4: Love Never Faileth

Today we're going to talk about a time when Friedrich Nietzsche made a rather unusual purchase in the year 1885. That purchase was a headstone for his father, Carl Ludwig. The purchase of this headstone is unusual for many reasons, but importantly, understanding this headstone will take us into the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy and his life. In fact, w one might say that we find this headstone, this monument for Nietzsche's deceased father, right at the intersection of his philosophy and life.

Yeah. Before we begin in earnest, I'd like to give credit um to mister Charlie Heoneman, I believe that's pronounced. He's a professor in Utah And uh his essay entitled Nietzsche's Task First made me aware of the heads of the And I will quote from this essay throughout.

He has a lot of books there that are very high quality, including a book on Nietzsche, so check out his stuff. Um I'll I'll include a link to Huneman's blog in the description, among the other sources cited in the episode. I'm drawing on you know his particular essay because this headstone is Rarely the center of attention when people talk about Nietzsche. And in fact, the headstone is not brought up, I'd say, in most introductions to Nietzsche's life and philosophy.

If I recall correctly, it's not even mentioned at all in Kaufman's book on Nietzsche. Central to the significance of the headstone is something about Nietzsche that you must certainly have heard about. If you're familiar at all with Nietzsche, uh which is Nietzsche's somewhat mysterious illness.

Nietzsche was afflicted with migraines his entire life, and his writing career ended in eighteen eighty nine when he collapsed and became mentally debilitated, and eventually his condition deteriorated until he was in an almost catatonic state. There's an article by Leonard Sachs that's the first.

uh published in the Journal of Medical Biography, that when it was published it helped overturn some old mischaracterizations of Nietzsche's illness. Sachs compiled quite a few clues as to what this mysterious illness might be. So I'll be drawing on that source as well. But uh let's go back to the year 1885, the year Nietzsche purchased the headline.

eighteen eighty five was the year that Nietzsche finished the spoke Zarathustra. He wrote Zarathustra in four volumes from eighteen eighty three to eighteen eighty five. And while the first volume was already published, he was excited to release the rest and complete his great work. When Nietzsche writes about Thus Spoke Zarathustra elsewhere in his work and in his letters, he often writes of it as though it is his magnum opening.

And uh more importantly, a turning point in his work, which divides his earlier writings from what he considered his mature period of philosophy. As a main character, Zarathustra expounds many of the biggest and most famous ideas of Nietzsche, and Nietzsche felt he turned over a new leaf in his philosophical development. and reached a new chapter not just in w his work but also in his life. But Nietzsche had a problem.

his publisher had badly mishandled the first volume of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While the publisher had no problem churning out hundreds of thousands of anti Semitic tracts and Christian hymnals, they'd stalled in the printing of the spokes Arthustra, and had been negligent in selling the book, so that only the most insistent buyers had even been able to place orders.

Nietzsche wanted to be free from his publishers so that they didn't, you know, mishandle the rest of his great work, and so he sued them, and he won. Consequently, Nietzsche was released from his agreement with the publisher, and furthermore, he was awarded a settlement.

And with that money Nietzsche bought a new headstone for his father, Carl Ludwig, who had been the Lutheran pastor of the small town of Ruken where Nietzsche grew up. He had died thirty six years before when Nietzsche was only five. The headstone was inscribed with the phrase Dilibe Horit Numer Alf, which translates to Love never faileth, which is a quote from First Corinthians chapter thirteen.

This headstone was to be placed in the graveyard in the small town of Roken, which Nietzsche had not seen since his youth. In Charlie Hewdeman's essay he writes The purchase of the headstone raises a variety of interesting questions. First, and less than three years after this date, Nietzsche would be writing his Antichrist, one of the most important and caustic criticisms of Christianity ever written. But how can the tone of that work square with the pious devotion of the headstone?

Second, Nietzsche barely knew his father. He had a few memories, some fond and some no doubt of the painful agony and madness suffered by his father just before he died. Why should this need to memorialize him arise over three decades later? Moreover, the type of man his father was, a country pastor of a rural Lutheran church. Was a type he would regularly ridicule in various works with great severity Christian, pious, rural, German.

And finally, the stone was going to his childhood home, placed in a cemetery he never wished to see again. Nietzsche never had money to waste. Why then did he spend such a considerable sum on a distant monument to the father he hardly knew, a father with whom he seemed to have so many deep and irreconcilable differences?

Yeah, and that's that's why I'm quoting Charlie Huneman, because I couldn't have put it better myself. How could a famously anti-Christian philosopher, perhaps one of the most famous, m have memorialized his Christian pastor father in that way, in in such Christian terms. Um and if Nietzsche indeed never had money to waste, why spend it on something on the headstone? That you know it it it almost seems frivolous, um but but it's not. It seems as if it was of great importance to him.

So how could this be?

