Being Dynamite: on the life of Nietzsche

This post is mainly an opportunity to rejoice in I Am Dynamite!, Sue Prideaux’s excellent biography of Friedrich Nietzsche.^[1] But thinking about Nietzsche’s life is also a way of reflecting on his thought. He was one of those thinkers who are sui generis, one of a kind, a lonely, creative genius, with a fabulous writing style and a tremendous capacity for put-downs of those he disagreed with. But – dynamite?^[2] Really? Or was that a rhetorical effect? Did he actually mean, I Am Really Interesting! Or should it just be, I Am Marmite!

Earlier this year I was part of a small conference exploring the theme of ‘Liberty, Nietzsche and Buddhism’. It was an opportunity for us to encounter the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and weigh up its relationship with Buddhism. Nietzsche was one of the first European philosophers to have the chance to learn about Buddhism, even to come into a conscious relationship with it. My friend Sāgaramati wrote a PhD thesis on this topic, published as Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Ironic Affinities (1997),^[3] and he kindly agreed to answer questions at our conference. It turns out that Nietzsche misunderstood Buddhism, reading the teachings through his own interests and getting them wrong, but nevertheless there are, ironically, some fascinating affinities between Buddhism and Nietzsche’s thought, like the relation of desire (taṇhā) and truth, and of course the rejection of any belief in God.

I gave a talk during the event, entitled ‘Dionysian Liberty: Towards a Nietzschean Buddhism’, picking up some more of those ironic affinities.^[4] In preparation, I re-read some Nietzsche, especially Beyond Good and Evil (1886), a book that addresses philosophical themes, especially metaphysics and ethics, most directly. It was an illuminating experience, to return to a thinker whom I’d last read thirty years ago, in my twenties; re-reading him now, in middle age, I found myself absorbed by his writing style, the extraordinary soaring playfulness and precision of his language (even in translation!), but at the same time completely unwilling to seriously entertain many of his more radical thoughts. They seem either too abstract, too generalised, or too wildly unfair and unbalanced. Yet this does not mean that I have become an anti-Nietzschean, only that I have taken to heart exactly what he himself believed important: that one notices one’s inherited views, subjects them to questioning, overcomes them, and lives out one’s own values, hence authentically participating in the innermost will to power of life, creating one’s self out of whatever resources lie at hand. No one should agree with Nietzsche; to do so would be not to have understood him at all. One should rather be inspired by him to be oneself.

So I started reading about Nietzsche’s life, starting with Lesley Chamberlain’s classic Nietzsche in Turin (1996), about the philosopher’s final year. Then I turned to I Am Dynamite!, and quickly became absorbed in a marvellously well-told tale, so much so that I immediately read it again. No wonder the book won prizes.

It helps that Prideaux is not a professional philosopher but rather a professional biographer. There is none of that over-intense involvement with Nietzsche’s many critical lines of thought that I remember from postgraduate philosophy events in the 1990s, tending to turn his thoughts into dense black sentences speaking academese; instead Prideaux manages both a certain lightness alongside an intensely appreciative interest in Nietzsche the man, that helps put his thinking into a warmer, more human light. The thing is, it is a miracle that Nietzsche managed to write anything at all. From an early age he suffered terrible headaches, nausea, pain, all too reminiscent for him of the ‘softening of the brain’ that had killed his father when young Friedrich was only five. Although he had a pretty healthy constitution, his life was punctuated by repetition of the same crippling migraine-like headaches and associated ailments. Out of, in the midst of, and through these periods of illness, Nietzsche was reborn into new inspiration, and managed to think and write with an electrifying, focussed clarity. Prideaux manages to remain sympathetic, even as Nietzsche negotiates with almost embarassing awkwardness his own emotional involvements with Richard and Cosima Wagner, whose friendship was evidently the encouragement he needed, to find his own direction, and, eventually, his own independent unfolding of thought. 

