This is the fourth excerpt from my upcoming book titled The Initiation of Nietzsche: Wagner’s Disciple. Anybody stumbling upon this without having read the first three should consider reading those first, since the argument made here builds upon the earlier posts. With that said, here is the excerpt.
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The normal state of affairs in any culture is that there is a well-defined and understood tradition in place and an equally well-defined set of Elders whose job is to safeguard it and propagate it to the next generation. History shows, however, that there are times of upheaval when a paradigm shift is taking place in a culture, usually due to some combination of external pressure and internal fissures. 19th-century Europe was an example of this latter type, and Germany was at the centre of the difficulties. A number of different schisms had opened up. There was the Catholic-Protestant division, with the latter splitting up into hundreds, if not thousands, of alternative interpretations of the faith. Then there were the secular approaches to the same set of stories taken by thinkers such as Feuerbach, Strauss, and Renan. Shakespeare enjoyed a massive spike in popularity, as did the medieval myths which were being rediscovered. As if that wasn’t enough, breakthroughs in archaeology and historical research more broadly led to renewed interest in the ancient world. The Orphans of the 19th century were offered all of these varying traditions as a kind of smorgasbord from which to choose their identity. The result was an identity crisis felt at both the collective and individual levels.
What this meant for Nietzsche and other members of the upcoming generation was that there were a number of options available and, by cross-cultural and historical standards, a perhaps unprecedented freedom of choice about which one to choose. We have seen that Nietzsche exercised his freedom of choice to decide in favour of the new secular wave of thinking. More specifically, however, our picture of Nietzsche during the Orphan phase of his life has so far been one of a successful initiation into that thinking. The separation from his family life offered by the Schulpforta scholarship was no doubt very important in establishing his independent frame of mind. He thrived in the military-like conditions of the school, and his subsequent university enrolment placed him under the tutelage of one of the best philologists of his time, Ritschl. Nietzsche was initiated during this time by a strong set of Elders culminating in his relationship with Ritschl, who ensured his ascent through the ranks of academic philology.
The story we have told about Nietzsche’s early life is a coherent and convincing one, and yet it points to an obvious problem. We have said that the Orphan-Elder relationship is about initiation in the institutions of society and the culture more broadly. Nietzsche had a first-class initiation in which he excelled. He gone from strength to strength and seemed set for a long and prosperous career as a scholar. Yet, the archetype that Nietzsche is known for in Western history is as a philosopher-hermit eventually leading to him earning a role that was very popular in the 19th-century: the mad genius. The question then arises, how did Nietzsche go from being one of the most promising philologists of his era to becoming a philosopher-hermit?
The key to understanding this is to recall the point we have just made, namely, that the 19th-century was a time of cultural upheaval where a large number of potential life paths had opened up, at least for the educated and upper classes of society (things were very different for the working poor). Although Nietzsche had ended up on the pathway of the scholar, this was by no means the only area that was of interest to him. In fact, his original enrolment at the University of Bonn was in a dual degree studying theology and philology. Since the theology part of the degree was intended to lead to a career as a pastor in the Lutheran church, and since that was the life path that would have seen Nietzsche in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather, it was surely no easy decision when he chose to drop that part of the degree only months after starting his university studies. On the surface of it, this seems only to have strengthened Nietzsche’s pursuit of the philological pathway. However, it was no longer afterwards that a seemingly random encounter in a bookshop would give the first hint of Nietzsche’s fate.
Nietzsche followed Ritschl to the University of Leipzig in 1865 following the dispute with Jahn in Bonn. Shortly after arriving in Leipzig, that he stumbled across the work of the man who was to become a kind of spiritual Elder that would guide Nietzsche towards philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. At just the moment in his life when Nietzsche had exercised his will, perhaps for the first time on a truly life-altering decision, he stumbled upon a philosopher who had made the subject of the will central to his work. Due to the intensely personal nature of his writing, we are fortunate to have Nietzsche’s reflections on what the work of Schopenhauer meant to him courtesy of an essay he would write almost ten years later in 1874. It was one of his Untimely Meditations called Schopenhauer as Educator. What is especially interesting from our point of view is that, even though Nietzsche did not think about it in our terms, the essay is really about the Orphan-Elder relationship. In fact, we could very well translate the title to Schopenhauer as Elder. Our preceding discussion has hopefully made clear why this is valid. Schopenhauer would become a culture hero to the young Nietzsche, a man worthy of imitation. But, more than that, Nietzsche’s essay is really about the personal aspects of the Orphan initiation and why the Elder role is necessary. He begins the essay by reflecting on the idea that our task in life is to become independent by the discovery of our selves:-
“We have to answer for our existence to ourselves; and will therefore be our own true pilots, and not admit that our being resembles a blind fortuity.”
