NietzscheRobin SmallLIFE AND PERSONALITYFriedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) is one of those thinkers whose personalitiescannot easily be separated from their achievements in philosophy. This is not because hislife was an unusually eventful one in outer respects. Rather, it is due to the intenselypersonal engagement in thinking that is evident throughout his writings. FranzRosenzweig’s description of Nietzsche as ‘the first real human being among thephilosophers’ is a striking testimony to this characteristic; though Rosenzweig was lessjustified in dismissing the content of Nietzsche’s thinking as irrelevant to his realimportance.Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a village in Saxony, the son of a Lutheranminister. After the death of his father four years later, the family moved to Naumburg,where Nietzsche attended the local Gymnasium before being sent as a boarder to thefamous Pforta school. He emerged as a classical scholar of great promise, moving on tothe universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where he attracted the sponsorship of the influentialRitschl. With his assistance, Nietzsche was appointed at the early age of twenty-four to achair in classical philology at the University of Basel. His early promise in scholarshipwas soon overshadowed by new developments. Making the acquaintance of RichardWagner, Nietzsche was drawn into the Wagner circle, which turned his talents to its ownpurposes. His first book,The Birth of Tragedy,published in 1872, created a storm ofcontroversy. It gave great offence to professional colleagues for its championing of theWagnerian ‘artwork of the future’, as well for its unconventional approach to scholarship.But Nietzsche had by now largely lost interest in philology; his writings over the nextfew years, published under the general titleUntimely Meditations,are essays in culturalcriticism, often stimulating and sometimes brilliant, yet marred by a Wagnerian mixtureof pomposity and abrasiveness.Several events now brought about decisive changes in Nietzsche’s life.A breakdownin his health led to a temporary separation from the university; a year’s leave was spent inSorrento, working on a new book,Human, All-Too-Human,A break with Wagnerfollowed, brought about primarily by Nietzsche’s negative reaction to the 1876 Bayreuthfestival and to Wagner’s new operaParsifal,whose religiosity aroused Nietzsche’slasting hostility. Two years later, renewed illness led to permanent retirement from theuniversity on a modest pension. From this time onward, Nietzsche was a man seeminglyalways on the move. He established a regular routine: summers spent in Germany oreastern Switzerland, reading widely and making extensive notes which, during winters onthe Italian and French Riviera, were turned into a succession of books. AfterHuman, AllToo Human,the works in which Nietzsche’s mature style is confidently establishedfollowed at regular intervals:Mixed Opinions and Maxims, The Wanderer and HisShadow, DaybreakandThe Gay Science.This pattern was to last for a decade. Although restless, Nietzsche was at the same timea man of regular habits. Apart from one not very successful trip to Sicily, he tended toreturn to the same places, neither cultural centres nor tourist spots but smaller cities inwhich he lived in inexpensive boarding houses. Always intensely health-conscious,Nietzsche suffered from a variety of illnesses, despite a healthy regime of frugal eatingand long walks. Although often alone, he was not a recluse but made friends and joinedin social activities. Indeed, he retained a certain Naumburg bourgeois character, whichsurfaces from time to time in his opinions. Nietzsche the person was no bohemian:conventional in dress and manner, he was also courteous and forbearing in responding tosometimes obtuse correspondents, reserving his polemical skills for his writings. As oneobserver reported after an 1884 encounter in Nice, ‘He was extremely friendly, and thereis no trace of false pathos or of the prophet about him, as I had rather feared from therecent works’.The question of Nietzsche’s relations with women has excited and frustratedbiographers. He always retained unusually close links with his mother and younger sister,despite a few periods of estrangement. Apart from this, there is evidence for only onesignificant attachment. After his Sicilian expedition of 1882, Nietzsche visited Romewith his friend Paul Rée, a writer on moral psychology. There he met a young Russiangirl, Lou von Salomé. An intense emotional period followed, during which the two menconducted a fierce, but unacknowledged, rivalry for Lou’s loyalty. The outcome was anestrangement, incited by the hostility of Nietzsche’s conservative sister Elisabeth, thoughalso due, in part, to Nietzsche’s own conventional side. A disillusioned Nietzschereturned to the Italian Riviera and began work on a new kind of writing,Thus SpokeZarathustra. The successively published parts of this, his best known work, occupied himfor several years.In 1886 Nietzsche returned to the format ofThe Gay Sciencewith his mostaccomplished book,Beyond Good and Evil. The subsequent year produced a boldexploration of moral concepts,The Genealogy of Morals. During the autumn of 1888,Nietzsche’s letters and writing took on an ominous tone of exaltation, as he worked on aseries of works in rapid succession:Nietzsche Contra Wagner,a summary of his longcampaign against his former friend;The Antichrist,a polemic against Christianity; and aremarkable autobiographical essay,Ecce Homo. In the early days of 1889, Nietzschesuffered a sudden mental collapse in the streets of Turin, where he was spending thewinter. Brought back to Germany by a friend, he was treated in a Jena asylum, butwithout improvement, and afterwards nursed at home by his mother and sister. Nietzschenever regained mental clarity, and underwent a steady physical decline until his death in1900. The cause of the catastrophe is unconfirmed, but the initial diagnosis of syphilisseems the likeliest explanation.WORKS AND STYLESNietzsche’s style of writing is very varied: hardly two of his books can be put in a givencategory. Works such asHuman, All Too HumanandDaybreakare often described as‘aphoristic’, though they are really composed of short essays, often carefully arranged inan overall progression of thought. One philosophical style hardly ever used by Nietzscheis that of extended argument. He gave an indication of his strategy when he wrote: ‘Iapproach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again’ (TheGay Science,section 381). Yet Nietzsche returns to these problems again and again, andone can often see patterns in his ways of approaching them: not only continuities, butvariations on a theme, developments of a line of thinking, reactions against formerapproaches, ideas gained from other thinkers, and ventures into new alternatives. Theconsistencies over the twenty years of his writing life are of style rather than doctrine.Particularly striking is Nietzsche’s use of the aphorism, which serves, as he puts it, ‘tosay in a few words what other writers say in a book—or donotsay in a book’. We cantake, as a typical example, section 126 ofThe Gay Science: ‘Mystical explanations.Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not evensuperficial.’ Setting aside its superfluous title, this is a genuine aphorism, a self-containedthought which nevertheless lends itself to interpretation and elaboration. The ‘mystical’ isanything that refers to something higher, as when some experience is explained as thevoice of God. The ‘superficial’ is the surface of things, the qualities experienced throughthe senses. Thus, the opposition invoked is that between appearance and reality. In themetaphysical tradition of Plato, appearance is devalued as in need of explanation byreference to a truer reality. But Nietzsche, who called his thinking an ‘invertedPlatonism’, wants a greater respect for appearance. Science, he suggests, has advancedonly in so far as the senses have been trusted; and so we do not need to flee fromappearance, but to engage more closely with both inner and outer phenomena; andmetaphysical explanations merely distract us from that task. Typically, however,Nietzsche elsewhere takes a different line, praising the courage of those who haverepudiated the evidence of the senses, like Parmenides and Plato in metaphysics, andCopernicus in natural science.Putting Nietzsche’s thought into traditional philosophical categories, such as idealismor materialism, rationalism or irrationalism, is a vain exercise. Sometimes he is includedin the assortment of thinkers labelled ‘existentialists’. This is an arbitrary and in someways misleading categorization which, with a greater appreciation of Nietzsche’sthought, has now gone out of use. One can at most specify certain recognizablephilosophical principles for which Nietzsche often expresses support: the idea that theworld is one of becoming, not of being, and as a consequence of this, an opposition toany doctrine that posits a reality over and above the world of appearance. An importantcorollary is the rejection of traditional religion, not only as a metaphysical doctrine butalso in its implications for moral concepts. These points are closely linked withNietzsche’s professed admiration of Heraclitus; in his own words:The affirmation of passing awayand destroying,which is the decisive feature ofa Dionysian philosophy; saying Yes in opposition and war;becoming,alongwith a radical repudiation of the very concept ofbeing—all this is clearly moreclosely related to me than anything else thought to date. The doctrine of the‘eternal recurrence’ that is, of the unconditional and infinitely related circularcourse of all things—this doctrine of Zarathustra might in the end have beentaught already by Heraclitus.