#2 - Taking Nietzsche Seriously

On hyperbole and bipolarity in Nietzsche's style

“To be able to look out from the optic of sickness towards healthier concepts and values, and again the other way around, to look down from the fullness and self-assurance of the rich life into the secret work of decadence—that was my longest training, my genuine experience…I have a hand for switching perspectives: the first reason why a ‘revaluation of values’ is even possible, perhaps for me alone.”

-Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

In a letter to Franz Overbeck dated Christmas, 1888, Nietzsche shared a strange feature of his final days of lucidity: “Here in Turin I exercise the most complete fascination on people…If I enter a large shop every face changes; the women in the street look at me—my old market ladies search out the sweetest grapes for me and reduce the price.” Nothing in Nietzsche’s life any longer happens by coincidence, leading him to suspect he might have telepathic powers: “There are no accidents anymore: when I think of someone a letter appears promptly through the door.” Less than two weeks later he would collapse in the street, throwing his arms around an exhausted and abused horse. Or so the story goes.

How do these fantastic, enchanted experiences shape Nietzsche’s writings in the fall and winter of 1888? Nietzsche’s final year of sanity also proved his most productive, resulting in five books (The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche contra Wagner). No doubt this was due in part to his astonishing good health in the second half of that year, “halcyon days” free from his usual migraines, near-total blindness, and indigestion.

But along with health came, it seems, an extended period of manic euphoria. He finished The Antichrist on a date which, the book’s conclusion tells us, is “the Day of Salvation…the first day of the year one (--30 September 1888, according to the false calculation of time.” He completed the draft of Ecce Homo, his autobiography, on November 4, then wrote an abortive apology to Malwida von Meysenbug the day after explaining that “as I suffer from a superabundance of righteousness this fall, it is a real blessing to me, to do wrong.” It is difficult to discern where grandiose hyperbole ends, and psychosis begins.

No doubt it is psychosis when, in January 1889, he writes to Cosima Wagner that “[i]t is but a mere prejudice that I am a human being…Among the Hindus I was Buddha, in Greece Dionysus…what is unpleasant and offends my modesty is that in fact I am every Name in history.” But how are we to distinguish these ravings from the extreme hyperbole of Ecce Homo? Nietzsche informs the reader of his autobiography that he is “a destiny” and “dynamite,” that he will come to be associated with “a crisis such as the earth has never seen,” that he has “a real fear that someday people will consider me holy,” and that his task is “preparing for humanity’s moment of highest self-examination.” Are these declarations, usually considered an important part of Nietzsche’s oeuvre, any less mad?

Ecce Homo constitutes nothing less than a step-by-step guide for interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophy written by the man himself. Few philosophers left as many explicit instructions on how to read his work, whether regarding the importance of the aphoristic style (Genealogy of Morals, Preface, §8) or even the pace at which we should read (Dawn, Preface, §5). In fact, it seems Nietzsche’s entire purpose in reissuing his publications with new prefaces in 1886 was, as in Ecce Homo, to ensure that his readers “not mistake [him] for anybody else!”, that they understand not just the work but the author who wrote it. Despite this, Ecce Homo turns out to be just as mysterious as the books (“such good books”) about which it instructs us, precisely because it is impossible to take seriously.

In Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas contends that Nietzsche’s writing is “irreducibly hyperbolic,” and that the focus on his use of aphorisms “has enabled us to avoid having to come to terms with hyperbole in its own right” as an integral element of his style. The point of his hyperbole, according to Nehamas, is to “call attention to his writing and engage his readers in a personal argument.” The extremity to which Nietzsche takes his “self-aggrandizing, aristocratic, esoteric manner” impresses his distinctive personality upon the reader in a way that contrasts with the ironically self-effacing Socrates.

But it is not just hyperbole, it seems, when Nietzsche writes to Jacob Burckhardt, on January 6, 1889, that he’d “much rather have been a Basel professor than God; but [he] didn’t dare be selfish enough to forgo the creation of the world”? Nehamas’s emphasis on hyperbole forecloses the possibility that similar declarations in Ecce Homo are not simple exaggerations but belong to Nietzsche’s madness. If the defining characteristic of hyperbole that we can’t take it seriously, then treating Ecce Homo as hyperbolic unfairly resolves the rich ambiguity of Nietzsche’s mania, a limit-experience suspended between seriousness and humor.

The question of what it means to be serious (Ernst) is, of course, itself a central problem in Nietzsche’s thought. The Gay Science associates seriousness with those “teachers of the purpose of existence” (GS, §1) who give weight to human life by burdening it with new justifications. One such teacher is the ascetic priest, who preaches renunciation of life in favor of an afterworldly heaven, and whose regime of moral values precipitates decadence and nihilism. According to the Genealogy of Morals, the ascetic priest is the “actual representative of seriousness.” “What is the meaning of all seriousness?” is the “even more fundamental question” raised by the ascetic priest: in service of what do we take existence seriously? (GM, §3.11).

At times Nietzsche himself seems to don the mask of the ascetic priest, signaling his own seriousness. As in §2 of Beyond Good and Evil, when he assures of his prediction that “in all seriousness: I see these [philosophers of the future] approaching” (emphasis added) or, more troublingly, emphasizing in §251 that he takes seriously the problem of “breeding…a new caste” of such philosophers to rule Europe. His seriousness in these moments of BGE clashes with the famous preface, in which the “grotesque seriousness” of dogmatic approaches to the truth whose “clumsy advances…are unsuitable ways of pressing their suit with a woman.” Here Nietzsche’s alleged hyperbole appears to join its opposite; only instead of the clever ironist, Nietzsche presents himself as the buffoon whose rhetoric deliberately stumbles into its own trap.

