Since R.J. Hollingdale’s erudite and stimulating biography of
Nietzsche was first published in 1965, interest in this most controversial
and influential of modern philosophers has burgeoned almost to
the point of excess. In spite of the classic status of Hollingdale’s
work, it has long been out of print, but it is reissued here with
its text reorganized, revised, and expanded in the light of the
glut of new documents concerning Nietzsche’s life and new interpretations
of his philosophy that have emerged in the intervening years.
Hollingdale has subjected the text to a careful revision in which
he has furnished stylistic amendments, corrected and updated certain
passages, and modified statements of supposed fact which later
research has shown to be erroneous. He has eliminated the now-obsolete
appendices of the original and replaced them with a postscript
which surveys the developments that have occurred in the publication
and understanding of Nietzsche over the last third of a century.
The end result is a meticulously researched, instructive, clear-headed,
and above all moving work that is lucidly written in straightforward
prose and which will serve as a fine introduction to Nietzsche.

As the subtitle indicates, the book attempts to combine biographical
interpretation with philosophical discussion and analysis. As
such, it integrates an account of Nietzsche’s works into a narrative
of his existence, from his formative years as the pious son of
a Lutheran pastor to his untimely descent into madness and invalidity
in 1889. It follows his years as a schoolboy at the celebrated
Schulpforta, his appointment as Professor of Classical Philology
at Basel at the prodigiously young age of 24, and the years of
his isolation, with his wanderings in France, Switzerland, and
Italy and his ill-fated affair with Lou Salomé.

In its capacity as an examination of Nietzsche’s philosophy, it
is an introductory text and, therefore, is bound to be selective
and cursory. Following the chronological progression of Nietzsche’s
thought, it discusses his discipleship and later rift with Wagner,
the nature and extent of his indebtedness to Schopenhauer and
Darwin, and his relationship with the Greeks. The oscillation
from biographical to philosophical material is inevitably somewhat
spasmodic. But Hollingdale considers Nietzsche’s philosophy as
part of his life; that his thought is a creation of his existence
and should be examined against this background. I have certain
misgivings concerning this stance, but it is to Hollingdale’s
credit that he does not indulge in fanciful psychologizing about
the origin or home of aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. He rejects,
for instance, the view that Nietzsche’s antipathy towards Christianity
owes its origin to an emotional rebellion against the Lutheran
tradition in which he was raised, or, as has also been suggested,
that his entire philosophy is no more than a conscious antithesis
to that tradition. While there is, I think, an unmistakable element
of rebellion present in Nietzsche’s work and his Lutheran origins
in particular exerted a potent influence on him, Hollingdale is
right to make light of this by emphasizing the rational foundation
of Nietzsche’s thought and by resolutely striving to formulate
interpretations and elucidations of his philosophy on secure textual
foundations. Where Hollingdale does engage in psychological hypothesizing,
it is always as a means of rationalizing concrete events in Nietzsche’s
life or aspects of his personality rather than his philosophy,
as for example, when he posits the death of the philosopher’s
father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, in 1849 as the ‘decisive event’
of Nietzsche’s life and as the primary cause of Nietzsche’s inability
in later years to settle down and lead a localized existence.

The cause of Karl Ludwig’s death has been hotly debated and there
has been speculation that he suffered from some kind of mental
illness which was inherited by Nietzsche and led, in turn, to
the philosopher’s own mental breakdown. Hollingdale rejects this
thesis on the grounds that there is only scant evidence as to
what precisely Pastor Nietzsche was suffering from when he died.
It is known that he was subject to ‘very minor’ epileptic
fits and that nine months before his death he sustained a brain
injury, but it is doubtful that he was ever in any sense insane
and there is certainly no evidence that he passed on his putative
insanity to his son. As regards the actual cause of Nietzsche’s
collapse of the last months of 1888, Hollingdale concurs in the
received view that the philosopher fell victim to a syphilitic
infection which degenerated into a condition usually known as
general paralysis of the insane. Hollingdale does not conjecture
as to the origin of Nietzsche’s contraction of syphilis, but it
is probable that it was the result of his consorting with prostitutes
whilst studying at the University of Bonn.

