I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux (Review)

Reviewed by Margherita Bovo

London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2018
452 pp., $19.14

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has become one of the most widely studied thinkers in the history of philosophy.¹ On one hand, he offered valuable tools to conduct one’s life independently and without fear of mystical superstitions while on the other, he denied free will and often conflated religious ethics with morality. A lot has been said about him—some fair praise, often focusing on his individualism and rejection of Christian morality, and some reasonable criticism, such as that about his rejection of “absolute reason.”² However, many critics falsely paint him as a thinker who sought to justify violence as the primary way to defend one’s ideas, as a precursor of Nazism, or as an extreme relativist.

Without a capable guide, unpacking his ideas to understand and get value from his work without falling prey either to the same errors he did or to the many popular mischaracterizations of his ideas is challenging. Sue Prideaux offers that guide in her book I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (2018). In a welcome change from the common tendency to misconstrue him, she precisely reconstructs Nietzsche’s philosophy as he developed it throughout his life. The work is biographical, chronologically recounting the main events Nietzsche lived through and how they affected his intellectual development.

It begins with a description of Nietzsche’s childhood and the oppressive Protestant environment in which he grew up. His mother and sister were devoted Christians, and they intended Nietzsche to become a Protestant pastor like his father, who had died during Nietzsche’s infancy due to a cerebral condition that was not understood at the time. Prideaux then describes the education Nietzsche received at the famous Pforta School, at that time a respected institution for humanities yet “an ecclesiastical fortress” permeated with mysticism (25). The book’s description of his childhood and youth clarifies the root of Nietzsche’s later hostility toward religion and his intellectual background—including the fact that he was never formally trained in philosophy (he enrolled to study theology first and later switched to philology).

This background enables Prideaux to properly contextualize Nietzsche’s first work—and arguably one of his least understood. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche introduced two categories that, according to him, explain the Greek sense of life that this genre embodies: Apollonian and Dionysian.³ These would later become key parts of his philosophy, so Prideaux expounds this framework. She explains that the Apollonian worldview is made of images, geometry, and steadiness and is embodied in the god Apollo. On the other hand, the Dionysian artistic impulse is a stronger force in the human mind, embodied by the god Dionysus, which makes an individual’s certainty crumble and leads him to realize that life is often dark and chaotic. In Nietzsche’s view, the cooperation of these seemingly opposed forces helped the Greeks embrace life without idealizing it or fearing it. Many scholars focus on these two concepts, but they do not always explain them accurately or recognize the importance of The Birth of Tragedy in Nietzsche’s development of this idea; they claim that to embrace the Dionysian side of life meant to pursue an “intoxication” of whims, lust, and drunkenness—even though he remarked that most Greeks were wise enough not to embrace such hedonistic behavior.⁴ Prideaux is aware of this balance and is precise in describing “Apollonian and Dionysian” as two spheres “responsible for the development of art and culture” in Nietzsche’s view (111). She also points out that with this work Nietzsche became a philosopher, even if many academics were horrified by the lack of footnotes, his decision not to include a meticulous analysis of ancient texts, and his supposedly imprecise vocabulary.

Prideaux also mentions a collection that scholars often do not engage with enough: the Untimely Meditations (1873–1876). In one of these volumes, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), Nietzsche described the main ways that people approached history and identified the main points of weakness in each approach. Prideaux is clearly aware that Nietzsche was trying to elaborate a new method to approach history, philosophy, and reality in general at this point, whereas most scholars admit this only in relation to Nietzsche’s later works, such as The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), or Beyond Good and Evil (1886). By considering Nietzsche’s earlier works, the book shows a philosopher who grappled with reality and with the mystical premises widely accepted in his own time to gain enough tools to later show that what Christians and most people consider “good”—including selflessness, obedience, and humility—is bad for individuals and derives from hypocrisy and envy rather than from a proper view on life.⁵ This reconstruction refutes the popular misconception that Nietzsche rejected morality merely for the sake of dismissing it.

