The Madness of Nietzsche

Nietzsche was either terribly misinterpreted, as my dearly departed scholar brother was adamant to say, or he was simply mad his entire life, and his philosophy was a philosophy of madness. But it ultimately matters little, other than to historians and biographers, which one is the case, because the philosophy that we associate with Nietzsche, be it Nietzsche’s real philosophy or a gross and systemic mistranslation and misrepresentation of it, is nevertheless the philosophy that has influenced the modern world from the early 20th century on.

On those grounds, what we are critiquing here is the philosophical and cultural influence of Nietzsche’s writings, be they accurate or misrepresented, and not Nietzsche’s intentions, which ultimately matter very little, if they are knowable at all.

We know what has been almost universally portrayed as Nietzsche’s philosophy, and it is that portrayal, be it accurate or inaccurate, which has shaped the past century in profound ways. Maybe Nietzsche can be rescued from the Nietzscheans, just as Jesus must be rescued from the Christians, or science must be rescued from the practitioners of scientism; but I seriously doubt that any philosopher can be so radically mistranslated as to utterly invert one philosophy and turn it into its opposite. Therefore, I must conclude, although it is, as I explained, a minor point, that not only is Nietzschean philosophy insane, but so too was its author.

Why is Nietzsche’s philosophy insane? Well, I read four of his major books, and he was perfectly vivid and explicit, and utterly unambiguous in his views – and I do not see how it is conceivable that anyone could be so radically misinterpreted as my friend proclaimed Nietzsche to be. It would be like saying that Ptolemy was misinterpreted, and he really meant that the sun is the centre of our solar system, and not that the cosmos revolved around the Earth. It’s pretty hard to misinterpret anyone in such a radical manner. I would say the same with regard to Nietzsche. But let’s look at Nietzsche’s core points of philosophy, as it appears in standard translations, prior to Kauffman, since it would seem that is the philosophy that has been delivered to the masses, and hence, the philosophy to be critiqued.

Nietzsche wrote, with great vividness and explicit clarity, the following points of philosophy. I will leave it to the reader to decide if these points could be so fundamentally misinterpreted as to translate them into their opposites, or whether that is even relevant at all, since it is the influence of Nietzsche’s writings which matters, and not the author’s possible hidden intentions; and secondly, whether the universally portrayed philosophy of Nietzsche’s books, which is what matters, is simply a form of madness. I would say my view has been made clear, and it is the view of many scholars of philosophy, and not just my own, for whatever that is worth.

1. Nietzsche glorified war.
2. Nietzsche was rabidly elitist and despised democracy.
3. Nietzsche glorified empire and conquest.
4. Nietzsche was rabidly and openly, vehemently sexist, if not misogynist.
5. Nietzsche was rabidly anti-religious.
6. Nietzsche praised self-indulgence and hedonism.
7. Nietzsche praised, not only a health self-respect – as Emerson, whom he was deeply impressed by and influenced by, and to whom Nietzsche, I would say, added absolutely nothing of value, but only layered over with deep and systemic confusion and delusion – but further, praised self-adoration, vanity and egotism.
8. Nietzsche praised and promoted the vicious and ruthless predation, conquest and domination of the common people, whom he despised, by the powerful few.
9. Nietzsche viewed morality, and above all compassion, as the root of all human problems, and something to be eradicated.
10. Nietzsche viewed all values as being social constructs, or human creations – and that is the very definition of nihilism. After all, if all human values are simply human creations, then all values are equally valid: this is moral relativism, and it is nihilism – it means that Hitler and the Nazis had their own value system, and who are we to judge? Their values are every bit as legitimate as the values of Jesus, the Buddha or Martin Luther King Jr. That is moral relativism, and that is nihilism, and yes, it is a profoundly delusional and profoundly toxic philosophy or world view. Which is why phenomenology, existentialism and post-modernism are all vastly over-hyped toxic garbage heaps of polysyllabic psycho-babble – because they are all based in nihilism, following on the disastrous example and terribly misleading and delusional views of Nietzsche.

In short, Nietzschean philosophy, as it has shaped a century of the modern world, is starkly materialistic, hedonistic, egotistical, elitist, imperialist, misogynist, militaristic, nihilistic – despite the fact that he warned against nihilism, which he nonetheless fell victim to – and narcissistic. His work in sum promoted, in effect, if not in intention, nihilism, fascism, hedonism and narcissism. The results were predictable.

