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Nietzsche’s prophetic warning to the modern world.

In 1882, Nietzsche entered into a love triangle with the beautiful Lou Salomé and their friend Paul Rée. On 5 November, in In 1882, Nietzsche entered into a love triangle with the beautiful Lou Salomé and their friend Paul Rée. On Nov. 5, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, nor 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.

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent out letters mentioning overdoses and suicide. On Christmas Day, he wrote 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.”

Fortunately, Nietzsche did discover the alchemical trick, and the result was his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 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 Thus Spoke Zarathustra the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is written as a stylised, biblical, and poetic narrative about a prophet, Zarathustra, who isolates himself in the mountains with his animals, a snake and an eagle. After ten years of solitude, he comes down to share his wisdom with humanity, in the form of speeches, parables, and aphorisms. When the masses laugh at him, he recruits an elite band of followers.

But he remains ambivalent about having followers: “You are my believers—but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to little.” He instructs his followers to leave him and become free thinkers: “I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only then… will I return to you.”

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 advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy. In so doing, Zarathustra introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes, including the Übermensch and Last Man.

The Übermensch

Zarathustra exhorts his followers to remain faithful to the earth. Instead of harbouring otherworldly hopes, they should embrace life as it is and take responsibility for creating their own values. The meaning of the earth is the Übermensch, a higher, self-overcoming type of human that is yet to exist.

Humanity is not an end, but a bridge between its animal past and its Übermensch future. Humanity is a “rope over an abyss”—”a dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still”—that most people fail to cross, falling instead into nihilism, that is, into despondency and mediocrity.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end in himself: what can be loved in man is that he is a going over and a going under.

Although the Übermensch is a future concept—not even Zarathustra is an Übermensch—in later works Nietzsche discusses certain “higher men” who approached the ideal, like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, Goethe, and Beethoven. The Übermensch rises above the conventional morality of the herd to become a law unto himself.

The Last Man

The antithesis of the Übermensch is the Last Man, a mediocre, apathetic, comfort-seeking creature who fears risk and struggle and chooses security over greatness. Without the drive to create or achieve, the Last Man focuses only on “little pleasures for the day and little pleasures for the night” while maintaining a strict regard for his health.

Have you noticed how, when people are overwhelmed, they start blinking? Nietzsche famously describes the Last Man as “blinking”—because his vision of humanity is so small.

Last Men, who are in the overwhelming majority, arrange things so that everyone is like them, so that no one rises, or even can rise, above the herd, so that no one can dare to dream or risk having an original thought. Any deviation from the norm is interpreted as a form of madness.

Zarathustra challenges the complacency of the herd: “Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Übermensch. He is this lightning, he is this madness.”

Wo ist der Blitz, der euch mit seiner Zunge lecke? Wo ist der Wahnsinn, der mit euch ausgeimpft werden müsste? Seht, ich lehre euch den Übermenschen: er ist dieser Blitz, er ist dieser Wahnsinn.

Ironically, the crowd does not heed the warning, but cheers and demands that Zarathustra make them into these Last Men.

Nietzsche’s Last Man marks the end of human evolution and ambition. It is a prophetic warning of what humanity could become if it settles for nothing higher than material wealth, risk-aversion, technological pacification, and a culture of feeling “safe and happy”—in one word, for mediocrity.

Nietzsche was writing in 1893. Since then, it has become ever more difficult to be free. Very soon, if not already, it will be impossible to become a person.

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

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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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The German Greeks was announced for end of June, because I didn’t want to rush it. But it was so inspiring to write that I finished earlier.

So I’m releasing the ebook early, on the quiet, at the special price of 2.99. When the paperback comes out at the end of June, the ebook will go up to the regular 9.99.

The work has already received a couple of editorial reviews, including from Prof Robert Wicks, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, who called it: ‘A fine, enjoyably readable and historically accurate book that informatively and excitingly portrays the lives of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.’

The lightning book cover (which I designed myself) is inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who preaches:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

For Schopenhauer, our character is inborn and immutable, and apparent, at every stage of life, in the face and, especially, the eyes, which are the ‘mirror of the mind’. For this reason, when someone surprises or disappoints us, we never say, ‘Oh, his character has changed’ but, ‘Oh, I must have been wrong about him.’

Under the changeable shell of his years, his relationships, even his store of knowledge and opinions, there hides, like a crab under its shell, the identical and real man, quite unchangeable and always the same.

Schopenhauer took this idea very seriously, and when sitting for painters, obsessed over the depiction of his eyes.

That’s why, now, his eyes are still so full of lightning.

You can order the ebook here in the US and here in the UK.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be very receptive to any comments and feedback.

PS. I appreciate that many will prefer to await the paperback or hardback.

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Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. – Nietzsche

Splitting is a very common ego defense mechanism; it can be defined as the division or polarization of beliefs, actions, objects, or persons into good and bad by focusing selectively on their positive or negative attributes. This is often seen in politics, for example, when members of the Labour Party portray members of the Conservative Party as narrow-minded and self-interested, and conversely when members of the Conservative Party caricature members of the Labour Party as self-righteous hypocrites. Other examples of splitting are the deeply religious person who thinks of others as being either blessed or damned, the child of divorced parents who idolises one parent and shuns the other, and the hospital in-patient who sees the doctors as helpful and dedicated and the nurses as lazy and incompetent. An example of splitting in literature can be found in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The main protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is mystified by adulthood. To help cope with his fear of becoming an adult, he thinks of adulthood as a world of entirely bad things such as superficiality and hypocrisy (‘phoniness’) and of childhood as a world of entirely good things such as innocence, curiosity, and honesty. He tells his younger sister Phoebe that he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play, and himself as the ‘catcher in the rye’ who stands on the edge of a cliff, catching the children as they threaten to fall over (and presumably die/become adults).

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

In contrast to JD Salinger, Miguel de Cervantes uses splitting to great comical effect as his main protagonist, the self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha, guides us through a world that he has repopulated with heroes and villains, princesses and harlots, giants and dwarves – with the heroes being the greatest, the villains the most cruel, the ladies the fairest and most virtuous, and so on. ‘Take care, your worship,’ cries Sancho Pancha, Don Quixote’s peasant-turned-squire, ‘those things over there are not giants but windmills.’ Splitting diffuses the anxiety that arises from our inability to grasp the nuances and complexities of a given situation or state of affairs by simplifying and schematising the situation and thereby making it easier to think about; it also reinforces our sense of self as good and virtuous by effectively demonizing all those who do not share in our opinions and values. On the other hand, such a compartmentalization of opposites leaves us with a distinctly distorted picture of reality and a restricted range of thoughts and emotions; it also affects our ability to attract and maintain relationships, not only because it is tedious and unbecoming, but also because it can easily flip, with friends and lovers being thought of as personified virtue at one time and then as personified vice at another (and back and forth). Splitting also arises in groups, when members of the in-group are seen to have mostly positive attributes, whereas members of out-groups are seen to have mostly negative attributes – a phenomenon that contributes to groupthink. Finally, it is worth noting that both fairy tales and the Church feature a number of sharp splits, for example, heroes and villains, good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, and saints and sinners; and that the greatest characters of literature, such as the Achilles or the Odysseus of Homer and the Anthony or the Cleopatra of Shakespeare, contain large measures of both good and bad, with the one being intimately related to the other.