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The Love Triangle That Ended in Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nietzsche, Paul Rée and Lou Salomé brandishing a whip
‘You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!’ —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Three would-be free spirits, two marriage proposals, and one 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. The 37-year-old Nietzsche was captivated by her charm and intelligence, and enjoyed reading to her and Rée from his newly published Gay Science.

Love Triangle

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, with Salomé brandishing a whip, is almost certainly the most famous picture in all philosophy.

From Heartbreak to Masterpiece

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.

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 alchemical trick. On 14 February, he journeyed from Rapallo to Genoa to post the manuscript of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to his publisher. It’s his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterwards was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call Thus Spoke Zarathustra 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, the prophet Zarathustra, who is a thinly veiled alter ego of Nietzsche, advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In doing so, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes: the Superman (Übermensch), the Will to Power, and Eternal Return.

Nietzsche’s Alchemical Trick

Sublimation is considered by many to be the most ‘mature’ or ‘successful’ of all ego defences. Let me give you a couple of examples.

If a person feels angry with his boss, he may go home and kick the dog—or he might instead go out for a long run. The first instance (kicking the dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature and destructive ego defence. But the second instance (going out for a long run) is an example of sublimation, which can be defined as the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into positive or productive activities.

If someone finds out that she’s been cheated upon, she might fly into a rage and cut up all her partner’s clothes—or she might instead write a poem to explore and express how she feels.

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

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Schopenhauer on Nationalism, Politics, and Rising Above the Times

Schopenhauer at the window with his opera glasses
Schopenhauer preferred to observe the torrent of history from a safe distance.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

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 safety and property. 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.

Really, Schopenhauer just wanted to be left alone, to enjoy his afternoon meanderings and deploy his opera glasses for the purpose that God had intended. He would rather have stood outside the torrent of politics and history. So when they rudely arrived at his door, he naturally sided with the forces of order.

Is Nationalism the Cheapest Form of Pride?

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 insult conceals an interesting argument. Pride in something that I myself have achieved—mastering an instrument, raising a family, growing a garden—is at least pride in something to which I have contributed. But what exactly have I done to deserve credit for Shakespeare, Goethe, or the US military? National pride enables us to appropriate the achievements of others simply because we happen to have been born into the same nation or culture. For Schopenhauer, the less a person has to be proud of individually, the more tempting this borrowed pride becomes. The nation supplies the power or the greatness that the individual cannot find in himself.

As for the Germans, Schopenhauer wrote in The World as Will and Representation that they benefited from having such long words in their mouths, because they ‘think slowly’ and need ‘time to reflect’. When the Nazis co-opted him to their cause, they disregarded this passage and others like it. But in his private papers, Schopenhauer went even further: ‘I hereby declare, in the event of my death, that I despise the German nation for its excessive stupidity and am ashamed to belong to it.’ In fact, Schopenhauer was an Anglophile who wrote a lot more like the limpid Hume than the convoluted Kant. For this reason, ironically, he is regarded as one of the greatest German prose stylists.

Rising Into Timelessness

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 true mark of a genius.

This is the larger idea behind his disdain for nationalism. Nationalism roots us all the more firmly in a particular place and time; Schopenhauer wanted to do the opposite and escape all contingency. To rise into timelessness is to stand outside the assumptions, passions, and controversies of one’s own age and try to see what remains when they have passed away. It is one reason I often retreat into antiquity—for perspective over my own times, and all times. For instance, if the ancients did not have a concept of one of our modern mental disorders, that tells me something about it—something which many other people don’t see.

Whereas for Hegel, the state was the aim of human existence, for Schopenhauer 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 lend his opera glasses.

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Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

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Finding the Right Distance Between Self and Others

Freud kept a model porcupine on his desk—a reminder of Schopenhauer's famous dilemma. (AI-generated image.)
Freud kept a model porcupine on his desk—a reminder of Schopenhauer’s famous dilemma. (AI-generated image.)

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Schopenhauer compared humans to hedgehogs who huddle for warmth, but in so doing prick one another with their quills.

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

In 1797, the nine-year-old Arthur was sent from Hamburg to Le Havre 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. As a grown man, 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.

The Brothers’ Final Meeting

A lifetime later, in 1845, Jean Anthime travelled to Frankfurt and met his ‘German brother’ for the last time.

In Frankfurt, Schopenhauer 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 Englischer 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 [Il passe pour fou et il doit l’être en effet].’

The Hedgehog Dilemma (or Porcupine 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.’

Schopenhauer 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 primeval 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 enjoy 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 passage 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 Schopenhauer’s analogy that, for the rest of his life, he kept a model porcupine on his desk.

