DESCARTES, René (1596–1650) In his relatively few references to Descartes, Nietzsche is chiefly concerned to question the validity of Descartes’ dictum cogito, ergo sum, mainly by way of analysing the proposition ‘I think’. This has less to do with Descartes himself than with Nietzsche’s general polemic against ‘the foisting on of a “subject”’.
DOSTOYEVSKY, Fyodor (1821–81) ‘A few weeks ago I did not even know the name of Dostoyevsky…. A chance reach in a bookshop brought to my notice a work just translated into French, L’ esprit souterrain [Notes from Underground]… The instinct of kinship (or what shall I call it?) spoke immediately, my joy was extraordinary: I have to go back to my becoming acquainted with Stendhal’s Rouge et Noir to recall another such joy.’ (Letter of 23 February 1887.) By 7 March he had also read The House of the Dead and The Insulted and Injured, both likewise in French translation. Whether he read all or any of the four great novels is unknown: in view of his continued enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky his failure to mention any of them in his considerable correspondence of 1887 and 1888 suggests he did not, although one is almost compelled to conclude that the employment of the word ‘idiot’ to describe Jesus, as well as its rather frequent employment in the works in 1888 in general, derives from a knowledge of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot: certainly an awareness of what Dostoyevsky means by that term helps us to understand why Nietzsche should have used it. Since he was twenty-three years younger than Dostoyevsky and produced many of his books after Dostoyevsky was dead, it is important to note how late it was before he came to read him: what suggests Dostoyevsky in Nietzsche’s writings before 1887 is not the product of influence or borrowing but of a similarity in psychological acumen.
ELIOT, George (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–80) Nietzsche’s friend Helene Druscowicz was a great admirer of George Eliot, wrote about her and talked to Nietzsche about her. Fräulein Druscowicz could read English (she translated Swinburne into German), Nietzsche could not, or only very haltingly, and it seems likely he knew of George Eliot mainly from her: he clearly thought of Eliot mainly as an English free-thinker. The reference to her in Twilight is the only one in Nietzsche’s works.
EMERSON, Ralph Waldo (1803–82) Aphorism 92 of The Gay Science, on the relation between poetry and prose, names the only four ‘masters of prose’ of the nineteenth century (Goethe being considered a product of the eighteenth): Leoparth, Mérimée, Emerson and Landor. Whatever one may think of this judgement, and of its somewhat narrow conception of what constitutes good prose, it provides evidence of Nietzsche’s extreme admiration for Emerson. The original edition of The Gay Science (1882) is prefaced by a quotation from Emerson, and he admired Emerson longer and with greater consistency than he did any other contemporary writer: his holiday programme for 1862 included making extracts from all Emerson’s essays (no record of whether he actually did so) and his enthusiasm is just as great in 1888.
EPICURUS (341–270 BC) Greek philosopher, adopted the physics and the ethical teaching of Democritus and made of the latter the influential moral doctrine named after him. For Nietzsche, ‘the garden god’ Epicurus is a mood rather than a man: aphorism 295 of The Wanderer and his Shadow, in which Epicurus is called ‘one of the greatest human beings, the inventor of an heroic-idyllic mode of philosophizing’, is a description of this mood.
FONTENELLE, Bernard Le Bovier de (1657–1757) French writer. He appears here as a representative of the group of six – the others are Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Vauve-nargues and Chamfort – of whom Nietzsche says (The Wanderer and his Shadow 214) that one is closer to antiquity when reading them than with any similar group of any other nation: ‘Their books… contain more actual ideas than all the books of German philosophers put together.’
FRIEDRICH THE SECOND (1194–1250) King of Sicily from 1198, king of Germany from 1212, ‘emperor of the West’ from 1220; continually in conflict with the Papacy; although excommunicated he took part in the sixth crusade, when he negotiated with the Mohammedans instead of fighting them and gained the city of Jerusalem without bloodshed. His court in Sicily was possibly the most cultured spot in Europe, and Friedrich himself, although the ‘German Christian emperor’, was more of a Mohammedan than a Christian and more of an Italian than a German. The need to be continually on the defensive against the forces of the Pope produced a deterioration in his character in later years which ended in a species of persecution mania. Nietzsche’s admiration for him is unqualified and it is interesting to see why: ‘the first European according to my taste’ (Beyond Good and Evil 200) he calls him at the end of a discussion of the possibility that higher types of men are produced as a consequence of racial mixture: it is Friedrich’s cosmopolitan culture which Nietzsche admires, the ‘good European’. (In expressing his admiration for Friedrich the Second Nietzsche is probably also expressing his lack of admiration for the traditionally admired Friedrich the First, called Barbarossa.)
GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang (1749–1832) The modern man Nietzsche admired most and the one who provided him with a yardstick against which he measured the achievements of other men; a type of the Übermensch or ‘Dionysian man’. The description of Goethe in ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ 49 defines the Übermensch more succinctly than any other single passage in Nietzsche’s works.
GONCOURT, Edmond (1822–96) and Jules (1830–70) French writers of the naturalist school. ‘The second volume of the journal des Goncourts has appeared… in it are described in the most vivid way the celebrated diners chez Magny, those dinners which brought together every fortnight the wittiest and most sceptical company of Parisian spirits of the time (Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Taine, Renan, the Goncourts, Schérer, Gavarni, occasionally Turgenev, etc.). Exasperated pessimism, cynicism, nihilism, alternating with much boisterousness and good humour; I myself wouldn’t be at all out of place there – I know these gentlemen inside out, so well that I have really had enough of them already. One has to be more radical: fundamentally they all lack the main thing – “la force”.’ (Letter of 10 November 1887).
HARTMANN, Eduard von (1842–1906) German philosopher, author of Philosophy of the Unconscious. Often referred to by Nietzsche, always with contempt.
HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) Nietzsche’s relation to Hegel is complex and cannot be satisfactorily described in a note. Two things can be noted, however: (i) Nietzsche’s basic attitude towards Hegel was that his philosophy was the conceptual basis of modern ‘evolutionism’ and thus encouraged a habit of mind which ought to be deprecated; (ii) Nietzsche clearly did not study Hegel very profoundly and was in many ways closer to him than he suspected, although he acknowledged that ‘we Germans would be Hegelians even if Hegel had never existed, in as much as we instinctively accord a profounder significance and a greater value to becoming and evolution than we do to that which “is”….’ (The Gay Science 357.)
HEINE, Heinrich (1797–1856) German-Jewish poet and writer. ‘The highest conception of the lyric poet was given me by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of the millennia for an equally sweet arid passionate music. He possessed that divine malice without which I cannot conceive the perfect. – I estimate the value of human beings, of races, according to how necessarily they do not know how to understand the god apart from the satyr. – And how he handles German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the greatest artists of the German language…’ (Ecce Homo II 4.)
HERACLITUS (c. 500 BC) Greek philosopher. Because of his dynamic view of nature much admired by Nietzsche. In his pride and isolation, and the sibylline character of his utterances, he is the ultimate model for Zarathustra.
HORACE (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BC) Often quoted by Nietzsche, although sometimes the quotations are only familiar tags, e.g. aereperennius.
HUGO, Victor (1802–85) ‘Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner – they signify one and the same thing: that in declining cultures, that wherever the decision comes to rest with the masses, genuinenes
s becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, an encumbrance. Only the actor still arouses great enthusiasm.’ (The Wagner Case II.)
KANT, Emmanuel (1724–1804) There are scores of references to Kant in Nietzsche’s works, and the greater part of them are hostile. What Nietzsche held against Kant can, however, be stated in a single sentence: that Kant believed in and sought to demonstrate the existence of a ‘moral world-order’.
LEIBNIZ, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) Nietzsche credits Leibniz with and praises him for the discovery that ‘what we call consciousness constitutes only a condition of our spiritual and psychical world (perhaps a morbid condition) and is very far from constituting this world itself’ (The Gay Science 357): the connexion with Nietzsche’s speculations will be clear. Otherwise he has little interest in Leibniz.
LISZT, Franz (1811–86), ‘who excels all other musicians in the nobility of his orchestral tone’ (Ecce Homo II 7) – but because he was Wagner’s father-in-law Nietzsche cannot resist making jokes about him. Liszt was, of course, very much an ‘actor’ in Nietzsche’s sense of the word.
