The biggest problem I see when discussing Friedrich Nietzsche is that we tend to pull his sayings out of context and use them like aphorisms, especially his more controversial or poignant statements. It’s not surprising, though, that we approach Nietzsche in this way, given that we live in an age of soundbites and we acclamate ourselves to interacting with information in small morsels at a time.
I believe we would do much better to approach Nietzsche within the context of his life and culture. By doing so, we will not only understand him better but also gain a deeper understanding of ourselves.
We live in a modern age, one that has taken its toll on most, if not all, of us in the West. Stress, depression, anxiety, and alienation are just a few of the unintended consequences of living according to the cold and impersonal mechanistic rhythms of modernity.
We think that the ills of modernity are a particular malady of our present time and even going back into the 20th century. However, people like Nietzsche in the 19th century were acutely feeling these modernity changes and they did not like it. Much of Nietzsche philosophy emerged from this struggle with modernity. In a way, Nietzsche not only helped define modernity for us but was also prescient in predicting what lay ahead.
Nietzsche and Wagner
Even as a young man, Nietzsche chose his friends very carefully. First of all, they had to have the same intellectual capacity as he did, which was extensive by all accounts. His professors at the University of Leipzig all concurred that Nietzsche was the most brilliant student any of them had ever overseen at the college. Not only did his friends have to be on the same intellectual level as him, but they also had to have fairly similar philosophical outlooks. As you can imagine, this left room for very few people as his life went on.
Despite this, during his years as a young professor at the University of Bonn in Switzerland, he had a rich and active social life. It was as he grew older and became more of a philosopher rather than a philologist that he became more isolated, partly because of his beliefs but also due to his declining health and “workaholism.”
One person with whom he did find a kindred spirit was the famous composer and philosopher Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Nietzsche met Wagner during his time at Leipzig and continued his friendship with him well into the 1870s. Nietzsche (1844-1900) was much younger than Wagner, but Wagner sensed early on that Nietzsche could be his equal. He, an amateur musician who at times dabbled in composing, could learn much from Wagner. In turn, Wagner, being interested in the culture and philosophy of ancient Greece, found a ready teacher in Nietzsche, who was adept in both Greek literature and language.
Enter Schopenhauer
If Nietzsche and Wagner had talents that complemented one another, more importantly, they shared a common bond in that they both idealized and practically worshipped the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche found an exit from the all-encompassing religious and cultural Christianity—namely Lutheranism—that was woven into the very fabric of 19th-century German culture.
That said, due to the influence of the Enlightenment, among other factors, many Germans were becoming disillusioned with Christianity. Significant works of Higher Criticism had already been published, supposedly debunking much of the historical reliability of the Gospel accounts and Old Testament historicity. Much of this criticism would later be debunked with the advent of archaeology, which at that time was just a budding discipline.
But this is really a “chicken and egg” problem. Were Germans becoming disillusioned with Christianity because of Higher Criticism, or did disillusionment with Christianity produce Higher Criticism? The answer is probably both. The problem was that, philosophically speaking, there was no “replacement” for Christian metaphysics. This would be the lynchpin by which the whole edifice was thought to come tumbling down. That’s where Schopenhauer came in. He laid out a grand and bold metaphysics that would supposedly dethrone the faith that had permeated Europe for almost 2,000 years.
This was music to Wagner’s ears, pardon the pun. For he, too, a philosopher as well as a composer was on the same quest. Together, he and Nietzsche would collaborate and argue over these points, spurring one another on to apply Schopenhauerism to German culture—Wagner mainly through his music, but also his philosophy, and Nietzsche through a philosophy both in content and style the likes of which the world had never seen before.
Nietzsche Discovers Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer (1788-1860) lived concurrently with Hegel (1770-1831), and some say, lived in his shadow. While Hegel shaped the philosophy of the modern, tyrannical nation-state, Schopenhauer was more concerned with metaphysics. Never an academic—in fact, he despised academic philosophers—Schopenhauer was independently wealthy and thus had the leisure time to philosophize. While Hegel constructed his ideas within the context of theism, albeit heterodox, Schopenhauer was far more radical. What Darwin did for science, Schopenhauer did for metaphysics, creating a worldview where the Christian God was not necessary, even superfluous.
One cold November day, during Nietzsche’s time as a student at Leipzig, he had an “impulse” to enter a used bookshop:
I came across this book in old Rohn’s second-hand bookshop, and taking it up very gingerly I turned over its pages. I know what demon whispered to me: ‘Take this book home with you’. At all events, contrary to my habit of not being hasty to the purchase of the books, I took it back home. Back in my room I threw myself into the corner of the sofa which my book, in which every line cried out renunciation, denial and resignation, I saw a mirror in which I espied the whole world, life, and my own mind depicted in frightful grandeur.1
After reading this obscure work, Nietzsche immediately became a Schopenhouerian. The work by this “gloomy genius” was none other than The World as Will and Representation. It had sold extremely badly, really on a few copies. Since it was published in Leipzig, you could still find numerous copies in the used bookstores there.
Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is extremely deep and complex, so I will not do justice with the following summary, but I will try anyway. Schopenhauer is known as the “pessimistic philosopher” for good reason. His starting point is that life is nothing more than suffering, brute competition, and violence. There is predominantly suffering and few pleasures.
If we look at the animal kingdom, we see animals competing with one another, often eating each other, due to their “will to live.” This same will, found in humans, is responsible for the violence and wars we observe. Compared to animals, humans fare not much better, though perhaps more sophisticated at times. Even when we experience the pleasure that alleviates suffering, there is always that post-pleasure letdown—the letdown we feel after returning from a vacation, for example, and knowing we have to work the next day. At best, if a person has all of his needs met, he experiences boredom. Thus, human existence is a pendulum swing between suffering and boredom, representing the wretched state of mankind. Are you depressed yet?
The only solution is a transcendent rising above the earthly, achieved through art. This is his answer to the malaise of mankind. Art is not just a temporary distraction or a means to inspire us to tackle our problems. It takes us completely out of ourselves and out of the world. It transports us to a higher, more real philosophical plane. In these moments, when we gaze at a beautiful painting in an art museum or listen to a piece by Bach, we are actually “philosophizing” without being aware of it. We become “disinterested” in the world and our existence. Visual arts achieve this to some extent, but music provides the ultimate salvation. It has no visible reminders of the world, only an otherworldly, transcendent experience. He says the following about art:
We experience the peace always sought but always escaping us on the…path of willing…the painless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the gods, for that moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penel servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.2
This brings me to my last point: the place where he makes Christian theology “obsolete.” If music is the gateway to the transcendent forgetting of the self, then the ultimate goal is the obliteration of the self as we merge into the oneness of the cosmos, having no consciousness and ceasing to exist. This is his view of the “afterlife.” No wonder The World as Will and Representation did not sell well. If Schopenhauer saw art as salvation for the wretched condition of man, I find my salvation after reading his depressing works is a strong shot of bourbon whiskey.
Nietzsche’s “Conversion” and Philosophy
Nietzsche became an immediate disciple of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics formed the foundation for Nietzsche’s philosophy, which, as we will see, was much more practical. In his mature years, Nietzsche came to repudiate some of Schopenhauer’s thoughts but never completely abandoned them. What Nietzsche found in Schopenhauer was the escape from Christian metaphysics that he was seeking. At that time, it was extremely difficult for a thinker like Nietzsche to abandon Christianity. He needed something substantial to replace it with. It is not like today, where someone can flippantly declare themselves an atheist without really understanding the ramifications. He found the Schopenhauerian transcendence he was seeking in the overpowering compositions of Richard Wagner.
Schopenhauer may not be alive today philosophically, but he lives on through Nietzsche. We are undoubtedly living in a Nietzschean world in the West. This is why, love him or hate him, we cannot understand our 21st-century world or our thinking without understanding Nietzsche. Even if we don’t agree with his basic philosophy, his thoughts have become part of our mental DNA, whether we are aware of them or not. By understanding Nietzsche, we will also be better equipped to navigate the present age in which we live.
Nietzsche’s Goal (Nietzsche and modernity)
We often think of Nietzsche as someone who sought to overturn everything and create a whole new society. Quite the contrary. Nietzsche hated modernity and the industrialization that had encroached upon the world. So, he was disturbed by the anxiety, depersonalization, loneliness, and atomization it caused. He detested the breakup of age-old traditions that had once held local principalities together and given their citizens a sense of belonging. When he went on personal retreats, he always sought out old medieval German towns with intact walls. He also eschewed the commercialization and consumerism that was rampant even then.
So, in a sense, Nietzsche wanted to return to tradition and move away from modernity. However, he wanted to do this without Christianity. He believed Christianity, for various reasons, could not carry the world forward. Instead, he sought a new philosophical basis to create a new world with a new set of “gods,” so to speak. For that, he looked even further back to Greek myth, literature, and art. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, firmly believed that salvation came through art. Just as the ancient Christian world declared that the god Pan was dead with the ascendancy of Christianity, Nietzsche now declared that the Christian God was dead. He sought to inaugurate a new epoch. More on that next time.
Nietzsche is the incomprehensible portal to the new epoch in which we find ourselves.
-Carl Jung
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Deo Gratias!
Footnotes
- Young, Julian, A Philosophical Biography, Cambridge University Press, p. 81
- Ibid., p. 84
References
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy
Young, Julian, A Philosophical Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2020, ISBN 978-0-521-87117-4
Thanks for the constructive criticism. I can always work to improve and comments like yours help me get better. There is a part 2 coming so I appreciate you hanging in there and I will try to address your concerns in part 2. Having said that,I desire constructive criticism from any reader or even suggestions on a particular topic that you would want me to write about.
Strangely, I feel a little cheated by this installment. It is much like the links to stories on my phone — they take a long time leading you in; repeating things until you are frustrated but invested in finding the answer to the question posed at the beginning. I don’t read anything here about what he proposed as an alternative. Criticism, yes, and rightfully so, but where is the synthetic part? I guess I am still interested in the answer to that question, so I will await your next installment.
You are right that we take the sound bites of Nietszche to be him. It was that little observation that opened the question whose answer I seek.