NIETZSCHE IS NOW the most often cited philosopher in the Western tradition. His name gets dropped in novels and movies, from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Blazing Saddles and A Fish Called Wanda. The literature about and against Nietzsche is voluminous, but despite a great deal of good scholarship in the past half century, old myths and prejudices remain prominent in the public consciousness. The infamous ad hominem argument, “Nietzsche was crazy, so don’t take anything he wrote seriously,” can still be heard in some philosophy seminars. Nietzsche’s supposedly right-wing political views continue to be cited and abused in intelligent street conversation, and Nietzsche’s supposed hatred of women is so well established as a bulwark of patriarchy that it is accepted even by those who should know better. Nietzsche’s alleged affiliation with Hitler and the Nazis survives fifty years after Walter Kaufmann debunked that vile association; and Nietzsche’s imagined love of raw, brute power remains a staple of quasi-philosophical college lore.
In order to even begin to make some headway into the question of what Nietzsche really said, it is first necessary to say with some confidence what he did not say, what he did not do, what did not motivate him, what he did not think. We begin, therefore, with thirty rumors about Nietzsche, many of them prominent mainly among those who condemn him without reading him, but others common even among his more enthusiastic readers. Let us begin with:
It is true that Nietzsche suffered from mental illness at the end of his life. For his last ten years, from 1889 until his death in 1900, he was utterly incompetent (in the clinical sense), and during this time he did not write at all. Some scholars claim to detect some craziness in his last book, Ecce Homo, but what is interpreted as impending insanity (and the key word here is impending) is much more convincingly understood as ironic, self-mocking genius. Those who attempt to make the case that Nietzsche was already mad typically interpret Nietzsche’s hyperbole and bombast as indications of delusions of grandeur. For example, Nietzsche entitles the chapters of Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Excellent Books,” and “Why I Am a Destiny.” But Nietzsche was a masterful and uninhibited wit, and irony as a form of philosophizing had its precedents. Socrates, considering the oracle’s pronouncement that he was the wisest man in Athens, announced to everyone who would listen (including the jury that would condemn him) that he was the wisest only because he knew that he was completely ignorant. Nietzsche’s implicit comparison with Socrates is hardly modest, but pseudo-self-aggrandizement hardly counts as “crazy.”
Nietzsche, while in Turin, in January 1889, is said to have “collapsed” into madness when he saw a horse being beaten by its driver. He walked up to the horse, attempted to protect it by hugging it, and lost consciousness. After he was taken back to where he was staying, Nietzsche wrote some peculiar letters to friends, who, consequently, became worried about his sanity. The letter that resulted in his institutionalization was written to Jakob Burckhardt, who had been Nietzsche’s colleague while he was a classics professor in Basel. This letter, dated January 6, 1889, began.
Dear Professor:
In the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices however and wherever one lives.…1
Nietzsche’s writing in the voice of God the Creator, who has restrained his egoism enough to be content in that role, distressed Burckhardt. He showed it to another of Nietzsche’s friends, Franz Overbeck, who had also received a letter from Nietzsche, this one signed “Dionysus” and claiming “I am just having all anti-Semites shot.”2 Overbeck went to Turin and took Nietzsche to a nursing home in Basel, eventually arranging for his hospitalization in an asylum in Jena (in the eastern part of Germany). Nietzsche was released a short while later into the care of his mother. After her death responsibility for him fell to his sister Elisabeth, who moved him to Weimar and quite literally put him on display for visitors in her efforts to develop a cult around him and his philosophy. These efforts were sufficiently successful that she later got Hitler interested in Nietzsche’s writings.
Nietzsche may have been “crazy,” in the vernacular sense, in the last years of his life, but this does not mean that he was mentally ill before 1889. But even if he displayed symptoms of mental disturbance (and how many of history’s great philosophers have not been neurotic, at least?), one must nevertheless admit that much of what he says, though often extreme, is hardly insane.
Nietzsche’s alleged misogyny is still the target of routine feminist attacks, but the truth is that Nietzsche struggled with many of the same ideas feminists today have been grappling with. He recognized the importance of education in determining the specifics of gender roles, for example, and he suggested that men and women have different perspectives that affect their understanding of the world. Because he shares a number of concerns with our era’s feminists, a number of feminist thinkers are currently reinvestigating Nietzsche’s ideas about sex and gender.
It is certainly true that Nietzsche shared at least some of the male chauvinism of his times, and he was no doubt influenced by his mentor Arthur Schopenhauer, who made many disparaging comments about women. Nietzsche’s personal relationships with women were complex, but they do not betray signs of hatred so much as confusion. Twice he proposed marriage to women so early on in the relationship that he could not reasonably have expected an acceptance. A more likely diagnosis is that he panicked, that he sought relief rather than acceptance, that he did not really want to get married.
Despite his romantic record and his largely solitary lifestyle, Nietzsche was close friends with several women of exceptional talent. One of his would-be fiancées, Lou Andreas-Salomé, was an accomplished writer and critic in her own right, and the two developed an intimate friendship of great significance to both of them, although the romance itself lasted only a few months. In a famous photograph with Nietzsche and their mutual friend (and Nietzsche’s rival) Paul Rée, Lou is perched in a wagon, holding a whip over the two men. This picture is often “Exhibit A” in the case against Nietzsche for his sexism. But Nietzsche himself posed the picture, and we should not forget who holds the whip, nor the joking spirit in which the picture was made.
The photograph with Lou may have added a dimension of private humor (most likely black humor) to a scene in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that Nietzsche wrote shortly after their estrangement. This scene presents Nietzsche’s protagonist Zarathustra’s reporting of a conversation with an old woman, which concluded with her comment, “You are going to women? Don’t forget your whip.”3 As in the photograph, the whip is introduced here by a woman, and the scene is far more complex than the usual out-of-context quote would reveal. Given that Zarathustra has been rhapsodizing about his own fantasies of heterosexual love, the old woman’s suggestion hints that she does not think that women will participate so readily. Far from endorsing the naturalness of male control, the old woman presents the sexes as engaged in a power struggle that the male is by no means assured of winning.
First, the obvious: Hitler did not form the Nazi party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) until 1919 and he did not ascend to power with it until 1933, several decades after Nietzsche’s death (in 1900). In the plainest sense, therefore, Nietzsche could not have been a Nazi. Nevertheless, there is a famous photograph (“Exhibit B”) of Hitler staring eyeball-to-eyeball at a bust of Nietzsche in the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar in 1934. But let us remind ourselves that there is little to support such suspicions of “backward causation.” Even if Hitler did accept or adopt some ideas of Nietzsche’s (and we have no evidence that he actually read much of Nietzsche’s work) it does not follow that Nietzsche is responsible for what Hitler did with those ideas. (Likewise, a philosopher such as Hegel is not responsible for the use of some of his political ideas by the Italian dictator and former philosophy professor Benito Mussolini, as Karl Marx was not responsible for the Soviet monster Joseph Stalin). To be sure, monstrous use was made of some of the ideas that Nietzsche defended—for example, eugenics, the project of manipulating human reproduction to produce the most desirable characteristics. But almost every intellectual of the period took eugenics seriously (including George Bernard Shaw in England). Hitler’s use of the gas chamber in the service of his own perverse plan to shape the species was not a strategy Nietzsche either suggested or imagined.
