Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 2 of 13

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Thus Spake Zarathustra. Beyond Good and Evil.
Philosophy Plunges into the Superman's Psyche
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 12, 1984

Transcript:

There are some who have been following these series for some time and are aware that last year we did a whole series on the 19th century over at the Gnostic Society on Hollywood Boulevard. So when you look at the program and you don't see some of the major figures of the 19th century it's because we've already done them. And in fact for those who were there for that series if you recall almost every single major figure that we took has been misunderstood in our time. Marx has been misunderstood; Wagner has been misunderstood; Darwin has been misunderstood. And we must then draw some bottom line somewhere about our time.

If all the major thinkers of the 19th century have been misunderstood in our time there is something wrong with our time. There is something skewed about our idea of history and man and indeed there is. And since the Second World War the skew has become more and more attenuated. So that courses like this are a necessity. They're not being given in the universities. They're not being given in any of the other metaphysical centers. There is no thinking that is being done today. And instead of acquiescing in our own demise we must investigate and find the reasons and the origins for our own time. For we are not mute, inglorious, miltons condemned to obscurity and anonymity. We will not accept that.

So the lecture series that you have before you, Prelude to the Twentieth Century, is a specifically designed look at, not the 19th century, but the jolt of lightning that came into the 19th century that ignited our own time. And so the first figure that we took last week, Søren Kierkegaard represents a breach with the past. He in fact was the individual who illuminated for us more than any other figure of that time the irreligious background of Western history as it had developed the way in which mental systems had proliferated to the point to where a genius on the level of Hegel had codified the entire mentality of Western history in one grand sweeping system. And had produced not the freedom that Hegel had supposed that he would produce but exactly the opposite. A kind of an intellectual pall began to settle over the mentality of Europe so that by the late 1840s almost all of Europe was emotionally in a cage which it could not stand. And in country after country, in 1848, revolutions and revolts tried to shatter this condition. They were all ineffectual because no one understood poignantly what was wrong. It was like a fairy tale where the disease was a spiritual disease and not a political disease. Although its origins were obscured the effects everywhere were apparent, and so men revolted against the effects as they always do.

And when you revolt against the effects you bring in the polarization that is latent in the unconscious and a worse tyranny comes into play. And that worst tyranny that emerged in the Europe following the revolutions of 1848 was the awakened pride and hubris of the German people. And we come tonight to Friedrich Nietzsche, who almost alone of his time, understood the dynamite that had been released in the German consciousness. Nietzsche, in fact, like Kierkegaard, like Schopenhauer, never enjoyed the sale of his books in his lifetime. His greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, would not even be published by publishers – he had to put out an edition of forty copies with his own money and mailed them out to friends. No one read it – but no one. It seems almost impossible for us in our own time that such a condition could happen. But the fact is is that in our own time the poignant critiques of our situation also go unread and unpublished.

We are forever suffering from the quandary that Arthur Schopenhauer discovered that his mother who wrote flamboyantly bad romantic novels which sold in the hundreds of thousands, and he was known as the son of Johanna Schopenhauer who was a no good-nick who wrote weird books and didn't smile a lot and wasn't pleasant in company. And how can you like somebody like this? Go away.

Well with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard we have just a foretaste of what is coming tonight because Nietzsche is in spades what Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard attempted to be. If Kierkegaard is trying to tear up the text of the past, Nietzsche is like a cannon shot that just blasts the paper all over the face of Europe. Nietzsche is the most peculiar individual and he's one of the few twentieth century men who occurred before our time. In fact, Nietzsche recognized in himself the fact that he did not belong in his own time. In fact, in his visionary outlook towards the end of his capacity to envision himself in what we what we would term rational terms. This is even enlarging the term rational. Nietzsche considered himself to be the prophet of man in his farthest evolutionary development the farthest man, or the überman, the superman. And in fact he will write in the last book that he was able to publish and we will see the tragic conditions that obtained in the life of Friedrich Nietzsche. A book which was supposed to have been the first volume of four which was to bear the title, Revaluation of All Values. It's usually misquoted as “Re-evaluation,” but the term is “Revaluation,” to revaluate, to recalibrate all of the value systems of mankind. And the first volume which was published bore the title of, Antichrist, and in the foreword Nietzsche writes:

“This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet. Possibly they are the readers who understand my ‘Zarathustra’: how could I confound myself with those for whom there are ears listening today? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me.”

