Nietzsche Now!: The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time

By Glenn Wallis

For readers both acquainted with and new to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche NOW! frames and explains Nietzsche's thinking on topics of immediate contemporary concern and relevance. Wallis unpacks Nietzsche's complex philosophy with a deft, empathetic, and brilliantly subtle analysis of the views o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warbler Press
• Release date: May 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962572422

Glenn Wallis

Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House) and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist's Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia.

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Praise for Nietzsche NOW!

The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time

by Glenn Wallis

"Wallis considers Nietzsche’s philosophy as it applies to everyday life. In these pages, the author, a professor, editor, and translator, aims to draw the reader into a kind of ‘adventure’ with his philosopher subject, Friedrich Nietzsche—it quickly becomes apparent that Wallis sees his project as an intensely modern, relevant discussion rather than an arid intellectual exercise…While offering a fast-paced and surprisingly comprehensive tour of the philosopher’s life and works, Wallis attempts to demonstrate that Nietzsche was grappling with some of the same core issues that spark debates and headlines today, from nihilism and public catastrophism to questions of faith and civic responsibility…We need Nietzsche, Wallis insists, and we need him now, because he remains such an ‘exceptionally timely thinker.’ Those who’ve read Nietzsche and consider him to be a long-winded crank mostly operating on sedatives, sophistry, and syphilis will smile at Wallis’s enthusiasm—and will likely be won over by it as well. At every turn, the author combines an encyclopedic knowledge of Nietzsche (his chapter outlining the philosopher’s life, ‘Reader, Nietzsche’ is a tight little masterpiece in its own right) with an empathetic understanding of the man…A surprisingly engaging grafting of Nietzsche’s philosophy onto the modern world."

—Kirkus Reviews

"Clearly written, relevant accounts are rare in the world of Nietzsche scholarship. Nietzsche NOW! is immensely readable. Our ‘now’ is as pessimistic as Nietzsche’s ‘now’ but Wallis guides us, through Nietzsche’s writings, towards coping with the same problems Nietzsche tackled, including truth, democracy, morality, and identity. The same problems but not the same. All now wear modern dress. Wallis’s deep knowledge of Buddhism feeds into the transfigurative nature of the Übermensch, the radical figure who realizes the possibility for personal and social change, the figure whom we can all—why not?—strive to become."

—Sue Prideaux, author of Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography; Strindberg: A Life, Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize; I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, Winner of the Hawthornden Prize

As an introduction to Nietzsche’s life and thought, Glenn Wallis’s book can be heartily recommended. He writes with brio, acumen, and good humour, covering an impressive range of topics, including Nietzsche on the nature of truth and consciousness, on nihilism, and on values and virtues. He admirably probes his thoughts about democracy and identity, and best of all he shows that he is the thinker we have most to learn from today as we confront our individual and collective decadence. This is a lively and spirited introduction to a masterful stylist and our greatest educator.

—Keith Ansell-Pearson, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick, England

"Glenn Wallis’s Nietzsche NOW! is an exhilarating journey through the life and mind of Friedrich Nietzsche, brilliantly contextualizing his philosophy for our era. This vibrant book passionately navigates Nietzsche’s time and his groundbreaking ideas, illuminating his influence on modern thought. Wallis masterfully connects Nietzsche’s theories on morality, truth, identity, and democracy to today’s crucial debates, including ‘wokeness’ and the iconic Übermensch. This work is not just an interpretation but a celebration of Nietzsche’s enduring legacy, offering an indispensable, thrilling guide to understanding his philosophical impact in our time."

—Amir Eshel, Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Stanford University

Nietzsche uncannily predicted both the challenges and some of their solutions, both disastrous and promising, that we live through today. Populism, threats to democracy, the promise of equality, our appetite for destruction, and our willingness to let others think for ourselves—all of these topics are addressed in Glenn Wallis’s extremely timely and remarkably accessible book on Nietzsche’s legacy. Drawing on a deep knowledge of the academic scholarship but unencumbered by academic prose, as Nietzsche himself would have wanted, Wallis charts a surprisingly useful path through this extremely contemporary philosopher’s work for our times.

