RONALD HAYMAN
41
false, does the concept of sanity still have any meaning? The case of
Nietzsche raises a number of problems which could not be resolved by
study of the case history, even if all the medical facts were available.
And, as it is, the aetiology of the malaise and the madness are likely
to
remain problematic. Of the specialists in venereal disease that I have
consulted, the majority considers it probable that he did contract
syphilis in about 1865.
If
paresis
or
dementia paralytica
was to ensue,
as it often did, a time lag of twenty-three years would have been
unusually but not impossibly long, while gradual loss of brain tissue
would have brought the delusions of grandeur that insidiously but
progressively invaded Nietzsche's conversation, letters, and books in
the last few years before the breakdown. It is extremely unlikely that the
paralysis did not have syphilitic origins. Alfred Adler noticed that in
paretics unconscious instincts often rise freely
to
consciousness, not
being held back by their cultural ideals. This causes violent changes of
mood. As Freud said, paretics could go on achieving extraordinary
artistic results, as Maupassant did, until shortly before collapse. The
loosening process resulting from paresis "gave Nietzsche the capacity
for the quite extraordinary achievement of seeing through all layers
and recognising them at the very base (of everything).
In
that way he
placed his paretic disposition at the service of science."
(Minutes of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.)
In
August 1886, when he wrote a new preface for the second part of
Human All Too Human,
his mind was not yet seriously unbalanced,
though he implied that he had won the battle against his lifelong
malaise. "One should speak only when one cannot remain silent, and
only about what one has conquered ... The man who is suffering has
as yet no right to pessimism." Addressing himself
to
those who have the hardest time of it, you rare spirits, the most
jeopardised, most intellectual, bravest spirits, who must be the
conscience
of the modern soul, and as such must be possessed of its
consciousness,
concentrating all the disease, poison, and danger that
only modern times could have produced-you whose lot it is to be
more diseased than any individual if only because you are not mere
individuals
he was obviously describing what he felt himself
to
be. The book he
wrote in the summer of 1887,
The Genealogy of Morals,
is among his
two or three best. But by February 1888, he was liable, in his letters, to
launch into self-praise as extravagant as that in
Ecce Homo:
"It
is not
inconceivable that I am the foremost philosopher of the era, perhaps