Nietzsche was born on October 15th, 1844. He was mistaken all his life for a Polish person. He looked Polish. Poles would come up to him in various parts of Europe and begin speaking to him and Nietzsche in his own autobiography, which is published and is in a Penguin classic [inaudible] recounts how he investigated his family to see whether he was just sprinkled with German– German background. And yes his grandfather was a German Lutheran pastor who had written some beautiful homey book which was on the shelves of many Lutheran pastors. He was definitely of the German background. And this became for Nietzsche a talisman of pride and tragedy at the same time. And he attempted to turn himself inside out to reveal that his Germanness of which he was very proud should be transformed immediately into Europeanness because it was also very dangerous. He considered himself a test case and was one of the few men in history who consciously realized that he would not die, but that he would completely unravel in terms of his mental capacities and his physiological workings – a fate worse than death for someone who prided himself upon clear thought and robust health. All the way through Nietzsche's writings we find the use of the French word decadent. All we are saying, that such and such an attitude or such and such a view of life is decadent. Whereas his own position was one of something robust.

He would later criticize his great inspirational friend Richard Wagner. Talking to another friend of his, he would say, “Yes, Wagner is very great, but I am here six thousand feet above Bayreuth and the air is clear here. You can breathe. There is something robust here for you.” So the contrast between a robust healthy clean outlook. He uses the words clean and cleanliness all the time as opposed to something decadent.

He was as a youngster being prepared for theology, for the pastorate probably – the Lutheran pastorate. The family actually suffered when the father passed on in 1849. Nietzsche was about five years old and the diagnosis at the time was that his father had died from a softening of the brain. A lethal phrase that stuck in the young boy's mind. And later when he would have his own peculiar tragedy it would echo in him again and again that his father had died of the softening of the brain – an unfortunate phrase. The mother then incapacitated from raising Nietzsche and his sister Elisabeth – just a few years difference in age between the two of them. So the mother moved in with the paternal grandmother and two maiden aunts so that the young Nietzsche was raised in a house of women. He had almost no contact with men and there was no father figure. And many people have made a great deal out of the relationship with Wagner – that Wagner was a father figure for Nietzsche. So let him be a father figure. There's nothing limiting in that. There are many younger men who find an ideal for themselves in someone they can admire. And at the time that Nietzsche will meet Richard Wagner he will be one of the lions of Europe.

Being raised in this house full of women, Nietzsche was very often the frail little boy. The person who relied upon his inner agility with images and words to have his way. And actually when Nietzsche was entered into the university system at Bonn he was entered in to become a Lutheran pastor and follow in the family tradition. No one could have had a more quiet kind of a childhood. All the doilies were on the couches and all the dishes were nicely put away at night in the cupboards. And it wasn't until he got to the university at Bonn that Nietzsche even began to recognize that there were other ways of life, other ways of being human. As someone once wrote, Jean Lissitzky wrote a book Four Ways of Being Human, a great anthropological classic. It was at the University of Bonn that he ran into his first professor who actually began to open the world up to him and the world that was being open to him was the world of classical ancient Greece. And one of Nietzsche's classmates, a man who became quite famous later on, Erwin Rohde, who wrote a grand book called Psyche, a study of Ancient Greek mystery religion which is still in print, I believe.

The professor's name was Ritschl. And within a year Ritschl moved to the University of Leipzig; Bonn was very pedestrian, Leipzig was very adventurous academically. So that the Nietzsche and the young Rohde went with professor Ritschl to the University of Leipzig. They went along to continue their studies with him. And Nietzsche wrote home and said I'm not going to be a minister. I'm going to become a classical philologist. That's the way they would have termed it in the Germany of that day.

For Nietzsche perceiving the Greeks was a shock to his entire intellectual outlook, which meant also for someone like Nietzsche that his entire life was changed, uprooted. He was always a highly integrated individual; someone for whom things intellectual were never distant from himself physiologically. He's also very sensitive. He was among other things a very great poet and a lot of Nietzsche's poems which have not yet been translated into English should be. Alot of Nietzsche's prose approximates the classic grand style of prose poetry. And of course some works, like Thus Spake Zarathustra, really are poems, grand epic poems. So that Nietzsche was one of these individuals who simply could not be exposed to new ideas without also exposing his life energy, as he would say, to this transformation.

