In Bed With The Right - Episode 8： Nietzsche

00:00:00.080 Friedrich, like, a single woman badly reviewed your book. You gotta get over yourself. Like, 0.95

00:00:05.300 that doesn't mean feminism is dominant in the culture. Yes, you had access to a typewriter. Oh, no. 1.00

00:00:22.740 Hello and welcome. I'm Adrian Daub.

00:00:25.180 And I'm Moira Donegan.

00:00:26.260 And whether we like it or not, we are in bed with the right.

00:00:28.440 so adrian what are we talking about today so today this is gonna be uh the deepest of dives

00:00:33.380 we've done yet on the show i think we're gonna go quite far back in time uh well we're not gonna go

00:00:39.760 to the beginnings of philosophical misogyny because honestly where do you even start yes

00:00:44.600 how much time do we have why this podcast could be endless this is fantastic yeah subscribe to

00:00:51.240 our patreon for never-ending a reading of history uh and then the next thing happened it was also

00:00:56.540 vaguely misogynist. We do not have a program, but what we do have on deck for you today is

00:01:01.360 Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher, definitely in the top three misogynists of the 19th century,

00:01:08.820 a century that is not known for its dearth of misogynists and all around kind of interesting

00:01:14.140 thinker. You know, I'm frequently out of my depth when I'm talking to Adrian. Adrian is a PhD. He is

00:01:22.320 a teacher of german history as well as being like a german speaker and a german citizen and i am like

00:01:27.600 a person with a twitter account so i am uh you know i am like often i think in these conversations

00:01:34.480 where you take the lead adria and sort of playing the role of the audience you know i'm like a

00:01:40.260 hopefully smart but kind of ignorant interlocutor but you know i like only kind of know who auto

00:01:45.640 you know my my understanding of german history is um you know sub wikipedia level so i'm going to

00:01:53.720 probably be jumping in here to ask you for more explanation than i normally would and you know

00:01:59.980 maybe i'm not a credible stand-in for the listener because the listeners might know a little bit more

00:02:03.400 than i do but i was interested reading through your show notes in sort of the resonance of

00:02:09.200 Nietzsche to contemporary debates about gender and sort of the like rise of some of these

00:02:16.580 masculinist ideologies that we're seeing in the new right. Could you like tell me a little bit

00:02:22.180 about how his influence is emerging now? Yeah, yeah. I mean, as you are kind of alluding to,

00:02:27.840 there are people, I think I would put it in three buckets, right? Like this show loves three buckets.

00:02:32.140 Like there are people who just explicitly invoke him, right? There's a lot of kind of thinkers that

00:02:37.280 cast themselves as these neo-Nichaeans, especially sort of incel types tend to really, like, there's

00:02:41.740 a lot to hold on to. You'll get some quotes later on that are just basically like, yep, you could

00:02:46.100 put that in an incel forum and people would probably hit follow or like and subscribe or

00:02:50.140 whatever. But that's only part of it. His legacy is pretty clear and pretty acknowledged among

00:02:55.640 various intellectual traditions. And that's the interesting thing. Like, there are both

00:03:00.320 deeply feminist traditions, I think, that recur to Nietzsche and that find him really generative

00:03:05.300 and interesting and like the most obvious anti-feminists like we'll see that jordan peterson

00:03:10.640 cribs a lot of stuff from there but so do you know a lot of french feminists the final thing 1.00

00:03:15.160 that i think is sort of interesting for us you know we've come up again and again in the last

00:03:19.020 couple of weeks against sort of like traditional quote-unquote forms of misogyny right where it's

00:03:24.400 like well this is how it's supposed to be because that's how it's always been and we've come across

00:03:28.200 explanations that are christian well nietzsche is a right-winger very clearly but he's as about as

00:03:33.220 anti-christian and as non-traditional as you're going to get right this is someone who both 0.96

00:03:37.540 thinks horrible things about women but also thinks that christians are just like wusses

00:03:43.720 and that you know tradition is bunk right but that doesn't make him an ally right so like i think

00:03:50.000 that's really interesting and then finally i think that nietzsche is kind of having a moment then

00:03:54.180 again he's kind of always having a moment uh basically since like 1880 like there's always

00:03:59.520 someone like you know who's really cool you should read Friedrich Nietzsche and I guess the the main

00:04:05.100 thing I would point to is like we're gonna trying to like give a full accounting like like I can't

00:04:10.360 do justice to everything this guy wrote and so if there are any Nietzsche fans listening my apologies

00:04:16.140 in advance but like the important point is that this is about selection right that like people who

00:04:20.600 use Nietzsche in the way that someone like Jordan Peterson uses Nietzsche like have to be selective

00:04:26.040 right they have to pick a couple of things decide that's what they are going to focus on and ignore 0.99

00:04:32.160 some pretty obvious things that he also thought were bullshit or stupid or whatever just to give 0.98

00:04:38.340 you an idea right like people sort of pick and choose where they want niches to apply and what 0.99

00:04:43.020 they want him to mean right so in right winger's hands he can be this great individualist even

00:04:47.200 though he didn't really believe in the concept of a coherent individual at all right he can be this

00:04:52.080 stalking horse for anti-egalitarianism which he was very much even though it's also super unclear

00:04:59.060 what he means by like hierarchies like what he thinks was supposed to happen with those right

00:05:04.640 he can be super political and totally apolitical at the same time so like you're gonna put your

00:05:09.880 foot wrong no matter where you stand with this guy so it sounds to me like you know you're

00:05:14.800 identifying a really capacious thinker who was thought is not coherent to one like political

00:05:22.460 project in our current terms right could you give me like just a gloss of what nietzsche understood

00:05:28.120 his posture to be how much did he contradict himself how much did he have a coherent project

00:05:32.360 in his time yeah and i'm asking you to summarize the career of one of the 19th century's most

00:05:37.660 important philosophers in like you know two three sentences so i assume you're going to be a little

00:05:41.880 bit reductive here. I'll try and give you the sort of super zoom out version of this, and then we're

00:05:45.620 going to, we can walk through his career in a little bit more detail. But like the way he himself

00:05:50.840 thought of it, one of his books has the subtitle, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. That's what he

00:05:55.700 took himself to be doing. He thought that he was going to be slaughtering the sacred cow of Western

00:06:00.340 metaphysics. That was his project. And he thought that it had a political dimension, but he didn't

00:06:05.340 think it was primarily something that he was worried about politically. He just thought people

00:06:09.240 had thought dumb things and here was Friedrich Nietzsche with his hammer to tell them they were

00:06:14.060 wrong the interesting thing of course is that like the interesting thing of course is that even though

00:06:19.380 he didn't sort of think of this as political like in the hands of his contemporaries like it almost

00:06:24.220 immediately became political and of course like he has all these political opinions he hated socialism

00:06:29.000 he hated feminism he hated right like but he also wasn't wild about nationalism right like he was

00:06:34.040 just an all-around corrosive he just couldn't look at anything and be like yeah I don't think

00:06:39.040 that's how that works. He had this curmudgeonly almost stance, but that made it so that which

00:06:44.900 Nietzsche you read and what you read him on and what you agreed with him on would influence quite

00:06:48.940 strongly what kind of political project you imputed to him. Then the other thing that we

00:06:54.520 briefly have to talk about, I don't know how much philosophy our listeners read, but there is no

00:06:59.320 such thing as one philosophical style of presentation, but Nietzsche definitely goes

00:07:05.100 well beyond any of the things that you would recognize as a philosophy book right like we'll

00:07:10.340 talk a little bit about a book called dustbox arthurstra that's like written basically as this

00:07:14.160 like pseudo bible that he decided to come up with he loves the essay he loves aphorisms right and

00:07:19.560 like as you say like how do you reconstruct a coherent project here well that's really hard

00:07:24.460 if someone's like you know that's also why there's no such thing as causality end of sentence and

00:07:29.580 then it's like paragraph 59 you're like wait oh i'm sorry can we can we just back this track up

00:07:34.620 to where there is no causality.

00:07:36.440 I was like, nope, we're on to, 0.99

00:07:37.900 like, my socialism is dumb, right? 0.98

00:07:39.700 It's not meant to be assimilable in this way. 0.97

00:07:43.340 And he made it as difficult as possible

00:07:45.720 to kind of substrate a coherent project

00:07:49.120 out of these texts.

00:07:50.600 You know, what we have today

00:07:51.620 are the pretty definitive texts

00:07:53.100 that he meant to write.

00:07:54.240 As we'll see, around 1900,

00:07:56.360 when a lot of the people

00:07:57.400 who sort of filtered Nietzsche

00:07:59.180 for a broader audience

00:08:01.000 sort of got interested in him,

00:08:03.540 including people like Sigmund Freud,

00:08:05.260 like they were dealing with, you know, 1.00

00:08:08.080 the books put out by a bunch of grifters

00:08:11.860 around this dude who was still alive,

00:08:14.300 but like was for all intents and purposes,

00:08:18.080 you know, not a real help in governing his own estate,

00:08:21.240 given that he was like insane, right?

00:08:23.800 I'm beginning to see parallels to the modern right already.

00:08:27.180 Yes, yes, yeah.

