“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” once cried Friedrich Nietzsche—and it certainly wasn’t a false cry. Everyone who is alive now has some form of meaning—and Nietzsche was no exception. But to many, Nietzsche’s meaning—that being the prophet of the future—felt like a delusion, or self-justification. But is there any distinction between his and ours? That is what this essay explores.
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The Life of Tragedy:
Nietzsche’s life was one filled with suffering: born October 15, 1844, it was a short life filled with traumas, illness, neurosis, loneliness, and extremity. At 5, his father became ill and later died in a state of insanity; this stuck with him until the end, always fearing he would suffer the same fate as his father. At 9, his incapacitating migraines began—making him take weeks to months off school. They never left him until his death. At 25, he served in the Franco-Prussian War as a medical orderly—witnessing horrific scenes and contracting a plethora of illnesses. He almost died when he came back. At 33, his closest friend, whom he saw as a father figure—Richard Wagner—had a conversation with Nietzsche’s doctor, saying he was convinced Nietzsche was a chronic masturbator. This rumor spread, isolated him further. This was because in the 19th century, masturbation was equated with many illnesses and moral corruption, even attributing Nietzsche’s vision problems to it. By 35, he left his professorship at Basel to embark on a nomadic and predominantly isolated life, and he did so until his breakdown at Turin.
At the age of 37, he met Lou Salomé, being introduced to her via Paul Ree. But at 38, becoming the first man ever literally ghosted, Lou and Ree abandoned him at a hotel in Tautenburg. He looked for them when he woke up and couldn’t find them. That same week he told Ida Overbeck—Franz Overbeck’s wife—“I guess I really am going into utter solitude.” By the age of 38, he was on opium—even faking signatures to get them; he was also suicidal, contemplating overdosing on them. Around this time, he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, his despair motivating the first 2 parts. By the third part, he was more stable. At the age of 41, he had published “Beyond Good and Evil” and was called a “dangerous thinker” by a journalist, which immensely exhilarated him. By the age of 44, he manages to get Georg Brandes—a prominent literary critic—to give a class on his thought, which Nietzsche was thrilled at. He seemed like he was happier and more stable… or so we thought. On January 3rd, 1889, at the young age of 44, after the exhausting task of churning out 3 books the year before, he collapsed in Turin and woke up mentally insane. He never regained sanity after. After 11 years of being mentally incapacitated and a similar time physically, he died by the age of 55 on August 25, 1900.
This is, of course, a sweeping generalization of his life. There was more. His physical pain was more brutal: almost blind, constant migraines and vomiting, and being bedridden for days to weeks. His life wasn’t all drama and tragedy; it was very quiet. But not the peaceful quiet—it was the empty one. The misunderstood one. The lone one. And that’s what made his life so tragic: it was ceaseless pain filled with gnawing silence. And in the end, it wasn’t misunderstanding that killed him; it was understanding with a lack of care that did.
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DEFINITIONS:
1. Self-Justification: a justification for one’s existence and/or a way for someone to deal with their pain. It typically provides a sense of meaningfulness or purpose to it.
EXAMPLES: someone saying, “Life is worth living because of love!” Or someone smoking under stress.
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The Human who was Too Human:
When we look around us, we predominantly find what we call ‘normal.’ People who behave, think, and desire in alignment with them. But what makes any two people similar is the underlying self-justification driving them. Love, religion, connection, morality, even power—these are the ubiquitous self-justifications. Yet the deeper the self-awareness, the less ‘normal’ the associated behaviours become.
Nietzsche, however, had an acute sense of self-awareness. He couldn’t simply lean on conventional self-justifications without tearing through them. Yet, he couldn’t live without any justification; any human would break under such a merciless weight. So he leaned on a rarer self-justification: the justification of prophecy, destiny, and immeasurability—even a sense of superiority.
“People didn’t reject me because I am wrong—they rejected me because I am dynamite! I have broken beyond even this time. I am not just a philosopher; I am an event. My philosophy isn’t merely abstract or unknowable—it is destiny itself, the destined philosophy of the future. No man alive could comprehend me. I am a prophet. A misunderstood one. And that makes all this pain, all this suffering—all these ceaseless, purposeless barrages of tragedy—meaningful!”
Those were the words Nietzsche whispered loudly to himself—those were the thoughts that forged him. Not just him, but the ground he stood on. Without them, we wouldn’t just lose Nietzsche—he would lose himself and collapse. But these thoughts weren’t weightless: they weighed immensely. There was a limit to them. And the weight would obliterate the limit soon enough, with a slow erode.
It started subtly: he would tag letters with the names of murderers or ancient gods such as Dionysus. But that subtlety became bold: he believed everyone treated him like a king. He would stand still watching crowds with a grin for hours. He would bury his face in books (literally). This happened for weeks—and his friends only got concerned after repeated letters and his refusal to come to Basel. Eventually, the weight of these thoughts broke the ground they built, and he collapsed. Nietzsche lost himself.
The Mad Prophet:
But that would be a reductive angle: was such a collapse really inevitable? Many would proclaim no—but they wouldn’t be talking about Nietzsche. They would be talking about an alternative version of him. What made Nietzsche was his grandiose and delusional justifications, the same justifications that made him want to be Nietzsche in the first place.
Yet, Nietzsche, the Nietzsche we know, would’ve died without them. He went insane because of his justifications, yes, but he only lived long enough to go insane by them because of them. And that’s the cruel paradox of self-awareness, the same self-awareness we believe we have but we should be thankful we don’t. The real question then becomes: why did Nietzsche collapse, yet not I? Because Nietzsche had self-doubt and unconventionality, and you probably only have one.
Normal self-justifications are as ubiquitous as rare self-justifications are hidden. You will never see someone loudly proclaim it, and if they do, it is never as greatly or vehemently proclaimed as it is internally. Because they doubt themselves—to a point of self-cruelty. Nietzsche believed himself to be a prophet, yes, but also an ant on other days. It was an oscillating state, and that oscillation was what broke him. He was delusional, which saved him, but he wasn’t fully so, and that’s worse than being nothing, because you know you are nothing while also knowing you could be lying about being anything.
The Twilight of Nietzsche:
And here we understand the Nietzsche phenomenon is a very rare one. One many of us—with our conventional justifications—will never have to experience precisely because of its conventionality. But Nietzsche’s justifications were so insidious because it would kill him if they were gone, and it killed him being around. And that is the biggest curse of self-awareness: the never-ending awareness that leads to your demise—just like it led Nietzsche to his.
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SOURCES:
1. “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” — Twilight of the Idols (1899).
2. Literally every single claim I am about Nietzsche’s life — I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche, by Sue Prideaux.
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