Nietzsche was, in fact, everything he claimed to loathe: weak, dependent,
and wholly captivated and reliant on powerful, independent women. Yet, in
his work, he preached individual strength and self-reliance, and was a woeful
misogynist. His lifelong dependence on the care of women seemed to blur his
ability to see them clearly. It would be the glaring blind spot in the vision of
an otherwise prophetic man.
If there were a Hall of Fame for “most pain tolerated by a single individual,” I
would nominate Nietzsche as one of its first cornerstone inductees. He was
continually sick as a child: Doctors applied leeches to his neck and ears and
told him to spend hours without moving. He’d inherited a neurological
disorder that brought about debilitating migraines throughout his life (and
caused him to go mad in middle age). He was also incredibly sensitive to
light, unable to go outside without thick blue-tinted glasses, and would be
nearly blind by the age of thirty.
As a young man, he would join the military and serve briefly in the
Franco-Prussian War. There, he would contract diphtheria and dysentery,
which nearly killed him. The treatment at the time was acid enemas, which
destroyed his digestive tract. For the rest of his life, he would struggle with
acute digestive pain, was never able to eat large meals, and was incontinent
for parts of his life. An injury from his cavalry days left parts of his body
inflexible and, on his worst days, immovable. He often needed help standing
up and would spend months at a time stuck alone in bed, unable to open his
eyes due to the pain. In 1880, what he would later call “a bad year,” he was
bedridden 260 out of 365 days. He spent most of his life migrating between
the French coast in the winter and the Swiss Alps in the summer, as he
required mild temperatures to keep his bones and joints from aching.
Meta quickly discovered that she wasn’t the only intellectual woman
fascinated by this man. He had a parade of women coming by to take care of
him for weeks or months at a time. Like Meta, these women were badasses of
their time: They were professors and wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs.
They were educated and multilingual and fiercely independent.
And they were feminists, the earliest feminists.
They, too, had seen the liberating message in Nietzsche’s work. He wrote
of social structures crippling the individual; feminists argued that the social
structures of the age imprisoned them. He denounced the Church for
rewarding the weak and mediocre; feminists, too, denounced the Church, for
forcing women into marriage and subservience to men. And he dared recast
the story of human history not as mankind’s escape from and dominance over
nature, but as mankind’s growing ignorance to its own nature. He argued that
the individual must empower himself and access ever-higher levels of