Nietzsche Goes to Naples

In his book on Hölderlin’s hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger develops an interpretative technique that we can call “stating the obvious”: he suggests the hymn is a meditation on the Ister river (the Danube) itself and its inner essence, and is not an allegory for any neoplatonic diatribe about the soul or anything else. Because it does not lend itself to any subjective literary-critical interpretation, he claims it breaks free of the metaphysical paradigm of “Aesthetics” which culminated in Hegel’s “end of art,” and thereby grants art a future. I think the same can be said about Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in a way that few may realize: Zarathustra is not a collection of metaphors that represent pure ideas or theses, but a meditation on one young German man’s trip to the Bay of Napoli, whose good weather and beauty cured his suicidal nihilism.

This may sound strange. Is it not a commentary on western philosophy? Yes, it still is; in fact, this practice of turning idealism inside-out (and not abolishing it altogether) is precisely what the book is about. The praise of the body, the comments about the spirit being a mere shadow of the body, lines about the spirit being contained in the blood and not in logical arguments—all of this proceeds not from an argument in a vacuum but is rather a living record of what Nietzsche realized when he went to Sorrento in the fall of 1876. And this revelation will bring us to the highest, hidden concept of Nietzsche’s thought.

“When for the first time I saw the evening rise with its red and gray softened in the Naples sky,” Nietzsche wrote, “it was like a shiver, as though pitying myself for starting my life by being old, and the tears came to me and the feeling of having been saved at the very last second.” His ill-health had forced him to resign from his teaching position that year. All his plans had grinded to a halt. Imagine, at this point of despair, receiving this invitation: possibly never having seen the sea before, and never having gotten out from under a repressive system of academic-state bureaucrats and Victorian protestants micromanaging his life, the scholar was taken out of the wet and chilly climate of Germany for the first time and considered himself “saved.” Throughout his works, the philosopher stresses the role that weather and diet play in thinking, how any kind of environmental degeneration can poison our thoughts, how “the south” is a great convalescent, how the heaviness of German metaphysics is due to beer—it would only make sense that he was getting all this from an experience.

This is the picture given to us by Paolo D'Iorio in his reconstruction of that trip, Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento: Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit (2016). At the invitation of writer and friend Mawilda von Meyenbug, whom he had met through the Wagners, for six months Nietzsche stayed in Sorrento at the Villa Rubinacci, a “vacant hotel in the middle of a vineyard run by a German woman.” Nietzsche brought his friends Dr. Paul Rée and law student Albert Brenner. They ate oysters, hiked on the sea cliffs, rode donkeys, and ventured off to Capri and Naples. He also began writing Human, All Too Human (the first of his scientific “free spirit” trilogy), listened to Rée’s comments as he wrote his The Origins of Moral Sensations (later to be mentioned in the preface to the Genealogy of Morals), and saw Richard Wagner for the last time, breaking off his friendship with him.

Wagner had just premiered The Ring cycle at Bayreuth, which Nietzsche attended, and the composer followed them down to the Amalfi Coast with his wife Cosima, cramping Nietzsche’s style: he had wanted to get out of his shadow. Wagner conceived of his Christian opera Parsifal while visiting Villa Rufolo in the nearby town of Ravello. He told Nietzsche about his plan for it as they walked among its gardens, leading Nietzsche to grow furious with his once revolutionary, atheistic friend. “I want to declare expressly to the readers of my earlier works that I have abandoned the metaphysical-aesthetic views that essentially dominated them: they are pleasant, but untenable,” he wrote in his Sorrento papers. And, because of this, he chose to dedicate Human to Voltaire, “the greatest liberator of the human spirit,” for the one hundredth anniversary of his death, purposely selecting a French author of the Enlightenment to rebuff his Wagnerian readers whom he subsequently lost.

