What Happened to Nietzsche? - Madness and the Divine Mania

Referring to the individual who descends into  the depths of the mind, Nietzsche wrote: “He enters a labyrinth, and multiplies a  thousandfold the dangers that life in itself brings with it - of which not the least is that  nobody can see how and where he loses his way, becomes solitary, and is torn to pieces by some cave-minotaur of conscience. ” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil In the first video of this 2 part series,  we explored the possibility that Nietzsche’s madness was psychological in origin and not  caused by any disease or damage to the brain. We then investigated the idea that it was  Nietzsche’s great suffering which compelled him to descend into his unconscious in search of what  Carl Jung called “the treasure hard to attain”; that is, the powers of psychological rebirth  and renewal.

And we noted that in such a descent there is the possibility of the conscious  mind losing itself, and madness ensuing. “In the darkness of the unconscious a treasure  lies hidden, the… “treasure hard to attain"…the fight against the paralyzing grip of the  unconscious calls forth man’s creative powers…it needs heroic courage to do  battle with these forces and to wrest from them the  treasure hard to attain. Whoever succeeds in this has triumphed indeed.

” Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation In this video, we are going to explore  whether Nietzsche’s alleged madness was the result of losing himself in  his explorations of the unconscious, or whether he found the treasure of rebirth and  renewal, and attained a state of great health. To gather some preliminary insights into the  nature of Nietzsche’s psychological state we can turn to the ideas of Carl Jung. For Jung  was familiar with the dangers of descending into the depths.

At the age of 38, through a technique  he termed “active imagination”, Jung underwent what he called a “voluntary confrontation with the  contents of the unconscious”, and as he wrote: “I was sitting at my desk…thinking  over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground  literally gave way at my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths.

” Carl Jung, Memories, Drams, Reflections Jung recorded his confrontations with the  unconscious in what are known as the Red Book and Black Books, and as he noted, the  fear that he was “menaced with a psychosis” was a recurrent companion. “I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult  and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic  blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me.

” Carl Jung, Memories, Drams, Reflections Jung relied on the stability of his life in the external world to ensure he escaped  his psychological explorations unscathed. “It was most essential for me to have a normal  life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world…The unconscious  contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have  a medical diploma…I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children…these were  actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed.

” Carl Jung, Memories, Drams, Reflections Nietzsche did not have a fraction  of the stability or success of Jung. He did not have a career, a place in  society, a reputation, close friends, a family of his own, nor a wife. And so,  there is the possibility that, unlike Jung, Nietzsche lost himself in his confrontation  with the unconscious, and that his solitary existence was the fertile soil from which  his madness sprung.

Jung hypothesized: “Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet  because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts which incidentally  possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he  succumbed to exaggeration and irreality. ” Carl Jung, Memories, Drams, Reflections Jung noted that one of the possible symptoms of a madness that results from losing one’s way  in the depths is an exaggerated sense of self, or what he called psychic inflation.

A psychic  inflation occurs when one loses touch with one’s individual limitations and human ego, identifies  with the powerful and impersonal contents of the unconscious, and thereupon feels as if one has  become a superman, a prophet, a god, or touched by divine knowledge and inspiration. Jung explains: “…the approach or invasion of the unconscious can cause…a dangerous inflation, for one of the  most obvious dangers is that of identifying with the figures in the unconscious.  For anyone with an unstable disposition this may amount to a psychosis.

” (Jung) Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis On January 6, 1889, Nietzsche  wrote to Jacob Burckhardt: “When it comes right down to it I’d much  rather have been a Basel professor than God; but I didn’t dare be selfish enough to forgo the creation of the world. ” Nietzsche, Nietzsche's Letters Two days earlier, Nietzsche penned the  following letter to Cosima Wagner: “It is a mere prejudice that I am a human  being. Yet I have often enough dwelled among human beings and I know the things human beings  experience, from the lowest to the highest.

