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       Nietzsche’s Life and Works

      With Nietzsche philosophy becomes dangerous again, this time with a difference. In previous centuries philosophy had been dangerous for philosophers; with Nietzsche it becomes dangerous for everyone. Nietzsche ended up by going mad, and this begins to show in the tone of his later writings. But the dangerous ideas started appearing long before he went mad, and have nothing to do with clinical insanity. They presaged a collective madness which was to have horrific consequences in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, and which shows ominous signs of recurrence today.

      Nietzsche’s larger philosophical ideas are barely worthy of the name – whether he’s talking about supermen, eternal recurrence (the idea that we live our lives again and again throughout eternity), or the sole purpose of civilisation (to produce “great men” such as Goethe, Napoleon, and himself). His use of the Will to Power as a universal explanation is either simplistic or meaningless – even Freud’s monism is more subtle, and Schopenhauer’s less specific concept is more convincing. Like any good conspiracy theory, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the all-pervasive Will to Power contains the usual element of paranoia. But Nietzsche’s actual philosophising is as brilliant, persuasive, and incisive as any before or since. When reading him you get the exhilarating feeling that philosophy actually matters (which is one of the reasons why he is so dangerous). And when he used the Will to Power purely as an analytic tool, it enabled him to discover constituent elements in human motives which few had formerly suspected. This allowed him to unmask the values to which these motives gave rise, and trace the development of these values over a broad historical canvas, illuminating the very foundations of our civilisation and culture.

      Although Nietzsche is not entirely free from blame for the dangerous nonsense that has been spouted in his name, it must be said that most of this is a travesty of what he actually wrote. He had nothing but contempt for the protofascists of his era, anti–Semitism disgusted him, and the idea of a nation of racially pure Germans becoming a master race would certainly have exercised his sense of humour to the full. Had he lived (and retained his sanity) until the 1930s, when he would have been in his eighties, he would certainly not have remained silent about the grotesque events taking place in his homeland – like some German philosophers of that era who claimed to be his successors.

      Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born October 15, 1844, in Saxony, which was by this time a province of the increasingly powerful kingdom of Prussia. Nietzsche was descended from a long line of tradesmen, including hatters and butchers, but his grandfather and father were both Lutheran pastors. Nietzsche’s father was a patriotic Prussian who held his king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in high esteem. When Ludwig Nietzsche’s first son was born on the king’s birthday, it was obvious that he had little chance of being named Otto. By an utterly meaningless coincidence, all three men were to die insane.

      The first to go was Ludwig, who died in 1849. He was diagnosed as having “softening of the brain” – and the autopsy apparently revealed that a quarter of his brain had been affected by “softening.” This diagnosis is no longer fashionable with the medical profession, but Nietzsche’s reputable biographers are convinced that Ludwig Nietzsche’s insanity was not inherited by his son.

      Nietzsche was now brought up in Naumburg in a house full of “holy women,” which included a mother, a younger sister, a maternal grandmother, and two slightly loopy maiden aunts. This appears to have affected Nietzsche’s attitude toward women in later life. At the age of thirteen he went to boarding school at nearby Pforta, one of the top private boarding schools in Germany. Nietzsche, very much the product of his pious, mollycoddled upbringing, became known as “the little pastor” and carried off all the prizes. But he was so brilliant that eventually he couldn’t help thinking for himself. By the age of eighteen he was beginning to doubt his faith. The clear–sighted thinker couldn’t help noticing the square pegs in the round holes of the world about him. Typically this thinking appears to have been done in complete isolation. Throughout his life Nietzsche was to be influenced in his thought by very few living people (and

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