P ATRICK R AMPONI Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy: Weather, Sickness and the Globalization of ‘Milieu’ In 1897, Friedrich Nietzsche’s personal publisher, the Naumann publishing house, brought out a collection of aphorisms by a certain Paul Mongré entitled Sant’ Ilario. Gedanken aus der Landschaft Zarathustras: Our spring announces itself with a torrent of death notices in the newspapers; this kind of ‘springtime,’ with its days heralding summer and relapses of winter, can insidiously finish off those sufferers who imagine they have been given another year. Summer follows, which tends to alternate close heat and rain so as to deny any rest to the working part of the population: evenings, Sundays and holiday weeks are irrevocably wet, desolate and unpleasant. Autumn inherits summer’s rain and lasts until December or January: then a late winter without character, little snow but a great deal of cold mud, and then spring again. The whole is a system of systemlessness, a deliberate nonsense, a game of chance with only probabilities of losing, a modus vivendi that no-one can live with. (Mongré 167-168, emphasis P.R.) 1 The idea of weather as a “system of systemlessness” is a prevalent topos in nineteenth century meteorological discourse - as are the lamentations about weather that is always too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry. And that it rains on the day off work of all days, that the seasons are full of deceitful intentions and make our life more difficult, that the malicious whims of the weather as a whole are not to be trusted, all of that is surprisingly universal and also quite current. The “joyous saint” who wrote these lines under the pseudonym of Paul Mongré, in an age that hadn’t yet heard of climate change, was the Leipzig mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Felix Hausdorff, who knew more than a little about weather; he earned his postdoctoral lecture qualification with his work Über die Absorption des Lichts in der Atmosphäre [On the absorption of light in the atmosphere]. At the time of writing Sant’ Ilario he was on leave from his professorial duties, staying on the Ligurian coast to cure his respiratory illness, not far from the site where ten years earlier Nietzsche had written his Zarathustra. The quite weather-sensitive Hausdorff, intoxicated by the “idleness of the South” (Mongré 173), shows complete understanding for 1 If not otherwise indicated all translations of German original text quotations into English have been done by Karsten Schöllner. P ATRICK R AMPONI 142 the European in our latitudes who catches a new illness, weather-neurasthenia: he is only responding to the increasingly pronounced disparity between climate and organism, and feels the urgent admonition, as a kind of haruspicium (alas, from his own entrails! ), to migrate to milder stretches of earth. (Mongré 167; emphasis P.R.) With this concept of “weather-neurasthenia” Felix Hausdorff ventured to diagnose a complaint that occupied many doctors towards the end of the nineteenth century and prompted a torrent of scholarly and popular publications. Yet by 1900, there was hardly a serious physician who would have given this diagnosis. The etiology of this new psychosomatic hypersensitivity to weather conditions, termed meteoropathy by academic medicine a short while later, was still too nebulous. 2 And in fact its symptoms resembled in many points those of the unspecific but highly epidemic and fashionable illness of the fin-de-siècle: neurasthenia (Steiner 120). The pathologically weather-sensitive, it was generally held, already had weak nerves to begin with as well as a sickly constitution. And the numerous hygienic writings, dietetics and health guides available towards the end of the nineteenth century all prescribed a single therapy: a change of location and thus of climate. It is no accident that Hausdorff wrote of a “disparity between climate and organism.” He was playing off an influential tradition of thought from Hippocrates and Aristotle that ran through Locke, Montesquieu, Herder, and the political geography of the nineteenth century and prevailed up to 1900: climate theory, or perhaps it is better to say, climate culture theory. In very rough terms it rested on the assumption that there was a more or less causal connection between the geography and climate of a region and the individual nature or collective character of its inhabitants. We “European[s],” as the lines quoted here suggest, are no longer at home in our ancestral latitudes, the weather is making us ill, hence we must migrate to more southern regions. The symptoms of this weather malady lead to a paradox that continually haunted climate theory since Montesquieu at the latest: if geography and climate decisively shape humans, how can we explain the adaptive ability shown by diverse migrations? After all, history reveals numerous examples of successful acclimatization. Hippocrates, perhaps the first proponent of environmental medicine, assumed that the human organism has to continually adapt to different climatic conditions. And Romantic medicine discovered that a change of climate (or of diet) could produce an irritating effect on the organism, and if used therapeutically could effect a cure. Hence, the differ- 2 The medical field still does not see meteoropathy as an independent illness today. Rather a lower stimulation threshold of the autonomic nervous system is thought to lead to an increased sensitivity of the human organism to atmospheric weather conditions. Surveys show that in the Federal Republic of Germany alone 50% of the population reports being meteoropathic (Schuh 55-57). For a foundational review of the medical history of meteoropathy, see Assmann 1-10. Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 143 ence between sickness and health is connected to the relative success of this adaptation (Schuh 11). Thus cultural geography turns into climatic geography. In this article I hope to make this argument plausible using the exemplary case of a philosophical meteoropath. “Signs of cultural weather” For a classical philologist Nietzsche occupied himself with the weather more than one would expect. 3 The rhetoric of weather and climatic tropes pervade almost all of his philosophical works; moreover, in his most productive phase, in the 1880s, when he was traveling between the alpine Engadin and the Mediterranean Riviera, he was exposed to constant changes of location and climate. Even though Nietzsche never wrote a work solely about the weather, there are clear meteorological traces in his most important figures of thought - the critique of subjectivity through the lived experience of the body, the will to power, the hypothesis of eternal return. Moreover, his ethics, which could be better conceived as a ‘dietetic’ theory of how life-forms are perceived (and are means of perception), takes its unity of self-forming, self-renunciation and self-overcoming from the exposure to weather. And Nietzsche’s critique of religion and culture as well as his reflections on the connections between morality, religion, health and culture make use, often polemically, of a rich repertoire of traditional weather topoi. For example, German politics and the ‘teutonic’ way of life strike him as a “kind of permanent winter and bad weather” (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,807 - letter from 24.2.1887). 4 When Nietzsche talks about culture, he usually talks about weather as well, and the talk about weather does not seldom imply an entire climatic theory of culture. It is in this sense that the phrase “signs of cultural weather” [“Wetterzeichen der Cultur”] crops up in one of the central aphorisms of the second part of Human, All Too Human, moreover with a strong emphasis on the critique of religion: There are so few decisive signs of the cultural weather; we must be glad if we find we have at any rate one reliable one in our hands for use in our house and garden. 3 The philological work on Nietzsche to date has not seen weather as a theme to be worked on systematically - with the exception of an unpublished MA thesis by Posth, from which this article has profited. Posth’s work not only sifts the material quite adeptly but also eruditely locates Nietzsche’s philosophy of weather within the philosophical dimensions of the “will to power” and the affective dynamics it implies. The primary interest of this study, in contrast, is not in Nietzsche’s meteorological philosophy, but rather in meteoropathy as a cultural symptom that points to a different epistemology of modernity. I am currently working on a monograph on meteorosensitivity as an epochal malady between 1800 and 1900. See also Ramponi 39-56. 