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Category: Pedagogy
Excerpted from Werner Ross’s Der ängstliche Adler
– Friedrich Nietzsches Leben (1980):
Carl Ludwig Nietzsche,
Nietzsche’s father
The boy does not remember the Röcken home dominated by women, but only the image of the father, idealized on par as it gradually fades out. The pious rural cleric remains completely safe from the uprising against Christianity, which would be the true mission of Nietzsche from his eighteen years. Since then, his father is for him an “ethereal angel.” One of the qualities that he has inherited from him is the kindness, the renunciation of revenge for nobility. So in the late self-portraiture of Ecce homo we read that, in case of offense, Nietzsche prohibits himself “any retaliation, any measure of defense.”
[Chechar’s note: Those who have read the passages of Alice Miller in The Untouched Key as to why Nietzsche went mad—just imagine a self-proclaimed Antichrist who, simultaneously, never defended himself before the father clergyman!—would treasure passages such as these.]
Another inherited quality is the love of music. In a postcard to Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz] of the time of Zarathustra an observation is included: “It is raining in torrents, music gets me away. I like that music and the way I like it is something I cannot explain based on my experiences: rather based on my father. And why should not…?”
The phrase is cut, but can be completed with another of Ecce homo in which he says: Why should not I continue to live in him and he in me after his untimely death?
And he was no less mystical in his later years, when he conceived the doctrine of eternal recurrence, so he could skip the generational order to become a descendant of Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander. But the same process also allowed otherwise: the mysterious identification with the father, either in the agonizing fear of premature death and madness, either in the gut, not even confessed to his friend Gast, that having survived the fateful thirty-third year of his life he would merge with his father to form a single figure with him.
The family was assured that Fritz (short for Friedrich) would be clergyman as the father. His mother, who was not limited to accompany him to the bed but every night carried him into it, panting said, “If you continue like this I’ll have to carry you up to bed until you study theology.” Fritz, meanwhile, was a precocious and obedient child; knew by heart passages of the Bible and religious songs so that their local school classmates called him the little shepherd. He was no friend of other children, and in school they laughed at him but then, at home, spoke wonders of the little sage.
Young Nietzsche, whose strange factions made one think of an owl, had an excellent performance. An anecdote belonging to the repertoire of Elisabeth [Nietzsche’s sister] tells us that, at one point, it started raining and as everyone ran from school to their homes, he continued to walk at a leisurely pace with the board over his hat and scarf on the blackboard. When Nietzsche got home was completely soaked. That why he had not run like the others? Well, because the school regulations say that, after school, children should go to their houses quietly and politely. The story seems credible; it was not normal behavior, but a show of obedience directed against his classmates’ behavior.
The little shepherd never tires of reciting pious maxims, edifying virtuous desires and prayers. Words like purpose, wise decision of God, beneficent hand of God, heavenly father come out of his lips with astonishing naturalness.
The strongest impressions were those that religious music gave Nietzsche. In the misty autumn evenings, the boy came sneaking into the cathedral to witness the rehearsals of the Requiem for the day of the dead; he was overwhelmed to hear the Dies irae and was deeply delighted with the Benedictus. It was not just a childish impulse that led him at fourteen, in Schulpforta, to write in all seriousness motets, chorale melodies and fugues and even try a Missa for solo, chorus and orchestra. At sixteen Nietzsche outlined a Miserere for five voices and, finally, began a Christmas oratory on which he worked for two years.
At seventeen, the son of the pastor received confirmation. His classmate Deussen, also a son of pastor says the two maintained a pious attitude, away from the world. They were willing to die immediately to go to meet Jesus. When his friend Wilhelm Pinder received confirmation, Nietzsche wrote: “With the promise you walk into the line of Christian adults who are considered worthy of the most precious legacy of our Savior, and through their enjoyment of life, achieve happiness of the soul.” Not even from the pastor’s pen would have come such pious words.
In High School Nietzsche had an “excellent” in religion. The commentary reports confirm that the student has shown, along with a good understanding of the New Testament, a keen interest in the doctrine of Christian salvation which he has easily and solidly assimilated, and is also able to express himself clearly on the subject.
♣
The above was extracted from one of the first chapters of Ross’ book. Unlike Curt Paul Janz, hundreds of pages later Ross only dedicates a few paragraphs to Nietzsche’s life after his breakdown. He writes:
Nietzsche’s biography ends in the early days of 1889, although his life was extended until August 25, 1900. Paralyzed and demented, he died of pneumonia.
