Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche is an elitist and anti-democratic philosopher. They say that Nietzsche is one of the easiest philosophers to read but one of the most difficult to understand.

 It has frequently been claimed that Nietzsche despised modern feminism, along with democracy and socialism. The English philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that Nietzsche never tired of inveighing against women and said that Nietzsche wrote: "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip." This actual quote is uttered by an old woman to Zarathustra. Russell wrote that Nietzsche's writings displayed the power fantasies of an invalid and that nine times out of ten, a woman would've taken that whip off Nietzsche, and given him a good beating with it. Yet, Nietzsche had numerous close friendships with early feminists and highly educated women, including Meta von Salis, the first woman in Switzerland to gain a PhD. He was also a friend of Lou Salome, a psychoanalyst, author and essayist. 

 Nietzsche called socialism "the tyranny of the meanest and the dumbest" and claimed that it attracts inferior people who are motivated by resentment. Nietzsche saw ordinary human beings as the "bungled and botched" and he saw no objection to their suffering if it was necessary for the production of a great man. He claimed that exemplary human beings must craft their own identity through self-realization and become the masters of their own fate. Nietzsche's "Ubermensch' or 'Overman' represents a human ideal and a goal for humanity. He saw civilization and its values has being born from barbarism a process where the strong eliminated the weak and the educated eliminated the uneducated. He wrote:

 "Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preference and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree."

 He also believed that morality was the herd instinct of the individual and that there were no facts but only interpretations. He wrote: “Morality is just fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior individuals.”

 Bertrand Russell wrote: "What Caesar Borgia was to Machiavelli, Napoleon was to Nietzsche: a great man defeated by petty opponents."

 I know that Nietzsche greatly admired the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky and in Dostoevsky's novel 'Crime and Punishment', there is much talk of the Napoleon complex and ordinary and extraordinary people. Raskolnikov's theory of the ordinary and extraordinary individual, mirrors Nietzsche's thoughts very closely. I think Nietzsche was probably very much influenced by this book and Dostoevsky in general who he saw as great psychological writer.

 Nietzsche has been identified with German Nazis but this is mainly due to the influence of his pro-Nazi sister Elisabeth, who had married a notorious anti-Semite agitator called Bernhard Forster in 1885. Nietzsche refused to attend the wedding and the couple went off to Paraguay to found a New Germany of "pure blooded" Aryan colonists.

 If there were three things that Nietzsche hated, it was the big state, nationalism and anti-Semitism. He once proposed marriage to the Russian-born, Lou Salome, who was Jewish and she refused his offer. She certainly made the right decision because Nietzsche finished up going mad which they think was due to syphilis. His philosophy influenced many writers including Jack London, D.H. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw.

 Today, this German philosopher, has been adopted by the alt-right. Richard Spencer, a leading light of America's alt-right claimed in an interview that he'd been "red-pilled" by reading Nietzsche. In the film 'The Matrix', popping the red pill, allows you to perceive reality. Spencer is an advocate of white nationalism, anti-feminism, racial and cultural purity. Nietzsche would've been opposed to all these things. He insisted that he'd rather be a good European than a good German, calling ("Germany, Germany, above all") the death of German philosophy. One of his last letters proposed that all anti-Semites should be shot.