When he got there to the University of Leipzig. This would have been probably in the late 1860s early 1870s. He was only there for about a year when one of the great German wars of the 19th century broke out, one of the Prussian Wars, 1870. And this was when the German army went in, eventually all the way to Paris and seized the city of Paris from the commune of 1870/1871. Nietzsche was turned down because of his delicate health to be in the regular infantry but he became an ambulance driver. There were no mechanical vehicles. There were horses and buggies and so forth. And in this episode as an ambulance driver Nietzsche found himself alone with six men who had come down with diphtheria and Nietzsche for days on end nursed them alone brought them all the way back to the lines where they could be taken care of. But Nietzsche himself suffered a grand impairment of his health. He also contracted diphtheria. It was then that he discovered that convalescing for him took a long time, that his body was actually very frail and once it was ill it took him a long time to come back. And he discovered in his convalescing that the reason for this was that his physiological system had been impaired in damage. For when he was very young first in university he'd been taken by a friend to a famed house of ill repute and there the bashful young Lutheran pastors boy recounted later in a letter to a friend that the only living thing in the place seemed to be a piano to which he had gone and played some pieces. He had contracted syphilis. And Nietzsche began to realize, by the early 1870s, that there was something wrong with him physiologically from this illness. As the slow long progression of the illness went on it would affect Nietzsche's life more and more and he would finally become terminally insane in early 1889 and spend the last 11 years of his life totally paralyzed mentally and physically. He would be just as we would colloquially term it today a basket case.

The awareness of this massive condemnation of him physically led Nietzsche increasingly throughout the 1870s to try and become daring in an intellectual way to try and transcend the Condition. And you can have this in quotation marks or capital C or however you wish to have it to transcend the Condition which man is given on the earth. And Nietzsche saw himself more and more as a test case as a particularly poignant individual who was selected out. He thought to himself I must have been selected out. This is meaningful. It's not just happenstance. Therefore I will overcome the situation. And in his desire to do this he would write his series of books.

The first book that he published, and it came out on the last day of 1871 – usually bears the date of 1872 – was called The Birth of Tragedy – The Birth of Tragedy. That the full title is, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. For what had happened– Nietzsche had gone to the University of Leipzig for the number of years that were required to gain his Ph.D. And even though he hadn't finished his doctorate thesis, a call came because of some articles that he had been publishing in scholarly journals to come and teach at the University of Basel, or Basel, in Switzerland right at the edge where Switzerland and France and Germany all come together. And he had gone there, and just outside of Basel not too far away, in Tribschen, Richard Wagner was living and Nietzsche would go out on the weekends and spend the weekends with Wagner and his new wife Cosima, who was a character in her own right was an extremely precocious woman. She'd been the wife of a very famous conductor Hans von Bülow and had simply decided in her own arrogant way that Wagner was the most spectacular human being of her time and she would have him. And so she just went and lived with him and had children by him and eventually obtained a separation and a divorce and eventually became Cosima Wagner a very precocious woman in every way. It was at this time that Nietzsche began to associate Wagner with ancient Greece. He would go out every weekend in the happiest days of his life were spent in the Wagner household at Tribschen and it occurred to him more and more that Wagner was in fact a let's use the term.

He was a reincarnation of Aeschylus that Wagner was bringing back the ancient classic tragic drama of Periclean Greece for the Germany of their day and that Wagner's operas were in fact poignantly the cultural igniting pilot light that Aeschylus tragedies were for ancient Greece. And so The Birth of Tragedy is dedicated to Richard Wagner and the full title Then The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music becomes extremely pointed. In The birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche for the first time brings out a typology which has become almost standard today. A typology which separates mankind into two massive tendencies: one an Apollonian and one a Dionysian character. That the Apollonian character seeks to impose form to generate pattern and have this pattern in form then create order and meaning for man for life for the earth for the gods. And that opposed to this continuously always is the Dionysian urge to be free not to be netted by order, not to be diced up and categorized by any kind of meaningfulness. And that the Dionysian tendency is the more primordial. It is the more natural, is in fact illustrative of what we would call reality. Whereas the Apollonian forms are illustrious of what we would call in the grandest designation: appearance. So that between appearance and reality between culture and naturalness there comes from time to time great gaps. And in this gap there come great individuals who by the lightning integrative meaningfulness of their art bridge the gap and carry man back to his salvation, back to the Dionysian original primal reality through an art form which specifically is guaranteed to pull the plug on all art forms. That is a form which allows for its own demise its own fading into the reality behind the formal mental cultural world of appearance.

