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Article Excerpt
NIETZCHE: A PHILOSOPHICAL BIOGRAPHY. By RUDIGER SAFRANSKI. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Norton. 412 pp. $29.95.
In the months before his final descent into madness, Friedrich Nietzsche made the following declaration and prediction: "I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of conscience, a decision conjured up against everything that had been believed, required, and held sacred up to that time. I am not a man; I am dynamite."
And so he was. The man who practiced and perfected the art of "philosophizing with a hammer," who pronounced that "God is dead," who called on his readers to follow him in exploring regions "beyond good and evil," who gleefully declared himself the Antichrist, who unconditionally denounced human equality and democracy, who claimed that "a great war hallows any cause," who praised the "blond beast" who "might come away from a revolting succession of murder, arson, rape, [and] torture with a sense of exhilaration and emotional equilibrium, as if it were nothing but a student prank"--this man was indeed explosive. One might even say that today, over one hundred years after his work was discovered by European intellectuals, Western culture has yet to come to terms with the fallout produced by the detonation of his most volatile ideas.
In the epilogue to his Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rudiger Safranski catalogues the philosopher's influence, and it reads like a comprehensive intellectual history of the twentieth century. The irrationalist vitalism that helped to inspire fascism; artistic movements from symbolism to art nouveau, expressionism, and Dada; Ernst Junger's ecstatic militarism; Heideggerian existentialism and antimodernism; the Counter-Enlightenment critical theory of the postwar Frankfurt School; the violent surrealism of Georges Bataille and, through him, the varying postmodern irrationalisms of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida; the neopragmatic conviction that "truth is an illusion that helps us cope with life"--all of these and many other radical cultural, intellectual, and political movements descend directly from Nietzsche. They are his legacy to our time.
For some--primarily those who take their intellectual bearings from outside the thoroughly Nietzscheanized humanities departments of the modern university, as well as the handful of conservative dissenters within them--there will be little in this legacy of atheistic immoderation to admire. But however we judge the often decadent productions of twentieth-century high culture, Nietzsche himself continues to merit the most serious attention, and not merely because of his considerable influence. The fact remains that Nietzsche is one of the most brilliant philosophers and prose stylists in the history of Western letters. His formidable challenge to so much that so many of us continue to hold dear simply cannot be ignored by thoughtful men and women.
But how ought we to approach the task of evaluating Nietzsche's work? The answer is far from clear. For Nietzsche is a deeply contradictory thinker, and glancing at the dozens of books devoted to his thought in the philosophy section of any good bookshop, it can seem that there are, in fact, many Nietzsches. Most scholars have assumed that his work amounts to a defense of radical right-wing politics, but many today think him more compatible with the far left. His books contain numerous misogynistic passages, but that hasn't discouraged feminists from claiming to find support for their program in his ideas. Some think his teaching is meant to inspire public actions, but many others have seen in his writing an aesthetic call to private cultivation and creativity. Competent scholars have declared that his work is hopelessly incoherent, while at least one leading philosopher has claimed that Nietzsche was the "last great metaphysician in the West." And then there are those who think that Nietzsche's texts can and should mean anything their readers want them to. This abundance of interpretations makes any attempt to render an informed and comprehensive judgment of his work exceedingly difficult.
Thanks to Safranski's biography, that task has now become considerably easier. As in his 1994 biography of Martin Heidegger (Between Good and Evil; English translation, 1998), Safranski manages to summarize his subject's ideas with admirable fluency--and without ever mistaking his own role for that of an advocate. Safranski also proves himself to be a master of what might be called philosophical narration, drawing on just the right amount of detail from Nietzsche's personal background and historical milieu to provide a context for his philosophy while rarely allowing those details to overshadow the ideas that form the core of Nietzsche's life.
The Nietzsche that emerges from Safranski's study is a man who, from his teenage years until his mental collapse at the age of forty-five, tirelessly devoted his formidable intellect to making sense of the world in terms of its intrinsic meaninglessness. The case of Nietzsche thus presents us with the peculiar spectacle of a philosopher who began his intellectual life, not from a position of openness to an elusive truth not yet grasped, but rather from an unshakable conviction that he had already found it--and that all of human experience and history had to be reconceived in its light.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844 in the small village of Rocken, Germany. HIS father, Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, died five years later of "softening of the brain," leaving Nietzsche to be raised (along with his sister Elisabeth) by his mother, Franziska, and two unmarried aunts. The young Nietzsche was both intellectually precocious and astonishingly self-absorbed. He wrote his first philosophical essay, "On the Origin of Evil," at the age of twelve. By thirteen, he had written his first autobiography. He would go on to write eight more over the next ten years, each of them concluding that, in Safranski's words, "his life was exemplary."
Despite Nietzsche's early penchant for self-aggrandizement--a tendency that would mark all of his written work--both he and his family believed for some time that he would follow in his father's footsteps to become a pastor. But at some point between 1859 and 1861, while Nietzsche attended an elite boarding school, he began to break decisively with his faith. Although he asserted in his 1859 autobiography that "God has guided me safely in everything as a father would his weak little child," by May 1861 he had concluded that the idea of God was, in Safranski's words, "unfathomable," because there was simply "too much intense injustice and evil in the world."
These first tentative steps away from Christianity were quickly followed by others. In an essay composed on his Easter vacation in 1862, the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche would wonder "how our view of the world might change if there were no God, immortality, Holy Spirit, or divine inspiration, and if the tenets of millennia were based on delusions." Safranski explains how this thought quickly generated a series of puzzles that would set Nietzsche's philosophical agenda for the rest of his life: "Might people have been `led astray by a vision' for such a long time? What kinds of reality are left behind once religious phantasms have been taken away?"
Over the next few years, Nietzsche would wrestle with his suspicion that all received truths are illusory. Although he had planned to study theological and classical philology at the University of Bonn when he arrived there in the fall of 1864, he dropped his concentration in theology after a single semester. By the following summer, he would write to his sister that, although it would be easy to continue believing in the comforting tales of their youth, "the truth is not necessarily in league with the beautiful and the good." On the contrary, he wrote, the truth can be "detestable and ugly in the extreme."
From this point on, Nietzsche would devote his life to breaking from--and then reflecting on how mankind might thrive after having left behind--"the first and last things." Early in his university education, Nietzsche thought of himself as continuing the work of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he described as his "liberator" from dogma and tradition. As Safranski writes, Schopenhauer confirmed Nietzsche's youthful intuition that "the inner nature of the world is based not on reason and intellect but on impulses and dark urges, dynamic and senseless." "True life," Schopenhauer claimed, is pure "will," which "roars behind...
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