Nietzsche’s New Testament of the Self

One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star.

I am all the names in history. Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows ..– Twilight of the Idols

Sometimes I think … of driving my solitude and resignation to the ultimate limit and –

– Letter to Franz Overbeck, Christmas, 1882

The story of Nietzsche’s life is well known: the early childhood in the remote Lutheran vicarage at Rocken, in the province of Saxony; the years of apprenticeship as a diligent pupil at the renowned school of Pforta; the distinguished professorship in classical philology at the age of twenty-four; the discovery of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig; the meeting with Wagner, the burgeoning friendship, then the disillusionment; the nine solitary years in the Alps writing his most original work; the embracing of a horse in the streets of Turin; the ensuing decade of insanity; his death on 25 August 1900; the subsequent editorial control of the writing by his sister, Elizabeth; her manipulation of his work to serve the rising Fascist movement; the gradual recognition of Nietzsche’s philosophical and literary eminence; his posthumous fame.

There is a disturbing extremity in the narrative. At times it borders on hyperbole, offering a parody of the Romantic notion of the creative and

– Thus Spake Zarathustra – Ecce Homotormented genius. In Nietzsche the archetype can quickly descend to the stereotype. The cartoon version, featuring the man with a vicar’s straight- back (even as a small boy he was nicknamed ‘the little pastor’) and a walrus moustache, the lonely warrior on a mountain peak preaching the doctrine of the superman, is never far away. Yet, in spite of the melodrama, there is a wrenching pathos in the story, an eagle-like courage, a prodigious gift, a bleak sublimity. While Nietzsche could not foresee his early death after a decade of abject madness, he anticipated his future reputation as one of the greatest writers and philosophers. In his foreword to The Anti-Christ he claimed: Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.

Nietzsche’s intellectual biography still possesses an electric charge, an incursion of turbulent energy which, simultaneously, shocks and vivifies. Indeed, his life has taken on the character of a myth central to the story of the self – for his driving preoccupation, like that of Montaigne (one of the few writers in the philosophical tradition for whom Nietzsche had the profoundest respect), was to become fully himself: to find the courage to be, to have the audacity to shape his life according to his reflexive and aesthetic understanding. Pindar’s maxim, become what you are, shone a fixed star above his turbulent life.

His consistent adversary is the conforming herd, the automatic cliché, the collective ticker-tape of unexamined opinion; his paragon is the autonomous creative being, the individual attending to his own life with the exact eye of an artist. He espouses a new form of individuation for a post-Christian epoch. With his fierce critique of received morality and counter notion of the Übermensch, Nietzsche redefined for a secular age the classical concept of eudaimonia: the art of human flourishing. It was a further amplification of the Romantic notion of Goethe’s bildung and Keats’ vale of soul-making. And with it came a further naturalising of the concept of self.

His place in the story of identity, however fraught, is as canonical as that of Rousseau and Montaigne, Petrarch and Dante, Augustine and Paul, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, Plato and Socrates – the names of those he laboured to supplant.

From his childhood onwards Nietzsche had struggled first to embrace and then to live beyond his inherited beliefs. First and foremost, there had been the Christian faith. His father and both his grandparents and great grandparents had been Lutheran ministers. Inevitably, Nietzsche was expected to follow in their footsteps. I am after all the descendant of whole generations of Christian ministers, he confessed to Peter Gast in a letter written to explain his obsession with Christianity. Guided by his mother’s fervid hope that her son would become a minister, he entered the University of Bonn in the autumn of 1864 to study Theology. But, early on, Nietzsche selected classical philology and followed his academic mentor, Friedrich Ritschl, to Leipzig. Thereafter he progressively disowned any belief in Christian doctrine and moved forward to launch ever more militant assaults on Christianity, especially the Lutheran version.

