6. Nietzsche the storm cloud

There are few western philosophers that have had such an impact on our contemporary culture as Friedrich Nietzsche. Why, then, is his thought so often dismissed? Why does his philosophy, which continues to provoke and inspire, still invite and hostility and derision? We delve into the widespread misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s work, the accusation of Nazism and misogyny, the dismissive sneers of his many critics, and the uncomfortable truths he forces us to confront. From his radical scepticism of morality to his challenge to conventional values, Nietzsche’s thought is both exhilarating and unsettling—so much so that even today, many prefer to wave it away rather than engage with it seriously.

This episode will unsettle easy assumptions and address some pervasive misconceptions - all part of our grand project to distil Nietzsche’s practical teachings for the aspiring individual.

Today’s music: Street Pulse Beat, by Special Interest

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Transcript

Hello everyone. Today we are going to discuss some of the controversies that surround Nietzsche and his philosophy, touching on the suggestions of Nazism, misogyny, his general moral scepticism that really places him beyond the pale for some people. Hopefully we’ll confront a few unnerving realities and clear up a few misunderstandings.

Let me read you the words of one Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, professor of Classical Philology at the University of Leipzig:

‘However many young talents I have seen develop under my eyes for thirty-nine years now, never yet have I known a young man, or tried to help one along in my field as best I could, who was so mature as early and as young as this Nietzsche. […] He is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution [for publication] at all while he was still a student. If — God grant — he lives long enough, I prophesy that he will one day stand in the front rank of German philology. He is now twenty-four years old: strong, vigorous, healthy, courageous physically and morally, so constituted as to impress those of a similar nature. On top of that, he possesses the enviable gift of presenting ideas, talking freely, as calmly as he speaks skilfully and clearly. He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig who — and they are rather numerous — cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is — and at the same time pleasant and modest. […] I have not the least doubt that, if confronted by a practical demand, with his great gifts he will work in other fields with the best of success. He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do.’

This is his 1868 letter, abridged slightly, recommending his student, Friedrich Nietzsche, for the position of professor of philology at the University of Basel. This is remarkable not only because Nietzsche had yet to complete his doctorate, normally an essential qualification for such a post, but because he was at the time a relatively tender youth of only 24 years. Despite these apparent insufficiencies for holding such a post Ritschl claimed, 'I should stake my whole philological and academic reputation that the matter would work out happily.' This extraordinary recommendation from one of the most esteemed philologists in Europe, led to his wunderkind protégé being appointed as one of the youngest university professors in Germany at that time.

Your first question, presumably, is what the hell is a philologist? A philologist is someone who studies language in historical texts, especially the Greco-Roman classics, often focusing on how languages evolve over time, how words and meanings shift, and how texts reflect the culture that produced them. Nietzsche began his academic career in this field, having rejected his earlier theological ambitions which would have seen him follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, both of whom were lutheran pastors. It was only later that Nietzsche discovered his true calling in philosophy. 

But I share this astonishing account of the young Nietzsche with you because it demonstrates that his brilliance was recognised even while he was just a student by an academic, who at that time enjoyed great notability and credibility. It is necessary to appreciate this, because there exists a pervasive, sneering hostility to Nietzsche, both historically and in some contemporary commentators, that means that his thought is sometimes derided as hardly worth taking seriously. This derisive response is exactly what Nietzsche predicted. 

It has to be admitted that the iconoclastic nature of Nietzschean philosophy has made it a rallying flag for every kind of posturing rebel, obstreperous contrarian, or flaky anti-establishmentarian; and its attractions for the young, a group naturally drawn to everything revolutionary, has been strong. Robert Solomon puts it well when he writes that Nietzsche: 

‘quickly became the favourite philosopher of undergraduate students, much to the horror of their senior mentors. […] He attacked authority, not only with indignation but also with relish and rudeness. He talked like a prophet but not like a preacher. […] In direct contrast to the conscientious and ultimately tiresome reasonableness of most other philosophers, Nietzsche was inflammatory, hyperbolic, sarcastic, even “insane”.’ 

