The Initiation of Nietzsche: Part 2

This is the second excerpt from my upcoming book titled The Initiation of Nietzsche. For anybody who has not read the previous post in this series, the text below should make some sense, but it does build on the earlier argument. For the best reading experience, you might consider reading the earlier post first. With that said, here is the second excerpt.

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To answer the question which guides this book, What was the true nature of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner and what role did it play in Nietzsche’s life?, we need to set aside the biases that we bring to the matter, including and especially the aforementioned error of taking the end state as the definitive truth. To overcome this bias, we do not merely need to pay closer attention to the circumstances or events that occurred during the relationship, we need a framework to understand the meaning of those events. Indeed, it is the application of this framework to the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner that will be the sole contribution of this book to our understanding of the two men. This book contains no new evidence, no new translations of the German, no new information at all that has not been covered by other commentators or contained in biographies and compilations of letters and notes. What we will provide is a new framework of understanding. In Nietzschean terms, this book is a re-evaluation and it implies a new philosophy of how human development works.

The name of that philosophical framework is archetypology. As the name suggests, archetypology places the concept of the archetype at the centre of analysis. The theory is inspired by the work on archetypes introduced primarily by the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung. Archetypology posits that there are four main stages of development we go through in life. We name these stages according to four archetypes: the Child, the Orphan, the Adult, and the Elder. Each of these maps to the biological terms of childhood, adolescence, maturity, and senescence, but the core notion of archetypology is that the archetypes are not merely biological or psychological in nature. They are integral. We can think of each archetype as a complex symbol that points to biological, socio-cultural, and psychological truths. For example, the Child phase of life has distinctive biological properties, but it also has distinctive psychological and socio-cultural properties. These are all aligned with each other and therefore form a natural unit of analysis.

By segmenting the human lifecycle into these four archetypes, we are able to identify and understand the unique qualities that each phase of life denotes. We are also able to understand the progression that occurs, including the difficult transitions between the archetypes. When archetypology is applied to analysing the life of an individual, our first task is to identify which of the archetypal phases they are going through. In relation to historical figures such as Nietzsche and Wagner, this helps us overcome the natural error of judging earlier events by the standards of later ones. When we apply archetypology to the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship, we ask which archetype each man was manifesting during the relationship. The answer is surprisingly clean-cut. We can see that Nietzsche first met Wagner just as he was graduating from university and was about to enter the Adult phase of life. Furthermore, we know that Nietzsche first encountered Wagner’s music right at the beginning of the Orphan phase of his life i.e. the early teenage years. Since teenagers, and teenage boys in particular, are eager for heroes, it makes sense that Wagner became a hero to Nietzsche during the Orphan years of his life.

By contrast, Wagner was in the mature Adult phase of his life when he first met the young university student, and he had no prior knowledge or expectations of Nietzsche. It’s easy for us to understand why Nietzsche was interested in a potential relationship with Wagner but not so easy to understand why Wagner reciprocated. In fact, there is no evidence that Wagner had any desire for an ongoing relationship with the younger man after their initial, unexpected meeting. This seemingly minor detail has enormous ramifications for the manner in which the relationship would proceed and especially the way it would end. It is not an exaggeration to say that the evolution of the whole relationship can be found here. Of all the asymmetries between the men we mentioned earlier, this will be the most important one: Nietzsche was looking for an Elder but Wagner was not looking for an Orphan. This makes sense. Why would a famous and accomplished middle-aged composer of operas be interested in a student of philology?

Of course, there is a far more to it than that, and it will take an entire book to work through the ramifications of this seemingly insignificant detail. In doing so, we will show the power of archetypology as a method of biographical analysis which works by placing the relationship between the two men into their respective phases of life. Nietzsche first heard of Wagner as a young teen, he first met him as a young man, and his final writings on Wagner occurred when he was in middle age, just weeks before his descent into madness. Although our focus will mostly be on Nietzsche in the pages ahead, it is also true that the relationship had profound implications for Wagner. Indeed, we will make the case near the end of the book that his final opera, Parsifal, was born out of the Nietzsche relationship.

Still, as just noted, Nietzsche is our main focus and so let’s begin by sketching out the period of his life that led up to his first meeting with Wagner.

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We begin with the Child phase of Nietzsche’s life, which is difficult because we have the least amount of information about this time. However, there were two dramatic events that occurred when Nietzsche was still a young boy. The first was the death of his father when he was five and then the subsequent passing of his brother almost immediately afterwards. It’s very difficult to know how much of an impact this had on Nietzsche. Some commentators have used his father’s death to speculate that Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner had an Oedipal dimension to it, since Wagner was about the same age. One piece of evidence against this reading is that Nietzsche very rarely mentioned his father in both his philosophy and his personal writings. For a writer who was so open about his inner thoughts in most other areas of his life, this absence signals that his father’s death was not an ongoing problem for the older Nietzsche. By contrast, Nietzsche never stopped writing about Wagner. In fact, two of his last three books had the composer as their main theme.

