by Peter Watson
This situation did not last. Around 1874, as Nietzsche was leaving his twenties, he seems to have felt an urge to strike out on his own. Or was it that Wagner, although used to associating with geniuses—Heine, Schumann, and Mendelssohn—refused to acknowledge that quality in Nietzsche? Wagner’s wife, Cosima, observed that Nietzsche was “undoubtedly the most gifted of our young friends, but the most displeasing…It is as if he were resisting the overpowering effect of Wagner’s personality.”38
There was no decisive act of breakage and, at the Bayreuth Festival in 1883, Wagner confided to Nietzsche’s sister: “Tell your brother than I am quite alone since he went away and left me.” Nor did Nietzsche turn his back on Wagner right away. Two of his own books were devoted to the composer, The Wagner Case and Nietzsche contra Wagner while the title of a third, Götzendämmerung (Twilight of the Idols) was a clear echo of Götterdämmerung.39
A complicating factor was the philosopher’s bad health. Nietzsche experienced chronic problems with his eyes, ferocious migraines, and terrible stomach upsets that caused him to vomit “in embarrassing circumstances.” Since he would succumb to tertiary syphilis at the early age of forty-four, these symptoms are usually assumed to be the first signs of onset. Another symptom may well have been his idiosyncratic lifestyle: he lived alone and moved from rooming house to small hotel in Switzerland, Italy, or France, devoting six to ten hours a day to walking in the open air, returning to his room only to write, eat, or sleep. The books that he composed in this way are now among the classics of philosophy, with a style all their own. Nietzsche was not concerned to give an overarching argument in the manner of Fichte or Hegel. He saw it as his task to offer startling, short, pithy insights in prose that is regarded as among the best German there is (“incandescent”).40
“WEEDS, RUBBLE AND VERMIN”
Nietzsche made the sharpest of breaks with Schopenhauer. There was no “other realm” for Nietzsche—he came to believe that this world that we experience is the only reality there is. (This is worth bearing in mind in all that follows: in modern German history the division between irrationalism and rationalism is sometimes too sharply drawn.) “The apparent world is the real world,” said Nietzsche, and it was occupied by “weeds, rubble and vermin.”41
His best known affirmation is that “God is dead,” from which two important things follow. One, there is no transcendental realm; and two, our morals and values cannot stem from the other realm. Morals must have their basis in this world since there is nowhere “else” they can come from. Socially and historically, human beings create their own moralities and values, and the “ideal” is nothing but “a figment of the human imagination.” He agreed with Schopenhauer that living things are basically selfish and will always seize what they want and then defend their possessions to the death. This is what he called “life-assertion,” for him the most fundamental instinct of all, meaning that “the war of all against all” is the natural order. Civilization emerged from this war of all against all, in which, over the millennia, “the strong eliminated the weak, the healthy the sick, the clever the stupid, the competent the incompetent.” Everything basic developed out of this struggle, but then came a crucial change. Two or three thousand years ago, in various parts of the world, there arose a generation of people who invented morality. “They taught that the powerful should not take what they wanted but should voluntarily submit to law.”42
Nietzsche picked out in particular Socrates and Jesus. Between them, he felt, they had reversed the process that had distinguished humans from other animals and made culture possible. Their influential—but to him perverted—doctrine succeeded because it suited the interests of the majority, the masses, the “ungifted.” In doing this, Socrates and Jesus, he thought, did their best to inhibit the natural processes of the onward march of civilization and were jointly responsible for decadence and decline.43
From such a starting point, Nietzsche embarked on a wholesale critique of contemporary culture. For him it was self-evident that mankind’s institutions, our arts and sciences, our philosophy and politics—as they have grown since Socrates and Jesus—have developed on the basis of false values. It was now our task, he said, beginning with himself, to reconstruct our world. “It will be the biggest break, the biggest watershed in the whole of history so that, throughout the future, all time will be reckoned as being either before this event or after it.”