I’ve slightly abridged there. 

In consequence, the assumption has too often been that Nietzsche’s is not serious philosophy for serious people. But should Nietzsche be damned because his thought is, what?—exciting? Some seem to think so. It is only the solemn, the austere, and the gravely serious that are to be afforded authority. As has already been touched upon in a previous show, such stuffiness and furrowing of the brow is not only anathema to Nietzsche, as a means to truth, he believes it’s fatally misguided too. 

In my own experience, many that dismiss Nietzsche have only the most uninformed and simplistic grasp of what he actually thought. They assume, in error, that these waters are shallow, but it is only their darkness that hides the fact that they are potentially bottomless. You will soon be able to decide for yourself, of course. ‘Still is the bottom of my sea: who would guess that it harbours sportive monsters.’

That’s from thus Spoke Zarathustra.

But of course, its not just Nietzsche’s iconoclastic firebrand style that repels some, but the fact that his scepticism extends as far as our most heartfelt moral convictions. He called his thought a philosophy of suspicion and nothing escapes his corrosive psychological scrutiny, including those values we believe are, or  should be, beyond all questioning.

Nietzsche loves a topographical metaphor. His prose abounds with the imagery of unmapped landscapes, vertiginous mountains and expansive seas. Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Nietzsche describes himself in Ecce Homo as a ‘psychologist without equal’⁠1 and in the preface to The Dawn we see him employing a topographical metaphor as he tunnels down into the human psyche with its layer upon layer of formative, forgotten, primordial strata. Here he describes himself as a ‘subterrestrial’,⁠2 a lonely mole-man who ‘labours in the dark’. He is busy, ‘digging, mining, undermining.’ What is he hoping to achieve with these claustrophobic exertions?

‘I went down into the deepest depths ; I tunnelled to the very bottom ; I started to investigate and unearth an old faith which for thousands of years we philosophers used to build on as the safest of all foundations—which we built on again and again although every previous structure fell in: I began to undermine our faith in morals.’⁠3

It is this, Nietzsche’s scepticism towards our morality, that many find most alarming in his writings. He understands our aversion only too well because ‘this was always too dangerous a subject. Conscience, a good reputation, hell, and at times even the police, have not allowed and do not allow of impartiality; in the presence of morality, as before all authority, we must not even think, much less speak: here we must obey!’⁠4 We must obey and obey without question: ‘to look upon morality as a problem, as problematic—what ! was that not—is that not—immoral?’⁠5—morality protects itself from any questioning by making the questioning of morality itself immoral. And yet, must not everything be amenable to examination and questioning and constructive criticism?—if for no one else, at least for the philosopher that Nietzsche dubs the free spirit? This free spirit’s most defining characteristic is a radical honesty with itself—to the point of masochism! As Nietzsche writes, ’How much truth can a spirit tolerate, how much truth is it willing to risk? This increasingly became the real measure of value for me. Error (– the belief in the ideal –) is not blindness, error is cowardice . . . Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself’⁠6 [BGE.39]

What does he mean here by this ’belief in the ideal’, this ‘error’ allegedly born of cowardice? The ‘ideal’ he speaks of is our whole contemporary worldview, its beliefs and its values—just about everything our culture holds most dear. Nietzsche thinks those of us who should know better cling doggedly to this worldview, not because we have an unshakable faith in it, but because we cannot even imagine a palatable alternative. We are afraid of the consequences of abandoning it; we imagine unspeakable horrors stalking the unknown regions beyond its borders. In this, perhaps, there is nothing unreasonable—the truth is not necessarily benign; it could even be ‘harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it could pertain to the fundamental nature of existence that a complete knowledge of it would destroy one – so that the strength of a spirit could be measured by how much ‘truth’ it could take, more clearly, to what degree it needed it attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified.’ [BGE.39]

