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One person has claimed the cause of Nietzsche's illness was an undiagnosed brain tumor;
http://home.cfl.rr.com/mpresley1/fn.pdf
As the headers of the article's pages imply, it has already been published in the Journal of Medical Biography, Feb 2003, Vol. 11, p. 47-54. According to this, this journal "...maintains high academic standards... Papers are peer reviewed...". The article is a reliable source. We can use its summary as a part of our article here. -- Dead3y3 Talk page 04:35, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Hehe, Sax' article was the cause of my first edit and discussion on (German) wikipedia nearly three years ago. Back then, I was more favorable towards it than today, as now I have read many of the other sources. So I think it could be mentioned in the article, but also it should be mentioned that the gros of Nietzsche scholars would still argue for syphilis. In fact, Sax quotes very selectively e.g. from S.L. Gilman and esp. from Pia Daniela Volz' Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheit, the standard work on Nietzsche's illness (unfortunately not available in English - very unfortunate indeed since in my experience, esp. American scholars do not read anything not published in English, so at least a little applause for Sax); Sax' hypothesis about N's outstanding eye is not at all visible in the photograph he gives nor any other, perhaps except for this one; and it remains a fact that 1) all the doctors who really treated Nietzsche more or less agreed on syphilis 2) people who have done more research on N's life than admiring youths and superficial biographers relying on Elisabeth's writings (and N's own writings) do agree that syphilis is not at all unprobable. N. was not a saint.-- Chef aka Pangloss 13:08, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
It seems like a smear campaign. What a person dies of doesn't negate their genius. - Timeloss 13:14, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Others have claimed Nietzsche was already insane.
Others have claimed he was insane, then contracted syphilis which worsened his mental state.
Others, still, adhere to the conventional theory written in textbooks that Nietzsche was merely an eccentric who caught syphilis, in particular, neurosyphilis, which causes paralysis, and the various biological manifestions via the pupils, language and behaviour, which clearly indicate this condition, which appears as dementia in Nietzsche (see; David Farrell Krell, and Donald L. Blates (1997). "The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image"). Syphilis is a degenerative disease which stays in the body for up to five decades, explaining much of Nietzsche's behaviour. Claims that Nietzsche was already insane is the minority view of a few academics who are refusing to allow two sides of the debate on this website.
User:Mtevfrog just reverted this—:
In the 1889 diary for insane people in the Jena clinic, a report states that Nietzsche frequently covered himself with excrement and that he even ate his own excrements. (Ross, Werner (1989). Nietzsche: el águila angustiada [original title: Der ängstliche Adler: Friedrich Nietzsches Leben]. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós. pp. page 829.
{{ cite book}}
:|pages=
has extra text ( help))
—stating in edit summary: "I don't think this is necessary to the article".
It's not a matter of what you "think" or not, Mtevfrog. Nietzsche had a classic psycho breakdown and you guys are speculating about "syphilis" and brain "tumors". The crude facts of N's biography must be known to the wiki readership. I repeat: have you read the above-cited biographers of N? Curt Paul Janz alone devoted the entire IV volume of his monumental bio to N's psycho breakdown and I have read it.
Unless you give me a valid reason of why the symptoms of N's disorder must be hidden from this article I will reinsert the above info again.
— Cesar Tort 16:00, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
User:RJC wrote in edit summary: "removed sensationalistic trivia: not every true detail is relevant."
You guys are wrong!
I inserted the sentence just as a first step to edit the article about many more clinic details of N's conduct which demonstrates that N was psycho as hell: not the victim of syphilis or tumors as some editors believe. Coprophagia is a well-known behavior of a terminal stage in schizophrenic patients. I quote from page 425 Silvano Arieti's book Interpretation of Schizophrenia:
“ | It is also not rare to see some patients grasping their own |
” |
So it's not sensationalistic trivia: clinical data of N's breakdown is relevant to understand more than a decade of his regressive mental state. Failing to mention his scatological habits —censorship actually— can only help those who want to embellish N's life by imagining the relatively less grotesque condition of syphilis, etc.
If I don't see any valid reason explaining why his regressive behavior shouldn't appear in article, I'm afraid I will have to revert again.
— Cesar Tort 15:01, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the correction. I don't want to demonstrate any OR; just mention that N's symptoms have been considered by some biographers as psycho symptoms. (BTW, I didn't use "psycho as hell" in the sentence that was removed.) Why shouldn't N's psycho symptoms be revealed in article? Is that something that the article must silence? If so, why? They reveal the nature of N's mind after all. — Cesar Tort 18:46, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
In a nutshell, since several serious biographers mention details of N's psychiatric state shouldn't we do the same? — Cesar Tort 23:36, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
I don’t know what you mean. N used to be my favorite philosopher when I was a teenager.