His purpose was to render human beings wholly spontaneous, to make them as free and unself-conscious as animals and to realize that they were discordant beings, not harmonious ones.44 The unrepressed and uninhibited life would be for him superior to what had gone before and, to reflect this brave new world, he minted a new name for those who lived in this way—Übermenschen (supermen). The Übermensch would be free to take full advantage of the fact that there is no soul, no God, no transcendental realm, no world other than this. “There are no rewards other than the joy in being. The meaning of life is life.”45 Life assertion became the task of superman, the supremely valuable activity. The will to live, to assert one’s presence in the world, to sweep aside all obstacles—Nietzsche called this “the will to power” and we can see clearly how this turns Schopenhauer on his head and comprises the radical mutation of the notion of Bildung. Since the noumenal realm doesn’t exist, our “oneness” with it cannot exist either, and therefore our compassion that arises from it, and forms the foundation of morality, cannot exist either. Morality stems from self-interest, and there is absolutely no place for compassion.46
In working against Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also—naturally—drew away from Wagner. This shift surfaced spectacularly in his attack on Parsifal, which he denounced as “An apostasy and reversion to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideas…”
In 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in the street in Turin, incurably insane, and was nursed for the next eleven years by his sister Elisabeth, who was to doctor his manuscripts and create her own controversy. Until that point he had never really settled in his own mind his attitude to his former friend. Just before his mental collapse, he had been quietly playing Wagner on the piano, but he was full of bitterness.
Only nine days after the composer’s death in 1883, Nietzsche confided in a letter to a friend, “Wagner was by far the fullest human being I have known.” However, he went on, “Something like a deadly offence came between us; and something terrible could have happened if he had lived longer.”47
Details about this “deadly offence” emerged only in 1956, when correspondence first came to light between Wagner and a doctor who had examined Nietzsche.48 It related to a consultation Nietzsche had in Switzerland in 1877. The doctor, a passionate Wagnerian, examined Nietzsche and found his health poor—indeed Nietzsche was at risk of going blind. This was when Nietzsche and Wagner were still friends and so, following the examination, Nietzsche wrote to Wagner, reporting the diagnosis, but also enclosing an essay on The Ring, which the doctor had written and given to Nietzsche, on the understanding that it would be passed on. Wagner replied to the doctor, thanking him for the essay, but also raising the matter of Nietzsche’s health, apparently referring to the belief, common at the time, that blindness was caused by masturbation. The doctor, in his reply to Wagner, behaved extremely unprofessionally, confiding that, during his examination, Nietzsche told him he had visited prostitutes in Italy “on medical advice.” (This was sometimes recommended then as treatment for chronic masturbation.)
Even at this distance, the set of events is shocking; how much worse it must have been then. It is now known that the details of this exchange circulated during the Bayreuth Festival of 1882, coming to Nietzsche’s own notice later that same year. He confessed in a letter that an “abysmal treachery” had got back to him. More than one observer has concluded that this episode helped to unbalance Nietzsche.49
It is a story that diminishes two great men.
17.
Physics Becomes King: Helmholtz, Clausius, Boltzmann, Riemann
For a whole year, beginning in February 1840, Julius Robert von Mayer (1814–78) served as a ship’s physician on board a Dutch merchantman to the East Indies.1 The son of an apothecary in Heilbronn, Württemberg, Mayer graduated in medicine from the University of Tübingen in 1838 and enlisted as a ship’s doctor with the Dutch East India Company.2 It was during a stopover in Djakarta in the summer of 1840 that he made his most famous observation. In the manner of the day, he let the blood of several European sailors who had recently arrived in Java. He was surprised at how red their blood was and inferred that it was more than usually vivid owing to the high temperatures in Indonesia, which meant the sailors’ bodies required a lower rate of metabolic activity to maintain body heat. Their bodies had extracted less oxygen from their arterial blood, making the returning venous blood redder than it would otherwise have been.
