My last Nietzsche post got some folks hot and bothered.
One commenter, in particular, was adamant that we should regard Nietzsche as a deliberate and considered pan-European imperialist. There was unsteadiness as to whether this attribution was to be made on entertainment or intellectual grounds – i.e. on the grounds that it is most fun, or else most true, to see Nietzche this way. I myself would sooner join the former school than the latter. But it cannot be denied that, if Nietzsche didn’t want to be viewed as a considered pan-European imperialist, maybe certain thoughts of his should not have been committed to paper. Without further ado, I present pretty much the worst you will find in his Late Notebooks
To show that an ever more economical use of men and mankind, a ‘maÂchinery’ of interests and actions ever more firmly intertwined, necessarily implies a counter-movement. I call this the secretion of a luxurious surplus from mankind, which is to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type, the conditions of whose genesis and survival are different from those of the average man. As is well known, my concept, my metaphor for this type is the word ‘superman’.
That first path, which can now be perfectly surveyed, gives rise to adaptation, flattening-out, higher Chinesehood, modesty in instincts, contentment with the miniaturisation of man – a kind of standstill in man’s level. Once we have that imminent, inevitable total economic administraÂtion of the earth, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a piece of machinery in the administration’s service: as a tremendous clockwork of ever smaller, ever more finely ‘adapted’ cogs; as an ever-increasing suÂperfluity of all the dominating and commanding elements; as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual factors represent minimal forces, minÂimal values. Against this miniaturisation and adaptation of men to more specialised usefulness, a reverse movement is required – the generation of the synthesising, the summating, the justifying man whose existence deÂpends on that mechanisation of mankind, as a substructure upon which he can invent for himself his higher way of being …
Just as much, he needs the antagonism of the masses, of the ‘levelled Âout’, the feeling of distance in relation to them; he stands upon them, lives off them. This higher form of aristocratism is that of the future. – In moral terms, this total machinery, the solidarity of all the cogs, represents a maximum point in the exploitation of man: but it presupposes a kind of men for whose sake the exploitation has meaning. Otherwise, indeed, it would be just the overall reduction, value reduction of the human type – a phenomenon of retrogression in the grandest style. – It can be seen that what I’m fighting is economic optimism: the idea that everyone’s profit necessarily increases with the growing costs to everyone. It seems to me that the reverse is the case: the costs to everyone add up to an overall loss: man becomes less – so that one no longer knows what this tremendous process was actually for. A ‘What for?’, a new ‘What for?’ – that is what mankind needs …
We get the weird Orientalism in there, be it noted, which was at issue in the previous post. The question is: is Nietzsche a Spengler, dreaming of a Rhodes-style Uber-capitalism-as-socialist-colonialism, or not. I’m strongly inclined to say: not. But these passages must be acknowledged. Maybe we’ll chat about it in the morning, after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
{ 36 comments }
MPAVictoria 11.18.15 at 2:45 pm
Relevant:
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/107
Bruce Wilder 11.18.15 at 3:48 pm
Weirdly pro-globalization, rah-rah neoliberalism: salvage something from ecological collapse and over-population before it is too late to realize the Singularity in the person of a successor species!
Rakesh Bhandari 11.18.15 at 4:05 pm
Don’t have time today to say anything adamantly. But based on my wife’s writing I think this passage should be understood not in relation to imperialism but to the sixth of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letter on the Education of Mankind. Here the clockwork imagery is used critically as well but in a very different spirit.
Also Amartya Sen also writes of the minaturisation of man but again in a very different spirt. See his Violence of Identity.
JimV 11.18.15 at 4:21 pm
I agree with him about being pessimistic about economic optimism: a) when we could feed everyone we won’t, because the resources will be concentrated in the hands of the Gate’s, the Koch’s, the Murdoch’s, etc. ; b) in the long run we can’t, because we are already consuming resources much faster than they can be renewed, and even the Sun’s energy won’t last forever. I also think he was realistic about a counter-movement (to egalitarianism). Where I disagree is that the counter-movement will produce supermen. It produces the super-rich, and their ability to control the rest of us, through their leverage on government and the media. Their new “what for” is the old “what’s in it for me”.
