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He was “the lad of infinite promise”—as are we all—but never understood the nature of his promise. He never understood that his duty was to perfect nature, to overcome himself, his culture, family, lust, his brutish animal nature, to become who he was, what he was.
I wish you could raise yourself up before me so that I didn’t have to despise you.
The surface bourgeois life is deadly—it’s too visible, one can see the end too clearly and all the acts, leading right to the end.
I hate others who rob me of my solitude and yet do not truly offer me company.”
It’s difficult, I believe, to overestimate the degree to which life—real life—is lived by the unconscious.
Yet can feelings. be trusted? Everywhere, religious zealots feel a divine presence. Shall I consider their feelings less trustworthy than mine?” “I wonder,” Nietzsche mused, “whether our dreams are closer to who we are than either rationality or feelings.”
To love woman is to hate life!”
“I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another. Once, not long ago, I thought I had found it. But I was mistaken.”
“I dream of a love in which two people share a passion to search together for some higher truth. Perhaps I should not call it love. Perhaps it’s real name is friendship.”
I was never weighed down by carrying my father on my back, never suffocated by the burden of his judgment, never taught that the object of life was to fulfill his thwarted ambitions. His death may well have been a blessing, a liberation. His whims never became my law. I was left alone to discover my own path,
Could I, the antichrist, have exorcized false beliefs and sought new truths with a parson-father wincing with pain at my every achievement, a father who would have regarded my campaigns against illusion as a personal attack against him?”
“Long ago, Josef, I learned that it is easier to cope with a bad reputation than with a bad conscience.
Perhaps my students are not yet alive. Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some philosophers are born posthumously!”
“Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time.”
“You answer questions with questions, Friedrich!” “You ask questions to which you know the answer,” Nietzsche countered. “If I knew the answer, why would I ask?” “To avoid knowing your own answer!”
“My friend,” he whispered, “I cannot tell you how to live differently because, if I did, you would still be living another’s design.
Dogma
if time infinitely stretches backward, must not everything that can happen have already happened?
“Duty? Can duty take precedence over your love for yourself and for your own quest for unconditional freedom? If you have not attained yourself, then ‘duty’ is merely a euphemism for using others for your own enlargement.”
at least, I have the courage of my convictions.” “Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions.
“To build children you must first be built yourself. Otherwise, you’ll seek children out of animal needs, or loneliness, or to patch the holes in yourself. Your task as a parent is to produce not another self, another Josef, but something higher. It’s to produce a creator.
“I should have become an ‘I’ before I became a ‘we.’ I made choices before I was formed enough to make choices.” “Then that, too, is a choice,” Mathilde snapped back. “Who is this ‘I’ that didn’t become an I? A year from now you’ll say this ‘I’ of today wasn’t yet formed, and that the choices you make today don’t count. This is just self-trickery, a way to weasel out of responsibility for your choices.
“Do not create children until one is ready to be a creator and to spawn creators.” It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future—as though sperm contains your consciousness!
One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you.
‘Choose the right enemy.’ I think that’s the key! All these years I’ve been fighting the wrong enemy. The real enemy was, all along, not Mathilde, but destiny. The real enemy was aging, death, and my own terror of freedom. I blamed Mathilde for not allowing me to face what I was really unwilling to face! I wonder how many other husbands do that to their wives?”
“I meant only that, to fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation. Only when one can live like the eagle—with no audience whatsoever—can one turn to another in love; only then is one able to care about the enlargement of the other’s being.
“You always said I must find my own way and not search for the way or your way.
“A deep man needs friends,” he began, as if speaking more to himself than to Breuer. “All else failing, he still has his gods. But I have neither friends nor gods.
I say that I must be separate from others to think my own thoughts. I say that the great minds of the past are my companions, that they crawl out of their hiding places into my sunshine. I scoff at the fear of solitude.
I crow that if I am misunderstood or feared or rejected, then so much the better—it means I am on target!
Become who you are’? That means not only to perfect yourself but also not to fall prey to another’s designs for you.
My parting wish for you, my dear friend, is that the word ‘unforgivable’ be banished from your lexicon.”
“History is fiction that did happen. Whereas fiction is history that might have happened.”
Siegfried Lipiner was a Viennese poet and philosopher and a friend of Nietzsche, Freud, Mahler, and Breuer. At one time they were all members, along with Freud, of the Pernerstorfer Circle,
Josef Breuer’s medical treatment of Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., occupied much of his attention in 1882. In November of that year, he began to discuss the case with his young protégé and friend, Sigmund Freud,
