Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
By Rudiger Safranski
Freud once said that Nietzsche had ‘a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.’ In Safranski’s Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, one gets a sense of how this obsession with self-knowledge and self-surveillance developed: the young Nietzsche spent a good portion of his time writing diaries, reading and re-reading his entries and sometimes critiquing them and making annotations. He wrote his first autobiographical essay when he was fourteen. In the decade that followed, he wrote eight more.
This book deals with Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole, and a lot of time is spent on the relationship between art and politics. Nietzsche believed that for the elite world of culture and art and philosophy to exist, a lower class – in his mind, a class of ‘slaves’ – was needed. A just and at the same time artistically productive world was impossible, since it is the labor of the majority that gives a select few the time and energy to compose, write or philosophize. What this amounts to saying is that good art is impossible under socialism, and stated in these terms it becomes less an artistic stance, which I think Nietzsche intended it to be, than a political one. Safranski quotes from a poem by Hugo von Hofmannsthal to illustrate the view:
Many truly down below must perish
Where the heavy oars of ships are passing;
Others by the helm up there have dwelling,
Know the flight of birds and starry countries.
Nietzsche sides with the men on deck as against the slaves rowing below. He looks on in disgust at the ‘roar of sympathy’ that may some day erupt from the working class, along with its growing ‘urge for justice.’ Because a just world would mean the end of great men and of great art, he sought to prop up all the little injustices that plagued nineteenth-century Germany: he was dead set against the shortening of the workday, and he thought child labor justified and necessary.
Many writers have attacked Nietzsche for his apparent influence on Nazism and on fascism generally, attacks made possible I think only by a superficial reading of his books. In Safranski’s boigraphy one gets more grounded criticism, along with a decent record of how Nietzsche’s philosophy developed over the course of his life.
Is Neitzche the Nazi another Adam Smith, doomed to misinterpretation by opportunists and charlatans alike? Have we been too critical of them?
They're all fascist bastards as far as I'm concerned.
Nietszche would have laughed at the stupidity of the Nazis and the cattle who followed them, when he wasn't appalled by their brutality.
From Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy:
"The Nazification of German philosophy was undertaken even more substantially in Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures delivered throughout the period 1936-40 and not published until 1961 under the title Nietzsche I and II. Nietzsche had already been enthroned as an ideological pillar of the Nazi state, and Heidegger was appointed to an academic commission to oversee the publication of a critical edition of his writings and letters. In his lectures, Heidegger pays special attention to Nietzsche's Will to Power, to which he gives an uncompromisingly "metaphysical" interpretation."
In danthony's sympathetic peek at Nietzsche, those "cattle" who followed the Nazis could also be seen as the galley slaves : "Nietzsche sides with the men on deck as against the slaves rowing below. He looks on in disgust at the 'roar of sympathy' that may some day erupt from the working class, along with its growing 'urge for justice.' "
Perhaps the direct linking of Nietzsche to national socialism was a work of forced labour, but I don't believe we can make him into a democratic socialist, al-Q.
And the vulnerability of the galley slaves/cattle hasn't been lowered a helluva lot in the IT world, eh?
How did you manage to glean that from what I said?
Your "cattle" nicely matched the galley slaves of Safranski (from danthony) in describing Nietzsche's view of the "lower orders."
As Jeeves said to Bertie Wooster: "You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."
It isn't my "cattle." That's Nietszche's term.
Ah. Sometimes one can't tell whose ox is being gored.
George, no one here with half a cheeze doodle associates the Nazis with socialism for Christ's sake. They murdered the socialist wing of the party by 1934.
Yes, Fidel. That's why I was attempting to have some fun with the concept:"Perhaps the direct linking of Nietzsche to national socialism was a work of forced labour, but I don't believe we can make him into a democratic socialist, al-Q.
" I'm very familiar with the difficulties posed to British socialism by the Nazi use of the name. But that is a confusion experienced by the galley slaves, not those gathered around the binnacle, eh?
