http://www.independent.co.uk/news/People/Profiles/2000-08/nietsche250800.shtml
N is for Nietzsche (and Nazis, Neuroses, Nihilism and the Nature of the
universe)
To mark the 100th anniversary of his death, we present the A-Z of the
philosopher who became one of the most reviled figures of the 20th century.
Could it be that he was just a little misunderstood?
By Kevin Jackson
25 August 2000
A is for Antichrist
Born in 1844 to a Lutheran clergyman, Friedrich Nietzsche tore himself away
from his pious roots to become a startlingly vehement and searching enemy
of Christian civilization. One of his last completed works, bluntly
entitled The Anti-Christ, declares that "The Christian Church has left
nothing untouched by its depravity..." And who or what, in the Nietzschean
view, was the Antichrist himself? The answer can be found in his short
autobiography Ecce Homo (III, 2): "Ich bin... der Antichrist." Eat your
heart out, Johnny Rotten.
B is for Beyond Good and Evil
"That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil":
one of the more pregnant sayings from Nietzsche's last book of aphorisms,
and a maxim which goes some way towards suggesting what its provocative
title, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), might fully signify.
C is for Classics
At the age of 24, Nietzsche was appointed to the chair of classical
philology at Basel University, and he remained a professor for the next 10
years. His very first publication, in 1867, was a textual essay on
Theognis. It was an inauspiciously dry overture to such an iconoclastic
career, and yet one of the foundations for all Nietzsche's later thought
was his reinterpretation of the Greek culture of the sixth century BC: he
was especially keen on the so-called Pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus,
Thales and Empedocles. Note, too, his lifelong fascination for:
D is for Dionysus
The Greek deity who meant many things to Nietzsche at different times of
his life. In The Birth of Tragedy, his first major publication (much
derided by his academic colleagues, who thought it at best fanciful, at
worst nutty), the emotional Dionysian force is opposed to the Apollonian
form-creating principle; in his middle years, "Dionysus" stands for the
sublimated "Will to Power" and becomes synonymous with the Übermensch; and
with the onset of his madness, he begins to sign his ranting letters
"Dionysus".
E is for Eternal Recurrence
The mystical doctrine preached in Thus Spake Zarathustra and elsewhere:
life – existence, time, the universe, what have you – repeats itself over
and over again, without cease. There are signs that Nietzsche really
believed that this was the nature of the universe, and that modern science
bore him out, but most of his commentators have charitably assumed that
"Eternal Recurrence" is in fact a sort of metaphor or moral injunction:
live your life in such a way that you would be content for every moment of
it to be repeated again and again and again into infinity. In either case,
Nietzsche's message is clear: be a man or, rather, a Superman – just accept
it.
F is for Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche
Nietzsche's sister: by turns a neurotically protective and vengeful
guardian of his sexual purity; a wife to one of the men Nietzsche most
despised, a co-founder of a bizarre proto-fascist colony in Paraguay; a
nurse of her now-deranged brother; and the High Priestess of the Nietzsche
cult, which began in the last decade of his life and was later adopted by
Hitler's gang.
G is for Gay Science
Or, in German, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Nietzsche's translation of la
gaya scienza or gai saber, meaning the art of the Provençal Troubadours,
"those splendid, inventive men... to whom Europe owes so much and, indeed,
almost itself". It has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality. At any
rate, that's what you should tell those ill-mannered people who give you
funny looks when they catch you reading The Gay Science on the bus.
H is for Heine
Nietzsche admired the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) with an
unflagging passion. "The highest conception of the lyric poet was given me
by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of the millennia for an
equally sweet and passionate music... One day it will be said that Heine
and I have been by far the foremost artists of the German language – at an
incalculable distance from anything mere Germans have done with it..."
(Ecce Homo). (The "mere Germans" crack needs a footnote: Nietzsche managed
to persuade himself, on exceptionally skimpy evidence, that he was
descended from Polish noblemen. He was not.)
I is for Insanity
On the morning of 3 January 1889, Nietzsche leaves his lodgings in Turin,
sees a cabman beating his horse, rushes to save the poor beast, throws his
arms around its neck and passes out. When he revives, he is uncontrollable,
and starts firing off megalomanical letters to the crowned heads of Europe.
His sanity is gone for ever, and he spends the remaining 11 years of his
life as a withdrawn invalid, unaware that he has in the meantime become one
of the most famous writers in the world. Likely cause of his insanity:
syphilis, contracted from a prostitute in one of his rare, youthful
debauches.
J is for Jews
"Don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are Jewish": traditional
mating call of the anti-Semite. Well, some of his best friends were indeed
Jewish, notably his fellow philosopher, Paul Ree; but it's a lot more
revealing to note that one of his worst enemies – his brother-in-law, the
professional bigot Bernhard Forster – was a rabid anti-Semite, and that he
despised the man's views ("This accursed anti-Semitism") as much as his
person. It's true that Nietzsche did write some weirdly disparaging things
about the Jews, but then he wrote weirdly disparaging things about almost
everyone except the Ancient Greeks, including the Germans and the English.
