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Philosophy Then

Life & The Mind

Peter Adamson wonders if we can learn philosophy from a life.

Recently I was chatting with some bright young philosophers about the role of biography in the history of philosophy. One of them, Daniel Drucker, offered a nice observation about Friedrich Nietzsche. Just as, for the sake of his philosophical reputation one might see Gottlob Frege as having been lucky to have died before the rise of Nazism (which, given discoveries about his rabid antisemitism, he might well have supported), so Nietzsche was unlucky not to have lived to a ripe old age, for he would then have had a chance to explicitly reject Nazism, a movement whose misplaced association with his thought has tarnished his name.

We are drawn to the life stories of famous philosophers, but Nietzsche’s story has a stronger pull than most. His youthful appointment as a university philology professor, his withdrawal from that post to live a rather isolated life as a philosopher, and his descent into infirmity and madness, possibly as a result of syphilis – to say nothing of his mustache – are at least as well-known as his actual ideas.

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