Friedrich Nietzsche's type (old discussion)

[HERO]

- 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.

[Korpsy Knievel]

ILI or IEI. His anti-humanism and attacks on the christian establishment could be regarded as emblematic of polr-Fe but I'd have to revisit his writing to be sure. On the other hand his inclination for sister-fucking might make him IEI in the crazedrat mold. A tough call. Either way, I'm glad to have had Nietzsche as my philosophizer of choice during my pissed-off adolescence instead of picking up that boring and ridiculous randian crap.

[Scapegrace]

Either way, I'm glad to have had Nietzsche as my philosophizer of choice during my pissed-off adolescence instead of picking up that boring and ridiculous randian crap.

I thought he was the philosopher of choice for most smart/angsty teens. Only stupid little assholes / young Republicans read Ayn Rand during that phase.

I've always had a sort of eye roll reaction to Nietzsche. I just find him incredibly predictable.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

He looks angry and insecure. And like he had a brilliant intellectual mind but didn't do shit with his emotional life. It's kind of sad.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

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.

whatever. Sounds pretty gay to me. Look, my entire point, and I do like a lot of what he says, but my entire point is that he could have had more personal happiness in life if he saw the gay/silly/campy side in things more. I've seen that a lot, 'ooh look how much more bad- ass we are than other gay men because we don't call it gay.' Bitch please!

[Absurd]

You sound holographic cognitive style of holographic thinking, korpsey. Hate to break it to you.

[Absurd]

that settles the question of Islam, me thinks. @Absurd enters stage, right.

Christians are Fe dominant. Absurd leaves the stage.

[JWC3]

In-groups will be the death of humanity you say? Fe-PoLR I say.

ADDENDUM: IEI would be my 3rd choice, FWIW.

[Absurd]

In-groups will be the death of humanity you say? Fe-PoLR I say.

Interesting you say that. Anyway, you read any of it?

[JWC3]

Interesting you say that. Anyway, you read any of it?

I'm trudging through Beyond Good and Evil currently. I don't know if I just have an old and ill-conceived translation or what but it's really slow going, lots of going back and re-reading the same stuff. Point being I'm not very far into it at this time but it is of the two books I'm currently reading the other being Room, which is fiction and strange enough in its own right.

[Taknamay]

I haven't read any of his works, although I am somewhat familiar with existentialism. Somehow existentialism seemed to coincide with humanism to me. Am I wrong? I suppose existentialism is a more individualist approach to finding purpose. However, humanism is rooted in the ability of human beings to do works of good, which seemed similar to existentialism to me somehow.

[HERO]

I've compiled what I thought were the best (or most relevant) quotations I had gathered in the previous thread... Note that none of these quotations were written by Nietzsche [except for one brief poem (and there may be some brief excerpts by Nietzsche in some of the quotes)].


- 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 thirty 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 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 the 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 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 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 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."


- from THE PHILOSOPHERS: Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought by BEN-AMI SCHARFSTEIN, pp. 349-350: In my accounts of individual philosophers I have adopted the psychoanalytic view that a child’s idea of God is likely to be modelled on its father . . . it strikes me as significant that the four philosophers, Hume, Nietzsche, Russel, and Sartre, who lost their fathers earliest in life are all atheistic or close to it.

- pp. 357-358: Of course, sado-masochism is a form of ambivalence, and, of our group of philosophers, most evidently characterizes Pascal, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. In each of these, with the exception of Wittgenstein, the personal sado-masochism is immediately perceived in his philosophy as well. It sometimes takes the form I have called ‘stuttering’. That is, philosophers such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein tend to write in aphorisms, notes, or fragments, as if the effort to express themselves coherently cannot withstand their powerful contrary impulses, but comes to more natural expression in spasmodic writing that resembles a dialogue of perpetually warring selves.