The letters and notes that D'Iorio quotes in his book reveal just how many parallels the stories in Zarathustra have with this Italian landscape. While the sight of the volcano Vesuvius makes its way into many of Nietzsche’s books, most famously the Gay Science aphorism exhorting readers to “live dangerously” by “build[ing] your cities on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius,”¹ it also appears in Zarathustra’s chapter “Of Great Events.” There, he mentions a “volcano continuously smok[ing],” which, according to the “old women,” contains a gate to the underworld.² A carnival-parade in the city of Naples getting interrupted by a hooded medieval funeral procession, which Mawilda took note of and which Nietzsche turned into a fragment collected in the Nachlass,³ sounds very similar to the prologue of Zarathustra where the prophet makes his way out of town holding the body of the tight-rope walker. The line, “In the mountains, the shortest route is from peak to peak,”⁴ or his mention of a young local man “gazing wearily into the valley,”⁵ makes more sense when you see the dramatic mountain peaks interspersed by the colossal valleys of Positano or Amalfi.

In 1883, Nietzsche told Heinrich Köselitz that the “Blessed Isles” of the novel, which prompt Zarathustra to tell mankind to replace the word “God” with “Superman” when they gaze out onto the open sea,⁶ are in fact supposed to be the island of Ischia. ““Cupid dancing with the young girls”⁷ is immediately comprehensible only in Ischia (the women of Ischia say “Cupedo”),” he says.⁸ These Blessed Isles are the setting of the entire Second Part of the book, which tests Zarathustra’s ideas to their breaking point, enabling the doctrine of the eternal recurrence to emerge in Part Three. The fig trees mentioned in the chapter “On the Blessed Isles” are directly pulled from real life, as Sorrento had fig trees in its gardens. Even the camel, one of the three “Metamorphoses of the Spirit,” derives from a camel ride they did in Pisa.

The examples go on and on and on. After reading through this book, it seems it would be harder to find symbols and images in Nietzsche’s work that aren’t drawn from this journey (it is staggering how much philosophical and poetic material he was able to pull from so short a time, but it makes sense that someone who had very few such experiences in their lifetime would be this grateful). But the most fundamental and crucial for his philosophy is the “Halcyon.” He uses this word only a handful of times throughout his works, but I have come to think it is his most important concept: he reserves it for moments in which he wishes to give something the highest possible praise. It therefore functions like Plato’s “good-in-itself” or Kant’s “categorical imperative,” albeit in a less systematic and more impressionistic way.

First, let us establish what it even is. It is most associated with the phrase “halcyon days,” used as a nostalgic reference to happy and successful days or years in one’s past. Today, “halcyon” is a word for a genus of birds otherwise known as “kingfishers,” first used in this way by the British naturalist William Swainson.⁹¹⁰ It comes from a Greek myth concerning a princess named Alcyone whose husband Ceyx was lost at sea. When she finds out that he had drowned from shipwreck, she runs to the window of her tower and throws herself into the water, drowning herself to be with her husband’s corpse. The gods take pity and transform them into birds who lay eggs on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea during a strange week in the winter when storms do not occur. As Ovid writes, their legacy is to “live and breed upon those waters / And for a week in winter, Alcyone / Keeps her brood warm within a floating nest, / Aeolus stills the winds that shake the waters / To guard his grandsons on a peaceful sea.”¹¹ This is why the word came to denote luck or fortune.

But Nietzsche seems to have intended to restore this geographical element to the phrase. He employs “halcyon” to signify fair weather, clear skies, and the smoothness of the sea, specifically the sea of the “south,” which of course for him meant the Mediterranean. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche says what is missing in Wagner’s music of “bad weather” and Hegelian¹² “enigmatical vagueness” is what “we halcyonians” enjoy, namely “la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grace; the great logic; the dance of the stars; the exuberant spirituality; the southern shivers of light; the smooth sea—perfection.—”¹³ In Beyond Good and Evil, he uses the term to describe cultures at their peak: “…that perfection and recent ripening of every culture and art, that which is genuinely noble in works and human beings, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the gold and coldness shown by all things that have perfected themselves.”¹⁴