In the penultimate paragraph of his intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo he allied himself with the French Enlightenment by quoting Voltaire’s blazing imperative: Ecrasez l’infâme! Crush the infamy! Somewhat in the euphoric manner of the French Revolution, he too longed to inaugurate a pagan epoch dedicated to Nature. He even sketched a militant poster, Decree against Christianity, in which the first proposal concluded: Don’t use arguments against the priest, but prison. The heading of his strident manifesto began by terminating the western calendar dated from the Incarnation. The new dispensation of time began on 30 September 1888, the very moment in which Nietzsche had completed The Anti-Christ. It was to be the first day of year one.

Condemned to a spirituality which could find no credence in Christianity or in the pragmatic culture of his own time, Nietzsche’s metaphysical craving first found consolation in the ineffable power of music and then, finally, in his slowly evolving conception of the Übermensch.

His tussle with Christianity began early. In 1860, at the age of seventeen, he had given a paper to Germania, a literary society he had co-founded with his friend Gustav Krug. A dazzling presentation for so young a man, it uncannily pre-figured much of Nietzsche’s later work:

How often have I thought that all our philosophy is like the Tower of Babel; to storm the heavens is the aim of all great aspirations … Great revolutions will occur in the future, when once the great mass of mankind is convinced that the whole fabric of Christianity rests upon assumptions; the existence of God, immortality, the authority of the bible, inspiration, and other things will always remain problems. I have attempted to deny everything …

Whatever that early speculative denial amounted to, it was to grow a hundredfold as Nietzsche continued to engage with philosopher after philosopher, catching up at the same time with current scientific theories and keeping his critical eye on Darwin’s controversial hypothesis of evolution through natural selection. His aspiration, too, was to storm the heavens. At seventeen, however, he reluctantly submitted to his Lutheran upbringing. He became the obedient camel that he later depicted in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a supine creature only too ready to take into the desert the heavy luggage others had thoughtlessly strapped to his back.

The youthful lecture closed on a melancholic note of nostalgic piety:

Force of habit … the suspicion as to the possibility of having been misled for two thousand years by a mirage, the sense of one’s own arrogance and audacity – all these considerations fight a determined battle within us, until at last painful experiences and sad occurrences lead our hearts back to the old beliefs of our childhood.

What were the painful and sad occurrences? No doubt, the death of his father, when Nietzsche was five, and the death of his only brother a year later. A loyalty to the absent father – and to the fiercely internalised father- figure – would seem to lie behind his reluctance to jettison Christianity at this stage, as also his own passionate metaphysical desire for something sublime and all-encompassing. All the biographical evidence indicates a pious faith in the Lutheran God up to and including his confirmation in1861. His friend Paul Deussen described the ‘holy and transcendental mood’ in which they knelt together to receive the sacrament that Easter morning. But the adolescent truce could not last. The confirmation was his last chosen Christian rite. Nietzsche’s restless love of knowledge could not accept for long any ignis fatuus cast by tradition and tribal piety. The possibility of a civilisation being misled for two thousand years by a mirage came to obsess him for the rest of his life.

Nietzsche saw with clairvoyant brilliance the nihilism which had to follow a sustained period of Christian faith. He reflected on the prospect constantly. As indicated in his youthful paper, this was ‘the great revolution’ which would occur in the near future: it would be a chaotic and eclectic period without coherence, without values, a technological civilisation without the traditional refinement of a high culture or the inspiration of any new spiritual imperative.

Near the end of his writing life he wrote a provisional preface to The Will to Power, a huge fragmentary work published after his death, in which he proclaimed:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism … For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Nietzsche talked of the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind dissolving all the old familiar landmarks and warned: where we still walk,

soon no one will be able to walk. He predicted decades of journalistic deceptions and counterfeit ideologies which would hide the underlying metaphysical loss (of being within Being) and mask the existential abyss which had to be confronted. Nietzsche’s epigoni, his last men, were those who had the means to inoculate themselves against the cosmic void. He claimed that he himself had crouched in all the shabby nooks of the dying Christian soul. He wrote: To have travelled through the entire extent of the modern soul, to have taken my meals in each of its corners. My pride, my torment, my joy. Classifying himself as the first perfect nihilist of Europe, he felt he had endured the whole psychic disintegration to the bitter end and, finally, was free of it.