Nihilism is a dangerous delusion, so too is the imagined separation of human beings from the realities of being. If we think there is nothing above us, then nothing is beneath us. We are immersed in nature and are inseparable from nature. If we think we are self-made, god-like beings, we are in deep trouble.

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I’m not sure how anyone could mistranslate any writing in such an extreme form as to turn a lover of democracy into a hatred of democracy; or a love of compassion, and the morality based in compassion, into a hatred of morality and compassion – for example. It seems impossible to me. But again, that is irrelevant. This depiction of ten key points of Nietzsche’s philosophy, as it has been delivered to the world, and as it has influenced and shaped late-modern industrial society, is what matters. And the question is, is this philosophy sensible, sound, useful or ennobling to humanity, or is it simply insane? I think the answer, to anyone who is not a sociopath, is pretty clear.

Nietzsche spent his whole life railing against compassion, as his most central argument and thesis, and then, late in life, he saw a horse that had collapsed in the street, after having been driven to exhaustion by a pitiless and cruel master, and he fell down upon the horse with his arms around the horse’s neck, and had a psychotic break, never to return to sanity again. I think it is reasonable to conclude, as other philosophers have concluded, that in that moment, Nietzsche realized that his whole life’s work had been based on a delusion, that what he was attacking – compassion – was what mattered most of all, and he could not handle the sudden realization, and went, suddenly and completely, finally, totally insane.

I would argue, however, that anyone who can venerate the predation of the powerful upon the powerless, or the less powerful, and anyone who could excoriate compassion as the root of all evil, was insane his whole life, and not just at the end of it. At the end, he realized he had been delusional his entire life, and that was the final break; but the madness began long before, decades before, for some unknown reason (certainly something beyond syphilis, though that may have contributed to it). To me it seems clear, though again, it matters not, that Nietzsche, and not only the philosophy we have been handed which was ascribed to Nietzsche, was completely insane from an early date. But whether one agrees with that or not, the fact remains undisputable, that the philosophy that the world was handed, and which heavily shaped the minds of generations of people for the past hundred years, which was ascribed, rightly or wrongly, to Nietzsche, was madness incarnate.

Love and compassion are not only virtuous, but also a matter of enlightened self-interest. The nature of being and reality is interdependence. That means that we are all connected, and it means that an injury to one truly is an injury to all. It means, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, that no man is an island. Jesus, the Buddha, Spinoza, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Kant were right: treat others as you would have them treat you – not only because it is the virtuous thing to do, but also, because it is the intelligent thing to do. No man is an island. And Nietzsche, or at least the philosophy ascribed to Nietzsche, which has sadly and deeply influenced the past century of the modern world, was, therefore, utterly mad.

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Ideas stand or fall on their own merit. The messenger is irrelevant. Biographies may be interesting, and they may shed light on the generation of ideas, the lineage of ideas, but biographies are ultimately and utterly irrelevant to philosophy. Either the philosophy is sound, sensible and useful, or it is not. No biographical information or detail has any slightest bearing upon that question. Whoever Nietzsche truly was, and whatever he may or may not have personally, secretly believed, matters nothing to the question which is the overwhelmingly central one: was the philosophy ascribed to Nietzsche, and which deeply influenced the past 100 years, sound and sensible, or delusional and insane? That question, the important question, and not the biographical question, which is by comparison trivial, I believe has been irrefutably and clearly answered.

Nietzsche is dead. It is time now to bury his philosophy along with him.

Travel well, and thanks for all the fish.

Goodbye, sad, lost friend. While we may sympathize with your tragedy, we cannot abide by your legacy of madness any longer, but must be done with it, for once, and for all.

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Marx was famously said to have turned Hegel on his head. He was first deeply influenced by Hegel, and then took Hegel’s philosophy, and turned one element of it upside down. Hegel said that spirit is the driver of history, and guides history toward an ever-expanding upward arc. Marx took Hegel’s determinism, and turned it into a materialist determinism. In that sense, Marx is worse than Hegel; and Marx, in his materialism and his determinism both, was simply wrong.

Hegel was an elitist, a statist, and an authoritarian, and therefore should be rejected, or at least those major elements of his philosophy should be rejected. Marx accepted Hegel’s elitism, and thus was both a crypto-authoritarian, as well as a statist. For that, Marx should be rejected. Both Hegel and Marx had useful things to say, but we cannot take either philosophy uncritically, as a whole.

