“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” would be among German philosopher Friedrick Wilhelm Nietzsche’s greatest philosophical hits, but researchers scouring some of his late, unpublished writings say he was working on a follow-up saying.
Notes unearthed from towards the end of his life have revealed that he was having second thoughts, and toying with a number of corollaries to the famous saying, in an unpublished volume of notes called Entschuldigung, auf Nachdenken (Sorry, On Second Thoughts).
Among his amendments to a life’s work was, “What does kill you doesn’t make you stronger.” This is thought to have been the result of ruminating on the likely effects of having tertiary syphilis, a condition that is widely blamed for Nietzsche slipping into madness.
“Later in his life, before he lost his mind to dementia, Nietsche seems to have realised that there may have been different qualities and types of suffering, some of them not beneficial to the sufferer,” says Professor Roger Lithcoe, from the Institute of Nietzsche studies at Heissenbaden.
“He was also toying with a follow up to the famous phrase, but sadly died before they were published.” They never appeared posthumously either, “A series of publishers looked at them but didn’t think they were as catchy as his earlier one.”
“It is a great shame that Nietzsche’s On Second Thoughts did not come into the light sooner, or his earlier saying may not have been used so widely to justify suffering sadism, coercion and neglect, often within educational institutions.”
“We only need to look at ideas like, ‘No pain, no gain’, ‘Tough love’, and the idea that suffering build character to see its ongoing influence,” says Lithcoe. “Nietzsche realised suffering is not necessarily of educational value. Endurance has its uses, but it only teaches us so much.”
In a lucid spell just before his death Nietzscheis said to have commented to a nurse, “Ich habe seit vielen Jahren Syphilis, aber ich habe nichts gelernt,” or, “I have had syphilis for many years, but I have learn nothing from it.”