—Eyal Peretz, Professor of Comparative Literature, Indiana University Bloomington

"At a time where Nietzsche is once again usurped by the far right, Glenn Wallis offers the perfect response. He walks us calmly and confidently through Nietzsche’s dense forest of ideas, enabling us to think with his life and thought, to resist those who would usurp his thinking, to meditate and overcome along with him. Above all, he brilliantly conveys Nietzsche’s sheer joy and living promise: as the philosopher with whom we can, time and again, grind new lenses, direct them, and open unexpected and vibrant new paths."

—Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University

NIETZSCHE

NOW!

First Warbler Press Edition 2024

Nietzsche NOW!: The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time © 2024 Glenn Wallis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher, which may be requested at [e-mail].

isbn

978-1-962572-41-5 (paperback)

isbn

978-1-962572-42-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number 2024930968

warblerpress.com

NIETZSCHE

NOW!

The Great Immoralist

on the

Vital Issues of Our Time

GLENN WALLIS

warbler press

Dedication

To my grandson, Liam.

May you know the great health!

Contents

Dedication

Prologue: Why Nietzsche? Why Now?

Reader, Nietzsche

Childhood and youth

University

Professorship

Interlude: war

An end and a beginning

The wanderer

Breakdown and death

We Perfect Readers

How to read like a cow

What to Pack: Truth, Consciousness, Embodiment

Truth

Consciousness

Embodiment

Democracy

Democracy as an antidote to tyranny

Democracy as tyranny

Master morality and slave morality

To where must we reach with our hopes?

Identity

The principle of identity

Personality crisis

Political ramifications

Wokeness and Ideology

Wokeness?

The Woke Mob Is Everywhere!

Public opinion

Agon

Perspective

Four readings

Overcoming

Nihilism

Becoming who you are

Being–nature

Being–body

Being–animal

Civilization

Representative types

The human animal

The artist

The free spirit

The new philosopher

The immoralist

The Übermensch

Virtue

Curiosity

Honesty

Courage

Pathos of distance

Solitude

Sense of humor

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

Why Nietzsche? Why Now?

Learning Changes Us

T

his book is a guide to thinking. It takes as fuel for thought certain

pressing

contemporary issues. Our guide in this journey is the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). So the book is also an introduction to Nietzsche’s thought. An important feature of Nietzsche NOW! is that it contains abundant passages directly from Nietzsche’s writings. In so doing, I am honoring Nietzsche’s fervent request, made toward the end of his sane life, that we do not mistake him for who he is not. This may seem obvious; but the history of reading Nietzsche is by and large the history of misreading Nietzsche. So it is essential to read him carefully and thoroughly, like a cow chews her cud, as our guide puts it. Nietzsche has a reputation for being easy to read but hard to understand. He is easy (the scare quote is a major Nietzschean tripping warning—take caution!) because he is a masterful stylist. Nietzsche is a pleasure to read. He is, however, difficult.

Why Nietzsche? Nietzsche was a sworn enemy of the pat answer to a question. He was a devoted acolyte of perspectivism—of carefully considering a matter from multiple angles. His most cherished values were intellectual curiosity and existential courage. He was also scandalously irreverent and hilariously funny. And although he confessed that "Nausea toward people is my danger,"¹ his abiding passion was how to create a better world of, by, and for those very same people. Anticipating the spirit of deep ecology by a century, the better world that he envisioned included care for the earth and for animals. Prismatic, uncategorizable, and daring, Nietzsche is the perfect guide to our times.

And how should we define these times? I’ll mention three features that I feel are particularly salient to Nietzsche NOW! To begin, how about we define our times as grimly divided? Exacerbated by an internet culture that is accessible via our smartphones literally every minute day and night, we are at a loud, hostile, and very public impasse concerning vital questions of our shared social life. As the Associated Press’s Divided America series puts it:

It’s no longer just Republican vs. Democrat, or liberal vs. conservative. It’s the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, rural vs. urban, white men against the world. Climate doubters clash with believers. Bathrooms have become battlefields, borders are battle lines. Sex and race, faith and ethnicity…the melting pot seems to be boiling over.²

But honestly, is this anything new? The terms of contention and the lines of division change from era to era, but, as any reader of history can tell you, contention and division remain constant. Might dissension simply be a necessary feature of a society? When people form into community—whether a family, a friend group, a workplace, or a nation—is a diversity of viewpoint avoidable? Is it even desirable? After all, what is the alternative—groupthink? Nietzsche does not believe that factionalism and friction necessarily entail discord. Or, expressed in more Nietzschean terms, what sounds discordant to our present ears may be transfigured into a future music. Still, given our present differences and what’s at stake because of them, the question looms: how should we proceed? Nietzsche has many surprising suggestions; and Nietzsche NOW! will share these with the reader.

We have, however, a massive obstacle in our way. That obstacle represents the second defining feature of our times: a morality that is infused with theologians’ blood.³ If we proceed with our current values in place, if we, consciously or not, insist on proceeding within the bounds of our shared sense of right and wrong, indeed of good and evil, we will remain stuck right where we are. And where are we? Nietzsche wants us to recognize that we are in a cultural-psychological space that steams with the stench of slaughtered spirit.⁴ We, ourselves, of course, are those slaughtered spirits, those diminished last mortals emitting the very stench. We have not, however, become such people through mere chance. We have become what we are over two millennia of acquiescence to a quite particular moral code. Nietzsche argues that our morality is tainted by no less than the gargantuan institutional formation known as Christianity. Nietzsche wants us to observe that the influence of Christianity—on our very thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting—is not a benign matter. Quite the contrary, it is the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity⁵ of our civilization. Our very conviction of what is good, proper, and right, and, conversely, what is evil, improper, and wrong, keeps us, furthermore, locked in the ruts of modern ideology and the wishful thinking of the herd.⁶ Nietzsche insists that the (Christianity-determined) values informing our morality must change, must be transvalued, must be mutated into something more noble. Nietzsche is making severe demands on us here. Many readers will balk at these demands. Nietzsche NOW! aims to assist the reader in navigating the treacherous currents that follow.

This condition of contingency, of having become what we are, points to the third defining feature of our times: we are experiments.⁷ Hardly any matter is more empirically demonstrative than the fact that humanity has always been, is always, in a condition of becoming. This fact is demonstrative both diachronically and synchronically. That is, the long view of human history over time is brimming with evidence that cultures and people are in constant flux, changing their ways, their values, their self-understanding, and their very forms of life. And we can see the same fact playing out simultaneously, right now, over the broad expanse of the earth, with its four-thousand-some distinct cultures. While these changes appear to evolve in reaction to events, Nietzsche believes that we must intervene and proactively experiment with new forms of life. The fact, in Nietzsche’s infamous proclamation, is that: God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.⁸ We, we moderns, have emptied the universe of the certainties and securities of the past. In so doing, we have initiated an unprecedented cosmic-cultural-existential-psychological crisis that is equal parts liberating and terrifying. Nietzsche offers many high-octane passages about this crisis, and even a few about its resolution. Nietzsche NOW! aims to accompany the reader as they encounter the explosive force of his ideas.

Let’s begin!

---

1 Ecce Homo, Why I Am A Destiny, 6. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I am translating from the Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe von Nietzsches Werken und Briefen: http://doc.nietzschesource.org/de/ekgwb. Wherever possible, however, I provide English titles for books and sections. Although these do, of course, vary from translation to translation, the reader should have no trouble locating the English source based on the information I provide in the notes. The opening epigraph is from Beyond Good and Evil, 231.