On August 10, 1889 Nietzsche entered the psychiatric clinic of the University of Basel; a week later he is taken to the Jena University Clinic where he remains for about fifteen months, and on March 24, 1890 he is discharged in writing and sent home. Nietzsche remains under the care of his mother until her death in 1897. In July 1897 the sister purchases a Weimar villa, “Silberblick,” for the Nietzsche Archive and in it she installs the patient.
About the demented Nietzsche several persons issued reports: (1) Turin dentist, Dr. Bettmann, who with Overbeck brought Nietzsche to Basel; (2) the diaries of Basel and Jena for the sick by the physician (and later professor) Ziehen; (2) the mother in his letters to Professor Overbeck, and (4) friends and visitors, from Gast to Deussen and from Overbeck to Resa von Schirnhofer.
The extracts that follow from 1889-1892 show on one hand the state of the disorder, but on the other they shed light on the “healthy” Nietzsche, specifically those oppressed and repressed aspects that madness liberated.
Dentist Bettmann’s opinion, in Turin:
The patient is usually excited, he asks much food but is unable to do something and take care of himself. He claims to be a famous man, and constantly asks a woman for him.
Basel journal for the sick, January 1889:
He only answers partially and incompletely or not at all to the questions addressed to him, insisting in his confused verbiage nonstop.
First day at Jena, January 19, 1889:
The patient walks on the department with many bows of courtesy. With majestic step, staring at the ceiling, enters the room and gives thanks for the “great reception.” He doesn’t know where he is.
Extracts from the diary for the sick at Jena, from January to October 1889:
He wants his compositions to be premiered. He has little understanding or memory of ideas or passages from his works. He always identifies the physicians correctly. He proclaims himself now Duke of Cumberland, now Emperor, etc… “At last I have been Frederick William IV,” “My wife Cosima Wagner has brought me here.” “At night they have uttered curses against me, have used the most horrible mechanisms.” “I want a gun if there is any truth in the suspicion that the very Grand Duchess commits these filthy acts and attacks on me.”
At night we always have to isolate him. He often smears himself with excrement. He eats excrements. He urinates in his boot or glass and drinks the urine or smears himself with it. Once he smeared a leg with excrement. He wraps excrements in paper and puts it all in the drawer of a table.
The mother to Overbeck, April 8, 1889:
About an hour ago my son has been taken to the department of the peaceful sick… The greatest joy you can provide is to speak in Italian or French to him… Gone are the ideas of grandeur that initially made him so happy…
On March 24, 1890 the mother takes Nietzsche out of the center to live with him in Jena. On one occasion Nietzsche undresses in public with intent of swimming and a guard is hired, who follows at a distance mother and son when they go for a walk. On June 17, 1890 she writes to Overbeck:
He plays a little of music every day, partly his small compositions or songs of an old book of songs… The religious sentiment is asserted more and more in him. During Pentecost, when we were sitting quietly in the balcony with me holding an old Bible [he says] that in Turin he had studied the whole Bible and taken thousands of notes, when I read this or that psalm; this or that chapter, I expressed surprise that he knew the Bible so thoroughly.
From 1892 Nietzsche can no longer feed himself. He has to be washed and dressed. The walks have to be abandoned because Nietzsche shouts and hits everything on his way. In 1894 Nietzsche recognizes Deussen, but in 1895 he no longer recognizes Overbeck.
In madness it clearly appears a regression to infantile and juvenile stages. In the time of megalomania Dionysus and Zarathustra are totally excluded. Instead it reappears Frederick William IV [discussed in Ross’ earlier chapters], and Nietzsche says to his mother he is twenty-two. The last letter to Jacob Burckhardt is written by a “student.” His fears (the light should remain lit at night, the door must be closed) belong to an early childhood stage, like the “magic of the pieces of glass.” It is also noteworthy the return to the old religion and a fearful, even radical avoidance of everything philosophical. As a sick man Nietzsche is an obedient or uninhibited child.
At the end he completely sinks into apathy.
The mother, fearful, “limited” (as seen in the Basel clinic) was at first mean, although she continued to receive Nietzsche’s pension. But when he was with her she cared for him, protected and looked after him with motherly love. Friedrich then again became what in her opinion should have always been: her little child.
Why I am starting this new series is explained: here.
Mankind sees things in photographic negative about childrearing: it’s all backwards, and only those who have deeply assimilated Alice Miller’s legacy have noticed it. Perhaps the most splendid paradigm, in stories, of what Miller called poisonous pedagogy or adult-child projection is precisely the original story by Carlo Collodi.