00:08:28.560 So we've got this guy who is,

00:08:31.160 got a posture of sort of universal skepticism, you know, bordering on contempt. He's writing

00:08:38.320 across a whole bunch of different genres. And he is being presented to the public after the end of

00:08:43.700 his life by people who are maybe, you know, committed to interest other than a faithful

00:08:49.240 interpretation of the work, right? So what we have is a guy who was difficult to assimilate

00:08:55.520 generally who had a sort of indefinable and vast intellectual project and who has come down to us

00:09:04.020 through this like game of telephone so like when we talk about appropriations of Nietzsche now

00:09:08.840 we're almost necessarily talking about misreadings you know ranging from the deliberate to the sort

00:09:15.860 of like understandable or overdetermined misreadings and like partial readings of Nietzsche

00:09:21.180 that exclude other parts of his oeuvre and his dance.

00:09:24.820 Exactly.

00:09:25.700 And I mean, but at the same time,

00:09:26.920 like we shouldn't just say like,

00:09:28.200 oh, poor Nietzsche, he was misunderstood.

00:09:29.840 Like today we have a vocabulary

00:09:31.580 for talking about his energy.

00:09:32.840 He has enormous troll energy.

00:09:34.800 The dude just like loved pushing buttons, right?

00:09:37.080 And so like, it's not an accident

00:09:38.600 that people kind of came away

00:09:40.320 with these, you know, very strident opinions.

00:09:42.600 It's like, well, he, yeah, he was a hot taker.

00:09:46.420 Definitely.

00:09:47.000 We'll talk about that.

00:09:47.760 He like, he would have killed at slate pitches

00:09:49.340 is all I'm saying.

00:09:50.780 So who are some of the people who are like appropriating Nietzschean postures now on the contemporary right?

00:09:56.220 Like who is making this guy relevant to like a Project Like Heart podcast?

00:10:01.440 Yeah. So, I mean, just to give a couple of examples, there's a Harvey Mansfield book, Manliness, from what is that, 2005, 2006?

00:10:09.160 Mansfield dwells on Nietzsche quite a bit, doesn't follow him.

00:10:13.060 Nietzsche for him is sort of a road not taken.

00:10:14.960 I'll quote from Mansfield here.

00:10:17.040 Nietzsche is the philosopher of modern times.

00:10:19.180 He saw modern civilization in decline and made it seem that the only remedy was manliness resurgent and recreated.

00:10:26.620 And Manziel, I should say, is kind of critical, actually, of this position.

00:10:30.080 It's interesting, right?

00:10:30.800 Like Manziel, I should say, is a far more careful reader of Nietzsche than most other of the people that we're going to be talking about in this hour.

00:10:37.060 But he's on to something here, the idea that Nietzsche is a masculinist thinker.

00:10:40.860 He thinks that masculinity will, in some way, is the way forward.

00:10:43.980 But Nietzsche's ideal of masculinity has nothing to do with Christianity.

00:10:47.140 It's explicitly anti-Christian. 1.00

00:10:49.160 He basically thought that Christianity was like cuck shit, basically, right? 1.00

00:10:52.400 Like it was just like, it was weak. 1.00

00:10:53.720 It was beta stuff, right?

00:10:54.840 As a lot of contemporary conservatives also feel about Christianity.

00:10:57.920 And I think, which is exactly the Mansfield book, for those who haven't read it, stands

00:11:02.700 exactly on the inflection point there where like, he's still trying to identify a form

00:11:07.340 of manliness that is not just like chauvinism, right?

00:11:10.440 And like, I think that's right.

00:11:12.040 That like our current styles of masculinity have often embraced this kind of position

00:11:16.300 that basically, you know, we talked about a few in our episode about the creeps and the

00:11:21.960 creatures. We ended up talking a lot about like people wanting a masculinity outside of Christianity,

00:11:27.880 outside of tradition. And then the second point here that I think Mansfield also emphasizes,

00:11:33.500 Nietzsche is to some extent a naturalist, right? He thinks that morality is a poor guide for what's

00:11:38.700 good and what's bad. He basically thinks that what's natural, right? Does it feel good? Is it

00:11:43.560 healthy to you, et cetera, et cetera, is a much more useful guide to what to do than like some

00:11:50.680 rule that like a priest or a philosopher came up with. Again, something that I think we get from

00:11:56.200 these sort of latter day social Darwinians today, or from evolutionary psychologists, right? Who

00:12:02.240 are like, oh, you know, this is what we're supposed to be doing. Therefore you should just do it,

00:12:06.620 right? Normatively, it's probably the right thing to do.

00:12:08.860 The natural as a moral imperative or a normative imperative without a lot of

00:12:13.560 defining of those terms or interrogation of how you got to them is also like a very frequent

00:12:18.080 anti-feminist talking point. Exactly. And then the final point that I think Mansfield is pointing to 1.00

00:12:22.400 in his book, which is really good, is he points out that while it can sometimes seem that Nietzsche

00:12:28.180 is looking backwards, right? He's like, oh, what did we do on the savannah? This kind of, like,

00:12:31.620 as you were saying, this kind of right-wing talking point. That's not quite what Nietzsche

00:12:34.860 does. Mansfield says that Nietzsche does not, quote, presuppose a natural order of rank

00:12:39.400 in which manliness makes sense and deserves respect, right?

00:12:43.400 He's not saying once upon a time,

00:12:45.820 we understood how to treat men right or something like that.

00:12:48.360 He's saying masculinity is the way forward,

00:12:50.780 but that means that's not traditional masculinity.

00:12:52.980 It has to be a masculinity that we have to design for the future, right?

00:12:56.580 What the hell that means, I don't know.

00:12:58.100 But like, he's very clear.

00:12:58.980 He's not saying like, we're not going back.

00:13:00.800 This is a forward-looking kind of masculinism.

00:13:03.600 This strikes me as in contrast to a lot of the ideas about masculinity

00:13:08.700 that we discussed in our crisis of masculinity piece, right? 0.66

00:13:11.220 In which like women's equality has victimized men 0.73

00:13:14.760 and emasculated them. 0.90

00:13:15.880 And women now have a like moral or social obligation 1.00

00:13:19.420 to retreat from aspirations to equality 0.95

00:13:22.860 so that men can flourish.

00:13:25.000 I think that's subtext of a lot of that kind of argument.

00:13:27.080 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:27.860 Nietzsche would not buy that.

00:13:29.060 He's like, well, if you're not succeeding,

00:13:30.720 it's because you're weak.

00:13:32.520 It's not an order that precedes power

00:13:36.420 and it's legitimacy.

00:13:37.220 power creates legitimacy. Exactly. It's not an ontological kind of hierarchy. On the other hand,

00:13:43.760 Nietzsche developed his thought, he's part of the first generation of European philosophers that are

00:13:48.320 really in dialogue with literal feminists, right? Women who are like, we want to vote, we want full

00:13:53.080 civil rights. Also, we're going to publish books about you, you know, buddy. And he doesn't handle

00:13:58.760 us super well. Yeah, he's living in the second half of the 19th century in Germany. So there are, 0.87

00:14:04.640 there is a feminist movement. There are women in public, at least like upper middle class women 0.98

00:14:10.660 who, you know, can read what he's writing about them and talk back, which men always respond to 0.99

00:14:18.860 so well. You may have just a second ago giving him a little too much credit, right? Like he

00:14:23.460 wants to be committed to this idea that like, oh, I don't actually want to go back to traditional

00:14:29.580 hierarchies. I'm not saying anything like that. But then he's super upset when women kind of

00:14:34.680 turn traditional hierarchies on their head or something like that. He's like, what the fuck? 1.00

00:14:38.560 Not like that. No, no, no, no. That's not what I was talking about. And these feminists call him 1.00

00:14:43.580 on it mercilessly. I found a couple of very, very nice quotes where they're like, no, I mean, 1.00

00:14:47.920 we hear you, but it seems like you're kind of traditional when you're like, oh, can you just

00:14:55.240 like, make me some soup, right? It's like, it seems like you're actually more traditionalist

00:14:59.940 than you give yourself credit for, than you claim for yourself, right? But we're going to get to his

00:15:04.920 roasting pretty soon. Oh, yeah. But we also have another, you know, like, self-identified Nietzsche

00:15:11.760 disciple in Jordan Peterson. That's right. Jordan Peterson loves Friedrich Nietzsche. And his Nietzsche

00:15:18.100 is really, really interesting in that he like, almost sort of positions him as a great critic

00:15:24.480 of Christianity and a great questioner, that's something that you get a lot on the right, where

00:15:28.240 it's like the stuff that you like in Nietzsche, you say like, oh, he destroyed that. And now we

00:15:33.560 can no longer use that. He made clear why that's pointless or why this is no longer actionable or

00:15:39.460 why this no longer should dominate our politics or morality or thinking our debates. With stuff

00:15:44.660 that you like, you're like, well, yeah, he's challenged it. It was a salubrious challenge.

00:15:49.060 Now we're forging ahead like more awesomely or whatever, right?

00:15:53.360 Like it's this very funny thing.

00:15:54.560 And he's exactly like this, right?

00:15:55.780 Like he thinks like Nietzsche's arguments, like point out that like, quote from him here,

00:16:00.180 what does he say?

00:16:00.980 This is in the 12 rules for life, right?

00:16:04.040 Pointing out that Europe awoke during the enlightenment as if from a Christian dream,

00:16:08.380 noticing that everything that had there to fore taken for granted could and should be

00:16:12.400 questioned.