Nevertheless, it can be argued that even if Nietzsche was not a member of the Nazi party, many of his ideas and attitudes prefigured the views of the Nazis—notably, his more general views about race and human inequality, his celebration of power and “might makes right,” his championing of the Übermensch (super-man) and “master morality,” and his condemnation of the weak. But few of these doctrines, as they were presented by Nietzsche, mean anything like what the Nazis took them to mean. Nietzsche expressed his views on race, like his views on just about everything, in an uncensored fashion. He did believe that many character traits were inherited, including some that were acquired by generations of one’s ancestors adopting a certain way of life or developing a particular diet. But what he praised most was miscegenation, the mixing of the races, not the “racial purity” idealized by the Nazis. And although he thought the desirability of genetic endowments varied across the species, Nietzsche went out of his way to ridicule the Germans and their “Aryan” pretensions to racial superiority. The “blond beast” he famously refers to is just that—a lion, the “king of the jungle,” not the blond-haired German soldier of Nazi iconography. Whatever else he might have thought of them, Nietzsche did not think the Germans were either super-men or masters.
We will discuss Nietzsche’s supposed celebration of power shortly, but let us say firmly here that it has nothing to do with the infamous “might makes right” argument that is put forward by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic and is often associated with Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century polemicist and consultant to princes. Nietzsche famously criticizes weakness, but it is mainly spiritual weakness that he has in mind, not political powerlessness.
Perhaps most important of all in the list of differences between Nietzsche’s views and the Nazis’ was the fact that Nietzsche was no anti-Semite. Indeed he became an anti-anti-Semite. (Consider the flamboyant letter to Overbeck when his sanity broke.) Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, is the manipulative presence behind the Nietzsche-Nazi myth. She was indeed sympathetic to the growing fascist cause and married to a notorious anti-Semite of whom Nietzsche thoroughly disapproved. (He had even refused to attend their wedding.) It was she, years after her brother’s death, who invited Hitler for his “photo-op” at the Nietzsche Archive. Elisabeth took over Nietzsche’s literary estate after his incapacitation, and she even published apocryphal books and “editions” of Nietzsche’s notes under his by-then famous name. With her husband, Bernhard Förster, she tried to found a “pure” Aryan colony in the jungles of South America. (It failed.)
Unfortunately, Elisabeth’s political views became firmly attached to Nietzsche’s name, and the association survived even the exposé of her forgeries and misappropriations of Nietzsche’s works. Yet we can say with confidence, that Nietzsche was no Nazi and that he shared virtually none of the Nazis’ vicious ideas about the “Thousand Year Reich” and the superiority of the German race. Indeed, Nietzsche famously declared himself “a good European” and lamented the fact that his native language was German. He spent virtully his entire adult life, from his professorship in Switzerland through his voluntary exile in and around the Alps, until his last moments of sanity in northern Italy, outside of Germany. Throughout his career he ridiculed the folly of taking German military victories as signs of cultural superiority. The fact that many German soldiers in World War I carried Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in their backpacks is a great and tragic irony.
Germany has a long history of anti-Semitism, dating back (at least) to the Middle Ages. Jews were the target of hostility from the Christian majority long before Hitler and his concentration camps. It is much to Nietzsche’s credit, then, living where he did and surrounded by anti-Semites, that he refused to share their intolerance and came to openly denounce anti-Semitism.
Nevertheless, Jews were the subject of many of Nietzsche’s reveries. For a German Christian to speak of Jews, especially when his tone is so often ironic and cutting, is to invite charges of anti-Semitism. Nietzsche’s mistaken reputation as a Nazi and a fascist aggravates the complaint, and the fact that Nietzsche is so often quoted out of context provides evidence for those who would claim that he, like many Germans of his time, hated Jews.
In fact, many of Nietzsche’s comments stemmed from his scholarly, historical interests. As a philologist, he was interested in both the origins of Christianity in Judaism and the complex relation between the Jews and the Greeks, particularly around the time of Philo of Alexandria and Saul of Tarsus (Saint Paul). As a student of what we would now call anthropology, he was also interested in the comparison of societies, the “Jewish race” included. As a moral historian he was deeply interested in the role of the Jews in the development of Western morality.
Nietzsche did have mixed feelings about Jews, as he did about most peoples, including the Germans, the English, and most Christians. We should remember, however, that he often characterizes Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism. What he finds objectionable in the Jewish moral outlook he usually finds in the Christian perspective as well. Some of his seemingly negative comments about Jews can be seen as barbs aimed at Christian anti-Semites, Nietzsche turning their own slurs back on them. For example, he describes Jesus as “too Jewish,” since he failed to recognize that “if God wished to become an object of love, he should have given up judging and justice first of all.… The founder of Christianity was not refined enough in his feelings at this point—being a Jew.”4
In the first book of On the Genealogy of Morals, similarly, he criticizes Judaism while describing Christianity as derivative and less creative. Nietzsche unmistakably refers to Jews when he introduces the idea of resentment (he uses the more general French term, ressentiment) giving birth to “slave morality.” “All that has been done on earth against ‘the noble,’ ‘the powerful,’ ‘the masters,’ ‘the rulers,’ fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them.” Theirs is “an act of the most spiritual revenge.”5 Nietzsche grudgingly praises this boldly “creative” act, and he notes that any such race “is bound to become cleverer than any noble race.” And if the Jews are viewed as the defenders of “the people” (or “the slaves,” “the herd,” or “the mob”), Nietzsche writes, dripping with irony, then “no people ever had a more world historical mission.”6
Nietzsche is sharply critical not only of Judaism but of the entire sweep of Western history that followed. For Jews themselves, Nietzsche shows not malice but a strange fascination:
The Jews [as compared to the Romans] were the priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt an unequaled popular-moral genius; one only has to compare similarly gifted nations—the Chinese or the Germans, for instance—with the Jews, to sense which is of the first and which of the fifth rank.7
If one is looking for anti-Semitism in Nietzsche’s life, one need not look far. His sister and brother-in-law of course, but also Nietzsche’s early hero, Richard Wagner—all were anti-Semites. And in Wagner’s case this was one of the reasons why Nietzsche turned against him.
Again, if it were not for the Nazis, eugenics—the selection of “desirable” human characteristics for reproduction and the exclusion of “undesirable” characteristics—would probably not be a matter of ferocious debate. Among the nineteenth century’s proponents of eugenics were numbered virtually all the progressive thinkers of Europe, as we have mentioned; and the actual practice of eugenics, in the sense of choosing a mate with some thought toward the traits of one’s offspring, has taken place ever since men and women first noticed the connection between sex and babies. Of course, like any gain of human control over natural and hitherto uncontrollable processes—the prolongation of life, the preselection of sex in pregnancy, the ability to clone and artificially reproduce in laboratory conditions—it has its dangers and the potential for abuse. Yet the idea of minimizing debilitating and lethal birth defects and improving general intelligence and well-being is, except in deranged political agendas and extreme laissez-faire theologies, beyond rebuke, and current scientific research continues to make steps toward realizing such goals. Yes, Nietzsche favored breeding a race that was more intelligent, free-thinking, creative, and less resentful than the folks he saw all around him, but he had few practical ideas about how this would be implemented. Being childless, he obviously did not engage in the practice himself.
Nevertheless, even if Nietzsche was not a Nazi or an anti-Semite (so the argument goes), he was certainly a fascist. He attacked democracy and ridiculed the idea of equality. He believed in government by the strong (whether or not he would have claimed that “might makes right”) and he praised some of the most notorious tyrants in Western history, Napoleon for one, Cesare Borgia for another.