Pinocchio is nothing more than the transformation of the pure feelings of a child into adult madness; for example, by going to schools where children’s souls are murdered and the child is socialized so that he finally sacrifices his sanity in search for the affection of parental figures, symbolized by the carpenter and the Blue Fairy.
Let’s see. The heading of Chapter IV states: “The story of Pinocchio and the Talking Cricket, in which one sees that bad children do not like to be corrected by those who know more than they do.”
Head over heels—everything in photographic negative! How I wish that my Whispering Leaves were sold out so that I could, by now, be writing the book I had dreamt since the beginning: pure narrative without using hundreds of pages to introduce the reader to the legacy of Miller, deMause and the critics of psychiatry.
Here is a passage of the Collodi tale, poisonous pedagogy in its purest form:
“Woe to boys who refuse to obey their parents and run away from home!” [Chapter IV]
The passage obviously presupposes that the parents (who beat their children or torment them emotionally and ocassionally even rape them) are always right and benign with their children: the opposite of what we saw in the previous entry showing the dark side of Geppetto, a side only noticed by the neighbors who knew him in the story. And what is worse, the domestic abuse is often supported by the abuse at school, so Pinocchio says to the cricket:
“If I stay here the same thing will happen to me which happens to all other boys and girls. They are sent to school, and whether they want to or not, they must study…” [Ibid]
To which the voice of the system, symbolized by the cricket who wants to instill a consciousness of black pedagogy into the child, responds:
“If you do not like going to school, why don’t you at least learn a trade…?” [Ibid]
That is a great insult; not bona fide council as adults often utter these sort of words not out of genuine empathy for the kids.
When I was a child I wanted to be a filmmaker. Kubrick, who dropped out from school, was my idol. Alas, in my late teens my parents put me in a medieval school system and I could not become either (1) a filmmaker or (2) get what they wanted: a college degree either. The mandatory school system was the barrier that destroyed my professional life. Unlike Kubrick, no “Uncle Jacob” appeared in my life to sponsor my filming career since Christian families don’t help their relatives as much as kike families do (cf. MacDonald’s first book of his trilogy).
More recently, this year in fact, I heard my brother angrily telling his child that if my nephew did not want to study at a conventional school, he should seek a trade, and mentioned a supermarket boy (something similar to what the Cricket proposed). My brother’s advice was not directed in an empathic way: it was an obvious act of psychological aggression as no one in his right mind wants to be an errand kid that only earns a few cents.
Going back to my life, if my parents had any empathy with the potential filmmaker I was as a kid, they would have supported my immigration to the US, and instead of spending money at a Mexican school, send me those scarce funds to complete my expenses near Hollywood. But no: the unconscious desire of my mother was to destroy the individualistic mind of her firstborn, as I recount in my Leaves.
Disney’s film is nonsense intended to beautify the crudeness of the Italian text. In Collodi’s original story the cricket’s advice was so insulting that Pinocchio grabbed a hammer of Geppetto’s workshop and threw it toward the damned bug, who “stayed stiff and flat against the wall”: precisely what I did as an adolescent.
Why I am starting this new series is explained: here.
In my blog in Spanish I said that I had recently watched again Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence. Well, now that I lost my computer for a while, while it is in the shop and still write in a borrowed laptop, I decided to return to my childhood classics. (Sometimes it’s refreshing to forget the net and have direct contact with printed books.)
Artificial Intelligence is clearly a fairy tale inspired, in part, in Pinocchio and set in the future. I would suggest fans of Alice Miller to read the original story in an edition whose drawings respect Carlo Collodi’s tale.
Here is my Spanish-English translation of a passage from the preface of the splendid 1965 edition in Spanish that my father read to me and my brothers when we were little ones:
The error or the superficiality of many editions of Pinocchio lies mainly in the fact that the illustrations give primary attention for graphic designs, but without a clear interlocking with the text. In our edition, by contrast, the drawings have been made expressly in Tuscany, where the author imagined his masterpiece.
I sent the old serial installments of Editorial Codex to be bound by a traditional bookbinder: the very same issues that my father read us decades ago. Here I quote some passages that portray why the original story of Pinocchio is a perfect case of what Alice Miller called poisonous pedagogy:
“Geppetto had a very bad temper.” [Chapter II]
Pinocchio has not yet appeared and the story reveals the personality of its maker. Like many other distortions, the image of Geppetto in the Disney film as a kind old man grossly distorts Collodi’s tale.