So in the end my problem with his conclusions as I read them in this excerpt is that they are too optimistic.
Jim Harrison 11.18.15 at 4:30 pm
Rawls famously opted for a minimax strategy in defining defining justice, but opting for a world in which you have a chance to win hugely is actually a popular choice, not only among those who have gamed the system but even among those who merely hope to win the lottery. After all, even if the odds are lousy, if the payout from the more modest strategy is disappointing enough, you may prefer the bare possibility of the big win. Even if you don’t win—the overwhelmingly likely outcome—at least you can identify with the winners. To a large extent, right wing axiology comes down to a preference for betting on the numbers. Of course Nietzsche’s idea of what counts as glorious outcome is not crudely economic, but he does write about the lucky throws. What’s metaphorical in his writings becomes quite literal in the mass-culture version of the same outlook. The remarkable growth of gambling in our society over the last several decades—the proliferation of casinos, the innumerable state-run lotteries, the Texas Hold ’em tournaments with multimillion dollar prizes—shows that. So does the theme of triage, which operates below the surface in many political debates, most recently in regard to the Syrian refugees, which is not just about the possibility that terrorists will sneak in with the others. Compassion is a fatal error in a world with not enough to go around, at least not enough to go around if the winners are going to keep their winnings.
A H 11.18.15 at 4:40 pm
Isn’t this just a riff off Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production”? Seems to be standard issue 19th century orientalist political economy rather than pan-European imperialism.
Stephen 11.18.15 at 5:28 pm
Thought-experiment derived from, I think, Bertrand Russell: if the exact opposite of all of this were true, what difference would that make to us now? NB I’m not prejudging the results of that experiment.
Rakesh Bhandari 11.18.15 at 5:56 pm
Nietzsche speaks of a new aristocracy as a luxurious surplus of mankind; Schiller in the Sixth Letter on the Aesthetic Eduction of Mankind refers to “a luxuriant imagination” which presumably is a possibility for all :
“It was culture itself that gave these wounds to modern humanity. The inner union of human nature was broken, and a destructive contest divided its harmonious forces directly; on the one hand, an enlarged experience and a more distinct thinking necessitated a sharper separation of the sciences, while on the other hand, the more complicated machinery of states necessitated a stricter sundering of ranks and occupations. Intuitive and speculative understanding took up a hostile attitude in opposite fields, whose borders were guarded with jealousy and distrust; and by limiting its operation to a narrow sphere, men have made unto themselves a master who is wont not unfrequently to end by subduing and oppressing all the other faculties. Whilst on the one hand a luxuriant imagination creates ravages in the plantations that have cost the intelligence so much labour, on the other hand a spirit of abstraction suffocates the fire that might have warmed the heart and inflamed the imagination.”
Rakesh Bhandari 11.18.15 at 5:58 pm
Doubt Nietzsche’s ideas about Asia came from anything Marx wrote. Perhaps Hegel, Schopenhauer or even Montesquieu. Or perhaps journalism.
A H 11.18.15 at 6:29 pm
Yeah I guess Nietzsche didn’t read Marx, but the idea of Oriental Despotism being a specific type of static society was widely held in the 19th century. Marx and Nietzsche probably received it from the same roots
A H 11.18.15 at 7:32 pm
It is important that he writes “higher Chinesehood”. I think he is using “Chinesehood” here not to refer to China, but to a way of organizing society. So higher refers to the purist type of this society.
The way a “Chinese” society is organized is complete government control over a uniform citizenry, which is very similar to Marx’s “Asiatic mode of productionâ€.
So this looks like Orientalism as short hand for political theory more than anything else.
anon 11.18.15 at 8:25 pm
Eh, I don’t find it particularly shocking or strange:
1. Most humans, including you and I, are “cogs” in the sense that most of our time and labor is owned, controlled, and directed in the service of the aims, interests, and profits of others. (Especially you and I, recalling that Nietzsche’s favorite image of the useful slave or cog is the scholar.)
2. the ruling classes for whom we are cogs are increasingly achieving a “total economic administraÂtion of the earth.”
3. this initially means our best chance of some degree of meaning and happiness is in more successfully and precisely fitting ourselves (“fitter, happier”) into the machinery, as any perusal of articles about career development and economic self-marketing or dispatches from the corporatized university make evident.
