Yesterday, I walked past one of my favorite bookstores and spotted a book in the window that screamed out to me. Aptly titled—and emphatically designed—I could not resist stepping into the place and buying Sue Prideaux's new biography of Nietzsche: I Am Dynamite! I began reading it later that day, huddled up in bed with my cat Tai Tai by my side, and ended up sleeping much too late. So it goes.

Prideaux's biography of Nietzsche is hardly the first of its kind. There have been a number of studies of Nietzsche's life and thought—most notably and originally, Walter Kaufmann's brilliant Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. First published in 1950, Kaufmann's Nietzsche, as well as his other scholarship, did much to change—that is, to rectify—the then-popular image of Nietzsche as a Nazi philosopher, and more generally to increase interest (especially in the United States) in the largely misunderstood German philosopher. It is in no small part thanks to Kaufmann that today, Nietzsche needs no apostle. Public interest is strong, and academic scholarship voluminous.

I read two chapters of I Am Dynamite! before I really could no longer avoid sleeping. Nietzsche's life as Prideaux tells it is captivating. She begins with Nietzsche's own account of meeting Wagner—one of the major events and biggest influences in his life—and then trails back to his early childhood. The loss of Friedrich's father, the bond that he had with his sister, his going off to a Spartan-like school for talented and mostly fatherless boys—Prideaux tells the story well, using many examples of Nietzsche's own precocious writing to add color to her account.

The difference between Prideaux's and Kaufmann's biography is clear, even after only a couple of chapters. Prideaux is intent on telling the story of Nietzsche life as a human being, with all the emotional attachments, reactions to specific events, and so on that such an approach entails. Kaufmann, on the other, while sensitive to Nietzsche's background and circumstances, is keener to get to the philosophy, so to speak. This is unsurprising, given that Kaufmann was himself a philosopher, while Prideaux is a novelist and biographer. This raises a—to me—interesting question. Should the biography of a philosopher be philosophical? Differently put, to what extent ought an account of the life of a philosopher be critically engaged with their philosophy?

To get at an answer to this question, I think that we should step back and address two others. First, What is a biography? This may appear to be a very simple question, answered with a dictionary definition: a biography is "an account of someone's life written by someone else" (OED). Straightforward enough. When we look at this a little more critically, however, we find that it raises many issues. Most importantly, there is the matter of what kind of account is being provided. Biographical information about a person is supposed to encompass the 'facts' about their life: when and where they were born, when and where they died—and everything in between. There are two related problems here. The first is that the 'everything in between' part could quite literally entail everything in between. As Rilke puts it in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, "Everything is composed of so many isolated details... In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed." There is an overwhelming, near-infinite amount of detail that can be included and conveyed in an account of someone's life. Assuming that facts are related to yet other facts, any given fact will give rise to a whole host of others that can be related to others, still; to the point of approaching an infinite number. (Think of it this way: an account of any given historical event properly involves an account of everything that has gone on before it in the history of the world to lead up to that event [vertically] and an account of everything that is happening at that time in the world that has a bearing on the event [horizontally].)

The second problem is that, even if a strictly-the-objective-facts account of someone's life were possible, no one will want to read it. This brings us to the second relevant question, Why do we biographize? One of the aims of a biography is to portray who a person was/is—to capture their subjectivity, their uniqueness in the stream of other lives that have been lived and are being lived through time. Even someone who firmly believes in the existence of objective facts, in objective truth, has to admit that explaining the life of a human being inevitably involves a substantial amount of subjectivity. Not just on the part of the biographer, who obviously has to decide on which facts to cover, and who is always going to have a limited ability to access all potentially relevant facts. This is the kind of methodological subjectivity that marks any given approach to a subject; important to remember, but not all that interesting. What is more interesting is the subjectivity inherent in the subject matter itself. A life cannot be reduced to biographical information. There are ways of reacting, ways of seeing, ways of being that cannot be uncovered or discovered in the way that facts can; nor can they be reduced to simple descriptions that exhaustively convey their subject matter. It takes a kind of circling, a puzzling, a fitting-things-together, a way-of-seeing the way-of-seeing of the person whose life one is describing—through their own eyes (e.g., via their own writings) and through those of others who knew them. This is what Prideaux is doing. Unavoidably, much is left out. But sometimes we see more through what is left out, on the basis of a solid foundation, then if the absences were all filled in. This is the subjectivity that I meant. For even Nietzsche did not have a full account of his own life. He couldn't have—no one ever does. A full account of one's life, any life, involves everything—all relations, all connections—in time and space.

This leads me to a final consideration. What do we want out of a biography? When it is an artist, a thinker, or a scientist about whom we read, then we want to gain insight into their creativity, their output, their thought. Biography is often considered crucial for this kind of insight. Is it important to know that Dostoevsky's father was killed by his serfs? If—like Freud—you want to argue that much of what preoccupied Dostoevsky, and what made its way into his writing, can be explained by the violent murder of his father, then it does seem to be important. To psychologize or psychiatrize the artist, biography is necessary—life events, and in particular the psychological responses to life events, provide invaluable insights into the artist's work under this approach. I find this view to be valuable in only a very limited way. Certain themes, interests, curiosities, and so on may be explained by someone's circumstances. Everyone is influenced by myriad factors, and some factor seem important. Dostoevsky read a newspaper clipping that would form the basis of his story A Gentle Creature (variously translated as The Meek One). However, especially in philosophy, but also in the literary and other arts, the works—the particular novels, philosophical treatises, and so on—by far exceed the empirical circumstances of the individual creator. This is one of the mysteries—and beauties—of art.   

This brings us back to the question of whether biographies of philosophers ought to be philosophical. If the aim is to link the life of a philosopher to their philosophy, then significant philosophical engagement is necessary. This was Kaufmann's position, who had to salvage Nietzsche's person as well as his philosophy from the wreck caused by his sister and the association with the Nazi party. Prideaux, on the other hand, can write comfortably about Nietzsche's life, painting his uniqueness as a human being first and foremost, knowing that his philosophy is in capable hands elsewhere (and that there are other biographies that explicitly link life and philosophy, like Rüdiger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography). That is not to say, of course, that the philosophical preoccupations and outputs of Nietzsche can or should be ignored—any less than Dostoevsky's novels and stories could be in a biography of the Russian writer.

In Untimely Mediations, Nietzsche writes: "The goal of humanity cannot lie in the end but only in its highest specimens." He didn't think that more time—more human beings—would change anything. There is no evolution here. As Kaufmann puts it, "In the highest specimens of humanity we envisage the meaning of life and history: what can an additional ten or twenty centuries bring to light that we could not find in contemplating Aeschylus and Heraclitus, Socrates and Jesus, Leonardo and Napoleon, or Plato and Spinoza?"

Perhaps Prideaux is doing Nietzsche's bidding by portraying his life, his peculiar human being. Those who are already familiar with his philosophy will be happy to read about him in the flesh. And, given that his philosophy can be found elsewhere, if reading about his life makes someone uninitiated in the field seek out Nietzsche's philosophy, then what more can one ask for?

Affiliate Link(s)

You can buy Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite! here from The Book Depository (free shipping and worldwide delivery).

You can buy the revised edition of Walter Kaufmann’s brilliant Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist here. Highly recommended.

(Note: if you buy any book(s) using the above link, or any book from The Book Depository via this link, I will receive a small commission. It won’t cost you anything extra, and you’ll help me maintain this blog.)