He commenced the long studies which he had assigned himself. He examined firstly Dühring's book, The Value of Life. Dühring was a Positivist who led the combat against the disciples of Schopenhauer and Wagner. "All idealism deceives," he told them, "all life that seeks to escape beyond life vows itself to chimera." Friedrich Nietzsche had no objection to offer to these premises. "A sane life carries its worth in itself," said Dühring. "Asceticism is unhealthy and the sequel of an error." "No," answered Nietzsche. Asceticism is an instinct which the most noble, the strongest among men have felt: it is a fact, it must be taken into account if the value of life is to be appreciated. And even if a prodigious error be here indicated as being at work, then the possibility of such an error should be placed amongst the sombre features of being.
"The tragedy of life is not irreducible," said Dühring, "the sovereignty of egoism is only apparent; the altruistic instincts work in the human soul."
Egoism an appearance! exclaimed Nietzsche. Here Dühring falls into childishness. Ich wollte er machte mir hier nichts vor! God be praised if it were true! He talks nonsense, and if he seriously believes what he says, he is ripe for all the socialisms. Nietzsche finally held out as against Dühring for the tragic philosophy that Heraclitus and Schopenhauer had taught him. There is no possible evasion, all evasion is a lure and a cowardice. Dühring says it and he speaks truly; but he attenuates the task in presenting a sweetened image of that life in which we are set. It is either stupidity or falsehood: life is hard.
Friedrich Nietzsche was gay, or appeared so. In the evening (he did not work because of his eyes) his sister read Walter Scott's novels to him. He liked their simple narration. "The serene art, the andante," he writes; he also liked the heroic, naïve, and complicated adventures. "What fellows! what stomachs!" he exclaimed at the recitals of the interminable feasts; and Fräulein Nietzsche, seeing him so cheerful, was astonished to hear him a moment later play and develop at great length his Hymn to Solitude.
She was astonished not without reason: the gaiety of her brother was artificial; his sadness was real; he dissembled with her, and doubtless with himself.
He had begun to study Balfour Stewart's book on the conservation of energy: he stopped at the first pages. It was odious to him to work thus without the consolation of art, or the real joy of hoping. He thought he would be more interested in the Indian wisdom, and took up the English translation of the Sutta Nipâta. Only too well he understood its radical nihilism.
"When I am ill and in bed," he writes in December to Gersdorff, "I let myself be oppressed by the persuasion that life is without value, and all our ends illusory...." His crises were frequent: every fortnight he was disabled by the headaches, internal cramp, twitching of the eyes, which laid hold of him.
"I wander here and there, alone like a rhinoceros," Nietzsche had kept in mind this final phrase of a chapter of the Sutta Nipâta, and applied it to himself with melancholy humour. His best friends were then marrying. Nietzsche was ready to abuse marriage and women: one is rarely sincere when one speaks thus, and we know he was not.
"I have more and better friends than I deserve," he wrote in October, 1874, to Fräulein von Meysenbug; "what I now wish myself, I tell you in confidence, is a good wife, and as soon as possible. Then life will have given me all that I shall have asked of it. The rest is my affair."