Read it again. From the top.
Made for a marvelous lightening of mood, ygtbk.
By the way, where does Nietszche use "cattle" to describe the "lower orders?"
From what I remember about his use of the term, he didn't make class distinctions, and would have called members of the Prussian aristocracy "cattle" just as readily (probably more readily) as he would any Saxon peasant.
My dear al, it was YOU who brought the word cattle to a discussion of Nietsche. I've no bloody idea where you found it.Don't go all syntaxy on us, please.
Clearly, you disagree with the OPs take on the fellow:" Nietzsche sides with the men on deck as against the slaves rowing below " ...You should have spoken up earlier...and perhaps not used "cattle" to describe the German citizenry?
Nietszche was a fucking dildo, a big skid mark on the historical record. There I said it.
Nice to hear. The reason I like that quotation is that, although it's stated in jest, it's a succinct (if understated) summary of how a lot of people react to reading Nietzsche. Certainly it was my reaction.
Nietzsche was a moral philosopher, not a political philosopher. Even his rhetoric against democracy is not meant as advice about what political parties or programs one should support, any more than The Sermon On The Mount is meant as advice about self-defense.
My Existentialism prof in university said that it's important to read Nietzsche as a "playful" writer. The same prof also scribbled "Very good" next to my comments in an essay to the effect that Nietzsche likes to mask reasonable opinions behind "outrageous and shocking metaphors". (Not bragging here, I didn't do exceptionally well in the course.)
As for Nietzsche's attitude toward "the herd": I think a good clue to understanding what he was getting at, once you clear away the shock-jock bombast, is his statement that "The opposite of pity is respect". It's not that Nietzsche wants us to hate the "botched and the ill-constituted", but rather that he wants us to think about what sort of sentiments are really motivating us when we express compassion for the supposedly weak. Sure, everyone agrees that we should have compassion for this or that group of suffering people, but how many of us would want to be the one that everyone points to as the poor sap in need of pity? Would we feel that we were being treated with respect, or condescension?
Another useful maxim of Nietzsche's is that "Morality is the highest form of aesthetics". Such an attitude does not preclude altrusim, or even political progressivism. But we would pursue those ideals not out of some sentiment of pity, but rather because we regard them as a form of high beauty. And then of course you have the whole Eternal Return metaphor, which I won't get into here.
I don't actually buy much of this, as I don't think any ethical approach has been devised that surpasses good old-fashioned, sentiment-driven utilitarianism. But, Nietzsche does provide a lot of food for thought.
Lovely!
My husband owns a copy of "Also sprach Zarathustra" that was issued to German soldiers to carry on their person when fighting in WW 1.
You can read Nietzche as an observor.
And he did cut through the bullshit of bourgeois rationalism- whoever's 'side' he was on.
Yes, playful. Nietszche loved to dance with words. Another thing those stern votaries of his (and those who get up on their hind legs to criticise him as well) miss is how hilarious he is.
Don't blame me if you can't follow the conversation. In any case, clearly you don't understand the meaning of "allusion" any better than you understand the meaning of "syntax."
Al, you grow bitter and vengeful and nonsensical. Don't bugger up a nice thread.
Great post, votd. Thanks!
I agree with Catch.; it's always nice to read such informed commentary on someone who is so widely misunderstood.
How did you find the experience of reading, then having to write about Nietzsche? I found the experience transformational as an undergrad. I had to do a measly paper on Nietzsche for a philosophy of religion class. As it turned out, I became immersed in his writing for a few months, and put far more into that crummy 30 marks (well, in the end, the marks didn't matter although I received a very high mark for the paper) than was probably warranted.
I found I didn't study Nietzsche just for essay-fodder, the way one usually does, but found the experience reflective. I couldn't just "read" his writing, I became involved with it personally. Looking into his pages (insert abyss joke here) became like looking into myself.
In the end, I couldn't write a conventional academic essay, but wrote an introductory blurb about the Nietzsche's views on the nature of tragedy, and a conclusion, but I filled the middle with poetry based on Nietzsche's writings and my own experiences reflected through my interpretation of tragic art. I didn't know how else to write the paper and still write authentically.
My favourite bits from Nietzsche are the bits about tragedy too. I found him very useful to get at what we actually mean when we use words like tragedy and katharsis. It was particularly fun to read Euripedes with Nietzsche in the background, especially The Bacchae.
How did you find the experience of reading, then having to write about Nietzsche? I found the experience transformational as an undergrad. I had to do a measly paper on Nietzsche for a philosophy of religion class. As it turned out, I became immersed in his writing for a few months, and put far more into that crummy 30 marks (well, in the end, the marks didn't matter although I received a very high mark for the paper) than was probably warranted.
My philosophy essays always tended to be night-before, not-quite masterpieces, and the one on N. was no exception. So I can't really say that writing it was much of a transformational experience. One thing I took away from the prof's lectures is that Nietzsche's books are best read cover-to-cover, not by scanning for the most outlandish-sounding passages, as a lot of readers try to do.
For my money, though, Kierkegaard was the existentialist I found the most engaging, possibly because of my latent Christian tendencies, but also because I thought he summed up the basic ideas of the philosophy in a more concise and succinct way than did Nietzsche. Especially the progression from the aesthetic through to the ethical and then to the religious modes of existence, as exemplified by his(admittedly idiosycratic) reading of Abraham and Isaac. And then of course, Sartre came along, swept away Kierkegaard's religion and Nietzsche's elitism, and boiled their ideas down to one easy-to-grasp technical philosophy that had all the pathos and artistry of a repair manual(and I mean that as a compliment to Sartre).
I found I didn't study Nietzsche just for essay-fodder, the way one usually does, but found the experience reflective. I couldn't just "read" his writing, I became involved with it personally. Looking into his pages (insert abyss joke here) became like looking into myself.
In the end, I couldn't write a conventional academic essay, but wrote an introductory blurb about the Nietzsche's views on the nature of tragedy, and a conclusion, but I filled the middle with poetry based on Nietzsche's writings and my own experiences reflected through my interpretation of tragic art. I didn't know how else to write the paper and still write authentically.
When I later took a course on Christian Existentialism, I begged the prof to write an essay on Kierkegaard(who was not on the syllabus), which came out as something sounding quite like your essay on Nietzsche(it included an entire paragraph, in parentheses, describing a dream I had had as a kid). The prof gave me an okay mark, but strongly implied that the essay was more theology than philosophy.
(insert abyss joke here)
When Nietzsche wrote in his journals "Some day my name will be associated with something monstrous", I suspect he was thinking not of the Nazis, but of innumerable Grade-Z serial-killer flicks in which the that "abyss" maxim would be inserted in order to impart cheap intellectual gravitas.
I knew there was an old thread on Friedrich. And here it is.
I missed that thread, as it occurred during my post-schism Enmasse exile.
I'm curious about this:
My guess is that Grant raised this in Technology and Empire, but I'm not sure about that. Can anyone point to this passage or discussion?
Unfortunately, the babbler who posted that was recently banned for trolling the WikiLeaks threads. I don't know to what he was referring, but you could be right: George Grant has an essay called "Nietzsche and the Ancients" in T&E, so perhaps that's it.
Geez, you had me thinking I was losing my marbles there for a sec. I didn't remember that chapter, so I checked my copy of Technology and Empire but couldn't find it. I then grabbed the book next to it, Technology and Justice, which I haven't read yet, and found the chapter you mentioned. Now I at least know what's next on my reading list.
Quite right! That's some lots of books youse got there. Or maybe just highly specialized. All Grant, all the time.
Yeah, don't that beat all? Some of us dumbass Saskatchewan farmboys even knows how ta reed!