In fact, Nietzsche was apolitical, if “political” has to do with endorsing social movements, parties, or causes. He described political parties as a manifestation of humanity’s “herding” tendencies, and as being only negligibly distinct from one another. His “praise” for the cruel Borgia was an ironic put-down of Wagner’s character Parsifal, the “holy fool” who seeks the Holy Grail, and his comment deliberately outrageous: “Those to whom I said in confidence that they should sooner look even for a Cesare Borgia than for a Parsifal, did not believe their own ears.”8 Napoleon, we tend to forget, was chastised as a dangerous liberal in Germany, not as an autocrat. Several distinguished authors have labored to show that Nietzsche was in fact a political thinker, but the range of their views, from liberalism to authoritarianism, shows, even more clearly than the absence of any identifiable political doctrines in Nietzsche’s texts, that no coherent political viewpoint emerges from his work. Nietzsche attacks democracy and socialism, but he attacks with equal ferocity autocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, theocracy, nationalism, militarism, racism, intolerance, and political stupidity of all kinds. If he defends any kind of political notion, it is aristocracy, “the rule by the best,” a notion he shared, ironically, with his favorite target, Socrates. Also like Socrates, Nietzsche abjured personal involvement in politics and paid full attention to the question of individual virtue, what Socrates summarized as “the good of one’s soul.”
Nietzsche was interested in individuals and their self-realization, and he is concerned with great states, as he puts it, only insofar as they are capable of producing (a few) great individuals. The virtues Nietzsche praises are not political virtues, and it is of little interest to him whether they have political consequences. A philosopher who praises solitude and artistic creativity is not likely to have a sympathetic ear for the fascist rant of submerging one’s individuality in the State and conforming to its laws as a matter of spiritual necessity.
In line with his emphasis on individual self-realization, Nietzsche does have some socially relevant ideas, for example, about the nature of education and child rearing (although he had no children himself and spent very little time with any). He had harsh words for democracy, but so did Plato. His comments are not very different in their tone or temper from the routine complaints we hear today (from democrats) about uneducated and ignorant voters who are easily led astray by demagogues, about the irrationality of making delicate and important strategic decisions by majority vote, about the need for leadership and wisdom at the top rather than simply a popular mandate through polls. Yet despite his opposition to democracy, Nietzsche was the very opposite of a fascist. He was a true believer in individual initiative and originality, and if he believed in any politics at all it was a politics in which there would be no need to be “political.”
One of the best-known phrases from Nietzsche’s philosophy is “the will to power” (der Wille zur Macht). Nietzsche coined this expression as an alternative to pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s “will to life,” the alleged motive of self-preservation that explained all beings’ continued efforts in life, despite the suffering involved. Nietzsche’s seeming celebrations of “will to power” are typically at the expense of Schopenhauer. As opposed to the pessimistic vision associated with “will to life,” Nietzsche posits that life is “will to power,” the enthusiastic drive to enhance vitality to act on the world (rather than reacting to it).
Not at all a modest author, Nietzsche often praised himself for discovering that human behavior is motivated by the desire for power. He did not, however, praise either the mechanism or many of its expressions, much less raw instances of power-mongering. Indeed, he claims, “Power makes stupid.”9 We might note that the German word for “power” is Macht, not Reich, indicating something more like personal strength than political might. One might think that Nietzsche’s own lack of political power suggests he would not have been familiar enough with it to adore it, but as Nietzsche would have been the first to point out, those without power are among the most likely to praise it and crave it.
Nietzsche’s “will to power” is not about political maneuverings but a psychological hypothesis about what drives human (and animal) behavior. He rejects what he sees as the rampantly hedonistic theory of his English (and some German) counterparts, their idea that people (and animals) are universally motivated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Throughout his works Nietzsche insightfully catalogues cases of human behavior that cannot be explained by the hedonist paradigm. Heroes and martyrs accept the most excruciating pain and an agonizing death, not to gain pleasure or avoid worse pain but to prove something, to make a point, to win a great victory.
None of this points to anything resembling political power, or, for that matter, power over other people. Indeed, what Nietzsche most often celebrates under this rubric is self-discipline and creative energy, and it is not so much having power or even feeling power that Nietzsche cites as the motivation of our behavior as the need to increase one’s strength and vitality to do great things—for example, to write great books in philosophy.
Nietzsche’s remark “God is dead”10 is often conflated—or simply confused—with Ivan Karamazov’s desperate statement in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “If God does not exist, then all is permitted!” But Nietzsche, unlike Dostoyevsky, never thought that values come from God. Some values are part of our biological makeup, the premium we place on health, for example. Others are socially constructed, and still others emerge from the creative activity of robust individuals who formulate their own judgments, independent of any social or religious sanctions. It is true that Nietzsche predicts that with “the death of God” (that is, as people come to realize that belief in God no longer constrains their behavior), people will come to doubt their previous values and even doubt that values are possible. But this is a diagnosis, not a proclamation, and Nietzsche anticipates the coming of such a world, already in evidence, with proper horror. Even if Nietzsche thinks it desirable that the death of God will lead to the dismantling of old moral codes, he is far from thinking that it does not matter how one lives. To the contrary, if there is no God and no afterlife, this life is all that matters.
Given the horror with which Nietzsche predicted the coming of nihilism in Europe and the vehemence with which he denounced the nihilism he saw as inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is surely a misunderstanding to say, as so many do, that he himself was a nihilist. His mouthpiece, Zarathustra, does indeed declare. “What is falling, we should still push,”11 but it is amply clear that the purpose of destroying some already rotting structures (and beliefs) is to make room for building new ones.
“Nihilism” was a relatively new concept in Europe in Nietzsche’s time. It was invented by the generation of Russian writers that included Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883), who in his novel Fathers and Sons used the term to refer to the rebellious younger generation who rejected their parents’ conservative values. Nietzsche defines nihilism in his notes with the cryptic remark “the highest values devaluate themselves.”12 But it is clear in everything he says about nihilism that he sees it as a sign of decadence and is in no way in favor of it.
Even some of his admirers claim that Nietzsche’s philosophy is completely destructive, or deconstructive, that he has nothing positive or affirmative to tell us. But Nietzsche’s philosophy is nothing if not affirmative, even if he does spend an enormous amount of time and energy criticizing and lambasting those people and ideas who oppose or undermine the positive vision he embraces. Nietzsche is not merely a destroyer, a nihilist who undermines everything. Paraphrasing Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, who claims, “I am not a destroyer of companies,” Nietzsche might well say, “I am not a destroyer of the virtues, I am a liberator of them.”
One of the best-known figures in Nietzsche’s philosophy, in part due to the lavish parody by George Bernard Shaw in his popular play Man and Superman (subtitled: A Comedy and a Philosophy) is the Übermensch, the “overman” or, in the more comical and ordinary translation, “the Superman.” Although Shaw’s rendition of the Übermensch pictured him as a sophisticated and philosophically suave defender of the “Life Force” that drives the universe (Shaw’s own philosophy), subsequent references have only heightened the image of the Übermensch as some sort of crude barbarian, culminating, not surprisingly, in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s characterization in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian. This cartoon image of the Übermensch, which Nietzsche does not forestall in his brief and cryptic announcements in Zarathustra (“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman”13), makes a mockery of much that Nietzsche valued—aesthetic sensitivity, humor and even self-mockery, creativity, and, despite his reputation, social grace and courtesy.
Another basis for the rumor that Nietzsche admires barbarians is his preference for the morality of the “masters” of ancient Greece over the “slavish” morality of the modern world. Although Nietzsche clearly includes in this allusion the less than fully civilized heroes of the Trojan War (1200 B.C.E.), these were not simply barbarian warriors fighting over captive slave girls. Primarily, Nietzsche was referring to the creative and sophisticated Greeks of the Golden Age of Pericles (fifth century B.C.E.). They were distinguished by their “nobility,” by which Nietzsche means not privileged birth but style and refinement. In Daybreak he explicitly associates the position of the “masters” with cultivated manners; he observes that a person who is aware of having power becomes “very fastidious and noble in his tastes.”14 Nietzsche urges his contemporaries in The Gay Science to aspire, in the fashion of such “masters,” to “ ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art!”15 For the barbarians of his own time (Otto von Bismarck, for example) Nietzsche had nothing but scorn.