Regarding his Zarathustra, which he calls “the greatest gift yet given to mankind,” he writes: “Here no “prophet” is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom people call founders of religions. Above all, one must hear aright the tone that comes from this mouth, the halcyon tone, lest one should do wretched injustice to the meaning of its wisdom.”¹⁵ The word “halcyon” appears in the preface to Genealogy in a similar context, where Nietzsche says he would regard no one as a “connoisseur” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra if they were “at some time not deeply wounded and at some time not deeply delighted by its every word: for only then may he enjoy the privilege of reverent participation in the halcyon element out of which this work was born, in its sunny brilliance, distance, breadth, and certainty.”¹⁶ And he tells his readers in Ecce Homo that “under the halcyon sky of Nizza, which then shone into my life for the first time, I found Zarathustra III—and was finished. Scarcely a year for the whole of it.”¹⁷

Halcyon, the word he chooses to convey perfection, or rather the mood we are in when we experience perfection—the closest thing to a value-ideal in Nietzsche’s works—essentially signifies the Mediterranean and its climate. But these things are esteemed only because of their fairness, lightness, spiritedness, and the quick-witted cheerful tempo they inspire. The “halcyon” also acts as a criterion to judge works of art. By contrast to the negative remarks Wagner receives in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche uses “halcyon” to praise Mendelssohn: “It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyonic master who was quickly revered and just as quickly forgotten on account of his lighter, pure, more favored soul: as a beautiful interlude of German music.”¹⁸ For Nietzsche, Mendelssohn belongs to the same high class of composers as those who were obsessed with the south, such as Mozart¹⁹ and Bizet.²⁰

In the penultimate section to Beyond Good and Evil’s eighth and most musicological chapter, “Peoples and Fatherlands,” Nietzsche gives an outline for what his ideal “Zukunftsmusik”²¹ would be:

I think it is necessary to be cautious of German music in many ways. Suppose someone who loves the south as I do, as a great school of convalescence in the most spiritual and sensual sense, as a boundless fullness and transfiguration of sun that spreads itself over an overbearing existence that believes in itself: well now, someone like this would have to learn to be a bit wary of German music, because as it ruins his taste it also ruins his health again.

This equating of artistic taste with physical health recalls to mind his comment in the Genealogy that he intended to write a “physiology of aesthetics.”²² He continues:

Such a southerner, not by birth but by faith, if he dreamed of the future of music would also have to have dreamed of a redemption from the music of the north, and in his ears he would have the prelude of a deeper, more powerful, perhaps more evil and mysterious music, a supra-German music that does not fade, yellow, and pale at the sight of the blue voluptuous sea and the Mediterranean brilliance of the sky, as all German music does, a supra-European music, that is justified even before the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is related to palm trees and knows how to be at home and to roam among big, beautiful, solitary predators . . . . . I could imagine a music whose rarest magic consisted in its no longer knowing anything of good and evil, only perhaps here and there some sailor’s longing, some golden shadows and delicate weaknesses would pass over it: an art that would see fleeing toward it from a great distance the colors of a setting moral world that had become almost incomprehensible, and would be hospitable and profound enough to receive such late refugees.—²³

Nietzsche also used the phrase to describe Zarathustra,²⁴ Dionysus,²⁵ and, in private, even himself. According to his friend, suffragette Meta von Salis, he would use the words “halcyon” and “tranquil” to characterize his attitude, and she concurred, saying, “the times we were together were halcyon for me, suited to spreading a golden glimmer over the rest of my life.”²⁶ In a draft for “Why I Am a Destiny,” Nietzsche wrote: “Have I been understood? He who enlightens about morality is a force majeure, a destiny—This shouldn’t prevent me from being the most cheerful man, from being a halcyoner (ein Halkyonier), and I even have a right to that.”²⁷