- from Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rudiger Safranski (translated by Shelley Frisch); pp. 19-22 [The Drama of Disillusionment]: [Nietzsche] hoped the music would never stop, but it did, and he faced the quandary of how to carry on with his existence. On December 18, 1871, Nietzsche traveled from Basel to Mannheim to hear Wagnerian music conducted by the composer. Upon his return to Basel, he wrote to his friend Erwin Rohde: “Everything that...cannot be understood in relation to music engenders...downright aversion and disgust in me. And when I returned home from the concert in Mannheim, I actually had a peculiarly exaggerated weary dread of everyday reality, because it no longer seemed real to me, but ominous”.
His return to a daily routine devoid of music was a problem that Nietzsche pondered incessantly. There is such a thing as life after music, he deliberated, but can it be endured? “Without music, life would be an error” (6, 64; TI [Twilight of the Idols] “Maxims and Arrows” 33).
Music, Nietzsche declared, imparts moments of true feeling”. It could be claimed that his entire philosophy was an endeavor to cling to life even when the music stopped. Although Nietzsche attempted to make music with language, thought, and ideas as much as humanly possible, displeasure was his constant companion. “It should have sung, this ‘new soul’ – and not spoken!”, Nietzsche wrote in a later self-critical preface to The Birth of Tragedy. His discontentment continued to dog him. Among his fragments written in early 1888, the following remark appears: “The fact is ‘that I am so sad’; the problem ‘I don’t know what that means’ ... “The tale from the distant past’”. Nietzsche was on the trail of Heinrich Heine, recalling lines from Heine’s famous poem “The Lorelei," in which a beautiful woman seated on the cliffs lures sailors to their deaths with the allure of her song. Having heard the siren song, Nietzsche grew dissatisfied with a culture in which the sirens had fallen silent and the Lorelei was nothing more than a tale from the past. His philosophy originated in postsirenian melancholy. He strove to preserve at least the spirit of music in words and an echo of farewell while tuning up for the possible return of music, so that the "bow" of life "does not break".
Over the course of many years Nietzsche used the music of Wagner to gauge his aesthetic pleasure. After hearing the overture to the Meistersinger for the first time, before his personal encounter with Wagner, he wrote to Rohde: "Every fiber and nerve of my being is tingling. It has been a long time since I experienced such a sustained feeling of rapture". This feeling was heightened when he improvised on the piano. He could surrender himself to the lure of the piano for hours at a time, forgetting himself and the world. One famous and infamous scene described by his childhood friend Paul Deussen refers to this rapture. "Nietzsche," reported Deussen, "traveled alone to Cologne one day, took a guided tour of the sights, and then asked the tour guide to take him to a restaurant. The tour guide took him instead to a house of ill repute. Nietzsche told me the next day, 'I suddenly saw myself surrounded by a half dozen apparitions in tinsel and gauze, staring at me expectantly. I was speechless at first, but then I went instinctively to a piano, as if it were the only being in the group with a soul, and struck several chords. They broke the spell and I hurried outside...' ".
Music, even when limited to a few improvised chords, triumphed over lust, In 1877, Nietzsche devised a hierarchy of things according to the degree of pleasure they afforded. Musical improvisation was placed at the pinnacle, followed by Wagnerian music. Lust was placed two rungs lower. In the bordello in Cologne, two chords were all he needed to transport him to another realm. They ushered in what he hoped would be a never-ending flow of improvisation and begin as though they had long since begun, and when they stop, they are still not truly finished. "The unending melody -- you lost the shore and surrender to the waves". Waves, which spill ceaselessly onto the shore, carrying you and pulling you along, and perhaps even pulling you under and submerging you, were Nietzsche's symbol of the depths of the world. "This is how the waves live -- just as we live, the desirers! I will say no more . . . how could I ever betray you! Because -- heed my words! -- I know you and your secret, I know your type! You and I are of one and the same type! -- You and I, we have one and the same secret!". One of these secrets is the intimate relationship of wave, music, and the great game of life that Goethe called "expire and expand." It is a game of grow and fade, rule and be overruled. Music transports you into the heart of the world, but in such a way that you do not die in it. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche called this ecstatic life in music the "rapture of the Dionysian state, which eradicates the ordinary bounds and limits of existence". As long as the rapture persists, the everyday world is carried off, only to be regarded with disgust when it returns to one's consciousness. The sobered ecstatic succumbs to a "will-nullifying frame of mind". At this moment, he resembles Hamlet, who is similarly revolted by the world and can no longer brace himself to act.

- from Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rudiger Safranski (translated by Shelley Frisch); pp. 243-244 (Chapter 10): Nietzsche remained in Genoa until the end of March 1882. Spring had begun, and the weather was balmy. Normally, he would have returned to more northerly climes at this point, but instead he made the odd choice of traveling to Messina, Sicily, on a moment's notice. He was the only passenger on a freighter. This trip gave rise to a great deal of speculation. Was he hoping for an unexpected encounter with Wagner, who had moved into his vacation lodgings nearby? Was it the homoerotic colony on the outskirts of Messina that attracted him, in particular the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, who was then famous for his pictures of naked young men cavorting in poses that recalled Greek antiquity? Interpreters of Nietzsche who focus on his latent homosexuality suspect that this was the case. Certainly, he associated the south with emancipated sensuality and relaxation. He was happy to keep dreaming the dream of the "blissful islands." In Zarathustra he sent "sweeping-winged longing" out into "hotter souths than sculptors ever dreamed of: to places where gods in their dances are ashamed of all clothes" (4, 247; Z Third Part, "On Old and New Tablets" 2). The enchanting experience of hearing Bizet's opera Carmen for the first time in Genoa in late November 1881 had given flight to Nietzsche's fantasies of the south.


- from The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche; p. 159:

For Darwin's disciples

Do these brave Englishmen,
These mediocre intellects,
Name you as 'Philosophy'?
Set Darwin besides Goethe,
And call out: Injured majesty --
Majestic genius!

[Scapegrace]

Nobody has noticed the cute little dominatrix with the whip? I bet she's the one who gave him syphilis.

[Taknamay]

Nobody has noticed the cute little dominatrix with the whip? I bet she's the one who gave him syphilis.

I don't understand. What's this about a dominatrix?

[NewBorn STAR]

He was napoleon !