The relationship between creative or intellectual thought and health is seldom examined, perhaps because such a focus may suggest that a work of art, literature, or philosophy is merely a byproduct of bad experience. Beethoven cannot be reduced to deafness, nor can the works of writers such as Milton, Joyce, or Borges reduced to blindness. The most compelling personality in this issue is, perhaps, Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s philosophy actually embraces the fullness of personal illness even to the point of presenting his philosophy of life as a means for overcoming suffering, and not the abstract suffering of existence (from Buddha to existentialism) but quite literally, for Nietzsche suffered grievoously from debilitating disease. At the same time, Nietzsche presents a profound philosophy of solitude.
Given his iconoclastic thinking about culture and belief, Nietzsche generated hostility years after his death. His most vehement twentieth-century opponents (and some proponents) accepted the outrageous interpretations of Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth Forster, who popularized a proto-Nazi version of her deceased brother. More conventional opponents of Nietzsche’s thoughts attributed them to “insanity” brought about by syphilis, a convenient ad hominum argument now proven false.
That Nietzsche suffered illnesses is clear. Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann points to biographer Stefan Zweig for a precise description, quoting Zweig’s summary as “unsurpassed.” Zweig notes:
“No devilish torture is lacking in this dreadful pandemonium of sickness: headaches, deafening, hammering headaches, which knock out the reeling Nietzsche for days and prostrate him on sofa and bed, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, weariness, hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, night sweat — a gruesome circle. In addition, there are his ‘three-quarters blind eyes,’ which, at the least exertion, begin immediately to swell and fill with tears and grant the intellectual worker only ‘an hour and a half of vision a day.’ But Nietzsche despises this hygiene of his body and works at his desk for ten hours, and for this excess his overheated brain takes revenge with raging headaches and a nervous overcharge; at night, when the body has long become weary, it does not permit itself to be turned off suddenly, but continues to burrow in visions and ideas until it is forcibly knocked out by opiates. But ever greater quantities are needed (in two months Nietzsche uses up fifty grams of chloral hydrate to purchase this handful of sleep); then the stomach refuses to pay so high a price and rebels. And now-vicious circles: spasmodic vomiting, new headaches which require new medicines, an inexorable, insatiable, passionate conflict of the infuriated organs, which throw the thorny ball of suffering to each other as in a mad game. Never a point of rest in this up and down, never an even stretch of contentment or a short month full of comfort and self-forgetfulness.” (Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 116; see also Stefan Zweig, Nietzsche, chapter 3: “Apologia for Illness,” p. 5-26. London: Pushkin Press, 2012.
With modern medicine, many scientific researchers discuss Nietzsche’s neurological history, beginning with the indisputable genetic connection: Nietzsche’s father died at age 35 from apoplexy. Today it can be specifically surmised that Nietzsche suffered CADASIL, also known as Cerebral Autosomal Dominant Arteriopathy with Subcortical Infarcts and Leukoencephalopathy (see “The neurological illness of Friedrich Nietzsche,” by D. H. Emelsoet, K. H, Emelsoet, and D. Devreese, in Acta neurologica.belg., 2008, 18, 9-16 (https://www.actaneurologica.be/pdfs/2008-1/02-Hemelsoet et al.pdf). We may then speculate whether and how the disease affected his ideas and thoughts. The correlation is clear, for Nietzsche always sought to transform personal pain and suffering into a transcendent or transvaluative experience, the very themes of his works. Nietzsche’s life as a loner and solitary was as much a physical inevitability as a psychological one. Nietzsche providides a path for addressing the challenges of life’s harshest necessities with grace, intellect, and circumspection.