His health was as problematic. From his schooldays, he had suffered from a range of ailments: headaches, indigestion, vomiting, dizziness, near blindness and insomnia, many of these the symptoms of the syphilis he had almost certainly contracted in a Cologne brothel in February 1865 (though Nietzsche claimed he had come away without touching anything except a piano). In a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug written three years after his trip to Sorrento, he explained, ‘As regards torment and self-denial, my life during these past years can match that of any ascetic of any time …’ And to his doctor he reported, ‘Constant pain, a feeling of being half-paralysed, a condition closely related to seasickness, during which I find it difficult to speak – this feeling lasts several hours a day. For my diversion I have raging seizures (the most recent one forced me to vomit for three days and three nights; I thirsted after death). Can’t read! Only seldom can I write! Can’t deal with my fellows! Can’t listen to music!’
Finally, at the beginning of January 1889, Nietzsche broke down in Turin’s Piazza Carlo Alberto and embraced a horse, was carried back to his boarding-house, where he thought of shooting the Kaiser, planned a war against anti-Semites, and grew certain that he was – depending on the hour – Dionysus, Jesus, God, Napoleon, the King of Italy, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Voltaire, Alexander Herzen and Richard Wagner; before he was bundled into a train and taken to an asylum in Germany to be looked after by his elderly mother and sister until his death eleven years later at the age of fifty-five.
22
And yet through appalling loneliness, obscurity, poverty and ill health, Nietzsche did not manifest the behaviour of which he had accused Christians; he did not take against friendship, he did not attack eminence, wealth, or well-being. The Abbé Galiani and Goethe remained heroes. Though Mathilde had wished for no more than a conversation about poetry, he continued to believe that ‘for the male sickness of self-contempt the surest cure is to be loved by a clever woman.’ Though sickly and lacking Montaigne or Stendhal’s dexterity on a horse, he remained attached to the idea of an active life: ‘Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that vicious!’
He fought hard to be happy, but where he did not succeed he did not turn against what he had once aspired to. He remained committed to what was in his eyes the most important characteristic of a noble human being: to be someone who ‘no longer denies’.
23
After seven hours of walking, much of it in the rain, it was in a state of extreme exhaustion that I reached the summit of Piz Corvatsch, high above the clouds that decked the Engadine valleys below. In my rucksack I carried a water-bottle, an Emmental sandwich and an envelope from the Hotel Edelweiss in Sils-Maria on which I had that morning written a quote from the mountain philosopher, with the intention of facing Italy and reading it to the wind and the rocks at 3,400 metres.
Like his pastor father, Nietzsche had been committed to the task of consolation. Like his father, he had wished to offer us paths to fulfilment. But unlike pastors, and dentists who pull out throbbing teeth and gardeners who destroy plants with ill-favoured roots, he had judged difficulties to be a critical prerequisite of fulfilment, and hence knew saccharine consolations to be ultimately more cruel than helpfuclass="underline"
The worst sickness of men has originated in the way they have combated their sicknesses. What seemed a cure has in the long run produced something worse than what it was supposed to overcome. The means which worked immediately, anaesthetizing and intoxicating,
the so-called consolations
, were ignorantly supposed to be actual cures. The fact was not noticed … that these instantaneous alleviations often had to be paid for with a general and profound worsening of the complaint.
Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.
To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something that must be abolished, is the [supreme idiocy], in a general sense a real disaster in its consequences … almost as stupid as the will to abolish bad weather. (Ill. 22.28)
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright Acknowledgements
Picture Acknowledgements
Notes
Consolation for Unpopularity
Aside from a mention of Aristophanes and quotations from Plato’s Phaedo, the portrait of Socrates is drawn from Plato’s early and middle dialogues (the so-called Socratic dialogues): Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno, Protagoras and Republic, book I
Quotations taken from:
The Last Days of Socrates
, Plato, translated by Hugh Tredennick, Penguin, 1987
Early Socratic Dialogues
, Plato, translated by Iain Lane, Penguin, 1987
Protagoras and Meno
, Plato, translated by W. K. C. Guthrie, Penguin, 1987
Gorgias
, Plato, translated by Robin Waterfield, OUP, 1994.
1 So … deaths: Apology, 29d
2 Whenever … angle: Laches, 188a
3 Let’s … courageous: Laches, 190e–191a
4 At … battle: Laches, 191c
5 By … inescapable: Meno, 78c–79a
6 I … cities: Apology, 36b
7 I … well-being: Apology, 36d
8 I … fellow-citizen: Apology, 29d
9 I … narrow: Apology, 36a
10 If … choose: Gorgias, 472a-b
11 The … him: Gorgias, 471e–472a
12 When … public: Crito, 47b
13 Don’t … say: Crito, 47a–48a
14 I … time: Apology, 37a–b
15 If … sleeping: Apology, 30d–31a
16 In … off: Phaedo, 116c–d
17 When … himself: Phaedo, 117a-d
18 What … friends!: Phaedo, 117d
19 And … man: Phaedo, 118a
Consolation for Not Having Enough Money
Quotations taken from:
The Essential Epicurus
, Epicurus, translated by Eugene O’Connor, Prometheus Books, 1993
The Epicurean Inscription
, Diogenes of Oinoanda, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith, Bibliopolis, 1993
On the Nature of the Universe
, Lucretius, translated by R. E. Latham, revised by John Godwin, Penguin, 1994
1 If … forms: Fragments, VI.10
2 Pleasure … life: Letter to Menoeceus, 128
3 The … this: Fragments, 59
4 The … happiness: Letter to Menoeceus, 122
5 A … malady: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III.1070
6 Just … mind: Fragments, 54
7 Send … like: Fragments, 39
8 Of … friendship: Principal Doctrines, 27
9 Before … wolf: quoted in Seneca, Epistle, XIX.10
10 We … politics: Vatican Sayings, 58
11 The … pleasant: Letter to Menoeceus, 126
12 What … anticipation: Letter to Menoeceus, 124–5
13 There … living: Letter to Menoeceus, 125
14 Of … necessary: Principal Doctrines, 29
15 Plain … away: Letter to Menoeceus, 130
16 As … without: Porphyry reporting Epicurus’s view in On Abstinence, 1.51.6–52.1
17 Nothing … little: Fragments, 69
18 The … accomplished?: Vatican Sayings, 71
19 The … joy: Vatican Sayings, 81
20 idle opinions: Principal Doctrines, 29
21 Luxurious … flesh: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 109
22 One … overflowing: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 108
23 Real … science: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 2
24 Having … salvation: Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 3 (adapted)
25 chosen … senses: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V.1133–4
26 send … like: Fragments, 39
27 ergo … herbas: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II.20–33
28 When … poverty: Vatican Sayings, 25
29 Mankind … seas: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, V.1430–5
30 It … good: Letter to Menoeceus, 129