On Portraying Nietzsche—Or Whether a Philosopher's Biography Should Be Philosophical
In the before time, the long long ago (i.e., before the pandemic), I happened to walk past one of my favorite bookstores in the city center. I browsed the display, as I always do, and found my eyes drawn to one book in particular: Sue Prideaux's new biography of Nietzsche called I Am Dynamite!. Boldly titled and emphatically designed, I could not resist going into the store and buying a copy for myself. I began to read it later that day, huddled up in bed with my cat Tai Tai, and ended up sleeping much too late. So it goes.
Prideaux's biography of Nietzsche is hardly the first of its kind. There have been a number of studies of Nietzsche's life and thought—most notably Walter Kaufmann's brilliant Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. First published in 1950, Kaufmann's Nietzsche, as well as his Nietzsche scholarship more generally, did much to change—to rectify—the then-popular image of Nietzsche as a Nazi philosopher. It also greatly increased popular and academic interest (especially in the United States) in the largely misunderstood German philosopher. It is in no small part thanks to Kaufmann that today, Nietzsche needs no apostle. Public interest in his life and work is strong and the academic work is voluminous.
I read two chapters of I Am Dynamite! before I could no longer avoid sleep. Nietzsche's life as Prideaux tells it is captivating. She begins with Nietzsche's own account of meeting Wagner, which was one of the major events in his life. Wagner’s influence on Nietzsche would persist until the end. She then trails back to Nietzsche’s early childhood. The loss of Friedrich's father, the bond that he had with his sister Elisabeth, his departure to a Spartan-like school for talented and mostly fatherless boys—Prideaux tells the story well, using many examples from Nietzsche's own precocious writing at the time to add color to her account.
After only a couple of chapters, the difference between Prideaux's and Kaufmann's approach to biography is clear. Prideaux is intent on telling the story of Nietzsche life as a human being, with all the emotional attachments and psychological reactions to specific events that such an approach necessarily entails. Kaufmann, on the other hand, while certainly not insensitive to Nietzsche's background and circumstances, is much keener to get right down to the philosophy. This is unsurprising, of course, given that Kaufmann was a philosopher himself, while Prideaux is a novelist and biographer. This raises a question that interests me: Should the biography of a philosopher be philosophical? Differently put, to what extent ought an account of the life of a philosopher critically engage with their philosophy?
To get at an answer to this question, I think that it helps to step back and address some other questions. Let’s start with a seemingly simple one: What is a biography? This appears to be answerable with a dictionary definition. A biography is "an account of someone's life written by someone else" (OED). Straightforward enough. However, when you examine this definition a little more critically, you find that it raises a number of issues. There is, for instance, the matter of what kind of account is being offered. Biographical information about a person is supposed to encompass the 'facts' about their life. When and where they were born, when and where they died, and everything in between. This includes more straightforward biographical ‘facts’ (e.g., where someone went to school, whether they married, etc.) as well as more nebulous aspects of someone’s existence (e.g., emotional responses to events, psychological states, etc.).
This brings me to two related problems, which I will call the Between Problem and the Beyond Problem. The Between Problem is that the 'everything in between' that I just referred to with regard to a person’s life could quite literally entail everything in between their birth and death, to the extent that everything that might in some way relate to the person’s life may be brought into the account. As Rainer Maria Rilke puts it in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge:
"Everything is composed of so many isolated details... In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed."1
There is an overwhelming, virtually infinite amount of detail that could be included and conveyed in any account of a person’s life. Any one fact is, or at least could be, related to yet another fact, so that any given fact will ultimately give rise to a host of others that can potentially be associated with still other facts, to the point of approaching an infinite number.
Think of it this way. An account of any given historical event properly involves an account of everything that preceded it in the history of the world so as to lead up to that event (vertically), as well as an account of everything that is happening at that time in the world that has some bearing on the event as it unfolds (horizontally). Starting points are arbitrary, at least within the larger scheme of history (the existence of the universe) and within the chain of causality that links historical events. This brings us to the Beyond Problem. Where to start one’s account within the history of human existence (let alone the universe)? Psychologically speaking, some starting points do of course make more sense than others. Perhaps the Stone Age is not the best place from which to begin one’s account of the Second World War. Nevertheless, strictly speaking, to get to the Second World War, we need to have gone through the Stone Age. Had the Stone Age not been as it was, after all, there might never have been a Second World War.