Nietzsche would in fact worship Wagner for several years, hold him as the great artist of the age and have all kinds of expectations. And the fact that he found himself with a short fused light, he knew he had just years to go. He tried to write in The Birth of Tragedy, the book which would set up Richard Wagner as the artistic heir of ancient Greece reincarnated in Germany. And Wagner would be that great philosophic clarion blowing the horn and alerting everyone to this fact. He in fact writes in The Birth of Tragedy, he writes in section five in– the near the beginning,

“We are now approaching the central concern of our inquiry which has as its aim an understanding of the Dionysiac-Apollonian spirit or at least an intuitive comprehension of the mystery which made this conjunction possible. Our first question must be where in the Greek world is the new seed first to be found which was later to develop into tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb. Greek antiquity gives us a pictorial clue when it represents in statues and cameos, etc. Homer and Archilochus side by side as ancestors and torchbearers of Greek poetry in the certainty that only these two are to be regarded as truly original minds from whom a stream of fire flowed onto the entire later Greek world. Homer, the hoary dreamer caught in utter abstraction prototype of the Apollonian naive artist, stares in amazement at the passionate head of Archilochus, soldierly servant of the muses knocked about by fortune.”

He who represents of course the Dionysian tone. Nietzsche will himself assume the name Dionysius and towards the end of his rational life more and more as he found himself compelled both physiologically to let go both mentally because he was literally disintegrating to let go and philosophically because he was envisioning a grand transcendental world vision to let himself go he began signing his letters more and more instead of Nietzsche, he would sign them Dionysius. When the break came, he was in a little Italian city and he saw a man whipping a horse and he broke into tears and he ran and thrust his arms around the horse and never stopped crying. Later when they took him to a physician's home in between the sobs he kept saying that he was famous, throughout time, throughout history. That he was to set man free from himself. And of course they thought he was crazy.

Wagner became a test case for the way in which the mind seeks in its grandest strategy to make a form to approach reality not a form Apollonian in purpose, but a form Apollonian only in design. That its strategic purpose beyond the tactical design is to release man, to let him go, to let him be free, to let him gain the heights.

In a book often published with The Birth of Tragedy called, The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche writes, “Let us remember that Wagner was young at the time Hegel and Schelling seduced men's spirits, that he guessed, that he grasped with his very hands the only thing the Germans take seriously – ‘the idea’ – which is to say something that is obscure, uncertain, full of intimations; that among Germans clarity is an objection, logic a refutation. Harshly Schopenhauer accused the epoch of Hegel and Schelling of dishonesty. Harshly also wrongly he himself, the old pessimistic counterfeiter, was not a whit more ‘honest’ than his most famous contemporaries. Let us keep morals out of this, Hegel is a taste, and not merely a German but a European taste! A taste Wagner comprehended! To which he felt equal! Which he immortalized! He merely applied it to music – he invented a style for himself, charged with infinite meaning. He became the heir of Hegel… Music as ‘idea’.”

And in the lecture that we did on Wagner, I think we were able to display and show the grand strategy of Wagner's miraculous art form. The bringing together of all arts into one massive mother form. And the development of that mother form to an archetypal universal tapestry against which man could play his insides, play his ideas, his archetypes out onto this grand screen and see dramatically what he was like inside. To create a projective world screen of operatic theater drama bringing music, and drama, and words, and language, poetry, architecture, and everything into one grand scene. They built a special theater for this at Bayreuth in the early 1870s. And when Nietzsche went out to Bayreuth he saw that his wonderful friend Wagner was changing. He was no longer the– the lovable lionized great artist, but he was becoming a cultural magician. To Nietzsche he was prostituting not only his art but the entire responsibility, ethically given to them across the ages. They were entrusted with this sacred duty and Wagner was prostituting it. Why would he do this? It must be because of his wife. It must be because of Cosima. What is she doing? Nietzsche would try and think this through. What is happening? I'm here he is saying in the midst of the most important happening in twenty-five hundred years and it's going down the drain. What does this woman want? She wants to take Wagner away from the classical Greek ideal and return him to a kind of an ambiguous mystical Christian ideal which exists in the mind only. Does not even obtain in history. Not a Christianity of Christ. Not a Christianity even of history, but a Christianity of German idealistic speculation.

Nietzsche could hardly stomach the situation. In fact, his letters at this time record vomiting for days on end, migraine headaches that would not quit, and he could no longer tell after 1875 where there was something physiologically manifesting whether it was something mentally manifesting whether it was something archetypally happening to him on a grand scale and he finally gave up trying to draw these lines to make these distinctions. And for Nietzsche he was simply showcased in world history for all time and that his physiological life, his spiritual inner life, and the cosmic unfolding of history were all one thing. That there was only one existentially present man in his own time. And it was he. He was the point of the pen of writing reality. And so when he saw Wagner becoming the cultural showcase, the sort of carnival master for all these devotees, Nietzsche took umbrage and he realized that if the Grand Master has been seduced at least he is left free, so he will do the job, he will create some form of deliverance for man.

