Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/503

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NOTES
487

Morals. Wagner did not like Rée, who was a Jew, and warned Nietzsche in Sorrento against him (see Drews, op. cit., p. 221). Richter has an extended discriminating note on the relations between Nietzsche and Rée (op. cit., pp. 163-4).

i Ziegler appears to me to exaggerate when he speaks of a "ganz fundamentale Wandlung" (op. cit., p. 76); he says later himself that the change was "angebahnt." Riehl speaks simply of a "grosse Loslösung" (op. cit., p. 59). There can be no doubt that the change appeared great, even to those who knew Nietzsche well (cf. what Rohde wrote, as quoted in Bernoulli's Franz Overbeck und Nietzsche, I, 261).

CHAPTER X

a Cf. a striking passage quoted by Riehl (op. cit., p. 68) which I cannot locate: "How strong the metaphysical need is … may be gathered from the fact that even when a free man has got rid of all metaphysical belief, art in its highest manifestations easily causes a reverberation (Miterklingen) of the long silent or even broken metaphysical strings. If one becomes conscious of this, one feels a deep twinge of the heart and longs for a return of the object he has lost, whether it be called religion or metaphysics. In such moments a man's intellectual character is put to the proof."

b Cf. Dawn of Day, § 540, where he even calls it a piece of pedantry to distinguish between learning by study and natural endowment, though he admits that Michael Angelo distinguished in this way (in contrasting Raphael with himself), and that learning is not altogether a matter of will: one must be able to learn.

c In Mixed Opinions etc., § 213, however, Nietzsche gives precedence in education to drawing and painting over music; and in The Wanderer etc., § 167, he has other depreciatory references to music, even saying that the Greeks gave it a secondary place—that is, aside from the Pythagoreans, who invented the five-year silence and did not invent dialectics—something for which he now has more respect than in his first period. This view of the Greeks, if at all reconcilable with his earlier view, is only so if he has the later (decadent) Greeks in mind, or at least the Greeks, so far as they loved discussion and strife.

d Cf. Human, etc., § 292, "No honey is sweeter than that of knowledge"; this aphorism closes with the ejaculation, "Toward the light—thy last movement; an exultant cry of knowing—thy last sound." On the other hand, Nietzsche is not unaware of the losses or dangers to which men of science are subject—on the side of active will they are apt to be weakened, and they may lose their highest power and bloom earlier than the poetic natures (Mixed Opinions etc., § 206).

e Cf. another description of one who has a "free" mind about life (Human, etc., § 287): though at first he loves and hates, and forgets nothing, he comes in time neither to hate existence nor to love it, but to lie above it, now with the eye of joy, now with that of sorrow, like nature herself with her alternating summer and autumn moods.

f Cf. the picture of the "Don Juan of Knowledge," Dawn of Day, § 327: the objects he gains fail to hold his love, but he enjoys the adventure, the pursuit, and the intrigues; he pursues the highest and remotest stars of knowledge, till at last there is nothing more to seek, unless it be the abode of pain, and perhaps even that will disappoint him like everything else. Even during Nietzsche's student days at Bonn, he had written his sister (June 11, 1865), "Do we then in our study seek rest, peace, happiness? No, only truth, and even if it were in the highest degree horrible and ugly" (Briefe, V, 113).