4. that’s a pretty shitty best case scenario.
5. where we see exceptions to this rule of someone finding meaning and value in what we might call, oh, I don’t know, “disalienated labor,” they are usually only able to do so on the backs of those cogs.
6. one side effect of that alternate scenario is that those exceptions do give some hope and meaning to the rest of us, e.g., talking about Nietzsche while slogging away as an academic cog feels a little better. So it’s a slightly less shitty option.
The problem is the failure to see any other options, and it’s a damned shame Nietzsche never read Marx.
Stephen 11.18.15 at 8:53 pm
AH@9 “better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”. Tennyson, I think, not an obvious Marxist.
Anderson 11.18.15 at 9:21 pm
Why would anyone think that N. (1) understood capitalism, (2) endorsed capitalism, or (3) had any sort of economic thinking worthy of the name?
“The strong exploit the weak” is not economics, unless Thucydides was an economist.
N. is smart on some things. Treating him as a political or economic thinker is like expecting a horse to quack.
Rakesh Bhandari 11.18.15 at 9:55 pm
Nietzsche’s Economy
Modernity, Normativity and Futurity
Peter Sedgwick
Nietzsche’s Economyenlargebrowse inside
Hardcover (256 pages)
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
This book offers an interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings that situates them in relation to the notions of modernity and the sphere of economic and industrial culture. Nietzsche is revealed to be a thinker who is inescapably bound up with his times: economically inspired notions of exchange, credit, debit, sacrifice, labour, posession, expenditure, surplus, measuring, weighing, evaluating, and the like permeate his thought. Starting with the Untimely Meditations, ths study charts Nietzsche’s early critical interest and engagement with the realm of commercial culture, his later criticisms of the cultural domination of modern mercantilism (in such works as Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science) and his mature development of an account of modern society as an amalgam of contemporary practices residing upon ancient economically derived foundations. These elements are related to Nietzsche’s vision of the overman and his conception of philosophy as a legislative enterprise.
Jim Harrison 11.18.15 at 10:09 pm
Any clue why my comment is still stuck in moderation? It is a puzzlement.
John Holbo 11.18.15 at 11:12 pm
“Any clue why my comment is still stuck in moderation? It is a puzzlement.”
I suspect ‘minimax’ plus ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ convinced our sophisticated AI that you were trying to sell drugs and/or gambling services.
John Holbo 11.19.15 at 1:46 am
“It is important that he writes “higher Chinesehoodâ€. I think he is using “Chinesehood†here not to refer to China, but to a way of organizing society.”
In my previous post (linked at the top) we were discussing the oddity/potential unseriousness of N.’s proposal to depopulate Europe of 1/3 of its workforce, for the sake of some unspecified colonial adventure(s), while simultaneously importing Chinese workers to make up the labor shortfall. I agree that it’s not right to think N is seriously proposing Grand Politics, in a colonialist, imperialist, neoliberal capitalism 1% on stilts way. But it does seem to be that some such thing is, for him, a spiritually resonant projection. He regards it as rather awful, per the quoted passage. But weirdly attractive for its alleged inevitability?
Peter T 11.19.15 at 2:00 am
One can re-cast this in line with a couple of recent threads:
A classical historian noted that in the funeral oration reported by Thucydides, Pericles portrayed the Athenian citizenry collectively as a Homeric hero. Not, of course, standing individually alone on the battlefield (wearing, of course, only a helmet), but each as a corpuscle of the glorious hero-body. Not long after, the mantle of heroism migrated to the Leader, to Alexander, Caesar and all their successors. Where it has mostly stayed.
But the Leaders are only great by virtue of the anonymous heroism of the masses. Alexander would not have got far into Asia without his phalanx. Nietzsche is, I think, groping for some justification for the Leader beyond narcissistic aggrandisement – he is seeking to rebut Tolstoy’s charge against Napoleon.
wha thing 11.19.15 at 3:24 am
“a tremendous clockwork of ever smaller, ever more finely ‘adapted’ cogs; as an ever-increasing suÂperfluity of all the dominating and commanding elements;”
could perhaps be understood as a precursor of the alleged movement from individual to “dividual” in Deleuze, and the more recent “datalogical turn”…
john c. halasz 11.19.15 at 4:44 am
Given the infinite number of Nietzsche interpretations, scholarly or not, anglophone or not, here’s a suggestion. Maybe Nietzsche is just whatever you make of him. Maybe that’s the “true” meaning of Herr Uebermensch.
