Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius

National Review, August 26, 1991 by Matthew Scully

IT would be hard to imagine Socrates and Aristotle sitting around discussing their own "genius," writing in diaries of their longing to be recognized for genius, or even consciously striving for that gift. Almost by definition, real genius is outward-looking, concerned with ideas or creations and not with itself.

One has to wonder, then, about Friedrich Nietzsche, whose deliberate "self-transformation" Carl Pletsch has traced. It was a slow, disciplined struggle full of anguish and disappointment, writes Mr. Pletsch, and always with just that goal in mind: to be a genius, and recognized as such. Above all Nietzsche did not want to be an ordinary man doing ordinary things, even if that life held out a happiness unavailable to the noble but lonely "genius."

In those days, the author observes, "God was retreating to the wings, and genius emerged as the focus of something approaching a secular religion." Young Friedrich having embraced this notion, his life was a search for established geniuses whom he could emulate--Goethe, Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner--and eventually eclipse. He was five when his father died; thus, Mr. Pletsch speculates, the quest for models was bund up with a yearning to fill the paternal void. As early as age 14, in 1858, Nietzsche was writing an "autobiography"--Aus Meinem Leben--imitating Goethe's work by that name. His deepest wish, the boy confided in his notebook, was "to write a little book and then read it."

"It is, in its youthful way," Mr. Pletsch reflects, "an exemplification of the largest project of the genius: an attempt to create the world in which he would live."

The rest of Nietzsche's story is told interestingly enough: his break from academic conventions, his poignant attempts at romance, his discipleship under Wagner and subsequent estrangement, and his triumph as the author of books that had their desired shocking effect and gave us the Ubermensch, the "eternal return," and the regrettable news that "God is dead." Mr. Pletsch, a history instructor at Ohio's Miami University, writes well and, despite an awe of Nietzsche, occasionally picks up on the conceits of modern "geniuses." (Though, alas, writing of the Enlightenment he can still offer as inane an observation as: "For the first time perhaps, the pen was proving mightier than the sword"--which makes you wonder what Plato, the Apostles, Augustine, or other scribes from antiquity or the subsequent "Dark Ages" might have written with.)

But here is the book's central flaw. Mr. Pletsch describes but never quite defines the trait he so greatly admires. Geniuses "create the world in which [they] live," he asserts. Because "narcissism is a virtue of genius," the genius defies conventions and "fashions a unique self." Even today, "some of us find it as difficult to look directly upon the creativity of the genius as Mosses did to look upon God in the burning bush." Nietzsche's friendship with the genius Wagner "fitted him for his [own] creative mission. It permitted him to complete his transformation from a provincial son of a Lutheran pastor and sometime professor of philology into a world-renowned nihilist philosopher."

Leaving aside the logical problem of calling nihilism "a creative mission," much less rating narcissism a "virtue" in anyone, there is a confusion here between artistic and philosophical genius. The artist may indeed defy conventions and even startle--though the burning-bush imagery overdoes it a bit. But if we define philosophy as a discipline in which the object is truth, then genius consists not in creativity but in discernment. The superior philosopher is not the one who fashions the most daring or intricate theoretical system. The superior philosopher is the wisest, the one whose ideas bear the closest relation to reality. As a philosopher and guide for mankind, therefore, Nietzsche rates praise for his "genius" only if nihilism is correct. And if nihilism is correct and all is meaningless, what meaning is left to words like philosophy, wisdom, or genius? One can be at the same time an undisputed intellectual genius and--Nietzsche, Sartre, Bertrand Russell--a jackass.

Reading Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius, you begin to sense that in his fascination with intellectual brilliance Mr. Pletsch has missed the real drama of his subject's life. Nietzsche's achievement, he concludes, "we one of criticism, unmasking, deconstruction, demolition, and nihilism." It was "an attack on Socratism ancient and modern," a "lifelong assault upon complacent rationality and the pursuit of knowledge . . ." Toward Socrates, Nietzsche bore a ferocious hatred, because the philosopher had taught of moral virtue and humility, foreshadowing the "slave morality" of Christianity--a still greater calamity for mankind.

Of course, the greatness of Socrates was precisely that he himself would never have dreamed of a term like "Socratism," nor prided himself on such feats as "demolition and nihilism." But beyond that, what Mr. Pletsch has missed is the drama of a profound, sensitive soul closing itself to the divine. Precisely because of his intellectual genius, Nietzsche could not really have dismissed life's central questions--Does God exist, and what does He expect of us?--as childish nonsense; indeed the intensity he brought to his project of "demolition" reflects not calm, good-faith disbelief, but defiance.