The closest to a "Nietzschean liberal" in intellectual history is Leo Strauss. Step (1): “Nietzsche so charmed me between my 22nd and 30th years that I literally believed everything I understood of him.” Step (2): "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy. While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence."
I too was a right-leaning young man who fell for Nietzsche in his late teens and early 20s, though I was also religious, which (for obvious reasons!) always stopped me from taking his philosophy on board in any kind of comprehensive way.
One thing you don't explicitly say, which is part of what makes Nietzsche so seductive, is just how good a writer he was, especially in German, but it comes through even in English translation. His rhetoric carries one along in a way that sometimes means that possible intellectual objections aren't at the forefront of the reader's mind. I can't think of another philosopher who is that good, except for Plato - who is, not at all coincidentally, another writer who was appropriated by a large number of apparently incompatible later thinkers.
It's interesting to compare notes with someone partly ideologically aligned but with very different sensibilities.
My take on Nietzsche has long been that he provides no reason to believe any of his claims, and that's all one needs to know about him. And also, I can't stand the guy. I can't read ten pages of him without intense feelings of contempt.
Another way to put it is that Nietzsche is to the mind as the wave is to the sandcastle. He is a deconstructor of rational thought, constantly substituting sneering for logic. It's always a vice to be able to tolerate Nietzsche. He doesn't reason, but he's like pornography to intellectual pride, and people who can tolerate him are invariably less rational than they should be because they're not humble enough.
My intellectual hero, C.S. Lewis, is the opposite. His writings are pervaded by an ethos of rational accountability for everything he claims. Of course, sometimes the evidence is inevitably introspective and personal, but he lets you know when he has to lean on that. CS Lewis appreciates the lone hero with his back to the wall every bit as well as Nietzsche, but he has no tincture of Nietzsche's snob appeal.
I should acknowledge one debt, though. I like to read the "madman" passage every Good Friday for devotional reading. Good Friday, after all, was the one day in history when it was really true that God was dead. Fortunately, the grave couldn't hold Him.
You're wrong. Read Daybreak. Nietzsche is incredibly reasonable. Yes there's a decent amount of sneering especially in his later work, but I believe it's earned.
So I downloaded an audiobook and listened for a few hours. I agree that it's a lot less sneering than other Nietzsche writings that I've had the unpleasant and unrewarding experience of reading.
A glimpse of my reader experience: “Hmmm, thought provoking… Disagree with that… Kind of astute…. Idiotic!…. Cleverly put though wrong…. But when is the ARGUMENT going to begin?”
Tendentious musings are fine for an introduction. They help establish the stakes. They signal to friendly and unfriendly readers which parts of their thought to activate, what to seek an ally on, what to be on guard against, where they'll be tested, before the argument begins.
But Daybreak is nothing but these tendentious musings. And the consequence is that, as I said before, Nietzsche provides no reason to believe anything he says, and that's all one needs to know about him.
It's striking, in particular, that he makes no real argument for the nonexistence of a real moral law, or of free will, much less of God or an immortal soul, it against the resurrection of Christ. He appears to assume a reductive materialism, but he doesn't even state that assumption.
Against pity and love, he makes what might perhaps be called arguments, although they are so weak and merely suggestive that they hardly qualify. And they're completely idiotic. It's as if he's the only person on earth who is blind to the centrality of love in the meaning of life, and the beauty and necessity of pity on a world full of trouble and suffering.
All in all, I think Nietzsche is a giant exercise in cope, in the face of a world rendered meaningless by the determinist physics and social Darwinism that seemed compelling in the 19th century. If Malthus has convinced you that love and pity only bring misery, then Nietzsche might be your best chance to render such a world imaginatively livable.
I mean I disagree I think he provides pretty good reasons, but if you're coming from a Christian worldview already I don't think much would convince you.
His writings are empirical insights into the human condition that he then derives a larger philosophy from. Most of these come from insight into himself, or from other people. I prefer this to a dishonest attempt to ground your moral law in an axiom, which is really just a reflection of how you feel, but dressed up in a suit of armor.
Let's take the idea of a moral law. He argues that it's no more than custom among groups, but has become so abstracted so that it feels like a greater truth inscribed in the universe. Where would you even get such a moral law from? How is moral law true in the way that the external world is true? Can you find it inscribed into the universe? Additionally, morality for what and for whom? What groups does morality benefit, what goals does morality facilitate? Morality is a set of customs to obtain some result for a specific group of people.
