Nootropical Nietzsche

The following is a recently discovered manuscript purportedly written by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1890 at the Jena asylum. It was smuggled out under the watchful eye of his sieg-heiling sister by a fellow patient with whom Nietzsche was on affable terms. The unpublished manuscript now before us is not that lost German original, written in the Antichrist’s blood-stained hand, but an English translation by an enigmatic philosopher and autodidactic NEET known only pseudonymously as Al E. N. Nate, who posted the text on a short-lived blog titled The Seventh Face on August 25, 2000, exactly a century after Nietzsche’s demise. The post has since been taken down and the blog deleted soon after. In a forthcoming article, I will divulge the nearly decade-long research and investigations that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this text can really be traced back to Nietzsche’s pen more than a century ago.

It suffices for now to present the English copy in full. The translation is far from perfect, seeing as Nate chose to deploy a number of apocryphal modernisms, making Nietzsche’s prose style more timely for our age if only at the cost of rendering it untimely for his own. While this flawed copy might at first seem more like a simulacrum, there are nonetheless three respects in which it marks a seminal moment in scholarship on Nietzsche, the man, and his works. Firstly, it is the only instance where Nietzsche is still lucid enough to offer an explanation as to the cause of his infamous breakdown in 1889 and subsequent hospitalization. It is also his only known work written during his stay in the asylum, going some way to showing the state of his mind during that final fateful decade. At last, it is the only time that he discusses at any length a subject that proved as pivotal to his intellectual development as his encounters with Schopenhauer and Wagner (particularly his notions of Dionysus and Apollo, Great Health, the will to power, the eternal return, perspectivism, passive and active nihilism, and the overman); namely, his excessive and lifelong drug abuse.^[1] The explanatory biographical footnotes scattered throughout are my own.

If I am to be remembered in a thousand years’ time—and in all likelihood I will be—after today’s great empires have all rotted into ruins, let it be as that rarest and most noble stock of philosopher-kings who went against his kind to fall so deeply in love with life. Since I loved everything that life had to offer, as it overflowed like an uncorked champagne bottle furiously shaken up, I have naturally had many crushing love affairs and honey-sweet romantic trysts, from the love of sophia to the love of dear Lou. But perhaps the one to whom I was alone everlastingly faithful, and who was in turn most faithful to me, the one who was my childhood sweetheart and now lays in my nuptial bed till death do us part, was what one might call a certain substance so long as it is not to be mistaken for the res cogitans kind. Nor am I thinking of Aristotle’s category of substance with which logicians like to bore their less than enraptured students to death. I mean rather certain chemical substances that are no less philosophically revelatory for all their power to obscure the workings of reason in wicked ways. On the contrary, it is precisely such dangerous substances that have long haunted the history of philosophy with bad trips that any free spirit worth his salt knows how to transcribe into an Eleusinian epiphany capable of breaking the world in two: from the demonic voice in Socrates’ head that convinced him to eagerly scull the hemlock, and Descartes’ evil demon that threw his very existence into doubt, to the chemically induced demon who stole into my loneliest loneliness one night through the window to spread the good news of the eternal return.

Although I made my pact at the devil’s crossroads already in my youth, practically begging on hands and knees for such satanic forces to possess me so that my thinking might be as precise as a surgeon’s knife, my writing ever more pyrotechnic, and the world’s immense suffering like music to my ears, I had never really thought that much about them until they had their way with me one winter’s day in a Turin piazza.^[2] Until then, they had only ever exerted a subterranean, if no less monolithic, effect on me like only something truly transcendental could. That is, until they at last took their revenge on me for failing to dedicate my books and dithyrambs in their names—which, like my own, are legion, being all the names in history—like I had for much less worthy inspirations such as that great deceiver Wagner; before they at last left me a stunned prey turned to stone by what I had glimpsed in the Medusa’s enticingly venomous eyes. Let it be known, then, that I dedicate these deathbed confessions, this pound of my own flesh, to those chemical gods in order to write off the debt.

Paul and I used to guzzle down gallons of alcohol, smoke poppy till we could no longer hold our pipes straight, and snort all kinds of other prohibited snuff.^[3] Back then, I could care less about amounting to anything more than a drunken Kant or a stoned Schopenhauer. On account of one particularly shameful night of excessive Dionysian intoxication that ended in a theatrical duel getting way out of hand, I was even demoted from the supervisory position of head of class. Ever since, I had forever sworn off the damned thing, though not without first shedding a tear as only a groom leaving his beautiful bride along with her meddlesome family at the altar for his own good could. Even then, I could already sense the great secret that the whole history of philosophy had hitherto ignored: that the nostrils critique harder, faster, and far more dramatically than the brain. But it was after my accident that I became properly acquainted with all the abundant delights that morphine—among other medicinals—could offer a spirit as anguished as my own.^[4] During the war, I learnt how to administer chloroform and had a ready supply provided by the Prussian emperor himself as seemingly infinite as the hypocrisies of the Christians or the contradictions of the Hegelians.^[5] I was never so patriotic as when I put the contents in those curious cabinets to good use tending to the wounded soldiers in the medical ward, as well as applying them to serve my more cerebral pursuits. After suffering another bout of ill health, I became well acquainted with potassium bromide and chloral hydrate, visiting them almost daily like one would a best friend, and at ever higher doses in an effort to sleep, racked as the nights had become with the howls of mutilated men squirming in agony. For some time, they did the trick so well at putting my nightmares to rest that I completely forgot to dedicate my first book to them, even though it was they that first inspired my ecstatic vision of the historical rhythms of culture across the centuries as a great banquet of the gods, with Apollo’s opium pipe easing life’s great suffering with each drag so that one could still dream, and Dionysus’ goblet flooding the mind with the most intoxicating of wines.