In this respect, Nietzsche can be seen to resemble one of the ‘certain few’ who, in Hardy’s poem, God’s Funeral, could encounter a new dawn light, while the conventional mourners turned away, too stricken to look. But there is pathos in the comparison. For Nietzsche was painfully aware that his own life was far removed from his ideal conception. In a characteristic moment of despair, sighing before his own bleak existence, tormented by pain and heavy with loneliness, he asked: what makes me able to bear the sight of my life? And answered with a single superlative; the vision of the Übermensch who affirms life. Even as he was preparing to shape what he conceived as his culminating magnus opus, his life had begun its steep descent into an all-eclipsing madness.

Yet, to understand Nietzsche’s place in the story of the self fully one must grasp his approach to philosophy. It was existential in character. His own existence, complex and enigmatic, was the continuous, ever bubbling, ever pristine, source of his own turbulent thinking. Philosophical questions emerged from his daily predicaments, his inner divisions, his extreme bouts of illness, and his relentless aspirations. Like Montaigne, he had a gift for over-hearing himself. He observed the shifts of mood and meaning within his own being: moving from surface to depth, surveying thoughts, feelings, sensations and impressions with a relentless honesty. In a letter written to his friend Franz Overbeck, he placed quotation marks around the word ‘philosophy’ and continued: if I have the right to call what tortures me to the very roots of my being by that name. Philosophy was not a profession, not a career in the academy, not a set of logical skills to be applied to remote theoretical problems. It was the urgent blood jet of his own life. After he retired from his chair in classical philology at Basel in 1879, at the age of thirty-four, he never returned. He remained a lonely wanderer, a deliberate outsider, an intellectual nomad.

Another way of saying ‘existential’ is to say ‘reflexive’ and ‘autobiographical’. Nietzsche knew on the pulse the truth of his epigrammatic quip: all philosophy is unconscious memoir. Even as a child he had kept diaries and journals. He constantly noted events around him, jotting down his states of mind, listing the phases of his development and (always) his soaring aspirations. He sought to transcend the ephemeral moment by recording it. In one jotting he described his task as that of holding up the head of a Gorgon to petrify in language whatever stirred in the dense forest of his inner world. At fourteen, writing in the dark living-room at Naumberg (where his family had moved after the death of his father), he would recall his childhood and struggle to express his early memories in the manner of a painting. He loved ordering and classifying everything into phases and periods, into evolving chronologies. He divided his early poetry into developmental stages. Even as a child genealogy was his second nature. In an early journal he wrote: It is exquisitely beautiful to convey the first years of your life before your soul and thereby to discern the evolution of your soul.

The evolution of the soul was the centre of his work, even if that wording would later strike him as archaic and too coloured by Christian and Platonic dualism. For where was the body when one employed the word soul? Did not the abstract noun already presuppose a certain unhealthy bifurcation? And, furthermore, did it not imply an eternal essence to which there might be no external correspondence? A signifier without a signified? A seductive deception of grammar? Nietzsche, in due course, pioneered these deconstructing questions but always continued to shape the narrative of his own life through daily reflection and compulsive writing. He was forever composing autobiographical accounts to discern his ‘evolution’, to discover his progress, to mould the form of his life. He scribbled his being.