To answer this we must return to the very beginning, even before the beginning of Nietzsche's life. Nietzsche's father Carl Ludwig Nietzsche was born in eighteen thirteen. Now something very important to mention is that this is the same year that Richard Wagner was born, who later became a friend and patron of Friedrich Nietzsche.

So the idea that Nietzsche would later see a mentor or father Figner figure in Wagner is very well supported just by the idea that he was the exact same age as his own late father. And Karl Ludwig studied theology, and he worked as a tutor for the princesses at the Court of the Duke in Altenburg.

In eighteen forty two, at the order of the king, Frederick Wilhelm IV of Prussia, he assumed the pastorship of the village of Roken and he moved into the rectory, together with his mother and his two unmarried sisters. He met his wife, uh Francisca, who was Nietzsche's mother, through another pastor, whom she was the daughter of. Apparently Nietzsche's father impressed Francisca and her family with his piano improvisation.

And a year into their marriage their son was born, whom they named Friedrich Wilhelm, because Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on the birthday of the then current king of Prussia. Frederick Wilhelm IV, who was the benefactor of Pastor Carl Ludwig Nietzsche. In Nietzsche's youth memoirs which he wrote when he was fourteen, he described his father as the quote very picture of a country parson in

Carl Ludwig was apparently a cheerful man and well loved by the community. Nietzsche's mother and aunts and the other villagers all told the young Nietzsche that his father knew the meaning of Christian love. The Nietzsche family soon also had a daughter, Nietzsche's younger sister, Elizabeth, and then a second son, Carl Ludwig Joseph Nietzsche. But the family's happiness was not to last, in eighteen forty eight Karl Ludwig was incapacitated.

The attending doctor described his condition as liquefaction of the brain. He suffered severe agony and then died in eighteen forty nine. Less than a year later, the youngest Nietzsche sibling, the namesake of Carl Ludwig, little Carl Ludwig Joseph, who was less than two years old, had severe cramps and then also died. Friedrich Nietzsche recorded a dream in which his father rose from the dead, claimed his younger brother, and then returned with him to the grave.

Nietzsche was five when his father died, and only a year older than that when his little brother died. A few years later, when he was nine, he would have his first um migraine headache, which incapacitated him. And so looking at the available evidence, well certainly the illness befalling Nietzsche and the condition that killed his father and younger brother might all have been unrelated. That's possible.

uh researchers in the present day have suggested there may have been a connection through genetics. So we'll return to the evidence for this later. But we should first note that Nietzsche believed, at least on some level, that there may have been a connection You know, the dream of his father's ghost claiming his brother seems to symbolize this in some way that the fate of the son is tied to the father, just as little Karl Ludwig Joseph was claimed by the same curse that afflicted his brother.

his father, that curse may one day come for Nietzsche himself. And we should also contemplate what is the effect it would have on the young Nietzsche, whom I should mention

was considered a Vunderkind when it came to theology, mastering it at a young age, and who who knew even, you know, all the hymns as a young boy to a degree that greatly impressed his his family. What effect would it have To see this man who is considered the exemplar of Christian love, a virtuous man, your father, be tortured and broken completely needlessly by this horrendous, inexplicable illness.

Not to oversimplify things, but we could say that perhaps Nietzsche had a crash course in the problem of evil at the age of five. a r a horrific thing happening to a good person with seemingly no justification. And perhaps the realization dawned on him that there was a

indifference to nature or meaninglessness to to his father's death that didn't match with the Christian understanding of the world that he'd been taught. And so Now we've covered Nietzsche's very early life and how his his origin story, so to speak, involves this specter of this illness.

Nietzsche's affliction, which may have been related to his father's, caused him headaches, nausea, vomiting, and it followed him throughout his life. In Huneman's essay he notes that Nietzsche often wrote that any year could be his last. the Yung Nietzsche then attended the prestigious boarding school, Schulpforta, um

Which very interesting place. It has a number of famous alumni going back centuries. Um and it was there that Nietzsche first discovered the world of ancient Greek heroes, of Greek dramas and plays and tragedies, and of the Olympians and their mythos. The Greeks enchanted Nietzsche from a young age. Nietzsche eventually attended college at Leipzig. I'll do a another quote here from Hunemann's essay.

Quote By this time he regarded himself as practically freed from the religion of his father. By eighteen sixty one he had stopped attending church services with his family. He was now drawn to the world of Greek heroes and great philosophers. He studied classical languages and texts and Hegel. He was already reading translations of the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he was lit a fire by Schopenhauer.

He worked endlessly to hone his own writing style so that his writing would be like improvisation at the piano. as free as possible, yet still logical and beautiful. End quote. And that last statement there that as free as possible, yet still logical and beautiful, is a direct quote from Nietzsche's letters. A letter to Karl Gerzdorf.

