{"id":801920,"date":"2022-09-17T13:58:12","date_gmt":"2022-09-17T13:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=133483"},"modified":"2022-09-17T13:58:12","modified_gmt":"2022-09-17T13:58:12","slug":"nietzsche-free-thinker-or-reactionary-aristocrat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/09\/17\/nietzsche-free-thinker-or-reactionary-aristocrat\/","title":{"rendered":"Nietzsche: Free-Thinker or Reactionary Aristocrat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Young individualist-anarchists, for more than a century, have been powerfully drawn to the highly original, often poetically exultant writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).\u00a0 The quintessential free spirit, Nietzsche effectively used paradox, playful irony and wordplay to heap scorn on life-hating (Judeo-Christian) morality, with its sex-negative ideas of \u201csin\u201d and its condemnation of healthy human desire and self-assertion.\u00a0 In Nietzsche\u2019s time and place, Calvinist-Lutheran morality warned of hellfire for the many, predestined salvation for only a few.\u00a0 As a psychologically crippling ideology, it produced obedient, moralistic and loyal subjects to the authoritarian power of fathers, the church, and, most significantly, the State.\u00a0 Of course, the young Nietzsche lived in a loose German confederation composed of dozens of small kingdoms and their \u201celectors.\u201d\u00a0 But the Prussian militarist Bismarck, through a ruthless plan of intimidation and military might, soon created a greater, united German Empire, with the Prussian king as Emperor with absolute powers.\u00a0 Nietzsche deplored the populist \u201cleveling\u201d of the populace into such a highly regimented, bureaucratized, and military-dominated Empire.<\/p>\n

Still in his twenties, the young Nietzsche was obligated to serve as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71).\u00a0 His assignment included daily transporting, from the raging battlefield, both decaying corpses and terribly wounded soldiers screaming in pain.\u00a0 It is surprising that biographers have generally failed to connect such horrifying experiences with his subsequent, lifelong nervousness and psychosomatic maladies; in short, with the aftereffects of PTSD.\u00a0 In any event, suffering recurrent insomnia and anxiety attacks for the remainder of his life, he became dependent on chloral hydrate, a powerful sedative with dangerous side-effects.\u00a0 Moreover, more recent research has disclosed that in later years, \u201cDr.\u201d Nietzsche \u2013 of philology, that is \u2013 wrote cocaine prescriptions for himself.\u00a0 It is certainly not implausible that his later writings\u2013with their often grandiose, exultant passages of unparalleled eloquence — might have been cocaine-induced.<\/p>\n

As a philosopher, he rejected the Platonic \u201cidealism\u201d which permeated German metaphysics from Kant to Hegel, in favor of the empirical-materialist Epicurus, who had insisted that the world of the senses, properly interpreted, was the only real world<\/em>.\u00a0 (But the French philosophe <\/em>and atheist Denis Diderot\u2013who had preceded him in this by over a century\u2013had also insisted, anticipating Darwinian ideas about species\u2019 adaptations, that the desires of the body were entirely natural.)\u00a0 Nor was Zarathustra\u2019s proclamation that \u201cGod is dead\u201d particularly earth-shattering\u2013having been preceded by many of the 18th French philosophes,<\/em> as well as Ludwig Feuerbach (and Karl Marx) by the 1840s.<\/p>\n

Despite the oracular incoherence and wild speculations of the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche oddly came to insist that the dialectical rationality exhibited by Socrates was a \u201cdecadent\u201d threat to the supposedly ecstatic (Dionysian) joie-de-vivre<\/em> of the ancient Greeks.\u00a0 But Greek tragedy, with its impulsive violence, relentless vengeance, and divinely-ordered predestination, hardly substantiates Nietzsche\u2019s sunny vision\u2013and slavery and warmaking were basic institutions of both Athens and Sparta.<\/p>\n

Despite the Enlightenment-influenced rational skepticism often expressed in such books as Human, All-Too-Human<\/em>, Nietzsche ultimately can be linked to the German Counter-Enlightenment, with its exaltation of instinct and sentiment as opposed to reason, and its dislike of the emerging commercial-industrial order which would diminish the semi-feudal traditions personified by the giant land-owning Junkers.<\/p>\n

