The Panacea of Knowledge 139Homo, he reported that he had found consolation with a "charming
Parisian woman" (6,324; EH "Human, All Too Human" § 2). This
woman was most likely Louise Ott, who had come from a well-to-do
Alsatian family and had moved to Paris after the German annexation of
Alsace. She was a passionate Wagnerian and had also admired Nietzsche's
essay on the composer. They continued to exchange letters after the fes-
tival was over. On September 22, Nietzsche wrote to Ott: 'This new
friendship is like new wine, quite pleasant, but perhaps a bit dangerous.
For me, at least. But for you as well, when I consider the sort of free spir-
it you have met up with! A man who wants nothing more than to lose
some comforting belief on a daily basis and who seeks and finds his hap-
piness in the daily addition to the liberation of his spirit. Perhaps 1 want
to be even more of a free spirit than is possible for me!" (Β 5,185f.).
Nietzsche's disillusionment at the Bayreuth Festival triggered his
rediscovery of the true nature of human beings and their motives, and
set him on the path to the "free spirit."
A pivotal new idea was gradually ripening within Nietzsche at the
same time, which was to give his philosophy a new direction and pull
him away from Wagner's intellectual milieu. This idea had begun to take
root before 1876, but only after this point could he resolve and formu-
late it with provocative clarity. In a letter of July 15, 1878, to Mathilde
Maier, who, like Louise Ott, was an admirer from the Wagner clique,
Nietzsche wrote that the "metaphysical befogging of all that is true and
simple, the batde of reason against reason, which seeks a miracle and an
absurdity in all things" (B 5,337f.), had been a fateful and sickening error.
At first blush, this wording appears to recall the formula for knowledge
that turns its goad against knowledge, which was inspired by Stirner.
With this formula, Nietzsche had hoped to give life the latitude to gain
a second immediacy. The formula had a vitalist meaning. In order to
stand in the service of life, the power of cognition and knowledge
needed to be delimited. However, he now regarded this maneuver of
disabling knowledge with knowledge as self-deception on the part of
reason. He found it dishonest to pit reason against reason.