The free spirit intuits that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy—at least in our philosophy before Nietzsche came along. And even some of the most conventional and conforming of persons have their moments of uneasy quietude when they can no longer evade the decisive question: is this really all there is? This thought might be accompanied by a discomforting suspicion that somehow, someway, one is being duped, lobotomised, castrated, incarcerated in an invisible prison without bars, without walls, where the wardens do not wear uniforms, and the wardens are also the prisoners, and you too are one of these wardens. On the heels of this suspicion might come a faint but alluring intimation that another life is possible; it is not unlike the experience of the lucid dreamer who suddenly becomes conscious of the fact that they are asleep and having a nightmare—that waking up is possible. Those who think they see through the dream; who recognise this game as a game, may throw an ironic glance to one or other of their peers who, to their surprise, express no recognition at all—these others never question the dominant worldview, their given life-script, the mainstream narrative—they seem to be oblivious to the possibility of such a questioning. They believe our contemporary values are, not historically situated, not historically contingent, but real, universal, absolute, inviolably correct. For them, what we take to be morality is Morality itself; it always has been and always will be. The values of former times are assumed to be error, a consequence of insufficient progress. Our ancestors, even those with the most extraordinarily productive and refined culture, are thought wicked or ignorant—‘they did not know any better’ we say with breathtaking condescension. Such uncritical people really believe in the non-conditionality of the ideology infused in our society. To use a modern computer-gaming metaphor, they are ‘non-player characters’—they are not in the game; they are the game though and through. They are not having the dream, the dream is having them.

Nietzsche addresses himself only to those who are capable of waking up and one cannot help but be reminded of the parable of Plato’s cave (look it up if you are not familiar with it) wherein those philosophers who reject the false shadow-play of consensus-reality climb out of the cave into the bright sunshine of truth. But Nietzsche rejects the platonic idea that the truth is transcendental. For him, the true world is not some ethereal, non-material plane; some abstract realm of archetypal forms—no, it is the world right in front of you, the only one you can truly know, the one disclosed to you by the senses and by your feelings. How was this world lost? Do you even know that it has been lost?

Nietzsche thinks he sees through the chauvinism of contemporary culture, its arbitrariness and its ‘noble’ lies. When he boasts that ‘My writings have been called a School for Suspicion’;⁠7 he is donning the garb of arch-inquisitor; of vivisectionist of culture—a physician forced to make an urgent and unflinching assessment of an ailing body. There can be no room for squeamishness: the diagnosis has to be assiduous, the dissection has to be merciless, the excision of diseased tissue has to be complete. But this all-devouring scepticism is directed not just outwards at culture; no, to an even greater degree, it must be directed inwards—Nietzsche was also a vivisectionist of conscience. His radical honesty, on which he placed an enormous premium was, in his view, genuinely novel—even among history’s purportedly truth-loving philosophers. He believed his commitment to this principle was so unprecedented that he deigned to pronounce that ‘it is my destiny to be the first decent human being’.⁠8 Here we see him being characteristically provocative, some have even suggested that signs of his encroaching madness shine through in such statements, but I suggest there is something more here than the manic, self-aggrandising rantings of an intemperate narcissist. To create the conditions for the human type to achieve its extraordinary potential, the decadent and the degenerate in man has to be exposed, faced down and vanquished and this is a task requiring exceptional critical perspicacity. All that limits, all that diminishes humanity must be swept away, even if it is that which has hitherto been believed to be humanity’s highest virtue. But what, we may ask, is the pathology that Nietzsche feels needs addressing with such urgency?—It is the problem of misery, despair, shame, meaninglessness—it is the desolate spectre of nihilism itself. 

Nietzsche presents us with a chance to vanquish nihilism and raise life to a higher octave but, as anyone who reads him soon discovers, he is also a storm cloud and a strong drink. He savages those most cherished, most sacred, ideals and values. There is so much in his writings that is disconcerting, even shocking, to the modern sensibility and he acknowledged as much himself: ‘May my readers be granted strong stomachs, May my readers be granted sharp teeth. If this book is one that they can stomach, Then surely they can stomach me!’⁠9 

Similarly, in this podcast, there will be no attempt to defang the Nietzschean philosophical monster, to clip its claws, to domesticate it—but it behoves us to be absolutely clear which outrages Nietzsche is guilty of and which he most assuredly is not. The accusation of his proto-nazism is an example of the latter. 