00:16:13.140 And he's like, this is a really good thing for Nietzsche to have done.

00:16:16.480 He understood that we were untethered by that.

00:16:18.540 and now we have to create those maps of meaning that he keeps talking about right we have to find

00:16:22.560 meaning the other thing with Nietzsche of course is that he hated these kinds of lies we tell

00:16:27.320 ourselves in order to live he just sort of thought there's extreme danger there too right that's all

00:16:33.220 that Peterson and especially given that Peterson as we talked about in our episode about him

00:16:37.520 like sort of waffles between you have to believe something or you have to believe this very specific

00:16:43.760 thing right like Nietzsche would say like yeah you got to believe in something but like very

00:16:48.120 famously peterson sort of can't get himself to ever just make it just about like oh pick any map

00:16:52.820 right like if it's intersectionality that's fine too for jordan peterson spoiler alert it's not

00:16:57.420 fine if it's intersectionality right and increasingly peterson seems to think that

00:17:02.020 secretly it's jesus right and he's just kind of got this like disavowed uh or like partial

00:17:07.800 commitment to christianity that he won't totally like go for which might make him you know a little

00:17:12.580 less plausible in his professions of interest in Nietzsche.

00:17:16.700 Yeah.

00:17:17.120 And then finally, maybe we talk briefly about Rod Dreher, who has sort of a very similar

00:17:21.120 idea, right?

00:17:22.160 Like he thinks that Christianity can be improved and transformed through like Nietzsche's 0.94

00:17:26.340 challenge, right? 0.71

00:17:27.140 But he also sort of points out or uses Nietzsche to point out that being truly post-Christian

00:17:32.440 is impossible, right?

00:17:35.100 Nietzsche sort of famously kind of used the mode of critique that was developed to show

00:17:40.400 that Christianity was bunk, to show that a bunch of moral precepts and metaphysical theories were

00:17:44.840 also bunk. He's like, oh, this actually keeps working. This cuts any which way. So Dreher 0.94

00:17:51.060 basically thinks that that makes it clear that a post-Christian world makes no sense. I'll just

00:17:57.560 quote from Rod Dreher here in the American Conservative. The Western world after Orthodox 1.00

00:18:01.900 Christianity is not going to be the paradise so many on the cultural left, including liberal

00:18:07.000 religionists think it will be. And Christianity will likely be rather different than what

00:18:11.660 Orthodox believers living in the fading afterglow experience today, right? So in general, I think 1.00

00:18:17.740 all three of these people, well, Mansfield, I'll exempt you a little bit from this critique, but

00:18:22.740 like symptomatic for sort of right-wing readings of Nietzsche that like, they think that there's

00:18:28.200 something that they like, right? Hierarchies, disruption of like established norms and moral

00:18:35.300 precepts, but it's been sort of furthered and applied to broadly, right? To things that basically

00:18:40.920 he thinks are just natural. That can't fly. That's not okay. And we'll find in our conversation today,

00:18:45.680 I think that basically Nietzsche would have nothing but contempt for that, right? He's like,

00:18:50.320 that's the whole point. You don't get to sort of pull off, you know, on that exit and be like,

00:18:56.760 oh, I don't care to follow this highway any further. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. This

00:19:00.700 highway and just keeps going. In the end, even moral precepts you care about will be affected

00:19:06.420 by this. If you're not okay with that, don't get the hammer out, basically.

00:19:10.120 Yeah. So this might be Nietzsche's virtue as his consistency or at least the broad reachingness

00:19:15.380 in his indictment of these structures, including ones that his acolytes find sacred cows.

00:19:20.820 This might be a good moment to interject a correction that I received from one of our

00:19:24.520 listeners about rod dreyer who we identified as a catholic on our previous episode that's right i

00:19:31.560 noticed that too in re-listening he is not a catholic he has he has converted to orthodox

00:19:37.140 christianity so he you know is a person with a strong value system and a belief in a very

00:19:42.620 specific kind of moral prescription and code that nature would maybe not yeah yeah tolerate exactly

00:19:48.680 so there's a selectiveness you've identified like an overarching selectiveness in the application

00:19:54.000 of Nietzschean ideology, which his contemporaries in the first wave feminist movement also identified

00:19:59.720 in him and in his own work.

00:20:01.400 Exactly. So maybe I'll talk a little bit about just who he was for folks who don't know much

00:20:06.120 about him. So his dates were 1844 till 1900. And so maybe it's a little bit too much to say that

00:20:12.460 he was among the first generation that really explicitly could engage with feminists, right?

00:20:16.980 Like think of when Seneca Falls was like, people could write about this stuff when Nietzsche was

00:20:21.500 in diapers, basically. But still, definitely there is an increase in visibility for feminist

00:20:28.080 organizing after 1848 in Europe and then also in the United States. And so he grows up with this

00:20:36.280 stuff in some way. But he's definitely one of the first thinkers to really give feminist thought a

00:20:40.380 sort of sustained place in his writing and in his public statements. And at least some early

00:20:45.920 feminist readers thought that Nietzsche's success, right, the fact that he had this immense impact

00:20:51.840 on the culture of the turn of the 20th century, really, he didn't have immediate impact. I'll

00:20:57.760 talk about that in a second. Sort of like it was time delayed by about a decade. And there were a

00:21:02.700 lot of feminists who remarked on the fact that like, you know, he really seized hold never of

00:21:07.000 like philosophy, like you couldn't take a Nietzsche seminar in 1895. But if you were to go to like

00:21:12.720 coffee house in munich everybody like hey you know who you should read this guy fridic nietzsche

00:21:17.260 he's like super cool or whatever right like so that was like he was he was just like you know

00:21:21.100 your favorite poet definitely read him your favorite painter had like some nietzsche quote

00:21:25.140 somewhere right i mean like this is the time when he's one of the few philosophers to have a

00:21:29.040 piece of music rickhard strauss writes dust spokes are through star right in reaction to

00:21:32.960 nietzsche's book of the same title like that's not normal right like you don't hear like oh

00:21:37.840 a critic of pure reason the symphony right that doesn't tend to happen so he really seizes hold

00:21:42.860 of like the culture much more so than a philosophy a lot of philosophers at the time were like this

00:21:47.640 guy's an embarrassment or this is ridiculous this is supported this literature they're like this is

00:21:51.960 pretty nice poetry but like this is not what we do but this is all like he sort of takes over the

00:21:56.080 downtown and the sort of like that's right hip intellectual set yeah but this is this something

00:22:00.780 that happens while he's still writing or does this happen towards the end of his life because

00:22:05.140 is he around and able to sort of appreciate his popularity with, you know, 19th century Germany's

00:22:11.280 dime square? Or is he like, sort of exiting as he is he gone by then? That's the freaky thing.

00:22:16.960 He's around, people can visit him, but he's no longer able to write and communicate anything

00:22:22.280 that doesn't sound just like batshit crazy, right? Like, and we'll get to that. So he's,

00:22:26.900 he's around for it. But part of his mystique clearly is that he's this figure. I mean,

00:22:32.060 i've never looked this up i don't know if this is true but i think his sister would usually put him

00:22:35.680 behind a curtain and people would talk to him so he was like presented as a delphic oracle we should

00:22:39.960 say for our for our listeners who don't know this bit of nietzsche's biography he had a psychic break

00:22:46.620 in turin in 1889 i want to say 1889 that's right and he was found weeping and clinging to a horse

00:22:55.460 that's right like you do yeah as as one does it happens to the best of us but he never really

00:23:00.960 recovered and was in this like quasi catatonic state for the rest of his life yeah died in 1900

00:23:06.720 so like he lived fairly long in that state so part of his initial part of his initial mystique

00:23:13.360 and popularity may in fact have been attributed to the fact that like a this is no longer a guy

00:23:18.680 who's going to keep talking and writing worse and worse books as a lot of intellectuals do as they

00:23:24.900 age right right but he also has this sort of like like a martyr's mystique almost like he's got this

00:23:31.800 uh like legitimacy maybe even conferred by his madness this is a thinker who critiqued the very

00:23:38.620 parameters by which philosophy is normally assessed reality he has championed ideas like

00:23:45.820 untruth and illusion and madness right and now here he is like actually breaking down mentally

00:23:54.060 right a lot of people were like well it kind of feels like the logical next step to be quite

00:23:58.640 frank with you right like it's like you know i'm sorry about the horse but like it feels like you're

00:24:03.180 you're living your philosophy like for him like to turn into like a boring like college professor

00:24:08.660 like doing intro classes like would have been a huge letdown right like in some way this kind of

00:24:13.860 bridge between philosophy and life was sort of cemented by the fact that he appeared to have

00:24:20.580 sort of drawn an ultimate sort of consequence from what he had found in his own writings right

00:24:26.260 like people could sort of read it as like well it's of one piece with what he was preaching and

00:24:30.160 that's something that it sounds like his sister was aware of and you know leading into at least

00:24:34.860 a little bit you said she would like prop him up like a fortune teller in one of those machines at

00:24:39.200 the fair yeah i mean there was a nietzsche archive and i think the first two volumes of his biography

00:24:43.620 were out by the time he was dead right so like the nietzsche myth coexisted with the dude right

00:24:49.200 like i don't know if he like ever was asked about it and he was like hey do you remember uh may 1883

00:24:54.000 were you ever in frankfurt like i don't know if they did that but like like it's weird right like

00:24:58.660 that the first two volumes of biography are out while you're like eating noodles next door right

00:25:04.280 like it's it's kind of remarkable and the archive was already being compiled and people sort of

00:25:09.220 visiting it and like researching this man who was like in the same house it's it's it's kind of wild

00:25:14.820 to think about. Before we get to his sister, who is like, super fascinating, too. I do want to

00:25:19.780 point out that like, feminists were by and large anti Nietzsche. And we'll talk about that in a

00:25:23.520 second. But above all, they were anti the Nietzsche cult, right? You're like, whatever, this guy is

00:25:27.700 like sitting around in Weimar, what do we care? But the fact that all the men in our lives think

00:25:32.440 this is like the cat's meow really pisses us off. And they thought that it was indicative of

00:25:37.580 something, right? They thought that there were a bunch of feminist writers being like, the fact 0.65

00:25:41.580 that people love this guy so much is part of back to our theme a crisis of masculinity they're like

00:25:48.320 there's something wrong with our men that they like this stuff like the same way that we think

00:25:52.560 like why is someone an incel like if that's your paradigm of masculinity something's gone horribly 0.76

00:25:57.840 wrong and there were a lot of feminist thinkers being like oh gee if that's if you're part of 1.00

00:26:02.940 that fan club like there's something wrong right and they thought of it as a backlash they thought 0.99

00:26:08.220 that Nietzsche was, whether he had meant to or not, an avatar for this anti-feminism backlash,

00:26:14.140 basically, in the 1890s. And they thought that his anti-feminism was a source of his popularity.

00:26:20.520 Exactly. Yeah. So I found this very interesting quote from an essay by a Austrian feminist with

00:26:26.720 the amazing name Irma von Troll Borostiani, which I think is awesome. Her name is Troll. 0.98

00:26:32.540 And she wrote this in the German periodical Die Frau, which is sort of one of the great organs

00:26:37.660 of the first wave in Germany.

00:26:39.600 It's called On the Precipice of the 20th Century.

00:26:42.760 And she's referring to a passage in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

00:26:46.360 which we already talked about from 1883.

00:26:48.620 And the passage is probably the most infamous thing

00:26:51.220 Nietzsche ever wrote about women.

00:26:52.700 So I do think we have to read it to people.

00:26:55.520 My apologies.

00:26:56.860 It's written, as I mentioned earlier, in this faux biblical style.

00:26:59.680 And the figure of Zarathustra has just encountered an old woman.

00:27:02.960 I'll read this.

00:27:04.500 The old woman says,

00:27:05.280 and now as a token of my gratitude accept a little truth i'm old enough for it bundle it up 0.54

00:27:11.600 and keep its little mouth shut otherwise it will scream loudly this little truth and we should

00:27:16.700 mention that like just in case this isn't gross enough that die Wahrheit truth in german is a 0.81

00:27:21.460 feminine noun meaning the old lady in the original is saying you should keep quote her from screaming 0.78

00:27:27.120 uh great ah lovely yeah give me woman your little truth Zarathustra says and thus said the old woman

00:27:34.320 And thus said the old woman. 1.00

00:27:35.880 You go to women, don't forget the whip. 1.00

00:27:38.520 Thus spoke Zarathustra. 1.00

00:27:40.060 So, yeah, you go to women, don't forget the whip. 0.98

00:27:43.960 Pretty, pretty, pretty hard to read that any other way.

00:27:47.720 But so here is Irma van Troelborostiani about this passage, which I think is great.

00:27:52.620 She says, I may be wrong, but I have the suspicion that among the ingenious and grotesque, earth-shatteringly sublime and boldly cynical,

00:27:59.240 profoundly sensitive, and cruelly Nero-esque ideas which Friedrich Nietzsche packed into his

00:28:04.200 mystical and profound philosophical poems, that not a single one of those ideas will ever attain

00:28:09.220 the same popularity as this one dictum, which presents itself stark naked in its sheer brutality.

00:28:15.300 It gives expression to the innermost core of Nietzsche's master morality, clearly and precisely,

00:28:20.800 and without any niceties, right? So she's saying, yeah, there's a reason you guys all like this guy,

00:28:26.720 And that's your misogynist.

00:28:29.160 I mean, this is a critique I've made of a lot of right-wing thinkers who are like my contemporaries, right?

00:28:36.040 It's like your popularity is because you've adopted this simultaneity of positions where on the one hand, you can pretend to be destroying sacred cows and revealing hard truths and-

00:28:51.120 Telling about how it is.

00:28:52.260 Yeah, and like offending liberal politesse, right?

00:28:55.300 And on the other hand, you can't affirm people's priors about this intimate high-stakes hierarchy that all of them have an investment in.

00:29:03.060 It's like a simultaneous affirmation of a hegemonic traditionalist position or traditional position, at least very old position, while at the same time sort of repackaging it as transgressive.

00:29:16.160 Exactly. There are definitely passages where we'll see exactly that. And so did feminists back then.

00:29:20.960 And notice what Troll Borostiani is saying here, right?

00:29:23.320 Like, she kind of praises some of his ideas, right?

00:29:26.040 They're earth-tatteringly sublime or baldly cynical.

00:29:29.420 They're profoundly sensitive or totally cruel.

00:29:31.820 They're ingenious and grotesque, right?

00:29:33.300 She's like, I get it.

00:29:34.760 Like, some of this stuff is cool.

00:29:37.040 I think it's just weird, like, you know, where he's one and where he's the other, right?

00:29:42.920 That's really astutely put.

00:29:50.960 So maybe I'll briefly talk about his path into this work and into philosophy.

00:30:08.020 Importantly, he never really was a philosopher by either training or by profession.

00:30:13.020 He was born in Merseburg, which was then in Prussian Saxony.

00:30:16.780 His dad was a Protestant pastor, and his father died when Nietzsche was still very young.

00:30:21.800 If you're wondering where the psychoanalytic critique of Nietzsche might start, feast yourself on the sentence.

00:30:27.740 He grew up with his mother, sister, grandmother, and two unmarried aunts on his father's side and a female servant.

00:30:33.760 So he grew up around a bunch of women and remarked on that.

00:30:37.340 Men always respond very well to early experiences of being subjected to female authority and are definitely not trying to get one over on their moms and high school English teachers in their adult lives at all.

00:30:53.160 Is it relevant to his worldview at all that he's growing up in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolution?

00:31:00.600 There's this sort of foiling of optimism or of liberal optimism in his very early life.

00:31:06.740 Yeah, that's a really good question. And yes, there is some of that. One of the groups that he sort of draws on early in his thinking, still as a schoolboy, basically, but that he kind of then abandons are the young Hegelians, who are sort of the big philosophical school associated with some of the 1848 revolutions, right, who were attacking, especially in the German speaking world, where there was still a lot of censorship, were attacking sort of temporal authorities by critiquing religion, right?

00:31:34.520 This is where you get things like Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, where you get something

00:31:39.280 like Bauer's The Life of Jesus, right?

00:31:41.200 Where he's like, I don't even think this guy existed, you guys, right?

00:31:43.940 Like, so this idea, this impulse, this critical impulse that basically says like, oh, these 0.99

00:31:48.400 things that we were taught were sacred are actually bullshit. 0.90

00:31:51.400 Like, that was very strong in the generation right before him. 0.99

00:31:54.840 And he grapples with that.

00:31:56.660 He isn't ultimately that interested in, but that style definitely is something that he

00:32:00.800 kind of likes, this kind of unmasking style.

00:32:03.400 What if this thing that we thought of as religious truth is just a piece of anthropology?

00:32:08.760 What if this thing that we thought of as moral was actually just a prejudice?

00:32:12.200 What if this, right?

00:32:12.800 Like, what if this is really that, something that he's very, very, to him is like the basic

00:32:17.160 impulse of philosophy.

00:32:18.160 And that's very much sort of an 1848 kind of feeling.

00:32:21.580 So he grows up in the wake of this, absorbing this sort of skepticism that is inherent to

00:32:26.800 the intellectual milieu of Germany in like sort of the mid-19th century.

00:32:31.520 And then what happens?

00:32:32.440 Yeah, so he is a really brilliant kid. He goes to this legendary boarding school for boys that's been around since the 16th century. He then moves to Bonn in West Germany, studied classical philology and Protestant theology. And he joins a fraternity at a time when you still had to duel, basically, to gain admission.

00:32:51.980 Wait, what? I'm sorry. You had a scar on his nose.

00:32:54.120 You had to do what to get into a fraternity?

00:32:56.200 Duel.

00:32:56.760 They don't just make you drink beer or something? You have to fight somebody?

00:33:01.020 Yes. The butt chugging of the 19th century in Germany were the so-called Schmisse. You had to 0.97

00:33:05.160 basically, you had to get cut with, I don't know what that is, an epay or a rapier or something

00:33:10.620 like that. Like it was sabers at dawn, basically. That's so dorky. That's like, it's-

00:33:16.560 I mean, be careful. This still exists. As you can imagine, these groups are fast as hell.

00:33:22.340 Well, so the important thing here, I think, is that like, you know, he goes from this all-female 0.98

00:33:26.240 environment to an all-male environment and seems to get along quite swimmingly there. Although I 0.96

00:33:30.640 should say he did quit I believe the fraternity very quickly he also quit the University of Bonn

00:33:36.240 and he quit Protestant theology very quickly but like he tangles with the idea of like hey what if

00:33:41.380 I only hung out with dudes for a while yeah yeah maybe dudes rock instead you know then he moves

00:33:46.520 to Leipzig so that's in East Germany to study philology so classical philology right like just

00:33:52.420 like the Greek classics he's basically a scholar of ancient Greek he's then drafted into the Prussian

00:33:56.620 army in 1867 but got a discharge a year later after falling off a horse i don't know if it's

00:34:03.780 the same i don't think it's the same horse different he blazed his glory it's probably

00:34:08.320 a different horse this poor horse he's like not great to horses yeah poor guy yeah nietzsche and

00:34:14.040 horses this sounds to me like a pretty conventional pathway for like a 19th century intellectual

00:34:21.300 This is a guy who's going to be a professor.

00:34:26.460 So how does he launch his actual career?

00:34:28.520 You're absolutely right.

00:34:29.200 Picking up on that conventionality there.

00:34:31.600 There's a great book by the historian Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History, which is not

00:34:35.560 about classical philologists, but about historians.

00:34:37.700 But the same thing kind of applies, where she kind of points out that the habits of

00:34:42.060 mind and the habits of research, what they thought was real research, what was the job

00:34:46.860 of a philologist or a historian, had all these gender connotations that they never reflected 0.86

00:34:51.180 on because I went back to like the fact that they all like you know had gone to these all-male

00:34:56.160 boarding schools that they like missed mommy there there's all these interesting sort of

00:34:59.980 psychological aspects there where Nietzsche like she I don't think she has Nietzsche in that book

00:35:04.560 but like basically he would fit right in but he's fairly unconventional in how he navigates this

00:35:11.200 kind of career and he kind of in a way that sort of points forward to the second half of the 19th

00:35:16.880 century where like everyone seems to do this stuff like where no one sort of fits in anymore and 0.66

00:35:20.520 Everyone is just kind of fucking up all the time, right?

00:35:23.700 So in the mid-1860s, he discovers the thought of Artur Schopenhauer for himself. 0.98

00:35:28.900 I don't know if you've read much Schopenhauer, but, you know, huge pessimist, subjective idealist, gigantic curmudgeon.

00:35:35.880 Basically, I don't know if Larry David was a philosopher, basically.

00:35:41.100 And unlike Larry David, I hope, pretty much the biggest misogynist of the early 19th century.

00:35:47.040 Also in terms of, by the way, with Schopenhauer, 0.97

00:35:49.380 huge misogynist, lesbian sister. 1.00

00:35:51.880 I report, you decide. 1.00

00:35:53.940 His sister was like, get the fuck out of my household. 1.00

00:35:57.280 I met a nice woman. 1.00

00:35:58.800 And he's like, you know who I hate? 1.00

00:36:00.500 The ladies.

00:36:01.240 So again, it doesn't take much to do a little bit of psychoanalysis here.

00:36:06.560 The other big encounter for him in the 1860s is the composer Richard Wagner,

00:36:11.000 who some listeners may be familiar with.

00:36:13.120 He was a huge fan of Wagner for some time.

00:36:17.220 And they meet.

00:36:17.760 They meet, yeah.

00:36:18.480 Going back to 1848, they meet in Trippchen on Lake Lucerne because that's where Wagner is in exile.

00:36:25.100 He had said some stuff that you can't take back about the king and guillotines in 1848 in Leipzig, in fact, and had to flee.

00:36:32.360 Relocated to Switzerland, which basically was a non-extradition country or whatever, and set up there on the shores of Lake Lucerne.

00:36:39.340 the house is still there and would eventually only leave when in a development that gives you

00:36:43.920 a good sense of how the radicals of 48 kind of aged poorly at times like he only left switzerland

00:36:50.220 when the king of bavaria was like hey the builder of neuschwanstein castle right it's like hey i

00:36:55.200 want you to build me an opera house and he's like cool yeah i'll do that i uh did i was that was 0.81

00:37:00.040 that talking about cutting people's heads i will cash you a check fagner very committed to his 0.80

00:37:06.320 politics. That's right. That's right. So Nietzsche, he goes to Wagner. He makes this pilgrimage to 0.99

00:37:12.120 Switzerland and meets him. Pilgrimage, exactly. Wagner was born in 1818, I want to say, so quite

00:37:17.220 a bit older than Nietzsche. He's just excited about this young fan. And the first books that

00:37:22.420 Nietzsche writes are very much still under the influence of Wagner. And then he makes a real

00:37:26.720 turn and starts hating on Wagner. We'll talk about that a little bit too. Basically, this is where

00:37:31.660 sort of the unconventional Nietzsche really comes through. In 1869, he takes a job at the

00:37:36.240 University of Basel in Switzerland. And as he leaves for Switzerland, he renounces his Prussian 0.65

00:37:41.480 citizenship and is basically stateless from there on out, which like, I don't know how common that

00:37:45.280 was in the 19th century. Why does he do that? I don't know, but it's kind of remarkable, right?

00:37:49.720 Like there's a real individualist streak to this guy. In the 1870, he briefly serves as a medic

00:37:54.840 during the Franco-Prussian War. So this is the war in which Prussia unites Germany under the

00:38:00.180 banner of the German empire, right? The second German empire. And Nietzsche is like super

00:38:04.320 unenthused about that. And he's like, these people are idiots. Like this sucks. We don't need an 1.00

00:38:08.280 emperor, et cetera, et cetera. And then in 1876, Wagner starts the Bayreuth festival, right? So

00:38:14.480 the first time that his operas are going to be performed in the space that he envisioned for

00:38:19.440 them, that he had built with King Ludwig's money in the town of Bayreuth. And Nietzsche goes and

00:38:24.360 Nietzsche's like, this sucks. 0.98

00:38:27.200 He just completely hates it and just really, really turns against his erstwhile idol. 0.89

00:38:35.420 So the important works from this time, from Nietzsche's life are, I'm going to name a

00:38:40.380 couple, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, The Essay on Truth and Lying in an Extra Moral Sense 0.84

00:38:46.360 in 1873, The Untimely Meditations of 1876, Human, All Too Human, 1878, The Gay Science,

00:38:53.720 1882 thus spoke zarathustra in 83 beyond good and evil in 86 on the genealogy of morals in 87

00:39:01.040 the case of wagner in 88 twilight of the idols 88 and the antichrist in 88 so you can already tell

00:39:09.140 like he quits the university basically there's no tenure in pretty much future because like these

00:39:14.100 are not the kinds of books you're supposed to be writing at this time right like right these are

00:39:17.600 meant to be read by people who are not professional philosophers right these are the titles are great

00:39:23.420 subtitles are even better like i already mentioned like how to philosophize with a hammer that's just

00:39:27.700 a killer subtitle i mean like and so from the beginning like his own colleagues are like this

00:39:34.220 guy's nuts and more and more artists and musicians and poets kind of discover this thought for

00:39:42.300 themselves it's also he's writing so prolifically this is all this is what like so many books in

00:39:48.860 just like a 15 16 year period he's just churning them out yeah some of it is repetition but not

00:39:54.660 much i mean part of it is that he doesn't bother to cite anyone and it's in this kind of like

00:40:00.660 essayistic aphoristic style sometimes in this kind of almost pseudo-biblical style but it's

00:40:07.020 it's true like he he's able to really sort of he's on a tear there and part of the reception

00:40:12.220 of this oeuvre once he has this breakdown in 1989 is german feminism right so there are german

00:40:18.380 feminists reading this, we have anecdotal evidence of Nietzsche reading groups organized by women. 0.61

00:40:23.540 I found out in an article that I didn't know that there was this phenomenon of women wearing bobs

00:40:28.880 who were called Nietzscheanerinnen, so female Nietzscheans, right? So there were a lot of 0.84

00:40:33.400 people in the mainstream women's movement who were like, this guy is a false friend and you

00:40:37.080 should not be reading him probably, or there's other things you can do with your time. But even

00:40:41.640 they kind of spoke of this sort of hypnotic spell that he was putting on women, right? One article

00:40:46.620 in the same journal I was quoting from earlier called him a Pied Piper of Hamelin, right? So

00:40:52.060 he's seducing people with this cool sounding pseudo intellectual or seemingly deep

00:40:59.680 philosophizing. This is not actually a good idea to follow him down out of Hamelin. We all know

00:41:05.440 what happens to the children that follow the Pied Piper. You know, I can see a rationale for 0.99

00:41:10.480 this if you are you know in 19th century terms a newly liberated woman you're going in public 0.67

00:41:16.580 you're wearing your bob it probably has a lot of appeal to be you know cynically or skeptically

00:41:23.820 critiquing all of these you know received notions that are among the ones that kept you repressed

00:41:30.340 in the home like excluded from public life right and you know that is potentially particularly

00:41:36.960 appealing posture for like sort of emerging woman intellectual even you know in spite of that

00:41:43.720 including his anti-feminism which as we know can also be very appealing to women yeah there there

00:41:48.800 is that there are women anti-feminists who quote Nietzsche too but I think you're exactly right

00:41:53.660 that like there were plenty of feminists thinking especially socialist feminists right who were like 0.89

00:41:58.360 look I don't care about this stupid whip thing but like he's mostly saying that a bunch of our 1.00

00:42:04.900 social conventions are outmoded and bullshit. Like, I don't see how I have much to lose from 1.00

00:42:09.680 more people being convinced of this, right? Like, sure, right? Like, that's fine. I'm not hot on

00:42:14.840 tradition either. So yeah, like, I'm fine with that. I mean, we should do a whole episode on

00:42:20.520 feminists and Nietzsche at some point, if we want to, or early feminism and these kind of thinkers

00:42:25.360 in general. But here's a little sample from Hedwig Dohm's book, The Anti-Feminists from 1902.

00:42:30.200 Dome's dates are 1833 to 1919, so she's a little bit older than Nietzsche himself.

00:42:36.060 So as you first quote Nietzsche, you always have to quote Nietzsche because he's actually quite quotable.

00:42:39.600 Man creates an image of woman, and the woman creates herself in its image.

00:42:43.720 By the way, that is almost a feminist point. 0.99

00:42:46.120 You can tell by Dome, it's like, oh, okay. 1.00

00:42:50.020 Yeah, that could be Simone de Beauvoir, yeah. 0.81

00:42:52.560 Yeah, it's really like, yeah, this is an androcentric fantasy that then real women are supposed to accommodate themselves to.

00:42:57.920 He was like, thanks, Friedrich. 0.82

00:42:59.420 That's not half bad, right?

00:43:01.420 But that's not quite what he means by it.

00:43:03.380 But still, Dom's commentary on this.

00:43:05.500 How?

00:43:06.360 According to Nietzsche's characterization, 1.00

00:43:08.180 women should naturally be made according to God's design, 1.00

00:43:11.380 full of lies and deceit, enemy of the truth, 1.00

00:43:13.680 full of sly accommodation like a wild animal.

00:43:16.480 Can anyone imagine a stronger argument 0.54

00:43:18.320 for the modern women's movement than this opinion of Nietzsche's?

00:43:21.640 We'll get back to what she's arguing here

00:43:23.580 at the end of the episode, I think.

00:43:24.860 But her main point is, and I want to flag that for folks,

00:43:27.920 that she's pointing to this weird status of nature right in Nietzsche's thought is nature the thing

00:43:32.340 that we're striving for naturalness or is it something we're trying to get away from is natural

00:43:37.420 good or bad is it evidence of a well-ordered cosmos worthy of affirmation or is it basically 0.99

00:43:42.900 a sign that shit is really fucked up right and is it set in stone or is it capable of 0.98

00:43:47.940 transcendence basically yeah this is like incredibly common on the right this kind of 1.00

00:43:53.520 contradiction about what nature is right yeah yeah we talked about this i think before we

00:43:57.920 started recording like this is jordan peterson's posture right uh nature is both this

00:44:04.500 feminizing chaotic force that needs to be sudued with like masculinist human logical order and

00:44:13.940 also it is this immutable force that is you know something more legitimate and more true about

00:44:19.700 ourselves and our like civilized illusions that we need to submit to and particularly need to 0.96

00:44:23.860 submit to in the form of a gendered hierarchy in which men exert like private and social control

00:44:30.000 over women exactly yeah and so i think i again think dome absolutely has his number on this

00:44:34.920 i think the how is like the perfect she's like i'm sorry how these two it's gonna be one of

00:44:43.120 these two things but i don't see how it could be both right yeah you can't have it both ways buddy

00:44:47.660 yeah exactly so i mentioned that like you know basically he's he's interacting with the women's

00:44:52.960 movement, but he's also like, he's got all these really kind of powerful women in his life. And I

00:44:58.040 think that's something we should also briefly talk about. One of his first sponsors is this woman,

00:45:02.940 Malvida von Meisenburg, who's fantastic, was philosophically really interested,

00:45:07.540 very involved with Hegelianism. She's kind of interested in socialism, part of the 1848

00:45:12.340 revolution as well. She's also a little bit older. I think she's almost exactly Wagner's

00:45:16.360 contemporary. She's maybe like one or two years older than him. He was also friends with Cosima

00:45:21.460 wagner so that's the second wife of richard wagner unfortunately kind of a horrible person

00:45:27.140 one should say the wagner clan for those i don't know how much you know about wagner but like

00:45:31.260 imagine i don't i don't want to say speak ill of the adams family they're basically the adams

00:45:35.160 family but evil like they're a bunch of freaks and they also turn out to be all kind of proto-nazis 0.98

00:45:41.280 right so they're just like they're antisemitic as shit like some of this obviously gets worse 0.99

00:45:45.780 with time as like actual nazis enter the picture but like their letters ain't great like it's not 0.99

00:45:50.580 it's not fantastic so wagner's daughter close friend of nietzsche not a great not a great broad

00:45:55.660 yeah wagner's wife oh wagner's wife i'm sorry daughter of france the daughter of france list

00:46:00.380 yeah the the famous pianist and composer but he has better friends like he's friends with

00:46:05.060 luandreas salome much younger contemporary 1861 to 37 right brilliant writer essayist and friend

00:46:13.280 of ranamaria rilkes and became a psychoanalyst later in life big friend of freud and he kind

00:46:19.580 of interacts with this philosopher that i've written about recently helena von ruskovitz

00:46:24.380 her dates are 1856 to 1918 who basically like wanted to be the female nietzsche and took his

00:46:32.420 books to the cleaner in her own books she's phenomenal it is quite possible that like a lot

00:46:39.080 of his diatribes of women thinkers are just like that he's mad at ruskovitz because she like 1.00

00:46:43.300 you know published something about like this guy sucks she embarrassed him in print and so exactly

00:46:47.840 He did the mature thing and went on a 500-tweet storm. 0.76

00:46:52.880 Yeah, and other fun fact about Bruscovitz,

00:46:54.780 also a long-term partner with a soprano,

00:46:57.940 with a female opera singer for quite a long time,

00:47:00.800 wrote a final book, which is the one I wrote about,

00:47:03.620 basically about how masculinity is a virus

00:47:06.140 and the only way to get rid of it

00:47:07.380 was maybe discontinuing the human species. 0.99

00:47:09.620 So she literally did Scum Manifesto 1.00

00:47:11.780 like 60 years before Valerie Solanas. 0.89

00:47:13.780 Yeah, I was going to say a proto-Solanus in Germany.

00:47:16.440 She's Austrian, but she's terrific. 0.99

00:47:18.300 Coupled up with her soprano.

00:47:20.220 Okay.

00:47:20.900 Yeah, she's amazing.

00:47:23.220 And so that's the thing, right?

00:47:24.420 Like, so he's in dialogue with women who kind of have his number and kind of push back.

00:47:30.340 And I think that shows in these works too.

00:47:33.100 And then, of course, he has the home situation, which he's not shy about, even in his more or less philosophical works.

00:47:38.760 Here, a passage about his mother and his sister from the book Ece Homo, reference to Jesus, by the way, because he's a humble guy.

00:47:46.440 The treatment I received from my mother and my sister up to this moment fills me with unspeakable horror.

00:47:51.240 A perfect infernal machine is at work here with infallible certainty about the moment where they can wound or draw blood.

00:47:57.760 That sounds to me like a diary rantings of a 13-year-old who's been told to clean up his room, you know? 0.98

00:48:03.980 Mom is being a total bee again, dear diary. 0.63

00:48:06.880 To be fair, Elisabeth I and Nietzsche, his sister, is indeed kind of a demon girl boss, I'm sorry to say. 0.73

00:48:13.200 So she and Nietzsche were quite close until she took up with a guy named Bernhard Forster, who was this German nationalist who had been thrown out of his high school teaching post for being too anti-Semitic. 0.79

00:48:25.820 This is 1880s Germany.

00:48:29.160 Think of how anti-Semitic you have to be for them to be like, Bernhard, Bernhard, kiddo, you got to go.

00:48:34.900 This is too much.

00:48:36.400 Cool it with the anti-Semitism.

00:48:37.940 That is far more than the acceptable amount of anti-Semitism in 1880s Germany. 0.70

00:48:42.600 And so he did the natural thing and moved to Paraguay, where he established an Aryan commune called Nueva Germania, as one does. 0.54

00:48:50.700 Another pioneer in the 20th century trends in the 19th century German-speaking world. 0.97

00:48:58.160 Yeah, we got Scum Manifesto. We got a German anti-Semite moving to South America. We've got all of it. 0.85

00:49:04.180 That's right. Before it was cool. Before the rat line.

00:49:07.720 Yeah. And the colony turned out to be, A, a shitshow in that no one was vaccinated against anything, and B, probably a financial scam. And once this sort of was figured out by the press, Ferster killed himself. And at the same time, Friedrich Nietzsche had his breakdown in Turin. 0.98

00:49:25.140 And so Elisabeth came back to Germany and cared for her brother full time and became sort of his executor, right?

00:49:33.720 Wrote the biography and then sort of assembled his sort of posthumous works.

00:49:38.960 There's a bunch of stuff that comes out from his notes that is assembled from, well, partly real, partially faked drafts and letters of his, right?

00:49:48.300 Okay.

00:49:48.620 And so Elisabeth I. Nietzsche is very clearly like a proto-Nazi.

00:49:52.400 It's just like, there's no way around that, right?

00:49:54.380 If you're founding an Aryan colony in Paraguay, a certain Rubicon of anti-Semitism has been crossed, even in 1880s Germany.

00:50:03.500 Part of why Nietzsche becomes the kind of court philosopher of the incipient kind of nationalist movements in Germany is that she markets him really heavily as that.

00:50:15.280 He's like this nationalist sage for them, right?

00:50:18.040 And so she's a big reason why he basically is so indelibly entwined with the thinking of the Nazis and with Hitler.

00:50:26.120 That being said, right, as any time on this pod when a woman appears to be at fault for a dude's bad reputation,

00:50:33.440 it's worth taking a step back and sort of thinking, huh, also super convenient after 1945 that you can blame Elisabeth I and Nietzsche for every horrible thing that her brother had become associated with, right?

00:50:44.600 Nietzsche did say and write many, if not all those things.

00:50:49.860 He did defend slavery.

00:50:51.620 He did seem eugenics curious, et cetera, et cetera.

00:50:54.320 It's just that he also hated anti-Semitism. 0.98

00:50:57.260 He also thought that German nationalism was dumb, right? 0.99

00:51:00.000 He hated Germany as a country, et cetera, et cetera. 0.99

00:51:02.160 So again, it's like the selection thing, right?

00:51:04.280 Elisabeth had not really distorted her brother, as far as I can tell.

00:51:08.860 She had just sort of curbed his toxicity artificially in certain arenas.

00:51:12.640 She's just been like, she excised stuff that he said that seemed to make it clear that he also hated the other side on any of these things.

00:51:19.620 So do you think it's fair to say that a differently inclined executor could have assembled and marketed a Nietzsche that took an opposite political stance or was useful for an opposite political project?

00:51:32.980 Or is he like, was she merely enhancing a fundamental like sort of reaction in his thought?

00:51:39.120 I mean, it's hard to say, right? Because on the one hand, I think there is, for almost any 19th century philosopher, we have horrible things that they said about non-white races and they said about women, et cetera, et cetera. And for all of them, we have executors who are like, look, not loving this, right? You should read it, but obviously don't take that seriously, right?

00:52:01.080 Like, you know, people who read Hegel and Kant that way and are like, look, I'm not

00:52:04.820 defending this, but like, I think the stuff about morals is pretty good, right?

00:52:08.600 You can disagree or agree with that, doesn't matter.

00:52:10.820 But like, you know, that's definitely available for Nietzsche and their people doing that.

00:52:15.000 He's definitely making it harder than some of these other people. 0.87

00:52:17.640 It's just, you know, he is just kind of a troll.

00:52:20.920 But, you know, the rediscovery of Nietzsche sort of for the left is a thing, right?

00:52:26.220 Like the, you know, a lot of the people sort of champion Nietzsche after 45 and especially

00:52:30.840 after 68, 1945 and 1968 are leftists, right?

00:52:35.260 And they're like, yeah, I'm not endorsing half of this. 1.00

00:52:37.600 Most of them are Jews, right? 1.00

00:52:38.640 They're like, I don't, I don't love what he's saying about me, but like, I still think that 0.99

00:52:42.600 essay is pretty good.

00:52:43.480 You know, that could have happened a lot earlier, but on the other hand, like, no, that stuff's

00:52:46.760 there.

00:52:46.960 I think, I think it's very hard to get around that.

00:52:49.760 And the only reason why I think we get around that when it comes to a sexism is that it's

00:52:55.060 so priced in right again that like you can find that for any philosopher that he said terrible

00:52:59.820 male philosopher that he said terrible things about women and so people are like well yada yada

00:53:04.000 for a number of women yeah that's true yeah i guess that's true but but it's true that like

00:53:08.840 what what you know the two women we've already quoted sort of point to they're like it feels

00:53:13.460 more central than that you know it's not an aside it's not a footnote it feels like he's really mad

00:53:18.980 of this and uh uh you know he's like how dare you speak up in public what is that a book review of

00:53:24.860 me right like this feels more than that and i think they're right i think i think it's possible

00:53:31.820 to read around it but it takes a little bit more than you know the sexism in emmanuel kant who is

00:53:37.580 like famously most likely never had never interacted with a woman in a sexual manner

00:53:43.380 judging from his descriptions they're like oh emmanuel emmanuel that's that's not how half of

00:53:48.440 this works and so Nietzsche's Nietzsche's quite quite different there maybe I'll dive in and like

00:53:54.460 you know just lay it on you like some some Nietzsche on ladies yeah tell me about thinking

00:53:59.760 on gender how did he how did he approach yeah so like yeah or or as I like to call it the metaphysics

00:54:04.600 of yikes here's a passage I'll pick a couple I mean there's too much to choose from but this is

00:54:10.180 from beyond good and evil part of an entire book of that that volumes book seven I believe that's

00:54:15.940 basically about the 19th century as a period of decline, and he's especially sort of going after

00:54:20.160 socialism and feminism. Here is Nietzsche. I'm not saying this. Nietzsche is saying this. It'll be

00:54:24.800 very clear. Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to enlighten men about woman

00:54:30.880 as she is. This is one of the worst developments of the general uglifying of Europe. For what must 0.97

00:54:37.080 these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificness and self-exposure bring to light? Woman has so 1.00

00:54:42.740 much cause for shame. In women, there is so much concealed pedantry, superficiality, school 1.00

00:54:48.120 masterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion. Study only women's behavior 1.00

00:54:54.320 towards children, which has really been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear 0.50

00:54:59.800 of man. Fun. Yeah. I like the fact that like, it doesn't go like, yeah, mom, right? It's like,

00:55:05.780 study only women's behavior towards children. It's like, Friedrich, we get it. Like, yeah, 1.00

00:55:11.140 like what's she what's she is that what's happening well you know he does a few things

00:55:17.940 here he like collapses like gender hierarchy into beauty yeah and feminism is specifically

00:55:25.360 positioned as opposed to beauty which is like you know the same idea that undergirds when 1.00

00:55:32.680 you know tucker carlson freaks out about the like green m&m wearing sneakers instead of heels and 0.99

00:55:38.680 He's like this, you know, cartoon corporate mascot is not fuckable enough. 0.97

00:55:44.720 But, you know, like contemporary conservatives attribute this uglifying force to feminism, but he collapses feminism with all women in general. 0.98

00:55:55.260 He doesn't seem to like hold out hope for a redeemable, virtuous kind of womanhood. 0.59

00:56:01.460 Yeah, I think that's right. 1.00

00:56:03.140 He like ascribes these failures to all women. 1.00

00:56:05.800 Well, that's true. 1.00

00:56:06.920 At the same time, I think it gets at why he's a little smarter than those oaths, basically.

00:56:12.300 Why he's smarter than Tucker Carlson.

00:56:13.820 He's a little more honest.

00:56:15.300 Exactly.

00:56:15.680 Because what he's saying here, he's saying women are naturally not like this, right? 1.00

00:56:20.620 But they have the good sense to pretend. 0.99

00:56:23.280 Who the fuck would want to know what they're really like, right? 0.99

00:56:25.860 That's his idea. 1.00

00:56:26.640 The sexes need to lie to each other because otherwise they will never be able to have sex with each other and have children. 0.94

00:56:32.060 Well, he's not saying that. 0.97

00:56:34.440 He's not saying that women are doing this, like, smart, sensical suppression of their ugly true selves.

00:56:41.000 He says that they're being restrained by the threat of violence.

00:56:43.980 I think that's different. 0.94

00:56:45.320 And that's much more of a justification for a violent enforcement of gender hierarchy. 1.00

00:56:49.740 That's like a, like, this is why you have to beat your wife argument. 0.99

00:56:52.800 And I think, you know, we're back to the whip implicitly. 0.91

00:56:55.780 Well, or he might say that traditionally, I mean, I think he would have said tradition is wife beating, right?

00:57:00.300 So, like, I think that it's really, like, we'll get to that in a second.

00:57:03.860 like he does think that like violence is part of the the sexual relationship in a way that like

00:57:08.700 like obviously you're right like this is rebarbative on the other hand it's also interesting 1.00

00:57:13.680 that like i think i can see why a certain early feminists saw something to like here because 0.95

00:57:19.140 they're like we get all these philosophical theories of marriage that never talk about the

00:57:23.900 fact that women are physically afraid of their husbands right and he's like yeah that's the

00:57:28.140 principle of the thing and they're like thank you like that's yeah that's important yeah there is a

00:57:33.420 kind of recurring theme in a lot of my own approaches to like conservative thought about

00:57:41.080 gender you know from like a radical feminist perspective is that the the diagnoses of the

00:57:47.120 feminists and the conservatives are the same they describe the same yeah they describe the same uh 1.00

00:57:52.780 like state of affairs they're like yeah uh there's pervasive violence uh this gender is a hierarchy 0.98

00:58:00.520 and it is enforced strictly and brutally and the difference actually is that conservatives think 1.00

00:58:07.740 that's good and radical feminists are like this is wrong it has to be demolished and the

00:58:13.940 conservatives say this is essential to our way of life it has to be maintained yeah and i think he

00:58:18.440 he sort of falls in the middle he would just say it's just the truth right he would just say that's

00:58:22.720 just what the facts are and it's neither worthy of affirmation nor of hiding behind anything right

00:58:30.360 he hates basically the mystification of sexuality right he thinks the relationship of men and women

00:58:35.540 is about power and about domination and he thinks i think that women ought to resent the hell out of

00:58:40.500 that but he especially hates the stories we tell ourselves to hide from that fact right so he's

00:58:45.760 both a huge anti-feminist and this kind of obsessive debunker of like the stories men tell

00:58:52.720 themselves right like about like well not not our relationship he's like nope yours too right he

00:58:59.800 says, this is another from Beyond Good and Evil, to be mistaken in the fundamental problem of man

00:59:04.860 and woman, to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile

00:59:10.260 tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligation,

00:59:16.500 that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness, right? This, by the way, very close to Peterson,

00:59:21.560 who also doesn't even attack feminism on its own terms, but sees it as a sign of a broader problem.

00:59:27.640 And Nietzsche's the same thing, right? He doesn't think that feminists are doing this. He thinks feminists are a symptom of something bigger.

00:59:34.400 Right, because women don't have their own ideas or agencies. They are tools of these larger forces. 1.00

00:59:39.260 Exactly, exactly. We'll see exactly how he thinks that works. Maybe we'll leave it there.

00:59:45.160 But I think it's important to notice that you'll be totally shocked to learn that his frequently male readers picked up on this pre-criticism of feminism.

00:59:55.920 Oh my God, really?

00:59:56.980 And on this kind of, yeah, and on this kind of naturalizing immoralism that he has, right? 1.00

01:00:01.880 It's pure pickup artist shit, right? 0.99

01:00:03.800 I mean, like, we haven't even mentioned those guys yet, but like, this is, this feels like 1.00

01:00:07.640 pickup artist shit. 0.98

01:00:08.940 And that's definitely in here, but it is, I think, more complicated than that. 1.00

01:00:11.620 And that's what those feminist thinkers that we've already talked about, and that what 0.98

01:00:14.840 queer thinkers kind of picked up on right away, right? 0.99

01:00:18.240 That like, there is something here that pulls the kind of veneer of tradition off of these 0.99

01:00:24.020 relationships and makes a very feminist point.

01:00:26.240 these are above all power relationships and therefore like Nietzsche thinks that that doesn't

01:00:32.340 make them susceptible to critique but like everyone on the feminist left who read him was like yeah I 0.90

01:00:37.020 mean like obviously like this is where our critique can start right like the idea that our ideas of

01:00:41.580 sexual morality are basically he's agreed upon fictions that are just used to like keep people

01:00:46.580 in their place like was something that like especially early queer activists that could

01:00:50.360 really or like lesbian and gay activists could draw on and be like yeah that sounds right to me

01:00:54.900 I think you just all decided that I'm sick and I feel no such thing, right? 0.70

01:00:59.100 And Nietzsche gives me vocabulary for saying exactly that.

01:01:01.860 That's the framework that will later be picked up by Foucault, right?

01:01:04.280 Exactly, exactly, right?

01:01:05.420 Like Foucault, this idea of a genealogy, it comes through straight in Foucault's theory

01:01:09.840 of sexuality, exactly.

01:01:11.340 And at the same time, I think it is important to note, and I think you've already mentioned

01:01:15.360 this several times and so have first wave feminist thinkers that I've been quoting,

01:01:19.920 Nietzsche is great at these gestures where it seems like he's slaughtering a holy cow,

01:01:24.440 right? Like everyone thought this, but here's Nietzsche to tell you it's bullshit, right? 0.99

01:01:28.200 Right. This is this philosophizing with a hammer, which to be fair, some of Nietzsche is quite 0.98

01:01:33.240 counterintuitive and unconventional, almost to a fault. And sometimes his thinking about sex and

01:01:38.340 gender can be that, but it's important to note that when he's describing women, you know, in

01:01:44.960 the middle of all this almost compulsive edgelordism, his idea of what women are like is

01:01:49.980 actually insanely conventional right he like it's like women are like birds they're like plants

01:01:55.520 they're like flowers they're like trees they only know emotions they have no will or too much will 0.98

01:01:59.820 right it's so fucking garden variety like misogyny in the middle of all this stuff that 0.75

01:02:06.680 can feel like whoa whoa i can imagine that no one's actually ever said that before yeah it's 0.93

01:02:10.680 not very inventive as misogyny you're pointing out it like relies on a lot of that's right sort

01:02:15.440 of tired metaphors you know received like slanders of their moral character you know it's just it's

01:02:23.900 it's not even inventive on women hating terms yeah just to give an example this is from thus

01:02:29.820 big zarathustra everything in woman is a riddle and everything in woman has one solution it is 0.99

01:02:35.320 called pregnancy it's like this is like the oldest fucking shit in the book this is so 0.99

01:02:40.680 tired it's it's a funny line i guess right this is again like nichi the edgelord right like but 0.99

01:02:47.540 and i think this is an important part of his legacy in its own right he perfected this pose

01:02:52.620 of dissidents while reinforcing these massively tired tropes right in his followers this goes one

01:02:59.020 of two ways right either they go with the unconventional stuff and like just chuck the

01:03:03.280 convention and like whatever he's just dumb here i don't care right and they use nichi to argue for

01:03:09.520 like gay rights against the patriarchy nudism veganism etc etc or they regurgitate the most 0.92

01:03:16.460 tired like stale tropes about gender and sexuality and claim that they're positioning it against you 0.98

01:03:22.080 know the well-meaning the bien pensant the politically correct the shit libs or whatever 0.96

01:03:27.380 right and like this is such a right this is the politically incorrect position of today where it's

01:03:32.560 like i shoot from the hip and i'm an unconventional thinker what are your unconventional thoughts oh

01:03:36.900 it's that women should be in the home and like you know that like right and it's like great so

01:03:42.400 it's basically 30 000 years of of tradition uh that's your that's your unconventional thought 0.96

01:03:47.420 is convention right like and nietzsche has like is like has been a unfortunately a great teacher 0.95

01:03:54.200 for how to make yourself believe that shit that like oh i'm being so i'm you know i'm being so 0.85

01:04:00.600 contrarian it's like what's your contrarian take basically the existing power structure it's bad 0.99

01:04:05.720 I am brave and unconventional enough to regurgitate the opinions of my uncle whose kids don't talk to him anymore and cash Peter Thiel's check.

01:04:19.480 So I think what we're seeing is really the introduction of an intellectual paradigm that we see recreated as if it's new on the right every couple of decades, right?

01:04:33.700 Like this guy is an internet troll in a lot of ways, in addition to his sort of, you know, serviceable, useful willingness to attack, you know, beloved intellectual frameworks and moral systems.

01:04:47.360 He also has this kind of like narcissistic tendency to frame convention as transgressive.

01:04:55.440 And this is kind of the intellectual shield that I see a lot of right-wing misogyny taking now is positioning feminism as somehow powerful and hegemonic and overstating its conventional acceptance and taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people will sort of profess feminist principles as a right-thinking stance while not quite believing them or certainly not acting upon them.

01:05:25.360 this is like you know the ashton kutcher problem uh yeah and you know this is a liberal hypocrisy

01:05:33.680 that conservatives like to take advantage of right like they know that their actual positions

01:05:38.860 hold power over real people's lives but a lot of those people in positions of sort of like 1.00

01:05:46.300 you know elite comfort or soft power do like to profess feminism even if they don't live it

01:05:55.340 And that allows conservatives to pretend that their stance is sort of like somehow daring or oppositional.

01:06:03.320 And that's, you know, seems like a legacy of Nietzsche, this simultaneous affirmation of tradition and disavowal of it.

01:06:11.680 Exactly. Even though he's doing it at a time when the feminist movement is extremely marginal.

01:06:16.980 And that's the interesting thing, right? Like this pose is kind of context independent.

01:06:22.420 You could do it in 1880, right? Like Friedrich, like a single woman badly reviewed your book. You got to get over yourself. Like that doesn't mean feminism is dominant in the culture. Like, yes, you had access to a typewriter. Oh, no. You know, hide your kids.

01:06:38.440 There's a problem of proportionality in anti-feminism and anti-feminists always accuse feminists of being disproportionate, right? And not of understanding their objections in a like sort of fair context of severity. And that's something that, you know, it's one of those accusations. It's really a confession that anti-feminists make because they always see any feminist dissent as this like threat of civilizational collapse. 1.00

01:07:07.080 Exactly. Yeah. I mean, like, I can't tell you the numbers, but like, yeah, the idea that he thinks that this is characteristic of his era is just like astonishing. And I think you're exactly right that like both the way he wants to trigger and the way he is being triggered are super transportable to the present moment. 0.99

01:07:26.220 It's exactly how it's become this codified way of interacting with the mainstream.

01:07:32.600 And I love the way you're pointing that out, kind of pretending that it's new, pretending

01:07:36.480 that like, oh, now we have these like internet trolls and like, we've never had anything

01:07:40.920 like that before.

01:07:41.500 It's like, yeah, no, we have.

01:07:43.380 It's a very tired position that you can step into.

01:07:46.500 And like, it's been available for quite some time.

01:07:48.120 It's not transhistoric probably, but it has been around for quite some time.

01:07:52.100 All right.

01:07:52.540 So I guess we'll dig in a little deeper next time.

01:07:55.560 But thank you for listening to us.

01:07:57.240 We've been In Bed with the Right.

01:07:59.660 In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

01:08:04.720 Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

01:08:07.160 Our theme music is by Katie Lau.

01:08:08.840 Our producer is Megan Kalthus.

In Bed With The Right - October 16, 2023

Episode 8： Nietzsche

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