Schopenhauer and the Will to Style 45Nietzsche's mentor heaped praise on his protégé, declaring that he had
never had such a talented student The philological protégé remained
cautious, however. "How easy it is," he wrote on August 30,1865, "to be
guided by men like Ritschl, to get pulled away on perhaps the very paths
most alien to one's own nature" (B 2,81).
From the moment he held the writings of Schopenhauer in his hands,
philosophy, rather than philology, became the force that pulled him away
on these paths. In October 1865, Nietzsche discovered the two volumes
of The World as Will and Representation in a secondhand bookshop in
Leipzig. He purchased them on the spot and perused them as soon as he
got home. As he reported in one of his autobiographies, he was walking
on air. He read in Schopenhauer that the world construed by reason, his-
torical meaning, and morality is not the actual world. True life, namely
the will, roars behind or underneath it.
In letters and diaries of his years in Leipzig, between 1866 and early
1868, an attitude of deep emotion manifested itself, one that could
almost be called a conversion. The notion that the essence of the world,
its very substance, was based not in reason or logic but in dark, vital
instinct was immediately apparent to him. First and foremost, however,
he had found confirmation for his passion for music in Schopenhauer's
idea of redemption through art. The young Nietzsche interpreted the
very fact that people wax enthusiastic about art as a triumph of the
human mind over the strictures of nature. If such a triumph is possible,
one can set the goal of the "sanctification and modification of the entire
essence of man" (/3,298). One has to gain control over one's own life
by means of self-denial. For a period of two weeks, Nietzsche forced
himself to go to bed no earlier than two in the morning and to get up no
later than six. He prescribed himself a strict diet, created his own clois-
ter, and lived like an ascetic He shocked his mother by providing chilling
details from his ascetic workshop, writing to her on November 5, 1865,
that a person needs to decide whether to be stupid and content or clever
and full of renunciation. We are either a "slave of life" or its master. The
latter is possible only if we discard the "goods of life." Only then is life