Misc
Nietzsche is important as a precursor of 20th century-existentialism and an inspiration for post-structuralism and an influence on postmodernism. However, dry academic summaries of his thought cannot capture the liveliness of his writing, and his extraordinary sense of humor, as in the famous exchange: "God is dead" - Nietzsche; "Nietzsche is dead" - God, and the riposte, "Some are born posthumously!" - Nietzsche. In many respects his writings today appear "romantic" relative to modern sociobiological and medical anthropological theory in the same sense that the Wright Brothers' flying machines appear quaint relative to modern high performance jets.
In his important work "The Anti-Christ[ian]" Nietzsche frontally attacked German scholarly Christianity for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. He went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment who felt that Christianity may simply be an untrue religion to claiming it may have been deliberately propagated as an inherently bad and subversive religion (or in late 20th century parlance: a "psychological warfare weapon" or "ideological computer virus") within the Roman Empire by the Apostle Paul as a form of covert revenge for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple during the Jewish War. However, in the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche has a remarkably high view of Jesus, claiming the scholars of the day fail to pay any attention to the man, Jesus, and only look to their construction, Christ. According to the American writer H.L. Mencken, Nietzsche felt that the religion of the ancient Greeks of the heroic and classical era was superior to Christianity because it portrayed strong, heroic, smart, and muscular men as role models and did not try to demonize healthy natural desires, such as creativity and writing poetry.
Nietzsche made it acceptable to view one's pre-Christian ancestors as "noble savages". His works have also been valued as a religious "deprogramming tool", such as in the large tome Which Way Western Man? by former American Christian minister and co-founder of the ACLU William Gayley Simpson in which he recounts in great theological detail how Nietzsche's works allowed him to see the light of Darwin and overcome the dysfunctional "slave morality" that had been programmed into him by society and co-religionists.
Nietzsche's works helped to reinforce not only agnostic trends that followed Enlightenment thinkers, and the biological worldview gaining currency from the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (which also later found expression in the "medical" and "instinctive" interpretations of human behavior by Sigmund Freud), but also the "romantic nationalist" political movements in the late 19th century when various peoples of Europe began to celebrate archeological finds and literature related to pagan ancestors, such as the uncovered Viking burial mounds in Scandinavia, Wagnerian interpretations of Norse mythology stemming from the Eddas of Iceland, Italian nationalist celebrations of the glories of a unified, pre-Christian Roman peninsula, French examination of Celtic Gaul of the pre-Roman era, and Irish nationalist interest in revitalizing Gaelic. The English character "Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle" represented a fantasy in which Victorians who were becoming increasingly industrialized and alienated from their rural and small village roots could show that they still retain the innate "right stuff" to make it under primitive, savage, and one might appropriately add, "Nietzschean" circumstances. A lot of early American heroes, such as Meriwether Lewis and Davy Crockett, who could simultaneously serve as a learned aid to President Thomas Jefferson or as a U.S. Congressman (respectively), and also hold their own in close combat with Indians in the wildest parts of the frontier, carry obvious Nietzschean overtones and even became folk heroes in their own time. (The Tarzan, Lewis, and Crockett examples are ones that come to mind to the author of this Wikipedia article and are not ones that were specifically made by Nietzsche himself, in fact Nietzsche's examples are all of poets, philosophers, thinkers, and strategist, NOT barbarians).
Apart from "noble savage" and "religious deprogramming" themes, in his brazen work "The Anti-Christ" Nietzsche wrestled with a major tragic issue that remains very much with us today. The politics of urbanized society may tend to reverse the evolutionary processes that bred for various strengths and nobility in primitive man. Ugly, physically weak, and inadequate men who would never make it in a frontier environment nevertheless through low cunning and mafia-like behavior might through financial manipulation acquire control of society. This fear was reflected in the hostility by frontiersmen in the era of Jacksonian Democracy towards creation of a U.S. central bank, for fear that "Eastern Establishment" financial manipulators would take over the society. In "The Anti-Christ" Nietzsche said that while it was necessary for Jews at points in their history to affect "slave morality" as an oppressed minority as a means to get their oppressors off their backs by deceiving them while hiding their own strengths, the
deception practiced by Saul of Tarsus in spreading Christianity went too far in its social destructiveness. Hence a paradox: a person who practices "slave morality" shows true inferiority if he really believes in it, but one can show strength and superiority if one uses it as sheep's clothing to disguise the stalking wolf. (As Sun Tzu put it: "All war is based on deception.") The question remains: at what point do men who amass great power through cunning and deception reflect a Darwinian hero, or do they instead reflect a different trait that goes by the chapter title "parasitism" in Dr. Wilsons' book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. ("Parasitism" is typically called "criminality" in human societies; a vivid example is the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel "Crime and Punishment" who thinks he is so superior he can take morality into his own hands and winds up a guilt-ridden criminal convicted of murder; some scholars think that Dostoevsky may have specifically created his plot as a
Christian rebuttal to Nietzsche. Of course, if they were real scholars they would have known "Crime and Punishment" had been written well before Nietzsche published any of his works). Nietzsche's own life reflected the possible perversity of selective factors in congested, complex, modern, urban environments. Sexual promiscuity within a primitive tribe might be "eugenic" (i.e. it can increases stronger traits within the gene pool) to the extent that it may enable more fit men to disproportionately spread their seed compared to less fit men, but in a modern urban society, this behavior can be the undoing of great men through the spread of syphilis, as was the case with Nietzsche himself. Getting back to the aforementioned American frontier icons, the apparent suicide of Meriwether Lewis in a probable effort to protect his legend after becoming ruined in business dealings as Governor of the Louisiana Territories (and also after possibly contracting syphilis from the Mandan Indians), may reflect how a "Nietzschean hero" in one context can become a failure and a tragedy in another. As another example, after Davy Crockett's principles cost him his
Congressional seat in the face of intrigue by fellow Jacksonian Democrats (a "failure" or "weakness" from one viewpoint), he redeemed his legend by returning to the frontier and making a heroic last stand at the Alamo.
List of Works
- Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872 (The Birth of Tragedy)
- Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1876 (Untimely Meditations)
- Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878 (Human, All Too Human)
- Morgenröte, 1881 (Daybreak, or The Dawn)
- Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882 (The Gay Science)
- Also sprach Zarathustra, 1885 (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
- Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886 (Beyond Good and Evil)
- Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 (On the Genealogy of Morals)
- Der Fall Wagner, 1888 (The Case of Wagner)
- Götzen-Dämmerung, 1889 (The Twilight of the Idols)
- Der Antichrist, 1895 (The Antichrist)
- Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1895 (Nietzsche vs. Wagner)
- Der Wille zur Macht, 1901 (The Will to Power, a highly selective collection of notes from various notebooks, not intended for publication by Nietzsche himself, but released by his sister)
- Ecce Homo, 1908 (Behold the Man, an attempt at autobiography; the title refers to Pontius Pilate's statement upon meeting Jesus of Nazareth)
External links