The moral law can seem unreal because it can't be placed in a strictly physio-material constitution of the universe. By those rules, beauty can't be real either. Nor free will. Nor numbers. When did two and two make four? What is the chemical composition of the number 779, and is it the same as that of the number 415?
The truth is that you need an ontology richer than scientific materialism to make sense of the universe. If Nietzsche had taken the trouble to argue, to try to build an edifice of truth from the ground up, he might have discovered that. Instead, since he limits himself to tendentious musings, he uncritically accepts the materialist dogmatism that happened to be fashionable at the time among the intelligentsia.
Now, it's true that he has a good deal of a kind of introspective empirical insight. Christianity has more, and Nietzsche often reads like Christianity kaleidoscoped, combined with references to a straw-man form of Christianity that is set up as an antagonist.
Nietzsche's version of Christianity is actually pretty astute in some ways, but it's truncated. It describes some parts of Christianity somewhat well, while being completely blind to other parts. Someone who got his impression of Christianity from reading Nietzsche would be very surprised to learn a heroic figures like King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, whose bravery eclipses the Greek heroes of The Iliad, yet who are completely at home in the Christian imagination, as indeed nowhere else.
The truth is that anything worthy in Nietzsche is excelled by Christianity. Christianity encompasses all that is worthwhile in Nietzsche, while containing far more. Nietzsche's project can perhaps be regarded with some sympathy if we assume that he was overwhelmed by scientific materialism and social Darwinism, checkmated it into believing that they were true, and then tried to salvage something of Christianity in order to make life livable, while using a straw man Christianity as a rhetorical device to mask what he was doing.
His writings, all in all, are a rather clever exercise. But fundamentally silly. Probably they can't really be appreciated properly without a perception of their irony.
Honestly it feels like you've cocooned yourself in a Christian worldview and aren't willing to take Nietzsche seriously on his own terms. It's frankly silly that you think Christianity encompasses all that Nietzsche has to say.
He wasn't perfect, and there are obviously things he missed, but there's a reason he's one of the most influential philosophers of all time.
It's hard to take Nietzsche on his own terms because he has so many of them. I don't know the proper term, but he is all over the place. One of my study guides notes that his tone varies a lot, his attitudes changing unpredictably. The reader is often unsure of how to intercept a certain chapter or essay, a point that author himself sometimes notes, e.g. that it’s up to the reader to figure stuff out sometimes. I’m often stumped by his giving little or no citation or biography. A study guide can help sometimes.
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”
"Like every other young man inclined towards Right-wing politics, in my late teens and early 20s I fell under the spell of Friedrich Nietzsche."
I would qualify this statement as "Like every other ATHEIST young man inclined towards Right-wing politics" as I highly doubt that devout Evangelicals and Catholics would agree.
It's pretty common for RW christian pundits to be "former" atheist Nietzscheans. They abandon atheism due to audience capture or the need to please their wives.
Nietzsche was about as negative on marriage as he was on Christianity. Somewhere (probably “The Problem of Socrates”) he notes that few of the great photospheres were married. He specifically claims that Socrates married to supply a counter-example of what it was a bad idea.
Good point. But in my experience most Christians, even intellectual Christians who struggle with mainstream theology (like myself), actually believe in the nuts and bolts of Christianity.
Nonbelievers have this tendency to project their own cynicism about religion onto believers.
Nietzsche scholar here. Thanks for not butchering his thought. I’ll say this: it is always surprising to me how much the idea of an übermensch has captured the public imagination, particularly when almost never comes up outside of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
“Much of the intoxication of reading him comes from his seductive combination of depth and lightness.” This is so true. Great essay, which reflects my own experience. I also loved the writing in Zarathustra, and got into it in my late teens, early twenties.
Hmm. There are writers here whose work screams AI. Repetitive sentence structure a tell for one person whose content otherwise greatly interested me. I didn't have that impression here. I wonder what you see that I am missing.
Oh youre not missing anything. In a previous post he talked about his use of ai with his writing, and now whenever i read anything he writes that question is always in the back of my mind.
I would expect richard to be smart and thorough enough to edit any ai creations for those telltale signs you mentioned. I thought the article was much better than what ive come to expect from him(though admittedly thats been limited to his free articles over the past few months), and definitely much better than standard ai fare, and *that* made me think hm maybe he had some help.