John Holbo 11.19.15 at 5:31 am
“Maybe Nietzsche is just whatever you make of him.”
Too epistemically loose for my taste, but I’m willing to sign on in a more arts&crafts spirit: everyone is allowed to make their own Nietzsche out of whatever material they have at hand, for decorative use around the home.
ZM 11.19.15 at 6:41 am
“everyone is allowed to make their own Nietzsche out of whatever material they have at hand, for decorative use around the home”
John and Belle’s perfect idea to add Christmas cheer to every home — The Arts and Crafts Neitzschean Set: Friedrich himself, the Upermensch and the Last Man can be made of household materials and will add gaiety to Christmas trees, Nativities, and the bonus King Flying Squirrel makes a wonderful stocking filler for all ages
C Trombley 11.19.15 at 11:29 am
“Oriental Despotism as a stationary state” wasn’t just a 19th century meme. It was around in the 18th century too. Adam Smith talks about eastern Asian countries while talking about the determination of wages in Wealth Of Nations:
“China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary.”
I think that Adam Smith has bad data here. He’s trying his best, but the anecdotes he had to rely on and Orientalism as it existed then were obstacles. He’s basically comparing the lowest, most oppressed with the average labor, attributing any wealth to rents in a feudal system (a system he criticized everywhere, not just in China). Smith’s ideas were much more complex and less racist than Hegel’s version. He talks about the Chinese institutions (basically, feudalism under the Qing) as the problem. I think that if he had better data, he would still be right in calling for a modernization drive such as we saw much later in the Meiji Restoration in Japan. Also, for what it is worth more modern estimates bear out that the standard in Beijing were lower than in most European cities (but on the level of a poor European city):
http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/allen/unpublished/group-1.pdf
The “Asia is a stationary state!” idea did get bigger in the 19th century though. Hegel promoted a caricatured version of the idea (“All of Asia has always been and will always be a stationary state”) to official status and (most non-specialist?) Westerners, such as Marx and Nietzsche, accepted it as a historical truth with complete blandness. In _their_ defense, the Qing dynasty genuinely did calcify during this time. In Japan, the Meiji Restoration wouldn’t happen until the year after Das Kaptial vol 1. “Stationary” was arguably the right word for these societies at the time, but taking that moment of time and smearing it out over all of history that is wrong.
Anderson 11.19.15 at 12:53 pm
15: economic metaphors (measuring?) do not an economic thinker make. Donald Trump would qualify, else.
ZM 11.19.15 at 2:10 pm
Apart from being prompted to start to think about my Christmas decorations for this year, I think that the concern Nietzsche has here was misplaced albeit common at the time. If you read social history from England around the time, working people were doing all sorts of things and not being “flattened out”. Not to say there wasn’t problems like displacement, overly long hours, poor conditions, poverty and so on, but the idea of people being “flattened out” is a sort of viewpoint that doesn’t take much interest in the encounters and routines and upsets and pleasures of daily life, and the shared life of communities.
“In moral terms, this total machinery, the solidarity of all the cogs, represents a maximum point in the exploitation of man: but it presupposes a kind of men for whose sake the exploitation has meaning.”
In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I still have not read all of, just parts) it has a similar sort of plot – it is set some hundreds of years in the future in a technocratic society where everyone does a few years of work as sort of national service after education, then only a small percentage who are going to be technocrats keep working. One person is writing a historical novel of WW2 — when the book was written and the aftermath of which leads to the technocratic society. And some of the young people organise a vote for freedom from the technocracy but it does not win. But in the parts I have read it is interesting where the future telling departs from what happened — not just in the big elements like the technocratic government — but smaller elements like what happens to indigenous people, and like Nietzsche how the technocratic government is associated with Asians, and the controlling of the environment with changing waterways and irrigation and so on.