In terms of our archetypal framework, this independence, self-assurance, and self-guidance is a quality not primarily associated with the Orphan phase of life, which is a period of training and education, but with the Adult archetype. However, it is very fitting that Nietzsche would have turned to such concerns during the last part of the Orphan phase of his own life since that is the time when adulthood is knocking on the door. But he notes that there are significant dangers from this transition, and he anticipates the psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung by noting that the dangers are mostly psychological in nature. In order to mitigate those dangers, Nietzsche proposes the need for “educators”
“There are other means of ‘finding ourselves’, of coming to ourselves out of the confusion wherein we all wander as in a dreary cloud; but I know none better than to think on our educators.”
In order to understand what Nietzsche meant by the phrase “educator”, we need to correct a modern bias that has become especially acute in the post-war years. Our concept of education has now been taken over by the technocratic philosophy that has come to dominate society more broadly. According to this philosophy, a teacher is a kind of professional service provider to a student rather than a role model or mentor. This was not the case in Nietzsche’s time, especially for students such as him who earned attendance at elite schools and universities. For Nietzsche, the relationship between students and teachers was certainly based in obedience and authority, but it was also far more personal than what has become the norm in our time. That is why Nietzsche was prepared to move cities to continue to study under Ritschl and also why he had a personal relationship with Ritschl’s wife, with whom he swapped numerous letters. When Nietzsche uses the word educator, he means it in the broader and older meaning of that term which is almost identical to what we have called the Elder archetype. That is why we are justified in claiming that Nietzsche was really talking about Elders.
But it turns out that the Elder that Nietzsche sought was a specific kind:-
“I wandered then as I pleased in a world of wishes and thought that destiny would relieve me of the dreadful and wearisome duty of educating myself: some philosopher would come at the right moment to do it for me,—some true philosopher, who could be obeyed without further question, as he would be trusted more than one’s self.”
Before continuing, let’s reiterate the points made earlier about the Orphan-Elder relationship as an induction into an institution of society. That institution can be highly formal, as in the case of a modern army, or informal, as in the case of a voluntary association or society. The Elder is both the individual who has the authority to initiate the Orphan and the one who is responsible for their training and education in whatever domain the institution operates. Nietzsche’s reflections in his essay on Schopenhauer show that he had formed an imaginative vision of this archetype when he was a teenager. His philosopher-educator (our Elder) is somebody to be “obeyed without further question”. But that is exactly the kind of authority which the Elder has wielded over the Orphan for most cultures throughout history. Whether the Orphan is being initiated as a warrior, a religious anchorite, a scholar, a philosopher, a medicine man, or a priest, every society has its elite forms of initiation where strict discipline is enforced with the goal of raising the initiate to the highest level of performance. Nietzsche was not just dreaming of any old initiation; he was dreaming of an elite kind of initiation in the realm of philosophy.
But here we must also reiterate our earlier point that the philosopher archetype is an Elder tied to a specific cultural tradition that the West inherited from ancient Greece. More broadly, the philosopher is a manifestation of the Sage archetype. The modern West also has the concept of a different kind of Sage which comes via the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Prophet. Looked at in this way, we would also say that the priests, bishops, and popes of the Catholic Church are Sage archetypes. Meanwhile, by Nietzsche’s time, there was a new recognisable manifestation of the Sage which we now call the Scientist. Finally, there was also the relatively new concept of the heroic Artist, which we can also posit as a Sage archetype. When we view it this way, we can see that, throughout his formative years, Nietzsche had flirted with each of these different variations of the Sage archetype. We know he had considered becoming a priest and even went to Bonn University with that goal in mind. We know he was an enthusiastic and talented musician as well as a writer of poetry, placing him in the Artist category. We also know that he seriously considered a move into the hard sciences after completing his studies in philology and was therefore considering a life as a Scientist.