Whenever Nietzsche wants to unveil the highest value—whether in morality, aesthetics, or theology—he begins to write poetry: sunsets, weather, melodies, names of great artists and places. He cultivates an atmosphere, and the word “halcyon” acts both as a symbol for what he believes is the highest mood as well as the physical environment he believes embodies this. The halcyon tone of Zarathustra is a purity that is as equal in malice as it is in exuberance, that dances on light feet and in mockery of all heavy souls, knowing full well their woe and in fact knowing woes far beyond them, yet retaining good humor and vigor, so overabundant in high feelings that it freely gives its gifts “like a bee overfull with honey.” It is not a self-help trait to obtain power, but the calm repose that visits those already in control of their passions and environment, the inner sensation of gods and masters: it evokes a calmness of strength (rather than of ascetic resignation), edifying culture and climate, robust health, and the sublimation of the will to power into beautiful works. Zarathustra whistles over the wanton cruelty, destruction, and tragedies in history in a halcyon key of levity. To stay in good spirits does not require Utopia, nor even modern standards of safety and kindness (as the blood-soaked Renaissance well knew), it only requires this “good weather.”

1. §283.

2. This could also be the volcano on the island of Ischia, mixed with the gate to the underworld in the nearby Cumae which appears in Virgil’s Aeneid. Mawilda wrote: “From the terraces there was a magnificent view beyond the flourishing foreground of the garden on the Gulf and Mount Vesuvius, which was in full activity at the time and sent columns of smoke up to the sky in the evening.”

3. Posthumous fragment eKGWB/NF-1876,23[147].

4. “Of Reading and Writing.”

5. “Of the Tree in the Mountainside.”

6. “On the Blissful Islands” [Hollingdale translation].

7. Mentioned in “The Dancing Song.”

8. August 16,1883, eKGWB/BVN-1883,452.

9. Zoological illustrations, or, Original figures and descriptions of new, rare, or interesting animals : selected chiefly from the classes of ornithology, entomology, and conchology, and arranged on the principles of Cuvier and other modern zoologists, 1832-1833. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/29156540#page/175/mode/1up.

10. The word apparently derives from the Greek ἀλκυών, which some say etymologically breaks down to “sea breeding.” Aristotle in his History of Animals claimed these birds were real and laid their eggs on the surface of the sea (Book V, Chapter VII, 542b24)—but the modern kingfishers only nest near bodies of water in burrows. It seems either this bird was only legendary and Aristotle got his information from the myth, or the bird was real and the myth based itself on this extinct bird.

11. Shapiro, Alcyone, 114; Ovid Metamorphoses XI lines 725-748, trans. Horace Gregory (New York, 1958).

12. “He was Hegel's heir.... Music as “Idea.”” This was likely meant as a humorous reversal, since Wagner was a disciple of Schopenhauer, a sworn enemy of Hegel; Wagner would have taken the comparison as an insult.

13. In Basic Writings trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), §10, 634.

14. Beyond Good and Evil, Part Seven, §224, 127.

15. Ecce Homo in Basic Writings trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992), Preface, §4, 675.

16. On the Genealogy of Morality, Preface, §8, 214.

17. Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books – Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” §4. He continues: “Many concealed spots and heights in the landscape around Nizza are hallowed for me by unforgettable moments; that decisive passage which bears the title “On Old and New Tablets” was composed on the most onerous ascent from the station to the marvelous Moorish eyrie, Eza—the suppleness of my muscles has always been greatest when my creative energies were flowing most abundantly. The body is inspired; let us keep the “soul” out of it.—Often one could have seen me dance; in those days I could walk in the mountains for seven or eight hours without a trace of weariness. I slept well, I laughed much—my vigor and patience were perfect.”

18. Beyond Good and Evil §245.

19. Beyond Good and Evil, §245: “The “good old” days are gone, they sang themselves out with Mozart:—how fortunate are we that his rococo still speaks to us, that his “good company,” his tender enthusiasms, his childish delight in things Chinese and in frills, his courtesy of the heart, his longing for delicate, enamored, dancing and blissfully tearful people, his faith in the south may still appeal to some vestige in us! […] Mozart, the fading of a great centuries-long European taste.”

20. Beyond Good and Evil, Part Eight, §254: “Even now in France there is still a predisposition and an accommodation for those rarer and rarely satisfied people who are too comprehensive to be content with any kind of fatherlandishness and in the north know how to love the south, in the south the north—for the born midlanders, the “good Europeans.”—Bizet made his music for them, this last genius who saw a new beauty and seduction—who discovered a piece of music’s southernness.”

