RONALD HAYMAN
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excessive healthiness,
extremely potent
senses." As for " us moderns"–
Nietzsche was probably thinking of himself-" Perhaps we are merely
not healthy enough to be in need of Plato's idealism. We are not afraid
of the senses because-. " The broken sentence is significant, and
nothing is more significant about it than its brokenness. Nietzsche held
that "Nothing at all about the philosopher is impersonal; above all his
morality provides decided and decisive evidence about
who he is-i.e.,
the relative positioning of the innermost drives in his nature." He also
suggested that poets-he mentions Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi,
Kleist, and Gogol but no . doubt he was, as always, thinking of
himself-revenge themselves in their works for an "inner pollution,
often taking flight from an all-too-persistent memory, often bogged
down and almost enamoured of the muck, until they become will-o'–
the-wisps around the swamp,
pretending
to be stars-people then call
them idealists." What was the inner pollution in Nietzsche?
We must not confuse the problem of whether the source of his
lifelong malaise was congenital with the problem of whether he
believed it to be congenital. At Pforta the school doctor noted that
"attention must be paid to the antecedents," and though there is no
suggestion in Nietzsche's early correspondence that he was thinking of
his ailments in terms of heredity, this does not prove that the idea never
crossed his mind. The first recorded reference to the possibility of an
inherited tendency to madness occurred in 1884 when h e spoke to a
young Austrian friend, Resa von Schirnhofer, about the visions he had
when he closed his eyes: "He saw a profusion of fantasti c flowers,
twining round each other and constantly growing, changing in shape
and colour with exotic opulence, one sprouting wildly out of anoth–
er ... Then suddenly, with his great, dark eyes fixed on me anxiously,
and with disturbing urgency in his soft voice, he asked: 'Don't you
believe this condition is a symptom of incipient madness? My father
died of a brain disease.''' And writing to Overbeck in July 1888, he
explained his "nervous exhaustion" as "partly acquired, partly
inherited-from my father who also died after apparently losing all his
stamina." Writing
Ecce Homo,
which he started three months later, he
seems to have been thinking of the disease as hereditary, but as more of
an advantage than a disability. "I regard it as a great privilege to have
had such a father: it even seems to me that this explains all my other
privileges, except for life, the great Yes to life." To enter into the world
of higher experiences, all he had to do was wait, and, once there, he felt
at home. "Almost paying with my life for this privilege was nut buying
it at too high a price."
One of his central problems, throughout his life, had been to cope
