RONALD HAYMAN
31
have less to lose than if he had felt comfortable inside his skin. Later
it would come to seem more as though he could not afford to re–
mam sane.
There was nothing sudden about his movement into madness. He
was only twenty-four when he wrote: "What frightens me is not the
fearful shape behind the chair but its voice; also not the words but the
terrifyingly inarticulated, inhuman tone of that shape. Yes, if only it
would speak in a human way."
In
1880, when he wrote
Dawn,
he made
the point that madness-or at least the semblance of it-had been the
sine qua non
of moral evolution. The men driven to reject tradition
and propose new norms had either had to feign madness or
to
cultivate
it. The recipe he offers for inducing it is like a distorting mirror focused
on his own life: inordinate fasting, continual sexual abstinence,
withdrawal into the wilderness, or climbing a mountain, or onto a
pillar, or "sitting on an ancient willow facing a lake." His sexual
abstinence was largely involuntary, but. his eccentric and inadequate
diet was determined partly by poverty, partly by masochistic self–
discipline. Physical comfort was of less importance to him than
ambition to be one of the great moral innovators. Insofar as he thought
about madness as a price he might have to pay, he does not seem to
have been scared of it. On one level he genuinely believed that his
incessant wanderings were in search of the climate in which he would
suffer least, but he was also, in his way, withdrawing into the wilder–
ness. When he decided to spend the winter of 1880 in Genoa, his sister
wrote to ask whether he would like one of his friends to join him. His
answer was: "I want to be my own doctor, and so I must be true to
myself in the deepest sense, and no longer listen to anyone else. I
cannot tell you how much good
solitude
is doing me."
That premise is at the opposite pole from Hegel's assumption that
to
take permanent refuge in an inner world is to miss the chance of
coming fully to life. "Once a man's social instincts are dislocated," he
wrote in his essay on the German constitution, "and he is obliged to
throw himself into interest peculiarly his own, his nature becomes so
deeply perverted that his energy is concentrated on refusing to con–
form." Both philosophers come close to equating sanity with confor–
mity and madness with isolation: the difference is that Nietzsche is
hostile
to
society and its norms. The argument in favour of solitary
eccentricity is developed in
The Gay Science,
which treats madness as if
it were the alternative to blind faith. Like the Romantics, Nietzsche
believed the most authentic experience to be the most individual, while
his prejudice against institutions which claimed canonical authority
