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Originally Posted by atari 2600
Nietszche once remarked that Dostoyevsky was the only "psychologist" from which he had anything to learn. Although Fyodor, aside from being an excellent analyst of human behavior, was at heart a Christian existentialist much like Kierkegaard.
And all three, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard are counted among the first "existentialist" thinkers. A common thread in each seems to be the influence of Schopenhauer (also Kant) who came before and a reaction to Hegel (and again, also the legacy of Kant), who was primarily viewed as the preeminent philosopher of the time. But whereas Schopenhauer formulated that the "will to live" was a prime motivator for the individual, Nietzsche developed his "will to power" as an, if you will, addendum. And although they are certainly Christians given to esoterica, Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard, in retrospect, seem to be closer to a modern understanding that fear of death and the psychological denial of this primal fear determines much of human behavior.
Interestingly, Dostoyevsky, who notably corresponded with Poe in America, utilized an account of the beginning of Nietzsche's madness in Raskolnikov's first dream (the whipping of the horse) in Crime & Punishment. Nietzsche, by then an aged retired professor, had been arrested by a couple of officers in Turin for creating a disturbance when he rushed to protect a horse being flogged.
It is now a fairly well-known tenet of abnormal psychology that sociopaths often care more for animals than people. And, of course, for all those familiar, this episode is only the tip of the iceberg with Friedrich.
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for one thing this sort of retroactive diagnosis is quite unfounded... for Nietzsche, or anyone else. who can say if Van Gogh had syphilis or lead poisoning or anything else without examining him? who can say Schreber was psychotic? how could Freud "analyse" Schreber by reading his book? He could not.
for another thing, Plato points out that madness is not necessarily bad, and that heaven-sent madness is superior to madness caused by human ailments.
so even IF one can say that Nietzsche was mad, which one cannot, one can still not say that he was necessarily evil.