The Philosopher

He confessed to being bored by his contemporaries . . .
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis.
One exception was Fritz Tegularius, whom we may well call, . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . past all parallel—
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time quoting Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . Joseph Knecht's closest friend throughout his life. Tegularius, destined by his gifts for the highest achievements but severely hampered by certain deficiencies of health, balance, and self-confidence, was the same age as Knecht at the time of Knecht's admission to the Order—that is, about thirty-four—and had first met him some ten years earlier in a Glass Bead Game course. . . . For a characterization of Tegularius we may use a page from Knecht's confidential memoranda which, years later, he regularly drew up for the exclusive use of the highest authorities. It reads:
"Tegularius. Personal friend of the writer. Recipient of several honors at school in Keuperheim. Good classical philologist, strong interest in philosophy, work on Leibniz, Bolzano, subsequently Plato.
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.

His sensitive temperament . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
He was as solitary and self-preoccupied as his father was garrulous; as serious and introspective as his father was effervescent and glib.
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
His father . . .
Franz Kafka, The Judgment.
. . . the old doctor . . .
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Guardian Angel.
. . . thought his son given to “looking at life as a solemn show where he is only a spectator”; William James . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
. . . Henry’s brother . . .
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines.
. . . found in him a “cold-blooded, conscious egotism and conceit.”
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
A timid adolescent, as sensitive as he was withdrawn, . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . a person who had never learned to relate to another person, not even as a child . . .
Ayke Agus, Heifetz As I Knew Him.
. . . he no doubt felt the need of a rigorous context, an orderly and protective society.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
The most brilliant and gifted Glass Bead Game player I know. He would be predestined for Magister Ludi were it not that his character, together with his frail health, make him completely unsuited for that position. T. should never be appointed to an outstanding, representative, or organizational position; that would be a misfortune for him and the office. His deficiency takes physical form in states of low vitality, periods of insomnia and nervous aches, psychologically in spells of melancholy, a hunger for solitude, fear of duties and responsibilities, and probably also in thoughts of suicide. Dangerous though his situation is, by the aid of meditation and great self-discipline he keeps himself going so courageously that most of his acquaintances have no idea of how severely he suffers and are aware only of his great shyness and taciturnity. . . ."
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
In the person of Fritz Tegularius, Hesse has given us his interpretation of the brilliant but unbalanced character of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Theodore Ziolkowski, Foreword to Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
The young Nietzsche . . .
H. James Birx, Nietzsche 2000: An Introduction.
. . . was shy and quiet and kept to himself. He was not the sort one befriended easily. Some found him very solemn.
Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg.
I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, . . .
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
. . . he wrote to his sister in Basel:
Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner.
. . . when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
Nietzsche's loneliness was caused by his inner plight, for only the very few were receptive to what he said, and perhaps he wasn't aware of even these few. Thus, he would rather be alone than together with people who did not understand him.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
He remained alone, because he found no second self.
Barry Cooper, Beethoven (quoting Grillparzer’s Funeral Oration).
In his solitude, he had new ideas and made new discoveries; since they were based on his most personal experiences, but at the same time concealed them, they were difficult to share with others, and they only deepened his loneliness and the gulf between him and those around him.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
To live alone one must be an animal or a god — says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both — a philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
Nietzsche's favorite philosophers—Socrates, Pascal, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer—were all "primarily concerned with the cure of sick souls," and for Nietzsche "a genuine philosopher was essentially a physician of the interior self." Nietzsche believed that the well won't care for the sick; true healers also had to be sick.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
I myself am convinced that . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . had he been healthy, it is doubtful he could have created as much, or as well.
Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man.
Nietzsche was too self-analytical not to be aware of the parallels between himself and the Jewish philosopher . . .
Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider.
. . . Benedict de Spinoza
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics: Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Affects.
Both were 'sickly recluses'; both were 'outsiders', rejected by their own community, living in rented rooms on a low income, devoting themselves to the life of the mind.
Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider.
At the age of twelve he kept a diary, the kind an adult might have kept, written in a well-adjusted, reasonable, well-behaved way.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
I live in the suburbs with my mother and my sister and my grandmother, . . .
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
. . . he wrote . . .
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
. . . almost a prisoner but full of road dreams and the constant anticipation of adventures in strange cities. At night, I pore over maps and imagine every highway and hill and out of the way town. I approach big cities in my mind. I explore every back street and alley. From the tops of tall buildings I enjoy crystal views of streets spilling into the country. Sometimes the streets are filled with traffic and sometimes they are deserted and I am alone.
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
His writing kept alive the illusion of liberation because on a symbolic level he actually did take steps in the direction of truth and freedom.
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
In fact two . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . separate individuals . . .
Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . two different Nietzsches talked about loneliness. The one was his mother’s son . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . a “laughed-at ‘mama’s boy’” . . .
Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study.
. . . the only male in a household of women—
Alice Miller, The Untouched Key.
The other was a fearless explorer and a military strategist on his philosophical quest, . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . who spoke of . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . life in military metaphor—as a war with battles, retreats, campaigns . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . one for whom solitude was powerfully symbolic.