LOBECK, Christian August (1781–1860) German philologist and antiquary; a specialist in the history of the Greek language. He wrote many scholarly works.
LUTHER, Martin (1483–1546) The long polemic in The Anti-Christ against ‘faith’ as the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian expresses what lies behind Nietzsche’s long-standing enmity towards Luther: emphasis on ‘faith’ is merely a confession of incapacity for ‘works’. Nietzsche also continually emphasizes Luther’s coarseness and his enmity towards reason.
MACHIAVELLI, Niccolò (1469–1527) Admired by Nietzsche for his ‘realism’; but Nietzsche refers to him very infrequently and there seems no good reason for linking their names as is sometimes done.
MALTHUS, Thomas Robert (1766–1834) ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio… the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.’ (Essay on the Principle of Population [1798].)
MICHELET, Jules (1798–1874) Historian of France and of the Revolution. Nietzsche links him with Schiller and Carlyle as an idealizing historian. (Will to Power 343.)
MILL, John Stuart (1806–74) Very few references to Mill in Nietzsche’s works, but many hostile ones to ‘utilitarianism’, which was especially Mill’s ethical theory.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (1769–1821) Not, despite occasional suggestions to the contrary, a type of the Übermensch, but a ‘synthesis of Unmensch [monster] and Übermensch’ (Genealogy of Morals I 16) – that is to say, a ‘problem’. Nietzsche worries this problem of Napoleon from the beginning of his life till the end, but arrives at no definite conclusion. Many of his statements about Napoleon are neutral as regards ‘admiration’ or ‘dislike’: they seek to describe. He shows no interest in his military campaigns and his assessment of him does not involve consideration of his generalship.
PASCAL, Blaise (1623–62) French mathematician and philosopher. At the age of sixteen he wrote a treatise on conic sections and at eighteen invented a computer; later he invented, among other things, the calculus of probability and the hydraulic press. On the night of 23 November 1654 he suffered a mystical ‘conversion’ to religious belief and from then on frequented Port-Royal and devoted himself largely to religious controversy and to introspective philosophizing and meditation (his celebrated Pensées). Nietzsche mentions Pascal dozens of times, and always with reference to this religious conversion and its consequences: he is ‘the most instructive of all sacrifices to Christianity’. (Ecce Homo II 3.)
PETRONIUS, Caius (suicide AD 65) Author of the Satyricon, a satire in prose and verse on the social life of first century Rome.
PLATO (428–347 BC) ‘Plato against Homer: that is the whole, the genuine antagonism’ (Genealogy of Morals III 25): the former as a slanderer of life, the latter as its glorifier. Nietzsche’s attitude becomes comprehensible in the light of his own ‘materialism’, for in that light Plato becomes a falsifier of reality. Nietzsche considered Plato’s theory of suprasensible forms, his ethical preoccupation and his other-worldly tendency in general as harmful to a healthy appreciation of the present world and as specific errors springing from a false relationship with the actual world: Plato is one of those who need to ‘lie themselves out of reality’.
RENAN, Ernest (1823–92) French rationalist writer: the type of free-thinker who has not really freed himself from religion.
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques (1712–78) In his essay Schopenhauer as an Educator (the third of the Untimely Meditations, 1874), Nietzsche offers a comparison between Rousseau and Goethe, the former representing the revolutionary man and the latter the contemplative, and in ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ 48 and 49 he contrasts them again. Goethe is now, of course, much more than the contemplative man: he is, in fact, the superman, the embodiment of sublimated will to power; and Rousseau too has undergone a change, this time for the worse: from the revolutionary he has declined to the rabble, and is in fact the representative of unsublimated will to power. Nietzsche’s long polemic against Rousseau – there are dozens of references to him – can best be understood in the light of this symbolism: Rousseau’s ‘back to nature’ means back to the animals, back to passion uncontrolled.
SAINT-SIMON, Claude-Henri, Comte de (1760–1825) Inventor of an economic theory involving common ownership of property and distribution of goods: the Saint-Simonians acquired rather quickly some of the characteristics of religious fanaticism.
