Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Chapter 25 - Catastrophe
from PART THREE - The Nomad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Becoming God
The first time the Finos noticed that all was not well with their tenant – they were, of course, unaware of the increasingly strange letters he had been writing for some time – was at the beginning of December, 1888. Nietzsche asked them to remove all the hangings from the walls of his room since he was expecting a visit from the king and queen of Italy, and the room needed to look like a temple to receive them. They also began to find torn-up banknotes in his wastepaper basket. Darkness did not, however, descend all at once; there were still moments of lucidity. Even though, at the beginning of December, he had begun to write letters that were unmistakably deranged – one to Bismarck, for instance, was signed, ‘The Antichrist/ Frederick Nietzsche/ Fromentin’ (the last a French romantic painter who died in 1876) – he was still capable of writing an entirely normal letter to Emily Fynn on December 6 and a reasonably normal one to Köselitz on December 16. Progressively, though, his loss of contact with reality became ever more marked.
With respect to his body, for instance, he himself notes a sporadic loss of control, a kind of emotional incontinence. Such idiotic, ‘private-tomfool-notions’, came to him as he walked the streets, he writes on November 25, that for a full half hour he would be unable to stop grinning.
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- Information
- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 528 - 533Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010