ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche’s letters are filled with detailed, almost obsessive, descriptions of the weather. Yet his fascination with meteorology is not frivolous, and, at a time when this new science overlapped with several other dominant discourses in nineteenth-century European culture — physics, biology, medicine, hygiene — many of his contemporaries shared his curiosity. Meteorological conditions did undoubtedly have an impact upon Nietzsche’s work, though perhaps not in the insidious way he sometimes assumed. Nietzsche’s own habit of self-doctoring mirrors wider cultural developments in the nineteenth century — the enormous explosion of medical and biological knowledge, and especially the increasing popularity and availability of self-help books and faddish do-it-yourself cures. In Daybreak, Nietzsche distinguishes between two different kinds of morality: a ‘joyful and restless’ one that accompanies an increase in nerve force and a gloomy one which is symptomatic of a decrease in nerve force.
