#4 - Nietzsche's Doppelgangers, Part 1

Socrates and sickness in Nietzsche's autobiography

“The happiness of my existence, perhaps its uniqueness, lies in its fatefulness; to give it in the form of a riddle: as my father I am already dead and as my mother I am still alive and growing old.”

-Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Socrates’s last words, as narrated in Plato’s Phaedo, are famously cryptic: “Crito, I owe a rooster to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it.”

If we believe Nietzsche, Socrates’s parting words amount to a confession: like “[t]he wisest men in every age” he has reached a decisive “conclusion about life: it’s no good.” Earlier in the dialogue, Socrates had taught Simmias that “preparing himself to live as nearly in a state of death as he could” was the true work of the philosopher, who should never fear death, but welcome it as the only way “we shall gain the wisdom which we desire” (Phaedo, 67a-e). Having imbibed the hemlock, Socrates now owes a sacrifice to Asclepius, god of medicine, expressing gratitude for this liberation from the mortal curse of the body. Socrates’s idea of philosophy as training for death therefore seems the clearest possible example of the life-denying nihilism that Nietzsche diagnoses in the history of Western metaphysics and culture: “To have to fight the instincts—that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness is equal to instinct” (TI, “The Problem of Socrates,” §11).

Our last entry broached “the problem of Socrates” for Nietzsche’s philosophy in the context of his account of classical tragedy. In this entry, we will deepen the opposition between Nietzsche and Socrates by examining its significance for Nietzsche’s description of his own life in Ecce Homo. For if Socrates constitutes a “problem” for Nietzsche, it is not simply as a threat to the tragic culture he prefers. It is because Nietzsche, despite his intentions, finds himself entangled with Socrates in an awkward way, one which threatens to undermine the coherence of his philosophical quest for “great health.” Socrates, we shall see, is Nietzsche’s doppelganger as much as his opponent, and the way he distinguishes himself and his style from that of the “great, secretive ironist” (BGE, §191) opens an illuminating window into the core problems of his thought.  

Nietzsche, it seems, would like to fashion himself as Socrates’s opposite—or as he often prefers, “antipode” (“It is so elegant, so distinguished, to have your own antipodes!” -BGE, §48). Yet he is also painfully aware of his own similarities to Socrates. In addition to matching Socrates stylistically in the liberal use of irony, Nietzsche shares his affinity for the cryptic, beginning Ecce Homo with a riddle about his inheritance:

“The happiness of my existence, perhaps its uniqueness, lies in its fatefulness; to give it in the form of a riddle: as my father I am already dead and as my mother I am still alive and growing. This double birth, from the highest and lowest rungs on the ladder of life, as it were, simultaneously decadent and beginning—this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from partisanship in relation to the overall problems of life, that is, perhaps, my distinction.” (EH, “Why I am So Wise,” §1)

When we start to unravel this riddle, we see that Ecce Homo negotiates this tension between health and sickness embodied in Nietzsche himself through a form of performative self-parody, one that brings him uncomfortably close to the Athenian gadfly. I want to suggest that Nietzsche’s need to distinguish himself from Socrates and the psychological and physiological type he represents is the governing anxiety of his autobiography. The stylistic work of Ecce Homo is not just to ensure that Nietzsche, when “born posthumously”, is not mistaken for a decadent like Socrates. The function of its parodic style is also, and even primarily, an effort on the part of the author to reassure himself against the disquieting possibility that he has been mistaking himself, and his destiny, all along.

In the preface to the book, Nietzsche presents Ecce Homo as a testimonial meant to ward off misunderstanding: “Under these circumstances it is a duty (albeit one that…the pride of my instincts rebel[s] against at a basic level) to say: Listen to me! I am the one who I am! Above all, do not mistake me for anyone else!” The decision to begin a book designed to ward off misunderstandings with a riddle suggests, at the very least, a bit of self-conscious levity. The irony is compounded by a passage in Twilight of the Idols, written only months before Ecce Homo, in which Nietzsche excoriates the “worthless idiot of a moralist” and “miserable fool” who in lecturing humanity on how the world should be “paints a picture of himself on the wall and says ‘ecce homo!’” (TI, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” §6). As is often the case, Nietzsche is implicitly presenting himself as this fool, deliberately blundering into his own rhetorical traps by appropriating Pilate’s notorious words about Christ. It is not a coincidence, then, that towards the conclusion of Ecce Homo he will express his “real fear that someday people will consider me holy,” clarifying that he is “publishing this book beforehand” for precisely this reason, and that rather than being viewed as a saint, he “would rather be a buffoon…Perhaps I am a buffoon…” (EH, “Why I am a Destiny,” §1, emphasis added at the end).