In the most learned circles, this purported association has long since been discredited. Nietzsche was never involved with any political organisation and he died decades before the German National Socialist Party was formed. He was no cheerleader for his fellow germans: far from considering them the master race, he was arguably more critical of them than any other nation. He writes, ‘How much sullen heaviness, dullness, humidity, pyjamas, how much beer there is in the German intellect!’⁠10 He much preferred the French, who he believed were far more cultivated, though he himself claimed Polish ancestry. And he was certainly no nationalist, calling the edification of the nation-state ‘the idolatry of the superfluous!’⁠11 As for the German racial fixation, which even in his time was a significant social current, Nietzsche writes of himself and those like him: ‘we are not nearly ‘German’ enough in the sense in which the word ‘German’ is used nowadays to advocate nationalism and race-hatred, or take delight in the nationalistic scabies of the heart and poisoning of the blood on account of which the peoples of Europe are currently being separated and segregated from one another as if by quarantines. […] we are too manifold and mixed in race and descent, and are consequently little tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and indecency which parades about nowadays in Germany.’⁠12 Nietzsche was scathing about the socialism bit of German National Socialism too, although his comments on the matter seem to indicate the brands of socialism he despises are more what we would call utilitarianism and communism. 

Finally, and most crucially, Nietzsche was vociferous in his opposition to anti-semitism, calling himself an ‘anti-anti-semite’.⁠13 As he descended into irreversible dementia in the 1890s, he was still capable of scribbling, ‘All anti-Semites ought to be shot.’⁠14 On their rise to power, the nazis appropriated Nietzsche as they appropriated all German culture, but in this case, his sister, Elizabeth, was deeply complicit. She had married an arch-anti-semite called Bernhard Förster who hated jews so rabidly that he had collected a quarter of a million signatures in a petition requesting their expulsion from Germany. Nietzsche did not approve of his sister’s love-match: ‘You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. . . . It is a matter of honour with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible’.⁠15 Supported by his wife, Bernhard Förster had attempted to establish a new and racially ‘pure’ German colony in South America in 1886. Having failed in this ambition, this unsavoury character used poison to put himself out of his misery in a Hotel room in Paraguay three years later. Elizabeth, unperturbed, maintained her anti-semitic prejudices long after Nietzsche’s death, deliberately misrepresenting his philosophy to ingratiate herself with the up and coming nazi top brass. In a gesture that would have appalled her brother, she made a gift of his walking stick to Adolf Hitler himself (this despite Hitler privately professing that he could not ‘get on’ with Nietzsche’s writings).

Of course, it is all too easy to pick and choose passages that serve to sanitise Nietzsche’s legacy. The truth is he had no shortage of blistering condemnations for almost everyone and everything. It is temptingly easy to dismiss all his ferocious rhetoric as the ravings of an impotent and embittered outsider, and that was a commonplace strategy in the west during the latter part of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of World War Two, with the allied nations bruised but victorious, the long dead Nietzsche was denounced not only as a fascist, but as a moral degenerate to boot! Following his mental breakdown in 1889, an attending physician had summarily diagnosed the bewildered patient’s condition as caused by late-stage syphilis—a relatively common condition at the time. This scandalous notion was eagerly seized upon by those keen to discredit his thought as the essential philosophical foundation of the nazi ideology. But this convenient legend ignores one of the most inconvenient facts of the case: Nietzsche’s father and brother both died prematurely from neurological conditions too—quite a coincidence—and a compelling indication that Nietzsche’s illness was possibly hereditary rather than the consequence of a dissolute lifestyle. The climate of hostility to Nietzsche in the post-war period was well represented by the great English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who dismissed Nietzsche as a megalomaniac and wrote that ‘His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is coming rapidly to an end.’ That sentiment was put into print in 1945 and inasmuch as the production of books about Nietzsche seems, if anything, to be increasing, we can assume that poor Bertrand is weeping in his grave. 

