Does Alcohol Dull Us Into Vapid Mediocrity? Nietzsche on Matters of the Spirit (His Diet Secrets Revealed!)

But this [German] people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer)

Later, around the middle of life, to be sure, I decided more and more strictly against all ‘spirits’: I . . . cannot advise all more spiritual natures earnestly enough to abstain entirely from alcohol. Water is sufficient.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

The pursuit of philosophy has long been associated with the consumption of alcohol, from Ancient Greek symposia, where the likes of Socrates and Plato sipped on the fruits of the vine, down to Monty Python’s “Bruce’s Philosophers Song”, which in comedic rhyme makes drinkers of some of history’s greatest thinkers. But although The Pythons sing that “There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ’bout the raising of the wrist”, this impression could not be further from the truth. (I have considered whether there might have been something deeper here lyrically: did The Pythons know of Nietzsche’s stance on alcohol and want to hold back, to say merely that the mature Nietzsche could teach one something of inebriation, not that he himself imbibed? I’m not sure, but I’ll leave this interpretive point for Flying Circus scholars.)

What was Nietzsche’s problem with ethanol? Shouldn’t its attendance at the birth of Western philosophy tell us something about its merits for stimulating creative thinking? And, perhaps most strangely of all, how could Nietzsche, who passionately favored what he called the “Dionysian” over the “Apollonian”, turn away the spirits of Dionysus and praise his spirit all the same?

To begin, it might be worth hearing a few words on ancient wine. By today’s standards, it was apparently most foul—one reviewer of the book Inventing Wine describes it as

Nasty, with underlying notes of totally gross. A typical wine from ancient times would have had a nose redolent of tree sap, giving way to a salty palate… Modern bottles help protect wine today, but exposure to oxygen quickly spoiled ancient wines. Vintners tried to preserve them with resin, which made the wines sticky and thick. Other additives included lead, lye-ash, marble dust, salt, pepper, and random assortments of herbs that were used to make wine remotely palatable… Some ancient winemakers even encouraged the oxidization that most modern vintners avoid, aging wines in the open air where they were easily infected by bacteria. The use of raisins instead of fresh grapes gave a concentrated sweetness to some wines, which were sometimes boiled before fermentation, resulting in gooey concoctions more closely resembling something you’d find in a gutter in New Orleans three weeks after Mardi Gras than something from the Chateau Mouton Rothschild. When ready for drinking, ancient wines were cut with honey, dried fruit, and even salt water. In ancient Greece, Pliny recommended that the seawater used to cut wine should come far away from shore.

Somehow Plato’s Symposium seems less romantic knowing that Socrates and his interlocutors were likely swilling a rancid cocktail of raisin tar and sea water. The Greeks are said to have thought unmixed wine fit only for barbarians. It is worth noting that the point of wine and other forms of alcohol then was of course often different than it is now. Throughout history, alcohol, no matter how foul, was frequently more potable than the offerings of the local well.

A slave comes to the aid of a vomiting symposiast.

But that is not to say that that the ancients weren’t frequently sloshed. Apparently, how serious the discussion at a symposium was to be would determine the strength of the wine served—weaker wine for lively discussion, stronger for symposia meant to conclude in an unbridled, orgiastic rumpus of homoerotic abandon. Perhaps it is here that the already fine distinction between the Greek symposium and the Roman bachannalia has become totally obscured. It is at least reassuring to know these things were thoughtfully planned. According to Paul Lukacs, the author of Inventing Wine, it wasn’t until the 6th century that the vintage began tasting better, when Christian monks and nuns got a hold of it, improved it, and began distributing it widely.

Perhaps it was its link with Christianity (that cult of water turned wine and wine turned blood) that helped wine—and indeed all spirits—to earn Nietzsche’s ire, as he himself seems to think, revealing his views in a chapter of Ecce Homo wonderfully entitled “Why I am So Clever” (it is meant ironically). There Nietzsche tells us that “In order to believe that wine makes cheerful I should have had to be a Christian—in other words I should have had to believe in what to my mind is an absurdity.” (In case the reader is under the impression that he reserved his wrath for grapes, he was perhaps even more scornful of grains: “Where does one not find that bland degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!”)

For Nietzsche, anything that made one content in a way that dulled the passion afforded by the inevitable struggle and sacrifice of life was suspect. He despised Christianity in part because it projected a paradise for the next life that he saw as enabling vapidity and mediocrity in this one. If everything will be sorted out in the next life, why struggle for greatness now? The problems are all solved and I don’t have to trouble myself to accomplish anything.

The gang’s all here.

Nietzsche spurned the comfort of religion because he thought it insulates us from all that was at stake in this life. It alters our mood and makes us docile, preparing us to accept any situation with idiotic smiles on our faces. This was a far cry from Nietzsche’s vision of the good life, one dedicated to the pursuit of greatness, and specifically the kind of greatness produced by struggle, that of great art. For Nietzsche it is the artistic genius that belongs to his category of “greater men”. Among their ranks he counts Beethoven, Goethe, and, of course, himself.