Having suffered as a child in an all-female household of sin-obsessed moralists\u2013who hardly extended to him Jesus\u2019s virtues of kindness and forgiveness\u2013he would later become a self-identified anti-moralist.\u00a0 Written in a style unmistakably parodying the Gospels, his Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/em>\u2013extolling human values and condemning life-hating moralities obsessed with the \u201cnext (non-existent) world,\u201d the book, adopting Jesus\u2019s style of teaching-by-parable, is not one of his best.\u00a0 In this and other books of his last period (1884-1889), he, like all right-wing Romantics (e.g., Carlyle), extols the majesty of pure will, <\/em>unfettered by religious moralism and intellectual objections.<\/p>\n

No doubt influenced by Plutarch (and probably Machiavelli), Nietzsche came to idealize the supreme vigor, grandeur and mastery exhibited by the vigorous Julius Caesar\u2013in reality a ruthless power-seeker, whose military prowess (slaughtering tens-of-thousands of Gauls and Germans) enabled him to vanquish his rival Pompey, thereby destroying the remnants of the Roman Republic in the process, in order to become absolute imperator perpetuus.\u00a0 <\/em>In one of his worst books, The Genealogy of Morals<\/em>, Nietzsche actually blames the early Christians\u2013who were sadistically tortured and dismembered in the arena for the amusement of Nero and his ilk\u2013for infecting the Roman empire with ideas of \u201csin\u201d and \u201cguilt\u201d (for such minor acts as raping slave boys and tormenting condemned gladiators, among others).\u00a0 A persecuted religious minority, these abused Christians had only their faith in eventual salvation as a consolation.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche eagerly prophesied a world presided over by overmen\u2013<\/em>superior, masterful individuals, artist-philosophers whose aristocratic station allowed them the leisure for supreme aesthetic cultivation and philosophical grandeur of vision.\u00a0 (Perhaps he had his former idol, composer Richard Wagner in mind\u2013though, unlike Wagner, he deplored the German empire and was emphatically not <\/em>an anti-Semite!).\u00a0 Yet what of the \u201cmasses\u201d of ordinary Germans, mere subjects of the Kaiser, a supreme autocrat.\u00a0 Like most aristocrats of the time, educated in a semi-feudal, mostly agrarian country of great landowners and small business folk, Nietzsche had little sympathy for democracy.\u00a0 <\/em>Dismissing the stupendous achievements of the French Revolution\u2013abolition of feudal titles and privileges (both the Church and Aristocracy, tax-exempt, had like the Crown heavily taxed the people into virtual starvation), establishment of a Republic of elected officials, guarantees of basic human rights including voting\u2013Nietzsche could only think of the few mob massacres and bloody Reign of Terror).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Conspicuously missing from his writings is any appreciation of Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Lincoln, or even, if I remember, J. S. Mill (whose On Liberty <\/em>includes the wonderful chapter \u201cOf the Individual\u201d).\u00a0 Unlike the slaveholder Jefferson, who nonetheless advocated vehemently for an imminent freeing of the slaves, Nietzsche by implication, may have envisaged a return to a slave-system, the labor provided enabling such overmen <\/em>the capacity to exercise their masterful will and ingenious creativity.\u00a0 Nietzsche, an \u201caristocrat of the intellect,\u201d was emphatically against republican equality of rights under the law<\/em>.\u00a0 His iconoclastic daring, however liberatory to certain aesthetic-intellectual non-conformists and \u201cfree spirits,\u201d failed\u2013unlike Beethoven or Robespierre\u2013to envision free growth for a universal humanity.\u00a0 <\/em>Unlike Jefferson and the others, Nietzsche ultimately believed in \u201cthe freedom of the noble [sic] men\u201d– not <\/em>\u201cthe nobility of the free men.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Image:\u00a0 Nietzsche, 1882 (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n

The post Nietzsche: Free-Thinker or Reactionary Aristocrat?<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Young individualist-anarchists, for more than a century, have been powerfully drawn to the highly original, often poetically exultant writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).\u00a0 The quintessential free spirit, Nietzsche effectively used paradox, playful irony and wordplay to heap scorn on life-hating (Judeo-Christian) morality, with its sex-negative ideas of \u201csin\u201d and its condemnation of healthy human desire [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post Nietzsche: Free-Thinker or Reactionary Aristocrat?<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801920"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":801974,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801920\/revisions\/801974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}