Was Nietzsche Woke?
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Abi XXx
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We finally had the time to watch this episode and OMG Abi it is awesome!!!! ❤️ It was funny, clear, interesting, exciting and just very informative. Can't wait to see the next one (just need to find the time, hopefully this weekend). Yay, thank you and your team again!
Corine van Huissteden
2025-03-18 20:45:41 +0000 UTCDear Ms. Abigail Thorn, Though we do not know each other, we hope that you take this communication in the spirit of friendship in which it is written. You recently released two videos on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, entitled "Was Nietzsche Woke" and "Was Nietzsche MAGA." In the second of these videos, you mentioned a strong desire to avoid spreading misinformation and indicated you felt a duty to inform your audience of significant factual errors in the statements you were quoting. Given this, we hope you will appreciate our sharing some thoughts on the factual errors we noticed in your videos. In your video, you say "After the war the German philosopher called Martin Heidegger said that the Nazis had misinterpreted Nietzsche, and that he was actually woke all along… And then just to put icing on the cake, in 2017, Martin Heidegger's" private notebooks were translated, and we discovered that Heidegger was a Nazi who tried to hide it after the war." This characterization has a number of factual inaccuracies. First, we always knew Heidegger was a Nazi. In April 1933 Martin Heidegger was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg. Ten days later he joined the Nazi party. In Heidegger's Inaugural Address, he said, "The will to the essence of the German university is the will to science as will to the historical spiritual mission of the German people as a people ["Volk"] that knows itself in its state ["Staat"]. Together, science and German destiny must come to power in the will to essence." In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger spoke of the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism. Heidegger stated "The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: that from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility. Heil Hitler!" Heidegger was a Nazi. After the War, the Denazification Committee charged Heidegger 1) for having an official position in the Nazi party, 2) for introducing the Führerprinzip into the University, 3) for disseminating Nazi propaganda, and 4) for incitement of students against faculty subsequently dismissed him from the university. In 1949 Heidegger was declared a follower of Nazism by the State Commission for Political Purification. He would not be allowed to teach again until 1951. Thus Heidegger had to go on a rehabilitation campaign of his own work and his own fascist lectures about Nietzsche. In 1966 Heidegger gave a famous Interview to Der Spiegel in which he attempted to sanitize his writing. Further, Heidegger edited his own works to appear less supportive of fascism because he had the incentive to. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger initially wrote about the "inner truth and greatness of National Socialism." Heidegger tried to retroactively insert a comment "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity)." Altering evidence is proof of consciousness of guilt. Further, the Black Notebooks were only first published 2014 at Heidegger's direction. Heidegger continued to work on these notebooks until 1970. You do not mention that it was Heidegger's fault that the notebooks were not published until later to deny any concrete evidence of Heidegger's virulent antisemitism until he was no longer around to face the consequences. Again, this is proof of consciousness of guilt. Also unmentioned in the video is that Heidegger was an editor of Nietzsche's literary estate. Sue Prideaux's biography of Nietzsche provides much needed context for how Nietzsche's worst fears were realized when dangerous monsters like Heidegger were put in charge of Nietzsche's literary estate. "The tarantulas, all men of high standing, were appointed as editors or members of the archive committee. Among them were Carl August Emge, Professor of Legal Philosophy at Jena University, prospective Nazi minister for the Thuringian government and an important signatory to the declaration of three hundred university lecturers supporting Hitler in March 1933. Another editor was the philosopher Oswald Spengler, whose most poisonous influence on the manipulation of Nietzsche’s ideas was his belief in Social Darwinism: the corruption of Darwin’s theory of evolutionary selection through conflict and survival of the fittest translated into German racial supremacy, justifying eugenics and, eventually, the Final Solution. The terms Übermensch and ‘master morality’ were gifts to Spengler. Harry Kessler seethed with fury and contempt at Spengler’s utterly mediocre presence in the archive and his endless spouting of trite and trivial slogans. Alfred Bäumler, Professor of