Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius
By Carl Pletsch
Free Press, 300 pages, $22.95
`I am terrified,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche to his sister Elisabeth in 1884, ”by the thought of the sort of people who may one day invoke my authority.” Terrified or not, he would not be surprised if he were alive today to read (or, better, review) Carl Pletsch`s book on how he learned his
”role” of prophetic genius from a succession of father-figures whom he first passionately emulated and then repudiated or drastically revised, ranging from his secondary schoolteacher Friedrich Ritschl to Schopenhauer and Wagner.
As Erich Heller points out in his essay ”The Importance of Nietzsche”:
”Among all the thinkers of the nineteenth century he is . . . the only one who would not be too amazed by the amazing scene upon which we now move in sad, pathetic, heroic, stoic, or ludicrous bewilderment. . . . It is all part of a story told by Nietzsche.” In this sense, the subject of Pletsch`s book already has reviewed it, for Nietzsche predicted that the Western mind, in the process of devaluation he himself set in motion, would, as Heller notes,
”eventually . . . unmask as humbug what it began by regarding as the finer things in life.” And Nietzsche himself could hardly remain immune to this corrosion.
It is not that Pletsch wishes to devalue the importance of this thinker or even that he has written a bad book. But in ”Young Nietzsche” (a title that might well catch the eye of Mel Brooks) he has fulfilled the prophecy of the prophet who is his subject by writing a kind of career guide to the trade of 19th Century prophecy. In describing the student Nietzsche`s first momentous meeting with Wagner, with whom he had been invited to dine, Pletsch has even written a scene that Brooks could put intact into a movie:
”As the day progressed (Nietzsche) was in a state of nervous anticipation and got into a fight with a tailor who had promised him a new suit for the occasion. First the suit was not ready. Then, when it was finally delivered to him half an hour before he was expected at the Brockhauses, the messenger demanded immediate payment, which the student was unable to make. With Nietzsche trying to put the suit on and the tailor`s helper trying to take it back, it was ripped and Nietzsche had to go in his old suit. But the evening went wonderfully anyway.”
It is probably unavoidable for the present, when it looks back, to impose its own values on the past, and thus for Pletsch (who teaches at Miami University in Ohio) to see this consummately rebellious thinker in the spirit of a 1980s academic making shrewd career moves. His thesis is that Nietzsche, born in Prussia in 1844 the son of a ”rigidly earnest” Lutheran pastor whose early death left him fatherless at age 5, ”had carefully constructed both his life and his works as monuments of creativity and had cast himself in the role of the genius,” a role that arose from ”a veritable ideology, a vehicle for conveying the grand aspirations of unusual individuals to the culture at large.”
He then traces the origin of this ideology as it ”emerged from the Enlightenment,” under whose auspices bourgeois intellectuals severed themselves from clerical careers and dependence on noble patrons ”and claimed the right to reform society according to their own lights.”
Pletsch is an acute psychobiographer, especially so in describing Nietzsche`s early years and analyzing the terrifying ”grave dream” Nietzsche had soon after his father`s death-in which his father, accompanied by funereal organ music, climbs out of his grave and hurries into his church and soon comes out again with a child under his arm: ”The grave opens, he climbs in and the cover sinks back onto the opening. At the same time the organ tones fell silent and I awoke.”
The next morning, Nietzsche`s younger brother Joseph fell ill and died in a few hours-a circumstance that made the dream a permanent part of family legend. Pletsch speculates that, because his father died during Friedrich`s oedipal stage of development, when a son secretly wishes his father (and male siblings) dead, Nietzsche probably felt not only guilt and fear of reprisal but also ”a tenuous sense of invulnerability and even immortality” by having become the only male family member to escape the ”vortex” of church and graveyard. And thus ”a rudimentary psychological matrix for Nietzsche`s mature style of thought may already have been prepared.”
He is similarly good at analyzing the young Nietzsche`s pysche at other crucial junctures in his development, such as his relations with male friends and especially with their fathers and his teachers and with his later intellectual and artistic heroes.
The problem with ”Young Nietzsche” is the almost ludicrous reductiveness hinted at earlier, the lack of any real concern with thought as such. There is no sense of how or why or in what spirit thinkers actually think, nor that they might mean what they say, nor of their relative lack of concern with matters of identity and self-presentation. Strictly speaking, real intellectuals don`t have identities, they have ideas, almost in the way that actors have parts.
Though Pletsch is very good at rendering Nietzsche`s growing sense of mission in expressing the dire import of his ideas, he fails to show the author of ”The Gay Science” playfully bouncing one concept off another, sometimes through pure high spirits or a rhetorical desire to shock. For that matter, Pletsch is deficient in showing that the thinker goes where the thought takes him, not where his ”role” points. True, the thinker has to make a living and create some kind of ”space” for himself in the social order, but surely it`s perverse to see Nietzsche as playing any kind of game in rejecting society`s rewards or especially in challenging its whole raison d`etre.
Heller quotes Nietzsche`s remark in ”Human, All Too Human”: ”Lonely and deeply suspicious of myself as I was, I took . . . sides against myself and for anything that happened to hurt me and was hard for me.”
Why? Heller asks. ”Because he was terrified by the prospect that all the better things in life, all honesty of mind, integrity of character, generosity of heart, fineness of aesthetic perception, would be corrupted and finally cast away by the new barbarians, unless the mildest and gentlest hardened themselves for the war which was about to be waged against them.”
It`s difficult to tell from this book whether Pletsch knows there`s a war on-and if so, which side he`s chosen.