And I just thought it was interesting that he his father won over his mother's heart and her family with his piano improvisations and how there's just this musicality. in the Nietzsche family, particularly a a talent for piano improvisation. It's an interesting similarity between him and his father. But when Nietzsche entered the academy um and began his university career He immediately im impressed his mentors with his brilliance. Particularly he impressed Otto Jan and Friedrich Wilhelm Richel.

Th they were somewhat legendary professors of philology, um and d between the two of them they were these two sort of um titanic voices that heads of the uh philology department. And eventually um actually there was a rift between them. And uh a lot of students stayed with Ottawa at Leipzig and then why n part of why Nietzsche ended up at a another university, if I recall correctly, is he followed Rish.

But in any case, uh philology at that time was part and parcel with the study of the classics, with Greek and Latin society and culture. Um, you know, more broadly, phil philology is the study of language, and the relationships of concepts in language, the relationship of language to culture, you could describe it that way. But philologists would therefore Study ancient texts to draw conclusions about their language and culture, and Nietzsche was first a philologist before he was a philosopher.

Nietzsche impressed Richel so much that he recommended Nietzsche for a professorship, which Nietzsche would eventually take at Basel without having to pass a final examination. This was also at the very young age of twenty-four. Richel described Nietzsche in the following words, in his letter of recommendation, to the faculty at Basel. And this is a very long quote, uh, but I think it helps to establish just how

brilliant Nietzsche was, and what a glowing impression he made on Richel, who was considered one of the foremost philologists of his day. Quote, However many young talents I have seen develop under my eyes for thirty nine years now, never yet have I known a young man or tried to help one along in my field as best I could, who was so mature as early and as young as this nature. His museum articles he wrote in the second and third year of his trinium.

He was the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all while he was still a student. If, God grant, he lives long enough, I prophesy that he will one day stand in the front rank of German philologists. He is now twenty four years old, strong, vigorous, healthy, courageous physically and morally, so constituted as to impress those of a similar nature. On top of that, he possesses the enviable gift of presenting ideas, talking freely, as calmly as he speaks skillfully and clearly.

He is the idol and without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig, who, and they are rather numerous, cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is, and at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant here.

Nietzsche is not at all a specifically political nature, he may have in general, on the whole, some sympathy for the growing greatness of Germany, but like myself, no special fondness for Prussianism. Yet he has vivid feeling for free civic and spiritual development, and thus certainly a heart for your Swiss institutions and way of living.

What more am I to say? His studies so far have been weighted towards the history of Greek literature, of course, including critical and exegetical treatment of the authors, with special emphasis it seems to me on the history of Greek philosophy. But I have not the least doubt that, if confronted by a practical demand, with his great gifts he will work in other fields with the best of success. He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do. End quote.

As is commonly known, Nietzsche did end up moving into fields other than philology, clearly. R Ristral was therefore correct about Nietzsche's many talents. But ironically, as is widely known, Nietzsche was.

originally scorned by the philological community upon his first public published work, which we'll get to in a moment, and in So it and also, you know, Nietzsche was not a very successful musician either either, even though um I personally like his musical compositions, but you know, uh he he didn't exactly set the world on fire in that regard.

In any case, in 1868 Nietzsche met uh Richard Wagner, and Hunemann writes about this meeting that the two hitted off. Uh he says, quote, Wagner seemed to Nietzsche to be exactly what Schopenhauer had defined as genius. Wagner presented a new world of possibilities, themes, and ideas that would never be reached by mole like scholars digging after the worms and bugs in ancient texts and tomes.

Nietzsche by this time wanted to be a cultural hero, not a mere scholar, and Wagner's world spoke to him of heroic possibility. End quote. Most of you have likely heard of Wagner. Um you know, most listeners are probably familiar with Ride of the Valkyries. Which is his most famous uh piece. But I would recommend all listeners who are not familiar with Wagner to go check out his ring cycle, which you can listen to all this for free on YouTube or where Spotify wherever you listen to music.

Uh one will find in listening to his music that many of the compositional tropes of modern film score music, and really actually the entire like history of film scores, owes a huge debt to Wagner. He's basically the founder of all that. that we associate with modern dramatic music.

music that's meant to be set to drama, you know, and film is the modern form of drama. The same way you feel when that, you know, that deep powerful boom that became associated with Hans Zimmer and modern film composers of that stripe. you know, the emotions that modern film scores well up in people. That's what Wagner did in the domain of opera in the eighteen hundreds.

