Poor Fritz!

Curtis Cate

Friedrich Nietzsche

Overlook, 2005. xxv + 689pp. $37.50

Let's see: his father died (from "softening of the brain") when he was four; his brother Joseph (barely two) six months later. He was plagued his entire life by migraine headaches, insomnia, horrific bouts of nausea, stomach ulcers, hemorrhoids, and stabbing pain in his eyes that often made it impossible to read or write so much as a line. Though he was gentle, charming, and well-mannered, he never found a mate or even had a girlfriend; and he suffered for years from bitter loneliness. His brilliant books attracted only a tiny circle of readers, largely depriving him of intelligent criticism or positive feedback. At the age of forty-four he went insane (likely due to syphilis acquired from a few atypical--for someone so chaste--visits to a brothel a generation earlier), and then spent the last eleven years of his life in increasingly immobile dementia. Almost all his laurels came too late. When he was no longer able to stop her, his dreadful sister Elisabeth helped to pervert his belatedly popular work into sacred texts of Nazism--and before that, in World War I, it was transmogrified into German-chauvinist scripture by the kind of flag-waving militarists he had fervently despised. It wasn't until fifty years after his death in 1900 that, thanks to the work of a German-Jewish scholar, Walter Kaufmann, the public (parts of it anyway) began to realize that this philo-Semitic opponent of Wilhelminian imperialism was nothing like the monstrous "Aryan" ideologue he had been mistaken for.

Still, even now, with his reputation rescued and his bust installed in the canonical pantheon, Nietzsche would likely regard Curtis Cate's new book, for all its good intentions, as one more indignity. This massive study, already hailed in England for its "formidable command of the philosophical issues of the day," has nothing new and not much useful to say about Nietzsche as a philosopher. It concentrates instead on his correspondence to recount the endless travails of his meteoric-doomed career. Many parts of it read like pages from the hospital records of a delicate, but very disturbed patient: N was repeatedly knocked prostrate by changes in the weather, by too-bright sunshine and thunderstorms, by the sirocco in southern Italy and freezing rain in Switzerland, by airless, low-ceilinged rooms and primitive railroad cars, by publishing snafus and lost luggage, by the estrus of composition and the wall of incomprehension it ran into. Relations with Richard Wagner, his failed "master," and Lou Salome, his failed "pupil," inflamed and infuriated him. And, as madness began to throttle his mind, he drifted off into the delirious auto-mythology of Ecce Homo ("I am not a man, I am dynamite," "Before me there was no psychology at all"), fantasizing about a splendid messianic apotheosis that never happened.

At any rate, Cate's mostly worm's eye view of Nietzsche's life works well, tracing the self-styled Dionysus-Zarathustra-Crucified One's every step (he was a passionate hiker, preferring dark, shady pine forests), recording his every sigh ("During the past year I had 118 serious nervous-attack days. Lovely statistic!") and sarcastic quip (he did have a sense of humor). This was, after all, the matrix that produced the hurricane of aphorisms and mini-essays that blows through Nietzsche's books. Cate is a philosophic amateur, best known for his biographies of French writers and freelance journalism; but then so was Nietzsche, having been trained as a classical philologist before getting a spectacular promotion from not-yet-graduated-student at the University of Leipzig to professor of Greek and Latin in Basel at the tender age of twenty-four.

Cate offers old-fashioned "appreciations" of Nietzsche's better-known works, such as The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) while dispensing with serious discussion of problematic Nietzschean concepts like the Ubermensch or the eternal return. Unfortunately, this means that Cate can't do justice to the tantalizing question of just how much this vociferous "anti-theist" and "anti-Christ(ian)"--never a coolly consistent atheist--was haunted all his life by the death of God. Cate doesn't do justice to Nietzsche's epochal notion of the potentially infinite perspectives for viewing everything; and he abruptly dismisses as "untenable" Nietzsche's claim that humans can't be held morally responsible for their actions, because they aren't free to begin with, and in the seamless continuum of existence there are, strictly speaking, no atomistic acts at all, just as there are no separate "things" in the naively realistic sense. On the other hand, the amount of professional philosophical literature on Nietzsche is staggering; and readers in search of enlightenment on such issues can always consult critics like Arthur Danto, Walter Kaufmann, Alexander Nehemas, or Tracy Strong.

Cate occasionally makes minor mistakes (calling Prometheus "a mortal," misquoting Horace Walpole; maintaining for no reason that the Diogenes-like madman who announces God's death is "old," etc.) He sometimes gives Nietzsche an unwarranted free pass, e.g., by defending him against misogyny, while not admitting his untutored sexism ("Everything about woman is a puzzle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy") or by failing to acknowledge the embarrassing frequency of bombast and portentous poetic mutterings in Zarathustra. He takes time out to deliver a series of quaint, quasi-Nietzschean diatribes against psychiatrists, Dr. Spock, television, and the cult of Princess Diana. He is too fond of the verb "enthuse" and eccentric words like "eulogious" and "misobiotic."

But, no matter, he's also a competent, exhaustive narrator; and the story as he tells it is available nowhere else. Cate's Friedrich Nietzsche lets us see, as never before in English, the roots of Nietzsche's sweeping stylistic bravado (grounded in real courage and heroic endurance). It helps us better understand Nietzsche's dazzling, but often unbalanced (in more ways than one) riffs on metaphysics (as a completely meaningless dimension), religion (as the castrator and killer of life), and democracy (as the triumph of the rabble). We can only wonder what Nietzsche might have accomplished--or changed--if he hadn't been cut off in his prime, if he hadn't spent so much of his life above the tree-line on metaphorical mountain peaks, as opposed to the nurturing atmosphere of a normal community, and if he'd gotten modern medical care (his doctors were by and large quacks, prescribing bizarre diets and worse-than-useless drugs). Perhaps if he hadn't been such a homeless, stateless wanderer, he might have taken a more nuanced view of politics. Idle speculation, no doubt, but hard to avoid when scanning this dense, detailed, melancholy life of the exhilarating genius (God bless him), poor Fritz Nietzsche.