In 1924 two exceptional students at the University of Chicago, Nathan F. Leopold and Richard A. Loeb, plotted the gratuitous murder of a child named Bobby Franks, supposedly thus demonstrating their status as Übermenschen, after reading Nietzsche. I hope that we need not make the point here that they seriously misunderstood Nietzsche. But the legend has been passed down since their trial, popularized in the novel Compulsion by Meyer Levin and dramatized first as a play and then a movie in 1959 (with Orson Welles playing the boys’ defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow). The legend has been supplemented by a number of other deranged criminal acts in which Nietzsche and other exciting philosophers were said to have influenced overly suggestible sociopaths who sought something other than their bad brain chemistry to blame for their atrocities. Once again, we want to proclaim, rather indignantly, that an author is not responsible for vile misreadings of his works.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s inspirational effect on students cannot be denied; and while most of the time their Nietzschean rebelliousness takes on forms no more dangerous than a couple of extra beers or a rude English composition essay, there are some very real dangers in Nietzsche’s militant prose. All the more reason, then, to try to understand and get across what Nietzsche really meant, which was not ruthlessness but a soul-searching appreciation for those values that might make life more vigorous and healthy. More than any other philosopher, Nietzsche is reknowned for urging that we affirm life. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [literally, “love of fate,” the embracing of one’s fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.” 16 How tragic, then, that murder has ever been committed in his name.
This much is true: Nietzsche spent most of his adult life sick and in pain. He had great difficulty sleeping and suffered terrible headaches that limited his daily writing time to a few hours (on good days). Accordingly, he kept something of a pharmacy on hand, including some powerful painkillers and sedatives to allow him a few pain-free hours of sleep. When he finally went mad, he no doubt did at first appear to be drunk, hugging a horse and then collapsing in the street. But Nietzsche, unlike some of his French contemporaries (notably Baudelaire), had no use for recreational or inspirational drugs, and he generally avoided alcohol. Ironically, however much Nietzsche praises Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, intoxication, and frenzied group behavior, little of the fermented grape ever passed his lips.
Nietzsche talks a lot about dancing, but there is no evidence that he did very much of it, at least while mentally competent. (Apparently he was given to outbursts of expressionistic dancing while in the asylum.) For a thinker who so celebrated the Dionysian, it is sad but true that Nietzsche seems not to have had many experiences of being possessed by the Dionysian impulse to dance. His health was fragile throughout his life, and his energy was limited. It is easy to imagine that he would have loved to dance and that he liked to think about dancing. Dancing is one of the defining characteristics of Dionysus (as of Shiva in Hinduism), and it is Nietzsche’s continuing metaphor for how to do philosophy. “Thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing.”17 Nietzsche’s relative solitude, however, was not conducive to much ballroom dancing. If Nietzsche had been more of a dancer, however, would we have as much of his philosophy?
Interest in the sex lives of the rich and famous has always been a popular entertainment in the lives of the not so rich or famous, and as Nietzsche’s fame has increased, so has interest in his sex life. Unfortunately for the voyeurs, but perhaps fortunately for the speculating rumor-mongers, Nietzsche was extremely discreet in his personal life—no matter how many personal observations and details spill into his writings—and so we have no idea what his intimate life was like. Krell and Bates report that while Nietzsche was a student at Bonn, his cohorts in the fraternity Franconia “proclaimed him a man ‘untouched by woman.’ ”18 Nietzsche’s own report of a visit to a brothel is that he preferred the piano to any of the women present. Nevertheless, Joachim Köhler has amassed considerable evidence to support the conclusion that Nietzche was gay, which might explain his reticence about his own sexual life despite his use sometimes of highly charged sexual metaphors. The juxtaposition of erotic prose and a seemingly sexless personal life is suggestive, but what we can conclude from it remains speculative, at best.
The diagnosis given when Nietzsche entered the asylum in Jena in 1889 was dementia praecox (syphilitic paralysis and chronic inflammation of the brain and major membranes of the nervous system, causing progressive insanity). This diagnosis has been disputed, sometimes because Nietzsche had aberrant symptoms (for example, he did not suffer from general paralysis) sometimes on the grounds that if Nietzsche had congenital syphilis he would have gone mad much sooner, while if he was infected in adulthood, we do not know where Nietzsche would have contracted the disease. Nietzsche’s discretion in his sex life is in keeping with his refined manners. While we have no direct evidence regarding Nietzsche’s sexual encounters, he allegedly visited prostitutes in his youth. Nietzsche also announced in the asylum that he had infected himself twice, but it is hard to know how to regard statements made in that context. In his last decade, Nietzsche suffered a series of debilitating strokes. Pneumonia and a final stroke killed him in the summer of 1900. Most scholars conclude, however, that syphilis played an important role in his deterioration.
Nietzsche clearly disliked some things about Christianity, but we should be very careful about making the blanket statement that Nietzsche hated Christianity as such. Nor is it at all true to say that he hated Christians as such. Like his near-contemporary Kierkegaard, Nietzsche had many words of contempt for “Christendom,” “the Christian mob,” those unthinking conformists who superficially accepted the words of the Gospel without believing them in any deep sense or living their lives according to them. Yet Nietzsche admired those exceptional Christian souls who really lived and suffered what they believed, Jesus in particular. Nietzsche himself was raised a Lutheran, and his father and grandfathers were all Lutheran ministers.
What he disliked—is hated too strong a word?—about Christianity was its “nihilism,” its disdain and contempt for the things of this world in favor of the “next world.” He despised and ridiculed the Christian denial of the flesh and its nervousness about the body more generally, and he certainly despised Christian hypocrisy, especially in the realm of morals. Christian morality is nihilistic, he insisted, because it refuses to see man as he is rather than through the lens of a ridiculous, life-denying ideal. It refuses to honor the instincts and appetites because it refuses to accept human nature. Nevertheless, Nietzsche is a firm defender of the spiritual, so long as this notion is not etherealized and rendered otherworldly. Spirituality, for Nietzsche, is heightened aesthetic awareness, a keen sense of life and destiny, the “love of fate” and a sense of the magnificence of nature—human nature included.
In his last, very tongue-in-cheek, semiautobiographical book, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche declares that he was an atheist “from instinct.” In the same passage, he claims that “God” was one of those concepts (together with “immortality of the soul” and “redemption”) to which he never devoted any attention or time, “even as a child,” adding “perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?”19 But in other instances Nietzsche talks a lot about God, and he admits that as a youth he was so convinced of God’s power that he concluded that God must be the origin of evil as well as good.
In most of his later works, what Nietzsche says about God is even less worshipful and often abusive. He complains that God has been turned into a petty and pathetic being, who has nothing better to worry about than the trivial prayers and fickle faith of his followers. “God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!”20 In Genealogy, Nietzsche makes it clear that God is the hope of the hopeless, the sweet promise of a better life to those who have too little to live for. As such, God serves as crutch for the weak and power for the resentful.
Nietzsche pointedly juxtaposes the Christian God to the pagan gods of Greece and Rome, commenting that the conception of gods as such “need not lead to the degradation of the imagination,” and that there are “nobler uses for the invention of gods than for the self-crucifixion and self-violation of man in which Europe over the last millennia achieved its distinctive mastery.”21 Nietzsche is not a typical atheist, in the sense of rejecting the very notion of a deity, but one would be hard put to say that he is any sort of “believer” in the usual sense either. Indeed, he thinks that his era, like him, has in practice moved beyond the issue of whether the Judeo-Christian God exists or not, and seeks instead to explain how humanity came to believe in such a deity.