As we said already, Nietzsche's father would have been the same age as Wagner, and he was afforded the opportunity to meet Wagner when he was at the university. And Wagner was at that time already a famous composer. Nietzsche was immediately smitten with him and with his wife Cosima. Nietzsche had his own um you know, he he appreciated Wagner from the aspect of his

compositions as only another composer can. He appreciated Wagner's cultural project of rejuvenating the German psyche. You know, uh this he'd imagine this rebirth of German art and culture. And the pagan elements of Wagner's operas reaching back into the vulcaries and Votan and these stories and characters that are at the root of the

of Indo European mythology. These seemed to Nietzsche to be the way forward for this rejuvenation because it offered something which was culturally significant but which predated Christianity. It was another path for Germany and for Europe.

an alternative path to Christianity. This is to oversimplify and surely we'll cover the complicated relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner in a future episode. But in any case Nietzsche had set out in The Birth of Tragedy to provide the philosophical support for Wagnerianism. This was a a period when Nietzsche was in love with the ancient Greeks, and he's focused on reaching into the past for a new foundation of society, and so this is sometimes called for this reason, his romantic period.

Nietzsche's book that exemplified this romanticism was The Birth of Tragedy, which Nietzsche published in eighteen seventy two, and in this book Nietzsche took a stand against the some of the prevailing ideas about the Greeks that were widely accepted in the Academy at that time. So for one, the idea that the Hellenistic Greeks were a cheerful, perhaps even naive people, Nietzsche believed on the contrary that the Greeks of antiquity were in some ways.

a quote unquote better or perhaps healthier society than the one of his own time. Or at least m like more advanced than they were given credit for. They had this complex deep culture and these deep ideas and our our own society was not simply as a token of having occurred later in history, naturally seen by Nietzsche as an improved

you know, per perhaps our society is a degeneration in respect to the Greeks, um, might have been his thinking. And so furthermore, the Greeks are not cheerful. Nietzsche believed that the refutation of this idea was the centrality of Greek Tragedy, in which the society depicted suffering, mortality, failure, death, betrayal,

and so on, and it represented these things on the stage, the centrality of Greek tragedy to Greek culture. Nietzsche argued in his later preface to the work that this was a neurosis of the healthy So Nietzsche rejected the idea that optimism was a healthy symptom for a culture to have. Rather Nietzsche says the Greeks represented through tragedy a pessimism of strength, which means the embrace and acceptance of a cruel world and a limited um

sometimes even tormented existence therein, and not just the acceptance of it, but the celebration of it and the apotheosis of it. The Greek gods live and suffer in this world, just as human beings do. Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, you know, that that's how the Olympians justify this world of suffering. Quote, they themselves live it.

Which is the only satisfying theodicy. End quote. So they referring to the gods. The gods themselves live this life. That's the only satisfying theodicy. Now a theodicy for those who don't know, it's a term in the in Christian apologetics specifically for an argument created to answer the problem of evil.

So again, if we consider that Nietzsche had a powerful brush with the problem of evil as a child, in the form of his father's senseless death, This can help elucidate why Nietzsche might have transitioned from his Christian upbringing to an identification with the ancient Greeks or like what he was looking for in in that he found in the Greek.

He finds their worldview, their exaltation of tragedy, to be a more acceptable answer to the problem of suffering than the Christian view, that the sufferers of the world will be rewarded so long as they remain faithful. They'll be rewarded in an afterlife. The Greeks, on the other hand, affirmed this life, with all of its suffering. Now we should note this work did not

you know, again it did not set the world of philology on fire. Famously several prominent figures like uh Vil Vil Viljamovitz, um I'm not sure how his name was pronounced. um attacked the work for its lack of citations and overall unorthodox approach to the field. And really this work has it has one foot in philology and the other in Romantic philosophy. Nietzsche as as much analyzing Greek drama as he is trying to make a point.

uh he's consciously using the work to make a point about man's search for meaning and the ways in which we have used art and religion to make sense of the human's condition uh human condition. And notably he says in birth of tragedy that only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life eternally justified. That's perhaps uh Kaufman says it's the most famous quote. I'm not sure if that's true. Um 'Cause I'd rarely hear it.

people bring up birth of tragedy first and they're talking about Nietzsche, but we have in this formulation of only an aesthetic only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life eternally justified. We have in this formulation what the shift was from a Christian worldview. to the pre Christian pagan Greek worldview, w what that represented to Nietzsche, rather than a religious or metaphysical justification for the world and its suffering.

which means a justification which appeals to some other world, some dominant reality, which is posited, a true world, a numenon. Nietzsche looks instead for an artistic justification to life. And he thinks he f found this in Greek tragedy. But the world of philology was not ready for this kind of analysis, and perhaps they were right to criticize Nietzsche for the book.

um especially because the last few chapters involve a not so thinly veiled uh celebration of Wagner. And in fact Wagner wrote a piece attacking Vilyamowitz for his essay criticizing Nietzsche's book. So that whole incident served more than anything to establish Nietzsche as a Wagnerian and as Wagner's philosophical disciple and representative, um, more than to actually serve as a

uh a co a a good defense for Nietzsche among the philological community. So Wagner um countering these attacks on Nietzsche, I don't I don't think helped him at all. Um, Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche's translator, he commented on this and Kaufman's assessment is that the the middle part of the book contains the most valuable insights, that the first third or so doesn't offer much that is substantial. And that the third and final part of the book is little more than unfortunate hero work.

Kaufmann writes For Wagner, who had many detractors, it was nice to have a brilliant young professor as an ally, and when the birth of tragedy appeared, he wrote Nietzsche I have never yet read anything more beautiful than your book. What he liked best was, of course, the worst part of the book, the lengthy part with its effusive appreciation of Wagner.

Nor did he have anything but praise for those stylistic qualities which Nietzsche himself later criticized in his preface to the edition of eighteen eighty one. But Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner would eventually become strained. Nietzsche followed up his effort with the Birth of Tragedy with a number of essays which were mostly cultural commentary.

These were called the untimely meditations, and in them Nietzsche shifted gears. He as far as his university career, he was still primarily teaching and lecturing about the Greeks, ancient Greek and Latin, about philology and so on. But his personal output shifted focus and he began to produce um work which was more experimental and and philosophical in nature.

Over the years Nietzsche had read a number of philosophers who had profoundly moved him, such as Schopenhauer. But um, you know, by the late 1870s, Nietzsche had read many of the French philosophers such as Voltaire, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld. His mind was beginning to open to new possibilities.

He began to question the project of looking for a a glorious pagan history prior to Christianity. He began to question the project of basing you know the values of a future society on the values of the distant past. And he began to become uncomfortable with what was becoming a personality cult growing up around Wagner.

in the town of Bayreuth, where an annual Wagnerian festival took place, and a Wagner Wagnerian newsletter was published, there was a growing movement surrounding Wagner. And Nietzsche He sort of disagreed on a temperamental or just character level, um, with the you know, the kind of people the backgrounds of the people who Wagner's movement attracted. They were the rural pious German Lutherans, um, you know, that um Nietzsche took so much issue with. And they were nationalistic.

Nietzsche worried that the Wagnerians would begin to influence Wagner, a concern which would seem to have come true. Wagner's operas began to reflect Christian themes, such as the themes of death and resurrection, particularly the opera Parsif. Nietzsche writes of various reasons which led to the schism between the two men, but there seems to have been three big points of disagreement.

First, Wagner capitulated to antisemitism. Antisemitism was very common among the German nationalists, and German nationalism was Wagner's second sin with Nietzsche. He said that he could not forgive Wagner that he had become Reichstoy. But finally Wagner, as Nietzsche wrote, eventually collapsed, helpless and broken before the Christian cross. He wrote that in the

second preface to humanal to human. This trifecta of three things that Nietzsche basically considered evidence of, you know, boorish, foolish herd thinking in Germany at that time. anti-Semitism, nationalism, and Christianity, Wagner had become consumed or identified by all three.

as a result of allowing himself to be consumed by the crowd of the German, you know, Volkish rabble that he'd fostered into a personality cult around himself. So this is the this is the rough summary of Nietzsche's disagreements with Wagner.

Meanwhile, Nietzsche's ideas had now shifted to become less of a project in finding a cultural hero. um you know, of cultural values and religious traditions as natural phenomena, and thus created from psychological origins, or due to natural conditions such as geography, climate, physiology, and so on.

This represented I think Nietzsche You know, coming out of Nietzsche's experimental period and his exposure to the French Enlightenment figures, it's like a first dive into relativism for Nietzsche. This is where he realized he had not only to overcome his own cultural assumptions, the Christianity of his upbringing, but even the cultural assumptions of the Greeks.

that all of these cultural structures of metaphysical grounding, all of these value systems, were relative to the time and place, and most importantly the needs of those creating them. This could not fit with Wagner's ideology, which was moving towards a more straightforward, simple, absolutist German ideology based on identity. Nietzsche had written an essay which was somewhat critical of Wagner, but the last straw was his next book.

Nietzsche published his second book, Human All To Human, which was the first Nietzschean work that took a deep and challenging look and demands metaphysical assumptions and moral judgments and so on. This symbolized the final break between himself and Wagner. He sent a copy to the Wagners, but Richard reportedly told his wife Cosima that he would be doing the young man Nietzsche a favor by not reading.

Meanwhile, Nietzsche had, in the first printing of the book, dedicated it to Voltaire, thus associating it with the French tradition. or at least proudly wearing that influence on his sleeve. And of course there was always the rivalry between the French and the Germans over everything, including culture and as Wagner was intent more and more going towards the the German nationalist sort of cultural orientation. Um that must have been a turnoff also.

In eighteen seventy nine Nietzsche then left the university due to his ill health. Uh as we discussed in episode two of the podcast, this represented A period of wandering for Nietzsche, where he looked for an ideal location for him to inhabit, where he would find the right conditions that would not exacerbate his headaches and other symptoms. But 1879 was also the year that Nietzsche had reached. the same age as his own father had been when he died.