One important outcome of the untimely death of his father and brother was that Nietzsche spent most of his childhood raised as the sole male in female-dominated homes. Despite achieving independence later on, his mother and sister remained pervasive influences throughout his life. Indeed, they became his primary caregivers when he later lost his mind. This was certainly an important influence on Nietzsche and may explain, among other things, his inability to form romantic relationships with women. In the case of Nietzsche’s failed attempt at courting Lou Salome, both his mother and sister were actively involved in subverting that relationship.

Nevertheless, all these seem to be minor points. The overall impression we get is that Nietzsche’s Child phase of life had no extraordinary influence on his later development. By contrast, the developments that occurred at the beginning of Nietzsche’s Orphan phase were crucial to his later identity. The name of the Orphan archetype derives from the fact that the primary mission of this time of life is to separate from our parents and begin to forge an independent identity that will reach maturity during the Adult phase. Nietzsche’s life shows us a prime example of this since he was able to escape the female-dominated household of his childhood by receiving a scholarship to study at the prestigious Schulpforta. Because the school was too far away from home for daily travel, Nietzsche became a boarder, and this gave him a physical separation from his mother and sister. Schulpforta was also renowned for the subject that Nietzsche would later become a professor of: philology. In both respects, this was a major turning point in his life. 

The Orphan phase of life is the beginning of the development of the full range of identities that we carry into adulthood. For analytical purposes, we can divide that identity formation into several categories. One of these follows from the onset of biological maturity, and that is our sexual identity. Most societies have strict regulations around the expression of sexuality in young teens with the intention of channelling the sexual instinct into marriage. In the post-war West, we have largely thrown away the rule book, but that was definitely not the case when Nietzsche came of age. The Victorian era was notorious for its repressive attitudes towards sexuality, and even though these were less restrictive for young men than their female counterparts, the result was much the same. Especially in the case of the educated and upper classes of society, sexuality began with marriage, and marriage did not take place until the individual had established themselves in society. In short, sexual identity did not begin to develop until the Adult phase of life. Nietzsche made two famously clumsy attempts to get married later, but during the Orphan years, he had next to no contact with females. Schulpforta was an all-boys school, and women were not allowed to study at university during this time. As a result, Nietzsche would never properly develop a sexual identity.

The other domains of identity outside the family are the economic, political, and military ones. For each of these, the Orphan phase of life represents an apprenticeship period. No society expects its Orphans to instantly transition from childhood to adulthood. There must be a time when we learn and build up our skills. Thus, the Orphan phase of life manifests in the socio-cultural domain as a time of education and training, and seemingly all cultures have a set of predefined roles, both formal and informal, to demarcate this fact. Common terms for the Orphan include ‘student’, ‘apprentice’, ‘novice’, ‘trainee’, ‘recruit’, ‘learner’, ‘beginner’, ‘debutant’, ‘fledgling’, or ‘probationer’. Note that almost all of these terms imply a relationship with another person. A student implies a teacher. An army recruit implies a drill sergeant. A trainee implies a trainer, and so on. If all of the former roles pertain to what we have called the archetypal Orphan, all of the latter pertain to the archetype of the Elder. Thus, the Orphan-Elder relationship in all its variations is a crucial component of the Orphan phase of life. Our separation from our parents coincides with the beginning of these Orphan-Elder relationships.

There is one other domain of identity we have not yet mentioned, and that is the religious. The anthropological literature tells us that most cultures have religious ceremonies and practices that mark the onset of the Orphan phase of life. These can take a wide variety of forms, but we can say that the main purpose of any religious initiation is the communication of the core meanings of the culture. These are inculcated via rites of passage and also by stories and myths. In the modern West, we also communicate our core values through the scholarly-style instruction provided in the education system. Thus, Nietzsche’s education at the Schulpforta was primarily religious in the broadest meaning of that term. It occurred at a time when mass education was not yet fully-developed. Thus we would say that Nietzsche was working towards the mature archetype of the Scholar-Monk that had existed since the medieval period in Europe. (In this respect, an unspoken vow of chastity makes sense).