My sacred initiation rites into the true world, the Dionysian world—which is just to say, my world—only intensified as I resigned from my star professorship to become a full-time nightcrawler when the affliction that had been lying dormant like an Olympian titan—the result of my father’s dubious inheritance—finally hatched within me.^[6] It was in those fateful years that the pain reached an almost unbearable peak. And yet, as I dripped my blood onto the pages of my suicide note that became The Gay Science, this pain paradoxically acted as a spur to Great Health. What I neglected to mention in that book was that my heroic convalescence by virtue of which I managed to turn my Achilles’ heel into, well, Achilles in the flesh was in large part thanks to my habit that had become more liberal than even the most decadent social democrat. I devoured everything I could get my eagle’s claws on if it helped me to get even an hour’s rest or keep on working just a little longer as my affliction made its way into my aching eyes like Jocasta’s golden pins. I still managed to make the most of my promising education, putting my doctorate to good use and signing sweat-sodden prescriptions in my own name “Dr. Nietzsche”, which—to my great surprise and feverish relief—were always filled without question.

My habit began in the hope of taking a load off my burden, but it was not long before I learnt that it was to have an altogether unexpected effect as an even more ancient titan wrestled within me against my well-being. Although I am undoubtedly better known by now as the pope’s assassin, I am also that stick of dynamite which is always going on about a certain will to power that the pursuit of all our other ends presuppose as the universal means of their realization. While less than free spirits tend to treat power as a mere means to their purportedly more noble and transcendent ends, since we can only really achieve any of our ends by first achieving power, it is really power itself that is the first and final cause of all our wanting. Now, I long ago learnt that drugs have a habit of enhancing my senses, expanding my mind, strengthening my resolve, and spurring on my creative faculties. It is precisely for this reason that I started using them as a means to help me study, to ease my pain, and to translate interesting thoughts into verse. It was not long, however, before the drugs became an end in themselves without any ulterior motive beyond the unleashing of their astonishing powers for their delirious sake. If drugs so quickly became a habit that I could not kick with ease, it is because they are the will to power on overdrive, which is no less addictive as the condition of possibility for willing anything else at all. It was thus that the divine pantheon of chemical gods revealed to me the will to power at the wellspring of all values as they turned my prudence, cunning, and creativity—what I had hoped to exploit as a means to my ambitions—into an end all unto their own. Truth be told—and what are confessions for if not to lead the guilty to the gallows by truth’s tight noose?—the addict’s body clock is set to the time of the eternal return as it thwarts all our values, purposes, and goals in favor of the artificially induced will to power over and over and over again.

I have frequently affirmed that we should treat our lives as an experiment and I certainly have not shied away from experimenting directly on myself no less than nature has experimented across the earth with different species, physiognomies, diets, cultures, regimes, arts, sciences, and psychological types. I would even go so far as to say that experimenting with drugs and scientific curiosity stem from exactly the same mindset, inasmuch as drugs provide a vast laboratory of different chemical processes for exploring radically new conditions of experience more innumerable than the new worlds that Galileo glimpsed through his telescope. Although drugs cause us to hallucinate all kinds of spectacular dreamscapes, they should not be seen as false and illusory relative to so-called “real life” when we are sober. On the contrary, such hallucinatory states of mind evince that our ordinary coordinates of perception amount to merely one rather arbitrary way of experiencing the world among a gourmet menu of chemically induced others. This is by no means to delude oneself into believing that these new conditions of experience grant us any greater access to the absolute reality of the things in themselves. Such expansions of the mind are no doubt fictitious, but, precisely because they are fictitious, they allow us to see both themselves and our everyday conditions of experience as equally arbitrary and shortsighted. In becoming possessed by the chemical demons, we invariably stumble upon new walks of life that show our sober, waking life to be utterly contingent and parochial, one habit of perceiving the world among many others with no greater purchase on the way things really are than all the rest. The paradox is that we gain a greater—if still only negative and apophatic—perspective on things, as if we had reached the highest misty mountain top in all of Sils Maria, through the fictionalization of everything we had previously held to be true. In a word, drugs transfigure an absolute Idea into a mere perspective. There is more critique in an opium pipe than in all the works of Hegel.

This is by no means to glorify all drugs tout court, like the apostle Paul glorified practically every bad idea that had ever previously existed without ever having a single one of his own. There are bad trips just as there are abominations in nature, not least among which I count the doomed socialist and anti-Semitic experiments now mushrooming like a malignant tumor across Europe. Much as I have distinguished between passive and active nihilism, so is it necessary to build a well-fortified wall between psychopassive drugs that stupefy and deaden the mind and psychoactive drugs that ecstasize and enliven it.^[7] Never mix your overman with your last man, the creator in you with the scholar in you! Dionysus is a drug dealer with a conscience to whom he sells.

Most of the drugs I have ever tasted were psychoactive substances that had the wondrous effect of stimulating me through restless nights only elsewhere rivalled by those induced in the throes of romance, enhancing me mentally and physically, and boosting my alertness, energy, and mood. Yet even for a spirit as free as my own, the hyperbolic doubt into which psychoactive substances throw our everyday lives can be so intense that one is led to mix them with psychopassive substances in order to prematurely come down from the high and get some much-needed sleep. Yes, even I became as well versed in all sorts of psychopassive sedatives as I am in the tragic Athenian playwrights, all of which had an altogether stuporing effect, slurring my speech, impairing my thinking, blurring my already blurred vision, diminishing my reflexes, and even inducing occasional bouts of near death-like catatonia. No wonder these drugs are almost exclusively reserved for those with one foot already in the grave. If the masses who flock to Church each Sabbath to have their Platonism spoon-fed to them are anything to go by, we can also count the body and the blood of Christ among such psychopassive substances. A nightcrawler like me wants nothing to do with them! Alcohol, which I certainly enjoyed for a time if no longer, is a little more complicated in that it boosted my confidence and daring when drunk in moderation just as much as it unsteadied my movements, perturbed my perception, stunted my reactions, and from time to time left me unconscious when I had drunk to excess. If psychopassive substances are for Christians, then alcohol can only be the poison of choice for Buddhists and Schopenhauerians.

I only really discovered how dangerous even psychoactive substances could be when I got to know a mysterious Dutch medicine man who gave me a big, splendid vial of Javanese narcotic, which would strip me of all reason and even the faculty of speech, throwing me into fits of convulsive laughter with just a few drops.^[8] Over time, I came to enjoy a few more drops and then a few more until that one fateful day out in the frigid Turin snow. It was then that I realized it was not I who was using the drugs as a means of enhancing my faculties, but the drugs were using me as a means to experiment into increasingly heightened conditions of life. Far from securing my fortune during those narcotic nights, I had ruined myself to become the demonic vessel for sublime visions that my still all-too-human mind could barely muster in my wildest dreams. Like Oedipus, I had blinded myself for knowledge. Far be it for the clever beasts behind the most mendacious and arrogant minute in “world history” to believe that we can exhaust what the will to power can do within our greedy clutches! If drugs drove me like so many to social and anatomical ruin all the while seducing me to strive evermore after them like Christian martyrs searching for salvation in the lion’s jaws, it is because they hooked me to the will to power beyond any of my anthropocentric purposes to which I might have channeled and inhibited it—what ultimately meant pursuing power even against my well-being if something greater could arise from my ashes. In the end, I did not turn to drugs to quell my sorrows but to affirm and even exasperate them in the hope that they might be a sign from the future of some higher power than myself, which had found a womb in my tears. Love and drugs—is that not how otherwise healthy philosophers artificially induce immense suffering as a spur to Great Health in the absence of war and plagues? Physiologists and historians of nature have traced the roots of some of these substances back to certain species of plants that deployed them as weapons in what marked the advent of chemical warfare. As they have made their way into the hands of cleverer beasts, are these intoxicating plants not still waging war—only this time against our festering conditions of life as they twist and turn them into inhuman shapes and chaotic constellations as sublime as the starry heavens? Neither Descartes nor Aristotle ever handled substances as dangerously addictive as these! And yet who can really say that drugs are all that bad? Drugs are neither good nor evil, but beyond good and evil, and all our idle chatter about what matters to us. With the addict scratching the skin off his bones as with a woman in the birth pangs of labor, or a scientist with chemical burns all over his body on the brink of an earth-shattering discovery, there can be no creation of new conditions of life without the destruction of that which came before.

Someday we might prove worthy enough to make something of these countless casualties and selectively extract from those sacred substances the power to permanently alter our senses and enhance the mind. Perhaps we might even consciously proceed in the direction of ever greater power, past the event horizon as we speciate into an altogether higher type. I am not at all a mad patient, just madly impatient for the time when humanity might make something of itself and give birth to a dancing star. And in all truth, my brothers, this time has long been coming! It was not me but the smoke rings eternally rising from my poppy pipe that first announced the overman as a promise and a curse upon the living.

But night has fallen, and the nurse will be back soon. My eyes are sore again, I must close them. There! Something slithers in the darkness. Can you see it? And besides, there are no idols left to pray to, and nothing left to do, except submit …

The manuscript trails off into illegible scrawlings at this point.