked since childhood. Consequently, they are not available to expression, feeling, or comprehension. The distress of the physically and psychically abused child he was can only find expression in the language of Nietzsche's philosophy. Hidden in the coded language of the books, unnoticed by Nietzsche himself or anybody else, and entirely divorced from his brilliant intellect, this soft, gentle voice -- the voice of the child he once was -- continues to speak. Finally, at the age of forty-five, the pain he has carried in him so long breaks through, flooding his intellect like a torrent of water after a sudden dam burst.
On a peaceful street in Turin, Italy, one January day in 1889, Nietzsche watches as a coachman brutally whips his horse. Nietzsche throws himself between them, throws his arms around the horse, and, overcome by his rising anger and sadness, begins to weep uncontrollably. But the man who has spent his life denying and suppressing the feelings of the abused child in him cannot cope with the emotions that now course through him. For that; he would need help. At the same time, these emotions will no longer allow themselves to be repressed. The labyrinth of the intellect is flooded like an abandoned mine shaft. Amid the flood, there is only a vacuum. There is no one there to help Nietzsche understand his feelings and the sadness of the mistreated child whom he symbolically sought to save in the form of the horse. There is no bridge on which his intellect and his feelings can meet. As a result, Nietzsche loses his mind. He will live another eleven years, but only in a state of total dependence, first on his mother and then on his sister.
- from The Untouched Key by Alice Miller; pp. 132-133: Nietzsche has this to say about the sources a writer draws from:
When I seek my ultimate formula for Shakespeare I always find only this: he conceived of the type of Caesar. That sort of thing cannot be guessed: one either is it, or one is not. The great poet dips only from his own reality up to the point where afterward he cannot endure his work any longer.
When I have looked into my Zarathustra, I walk up and down in my room for half an hour, unable to master an unbearable fit of sobbing.
If Nietzsche had not been forced to learn as a child that one must master an "unbearable fit of sobbing," if he had simply been allowed to sob; then humanity would have been one philosopher poorer, but in return the life of a human being named Nietzsche would have been richer. And who knows what that vital Nietzsche would then have been able to give humanity?
- from Breaking Down the Wall of Silence by Alice Miller; pp. 27-28: ...Nietzsche wrote: "We all fear the truth." He also wrote, "Error is not blindness. Error is cowardice. Every gain, every step we take toward recognition, depends on our courage." To me, blindness is the fear of facts -- facts that may cause us anger. But it is precisely the experience and expression of justifiable anger that gives up the courage to go forward. Tragically, in the fifty-six years he lived, Nietzsche did not find one single person who might have encouraged him to do what he so deeply desired: to "bear the truth." Lonely and isolated, for Nietzsche fear conquered that desire. Today, one hundred years later, he might have more chance of finding an enlightened witness to help him take the decisive steps toward the truth. Even that is not certain. A Nietzsche of tomorrow might well succeed. But he would still need our support. We shouldn't let the injured go on languishing for years in loneliness, desperation, confusion or "spiritual eclipse" because of our ingnorance, fear, and resistance to learn from facts.
- from The Untouched Key by Alice Miller; p. 109: Not only obedience and submissiveness were preached to him [Nietzsche] but also the so-called love of truth, which was pure hypocrisy, for the boy who was forbidden to say anything critical was also forced to lie repeatedly. It is this perversion of values that continually aroused Nietzsche's ire and that he tried to make tangible by his paradoxical formulations in the hope that he would no longer have to be alone with his anger.
- The Untouched Key by Alice Miller: [The young Nietzsche]...was forced to suppress his healthy and understandable feeling of joy at what he knew as well as his grief at being alone with his knowledge; not until much later--in Ecce Homo, for instance--was he able to express these feelings. But then he did it in a way that people could not tolerate, putting himself in the position of a "sinner," of someone who violates society's norms--the norm of modesty, for one. He was sure to reap the moral indignation of his contemporaries and of posterity, an outcome he accepted gladly, presumably even enjoyed, because he felt liberated by his daring. A different kind of liberation, such as having insights that could be shared with others, was unknown to him. This man who was condemned to be alone with his insights never learned that someone can speak the truth without punishing himself for it and without giving others grounds for dismissing what he says by applying the label "delusions of grandeur."
[Nietzsche:] A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty!
Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superflous: 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.
- from The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche; pp. 101-103:
Loneliness
The crows cry
And fly to the city
Soon it will snow --
Comfort to the one -- who still has a home!
Now I see you stand there rigidly,
Looking back! For how long already!
What a fool you are
To flee before winter comes into the world?
The world -- a folly,
Like a thousand deserts still and cold!
Who that loses,
What you have lost will stop nowhere.
Now you stand there
Cursed to winter-wandering,
Like the smoke,
Searching for the cold skies.
Fly bird, sing your song
Like the Desert-Bird-Tone
Hide, you fool, your
Bleeding heart in ice and scorn!
The crows cry
And fly to the city:
-- Soon it will snow,
Sad for him who has not a home!
, LIE, ENTj logical subtype, 8w9 sx/sp
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