If we now apply these considerations directly to the life of Nietzsche, we find that the beginning of the Orphan phase of his life was marked by two primary forms of initiation. The first was his induction into high school, which was an intense and difficult transition involving the military-style practices of the 19th-century Prussian education system. The second form of initiation would have been his Confirmation ceremony at the Lutheran church of which he was a member. Confirmation is the coming-of-age ceremony given to Christians. The purpose of the rite is to instil the Holy Spirit in the initiate. It also marks a change of status within the congregation as the individual begins working towards full membership, i.e. adult status. In both of Nietzsche’s initiations, we can identify the Elder whose role was to induct him. In the case of high school, that would have been his teachers. In the case of the church, the priest or bishop is the Elder who initiates the Orphans during the rite of Confirmation.

Since it will become crucial later in our analysis, let us now give a formal definition of the role of the Elder. The Elder is responsible for the initiation of an Orphan into an institution of society with an associated duty of care to the younger person to train, educate, and guide them to full membership in that institution. Institutions can be both highly formal or highly informal in nature. The army is a classic example of a formal institution, while voluntary and ad hoc associations are examples of informal ones. In both cases, however, the Elder archetype is fulfilled by the individual who has the authority to grant admission and who subsequently initiates the Orphan. Since many formal institutions have an internal hierarchy of command, we can also distinguish between the Elders in leadership roles who have ultimate responsibility versus the lower-level Elders who are responsible for day-to-day activities. For example, a general is an Elder with ultimate authority to grant admission to new recruits to the army, while the drill sergeant is the lower-level Elder who is responsible for the actual training of those recruits.

Every Orphan initiation into an institution implies a change of identity for the individual, even for seemingly minor examples. In more extreme cases, the change of identity can be far more dramatic. Let’s take the example of the initiation of an army recruit.

The recruit must leave their civilian identity at the front gate. Normal, everyday clothing is exchanged for combat fatigues. For those with inappropriate hairstyles, a new haircut is in order, probably involving a short razor. New forms of address are learned. New forms of behaviour are inculcated. In highly formal environments like the army, the exoteric, outward-facing identity of the recruit is strictly determined, and all recruits are expected to live up to the mark. In some sense, we might say that the army denies or suppresses the esoteric or inner identity of the trainee. But another way to look at it is that the esoteric identity must conform to the exoteric. Whatever the recruit happens to feel about the training being given to them is irrelevant. What is relevant is that they do as they are told i.e. that their exoteric behaviour matches expectations. We might more accurately say that the recruit must reconfigure their esoteric identity to develop the discipline and determination required to maintain the exoteric behaviour required of them. The recruit is required to learn a completely new set of exoteric behaviours as well as the esoteric states that facilitate them. There is both an exoteric and esoteric reconfiguration. Because this new form of identity does not come naturally, it must be learned by the recruit (the Orphan archetype), and it must be strictly taught by the drill sergeant (the Elder archetype). 

Nietzsche would go through army training in his early twenties in accordance with the laws of Prussian society at that time. However, as we have already alluded to, his high school initiation was already of military-grade intensity. We must remember that this was the 19th century, and the Prussian discipline that had earned its military a fearsome reputation also manifested itself in the way in which education was conducted. Nietzsche’s school regime required him to rise at 4am to be ready for the start of class an hour later. Classes continued through the day and into the evening before an early bedtime of 9pm. Saturdays were also school days, with only Sunday reserved for rest. The teenage Nietzsche initially struggled to get used to this military-style education, but once the difficult period of adjustment was over, he excelled, and it was this environment which prepared him for his meteoric rise through the ranks of academic philology later.

Part of the purpose of these Orphan initiations is to demarcate the beginning of a new phase of life, one that is explicitly separate from the Child years. To reiterate, the reason why the archetype is called the Orphan is because it implies a break with the parents. This break is normally made in the psychological and socio-cultural domains, but in the case of Nietzsche there was a physical dimension to it as well since he was living away from home. In short, Nietzsche received the kind of initiation that matches what the anthropological literature tells us is common for young men across cultures. He was physically separated from family life and thrust into a new way of living. He was initiated into an institution of society that had a strong scholarly ethic. The Elders of that institution held its students to a very high standard; obedience and discipline were paramount. Nietzsche excelled in this environment which prepared him directly for university where he would become one of the most promising young philologists of his era.

Alongside his formal education, we have also seen his enthusiasm for extracurricular activities such as the aforementioned club Germania that he founded with a couple of schoolmates. This was a setting where the young men could present their own creative works of music, poetry etc. while also discussing leading figures of the day. Alongside the discovery of Wagner, Nietzsche was also reading popular new thinkers such as Feuerbach and David Strauss, who were directly challenging the dominance of the Church. This more self-directed education would have major implications for Nietzsche later on when it led him to renounce Christianity. But before we discuss those dramatic events, let’s first examine how the Orphan initiation fits more broadly into how cultures propagate themselves.