But the Collodi tale distorts reality too, reversing colors like a photographic negative of what happens in the real world. Consider for example the following passage of poisonous pedagogy, in the sense of adult projections on a child unsure of himself, represented by the wooden puppet who aspires to become real. Anyone who has assimilated a little psychohistory knows that it is the parents who, over the millennia, have abused their children; not vice versa. As narrated in the birth of Pinocchio:
At that unexpected trick, Geppetto became very sad and downcast, more so than he had ever been before.
“Pinocchio, you wicked boy!” he cried out. “You are not yet finished, and you start out by being impudent to your poor old father. Very bad, my son, very bad!”
And he wiped away a tear. [Chapter III]
Of course: in real life it is parents who abuse the newborns; never, ever the other way. Collodi’s story is fiction, obviously, but in my opinion it perfectly reflects aspects in the dynamics Collodi had to bear with his own mother, with whom he lived all his life. After Pinocchio was “born” and escaped into the streets, the story goes:
“Poor Marionette,” called out a man. “I am not surprised he doesn’t want to go home. Geppetto, no doubt, will beat him unmercifully, he is so mean and cruel!”
“Geppetto looks like a good man,” added another, “but with boys he’s a real tyrant. If we leave that poor Marionette in his hands he may tear him to pieces!” [Chapter III]
He may tear him to pieces! The neighbors knew that this was how an acquaintance of them behaved. Although in that passage Collodi puts Geppetto as the victim, and Pinocchio as a miscreant who despised a loving father, the neighbors knew better. In real life, of course, runaway children do so because of horrific abuse at home. As I have had dealings with these children in Mexico City I have the impression that behind every street child, even those who I haven’t interviewed, there is a horror story at home.
It is very instructive that Collodi inverts reality in a story meant to subjugate the will of the child before the omnipotent adult. That is precisely the reason that his story became a bestseller in a world dominated by parents who want to “educate” their children through poisonous pedagogy.
I have been asked why the recent focus of The West’s Darkest Hour on Nietzsche. I replied that my intention is to explain (1) the “transvaluation of all values” (Nietzsche’s ultimate philosophy) and (2) “poisonous pedagogy” which goes together with the “trauma model of mental disorders” (illustrated in Nietzsche’s life).
As to #2, I believe that one of the ingredients of the witches’ brew that is killing whites is the toll of child abuse in the adult. In the white nationalist movement no one has suspected this. A few months ago Alex Kurtagic wrote on The Occidental Observer that the engulfing behavior of Jewish mothers towards their male children explained the haughty behavior of the grown-up Jew. But Kurtagic and the rest of writers of the pro-white blogosphere have failed to ask what could the engulfing behavior of white mothers cause on their white children.
I am the only one in the movement who has written on the implications of the trauma model on white pathology. See for example my seminal article, “A body-snatched Spaniard.” I even plan to translate to English the rest of my book Hojas susurrantes, the most didactic and comprehensive explanation of the model under a single cover.
However, since that kind of literature is very strong meat indeed, and since pro-white advocates are uninterested in the subject, I better start introducing it by means of baby steps, like my next series of entries on Carlo Collodi’s novel for children.
Pinocchio
The original Pinocchio tale by Collodi is must reading. A 1880 magazine series (Disney’s 1940 film is a betrayal of the original Italian tale), Collodi projected his feelings for his abusive parents onto the characters of the very manipulative Blue Fairy and Geppetto.
In chapter XV Pinocchio is hanged in front of the Blue Fairy mansion and the motherly Fairy didn’t help him at all. The wooden puppet exclaimed Jesus-like words on the cross:
The editor asked Collodi to rescue Pinocchio in the following issue of the magazine.
♣
As a child Collodi had been tormented in a Jesuit school (incidentally, as a child my father was also tormented in a Jesuit school). Since Collodi (like my father) never settled accounts with the perpetrators, he later identified himself with them; hated the children, illustrated boring school textbooks for them and always lived with his manipulative “Blue Fairy” mother.
The original Le Avventure di Pinocchio is poisonous pedagogy at its worst. The parents and the school system are idealized at the expense of the child’s true self. (Later in my series on Nietzsche you will see the relevance of the Prussian pedagogy applied to the child Nietzsche by his mother and other female figures and his adult breakdown.) A major bestseller, Collodi’s novel was used to manipulate and socialize children in the early 20th century.
In future entries I will show that together with the German biographers of Nietzsche I will be quoting, Alice Miller is the obliged reference to understand “poisonous pedagogy” and ultimately my interpretation of both Pinocchio and many people who have suffered mental breakdowns.