Consider how far ai images have come in the past year.. theyre so good now many of them are indistinguishable from real pictures. I would expect writing to follow suit. And it really wouldnt be that hard to fine tune an ai creation to make it more "authentic", as it were. That, to me, is whats really meant by those purporting to work *with* ai. Mark my words, thats what the next year will be on substack, ai creations edited for humanness. Richard himself is the one who brought this to my attention, by suggesting paying him would ensure we get the real deal.
Ofc we have no way to know, and that i think is the most damning part.
I became a Nietzsche (I call him Nightshade) aficionado in my late 50s. I have audio book versions and listen as the spirit moves me. Other than reading a study guide or two, I have no “formal” training in philosophy in general or Nightshade in particular. Congratulations on a well-thought-out article at UnHerd. It agrees with pretty much everything I’ve read by or about Herr Fritz.
Although my Substack is a pathetic little thing, I have a quote from the very Zarathustra:
"It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who saith: 'Who is ungodlier than I, that I may enjoy his teaching?'"
Nietzsche is an idiot and it is only a good thing that people outgrow him.
Never take seriously the philosophy of any man who has obviously and observably failed at life.
My philosophy, such as it is, includes this precept: never take advice from a man who died in a state of raving dementia after drinking his own urine for 11 years.
> In the Nietzschean worldview, genetic determinism coexists alongside an obsession with individual and collective transformation.
I think this line is incorrect. Nietzsche was definitely an anti-egalitarian, but I would say he's definitely not a genetic determinist. First of all, because genetics as we understand it wasn't really around there so it would be historically anachronistic. But second, on a deeper level, the notion of genetic determinism is that what you are and what you become is not your fault. A genetic determinist generally believes that a large component of who "you" is controlled by something other than your actions. I think objecting on the grounds that this is empirically observable misses the point.
To highlight yourself as a genetic determinist and talk more about pre-intentional causes of action instead of the results of action fundamentally puts the emphasis in the wrong place (in terms of an ethics of living). Nietzsche does talk about sort of unconscious resentment, but this is still a determinate cause of action (it gains its reality as a source of specific bad types of actions) as opposed to genetics as the cause of action which is indeterminate (if you look at somebody's genetics and predict that they should take action X but instead they take action Y, you are forced to say "oh I guess genetics made them do that instead").
Believing there's some indeterminate cause of yourself outside of yourself, such that you sever the connection between your essence and your activity, seems to me very much against Nietzsche's project.
Nietzsche, who today would have been called autistic, always seem to attract other autistic individuals. Not sure why. To me he just seems like rambling, incoherent, and attacking just about everything and everyone. I never understood how anyone could make sense out of his writings.
I sometimes think that if a person has one or ten crazy ideas, they are laughed at, but if they have thousands of them, they are seen as geniuses.
For me it was _The Gay Science_. I vividly remember my first reading of the preface to the 1887 edition:
> In some, it is their weaknesses that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, be it as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation; for the latter, it is only a beautiful luxury, in the best case the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually has to inscribe itself in cosmic capital letters on the heaven of concepts.
>
> […]
>
> All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies […] what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but rather something else - let us say health, future, growth, power, life…
One of my favorite passages, Nietzsche at his most droll, is the introduction to Human, All Too Human:
It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings...they all contain, I have been told, snares and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs. What!? Everything is merely — human — all too human? With this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without a certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply misrepresented. My writings have been termed a school of distrust, still more of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do, not simply the timely advocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy and challenger of God;...
When I first read Nietzsche as a young person, I thought it was all senseless clap trap, no guide to moral philosophy, and certainly not well written.
I can understand the appeal now that I better understand the orientation of some people who end up right wing, and I I guess Nietzsche appeals to people who are already predisposed to be receptive to his ideas.
To be fair, that is probably true of all thinkers. Maybe we just all fall into traps we set for ourselves — a sort of classic confirmation bias in the realm of intellectual ideas rather than evidence.
The closest to a "Nietzschean liberal" in intellectual history is Leo Strauss. Step (1): “Nietzsche so charmed me between my 22nd and 30th years that I literally believed everything I understood of him.” Step (2): "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy. While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence."
I too was a right-leaning young man who fell for Nietzsche in his late teens and early 20s, though I was also religious, which (for obvious reasons!) always stopped me from taking his philosophy on board in any kind of comprehensive way.
