1034 FRIEDRICHNIETZSCHE
professor, but Leipzig immediately awarded him a doctorate without examination
or thesis, and within a year he was promoted to full professor at Basel.
In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book,The Birth of Tragedy,which
included a laudatory section on Richard Wagner’s music. Over the next four
years, Nietzsche wrote four meditations (published collectively in English as
Thoughts Out of Season), the last of which was another tribute to Wagner. During
this period, Nietzsche and Wagner were close friends; and Nietzsche often visited
Wagner’s villa on Lake Lucerne. But by 1878, they had broken relations over
Wagner’s nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Nietzsche’s health began to deteriorate, and he was forced to resign from the
university in 1879. Over the next ten years, Nietzsche traveled and devoted all his
remaining energy to writing, publishing books such as The Gay Science(1882),
Thus Spoke Zarathustra(1883–1885),Beyond Good and Evil(1886),On the
Genealogy of Morality(1887), and his final denunciation of his former friend The
Case of Wagner(1888).
By the end of 1888, Nietzsche showed signs of oncoming madness, and in
January 1889 he collapsed in the street in Turin, Italy, while hugging the neck of
a horse. For the next eleven years until his death in 1900, he lived in the care of
his mother and sister. Works that he had written in 1888, including The Will to
Power, Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ,and his outrageous autobiography
Ecco Homo(which includes chapter headings such as “Why I Am So Clever”),
were published after distorted editing by his sister. Only in the twentieth century
have unedited versions of these works become available.
The cause of Nietzsche’s insanity has been vigorously debated. Critics have held
that his ideas caused it and claim to have found evidence of insanity in many of his
writings. His sister romanticized that he went mad because Germany spurned him.
More likely explanations are that he contracted syphilis during a rare sexual escapade
while a young man or that he simply inherited a brain disease from his father.
Nietzsche’s style of writing in epigrams, aphorisms, stories, poetry, and essays vir-
tually defies an editor to systematically summarize his thought. Nevertheless, even
though Nietzsche never sought to build a system, there are recurring, interwoven
themes represented by the selections given here.
In The Birth of Tragedy,translated by Francis Golffing, Nietzsche presents a
distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in art. The Apollonian
tendency (named for the Greek god of the sun, Apollo) represents the harmony
and restraint exemplified by Greek sculpture and architecture. The Dionysian
tendency (named for the Greek god of wine and revelry, Dionysos) represents
wild abandonment as exemplified by the drunken sexual frenzies of the
Dionysian cult festivals or the music of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Greek
tragedy arises as a synthesis of Apollonian form and Dionysian urges. But Greek
tragedy is in turn superseded by Greek rationalism as exemplified by Socrates:
the theoretical man who optimistically sees knowledge as the panacea to the
problems of life. What is needed now, Nietzsche argues, is a new synthesis of
these Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies by an “artistic” Socrates. Such a
Socratic figure would be a creative genius who would honestly face the harsh-
ness of life without losing a clear rational analytic perspective.