(Ecce Homo,‘The Birth of Tragedy’, 3)Nietzsche wants to be an affirmative thinker, a ‘yes-sayer’. But the possibility of such anaffirmation depends on overcoming a system of concepts that have dominated humanthinking. Hence he is, in practice, a critical thinker—indeed, one of the most destructivein the history of philosophy. Nietzsche provides a critique of knowledge, and its conceptof truth and objectivity; of morality, and its concepts of good and evil; of philosophy, andits concept of being or reality; and of religion, and its concept of God. In each case,Nietzsche champions the concepts rejected by these systems: he affirms the value of lies,of fate, of semblance and becoming. But his critiques are not external ones; he argues thatthe highest valuesdevalue themselves. To take an example: the will to truth is somethingwe owe to the Christian tradition, which judged the world of appearance as one ofuntruth, and so posed the task of finding genuine truth. But the determination to follow aline of thought to its end—not a natural human trait, but a capacity acquired with greatdifficulty—has led to the downfall of those beliefs. We now recognize that ourknowledge is based on metaphors; and a metaphor, because it asserts the identity of whatis not identical, is really a lie. It is these lies that human beings need to create a world ofstable and regular objects, within which they can live.In his early sketches, Nietzsche supports this view of knowledge by using a vocabularyof rhetoric rather than logic. The basic operation of thought is not unconscious inference,as suggested by some neo-Kantians. Rather, figures of speech provide the model for allthinking: in particular, metonymy and metaphor are its crucial operations. Language,Nietzsche suggests, consists entirely of metaphors; and metaphor, which equates theunequal, is a lie, or perhaps a riddle.What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, andanthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have beenenhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and whichafter long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths areillusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphorswhich are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost theirpictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.(‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’)These ideas about knowledge suit the Heraclitean concept of absolute becoming which, asNietzsche understands it, implies a process which has no beginning or end, and containsno pauses. ‘If there were just one moment of being in the strict sense,’ he writes, ‘therecould be no further becoming.’ Yet that is not how we ordinarily understand the world.Our organs of perception are geared to the conditions of our survival, and they allow usto apprehend only a minute fraction of what happens. Hence we suppose that there arediscontinuities and separate things: even the most fleeting process, such as a flash oflightning, is imagined as the activityofsomething. Our language contains philosophicalassumptions: ‘Every word is a prejudice’ (The Wanderer and His Shadow,section 55).Because the Indo-European languages contain the distinction between subject andactivity, they determine our conceptual bias towards belief in permanent or at leastenduring beings, and lead inevitably to belief in the soul and in material substance. Theline of thought here is akin to the more recent hypotheses concerning the determininginfluence of language structure on our ways of seeing the world. But our conditions oflife demand such illusions; for absolute becoming makes the world ungraspable. Hencewe invent fictions which enable us to make sense of the world, such as things, and hencenumbers and formulae. Nietzsche is not proposing any move to a new language: evenZarathustra, who proclaims a ‘new speech’, still uses German. It seems that we must goon using the only language available to us, while acknowledging that its concepts areinadequate to reality.INFLUENCES AND REACTIONSA search for direct influences on Nietzsche is not very rewarding. He did speak of asupposed group of ‘new philosophers’; but in reality, Nietzsche had no philosophicalassociates. Schopenhauer and Wagner are often mentioned as early influences. Nietzschegained much from both—as thinkers he could react against, primarily in ethical andaesthetic concepts respectively. Schopenhauer was an early passion, and the subject of an‘untimely meditation’ which makes no mention of transcendental idealism, pessimismand the doctrine of the will as essence of the world; instead, Schopenhauer’sindependence and hatred of philosophical obscurantism are celebrated. Emerson was aninfluence for similar reasons. His essay form, flexible and loosely structured, was verycongenial to Nietzsche. Again, the doctrines are hardly important, and the idea of an‘over-soul’ common to all thinkers is the opposite of Nietzsche’s view. Yet he retained ahigh opinion of Emerson, and an essay such as ‘Self-Reliance’, with its forthrightrejection of any consistency in belief or action, has a very Nietzschean ring: ‘Speak whatyou think now in hard words; and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard wordsagain, even though it contradict everything you said today’. Moreover, the Emersonianemphasis on the will has a direct relation to Nietzsche’s later idea of the will to power.Among philosophers of a more academic kind, Nietzsche’s reading was largely incontemporary writers, some not much known even in their day, let alone a century later.Two figures worth attention are the idealists Friedrich Albert Lange and GustavTeichmüller. InBeyond Good and Evil,Nietzsche pays a generous tribute to boththinkers for the courage of their metaphysical thinking—at the same time as he rejectstheir principal theses. Nietzsche studied Lange’s importantHistory of Materialismshortlyafter its publication in 1865, and often returned to it later. It was a fortunate encounter,for the book provides a comprehensive survey of materialist thought, from Democritus tothe nineteenth century. Just as valuable is Lange’s responsible and fair-minded approach,which gives full credit to the contributions of the materialist philosophy, while in the endrejecting it in favour of a neo-Kantian idealism. Lange characterises materialism as aconservative force in science, emphasizing facts at the expense of ideas, hypotheses andtheories. He recommends a more speculative approach, raising even paradoxicalquestions. Materialism ‘trusts the senses’, Lange says, and it pictures the worldaccordingly. Yet the scientific investigations that arise on this basis underminephilosophical realism. Lange’s treatment of perception is like that of Hermann vonHelmholtz: when we understand how information received by the senses is transformedby our sensory apparatus, we must conclude that the world as we perceive it is really aproduct of our organization. This includes our own sense organs, since their status asobjects of perception is no different from other things. Nietzsche rejects Lange’sargument as incoherent: ‘But then our organs would be—the work of our organs! Itseems to me that this is a completereductio ad absurdum’ (Beyond Good and Evil,section 15.) In contrast, he suggests that ‘Today we possess science precisely to theextent to which we have learned toacceptthe testimony of the senses—to the extent towhich we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through to theend.’ (Twilight of the Idols,‘“Reason” in Philosophy’, section 2.) This is not realism, but‘sensualism’, an affirmation of appearance in its own right, however unstable andcontradictory it may be.In 1882 Nietzsche read a newly published book entitledDie wirkliche und diescheinbare Welt (The Real and the Apparent World),by a former Basel colleague, GustavTeichmüller. From this work he gathered several concepts of great use for his subsequentthinking. Central to Teichmüller’s metaphysical system is the idea of ‘perspective’. Thedefect of dogmatism in all its forms is, he argues, its failure to appreciate that allphilosophies are ‘protective’ or ‘perspectival’ images of reality from a certain standpoint.The same is true of the knowledge of everyday life, in which we rely on whatTeichmüller terms ‘semiotic’ knowledge, that is, a translation of phenomena into thevocabulary of a particular sense. Even our own mental states are known in this wayalone. Each sense has its own ‘sign language’, and philosophy has been dominated by abias in favour of sight; we need to overthrow this dictatorship and establish a kind ofdemocracy of the senses and their corresponding concepts. Treating space and time asperspectival concepts, Teichmüller arrives at a conventionalist account, according towhich questions about infinity reduce to arbitrary decisions about measurement.Materialism and idealism are alike inadequate, because they remain within their limitedperspectives. Teichmüller’s own system posits an intellectual intuition of the real self, atimeless subject which, transcending all perspectives, is their ultimate source.With the exception of this last point, Nietzsche’s own view