Nietzsche’s rehabilitation has taken a long time and some of the nazi mud still sticks to him today but my task here is not to defend his reputation, it is merely to ensure that if we feel compelled to excoriate him, we do it for the right reasons. 

A case in point: Nietzsche’s disparaging comments about women. We won’t delve too much into these because this topic is amongst the least interesting aspects of his philosophy and it takes us beyond the scope of our current enquiry, but suffice to say he criticises women for what he sees as their weakness, their coquettishness, and their tendency to scheming, conniving, and general slipperiness. He sees them as invariably dependent on men and only able to realise their potential through a man, using those they bewitch and manipulate as a means to their own petty ends. In his opinion, the summit of their ambitions can only ever be the bearing of children. 

Of course, it takes but a moment’s reflection to realise that for a woman in Lutheran Christian Europe in the late 1800s, options were as severely constrained as were their bodies within the corsets and bustles they were forced to wear. Women at that time were born into inescapably dependent positions whether they liked it to not. Nietzsche seems happy to laud the man who strives to assert himself, to use guile and ingenuity to prevail over the conditions that resist his will, to dominate his environment, to make his mark, so it can be hard to fathom what seems to be his blindspot with regard to women expressing their instinct to do the same via the minimal and often exclusively vicarious opportunities available to them. If, as a woman, it is impossible for me to access education, employment or other social opportunities—if I am not even permitted to leave the house without a chaperone—how else can I express my inherent desire to exercise my personal power and ambition except through the use of my sex and my wiles to get those who do have social power by right of birth (men) to do my will?

And yet, it seems Nietzsche should have known better because he had close acquaintance with a handful of exceptional women during the course of his career, women who flouted society’s conventional gender roles—real intellectuals. Doubtless, Nietzsche’s personal life experience affected his views: he was never romantically successful with women and he never married or even had a sweetheart as far as we are aware. After the death of his father and infant brother, Nietzsche grew up in an all female household, being fussed over by his mother, his sister and his grandmother. Probably—being socially limited themselves—their ambitions were necessarily invested in the young man of the house. Perhaps he rankled at this burdensome responsibility. Perhaps the notion of the superiority of the male sex was his lived reality at home from childhood, a ‘fact’ that went unquestioned. Then again, Nietzsche appears to acknowledge his own personal prejudices in this matter: in Beyond Good and Evil, he presents us with ‘a few truths about ‘woman as such’: assuming it is now understood from the outset to how great an extent these are only – my truths.’⁠16

There is a further angle on this apparently unfortunate sexism business for which I am indebted to John Richardson and his book, Nietzsche’s System (1996). He observes that though Nietzsche was superficially misogynistic, his philosophy embraces some essentially feminine traits. These include a scepticism around absolute and universal values and principles, positing instead a recognition that reality is actually disclosed via multiple differing perspectives rather than a single privileged—we might say paternalistic—perspective. Nietzsche’s philosophy also hinges on a commitment to the contextual character of life which serves to broaden-out one’s personal interests, making them transpersonal, deflating what might be considered a typically masculine ideal of an independent, sovereign, autonomous individual. Richardson concludes, ‘Since life, the world, is contextual, the truth about it can be grasped only by someone with a female aptitude for empathy, for traversing the multiple, intersecting perspectives that constitute that reality.’ 

There is also an apparent femininity in Nietzsche’s qualified rejection of those traits considered archetypically male: reason, logic and objectivity. He often privileges feelings, intuition and subjectivity instead. It is also notable that his most exalted concepts, Truth, Life and Wisdom, are all metaphorically represented in feminine personifications (the first in Beyond Good and Evil and the latter two in Thus Spoke Zarathustra). 

Of course, it is a matter of debate whether any of these so-called ‘feminine’ qualities really are typical characteristics of females, and even if they are, whether they are naturally inborn or socially inculcated is a question we must leave unanswered. Whatever the case, these purportedly feminine qualities are no more than tendencies and, as such, can be expressed by either sex—naturally, the same can be said of the purportedly male qualities.