He'd just broken from Wagner, his surrogate father figure, and now the intense feeling that any year could be his last was ever greater. Nietzsche's future looked very uncertain. Perhaps one of the best recorded examples of Nietzsche's feeling that he could be stricken by imminent doom at any time I found in one of the footnotes of Saxe's article on Nietzsche's illness. It records that in 1884 Nietzsche reported symptoms of what are called visual phosphenes to his friend Risa Scharnhoff.

This source the source for this is Nietzsche a critical life. Um Nietzsche told his friend that when he closed his eyes, quote, he saw a profusion of fantastic flowers, twining round each other and constantly growing, changing in shape and color with exotic opulence. With disturbing urgency in his soft voice he asked Don't you think this is a symptom of incipient madness? End quote.

So he was worried that he might have a sudden onset at any moment of madness, and his brain, you know, suddenly going haywine. And so with the repeated barrages of headaches and the fate of his father and younger brother, we can see why he might have had this intuition.

So we can also understand why Nietzsche might ha might have thought every year was precious, that every moment he had should be devoted towards some sort of valuable or worthwhile pursuit, some sort of work of great This is why he recorded you know the the year he spent at Bonn University in eighteen sixty five he wrote was a quote wasted year.

You know, he he he considered the whole th the whole year a waste. He was thinking of the years of his life as a precious resource that could evaporate at any time. So once he left teaching in eighteen seventy nine after publishing Human Ultra Human, His propensity for a consistently high output of writing and his incredible productivity as a philosopher, I think can also be attributed to the same basic attitude.

And aga you know, from the time when he published Human Ulti Human until his last productive year, he had an average output of a book a year. Until his last year when he wrote like five Nietzsche eventually settled on Silsmaria as his place of residence during the eighteen eighties, and that's where he'd write most of his major works, and that part of Nietzsche's life was largely covered in the second episode.

And um we have one more major life event to discuss before we come up to the point of the headstone. Uh did you forget about the headstone? Well we're almost there, but we have to we have to first discuss uh a woman named Lu Salome. And Huneman again offers a very succinct summary of their relationship. So I will once again defer to Charlie Huneman quote.

He, Nietzsche, dreamed of a class of friends who were able to free themselves from the trappings of conventional thought and bravely explore the uncharted potential of human resource and creativity. And in eighteen eighty two he believed himself to have found such friends. He and his friend Paul Ray met Lou Salome, a captivating woman who seems to have cast a spell over every man she met, and she met her share of greats, including Nietzsche, Freud, Tolstoy, and Rilke.

She was intelligent, creative, and daring, just the qualities Nietzsche thought his free spirits must possess. Together they plan to form their own small intellectual commune, combining forces to make actual a new human possibility of cultural creation. But the triangle self-destructed. Ray and Salome went off together to Berlin, and Nietzsche was left answering priggish and defamatory letters from his sister and mother. End quote.

Many commentators on Nietzsche's life have made a great deal of this event, you know, that Nietzsche fell in love with a woman whom he proposed to twice and who rejected him and ran off with one of his best friends. And I would say it's not insignificant, it certainly it was significant event to Nietzsche, but I think in light of everything else we've covered, What this incident represents is neat it's more like a final push.

rather than a prime mover, in my opinion. I think the incident represents Nietzsche's final push into some sort of self-imposed solitude that would last more or less until the end of his life. It was emotionally devastating to him, but we must consider it in light of the fact that he'd been pushed on this quest to do great things, publish great works and so on, by a fire that was kindled within him many years before.

by the awareness of his own mortality. And indeed, you know, the not only that he was mortal like other men, but that he might contain within him the seed of his own unmaking and untimely death just like his father. And the incident with Lou Salome and Paul Ray, you know, the what he saw as this abandonment by his two friends is it was the final push to devote himself wholeheartedly to his own great work, his magnum opus, without any more

you know, relationships or obligations to the university or his students or friends or to his religion. Um it was led him to embrace philosophy as a solitary practice, and the great work consumed him entirely, and the result was, thus spoke Zarathustra. So we said in the beginning this was a turning point in Nietzsche's life. This was his great work, in his view, this book.

was written in the style of the Bible and um has this character Zarathustra, who is Nietzsche's prophet, it's a very grand narrative, and uh he was now able to, after the lawsuit with his publisher, um publishes opus on his own terms.

he now had some money from the the settlement, and so To understand the headstone we must look now to not to historical evidence, because there is barely any, it's very scant, as to why Nietzsche d did this, but to Nietzsche's philosophy, in particularly The underlying emotional thrust of thus spoke Zarathustra and the power of the ideas contained therein.

And thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche puts forward the thought experiment of eternal recurrence of the same events. This idea means that Every event, every happening, every decision, every experience, every moment in one's life will repeat in exactly the same manner, in the same sequence, in the same way, over and over again for all eternity.

