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Friedrich Nietzsche in circa 1875.

How Nietzsche channelled a traumatic breakup to write his most famous book.

In March 1882, the writer Paul Rée travelled to Rome to join a community of free spirits. There, he met the 21-year-old Lou Salomé, who was travelling with her mother following the death of her father, Gustav von Salomé, an ennobled Russian general.

Nietzsche rejoined them in April, after three weeks in Messina, Sicily. Nietzsche and Salomé first met, of all places, in the grandeur of St Peter’s Basilica. Nietzsche was captivated by her charm and intelligence, and enjoyed reading to her and Rée from his newly published Gay Science.

Love Triangle

The then 37-year-old Nietzsche asked Rée to deliver a marriage proposal to Salomé, without knowing that Rée had himself proposed to her. Salomé rejected both proposals, suggesting instead that she, Rée, and Nietzsche form a platonic “intellectual trinity” and wander in search of some monastery or other edifice in which to establish a commune of free spirits.

On 5 May, Salomé and Nietzsche ascended Monte Sacro, with its romantic views over Lake Orta and San Giulio Island. Nietzsche described this pilgrimage of sorts as “the most exquisite dream of my life”. Later, he wrote to Salomé, “Back at Orta, I conceived a plan of leading you step by step to the final consequence of my philosophy—you as the first person I took to be fit for this.”

He proposed to her a second time in Lucerne’s Löwengarten. Later that day, they had their photograph taken with the reluctant Rée in a photographer’s shop. This photograph (below), with Salomé brandishing a whip, is almost certainly the most famous picture in all philosophy.

On 5 November, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, or why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, “So I really am going into utter solitude.” He never saw Salomé or Rée again. After hiding in Leipzig for some days, the pair had made for Berlin.

The most famous picture in philosophy, with Nietzsche, Rée, and Salomé holding a whip.

From Heartbreak to Masterpiece

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent letters mentioning overdoses and suicide to Salomé, Rée, and Overbeck. To Overbeck, he wrote: “My whole life has crumbled under my gaze… the barrel of a revolver is for me now a source of relatively pleasant thoughts.”

On Christmas day, he wrote again to Overbeck: “This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.”

Nietzsche did, of course, find the trick. On 14 February, he posted the manuscript for the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to his publisher. It’s his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterward was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call it the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, Zarathustra advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy, and introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes: the Superman (Übermensch), the Will to Power, and Eternal Return.

The Ego Defence of Sublimation

Sublimation is considered by many to be the most successful of all defences.

If a person’s partner has just left her for someone else, she might fly into a rage and cut up all his clothes… or she might instead write a poem to express how she feels. The first instance (cutting up all her partner’s clothes) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature ego defence. But the second instance (writing a poem) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into positive or productive activities, which is a much more mature ego defence.

And if the poem or poet were one day to be remembered, would that not be the sweetest revenge of all?

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Arthur Schopenhauer on Noise and Genius

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus [The crone dies, the burden is lifted].

The Case of Immanuel Kant

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who also hated noise. Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. According to lore, he once moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster.

In May 1784, Kant, who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the “stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail” (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud “as fifty voices of other men”). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth century equivalent of revving motorbikes or these fart-can cars with modified exhausts): “Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.” To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary, and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

Schopenhauer links misophonia [the hatred of sound] with intellect and creativity: “Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.”

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness, because, as every creative person knows, there is no happiness greater than that of the mind at play. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to help occupy and numb their minds.

What Science Says

Was Schopenhauer being fanciful in linking misophonia (the hatred of noise) with intellect and creativity? In recent years, researchers at Northwestern University have found that real-world creativity may be associated with a reduced ability to filter “irrelevant” sensory information. “Leaky” sensory gating may help our brains integrate ideas that are outside the focus of our attention and thereby promote associative and creative thinking. But if these extraneous ideas are, well, noise, it can also cripple us.

The genius mind is like a high-compression engine, which knocks if fuelled with lower octane gasoline, i.e. nonsense. Even if he might have overstated his case, Schopenhauer, it seems, was on to something.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Schopenhauer on the psychology of nationalism.

Although he thought of existence as a sorry mistake, the philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer retained a strong “Will to life”. One of his reasons for settling in Frankfurt was the reputation of that city’s doctors. 

In Frankfurt, he took many precautions, bordering on the paranoid, to preserve his life and comfortable lifestyle. For example, he kept loaded pistols at his bedside, carried a leathern flask to avoid drinking infected water, and forbade barbers from shaving his neck. To prevent robbers, servants, and others from reading them, he wrote his business records and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in a shorthand code.

In the final year of his life, he moved to a ground-floor apartment not because he could no longer manage the stairs but from fear of being caught in a house fire. “A man of genius” he wrote in typical style, “is like a person who lives in a house where there are no other people but only dogs and cats; he is the only one who has any intelligence, but he is constantly in danger of being bitten or scratched.”

The 1848 riots

In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt following the murder of two conservative politicians, a prince and a general.

Schopenhauer, who was then sixty years old, became worried about his property and safety. He welcomed the arrival of Austrian troops, and even allowed some twenty soldiers into his elegant apartment to shoot at revolutionaries from the window. In a parody of his social class, when the soldiers moved next door for a better vantage point, he lent one of the officers his large, double opera glasses.

Shaken by these events, he altered his will to leave the bulk of his estate to a fund for Prussian soldiers who had been maimed while quashing the 1848 revolutions—a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions across the German Confederation aimed at establishing a unified nation state, constitutional governance, and civil rights.

