Steve Sailer writes: In recent decades, the reputation of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has been largely rehabilitated despite the unfortunate events of 1933-1945. (In contrast, Francis Galton is today widely considered to be a progenitor of the Holocaust.)
Nietzsche’s popularity with the Nazis has been widely blamed upon mendacious editing by his sister and her anti-Semitic husband after the philosopher’s mental breakdown in 1888. In Nietzsche’s defense it is often pointed out that while perhaps he didn’t much like Jews (other than Spinoza), he really hated anti-Semites.
I think Nietzsche is respectable again today for several reasons:
First, he truly was super smart with lots of brilliant ideas.
Second, with his proto-Tom Wolfe prose style, he’s extremely readable for a German philosopher (think Kant, Hegel, Heidegger; Marx, a snarky bastard, throws in a lot of fun sarcasm in his prose but is still a pedant).
Third, Nietzsche’s thought is seen as corrosive of Christianity, so he is on Team Good. (To be precise, however, Nietzsche’s objection to Christianity was not that some Christians had owned slaves, but that a lot of Christians had been slaves. Christianity, to Nietzsche, was a contemptible “slave morality.”)
COMMENTS:
* His anti-semitism or lackthereof is neither here nor there regarding Nietzsche’s popularity. Do you know how many Big Names despised Jews? Or blacks, or gays, or the protected group du jour? Like all of them.
Just recently, they started publicizing the fact that Mencken was anti-semitic. Not sure why, but he wasn’t unpersoned as a result. He’s still semi-respectable, because he’s useful against Christianity and the booboosie. Martin Luther is a name you can bring up in polite conversation, though not far back people were writing books tracing the Holocaust back to him. Wagner is always coming in and out of acceptability.
They’re always holding back, pushing forward, taking away and putting back again the stigmata of anti-semitism at their convenience. It hardly matters whether Nietzsche really was anti-semitic or not, either. Because they could just say he was, and what’s the difference? It worked for a damn long time, if only by implication.
* Nietzsche was a masterful aphorist, and that works well with the masses because you don’t have to be smart to get them. Most people aren’t very smart, and don’t have time for high-falutin’ philosophy. You can read them a few at a time while you take a whiz.
For the intellectual, Nietzsche is deadly clever, and he has longer works with extended arguments. He’s not a very consistent thinker, especially not at range, I don’t think. But smart people like inconsistency, too. And if they’re lazy, like most people are, their minds can drift a few times per page without losing the plot.
* Nietzsche is rubbish. It’s just another variation on the oldest false religion in the world (“you will be like God, determining for yourself good and evil”).
What Moses said was effective because people believed it came from God. Same for Jesus. Same for Mohamet with respect to Allah.
The notion that one should simply ‘man up’ and be a superman and simply posit values you like and impose them as you are able fails, because unless people believe these actually come from God (or the gods or a supernatural dimension) they simply aren’t very effective. They are just assertions from some dude who claims to be a superdude. They can be imposed only at the point of a spear or by bribing people to follow them.
Atheistic existentialism is a con game. The idea that in the abyss is nothing, but yet by staring into it it will eventually supply you with some set of lifeforce values, is just nonsense.
Atheistic existentialism as a concept simply cannot sustain civilization. And no one would sacrifice his life to preserve such a society. You would have to fall back on tribalism or racialism or nationalism or crudely indoctrinated hatred of an enemy or just threatening people with death in order to motivate people to fight to defend it. Remember how the Soviets had to fall back on Russian nationalism.
There are basic principles that most of our contemporary intellectuals are in deep denial of.
First, ‘Science’ is incapable of supplying values. Science has nothing to offer in the way of prescribing standards of human behavior. What science can do, is tell you how to more effectively further a given set of values. Science can tell you what the most effective way is to gas the Jews; it cannot tell you whether it is right or wrong to gas the Jews.
Second, naturalism is a failure scientifically. The postulated naturalistic mechanism of random mutation and natural selection has failed and no one has been able to rescue it. It’s been a semantic shell game at least since Gould came up with ‘punctuated equilibrium’ if not before. It is incapable of supplying enough information. Information is the critical failure. Its defenders are con men who are grossly misleading their students and the public as to the information deficit in their postulated mechanisms. And it’s not just the Cambrian explosion. There is a vast operation not directly perceptible to our limited capabilities of perceiving reality around us that is mediating an incredible amount of information into life forms on a continuing basis.
These people selling naturalism and following it up with atheistic materialism are peddling a pack of lies.
Nietzsche would have been happy as a clam at an ancient Greek homosexual orgy and everything on top of that was just an elaborate rationalization for why he should feel justified in doing so.
* Nietzsche’s writing is a pleasure in small doses. But his books [are] a chore after the first few pages.
* He’s a bit like Emerson in that regard. Of course, Emerson is a much more extreme case. I can only take him a paragraph at a time.
Interesting to note that Nietzsche liked Emerson a lot; he said that reading him always cheered him up when he was depressed.
* Nietzche wasn’t considered a Nazi until Heidegger started writing about him, and we all know Heidegger was such an evil Nazi he even bedded and defiled his Jewish student, Hannah Arendt, who went on to have a measure of success as a philosopher herself. His early association with Wagner didn’t help either. Because we all know Hitler liked Wagner and that’s all we need to know.
But seriously, Nietzche hated both Christians and Jews, and most of humanity. He was the original misanthrope. He also hated Prussian militarism and Prussian “Junkers” and no doubt would have despised Nazis as vulgarians and plebeians, had he lived long enough to meet them.
Having no formal training in philosophy but rather in classical philosophy and being a great natural writer, his philosophical style revolutionized a field that was unreadable and possibly worthless at that point under the obscure and onanist brand of Hegelianism of his time.
You could say his greatest influences were Spinoza, Darwin, Lucretius and Carlyle.
Although he didn’t create a philosophical system, Nietzche left behind a rich legacy in thoughtful and enjoyable essays and in the form a long prose poem, his Zarathustra.
“Also sprach Zarathustra” was considered inocuous enough that copies of the book were lent to German war prisoners after the Reich was defeated, without a second thought. I own one such copy, bought many years after the war in a second – hand bookstore in West-Berlin, stamped by the Allied occupation forces.
* There is a Midsomer Murders episode that is very down on Galton. One suspect mentions he is a Galton fan, and at first the detective is all “Galton! Discoverer of fingerprints! Great guy!” But then he starts reading up on Galton and finds out about the eugenics stuff, and by the end he’s theatrically throwing his Galton book in the trash. And (spoiler alert) the Galton fan turns out to be the murderer, for creepy Galton inspired reasons, no less.