Among the Hindus I was Buddha, in Greece Dionysus  – Alexander and Caesar were incarnations of me, as well as the poet of Shakespeare, Lord Bacon.  Most recently I was Voltaire and Napoleon, perhaps also Richard Wagner…I also hung on the cross. ” Nietzsche, Nietzsche's Letters Within the span of these days  he wrote the ominous line: “What is unpleasant and jeopardizes  my modesty is that, fundamentally, I am every name in history.

” Nietzsche, Nietzsche's Letters These letters support Jung’s claim that  Nietzsche underwent the psychic inflation that occurs when the conscious mind is engulfed  by the figures and forces of the unconscious. But this is not all there is to the mysterious  tale of Nietzsche’s supposed madness. For as we explored in the first video of this  series, Nietzsche suffered his entire adult life from a myriad of debilitating physical symptoms  including migraines, fits of vomiting, nausea, convulsions, blindness and visual hallucinations,  that would leave him bed ridden for days, unable to eat or sleep, and at times questioning whether  life was worth living.

Yet in the autumn of 1888, just prior to his psychological break Nietzsche  reported that his physical ailments had vanished, and that his mood and mental  health had never been better. On September 27th he penned  the following letter: “Marvelous clarity, autumnal colors, an  exquisite feeling of well-being on all things. ” (Letter to Gast, Sept 27, 1888) Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche During these autumn months, in a flood of inspiration he wrote his  autobiography Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, and in it he explained: “Whoever saw me during the seventy days this fall…will not have noticed any trace  of tension in me; but rather an overflowing freshness and cheerfulness.

I never ate with  more pleasant feelings; I never slept better. ” Nietzsche, Ecce Homo In another passage from Ecce Homo, Nietzsche seems to indicate that he had overcome  the great pain that was plaguing his life. “I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy  again…I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as  others cannot easily taste them—I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy.

” Nietzsche, Ecce Homo These passages do not sound like a man  struggling on the brink of madness, but like a man who found the treasure of rebirth  and renewal, and attained “the great health”. What is more, Nietzsche’s mother reported that  during his stay in a mental asylum the year following his break, Nietzsche appeared to save  his displays of madness for certain people, at certain times; and that other than these selective  presentations, his behaviour was normal. “Yesterday the inspector of the sanatorium  told me [about Nietzsche], ‘he doesn’t speak two words which make sense,’ and with the doctor  and me he does not speak a single confused word.

Isn’t that strange? ” Franziska Oehler, The Madness of Nietzsche by Erich Podach After visiting Nietzsche in February of 1890, Nietzsche’s closest companion Franz  Overbeck wrote the following. “I have always held that his madness, the  inception of which no one witnessed at closer hand than myself, was a catastrophe  as sudden as a flash of lightning.

It came on between Christmas 1888 and  the day of Epiphany [January 3] 1889. Before this…Nietzsche cannot have been mad.  Still…I cannot escape the horrible suspicion that arises in me at certain definite periods  of observation, or at least at certain moments, namely, that his madness is simulated.

This  impression can only be explained by the general experiences which I have had of Nietzsche’s  self-concealment, of his spiritual masks. ” Franz Overbeck, The Madness  of Nietzsche by Erich Podach “Every profound spirit needs a mask:  moreover, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing…” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil The idea that Nietzsche’s madness was a mask,  is a possibility. As at times it appeared to his closest companions, Franz Overbeck and Peter Gast,  and even to his own mother, that he was simulating madness.

But one has to wonder what would have  been the point and how plausible it would have been to keep this act of madness up for over a  decade, until his death. But even if Nietzsche did not fake madness, there is another alternative  to the possibility that he was mentally deranged: Nietzsche’s so-called madness could have been  what the Ancient Greeks called a divine mania. “There are two kinds of madness, one arising  from human diseases, and the other from a divine release from the customary habits.

. . " Plato, Phaedrus To better understand the divine mania,  we can turn to a report from the 19th century British poet Alfred Tennyson, who  likened a divine mania to a “waking trance”, or as Tennyson explains the experience: “…[my] individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a  confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly  beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality…  seeming no extinction but the only true life.