In describing his later works, Prideaux connects them to his close friendships with the author and psychoanalyst Lou Salomé (1861–1937) and the philosopher Paul Rée (1849–1901). The three thinkers aimed to live according to their own ideas about morality and philosophy rather than accepting the dominant Christian ethics (255). Nietzsche devoted himself to that cause in an unconventional way, often writing aphorisms rather than linear treatises, because he associated the latter with academia, which—as Prideaux shows—was an environment in which Nietzsche felt uncomfortable. This way, he was able to reach a broader audience, but it also made it easier to misinterpret his meaning. Prideaux systematically analyzes Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which acknowledges that only this world exists and that, despite life being hard, we have no excuse for dismissing and evading it. She is interested in this work because Nietzsche presents here his concept of the “Übermensch” (generally translated as “Superman” or “Beyond-Man”), whose aim is to live beyond the average man’s religious framework. The prophetic character of Zarathustra proclaims the aim of the Übermensch as giving meaning to life on this planet, admonishes the readers to ignore those who promise otherworldly fulfillment, and reminds them to “remain true to the earth.”⁶ Many critics claim Nietzsche’s philosophy aggrandizes violence against weaker people, particularly focusing on his description of the Übermensch, but Prideaux provides evidence to reject this claim.⁷ While recounting Nietzsche’s youth, she mentions his unease toward Prussia’s brutality during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and his disillusionment in seeing the newly united Germany being ruled by nationalists who supported and further spread antisemitic ideas (103). Prideaux also highlights what Nietzsche later wrote in one of his notebooks: “[I]f we could dissuade from wars, so much better” (369).

Prideaux is aware that some of Nietzsche’s statements have been controversial and that many interpret them as racist, especially when he criticizes the “morality of resentment” that, according to him, started with early Jewish religion. She focuses on his claims in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) to clarify their real meaning. She points out that in this work Nietzsche claims that those who embraced this moral code condemned other individuals rather than working on themselves and labeled as evil what they were not able to achieve, such as self-interest, strength, or independent thought.⁸ This is how he believed the morality of altruism was invented: For such individuals, life in this world became irrelevant because they couldn’t succeed at it. So, exceptional individuals ought to feel guilty because of their success and sacrifice themselves for mediocre people, and their virtue was portrayed as vice. This kind of morality must be rejected, Nietzsche held, so he traced its development through time to attack its foundations. However, he did not believe that every Jew was responsible for altruism only by being a Jew. Any individual who embraced this wrong view was guilty, regardless of his race. Further evidence of this is Nietzsche’s decision to end his friendship with the well-known composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883): Prideaux highlights that he could not tolerate Wagner’s antisemitic and nationalist ideas any longer and that, in response, Wagner spread rumors about Nietzsche being a dissolute who built a whole philosophic system to justify his sins (233). She also recounts that when his sister, Elisabeth (1846–1935), and her husband, Bernard Förster (1843–1889), left Europe and founded an Aryan colony in Paraguay, Nietzsche was horrified.

Prideaux also describes the moments when Nietzsche’s disagreements with his family reached a peak, and his friendship with Salomé and Rée was ruined by a rivalry with Rée (as they had both developed feelings for Salomé). Nietzsche became deeply lonely while his physical health continued to deteriorate. The context provided is useful to better understand why his thoughts became even more focused on suffering even if he did not accept pessimism. According to him, an individual who embraces life rather than relying on mysticism despite all the challenges reality presents is able to live fully and love his existence. The concept of “will to power” is related to this, but Nietzsche never had the chance to develop it. He was beginning to work on an outline for his new book, The Will to Power, when his mental health was seriously compromised. Prideaux tries to reconstruct what happened on the morning of January 3, 1889, when Nietzsche had a serious mental breakdown after seeing a horse being beaten by its owner. For the following eleven years, his sister insisted on being the only one to look after him. Prideaux examines Nietzsche’s father’s undiagnosed condition, which Nietzsche might have inherited and would explain his later decline. This is useful to readers who might have heard rumors about Nietzsche contracting syphilis in his early twenties, which some claim both as the cause of his decline and as evidence of a hedonistic lifestyle. Prideaux’s examination of the evidence indicates that this is not the likely explanation, dispelling the idea that Nietzsche was a hedonist rather than a sophisticated thinker.⁹