Between the years 1858 and 1868 he composed no fewer than nine autobiographical sketches. Over a decade later, bitterly wounded by Lou Andreas-Salomé’s rejection of his offer of marriage and close to suicide, he

 

composed his auto-mythography: Thus Spake Zarathustra. It was as if to defeat despair, the mind had to create its own creative mythology. The solitary figure of Zarathustra was the rejected man idealised, and made mythical. What the figure of Augustinus was to Petrarch, what the Ancient Mariner was to Coleridge, so Zarathustra was to Nietzsche. The book was a promethean act of sublimation and compensation. Later, his sister would nickname her brother ‘Zarathustra’; and, near the final crack-up in Turin, Nietzsche came to dangerously conflate himself with his literary persona. Of the work itself he confessed: everything in it is me alone without prototype, parallel, or precedent. It is the beginning of self-disclosure – nothing more … He declared that some of the pages were bleeding with his own blood. Certainly, it was an eruption from his unconscious and, tellingly, much of it was composed in the cadences of his father’s sermons and Luther’s translation of the New Testament. If its meaning was pagan, its resonance remained Lutheran. Then, at the end of his sane life, Nietzsche wrote yet another autobiographical work, Ecce Homo – a disturbing amalgam of inflated apologia and personal reflection. A memoir quivering on the brink of madness, the foreword began: Seeing that I must shortly approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made on it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am. Once again, the stress is existential: self-identification and self-disclosure.

But Nietzsche’s notion of identity included not only his immediate introspective experience, but all the major dramatis personae of his inherited culture. Existence was not only ontological, it was historical. The self was not only ‘inside’, it lay ‘out there’ in the jostle of seductions and invitations offered by the surrounding culture. The very language used to mediate experience was never neutral or disinterested, it invariably reflected centuries of historical development and carried a hidden tangle of assumptions that needed to be exposed. The seductions in the culture had to be resisted, but there were invitations too. Nietzsche examined with minute care those seminal figures with whom he felt a compelling affinity. He saw them as potential ‘educators’: exemplars of one’s prospective self. One could find who one was not only by looking within but by looking without – at the life and work of powerful thinkers and artists. To study them was to begin to become them. Two of the most charismatic mentors for the young Nietzsche were Schopenhauer and Wagner. The initial attraction was all but Pauline in intensity; a matter of conversion, of metanoia. In his early polemic Nietzsche paid memorable homage to both men. In the third of the Untimely Essays he suggested that the true self lay beyond one, immeasurably high, not in the inner depths, but in the outer heights. Not unter, but über. This was Nietzsche’s first spatial metaphor prefiguring the later conception of the Übermensch most fully advanced in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

But Nietzsche’s existential learning was never as naïve as a simple identification with heroes. The intoxicating period of adulation never lasted long. It was the first exultant stage of an infinitely more complex progression. After the ‘hot’ act of recognition, there always followed a cooler period in which the idol slowly began to crack and disintegrate. In this second stage – a stage of progressive dissociation – Nietzsche’s speculative mind began to spiral out of the matrix of the original exemplar. Part of this spiral movement consisted of discovering what had been excluded or repressed in the original formulation and, thereby, locating further cognitive possibilities. The process was dialectical to the core. These intense periods of intellectual emancipation were experienced by Nietzsche as outwardly disillusioning – they often culminated in savage attacks on the original mentors – but inwardly liberating, bringing a sense of creative élan and vaulting freedom. Yet, at the same time, many traces of the first identification remained in what was to take its place. The original was not so much trashed as transformed. Revealing the same dynamic, even Nietzsche’s later militant paganism was, as he once expressed it, ‘over-Christian’: a work of sublation. Zarathustra often sounds like Jesus.

 

Nietzsche applied this dialectical approach to everything, including his own most intimate thinking. He had a unique ability to take sides against himself. In his later years he constantly declared war on his own inner state and, through an act of self-imposed estrangement, forced himself to reach ever higher levels. He became his own ladder. Each rung pointed only to the next, and the next – an endless ascent. His correspondence frequently recorded this upward motion and the dizzy vertigo which accompanied it. In one letter he wrote: I now took sides against myself and for everything that would hurt me – me especially – and come hard to me. At another moment he wrote: During the last few years the vehemence of my inner vibrations has been terrific; and now I must ascend to a new and higher form, what I most of all need is a new estrangement, a still higher form of impersonalisation. To understand Nietzsche one must always relate his thought not to any final position but to the particular rung of the ladder he was standing on when he made his pronouncement. In an aphorism he declared: For me they were steps. I have climbed up on them – therefore I had to pass over them. But they thought I wanted to settle down on them. Not stasis, but motion; not settled being, endless becoming. In a sense, there can be no definitive Nietzsche. He was a perpetual dissonance. Anomalies multiply; contradictions abound.