Schopenhauer on nationalism

Schopenhauer had no truck with either nationalism or rabble utopias. National pride, he held, is the cheapest form of pride, because it requires no individual effort or character. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he wrote: “Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resort pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” The Germans, he opined, benefited from having such long words in their mouths, because they “think slowly” and need “time to reflect”.

While the Young Hegelians (most famously, Karl Marx) were agitating for political and social reform, Schopenhauer claimed that misery is the natural, inevitable state for human beings, regardless of external conditions, and would not be alleviated by “progress.” He made a point of stepping outside the torrent of history and “minding not the times but the eternities”—and considered this ability to “rise into timelessness” to be the mark of a genius.

Whereas for Hegel, the state was the aim of human existence, for him it was simply its guarantor. The role of the state, in his Hobbesian view, was strictly to limit “the war of all against all” and afford him the conditions to philosophise and enjoy the arts without having to forsake his opera glasses. States with any higher ideals jeopardised their true goal of simple security.

How the Nazis interpreted Schopenhauer

The Nazis viewed Schopenhauer’s older contemporary G.W.F. Hegel with hostility. They abhorred his emphasis on reason: on history as the march of reason and the state as a body of rational laws and institutions. In 1933, Carl Schmitt, the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich, famously declared that “on the day Hitler came to power, Hegel died.”

In his Table Talk, Hitler, who did not have much philosophy, dismissed Hegel’s “tedious” and “Jewish” rationalism in favour of the “irrationalism” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—even though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both strongly rejected nationalism. Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave morality of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the “good European.” In 1886, he wrote to his mother, “Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.”

Hitler and the Nazis praised Schopenhauer’s ideas on the “will to life,” which, with Nietzsche, became the “will to power.” They glorified this “irrational will” over reason to support their “social Darwinism,” according to which brute force and action are superior to intellectualism, justice, and the rule of law.

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Arthur Schopenhauer on ageing and isolation

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland).

Arthur’s father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg, where Arthur’s sister, Adèle, was born.

Arthur’s French brother, Jean Anthime

1797, the nine-year-old Arthur was sent from Hamburg to Le Havre, in France, to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age.

The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, Schopenhauer claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learned to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

From these common beginnings, the lives of Arthur and Jean Anthime would diverge, with Jean Anthime becoming a successful merchant and family man and Arthur growing into a philosopher (“the Sage of Frankfurt”) and celibate recluse.

When Arthur and Jean Anthime met for the last time

In 1845, a lifetime later, Jean Anthime travelled to Frankfurt and met his “German brother” for the last time.

In Frankfurt, Arthur took all his meals at the Englischer Hof. He sat alone, dressed in white tie, at a large common table. At every meal, he would place a gold coin on the table. When a waiter enquired into this practice, he replied that he had vowed to himself to give the coin to charity on the first occasion that the other diners discussed something more substantial than “horses, women, or dogs.” In thirty years, he never lost his coin.

When Arthur received news of Jean Anthime’s visit, he booked two rooms at the Englisher Hof, one for Jean Anthime and another for Jean Anthime’s daughter by his second marriage.

But Arthur arrived late and in a foul mood to their dinner meeting. In his travel diary, Jean Anthime wrote: “He is of such disagreeable character that we quarrelled quite seriously. He professes, he says, the religion of the Hindu. It’s an eccentricity to add to all the others. He is considered mad, and indeed he must be.”

The Hedgehog Dilemma

A few years later, in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Schopenhauer would reflect upon the increasing isolation that accompanies old age, positing that the older we become, the more we diverge from others, and the less we need, or think we need, from them.

This is most true of the genius or man of intellect, who finds his own thoughts a lot more interesting and fulfilling than “the fuss created by fools.” If we must mingle with fools, we should carry our solitude inside us so as to be “not quite in their company, though in their midst.” “To be alone” he wrote, “is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.”

He famously compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills. Thus, the hedgehogs need to find just the right degree of closeness between feeling warm and being injured. But in old age, aided by a waning of the Will (the primitive life force in Schopenhauer’s philosophy), we finally have a coat thick enough to keep us warm:

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoys the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth.

When Freud read Parerga and Paralipomena, he picked up on the Hedgehog dilemma and quoted the parable in a footnote to his own 1921 work, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He used the metaphor to explain the ambivalence of human emotions and the necessity of “good manners” or a “proper distance” in social interactions.

Schopenhauer originally wrote about porcupines, which have longer, more dangerous quills, rather than hedgehogs. Freud was so fond of the analogy that, for the rest of his life, he kept a bronze model of a porcupine on his desk.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Lessons from the teenage Schopenhauer’s European tour.

Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on in 22 February 1788 at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associated, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learn to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur too exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Arthur’s European tour: The Wimbledon academy

Thus, in 1803, the fifteen-year-old Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austra, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a “seething, belligerent pupil.” He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of “incarceration.” But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Schopenhauer is still regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking, and distances us from intuitive perception and action. 

However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Arthur’s European tour: Three hangings and a hard-labour penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: “One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.”

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. “Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?”

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddharta (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the “Four Sights” of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Arthur warned against book knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over “mere scholars” or “book philosophers”, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like “thinking with somebody else’s head” and produces only superficial knowledge, which, “like an artificial limb, false, tooth, or waxen nose,” is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to “theories and doctrines” until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, Schopenhauer wrote: “For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Nietzsche, in the autobiographical Ecce Homo:

[Sickness] bestowed on me the compulsion to lie still, to be idle, to wait and be patient … But to do that means to think! … My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms … I was redeemed from the “book,” for years at a time I read nothing—the greatest favour I ever did myself! 

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.