Let us conclude by acknowledging that Nietzsche was a man of the 1800s. Aside from his personal circumstances and life experience, the social values and prejudices that prevailed during his lifetime were surely a part of who he was; as the values and prejudices that prevail today are for you, I, and everybody in our own society. It is, in fact, a principle of his philosophy that we are all historically, culturally and environmentally situated. Notwithstanding his self-professed ‘untimeliness’ and his thorough rejection of the dominant worldview of his era, Nietzsche was, in many respects, just a product of his time. 

Today, the gender-power disparity has tilted significantly. Today there is, in principle, no reason that a person’s sex should hold them back from just about any and every kind of achievement. This is a far preferable state of affairs, in my opinion. Here we will have no truck with the misogyny of former times. The exceptional woman is all the more impressive because of the history of oppression and struggle that provides the context for, and contrast to, her success. In Nietzsche’s writings, his grammatical subject is invariably man, and though I would never dream of amending the original material, in the majority of cases you can interpose whatever pronoun you prefer in its place. 

To all appearances, Nietzsche wasn’t at his best in his writings on women, however—(and this is a hint for the philosophically minded) later we might see something else in his apparently embarrassing chauvinism that might put it beyond any simple, unthinking sexism. For now, let us just say that, for Nietzsche, unrealised potential has nothing in common with potential realised. I invite you to carefully consider the implications…

There we are then—you have had a foretaste of some of Nietzsche’s philosophy that might conflict with your expectations due to its incongruity with the commonly-held, hyper-masculine, conception—we might say, ‘misconception’. Prepare to have many more misconceptions swept away as we proceed.

Whilst we are on the topic of politics, I must state here that this podcast does not concern itself with such things. Both the left and the right and everyone in-between have claimed Nietzsche as a champion but he completely eschewed parties and partisans. Whilst he did write about political matters, he had no well-developed social programme as such. For the development of humankind, which was a matter of importance to him, his principle concern was cultural, rather than political. Critical to that end, the development of exceptional individuals was to be encouraged. Well, this project aims to support individuals in fulfilling their potential. We are not going to get into the messy and divisive business of politics or the so-called culture wars. All that stuff is for another place. Hopefully you will appreciate the respite that this offers. 

Anyway, speaking of culture, time for this week’s music recommendation.

Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of art, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I recommend a track every week that, in my view, reflects the emotional states encountered during the development of this Becoming Übermensch project—tracks that have some significance, tracks that have something of the Dionyisan. Remember, sometimes the lyrics are relevant, sometimes not so much, it’s more the feeling that’s important. 

I can invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, while listening to Street Pulse Beat, by Special Interest. Links in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be really interested. Also, feel free to speculate on my reasons for choosing the tracks I do with regard to the work we’re doing here. 

Im going to leave you today with a very simple little exercise. This is a first simple step towards a more aesthetic orientation to life; even an erotic orientation to life.

Obtain for yourself a beautiful, crisp, sharp apple, or brew yourself a strong cup of really good coffee—not the cheap stuff. You could even substitute a simple glass of pure water, cold and fresh—especially if you are very thirsty. Whatever you like really, food or drink. Consume it mindfully. Be with it completely. Stay with it completely. Surrender to the experience. Do not describe your experience to yourself mentally—actively eschew all words. Language here is an impediment. And yet you might find that your efforts to quash language are difficult. Our thinking, our reasoning, uses language. We often experience our thinking as a running commentary. That’s what you must let go of. Just focus on the sensations, the flavour, the aroma, the sound of your chewing or swallowing inside your head. You are staying right in the now, not remembering, not imagining. Let nothing else exist for you but the apple or the coffee or the water—absolutely nothing else.

1 EH.Good books,5

2 D.Pref.,1

3 D.Pref.,2

4 D.Pref.,3

5 D.Pref.,3

6 EH.Pref,3

7 HH.1886 Pref.

8 EH.Destiny,1

9 JS.54

10 TI.Things The Germans Lack,2

11 Z.1,Of the New Idol

12 JS.377

13 70. KGB 111.3 669

14 KGB 111.5 1249

15 Letter to Elizabeth Nietzsche Förster, Christmas 1887

16 BGE.231