It was at this time that Nietzsche began to talk seriously about man being a passing phase; that there is a reality that we are and mankind is only a stage on the way and that we have to learn to overcome man in order to be what we really are. And in this Nietzsche began then to single out all of the cultural flaws that made possible the seduction of what we would call everyday life, what we would call everyday people even to the extent of being able to seduce a mastermind like Wagner. He always maintained that Wagner was a mastermind, but he had been seduced by the culture of the time. And so Nietzsche began then to use his tremendous intellectual powers, his great compositional writing powers. Trained on classical Greek he could write beautiful prose. He began to try to dissolve all of the forms of Western civilization. And so his books become, after 1876, a concerted barrage, an attack, he calls himself a warrior: a grand warrior of the reality behind man seeking to dissolve effectively once and for all the entire cage of culture which has kept man in a seductive kind of a whore house of history that he will be freed from this.

And so all of Wagner's writings– Nietzsche's writings begin to lean towards this background. He will in fact discover for himself just as he has made up his mind that it seems that fate and history are totally against him. He discovers that he's starting to go blind. And in fact, in 1879, he had to resign his professorship and accept a very small pension because he could no longer see. He could no longer think, and he thought perhaps tragically that his time had come premature. He didn't know. He felt in fact like a shadow. And he records that he went home, he went back to the house of women: he went back to where his mother was alive where his sister was. The same nightmarish environment that is a little boy. He had struggled to be free. And the prophet of the superman went back there because he was totally incapacitated. And he spent a year as a shadow.

He later would write in a very poignant phrase in Thus Spake Zarathustra. He would give an incredible image of this kind of a mentality. He would say,

“Behold! I show you the Ultimate Man. ‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asked the Ultimate Man and blinks. The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Ultimate Man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Ultimate Man lives longest. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Ultimate Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs oneself against him: for one needs warmth. Sickness and mistrust count as sins with them: one should go about warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or over men! A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death.”

So in this tone we gain the feeling that Nietzsche is bringing to himself. And he records later on in one of his works, thinking back to the time when he was just a shadow. And he writes that, at the death of the Buddha there was a legend that his shadow remained in a cave for centuries. And that only very slowly did this shadow disappear. That the impress of the man was so great that it left this quality, this negativity, which was in fact not the obverse of existence but was the underlying nothing of reality.

Nietzsche found himself absolutely destitute. And then slowly his sight came back. Slowly he began to realize that he had an extension of life and when Nietzsche came out of it he wrote a book which is entitled, in its English translation, Daybreak. It's usually called Dawn but in this translation it's called Daybreak. And at the very end of Daybreak, in the 575th section, he writes this:

“We [are] aeronauts of the spirit! – All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance – it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch on a mast or a bare cliff-face – and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop and it is not with the noblest or most graceful of gestures that weariness comes to a stop: it will be the same with you and me! But what does that matter to you and me! Other birds will fly farther! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights from which there surveys the distance and before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea! – And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach some India – but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers?”

Well let's take a little break and then we'll come back.

I'm sorry that we don't have– we don't have a question and answer period and we're unable to– we're unable to do justice to all the figures. I put on the board names of individuals who are important in the life of– of Nietzsche. And if we don't get to them all it's just simply because I do not lecture from a written text. I try to compose the material on the spot for you. That I'm convinced that that has an efficacy of form, and I try to engrave the present with the actuality. There are limitations not only for form but for myself too, obviously. We've been taking the entire history of the West, from Homer to the present day. We've been moving patiently for years now. Person by person. And I try also to keep ideational histories out of the picture to present as accurately as I may the impression of the person: who this is, how they saw themselves, their mission if you wish, their purpose. And we have been moving now through several hundreds of individuals. And so when we come to individuals who are important to us, in our lives, we do not like to see them mishandled. But the purposes here are very large, very strategic. And always the concern is to keep the honesty of a single voice in a single mind, giving us personal developments of man. It's the only guide that we have because when we get into our own time there is no way to tell where we are or who we are by any kind of ideational computation. We think it's 1984. What's that? And we can go on from that.