4 All Nietzsche quotes are cited, if not indicated otherwise, from D’Iorio, abbreviated as eKGWB in the running text. P ATRICK R AMPONI 144 To test whether someone is one of us or not - I mean whether he is a free spirit or not - one should test his feelings towards Christianity. If he stands towards it in any other way than critically then we turn our back on him; he is going to bring us impure air and bad weather. - It is no longer our task to teach such people what a sirocco is; they have Moses and the weather-prophets and the prophets of the Enlightenment: if they will not pay heed to these, then -- ( eKGWB/ WS-182 ) 5 If here Nietzsche treats the question of personal religious conviction according to the paradigm of a weather forecast, it is by sanding the metaphorical excesses of the notion of Enlightenment down to its metaphorical minimum: The notion of ‘Enlightenment’ as - on the one hand - secularization and critique of religion, and - on the other, meteorological hand - as an atmospheric lightening of the skies, become indistinguishable. The sirocco, as we will see, becomes the key to Nietzsche’s philosophical meteorology; it unites in itself culture and nature, symbolic event and weather in its psychosomatic influence on the human organism. The “signs of cultural weather,” the meteorological figures that pervade Nietzsche’s work, are difficult to chart: a fluctuation of highs and lows, glaring sunlight yields to complicated wind currents that draw clouds and storms after them. Yet the opening aphorism makes it clear that Nietzsche’s weather changes insistently not just between nature, culture and morality, but also between the abstraction of culture on the one hand and a quite personal, somatically experienced atmospherology on the other. To put a rather fine point on it, we could say that the semiotics of weather reaches its terminus in Nietzsche’s philosophy at the latest. Winds, clouds, storms, rain, and also sunlight and heat are in his work no longer signs of the gods and certainly not any pure signifier; their ability to prophesize over cultural affairs is put on par with the ability of animals to sense changes in weather before they become visible. But for Nietzsche the weather retains that elemental character that the pre-Socratic materialists saw in it, above all Lucretius, the natural philosopher that Nietzsche admired, who saw weather as embedded in the contingent stream of natural, physiological forces. Referring to Lucretius, Nietzsche develops his anti-rhetorical poetics of the elements of weather (see H. Böhme, “Was” 13). Nietzsche, as I will show here, takes up atomistic natural philosophy, together with the other epistemic formation about climate and weather that dominated antiquity - the medical and cultural climate theory of Hippocrates, Galen, and their followers in early modernity - and brings it in line with the current scientific state of his age by conceiving weather less as a geophysical event than as a psychophysiological one. His own pathological meteoropathy directs his sceptical gaze at the positivism of the contemporary quantitative meteorology as well as the climatic and milieu-theoretical ideol- 5 Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale 354. Further English quotations are taken from this edition. Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 145 ogy of the globalizing nineteenth century. For Nietzsche was at war for his whole life with the immanent happening that is atmospheric weather. His comprehensive correspondence with the musician Heinrich Köselitz (pseudonym Peter Gast) for example reads like a single repository of meteorological lamentations and complaints about the daily weather: Nietzsche feels “very draped and hidden” again and again, incapable of any productivity, because the climate strikes him as an “absurd disorder” (eKGWB/ BVN- 1888,1049 - letter from 20.06.1888). His correspondence as a whole after his severe academic and health crisis in the last years in Basel showed a rapid increase in meteorological observations and worries about the weather. His decision in 1879 to permanently leave his position as professor seems to him in retrospect less a decision against the university and academic philosophy and more against the city of Basel itself, which he recognized - late but at last - as his “forbidden place” (eKGWB/ EH-Klug-2) - the “infamous, harmful Basel” (eKGWB/ BVN-1879,839 - letter from 12.04.1879) - against which he had developed a regular “Basileophobia”: “a true fear and shrinking from the bad weather, the bad air, the whole depressed essence of this unfortunate breeding ground of my sufferings” (eKGWB/ BVN-1879,832 - letter from 03.04.1879). Meteorology, as we can see in these passages and other countless testimonies from his letters, is for the philosopher above all a question of the body as affected by weather, the highly sensitive bodily perception of environmental stimuli, such that thinking and symbolic orientation, like all mental states for Nietzsche, can only be seen as “consequences and symbols” (eKGWB/ NF-1883,9[41]) of bodily states. This means that Nietzsche’s thought in every direction is always already climatically tempered. The meteorological figures are not mere conceptual metaphors or spatial symbols of meaning; rather, as the concrete consequences for the body they stand in a metonymic relation to their climatic environment, to that domain of dynamic phenomena where the body, space and the events and currents of the atmosphere become undifferentiable from one another (Small 189-207). The peculiarity of Nietzsche’s occupation with the weather is that at the epistemological level he seems to eliminate every anthropomorphism from our knowledge of the weather, and yet as a life-long meteoropath he reintegrates the human element into meteorology. With its orientation to the ambulant Nietzsche’s thought cashes in like no other on the distinction between work and life, between texts and their natural milieus and conditions of production, precisely in the time in which this distinction between text and life was becoming the leading philological paradigm of textual interpretation (Deleuze, “Nomaden-Denken” 105-121). That this still causes problems today for Nietzsche research, which after all passed through the constructivist P ATRICK R AMPONI 146 school (itself inspired by Nietzsche’s famous discussions of truth and rhetoric), is to be renegotiated through the phenomenon of weather. Thanks to the work of Gilles Deleuze and, following him, Stefan Günzel and Gary Shapiro, Nietzsche philology is in the meantime thoroughly aware of how intensively he occupied himself with questions of cultural geography and the anthropogeography of his time and how topography and topology inspired his turn to “geophilosophical” forms of thought that could be used to attack the teleology of academic historicism. 6 I will argue here that the model of climate theory that can be traced back to antiquity and came to prominence in early modernity, the (more or less deterministic) thesis that peoples and characters are influenced by geographical location and climatic environment, is given a decisive epistemic turn by Nietzsche. The equation of culture and climate is expanded by a third term which Nietzsche introduces by way of his reception of the empirical climate sciences and the medical weather experiments of his time: the physics of weather and the physiology of the body exposed to weather. Nietzsche emancipates the concept of climate from space and thus from its etymological derivation from the ancient Greek word κλίμα (inclination, angle of the sun) that still treats weather in terms of a mechanics of the sky. Nietzsche in contrast is primarily interested in the change of climate, which is always a question of the semiosomatic sensing of weather shifts. Nietzsche’s framing of cultural phenomena in terms of imagined climates can be seen clearly exemplified in his famous “Turin letter from May 1888,” his great reckoning with Richard Wagner. It is well known that The Case of Wagner is also Nietzsche’s fulminating engagement with the nervous overstimulation of his epoch and his own “problem of decadence” (eKGWB/ WA- Vorwort), written immediately before his paralytic collapse in Turin in January of 1889. The polemic against Wagner begins with the programmatic call “Il faut méditerraniser la musique” (eKGWB/ WA-3) and the invocation of Georges Bizets opera Carmen, the southern lightness of which he contrasts with the “heaviness” of Wagner’s operatic art: With Bizet’s work one takes leave of the humid north, and all the steam of the Wagnerian ideal. Even the dramatic action saves us from it […] It possesses, above all, what belongs to the warm climate, the dryness of the air, its limpidezza. Here, in all respects, the climate is altered. Here a different sensuality expresses itself, a different sensibility, a different gaiety. (eKGWB/ WA-2) 6 Stefan Günzel introduced the “geophilosophical turn” in Nietzsche studies with his canonical study: Geophilosophie. Nietzsches philosophische Geographie (2001). See also the instructive review by Knut Ebeling and the work of Shapiro. These authors’ engagement with space in Nietzsche’s work is, in turn, decisively inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “geophilosophy” (97-131). Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 147 We cannot underestimate this certainly somewhat polemical intervention of Nietzsche’s in the semantics of the climatic zone models prevalent in Germany at the latest since Hegel and his geographical student Carl Ritter: while Hegel’s geomorphological mapping of the world-spirit still follows a temperature index of heat and cold along with the telos of ‘moderate zones’ already preferred by the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche here emphasizes the qualities of the air (Günzel, “Nietzsches Geophilosophie” 25). The mention of “dryness” and “limpidezza” shifts the register from geography to the chemistry of the air and makes Nietzsche one of the first to introduce the atmospheric dimension to climate theory. Wagner’s music, Nietzsche goes on to say in The Case of Wagner, oppresses with “a hundred atmospheres” (eKGWB/ WA-8): “how detrimental to me is this Wagnerian orchestral sound! I call it sirocco. I break out into a disagreeable sweat. My good weather is gone” (eKGWB/ WA-1). 