of knowledge takes upmany of Teichmüller’s themes. His most striking idea is usually referred to as‘perspectivism’, though in fact Nietzsche uses the wordPerspektivismusnot for a certaindoctrine but for the property of being perspectival, that is, for ‘perspectivity’. Theassertion that there are only perspectives, without the underpinning supplied by eitherthings-in-themselves or by a ‘real’ self, implies an opposition to objectivity, or at least toone version of objectivity. Nietzsche says that we need to control our drives ‘so that oneknows how to employ avarietyof perspectives and affective interpretations in the serviceof knowledge’. This leads to a truer conception of objectivity: ‘There isonlyaperspective seeing,onlya perspective “knowing”; and themoreaffects we allow to speakabout one thing, themoreeyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the morecomplete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be’ (The Genealogy ofMorals,Third Essay, section 12). Nietzsche often asserts that we are prisoners of ourhuman perspectives, forever unable to see ‘around our corner’. Yet he also suggests thatartists have the ability to provide us with otherwise unavailable perspectives; and heclaims for himself a special talent for ‘reversing’ perspectives. A condition of thisgenuine objectivity is an avoidance of ‘convictions’, that is, of beliefs purporting topossess certainty. ‘Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies,’ Nietzschewrites (Human, All Too Human,section 483). Avoiding convictions does not imply anironic withdrawal from engagement and commitment: on the contrary, we should ‘livedangerously’ in the quest for knowledge, risking ourselves in following an hypothesis asfar as it can be taken.These concerns are crucial in Nietzsche’s attitude towards science. Cut off fromprimary scientific sources by his lack of mathematics, Nietzsche browsed widely amongpopular science andNaturphilosophie,and was aware of current debates—for instance,over the implications of the second law of thermodynamics. Many of these authors werewhat one might term vulgar Leibnizians, writers opposed to mechanism for its supposedsuperficiality and soullessness, and often willing to suggest a close link betweenmaterialism and the English national character. Nietzsche’s approach is free of this tone,and his assessment of materialism is of far more interest.For Nietzsche, mechanism is first and foremost amethodology. Its ideal, he says, is ‘toexplain, i.e. put into formulae, as much as possible with as little as possible.’ ([7.5], 7/3.158). The best theory is the one which uses the fewest concepts, while encompassing themost natural phenomena. This idea is well known in Ernst Mach’s formulation of the‘principle of economy’. But Nietzsche links it with a main theme of his own: the will topower. Scientific theory enables us to exert more control over our environment. Moreimportantly, however, scientific theory is itself a form of power. Mechanism is the mostadvanced and successful form of science, just because it embodies this scientificimperative in its purest form, nowhere seen more than inreductionism,its essentialstrategy and the key to its greatest successes.Nietzsche’s complaint against materialism is that it has not pushed its own programmefar enough. He took the dynamic physics of Boscovich to represent a further step.Whereas Copernicus overcame the belief in the stability of the earth, Boscovich opposedan equally deep prejudice: the notion of material substance. The outcome is a theory inwhich solid material atoms are replaced with unextended ‘points of matter’ (in theterminology of Faraday, ‘centres of force’) whose spatial fields produce all the familiarmodes of interaction with other centres: repulsion, cohesion and mutual impenetrability.Boscovich thus eliminates not only the distinction between matter and force but also thedistinctions between kinds of force.Another concept to be eliminated is, Nietzsche considers, that of causality. Materialismeliminates teleology, and uses only causal explanation; yet Nietzsche suggests thatefficient causes are not alternatives to final causes, but only disguised versions of them.Scientific formulae establish quantitative equalities (in terms of energy or mass) betweenstates of affairs, which make no mention of cause and effect. Thus, Nietzsche argues,science should give up any pretence to provideexplanationsof phenomena, and contentitself with an accurate description of them. If explanation is turning the unfamiliar intothe familiar, then it appeals to what we take to be familiar, the everyday experience ofwhat can be seen and felt, and the even more familiar processes of our own minds,thinking, willing, and so on. However, the seeming certainty of these phenomena is anillusion. Even the simplest experience, the ‘I think’, turns out on closer examination tocontain a number of assumptions, such as the distinctness of the subject from the processof thinking. Summarizing these critiques, Nietzsche writes:When I think of my philosophical genealogy, I feel in agreement with the antiteleological,i.e. Spinozistic movement of our time, but with this difference, thatI hold even the ‘aim’ and ‘will’within usto be an illusion: similarly with themechanistic movement (tracing all moral and aesthetic questions back tophysiological ones, all physiological to chemical ones, all chemical tomechanical ones) but with this difference, that I do not believe in ‘matter’ andhold Boscovich to be one of the great turning-points, like Copernicus.([7.5], 7/2:164)Also unusual in Nietzsche’s approach to science is his refusal to separate scientificthought from the personality of the scientist. The original founders of science, thematerialist thinkers of ancient Greece, were free spirits. Modern scientists are lessadmirable: unlike the poet Lucretius, they are prosaic minds, who turn science into aroutine procedure, relying on measuring and calculating to ensure security. Theirmaterialism is taken as a doctrine, when it should be a provisional hypothesis, allowingus to run ahead of our present knowledge into unknown areas. With this in mind, wecannot separate these ideas from Nietzsche’s more obviously imaginative and speculativewritings.THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRANietzsche regardedThus Spoke Zarathustraas his most important achievement. Thework’s subtitle, ‘A Book for Everyone and No one’, conveys its mixture of accessibilityand inaccessibility. In style, it is most obviously modelled on the Bible; and Nietzschemay have gained a hint of the possibilities of Biblical pastiche from Mark Twain’ssatirical description of the Mormon scriptures. Although the name ‘Zarathustra’ isborrowed from the ancient Iranian figure, there is no particular relation betweenNietzsche’s protagonist and the historical Zarathustra. Rather, Nietzsche has chosen aformat which allows a dramatic and poetic presentation of ideas which could hardly beexpressed in a more conventional manner. Although he had been preparing and makingnotes for the composition for some time, the actual writing of each instalment was donein a few weeks. This may account for the spontaneity of many passages, but it cannot bedenied that the level is uneven. Zarathustra is forceful, poetic, thoughtful and satirical; hecan also be rambling and querulous or, worse still, as sentimental as his all-too-legitimatedescendant, Kahlil Gibran’s best-selling ‘Prophet’. Especially in Part Three, the carefulorganization of Nietzsche’s earlier books is lacking; and the turn to a kind of satiricalburlesque in Part Four, while it has some admirers, is seen by most (including, perhaps,its author) as failing to achieve its intentions. Martin Heidegger advised that we ought toreadThus Spoke Zarathustrajust as rigorously as we read a work of Aristotle—thoughhe added that this does not mean in precisely the same way ([7.40], 70). There is much inthis, even though, knowing something of Nietzsche’s personal life, we recognize variousallusions in the text.In Part One Zarathustra is introduced as a sage who, weary of his solitary possession ofwisdom, descends from a mountain retreat to bring it as a gift to humanity. In amarketplace he announces to an unreceptive audience his message of self-overcoming,the process of transforming oneself into something higher through turning passions into‘virtues’. The aim in this process is what Zarathustra calls theÜbermensch. (Since somereaders are distracted by the overtones of English words like ‘superman’, recent practicehas been to leave the term untranslated.) This idea has often been misinterpreted: it hasnothing to do with any evolution of the human species towards a more ‘advanced’ form.Even taking it as the development of a single person is too literal, since Zarathustra’sfurther discourses specify the problem in terms of forces or impulseswithintheindividual. We have no literal vocabulary for these, it seems, and so need to personifythem. TheÜbermenschis thus a symbol for higher states of being, as when Nietzschespeaks of ‘the invention of gods, heroes, andÜbermenschenof all kinds’ (The GayScience,section 143).The relation between soul and body is a main theme in Part One. Zarathustra insiststhat the soul is not separate from and superior to the body. On the contrary, the soul is aninstrument of the body, and its characteristics express the state of the body—where‘body’ is to be understood as a collection of impulses and drives. Our virtues arise fromthe body, and are indissolubly linked with the passions that morality usually condemns.Hence those who seek refuge in a world ‘beyond’ are enemies of life, whose assertionsare only symptoms of their own sickness and weariness of life. Zarathustra’s scorn forthese ‘preachers of death’ is expressed in a series of fierce denunciations.Part Two is more poetic, and we now catch glimpses of the higher state, as importantthemes emerge with greater emphasis. Zarathustra states his task as the ‘overcoming ofrevenge’: ‘Forthat man may be delivered from revenge,that is for me the bridge to thehighest hope, and a rainbow after long storms’. The key to this liberation is the creativewill, which, as a ‘will to power’, is identified as the essence of life itself. Yet Zarathustranotes that one obstacle stands in the way of this otherwise omnipotent power: its ownpast.But now learn this too: the will itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates; butwhat is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? ‘It was’—that is thename of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerlessagainst what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The willcannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness,that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.