As stated above, my intention was to show that the picture you see about N in the biographies by Zweig, Janz, Ross and Miller is that of a psychiatric breakdown, not of a somatic disease. If I mentioned the coprophagia stuff it was to show that his mental symptoms were terrible indeed —very different behavior from tumor or syphilis symptoms. This way the reader is not misled by a bioreductionist interpretation (tumor or syphilis).
If you want to censor the coprophagia phrase, it’s ok with me but that’s not consensus: it’s called false consensus. I added a phrase about N’s "commanding the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot and summon the European powers to take military action against Germany" because it furthers the view of N’s breakdown as a typical schizo breakdown (unlike people suffering from florid psychoses, syphilis patients usually don’t have these sort of grandeur delusions).
My time to edit in Wikipedia is limited. I would recommend you guys to take a look at Stefan Zweig’s biography on N, which I referenced in article today. Walter Kaufmann considers Zweig’s study as unsurpassed in the psycho-biographies about N.
— Cesar Tort 16:07, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
@Cesar Tort: I think you are right in promoting Janz' and Ross' biographies which seem to be the best ones available, but you should not misquote them. Both Janz and Ross more or less agree on progressive paralysis / neurolues due to syphilis which, by the way, also Jaspers took as "fast gewiß" (quoted by Janz). Of course all good biographers present or speculate on other hypotheses and concede that there is no absolute clarity on this issue. Also, I do not think that the approaches of Zweig and especially Miller, who has been ridiculed, are as important as you present them. If you are really interested in Nietzsche's illness(es) and the history of their reception, and as you seem to be willing and able to read German books, I repeat my suggestion to read Pia Daniela Volz' Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheiten. Among many other things, it gives a complete reprint of the Jenaer Krankenreport from which you got the coprophagia story (which is not a sensation, it was published for the first time in the early 1930s).-- Chef aka Pangloss 16:14, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
In his 1949 book about N, Karl Jaspers didn't buy the syphilis hypothesis. And for Kurt Kolle (Nietzsche, Krenkheit un Werk in Aktuelle Fragen der Psychiatrie und Neurologie II, Bibliotheca Psychiatrica et Neurologica, 127 Basel/NY 1965) N's disorder was "manic-depressive oscillations" (bipolar disorder).
Regarding Miller: I had in mind an essay in a book by Peter Haffner, Die fixe Idee, and a short rebuff in Andreas Urs Sommer's (Swiss N / philosophy scholar, German wikipedia article) voluminous commentary on N's Antichrist. Both find Miller's reading of Nietzsche (and others) extremely over-simplified. Btw, a more complete collection of "anecdotes" about N's years of illness is Sander Gilman's Begegnungen mit Nietzsche. I am sorry I have to rely on books in German language.-- Chef aka Pangloss 15:54, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
There have been concerted efforts at describing Nietzsche as a "German" in the lede of the article. From the Manual of Style:
As no reliable sources have been asserted as to Nietzsche's citizenship, I am replacing the current version of the article, which is a gross simplification, with the previous version which has a lengthy note explaining in detail the complexity of the situation. Skomorokh incite 19:21, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I'M NO EXPERT BUT DIDNT HE CONSIDER HIMSELF POLISH?: There were two other children in the house. One was a boy, Josef, who was named after the Duke of Altenburg, and died in infancy in 1850. The other was a girl, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, who became in after years her brother's housekeeper, guardian angel and biographer. Her three names were those of the three noble children her father had grounded in the humanities. Elisabeth - who married toward middle age and is best known as Frau Förster-Nietzsche - tells us practically all that we know about the Nietzsche family and the private life of its distinguished son. ((1)) The clan came out of Poland, like so many other families of Eastern Germany, at the time of the sad, vain wars. Legend maintains that it was noble in its day and Nietzsche himself liked to think so. The name, says Elisabeth, was originally Nietzschy. "Germany is a great nation," Nietzsche would say, "only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.... I am proud of my Polish descent. I remember that in former times a Polish noble, by his simple veto, could overturn the resolution of a popular assembly. There were giants in Poland in the time of my forefathers." He wrote a tract with the French title L'Origine de la famille de Nietzsche and presented the manuscript to his sister, as a document to be treasured and held sacred. She tells us that he was fond of maintaining that the Nietzsches had suffered greatly and fallen from vast grandeur for their opinions, religious and political. He had no proof of this, but it pleased him to think so. http://www.geocities.com/danielmacryan/nietzsche1.html#para0 