One thing you don't explicitly say, which is part of what makes Nietzsche so seductive, is just how good a writer he was, especially in German, but it comes through even in English translation. His rhetoric carries one along in a way that sometimes means that possible intellectual objections aren't at the forefront of the reader's mind. I can't think of another philosopher who is that good, except for Plato - who is, not at all coincidentally, another writer who was appropriated by a large number of apparently incompatible later thinkers.
It's interesting to compare notes with someone partly ideologically aligned but with very different sensibilities.
My take on Nietzsche has long been that he provides no reason to believe any of his claims, and that's all one needs to know about him. And also, I can't stand the guy. I can't read ten pages of him without intense feelings of contempt.
Another way to put it is that Nietzsche is to the mind as the wave is to the sandcastle. He is a deconstructor of rational thought, constantly substituting sneering for logic. It's always a vice to be able to tolerate Nietzsche. He doesn't reason, but he's like pornography to intellectual pride, and people who can tolerate him are invariably less rational than they should be because they're not humble enough.
My intellectual hero, C.S. Lewis, is the opposite. His writings are pervaded by an ethos of rational accountability for everything he claims. Of course, sometimes the evidence is inevitably introspective and personal, but he lets you know when he has to lean on that. CS Lewis appreciates the lone hero with his back to the wall every bit as well as Nietzsche, but he has no tincture of Nietzsche's snob appeal.
I should acknowledge one debt, though. I like to read the "madman" passage every Good Friday for devotional reading. Good Friday, after all, was the one day in history when it was really true that God was dead. Fortunately, the grave couldn't hold Him.
You're wrong. Read Daybreak. Nietzsche is incredibly reasonable. Yes there's a decent amount of sneering especially in his later work, but I believe it's earned.
I will. Thanks!
You are retarded. Literally. Never take advice from a man who died in a state of raving dementia after drinking his own urine for 11 years.
He was thirsty. And the price of bottled water...!
So I downloaded an audiobook and listened for a few hours. I agree that it's a lot less sneering than other Nietzsche writings that I've had the unpleasant and unrewarding experience of reading.
A glimpse of my reader experience: “Hmmm, thought provoking… Disagree with that… Kind of astute…. Idiotic!…. Cleverly put though wrong…. But when is the ARGUMENT going to begin?”
Tendentious musings are fine for an introduction. They help establish the stakes. They signal to friendly and unfriendly readers which parts of their thought to activate, what to seek an ally on, what to be on guard against, where they'll be tested, before the argument begins.
But Daybreak is nothing but these tendentious musings. And the consequence is that, as I said before, Nietzsche provides no reason to believe anything he says, and that's all one needs to know about him.
It's striking, in particular, that he makes no real argument for the nonexistence of a real moral law, or of free will, much less of God or an immortal soul, it against the resurrection of Christ. He appears to assume a reductive materialism, but he doesn't even state that assumption.
Against pity and love, he makes what might perhaps be called arguments, although they are so weak and merely suggestive that they hardly qualify. And they're completely idiotic. It's as if he's the only person on earth who is blind to the centrality of love in the meaning of life, and the beauty and necessity of pity on a world full of trouble and suffering.
All in all, I think Nietzsche is a giant exercise in cope, in the face of a world rendered meaningless by the determinist physics and social Darwinism that seemed compelling in the 19th century. If Malthus has convinced you that love and pity only bring misery, then Nietzsche might be your best chance to render such a world imaginatively livable.
But there isn't any truth in his worldview.
I mean I disagree I think he provides pretty good reasons, but if you're coming from a Christian worldview already I don't think much would convince you.
His writings are empirical insights into the human condition that he then derives a larger philosophy from. Most of these come from insight into himself, or from other people. I prefer this to a dishonest attempt to ground your moral law in an axiom, which is really just a reflection of how you feel, but dressed up in a suit of armor.
Let's take the idea of a moral law. He argues that it's no more than custom among groups, but has become so abstracted so that it feels like a greater truth inscribed in the universe. Where would you even get such a moral law from? How is moral law true in the way that the external world is true? Can you find it inscribed into the universe? Additionally, morality for what and for whom? What groups does morality benefit, what goals does morality facilitate? Morality is a set of customs to obtain some result for a specific group of people.