This method of ‘initial identification’ followed by ‘defamiliarisation’ came to mark the philosopher’s approach not only to his intellectual mentors and himself but to whole epochs of history and long phases of cultural and identity formation. Nietzsche loved the idea of ranging across huge spans of time. The task of the creative thinker was to rise and circle like a mountain eagle: to inspect millennia from the highest altitude. The claim made in Ecce Homo that he was all the names in History, while bordering on megalomania, recorded, nevertheless, a manifest truth. He had lived the life of ideas with a scorching passion. The various layers of western history were experienced as if they were strata of his own psyche. The stark unselfconscious signatures on some of his last brief crazy letters scrawled in 1889 tell their own story. Some are signed The Crucified One; others Nietzsche Caesar; still others Dionysus.

One could construct a compelling biography of Nietzsche which divided his life into periods conforming to the major shifts and transformations of western culture. Such a narrative might start with The Good Christian (covering his childhood) then move to The Good Classicist and Idealist (covering the time from his entrance to Pforta School to his Chair in Classical Philology), continue with The Inspired Romantic (from the time of his school essay on Holderlin in 1861 to his meeting with Wagner in 1869), then progress to The Votary of the Enlightenment (covering the period after 1876 when Nietzsche engaged more sympathetically with the French rationalists and the empirical scientists, including Darwin) and culminate in The Harbinger of Modernism and Post-Modernism (covering the last frenetic decade of his intellectual life when, at the end, he talked of irony, the parodists of world history and the need for clowns). Looking to the future, the biography might end with a coda: The Prophet; an account of his dream of the Übermensch, anticipating millennia to come.

Nietzsche as a rich microcosm of a whole complex civilisation spanning two thousand years … A history of the western self in one man.

Yet Nietzsche refuses any final classification. He was large and contained multitudes. He would even have resisted the label ‘existentialist’ for holding him, too rigidly, under a single category. At his most characteristic, Nietzsche was partly beyond whatever he was thinking. He could rise beyond the immediate reflection, even as it was in the process

of being formulated, by anticipating its antitheses. It is indicative that as a modest musician (Wagner sneered at his performances) he was drawn to improvisation. At formative moments in his life – on his student visit to a brothel in 1865, on the celebration of Cosima Wagner’s birthday on Christmas Day 1872, in his small rented room in Turin in 1889 after embracing the horse – we observe Nietzsche hunched over the piano, his hands moving across the keys, improvising, always improvising, creating melodies to match the drama. The same Mozartian spirit informs much of his literary-philosophical work. He aspired to write free fantasias with memorable linguistic cadences and claimed: one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician.

His mind moves like quicksilver, scattering and reassembling in unexpected patterns, forever fluid. Hence his delight in aphorisms – those brilliant linguistic flares which, thrown out, suddenly illuminate a portion of reality previously obscure or inaccessible. Like Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche was the master of epigrammatic utterance. Indeed, he is one of the very few philosophers in the western tradition with a consummate style and a poetic genius for striking images and vivid analogues. The first chapter of Twilight of the Idols is made up entirely of a series of disconnected maxims, while the unfinished Will to Power housed well over a thousand aphorisms. They implicitly affirm the cognitive significance of small fragments, the salience of sharp but partial insights. Maxim 26 reads: I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity. It is this part of his mercurial nature which is drawn to the clown, the acrobat, the tight-rope walker, the fool, the free-wheeling child and, above all, the dancer – all images to be associated with the figure of the Übermensch, moving under the sign of Dionysus.