In Nietzsche’s description in Twilight of the Idols, buffoonery is one of Socrates’s defining features, one that attaches to his dialectical approach: “Everything about him is exaggerated, a buffo, a caricature” (TI, “The Problem of Socrates,” §4). What is specifically clownish and decadent about Socrates lies “not only in the admitted chaos and anarchy of his instincts, but in the hypertrophy of logic,” along with “those auditory hallucinations” that Socrates identified as his daimon—the extreme hyperreflexivity which, in the last entry, we compared to certain experiences of schizophrenia. “Socrates was the clown who made himself be taken seriously: what really happened here?” (TI, “The Problem of Socrates,” §5). “What really happened” with Socrates, on Nietzsche’s account, was the disruption of a more intuitive, practical attitude towards the world by a hypertrophied reasoning faculty, an “idiosyncrasy” which led Socrates to reject the pessimistic wisdom of tragedy and replace it with the optimistic “equation of reason = virtue = happiness: the most bizarre of equations, which is opposed to all the instincts of the earlier Greeks” (TI, “The Problem of Socrates,” §4).

If this Socratic formula became dominant, shifting “Greek taste suddenly…in favor of dialectics,” it was because the earlier, tragic solution to what we called the problem of intelligibility had broken down. Ancient Greek culture, in the period of decline following the Peloponnesian War, came to mirror the anarchic state of Socrates’ soul, necessitating “a permanent state of daylight against all dark desires” (TI, “The Problem of Socrates,” §10). The critical point, for Nietzsche, is that the Socratic faith in reason arises from an underlying psychological and physiological condition, a state of disordered and fragmented instincts that can only be unified when brought under the tyranny of an overgrown consciousness. At the extreme, rather than accompanying and guiding desires, the reasoning faculty detaches itself from instinct and metastasizes, ruminating endlessly in the empty play of dialectical oppositions.

Nietzsche is characteristically vicious in describing Socrates’ physiological condition. He was “plebeian”, “ugly” (“a sign of crossbreeding, of arrested development”), “repulsive”, and “a repository for all the vices and bad appetites” (TI, “The Problem of Socrates,” §3, 8). His diagnosis of Socrates, in other words, recalls those aristocratic tendencies of Nietzsche’s that the contemporary right is currently rushing to embrace, and which his more circumspect interpreters are careful to dissociate him. We will have a great deal more to say about what’s wrong with so-called right Nietzscheanism in future entries, but for now, I wish to stress how taking Nietzsche at his elitist word here means resolving the constitutive tension of his text in a definite direction, and thus also overlooking the ways in which Nietzsche’s style works to keep this tension open—the very same “magnificent tension of spirit in Europe” that, like a bow, must be drawn taut to “shoot at the furthest goals” (BGE, Preface).

What is decisive about Nietzsche’s analysis of Socrates is the way it embodies a form of physiological evaluation at the heart of Nietzsche’s thought. In most contexts, I will prefer the term “physiological” over “psychological,” both to echo the concept of the “bodymind” that has become current in recent neurodiversity literature and to avoid foreclosing artificially the problematic associations that come with Nietzsche’s writings on the body. On Nietzsche’s account, Socrates’ philosophy grows out of his physiology, representing an “involuntary and unself-conscious memoir” (BGE, §6) of an individual’s embodied needs, interests, and desires. Socrates’ chaotic physiology, in which a diverse multiplicity of contradictory drives roils in conflict and never coheres, is why he requires a philosophical faith in reason, the one drive within him powerful enough to dominate all the others and confer upon them some kind of unity. Socrates sustains the dominance of this drive, however, only through asceticism—a thoroughgoing denial of life and the world that allows him to restrain the chaos of his instincts. It is in this sense that Socrates is, in Nietzsche’s view, fated to be decadent.