The point of this is not to consider whether this is the case. Nietzsche used this idea as a sort of intellectual test. It's a Thought experiment not because we're supposed to speculate on whether we think it is true, but because we should consider how we would feel if it was true. Would we think this was horrific if we discovered that we are doomed to repeat our lives endlessly? Or would you rejoice because your life has been so full and exciting and meaningful?

In short, Nietzsche believed that the formula for understanding whether someone was a great person was whether or not they could accept wholeheartedly their own life, to the point of wishing it to repeat forever. He says in thus spoke Zarathustra that all great joy wishes for eternity. He writes later in Echehomo that

Quote, my formula for greatness in a human being is amorfati, which that of course translates to the love of fate. He writes that such a person wishes for nothing to be different, not in the past, not in the present. This person wishes only for the fate that they actually possess, and they do not invest value into the fantasies of alternate versions of their life or potential better worlds that may exist after death.

And importantly, this is not simply the claim of a garden variety atheist that, you know, this temporary life of suffering is all there is. Um because that means one could live an unfulfilling and unhappy life, but simply console themselves with their inevitable death. And this was the pessimism of a figure like Schopenhauer, whom Nietzsche had been greatly influenced by. You know, Schopenhauer was one who argued that life was redeemed by the negation of the will to life.

the salvation of one's eventual um you know annihilation in a sense. And so Nietzsche believed that for this life, this world, this existence, have a the kind of of truly eternal value that we had once attributed to, for example, Christianity, then this life would have to be itself eternal. And so eternal recurrence. becomes a sort of challenge in one's mind to affirm the world by wishing for its eternality.

One knows that one is living the good life because all true joy wants eternity, and one naturally living a life of joy would wish for their life just as it is to repeat forever. This is related to, you know, the love of one's fate and the broad characterization I would give to this whole attitude towards life. This is what we might call saying yes to life. That's the idea of Nietzschean affirmation.

And we may notice that this is in some sense what Nietzsche was looking for his entire life, the justification of this world. the suffering of which Nietzsche himself felt, and the suffering of his father, the untimely death of his father and brother, and so on, but he rejected the Christian explanation. He first sought the answer in aesthetics and the ancient Greeks, but what he eventually reaches as what he himself considers to be the way beforewards.

um in the great, you know, reevaluation of all values is the affirmation of life that is expressed in the form it it is expressed in Zeth thus spoke Zarathostra. It's not romanticism or Christianity. Um it's an act of embracing life, which can in principle be undertaken in any cultural context, and the greatest expression of this attitude is the eternal recurrence of the same events as we've mentioned.

Uh I'll quote one last chunk of Huneman's essay. And the answer that Hehnemann therefore gives as to why Nietzsche spent what little money he was awarded on the headgestone for his father. Now after everything we've gone over and Nietzsche's ideas and how they developed. Yeah. We have barely a scrap of evidence for any immediate motive.

In one letter he mentions the headstone purchase to a friend, and remarks only that he did it to please his mother. But the event must have meant more to him than this. For thirty six years his father's death had cast a dark shadow over Nietzsche's life. and for at least twenty five years Nietzsche must have feared that he shared the fate of his father. Now he had come to terms with that fate, and had even learned to embrace it.

The headstone must have figured in a way as a monument to his own embrace of the eternal recurrence. It marked the fact that he would no longer live in fearful expectation of madness and death. The stone said, in effect, here is my father's death, which will also be my own, and I do not hide from it, but raise a monument to it. And the inscription Love never failth certainly reads like a marvel of Nietzschean double entendre.

Signifying both Karl Ludwig's belief in the unfailing love of Christ for humanity, and Frederick Wilhelm's belief in his own unfailing love for the world, his own great and terrible Dionysian yes. Again, it's a great essay, and there's a great deal more there to check out, so please go read it. But before we conclude, I'd like to touch on the nature of Nietzsche's illness. Um and get into the hard facts of that because again, this is the thing that eventually incapacitated and killed him.

Initially, Nietzsche's doctors believed that what he'd contracted was paritic syphilis, but Leonard Sachs's article on the subject definitively debunks this claim. Nietzsche had symptoms from the time when he was very young, long before he would have contracted symptoms. Furthermore, syphilis patients simply did not last as long as Nietzsche did. They usually died within a couple years, and Nietzsche had headaches and visual phosphenes for years and years.

A doctor reported that Nietzsche's journals during his delusional period didn't resemble anything like the product of a syphilic mind, and finally he could stick out his tongue without tremor, which is considered the Cinequinon of paritic syphilis. If you can do this, you don't have Sax believes that Nietzsche had a tumor behind his right eye. This would explain a great deal about the

uh Nietzsche's condition, uh you know, if under that scenario, as the tumor grew and grew, it would explain the headaches and the visual phosphenes. It would also explain why the pains and the visual impairment were only on one side of Nietzsche's head.