Even if a strictly-objective-facts account of someone's life were not impossibly demanding, no one will want to read it. It would take more than a lifetime to read another’s full lifetime. This brings us to another highly relevant question: Why do we biographize? One of the aims of a biography is to portray who a particular person was or is. The idea is to capture their subjectivity, their uniqueness in the stream of historical events and among other lives that have been lived and that are perhaps still being lived through time. Yet to explain the life of another (any) human being inevitably involves a substantial amount of subjectivity. Not just on the part of the biographer, who obviously has to decide on which facts to cover, and who is always going to have a limited ability to access all potentially relevant facts. This is the kind of methodological subjectivity that marks any given approach to a subject, which is important to keep in mind, but not all that interesting.
What is more fascinating is the subjectivity inherent in the subject matter itself. A life cannot be reduced to biographical information. There are ways of reacting, ways of seeing, ways of being that cannot be uncovered or discovered in the way that facts can—nor can they be reduced to simple descriptions that exhaustively convey their subject. It takes a kind of circling, a puzzling, a fitting-things-together, a way-of-seeing the way-of-seeing of the person whose life one is describing, through their own eyes (e.g., via their own writings) and through those of others who knew them. This is, in the end, what Prideaux is doing. Inevitably, much is left out. But sometimes we see more through what has been left out, on the basis of a solid foundation, than if all the absences were filled in. This is the subjectivity that I meant. For even Nietzsche did not have a full account of his own life. He couldn't have had it—no one ever does. A full account of one's life, any life, involves everything: all relations with others and the world, all connections through time and space.
This leads me to another question. What do we want out of a biography? When it is an artist, thinker, or scientist about whom we want to read, then we presumably want to gain insight into their creativity, their output, or their thought. Biography is often considered crucial for this kind of insight. Is it important to know that Dostoevsky's father was killed by his serfs? If, like Freud, you want to argue that much of what preoccupied Dostoevsky and what therefore made its way into his writing, can be explained by the violent murder of his father, then it does seem to be important. To psychologize or psychiatrize the artist, biography is necessary. Life events, and in particular the psychological responses to life events, provide invaluable insights into the artist's work within this approach. I find this view to be valuable in only a limited way. Certain themes, interests, curiosities, and so on may be partly explained by someone's circumstances. Everyone is influenced by myriad factors and some of these seem important to literary or scientific output. Dostoevsky read a newspaper clipping that would form the basis of his story A Gentle Creature, variously translated as The Meek One (1876). However, in the literary as well as other arts, the individual works—that is, the particular novels, specific philosophical treatises, and so on—far exceed and cannot be reduced to the empirical circumstances that may have influenced their creation. This is one of the mysteries and beauties of art.
This brings us back to the question of whether biographies of philosophers ought to be philosophical. Whose approach is right, Kaufmann’s or Prideaux’s? If the aim is to link the life of a philosopher to their philosophy, then I think that significant philosophical engagement is necessary. This was the position of Kaufmann, who had to salvage Nietzsche's person as well as his philosophy from the wreckage caused by his sister and her association with the Nazi party. Prideaux, on the other hand, can write comfortably about Nietzsche's life, first and foremost painting his uniqueness as a human being, with the knowledge that his philosophy is adequately dealt with elsewhere even in relation to his life (e.g., Rüdiger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography). That is not to say, of course, that the philosophical preoccupations and outputs of Nietzsche can be ignored. They cannot be ignored any more than Dostoevsky’s fiction could be in a biography of the Russian writer.
In Untimely Mediations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen), Nietzsche writes that "the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars."2 He didn't think that more time—more human beings—would change anything. There is no evolution in this sense. As Kaufmann puts it, "In the highest specimens of humanity we envisage the meaning of life and history: what can an additional ten or twenty centuries bring to light that we could not find in contemplating Aeschylus and Heraclitus, Socrates and Jesus, Leonardo and Napoleon, or Plato and Spinoza?"3
Perhaps Prideaux is doing Nietzsche's bidding, then, by portraying his life. Whether we want to see him as an exemplar is another question. I imagine that those who are already familiar with his philosophy will be happy to read about him as a living subject. Given that his philosophy can be found elsewhere, if reading a vivid account of his life will make someone who is uninitiated seek out Nietzsche's philosophy, then what more can you really ask for?
Rilke, Rainer Maria. (1910/2008). The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Translated by Burton Pike. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1873/2007). Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 111.
Kaufmann, Walter. (2013). Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 149.