CHAPTER II
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING
I
Nietzsche's life was practically one of thought. Of outer events, "experiences" in the ordinary sense, there were few: "we have not our heart there," he confesses, "and not even our ear."[1] But to the great problems of life he stood in a very personal relation. He philosophized not primarily for others' sake, but for his own, from a sense of intimate need. Body and mind co-operated. "I have written all my books with my whole body and life; I do not know what purely spiritual problems are.""May I say it? all truths are for me bloody truths—let one look at my previous writings." "These things you know as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, but the echo of the experiences of others: as when your room shakes from a wagon passing by. But I sit in the wagon, and often I am the wagon itself."[2] These were private memoranda that have been published since his death, but an attentive reader of books he published often has the sense of their truth borne in upon him. As he puts it objectively in Joyful Science, it makes all the difference in the world whether a thinker is personally related to his problems, so that his fate is bound up in them, or is "impersonal," touching them only with the feelers of cool, curious thought.[3] So earnest is he, so much does this make a sort of medium through which he sees the world, that he once set down Don Quixote as a harmful book, thinking that the parodying of the novels of chivalry which one finds there becomes in effect irony against higher strivings in general—Cervantes, he says, who might have fought the Inquisition, chose rather to make its victims, heretics and idealists of all sorts, laughable, and belongs so far to the decadence of Spanish culture. [4] Some
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