On the morning of 3 January Nietzsche had just left his lodgings when he saw a cab-driver beating his horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. Tearfully, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal's neck, and then collapsed. The small crowd that gathered around him attracted Davide Fino, who had his lodger carried back to his room. After lying unconscious or at least motionless for a while on a sofa, Nietzsche became boisterous, singing, shouting, thumping at the piano. He probably thought he was clowning deliberately.… But the 'inspired clowning' which had already been hard to control by the end of November was now in unchallengeable possession of his mind. He wrote notes to the King of Italy ('My beloved Umberto'), the royal house of Baden ('My children'), and the Vatican Secretary of State. He would go to Rome on Tuesday, he said, to meet the pope and the princes of Europe, except for the Hohenzollerns. He advised the other German princes to ostracize them, for the Reich was still the enemy of German culture. Writing to Gast, Brandes and Meta von Salis, Nietzsche signed himself 'The Crucified', and writing to Burckhardt, Overbeck and Cosima Wagner, signed himself 'Dionysus'. The note to Meta runs: 'The world is transfigured, for God is on the earth. Do you not see how all the heavens are rejoicing? I have just seized possession of my kingdom, am throwing the pope into prison, and having Wilhelm, Bismarck and Stocker shot.' The note to Burckhardt starts: 'That was the little joke for which I condone my boredom at having created a world.'
It is not difficult to trace certain general parallels between historical materialism and the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche is in his own way a full-blooded materialist, whatever scant regard he may pay to the labour process and its social relations. One might say that the root of all culture for Nietzsche is the human body, were it not that the body itself is for him a mere ephemeral expression of the will to power. He asks himself in The Gay Science whether philosophy has 'not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body', and notes with mock solemnity in the Twilight of the Idols that no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude of the human nose. Nietzsche has more than a smack of vulgar Schopenhauerian physiologism about him, as when he speculates that the spread of Buddhism may be attributed to a loss of vigour consequent on the Indian diet of rice. But he is right to identify the body as the enormous blindspot of all traditional philosophy: 'philosophy says away with the body, this wretched idee fixe of the senses, infected with all the faults of logic that exist, refuted, even impossible, although it be impudent enough to pose as if it were real!' He, by contrast, will return to the body and attempt to think everything through again in terms of it, grasping history, art and reason as the unstable products of its needs and drives. His work thus presses the original project of aesthetics to a revolutionary extreme, for the body in Nietzsche returns with a vengeance as the ruin of all disinterested speculation. The aesthetic, he writes in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, is 'applied physiology'.
This is a free excerpt of 552 words. There are 10,853 words (approx.
36 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Friedrich Nietzsche: Critical Essay by Terry Eagleton Access Pass.