Put grammatically, Nietzsche placed participles above nouns: philosophy became the continuous act of thinking, tending to spiral upwards, always changing, always provisional. Playing, improvising, pondering. The protean self was to be baptised in the Heraclitean river of time, a living part of the living flow, being-becoming. Something of the same spirit is affirmed in Nietzsche’s contemporaries, Monet and Van Gogh, in the drama of Impressionism and Expressionism, consecrating the vivid moment. It was further and more fully confirmed by Darwin’s theory of

evolution and by Hegel’s recognition of the profound role of history in the formation of concepts. Being was no longer located in a fixed hierarchical order, but in the perpetual flux of natural and cultural phenomena: of change, struggle, mutation, development, progress. In 1892 the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ was coined by William James. The three words pinpointed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel exactly that sense of movement, flux and contingency, and entered the English language like a revelation.

It seems right to emphasise Nietzsche’s spontaneous, poetic and many- sided approach to existence. It is clear, however, that he intended to broaden the narrow path of traditional philosophy. To some extent, there was a programme; a subverting agenda. In the last decade of his sane life, he began to espouse more explicitly and more consistently a perspectivalist view of the world. In his notes for The Will to Power he wrote: The (true world) is a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us in so far as we continually need a narrower abbreviated simplified world. Nietzsche argued that as all seeing was perspectival, that there could be no absolute facts, only the play of contending interpretations from various positions. There was no one omniscient Reality, only various ‘realities’ constructed by competing paradigms brought to experience, from different angles and, often, driven by hidden compulsions. Any notion of an Ultimate Truth or Final Reality was judged chimerical, the deceptive projections of Pure Reason (Plato) or Pure Faith (Christianity), impelled by an unacknowledged will to power. The first task of Nietzsche’s perspectival philosophy was critical. He set out to expose what he saw as the deceptions cast by two thousand years of false thinking: to remove the conceited interpretations and misconceptions which had been scribbled on the uncertain text of humanity. The goal was deconstruction, what Nietzsche often called ‘unmasking’.

The long hieroglyphic text of history was now to be deciphered through a variety of readings and interpretations – not just those of rational argument and logical consistency. It was one of Nietzsche’s claims that traditional philosophy had failed to recognise either the influence of history or psychology. In its high-minded approach, it had been blindly ahistorical and either naïve or hypocritical with regard to motives. In contrast, Nietzsche aimed to employ as many paradigms as possible, to circle round the object under discussion with a variety of models and metaphors drawn from literature and the arts, from biology, chemistry and physics, from linguistics, law and medicine but, above all, from history and psychology.

In his justifying preface to his book on the genealogy of morals, Nietzsche indicated the number of perspectives that were in play, as well as the dynamic process of thinking that had made the diagnosis possible. He lists History, Philology, and Psychology; he mentions the social and class conditions; then talks about the new questions, investigations, hypotheses, and probabilities that emerged as he continued to decipher the dark text of western morality. Finally, like a proud conquistador entering uncharted ground, he celebrated the secret garden he had discovered by a new perspectival method of interpretation; philosophy as genealogy.

Nietzsche’s approach was not too far removed from Montaigne’s but it was formulated in a more explicit and rigorous manner. It was directed to another age, an epoch that was losing, by an inner dialectical necessity, the all-encompassing Christian faith to which Montaigne had remained loyal. For Nietzsche such belief had become both ethically undesirable and historically impossible. Was perspectivalism, then, relative, even nihilistic? Not entirely. For the deconstruction was seen by Nietzsche as the first step towards a reconstruction: what he called a re-evaluation. In the preface to the genealogy he claimed that he was responding to three related questions: Under what conditions did man invent the value judgements good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess? Have they helped or hindered the progress of mankind? The last question implied that the evaluation would lead to a re-evaluation concerning the quality and purpose of human life: the progress of humanity. The perspectival/genealogical method of analysis pointed to a possible advance in human affairs to that symbolic noon, that mid-day moment, which cast the shortest shadow and allowed the greatest play of light. For Nietzsche this

moment marked the advent of the Übermensch. The unconditional ‘no’ emerging from the critique became the premise for an unconditional ‘yes’: the affirmation of the creative and embodied self. Incipit Zarathustra, he declared: a new image of indivisible identity in a relative and unstable cosmos.