Prideaux’ sympathy reaches a climax as she writes about the period in 1882, when Nietzsche had published Human, All Too Human, at the height of his powers, as they say, and then met Lou Salomé via his friends Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. It is fascinating to read about Lou; she was only twenty-one, rich, beautiful, intelligent, and determined to do what she wanted with her life; to flirt, kiss, talk philosophy and live in a threesome with Rée and Nietzsche, and apparently without particularly suffering from any self-doubt or from the judgements of those with more limited and traditional views about gender and propriety, which was most of the people she met. Lou is intensely attractive to read about, just because she sheds a kind of radiance of health and fun that is lacking in Nietzsche’s life. The two of them strike up an intense friendship, but she will not agree to marry him. For Nietzsche, she seems to be his first and only philosophical disciple – but in fact this is the fantasy he has fallen for, the enchanted spell of eros, that probably most of us have fallen under at some point, when we were riding a wave of beauty, running over green grass, that in the end turned out to be not ours at all, and which then left us disillusioned and alone in a bare room.

So Nietzsche had his heart well and truly broken. Sue Prideaux manages to convey this with great sympathy but also a wise distance, letting the reader work out what it means. To my mind, Nietzsche’s human journey adds a lot more depth to reading his subsequent thought and writing. His life continues with him wandering, homeless, stateless, not friendless (he was always a great friend, and his friends loved him) but mostly alone, in France, Switzerland and Italy, staying in rented rooms, often ill, guided only by an inner determination to write what appeared to him in his inspired thoughts. Prideaux writes a lot about his sister Elisabeth, their relationship, her marriage to a German nationalist anti-semite, their failed German commune in Paraguay; – I wondered why she wrote so much about such an awful person, but the last chapter reveals why, in cool, horrifying slow-motion, as Nietzsche firstly goes mad, then comes under his sister’s demonic power, then dies, and then his legacy becomes appropriated and bent into the shape of a Nazi swastika. Hitler visits the Nietzsche archive, and later comes to Elizabeth’s funeral. It is a miracle Nietzsche’s philosophy has survived such terrible misappropriation, to become what it is today, a kind of symbol of resistance to all the impersonal, random forces that undermine true creativity, that favour mediocrity and lapsing into what is easy and conventional.

Thank you Sue Prideaux. But I don’t think my engagement with Nietzsche’s life has lured me into a biographical reading of Nietzsche’s thinking, as if one can make sense of his very various, often contradictory ideas through the life. Rather the opposite: his thinking is mostly in spite of his disappointments, his lack of a settled place in this world. In my talk on Nietzsche and Buddhism at our conference I drew attention to his devotion to the god Dionysus. It is rare these days for thinkers to try to serve a transpersonal deity, especially one which has no cult, no religious institution, no legitimating structure. Rather, Nietzsche’s devotion to the god Dionysus was part of his own commitment to a certain kind of life of the heart, to not denying or limiting his exploration of the truth of things through paying too much attention to what is rational, to what can be approved by that narrow capacity for reason and rationality that unfortunately characterises too much of western life. I talked about how, from the point of view of his Dionysian commitment, there was a deep convergence with the Buddha’s point of view, with regard to a complete suspicion of metaphysical views. What is this human ability to believe in the products of the human mind, these systems of thought about the nature of reality? While the Buddha’s version of this anti-metaphysical stance is mostly preserved in the ancient Buddhist texts as a pragmatism and silence about the nature of reality, for Nietzsche it is more immediate, more alive to our cultural ears: if you appreciate the Dionysian, then reality is chaos, unknown, something to be danced with and not pinned down in concepts.

---

^[1] Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, Faber & Faber, 2018.

^[2] ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite!’ – from Ecce Homo (1888), §1, ‘Why I am a Destiny’.

^[3] Published by Oxford University Press; a summary of the book is available online at https://www.academia.edu/41930198/.

^[4] Online at https://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/audio/details?num=LOC6094