Historical refutation as the definitive refutation.—In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God—today one indicates how the belief that there is a God could arise and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.… In former times … atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.22
Nietzsche often makes points in striking ways, and one of the most upsetting or unsettling ways in which he attacks the overly benign view of human nature promoted by many philosophers is by pointing out the prevalence of cruelty in human history. In Genealogy, he famously discusses the “voluptuous pleasure” that the semipowerful enjoy in punishing the powerless, “a delicious morsel, indeed as a foretaste of higher rank.” He describes how the moral world begins “like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time. And might one not add that, fundamentally, this world has never since lost a certain odor of blood and torture?” (“Even in good old Kant,” he adds, “the categorical imperative smells of cruelty.”) Indeed, he concludes, “Without cruelty, there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches—and in punishment there is so much that is festive!”23
What are we to make of such passages? To be sure, Genealogy is forthrightly presented as a “polemic” and much of what Nietzsche says is ironic and not to be taken at face value. But it would be as much of a mistake to simply dismiss such passages as mere outrageousness as it would be to take them literally as a defense (or celebration) of cruelty. Remember, Nietzsche spent his last ounce of strength trying to save a horse from its cruel master.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche tells a story about “holy cruelty.” A man holding a horribly crippled child approaches a holy man for counsel, not knowing what to do. “Kill it!” shouts the holy man, and he tells the man to hold the dead child for three days to create a memory that will dissuade him from again begetting a child this way. The story concludes, “When the man heard this, he walked away, disappointed, and many people reproached the holy man because he had counseled cruelty.… ‘But is it not crueler to let it live?’ asked the holy man.”24
This story will not warm the hearts of those who believe that any life is a life worth living, but it illustrates rather well the overall point that Nietzsche wants to make. Cruelty and suffering are part of life, and what counts as cruelty depends on how one thinks of suffering and its place in life. Against those many thinkers who would deny the reality of suffering or dismiss it as insignificant in the light of eternal salvation, Nietzsche, like the Buddha in his first Noble Truth, insists on recognizing that life is suffering. The question is only, what are we to do about it.
The ancient Greeks, Nietzsche says, turned their suffering into something beautiful. Their famous tragedies, accordingly, were cruel simply because they recognized that life itself is cruel. Christianity, by contrast, ostensibly seeks salvation from suffering, but in an afterlife, not in this world. Implicitly, then, Christianity also recognizes the cruel character of life, seeing this as an objection to life on this plane. By emphasizing the role of suffering in human affairs Nietzsche wants to jolt us back into the recognition that not only do we suffer, but we quite consciously cause and even enjoy the suffering of others. This is no less true in Christianity than elsewhere. Nietzsche reminds us of Tertullian, a Father of the early Christian Church, gloating over the tortures of the damned.
So what are we to say about Nietzsche’s seeming celebration of cruelty? Not that it is not serious, but that it has an ulterior, benign purpose. Nietzsche tries to force us to look at life as it is, not as we might fantasize it to be, to get us to accept and celebrate life, even at its ugliest, to get us to face ourselves and our own darkest pleasures and motives. But what Nietzsche really celebrates, in the passages that follow his treatment of suffering, is justice, conceived not as the fair distribution of punishments but as “love with open eyes,” in the words of Zarathustra.25 Nietzsche sees real justice as involving a largeness of spirit that considers all forms of punishment petty, and which does not feel lessened by showing mercy.
What Nietzsche offers us is not celebration of cruelty. Instead, his accounts provide a mirror in which we can see ourselves, ideally without hypocrisy. He aims to spur us into a different way of facing life, without resentment and vengefulness, but he argues that this requires, first of all, an honest assessment of what we are.
As a young man, Nietzsche aspired not to be a great philosopher but rather a great musician. He played the piano and seems to have been at least an entertaining improvisationalist. From his teens, he attempted composition in various traditional forms, writing mostly for piano. He also wrote many Lieder (songs) and choral works, and composed a duet for piano and violin. After he became personally acquainted with Wagner, Nietzsche wrote a number of longer works, a particularly ambitious accomplishment given that he was simultaneously writing his first book and beginning his career as a university professor.
This flurry of compositional activity, beginning in 1871, came to a halt in 1874. After that, Nietzsche did not write any entirely new compositions, although he later revised several of his earlier ones. Nietzsche may have been dissuaded from further pursuing a musical career by the unflattering assessment of conductor Hans von Bülow, who described Nietzsche’s “Manfred Meditation” as “the most fantastically extravagant, the most unedifying, the most anti-musical thing I have come across for a long time in the way of notes put on paper.”26 This blow may have been somewhat cushioned by some encouragement from Liszt and Wagner. In that von Bülow complains that Nietzsche lacks traditional training and uses Wagnerian technique as a foundation, Nietzsche might also have suspected that von Bülow was venting his hostility toward Wagner, who had run off with the conductor’s wife, Cosima (whom he later married).
Whatever the reason, Nietzsche’s later artistry is expressed mainly through writing. Nietzsche’s indications that he considers his writing style “musical” may suggest that he consciously considered his literary work a continuation of the same ambition that he had earlier pursued as a composer. Whatever his own assessment, his critics concur in assessing this shift as a sound decision. Nietzsche’s music is best described as undistinguished, while he continues to be rightly regarded as a master of German literature and philosophy.
Cosima Wagner was the daughter of the great Hungarian composer-pianist Franz Liszt and the mistress and then wife of Nietzsche’s one-time hero, Richard Wagner. She was beautiful and talented, and Nietzsche considered her the epitome of refinement. He describes her in his autobiography as “by far the first voice in matters of taste that I have ever heard.”27 She was also unconventional, having left her first husband, Hans von Bülow, to live with Wagner, with whom she had three children before she and von Bülow divorced.
Unlike Wagner, who was literally the age of Nietzsche’s father, Cosima was closer to Nietzsche’s own age. At the high point of Nietzsche’s friendship with the Wagners, she corresponded with Nietzsche more often than did Wagner himself, and at times the tone is like that of two enthusiasts, almost worshipful in their mentions of “the Master.” Nietzsche certainly felt close to her. He made presents of some of his creative work to her, including five prefaces for prospective books which he dedicated to her as a Christmas present in 1872. She did not see this gesture as romantic in nature, however. Instead, she was annoyed with him for not coming to spend Christmas with her and the Master, and wrote a peevish letter telling him so. The Wagners seem both to have been extremely temperamental, with the consequence that Nietzsche was often required to avert offending them with gestures that would suit a comedy of manners. For example, Wagner, unwilling to share acclaim with any other living composer, threw a tantrum when Nietzsche brought a Brahms score to Wagner and spoke favorably of Brahms. Nietzsche turned down an invitation to visit Greece from the son of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, fearing that he would offend the Wagners if he kept company with a Jewish member of a rival’s family. These were not Nietzsche’s most willful years.
Some of Nietzsche’s remarks at the time of his breakdown suggest that Cosima had been an object of his long-term fantasies. In his flurry of final missives, he wrote her a one-line letter, “Ariadne, I love you. Dionysus.”28 (Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, apparently jealous of all the women with whom he was infatuated, makes a dubious point of denying that the several references to Ariadne in her brother’s writings referred to Cosima.) Nietzsche also announced in the asylum, “My wife, Cosima Wagner, has brought me here.”29 We have no evidence, however, that Cosima ever recognized any romantic feelings on Nietzsche’s part. He may have harbored amorous longing for Cosima throughout their acquaintance, but if so, he was characteristically discreet about them.
A very different interpretation of Nietzsche’s mad claim that Cosima Wagner was his wife is that he had come to identify with Wagner. If Cosima was a figure of fantasy for Nietzsche, Wagner was apparently much more so. In the years after his break with Wagner, he revisits the relationship in his writings numerous times. In his last year of writing, he wrote The Case of Wagner and assembled Nietzsche contra Wagner, both apologies, in a sense, for the end of his friendship with the composer. The fact that the latter was Nietzsche’s final work before he was overtaken by insanity suggests the importance he placed on this relationship throughout his productive life (if not beyond).