Nietzsche had a kind of lovable sincerity to him which does not come out in normal biographies. He was an exquisitely tender individual and he had a great love of his life. She was young at the time Lou Salomé who later would marry and become Lou Andreas-Salomé. He wanted to, more than anything, settle down, to have a place for himself, to have a life. It was tragic in the extreme to realize that he could not do this. There are reports always. What does the man do? What is his sexuality like? Reports of Nietzsche going off to peasant girls from time to time. Indiscriminate. But against all of this muttering the great evident truth of his ascetic life, of the imposition of a tragic realization upon him as a man, as a feeling individual. And it came poignantly to a head early in 1882. Lou Salomé, twenty years younger than he was at the time. He was in his late thirties, nearly thirty-eight. She was a brilliant intellectual genius. She became a very fine writer in the nineteenth century. She was also a very peculiar lady. She, in fact, remained virginal up until her late twenties. Her desire was to participate in the life of man as an equal and her openness was mis-seen at the time. She in fact did not have a real love affair until the late 1890s when she met the younger Rainer Maria Rilke, the great poet. When she was still a young, bright, brash woman of late adolescent years, and Nietzsche met her, she appeared to him as the lovable companion. She was someone to whom he could talk in the highest levels. She would be the most likable disciple for him. And he turned over in his mind, many times, the possibility of a marriage. It could not be; he could not carry his tragedy to her. They spent some time together in a mountain resort. Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth accompanied them. The sister, who was about fifteen years older than Lou, tried to become a school teacher-elder-woman to Lou who just laughed at her. She could talk on a par with Nietzsche his grandest flights of ideas. She was at home, she was a free lady, and Nietzsche loved her. And in order to mitigate the crushing realization that now he would never marry, he would never have the life proper to a man, he tried to convince her to see in his friend a certain Rée, the– all the qualities which he would hope that she would have found in him but She didn't care much for Rée. She liked to talk with them and was an acquaintance but there wasn't much for her with him so she went on her way. He never saw her again.

Lou Salomé and Cosima Wagner were the two women that most struck him as being the figures of the new kind of woman. Harbingers of the new kind of man that must surely be over the horizon. We can't see him yet. He must be there though. He'll be coming and he'll need a new world.

Wagner, for him, was a turning point he says in an epilogue to The Case of Wagner he says, “Let us recover our breath in the end by getting away for a moment from the narrow world to which every question about the worth of persons condemns the spirit. A philosopher feels the need to wash his hands after having dealt so long with the case of Wagner. I offer my conception of what is modern.” And we skip over to the very last two paragraphs. What is modern? “One looks in vain for more valuable, more necessary opposites. But such falseness is that of Bayreuth is no exception today. We are all familiar with that esthetic concept of the Christian junker. Such innocence among opposites. Such a good conscience is in a lie and actually as modern par excellence. It almost defines modernity. Biologically modern, pre-modern man represents a contradiction of values, he sits between two chairs, he says yes and no in the same breath. Is it any wonder that precisely in our times falsehood itself has become flesh and even genius! That Wagner dwelled among us! It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.… But all of us have, unconsciously, involuntarily in our bodies, values, words, formulas, moralities, of opposite descent. We are physiologically considered false… The diagnosis of the modern soul. Where would it begin? With a resolute incision into this instinctive contradiction with the isolation of its opposite values, with the vivisection of the most instructive case. The “Case of Wagner” is for the philosopher a windfall – this essay is inspired, as you hear, by gratitude.”

So he learned from the master after all. And he learned the responsibility. And after the episode with Lou Salomé. And after the episode of becoming a shadow in his own life, and emerging Nietzsche entered into a new period. The last six years of Nietzsche's life are truly a Herculean task to unravel. The books that came out are so poignant that they still strike the chords of anxiety and hope today. In the very preface to Dawn, or Daybreak, he wrote:

“In this book you will discover a ‘subterranean man’ at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines. You will see him – presupposing you have eyes capable of seeing this work in the depths – going forward slowly, cautiously, gently inexorable, without betraying very much of the distress which any protracted deprivation of light and air must entail; you might even call him contented, working there in the dark. … Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole.”

And at the very beginning of book one – and there are five books in Daybreak – I just give you one paragraph.

“Supplemental rationality. – All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?”

And so, with Daybreak, Nietzsche began again, this time concerted. All right. We are limited. We have only so much time. We have only so much energy. We can just read a few hours before the migraines come, before the tremendous vertigoes begin racking our system before we realize that we are all alone, there is no help, there are no real friends. One has a correspondence. He kept up a correspondence with Overbeck almost all of his life. His sister married someone for whom the clarion call was a brutal antisemitism. And Nietzsche took such umbrage to this association of his name with such a despicable distortion that he almost disowned his sister. They moved to Paraguay hoping to be in a small colony there and Nietzsche had hopes that perhaps this new landscape would bring them back that the colonizing experience would open them up. And then he found out that it was a completely reactionary colony and they were just breeding hatred for themselves. A lot of the distortions of Nietzsche, later in the 20th century, come from his sister who took care of him the last eleven years of his life, who edited a lot of his works, who re-edited a lot of his works, who left things out. And when the National Socialists began to look for some philosopher to lay the ideational structure for their particular brand of how to be victorious, they took many of the cut-up snippet versions of Nietzsche – especially of his notebooks, which were very handily put together in certain forms – to reveal that Nietzsche was on their side. Many of the distortions still exist almost to our own day. It's only been in the last ten years that we have had scholars, individuals, who have gone back and reread the material and brought Nietzsche back, exhumed him, from the kind of intellectual morass into which his works were plunged for nearly three quarters of a century.