” Alfred Tennyson, The Divine  Mania by Yulia Ustinova After transitioning from a state of great  suffering into a state of great health, as occurred with in the autumn months of 1888,  could it be that thereafter Nietzsche lived in a state of divine mania which was mistakenly  interpreted by doctors as indicative of a degenerating madness? As the historian Yulia  Ustinova explains in her book on Divine Mania, most people are too quick to brand all abnormal  states of consciousness as pathological: “…the reluctance to acknowledge that being  in a non-ordinary state of consciousness is not synonymous to being mad is characteristic  of our culture, which tends to medicalise the nonconformities, especially behavioural deviance.  In historical and cultural situations different from the modern Western norm, people take  for granted that a person may be out of his or her mind, but not crazy; for instance, in the  traditional Inuit society a shaman while healing is not deemed mad.

In our society, the idea that  deviation from the normal state of consciousness may be beneficial is still considered by  many extravagant, if not preposterous. ” Yulia Ustinova, Divine Mania: Alteration  of Consciousness in Ancient Greece After his stay in a mental asylum, Nietzsche  returned home and lived out the rest of his life under the care of his mother and sister.  During these years they reported that most of the time it was next to impossible to  connect with him – he was mostly mute, it almost appeared as if he was reposing  above himself, on the peaks of his mind.

He would go for walks with his sister  and would not respond when talked to; and then out of the blue he would offer concise  and intelligible comments. As Jung reported: “For instance, he once said to his sister: "Are  we not quite happy? " - perfectly reasonably, and then he was gone.

. . People have concluded…that  his madness was a divine mania - what the Greeks called mania, a divine state, the state of  being filled with the god; one is entheos, the god is within.

The remark was quoted  as evidence that he had reached a sort of nirvana condition. ” (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) Carl Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra In an aphorism titled “In the great silence” from  the Dawn of Day, Nietzsche seems to convey the idea that it is possible to live in a non-ordinary  state of consciousness - a divine mania - which would appear to most other people as indicative  of mental disease. As Nietzsche wrote: “Now all is still!

The sea lies there pale and  glittering, it cannot speak. The sky plays its everlasting silent evening game. .

. it cannot speak.  .

. O sea, O evening! You are evil instructors!

You teach man to cease being a man! Shall he  surrender to you? Shall he become as you now are, pale, glittering, mute, tremendous, reposing  above himself?

Exalted above himself? ” Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day Throughout his life Nietzsche was heavily influenced by the ancient Greek  god Dionysus; he called himself the “last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus”.  Dionysus was the god of festivals and wine, but he was also the god of divine mania  - of a madness which heals, liberates, and breaks the sterile chains of life.

“His coming brings madness. ”, Walter Otto wrote, regarding Dionysus. Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult On the day of his break on January 3, 1889,  Nietzsche penned the following in a letter: “I come as the victorious Dionysus, who  will make the earth a festival.

” Nietzsche, Nietzsche's Letters It may be but a coincidence, but in the ancient world the winter festival  of Dionysus was celebrated each year in early January, the same time as Nietzsche’s break,  or crossing over, into his new state of mind: “…it is precisely in winter, when the sun  gets ready to start on its new course, that Dionysus makes his most tumultuous entry. ” Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult Was the onset of Nietzsche’s  alleged madness a celebration; his own Dionysian festival - the supreme  symbol of his victory over the great pain? “The madness which is called Dionysus  is no sickness, no disability in life, but a companion of life at its  healthiest…[it is a madness] which ushers in primal salvation amid primal pain.

” Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult Ultimately, we will never know whether Nietzsche  found the treasure of rebirth and renewal and lived out the rest of his life in a state  of divine mania, whether he lost himself in the depths of the unconscious and went mad, or  whether his madness was of an organic origin. Nietzsche’s madness will forever  remain shrouded in mystery. We will conclude this 2-part series  with an aphorism from The Dawn of Day titled “How one ought to turn to stone”.

For  if Nietzsche’s “madness” was a divine mania, this aphorism foreshadows the psychological  state that would later unfold in him: “Slowly, slowly to become hard like a precious  stone - and at last to lie there, silent and a joy to eternity.