This dichotomy reflects a hallmark of Nietzsche’s psychology: his intense bipolarity of mood, which he frequently symbolizes using the spatial contrast between heights and depths. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche presents his “hand for switching perspectives” as the product of his “longest training” and “genuine experience” in sickness and health, through which he learned “[t]o be able to look out from the optic of sickness towards healthier concepts and values, and again the other way around.” There is always a temptation to resolve these contradictions in Nietzsche dialectically, in the play of opposition between hyperbole and irony. The extremity of Nietzsche’s moods suggests an alternative way of reading Nietzsche’s use of hyperbole: as a style therapeutic critique and self-examination that I will call psychotic seriousness.  

Nietzsche confronts his moods as a demonic excess within him: they threaten to overflow and so must be discharged in the passionate activity of writing. “The intensity of my feelings makes me shudder and laugh,” he wrote to his friend and amanuensis Peter Gast in August of 1881. Around the same time he has an “epiphany” and “discovers” the thought of eternal return “6,000 feet beyond people and time,” an experience that may have been a manic psychotic episode (Cybulska, 2023). Lou Salomé, among others, remarked on his “elated mood” and the solemn, almost hypnotic tone he adopted on the rare occasions when he spoke of his newly discovered secret. And many of Nietzsche’s works, including the individual books of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the writings of 1888, were written in brief bursts during hypomanic periods lasting one to two weeks.

As early as 1864, in the fragment “On Moods” written during his student days, Nietzsche experiences “the confusing amount of stuff, events and thoughts, which all demand to be written down.” At the antipode of his ecstatic moments, he describes entering a long period of “the blackest melancholy” in an 1876 letter to Wagner. In 1879 his poor health forced him to leave his professorship at Basel: “I hit the low point in my vitality, I kept on living, but without being able to see three steps ahead of me…This was my low point” (Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” §1). Despite this, he would insist in a letter to Gast from around the same time that no “traces of suffering and depression” are to be found in his most recent writing. In December of 1887, he would still record his terror at “[t]he vehemence of my inner vibrations…all through the past years.”

Those who experience cyclothymia, mania, or even psychosis are intimately familiar with the ways in which the vagaries of mood impact both everyday functioning and the content of one’s thoughts. Many who experience an episode of manic psychosis comparable to Nietzsche’s discovery of the eternal return face a major therapeutic challenge: manic states are often accompanied by intense euphoria and feelings of religious revelation that are difficult to shake even after an episode ends, but indulging them can also result in serious dysfunction. When much of psychiatric treatment depends upon pathologizing these experiences, thus depriving them of validity, it can be difficult for mad or neurodivergent people to grapple with the lasting impact these can states have on their identity and worldview. We are still left wondering: are the visions or nightmares you experience in psychosis real? Should we take them seriously?

I want to suggest that Nietzsche’s hyperbole can fruitfully be understood as a rhetorical strategy for managing just these sorts of experiences. On this reading, Nietzsche’s employs extreme hyperbole for a paradoxical purpose: as a subtle way of making it difficult to see that he might not be exaggerating. Here Nietzsche gives the self that erupts in psychosis free rein, with all of its prophetic or even Messianic convictions. The grandiose pronouncements that he is the first to ever discover the will to power or that his teachings break human history in two prompt the reader to tell themselves: “He can’t mean it seriously, since that would be mad.”

This rhetorical device has two functions. First, it tempts Nietzsche’s readers, with smug irony, to reassure themselves against the mad possibility before ever considering it (“of course Nietzsche is just being ironic”), a temptation made all the stronger by most commentators’ anxiety to distinguish between Nietzsche’s philosophy and his madness. Second, it offers Nietzsche an opportunity to vent his psychotic ambitions in the therapeutic context of the written page, where he can declare his most grandiose dreams while simultaneously presenting them his own piercing philosophical gaze as the follies of a buffoon.

Read as literary tropes, irony and hyperbole neutralize the mad possibility latent within Nietzsche’s thought, domesticating madness and reinscribing it within the economy of reason. If Nietzsche means something ironically or hyperbolically, then we don’t have to take it seriously. Read as Nietzsche’s therapeutic strategies of self-writing, however, they play a very different role. They allow Nietzsche to enact both ecstasy of his manic states and the ironic distance he cannot fail to adopt towards those same experiences when his mood swings back towards the depths. As a form of mad writing, Nietzsche’s style allows both the heights and the depths to speak with maximum intensity, transmitting a spark of communication between the two without sublating their difference in any kind of synthesis.

Nehamas’s focus on literary style obscures the way in which Nietzsche’s writing operates as a therapeutic process, integral to his attempt to become his own physician in a quest for “great health”. His psychotic seriousness represents a method for managing one’s madness artistically, giving manic visions their due while balancing their grandiosity with ironic distance and laughter.

If Nietzsche employs hyperbole, then, it is the “demonic hyperbole” that Glaucon, in Plato’s Republic, associates with the philosopher’s sun, described by Socrates as epekeina tes ousias (beyond being). The kind of hyperbole whose “fundamental derangement and excessiveness,” as Jacques Derrida puts it, “opens and founds the world as such by exceeding it” (“Cogito and the History of Madness”, Writing and Difference, p. 57). Nietzsche’s madness functions as his own overflowing will to power, and his literary project must be grasped as an effort to shape that chaos and transfigure it into a dancing star.