Like that book, the scenario given by Nietzsche follows a logic, but what really happened was much more complex, and there is not really the prospect of seeing most people “flattened out” anywhere on the horizon. I think that how history has gone with more organisation there has tended to be more complexity rather than less, which is sort of the opposite of Nietzsche’s idea of most people being “flattened out”.
AB 11.19.15 at 3:08 pm
Nietzsche is a political thinker insofar as he wanted his “philosophers of the future” to rule society through widespread adoption of their morality (via a new religion if need be).
chris 11.19.15 at 3:53 pm
I think anon (#12) is on the right track. In the face of a totally administered social and economic order, a small minority will find personal reconciliation with it revolting; will become increasingly alienated from the norms of this order (die Sittlichkeit der Sitte) and will welcome this alienation as a privilege and freedom; to the point where the ways of thinking, feeling and speaking regulated by this administered way of life barely resonate, if at all. Nietzsche’s main concern here is not political economic development, which he considers a fait accompli (think Tocqueville without any optimism), but rather with the possibilities that open up for the exceptions who will exist on the periphery. Recall from the Genealogy of Morals, subjectivity for Nietzsche is a disciplinarian fiction. Without the daily routine enforcing it, it falls by the wayside. Thoughts flow with greater ease. Unhurried contemplation and leisure in the classical sense become possible again. In other words, the secretion (i.e., excretion from the system) of a luxury (luxury not in a financial, but existential sense) surplus (i.e., that which exceeds reckoning with the normal).
I agree with Anderson (#14) that Nietzsche isn’t a political thinker per se. For Nietzsche politics these days is all a bunch of ressentiment. (Having said that, those Republican f*cks better not cut my Medicaid!)
anon 11.19.15 at 5:02 pm
ZM @26,
“there is not really the prospect of seeing most people “flattened out†anywhere on the horizon.”
I find this surprising. You might be right, but it doesn’t seem obvious. I’m sure many would even argue that most people are ALREADY “flattened out.” Marcuse found a pretty receptive audience for “One Dimensional Man” 50 years ago.
Perhaps it depends on what you mean by “flattened out”? I’m not sure it has a clear, much less inverse, relation to complexity. Indeed, the case made by Marcuse and other Critical Theorists was that there was a positive relation between social, political, and technological complexity and the flattening of the human psyche.
“the idea of people being ‘flattened out’ is a sort of viewpoint that doesn’t take much interest in the encounters and routines and upsets and pleasures of daily life, and the shared life of communities.”
Nietzsche does take interest in this, but as a negative ideal. It’s what he calls “the last man” or “the Englishman’s happiness.” I think this is a grave error on his part–often identifying the fullness and richness of life with a crassly quantitative and comparative measure of joy or greatness (Goethe! Napoleon! Borgia!) that cannot discern, much less appreciate, the real but nuanced dramas, of everyday life.
I think it’s an overreaction on his part to the very real danger of nihilism–his fear we use small pleasures as an opiate to avoid confronting the hollowness of our deeper, culture organizing and morality directing values.
On the other hand, the case could be made that even our everyday dramas are flattening out. How three-dimensional, psychologically rich or even “complex” is the drama of absent wifi or a cracked smartphone screen?
Rakesh Bhandari 11.19.15 at 5:49 pm
I think the passage that John is looking for is this, from Human, All Too Human; it may come across as a critique of anti-Semitism, which it is, but it is more:
“Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more natural, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: in a certain sense this means as much as making Europe’s task and history a continuation of the Greek.”
ZedBlank 11.19.15 at 7:02 pm
@ anon 29
I think it’s an overreaction on his part to the very real danger of nihilism–his fear we use small pleasures as an opiate to avoid confronting the hollowness of our deeper, culture organizing and morality directing values.
Agreed – and I don’t think the left has offered many robust responses to this. The rising debate in the US over the European “democratic socialist” model, specifically the Nordic countries, makes this question particularly contemporary. Nietzsche seems unwilling or unable to conceive of human development occurring in the absence of some kind of existential conflict. Thus the leftist projects, even those factions who advocated violent revolution, still believed in a kind of eventual growth on the other side of the mayhem, of social equilibrium preceding a higher level of human achievement, remained anathema. Trouble is, it’s hard to claim definitively that N was wrong on this account.
phenomenal cat 11.19.15 at 8:21 pm
This really isn’t the worst to found in his late notebooks–there’s passages that are far more offensive to “our” fragile modern sensibilities than this one. Stuff that would make a Palo Alto venture capitalist cough uncomfortably and change the subject.