Similarly, Nietzsche was deeply influenced by Emerson, but Nietzsche, unlike Marx in relation to Hegel, adding nothing useful to Emerson’s philosophy, but merely corrupted and confused it. Nietzsche, therefore, should be rejected, for this reason, and for the reasons I have made clear above.

Some people, surprisingly from the left, have recently made scathingly dismissive critiques of Emerson. I think that is both foolish as well as ungenerous. Emerson has a tremendous amount to offer us. Whether he made serious mistakes is not the question to be asked – almost everyone does. What matters is if we can glean anything useful from Emerson. I would say the answer is a decided and emphatic, definite yes.

We can say there are useful elements to Hegel’s philosophy, and to Marx’s philosophy, and to Nietzsche’s philosophy, but the errors are so grave and so profound that I think it would be insane to adopt the philosophies of the three, even though it may be and is useful to study them all. With Emerson, all of his most famous and influential writings I have read, and I can see no major or grave error in them. That puts Emerson on an entirely different, and vastly superior plane, compared with Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche.

Thoreau criticized Emerson, who was his friend and mentor, and criticized his infatuation with his “choo-choo”, as Thoreau playfully and bluntly referred to Emerson’s adoration of a presumed “progress”, which hinged, to a dangerous degree, on materialism, material “progress”, and an undue veneration of technology. That is the one error that I am aware of in Emerson’s writings, but I am sure there may be more. In any event, I believe Emerson’s writings are not only highly relevant, and highly useful and informative to us today, but that they are, on the whole, a beacon of light in a mentally and sociologically darkened world. Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx cannot share that same light, but are, on the whole, and on the contrary, ideologies and philosophies to be learned from, and then, largely, and overall, discarded.

In fact, I would say that if we were to take Emerson and Thoreau together, we have the best of American philosophy, along with Chomsky, Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Allan Wallace, Joanna Macy, Joseph Campbell, Erich Fromm, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Now that combination can offer us some very good and even excellent guidance. Nietzsche’s philosophy, however, has no place in any sane man’s, or sane woman’s, philosophy or mind.

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What has gone wrong with the modern world? A great many things. But one element of what has gone wrong, is the philosophers we have foolishly taken as guides, and the philosophers, thinkers and sages we likewise foolishly undervalued or ignored, but whose vision and guidance we should have followed. We venerated or were unduly and tragically influenced by Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Spencer and Nietzsche, along with Locke and Descartes, and that has been absolutely disastrous. And, in the modern world, we have either ignored, undervalued, or recently devalued or lost sight of, the philosophies and the generally good guidance of Socrates, Plotinus, the Renaissance thinkers, Spinoza, Hume, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Dickens and Blake, Emerson, Thoreau, Kropotkin, Popper, Whitehead, Einstein, Bohm, Wheeler, Allan Wallace, Joanna Macy, Alan Watts, Ken Wilber, Morris Berman, Joseph Campbell, Bertrand Russell, Murray Bookchin, Erich Fromm, Huxley and Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, the Buddha, Moses, Mohamed, Shankara and Lao Tzu, to make a very incomplete list.

We have followed the wrong guides. But it is never too late to correct our bad habits.

It is also important to realize this. Despite the obvious darker trends which lay on the surface of things, the deeper trend in the world is towards a cosmopolitan spirit of decentralization and democracy, relocalization and freedom; or more directly said, toward a resurgence of the local, combined with openness, a greater balance of confidence, dignity and humility, and unity amidst diversity. With that in mind, I would say that very soon, if not immediately, the great majority of people who are broad-minded and spiritual, as well as the great majority of people who are broad-minded humanists – and the two are not in the slightest in contradiction, but in truth compliment one another – can both embrace the majority, if not all, of the luminaries I have mentioned here. If we do, and many will, I can assure you the overall effect will be profoundly positive, and ultimately, deeply liberating, and deeply healing to ourselves, and to our world. But the important point is this: We must think for ourselves, and rely above all, on our own innate, natural intelligence. The herd mentality, and the tendency to bow down to perceived, benevolent and wise authorities, has led us into a dark time – redoubling those failed measures now will only worsen our lot, and will profoundly diminish our chances for a decent future, or any future at all. Think for yourself, above all. Question everything. Look to the actual evidence, and to your own experience and innate, natural intelligence. Examine things for yourself. See for yourself.