The following chapters focus on the damage Elisabeth caused to her brother and his intellectual heritage. She never approved of his anti-religious ideas or his friendship with Salomé. While he was losing his ability to move and speak due to a progressive cerebral paralysis, Elisabeth edited Nietzsche’s notes, omitting or editing some passages that were openly against her and focused on spreading decontextualized statements from his unpublished aphorisms that could look close to her own antisemitic ideas. She manipulated his drafts to convey that Nietzsche regarded the will to power as the will of superior people to gain power and use force against weaker individuals.

Friedrich Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900. Later, the Nazis fully supported Elisabeth’s portrayal of Nietzsche’s ideas and considered him an Aryan hero. They presented him as a leader whose ideas would bring about a nation of Übermensch who could embody the will to power, which many interpreted as the desire to obtain power over others by force. None of this is true. Prideaux knows it and firmly condemns what Elisabeth did. She also remarks, “[T]o be a source of political theories had never been Nietzsche’s aim” because “he was only ever interested in man as an individual, rather than a herd animal—be the herd political or religious” (375).

The book’s main strength is the way it combines biographical data and philosophic explanations. The wording is precise yet nonacademic, so a broad audience can benefit from it. Prideaux knows that it is almost impossible to separate Nietzsche’s ideas from his life, especially his rejection of mysticism and violence and his thoughts on suffering. She also concentrates on the misinterpretations of Nietzsche’s ideas and explains why they are wrong. Her focus on the distortion that Elisabeth and the Nazis made of the Nietzschean philosophy demonstrates that scholars’ misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s ideas in the last century come from his sister and not from his words.

Prideaux does not fully cover one major point of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the fact that he rejected the idea of universal morality. She partly explains the reasons for this, such as the fact that he rejected religious absolute views on good and evil, but she does not identify the fact that his conflation of religious absolutism with morality as such created a self-contradiction in his work, much of which consists of moral proclamations.

Although Prideaux’s book does not exhaustively deal with Nietzsche’s view on morality and is not a fully evaluative work, it provides a valuable guide to his philosophy and successfully shows that Nietzsche’s ideas are a useful tool for rejecting dogmas and understanding the roots of Judeo-Christian morality. She describes the way he advocated for a form of individualism that leads to work on oneself rather than blaming others and the reasons that led him to reject any form of conformism (or “herd instinct”). Nietzsche is an interesting yet still often misunderstood thinker, and Prideaux’s analysis of him is a good starting point to discover his ideas without demonizing or idealizing them.

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1. Cfr. Robert Wicks, Nietzsche’s Life and Works, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), edited by Edward N.- Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/nietzsche-life-works/.

2. Even if “absolute reason” is an invalid concept, he tended to associate the rational faculty with that and was wary of it.

3. Cfr. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited by Michael Tanner (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 24.

4. Paweł Pieniążek, The Concept of Violence in the Evolution of Nietzsche’s Thought, in Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 3, no. 2 (8), 2019, https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2019.0014, 15; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 19.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Carol Diethe, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 27–28.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common (New York: The Modern Library, 1917), 81.

7. Jean-Honoré Koffi, Nietzsche et la Violence: Questionnement sur une Ėtrange Fascination, in Perspectives Philosophiques, n°017, Deuxième trimestre, Revue Ivoirienne de Philosophie et de Sciences Humaines, 2019, Microsoft Word - pp0175koffi.

8. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 25–26.

9. Liliana Cavani’s movie Beyond Good and Evil (1977) gives this kind of portrayal of the philosopher and focuses on his lust as the main source of his ideas and works.