I’ve remarked often over the years that — with the possible exception of Ayn Rand, who shared a lot of his ideas — few philosophers have been so grievously misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. A longtime reader sends this video prepared by Slate that helps correct some of the commonplace mistakes.
Nietzsche can be understood only if he is properly located in Western thought, which begins with Plato. Plato believed, to radically simplify matters, that for everything we encounter in the temporal world there is an ideal, eternally-existing “form” in some other world. Consider, for instance, dogs. There are big dogs, little dogs, dogs with long narrow faces and dogs with smooshed-in faces. I have two Boxer dogs, and a neighbor has a Yorkie; it’s hard to believe they are the same type of mammal. Plato believed that, somewhere, there is an ideal dog in which my dogs and the neighbor’s dog somehow participate, that they are all poor copies of the ideal dog found somewhere else.
Eight-hundred years elapse. Christianity successfully suppresses Epicurus’ theory of evolution, and suppresses Aristotle; there is only Plato and his deranged idea of forms. Then, St. Augustine comes along and, in 420 A.D., suppresses the Pelagian heresy by layering-on Original Sin, explaining why that other place where the forms are is inaccessible to us. Supposedly, the Garden of Eden was the home of the perfection, the ideal, of everything
Many people still take this seriously: take a look at this tweet from Monday by John Piper’s organization.
Piper: “America is not our home. Political power is not our strategy. Privilege in this age is not our birthright.” https://t.co/gOVhEG439z
— Desiring God (@desiringGod) October 31, 2016
Our ‘home’ is that place where the ideal ‘forms’ are — Heaven, or Eden.
In 1670, a Dutch philosopher named Baruch Spinoza published Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which argued that ancient texts such as the Torah should be read according to the understandings prevailing at the time they were written. That seems like common sense today, but was radical at the time; then, the Torah and the Bible were to be read only devotionally. Spinoza’s Tractatus was suppressed, and his ideas went underground.
In the 1850’s, with the idea of the secular state firmly established (if not always scrupulously observed), Spinoza’s approach to reading ancient texts was revived in Germany. And then, in 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published.
Origin? Species? Species were created at the founding of Eden, and we now lived amongst corrupted (By Sin! Sin-Sin-Sin!) versions of those species. Everybody knew that!
Nietzsche’s academic career began in the late 1860’s, and he was uniquely situated to grasp that the confluence of Spinoza’s ideas about reading ancient texts — the work in Germany had already shown that much of the Old Testament was untrue and simply make-believe history — and Darwin’s idea of evolution couldn’t possibly end happily for Christianity, whose metaphysics had governed the world for 1600-years. Species, Darwin showed, came and went according to an apprehensible mechanism. Highly organized structures could evolve naturally. Darwin didn’t show or claim to show that there is no Invisible Wizard with a long beard sitting on a cloud someplace, but he showed dispositively that he wasn’t needed to explain the diversity of life.
“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. “
from Ecce Homo
A huge, epochal, paradigm shift was afoot — and it fell to Nietzsche to be the first to grasp that or, at least, to be the first to say so. All of Nietzsche’s writings then focused on avoiding the nihilism which he believed would follow upon Christianity’s inevitable, unavoidable, collapse.
The churches, too unintelligent to understand what was happening all around them, focused on destroying Nietzsche, with the result that he gets beat-up from two directions — by those Holy Men whose livelihood he threatens, and those dullards who are simply incapable of understanding the world without the aid of hobgoblins and fairy tales.
One of our local preachers got to howling-out one Sunday a list of writers that no decent, godly person would ever permit in his home. Imagine my surprise when I realized I had all of them in my home library except ol’ Friedrich! So, next visit to Barnes & Noble, I picked-up a copy of Twilight of the Idols. The only reason I had for selecting that particular title is that I liked it, but it was a fortuitous choice; the book was written in the last year of Nietzsche’s working life, and serves as a sort of survey course in his thought. It’s a good place to start.