Many of his works, like The Will to Power, actually for the first time when one sees that these notebooks of Nietzsche were actually the workbooks out of which he would work with his ideas. And very often he would write from back to front in his notebooks, and sometimes he would write only on right hand pages, sometimes only on left hand pages, sometimes writing in the margins. All of his works had to become like small aphoristic statements because he couldn't work for a long time continuously. He couldn't lay these manuscripts out and work with the broad beautiful prose. So he kept collections of thousands of statements. And in his living presence was the overall purpose of designs of how to bring this together. And we know now, by comparing his notebooks to some of the published works, that actually Nietzsche changed in the ordering the meaning of a great many of his statements, all of them poignant and quotable, but it's only when we see the massive scale, not the mosaic chips, but the decoration on the whole edifice that we realize we have before us a real twentieth century man for whom his own existence is the only definite point at which he can move. That all of his understanding comes to a halt in an ideational jungle if he pauses too long. If he stops to think too long he nets himself involuntarily in his own habitual almost predestined traps. And so, in order to free himself he must keep moving restlessly ever, keep above tree line, keep up into the sparse spaces, and this means then that one has to go beyond the reach of opposites, beyond the polarities that constantly nudge him without his even recognizing that he's being nudged, pulled, cajoled, co-opted, you name it. That we do it to ourselves because we are conditioned, again and again, by the very circumstance in which we exist we're drowning in a sea of history. We're suffocating by the mountain slides of culture. And the only way to get free is to go beyond them, above them. And so works like Beyond Good and Evil come out. And Nietzsche begins to try to assess.

Part 40. The Free Spirit.
“Everything profound loves the mask: the profoundest things of all hate even image and parable. Should not nothing less than the opposite be the proper disguise under which the shame of a God goes abroad? A questionable question! – it would be strange if some mystic or other had not already ventured to meditate some such thing. There are occurrences of so delicate a description that one does well to bury them and make them unrecognizable with a piece of coarseness; there are acts of love and extravagant magnanimity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give the eyewitness a thrashing and so to confuse his memory of the event.”

But the powerful work that came after realizing that life would no longer be for him any kind of an order: Thus Spake Zarathustra. And the twenty-two sections of Zarathustra give us an insight, constantly reminding us.

“But then something happened that silenced every mouth and fixed every eye. In the meantime, of course, the tightrope walker had begun his work: he had emerged from a little door and was proceeding across the rope, [that] was stretched between two towers and thus hung over the people and the market square. Just as he had reached the middle of his [little] course the little door opened again and a brightly-dressed fellow like a buffoon sprang out and followed the former with rapid steps. ‘Forward, lame-foot!’ cried his fearsome voice, ‘forward sluggard, intruder, pallid-face! Lest I tickle you with my heels! What are you doing here between towers? You belong in the tower, you should be locked up, you are blocking the way of a better man than you!’ And with each word he came nearer and nearer to him: but when he was only a single pace behind him, there occurred the dreadful thing that silenced every mouth and fixed every eye: he emitted a cry like a devil and sprang over the man standing in his path. But the latter, when he saw his rival thus triumph, lost his head and the rope; he threw away his pole and fell, faster than it, like a vortex of legs and arms. The market square and the people were like a sea in a storm: they flew apart in disorder, especially where the body would come crashing down. But Zarathustra remained still and the body fell quite close to him, badly injured, broken but not yet dead. After a while, consciousness returned to the shattered man and he saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked at length. ‘I've known for a long time that the Devil would trip me up. Now he's dragging me to Hell: are you trying to prevent him?’ ‘On my honor, friend,’ said Zarathustra, ‘all you have spoken of does not exist: there is no Devil; there is no Hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body; therefore fear nothing any more!’ The man looked up mistrustfully. ‘If you are speaking the truth,’ he said then, ‘I leave nothing when I leave life. I am not much more than an animal which has been taught to dance by blows and starvation.’ ‘Not so,’ said Zarathustra. ‘You have made danger your calling, there is nothing in that to despise. Now you perish through your calling: so I will bury you with my own hands.’ When Zarathustra had said this the dying man replied no more; but he motioned with his hand, as if he sought Zarathustra's hand to thank him.”