Nietzsche was already a fan of Wagner’s music during his university years and was invited to meet him while the latter was secretly visiting his sister and her husband, who lived in Leipzig. Wagner’s sister was a friend of the wife of Nietzsche’s adviser, Professor Albrecht Ritschl; and when Ritschl’s wife mentioned to Wagner that she and her husband had been introduced to his music by Nietzsche, Wagner asked to meet the young man.
Nietzsche and Wagner hit it off, particularly when they discovered their common admiration for Schopenhauer. Wagner invited Nietzsche to come visit, which he had ample opportunity to do when he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Basel a few months later. Wagner’s villa in Tribschen was not far from Basel. Nietzsche became very close to the Wagners, even doing some of Cosima’s Christmas shopping for her in addition to more scholarly chores (like proofreading) for Wagner. The visits to Tribschen were conducive to the development of Nietzsche and Wagner’s intellectual friendship. Referring particularly to this period, Nietzsche writes in his autobiography, “I would let go cheap the whole rest of my human relationships.… I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life.… I have loved Wagner.”30
Nevertheless, the friendship with Wagner was unstable, and eventually it collapsed. One factor in the break, operative from the start, was that Wagner regarded Nietzsche as the junior member of the friendship, while Nietzsche considered the relationship a true meeting of equals. Wagner’s anti-Semitism became increasingly distasteful to Nietzsche, as did the smug superficiality of the audiences that Wagner attracted. The latter became painfully obvious to Nietzsche when he went to Bayreuth for the inaugural festival of Wagner’s newly constructed theater. Nietzsche considered the audience a group of unmusical philistines, “truly a hair-raising lot.”31 The end of the friendship was definite when Wagner sent Nietzsche a copy of his music-drama Parsifal, which promoted religious sentiments that Nietzsche considered unsavory and (in Wagner’s case) hypocritical.
Wagner was born in the same year as Nietzsche’s father, whom Nietzsche idealized after his death, when Nietzsche was only four years old. Some scholars have speculated that Nietzsche responded to Wagner as a father figure, and felt ambivalent Oedipal feelings for him. If so, a break with Wagner might have been psychologically necessary for Nietzsche as a means of asserting his autonomy, regardless of the particular events that actually provoked it. The break signaled a new and highly original turn in Nietzsche’s thought.
Nietzsche certainly did defend a view which has since been dubbed perspectivism. One of Nietzsche’s most prominent innovations, providing a bridge to the twentieth century, is his insistence that there is no absolute knowledge that transcends all possible perspectives: knowledge is always constrained by one’s perspective. In the natural sciences, for example, knowledge depends on one’s intellectual setting, on the nature of one’s apparatus, and on the problems that have been posed. In modern-day terms, we might say that Nietzsche strongly anticipated the American pragmatists William James and John Dewey in his emphasis on the practical presuppositions and provisional nature of knowing.
Nietzsche rejects Immanuel Kant’s notion of the world’s existence “in itself,” independent of our knowing faculties. Such an idea, according to Nietzsche, is absurd and superfluous. If there were such a world, we could not know it, nor could we even know of it (a conclusion that Kant himself comes close to accepting). Anything we do know we know from a certain perspective, and that perspective depends on our physiological constitution, our skills of inquiring and interpreting, our culture, and our language. Nietzsche was ahead of his time in realizing the extent to which language determines our beliefs about the world, the way in which grammar sets the stage for metaphysics. “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar,” he says, in one of his strongest declarations of that view.32 He suggests that the very linguistic structures that require a subject for every predicate encourage us to look for some person or agent as the cause behind the active flux of the world.
But does Nietzsche’s perspectivism amount to a commitment to what is variously and usually disdainfully referred to as relativism? Perspectivism is generally accepted as part and parcel of the scientific world view, and it is accepted by most ecumenical thinkers as the watchword of religious tolerance. There are different perspectives on the world, and this is a good thing. Relativism, by contrast, has been generally condemned and disowned even by those philosophers whom we would expect to be most committed to it. On one account, relativism is the thesis that every view is as good as any other—no better, no worse. For obvious reasons, this is anathema to any thinking person. It is an invitation to stupidity, and negates any warrant for pursuing the truth, or even plausibility, right from the outset. Given how often Nietzsche lambastes views for their falsehood or stupidity, it is clear that he is not a relativist in this sense.
But relativism has also been defined more sensibly as the view that all views are relative to a particular framework, an outlook, a culture, a time and place. Thus the early Medievals honestly thought, in the light of the available evidence, that the earth was flat and stationary, the center of their universe. Subsequent science showed them to be mistaken, yet it would have been a rational belief to hold, say, in the year 799. The problem comes in when one tries to say that that thesis about the earth was true for the Medievals, rather than simply false but justifiable given the available evidence then. If a “true” belief is one that corresponds to the facts, this doesn’t make sense. Nevertheless, it is clear enough what one might mean, if one considers a “true” belief to be one that is warranted on the basis of available evidence. Given the plausible supposition that all knowledge is provisional and that our most firmly held scientific beliefs, like so many scientific beliefs of the past, may someday be shown to be false or inadequate, then we should admit that “true” for us, too, must always be provisional and admitted to be relative to our perspective. Relativism, defined this way, looks very much like Nietzsche’s perspectivism.
Nietzsche recognizes the awkwardness of his being a relativist on one view and a nonrelativist on another. He confronts this tension head-on, and in some of his more outrageous pronouncements declares “there is no truth.” Many readers take such claims to be an endorsement of relativism in an extreme sense, implying that we should abandon all hope of learning the truth and simply regard ourselves as condemned to ignorance and falsehood. But this is not what Nietzsche meant. Here again, he is attacking the presumptuous belief that we can get at the truth “in itself,” free from any conditions or perspectives, a world “behind” the mere appearances of everyday and scientific experience. Nietzsche retorts, “The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.”33 If relativism means “relative to our experience, and the best we can come up with given what we know so far,” then it is hard to see how anyone would resent Nietzsche’s perspectival relativism, except for the dogmatists he attacks.
Nietzsche was indeed an egoist (also an egotist, but that is another matter). “Egoism” is a term for the twin views that we (a) do or (b) ought to look after our own interests. Some egoists accept both of these views, while others accept only one of them. Nietzsche would be hesitant to accept either as a universal principle. According to Nietzsche, we each have an impulse to seek to enhance our own power, but this does not always involve looking after our own interests. In some cases, people risk all they have, even their lives, for power. Moreover, Nietzsche would differentiate among individuals, considering the interests of certain exceptional individuals as more important than those of the majority. His first question, to a defender of universal egoism, would be, “Whose interests?” “Whose ego?”
Nietzsche also raises questions about what a person’s real interests might be. Socrates obeyed the laws of Athens and gave himself up for execution, claiming that he did so not so much because it was the right thing to do but rather because it was “good for his soul.” Was that selfish? Does it make any sense at all to say that his was a selfish course of action? A soldier on the battlefield suddenly “finds himself” charging up a hill against machine-gun fire to save a buddy who has just been wounded. Asked about it later, he claims he “just had to do it. I couldn’t have lived with myself otherwise.” Is he selfish? Nietzsche wrote great philosophy books, not because he was imbued with an altruistic spirit, but because he loved what he was doing; in the preface to Twilight of the Idols he calls writing that book “a recreation, a spot of sunshine.”34 Was he just being selfish?
What Nietzsche does for us, among many other things, is to call into question our facile use of such notions as selfishness, self-interest, egoism, and their opposites, altruism and self-sacrifice. Noble actions are both for the sake of the actor and serve some larger purpose. To force an “either/or” opposition onto our behavior—asking, for example, “Is this self-serving or is this altristic?”—is to distort and cripple the complex (and often unknown) motives that go into every significant action. A saint may be egoistic when he faithfully serves his God. A hero may be avoiding a display of cowardice when he fights bravely by the side of his comrades. The honest grocer that Kant and Adam Smith both consider may well be acting both out of a concern for his good reputation and integrity and in order to keep his customers coming back to spend more.
On the other hand, Nietzsche would join us in criticizing petty egoism, the inconsiderate, childish, meaningless, competitive effort to get more than one’s proper share or to appear more important than other people. Nevertheless, even then, Nietzsche would say that the egoism of such behavior will usually be among the least of our concerns. Rather, it is the pettiness, the childishness, the rudeness and lack of perspective. Egoism as such is not the problem.
Nietzsche loved to use warrior imagery. Despite his antimilitarism and short military service, he retained a love for military discipline, formality, and precision. Nietzsche often describes his own philosophical campaigns as declarations of war (for example, the preface to Twilight) and like his ancient ally, Heraclitus, celebrates war as the ultimate agon (contest) of human experience. (Heraclitus: “War is father and kin of all.”) In part, no doubt, such metaphors were compensation for his own poor health. He often talks about regaining his health in military terms, most famously in the passage, “Out of life’s school of war: Whatever does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”35 The military imagery is also a reflection of his fondness for and fantasies of the Homeric Greeks and his contempt for the meek self-righteous pacifism of some of his contemporaries. Then again, warrior imagery was also the macho literary currency of Nietzsche’s times, and in this respect he was merely doing what was fashionable. Hegel had similarly described war in terms of the ultimate solidarity of the state in his Philosophy of Right.
We should remember, however, that for Europe the nineteenth century was one of the longest protracted periods of peace in memory. The only notable exception was the Franco-Prussian War, in which Nietzsche served as a medical orderly and saw some of the devastating effects of war firsthand. Like most people with any sense, he found the actual ravages of battle grotesque and terrible, and it would be misreading the man if not so obviously his books to understand him as a warmonger. We should remember, too, that war had not yet taken on the aspect of gruesome wholesale mechanical slaughter invented in the twentieth century. When he speaks admiringly of wars in which people are willing to risk their lives for their ideas, he is not envisioning nuclear or contemporary biological warfare.
Nietzsche loved the good fight, the agon, but the primary struggle in Nietzsche’s mind was his own struggle within himself, with his health, with his Christian bourgeois upbringing, with his own feelings of meekness, pity, and resentment. There he was indeed a trooper, if not exactly a warrior. All the rest, we can charitably but cheerfully say, was mere metaphor.
In recent years Nietzsche has been widely interpreted and celebrated as a postmodernist, or at least as the single most important precursor of twentieth-century postmodernism. This is not the place to try to define postmodernism—a minor academic industry in itself. We can, however, readily spot some themes that would make Nietzsche attractive to such people as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray (all of whom have written a book about him or claim to have been heavily influenced by him).
The first is Nietzsche’s radical critical stance, his searching for flaws in the very origins of things, which naturally allies him with what is now known as “deconstruction.” Second is his fascination with and attention to language, or “discursive practices,” always a favorite focus of the linguistically minded poststructuralists. Third is Nietzsche’s penchant for flamboyant proclamations. His claims that there is no truth and that there are “only interpretations” warm the cockels of the “nothing but the text” generation. Fourth is Nietzsche’s rejection of much of the tradition of philosophy since Plato (and Socrates), a favorite stance borrowed by the postmoderns from Heidegger. Fifth are Nietzsche’s various assaults on the self and the notion of agency, much in tune with the “fragmentation of the subject” and “death of the author” fixations of the current French academic scene.
Nevertheless—let’s just say it—Nietzsche is no postmodernist. He would have little sympathy for the irresponsible “play” that passes for serious philosophy these days. Maudemarie Clark has shown in considerable detail how false are some of the readings of Nietzsche that would render him an ally of postmodernism. True, Nietzsche adopted a critical or perhaps even “deconstructive” stance, but only in order to promulgate a more vigorous, positive philosophy. He rejected the notion of truth and insisted on the importance of interpretation not in order to undermine science but rather because he agreed with its empiricist aims and methods. Furthermore, although Nietzsche was trained as a philologist rather than as a philosopher, his writings (like those of Heidegger) are steeped in the philosophical traditions of the West. Nietzsche demolishes certain views of the self and subjectivity only to make room for a very different notion of agency, and with it a very different notion of self. This great individualist cannot be conscientiously read as dispensing with the self and its unique perspectives.
We began this chapter by entertaining the dismissive ad hominem argument “Nietzsche was crazy, so don’t take anything he wrote seriously.” Since we do take Nietzsche seriously, such arguments are something of a joke, not to mention the fact that Nietzsche, as we have argued, was not crazy when he created his works. Nevertheless, Nietzsche himself often uses arguments that look very much like this one. Indeed, ad hominem arguments, which criticize the person instead of the works, seemed to have special appeal to Nietzsche. In Twilight of the Idols he argues notoriously that we should be suspicious of Socrates’ teachings because Socrates was ugly! Such an argument is an offense to philosophers everywhere (some of whom are not so good-looking themselves). We should ask ourselves, Why does Nietzsche so flagrantly violate such a crucial canon of professional courtesy, that one may attack the position, the argument, or the philosophy but not the philosopher?
The first part of the answer is that Nietzsche insisted that the philosopher should be an example of his own teachings. Nietzsche recognized that Socrates would not have been a very effective or influential teacher of virtue if he had not been seen as an exemplar of virtue himself. And Jesus, whatever his divine status, would surely have been a fraud if he had taught meekness and compassion but demonstrated nothing but personal combativeness and insensitivity.
One might well object, as many have, that Nietzsche, “the miserable little man” who suffered so many sleepless nights and never had a proper girlfriend, put on a fairly poor performance when judged against this criterion, however brilliant his writing.36 On the other hand, if what Nietzsche lived for was his devotion to and the production of his work, then the objection may not have such a devastating impact. He was indeed an example to us all, of true philosophical originality, dedication, and enthusiasm.
Nietzsche’s ad hominem arguments are of many kinds. Sometimes, they concern a whole people, as in his treatment of the Jews in Genealogy and of the Germans in many contexts. (“How much beer there is in the German intelligence!”37) In Genealogy Nietzsche clearly intends to show how whole moralities follow from certain attitudes and character, which in turn develop in response to certain ways of life and social circumstances—a particularly important example of the perspectivism that pervades Nietzsche’s views of values, as well as of knowledge. In such cases, where the target of attack is collective, one is less likely than in attacks on individual targets to simply dismiss ad hominem arguments as mere fallacies. Such discussions force us to pay closer attention to what philosophers often seek to ignore, the concrete social and psychological situations out of which ideas, ideologies, and whole philosophies are born.
Ad hominem arguments are not the only examples of “informal” logical fallacies that can be found in Nietzsche. Appeal to emotion (as opposed to “reasoning”) is another of those offenses beginning students are regularly warned against. But throughout his work, Nietzsche appeals to the emotions, to contempt and disgust as well as outrage and his always present sense of humor. Nietzsche often employs circular reasoning, even “begging the question,” for the sake of rhetorical flourish, usually because he is convinced that repeating a bad thesis will display its limitations in a more devastating manner than would engaging in an outright refutation of it. He attacks straw men left and right, although, as so often, there are very real targets hiding behind the straw men. A philological genius, Nietzsche often plays with the various meanings of a term, sometimes shifting back to ancient or archaic etymology to make a point. He delights in slippery-slope arguments; his conclusions are often ambiguous or unclear; he delights in hyperbole and overstatement; he often substitutes boisterous assertion for real argument; and he is often willing to tolerate ambiguity, incoherence, and even contradiction.
