Write your abstract
here.
The last term of this title isn't intended as a
swipe
at Nietzsche
but as a
deliberate provocation by
Walter
Kaufmann to the assumed prejudices of (some)
readers.
It
echoes Nietzsche's own, since he was scathing in
his
denunciations of Christianity throughout his
career,
most
concertedly in one of his last books, THE
ANTICHRIST.
Elsewhere, for example in CRITIQUE OF RELIGION
AND
PHILOSOPHY, Kaufmann engages points of
disagreement,
but
here is mainly concerned with elucidating
Nietzsche's
ideas-
--and clearing the thicket of
misrepresentations that
have
developed around them. (His one sustained criticism
of
Nietzsche is that the deliberate crystallization of
ambiguity in his style hasn't exactly starved those
misrepresentations. He also notes mildly in one
section
that Nietzsche's insight into women wasn't really
prodigious.)
Kaufmann is far more scathing in his assaults on
the
deliberate or thoughtlessly parroted
misrepresentations
of
commentators---beginning with Nietzsche's sister
and
her
militarist, anti-semitic husband, who took
advantage of
his
weakened mental state at the end of his life to
remake
Nietzsche in their own image. (The measure of
Nietzsche's
anti-semitism is perhaps best gauged by his
remark: "If
you
subtracted the Jewish contribution, you would lose
75%
of
the intellectual legacy of Europe." As for his
militarism,
he argued that defeated peoples were usually much
more
culturally robust than victors.) The Nazi use of
Nietzsche
as Kaufmann details it was even more unscrupulous.
Half
paragraphs and half sentences are quoted as if they
were
complete, when Nietzsche's apparent support of Nazi
doctrine is immediately contradicted by what
follows.
(In
contrast to the 'pure race' blather of the Reich,
Nietzsche
believed that every great leap forward in human
culture
had
come from the mixing of races.)
Almost as scandalous in Kaufmann's view are the
many
lazy commentators who've assumed the Nazi
assessment of
Nietzsche was fair, because it was
opportunistically
favourable, and have abused Nietzsche as a proto-
Nazi
without reading his actual words. (Particularly
ludicrous
the notion that Hitler drew his ideas from a close
reading
of Nietzsche. Superman comics were more consistent
with
his
reading skillset.)
Kaufmann patiently separates core concepts in
Nietzsche
from the misreadings that have gathered like clots
about
them. The Overman (Ubermensch) is not, as is often
claimed,
a thug bent on crushing lesser breeds with superior
muscle:
rather a man who has overcome what is weak and
mistakenly
willful in himself, and whose relations even with
the
weakly willful are likely thereafter to be kinder.
The
Will
to Power is not a will to conquer other men by
force,
or
rather this is perhaps its weakest human
expression. As
long as Nietzsche accepted the conventional usage
whereby
power is understood as exclusively military and
political,
he despised it. Only when he came to recognize the
force
exerted by the great ascetics and philosophers,
first
in
self-overcoming, then in the spread of influence
their
ideas acquired, did he come to admire the Will to
Power.
Kaufmann goes into considerable biographical
detail
as
well, not to give Nietzsche a sort of cuddly human
warmth
and accessibility, but to emphasize the connection
between
the personal and philosophical in a writer and
thinker
for
whom they were always conjoined. The force by which
Nietzsche persevered, under daily assault from
migraine
and
nervoueyesight failing, in constant
pain
yet
prolific of wit and joy in his writing, is as fine
a
gloss
as you could ask for of his famous aphorism: "If
you
have a
why in your life, you can make do with any how."