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
He was alone with his past, his present and his future. Alone! He needed to be. The strongest must pause when the precipice yawns before him. The gulf can be spanned; he feels himself forceful enough for that; but his eyes must take their measurement of it first; he must know its depths and possible dangers.
Anna Katharine Green, Initials Only.
When he became an expert in the use and manipulation of his . . .
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
. . . own egotism, . . .
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
. . . he conceived a notion of space that allowed him to navigate . . .
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
. . . unknown currents . . .
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
. . . across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche . . .
Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl: Artist and Politician. A Biography of the Father of Modern Israel.
. . . was truly a hero of the nineteenth century, that era when the tale of lonely outsiders—reviewing life and society in the obscurity of a study and plotting new policies in the reading room of a public library—was often more fascinating and significant than the story of crowned heads, prime ministers, illustrious generals, and captains of industry.
Amos Elon, Herzl.
His room . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . a quiet room for a . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . closet metaphysician, . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . was more than a place for work, . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . this wonderful place . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . Nietzsche’s place . . .
Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography.
. . . was to him a . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . retreat . . .
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.
. . . a banqueting room of the spirit, a cupboard of mad dreams, a storeroom of revelations.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
Nietzsche . . .
Edward R. Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation Before the Great War.
. . . as we have seen, . . .
Daniel J. Boorstin, Cleopatra’s Nose: Essays on the Unexpected.
. . . had a good mind and was an excellent writer.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
He looked at the world with the eyes of a Henry James, noting the subtlest of feelings in himself and those around him.
Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst.
Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
The books he wrote are now among the classics of philosophy, but are highly untypical of works that answer to that description. Primarily concerned to convey insights rather than expound arguments or analyse other people’s positions, they are usually written not in long chapters of extended prose but in short, concentrated bursts, sometimes no more than aphorisms, separately numbered.
Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.
The internal tensions in . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
. . . Nietzsche . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . ultimately led to a fatalistic dependence on paradox and impotence, and this formed the basis of his . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
. . . philosophy.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Consciously or unconsciously, he perceived the opposing impulses in himself, . . .
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
. . . what he called the constitutional incapacity . . .
Siegfried Hessing, Freud’s Relation with Spinoza.
. . . and gave up attempting to reconcile them. Whether man was inherently evil or perfectible, whether change ever constituted progress, even whether he himself existed—a question he took seriously—were unanswerable riddles. The easy solution was to acknowledge “ultimate Facts”—power, force, and change—
G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges.
The idea that came to him was that all religions and philosophies have so far been mistaken about the highest good. It does not lie in moral virtue, or in self-restraint, or even in self-knowledge, but in the idea of great health and strength. This, says Nietzsche, is the fundamental constituent of freedom. Once man has these the others will follow. For most of his evils—and his intellectual confusions—spring from weakness.
Colin Wilson, Spinoza—The Outsider.
Momentous for Nietzsche in 1865 . . .
Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.
. . . as he claims in his “Autobiographical Sketch,” . . .
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a local bookstore. He was then 21.
Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.
These notes . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . “fragments of a grand confession”—
Geoffrey Skelton, Wieland Wagner: The Positive Sceptic quoting Goethe.
. . . were found later among his papers:
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
I must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
From my youth upwards my spirit . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred.
. . . sought for the hidden metaphysical truth behind and beyond the phenomena of this world, for the ideal.
Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody.
I lived then in . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
. . . my small albergo, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . in a state of helpless indecision, alone with certain painful experiences and disappointments.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
“Nothing more terrible could be imagined,” he wrote.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.
What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!
Carl Gustav Jung, Commentary on “The Secret of the Golden Flower.”
This was an error.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.
One day . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
—strangely enough,
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
. . . I found . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig
. . . Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a . . .
Robert Wicks, Friedrich Nietzsche.
. . . secondhand bookshop, picked it up as something quite unknown to me, and turned the pages. I do not know what demon whispered to me, 'Take this book home with you.' It was contrary to my usual practice of hesitating over the purchase of books. Once at home, I threw myself onto the sofa with the newly-won treasure and began to let that energetic and gloomy genius operate upon me . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Here I saw a mirror in which I beheld the world, life and my own nature in a terrifying grandeur . . . here I saw sickness and health, exile and refuge, Hell and Heaven.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Retrospect of my Two Years at Leipzig.
He never tired in his search after that transcendental and supernatural secret of the Absolute and he did not recognize that the great secret of the transcendental, the miracle of the metaphysical is that it does not exist.
Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody.
The very notion that . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . one might imagine . . .
Henry James, The Ambassadors.
. . . the strange sublunary poetry which lies in . . .
John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre.
. . . a particle of an inch . . .
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
. . . at the other end of a microscope . . .
John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre.
. . . was so . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . wantonly extravagant . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . that even a century later . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . the philosopher . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . would be mocked for spending his . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . whole life . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
. . . both interest and principal, . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan.
. . . in a vain search for it.
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
It had been the dream of his life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all his life he had struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how he assimilated it. He had striven constantly for an unostentatious style, and he was dismayed to find how far he still remained from his ideal.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
While he was lost in his work, life . . .
Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers.
. . . that miserable patch of event, that melange of nothing, . . .
Clifford Odets, Personal Notes quoted in Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
. . . passed him by.
Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers.