Dear sir, The syphilis is merely hear-say from incompetent reporters with no fact based diagnosis whatsoever. Syphilis does not have to result in personality disorder, but does have specific physical symptoms which were not reported of him by any competent physician qualified to do. It was a mere fad, a myth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that all brilliant men had syphilis and derived their genius from the disease. This is nonsense. ¶ Nietzsche within his personal and scholastic context was the same bright person in 1867 as he was before his collapse in Turin in 1889 and supposedly had periods of perfect clarity after that. He did have some distinct symptoms of mental deterioration of some sort but which is common to a number of so-called mental disorders. ¶ But some of the symptoms were defense mechanisms which he could have developed whether mad of sane since he was in the care of his thoroughly exploitative sister who deliberately enlarged the story of his madness to promote his ‘mad genius myth’ which made his books bestsellers for her which they were not when he was sane and motivated her to be the first to edit a manuscript for the mythical WILL TO POWER which real scholars re-edited for the official complete works around 1911.¶ The sister was an ardent Nazi who petitioned Hitler repeatedly to visit the Nietzsche archive in Weimar when he was in power, and which he visited only once for a few seconds, long enough for her to get a photograph of him next to Nietzsche ‘mad’ bust with the downturned face and overgrown mustache. The ‘mad genius” Hitler was suppose to have had syphilis too along with Napoleon, Goethe, Henry VIII and whoever else you want.¶ Thomas Mann has him picking up his syphilis in a brothel when he first went to the university. Kaufmann speculates that he served as an medical orderly for wounded soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War. Nietzsche himself may have given slight credence to the first incident. I do not know where Kaufmann got his information. ¶ I certainly do not know everything about his insanity. Kaufmann did come up with some graphic facts that support he really was insane. But one should make rational, fact based statements about it rather than eluding to the myth of syphilis making one a genius – which I know you did not state it so, but it was the gossip of the time.¶ Gary C. Moore
From: Harley Myler <h.my...@myler.org> To: Gary Moore <gottlos752...@yahoo.com> Sent: Monday, April 30, 2012 7:28 AM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] PEIRCE QUOTATION FROM JOHN DEELY LOCATION, now Nietzsche On Apr 30, 2012, at 2:08 AM, Gary Moore wrote: You mention Nietzsche. My theory is that he went mad in part because his own values and those he excoriated left him unable to complete revaluation of values of which Antichrist was the first of five intended works. I may have come into this late, but he went mad because he had syphilis. If you were treated with mercury vapors/injections (standard practice at the time), you would go as mad as a hatter as well. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
