Two Women and a Philosopher

“From what stars have we fallen together here?” Nietzsche exclaimed when he met the 21-year-old Lou Andreas-Salome in St Peter’s Basilica, Rome, along with another philosopher Paul Ree. Nietzsche and Ree were friends. Now Salome joined them in what she called a “Holy Trinity.”

If there ever was a cataclysmic love-at-first-sight of cosmic proportions, it was this. Nietzsche proposed to Salome twice, first through Ree and then personally. Both proposals were rejected promptly because Salome didn’t want to sacrifice her freedom or intellectual independence.

The philosopher who idealised the unemotional, unromantic Superman snapped like a twig.

Before that breakdown came, the “Holy Trinity” had travelled together to Switzerland. Salome had rejected the proposal of Ree too in the meanwhile. Nietzsche got a famous studio in Lucerne to shoot a very symbolic photo. Salome kneels inside a small wooden farm cart holding a whip. Nietzsche and Ree stand in front, tide to the cart with ropes, as if pulling her along.

In the very next year, Nietzsche would write in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!”

Salome chose not to be Nietzsche’s whip. She left the Trinity along with Ree to live in Berlin. Nietzsche was devastated.

The philosopher turned his acute depression into creativity. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the result.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a solitary prophet who retreats to the mountains because he cannot find peers who understand him. The book encourages us to embrace suffering, overcome ourselves, and say ‘Yes’ to life despite its agony.

We should not forget Ree and Salome now. They lived together for some time, nearly three years. But two philosophers with strong individualities cannot go on together for long. Salome wanted only a platonic relationship while Ree wanted the love be sensual too. Philosophy flourished but relationship crashed.

Something very dramatic evolved. In 1887, towards the end of Ree’s cohabitation with Salome, the lady shocked Ree by accepting a marriage proposal from Friedrich Carl Andreas, Orientalist and philologist. Andreas was obsessed with Salome. In fact, Salome was extremely beautiful. Even psychologist Freud and poet Rilke were enchanted by her.

When Andreas threatened suicide in front of her, Salome accepted his marriage proposal. On a strict condition. The marriage would remain completely unconsummated.

Overwhelmed by grief, Ree quit the place. Interestingly, he abandoned philosophy altogether and returned to study medicine. Eventually, he qualified as a doctor and spent years providing medical care to poor rural labourers on his family’s estate as well as in other places.

When he died in 1901, after falling into the Charnadüra Gorge while hiking, many were not quite certain whether it was an accident.

Nietzsche had died a year ago in more tragic circumstances. In 1889, he suffered a sudden severe breakdown in Turin, Italy. This man who worshipped the Superman now signed his letters as The Crucified. Soon he lost most of his cognitive faculties and fell into total silence. He was nursed by his mother and sister in his final days.

Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth also perpetrated a terrible disservice on him. She distorted his philosophical legacy by taking control of his manuscripts and fabricated a book titled The Will to Power. Elisabeth was an ardent German nationalist and her version of Nietzsche advocated militarism, rigid racial hierarchies, and political authoritarianism. Elizabeth forged or altered many letters. She made it appear that Nietzsche was closer to her than was the reality. She suppressed texts and correspondence that painted her or her late husband in a negative light, as well as Nietzsche’s explicit denunciations of German anti-Semitism. She delayed the publication of the philosopher’s autobiographical work, Ecce Homo whose unflattering references to her made it particularly inconvenient for the image of Nietzsche she was constructing.

Elisabeth went to the extent of hosting Adolf Hitler at the Nietzsche Archive after the philosopher’s death. She presented Hitler with Nietzsche’s walking stick and endorsed the dictator’s appropriation of Nietzsche’s concepts such as Superman and the will to power.

Elisabeth rewrote the very DNA of the philosopher. Fortunately, her errors were corrected later by scholars. But the point I’d like to highlight is: how two women played jolting roles in the life of the philosopher.

PS. I happened to read an article on Nietzsche and Salome in Mathrubhumi, a Malayalam journal, this morning. The picture in this post is taken from that magazine.

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