2 The Associated Press, Divided America, https://www.ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2016/divided-america-series-to-explore-tensions-underlying-campaign/. Accessed April 3, 2024. Ellipsis in original.

3 The Antichrist, 8.

4 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On Passing By.

5 The Antichrist, 62.

6 Beyond Good and Evil, 44.

7 Dawn, 453.

8 The Gay Science, 125.

Reader, Nietzsche

I

would like to introduce Nietzsche to readers unfamiliar with his work.

⁹

My goal is to convey a sense of Nietzsche. Biographical facts are important, of course; but a sense of the person is even more so. I will, moreover, convey my sense of Nietzsche, as I feel him and understand him. I like Nietzsche. He has been my companion since the mid-1970s. That was when I discovered Thus Spoke Zarathustra and, along with my brother and a couple of friends, consulted the book for every pressing issue under a teenager’s too-hot sun—becoming oneself, love and relationships, rejecting the herd, the evils of education, overcoming obstacles, and so much more. We felt personally and forcefully addressed by Zarathustra’s admonishments: I say to you: you must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star.¹⁰ Each of us longed to become an Übermensch. We were prepared to give whatever we had to follow Zarathustra’s advice for going under, crossing over, and rising up. When, a few years later, I wrote my philosophy undergraduate thesis on his concept of the will to power, I came to know a side of Nietzsche’s personality that was different from the, by turns, playful, mournful, silly, prophetic, occasionally adolescent Zarathustra. I was becoming acquainted with the Nietzsche who would soon feel compelled to explain, I am no bogeyman, no moral monster.¹¹ Reading his works over several decades, I have come to have a deep appreciation of Nietzsche’s many colors, his fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds, his world of richly complex valuations, colors, accentuation, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations. So, here, I will try to do justice to his rich palette and to paint a portrait of our guide as I have come to see him.

Even readers who already know something of our Immoralist might be surprised to learn of the close connection between the person and the philosophy. The connection between the two is more than close; it is inextricable. Nietzsche is, in fact, (unintentionally?) explicit about this point.

I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy up to now has been: namely, the self-confession of its originator, and a type of inadvertent and unrecognized memoir; similarly, that the moral (or unmoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the actual seed out of which the entire plant perpetually grows.¹²

Every thought, every word, every action, in short, every intention, of a person, Nietzsche believes, seeds not only their philosophy: it contributes to the seeding of the entire monster of energy¹³ that is our very world. Thinking, being, seeding the world with our intentions, is never the cold, abstract act of reason that philosophers make it out to be. Like mathematicians, philosophers habitually leave out the messy lived parts—the failures and wrong turns, the embarrassments and humiliations—and give us only their all-too-tidy, all-too-clever conclusions. Imagine a thinker whose finished product bears the marks of the motley jottings in his notebooks. Nietzsche can occasionally be like that. Next to ominous depictions of the rushing torrent of nihilism, we might read, I have forgotten my umbrella, or even glimpse his shopping list: toothpaste, buns, shoe polish.¹⁴ Thinking is as necessary for him, and as personal, as toothpaste. And, speaking of breakfast buns, Nietzsche learned firsthand that thinking and intending are, more often than we care to admit, an effect not of our exalted reason or intelligence but of the gastric system.¹⁵ Your thinking about X or Y may well include traces of bad digestion or a pounding headache. Nietzsche certainly knew both of those painful realities in great intimacy. So let’s begin our portrait of Nietzsche with his stomach.

One of Nietzsche’s most popular bumper sticker sayings goes: That which does not kill me makes me stronger.¹⁶ Less well known is A man should know the size of his stomach.¹⁷ But the two are related. In getting a feeling for Nietzsche, we should know that he was prone to physical suffering, and to the mental desperation that follows in its wake. We should understand, too, that he neither romanticizes nor demonizes pain. As a feature, indeed an intimate feature, of his life, Nietzsche wants to learn how to transform inevitable pain into an ingredient of abundance. (What would be the alternative to such transvaluation, of not making such an effort?)

