/lit/ - Literature

Is this guy just for edgy teenagers?

I have just finished 2 Nietzsche's biographies (I have studied his entire ouvre as an auto-didact), and apparently Nietzsche did extensively drugs for 3 decades: opium and chloral hydrate, mostly.
Of course he used to take them for his ailments (opium for headaches, chloral hydrate for insomnia), yet he ended up abusing chronically all of them, and apparently he was extremely influenced by it. His entire imagination (as in "mental visualization") was coopted by drugs (he used to suffer from closed eyes hallucinations that troubled him deeply, the most famous account has him seeing flowers multiplicating extremely fast everytime he closed his eyes), and his poetic sense was, self-admittedtly, shaped by his opium use.

Now, so far I have always read Nietzsche as an essentially sober philosopher (I might have been tricked by him rejecting alcohol in Ecce Homo), but apparently this is not the case. I've started to think about it, and about my (very sparse, especially compared to his) drug experiences. The link between said experiences and his philosophy seems to be the mysterious, almost mystical, outlook on reality that is sometimes accompanied to these drugs, which resembles (to mention a unaltered experience) derealization: that feeling when one is able to loom at reality in a completely unadultered way, being this able to "almost" (keyword) grasp at something, as if the truth is just there and you're one step from understanding it.

I've started to think about his main concepts in this optic, which is completely removed from the usual human experience. Let's take for example the concept of übermensch.
The common understanding of this concept is still fairly traditional: the übermensch is usually seen still as a human with perfected istincts, but still essentially human. We already know what he does: he says yes, he says "I want" instead of "I have to", he looks from above, he creates and so on.
This figure has almost seemed recognizable to me, but suddenly I've got the impression that for übermensch Nietzsche meant instead something downright incomprehensible: a man whose thoughts simply can't be understood, who, on the other hand, has a full understanding of everything that stands beyond him. To try to imagine the übermensch thought process is like trying to understand the thought process of a fish: it's simply something else, no amount of contemplation will get you there. The cognitive jump is inhuman. The models that are usually used to define übermensches (Nietzsche used often Goethe as an example) are merely a metaphor, in the same way a man can be a metaphor for a überAffe (overmonkey).

My strongerst impression (of which I'm not sure, hence why I am putting it in this incomplete form here on /lit/) is that drugs lead Nietzsche to think mostly in mysteries, in concepts that were meant to be grasped only barely.

What's your opinion on the matter, and what details and tendencies have you (yes, you anon) noticed in his writings?

The best nihilsts in history:
Nietzche is my fav philosopher. What anons think about Nietzche?

>>9017879
>Power above happiness
That's my boy.