From Kenneth Clark’s The Other Half: A Self-Portrait (ellipsis omitted between unquoted excerpts):
The last words of the programme were shot in Saltwood, in my study. As if in sympathy the camera broke down, and a new one had to be sent from London. But at last the final words were spoken, including the prophetic lines by Yeats, which I had heard him read soon after he had written them; I walked in to my library, patted a wooden figure by Henry Moore, as if to imply that there still was hope, and out of shot.
It was all over. The crew came over to the Castle for a drink. We had become a band of brothers and were not far from tears at the thought that we should not meet again. I may be fanciful, but I think something of this feeling of comradeship is perceptible in the film. It seems ridiculous to say that the happiest years of my life took place when I was sixty-eight, but so it was.
♣
The communication with simple people was one of the things about the programmes that particularly annoyed intellectuals of the left, who believed that they had a prescriptive right to speak to the working classes. Academics were furious at the simplification of their labours. In fact my approach to history was unconsciously different from that now in favour in universities, which sees all historical change as the result of economic and communal pressures. I believe in the importance of individuals, and am a natural hero-worshiper. Each programme had its hero—Charlemagne, the Abbot Suger, Alberti, Erasmus, Luther and Montaigne, Mozart, Voltaire, Jefferson, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and finally Brunel. One whole programme is called The Hero as Artist. The majority of people share my taste for heroes, and so were glad of an historical survey that emphasised outstanding individuals rather than economic trends.
When the series was shown in the U.S.A. things got out of hand. The number of letters quadrupled, and some of them were rather dotty.
When I arrived in Georgetown to stay with my old friends David and Margie Finley, Carter Brown, the Director of the Gallery [National Gallery at Washington], rang me to say ‘For God’s sake don’t go in through the front door. You’ll be mobbed’. I went in by the back door and down a long underground corridor to a press conference. After it was over I was led back along the same corridor so that I might walk the whole length of the Gallery upstairs. It was the most terrible experience in my life. All the galleries were crammed full of people who stood up and roared at me, waving their hands and stretching them out towards me.
I then went downstairs and retired to the ‘gents’, where I burst into tears. I sobbed and howled for a quarter of an hour. I suppose politicians quite enjoy this kind of experience, and don’t get it often enough. The Saints certainly enjoyed it, but saints are very tough eggs. To me it was utterly humiliating. It simply made me feel a hoax. I came up to lunch with red eyes, and tried to put the experience out of my mind. But, as the reader will have realised, it would not let go, and has not gone. And I record it because I must be one of the few ordinary, normal men on whom this kind of experience has been inflicted. The Finleys drove me home in silence. They felt as embarrassed as I did.
Speech on receiving the National Gallery of Art medal
When I tried to read the great German philosophers, I turned over the pages of Kant and Hegel, and I couldn’t make head or tail of them. I felt absolutely frustrated and humiliated, but I had to go until I thought I understood something, and at least acquired a new mental process.
Now although I believe that this part of education is the most important part, it has a great defect. One may achieve intellectual discipline, but one doesn’t remember a single thing that one learnt in that way, because one doesn’t absorb it. I can’t translate the simplest Latin inscription, and if you ask me what Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is about I couldn’t tell you.
Education has another aspect—what you learn through delight. It is by falling in love with a subject, a period, a style, an individual hero, that one absorbs something so that it becomes a part of one’s living tissue, and one never forgets it. ‘Give all to love,’ your great underrated poet said. It’s true of education as well of life. And the first advice I would give to any young person is, when you fall in love with Roman baroque or with the essays of Montaigne or with whatever it may be, give up everything to study that one, all-absorbing theme of the moment, because your mind is in a plastic condition. A plastic period usually takes place between the ages of about fifteen to the age of twenty-two; and anyone who is learning at that moment will never forget what he has learnt. Read and read, look and look; you will never be able to do it so intensely again. I often wonder if in the last fifty years of grubbing away and reading in galleries and libraries I’ve learned anything compared to what came to me in those plastic moments.
My goodness, if people really began to be sceptical and use their minds, in order to see through cant and humbug and after self-serving lies, advertisers and public relations men and a number of politicians, and even a few favourable philosophers, would be out of business. And the way that education does this is not only by training people to use their minds, but by teaching them history. When you read history you learn that people in the past were just as clever as we are, in fact at some periods they were a good deal cleverer.
I would like to think that these programmes have done two things: they have made people feel that they are part of a great human achievement, and be proud of it, and they have made them feel humble in thinking of the great men of the past.