Everything Is F*cked(32)
This was Meta’s third summer caring for Friedrich Nietzsche and probably, she figured, her last. She loved him—as a brother, that is. (When a mutual friend suggested they marry, they both laughed uproariously . . . and then became nauseated.) But Meta was approaching the limits of her charity.
She had met Nietzsche at a dinner party. She listened to him play piano and tell jokes and rambunctious stories of his antics with his old friend, composer Richard Wagner. Unlike in his writing, Nietzsche was polite and mild in person. He was an affectionate listener. He was a lover of poetry and could recite dozens of verses from memory. He’d sit and play word games for hours, sing songs and make puns.
Nietzsche was disarmingly brilliant. A mind so sharp he could slice a room open with only a few words. Aphorisms that would later become world famous seemed to spill out of him like fogged breath in cold air. “Talking too much about yourself can also be a means to conceal yourself,” he would spontaneously add, quickly silencing the room.2
Meta often found herself speechless in his presence, not because of any overwhelmed emotion, but merely because her mind felt as though it were constantly a few paces behind his and needed a moment to catch up.
Yet, Meta was no intellectual slouch. In fact, she was a badass of her time. Meta was the first woman ever to earn a PhD in Switzerland. She was also one of the world’s leading feminist writers and activists. She spoke four languages fluently and published articles all over Europe arguing for women’s rights, a radical idea at the time. She was well traveled, brilliant, and headstrong.3 And when she stumbled upon Nietzsche’s work, she felt she had finally found someone whose ideas could push women’s liberation out into the world.
Here was a man who argued for the empowerment of the individual, for radical personal responsibility. Here was a man who believed that individual aptitude mattered more than anything, that each human not only deserved expansion into his or her full potential but had the duty to exercise and push for that expansion. Nietzsche put into words, Meta believed, the core ideas and conceptual frameworks that would ultimately empower women and lead them out of their perpetual servitude.
But there was only one problem: Nietzsche wasn’t a feminist. In fact, he found the whole idea of women’s liberation ridiculous.
This didn’t deter Meta. He was a man of reason; he could be persuaded. He simply needed to recognize his own prejudice and be freed from it. She began visiting him regularly, and soon they became close friends and intellectual companions. They spent summers in Switzerland, winters in France and Italy, forays into Venice, quick trips doubling back to Germany and then Switzerland again.
As the years wore on, Meta discovered that behind Nietzsche’s penetrating eyes and gigantic mustache was a bundle of contradictions. He wrote obsessively of power while being himself frail and weak. He preached radical responsibility and self-reliance despite being wholly dependent on (mostly female) friends and family to take care of and support him. He cursed the fickle reviewers and academics who panned his work or refused to read it, while simultaneously boasting that his lack of popular success only proved his brilliance—as he once proclaimed, “My time has not come yet, some men are born posthumously.”4
Nietzsche was, in fact, everything he claimed to loathe: weak, dependent, and wholly captivated and reliant on powerful, independent women. Yet, in his work, he preached individual strength and self-reliance, and was a woeful misogynist. His lifelong dependence on the care of women seemed to blur his ability to see them clearly. It would be the glaring blind spot in the vision of an otherwise prophetic man.
If there were a Hall of Fame for “most pain tolerated by a single individual,” I would nominate Nietzsche as one of its first cornerstone inductees. He was continually sick as a child: Doctors applied leeches to his neck and ears and told him to spend hours without moving. He’d inherited a neurological disorder that brought about debilitating migraines throughout his life (and caused him to go mad in middle age). He was also incredibly sensitive to light, unable to go outside without thick blue-tinted glasses, and would be nearly blind by the age of thirty.
As a young man, he would join the military and serve briefly in the Franco-Prussian War. There, he would contract diphtheria and dysentery, which nearly killed him. The treatment at the time was acid enemas, which destroyed his digestive tract. For the rest of his life, he would struggle with acute digestive pain, was never able to eat large meals, and was incontinent for parts of his life. An injury from his cavalry days left parts of his body inflexible and, on his worst days, immovable. He often needed help standing up and would spend months at a time stuck alone in bed, unable to open his eyes due to the pain. In 1880, what he would later call “a bad year,” he was bedridden 260 out of 365 days. He spent most of his life migrating between the French coast in the winter and the Swiss Alps in the summer, as he required mild temperatures to keep his bones and joints from aching.
Meta quickly discovered that she wasn’t the only intellectual woman fascinated by this man. He had a parade of women coming by to take care of him for weeks or months at a time. Like Meta, these women were badasses of their time: They were pro fessors and wealthy landowners and entrepreneurs. They were educated and multilingual and fiercely independent.
And they were feminists, the earliest feminists.
They, too, had seen the liberating message in Nietzsche’s work. He wrote of social structures crippling the individual; feminists argued that the social structures of the age imprisoned them. He denounced the Church for rewarding the weak and mediocre; feminists, too, denounced the Church, for forcing women into marriage and subservience to men. And he dared recast the story of human history not as mankind’s escape from and dominance over nature, but as mankind’s growing ignorance to its own nature. He argued that the individual must empower himself and access ever-higher levels of freedom and consciousness. These women saw feminism as the next step to that higher liberation.