The moral law can seem unreal because it can't be placed in a strictly physio-material constitution of the universe. By those rules, beauty can't be real either. Nor free will. Nor numbers. When did two and two make four? What is the chemical composition of the number 779, and is it the same as that of the number 415?
The truth is that you need an ontology richer than scientific materialism to make sense of the universe. If Nietzsche had taken the trouble to argue, to try to build an edifice of truth from the ground up, he might have discovered that. Instead, since he limits himself to tendentious musings, he uncritically accepts the materialist dogmatism that happened to be fashionable at the time among the intelligentsia.
Now, it's true that he has a good deal of a kind of introspective empirical insight. Christianity has more, and Nietzsche often reads like Christianity kaleidoscoped, combined with references to a straw-man form of Christianity that is set up as an antagonist.
Nietzsche's version of Christianity is actually pretty astute in some ways, but it's truncated. It describes some parts of Christianity somewhat well, while being completely blind to other parts. Someone who got his impression of Christianity from reading Nietzsche would be very surprised to learn a heroic figures like King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, whose bravery eclipses the Greek heroes of The Iliad, yet who are completely at home in the Christian imagination, as indeed nowhere else.
The truth is that anything worthy in Nietzsche is excelled by Christianity. Christianity encompasses all that is worthwhile in Nietzsche, while containing far more. Nietzsche's project can perhaps be regarded with some sympathy if we assume that he was overwhelmed by scientific materialism and social Darwinism, checkmated it into believing that they were true, and then tried to salvage something of Christianity in order to make life livable, while using a straw man Christianity as a rhetorical device to mask what he was doing.
His writings, all in all, are a rather clever exercise. But fundamentally silly. Probably they can't really be appreciated properly without a perception of their irony.
Honestly it feels like you've cocooned yourself in a Christian worldview and aren't willing to take Nietzsche seriously on his own terms. It's frankly silly that you think Christianity encompasses all that Nietzsche has to say.
He wasn't perfect, and there are obviously things he missed, but there's a reason he's one of the most influential philosophers of all time.
It's hard to take Nietzsche on his own terms because he has so many of them. I don't know the proper term, but he is all over the place. One of my study guides notes that his tone varies a lot, his attitudes changing unpredictably. The reader is often unsure of how to intercept a certain chapter or essay, a point that author himself sometimes notes, e.g. that it’s up to the reader to figure stuff out sometimes. I’m often stumped by his giving little or no citation or biography. A study guide can help sometimes.
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
"Like every other young man inclined towards Right-wing politics, in my late teens and early 20s I fell under the spell of Friedrich Nietzsche."
I would qualify this statement as "Like every other ATHEIST young man inclined towards Right-wing politics" as I highly doubt that devout Evangelicals and Catholics would agree.
It's pretty common for RW christian pundits to be "former" atheist Nietzscheans. They abandon atheism due to audience capture or the need to please their wives.
No man abandons atheism to please their wife. Christianity is robust and men like it.
Nietzsche was about as negative on marriage as he was on Christianity. Somewhere (probably “The Problem of Socrates”) he notes that few of the great photospheres were married. He specifically claims that Socrates married to supply a counter-example of what it was a bad idea.
Good point. But in my experience most Christians, even intellectual Christians who struggle with mainstream theology (like myself), actually believe in the nuts and bolts of Christianity.
Nonbelievers have this tendency to project their own cynicism about religion onto believers.
Nietzsche scholar here. Thanks for not butchering his thought. I’ll say this: it is always surprising to me how much the idea of an übermensch has captured the public imagination, particularly when almost never comes up outside of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Speaking of many different interpretations of Nietzsche, did you know that your editor Sohrab Ahmari was once a goth kid that read Nietzsche and ended up becoming a communist? I talk about it here: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/nietzsches-eternal-return-in-america/
Ahmari has always struck me as a ridiculous person, so that doesn't surprise me.
“Much of the intoxication of reading him comes from his seductive combination of depth and lightness.” This is so true. Great essay, which reflects my own experience. I also loved the writing in Zarathustra, and got into it in my late teens, early twenties.
Sorry, I don't think you contribute anything with these comments. Take a month off and think about this.
Hmm. There are writers here whose work screams AI. Repetitive sentence structure a tell for one person whose content otherwise greatly interested me. I didn't have that impression here. I wonder what you see that I am missing.
Oh youre not missing anything. In a previous post he talked about his use of ai with his writing, and now whenever i read anything he writes that question is always in the back of my mind.
