A little research assistance

[Pye]

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I'd be grateful for anyone who could point me to a link that I am pretty certain I orginally stumbled upon here at the Genius Forum: it dealt with the "latest" research into Nietzsche's state of health, and it implied that he suffered from a myo-something-or-other-tumor that pressed on one of his eyeballs and apparently manifests symptoms similar to Nietzsche's complaints.

It's not dire, but I'd be grateful to anyone who can assist. I am trying to answer the curiosities of a current student.

Hope to wrangle some quality time here for other thoughts, soon.

Ta

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[Diebert van Rhijn]

Hi Pye,

There's this article in the Telegraph newspaper. There's also some good summary about the whole insanity issue at The Nietzsche Channel (from google cache since it's not always available).

I've been thinking and reading on and off about Nietzsche's physical and mental state at the end of his life over the last decade. I've even started to write it all down to provide an alternate more philosophical viewpoint of the seemingly unimportant subject. Your question might make me finish it and post it!

[propellerbeanie]

Check with NickO. Someone posted some good stuff of that nature when I was ragging on Nietzsche early on talkphilosophy.
Nick may remember, and I can't say how to find it.

[Pye]

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Ta very much for the Telegraph link, Diebert. It is not the one I remember (that spoke of Nietzsche's enlarged eyeball as evidence), but either way, cancer, tumor, myo-something-or-other -- the article you supplied is even more direct about the genealogy of these suppositions -- suspect or otherwise -- very helpful to me, to the student.

I am wondering if in your research you have come across Lesley Chamberlain's Nietzsche in Turin (1996) (an interesting book that nevertheless still sports me some serious reservations about it) and also, a book entitled Conversations with Nietzsche (1987 Sander L. Gilman) in which contemporaries of Nietzsche collect their reminiscences about him (with thankfully, very little Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, and in fact, a nice little intelligent reaming of her). The latter contains some really really interesting thoughts from people who knew him at all periods of his life, and in those thoughts, some telling little things, as much personality as illness-related.

I don't think of your project as 'seemingly unimportant' and would very much like to hear more of your thoughts/conclusions on it. I don't even think Nietzsche would have minded(!), this philosopher of the body, of the individual . . . .

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[Diebert van Rhijn]

Pye, I haven't read Chamberlain's book yet. Gilman's book I've read long time ago, I think it was the one introducing me fully to Nietzsche's character which is so unlike the image many have created of him browsing through his work.

Last interesting book I read on the issue was Rudolf Steiner's Friedrich Nietzsche, fighter for freedom, which contains translations from articles and memorials by Steiner about Nietzsche's work and psychological state, all written 1895-1900. Interesting of course since Steiner was a great admirer of Nietzsche while himself being way more mystical and community orientated (see also: Anthroposophy). Steiner however was also deeply involved in the Goethe-Schiller archive and helped setting up the Nietzsche archive with Elizabeth Foester-Nietzsche. He unfortunately never met Nietzsche apart from one visit when Nietzsche was already too much in decline to have a conversation.

[Pye]

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Diebert, I appreciate the intelligent confirmation of the impact this book - Conversations with Nietzsche - is having on me as well. I'm correcting a recent scan-read just this week, replacing it with depth, and I could not agree more with the deeper character that emerges in these reminiscences. A colleague who knew of my interest in Nietzsche recently gave it to me; it was a publisher's copy that he was a long time ago invited to review (and had not the interest).

Regarding Nietzsche in Turin should you ever get around to it, my reservations come from Chamberlain's unreserved "crush" on him that seems to engine every sentence. Nevertheless, it creates a lively picture of Nietzsche's last two years in "this" world. It also contains what I estimate to be a particularly alert exegesis regarding the genesis and demise of the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship.

Thanks for the Steiner reference; it goes on the list as well.

A long, long conversation on these things is crowded and milling at the back of my throat. In an effort to keep it from becoming verbal diarrhea, let me just ask you if you have done any research yourself into the pathology of brain cancer/tumours, and if you find it to square with Nietzsche's symptoms. I have not done this research, but a simple, probably childish questions raises itself: do not tumours eventually, simply kill outright? -- as opposed to manifesting long "madness"? There may not be just one thing going on here . . . .

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[Diebert van Rhijn]

In an effort to keep it from becoming verbal diarrhea, let me just ask you if you have done any research yourself into the pathology of brain cancer/tumours, and if you find it to square with Nietzsche's symptoms.

To add anything relevant to this matter a lot of medical expertise is needed, a way lot more than just some research. Personally I believe it's impossible to make any accurate diagnosis just from a list of symptoms, so it seems like a dead end.

I have not done this research, but a simple, probably childish questions raises itself: do not tumours eventually, simply kill outright? -- as opposed to manifesting long "madness"? There may not be just one thing going on here . . .

From what I know tumours can cause many things, including delusions of all kinds, depending on which tissue where in the brain they are forming or pressing against. Growth can speed up and slow down depending on body resistance and so on.

Having said that, I don't believe the issue is simply a matter of which disease Nietzsche had or didn't have. The interesting point for me is the way he dealt with it and at some point stopped dealing with it, or had to give up somehow.

So do I believe Nietzsche's illness was of influence on his philosophy? I think it was crucial in many ways. In the same way the disease finished the man we call Nietzsche it also created the philosopher. Funny things: diseases.

The foreword of The Gay Science comes to mind:

For a psychologist there are few questions that are as attractive as that concerning the relation of health and philosophy, and if he should himself become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into his illness. For assuming that one is a person, one necessarily also has the philosophy that belongs to that person; but there is a big difference. In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, whether it be a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation. For the latter it is merely a beautiful luxury—in the best cases, the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually still has to inscribe itself in cosmic letters on the heaven of concepts. But in the former case, which is more common, when it is distress that philosophizes, as is the case with all sick thinkers—and perhaps sick thinkers are more numerous in the history of philosophy—: what will become of the thought itself when it is subjected to the pressure of sickness? This is the question that concerns the psychologist: and here an experiment is possible. Just as a traveler may resolve, before he calmly abandons himself to sleep, to wake up at a certain time, we philosophers, if we should become sick, surrender for a while to sickness, body and soul—and, as it were, shut our eyes to ourselves. And as the traveler knows that something is not asleep, that something counts the hours and will wake him up, we, too, know that the decisive moment will find us awake, and that something will leap forward then and catch the spirit in the act (...)

I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of that word—one who has to pursue the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity—to muster the courage to push my suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all "truth" but something else—let us say, health, future, growth, power, life ...

[Pye]

Diebert writes:

Having said that, I don't believe the issue is simply a matter of which disease Nietzsche had or didn't have. The interesting point for me is the way he dealt with it and at some point stopped dealing with it, or had to give up somehow.

We agree with this.

I'd like you to know that I have used this very excerpt you provide (well, really the whole Preface) in numerous and sundry settings that deal with the philosophic historicity of the mind-body split. It is a clarion call in many ways, as "we philosophers" [as in now, we 'new' ones; we post-Darwinian ones - or more poignantly, "we" as in Nietzsche perhaps at that time entirely alone!] "are not free to divide the body from soul as the people do; we are even less free to divide soul from spirit," etc. This Preface in its entirety, I think, is one of the most powerfully saturated pieces of Nietzsche's thinking, loathe as he was to write such things as prefaces (as the first sentence of it indicates). This is how I see support and legitimacy for your interest in it overall. You have it from Nietzsche himself, and all that he has "traversed" and "transposed" into the "most spiritual form and distance."

and

"This art of transfiguration is philosophy . . . ."


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