Monday, January 07, 2013

The Neurological and Philosophical Causes of Nietzsche's Madness












Xenophon said...

I'm not in qualified to judge but the paper by the Belgian neurologists with the hypothesis of CADASIL seemed convincing to me. Here's another explanation in terms of a genetic illness (MELAS syndrome):

I don't think any neurologist today who has examined the facts of his case still holds to the diagnosis of syphilis. I'm suspicious of the view that madness and a total breakdown of Nietzsche's type could have a "philosophical" cause. What does this mean exactly? Are you not confusing cause and effect here?

Larry Arnhart said...

Nietzsche's tendency to have delusions might have been neurological. But the content of those delusions--the Dionysian megalomania, the visions of eternal recurrence, the will to power, etc.--were products of Nietzsche's philosophic mythopoetic fantasy.

Troy Camplin said...

It was while reading the works of Nietzsche's later period that I myself had a psychological breakdown. But much like Virgil led Dante both into the underworld and out again, so too did Nietzsche with me. Perhaps not coincidentally, I came back up through his middle works (and emerged with the gift of poetry).

In my dissertation Evolutionary Aesthetics, however, I argue that in his later work, Nietzsche was coming to understand self-organization, fractal geometry, strange attractors, etc., but developed the language of eternal recurrence and will to power rather than the scientific language we have for these things.

There is also a distinct possibility that he was the first to emerge into Gravesean psychology's second tier -- as the first, it could drive one to madness. Surely the first to emerge into human-level complexity of thought went equally mad.