Philosophy at the Universities of Dresden and Berlin, prepared Nietzsche’s texts for new editions, including yet another edition of The Will to Power that again gave the impression the text had been authored by Nietzsche himself. Bäumler headed the science and scholarship division of Alfred Rosenberg’s department for Supervision of All Intellectual and Ideological Education, which produced textbooks for schoolchildren that taught theories of race and blood as fact. Bäumler has been described as the single person most responsible for establishing the link between Nietzsche and Hitler. Bäumler oversaw the notorious book burning in Berlin. Just a few days earlier the philosopher Martin Heidegger had joined the Nazi party in a public ceremony replete with swastikas. He appeared on podiums in support of the Nazification of the universities and he appealed for more book burnings across the country. Heidegger joined Bäumler as an editor in the archive, where they took the extraordinary view that Nietzsche’s published works hardly counted because the real philosophy resided in the Nachlass, the literary estate that Elisabeth had already manipulated to her own ends. The elevation of the Nachlass to the status of Holy Writ was the key to allowing the philosophers and editors in the archive to cut and paste the dislocated fragments and reassemble them to convey their own ideas." [I Am Dynamite, A life of Friedrich Nietzsche] You said, "This book, the 'Will to Power', has Friedrich Nietzsche's name on it but it was actually assembled posthumously from all his various scribblings." We observe several issues. First, though he was incapacitated when "The Will to Power" was published, it was published while Nietzsche lived. It was assembled by his sister without his consent after she took over his estate. Second, Nietzsche abandoned the plan for the book and the text as presented ignores much of the very outline for the work that could be used to justify its title. Third Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche butchered the already fragmentary notebooks and stitched together a work that is rejected by scholars. In the introduction to the more modern collection "Writings from Late Notebooks, Rudiger Bittner explains, "The history of the project 'The Will to Power' is important for the present purposes. For one thing, many of Nietzsche's notes from the years 1885-89 were at some time intended to form part of the book of that name. A further reason is that in 1901 Nietzsche's first editors, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Peter Gast, published a selection of notes from his notebooks under the title Der Wille zur Macht ('The Will to Power'), suggesting that this book was the execution of a plan which Nietzsche had only been prevented from completing by his illness. A much larger selection followed in 1906, and especially in this version the collection was extremely successful: it became the standard source on the late Nietzsche's thought, in spite of the fact that doubts about its philological reliability had been raised quite early on. In English, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale's 1967 translation of Der Wille zur Macht as The Will to Power acquired a similarly dominant position. The Will to Power is a dubious text for several reasons. Firstly and most importantly, the evidence shows that Nietzsche abandoned the project 'The Will to Power' early in September 1888, so that publishing a book of this title under his name falsifies his intentions. Secondly, if we waive this objection and suppose that 'The Will to Power' remained Nietzsche's dominant concern right to the end of his writing life, it is in any case arbitrary to arrange the material, as the editors of The Will to Power did, in the order Nietzsche sketched in the fragment 7[64] of 1886/1887 (not reprinted here). A number of such projected tables of contents can be found in the notebooks of these years, so why choose this one in particular? It may be replied that the order sketched in 7[64J is also the basis for the list of 374 texts in fragment I2[ I], mentioned above. Yet if that is the reason for using the order of 7[64], it would seem natural also to follow the detailed plan set out in 12[I], and that is not what Förster-Nietzsche and Gast did. They excluded roughly a quarter of the texts Nietzsche at that time intended to include in 'The Will to Power', some of these going instead into volumes 13 or 14 of the Grossoktav edition produced by the Nietzsche Archive under the direction of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, but most being suppressed entirely; and a good proportion of the texts that were included suffered various changes at the hands of the editors, such as division into separate fragments or the omission of parts of the text." Second, when you say "The word is genealogy," your viewers are left not knowing the answer to a very simple question. What is genealogy? What do the words genos and logos mean when combined? What do they mean when used by Nietzsche? You also do