Mayer was struck by this observation because it seemed to him to be self-evident support for Justus von Liebig’s theory that animal heat is produced by combustion—oxidation—of the chemicals in the food taken in by the body. In effect, he was observing that chemical “force” (as the term was then used), which is latent in food, was being converted into (body) heat. Since the only “force” that enters animals is their food—their fuel—and the only form of force they display is activity and heat, these two forces must always—by definition—be in balance.
Mayer originally tried to publish his work in the prestigious Annalen der Physik und Chemie, edited by Johann Christian Poggendorff, but was rebuffed.3 His first published work, “Bemerkungen über die Kräfte der unbelebten Natur” (“Remarks on the Forces of Inanimate Nature”), was therefore published in the Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie in 1842, and it was here that he argued for a relationship between motion and heat, that “motion and heat are only different manifestations of one and the same force [which must] be able to be converted and transformed into one another.” Mayer’s ideas did not have much impact at the time, though presumably the editor of the Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie, none other than Justus von Liebig, thought them worth printing.4
Julius Mayer’s story is tidy. The historian of science Thomas Kuhn has pointed out, however, that between 1842 and 1854, no fewer than twelve scientists had arrived at some version of the idea that became known as the “conservation of energy.” The word “energy” was new at mid-century, but by 1900 all of physics would revolve around the concept.5 Kuhn points out that, of these twelve pioneers, five came from Germany, one from Alsace, and one from Denmark, areas of German influence. He put this preponderance of Germans down to the fact that “many of the discoverers of energy conservation were deeply predisposed to see a single indestructible force at the root of all natural phenomena.” He suggested that this root idea could be found in the literature of Naturphilosophie. “Schelling, for example, [and in particular] maintained that magnetic, electrical, chemical and finally even organic phenomena would be interwoven into one great association.”6 Von Liebig studied for two years with Schelling.
THE ADVENT OF PHYSICS AS WE KNOW IT
So far as physics was concerned, the first half of the nineteenth century saw some crucial changes in approach and even in vocabulary, changes that reflected the evolving nature of physics. In the late eighteenth century, for example, the term “physics” had referred to the natural sciences in general. In the early nineteenth century, the same word came to mean the study of mechanics, electricity, and optics, generally employing a mathematical and/or experimental methodology.7 By mid-century, “there emerged a distinctive science of physics that took quantification and the search for mathematical laws as its universal aims.” In 1824, for example, the curator of the University of Heidelberg proposed that a “mathematical seminarum” be established there, to be modeled on the increasingly successful seminars in philology that, as we have seen, were being credited with improving German classical education. Other universities followed.8 Moritz Stern, extraordinary professor of mathematics at Göttingen, called for much the same thing, while the Berlin Physical Society was founded in 1845.9
Research, as already noted, began to acquire greater prestige, and physics was no different from other disciplines. The Annalen der Physik increasingly devoted its pages to the research of German scientists and less to the translations of papers from foreign journals. Founded in 1790, the Annalen was itself a symptom of the changes taking place: by the 1840s it was the most important German journal of physics, though many new journals proliferated in that decade, just as many new medical instruments began to be introduced. Johann Christian Poggendorff, the editor of the Annalen since 1824, could make or break scientific careers.10 Poggendorff edited the Annalen until he died in 1877, when its pre-eminence was so assured that the Berlin Physical Society took it over, with Gustav Wiedemann as editor, and Hermann von Helmholtz as adviser on theoretical matters. In physics, a clear division of labor was already emerging between the experimenter and the theoretician. By the 1860s or 1870s, research in physics, including theoretical physics, was regarded as an end in itself, not just as an adjunct to teaching: beginning in the 1870s, professorships of theoretical physics were established at a number of German universities. Mary Jo Nye has tracked these institutions, in particular the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) at Berlin-Charlottenburg and calculates that 800 physicists and chemists from Britain and North America earned doctorates in Germany in the nineteenth century and that thirty-nine important British scientists came under German influence.11 By the same token, new laboratories were being built all over Europe, differing from their predecessors in kind as well as number, no longer merely teaching aids but spaces for research in their own right. “Experiment increasingly looked like the key to unlocking nature’s secrets.”12