(Thus Spake Zarathustra,Second Part, ‘On Redemption’)Because the will cannot will backwards, it suffers from frustration and anger, andrevengeis its attempt to escape from the predicament. Revenge can be understood atvarious levels. As a common pattern of social behaviour, it expresses a mixture ofmotives, ranging from immediate self-preservation to a maintenance of social prestige(The Wanderer and His Shadow,section 33). In a narrower sense, revenge is an attemptto redirect one’s own pain on to others, under the pretext that their ‘guilt’ requires themto suffer. From that rationalization in turn derives the whole apparatus of moral thinkingand, for that matter, the concept of the individual subject as bearer of moralresponsibility. Ultimately, however, revenge is concerned with time: ‘This, indeed thisalone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill-will against time and its “It was”’. It is this alonethat accounts for the extraordinary prevalence of revenge, or rather of its intellectualform, the ‘spirit of revenge’, across the range of human thinking.Just what is it that makes the past a problem here? Not, it seems, its factual content, butsimply its pastness. In that case, whether the events and acts of the past were good or bad,pleasurable or painful, is irrelevant. So is the distinction between actions and merehappenings: one’s own past actions, having become past, are as far removed from thepower of the will as anything else that has taken place. The past is thus anundifferentiated totality. The solution, if there is one, to the problem of the past mustenable us toaffirmthe past as a whole, not just with its pains but with its trivial andmeaningless elements. There must, Zarathustra hints, be a way of transforming ‘It was’into ‘Thus I willed it’ and, in turn, into ‘Thus I will it; thus shall I will it’. The thought ofeternal recurrence, to be considered below, must be seen in that light.In Part Three ofThus Spoke Zarathustra,Nietzsche enters into deeper themes.Peaceful episodes of exalted mystical feeling alternate with stormy scenes ofconfrontation and struggle, as Zarathustra comes slowly and reluctantly to accept his roleas teacher of the eternal recurrence. It is clear that this thought, more than any other, isonly for those few who are ready to let it gain power over them. A fourth part of the workchanges direction again, with Zarathustra’s encounters with the ‘higher men’ who, indifferent ways, illustrate the pitfalls in the way of self-overcoming. The intended tone issatirical—but modelled on the ancient satyr plays which followed performances of Greektragedy. Nietzsche himself was apparently dissatisfied with Part Four since, after havingcopies privately printed, he withdrew it from circu-lation. WhetherThus SpokeZarathustracan be regarded as a completed work is doubtful. Certainly, many of itsthemes are left unresolved, not least the one that Nietzsche called the ‘fundamentalconception’ of the book, the thought of eternal return.ETERNAL RECURRENCEOn his own account, the idea of the eternal return came to Nietzsche quite suddenly,during his summer residence in Switzerland in August 1881. Yet his notebooks of thetime reveal a wide reading in popular science and philosophy of nature, includingdiscussions of the idea of recurrence. From the beginning, the idea is sketched out byNietzsche in several forms. In his notebooks, though not in published works, he sketchesan argument using the vocabulary of science. The key to this line of thought isNietzsche’s finitism. He takes the world to be a finite amount of energy, within a spacewhich is also finite although unbounded. If the world consists of a finite number of‘centres of force’, and any state of affairs consists in some configuration of theseelements, then the number of possible states of affairs must be finite; or so Nietzschesupposes: critics have pointed out that this is anon sequitur,supposing space to be acontinuum. But the time within which changes occur is infinite. Nietzsche insists on aninfinitude of past time, since a beginning for the world would raise the question of itscause, and perhaps invite a theistic answer. Therefore, after a long but finite period oftime, the whole range of possible situations must be exhausted, and some past state willreappear. Such a recurrence of a single total state will lead to the recurrence of the wholesequence of states, in exactly the same order, leading to another complete cycle, and soon into infinity.This is not a wholly original argument: something similar can be found in earlierphilosophers, going back at least as far as Lucretius. With the required premisses, it hasthe look of a valid demonstration. If we suppose that whatever is possible must occur inan infinite time, that past time is infinite, and that the present state of affairs is a possibleone, it follows that this state must already have occurred in the past, not just once butinfinitely many times. Similarly, it must occur again infinitely many times in the future.Once a principle of causal determination is added, it follows that the whole course ofevents leading up to this moment, as well as that following from it, must recur eternallyin the same sequence.As a line of thought, all this is somewhat inconsistent with Nietzsche’s expressedviews. A vocabulary of static ‘states’ is at odds with his support of a Heraclitean doctrineof absolute becoming, which allows no standstill, even the most momentary one. Further,the argument relies on a causal determinism stated in terms of necessary relationsbetween ‘total states’ of the universe. Elsewhere Nietzsche maintains that reality consistsnot of momentary states related by cause and effect but rather of extended processeswhich are somehow ‘intertwined’ or ‘entangled’ with one another. Causality cannotexplain why there should be any change at all, or why change should occupy some finiteamount of time, instead of being instantaneous. Nietzsche proposes to explain the finiteduration of processes by an inner conflict of forces, a conception bound up with the ideathat the will to power is found in physical as well as psychical processes.In these sketches, the theory of eternal recurrence is arrived at by eliminating two otheraccounts of the world. The view that becoming continues endlessly into new states ofaffairs is, Nietzsche argues, excluded by the finitude of the universe. On the other hand,the idea of a final state, one in which all change comes to an end, is refuted by immediateexperience. Given an infinitude of past time, such an ending would already have beenreached; and, if reached, it would never have given rise to further development, assumingno divine intervention. Since our thinking shows that becoming has not come to an end, afinal state must be impossible. This leaves only one possibility: that the same states arerepeated again and again, infinitely many times. Now this procedure is not veryconsistent with Nietzsche’s programme for scientific thinking: a theory arrived at byelimination is not a daring hypothesis, or even a particularly imaginative conception. Inany case, a scientific theory of eternal recurrence, however valid, does not account foranything in our experience, and so has no value for scientific explanation; it is just a finalconsequence of premisses already accepted. We could see all this as anad hominemstrategy, arguing with science on its own grounds, and using its own principles ofthought. Arguing ideas to their final consequences, even to the point of absurdity is, afterall, valued by Nietzsche as a mark of integrity.In Nietzsche’s published works, the idea of eternal recurrence is always presented in adramatic context of confrontation and challenge. This is especially true of the strikingsection ofThe Gay Sciencein which the idea is first introduced:What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliestloneliness and say to you: ‘this life as you now live it and have lived it, you willhave to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothingnew in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh andeverything unutterably small and great in your life will have to return to you, allin the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlightbetween the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass ofexistence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck ofdust!’Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse thedemon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous momentwhen you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heardanything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would changeyou as you are and perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing,‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie uponyour actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have tobecome to yourself and to lifeto crave nothing more ferventlythan this ultimateeternal confirmation and seal?(The Gay Science,section 341)Here the thought of recurrence is announced, not demonstrated. There is no question of adebate, or even of a choice between acceptance and rejection. Each of us will presumablyrespond according to the sort of person we are. One possible reaction is a completecollapse. In this respect, the thought is something like the doctrine of eternal punishment;in fact, Nietzsche’s depiction of this outcome owes much, surprisingly, to Englishaccounts of Methodist preaching. But the thought is also presented as a power fortransformation into a higher state, in which one is able to affirm ‘each and every thing’ ashaving a status which is a kind of approach to eternal being, without an imagined escapefrom the course of becoming.The element of challenge is just as evident in a powerful chapter ofThus SpokeZarathustra(Third Part, ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’). Zarathustra describes anepisode in which he confronts his enemy, the dwarflike ‘spirit of gravity’, and initiates acontest of riddles. He points out a gateway which stands between two lanes, stretchingforwards and backwards into an infinite distance. The gateway, at which they come intoconflict, has a name: ‘Moment’. Zarathustra poses a question: do the lanes contradict oneanother eternally? The dwarf answers that ‘time itself is a circle’—implying that anyconflict between past and future is a mere semblance. Angered by the evasion,Zarathustra retorts with a direct statement of the thought of recurrence: must noteverything that runs on these lanes do so again and again? The dwarf, apparently unableto confront this idea, disappears from the scene. A new turn follows, as Zarathustradescribes a vision which is also a riddle. A young shepherd is choking on a ‘heavy blacksnake’ which has crawled into his throat. The shepherd bites the head off the snake, andleaps up, transfigured: ‘one changed, radiant,laughing!’ What does this mean? Thequestion remains unanswered. Perhaps Nietzsche is unwilling to eliminate the tension andenigmatic character of this situation, or alert to Emerson’s suggestion that ‘The answer toa riddle is another riddle’.Some aspects of the theme of eternal recurrence are shared by another main idea ofNietzsche, the ‘death of God’, first announced in section 125 ofThe Gay Science:Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morninghours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, heprovoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his waylike a child? said another. Or is he in hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone ona voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumpedinto their midst and pierced them with his glances.‘Whither is God’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you.We have killed him—you and I.All of us are his murderers… God is dead. God remains dead. And we havekilled him…. Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we notourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been agreater deed; and whoever will be born after us—for the sake of this deed hewill be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.’As inThus Spoke Zarathustra,the message is not received by the marketplace crowd;and the ‘madman’ acknowledges the failure of his mission. He has come too early, hesays.This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reachedthe ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the starsrequires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can beseen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distantstars—and yet they have done it themselves.It must be noted that the message of the death of God is addressed not to believers but to‘those who do not believe in God’. The assumption is that there are no believers in themodern world, or at least in the marketplace, symbol of mass society. When Zarathustraencounters one believer, a hermit who lives apart from society, he refrains from revealingthat God is dead; the message is only for those who have brought it about. The hermit is‘untimely’ too, and would appear as absurd in the marketplace as the madman. There,support for Christianity is not an error, Nietzsche alleges inThe Antichrist,but adeliberate lie. ‘Everyone knows this,and yet everything continues as before.’ Nietzsche’starget here is those who have abandoned traditional religion yet who assume that moralitycan be continued in the same way. ‘They are rid of the Christian God and now believe allthe more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality… Christianity is a system, awholeview of things thought out together. By breaking one concept out of it, the faith inGod, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.’ Nietzsche isinsisting on understanding the full implications of disbelief. It puts in doubt not just theexplicit content of old beliefs but the standards of knowledge and morality whosefoundations they supplied. The madman expresses this as the predicament he and hislisteners are in, whether they realize it or not.As with the thought of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche’s emphasis is on the consequencesof the idea, rather than on reasons for supporting it. His atheism does not arise from anycritique of arguments for the existence of God. Once we have a psychological account ofthe origin of belief in God, he argues, ‘a counter-proof that there is no God therebybecomes superfluous’ (Daybreak,section 95). Elsewhere his atheism seems to be not areasoned view but a stipulation. Zarathustra says: ‘If there were gods, how could I endurenot to be a god?Hencethere are no gods.’ His real objection is to theconceptof God, asa denial of life and, in turn, a symptom of a lack of creative power within individuals andgroups.In this way, the ‘death of God’ is part of a wider theme: what Nietzsche, in his lastyears of work, termed ‘nihilism’. The collapse of all values, even that of truth, has led toa historical situation of hopelessness. ‘One interpretation has collapsed; but because itwas consideredtheinterpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all inexistence, as if everything were in vain’ (The Will to Power,section 55). Withinphilosophy, scepticism and pessimism fit into this picture, as symptoms of decline—ultimately, Nietzsche suggests, owing to physiological causes. But he makes an importantdistinction between two kinds of nihilism.Activenihilism is an expression of strength,whilepassivenihilism is a sign of weakness. Active nihilism finds satisfaction indestroying old illusions, and the will to pursue ideas through ‘to their ultimateconsequences’, even to absurdity. This is just the truthfulness that leads to a paradox, byputting the question of its own origin and value, and thus undermining its own validity.Affirmative nihilism represents a preparation for a new phase of creativity. In thesymbolic language ofThus Spoke Zarathustra,it is the strength of the lion, courageousand defiant, who destroys the authority of every ‘Thou shalt’ and assumes the lonely taskof setting up his own values.NIETZSCHE AS PSYCHOLOGISTNietzsche often called himself a ‘psychologist’ rather than a ‘philosopher’. What hemeant has little to do with any science of behaviour modelling itself on the physicalsciences. In the first section ofHuman, All Too Human,he uses the metaphor of‘sublimation’, taken from physical chemistry, to express the transformation of lower intohigher impulses. (Borrowed by Freud, this expression has become common.) Moral andreligious sentiments do not have a higher origin, or give access to any realm of values;their difference from lower impulses is one of degree, not of kind. Crucial to this pictureis a rejection of the unity of personality. The self is, in fact, a plurality of forces—Nietzsche says ‘personlike’ forces, whose relation to one another is a sort of politicalstructure. A healthy and strong personality is one which has a well organized structureamongst its drives and impulses. Despite his talk of the ‘will to power’, Nietzsche regardsthe will in its usual sense as a fiction. When we analyse the typical ‘act of will’ we find amixture of various elements: sensations of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states, of themovement, of the thinking, and above all of the ‘affect of superiority’ associated with aninner commanding. This last is close to synonymous with the will to power. But wherethat concept comes to the fore is in biology, where it allows Nietzsche to opposeDarwinism, or at least what he takes to be the Darwinist emphasis on the will to live:‘The physiologists should take heed before they assume self-preservation as the cardinaldrive of an organic being. Above all, a living being wants to discharge its