SAINTE-BEUVE, Charles-Augustin (1804–69) Very influential literary critic and historian. Nietzsche criticizes, here and elsewhere, his celebrated ‘objectivity’.
SALLUST (86–c.35 BC) Latin historian; chronicled the Catiline conspiracy. He modelled his style on that of Thucydides.
SAND, George (Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, 1804–76) Novelist and writer. ‘It betrays corruption of the instincts – quite apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste – when a woman appeals precisely to Madame Roland or Madame de Staël or Monsieur George Sand as if something in favour of “woman as such” were thereby demonstrated. Among men the above-named are the three comic women as such – nothing more! – and precisely the best involuntary counter-arguments against emancipation and female autocracy.’ (Beyond Good and Evil 233.)
SCHILLER, Friedrich (1759–1805) As a youth Nietzsche was a Schiller enthusiast; he lost his enthusiasm as he grew older. From that he concluded that Schiller was essentially something for young people (this opinion is expressed several times in his works). Ultimately he considered Schiller superficial and Romantic.
SCHOPENHAUER, Arthur (1788–1860) His World as Will and Idea (1818) was a major influence on the young Nietzsche, who for many years considered himself a ‘Schopenhaueran’: but Schopenhauer’s pessimism, his duality of will and intellect, his metaphysical preoccupation and his hostility towards the emotions, particularly sexuality, were none of them finally acceptable and Nietzsche’s mature philosophy is not indebted to Schopenhauer in any way. His youthful discipleship is, however, the reason for the frequency with which the older Nietzsche makes polemical points against Schopenhauer.
SOCRATES (470–399 BC) ‘Socrates… stands so close to me that I am almost always fighting with him’, Nietzsche confessed in the notes for an uncompleted essay of 1875 (Wissenschaft und Weisheit in Kampf) and the fight went on until the end. Socrates is the type of ‘the philosopher’ and in investigating the mind and heart of Socrates Nietzsche is investigating his own: with none of the figures he discusses is the tremendous inner dialectic of Nietzsche’s lifelong monologue so clearly displayed as it is in the passages dealing with Socrates (of which there are hundreds). The ‘problem’ of Socrates is the problem of reason, of the status of reason in the life of man: and Nietzsche finds that problem inexhaustible.
SPENCER, Herbert (1820–1903) Philosopher of evolution. Nietzsche never refers to him without disdain.
r /> SPINOZA, Baruch (1632–77) On five main points, Nietzsche says in a letter of 30 July 1881, he finds that he and Spinoza are in agreement: on denying free will, purpose, the moral world-order, the unegoistic and the existence of evil. But he deprecates ‘that hocus-pocus of mathematical form with which Spinoza encased his philosophy as if in brass’. (Beyond Good and Evil 5.)
STENDHAL (Henri Beyle, 1783–1842) Greatly admired by Nietzsche for his psychological insight and as an ‘honest atheist… Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He has robbed me of the best atheist joke, which precisely I could have made: “God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.”’ (Ecce Homo II 3.)
STRAUSS, David (1808–74) His Life of Jesus and The Old Faith and the New were very popular expositions of the rationalist approach to religion. The first of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations – David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer (1873) – was a violent attack on him.
THUCYDIDES (c. 460–c. 395 BC) Greek historian, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War.
TOLSTOY, Leo (1828–1910) Décadent because of his emphasis on ‘pity’. (Genealogy of Morals III 26, Will to Power 1020.) That ‘resist not evil’ is the key to the Gospel may have been suggested to Nietzsche by Tolstoy (see Tolstoy’s My Religion, chapter I), but the conclusions he draws from this have nothing to do with Tolstoy.
WAGNER, Richard (1813–83) As a youth Nietzsche was deeply under Wagner’s influence; around 1876 he broke away, but the figure of Wagner continued to haunt him and there is an unceasing dialogue between the two in Nietzsche’s works almost passim. In the mature Nietzsche, Wagner is the type of ‘the artist’. He plays a relatively minor role in Twilight because an entire book The Wagner Case, had just been devoted to him; but later in the year 1888 he comes to the forefront again in Nietzsche contra Wagner.