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Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

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Schopenhauer on the Benefits of Skipping School

Schopenhauer at the age of 14
Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 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 then 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 associate, 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, learnt 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 the condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Picking Up English

Thus, in 1803, Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, 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.

Indeed, Schopenhauer is 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.

Three Hangings and a 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 Misérables. ‘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 Siddhartha (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 Schopenhauer 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. Ironically, had his father never taken him out of school, he may never have become Schopenhauer. 

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, he 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.

Can Reading Make You Stupid?

Schopenhauer cannot have believed that all reading makes us stupid, or he would not have written so many books. The problem is not reading as such, but what kind of reading, and when or in what order. The point, as he himself says, is to use books as rungs and climb beyond them, rather than gather a burden of rungs and carry them around like a donkey.

Much formal education consists in feeding us detached facts in the hope that some may stick and perhaps even inspire us to follow the subject. But true learning often proceeds in the opposite direction. We learn far more readily when we start from a place of meaning and emotion. Then, rather than being weighed down by the information, we thoroughly assimilate it, actively seeking out the answers to the further questions that it raises and moving, as it were, onto the next rung of the ladder.

Consider philosophy. Many people read Sartre at school or university. They hear that ‘existence precedes essence’, write an essay on existentialism, pass an examination, and then carry on living as if they were none the wiser. But pick up Sartre because you feel trapped and are questioning your life choices, and suddenly Existentialism Is a Humanism becomes electrifying. For Schopenhauer, Newgate and Toulon were not abstract answers to somebody else’s questions, but vivid experiences that set him—as the Four Sights did the Buddha—onto the path to enlightenment.

The problem, then, is not reading per se, but reading without intellectual appetite. When we are hungry for knowledge, we will make sure not to read the unedifying books that merely confirm or comfort us without being able to lift us onto the next rung of the ladder.

The best education makes us hungry before it feeds us, or trusts us to feed ourselves.

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You Will Laugh and Cry

Schopenhauer portrait
Arthur Schopenhauer in 1852, possibly the earliest philosopher to be photographed.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could all count as optimists, believing that human life could improve, Schopenhauer is the first—and perhaps the last—thinker in the Western tradition to have constructed a complete and systematic philosophy of pessimism.

Despite, or because of, this, he may also have been its funniest philosopher.

He is interesting for other reasons too—some of which are close to my heart. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as ‘the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought’.

Magee continued: ‘He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and had more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.

Schopenhauer’s Epigrams

To give you a flavour, here are a few of Schopenhauer’s many epigrams:

  • Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
  • Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
  • The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain… If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
  • What everyone most aims at in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them inferior to himself.
  • Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
  • It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Probably, you chuckled while reading these aphorisms. But why did you chuckle?

Why You Laughed

Schopenhauer had his own theory of laughter, which is a version of the incongruence theory, according to which laughter arises from a contradiction between a concept (what people think is happening) and the reality (what is in fact happening)—highlighting a failure of reason over perception. Thus, when people laugh at us (rather than along with us) they are filling the gap between our idea of ourself, or people’s general idea of us, and the sad reality.

Many people who read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms laugh only half-heartedly because they feel threatened by them. But the few who laugh full-throatedly feel liberated by their insight. In this moment of pure perception, while they laugh, they escape, if only for a few seconds, from the tyranny of the Will—the blind, irrational force that, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, underlies all reality, and drives us to exist and strive and suffer without purpose.

Schopenhauer’s Theory of Weeping

Schopenhauer also had a theory of weeping.

Weeping, which is a physical expression of mental misery, is a form of self-compassion. As such, it requires an outside perspective on the self, which is why animals don’t cry, and children don’t cry if no one is watching. Schopenhauer cites the example of a person who did not think to weep over their misery until their case was summarised to them in court and they were brought to reflect upon their suffering—when they suddenly broke into a stream of tears.

When we weep, we become ‘both the sufferer and the compassionate onlooker’. Because weeping originates from self-compassion, it suggests to others that the crier is capable of compassion, and thus worthy of compassion.

Psychopaths don’t cry, or only crocodile tears.

Why Schopenhauer Matters

To me, Schopenhauer is important because he is the first philosopher since antiquity to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of living and suffering.

As well as a great philosopher, Schopenhauer was a fine psychologist, so that we often find ourselves laughing along with him. But almost as often, we find ourselves laughing at him, owing, I think, to the incongruence between his lofty philosophy of temperance and compassion and his own bad-boy ways.

Had Schopenhauer met himself, he would have laughed.

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