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.41.163.88 ( talk) 04:53, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Just a thought: I am the last one to disagree that calling N a "German philosopher" is over-simplistic, but so is calling Goethe a German writer, or Shakespeare an English poet, or da Vinci an Italian polymath. But: They all come without a description and a footnote that not only again prolongs the legend of Polish ancestry (read Radwan coat of arms for the Let's-bet-it's-not-the-last-attempt to get this out of "My-primary-research-base-is-called-Google"-heads) but also gives some utterly marginalic facts to frighten and confuse readers and does little to clear up the simplification by referring to phrases as undefined as "belles lettres" or, again, over-simplistic as "German cultural tradition". I mean, I recognize the problem, but this solution is in no way better. The text you try to improve is an introduction to an encyclopedia article, perhaps it cannot solve a problem on which you could write a book?-- Chef aka Pangloss 03:37, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Pedant17 has denied waging a campaign to rid the article of any reference to Nietzsche's being a German (reply to BCST2001, 06:24, 25 August 2007 [UTC]). The actions which led (I surmise) BCST2001 to characterize this as a campaign have continued unabated. This seems to be a long-standing project of Pedant17's, so I note the times he has made this attempt. September 21, 2006; December 22, 2006; January 16, 2007; March 12, 2007; April 7, 2007; May 9, 2007; June 11, 2007; July 6, 2007; July 30, 2007; August 21, 2007; September 20, 2007; October 30, 2007; and, most recently, November 26, 2007. The last two attempts referred to the talk page, but no justification was given here. I find it unseemly to single someone out this way, but this has gotten ridiculous. RJC Talk 01:22, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
Just a note: Nietzsche was officially released (? sorry, don't know the correct English term) from Prussian citizenship on April 17, 1869. The document is still in the Nietzsche-Archiv and is reprinted in the Colli-Montinari edition of the letters and also in the articles by His and Hecker - see footnotes of the article. (Is Safranski unaware of all this?).-- Chef aka Pangloss ( talk) 20:42, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 5 | ← | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | → | Archive 15 |
One person has claimed the cause of Nietzsche's illness was an undiagnosed brain tumor;
http://home.cfl.rr.com/mpresley1/fn.pdf
As the headers of the article's pages imply, it has already been published in the Journal of Medical Biography, Feb 2003, Vol. 11, p. 47-54. According to this, this journal "...maintains high academic standards... Papers are peer reviewed...". The article is a reliable source. We can use its summary as a part of our article here. -- Dead3y3 Talk page 04:35, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Hehe, Sax' article was the cause of my first edit and discussion on (German) wikipedia nearly three years ago. Back then, I was more favorable towards it than today, as now I have read many of the other sources. So I think it could be mentioned in the article, but also it should be mentioned that the gros of Nietzsche scholars would still argue for syphilis. In fact, Sax quotes very selectively e.g. from S.L. Gilman and esp. from Pia Daniela Volz' Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheit, the standard work on Nietzsche's illness (unfortunately not available in English - very unfortunate indeed since in my experience, esp. American scholars do not read anything not published in English, so at least a little applause for Sax); Sax' hypothesis about N's outstanding eye is not at all visible in the photograph he gives nor any other, perhaps except for this one; and it remains a fact that 1) all the doctors who really treated Nietzsche more or less agreed on syphilis 2) people who have done more research on N's life than admiring youths and superficial biographers relying on Elisabeth's writings (and N's own writings) do agree that syphilis is not at all unprobable. N. was not a saint.-- Chef aka Pangloss 13:08, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
It seems like a smear campaign. What a person dies of doesn't negate their genius. - Timeloss 13:14, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Others have claimed Nietzsche was already insane.
Others have claimed he was insane, then contracted syphilis which worsened his mental state.
Others, still, adhere to the conventional theory written in textbooks that Nietzsche was merely an eccentric who caught syphilis, in particular, neurosyphilis, which causes paralysis, and the various biological manifestions via the pupils, language and behaviour, which clearly indicate this condition, which appears as dementia in Nietzsche (see; David Farrell Krell, and Donald L. Blates (1997). "The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image"). Syphilis is a degenerative disease which stays in the body for up to five decades, explaining much of Nietzsche's behaviour. Claims that Nietzsche was already insane is the minority view of a few academics who are refusing to allow two sides of the debate on this website.