We haven't time to go into the work but you begin to get the tone. Just a paragraph from part three to give you some of the indelible poetic imagery which Nietzsche now brings forth. His power at composition at unraveling the ideational structures which have taunted and bedeviled man, especially in Germany in the nineteenth century.

“It was midnight when Zarathustra made his way over the ridge of the island, so that he might arrive at the other shore with the early dawn: For there he meant to board ship. For there was a good harbor at which foreign ships, too, liked to drop anchor: they took on board many who wanted to leave the Blissful Islands and cross the sea. Now, as Zarathustra was climbing the mountain he recalled as he went the many lonely wanderings he had made from the time of his youth, and how many mountains and ridges and summits he had already climbed. I am a wanderer and a mountain-climber (he said to his heart), I do not like the plains and it seems I cannot sit still for long. And whatever may yet come to me as fate and experience – a wandering and a mountain-climbing will be in it: in the final analysis one experiences only oneself.”

And so book after book came out. Nietzsche bringing to bear and to focus all of his great talents. And always behind him, the concern with the largest structures of the age, the largest presentational forms. Always Wagner holding a position of tutoring to him, even in absence. One of his last books, finished just months before he passed on, was a play on the word, the title of the Last of the ring series. Instead of Götterdammerung he used the term Götzen-Dämmerung, the philosopher of the man with the hammer, and it's translated as the Twilight of the Idols. And in the Twilight of the Idols we read the mature Nietzsche trying to pour, torrentially, out in a balanced prose inspired form a vision of final days.

“The psychology of the orgiastic as an overflowing feeling of life and energy, within which even pain acts as a stimulus, provided me with the key to the concept of the tragic feeling, which was misunderstood as much by Aristotle, as it especially was by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes, in Schopenhauer's sense, that it has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea and the counter verdict to it. Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I call the Dionysian, that is what I recognize as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge – it was thus that Aristotle understood it – but beyond pity, beyond terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy to destruction. And with that I return again to the place from which I set out: The Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values. And with that, I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will. And can I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysius – I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”

And for Nietzsche, the last three or four months of his sanity, the overwhelming realization that it all happened before, again and again and again, at the same people, the same circumstance, the same conditions, re-occur eternally. That somewhere in the tragic vision of life what is wrong with it is that this infinity of reoccurring is what man has to break out of. Get rid of. And that doctoring himself up by acclimating himself to this or that aspect of it is paltry. But that's a sign of decadence. That we are not to acclimate ourselves to life to the appearances to the forms – no matter how grand, no matter how poignant – they are all wrong, fundamentally, because none of them are real.

So he writes in the Foreword to The Antichrist, which is the epitome in his mind of the anti-form: “the conditions under which one understands me and then necessarily understands me – I know them all too well. One must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of harshness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion. One must be accustomed to living on mountains, to seeing the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egotism beneath one. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask whether truth is useful or a fatality. Strength which prefers questions for which no one today is sufficiently daring; courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. An experience out of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant things. A new conscience for truths which have hitherto remained totally dumb. And the will to economy in the grand style: to keeping one's energy, one's enthusiasm in bounds. Reverence for oneself; love for oneself; unconditional freedom with respect to oneself. Very well! These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? The rest are merely again and again and again, mankind trapped. One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul – even if necessary in contempt.”

And so with Nietzsche there enters into Western thought this explosive bomb mentality that all of reality must be comprehended in one enormous move of the individual freed from all appearance; that it must be done courageously. And this is the real ‘will to power’: the power of envisioning the real. The power of the Dionysiac freeing itself from all of the nets. And so Nietzsche will say, what I dislike most is the ‘dialectic’, especially that of Socrates. It's that comfortable feeling that by our questioning by creating these beautiful forms of questioning that we're arriving somewhere and we are arriving nowhere. But we will be free. For he says the überman, the superman, is coming and he will not be stopped by any of the forms no matter what.

With this explosiveness, the preludes to the twentieth century begin now to take on an ominous storm cloud. It was one thing to have the Hegel. It was one thing to have a Schopenhauer or even a Kierkegaard. But now with Nietzsche we have something new on the horizon. And it was indicative of that particular poignancy of the age. And Nietzsche was not the only one thinking in grand eloquent terms of complete forms and contexts outside of them.

And next week we'll look at a grand woman who envisioned yet another way of seeing this – Madame Blavatsky. I hope some of you can make it.