I would expect richard to be smart and thorough enough to edit any ai creations for those telltale signs you mentioned. I thought the article was much better than what ive come to expect from him(though admittedly thats been limited to his free articles over the past few months), and definitely much better than standard ai fare, and *that* made me think hm maybe he had some help.
Consider how far ai images have come in the past year.. theyre so good now many of them are indistinguishable from real pictures. I would expect writing to follow suit. And it really wouldnt be that hard to fine tune an ai creation to make it more "authentic", as it were. That, to me, is whats really meant by those purporting to work *with* ai. Mark my words, thats what the next year will be on substack, ai creations edited for humanness. Richard himself is the one who brought this to my attention, by suggesting paying him would ensure we get the real deal.
Ofc we have no way to know, and that i think is the most damning part.
I became a Nietzsche (I call him Nightshade) aficionado in my late 50s. I have audio book versions and listen as the spirit moves me. Other than reading a study guide or two, I have no “formal” training in philosophy in general or Nightshade in particular. Congratulations on a well-thought-out article at UnHerd. It agrees with pretty much everything I’ve read by or about Herr Fritz.
Although my Substack is a pathetic little thing, I have a quote from the very Zarathustra:
"It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who saith: 'Who is ungodlier than I, that I may enjoy his teaching?'"
Nietzsche certainly fits the bill.
Nietzsche is an idiot and it is only a good thing that people outgrow him.
Never take seriously the philosophy of any man who has obviously and observably failed at life.
My philosophy, such as it is, includes this precept: never take advice from a man who died in a state of raving dementia after drinking his own urine for 11 years.
See: Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer
If nothing else, Nietzsche had one of the greatest mustaches in world history.
> In the Nietzschean worldview, genetic determinism coexists alongside an obsession with individual and collective transformation.
I think this line is incorrect. Nietzsche was definitely an anti-egalitarian, but I would say he's definitely not a genetic determinist. First of all, because genetics as we understand it wasn't really around there so it would be historically anachronistic. But second, on a deeper level, the notion of genetic determinism is that what you are and what you become is not your fault. A genetic determinist generally believes that a large component of who "you" is controlled by something other than your actions. I think objecting on the grounds that this is empirically observable misses the point.
To highlight yourself as a genetic determinist and talk more about pre-intentional causes of action instead of the results of action fundamentally puts the emphasis in the wrong place (in terms of an ethics of living). Nietzsche does talk about sort of unconscious resentment, but this is still a determinate cause of action (it gains its reality as a source of specific bad types of actions) as opposed to genetics as the cause of action which is indeterminate (if you look at somebody's genetics and predict that they should take action X but instead they take action Y, you are forced to say "oh I guess genetics made them do that instead").
Believing there's some indeterminate cause of yourself outside of yourself, such that you sever the connection between your essence and your activity, seems to me very much against Nietzsche's project.
Nietzsche, who today would have been called autistic, always seem to attract other autistic individuals. Not sure why. To me he just seems like rambling, incoherent, and attacking just about everything and everyone. I never understood how anyone could make sense out of his writings.
I sometimes think that if a person has one or ten crazy ideas, they are laughed at, but if they have thousands of them, they are seen as geniuses.
For me it was _The Gay Science_. I vividly remember my first reading of the preface to the 1887 edition:
> In some, it is their weaknesses that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, be it as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation; for the latter, it is only a beautiful luxury, in the best case the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually has to inscribe itself in cosmic capital letters on the heaven of concepts.
>
> […]
>
> All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies […] what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but rather something else - let us say health, future, growth, power, life…
One of my favorite passages, Nietzsche at his most droll, is the introduction to Human, All Too Human:
It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings...they all contain, I have been told, snares and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs. What!? Everything is merely — human — all too human? With this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without a certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply misrepresented. My writings have been termed a school of distrust, still more of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do, not simply the timely advocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy and challenger of God;...
When I first read Nietzsche as a young person, I thought it was all senseless clap trap, no guide to moral philosophy, and certainly not well written.
I can understand the appeal now that I better understand the orientation of some people who end up right wing, and I I guess Nietzsche appeals to people who are already predisposed to be receptive to his ideas.
To be fair, that is probably true of all thinkers. Maybe we just all fall into traps we set for ourselves — a sort of classic confirmation bias in the realm of intellectual ideas rather than evidence.