However, as Nietzsche’s American hero Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in one of his best known essays (“Self-Reliance”), “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. With consistency a great soul has nothing to do.… To be great is to be misunderstood.”38 What Nietzsche does, to the horror of logicians and English composition teachers, is to call on us to rethink what we mean by “logic” and what we condemn as “fallacy.” To argue fallaciously is sometimes just to argue with conviction and more convincingly than one does when one has nothing but a good argument on one’s side.
Amusingly, Nietzsche turns ad hominem against himself on this very point. As a child and grandchild of Lutheran clergymen, he must have himself in mind when he remarks:
The sons of Protestant ministers and school teachers may be recognized by their naive certainty when, as scholars, they consider their cause proved when they have merely stated it with vigor and warmth; they are thoroughly used to being believed, as that was part of their fathers’ job.39
Nietzsche was an ambivalent follower of Darwin, who had published his great Origin of Species in 1859 and Descent of Man in 1871. On the one hand, there was a great deal in Darwin that Nietzsche clearly accepted with enthusiasm: his stark naturalistic thesis, the continuity of man and ape, the concepts of “natural selection” and “fitness,” at least in their general outline. But Nietzsche read (or misread) Darwin in a number of less agreeable ways, for example, as a teleologist who believed that man emerged as the highest creature. To this view Nietzsche provided an alternative: human beings are not the “end” of Nature; the Übermensch [sometimes translated “the overman” or “the Superman”] may follow the human species on the evolutionary ladder. But Nietzsche suggests that this is far from an inevitability.
Lest anyone imagine that the Übermensch is an assured stage of evolution, Zarathustra contrasts the Übermensch with the Last Man, the person who is too risk-averse to pursue any aim beyond comfort, and who consequently avoids starting a new generation. He is utterly unadventurous, incapable of self-criticism, wholly caught up in his own petty pleasures, his contentment, his “happiness.” The Last Man is clearly presented as a dolt, the ultimate couch potato, and Nietzsche suggests this as a warning. If we do not aspire to be “higher,” this is what we shall become. But whereas Nietzsche clearly intended the Übermensch as a fiction, the likelihood of the coming of the Last Man, he thought, was all too real. (When Zarathustra announces this vision to the people of the town, for example, Nietzsche has them all cheer and demand, in effect, that they be made Last Men now.) Zarathustra presents the Übermensch and the Last Man as two alternative possibilities, asking modern individuals which mode of existence their own lives promote.
The Übermensch, moreover, seems to be the ideal aim of spiritual development more than a biological goal. In Ecce Homo, he scoffs at the “scholarly oxen” who “have suspected me of Darwinism” in connection with this concept.40 In Zarathustra, the only text in which the Übermensch is discussed at any length, Nietzsche’s fictional hero presents the idea in images, describing this Übermensch as devoid of human timidity, continually aspiring to greatness and living life as a creative adventure. A person who embodied these ideals would be an improvement on the contemporary human being; but Nietzsche does not think that natural selection will produce such a type. Instead, we should reconsider our own way of living, redesigning it to aim in the direction of the Übermensch, even if this ideal is too extreme to be fulfillable.
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche presents his most protracted version of a historical (“genealogical”) argument, one that he both anticipates and refers to in many of his other works. The argument consists of a sociological-psychological analysis of the nobility and the poor in the ancient world. Nietzsche sometimes makes specific reference to particular epochs in Greek and Roman history but just as often provides only generic portraits of the pyramidal structure of most ancient societies, a small number of rich and powerful men at the top and the great mass of ordinary subjects down below. Intermingled with this, and throughout Nietzsche’s works, are detailed references to the history of Christianity. From these descriptions, Nietzsche makes bold claims about the nature of morality and religion, the natural structure of society and the ways in which language expresses status and values even when it seems to be purely descriptive. These claims are controversial enough in themselves, but what further fuels the controversy is Nietzsche’s history. His story reads more as allegory than history, and there are, needless to say, respectable alternative accounts in which Christianity and Christian morality, in particular, come out looking far more attractive.
What are we to make of Nietzsche’s historical analyses? He was a skilled philologist and a keen reader of history, but even his readings of the ancient world are contentious and against the grain of the dominant scholarly convictions of his time. They are often biased, and his targets are often snatched from historical context and thus not presented historically at all. But, of course, Nietzsche presents history to make polemical points, and he himself would probably say that the literal truth of his story is not what is at issue. Instead the question is: Does it capture the psychological essence of what has happened?
We will not make any defense of Nietzsche’s history here, much less try to give any detailed support for his specific historical claims. Nevertheless, as a perspective on history, a perspective that inverts the usual readings of Christianity as a civilizing influence on pagan barbarism and the Judeo-Christian tradition as the sole repository of what is best and highest in the human spirit, Nietzsche’s genealogy and its accompanying observations serve an important purpose. They provoke us to think and see differently, to see the deficits as well as the blessings of our heritage, and perhaps to get ready to try something different for a change.
In his “middle,” or “experimental,” period—in his books Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science—Nietzsche experimented with short bursts of prose, each of them a distinctive (and often ambiguous) insight. But even in those books, in The Gay Science in particular, there are often substantial prose paragraphs that develop several thoughts together, and in all of these books the arrangement and composition of the short segments is as important as the insights themselves. Nietzsche’s strategy is juxtaposition, following one sort of thought with another, manipulating moods and expectations (and sometimes thwarting them).
Nietzsche’s works are not all aphoristic. In his earlier works (notably The Birth of Tragedy) and his later ones (for example, On the Genealogy of Morals) he writes, if not in standard essay form, in continuous prose and polemic. The aphorism is only one among many unorthodox philosophical styles Nietzsche adopts to get across his most unorthodox philosophy. Even more strikingly, he employs nursery rhymes (in The Gay Science), songs (in Beyond Good and Evil) and a faux-Biblical style (in Zarathustra)—whatever it takes to get the point across.
It is not clear that Nietzsche would come off at all well as a philosophical example. He was lonely, desperate, and occasionally embarrassing in his behavior, not to mention in some of his published writings. He was incompetent to the point of humiliation with women, and his friendships were turbulent. He did no great deeds. Unlike his imaginary alter ego Zarathustra and his one-time mentor Wagner, he addressed no crowds, turned no heads, confronted no enemies. Nietzsche was sickly all his life, and yet he was one of the few philosophers who celebrated health as a philosophical ideal. He died badly; indeed, he was perhaps the worst imaginable counterexample to his own wise instruction, “Die at the right time.” He lingered on in a virtually vegetative state for a full decade, sometimes cared for by a sister who would use him to promote views he despised. He railed throughout his career against pity, an emotion that, according to those who knew him, was one of the most prominent features of his own personality. Marie von Bradke, who knew Nietzsche in Sils Maria, describes him in the summer of 1886 as follows: “The inner struggle with his pathologically delicate soul, overflowing with pity, was what led him to preach, ‘be hard!’ ”41 But for Nietzsche, it is hard for us not to feel pity. (How he would have hated that!)
Like his near-contemporary in Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche did not have an externally dramatic life. For Kierkegaard, it was the “inner life,” “passionate inwardness,” that counted. But, we should certainly ask: Can virtues be entirely “internal,” even “private”? In what sense is a rich inner life an admirable life, a virtuous life? By Nietzsche’s own standards, the inner life is hardly sufficient. One should not just be inward but be “fruitful” as well, striving for greatness whenever possible. As an example, Nietzsche is more plausibly viewed as a play of opposites. Like Rousseau’s, his advice might be best understood to say, “Admire people most unlike yourself.” But then again, there are those great works and words. From that perspective, what philosopher’s life has been more exemplary?