For these reasons, we have to be careful about taking Nietzsche’s claims in Schopenhauer as Educator at face value. He wrote the essay in 1874. The work not only provides the background to why Nietzsche was attracted to the work of Schopenhauer, it also laments the current state of philosophy in Germany and attempts to sketch out a remedy to that situation. A shallow reading may lead us to believe that the discovery of Schopenhauer in 1865 had changed Nietzsche’s life and placed him on a new pathway. If so, that would give us the answer to the question we asked earlier about how Nietzsche came to be a philosopher. The answer would be simple: Nietzsche read Schopenhauer; the rest is history. We have to be very cautious in drawing that conclusion, however, because it commits the same error we identified at the start of the book i.e., it judges former events by later ones. It also judges Nietzsche’s earlier attitudes and decisions based on ones he wrote after the fact. Nietzsche had not just warned about this error; he had demonstrated it in his writing. His mature philosophy is filled with little deceptions, ambiguities, and clues. He leads the reader astray and subtly invites them to find their way back. He was the philosopher who said everything is interpretation, and he structured his work as a kind of interpretive puzzle. These puzzles are meant as a kind of training exercise in the art of interpretation.
In this case, Nietzsche is leading us into the kind of error that occurs because there is a romantic notion in our culture that people are somehow destined to become what they actually do become. This is especially true for the great figures in any field of endeavour. We like to believe that they are all savants who were born to become great. Since Nietzsche became a great philosopher, we are predisposed to think that he must have been born that way. In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche tells us the kind of story we like to hear i.e., that becoming a great philosopher was his destiny. But this is exactly the kind of trick that Nietzsche would often play in his writings, and he himself would have urged interpretive caution in this respect. As we will do repeatedly throughout this book, the best way to begin is to compare his story against the facts.
In 1858, Nietzsche began his studies at Schulpforta. His schooling focused heavily on languages and philology and contained an emphasis on the twin traditions of western culture, Christianity and ancient Greece and Rome. We know Nietzsche had a strong interest in music and art, as evidenced by the Germania club which he and his friends created and through which he was introduced to the work of Wagner. At this time, Nietzsche had not yet discovered Schopenhauer but was reading contemporary philosophers such as Feuerbach and David Strauss. It should be clear that Nietzsche was dabbling in all of the above-mentioned sub-archetypes of the Sage: the Philosopher, the Priest, the Artist, and the Scholar-Scientist.
At the end of high school, Nietzsche appears to have decided to become a priest, as evidenced by his decision to study theology at the University of Bonn. After a few months, he quit and wrote to his sister explaining that he had renounced what he called “peace of soul and pleasure” to become a “devotee of truth”. We have every reason to believe that Nietzsche was genuine in his sentiment here. We also have every reason to believe that this was a major turning point in Nietzsche’s life. It was a break with his devout mother and sister and, even more importantly, with his dead father. We have to remember that Nietzsche himself had been so devout as a child that his classmates referred to him as the “little pastor”. By giving up any hope of becoming a priest, Nietzsche was renouncing the life path that had been laid out for him as a child. In doing so, he was asserting his independence. Another way to think about it is that Nietzsche was crossing off one of the possibilities on his list of potential futures. The Priest was gone, but that still left the options of Philosopher, Artist, Scholar-Scientist.
Nietzsche was already on the pathway of the Scholar-Scientist under the tutelage of Ritschl, who was one of the foremost philologists of his day. This relationship began at the University of Bonn, but Ritschl would soon have a major falling out with another pre-eminent philology scholar, Otto Jahn. These days we think of scholarly disagreements as being relatively tame affairs involving politely worded criticisms in journals or newspapers. The Ritschl-Jahn dispute was far more intense. There were physical altercations on campus between supporters of the two men, and even the Prussian government got involved. Again, this shows us that 19th-century academia was a very different beast from the post-war one we are all used to. In any case, Ritschl was forced out of Bonn University only to be immediately scooped up by the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche and a number of other loyal students moved there to continue to study under him.
To say it again, this is not the kind of behaviour that we would expect from students in our time, and it once again points to the far more personal nature of scholarship in 19th-century Germany. Since we know that Nietzsche would become close to both Ritschl and his wife, it is clear that their relationship was more than the cool professionalism we would consider normal between a student and professor. In fact, we can go one step further and say that Ritschl had become Nietzsche’s Elder not just in the academic sense but in a broader, more personal manner. This Orphan-Elder bond was clearly a very close one, as is evidenced by the fact that Ritschl later went out of his way to find Nietzsche a position as a philology professor in Basel.