7 That Nietzsche clearly suffers a physiological response to Wagner’s famous compositional technique - the tonal veiling 8 of harmonic sequences - feeling it as an atmospheric veiling, points to the doubled register of this philosophical meteorology: whereas Nietzsche as epistemologist (as a ‘constructivist’ theoretician of metaphors and tropes) practices techniques of veiling, 9 as an atmospheric thinker he is a physiologist of the ‘real,’ who uses his entire energy to achieve atmospheric clarification and clarity. Wagner’s music has the same influence on Nietzsche as the disagreeable climate. In speaking of the sirocco he is of course alluding to the southern downward wind - well documented in the advice literature on climate therapy and the medical tour-guides for recuperative trips which flourished in the end of the nineteenth century - which was the arch-nemesis of the Mediterranean treatment. Hence here Nietzsche is not just drawing on all the registers of climate-theoretical metaphors that use the semantic opposition between ‘North’ and ‘South; ’ 10 he also expands his polemic on climactic determinism (Bizet’s “African” “cheerfulness,” eKGWB/ WA-2) to include a clearly physiological dimension. The attribution of possessive pronouns to 7 Nieztsche was probably also inspired here by a statement of his friend Reinhard von Seydlitz, as he writes in a letter to Köselitz from Nice on March 21, 1888: “He complains of the Khamsin blowing there [in Egypt] ‘that resembles a Brahms symphony translated into meteorology: relentless, sandy, dry, inconceivable, nerve-shattering, a tenfold sirocco.’” (eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1007 - letter from 21.03.1888) 8 That Wagner sees veiling as an aesthetic condition of his musical drama is a commonplace in the literature since Adorno’s In Search of Wagner at the latest. The meteorological dimensions of this veiling aesthetic have so far been barely taken into consideration at all. 9 That the concept of veiling plays a central role for Nietzsche can be seen in its use in Ecce Homo. See also Sommer 342. 10 On the complex of the “South” in Nietzsche see Schaefer; on Gottfried Benn’s repurposing of Nietzsche’s climatic and geosemantic oppositional pairs see Berthold 143. P ATRICK R AMPONI 148 the weather (“My good weather is gone,” eKGWB/ WA-1) implies a correspondence between inner and outer mood modelled by the atmospheric. This formulation not only indicates that weather as a natural event also always intervenes in cultural affairs; in the context of a meteorology increasingly reliant on quantification and measurement, Nietzsche aims to grasp weather as a “subjective fact” (G. Böhme 149), what we might describe today as bio-weather (Schuh) - as “felt temperature.” This kind of philosophical meteorology can only be understood in light of the “phenomenology of weather” stemming from Goethe and Herder, a kind of “study of weather […] that does not describe weather as an objective fact, nor as a framing condition for human action, but rather as the correlate of sensations, more specifically: bodily traces” (G. Böhme 156). What we can study in Nietzsche is the metaphorical interchange between weather and feelings, between meteorological, atmospheric turbulences and mental or spiritual atmospheres. 11 If Nietzsche sketches something like a musical response aesthetics, a cultural somatics of sound in meteorological or even atmospheric terms, then this can only be understood in light of the subliminal thesis that Nietzsche propounds here in “The Case of Wagner” as a proxy for his philosophy of weather: Cultural (hence aesthetic and moral) and physiological dispositions are both equally subject to a “transcendental meteorology,” 12 to adapt Merleau Ponty’s formulation. Even art, literature and philosophy are for Nietzsche subject to the transcendentality of atmospheric meteorology. Thus it is not just a witticism when Nietzsche writes to Heinrich Köselitz on September 3, 1883: “This Engadin is the birthplace of my ‘Zarathustra.’ I just found the first sketch of the thoughts he connects; underneath it reads ‘beginning of August 1881 in Sils-Maria, 6000 feet over the ocean and higher still over all human things’” (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,461; see also Geier). We know of Nietzsche’s alpine affinities, his extensive “mountain marches” (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,842 - letter from 04.05.1887), but also his preference for the imaginary heights of a “free and voluntary life in ice and lofty mountains” (eKGWB/ EH-Vorwort-3; see also Ireton 194). It would be a half-truth to read the tropes of ascent and descent, the vertical topology pervading the Zarathustra work, as purely emblematic. We have seen that Nietzsche thinks very little of reading signs into the weather. Rather Zarathustra develops an atmospheric poetics that binds the symbolic directionality of conceptual flights, the “wind rose of thought,” as Hartmut Böhme quite astutely put it, 11 The way that this anticipates several insights of the New Phenomenology cannot be discussed here. See Schmitz for a detailed discussion. 12 In the context of Husserl’s discussion of the phenomenologically primal spatiality as an anti-Copernican turn of a certain kind Maurice Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “transcendental geology” (cited in Günzel 19-20) Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 149 to an element. 13 More important than the indication of geographical height are the wind conditions - and this is what Nietzsche means when Zarathustra says he “doesn’t love the plains” (eKGWB/ Za-III-Wanderer): in 1874 in Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche had already written “To rise as high as any thinker yet into the pure icy air of the mountain, where there are no mists and veils, and the inner constitution of things is shown in a stark and piercing clarity! ” (eKGWB/ SE-5). It is the clear, pure air that transcends the bad weather on the ground (the nomosphere) and that is for Nietzsche the element of freedom and superhuman joy. This air is a curiously joyous substance, as Bachelard said, a substance without any substantial qualities (175). In Zarathustra and the commentaries accompanying it Nietzsche displays an atmospheric complex aimed at the conditions of production of literature and philosophy - and the “enveloping atmosphere,” incidentally, was decidedly “unhistorical” for Nietzsche, something only overcome with the divisions created by consciousness, which give rise to both time and historical directionality (cf. eKGWB/ HL-1). Nietzsche still recalls the geo-climactic 14 genealogy of his Zarathustra poem at Lake Silvaplana in his last work, his autobiography Ecce Homo, when he speaks of Zarathustra as his “mountain-air book” (eKGWB/ EH-Vorwort- 4). A very characteristic example of this is the chapter “Before Sunrise” from the third part of Zarathustra, the lyrical tone of which recalls sentimental, romantic nature poetry: “Oh sky above me, you pure, you deep one! You abyss of light! Gazing at you I shudder with godlike desires. / To hurl myself into your height - that is my depth! To hide myself in your purity - that is my innocence! ” (eKGWB/ Za-III-Sonnen) This (catachrestic) weaving of heights and depths, of ascent and descent (H. Böhme, “Windrose” 27-29) which is so central for the poetics of Zarathustra, shifting between mountain treks and aviational desire (“the only thing my will wants is to fly, to fly into you! ,” eKGWB/ Za-III-Sonnen), is complemented here by the address 15 to the sky as a partner: “Together we learned everything; together we learned to climb up 13 H. Böhme focuses above all on the dimensions of spatial symbolism and landscape morphology in Nietzsche’s poetics. In this sense the title of the article also alludes more to the dynamics of directional topology and hardly at all to the atmospheric elements. 14 It is telling that Sils-Maria is for Nietzsche, in terms of climate theory, the ideal site to merge the northern and the southern; Engadin seems to him a “height, which has encamped itself without fear next to the terrors of eternal snow, where Italy and Finland have come together to form a union” (eKGWB/ WS-338). 