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Sunday Times of London
Review: I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue
Prideaux — unmasking philosophy’s superman
An outstanding life reveals the full extent of Nietzsche’s
delusions of grandeur.
Review by John Carey
Friedrich Nietzsche was the Walter Mitty of philosophers. Like James
Thurber’s comic hero, he was not much to look at: short and stout, he
wore thick-lensed green spectacles to protect his weak eyes. His conduct
matched his appearance: he was mild-mannered and courteous towards
women. But in his imagination he was a superman, a mighty prophet, an
“astronaut of the spirit” — and ruthless with the fair sex. “You go to
women? Do not forget the whip!” he advised in his philosophical
testament, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Unfortunately, his delusions of grandeur gradually took hold of him. His
father, a Lutheran pastor in the small German town of Röcken, had died
young and insane, and in middle age Nietzsche began to show signs of
madness. “I shall rule the world from now on,” he told a friend in 1888.
In January 1889, aged 45, he was found dancing naked, apparently
believing himself to be the Greek god Dionysius. Until his death 10
years later he remained incurably insane, cared for by his mother and
sister, of whom he observed: “It would blaspheme my divinity to think
that I am related to this sort of canaille.”
Sue Prideaux chooses difficult subjects to celebrate. Her last biography
(2012) was about the dramatist August Strindberg, a rabid misogynist, in
thrall to weird occult beliefs, who was brutal to his three wives.
Nietzsche seems almost likeable by comparison. He battled against
chronic ill-health all his life — blinding headaches, suppurating ears,
marathons of vomiting. As a boy he got up at 5am each day to study, and
won a place at a top German school where pupils were expected to
converse in Latin and Greek. He shone academically, and at 24 became the
youngest professor of classical philology at Basel University.
But he wanted to be a philosopher, and found his idol in the great
romantic impresario Richard Wagner, who graciously accepted him as a
disciple. Prideaux is wonderfully funny about Wagner and his wife,
Cosima, — the flummery they surrounded themselves with, their limitless
egotism, and the ridiculous mythical extravaganzas of Wagner’s Ring
cycle, bankrolled by mad King Ludwig. The dress rehearsal of the Ring in
the grandiose new opera house in Bayreuth was a chaos of comic mishaps.
The scenery fell down, the smoke machine would not work, and the dragon,
made in an English workshop (because no one else could create one that
breathed fire, waved its tail and rolled its eyes), was shipped in three
parts of which only two arrived in Bayreuth. The third went to Beirut.
It used to be thought that Nietzsche parted
company with Wagner over some philosophical issue. But it now seems it
was because Wagner, writing to a doctor friend, had suggested that
Nietzsche’s poor eyesight was the result of masturbation and would
improve if he married. Whatever the truth of this, there seems to
be no reliable evidence that Nietzsche ever formed any kind of sexual
union. He proposed to several women, who declined the offer, and he
believed for a time that he was sharing a mystical relationship with a
young Russian woman called Lou Salome. However, she proved less mystical
than he had supposed and went off with one of his male friends.
Nietzsche expressed his disapproval by characterising her as “a sterile,
dirty, evil-smelling she-ape with false breasts”. In his post-Wagner
period he transferred his allegiance from the Ring cycle to Bizet’s
Carmen, which he saw 20 times.
He counted himself among “the great teachers of mankind”, but he was not
an original thinker. Compared to a true originator such as Darwin, he
was scarcely a thinker at all. What he had was a talent for pithy
aphorisms. His most famous, “God is dead”, is often cited as a landmark
in thought, but it merely summed up the often-noted decline of religious
faith since the Enlightenment. Whereas many commentators regretted the
consequent eclipse of moral certainties, Nietzsche welcomed it. He saw
Christianity, which taught pity and compassion, as a “slave morality”
that inhibited mankind’s “most natural instincts”. Its extinction would,
he predicted, enable the superman (Ubermensch) to move “beyond good and
evil” and rise above the “sickly, tired, exhausted” masses that
Christianity had “poisoned”. He envisaged the superman as a “magnificent
blond beast”, avid for pillage and conquest, and declared that such a
being could be seen at the centre of all “noble races”.
Why he should have imagined that pity and compassion were less natural
to humans than brutality is not clear, and his belief that these virtues
would not survive the decline of religion was demonstrably mistaken. It
is a weakness of Prideaux’s book that she does not point out the gaps in
Nietzsche’s thought. He expressed himself mostly in aphorisms and was
often self-contradictory, as he readily admitted. “There are no facts,
only interpretations”, for example, offers itself as a fact, but then
cancels that possibility. Prideaux applauds his self-contradictions as
“mischievous”. But they could be dangerous. They enabled his Jew-hating
sister Elisabeth to put together a selection of his uncollected
aphorisms that, published after his death, allowed the Nazis to see
themselves as Nietzscheans. Elisabeth encouraged them. She was a fan of
Mussolini and helped to get a play he co-authored performed at Weimar’s
National Theatre. When it was produced in 1932, Hitler turned up with
his storm troopers and presented her with a bunch of red roses.
Despite
Prideaux’s reluctance to challenge Nietzsche’s ideas, this is an
outstanding biography impressive in the depth and breadth of its
knowledge. Her Strindberg deservedly won the Duff Cooper prize, and I Am
Dynamite (which takes its title from Nietzsche’s boast in his
autobiography Ecce Homo) is of comparable stature. Prideaux thinks he
might have had an inkling of the horrors his admirers would perpetrate.
“One day there will be associated with my name,” he wrote, “the
recollection of something frightful — of a crisis like no other before
on Earth.” About that, at any rate, he was right. |