Hollingdale’s discussion of the importance of Wagner in Nietzsche’s
life and philosophy constitutes one of the most compelling portions
of the book. It traces the evolution of Nietzsche’s friendship
with Wagner from their first meeting in 1869, through the years
of Nietzsche’s blind devotion as a propagandist of the Wagnerian
cause, to the eventual break from Wagner marked by the publication
in 1878 of Menschliches Allzumenschliches. The first question
Hollingdale raises in connection to Nietzsche’s relationship with
Wagner concerns the source of his attractiveness to Nietzsche.
Hollingdale rightly dismisses the whimsical view that Wagner was
a ‘father-figure’ for Nietzsche and that it is this consideration
which best accounts for the hold which the composer had over him.
As Hollingdale points out, it may be true that Wagner took on
a paternal role in Nietzsche’s life: Wagner was just the age Karl
Ludwig would have been had he lived and also looked like him.
But a more realistic supposition is that it was primarily Wagner’s
character and genius that fired the philosopher’s imagination.
Hollingdale describes the experience of Nietzsche’s relationship
with Wagner as an ‘awakening’; it was through his association
with Wagner that Nietzsche became aware for the first time of
the possibility of human greatness and the meaning of genius.

Hollingdale claims, however, that it was not only Wagner’s genius
as a composer that captivated Nietzsche; he was also in thrall
to certain of Wagner’s prose writings, especially those on aesthetics
and art-theory. Hollingdale identifies the five works of 1849-51
(Kunst und Revolution, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,
Kunst und Klima, Oper und Drama, Eine Mitteilung an
meine Freunde) as those which exerted the most profound influence
on Nietzsche’s early work, and claims that their fundamental effect
was to direct Nietzsche’s attention towards drama, something in
which he had hitherto shown no interest and to which he accorded
no special value. Hollingdale argues that Nietzsche’s interpretation
of Athenian tragedy in Die Geburt der Tragödie (GT)
as the fragile synthesis of two aesthetic principles or drives
(Apollo and Dionysus) is derived from Wagner’s dichotomy of Man
and Nature. I think Hollingdale exaggerates the degree of Wagner’s
influence over Nietzsche in this matter, for although Nietzsche’s
analysis of tragedy is undoubtedly a counterpart to Wagner’s Man
and Nature, the dualism of GT is more directly linked to
Schopenhauer’s categories of ‘will’ and ‘representation’. The
Apollo/Dionysus distinction is principally between illusion and
truth, individuation and unity; hence, Dionysus corresponds to
Schopenhauer’s indivisible and ultimately real Will, and Apollo
resembles his individuated and inherently illusory world of representation.
Of course, it may have been partially under Wagner’s influence
that Nietzsche too tried to solve problems by means of two self-sufficient
principles, but the particularities of Nietzsche’s duality certainly
derive more from Schopenhauer than from Wagner.

Hollingdale’s claim that Nietzsche’s theory about the decline
of ancient tragedy bears certain correspondences to Wagner’s is,
I think, more reasonable than the one just discussed. For both
Nietzsche and Wagner represent the demise of Attic tragedy as
a consequence of the rise of scientific rationalism and the belief
in the supremacy of theoretical knowledge. But here too, Hollingdale
does Nietzsche a disservice. For to imply, as Hollingdale does,
that Nietzsche’s account is simply a reiteration of Wagner’s,
is to underestimate the complexity of one of the most distinguished
contributions to nineteenth century aesthetics.