15 Nietzsche’s association of his philosophy with the cultural-geographical topos of the ‘South’ can be found e.g. in the following passage in a letter from Sils-Maria to Overbeck on September 14, 1884: “what one hates about me […] is the clear sky. An Italian said to me recently, compared to what we call the sky cielo, the German sky is une carricatura./ Bravo! That’s my entire philosophy! ” (eKGWB/ BVN-1884,533 - letter from 14.09.1884) Böhme interprets the “clear-skied south as a metaphor for philosophy” (Böhme 30). P ATRICK R AMPONI 150 to ourselves by climbing over ourselves, and to smile cloudlessly” (ibid.). The cloudless smiling is to be read in the sense of a resistance to those “drifting clouds” (ibid.) that are conceived in the same passage as media (as “middlemen and mixers,” eKGWB/ Za-II-Dichter) disrupting the vertical communication between the alpine Zarathustra and the “sky of light” (eKGWB/ Za-III- Sonnen): “I grudge these drifting clouds, these creeping predator-cats.” (ibid.) The meaning of this struggle against the clouds is illuminated by the figure of dancing that is so insistent in Nietzsche’s philosophy: “that you are my dance floor for divine accident,” (ibid.) Zarathustra continues, turning to the sky. Whereas clouds (the metaphorics of veiling! ), cloudedness, etc. signify, it is the winds that bring the sky to dance. Here the north Provençal wind stands out, to which Nietzsche - in contrast to the hated sirocco - has dedicated the euphoric poem “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind”: Wildly rushing, clouds outleaping, / Care-destroying, Heaven sweeping, Mistral wind, thou art my friend! […] How you bound across the ocean, / Unimpeded, free in motion, / Swifter than with boat or wing! / […] Off with those who spoil Earth’s gladness, / Blow away all clouds of sadness, / Till our heavens clear we see. (eKGWB/ FW-Lieder-14) Thus Nietzsche’s “message of clouds,” to use Joseph Vogl’s formulation, marks a third epistemic break in the history of meteorological knowledge: whereas in the Renaissance clouds were simply that which impeded the telescope’s view of the stars, and whereas in the anti-astronomical meteorology of Luke Howard and Goethe the clouds as atmospheric irregularities were the object of aesthetic and physiological fascination, for Nietzsche the clouds are the “sky-beclouders” (eKGWB/ FW-Lieder-14) which moreover becloud soul and mind and not least of all the sensitive body - and wind is the “misery-murderer” (ibid.). From here we can get a glimpse of the epistemic zone in which the diverse currents of Nietzsche’s obsession with weather all run together. In the following I will argue that we can describe this site of non-knowledge (cf. Bies and Gamper) about the weather using the concept of meteoropathy. I use the term non-knowledge intentionally, since in 1880 the emergent disciplines of positivistic, quantitative meteorology, the climatology reliant on global compilation of data, and the unsystematic attempts at medical epidemiology for the most part conducted by practicing doctors, were all almost entirely working in a sub-disciplinary and interdisciplinary grey area (Büttner, “Meteorologie” 406). A causally oriented meteorology was very unreliable and susceptible to error in Nietzsche’s time, not to speak of the primary interest of this meteorology, weather forecasting. Hence meteoropathy seems to me to be not just the core of what we might describe as Nie- Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 151 tzsche’s “meteorological complex; ” 16 in the second half of the nineteenth century, meteoropathy can be defined as the syndrome that precisely reflects the deficiencies of contemporary meteorology. Nietzsche’s Medical Files: Meteoropathy “‘I forgot my umbrella’” (eKGWB/ NF-1881,12[62]). This remark in scarequotes from the Nachlass, which Nietzsche must have written between 1880 and 1882, appears as an erratic and lonely fragment in the work. Derrida famously used it as the occasion to reflect on the connections and limits of a work and on the impossibility of a hermeneutic unity of work, meaning and life (158-9). But this overlooks the seemingly trivial fact that the umbrella, or more precisely its employment as a parasol, took on a particular function among Nietzsche’s things, as the philosopher used it on his extended wanderings to protect himself from the direct sunlight which has led to painful inflammations of his sensitive eyes again and again. Nietzsche himself frequently objected to the “hypocritically feigned contempt of the closest things,” the “contempt for the demands of the body and the deliberate desire to look away from them” (eKGWB/ NF-1888,15[89]). The literature on Nietzsche has still not grown tired of posthumously maintaining this poetic philosopher’s medical files and continually introducing newly observed symptoms, offering new diagnoses, and redefining the relation between his work and his illness. It seems otiose to continue to offer posthumous diagnoses of the disease that killed him - and not a few medical historians are still pursuing this project today with a detective’s pathological meticulousness 17 - and the question of the causal connection between philosophy and mental illness seems just as irrelevant from today’s perspective. The genre of “pathography” (Schmiedebach 203-204) saw a boom after Nietzsche’s death, from Paul Julius Möbius through Kurt Hildebrandt and Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum up to Karl Jaspers’ philosophical psychopathology. Here I am not concerned to produce another diagnosis for the patient Nietzsche. Whether Nietzsche suffered from meteoropathy cannot be decided by the diagnostic criteria of contemporary medical handbooks. (It is still in dispute today whether any scientifically demonstrable epidemiological causality can be found between the skies and humans.) 18 From a his- 16 I take this concept from Sebastian Posth’s MA thesis, l.c. 17 Whereas for a long time it was assumed that Nietzsche suffered from increasing dementia as a result of an early syphilis infection, the research in recent years has determined that a brain tumor (meningioma) is the most likely final cause of his death (Sax). A summary of the latest research can be found in Huenemann; see also the classic study by Volz. 18 See Frey. Jürgen Kleinschmidt, professor emeritus in München and specialist in balneology, is one of the most vehement critics of meteoropathy as an illness: P ATRICK R AMPONI 152 torical perspective the diagnosis would be anachronistic anyways: No serious doctor would have made it - and Nietzsche sought out countless doctors and discussed his weather-sensitivity with them again and again. I am concerned here more with a reconfiguration of the symptoms, as Gilles Deleuze proposed following Nietzsche, seeing the author not as ill but as “the doctor of himself and the world”: “The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with the man” (Essays 3). 19 In Deleuzian terms, the “symptomatology” (Deleuze, “Mystique” 12-13) of meteoropathy would be located outside of clinical medicine, at the point of origin where poets and philosophers, doctors and patients meet and first bring forth the knowledge of that object that they themselves have long since found themselves to be. A small find from 1913 that the Nietzsche literature has hardly taken note of can serve to trace the contours of the genesis of meteoropathy as a cultural affliction using “the case of Nietzsche,” and at the same time to reconstruct the discursive conditions in which meteoropathy comes to look like the blueprint for the climatic and environmental medicine that first emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested here in the connection between the physiological and the aesthetic frames of reference in the early discussion of pathogenic meteoropathy. The composer, theater critic and music journalist Paul Zschorlich published a two-page “psychoclimatic study” in the Propyläen in 1913 in which he concedes that Nietzsche’s nervous condition made him dependent on the landscape around him and the weather to an extent that the average person cannot even imagine. Perhaps there has never been an artist whose creative activity has been so intimately connected to the climate and landscape as Nietzsche. […] For years Nietzsche had no greater personal worry than the climate. His powers of thought, his work capacity, his personal mood were dependent on the weather to an extent rarely seen. […] We healthy people can only with great difficulty imagine ourselves into the position of a man who falls into an insufferable physical state as soon as the sky is clouded. (278) In 1887, in his study Moderne Behandlung der Nervenschwäche [“Modern Treatment of Weak Nerves”] Leopold Löwenfeld had already noted the neurasthenic’s susceptibility to changes in weather (45-46). (Nietzsche knew the book well! ) But Zschorlich goes further: In describing Nietzsche as someone outside the norm, as an exceptional case, he also connects to the relevant discourses on the “etiology of genius.” Before Zschorlich, Max Nordau, http: / / www.prof-kleinschmidt.de. Scientific evidence for meteoropathy can be found in Schuh, see also Wessel. 19 “Literature then appears as an enterprise of health; not that the writer necessarily be in good health […] he possesses irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him […] The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with red eyes and pierced eardrums.” (Deleuze) Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 153 Cesare Lombroso and Paul Julius Möbius had also speculated as to whether Nietzsche’s thought was shaped by his sickly disposition. Nietzsche himself was famously both an object of the debate about the pathology of geniuses as well as an actively involved psychologist of his own “degeneration” and “decadence” - the cultural illness of his time which he treated in The Case of Wagner. Alongside racial, hereditary, sexual and physiognomic aspects, the physiology and the metabolism of the genius were also discussed and linked to a heightened sensory awareness and extreme irritability, which “are just as much the necessary preconditions for the production of art as they are symptoms of organic dysfunction” (Moore 261). That this also hinges on the weather can be read in Lombroso’s treatise Der geniale Mensch from 1890. Lombroso explicitly refers to the climatic cultural theory and the aesthetics of genius from the eighteenth century 20 on the positivistic foundation of the nineteenth century, making use of Adolphe Quetelet’s probabilistic and statistically based “physique sociale” as a methodological reference point (Lombroso 119). He begins by introducing pages of statistical assessments showing a measurable correlation between climate, altitude, atmospheric state and the quality of the air and the living environment for ingenious people and creations. He concludes “that genius cannot prosper in areas with impure air” and that thin air above all is the ideal atmospheric environment for great achievements of genius: “From ancient times the common people and the wise have had a premonition of this almost unqualified correlation between genius and climate and unanimously attributed the cause of the frequent appearance of ingenious men to the hilly lands” (Lombroso 153-154). 