energy: life assuch is will to power. Self-preservation is only one of its indirect and most frequentconsequences’ (Beyond Good and Evil,section 13).For many philosophical questions, it is difficult to separate psychological andmetaphysical components in Nietzsche’s approach. His critique of pessimism is anexample. Nietzsche argues that it is absurd to make any judgement about the value of theworld as a whole, simply because there can be no external measure by which to assess it.If pessimism means that there is more pain than pleasure in life, it implies a hedonismwhich Nietzsche regards as a superficial psychology. Pleasure and pain are not ‘facts ofconsciousness’, phenomena whose nature is self-evident, but themselves interpretations,and therefore dependent on context for their meaning. Accordingly, Nietzsche attacksutilitarianism for its uncritical view of pleasure and pain, as well as its appeal toquantitative calculation: ‘What can be counted is worth little’.Similarly, valuing oneself is entirely dependent on what sort of self this is; despisingoneself may represent a higher state. The egoism that Nietzsche advocates is unlike thecommon version, in that it involves no solicitude for the existing self; that is a sign ofweakness, not strength, and a failure in the important task of self-overcoming. Further,the ‘self that such importance is placed upon is a very secondary phenomenon, oftenmerely the product of others’ expectations. The personality that we are aware of in oureveryday lives is only the surface of what we are, and the thoughts and motives weattribute to ourselves are only the end-products of the real processes going on within us.A genuine egoism must direct our attention towards the real self, and bring about atransformation of the person. It must be an affirmation of becoming, implying not justchange but conflict, contradiction and even destruction. Conflict has to be seen as apositive and creative process, in the spirit of Heraclitus’s statement that ‘War is the fatherof all things’. Becoming is not just a philosophical concept but something to be affirmedin our lives, by committing ourselves to the process of self-transformation. As Emersonsaid, ‘Power ceases in the instant of repose’. Affirming becoming means affirmingconflict, between individuals and groups of individuals, but also within ourselves.A constant theme in Nietzsche’s writing, from its earliest period, is his rejection of thefreedom of the will and endorsement of a fatalist view of becoming, for which ‘Event andnecessary event is a tautology’. But Nietzsche opposes what he calls ‘Turkish fatalism’,which separates human beings from circumstances, and sees them as the passive victimsof impersonal, incomprehensible forces. We must realize that we are ourselves a part ofnature, and exert as much influence over what is to come as does any other factor. On theassumption that all things are connected with one another, even our most trivial actsmake a difference to the whole course of later events. This notion ofego fatumis closelyrelated to another:amor fati,often invoked in enthusiastic tones, as Nietzsche asserts thatwe must not merely accept fate but love it: ‘My formula for greatness in a human being isamor fati:that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in alleternity’ (Ecce Homo,‘Why I am So Clever’, section 10). Fatalism is not a crushingweight if we ‘incorporate’ it, so that the force of past and present circumstances isbalanced by the same force within ourselves. That there are no goals beyond the processof becoming, no reality above the world of appearance, is to be experienced as aprecondition for true freedom.For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself.That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes moreindifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one isprepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding oneself.(Twilight of the Idols,‘Skirmishes of An Untimely Man’, section 38)This responsibility for oneself has nothing in common with the moral responsibilitywhich is a pretext for assigning blame and justifying punishment. It is a function of thestrength of will whose typical expression is the ability to make and keep promises—primarily to oneself, not to others. To this ‘free spirit’, Nietzsche poses the demand:‘Become what you are!’ This may suggest a Kantian or Schopenhauerian concept ofintelligible character; yet Nietzsche has no belief in an intelligible self, located beyondthe realm of becoming.A REVALUATION OF VALUESA constant theme in Nietzsche’s thought is a radical revaluation of moral conceptions. InHuman, All Too Human,he introduces a crucial distinction between two kinds ofmorality. One, the earliest source of these concepts, is the creation of ruling groups andindividuals. ‘Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, masterand slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. InHomer the Trojan and Greek are both good. It is not he who does us harm but who iscontemptible who counts as bad’ (Human, All Too Human,section 45). The second kindis that of the subjected and the powerless, the system of moral concepts that rationalizestheir lack of power. Nietzsche returns to this theme inBeyond Good and Evil;but it is inThe Genealogy of Morals—the last work he published, and one of his most daring—thatthe theory is fully elaborated. Each of its three long essays develops a central moraltheme in terms of the concept of the will to power. There are two types of morality,‘master morality’ and ‘slave morality’, though Nietzsche adds that ‘at times they occurdirectly alongside each other—even in the same human being, within asinglesoul’ (Beyond Good and Evil,section 260). In the first case, a ruling group posits its ownsense of nobility and superiority as valuable and good. Here ‘good’ means ‘noble’,whereas ‘bad’ means ‘common’. In the second case, the weak establish their own values,in which strength is regarded as ‘evil’. At the most fundamental level, the distinction is a‘physiological’ one, between active impulses, spontaneous expressions of one’s ownenergy, and the ‘reactive’ impulses, which by their nature are directedagainstsomething,an external danger. In fact, the noble are really not much interested in the ignoble; but theweak are preoccupied with the strong. Nietzsche uses the French wordressentimentfortheir attitude. ‘The slave revolt in morality begins whenressentimentitself becomescreative and gives birth to values: theressentimentof natures that are denied the truereaction, that of action, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.’Christian morality is the most successful instance of such a system. But since the weaklack the power to take revenge directly, their revenge has to be mediated by a long andindirect process of deceitful conceptual manipulation which induces the strong to valuerespect and pity for the weak, and to condemn their own virtues.Having laid out this schema, Nietzsche goes on to discuss the concept of responsibility,proposing a prehistory of harsh discipline out of which human beings have acquired theability to maintain a commitment. Moral conscience is an internalized product of socialcustom. But like so much of morality, this turns against itself—for its final product is theperson whose independence extends to the choice of goals. A further discussion ofasceticism brings out the ambiguity which so often appears in Nietzsche’s interpretationof moral phenomena. Asceticism can mean either of two very different things. Poverty,humility and chastity can be found in the lives of the great creative spirits; but here theyare not valued for their own sakes, only as conditions enabling their activities to flourishmost advantageously. This is very different from the attitude of the ‘ascetic priest’ who isreally hostile towards life itself.Nietzsche’s thinking about society is really an extension of his attack on morality. Healways emphasizes distinctions and ‘order of rank’. He is hostile to socialism, as heunderstands it, understood as a levelling phenomenon, based onressentiment. It must beremembered that his prototype of the socialist was not Karl Marx but rather EugenDühring—ironically, remembered later only as the target of Friedrich Engels’s polemicalworkAnti-Dühring. Dühring traces the concept of justice back to the impulse towardsrevenge. He argues that revenge is given an impersonal and universal form by society,which establishes its own monopoly and takes vengeance out of the hands of individuals.Dühring was also a leading anti-Semite; and Nietzsche perceptively attributes thisideology (‘the socialism of fools’, as August Bebel called it) to the same underlyingimpulse. In one way, Nietzsche agrees with Dühring: that a formalist approach cannotaccount for the concept of justice. But he objects that Dühring has overlooked anotherclass of drives: the active and creative ones. Systems of law are not set up by the weakfor their common protection against the strong, or in order to satisfy their reactivefeelings. Rather, they are instituted by individuals or groups who are ‘active, strong,spontaneous, aggressive.’CULTURE, ART AND MUSICAlthough its scholarship plays a secondary role to intuition,The Birth of Tragedyhasbeen influential for its distinction between the ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ strains inGreek culture. Nietzsche wanted to get away from the classical stereotype of Greekculture, to point to a darker, more violent and