Why did Nietzsche go insane?

Many scholars take as a matter of course that Nietzsche’s descent into madness was completely incidental and physiological. No one will really ever know all the details they would need to give an account that would satisfy a clinician. All that is to say–I presume no more than the white scholars do in on my own stipulation that the author of the European Lotus Sutra went mad as a result of the same implosion of his own philosophy; he casually in his unpublished Will to Power notebooks admits that he was still a nihilist when we wrote it. And this isn’t just a case of ordinary irony or hypocrisy, writing his spiritual polemic against nihilism while still a nihilist; but so much more subtly and insanely, since it was the very project of religious affirmation that invited his scathe for failure to do just this. The whole point of his work and his rage is that ‘merely getting it’ is not enough; you have to actually believe in order to have the authority to preach. Nietzsche went through darkness at noon at the end of his life, because he wasn’t in fact a prophet, a holy man; he just wanted to be admired as the brilliant artist he was. A forgivable vanity for someone of his artistic stature, but not of the (ostensibly) spiritual mission toward which he directed it, as indeed he claimed all true art and philosophy could only ever be. He never confronted the fact of his own anger, which he so brilliantly and acutely dissected in others; he was still angry about living in a world that gave the spoils of his game to manifest inferiors. His emotional, and likely sexual frustration got the best of him. He never wanted the job; he could not forgive the society that put him in a position of having to work outside of his vocation–the resentment borne of which, one might add, that begot all revolutionary energy whose hubris and self-defeating self-service he most cannily sniffed out. He wasn’t actually* Jesus, who, thorny as his spiritual legacy has been, was indeed willing to go down with the ship for the sake of his ministry, and therein transformed the world in unfathomable ways. Nietzsche was in fact, and knew he was, just that—a brilliant artist. Like, top few of all time, brilliant. And he couldn’t even get laid or a good job. He wasn’t really a spiritualist; he was a philosopher, and the philosopher is close to the artist, but has only himself for a character (Novalis). Ultimately, the joke was on him; his destiny, his role as an artist, was a de facto illustration of the failure of the Apollonian, of Christianity, of the West—the idea that the correct opinion, and worldly cultivation, can save us from savagery and spiritual death. No matter how brilliant you are, you will just be a more a labyrinthine, distracting, beautiful ornament over the same hideous core of nihilism and narcissism. This is what Nietzsche never grasped about Jesus, that he wasn’t a character in one his storybooks, a construct made for church and state politicians; he was a real man who did real things, put everything on the line for his beliefs and followed through on the sacrifice, and had no desire, or too much wisdom, to write anything down, or be proven the smartest and rightest after all in the courts of Europe or University departments. There is a threshold that cannot be crossed with just learning and brilliance, and Nietzsche misidentified it with the (oversimplified) allegation of the passivity of Christianity. It is the idea of wariness of gnosis advancing so far beyond one’s spiritual station, which itself can only be elevated through hard work, which cannot be conducted in the comfort and safety of one’s study.

“And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow.”

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I will state for the record, if it wasn’t obvious, that Nietzsche was twenty times the philosopher GKC was; and yet that is the whole point–for all his superior sophistication, Nietzsche was by his own admission, still a nihilist; while Chesterton the mere journalist committed to faith and caught all of the affronts to common sense that the Nietzschean heresies mounted, even if he lacked the truly adequate ability to defrock them at the metaphysical level.