Many of Nietzsche’s observations related to the emergence of this identity. The existential and perspectival here often became utterly practical in orientation, a deliberate reclamation of askesis, the daily Stoic regime of working on the self. It was one of Nietzsche’s deepest regrets that he had been unable to create a small school in the manner of Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’ Garden. It would have been a school not only for speculative thinking but also for inner transformation, labouring for what he called a new image and ideal of the free spirit. Inspired by the notion of philosophy as daily mindful practice, Nietzsche considered the place of solitude and meditation, of friendship (invariably seen agonistically) and the role of writing. He also considered habitat, diet and kinaesthetic movement, particularly dance. In a long tradition going back beyond the Stoics, to Plato and Pythagoras, he thus reclaimed philosophy as primarily a matter of eudaimonia: the search for a creative wholeness of being within a flourishing culture. Suddenly the thinker had become, once again, a therapist fostering the individuated self and the highest form of life: a self that was a tremendous multiplicity but the very opposite of chaos. Philosophy was about to return to therapeia, into the art of the reflexive and creative life: the art of dancing over the abyss.

Many charges can be brought against Nietzsche. For all his epigrammatic brilliance, much of the later writing is marred by hyperbole and inflation: a distressing megalomania. There is an intemperate and even histrionic cast of mind courting repugnant extremities. There is a failure of dialogic imagination. Typically, much of the work (following in the dusty tracks of Paul and Augustine, Petrarch and Luther) is marred by an appalling, unexamined misogyny. Most obviously, there is a stalling of eros. Far too great an emphasis is placed on the agon. Endless polemic. If ‘perhaps’ had been Montaigne’s favourite word, then ‘against’ was Nietzsche’s.

 

The small iconoclastic preposition became in his writing a distorting, aggressive mannerism: Dionysus against the Crucified, Nietzsche contra Wagner, culture against civilisation. Nietzsche Agonistes! And, at times, there was a temptation to build the very kind of elaborate system his more nimble insights disown. Betraying his own Maxim 26, some of his later work is drawn to a single interpretation of all things, an over- arching explanatory system predicated on the will to power – yet another metaphysical system in the long tradition he has declared war on with his subtle perspectival philosophy. At points Nietzsche succumbed to the very impulse he attacked with such deconstructive panache.

Finally, it has to be said the craving for tyrannical omnipotence that Nietzsche detected in Wagner was also an unconscious account of himself – at least, in the last decade of his life. By the end he had turned himself into a God: Ecce Homo, indeed – and counter to all the most brilliant insights and prescient flashes of genius. It is chilling to know that some years after his death Elizabeth presented Adolf Hitler with her brother’s walking stick.

Yet, for all this, he was the most acute circumnavigator of his inner world, a Christopher Columbus of the natural and embodied self, a prophet of a new kind of predicament and a new form of sensibility: of a creative self, vaulting a world without metaphysical foundations, dancing the abyss. As Socrates to the birth of reason, as Galileo to the birth of modern science, as Rousseau to Romanticism, so Nietzsche stands to the modern, post- modern and post-Christian world.

In one of his last mad letters, scrawled to Georg Brandes, Nietzsche claimed: after you discovered me, it was no great feat to find me. The problem now is how to lose me. Over a century later the words abide. Ever since his death in 1900 Nietzsche has been a haunting and pervasive presence: a voice in the long soundtrack of the reflexive self impossible to erase.

In his next essay Peter Abbs will examine Nietzsche’s notion of the self as Übermensch. For further details of the story of the self see www.peterabbs.org