Friedrich Nietzsche
God is dead, and we have killed him. He wrote five major books in 1888. On January 3, 1889, he collapsed in a Turin street, threw his arms around a horse, and never recovered. He spent his last eleven years insane. His legacy was then corrupted by a sister who aligned him with everything he despised.
On the morning of January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche walked out of his lodgings in Turin and collapsed in the street. A horse was being flogged by its driver. According to the account that has passed into philosophical legend, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse’s neck and wept. He was taken back to his room. Over the following days he wrote a series of letters -- addressed to Cosima Wagner, to the King of Italy, to Bismarck -- signing himself Dionysus and the Crucified One. He was forty-four years old. He spent the next eleven years in progressive mental darkness. He died in 1900. He had been insane for more than a decade.
He had been forty-four when he wrote five major books in a single year. The productivity of his final sane year, 1888, is almost impossible to account for. Twilight of the Idols. The Antichrist. Ecce Homo. Nietzsche contra Wagner. The Case of Wagner. Each one would have been considered a major work by a philosopher operating at a normal pace. Nietzsche was working at the absolute edge of what the human mind can sustain.
He was born in 1844 in Röcken, a small village in Prussia, to a Lutheran pastor who died of a brain disease when Friedrich was four years old. He was raised by women: his mother, his grandmother, two aunts, and his younger sister Elisabeth. He was solitary, bookish, precociously intelligent. He studied classical philology at Leipzig under Friedrich Ritschl, who recognized something unusual in him. When the University of Basel needed a professor of classical philology in 1869, Ritschl recommended the twenty-four-year-old Nietzsche with near-implausible enthusiasm. Basel appointed him before he completed his doctorate. They awarded the degree without examination.
At a salon in Leipzig, the year before his appointment, Nietzsche had met Richard Wagner. The encounter was electric. Wagner was fifty-five, famous, opinionated, working on the Ring Cycle, absorbed in Schopenhauer, in search of intellectual companionship. Nietzsche was twenty-three, brilliant, already devoted to Schopenhauer, and overwhelmed by the meeting. Wagner and his wife Cosima treated Nietzsche as a surrogate son. He visited them regularly at their estate at Tribschen, overlooking the lake at Lucerne. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, was dedicated to Wagner’s cultural project. Classical scholars savaged it.
He had discovered Schopenhauer at twenty-one in a Leipzig bookshop. He picked up The World as Will and Representation, took it home, read through the night, and was transformed. He called it the most important reading of his life. He called Schopenhauer his educator. He would later depart from Schopenhauer completely -- replacing the denial of the Will with the affirmation of life, replacing pessimism with what he called the great Yes. But the conversation never stopped.
The rupture with Wagner came gradually, then suddenly. Nietzsche was disturbed by what he saw as Wagner’s turn toward Christian piety, most visibly in Parsifal. He was disturbed by Wagner’s German nationalism and his virulent anti-Semitism. By the late 1870s, the friendship had effectively ended. The books Nietzsche wrote in the aftermath, The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner, are among the most savage pieces of literary criticism ever produced. He dissected his former idol with a precision made more devastating by how much he had loved him.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. The Gay Science, 1882. This was not a metaphysical claim about divine non-existence. It was a historical diagnosis. The Enlightenment had destroyed the credibility of the Christian worldview. European civilization had not yet understood what this meant: the collapse of the entire value system built on it. Into that void could come nihilism -- the conviction that nothing matters -- or the creation of new values. Nietzsche spent the rest of his career on that question.
He proposed several ways of thinking through the problem. The will to power: not domination of others -- a common misreading -- but growth, overcoming, self-mastery, the creative discharge of life’s energy. The Ubermensch, the Overman: not a racial type -- that was his sister’s corruption of the concept -- but a human possibility. The person who has genuinely faced the death of God, refused the comfort of inherited values, and taken on the terrifying freedom of creating new ones.
And eternal recurrence. The most difficult thought he attempted. What if a demon came to you in your loneliest loneliness and told you that you would have to live your life over and over, exactly as you have lived it, forever? Could you say yes? Could you will it? The thought is not a cosmological claim about the universe. It is a test. The maximum possible weight placed on existence to find out whether it can bear it. To affirm eternal recurrence is to affirm everything -- including the suffering, including the collapses, including the loneliness. It is the most total possible yes.
Nietzsche himself was not healthy enough for the life he was describing. His eyesight had failed since his twenties. He had severe migraines that prostrated him for days. He took increasing doses of chloral hydrate to sleep. He moved constantly through Italian and Swiss cities looking for climates that did not aggravate his condition. He was often desperately lonely. The correspondence of his last years is full of the ache of someone whose work was almost entirely unread.
After his breakdown, his sister Elisabeth took control. She had married Bernhard Forster, a virulent anti-Semite, and had gone to Paraguay to found a pure Aryan colony called Nueva Germania, which collapsed. When she returned to Germany after Nietzsche’s breakdown, she built the Nietzsche Archive and placed herself at its center. She suppressed inconvenient evidence of his anti-nationalism. She forged letters. She shaped his posthumous reception toward German nationalism and, eventually, toward Nazism. She was photographed with Hitler. The philosopher who had written with contempt about German nationalism, who had explicitly and repeatedly attacked anti-Semitism, who had broken with Wagner over Wagner’s anti-Semitism, was turned into the philosopher of the Reich.
It took decades of serious scholarship to undo the damage.
Carl Jung ran a seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra from 1934 to 1939, a five-year exploration of the text. He read Nietzsche’s breakdown as a psychological catastrophe: Nietzsche had identified completely with Zarathustra, with the archetype of the great man, without maintaining the ego distance that would have protected him. The archetype flooded him. The breakdown in Turin was not random. It was the end of a process.
He threw his arms around a horse in a Turin street and wept. We have been trying to understand what he meant ever since.