It seems to me he’s just being a good historical materialist here, but after the Nietzschean fashion. If one supposes that the predominance of economic rationality wedded to a kind of a pan-utilitarianism, which is itself funneled through the herculean administrative capacities of State and Corporation, continues to absorb greater and greater areas of (human) life–what is the result? Or better: what kind of human being results on average? Also, what would the exceptions look like? What would they say and do? Given the conditions, what would they have to be?
I don’t get this: “Nietzsche does take interest in this, but as a negative ideal. It’s what he calls “the last man†or “the Englishman’s happiness.†I think this is a grave error on his part–often identifying the fullness and richness of life with a crassly quantitative and comparative measure of joy or greatness (Goethe! Napoleon! Borgia!) that cannot discern, much less appreciate, the real but nuanced dramas, of everyday life.” anon @29
Maybe it’s the use of the term “quantitative” which makes this unintelligible to me…However as a counterpoint, N. either in a letter or perhaps in one of his published asides says one of his greatest pleasures as a “philosopher” is that a couple of old fruit vendors on the streets of Turin reserve their best pieces of fruit for him.
A minor act of social delicatezza and grace that he apparently took great joy in.
anon 11.19.15 at 11:42 pm
Phenomenal Cat @32
By “quantitative” I just meant that he often equates “greater” (in the sense of superior human beings, a more flourishing and admirable life) with “bigger” and “more”: higher degrees of artistic genius, vaster and longer lasting political achievements, greater culture influence and impact, more intense joys and pains, and so on. I might have a much more exciting and satisfying game of billiards with my wife, since we’re both equally mediocre, than the world’s greatest billiard player might have with his or her nearest competitor. But Nietzsche will find the latter “greater” in a normative sense then me. I don’t see any reason for that except comparative quantity (of skill, of inferiors, of wins, etc.)
I agree, however, that he doesn’t always make this mistake. There are some striking passages in which he celebrates “small things” and what’s “closest.” Where he treats happiness as light, simple, easy–probably his love of Epicurus peaking through.
The street vendor example is a curious one. That claim appears in many late letters as well as in Ecce Homo, and he specifically offers it as proof that he is a destiny, that he will soon become famous and influential. It often comes up along with claims that restauranteurs recognize him as a great philosopher and give him the best tables, and right after he boasts about Georg Brands giving sold-out lectures about him Denmark. And it comes up in between bouts of depression where he speculates that he will die soon and worries he has not been heard. So, it always strikes me as part of his attempt to shore up his morale, to find glimmers of hope that his work will have an impact, even though he knows his time is short.
Lawrence Stuart 11.20.15 at 3:22 am
Compare Blake’s “There is no Natural Religion.” In it, the miniaturizing force is ratio, which gives us the bounded world which we loathe because we possess it. The heroic antagonist is prophecy, or the poet. Ratio is bound by sense and reflection (think Locke). The poet is liberated by imagination, the ability to see through the lens of the mind, a lens which is capable of infinite perception. But where Blake oozes optimism, and sees his higher, larger man as the bringer of an apocalyptic utopia, Nietzsche does indeed sometimes wallow in a Spenglerian swamp (the question of why this choleric tendency in someone so self consciously cheerful is an enigma to me). The wallowing notwithstanding Nietzsche is very much a poet, prophet, and philosopher working against the grain of the same dull round of things. And I find that shines through, even in a passage like the one you cite.
Glenn 11.20.15 at 3:36 am
I read Nietzsche as expository writing, conveying the mindset of the common man’s “Betters”, better to call attention to the conqueror worm’s willingness to exploit the common slave mentality of modern man, this being incumbent in those who still worship those who would hold them in so low esteem.
Bill Murray 11.20.15 at 3:43 am
everyone is allowed to make their own Nietzsche out of whatever material they have at hand, for decorative use around the home.
and then one must go to philosophical was with the Nietzsche one made, rather than the Nietzsche one might want or wish to have
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