American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

According to Cook, Nietzsche pushed his mind toward insanity knowingly and willingly. His madness was no accident, it was martyrdom. Nietzsche “would have been willing to pay the price had he known in advance that it was to be the loss of reason,” Cook wrote. He knew that a new world of ideas worth living for would also be worth dying for; mental death was the price. According to Cook, the penalty of madness has always been central to religious mysticism, and it would remain so for secular moderns who struggled against inherited forms but longed for the sense of transcendence they provided.58 For radicals like Cook, the lesson of Nietzsche’s madness was not simply that mental suffering is an occupational hazard for the modern intellect, but that such suffering has a greater purpose.