Though punctilious in sending his best wishes to friends, Nietzsche knew in his heart what they needed:
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.
Which helped to explain why his work amounted to, even if he said so himself:
The greatest gift that [mankind] has ever been given.
3
We should not be frightened by appearances.
In the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time … usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache … usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent – and as such he will be treated. (Ill. 22.1)
4
He had not always thought so well of difficulty. For his initial views, he had been indebted to a philosopher he had discovered at the age of twenty-one as a student at Leipzig University. In the autumn of 1865, in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig’s Blumengasse, he had by chance picked up an edition of The World as Will and Representation, whose author had died five years previously in an apartment in Frankfurt 300 kilometres to the west:
I took [Schopenhauer’s book] in my hand as something totally unfamiliar and turned the pages. I don’t know which daimon was whispering to me: ‘Take this book home.’ In any case, it happened, which was contrary to my custom of otherwise never rushing into buying a book. Back at the house I threw myself into the corner of a sofa with my new treasure, and began to let that dynamic, dismal genius work on me. Each line cried out with renunciation, negation, resignation.
The older man changed the younger one’s life. The essence of philosophical wisdom was, Schopenhauer explained, Aristotle’s remark in the Nicomachean Ethics:
The prudent man strives for freedom from pain, not pleasure.
The priority for all those seeking contentment was to recognize the impossibility of fulfilment and so to avoid the troubles and anxiety that we typically encounter in its pursuit:
[We should] direct our aim not to what is pleasant and agreeable in life, but to the avoidance, as far as possible, of its numberless evils … The happiest lot is that of the man who has got through life without any very great pain, bodily or mental.
When he next wrote home to his widowed mother and his nineteen-year-old sister in Naumburg, Nietzsche replaced the usual reports on his diet and the progress of his studies with a summary of his new philosophy of renunciation and resignation:
We know that life consists of suffering, that the harder we try to enjoy it, the more enslaved we are by it, and so we [should] discard the goods of life and practise abstinence.
It sounded strange to his mother, who wrote back explaining that she didn’t like ‘that kind of display or that kind of opinion so much as a proper letter, full of news’, and advised her son to entrust his heart to God and to make sure he was eating properly.
But Schopenhauer’s influence did not subside. Nietzsche began to live cautiously. Sex figured prominently in a list he drew up under the heading ‘Delusions of the Individual’. During his military service in Naumburg, he positioned a photograph of Schopenhauer on his desk, and in difficult moments cried out, ‘Schopenhauer, help!’ At the age of twenty-four, on taking up the Chair of Classical Philology at Basle University, he was drawn into the intimate circle of Richard and Cosima Wagner through a common love of the pessimistic, prudent sage of Frankfurt.
5
Then, after more than a decade of attachment, in the autumn of 1876, Nietzsche travelled to Italy and underwent a radical change of mind. He had accepted an invitation from Malwida von Meysenbug, a wealthy middle-aged enthusiast of the arts, to spend a few months with her and a group of friends in a villa in Sorrento on the Bay of Naples.
(Ill. 22.2)
‘I never saw him so lively. He laughed aloud from sheer joy,’ reported Malwida of Nietzsche’s first response to the Villa Rubinacci, which stood on a leafy avenue on the edge of Sorrento. From the living room there were views over the bay, the island of Ischia and Mount Vesuvius, and in front of the house, a small garden with fig and orange trees, cypresses and grape arbours led down to the sea.
The house guests went swimming, and visited Pompeii, Vesuvius, Capri and the Greek temples at Paestum. At mealtimes, they ate light dishes prepared with olive oil, and in the evenings, read together in the living room: Jacob Burckhardt’s lectures on Greek civilization, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Stendhal, Goethe’s ballad Die Braut von Korinth, and his play Die natürliche Tochter, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato’s Laws (though, perhaps spurred on by Montaigne’s confessions of distaste, Nietzsche grew irritated with the latter: ‘The Platonic dialogue, that dreadfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics, can only have a stimulating effect if one has never read any good Frenchmen … Plato is boring’).
And as he swam in the Mediterranean, ate food cooked in olive oil rather than butter, breathed warm air and read Montaigne and Stendhal (‘These little things – nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness – are beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto’), Nietzsche gradually changed his philosophy of pain and pleasure, and with it, his perspective on difficulty. Watching the sun set over the Bay of Naples at the end of October 1876, he was infused with a new, quite un-Schopenhauerian faith in existence. He felt that he had been old at the beginning of his life, and shed tears at the thought that he had been saved at the last moment.
6
He made a formal announcement of his conversion in a letter to Cosima Wagner at the end of 1876: ‘Would you be amazed if I confess something that has gradually come about, but which has more or less suddenly entered my consciousness: a disagreement with Schopenhauer’s teaching? On virtually all general propositions I am not on his side.’
One of these propositions being that, because fulfilment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counselled, ‘in a small fireproof room’ – advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, ‘hidden in forests like shy deer’. Fulfilment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.
7
What had, besides the food and the air, helped to change Nietzsche’s outlook was his reflection on the few individuals throughout history who appeared genuinely to have known fulfilled lives; individuals who could fairly have been described – to use one of the most contested terms in the Nietzschean lexicon – as Übermenschen.
The notoriety and absurdity of the word owe less to Nietzsche’s own philosophy than to his sister Elisabeth’s subsequent enchantment with National Socialism (‘that vengeful anti-Semitic goose’, as Friedrich described her long before she shook the Führer’s hand), and the unwitting decision by Nietzsche’s earliest Anglo-Saxon translators to bequeath to the Übermensch the name of a legendary cartoon hero.