The rumour that Nietzsche was vilely anti-Semitic owes more to the
editorial jiggery-pokery of his sister and the unsavoury nature of some of
his fans than it does to the printed record. If anything, the
characteristic Nietzschean note is markedly philo-Semitic: "What a blessing
a Jew is among Germans!" (The Will to Power, I, 49).
K is for Kant
That is, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804); Nietzsche
seldom passed up the opportunity to point out that he was utterly wrong
about almost everything.
L is for Lou Salome
When they make the Nietzsche biopic, Lou Salome will be the major romantic
interest: Nietzsche fell for the 21-year-old in 1882, proposed to her and
was rejected twice, and ended up briefly in a ménage à trois with Miss Lou
and Paul Ree. (Probably sexless, at least on Nietzsche's part.) When the
ménage dissolved, he left in a rage; the later part of his life remained as
loveless as the earlier.
M is for Maxims
Aphorisms, maxims, apopthegms and dicta are the essence of Nietzsche's
literary genius. "What does not destroy me, makes me stronger" (Twilight of
the Idols, aphorism 8); or "He who fights with monsters should look to it
that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an
abyss the abyss also gazes into you" (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 146).
N is for Nazis
They revered him as a prophet, they built him a museum in Weimar, they
poisoned his name for generations. And there are extremely strong grounds
for saying that they got him dead wrong. He derided Germans and Germany,
held racism in lofty contempt, scorned ideas of racial purity...
O is for Overcoming
A key term of his later writings: it refers chiefly to self-overcoming, and
the route towards the superhuman: see U is for Übermensch.
P is for Power
The Will to Power is a keystone of Nietzsche's psychology and cosmology,
the constant theme of his mature thought: the whole universe is a
battleground of contending wills, he believed, and the fight for supremacy
visible in every manifestation of life (he developed the idea from a
radical re-reading of the work of Schopenhauer, the first writer to wake
him up to his vocation as a philosopher); The Will to Power is a posthumous
collection of his notes and jottings, authorised by Elizabeth
Forster-Nietzsche ,and variously regarded as (a) the pinnacle of his
philosophical career, (b) a hopeless mess and (c) neither of the above.
Sample extract:
Q is for Quality
"Qualities are an idiosyncrasy peculiar to man; to demand that our human
interpretations and values should be universal and perhaps constitutive
values is one of the hereditary madnesses of human pride" (The Will to
Power, section 565).
R is for Ressentiment
Roughly: the feelings of rancour, hatred and envy inevitably experienced by
the rabble when they confront the noble, the true and the great; and, then,
the system of life-hating ethics created by the herd in revenge. For
Nietzsche, the "herd religion" of Christianity is the most triumphant, and
so disastrous, historical flower of ressentiment.
S is for Socrates
A casual reading of Nietzsche leaves one with the impression that he
despised the Greek philosopher: "Socrates was rabble." But more subtle
readers have argued that Nietzsche identified with him strongly, modelled
some of his style on the mocking Socratic method, and that in arguing
against Socrates he was really arguing with himself.
T is for Twilight of the Idols
Sub-titled "How to Philosophise with a Hammer", this is the late work which
"says in 10 sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone
else does not say in a book". It's not a bad place for the interested
beginner to start – certainly better than the work most often recommended,
Thus Spake Zarathustra, which can be dull and repetitive.
U is for Übermensch
"I teach you the Superman. Man is a thing to be surmounted. What have ye
done to surmount him?... What is the ape to man? A jest or a thing of
shame. So shall man be to Superman – a thing of jest or shame..."(Thus
Spake Zarathustra, Introductory Discourse). The Superman is at once
Nietzsche's best-known and most variously interpreted idea, and it hasn't
done his reputation a lot of good. As the wording of Zarathustra suggests,
though, there is at least one clear thing about it: Nietzsche had been
reading his Darwin.
V is for Values
"One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good
and evil – that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them.
This demand follows from an insight first formulated by me: that there are
no moral facts whatever..." (Twilight of the Idols)
W is for Wagner
The most intense relationship of Nietzsche's life was that which he enjoyed
and suffered with the composer Richard Wagner: it went through all the
classic stages of infatuation, discipleship, disillusion and repudiation,
and left the fragments of a fascinating oedipal narrative in a series of
books from The Birth of Tragedy (1870-1) to The Wagner Case (1888) and
Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1888-9).
X is for Xymphora
The Greek word for "misfortune": in the Genealogy of Morals (I, ii),
Nietzsche observes that it was a word applied by the sublimely confident
nobility to the wretched lower orders. A study of etymology, he asserted,
will teach the same lesson again and again: that all the words for "good"
ultimately derive from the nobility and that all the words for "bad"
originally signify "common" or "plebeian." Discuss.
Y is for Yea-Saying
If forced to condense Nietzsche's ethical doctrine into a single slogan,
one could do a lot worse than: "Just say Yes."
Z is for Zarathustra
Of course. Let him have the last word: "I say unto you: a man must have
chaos yet within him to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto
you: ye have chaos yet within you..."
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Dr. J. Hughes
Changesurfer Radio
www.changesurfer.com
jhughes@changesurfer.com
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