Absolutely no local degeneration can be detected in me. No organically conditioned stomach pain, however severely I have suffered—as a consequence of complete exhaustion—the most profound weakness of the gastric system. The eye pain, too, which sometimes dangerously approached blindness, was only a consequence, not a cause: such that with every increase of vitality my ability to see also increased.—A long, all too long stretch of years means for me convalescence. It also means, unfortunately, relapse, decline, periodicity of a kind of décadence. After saying all of this, do I need to mention that I am experienced in questions of décadence? I have spelled it out frontwards and backwards. Even that delicate art of prehension, and of comprehension in general, that fine feeling for nuances, that psychology of seeing-around-the-corner, and for whatever else I have been capable, was first learned at that time, is indeed the actual gift from that time during which everything became more refined for me, the very ability to observe, as well as all of the organs of observation. To look through the lens of the sick toward healthier concepts and values, and again, the other way around, to look from the fullness and self-confidence of the rich life down into the secret work of the instinct for décadence—this has been my longest training, my actual experience; if I am a master in anything, it is in this. I can now handle it, I have the hands for it: reversing perspectives. This is the first reason why for me alone perhaps a revaluation of values is at all possible.¹⁸

One of Nietzsche’s recurring images is that of embodiment.¹⁹ In this passage, I see him as an embodiment of his—and, more importantly, of our—culture. We are sick. We suffer serious gastric pain, but not for any inevitable, intrinsic, reason. Our pain is not a cause of our unhappiness. It is an effect. We improve here and there, and then lapse again into decline. As a society, we are profoundly exhausted. We feel as if we can’t go on, that there is no way forward. Hence, we are intimately familiar with décadence. Nietzsche uses this French word to describe not only our personal and collective condition of decay, decline, exhaustion but also our attraction to that which leads to such decline. We have become too weak even to resist those elements of culture, society, politics, entertainment, diet, social media, and technology that are destroying our vitality. In our enervating weakness, we have even come to enjoy these things.²⁰ Nietzsche’s biography is very much a story of how we might confront and counter our personal and collective decadence. In this sense, his story has a certain mythological value for us—slaying the dragon of decadence, reversing the torrent of nihilism, overcoming the merely human, becoming an Übermensch. Drawn to the hero of our myth, we must emulate his training. As the foregoing passage puts it, that means becoming adept in such matters as refining our organs of observation, increasing our sensitivity to subtlety and nuance, acquiring the probing intuition of a psychologist. It means not losing sight of potentially healthy values, even while in the very throes of our sickness. And it means to remain vigilant, even in periods of joyous abundance, to the unconscious workings of our instinct for decadence. If we can emulate the hero of our myth and learn the arcane alchemy of reversing perspectives, we might just learn the coveted secret of transforming base metal into philosopher’s gold—sickness into health, our nihilistic hatred of life into amor fati (love of our fate), the decadent into the Übermensch. In the end, for Nietzsche the magis, it all comes down to the transubstantiation of values.

The more mundane aspects of Nietzsche’s life might provide us with additional trainings, in spirit. So we will now turn to those.

Childhood and youth

I, the son of a Protestant country parson, was born on October 15, 1844 in the village of Röcken, near Merseburg. I lived here the first four years of my life. But when the untimely death of my father necessitated that we find a new home, my mother settled on Naumburg.²¹

