I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

"It’s certainly true that Nietzsche’s writings were used in the context of Nazism. That’s an interesting story—how his sister took control of his papers when he went mad and edited them in ways which made them much more amenable to use by Nazis. They were then circulated and read by Nazis, and much of his popularity in the 1930s came from that National Socialist readership. Sue Prideaux is a biographer rather than a philosopher. She’s written two excellent biographies before: one of Strindberg and one of Munch, both of whom had some connection with Nietzsche’s ideas. As a biographer, she was immersed in that late nineteenth-century milieu and fascinated by it. When she turned to Nietzsche, she did what all good biographers do: go to the primary sources as much as possible. There’s a huge amount of philosophical writing about Nietzsche. Because he’s such a fragmentary, often contradictory writer, just about every commentator has a different take on him. I don’t think there’s an orthodox interpretation of Nietzsche. There are overlapping ways of interpreting him, but everyone can find what they’re looking for somewhere amongst Nietzsche’s writings, which may have been, to some degree, deliberate. “Because Nietzsche is such a fragmentary, often contradictory writer, just about every commentator has a different take on him.” But Sue Prideaux’s book is not focused exclusively on his philosophy. It’s more a book about a man who was a philosopher—a very great philosopher, a very original thinker, a very stylish writer. He famously said, “The one thing needful: to give ‘style’ to one’s character.” That’s the governing principle of his writing and life—that you have a distinctive way of being who you are. What I loved about this book is that it takes you right into Nietzsche’s life. This is particularly important with him because the life and the work are not so easily separable. With some philosophers, you can understand them and appreciate them without knowing much about them. You have to know when they lived but you don’t have to know too much detail. For Nietzsche, there’s a sense that his life is actually part of what he’s trying to do. A lot of his philosophy is about overcoming things and his life exemplifies that. He was a very brilliant philological scholar—a student of classical languages—and made a professor at Basel while he was still very young for that prestigious appointment. But he was extremely ill from a relatively early age with blinding headaches, digestive problems, and problems with his eyes. He gave up his job and was basically a wandering scholar producing these extraordinary books which weren’t much read in his lifetime. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . They’re often very fragmentary. Nietzsche is a very famous aphorist. He writes these short, pithy comments, many of which are actually given as an appendix in Prideaux’s book, which is great. That was a direct reaction to not being able to sustain thought and writing because of his illness, his blinding headaches, and his failing eyesight. He just couldn’t sustain things, but he made that into a virtue, an affirmation of something rather than an obstacle. This book isn’t a primer on Nietzsche’s philosophy. It’s a serious engagement with his life. I think the ideal would be to read it in combination with Nietzsche’s own books, but also with an overview or commentary. Michael Tanner’s Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction is a good place to start: it’s literally a very short introduction to Nietzsche, an overview of one way of seeing him, written in a very accessible way. But I Am Dynamite is excellent as an insight into just what kind of a man he was and what kind of life he led. We see pictures of this guy with a big moustache looking incredibly serious and forbidding, but what emerges from his letters—many of which are quoted in this biography—is that he’s got a sense of humour, he’s self-deprecatory sometimes, he’s got a sense of fun. It’s important to realize that it’s not all po-faced, that sometimes he’s pulling your leg. He has a poetic aspect, but he’s also got a kind of irony that, knowing more about his life and seeing him writing in this way, you can appreciate much more. This is important because Nietzsche has often been characterized as an anti-Semite, and as a proto-Nazi. Prideaux is very clear about how, when publishing his writing under the title The Will to Power , Nietzsche’s sister self-consciously added parts, engaged in selective editing and so on, to create this ‘false Nietzsche’, as it were, that was for many years thought to be the real Nietzsche. These were supposedly his ideas, and they were dangerous ideas—not just because he was challenging religion and saying, ‘God is dead’ and that we have to reinvent morality, but also because he seemed to be advocating a kind of racial purity, a celebration of the great blond beast, an anti-Semitic story about the weakness of the Jews. “We must still remember Nietzsche wasn’t an egalitarian. He wasn’t a liberal.” While that seems to be dramatically unfair to the real Nietzsche, we must still remember he wasn’t an egalitarian. He wasn’t a liberal. He did think that some people were much more important than others. He had a kind of idealized view; he celebrated genius in a certain sort of way, and initially saw Wagner (who was anti-semitic) as a great genius and spent a lot of time with him. He later fell out with him, but there was a phase in his thinking where Wagner was the greatest person alive and was going to renew Germany through, as Nietzsche saw it, a combination of Apollonian and Dionysian art. Similarly, Nietzsche was in thrall to Schopenhauer for a long time. He felt that Schopenhauer had more or less characterized the nature of reality and what was important in life. Schopenhauer was a great pessimist, but Nietzsche to a degree broke free from that and became a much more optimistic thinker than his mentor. Schopenhauer thinks ‘Things are terrible and dark’, and Nietzsche replies, ‘Yes, they’re terrible and dark, but we can seize control, become powerful, turn bad into good, become stronger and be heroes of our own destiny.’ I don’t think so. He genuinely describes himself as an explosive thinker because he is. He’s a vain thinker in lots of ways—he’s got a section in one his books called ‘Why I’m so clever’—but it’s sort of true, too. He was initially extremely brilliant in conventional academic terms. Then, he was brilliant as a highly original thinker, diagnosing the late nineteenth-century position relative to religion. The loss of confidence that there was an external God to underwrite morality was a major fallout from Darwinism. Opinion was heading that way anyway, but Darwin gave a very plausible account of how human beings could have evolved through natural processes without some kind of external intervention. The big question becomes, ‘What does that mean for how we live and how we treat each other?’ We’ve always felt we had to be good because God will punish us if we weren’t. If you don’t believe that, where do you stand? Is everything then permitted? Eventually, Nietzsche had severe psychological problems. He went mad and had to be locked away. It’s debatable why he became mad. It’s a romantic picture, to see him looking too far into the abyss and becoming mad as a result of his thinking. I suspect the reality is much more prosaic. His father died young and had severe psychiatric problems. One story is that he inherited syphilis, another that he contracted it. There were physiological explanations of what happened to him alongside genetic ones. I suspect these were much more significant than any intellectual triggers. This is a very sad case of somebody who had a great propensity to psychiatric problems and circumstances, the environment, pushed him in that direction. Having been in that position, it was then objectively terrible—though he didn’t realize it was happening—that his sister took control of his ideas in the way they were presented to the public."