In calling alcohol and Christianity the two great European narcotics, Nietzsche was criticizing both for engendering complacency. He saw them as inuring us to the difficult realities of life, the trial and suffering which greater men embrace to make something of themselves. Whether one retreats from this world to the pages of scripture or to the bottom of a bottle does not seem to matter for Nietzsche, who believed both to exhibit a contemptible escapism. (This is not so different from the message of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where human beings are pleasurably drugged into stupefied, unthinking banality. It is also telling that “Victory Gin” is still supplied by The Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, numbing the pain of existence just enough so that no one will show a hint of independent thinking.)

It is not that Nietzsche always spurned intoxicants, however. His attitudes seem to stem from the lessons of experience:

Strange to say, whereas small quantities of alcohol taken with plenty of water succeed in making me feel out of sorts, large quantities turn me almost into a sailor. Even as a boy I showed my bravado in this respect. To compose a long Latin essay in one night, to revise and recopy it, to aspire with my pen to emulation of the exactitude and the terseness of my model Sallust and to pour a few swigs of booze over it all—this kind of approach was, while I was a pupil at the venerable old school of Pforta, not in the least out of keeping with my physiology nor perhaps that of Sallust — however much it may have been alien to dignified Pforta.

The budding scholar.

Nietzsche’s habit of pulling all-nighters to finish Latin assignments is eerily familiar to this writer. But let us leave that aside. From this passage, and with the help of another, we can apparently glean that a further motivation for Nietzsche’s retirement from the drinking life came when he was older, in middle age as he tells us. It came to pass that he could no longer stand the stuff. “Alcoholic drinks do not agree with me…” he wrote, confessing that “a single glass of wine or beer a day is sufficient to turn life into a vale of tears for me.” So perhaps the real reason Nietzsche turned away from boozing is that, as they say, he couldn’t hold his liquor. Perhaps, as they also say, his drinking caught up with him. Or perhaps, as is the case with most of us, the experiences of his life shaped his own philosophical views and vice versa, so that the two worked out to complement one another.

But what of Nietzsche’s praise of Dionysus? How do we square this with his abstinence? In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche distinguished two forces at work in culture, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian embodies the use of reason and rationality, after Apollo, the ancient Greek god of, among other things, the sun and truth. The Dionysian, which Nietzsche identifies with creativity, embodies irrationality, emotionality, and chaos, after Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of, among other things, ritual madness and myth.

For Nietzsche, the very birth of philosophy, in the life of Socrates, is steeped in the Apollonian. Socrates does not wildly create, he prevents others from creating through reason, by questioning them about their pursuits. He is the ultimate critic, who wanders about Athens decreasing self-confidence and increasing self-doubt, so that the people he meets no longer believe in their abilities and will never take the creative risks that great art requires. He drinks the hemlock his executioners offer him willingly and cheerfully, hoping that he will leave this life for a better one.

Nietzsche does not believe that we should only embrace the Apollonian, as Socrates does. The Dionysian is the force we cannot abandon, the creative, passionate force that is untamed and unfettered by reason. The Dionysian is an affirmation of life, while the Apollonian, to use a phrase of Nietzsche’s, says “no” to life, as when Socrates undermines the creativity of others and embraces his annihilation willingly.

But then where do the fermented grapes fit in? Aren’t they a central part of the Dionysian? Nietzsche admires the Dionysian for its creativity, but this does not lead him to embrace inebriation, for he sees inebriation as dulling us to this world in ways that prevent us from goading ourselves into creative action in this life. He sees intoxication as leading to complacency, passivity, and a static existence, an escape from this life (like Huxley envisioned in his drugged-up dystopia) rather than an affirmation of it . It is the creative, dynamic passion of the Dionysian, not the numbing grapes, that makes for greatness.

One might well ask, however, what to make of all those great writers who apparently did some of their best work under the guiding hand of the Dionysian nectar (or, for that matter, all the artists and poets who labored under the influence of Christianity). Apparently Hemingway never delivered the imperative “write drunk, edit sober”, even if he was a firm believer in alcohol’s ability to aid in diction. The quote instead likely stems from another writer, who placed it in the mouth of a character he based on the Welsh author Dylan Thomas, a tragically heavy drinker. Other legendary tipplers like the late Christopher Hitchens swore by the stuff, even if, as he acknowledged in his last interviews, the lifestyle shortened his life.

One could have a debate on whether the output of great writers would have been as prodigious without a liquid muse, and whether this is offset by the shortening of their lifespans and so a reduction in their writing career, but it would likely be an interminable one. Perhaps, as it has been suggested, some people would have taken their own lives before they did their greatest work if they were not so medicated. Or perhaps they would have done still greater work if sober. So much depends on the person and their life in such matters, and it seems impossible to know, even being them, what might have been.

What of other mood-altering drugs, like coffee, dramatically credited by some for the birth of the Age of Enlightenment, as conversation is said to have moved from the public house to the coffee house? In the same section of Ecce Homo from which I have been quoting, Nietzsche instructs us that “coffee should be given up—coffee makes one gloomy”. (Not my assessment at all.) But all caffeine is not lost, however, for Nietzsche does sanction the consumption of tea, with some qualification: “Tea is beneficial only in the morning. It should be taken in small quantities but very strong. It may be very harmful and indispose you for the whole day if it be taken the least bit too weak.” Note the characteristic emphasis on strength.