not mention the scientific method--etymology--that guides the science Nietzsche studied. What is etymology? We invite you to inform your viewers on these definitions by consulting the Online Etymology Dictionary on the etymology of etymology and related terms. Etymology, from the French Ethimolegia "facts of the origin and development of a word," from Old French etimologie, ethimologie (14c., Modern French étymologie), from Latin etymologia, from Greek etymologia "analysis of a word to find its true origin," properly "study of the true sense (of a word)," with -logia "study of, a speaking of" (see -logy) + etymon "true sense, original meaning," neuter of etymos "true, real, actual," related to eteos "true," which perhaps is cognate with Sanskrit satyah, Gothic sunjis, Old English soð "true," from a PIE *set- "be stable." Latinized by Cicero as veriloquium. The etymology of genealogy is "line of descent, pedigree, descent," from Old French genealogie (12c.), from Late Latin genealogia "tracing of a family," from Greek genealogia "the making of a pedigree," from genea "generation, descent" (from PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups) + -logia (see -ology)." The etymology of the suffix -ology is "word-forming element meaning "a speaking, discourse, treatise, doctrine, theory, science," from Medieval Latin -logia, French -logie, and directly from Greek -logia, from -log-, combining form of legein "to speak, tell;" thus, "the character or deportment of one who speaks or treats of (a certain subject);" from PIE root *leg- (1) "to collect, gather," with derivatives meaning "to speak (to 'pick out words')." In the philosophical text that you discuss, Nietzsche asks “What signposts does linguistics, especially the study of etymology, give to the history of the evolution of moral concepts?” Your viewers are left without any understanding of what this means in historical context. The words Proto Indo European do not occur in either of your videos. These "PIE Roots" that go unmentioned are etymologies which are the very citations that you assert Nietzsche fails to provide. A brief history on the concept of Proto-Indo-European languages is needed since it is a real language that never existed and was never spoken. Languages come in families and are grouped by closeness of relationship. For instance, French and Spanish are Romance. English and German are Germanic. Greek is Hellenic. All of those languages are Indo-European, as are, inter-alia; Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Sanskrit, Avestan, Persian, Kurdish, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Sinhala, Dhiveh Minicoyjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Sindhi and Nepali. These linguistic families are so similar that archeology and linguistic anthropology posit that there was an original community of speakers. Consider the following timeline. In 1786, Sir William Jones observed that many languages previously assumed to be unrelated were in fact distant cousins from some original mother tongue. "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." [Cited in [David W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, 7] In 1813 Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European. In 1816 Franz Bopp wrote 'On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language compared with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic' and between 1833 and 1852 he wrote Comparative Grammar, initiating the scientific study of Proto-Indo-European languages. In 1844 Nietzsche was born. In 1849 Nietzsche's father died from a brain disease after a year of excruciating agony. In 1859 Darwin published the Origin of Species. In 1869 Nietzsche began his career in Philology, the study of language in oral and written historical sources. 1879, Nietzsche retired from his professorship due to declining health. He suffered from vision loss and headaches. In 1889 Nietzsche's career ends when he succumbs to illness, possibly due to CADASIL or a genetic mitochondrial disease inherited from his mother. In 1898 Nietzsche suffers a stroke and is left unable to care for himself. In 1900 Nietzsche dies. In 1905 the word genetic is coined. Prior to this, there was no common term used in the scientific community to discuss hereditary diseases such as the ones Nietzsche had. In 1943 the role of DNA in genetic inheritance is demonstrated. In 1990 CADASIL is identified. Your viewers were further left unaware of the historical context in which Nietzsche wrote. "If Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were relatives, descended from the same ancient parent language, what was that language? Where had it been it spoken? And by whom? By what historical circumstances did it generate daughter tongues that became the dominant languages spoken from Scotland to India? These questions resonated particularly deeply in Germany, where popular interest in the history of the German language and the roots of German traditions were growing into the Romantic movement…After the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, the