he had discovered, and that powered his creativity, was opposition as a value
in itself. His political position, like Nietzsche’s, would be downplayed or
forgotten when the oppositional movement of a later day focused on his
literary-philosophical message.
Isolation of the individual forms part of the content of these proto-existen-
tialist philosophies. Its corresponding reality is partly in career bases, partly
geographical. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche prepared for academic careers,
then dropped out. Both went through phases of despair, not unmixed with
pride, at their lack of recognition. Their hybrid qualities between literary and
philosophical bases made them, initially, successful in neither. Both too were
provincials, far from the centers of intellectual life; more exactly, they were
provincials who had been at the center, connected with its main networks,
who then retired to the periphery to work out their unique positions.^4 There
was another commonality in the way their reputations were finally made.
Kierkegaard was publicized in the 1880s by the Danish critic and Berlin
sojourner Georg Brandes, who also first discovered Nietzsche (Bretall, 1946:
xviii; Kaufmann, 1950: 16, 106). As a result Kierkegaard was translated into
German around the turn of the century, publicized in the same circles that
welcomed Nietzsche.
Nietzsche portrayed himself as the lonely explorer of the frontiers of
thought. During most of his creative life he was unknown; just when his fame
began (around 1888), he went mad, removing the possibility of having to live
with a public persona. He worked in isolation, in tourist hotels in Italy and
the Alps, having resigned his academic post at Basel in 1879, before his great
series of writings in the 1880s. Is he an exception to world network patterns,
an isolated creator of the first rank? But no; Nietzsche had excellent connec-
tions from early in his career. He studied at Leipzig with the preeminent
academic philologists of the time, who sponsored him for a chair at the early
age of 24. From his days in the Gymnasium at Pforta, he was a friend of Paul
Deussen, who went on to introduce Hindu Vedanta into Europe (1883) at the
same time Nietzsche was writing his Zarathustra, idealizing yet another non-
Christian religion.^5 At Basel the young Nietzsche audited the lectures of the
Renaissance historian Burckhardt, and from 1868 onward he was a close
follower of the composer Richard Wagner, whom he often visited in nearby
Lucerne. To be sure, these are not the ordinary connections of his philosophi-
cal contemporaries; the German network by his generation had become domi-
nated by academic lineages. Yet Wagner and Burckhardt are in the network
too; Wagner had been an early friend of the anarchist Bakunin, who, like
Burckhardt, had attended Schelling’s lectures at Berlin in the 1840s. Nietzsche
culminates the lineage of Schelling and the Idealist circle: his vitalism is a
radical extension of Naturphilosophie, while his anti-Christianism carries fur-
768 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths