Resumo de Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist

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."

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