Screw New Directions

Nietzsche

There is an old Graffiti that goes:

"God is Dead" -- Nietzsche

To which was added:

"Nietzsche is dead" -- God

Then people began to read and understand him and the following line was added:

"I was born posthumonously" -- Nietzsche

I THOUGHT WE HAD ALL GROWN UP

The reputation of Frederick Nietzsche had been restored to a semblance of sanity as early as the early 50s by the work of Walter Kaufmann and others. The translation of most of his works into reasonably accurate English versions had taken the misguided public impression of him and eventually restored it to some semblance of its original intent. Imagine, then, when in the Nation, of all places, Daniel Lazare writes of “…the baleful influence of Nietzsche, the favorite philosopher of overwrought 16-year-olds…” (May 28, 2007, p. 32). I had been considering taking a new direction in the work to come, but there is far more fun in relating the antics of George Bush (favorite philosopher, Jesus) than in dealing with people like Lazare who, presumably, know better.

First, how many 16-year olds in 2007 have read Nietzsche? If Lazare can find one, he has been looking too hard for his own good. “Baleful” means “harmful, portending evil” and “bale” means “Evil, mental suffering”, terms that seem to describe Lazare much better than the influence of Nietzsche who wrote “Beyond Good and Evil,” considering these invented concepts with no basis in reality.

Second, Nietzsche probably had more positive influence on the 20^th century than any philosopher in history. Direct influences that come to mind are Camus, Sartre, Eugene O’Neil, Bernard Shaw, H. L. Menken (not altogether correctly), Jack London, Kafka, Hesse, Thomas Mann – the list of direct, acknowledged, debtors is enormously long. In addition, there would be all of those influenced by those on the list. In an enigmatic acknowledgment, Freud claimed that he stopped reading Nietzsche until he had completed his own theories because he wanted to make certain he had developed them independently. Once done, he re-read Nietzsche and found that Nietzsche an anticipated him in every important aspect of Psychology possible.

There is no need to revisit the history of his sister who curried favor with Hitler and was married to an anti-semite and the many distortions for which she is responsible. One sentence from Nietzsche to Jacob Burkhart should suffice: “I am having all anti-Semites shot.” Or helpful here, perhaps, is another statement about his explicit fear that someday someone would pronounce him holy (which his sister had Peter Gãst do as he sprinkled something on his grave). I have already addressed many of the standard and deliberate distortions of Nietzsche haters – see the archives for the first month or so.

To see such things still slip by in the 21^st century some 60 of 70 years later, despite the understanding of others who could either read German or had adequate insight into Nietzsche makes me realize that there simply isn’t any other path.

Examples of absurdity that we can all chuckle at is far more therapeutic and fun than taking such above examples seriously.

So much for that.