21. As opposed to Wagner’s. “Zukunftsmusik,” or “music of the future,” is how Wagner described his music in a famous essay. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy was mocked by rival philologist Ulrich Von Wilamowitz-Moellendor as Zukunftsphilologie. Nietzsche adopted this insult as a joke for the rest of his life, subtitling Beyond Good and Evil “A Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future” and signing the registry at a Capri hotel “Don Federigo, uomo dell’avvenire!”

22. “Incidentally we should piece together the aforementioned case of Schopenhauer in line with this interpretation: the sight of the beautiful obviously acted in him as a triggering stimulus on the main force of his nature (the force of concentration and of the engrossed gaze); so that the latter then exploded and all at once became master of his consciousness. Here the possibility should not be precluded in the least that the peculiar sweetness and fullness unique to the aesthetic condition could take its descent precisely from the ingredient “sensuality” (just as that “idealism” of pubescent girls stems from the same source)—therefore that sensuality is not suspended at the onset of the aesthetic condition, as Schopenhauer believed, but only transfigures itself and no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus. (I will return to this viewpoint another time, in connection with the still more delicate problem of the heretofore so untouched, so unexplored physiology of aesthetics.)” Third Treatise, §8. Nietzsche brought this concept up previously, in Human, All Too Human §1 (where he names them “sublimations” Sublimirungen) and in Beyond Good and Evil §75. In the third treatise of the Genealogy, Nietzsche aims to expose how asceticism, as opposed to art, does not sublimate the sexual interest but instead makes it boil over into ressentiment (see especially §17 on Christian “consolation”). Sigmund Freud, of course, developed this idea into one of his core concepts, “sublimation,” which Jacques Lacan neatly explains: “Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression” (Seminar XI, “The Deconstruction of the Drive”).

23. Beyond Good and Evil, Part Eight, §255.

24. “The halcyon, the light feet, the omnipresence of malice and exuberance, and whatever else is typical of the type of Zarathustra—none of this has ever before been dreamed as essential to greatness. Precisely in this width of space and this accessibility for what is contradictory, Zarathustra experiences himself as the supreme type of all beings; and once one hears how he defines this, one will refrain from seeking any metaphor for it.” Ecce Homo “Why I Write Such Good Books – Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” §6. He then quotes a passage from the 19^th section of Zarathustra’s Of Old and New Law Tables” sermon, in which he describes an immense soul that is capable of highs and lows and never tires of willing (however, in Ecce Homo he omitted from it two lines about how parasites will naturally be attracted to feed on such a soul). He then immediately adds, “But that is the concept of Dionysus himself.”

25. The second to last section of Beyond Good and Evil, §295, concludes with a half-facetious introduction to the philosophy of Dionysus, where the god in dialogue form tells Nietzsche that “under certain circumstances I love humans […] the human being to me is a pleasant, brave, and inventive animal without peers on earth, it can find its way in any labyrinth. I think highly of it: I often think about how I can advance it and make it stronger, more evil, deeper than it is.” Nietzsche, startled, asks if he heard him right, and the “tempter god” assents and repeats himself “smil[ing] with his halcyon smile, as if he had just uttered a charming compliment.” The gods and especially Dionysus, Nietzsche says, lack not only shame but “humaneness”—to their merit. The halcyon, for one thing, is meant to evoke the innocence of becoming.

26. Gary Shapiro, Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women, 123; source: Sander Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche trans. David J. Parent (New York: 1987), 159.

This phrasing found its way into The Gay Science, Book V §370, where he wrote: “On the one hand it can stem from gratitude and love:— an art of this origin will always be an apotheosis art, dithyrambic perhaps like Rubens, blissfully mocking like Hafiz, bright and gracious like Goethe and spreading a Homeric radiance and halo [translated as “aureole” by Kaufmann and Hollingdale in The Will to Power, §846] over all things.”

27. (14, 512). Shapiro, Alcyone, 112.