User:Mtevfrog just reverted this—:
In the 1889 diary for insane people in the Jena clinic, a report states that Nietzsche frequently covered himself with excrement and that he even ate his own excrements. (Ross, Werner (1989). Nietzsche: el águila angustiada [original title: Der ängstliche Adler: Friedrich Nietzsches Leben]. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós. pp. page 829.
{{ cite book}}
:|pages=
has extra text ( help))
—stating in edit summary: "I don't think this is necessary to the article".
It's not a matter of what you "think" or not, Mtevfrog. Nietzsche had a classic psycho breakdown and you guys are speculating about "syphilis" and brain "tumors". The crude facts of N's biography must be known to the wiki readership. I repeat: have you read the above-cited biographers of N? Curt Paul Janz alone devoted the entire IV volume of his monumental bio to N's psycho breakdown and I have read it.
Unless you give me a valid reason of why the symptoms of N's disorder must be hidden from this article I will reinsert the above info again.
— Cesar Tort 16:00, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
User:RJC wrote in edit summary: "removed sensationalistic trivia: not every true detail is relevant."
You guys are wrong!
I inserted the sentence just as a first step to edit the article about many more clinic details of N's conduct which demonstrates that N was psycho as hell: not the victim of syphilis or tumors as some editors believe. Coprophagia is a well-known behavior of a terminal stage in schizophrenic patients. I quote from page 425 Silvano Arieti's book Interpretation of Schizophrenia:
“ | It is also not rare to see some patients grasping their own |
” |
So it's not sensationalistic trivia: clinical data of N's breakdown is relevant to understand more than a decade of his regressive mental state. Failing to mention his scatological habits —censorship actually— can only help those who want to embellish N's life by imagining the relatively less grotesque condition of syphilis, etc.
If I don't see any valid reason explaining why his regressive behavior shouldn't appear in article, I'm afraid I will have to revert again.
— Cesar Tort 15:01, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the correction. I don't want to demonstrate any OR; just mention that N's symptoms have been considered by some biographers as psycho symptoms. (BTW, I didn't use "psycho as hell" in the sentence that was removed.) Why shouldn't N's psycho symptoms be revealed in article? Is that something that the article must silence? If so, why? They reveal the nature of N's mind after all. — Cesar Tort 18:46, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
In a nutshell, since several serious biographers mention details of N's psychiatric state shouldn't we do the same? — Cesar Tort 23:36, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
I don’t know what you mean. N used to be my favorite philosopher when I was a teenager.
As stated above, my intention was to show that the picture you see about N in the biographies by Zweig, Janz, Ross and Miller is that of a psychiatric breakdown, not of a somatic disease. If I mentioned the coprophagia stuff it was to show that his mental symptoms were terrible indeed —very different behavior from tumor or syphilis symptoms. This way the reader is not misled by a bioreductionist interpretation (tumor or syphilis).
If you want to censor the coprophagia phrase, it’s ok with me but that’s not consensus: it’s called false consensus. I added a phrase about N’s "commanding the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot and summon the European powers to take military action against Germany" because it furthers the view of N’s breakdown as a typical schizo breakdown (unlike people suffering from florid psychoses, syphilis patients usually don’t have these sort of grandeur delusions).
My time to edit in Wikipedia is limited. I would recommend you guys to take a look at Stefan Zweig’s biography on N, which I referenced in article today. Walter Kaufmann considers Zweig’s study as unsurpassed in the psycho-biographies about N.
— Cesar Tort 16:07, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
@Cesar Tort: I think you are right in promoting Janz' and Ross' biographies which seem to be the best ones available, but you should not misquote them. Both Janz and Ross more or less agree on progressive paralysis / neurolues due to syphilis which, by the way, also Jaspers took as "fast gewiß" (quoted by Janz). Of course all good biographers present or speculate on other hypotheses and concede that there is no absolute clarity on this issue. Also, I do not think that the approaches of Zweig and especially Miller, who has been ridiculed, are as important as you present them. If you are really interested in Nietzsche's illness(es) and the history of their reception, and as you seem to be willing and able to read German books, I repeat my suggestion to read Pia Daniela Volz' Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheiten. Among many other things, it gives a complete reprint of the Jenaer Krankenreport from which you got the coprophagia story (which is not a sensation, it was published for the first time in the early 1930s).-- Chef aka Pangloss 16:14, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
In his 1949 book about N, Karl Jaspers didn't buy the syphilis hypothesis. And for Kurt Kolle (Nietzsche, Krenkheit un Werk in Aktuelle Fragen der Psychiatrie und Neurologie II, Bibliotheca Psychiatrica et Neurologica, 127 Basel/NY 1965) N's disorder was "manic-depressive oscillations" (bipolar disorder).
