FN

Does it not seem as though some faith were leading him on, some consolation offering him compensation? As though he perhaps desires this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows what he will thereby also acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak? ... He will tell you himself of his own accord, this seeming Trophonius [son of Apollo, who was swallowed up by the earth and lived on, underground, as an oracular god], and suberranean, as soon as he has ‘become a man’ again. Being silent is something one completely unlearns if, like him, one has been for so long a solitary mole.”? 

A passage from the preface to Daybreak, and a portrait of himself during the Wanderjahre, the wilderness years during which the purblind ex-philologist mole of yore wandered the mountains and shores of Europe transforming himself into the blind seer of vast, prophetic horizons. 

The burrowing mole was at home below the tree line where the canopy softened the light to a green gloom. More importantly, it hid him from the clouds, which were full of electricity and persisted in a merciless persecution of him. Ever since Benjamin Franklin had apparently drawn down the electric energy from the clouds in his kite experiment of 1752, it was not altogether outrageous for the individual to imagine himself an electricity conductor, though today the notion of absorbing electricity from the atmosphere is considered a delusional symptom of mental illness, often associated with schizophrenia. 

Nietzsche had always been peculiarly susceptible to electric storms. From his school days at Pforta onwards, his contemporaries had noticed that his most inspired and ecstatic outflows of creativity and musical improvisation were produced during thunderstorms. Dionysus’s father, Zeus, had appeared as a thunderbolt, and with an increasing feeling of kinship to Dionysus, Nietzsche believed that he was probably more susceptible to the power of the electricity in the clouds than any other man on earth. He wondered about going to Paris, to display himself as a specimen at the exhibition of electricity that was taking place there, and he decided that electricity was even more deleterious to his health than Wagner's music. “I am one of those machines which can explode,” he wrote; “,.. the electrical pattern in the cloud cover and the effects of the wind: I am convinced that 80% of my suffering results from these influences.”* The attacks now often involved three days of raging pain and vomiting, accompanied by the feeling of being half paralyzed, sensations of seasickness and real difficulty speaking. And yet also, high in the thin mountain air, he found himself at umes overwhelmed by sudden gushes of extreme happiness of an exquisite intensity that he had never before experienced. He felt himself so thinned, so deliciously etiolated, that he had the sensation of moving through the landscape like a zigzag doodle drawn on paper by a superior power wanting to try out a new pen. He began to rate the mountains by the capacity of their forests to hide him from the all-seeing sky. 

Daybreak went further along the road of materialism. It was written during one of his periods of interest in contemporary scientific speculation, together with his delighted discovery of the seventeenthcentury Jewish philosopher Spinoza. “My solitude is now a solitude for two! I am really amazed, really delighted! I have a precursor!” He wrote a poem to Spinoza, in whom he saw mirrored his own “denial of free will, purposes, evil, the moral world order and the non-egotistical. ... Of course the differences are enormous, but they are differences more of period, culture, field of knowledge.”3 He read Robert Mayer’s Mechanics of Heat, Boscovich’s theory of non-material atoms, and Force and Matter (1855) by the materialist medical doctor Ludwig Biichner, whose bestselling book spread the gospel that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings.” F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism (1866) asserted that man was only a special case of universal physiology, and thought was only a special chain in the physical processes of life. When Nietzsche was looking back on this year and writing about it in Ecce Homo, the autobiography he wrote in 1888 when he was zigzagging between sanity and insanity, he described himself in thrall to a burning and exclusive fascination with physiology, medicine and natural science. This is what he set out to explore in Daybreak: the idea that man is merely a bodily organism whose spiritual, moral and religious beliefs and values can be explained by the physiological and medical. General interest at that time was growing in the idea that man might control the future by controlling his own evolutionary development through diet. It is an attitude famously summed up by the philosopher and anthropologist Feuerbach, who had died only a few years earlier: “Tf you want to improve the people, give them better food instead of declamations against sin. Man is what he eats.”¢ And yet, in direct contradiction to this, Daybreak also introduces speculation on the significance of the exaltation and ecstasy of madness on the history of ethics and morality. Nietzsche proposes that beneath the fearful pressure of millennia of custom, the only way to break out was “by a dreadful attendant: almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, which broke the spell of a venerated usage and superstition. Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this?” Madness was total freedom, It was the speaking trumpet of the divinity. If madness was not conferred, it must be assumed. 

“All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad ... How can one make oneself mad when one is not mad and does not dare to appear so? ... Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may only at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may come to believe in myself! I am consumed by doubt, I have killed the law, the law anguishes me as a corpse does a living man: if Iam not more than the law I am the vilest of all men.”5 

The book ends with a clarion call to dare all: 

“We aeronauts of the spirit ... whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down. Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India-but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Orr-” 

Few authors are brave enough to end a book on “Or?-”