Uh this serves as another refutation of the syphilis hypothesis because Nietzsche would have had pains that were on both sides of the head, or behind both eyes, if that were his affliction, whereas a tumor behind the right eye would explain it perfectly. But there's another possibility, and recent medical scholarship published in a Dutch medical journal in twenty thirteen has suggested something called catacill.

Which stands for cerebral autosomal dominant atteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy. And so this is a medical condition which is heritable and which would therefore explain the deaths of Karl Ludwig and both his sons. And I'll quote from the abstract of this study. Quote During his last years a progressive cognitive decline evolved and ended in a profound dementia with stroke. He referred to Nietzsche. He died from pneumonia in nineteen hundred.

The family history includes a possible vascular related mental illness in the in his father who died from a stroke at thirty six. Cerebral autosomnal dominant eteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy catacyl accounts for all the signs and symptoms of Nietzsche's illness. The study adds new elements to the debate and controversy about Nietzsche's illness, end quote.

Catacill basically causes repeated strokes to occur in the individual, and it is heritable, as we've mentioned. And so while the brain tumor hypothesis would explain uh simply Nietzsche's illness, um you know, I should mention we do not know which explanation is correct. But it would explain also the fate of Nietzsche's father and younger brother if Nietzsche's condition was heritable and Catusil

um would fit the the the criteria in a lot of ways. And it is, according to the US National Library of Medicine, it can strike even in children, as would be the case with Nietzsche's younger brother possibly, or as in the case of Nietzsche and his father, not become serious until adulthood.

Again, we don't know, but personally I believe it was Catasil because it's consistent with all the symptoms, and furthermore, it would just be more poetic if Nietzsche intuited that his fate was directly tied to that of his father and that he was actually right. But you know, on a certain level, whether or not Nietzsche's fate was actually a heritable disease is one thing. Um but it's important in and of itself because to remember that Nietzsche himself thought

So even though it wasn't syphilis, could have been a tumor, was likely catacyl, we don't really know. It remains mysterious to this day. But Nietzsche in his journals makes it clear that this idea that his father's affliction was the thing that would kill him.

you know, i this untimely death. This l f this followed him his whole life. And so the idea of Nietzsche establishing a philosophy based on the acceptance of life And the embrace of life, the affirmation of this life and no other life, which one wishes not to be different in any way, in which one actually wishes to eternally repeat over and over again. This is even more extraordinary for Nietzsche to be writing this in comparison to someone else, like let's say Voltaire.

Someone who lived a life of relative luxury for his time. I'm not saying he had no you know, Voltaire had no hardships. I'm just saying when we consider what it must have been like to have been afflicted as Nietzsche was, and with this sword of Damocles hanging over his head at all times, the challenge that he posed for himself is practically Olympian in nature. And we can see how this task was for him.

Y you know, it was with him even in his early days. The seeds of this are contained within his admiration for Greek tragedy, the desire to affirm the pain of life and apotheosize it into something eternally significant. So, you know, remember the language he uses when he's trying to say as an aesthetic phenomenon life is eternally justified, as his wording in the birth of tragedy. So he's looking for an eternal justification for life.

Um, he goes from Christianity to aesthetics to, you know, his philosophical pursuits. And so the headstone, the monument to Nietzsche's father. Now it makes perfect sense to the The headstone for Karl Ludwig exemplifies Nietzsche's attitude towards life. never to wish that things could have gone differently, not to fool yourself about who you are,

Or, you know, who someone you loved really was, um, or, you know, the f who the family you come from is, not to scorn the beliefs and values from which you came. Every single event in the Nietzschean view is necessary. Every factor of one's origin is part of that person. That includes their mother and father, but it also includes their genetics, their cultural and religious upbringing, um, you know, their nation, their society, their friends, and so on.

uh and just random life experience. Um one can't change these things. Um or they they don't They don't occur of our own free will, all of these influences and factors that create us. And if you could go and alter these things, that you would you would be fundamentally altering who you are.

You cannot therefore in the Nietzschean view of life You can't truly love and embrace your life if you're condemning your own past, or like living in moral condemnation of the conditions that brought you forth. Those things are at best simply a recapitulation to the metaphysical longing for some other world to justify this one, you know, wishing for some other life. Um and at worst it's an expression of self-hatred. Nietzsche believed that

the good involved the transcendence of all that. His father was someone that he could celebrate. even as he grew apart from everything that his father and his family and his culture believed. He celebrated his father because his father is a part of him. He cannot wish that he was had not been brought forth into the world by this man, cursed with this mystery affliction that caused him so much pain, because to wish this is to wish that he, as he was and as he lived, would never have existed.

Nietzsche therefore celebrates even his illness, even his source of endless suffering as a part of himself, an inexorable, inseparable part of himself. Because without that great suffering, he would not have been Nietzsche.