American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Durant argued that Nietzsche’s“sick” biography was crucial here, not because it appealed to readers’ voyeurism but because it helped explain why he went wrong. Nietzsche was a “man sick to the very roots—if you will let me say it, abnormal in sexual constitution; a man not sufficiently attracted to the other sex, because he has so much of the other sex in him.” Plenty of authors throughout the century would speculate about Nietzsche’s sexuality—his orientation and his undercharged virility—in order to explain why he wrote a compensatory “martial” philosophy, or how his displaced energies fueled his breathless intellectual production. However, Durant’s version stressed its particular object “lessons” for young intellectuals. Nietzsche’s example demonstrated the effeminacy of the socially passive intellectual: better to have callused palms from manual labor than the neurasthenia of prissy intellectualism. Nietzsche’s problem was that he was “abnormally weak in the social instincts,” which are crucial for connecting ideas to real world problems, the critical intellectual to community.