Romantic conviction that language was a defining factor in national identity was combined with new ideas about evolution and biology. Natural selection provided a scientific theory that was hijacked by nationalists and used to rationalize why some races or "folks" ruled others-some were more "fit" than others…Proto-Indo-European, the linguistic problem, became "the Proto-Indo-Europeans," a biological population with its own mentality and personality: "a slim, tall, light-complexioned, blonde race, superior to all other peoples, calm and firm in character, constantly striving, intellectually brilliant, with an almost ideal attitude towards the world and life in general. The name Aryan began to be applied to them, because the authors of the oldest religious texts in Sanskrit and Persian, the Rig Veda and Avesta, called themselves Aryans. These Aryans lived in Iran and eastward into Afghanistan-Pakistan-India. The term Aryan should be confined only to this Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. But the Vedas were a newly discovered source of mystical fascination in the nineteenth century, and in Victorian parlors the name Aryan soon spread beyond its proper linguistic and geographic confines." [ibid 9] In 1887 Nietzsche published Genealogy of Morals. He did so within the historical context just mentioned. You ask your audience "Did any of that actually happen is it meant to be history?" The answer is yes, Nietzsche meant it as history. The modern scientific consensus is that it occurred from before 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE. Third, by omitting the intellectual context in which Nietzsche was writing or the audience he was writing to, you provide your audience less of a strawman and more of an effigy. The question "Quid Fonti" is entirely misplaced because Nietzsche himself was involved in original scholarly research of primary historical texts using techniques that he was so well versed in that he was appointed the youngest philology Professor ever. In the Preface, Nietzsche cites his own work 'Human, All Too Human' which he says he assumes the reader is familiar with. In addition, he explains that he is responding to a work by Paul Ree. As another example, In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche cites Roger Joseph Boscovich's 1758 treatise 'Philosophiae Naturalis Theoria Redacta ad Unicam Legem Virium in Natura Existentium' as part of his explanation of the science of forces with respect to the will-to-power. As far as materialistic atomism goes: this is one of the most well-refuted things in existence. In Europe these days, nobody in the scholarly community is likely to be so unscholarly as to attach any real significance to it, except as a handy household tool (that is, as an abbreviated figure of speech). For this, we can thank that Pole, Boscovich, who, together with the Pole, Copernicus, was the greatest, most successful opponent of the visual evidence. While Copernicus convinced us to believe, contrary to all our senses, that the earth does not stand still, Boscovich taught us to renounce belief in the last bit of earth that did “stand still,” the belief in “matter,” in the “material,” in the residual piece of earth and clump of an atom: it was the greatest triumph over the senses that the world had ever known. [Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Section 12] A summary of Boscovich's work is available in Keith Ansell Pearson Nietzsche's Brave New World of Force “In his "synopsis" of the text, Boscovich presents an outline of the chief articles of the work, pointing out the relation of his theory to Newton and Leibniz, what it shares with them and where it departs from them and how it attempts to chart new ground. His system offers a "midway" between those of Leibniz and Newton and has both much in common with them and much that is different. He holds it to be simpler than either and so marvellously suitable for "deriving all general properties of bodies, and certain of the special properties also, by means of the most rigorous demonstrations" (p. 19, pt. 1). With Leibniz it shares the idea that matter is composed of simple nonextended primary elements, and with Newton it shares the idea of the universe as composed of mutual forces that vary as the distances of the points from one another vary. There are two kinds of forces, attractive and repulsive.19 The contention is that any particle of matter is connected with every other particle no matter how great the distance between them, so that with a change in the position of one the factors deter mining the motion of all the rest will be altered. A departure is made from Newton, who held that his indivisible and extended atoms touched one an other; a departure is made from Leibniz, who thought there was no void and that nonextended points were at rest. Matter is conceived by Boscovich in terms of simple, nonextended, and indivisible points that are separated from one another: [E]ach of these points has a property of inertia, and in addition a