21 Nietzsche also reports again and again that he progresses in his work only during good weather, with a clear sky (“the weather is so glorious, that it’s no great feat to make something good,” eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1137 - letter from 30.10.1888). In this he completely follows Lombroso’s empirical geopsychology (and not the climate-theoretical aesthetics of genius of the eighteenth century anymore! ). On September 2, 1884 Nietzsche calculates that his best and most important works (The Birth of Tragedy, Zarathustra) coincide with the maximum of magnetic solar radiation, and that his decision to go into philology and his ideational affinity with Schopenhauer - which he later describes as a “kind of loss of faith in myself” (eKGWB/ BVN-1884,536 - letter from 20.09.1884: “eine Art Selbst-Irre- 20 The centrality of argumentative figures taken from climate theory for the discussion of genius from early modernity to the 18 th century can be seen in the Abbé Du Bos’ Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. The poetics of Winckelmann, Herder, Lessing, Hölderlin and Schiller - to name just a few - have included climate-theoretical arguments for a genealogy of genius. For a fundamental review see Zacharasiewicz 576 or Fink. 21 On the metaphorical function of weather and the sky in the discourse on genius around 1900 in general see Köhne 114-126. P ATRICK R AMPONI 154 werden”) - were caused by an atmospheric “minimum” (ibid.) that also marked his decisive health crisis. One year earlier he had complained that his winter agony was triggered by the many “electrical ‘storms’” “that astonished all observers of electrical currents in the fall and winter months: they coincide temporally with great sunspots becoming visible” (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,415 - letter from 10.05.1883). But the decisive point in the debate about the meteorology of genius seems to me to lie in the diagnosis of an augmented affective system in natural geniuses. It remains unclear whether the lowering of sensory stimulation thresholds is itself climatically determined (the arguments of cultural climate theorists for this would have to be that people in certain zones have a particular tendency to nervous symptoms) or whether genius can be traced back to a pathological organism which is then especially sensitive to shifts in weather. Just as the mental states of the mentally ill change in quantitatively measurable ways in relation to temperature and air pressure, the “degenerated” genius, wrote Cesare Lombroso, is distinguished by his particular “meteoric sensitivity” (118). 22 Lombroso offers numerous examples, such as Montaigne, Diderot, Maine de Brian, Alfieri, W. Irving, Goethe, Michelet etc. 23 It is not completely clear whether Nietzsche was familiar with Lombroso’s theses about weather and genius, but it seems quite probable since, after all, Lombroso was professor at the University of Turin where Nietzsche lived repeatedly for his last conscious years. In any case, in a letter to Franz Overbeck from July 4, 1888 Nietzsche wrote of his “extreme irritability under meteorological impressions” (eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1056) which he 22 Lombroso conducted empirical studies on 23,405 mentally ill patients and noted the results in a table. Lombroso’s study is in this sense one of the first examples of statistical climatic medicine. See Lombroso. 23 The pages-long quotes from and references to intellectual meteoropaths and their inspirations from the weather read like a brief literary history of meteoropathy (Lombroso 119-132). Lombroso was concerned to show statistically the exact frequency of seasons, weather conditions and literary or scientific innovations. The most productive months are May, September and April. February, October and December are less favorable (134). “I believe I can group together the aesthetic and the scientific creations, since both share the moment of psychic excitation and extreme sensitivity which brings oppositions and the furthest removed things closer together and breathes new light into the doubting, in brief that fruitful something that we call creativity, in which poet and scholar stand closer together than one generally assumes.” (139) Moreover Lombroso examines the geographical influence as well as the “atmospheric influence” (146) of certain altitudes on the living conditions of particularly gifted people: “All the great lowlands, such as Belgium, Holland, Egypt, and those mountain lands that, like Switzerland and the Savoy, are enclosed within mountainous heights, are haunted by goiter and cretinism and are poor in ingenious men; the swamp lands are yet poorer. The few ingenious people Switzerland has produced were born only after the race defeated the influence of goiter, and are the sons of immigrated French and Italians…” (146) Like all climatic cultural theorists, Lombroso was concerned to underline the favorability to genius of his own latitude, his own climate zone: Italy, particularly Tuscany (147). Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 155 contends pointed to a “certain total exhaustion” (ibid.). In this letter Nietzsche even goes so far as to describe his chronic headaches and stomach problems not as true illnesses, but rather merely as symptoms of his nervous suffering under the weather, which dominates all other complaints. Paul Cohn, the Berlin nerve doctor and one of the pioneers of psychosomatic medicine, dedicated a chapter of his 1931 study Um Nietzsches Untergang to the complex “Nietzsche und das Wetter” (59-67). From his experience with patients as a practicing doctor Cohn confirms the connection between neurasthenia and sensitivity to abrupt changes in the weather: It was the days when the barometer fell abruptly, followed by those more frequent bodily complaints in the consultation as well as the cluster of mental conflicts outside the consultation. The barometer rose: and everything cleared up, the massed clouds dispersed, inside as well as outside. It was the influence of the weather that led to these clustered ailments, and particularly in the case of more sensitive people known as neurasthenics. (60) Whereas in 1913 Zschorlich had treated Nietzsche’s weather-responsive mood swings on the basis of the ancient clinical picture of “melancholy,” the symptoms of which have included moodiness triggered by bad air ever since Galen (who listed six non naturales as external factors of the traditional medical hygiene) 24 and Robert Burton, in 1931 Cohn provided an explanatory model for the influence of weather on mental and physical health based on biochemistry and the physics of air pressure. He attributes changes in muscular states to shifts in the “atmospheric total pressure,” for one thing. Musculature goes slack with lower pressure, which puts greater demands on the will, increasing the frequency of mental activities, with significant repercussions for the circulation of blood and the lymphatic system (Cohn 61). The effect of air pressure on the inner organs (Vivenot) is particularly strong: the “reduced pressure on the intestines” leads to “increased expansion of the internal gasses” and a “swelling of the body,” all “vexatious symptoms that drive the neurasthenic to the doctor” (Cohn 63). On the other hand, in the debate about the organic influence of weather, Cohn’s position gives pride of place to the central nervous system; for mood swings are for him simply “altered vibrations of the brain” (ibid.), which are quite sensitive to the electricity in the air and the ionization of the atmosphere. In a central passage of the chapter Cohn puts together a schema organizing the various forms of weather influence on the “tone,” that is, the “total tension of the body.” 25 Here the weather 24 That Nietzsche also followed the Galenic concept of melancholy has been shown by Dahlkvist 148-153. See also Kilbansky/ Panofsky/ Saxl 148-149. 25 He distinguishes between “hypertonizing, hypotonizing and perhaps paratonizing weather,” “where the first refers to an increase in tone, the second to a reduction in tone, and the third to a change in tone, analogous to other types of tension and vibration in the brain with the other corresponding mental signs. A vibration through the whole brain can increase, decrease or change the brain’s native vibration. One could call P ATRICK R AMPONI 156 perturbs the brain’s native vibrations, which leads either to a mental sensation of desire (eutonus) or to tensions that foster aversion (dystonus). Nietzsche himself provided the central terms to locate his sensitivity to weather - Cohn speaks of “meteoroasthesia” (65) - in his philosophy of affect: It is intimately connected to his theses about the Dionysian in his Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, the nature of which Nietzsche describes as follows: In the Dionysian state […] the whole affective system is excited and enhanced […]. The essential feature here remains the ease of metamorphosis, the inability not to react […]. It is impossible for the Dionysian type not to understand any suggestion; he does not overlook any sign of an affect; he possesses the instinct of understanding and guessing in the highest degree, just as he commands the art of communication in the highest degree. He enters into any skin, into any affect: he constantly transforms himself. (eKGWB/ GD-Streifzuege-10) In the anti-bourgeois “Dionysian” state of increased susceptibility to stimulus, the regulation of corporeality and weather goes entirely off track, which manifests itself above all in the correlation between atmospheric, psychic and cognitive fluctuations. Paul Cohn speaks metaphorically of “weather-vane natures,” or neurasthenic “Aeolian harps, played by the slightest wind shift,” (64) and he goes on to specify: To Nietzsche, body and soul were the finest instruments for all climatic and meteorolo-gical influences, the slightest shifts in which he could read off of himself like a fine recording mechanism. He was particularly sensitive to lack of light, humid air, clouds, winds, and abrupt shifts in weather, which his sensitive nervous system couldn’t catch up to quickly enough. […] Nietzsche is the classic example of a meteoropath, and his letters are the first comprehensive diary of such in the literature. (67-68; emphasis in original) Hence the diagnosis of “meteoropathy” (Duhot) which is above all defined as the pathological sensitivity to weather and weather changes. The point here is that the meteorological hypersensitivity noted by Zschorlich and Cohn is both the sign of a degenerate constitution and organic dysfunction as well as the condition for intellectual creativity, the creation of poetry. Nietzsche saw this connection quite clearly as he wrote to Köselitz in Venice on September 4, 1883 shortly before leaving Sils-Maria: How might my anguish and confusion of mind have influenced the colors of the first part [of Zarathustra]? (for the thoughts and directions were granted) strange, old friend! I mean it quite seriously, that Zarathustra came out more cheerier and more comical than it would have otherwise. I could almost prove this with “doc- the tension with positive mental signs, i.e. the appetitive tension, eutonus and speak of eutonic weather, and the tension with negative mental signs dystonus and speak of dystonic weather. […] There is a weather of mental cramps and a weather of their dispersion.” (Cohn 65) Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 157 umentation.” On the other hand: I would have suffered and would suffer far, far, far less, if in the last two years I hadn’t translated motifs from my hermit theory into practice fifty times and been driven to doubt myself by the worst, the gruesome consequences of this “practice.” In this way “Zarathustra” has cheered itself up at my expense, and I have darkened myself at its expense. (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,461) Hence contrary to the implications of the rather passive image of the Aeolian harp, the weather guides Nietzsche’s writing in part by correcting if not sublimating his own meteoropathy: Rather than being merely affected, the Dionysian ‘reads’ the ‘signs’ of his affects. Nietzsche uses the empowering strategy of creatively shaping the weather in the imaginary meteorology of his work to style himself as a weather-maker, as he tells his mother in a postcard from December 3, 1887 from Nice: My dear old mother, we have almost ceaselessly a sad weather that oppresses me: such that neither my health nor my work are making any progress. Otherwise I would have reason to be in good spirits: there were beautiful and unexpected letters from all corners of the earth. Your son is well-nigh powerful: he strengthens and revitalizes, he makes ‘good weather’ for others. (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,962) But Nietzsche the weather-maker is at the same time the “philosophical doctor” who uses the elements of the weather as media of transcription, as he makes unmistakably clear in the fall of 1886 in the preface to the second edition of the Gay Science, written in Genoa: It seems to be written in the language of the thawing wind: high spirits, unrest, contradiction, April weather are present in it, so that one is constantly reminded no less of the proximity of winter than of the triumph over the winter that is coming, must come, and perhaps has already come. (eKGWB/ FW-Vorrede-1; Nietzsche, The Gay Science 32) Yet philosophers, Nietzsche explains in the same preface, are “not objectifying and registering devices with frozen entrails” (preface GS). Nietzsche’s aesthetics of weather can thus be seen as the attempt at a weather-writing that transcends its role as passive instrument in the power of the elements. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche brings into play the ancient model of inspiration: “what the poets of strong times called inspiration” is not just “being the mere medium of overpowering forces” (eKGWB/ EH-Za-3). It is not the weather that speaks through him, rather the physiological reaction of the ecstatic body to weather - from delight to tension to shuddering - transmits the signals to the surface of consciousness. In this sense the cloudiness, the fog or the sunniness of the feelings are not to be located inside of a subject, however constituted. They are not triggers but reactions to an event that does not arise from within but to the contrary seems to befall us from without: like lightning, like an excess of light or even, as Nietzsche writes, “as if the things themselves came inside” (eKGWB/ EH-Za-3). When we speak of a flash of inspiration or of clouded thoughts these are anything but metaphorical figures; they are affec- P ATRICK R AMPONI 158 tive powers that seize us: Weather and the body that is always already tempered by the climate can no longer be divided into subject and object, but rather form an atmospheric unity of reciprocal effect. Johann Gottfried Herder was aware of this when he spoke of a “climatology of the human powers of thought and sensation” (239) of which his era knew far too little. “The whole world will finally be a series of sanatoria” - Climatic Hygiene and Milieu Nietzsche wrote on June 23, 1881 to Heinrich Köselitz in Venice: It is hard for my nature to find the right height and depth, it is essentially a groping about, there are many factors involved that cannot be strictly grasped (e.g. the electricity of the drifting clouds and the effects of the winds: I am convinced that eighty times out of 100 I have these influences to thank for my suffering.) Where is the land with lots of shade, eternally clear skies, a constant strong sea-breeze from morning to evening, with no changes in weather? There, there - I wish to - go! Even if it is outside Europe. (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,119) The allusion to Mignon’s song in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister plays upon the Arcadian aesthetics of harmonious landscapes (where incidentally “a gentle wind from deep-blue heaven blows”) but only in order to decisively strike it out by the preceding sentence. For the reality of Nietzsche’s existential weather plays out in secrecy: The idyllic imagery of a clear sky and shaded spots of the traditional picture of longed-for Italy is foiled by the meteorological domains located beyond the visible and below the perceptual threshold of the external senses, which are the organs of distanced perception: it is no longer the clouds veiling the sky but rather the electrical charge of the atmosphere; it is no longer the breeze on one’s skin, but the physics of wind currents and weather zones that make up Nietzsche’s outer and inner weather. Karl Jaspers was one of the first to describe this new understanding of landscape when he wrote in his famous 1936 study of Nietzsche: “In his world nature and the elements are not like paintings that can be seen or music that can be heard; they are like the unrepresentable type of reality that speaks as itself without mediation” (Jaspers 368). 26 This gives us the precise outlines of Nietzsche’s anti-semiotic understanding of the weather. For this no longer implies the old European notion of landscape 27 and certainly not 26 Karl Jaspers writes in his Nietzsche study: “The causality that influences the emergence of something tells nothing about the value of that which emerges” (he specifies: “the internally non-comprehensible causality of natural events”), but not without coming to speak in a later part of the book about the influence of landscape on Nietzsche’s thought (101). 27 See Bah. On the concept of landscape in Nietzsche see Schneider. Here landscape is still seen in the Ritter-inspired tradition of “aesthetic landscape” which seeks to compensate Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 159 the associated topos of a signifying and significant nature (natura loquans); Nietzsche’s weather landscapes imply an epistemology oriented by the modern natural sciences, an epistemology of invisible, chaotic and contingent influences operating in the ‘reality’ of the meteorological space (see Engell, Siegert and Vogl 5-8). The land of much sun and shade and “with no changes in weather” was, in the end, not sought by Nietzsche outside Europe. 