Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/24

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
8
NIETZSCHE THE THINKER

possessed;" liked to wait on himself; despised the dinners of the rich; loved solitude, aside from a few friends—and the common people. Some of the latter class, in the later days of his illness and comparative emaciation in Genoa, spoke endearingly of him as "il santo" or "il piccolo santo." He had remarkable strength of will. Once, when the story of Mutius Scaevola was being discussed among his schoolmates, he lighted a number of matches on his hand and held out his arm without wincing, to prove that one could be superior to pain. After reading Schopenhauer, he practised bodily penance for a short time. Later on he asserted himself against the illnesses that befell him in extraordinary fashion, and when he became mentally and spiritually disillusioned, he was able to wrest strength from his very deprivations. In general, there was an unusual firmness in his moral texture. He despised meanness, untruthfulness, cowardice; he liked straight speaking and straight thinking. He did not have one philosophy for the closet and another for life, as Schopenhauer more or less had, but his thoughts were motives, rules of conduct. In his thinking itself we seem to catch the pulse-beats of his virile will. Professor Riehl calls him "perhaps the most masculine character among our philosophers." [1] He was not without a certain nobleness, too. He once said, "a sufferer has no right to pessimism," i.e., to build a general view on a personal experience. Nor was he dogmatic, overbearing—in spirit at least; I shall speak of this point later. He owned that he contradicted himself more or less. "This thinker [he evidently alludes to himself] needs no one to confute him; he suffices to that end himself." [2] Nor did he wish to be kept from following his own path by friendly defense or adulation. "The man of knowledge," he said, "must be able not only to love his enemies, but to hate his friends." [3] In short, there was a kind of unworldliness about him, not in the ordinary, but in a lofty sense. I discover few traces of vanity in him (at least before the last year or two of his life), though not a little pride; he cared little for reputation, save among a few; and he was not ungenerous,

  1. Alois Riehl, Friedrich Nietzsche, der Künstler und der Denker (4th ed.), p. 161.
  2. Mixed Opinions and Sayings, § 193.
  3. Thus spake Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 3.