The Portable Nietzsche Read Free Page B

Science. The two great events in this period of Nietzsche’s life were his break with Wagner and his departure from the university. When the composer, no longer the lonely genius of Tribschen, became the center of a cult at Bayreuth, and his influence was widely felt not only in musicis, Nietzsche left him. The jingoism and anti-Semitism, which had seemed relatively unimportant personal idiosyncrasies, now called for a clear stand. Moreover Wagner, fond of Nietzsche as a brilliant and likable professorial ally, had no interest in him as a writer and thinker in his own right and stood in the way of Nietzsche’s development. These factors, rather than Nietzsche’s growing reservations about Wagner’s music, precipitated the breach. Parsifal merely sealed it —and not because it was Christian but because Nietzsche considered it an essentially insincere obeisance. Wagner, the disciple of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, the two great atheists, used medieval Christianity for theatrical effect; the self-styled modern Aeschylus glorified the antithesis of all Greek ideals, the “pure fool”; a composer whose personal worldly ambition knew no bounds wrote Parsifal . If the friendship had given Nietzsche some of the happiest days of his life, the break was one of his most painful experiences; and if the personal contact had done its share to raise his horizon beyond philology and classical antiquity, the breach spurred his ambition to rival and excel the composer and dramatist as a writer and philosopher.
    When Nietzsche resigned from the university in 1879 he claimed ill health, which was true enough, and he obtained a pension. Clearly, however, he also felt that his further development called for a break with his academic career as a professor of philology.
    Instead of returning to Germany, he spent most of the rest of his active life in Switzerland and Italy—lonely, pain-racked writing. In 1882 he thought for a short while that he had perhaps found a companion and intellectual heir—a Plato who might fashion his many stimulating suggestions into a great philosophy: a young woman, born in St. Petersburg in 1861, unquestionably of extraordinary intellectual and artistic endowment. But Lou Salomé, who was later to become Rilke’s beloved, and still later a close friend of Freud, was then, at twenty-one, much more interested in another young philosopher, Paul Rée. Her walks and talks with Nietzsche meant less to her; but he never found another human being to whom he could expound his inmost ideas as in those few weeks.
    After Lou left he made his first attempt to put down his philosophy—not merely sundry observations—in one major work: Zarathustra. He still did not proceed systematically, and though the style reveals a decided change from the essays of his first period and the aphorisms of the second, it is less philosophic than ever. Rhapsody, satire, and epigram predominate; but Nietzsche’s mature thought is clouded and shrouded by an excess of adolescent emotion. Nevertheless, despite the all-too-human self-pity and occasional bathos, the book is full of fascinating ideas; and probably it owes its unique success with the broad mass of readers not least to its worst qualities.
    The book consists of four parts, originally published separately, and more were planned. But Nietzsche came to realize that this style was not adequate for his purposes, and he returned to his earlier aphoristic style, though with a difference. Beyond Good and Evil , his next book, is much more continuous than appears at first glance; and the Genealogy of Morals is composed of three inquiries which might well be called essays.
    All the while, Nietzsche assembled notes for a more comprehensive work which he thought of calling The Will to Power . But he never got beyond those notes; and the work later published by his sister under that title is nothing but an utterly uncritical collection of some of