Two delicious ironies in the life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche stand out at the beginning. The first is that Nietzsche was born on the birthday of the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1795–1861). Hence, his name. The younger Friedrich Wilhelm would become one of the fiercest despisers of the Prussian state, and, later, of the German Empire under heavy Prussian influence. Indeed, on the example of Prussia, the state, in general, would become an object of Nietzsche’s scorn. An even greater irony is that the self-proclaimed Antichrist who condemned Christianity as "the one great curse, the one great inherent depravity, the one great instinct of revenge for which no expedient is poisonous, underhanded, low enough—I proclaim it the one immortal stain of mankind,"²² deeply admired his parson father and had loving lifelong memories of his parsonage home. The Antichrist, it turns out, came from a long line of Lutheran ministers. The six previous generations on his father’s side had been Lutheran pastors. Nietzsche’s maternal grandfather, too, had been a Lutheran pastor in the village of Pobles, not far from Röcken. Let’s not, however, jump to the easy conclusion that Nietzsche’s later execration of Christianity stemmed from religious abuses suffered as a child. The religion of his early years was relatively undogmatic and, it seems to me, mainly cultural. He was, for instance, deeply affected by church music. After hearing the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah, Nietzsche wrote that he felt as if I had to join in…the joyful singing of angels, on whose billows of sound Jesus ascended to heaven.²³ As we will see, his eventual attack on Christianity was much deeper than anything that can be explained by negative exposure or even by the Oedipal complex (I consider it a great privilege to have had such a father, he writes toward the end of his active life²⁴).

As Nietzsche said, his family had to move out of the parsonage on the early death of his father. So five-year old Nietzsche, his younger sister Elizabeth, his mother, grandmother, two unmarried aunts, and a servant girl eventually moved to the considerably larger town of Naumburg. Nietzsche was surrounded by women in his youth. In a sentiment that would eventually lead him high into the mountains, Nietzsche expresses a feeling of claustrophobic estrangement from his surroundings:

It was terrible for us to live in the city after we had been living in the country for so long. We avoided the gloomy streets and looked for the open spaces, like birds trying to escape from a cage…The huge churches and buildings of the marketplace, with its Rathaus [town administrative building] and fountain, the throngs of people, to which I was unaccustomed…I was astonished by the fact that typically these people did not even know one another. Among the most disturbing things to me were the long paved streets.²⁵

From an early age, the precocious boy threw himself into his schoolwork. Falling into a pattern that would last his entire working life, Nietzsche studied until late at night and rose at five in the morning to continue. Because his lifelong health issues were already manifesting, this pattern was also one of self-overcoming, a central concept in Nietzsche’s philosophy. That is, applying himself to what was most valuable to him—in this case, study—necessitated an overcoming of the forces, internal and external, that worked against actualization of the value. His health was devastatingly bad at this time.

Harrowing episodes of headaches with vomiting and extreme eye ache might last as long as a whole week during which he had to lie in a darkened room with the curtains drawn. The slightest light hurt his eyes. Reading, writing and even sustained coherent thought were out of the question. Between Easter 1854 and Easter 1855, for example, he was absent from school for six weeks and five days.²⁶

Nietzsche was striving—successfully, it turned out—to get into the renowned Schulpforta. Pforta, as it is known, was (and still is) a boarding school for intellectually gifted students. Founded in 1583 on the site of a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery, Pforta, in Nietzsche’s day, retained many monastery-like features. Within its magnificent Gothic buildings, surrounded by walls twelve foot high and two and a half foot thick,²⁷ unfolded an education that was equal parts monastic and militaristic. The school day began at four in the morning and ended at nine at night. It was, using a recurring Nietzschean word, hard—extremely rigorous mentally, physically, and emotionally. But the type of education that Nietzsche received suited him very well. Based on the reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), Pforta emphasized ancient languages (students often conversed in Greek or Latin), literature (Nietzsche developed a lifelong love of Goethe), and history. The sciences and mathematics were also featured, though Nietzsche would always feel inadequately instructed in the former, and his disinterest in the latter nearly sunk him. Against the vocational orientation preferred by the Prussian state, Humboldt advocated for a deeply humanistic approach. In a letter to the king, he argues for his approach to education (Bildung) that forms (bilden) the whole person: People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and—according to their condition—well-informed human beings and citizens.²⁸ As congenial as the curriculum was for Nietzsche, completion would take a determined application of his theory of perpetual self-overcoming:

At Pforta they were treating Nietzsche’s ghastly episodes of chronic illness, his blinding headaches, suppurating ears, stomach catarrh, vomiting and nausea with humiliating remedies. He was put to bed in a darkened room with leeches fastened to his earlobes to suck blood from his head. Sometimes they were also applied to his neck. He hated the treatment. He felt it did him no good at all. Between 1859 and 1864 there are twenty entries in the sickness register lasting, on average, a week.²⁹

Before moving on to his next life phase, the university, I’d like to share this portrait from Raimund Granier, a Pforta classmate:

In Schulpforta, Nietzsche was an excellent student, as is well known; but if I remember rightly mathematics was not his strong point. He did not stand out especially among his fellow students, but he immersed himself in his school assignments, especially ancient languages, and in his own particular studies…He did not join in the noisy games in the schoolyard, but as a fifth-year student, like we others, he liked to go to the nearby village Altenburg, where he drank not beer but, with great enjoyment, hot chocolate. Already at school he was extremely myopic, and his deep set eyes had a peculiar gleam. His voice could be very deep; generally it was as soft as his whole being. No one would then have suspected that someday he would attempt the revaluation of all values. His mustache, which later became so extraordinarily prominent, already began to appear in school…Nietzsche practiced music zealously already in Pforta and, since I can’t play any instrument, he played for me, many a time—a lot of Chopin, if I remember rightly.³⁰

University

For his university studies, Nietzsche decided on Bonn. The dual attraction was Friedrich Ritschl (1806–1876) and philology. Ritschl was the fellow son of a poor country parson and, more importantly, the most renowned classical philologist of his time. (Ritschl is still considered the preeminent German classical scholar of the nineteenth century.) Just as importantly for someone who, like Nietzsche, despised phony formality, Ritschl had a reputation for openness, warmth, humor, and liveliness—highly unusual public traits for a German professor at that time. The fact that dozens of his students went on to splendid careers attests to his fatherly concern and active support for them. Indeed, behind his back, Nietzsche affectionately referred to him as Father Ritschl.³¹ It is important to get a feel for Ritschl because in doing so we deepen our feeling for Nietzsche, who, during a formative period of his life so admired and emulated Ritschl. Here is a description from a student, Basil Gildersleeve (1831–1924), who would go on to become a preeminent American classical scholar and founder of the still-thriving American Journal of Philology.

Almost every one of the thousands who attended his courses faithfully could tell the same story. He radiated love and kindness…He stood when he lectured, his notes were there apparently for the fun of the thing, his gestures were animated, there was something almost French about his liveliness. His eyes, though shielded by spectacles, shone with excitement; his nose played a most important part in the drama, for he took snuff by the boxload, as it were, helping himself, at times, from the supply of a convenient student; his mouth went through the whole range of expression from rapt inspiration to bitter sarcasm. He was a thoroughly vivid personality, who stands before my mind as clearly today as in the spring months of more than thirty years since.³²

Of course, there is always another side. So, in the spirit of Nietzschean perspectivism, we should add that Ritschl was also a pugnacious, high-tempered man, the old fighting blood of the [ancient Bohemians] was in his veins.³³ All the more to recommend him! Nietzsche must have thought. On his regular lunchtime visits to Ritschl’s office, Nietzsche reports favorably that his professor, glass of red wine unfailingly at hand, was free from all reserve; his anger with his friends, his dissatisfaction with existing conditions, the faults of the university, the quirks of the professors, it all poured out of him such that he revealed himself to possess the opposite of a diplomatic nature. He also poked fun at himself.³⁴

It was not, however, merely the man Ritschl who attracted Nietzsche to Bonn; it was also his love of philology. This love was inflamed at the classics-heavy Pforta. From his first book, The Birth of Tragedy to his last, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche reveals his deep, complex relationship to philology and to its practitioners, the philologists.