Young and hungry.

Nietzsche is not beyond parody, of course. Yet when the likes of The Onion and then Woody Allen have cheekily imagined what a Nietzschean diet would look like their offerings are just that—imagination. They conjure up fictional quotes and recipes, joking that they might be of the kind that Nietzsche would write in a diet book. But, in a sense, the joke is on them—Nietzsche really did offer diet tips. The same chapter from which I have been quoting counsel on caffeinated beverages contains even more delightfully Nietzschean nutritional advice beyond taking one’s tea strong. The attempts at satire are woefully unimaginative compared to the real thing. It’s a pity they didn’t do the reading:

Indeed I can say that up to a very mature age my food was entirely bad—expressed morally it was “impersonal”, “selfless”, “altruistic” for the salvation of cooks and all other fellow Christians. It was through the cooking in vogue at Leipzig for instance together with my first study of Schopenhauer (1865) that I earnestly renounced my “Will to Live”. To spoil one’s stomach by absorbing insufficient nourishment—this problem seemed to my mind solved with admirable felicity by the above mentioned cookery. (It is said that in the year 1866 changes were introduced into this department.) But as to German cookery in general—what has it not got on its conscience! Soup before the meal (still called alla tedesca in the Venetian cookery books of the sixteenth century); meat boiled to shreds, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of puddings into paper-weights! And if you add to this the absolutely bestial drinking habits during meals of the ancients and not only of the ancient Germans you will understand the origin of the German spirit—that is to say, in bad stomachs. German sprit is indigestion; it can digest nothing. But even English diet which in comparison with German and indeed with the French seems to me to constitute a “return to Nature”—that is to say to cannibalism—is profoundly opposed to my own instincts. It seems to me to give the spirit heavy feet— the feet of English women. The best cuisine is that of Piedmont….

A heavy meal is digested more easily than an inadequate one. The first principle of a good digestion is that the stomach should come into action as a whole. A man ought therefore to know the size of his stomach. For the same reasons all those interminable meals should be avoided which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts and which are to be had at any table d’hôte. Nothing should be eaten between meals… In an enervating climate tea is not a good beverage with which to start the day: an hour before taking it, it is advisable to drink a cup of thick oil free cocoa. Remain seated as little as possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open whilst moving freely about— nor when the muscles are not in festive mood. All prejudices originate in the intestines. A sedentary life as I have already said elsewhere— is the real sin against the holy spirit… Even a slight tendency to laziness in the intestines, once it has become a habit is quite sufficient to make something mediocre, something “German” out of a genius; the climate of Germany alone is enough to discourage the strongest and most heroically disposed of stomachs.

And those are only some of his glorious offerings. Nietzsche also described himself as an “opponent of vegetarianism by experience”, saying that he was converted back to eating meat by the German operatic composer Richard Wagner. Whether this was due to a personal interaction or from the stirring carnivorism of Wagner’s compositions, he does not specify, but the diaries of Wagner’s wife Cosima allow us to discern some of the debate between them (“R” refers to Wagner himself):

Coffee with Prof. Nietzsche; unfortunately he vexes R. very much with an oath he has sworn not to eat meat, but only vegetables. R. considers this nonsense, arrogance as well, and when the Prof. says it is morally important not to eat animals, etc., R. replies that our whole existence is a compromise, which we can only expiate by producing some good. One cannot do that just by drinking milk—better, then, to become an ascetic. To do good in our climate we need good nourishment, and so on. Since the Prof. admits that Richard is right, yet nevertheless sticks to his abstinence, R. becomes angry.

The then coffee-drinking Nietzsche fell in love with Cosima, who never returned his affections, and it was this, along with Nietzsche’s disdain for Wagner’s popularity among the effete and refined of Europe, that drove him to eventually turn against Wagner. It probably also didn’t help that Wagner fell on the floor laughing upon hearing one of Nietzsche’s own attempts at musical composition.

To Nietzsche’s credit, I doubt the nutritional advice of many popular writers on the subject today is any more well-founded than his own. In the end, Nietzsche stands out for worshiping Dionysus in ways that most do not, and withholding praise where many heap it. Whatever our proclivities, it might be worth asking with him, when it comes to any activity, whether it makes us more productive, more passionate, more brilliant, lively, dynamic, creative, and great—or whether it is holding us back from potential greatness, dulling us to the realities of life which should instead stir us to greater heights. Whatever we decide to do, it should be done for ourselves. For no matter how many people do something, and no matter how famous the name that offers some advice, we should not give in to so-called “peer pressure”. Nietzsche understood that his teetotaling set him at odds with much of the rest of the Western tradition, but, ever the individualist, he did not let this sway him in the least, standing by his view with inimitable style:

In vino veritas: it seems that here once more I am at variance with the rest of the world about the concept “Truth”—with me spirit moves above the waters.

Image sources, by caption:

“The vomiting symposiast” – Stefano Bolognini

“Young and hungry.” – Isenheim