28 He famously spent his last ten years before his collapse in Turin in restless travel, as a “fugitivus errans” (eKGWB/ BVN-1879,869 - letter from July 1879; see also Farago 68- 75) in the climatic triangle of the Italian Riviera, the Côte d’Azur and the high valleys of Grisons. Like a wandering barometer, he plunged himself into a “terrible spell of travelling” (eKGWB/ BVN-1880,17 - letter from 22.03.1880), driven by the weather, fleeing every approaching depth towards dry mountain air or the next coastal climate he found favourable to himself. 29 In March of 1884 he was able to report to Malwida von Meysenburg: “What I need, firstly, secondly, and thirdly […] is bright skies and sunshine without any clouds, never mind the sirocco, my mortal enemy. Nice had on average 220 such days as I need: I wish to carry my work forward under this sky” (eKGWB/ BVN-1884,498). In his first winter in Nice, Nietzsche wrote the third part of Zarathustra, which can be read as a poetics of the mixed zones, time standing still, becalmed air and the mid-day, the ‘midi’ (see also Nieradka-Steiner). But this climatic liberation of an intense and profound life, such as the poetry of Zarathustra celebrates and uses to create its own milieu in which the mind can regenerate itself, was ultimately just a brief stage although Nietzsche’s relation to Nice lasted five winters. Nietzsche’s suffering from the weather is both a physiological and an aesthetic occurrence operating below the threshold of subjective control. This is the motor of his meteorological poetics. The modulation of this poetics, as I will argue in conclusion, is subject to the “regime of illness” (Därmann 138) 30 for the absence of nature with an endless regress of emblematic representations of landscape. 28 On October 28, 1881 he wrote to Franz Overbeck on a postcard: “It is because of the appalling influences of atmospheric electricity on me - they will one day drive me off the earth, there must be better living conditions for my nature. For example on the high plains of Mexico, on the side of the Pacific Ocean (Swiss colony ‘New Bern’). Very, very, very tormented, day after day.” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,163) 29 That it is as if the weather dictates the choice of place is shown by the following passage from a letter from April 4, 1888: “It is not a decision, but a coercion, that I spent the summer of Oberangadin, the winter on the Riviere.” (eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1014) 30 “The regime of illness has Nietzsche solidly in its grasp, hinders him in working, travelling or living and leads him to seek for his very own ‘personal diet,’ modified by place, climate and his felt condition.” (Därmann 138) - I am indebted to Därmann’s detailed study for inspiring many of these considerations on Nietzsche’s climate hygiene, particularly since her concept of an “ethics of dietetic existence” (140) is of vital significance for the meteoropath Nietzsche. P ATRICK R AMPONI 160 that had Nietzsche solidly in its grasp for almost his entire life, as well as the strict hygienic regimen 31 that allows him to bring the truly disorderly and ungovernable into manageable channels and to wrest the “demands of the body” from the weather (eKGWB/ NF-1888,15[89]). Nietzsche complements the inner dietetics he intensively concerned himself with - the strict regulation of his meal-times and eating habits, an alimentary based “ethics of dietetic existence” (Därmann, 140) - with an outer dietetics, primarily climatic hygiene. Here Nietzsche’s concept of “great health” - the “physiological precondition” (eKGWB/ EH-Za-2) of the Zarathustra type - is also relevant for our theme of weather; after all, “great health” includes “getting acclimatized to keen, high air, winter wanderings, to ice and mountains in every sense” (eKGWB/ NF-1885,2[164]), as Nietzsche writes in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals. It would be a mistake, however, to derive from this only that climatic strategy of hardening oneself that is generally associated with the concept of the superman. Rather, Nietzsche follows the old Hippocratic counsel of contraria contraris, curing an illness triggered by certain influences by the means that cause the exact opposite effect. Hence weather therapy or climatic therapy was a self-evident step. Nietzsche was constantly looking for the right place, or better: the suitable climatic milieu to alleviate if not cure his various chronic pains, his stubborn migraines, his light-sensitive, almost blinded eyes and the complicated symptoms of his irregular metabolism. He got most of the practical information about the places that would be climatically favourable to him from the climate therapy guidebooks that were an extremely successful genre in his time. 32 From the countless guidebooks available to the more moneyed spa visitors of the Wilhelminian age and the Fin-de-Siècle we can find one clear schema: Dry and invigorating climates were recommended to those patients suffering from nervous exhaustion syndromes (like Nietzsche himself), for example Nice in the winter and Engadin in the summer; those whose nerves were easily irritated, however, or suffered from diseases of the heart, the circulatory system or the lungs, were advised to seek out mild, humid and less windy milieus like Venice or Tenerife. Nietzsche’s visit to Venice in March of 1880 shows what sort of fatal health effects the wrong choice of place could have. After numerous visits to other health resorts on the Mediterranean Nietzsche found in this city of lagoons a climate diametrically opposed to the dry climate of the Ligurian coast and the Côte d’Azur: 31 Dahlkvist reads Nietzsche’s entire philosophy - particularly Ecce Homo - as a “System of Hygiene” (139). 32 From among the mass of advice literature on medical climatology we can mention the following, which Nietzsche is known to have consulted: Sigmund; Goubet, see Moore 83. Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 161 For the time being the terrible spell of travelling is at an end! And I am conducting a very necessary experiment whether a decidedly ‘depressing’ climate (medically speaking) might not be better for my head than the exciting ones applied so far. Venice has a favorable influence on many with head ailments. (eKGWB/ BVN- 1880,17 - letter from 22.03.1880) But he would soon be disabused of this notion. While the health of other patients profited from the calming, dulling effect of the lagoon weather on the circulatory system, Nietzsche only noticed headaches and melancholy, as he was able to say in retrospect. Nietzsche’s choice of place, as he wrote on June 7, 1881 to his sister, was “a pure experimentation” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,121), like the numerous diets he put himself through. For he had to account “for conditions, that are only so decisive for my type of nature (that of atmospheric electricity); hence I have to try the places out myself” (ibid.). In this way Nietzsche the patient stylized himself as his own doctor 33 - under the southern sun. His obsessive occupation with the weather, as Gregory Moore has demonstrated, is part of the wide-ranging but not thoroughly disciplined discourse around medical climatology and climate theory that became increasingly popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. 34 In these years many doctors who engaged with meteorological phenomena were deeply entrenched in the Hippocratic hygienic tradition and had essentially two functions: on the one hand they were to offer comfort and convalescence to the sick, and on the other hand they served to prevent diseases that spread atmospherically such as cholera, typhus or dysentery. Etiologies of the latter diseases based on miasmic theory were dominant for a long time, even after the speculative discoveries of bacteria. 35 33 For example, he writes on July 9 to his mother: “My brain ailment is very hard to judge; concerning the scientific material that is necessary, I am superior to every doctor. In fact it insults my scientific pride, when you suggest new spas to me and claim that I ‘let my illness run’. […] So far I have only been under my own treatment for 2 years, and if I’ve made a mistake, it’s only due to the fact that I finally gave in to others’ zealous cajoling and made experiments. These include the stay in Naumburg, in Marienbad etc. […], and what I have to do above all is try to eliminate the severe aftereffects of all these false methods that were used to treat me for so long. Do not be angry with me if I seem to rebuff your love and sympathy in this regard. But I very much wish to be my own doctor from now on, and people should say of me that I was a good doctor - and not just for myself alone.” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,125) 34 On this and the following see the wealth of material in the study of Moore 81. - In her standard work on Nietzsche’s history of illness Daniela Volz lists a series of medical and natural-scientific writings that Nietzsche consulted, particularly on the subject of climate and medicine (Voltz 381). Nietzsche owned a copy of the above-mentioned work of Löwenfeld’s, Die moderne Behandlung der Nervenschwäche, with a hand-written reference of Nietzsche’s to the passages about the “beneficial effects of high climates” (Volz 72). - Other sources can be found in Posth 41-57. 