Philology is the study of an ancient culture using methods from literary analysis, textual criticism, linguistics, and history. It involves the slow, vigilant, rigorous, slow, slow reading of texts. The basic principle is that an ancient society’s culture circulates vibrantly within its supposedly dead language, and the language courses through its texts. So, the culture is accessible to us through texts. A single word, as a microcosm of the culture, can, via the philological method, slowly be unraveled, thickened, and expanded, to reveal the macrocosm of the culture. For philology literally means love of the word, or, indeed, of the syllable, as William Cowper put it:

philologists, who chase

A panting syllable through time and space

Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,

To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah’s ark.³⁵

It is no accident that one of Nietzsche’s lifelong mottos is lento! lento! (slowly! slowly!) Such a motto cannot but arise out of the rigors of philological training.³⁶

Philology in nineteenth-century Germany was not the obscure field that it is today. Rather, it was a kind of queen of the sciences, integral to understanding the classical languages and cultures that were, as the foundation of European humanities, essential to an intelligentsia. As a philological prodigy, Nietzsche was thus something of an elite among intellectual elites.

Yet, as promising as it began, of his time in Bonn Nietzsche says, I have poorly squandered the year. He is furious mainly with himself. He made the false step of joining a fraternity devoted to drinking beer and chasing women. Worst of all, perhaps, was that he produced poor work; I look scornfully at the work I completed in Bonn…Atrocious! The thought of that crap fills me with shame. Everything I produced in high school was better. Nonetheless, in a foreshadowing of his weightiest thought³⁷—that of the eternal return of the same—and its corresponding amor fati, love of fate, Nietzsche has faith that a wider perspective will prove that The bitter shell of the present, of reality, prevents me from enjoying the seed as yet. For, I hope that one day, from the standpoint of memory, I can joyously register this year, too, as a necessary part of my development.³⁸

In fact, the good times with Father Ritschl that I mentioned actually did not fully develop until Ritschl’s fighting blood necessitated his decampment to the University of Leipzig, with Nietzsche and other loyal students in tow. But before likewise following him to Leipzig, I think we should glance at a few consequential events from the wasted year in Bonn.

The first incident is one that resounds down Nietzschean literature and legend.³⁹ It involves a visit he made one day to Cologne, a city some twenty miles up the Rhine River from Bonn. Cologne was also the city whose brothels Franconia, Nietzsche’s fraternity, was known to frequent. Being shown the sights of the city by a carriage guide, Nietzsche asked to be taken to a restaurant. Instead, the guide brought him to a brothel. Did the guide mishear Nietzsche? That’s hard to imagine since restaurant and brothel sound no more alike in German than they do in English. Did the carriage driver think that Nietzsche was giving him a knowing wink? Was restaurant code for brothel among young men of Nietzsche’s age? In any case, Nietzsche ends up at a brothel. The following day he tells his friend Paul Deussen what happened:

Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by a half-dozen creatures in tinsel and gauze, looking at me expectantly. I stood speechless for a while. Then I instinctively went to a piano as if to the only soul-endowed being in the place and struck a few chords. That dispersed my shock and I escaped to the street.

It is a humorous, somewhat slapstick, scene. Taking him at his word, we might wonder: why did Nietzsche run? Did he panic when, innocently believing himself to be entering a restaurant for a midday bite, he looks up to see six barely clad women staring expectantly at him? That would indeed be weird. Or did he simply lose his nerve? Did he (not so innocently) play at more than the piano? Deussen slyly suggests another motive:

According to this story and everything else I know about Nietzsche, I am inclined to believe that the words which Steinhart dictated to us in a Latin biography of Plato apply to him: mulierem nunquam attingit [he never touched a woman].⁴⁰

The reason this incident so resounds through Nietzsche’s life story is that it has sparked speculation about three related issues: his sexuality (was he asexual? heterosexual? bisexual? homosexual?); his cause of death (was it from the effects of syphilis? Of gonorrhea? Of some combination of sexually transmitted diseases?); and the origin of the former