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PARTISAN REVIEW
was intensified by the compulsion to justify the urge that had made
him throw off the Wagnerian yoke-the urge towards independence.
Inevitably, he went
to
the extreme, favouring all deviation from the
norm, condemning all subservience to what he called "the morality of
mores." The man who renounces
(der Entsagende)
"aspires to a higher
world. He wants
to
fly further and higher than the men who affirm.
The madman's world has its Antipodes not in truth and certainty, but
in the generalities and the general restrictiveness of a faith." Not that
Nietzsche could afford
to
commit himself unequivocally to supporting
madness against conformism: in the same paragraph he warns us that
the greatest danger hanging over humanity is an "eruption of
madness-an
outbreak of arbitrariness in feeling, hearing, and seeing;
pleasure in mental indiscipline; joy in human unreason." But in the
crucial passage about the death of God he uses a madman as his
spokesman.
In
Human All Too Human
(1877-1878)
he claimed that an interest
in degeneracy and ambivalence is an essential prerequisite to self–
analysis: where there is no self-division there is nothing to analyse.
According to Freud, who maintained that Nietzsche had attained a
degree of introspection never achieved by anyone else, before or since,
there was an element of homosexual narcissism in his preoccupation
with his own ego, but I can find no basis for the rumour, which both
Jung and Freud helped to propagate, that he contracted syphilis in a
Genoese male brothel. (See
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society,
volumes one and two.) In
1883,
recuperating from the experi–
ence with Lou Salome, he envisaged the possibility of having a mental
breakdown; when he tried to show that ill health was a qualification
for making philosophical pronouncements, all his arguments applied
equally to incipient madness. It is in the final section of
The Geneal–
ogy
of Morals
(1887)
that he makes his most discursive attempt to
validate the authority of the sick philosopher. "Since the healthy
cannot be expected to take care of the sick, we need doctors and nurses
who are themselves sick. The healthy man can digest his misdeeds as he
does his meals, even if there are tough morsels to be chewed, but
sickliness is normal. Man is the sick animal, insecure, inconstant,
indeterminate. "
He had already suggested in
Beyond Good and Evi l
(1886)
that
consciousness was pathological and philosophy (like art) therapeutic.
But the therapist had to be sick. Spinoza's interest in the will to life
derived from his being a consumptive. All philosophical idealism has
been "something like a disease, " unless, as with Plato, it was a prudent
attempt to preserve equilibrium against the pressure of "a dangerously
