Month: July 2023

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Nietzsche: thought and health

The relationship between creative or intellectual thought and health is seldom examined, perhaps because such a focus may suggest that a work of art, literature, or philosophy is merely a byproduct of bad experience. Beethoven cannot be reduced to deafness, nor can the works of writers such as Milton, Joyce, or Borges reduced to blindness. The most compelling personality in this issue is, perhaps, Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy actually embraces the fullness of personal illness even to the point of presenting his philosophy of life as a means for overcoming suffering, and not the abstract suffering of existence (from Buddha to existentialism) but quite literally, for Nietzsche suffered grievoously from debilitating disease. At the same time, Nietzsche presents a profound philosophy of solitude.

Given his iconoclastic thinking about culture and belief, Nietzsche generated hostility years after his death. His most vehement twentieth-century opponents (and some proponents) accepted the outrageous interpretations of Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth Forster, who popularized a proto-Nazi version of her deceased brother. More conventional opponents of Nietzsche’s thoughts attributed them to “insanity” brought about by syphilis, a convenient ad hominum argument now proven false.

That Nietzsche suffered illnesses is clear. Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann points to biographer Stefan Zweig for a precise description, quoting Zweig’s summary as “unsurpassed.” Zweig notes:

“No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat — a gruesome circle. In addition, there are his ‘three-quarters blind eyes,’ which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears and grant the intellectual worker only ‘an hour and a half of vision a day.’ But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches and a nervous overcharge; at night, when the body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates. But ever greater quantities are needed (in two months Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase this handful of sleep); then the stomach refuses to pay so high a price and rebels. And now-vicious circles: spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable, insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game. Never a point of rest in this up and down, never an even stretch of contentment or a short month full of comfort and self-forgetfulness.” (Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 116; see also Stefan Zweig, Nietzsche, chapter 3: “Apologia for Illness,” p. 5-26. London: Pushkin Press, 2012.

With modern medicine, many scientific researchers discuss Nietzsche’s neurological history, beginning with the indisputable genetic connection: Nietzsche’s father died at age 35 from apoplexy. Today it can be specifically surmised that Nietzsche suffered CADASIL, also known as Cerebral Autosomal Dominant Arteriopathy with Subcortical Infarcts and Leukoencephalopathy (see “The neurological illness of Friedrich Nietzsche,” by D. H. Emelsoet, K. H, Emelsoet, and D. Devreese, in Acta neurologica.belg., 2008, 18, 9-16 (https://www.actaneurologica.be/pdfs/2008-1/02-Hemelsoet et al.pdf). We may then speculate whether and how the disease affected his ideas and thoughts. The correlation is clear, for Nietzsche always sought to transform personal pain and suffering into a transcendent or transvaluative experience, the very themes of his works. Nietzsche’s life as a loner and solitary was as much a physical inevitability as a psychological one. Nietzsche providides a path for addressing the challenges of life’s harshest necessities with grace, intellect, and circumspection.

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Nietzsche on Homer

The philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil are certainly distinct, but both note — to a degree not noted or pursued by modern conventional thinkers — the characteristic violence embedded in ancient Greek culture. Both Nietzsche and Weil were scholars of Greek and understood the literature and spirit of ancient Greek cultural expression perhaps better than most contemporaries. They both see in Homer the purest expression of human nature in culture and society, extrapolating to an understanding of how ancient Greek psychology is the foundation of modern Western thought and institutions.

In Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” (1940), the culmination of warfare and savagery highlighted by descriptions in Homer’s Iliad renders Homer’s work a clear paean to force or violence. The contemporary gods encourage and abet the madness, and Homer’s cosmogony presents human nature as corrupt, vain, jealous, vengeful, and debased. Weil suggests that the Greek model adapted by the West in Greek politics, aesthetics, and intellectualism inevitably absorbed premises about human nature as well, embracing the premises of the mindless warriors and the supposed heroism of war.

Nietzsche, too, was influenced by philosophers about human nature, but he sees Greek culture in a more benign light. In his short essay “Homer’s Contest” or ”Homer’s Strife” (1872), Nietzsche argues that the Greek goddess Eris, who incites war and destruction among humans, is accompanied by a good second Eris who incites (only) jealousy and envy. Eris (the second one) only foments struggles that include a sense of competition or contests. This influence is useful to human productivity, says Nietzsche. But it is not a tenable presentation of Homer, where no such temperate sentiment drives the absolute violence and cruelty of the Trojan War, where no sense of fair competition is in sight. Nietzsche is searching for an exemplar of how Greek culture made itself superior to contemporaries, but his assumptions are untenable compared to Weil’s keen understanding.

The ancient Greeks (says Nietzsche) consciously pursued the “contest” because it challenged everyone to strive to perform to their best ability. The contest assured the generation and distribution of jealousy, rivalry, and envy, because those were virtues that maintained and extended accomplishment. The domination of envy in the Greek mindset is demonstrated not merely on the large theater of war, as in Homer’s Iliad, but at lesser levels of conflict, as Nietzsche himself notes. A representative example of poisonous envy Nietzsche points out is that in Ephesus the philosopher Hermodorus was banished simply because of envy. Nietzsche writes:

“If one wants to observe this conviction — wholly undisguised in its most native expression — that the contest is necessary to preserve the health of the state, then one should reflect on the original meaning of ostracism, for example, as it is pronounced by the Ephesians when they banish Hermodorus: ‘Among us, no one shall be the best; but if someone is, then let him be elsewhere and among others.’ Why should no one be the best? Because then the contest would come to an end and the eternal source of life for the Hellenic state would be endangered. … Originally this curious institution is not a safety valve but a means of stimulation: the individual who towers above the rest is eliminated so that the contest of forces may reawaken an idea that is hostile to the ‘exclusiveness’ of genius in the modern sense and presupposes that in the natural order of things there are always several geniuses who spur each other to action, even as they hold each other within the limits of measure. That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the genius, another genius.” (Walter Kaufmann translation)

Ostracism or banishment in the ancient Greek world exiles the offender to eremos, a desert place, a place of desolation. And eremos is the root word of eremite or hermit. And so Nietzsche indirectly provides a description of the historical hermit: best at whatever it is that provokes resentment among the authorities.

For Nietzsche, this essay is an early one, still under the influence of his The Birth of Tragedy, with its bipolar contrast of Apollonian and Dionysian. Later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche will pursue the element of “contest” no longer in a literal sense but as an individual project, the transformation of self that coincidentally recognizes the superiority of the hermit life, the life of solitude, which is at the same time a projection of Nietzsche’s own life and vicissitudes.