Regarding Miller: I had in mind an essay in a book by Peter Haffner, Die fixe Idee, and a short rebuff in Andreas Urs Sommer's (Swiss N / philosophy scholar, German wikipedia article) voluminous commentary on N's Antichrist. Both find Miller's reading of Nietzsche (and others) extremely over-simplified. Btw, a more complete collection of "anecdotes" about N's years of illness is Sander Gilman's Begegnungen mit Nietzsche. I am sorry I have to rely on books in German language.-- Chef aka Pangloss 15:54, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
There have been concerted efforts at describing Nietzsche as a "German" in the lede of the article. From the Manual of Style:
As no reliable sources have been asserted as to Nietzsche's citizenship, I am replacing the current version of the article, which is a gross simplification, with the previous version which has a lengthy note explaining in detail the complexity of the situation. Skomorokh incite 19:21, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I'M NO EXPERT BUT DIDNT HE CONSIDER HIMSELF POLISH?: There were two other children in the house. One was a boy, Josef, who was named after the Duke of Altenburg, and died in infancy in 1850. The other was a girl, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, who became in after years her brother's housekeeper, guardian angel and biographer. Her three names were those of the three noble children her father had grounded in the humanities. Elisabeth - who married toward middle age and is best known as Frau Förster-Nietzsche - tells us practically all that we know about the Nietzsche family and the private life of its distinguished son. ((1)) The clan came out of Poland, like so many other families of Eastern Germany, at the time of the sad, vain wars. Legend maintains that it was noble in its day and Nietzsche himself liked to think so. The name, says Elisabeth, was originally Nietzschy. "Germany is a great nation," Nietzsche would say, "only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.... I am proud of my Polish descent. I remember that in former times a Polish noble, by his simple veto, could overturn the resolution of a popular assembly. There were giants in Poland in the time of my forefathers." He wrote a tract with the French title L'Origine de la famille de Nietzsche and presented the manuscript to his sister, as a document to be treasured and held sacred. She tells us that he was fond of maintaining that the Nietzsches had suffered greatly and fallen from vast grandeur for their opinions, religious and political. He had no proof of this, but it pleased him to think so. http://www.geocities.com/danielmacryan/nietzsche1.html#para0 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.41.163.88 ( talk) 04:53, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Just a thought: I am the last one to disagree that calling N a "German philosopher" is over-simplistic, but so is calling Goethe a German writer, or Shakespeare an English poet, or da Vinci an Italian polymath. But: They all come without a description and a footnote that not only again prolongs the legend of Polish ancestry (read Radwan coat of arms for the Let's-bet-it's-not-the-last-attempt to get this out of "My-primary-research-base-is-called-Google"-heads) but also gives some utterly marginalic facts to frighten and confuse readers and does little to clear up the simplification by referring to phrases as undefined as "belles lettres" or, again, over-simplistic as "German cultural tradition". I mean, I recognize the problem, but this solution is in no way better. The text you try to improve is an introduction to an encyclopedia article, perhaps it cannot solve a problem on which you could write a book?-- Chef aka Pangloss 03:37, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Pedant17 has denied waging a campaign to rid the article of any reference to Nietzsche's being a German (reply to BCST2001, 06:24, 25 August 2007 [UTC]). The actions which led (I surmise) BCST2001 to characterize this as a campaign have continued unabated. This seems to be a long-standing project of Pedant17's, so I note the times he has made this attempt. September 21, 2006; December 22, 2006; January 16, 2007; March 12, 2007; April 7, 2007; May 9, 2007; June 11, 2007; July 6, 2007; July 30, 2007; August 21, 2007; September 20, 2007; October 30, 2007; and, most recently, November 26, 2007. The last two attempts referred to the talk page, but no justification was given here. I find it unseemly to single someone out this way, but this has gotten ridiculous. RJC Talk 01:22, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
Just a note: Nietzsche was officially released (? sorry, don't know the correct English term) from Prussian citizenship on April 17, 1869. The document is still in the Nietzsche-Archiv and is reprinted in the Colli-Montinari edition of the letters and also in the articles by His and Hecker - see footnotes of the article. (Is Safranski unaware of all this?).-- Chef aka Pangloss ( talk) 20:42, 29 December 2007 (UTC)