Here is an interesting article on the same level about philosopher and psychotic Friedrich Nietzsche. He ended up in an insane asylum. He was studied intensely by Nazi Germany and was famous for his, "God is Dead" philosophy.
It is interesting how both of them led their entire lives trying to disprove God, Christianity, and Creationism and both had chronic diseases that haunted them their entire lifetimes.
Hmmmmmmmm......................
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in Rocken, in the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15, 1844. His father, a Lutheran minister, was the son of a minsiter and had Nietzsche when he was 18 years old. Unfortunately, a few years later his father was diagnosed with "gehirnerweichung" or softness of the brain and became mentally ill. He died in 1849. Forty years later, Nietzsche too, suffering from this illness, went insane.
As a youth, in 1858, Nietzsche entered the old boarding school, Pforta, on a full scholarship - the same school that groomed Klopstock, Novalis, Fichte and Ranke. From there, he attended the University of Bonn and graduated in 1864 with a thesis on theognis. Nietzsche wrote, "If you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth [ein junger der wahrheit], then inquire."
Though he had not yet received his doctorate, he was appointed a professor of Classical Philosophy at Basel and was conferred the doctorate without examination at age 24. He taught there for ten years from 1869-1879 when he retired because of poor health.
In 1867, in his first attempt in the military, he sustained injuries after falling off a horse. Then again, in 1870 during the France-Prussian War, Nietzsche volunteered as a medical orderly. During his service, he contracted both dysentery and diphtheria. He wrote to his friend Gersdorff, "the atmosphere of my experiences had spread around me like a gloomy fog: for a time I heard a sound of wailing which seemed as if it would never end." (Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, 4th edition, page 26). It was questioned whether Nietzsche suffered a type of nervous breakdown at this time.
Eventually Nietzsche began teaching and lecturing again and, in 1872, published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. This highly original analysis of Greek culture investigated the Apollonian element of classical restraint, with the darker, more instinctual Dionysian forces. Greek tragedy, Nietzsche wrote came from a combination of these two forces. This was the first time that the dark side of Greek culture had been emphasized and this made his work quite controversial. His emphasis on the "power-filled Dionysian character" proved to be a major theme throughout his future writings.
Richard Wagner was one of Nietzsche’s the closest of his many prominent friends. (1813-1883). This relationship was in fact crucial to Nietzsche's development as Wagner inspired Nietzsche to "greatness and genuine creation" (ibid., page 30) and is linked to his later work about "will to power" (ibid., page 31). Their friendship most certainly started from Nietzsche's love of music. He proclaimed, "Schopenheurei, Heine and Wagner were the most important men in Germany arts & letters since Goethe's death." And, later he added his own name to this list. Even after his break with Wagner, Nietzsche admitted how much Wagner's opera Tristan had meant to him. He writes, "To this day, I am still looking for a work of equally dangerous fascination, of an equally gruesome [schaverlich] and sweet infinity as Tristan - and look in all the arts in vain - all the strangeness of Leonardo da Vinci emerge from their spell at the first note of Tristan. This work is emphatically Wagner's non plus ultra…The world is poor for anyone who has never been sick enough for this 'voluptuousness of hell', it is permitted, it is imperative, to employ a formula of the mystics at this point."
Most striking about their relationship was that Wagner was born in the same year as Nietzsche's father in the year 1813. One could conclude that Wagner eventually became a father-substitute for him. Even more striking is that Wagner's wife, Cosima became to Nietzsche an obsession of mystical proportions, stating of her when he was brought to the asylum in Jens, "My wife, Cosmina Wagner, has brought me here". His symbolic slaughter of the father in Der Fall Wagner may make referrence to the Oedipal feelings that grew in Neitzsche over his secret love for Wagner's wife.
It could be said that only after the break with Wagner was the first and the greatest of Nietzsche's struggle for psychological autonomy. Some historians suggest that the break from Wagner occurred when Wagner expressed strong Christian sentiment in his opera, Parsifal. And this to Nietzsche, a pagan, was intolerable. However, strong evidence points to Wagner's increasing nationalistic "germanomania" and Nietzsche's growing disillusionment with the German empire. Nietzsche, even while writing his pro-Wagner essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, realized how dangerous Wagner was with his "insatiable lust for domination" and clear feelings of superiority over the races - especially, the jews. Wagner writes "The Jewish race is the born enemy of pure humanity and everything that is noble in it". (Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, IV 1946, page 40 ).
Another crucial turning point for Nietzache was that in 1885, his sister Elizabeth, married an anti-semite named Bernhard Foster. Nietzsche writes to her, "You have gone over to my antipodes…I will not conceal that I consider this engagement an insult - or a stupidity which will harm you as much as me". In another letter a few years later in 1887 he writes, "One of the greatest stupidities you have committed - for yourself and for me! your association with an anti-semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire and melancholy…"
In 1878, Nietzsche published a collection of aphorisms called, Human, All Too Human, which completed his break with Wagner. Firstly, Nietzsche mentioned nothing of Wagner’s "music of the future". Secondly, the very act of writing in aphorisms during an age of stylistic writing was an affront to many. They did not realize, in fact, that Nietzsche was writing in the language of the twentieth Century. Many of his contemporaries and admirers were concerned that he wasn’t writing philosophy, but rather psychology when he declared statements such as "fantasist denies reality to himself, the liar does so to others." And, because the work was not connected in thought or subject, it was thought to be "unsystematic" and not scholarly. Yet, it was his very action of working outside of the box that made Nietzsche the "finest psychologist of his age."
In 1879, Nietzsche resigned from Basel because of continued ill health. With a small pension, he roamed between Italy, Southern France and Switzerland seeking out warmer weather. It was during this time that he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra. This long, disjointed poem lacking in wit or direction, still carried enormous insight into Western man’s existence.
During this time, he was introduced by his friend, Paul Ree to a twenty-one year old Russian woman by the name of Lou Salome. Together, Ree and Nietzsche fell in love with Lou and together proposed that the three of them move in together to "study philosophy". This was short-lived and eventually the three broke it off. Nietzsche, however, would never be the same. Of the break-up he wrote, "This evening I’ll take enough opium to send me insane". Lou, who changed her name to Andreas-Salome went on to have an affair with German Lyric poet Rilke, and developed an intimate relationship with Freud in his later years.
After this, Nietzsche became more and more isolated, but each year continued to publish a new piece of writing of great substance such as The Dawn, The Joyful Wisdom and Beyond Good and Evil. By 1888, he began to show signs of mental instability. And, as he saw his mind going, he wrote in Ecco Homo statements such as "Zarathustra is the highest and deepest book in existence", and chapters entitled, "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Write Such Great Books" and "Why I Am Destiny". Mania had arrived.
In January 1889, while walking in Turin, Nietzsche collapsed, grasping onto a horse that had been whipped by his owner. Declared clinically insane from Syphilis, he was sent to an asylum and eventually released into the care of his mother and then his sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche after his Mother died. His sister, with plans for greatness of her own moved Nietzsche to Weimer because of its cultural connections to Goethe and Schiller. There she began to establish a Nietzsche archive, doctoring up his unpublished notebooks, inserting anti-semitic ideas and ideology that was hers. These notebooks were published as The Will To Power. Years later, the great Nietzsche scholar, Walter Kaufmann, edited his writings in this volume to more closely reflect Nietzsche’s true thinking. This work has become arguably one of Nietzsche’s greatest testaments to the state of mankind. (add quotes here). Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900 at the age of 56.