uncontrolled side. He traces the origins oftragedy to the trancelike state of the devotees of Dionysus, the god of death and rebirth.In their drunken ecstasies, the distinction between individual and world is eliminated; thetruth of existence as a neverending process of creation and destruction is revealed. Theoriginal performers of tragedy, Nietzsche suggests, are the chorus, who translate thisinsight into the visible forms of the Apollonian style, modelled on dream images. Thedownfall of ancient tragedy, Nietzsche goes on to argue, was brought about by theascendancy of rationalism, as represented in the figure of Socrates. Access to the sourcesof tragic wisdom is now blocked, and so the fruitful interaction of the Dionysian andApollonian becomes impossible.Having reached this conclusion,The Birth of Tragedyturns into an exercise in specialpleading for the Wagnerian ‘artwork of the future’ as a vehicle for national revival.Nietzsche’s ideas on aesthetics cannot be separated from the history of his involvementwith Richard Wagner. By the time Nietzsche knew him, Wagner’s early admiration forthe humanistic materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach had given way to a Schopenhauerianpessimism, clearly visible in the operas of hisRingcycle, as inThe Birth of Tragedy.Much of Wagner’s influence was bad, especially a pompous tone and indulgence inpersonal polemic, both of which Nietzsche soon outgrew. In later years, Nietzsche clearlymissed the camaraderie he had enjoyed in the Wagner circle, and wistful references to agroup of ‘new philosophers’ appear in such later writings asBeyond Good and Evil.Wagner had argued for an art based onpathosrather thanethos,claiming Beethoven asboth the paradigm case and his own immediate precursor. Many of Nietzsche’s laterreflections on style take the form of attacks on Wagner and a critique of the Wagnerianmusical style which is often just a reaction against it. Music remained a preoccupation forNietzsche, extending to several ventures in musical composition; in comparison, attentionto the visual arts is notable by its absence. Perhaps surprisingly, Nietzsche took nointerest in the operas of another winter resident of Genoa, Giuseppe Verdi; instead, heexpressed admiration for Bizet’sCarmen,much to the disgust of one reader, theunrepentant Wagnerian Bernard Shaw. Whether Nietzsche would have welcomed theverismoof the 1890s is unclear; his hostility to literary naturalism suggests not, and yetthe abrupt termination of his development leaves such questions open.More importantly, however, Nietzsche wanted to become known as a poet. Hispublished works contain not only some light satirical verse but also more serious poetry,so-called ‘dithyrambs’, a term suggesting the choral hymns of Greek drama;Thus SpokeZarathustracontains many instances of such a poetic prose.Nietzsche wanted to be thought of as a ‘good European’, like Goethe, standing abovenational divisions. He often made derogatory comments about German culture, arguingthat the political and military victories of the Prussian Empire had been achieved at theexpense of its cultural values, and professing to think more highly of French culture foritsesprit. The light style of French aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld and Chamfortappealed to him as a model which he emulated with some success. As a humorist he isless skilful, butThe Wagner Caseis a true satire, which conveys serious ideas with a lighttouch.INTERPRETATIONS OF NIETZSCHEAlthough his books sold poorly when first published, Nietzsche had become a wellknownwriter by the time he died. His unpublished writings, which included severalcompleted works and a large collection of notebooks, remained under the control of hissister until her death in 1935. The history of their publication is a dramatic and in partscandalous story. Extensive notes from the last years of his work were brought out underthe nameThe Will to Power,one of the many titles for works that Nietzsche projected.Whether he would ever have issued anything resembling this book is very doubtfulindeed. The value of Nietzsche’s notebooks has been the subject of a somewhat sterilecontroversy amongst commentators, with opinions ranging from summary dismissal tothe equally exaggerated view that Nietzsche deliberately withheld his most importantideas. The sudden ending of his working life makes any claim as to what he would havelater published speculative.The control of Nietzsche’s writings by his sister, until her death in 1935, hadunfortunate effects. Nietzsche’s reputation has suffered from her admiration for AdolfHitler, an honoured guest at the Nietzsche Archiv in Weimar, where he wasphotographed contemplating a bust of the philosopher. More significantly, the worksthemselves were often tampered with, passages being removed or even altered to suit thepurposes of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. A scholarly edition, begun in the 1930s, wasinterrupted by the Second World War before it had progressed beyond the earliestwritings; not until the 1960s was a collected edition of Nietzsche’s writings begun again,under the editorship of two Italian scholars, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Thiswork has continued steadily, to the great benefit of scholarship.Nietzsche’s influence has been strong on artists. Composers such as Richard Straussand Delius set passages ofThus Spoke Zarathustrato music, and Nietzsche’s life hasinspired such works of fiction as Thomas Mann’sDoctor Faustus,and was even thesubject of a 1977 film entitledBeyond Good and Evil,described by one reviewer as‘somewhat disturbingly unpleasant’. In English-speaking countries, appreciation ofNietzsche was slow to come. His admirers were often eccentrics of an intellectual fringe,attracted by his scornful remarks about democracy, socialism and feminism. JamesJoyce’s story ‘A Painful Case’ gives a cruelly accurate picture of the ‘Nietzschean’ of thisperiod. A collected English edition of Nietzsche’s published works was brought out bythese enthusiasts shortly after his death. The translations are of variable quality, withThus Spoke Zarathustradutifully rendered in a distractingly pseudo-Biblical style. Thelater translations of Walter Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale, covering the same range, arefar superior in both reliability and readability.The 1960s saw a renewal of interest in Nietzsche and, in a slightly arbitrary way, threeimportant works of that time, appearing in different languages yet in close succession,may be singled out. Martin Heidegger’s two-volumeNietzsche(1961) was really the textof lectures delivered twenty years earlier. Nietzsche is here a figure of historicalimportance: the last western philosopher of the tradition beginning with Plato, who bringsthe glorification of the human will to its most explicit form, and whose conception ofnihilism captures accurately the essence of our own historical situation. Gilles Deleuze’sNietzsche et philosophie(1962, [7.34]) presents Nietzsche, in a version suited to theFrench philosophical scene of the time, as an opponent of Hegelian dialectical thought, aphilosopher who replaces opposition and contradiction with difference. In Arthur Danto’sNietzsche as Philosopher(1965, [7.33]), Nietzsche is something of an analyticphilosopher, interested in the problems that have concerned such philosophers: abouttruth and knowledge, morality and religion. More recently, the ‘postmodern movement’in particular is strongly influenced by Nietzsche, as a radical thinker who subverts allestablished norms. Alexander Nehamas’s widely readNietzsche: Life as Literature(1985,[7.50]) is less unorthodox, yet it offers an original interpretation. Nehamas argues thatNietzsche recommends treating one’s own life as something like a work of art. Byreinterpreting the past, we can overcome the angry frustration of the will confronting the‘stone it cannot move’. All these versions of Nietzsche find support in his writings, as doyet other lines of interpretation. The days when Nietzsche could be put under the‘existentialist’ heading are gone.CONCLUSIONFew philosophers have been as little read during their working lifetimes as Nietzsche.During the century since the ending of his life as a thinker, his reputation has increasedsteadily. In many ways he seems a twentieth-century rather than nineteenth-centurythinker, a prophet of modernism, and even of the social and political changes that beganin 1914. He has also remained a source of controversy. Nietzsche has always arousedstrong opinions, and been both praised and condemned for the wrong reasons. He wasnever an academic philosopher, and the entry of his thought into that philosophical spherehas good and bad aspects. Nietzsche would have welcomed the resulting attention, andespecially the careful and scrupulous reading of his works. He would have been lesspleased at contributing to the academic publishing industry, and at becoming somethingof an intellectual fashion in some circles. Yet the accessibility of his works ensures that aco-option is not to be looked for. Nietzsche remains the untimely thinker that he wantedto be.BIBLIOGRAPHYOriginal language editions7.1 Förster-Nietzsche, E. et al., eds,Werke (Grossoktavausgabe),2nd edn, 19 vols,Leipzig: Kröner, 1901–13.7.2 Oehler, M. and R.Oehler, eds,Gesammelte Werke (Musarionausgabe),23 vols,München: Musarion Verlag, 1920–9.7.3 Mette, H.J. and K.Schlechta eds,Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke,5 vols,München: C.H.Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1933–42.7.4 Schlechta, K. ed.,Werke in drei Bänden,4 vols (inc. Index-Band), München: CarlHanser Verlag, 1954–6.7.5 Colli, G. and M.Montinari eds,Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke,Berlin and NewYork: Walter de Gruyter, 1973–.7.6——eds,Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel,Berlin and New York: Walter deGruyter, 1975–.English translationsComplete and selected writings7.7The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche,ed. O.Levy, 18 vols, Edinburgh andLondon: T.N.Foulis, 1909–13; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1964.7.8The Portable Nietzsche,ed. and trans. W.Kaufmann, New York: Viking Press, 1954.7.9Basic Writings of Nietzsche,ed. and trans. W.Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library,1966.7.10A Nietzsche Reader,ed. and trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977.7.11Philosophy and Truth: Selections From Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s,ed. and trans. D.Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities 1979.7.12The Will to Power,ed. W.Kaufmann, trans. W.Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale, NewYork: Random House, 1967.7.13Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche,ed. and trans. C.Middleton, Chicago andLondon, Chicago University Press, 1969.Separate works7.14Beyond Good and Evil,trans. M.Cowan, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955;trans. W.Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966; trans. R. J.Hollingdale,Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.7.15The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner,trans. W.Kaufmann, New York:Random House, 1967.7.16The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals,trans. F.Golffing, Garden City,NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956.7.17Daybreak,trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.7.18Dithyrambs of Dionysus,trans. R.J.Hollingdale, London: Anvil Press, 1984.7.19Ecce Homo,trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979.7.20The Gay Science,trans. W.Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974.7.21Human, All Too Human,trans. M.Faber and S.Lehmann, Lincoln, Nebr.: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1984; trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1986.7.22On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo,trans. W.Kaufmann and R.J.Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967.7.23Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,trans. M.Cowan, South Bend, Ind.:Gateway Editions, 1962.7.24Thus Spoke Zarathustra,trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,1961; trans. W.Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966.7.25Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ,trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1968.7.26Untimely Meditations,trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983.Bibliographies7.27 Reichert, H.W. and K.Schlechta,International Nietzsche Bibliography,Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1968.7.28 Milliard, B.B.Nietzsche Scholarship in English: A Bibliography 1968–1992,Urbana, Ill.: North American Nietzsche Society, 1992.The philosophy of Nietzsche: general7.29 Allison, D.B. ed.,The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation,NewYork: Dell, 1977.7.30 Ackermann, R.J.Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look,Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 1990.7.31 Blondel, E.Nietzsche: The Body and Culture,trans. S.Hand, Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1991.7.32 Clark, M.Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy,Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990.7.33 Danto, A.C.Nietzsche as Philosopher,New York: Macmillan, 1965.7.34 Deleuze, G.Nietzsche and Philosophy,trans. H.Tomlinson, London: Athlone, 1983.7.35 Derrida, J.Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles,trans. B.Harlow, Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, 1979.7.36 Fink, E.Nietzsches Philosophie,Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960.7.37 Gillespie, M.A. and T.B.Strong, eds.,Nietzsche’s New Seas,Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 1988.7.38 Grimm, R.H.Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge,Berlin and New York: Walter deGruyter, 1977.7.39 Heidegger, M.Nietzsche,trans. D.F.Krell, 4 vols, San Francisco: Harper and Row,1981–7.7.40——What is Called Thinking?,trans. F.D.Wieck and J.G.Gray, New York: Harperand Row, 1968.7.41 Hollingdale, R.J.Nietzsche,London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.7.42 Jaspers, K.Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his PhilosophicalActivity,trans. C.F.Wallraff and F.J.Schmidt, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965.7.43 Kaufmann, W.Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist,Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1950.7.44 Klossowski, P.Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux,Paris: Mercure de France, 1969.7.45 Krell, D.F.Postponements: Woman, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.7.46 Krell, D.F. and D.Wood, eds.,Exceedingly Nietzsche,London: Routledge, 1988.7.47 Magnus, B.Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative,Bloomington and London, IndianaUniversity Press, 1978.7.48 Moles, A.Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology,New York: Peter Lang,1990.7.49 Müller-Lauter, W.Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätzeseiner Philosophie,Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1971.7.50 Nehamas, A.Nietzsche: Life as Literature,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1985.7.51 O’Hara, D.T. ed.,Why Nietzsche Now?,Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1985.7.52 Schacht, R.Nietzsche,London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.7.53 Schutte, O.Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks,Chicago and London:Chicago University Press, 1988.7.54 Schrift, A.D.Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation,New York and London:Routledge, 1990.7.55 Shapiro, G.Nietzschean Narratives,Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 1989.7.56 Solomon, R.C. ed.,Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays,New York: AnchorBooks, 1973.7.57 Solomon, R.C. and K.M.Higgins, eds,Reading Nietzsche,New York and Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1988.7.58 Spiekermann, K.Naturwissenschaft als subjektlose Macht? Nietzsches kritikphysikalischer Grundkonzepte ,Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992.7.59 Stambaugh, J.Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Return,Baltimore and London: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1972.7.60——The Problem of Time in Nietzsche,trans. J.F.Humphrey, Lewisburg: BucknellUniversity Press, 1987.7.61 Stern, J.P.Nietzsche,London, Fontana Modern Masters, 1978.7.62 Strong, T.B.Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration,Berkeley:University of California Press, 1975; 2nd edn, 1988.7.63 White, A.Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth,New York and London: Routledge, 1990.7.64 Wilcox, J.T.Truth and Value in Nietzsche,Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1974.7.65 Young, J.Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ,1992.Studies ofThus Spoke Zarathustra7.66 Alderman, H.Nietzsche’s Gift,Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1977.7.67 Higgins, K.M.Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,Philadelphia: Temple University Press,1987.7.68 Lampert, L.Nietzsche’s Teaching,New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.7.69 Whitlock, G.Returning to Sils-Maria: A Commentary to Nietzsche’s ‘Also SprachZarathustra’,New York: Peter Lang, 1990.Studies of Nietzsche in relation to other thinkers7.70 Ansell-Pearson, K., ed.,Nietzsche and Modern German Thought,London and NewYork, Routledge, 1991.7.71 Hollinrake, R.Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Philosophy of Pessimism,London:George Allen and Unwin, 1982.7.72 Houlgate, S.Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics,Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986.7.73 Megill, A.Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida,Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.7.74 Simmel G.Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,trans. H.Loiskandl, D.Weinstein andM.Weinstein, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.7.75 Stack, G.J.,Lange and Nietzsche,Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983.7.76——Emerson and Nietzsche: An Elective Affinity,Athens, Ohio: Ohio UniversityPress, 1992.7.77 Williams, W.D.Nietzsche and the French,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.Biographical studies7.78 Gilman, S.L., ed.,Conversations with Nietzsche,trans. D.J.Parent, New York andOxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.7.79 Hayman, R.Nietzsche: A Critical Life,Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.7.80 Hollingdale, R.J.Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy,London and BatonRouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965.7.81 Janz, C.P.Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie,3 vols, München and Wien, CarlHanser, 1978.7.82 Pletsch, C.Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius,New York: Free Press, 1991.