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Thoreau said, “When I notice the ruts in a road, I am compelled to think, how much deeper are the ruts in the mind.” He also said – I am quoting from memory here, but it is nearly an exact quote: “I sometimes despair of getting anything accomplished with the help of my fellow men. Their minds would first need to be put through a kind of powerful vice, to squeeze their old ideas out of them.”

Einstein said something similar: “Common sense is the set of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.” And that is true. We are deeply indoctrinated before we reach the age of eighteen, and worse, most people spend their lives trying to shore up their prejudices, rather than being open to new ways of thinking, seeing, living, being, or learning. I do not mean prejudice in the form of bigotry here – I mean prejudice as Einstein used the term, meaning preconceptions. We are fastidious and fervent in our commitment to maintaining our cherished preconceptions – and the evidence be damned!

Not only are we deeply indoctrinated from an early age, but we are continuously being indoctrinated by our society, by powerful institutions, the media, the government, big business, advertising, peer groups, our workplace or employer, and yes, by academia, “science”, school and church. And beyond that, there is the deeper issue of cognitive bias and emotional bias. The psychological studies show that whenever new evidence conflicts with our previously existing beliefs, instead of changing or altering our beliefs, most people try to mould or filter the evidence to conform with their pre-existing beliefs. We are deeply committed, that is, to irrationality, group-think and dogmatism. We think, in the modern world, that we are rational and free, but as John Lennon said, “You’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see” – and we are hardly ever rational. But we can be.

Most people value comfort over truth. That makes them unconsciously conformist and obedient to authority, and it makes them cling to their preconceived beliefs, no matter what evidence they are shown. These are the problems we must get beyond. But while that all sounds very gloomy, we also know that there are periodic shifts in consciousness in history, or paradigm shifts, as it is called in science (see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), periods of cultural awakening, or revolutions of the mind. And while things may look very dark now, and they are, it is also true that there is an awakening occurring across humanity, as well as a slow-motion paradigm shift occurring in science and philosophy. And that is an extremely good sign. Life is always reinventing itself. Human society is no different. We too, like all of nature, are in continuous flux. Things only seem static and permanent when our view of life and of history is tiny and narrow. When we widen our view, we see that things are always changing, and that while change is generally gradual, it is also true, as we know from Prigogine’s work in chemistry, and Kuhn’s work in the history of science, that there are also moments when small cumulative changes build up to a kind of quantum shift. That too, is unfolding now. Be the precipitating factor. Nudge the world towards awakening. Terrible things are happening, but so too are an awakening and a renaissance emerging. These are, in fact, both scary, and exciting times.

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I have said before, and I will say it again, that what we need, is not a new philosophy, ideology or religion, but simply a fresh perspective. In order to accomplish that, we must, figuratively speaking, clear the decks. We must declutter our minds. We must unearth from our collective unconscious all the dark things, and all the dark illusions, above all, that do not serve us now, and never truly have. It is illusion that is the only true enemy, in any time or place. We cut through illusion, in order to liberate our own common sense, or if you prefer, in order to liberate our own natural clarity of mind and innate intelligence.

If we need a new vision, which we also do, it will arise from this ground of liberated clarity and innate, natural intelligence, and not from some new or old dogma. That being said, once we have cleared away some of the reigning confusion, illusion and delusions which shroud the modern mind in darkness, it is only reasonable to look to the best of both the present and the past for knowledge, wisdom, practical ideas and good guidance.

It is just such a synthesis of the best of our more than 5,000 years of history, which I have distilled in my first three published books and over 500 essays. I hope they will be of help. I am convinced that they can be, and will. But it is always our own innate, natural intelligence that should guide us above all. Question everything, and think for yourself.

I would say that if you want confidence and self-dignity, to throw off the chains of conformity and dogma, and the unthinking deference to authority, and to overcome both the master and the slave mentality, and thereby, to become an ubermensch – meaning, a person who has inwardly risen to a higher state of being and mind – then you would do far better to follow the guidance of Emerson, Thoreau or Blake; or better yet, Spinoza in the West, or Nagarjuna, the Buddha and Lao Tzu in the East (again, to make a very incomplete list of better options, and all of them are the inherited treasures of all humanity, it is important to note). The worst, or among the worst that we could do, would be to follow the philosophy of Nietzsche.

JTR,
April 17, 2021