Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism
homogeneous. Nietzsche’s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed
in this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its
snapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not
sure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged
his physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the
ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the
months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the
heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to
explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness
as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he
lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to
refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation.
Nietzsche’s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid
illustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations
of great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of
La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a
scale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible
that Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist
and moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great
tradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men’s ears,
and, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked
merely as explanatory of his psychology’s private and individual tone.
The Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations
on friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked
away in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his
remarks on self-development or war.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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