35 On the epistemological break around 1860 between the premodern epidemiology and the bacteriological era see King and Rütten. P ATRICK R AMPONI 162 In the 1880s in particular, Nietzsche fervently read all the publications on contemporary meteorology and climatology he could get his hands on. “One is soundly punished for one’s ignorance,” he wrote to his mother and sister on March 14, 1884 from Nice. “If I had only occupied myself in due time with medical, climatological and similar problems, instead of with Suidas and Laertius Diogenes: I wouldn’t be a half-ruined man” (eKGWB/ BVN- 1885,581). The standard works of the time on neo-Hippocratic dietetics and public hygiene as well as medical epidemiology were not very illuminating for Nietzsche (Ramponi). In 1881, with great expectations, he ordered from Overbeck the German edition of the handbook Meteorologie mit Rücksicht auf die Lehre vom Kosmos und ihren Beziehungen zur Medizin und allgemeinen Gesundheitslehre (1859) [“Meteorology with a View to the Doctrine of Cosmos and its Relations to Medicine and General Theory of Health”] by the French doctor Pierre Foissac. Yet he was quickly disappointed. Although he understood that atmospheric electricity is what triggers climactic ailments, as he noted in a letter from November 14, 1881, the “medical meteorology” he was reading was “a science in its infancy and as it concerns my own personal problems a dozen additional question marks” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,167). In summary, meteorology had advanced rapidly since the 1850s, but most experts only knew that atmospheric conditions influenced the human organism and not how exactly they did so or what was to be done about it. Hence Nietzsche found it necessary to develop his own theorems and therapies; he discussed weather problems at every visit to the doctor and tried to link the abstract knowledge about atmospheric physics and air chemistry from natural-scientific works with practical knowledge. Conclusion The central problem that every empirical meteorology faced around 1880 was forecasting the weather. Most larger daily newspapers had large-format weather maps since the 1880s that indicated long-term weather tendencies (Anderson 187-210; Momonier), supplanting the older tables of measurements, which were actually weather retrospectives (see Büttner, “Poetik”). Yet Nietzsche preferred to rely on his own “climatological studies” (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,394) to decipher regular patterns from the contingencies of weather. By 1875 his letters had begun to accumulate detailed weather protocols that were used as the occasion to explain his somatic ailments or his affective and emotional shifts and to make the corresponding diagnosis of his poor health in terms of the weather. Nietzsche speaks of his postal “weather reports,” and he even calls the parts of his letters not directly related to the weather his “intellectual weather report(s)” (eKGWB/ BVN- 1884,525 - letter from 10.08.1884). His real concern however was to impose a Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 163 form onto the unpredictability of the weather, to defeat his “opponent” the weather again and again by calculating it. 36 “That a month of pure clear sky has become a necessity of life for me, I can now see: I cannot much longer bear myself up against this constant change, these gathering clouds! And how much energy of patience I use up vainly in the struggle against this unreasonable element” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,153 - letter from 22.09.1881). Again and again Nietzsche compiles all the weather data available to him from travel literature, spa guidebooks, travel guides, etc. and constructs his own meteorological tables to calculate the statistical probabilities for his next destination. An example of this is the letter to Meta von Salis from June 17, 1888: With the help of meteorological tables I have just ascertained the following, most unlikely sounding truth. “January in Italy” sunny days rainy days degree of clouds Turin 10.3 2 4.9 Florence 9.1 9.7 5.7 Rome 8.2 10 5.8 Naples 7.7 10.8 5.2 Palermo 3.2 13.5 6.5 This means that in winter, the further south one goes, the worse the weather is (- fewer clear days, more days of rain and a continually clouded sky -) And we all instinctively believe the opposite! ! (eKGWB/ BVN- 1888,1048 - letter from 17.06.1888) Whereas this elaborate meteorological statistic seemed to serve him as a means for choosing his next place to live, his other empirical weather obsessions can be ascribed to the complex of meteoropathy. For ultimately, as he argues in Ecce Homo, his own meteoropathic body is the only valid meteorological procedure: Now when from long practice I can read off climatic effects and meteorological origins from myself as if from a very delicate and dependable instrument, and even on a short journey, say, from Turin to Milan, can physiologically verify in myself the change in the degree of humidity, I reflect with horror upon the ghastly fact that my life up to the last ten years, the life-threatening years, has always been played out in places false and expressly forbidden to me. (eKGWB/ EH-Klug-2; Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 26-27.) One’s own body is more precise than any barometer, thermometer or hygrometer as an instrument to measure the finest changes in weather. It is the secretive electrical phenomena of the atmosphere that particularly worry Nietzsche and that his reading of hygienic guides and medical meteorology was unable to sufficiently explain. Thus he wrote in a letter to Franz Overbeck on November 14, 1881: Maybe we now know more - in Paris I should have gone to the electricity exhibit, partly to learn the newest information, partly to be an object of the exhibition: for as a sensor of electrical changes and so-called weather prophet I can compete with the apes and I am probably a “specialty.” Could Hagenbach perhaps say what 36 On the semantics of the “struggle” with the weather and the “topos of calculation” in Nietzsche’s weather letters see Posth 37-38. P ATRICK R AMPONI 164 clothes (or chains, rings etc.) are best to protect oneself from these all too strong influences? (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,167) In summary we can say that Nietzsche’s meteoropathology leaves behind the causal determinism of climate-theoretical models in focusing on the human body, which, as a meteoropathic body, is no longer subject to any clear laws and thus inserts itself as an unknown into the statistics of weather forecasting as well as the equation of culture and climate. The way the meteoropathic body responds to the specific environmental influences of climate and weather cannot be derived from any general law that distinguishes between cause and effect - in this point Nietzsche follows Herder’s thoughts about climate. We could say that climate theory has come to its end, in terms of philosophical history, with Hegel, who had recompiled everything that the entire philosophy of weather from Hippocrates to Montesquieu had dreamed up. For the global success of the Occident shows the historical philosopher that it does in fact have the best and most ideal climate. After Hegel it is the theoreticians of milieus in the nineteenth century who individualize climate theory so to speak: Rather than climatic zones determining the character of peoples, it is the environment (the milieu) that determines the individual person. Nietzsche was quite familiar with Hippolyte Taine, and once called him the “most substantial mind in today’s France” (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,849 - letter from 19.05.1887). At the same time, as a practical meteorologist himself, Nietzsche contradicts all the regularities of milieu theory. The important point here is that the theory of milieus fails as soon as people start to move. For Nietzsche they do this primarily for health reasons. Medical meteorology as a healing art is the test of all climatic schema. Accordingly, the aphorism 188 from The Wanderer and his Shadow bears the following succinct rubric: “Intellectual and physical transplantation as remedies” (eKGWB/ WS-188) and it exemplifies Nietzsche’s milieu theory as transformed by his meteoropathy: The different cultures are so many intellectual climates, every one of which is peculiarly harmful or beneficial to this or that organism. History as a whole, as the knowledge of different cultures, is the science of remedies, but not the science of the healing art itself. We still need a physician who can make use of these remedies, in order to send every one - temporarily or permanently - to the climate that just suits him. To live in the present, within the limits of a single culture, is insufficient as a universal remedy: too many highly useful kinds of men, who cannot breathe freely in this atmosphere, would perish. […] Add to this cure of intellects that humanity, on considerations of bodily health, must strive to discover by means of a medical geography what kinds of degeneration and disease are caused by each region of the earth, and conversely, what ingredients of health the earth affords: and then, gradually, nations, families, and individuals must be transplanted long and permanently enough for them to become masters of their inherited Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 165 physical infirmities. The whole world will finally be a series of sanatoria. (eKGWB/ WS-188) Hence Nietzsche’s meteorology, in passing through meteoropathy and medical meteorology, returns once more to a geophilosophical concept of a “sense of earth,” that situates individual milieus beyond the cultural and political boundaries of peoples and fatherlands (Shapiro “Beyond”). 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