human beings are inextricably a part, is itself a chance product of random variations. Thus, the will, far from representing some sort of supernatural and inexplicable essence, itself had to be “a highly complex end product of nature.” Contrary to Kant and such successors as Hegel, there was no rational goal to history: “For a long time, human beings did not exist … They have no further mission and no purpose.” If Darwin was correct, then even the most basic tools of reason itself—dialectical questioning, the methodical deployment of induction and definition, empirical research and logical analysis—also had to be regarded as unintended outcomes of natural selection. As Nietzsche put it, writing with characteristic hyperbole, “The human being became a knowing being by accident.”
If the culture one shares with others is devoid of a unifying style, and if there is no goal to history, Nietzsche concludes that anyone aspiring to live a thoughtful life must learn to live a life of self-reliance (not unlike that prescribed by Emerson a generation before): “He must organize the chaos within by thinking back to his real needs. His forthrightness, the strength and truthfulness of his character, must at some time or other rebel against a state of things in which he only repeats what he has heard, learns what is already known, imitates what already exists.”
A circumscribed ambition, perhaps, but one with consequences for the larger culture as potentially revolutionary as any piece of music composed by Wagner. “ ‘Beware,’ ” writes Nietzsche, quoting Emerson with approval. “ ‘When the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned; the things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.’ ”
The first fruit of Nietzsche’s changing conception of his proper vocation was a sequence of four essays in cultural criticism. The first, published in 1873, was a polemical attack on David Strauss, the author of a popular Life of Jesus; the second, which appeared in 1874, was an attack on conventional views about the value of historical knowledge epitomized by philosophers like Hegel and scholars like Leopold von Ranke; the third, also published in 1874, was a hymn to Schopenhauer as a contemporary example of a true philosopher; and the last, published in 1876, was a new essay about his old idol, Wagner.
The essays on history and Schopenhauer both indirectly broach the issue of the philosophical life. But Nietzsche in his written work had yet to forge a philosophical voice uniquely his own; he had yet to experience the sort of “mystical intuition” that might supply him with “a metaphysical theorem, taken on faith.”
On May 22, 1872, on the occasion of Wagner’s fifty-ninth birthday, Nietzsche traveled to the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, to participate in the laying of the foundation stone for the new opera house there. The Wagners were in the midst of moving from Lucerne to their new villa in Bayreuth. Desperate to remain a member of their inner circle, Nietzsche volunteered to move to Bayreuth and become Wagner’s personal publicist. It was a crazy idea, and Wagner talked him out of it.
When Nietzsche returned to Basel in the fall, he discovered that nobody had enrolled in one of his seminars, and that no one was registered for his lecture course on Homer; his third class, on classical rhetoric, attracted only two people.
Despite a lack of students, Nietzsche was not intellectually isolated in these years. In the summer of 1873, Nietzsche met Paul Rée, who would become perhaps his single most important interlocutor over the next decade. Five years younger than Nietzsche, Rée was an aspiring author. Impressed by The Birth of Tragedy, Rée showed Nietzsche a manuscript of the book he was working on, which would be published anonymously two years later as Psychological Observations. When Nietzsche read the published book—audaciously composed as a sequence of aphorisms, modeled on those of the seventeenth-century French