The reason why this is important is that it gives us a strong reason to doubt what Nietzsche would later imply in the Schopenhauer essay, namely, that he had had no inspiration from his educators prior to discovering Schopenhauer. Clearly, Ritschl had been his educator (Elder). What’s more, we can see that Nietzsche’s discovery of Schopenhauer did not trigger the kind of dramatic change that he had been prepared to make by quitting theology and moving from Bonn to Leipzig. The Orphan-Elder relationship with Ritschl began in 1864, one year before Nietzsche would first discover Schopenhauer. Nietzsche had already shown a willingness to make life-altering decisions. If, as he would later have us believe, Schopenhauer’s example had proven so decisive and revelatory, if Nietzsche suddenly felt the uncontrollable urge to become a philosopher, why did he not give up his philology studies and swap to the philosophy department at the university? Why did he not throw off the constriction of academia altogether and become a self-directed philosopher following the example of Schopenhauer? At least at this time in his life, Nietzsche chose to remain a disciple of Ritschl rather than follow the life path of Schopenhauer. In the years ahead, he would continue to excel in his field, even having a number of scholarly papers published in philology journals, a very unusual achievement for a student who did not yet have his degree. In short, he had consciously chosen the Scholar-Scientist option and was succeeding in that role.
None of this is a problem or even a criticism of the young man. It just means that Nietzsche was not yet prepared or willing to take the step of becoming a philosopher. He had simply not yet decided what he wanted to do in life. This makes sense; Nietzsche was just starting his university studies. He had found himself under the tutelage of a renowned philologist and would go on to become perhaps Ritschl’s best student. He would later do some time in the army, as required by Prussian law. We know that, when he was coming to the end of his university degree in 1868, he and some friends considered living in Paris for a while. Nietzsche had even written in his letters and notebooks about perhaps starting up some kind of artistic or intellectual commune. In short, Nietzsche was still experimenting. He had ruled out the Priest archetype as a life path, but he still entertained hopes and dreams for the other options, including the Philosopher, the Scholar-Scientist, and even the Artist. We take this kind of thing for granted nowadays. Nobody expects a first-year university student to have their life planned out. But in the 19th century, it was the prerogative only of the educated class, of which Nietzsche had become a member.
We must remember that Nietzsche was twenty-one years old when he first read Schopenhauer. His eventual life path as a philosopher-hermit was not even on the radar at this time. He was a young man who had friends and was active in the institutions of which he was a member. Meanwhile, Schopenhauer was dead, and while he was able to provide an abstract example that Nietzsche could engage with in his imagination, he was not able to provide a direct Orphan-Elder relationship. Schopenhauer had had no disciples and created no institutions. In fact, he had explicitly removed himself from the universities after unsuccessful attempts at promoting his philosophy in Berlin. He was an outcast and a loner. As fate would have it, Nietzsche would eventually follow him down the lonely path as a disciple of truth, but to say that Schopenhauer was the direct cause of Nietzsche’s eventual life journey is not correct. It would be more correct to say that Schopenhauer provided him with an archetype: a possibility in his imagination.
Thus, we still don’t have a definitive answer to the question of how Nietzsche became a philosopher. Schopenhauer had perhaps planted a seed, but it had shown no signs of germinating. As a twenty-one-year-old, Nietzsche was still in the Orphan phase of life. He had a real, flesh-and-blood Elder in Ritschl, somebody that he could interact with and learn from. He had been initiated into a community of fellow students who had already rallied around their academic leader and followed him to Leipzig. He was winning renown in the institution of academia more generally. This was the everyday reality in which Nietzsche lived at that time. Schopenhauer existed in a different reality, an esoteric or spiritualised one. He existed as an archetype in Nietzsche’s mind and also in the collective mind of Western culture. Schopenhauer was one of a number of such archetypes that existed in this spiritualised form. Nietzsche himself would later join the ranks of the spiritualised philosophers. As he himself famously predicted, his (spiritual) birth would come posthumously. But as a young man in his early twenties, there was no indication that Nietzsche would become a philosopher at all, let alone a great one. Rather, his most likely life path was still that of the scholar.
It would require a different kind of flesh-and-blood Elder to eventually lead Nietzsche to the pathway of the philosopher. The fact that the man for the job was a famous and notorious composer of operas doesn’t make a whole lot of logical sense, and this is one of the reasons why commentators have avoided tackling the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship in its early manifestation. Of course, Wagner himself insisted that he was not merely a composer of operas. He had always demanded more of his art. As a result, he became one of the most influential storytellers of his era. He did so in a culture which believed that art would fill the void left by religion. The heroic Artist would take over the roles of priest, bishop, and pope as the custodian of the deeper truths that governed human affairs. Wagner had inadvertently become the prophet, and Nietzsche was about to become his foremost disciple. The young philology student, who had renounced Christianity just a few years earlier, was about to receive a personal and direct religious initiation.