As regards the much discussed issue of the cause of the later
discord between Nietzsche and Wagner, Hollingdale simply asserts
that Nietzsche’s apparent revolt against Wagner was really just
a ‘return to himself’ – an outcome of his growth as a thinker
and his resolve to go his own way. This seems to me to be broadly
correct, and it is worth noting in support of Hollingdale here
that when Nietzsche broke away from Wagner he broke away from
his other great mentor, Schopenhauer, as well. As Nietzsche would
later put it, he eventually overcame these youthful passions,
outgrew the deluded, unconditional admiration for Wagner (although
he continued to love his music) and moved to a position of clear-sighted
self-determination. One implication of interpreting Nietzsche’s
break with Wagner in this way is that his later re-appraisal of
the composer as a décadent and the personification
of everything that was to be rejected in modern culture cannot
be taken at face value. For although the anti-Wagnerian Nietzsche
did alter some of his views of his former idol on authentic intellectual
grounds, it may be assumed that much of his condemnation was induced
by a desire to diminish his intellectual debt to Wagner and a
need to rid himself of all feelings of subservience to him. Accordingly,
the mature Nietzsche’s retrospective claims concerning his relationship
with Wagner should be viewed with some caution. For their principal
aim, I think, was not to provide an accurate mirroring of the
facts, but to realize the redemption of Nietzsche’s past, a redemption
which required him to recreate his earlier self as more unique
and self-directed than he actually was.

One of the weaker sections of Hollingdale’s book is devoted to
a discussion of Darwin’s influence on Nietzsche. Hollingdale expounds
a contentious view of Nietzsche’s philosophy as both assimilating
aspects of Darwinism and as an answer to the challenge posed by
Darwin. He makes three main claims in this connection. First,
he suggests that Nietzsche accepted the fundamental implication
of Darwin’s hypothesis, namely that mankind had evolved in a purely
mechanistic way through fortuitous variations in individual organisms.
Second, he claims that Nietzsche’s basic interpretation of nature
as chaotic, indifferent, and without a directing agency arose
straight from his reading of Darwin. Third, he argues that Nietzsche’s
‘death of god’ hypothesis and the related notion of the ‘advent
of nihilism’ were engendered by Nietzsche’s realization of the
truth of the general conclusions of Darwinism. One initial rejoinder
to the first of Hollingdale’s claims is that it is at odds with
numerous passages in which Nietzsche explicitly repudiates the
truth of Darwinism. In particular, Nietzsche questions the cardinal
Darwinian tenets of progress (‘man as a species is not progressing’),
transitional forms of life (‘there are no transitional forms…Every
type has its limits: beyond these there is no evolution’),
and the development of higher species from lower (‘that the higher
organizations should have evolved out of lower has not been demonstrated
in a single case’). Admittedly, such statements as these were
probably intended to avert misrepresentations of the Übermensch
as an evolutionary phenomenon. But, notwithstanding this consideration,
it is difficult to reconcile these remarks with Nietzsche’s alleged
affirmation of Darwinism. As regards Hollingdale’s second assertion,
while it is true that Nietzsche’s depiction of the natural world
as chaotic was informed by a Weltbild which finds its origins
at least partially in Darwin’s system of nature, it is likely
that it grew more directly from Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer had
propounded a proto-Darwinian view of nature in his great work
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, published in 1818,
more than forty years before the appearance of The Origin of
Species. Nature, Schopenhauer thought, was essentially an
open bellum omnium contra omnes in which rival egoisms
compete for individual satisfaction and survival. In view of Nietzsche’s
clear denunciation of Darwinism and his initial approbation of
and deep immersion in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it seems probable
that his own perception of nature owes more to this Schopenhauerian
picture, than to Darwin. Finally, Hollingdale’s interpretation
of Nietzsche’s overall philosophical enterprise as essentially
an attempt to meet the existential challenges posed by Darwinism
is, I believe, quite misleading. It is true that Nietzsche’s main
philosophical motivation was the need to work out and obviate
the existential implications of the ‘death of God’, but it is
anachronistic to construe Western atheism as having been generated
by Darwinism alone. Atheism, of course, has its roots in the Enlightenment
and eighteenth century rationalism, and so it is inaccurate to
portray Darwin as its singular benefactor. Hollingdale is therefore
wrong to represent Nietzsche’s project as having been exclusively
bestowed upon him by the general conclusions of Darwinism.

Despite the minor objections mentioned above, the book’s classic
status can only have been consolidated by Hollingdale’s fresh
examination of the text and evidence. It will remain indispensable
as an introductory text for students of Nietzsche.

© 2001 Daniel Came

This review first appeared online Sept 1, 2001

Categories: Philosophical, Memoirs