It was in the laboratory that more and more experimenters were looking for ways to turn one kind of force into another. To Romantic natural philosophers in particular, as Kuhn has said, these “proliferating instances” of the apparent conversion of one kind of force into another seemed to confirm the underlying unity of nature—they were mutually convertible because they were different manifestations of the same underlying power. At the same time, pragmatists saw economic possibilities in these transformations. The new technology of photography used light to produce chemical reactions. The voltaic pile seemed to turn chemical forces into electricity, a major concern in industrializing and urbanizing societies. Above all, there was the steam engine, a machine for producing mechanical force from heat.13
THE DISCOVERY/INVENTION OF ENERGY
In the eighteenth century, heat and electricity had been explained by supposing there were “imponderable fluids and ethers” which interacted with the atoms of ordinary matter. In 1812 the Academy in Paris announced it would offer its Grand Prix des Mathématiques to whoever could show how heat moved through matter.14 Joseph Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat, published in 1822, brought heat and mathematics together, while James Prescott Joule’s experiments in 1843 established the equivalence of heat and mechanical work. Two years later, Julius Mayer published his observations about body heat and blood color.
With hindsight, everything can be seen as pointing toward the theory of the conservation of energy, but it still required someone to formulate these ideas clearly; that occurred in the seminal memoir of 1847 by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94). In On the Conservation of Force, he provided the requisite mathematical formulation, linking heat, light, electricity, and magnetism by treating these phenomena as different manifestations of “energy.”15
The son of a Prussian Gymnasium teacher, Helmholtz studied medicine at the University of Berlin, funded by a Prussian army scholarship. In return, he served as a medical officer before becoming associate professor of physiology at the University of Königsberg in 1849.16 Helmholtz’s 1847 essay was privately published as a pamphlet. Like Mayer, he had sent his paper to Poggendorff at the Annalen der Physik but was rebuffed. Helmholtz’s previous physiological publications had all been designed to show how th
e heat of animal bodies and their mucular activity could be traced to the oxidation of food—that the human engine was little different from the steam engine. He did not think there were forces entirely peculiar to living things but instead that organic life was the result of forces that were “modifications” of those operating in the inorganic realm.17 In the purely mechanical universe envisaged by Helmholtz there was an obvious connection between human and machine work.18
While Mayer and Helmholtz, being doctors, came to the science of work through physiology, Helmholtz’s fellow Prussian Rudolf Clausius approached the phenomenon, as did his British and French contemporaries, via the ubiquitous steam engine. Unlike Mayer and Helmholtz, Clausius did succeed in having his first important paper, “On the Moving Force of Heat, and the Laws Regarding the Nature of Heat That Are Deducible Therefrom,” accepted by the Annalen; it appeared in 1850.19 Clausius (1822–88) was born in Köslin in Pomerania and was yet another son of a pastor. From the Gymnasium he went to the University of Berlin where he was at first attracted to history (studying under Ranke), but then switched to mathematics and physics. In 1846, two years after graduating at Berlin, Clausius entered Boeckh’s seminar at Halle and worked on explaining the blue color of the sky. The importance of his 1850 paper was immediately recognized and, on the strength of it, he was invited to become a professor at the Royal Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin, later transferring to the chair of mathematical physics at Zurich.20
In his famous paper Clausius argued that the production of work resulted not only from a change in the distribution of heat, as Sadi Carnot—the French physicist and military engineer—had argued, but also from the consumption of heat, and that heat could be produced by the “expenditure” of work. “It is quite possible,” he wrote, “that in the production of work…a certain portion of heat may be consumed, and a further portion transmitted from a warm body to a cold one: and both portions may stand in a certain definite relation to the quantity of work produced.” In doing this, he stated two fundamental principles, which would become known as the first and second laws of thermodynamics.21
