F. W. Nietzsche
I had long shared the general belief that this remarkable man died of general paralysis; but a brief study of the facts as they are set forth in Frau Foster-Nietzsche’s book,The Lonely Nietzsche, will convince any fair-minded person, as they did me, that such an hypothesis is untenable. As Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the makers of the modern mind it will be worth while to study his health a little, for the more we study it the more remarkable he becomes.
From youth onwards he was subject to dreadful headaches, often accompanied by vomiting and intense pain in the eyes. He had temporary strokes of paralysis, and sometimes lost the power of speech. Probably the disease from which he suffered was what we now call migraine or “sick headache.” This is a trouble that is almost confined to persons of active and intelligent mind, and the cause of it is quite unknown. Nietzsche, imagining that his headaches had something to do with his digestion, used to starve himself and lead the most ascetic life; but all to no purpose.Starvation rather tends to make the patient worse. As a rule this sickness tends to improve as the patient grows older; but in Nietzsche’s case advancing age brought no relief. Work was impossible, and he had to get leave of absence from his position as Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Basel in 1876. Later on he tried to resume work, but spent many years in wandering from one health resort to another in almost constant pain; indeed, he said that for him two hundred days out of every year were days of pain.
This migraine is a very terrible complaint which affects mostly the elect of the earth: those whose brains are far above the average. Women are more often affected by it than men; and in them it appears to become worse periodically and at the climacteric. Afterwards it generally leaves them. Clods do not suffer from migraine; the trouble appears to be one of the prices that very clever men have to pay for their brains. Sufferers from it are generally very prone to seasickness and to trainsickness, and once an attack is in full blast no treatment whatever but natural sleep seems to relieve it. The pain appears to be so terrible that the stomach is paralysed by the sheer violence of it, and such drugs as aspirin, phenacetin,and even opium pills are useless because they are at once vomited. Sometimes symptoms indistinguishable from those of migraine persist for many years in cases of chronic Bright’s disease; and there is reason to suspect that it may be accompanied by some sudden constriction of an artery in the brain. In the worst cases the pain also affects the eye; and occasionally there is confusion of speech or even positive aphasia. Possibly even a stroke of paralysis may occur, and there is the usual fear of insanity that seems to accompany all nervous troubles in highly neurotic men.
Late in the year 1888 the blow fell; and Nietzsche became definitely insane. Nietzsche’s sister has left us quite a good account of it which enables us to guess with a certain amount of probability the actual nature of his insanity; though we must always remember that he had been suffering from this terrible agony for years and had already had strokes that were probably due to a temporary constriction of a cerebral artery.
During the latter end of 1888 Nietzsche was even more than usually worried; sensitive old women, Wagnerians and all the little people were writing him abusive letters. Something had to go. Either angry people must leave him aloneor the delicate filament of Nietzsche’s mind must snap. It had already been strained past endurance by his headaches and pains in the eye and incessant self-denial. The first symptom seems to have been that his Italian landlady noticed that Professor Nietzsche had suddenly taken to imbibing gigantic draughts of water. Suddenly, while he was walking near his home, he fell down in the street and could not get up again; that is to say, probably one of his cerebral arteries had gone into a state of spasm. His landlord found him and helped him home, where he lay for two days on a sofa in a lethargic, probably semi-conscious, state; he would not say a word nor answer questions. When he awoke to the world again he was deranged. He talked loudly to himself and would not allow people into his room, for he said he was composing an oratorio. He had always been interested in music. He began to write wild letters to his friends and relatives, accusing them of all sorts of silly things, but, be it observed, of nothing indecent. Then he began to accuse himself of fancied extravagance. When he met Professor Oberbeck he ran towards him and embraced him, saying, “My dear fellow, I hope you’ve brought me money; I’ve been living so extravagantly!” Nietzsche extravagant; a manwho was a byword for asceticism and who did not even then realise the fame and fortune that was beginning to come to him! When they examined his papers they found 900 francs among them. They took him to Jena, where he was admitted to an asylum. Unhappily his friends had no specimen of his handwriting to assist the asylum doctors, and as it was before the days of the cerebro-spinal Wassermann test, it is not surprising that the poor doctors, driven to give the thing a name, hinted at general paralysis, though they seem to have eaten their words later.
The ordinary typical case of general paralysis is much as follows: An apparently perfectly sane and normal man suddenly goes out and orders a dozen motor-cars, or twenty-three cameras, or fifty arm-chairs, or a dozen sets of gymnastic apparatus or something equally silly; then he goes home to his wife very well pleased with himself and boasts how he has suddenly become the best cyclist in Europe or the most famous cricketer. No doubts for him, gladsome fellow! Probably he will also tell her that he is God. Or perhaps he will indecently assault some little girl before the very eye of some hitherto friendly policeman. Sometimes the disease will begin with purely neurasthenic and gloomy symptoms, so that evena clever doctor may be put off the scent for months or years. But when he is examined carefully it will generally be found that his hand is tremulous so that he cannot write intelligibly; his tongue trembles and perhaps wobbles in and out like a trombone; his speech is indistinct; the pupils of his eyes may be unequal or not circular. Later come the fits and increasing dementia that haunt him till his death.
The fact that Nietzsche suffered from doubts about money and showed no sign of obscenity seems to point to a totally different form of insanity. Faithful to the principle that no doctor ought to offer a diagnosis without having seen the patient, I hesitate to say definitely what was the matter with Nietzsche, especially as Dr. Oscar Levy of Hamburg is still alive and knows the Nietzsche case intimately; but I should not wonder if the poor overwrought man was suddenly seized by something akin to melancholia,[23]that last infirmity of sensitive minds. As clods do not suffer from migraine they comparatively rarely attain to the heights—or depths—of melancholia. Under the influence of nursing, rest and protection from the attacks of theworld, he partly recovered, but, as generally happens with melancholia in middle age, he seems to have become more emotional and partly demented before the chronic trouble that may have caused his headaches ultimately killed him. Throughout his insanity the difficulty in speaking pursued him. “I don’t speak prettily,” he would pathetically say; and after a tremor that may have been uræmic he passed away.
No philosopher has been more shockingly misrepresented to the British public; and now that the bitterness of the war is over it is quite time that we should make some effort to understand what he intended. The famous “superman” was not a big bullying Germanpicklehaube; it seems to have represented what a man might become if freed from conventional repression: if his instincts were perfect in every way. The “will to power” was not the arrogance that caused the war; as a matter of fact, no man ever attacked German militarism so fiercely as did Nietzsche. It really represented what the modern evolutionist means by survival value in all organisms. Possibly Nietzsche made a mistake in attributing prudery to the effects of Pauline Christianity; the very essence of prudery is now thought to lie in unconscious regrets of the old for their lost sexualpower. It seems to be a frustrated wish-fulfilment and is found among people who worship mumbo-jumbo, as well as among those who pretend to follow Jesus.
Nietzsche did well to point out, as Huxley pointed out years ago, that “all men arenotborn free and equal,” as optimists have averred. A little healthy pessimism would be very good for the world; it would teach it to be more careful about paying its debts and would prevent it from blundering into an ignorant war such as the last one.
But nobody who has ever seen the disgusting spectacle of a man dying of general paralysis, demented, helpless, lying bestial, an obscene body that has long survived its soul, deserted by every one but his mother and his old aunts, could ever look at the portrait of the dying Nietzsche, gazing so wistfully into the setting sun, and say that Nietzsche died of general paralysis. The Italians called him Il Santo, the Saint; so far did he seem to them above all moral frailty.
It was probably owing to his incessant pain that he could never settle down to systematise his philosophy, but had to write in epigrams.