It is precisely here that the aforementioned instability enters. For it is immediately obvious, from a biographical standpoint, that this physiological evaluation of Socrates might apply just as well to Nietzsche. There is some humor in watching reactionary buffoons like Bronze Age Pervert abuse Nietzsche’s thought to fashion themselves Übermenschen, as if they have forgotten that Nietzsche was sick. From his early youth, Nietzsche’s life was dominated by terrible physical and mental ailments—constant migraines, near-total blindness, unrelenting nausea and bouts of vomiting, and of course eventually psychosis. If Nietzsche is so concerned to diagnose Socrates’ as a decadent, it is because he detects the exact same tendencies in himself and recognizes both the threat they pose to his own search for health and a life-affirming philosophy as well as their unique, invaluable contribution to his life—this is the meaning of Nietzsche’s riddle.

Once we notice the ways in which Nietzsche’s style consistently works to sustain this fundamental ambivalence, it becomes clear that “BAPists” have, in effect, fallen for Nietzsche’s rhetorical prank. By confidently identifying as members of a fantasized aristoi, they reveal themselves as the exact opposite of the Übermenschen type that Nietzsche describes: those who, knowing themselves fragile and sick, are forced to transfigure their chaos within into a dancing star. “Everything about him is exaggerated, a buffo, a caricature?” Does this not also characterize Nietzsche? Still more: does Nietzsche not go deliberately out of his way to ensure that his style is, at every point, somehow hyperbolic, larger-than-life, even buffoonish (this was Nehamas’s argument). “Perhaps I am a buffoon…”

Resa von Schirnhofer, one of Nietzsche’s closest friends in his final decade of lucidity, describes him in her correspondence high on opium, distressed, leaning weakly against the door to his little room in Nice and inquiring anxiously of his ongoing struggles with illness: “Don’t you believe that this condition is a symptom of incipient madness? My father died of a brain disease” (see Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!). This brain disease, which Nietzsche worried he inherited from his father, refers to the first part of his riddle: the death of Ludwig Nietzsche on July 27, 1849, when young “Fritz” was only four years old. “My father died when he was thirty-six years old,” Nietzsche explains, beginning to unravel his riddle, “My life went downhill the same year as his: at the age of thirty-six I hit the low point in my vitality, I kept on living, but without being able to see three steps ahead of me” (EH, “Why I am so Wise,” §1). In this sickened state, Nietzsche became, in effect, Socratic: “I had a dialectician’s clarity par excellence and could think with cold-blooded lucidity about things that, in healthier conditions, I was not enough of a mountain climber, not refined, not cold enough for” (EH, “Why I am so Wise,” §1). Nietzsche’s experience of sickness, his becoming-Socratic, is precisely why he is “so wise”.

Nietzsche’s illness, to which he claims to owe much of his philosophy and his distinctive talent for switching perspectives between the heights and the depths, constitutes the problematic terrain upon which he enacts the performance that his writing contains. For immediately after recognizing this, Nietzsche must enact a different part of himself, the one anxious about what it means to have detected such a Socratic tendency within himself, given “the extent to which I see dialectics as a symptom of decadence…[in] the case of Socrates.” A number of buffoonish (and mostly false) caveats about the minutiae of Nietzsche’s health are hence required: “All pathological intellectual disturbances…have been completely alien to me to this day…My blood flows slowly. Nobody has ever detected a fever in me…Any sort of local degeneration simply cannot be proven,” and so forth. It is essential to Nietzsche’s self-understanding that he is “experienced in question of decadence”—without this experience, no revaluation of values would have been possible—but he must reassure himself that he remains “basically healthy” (EH, “Why I am so Wise,” §2).

Was Nietzsche basically healthy? Did his life truly embody the “great health” he sought—that exuberant, overflowing love of life powerful enough to incorporate even the tragic knowledge of the eternal return? Or is it instead fundamental to Nietzsche’s thought that he failed to become healthy, that he was ill and even mad, and that this was why he could only create a character—Zarathustra—capable of such affirmation? “But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point just one thing is proper, silence: otherwise I shall be misappropriating something that belongs to another, younger man, one ‘with more future’, one stronger than me—something to which Zarathustra alone is entitled, Zarathustra the Godless…” (GM, II, §25).

We have only examined the first half of Nietzsche’s riddle here: the side focused on his father and his own experience of decadence. In the next entry, we’ll continue with the theme of Nietzsche and his doppelgangers by unpacking the second half of the riddle, about his mother and sister, who he describes as his “diametric opposite” and “greatest weight” preventing him from achieving the affirmation he seeks.