mutual active force depending on the distance in such a way that, if the distance is given, both the magnitude and the direction of this force are given; but if the distance is altered, so also is the force altered; and if the distance is diminished indefinitely, the force is repulsive, & in fact also increases in definitely; whilst if the distance is increased the force will be diminished, vanish, be changed to an attractive force that first of all increases, then decreases, vanishes, is again turned into a repulsive force, and so on many times over; until at greater distances it finally becomes an attractive force that decreases approximately in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances. [On Nietzsche's 1873 "Time Atom Theory" Fragment and the Matter of Boscovich's Influence on Nietzsche Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 20 (FALL 2000), pp. 13-14] Your discussion of Nietzsche's Anti-Semitism in the context of his juxtaposition between The Blonde Aryan and the Jewish Priest occurs without any reference to the Proto-Indo-European debate that Nietzsche operated in. David Anthony could provide additional context for your readers that would demystify Nietzsche's use of the word "aryan." "The oldest texts in Old Indic are the "family books," books 2 through 7, of the Rig Veda (RV). These hymns and prayers were compiled into "books" or mandalas about 1500-1300 BCE, but many had been composed earlier. The oldest parts of the Avesta (AV), the Gathas, the oldest texts in Iranian, were composed by Zarathustra probably about 1200-1000 BCE. The undocumented language that was the parent of both, common IndoIranian, must be dated well before 1500 BCE, because, by this date, Old Indic had already appeared in the documents of the Mitanni in North Syria (see chapter 3). Common Indo-Iranian probably was spoken during the Sintashta period, 2100-1800 BCE. Archaic Old Indic probably emerged as a separate tongue from archaic Iranian about 1800-1600 BCE (see chapter 16). The RV and AV agreed that the essence of their shared parental Indo-Iranian identity was linguistic and ritual, not racia!' If a person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan4S wise the individual was a Dasyu, again not a racial or ethnic label but a ritual and linguistic one-a person who interrupted the cycle of giving between gods and humans, and therefore a person who threatened cosmic order, r'ta (RV) or afa (AV). Rituals performed in the right words were the core of being an Aryan." [Anthony, 409] You say in your video "According to Nietzsche," but leave out that the trifunctional classification of Proto Indo-European society into Warriors, Priests, and Herd traces back to Georges Dumézil who proposed it in 1929, 40 years after Nietzsche stopped writing. Silly Nietzsche, not citing a book that had yet to be written! Your readers may have appreciated a summary of Proto Indo-European mythology such as this one. "At the beginning of time there were two brothers, twins, one named Man ('Manu, in Proto-Indo-European) and the other Twin ('Yemo). They traveled through the cosmos accompanied by a great cow. Eventually Man and Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to sacrifice Twin (or, in some versions, the cow). From the parts of this sacrificed body, with the help of the sky gods (Sky Father, Storm Cod of War, Divine Twins), Man made the wind, the sun, the moon, the sea, earth, fire, and finally all the various kinds of people. Man became the first priest, the creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order. After the world was made, the sky-gods gave cattle to "Third man" ('Trito). But the cattle were treacherously stolen by a three-headed, six-eyed serpent ('NgWhi, the Proto-Indo-European root for negation). Third man entreated the storm god to help get the cattle back. Together they went to the cave (or mountain) of the monster, killed it (or the storm god killed it alone), and freed the cattle. 'Trito became the first warrior. He recovered the wealth of the people, and his gift of cattle to the priests insured that the sky gods received their share in the rising smoke of sacrificial fires. This insured that the cycle of giving between gods and humans continued.' These two myths were fundamental to the Proto-Indo-European system of religious belief. 'Manu and 'Yemo are reflected in creation myths preserved in many Indo-European branches, where ·Yemo appears as Iodie Varna, Avestan Yima, Norse Ymir, and perhaps Roman Remus (from *iemuJ, the archaic Italic form of'yemo, meaning "twin"); and Man appears as Old Iodie Manu or Germanic Mannus, paired with his twin to create the world. The deeds of 'Trito have been analyzed at length by Bruce Lincoln, who found the same basic story of the hero who recovered primordial lost cattle from a three-headed monster in Indie, Iranian, Hittite, Norse, Roman and Greek myths. The myth of Man and Twin established the importance of the sacrifice and the priest who regulated it. The myth of the "Third one" defined the role of the warrior, who obtained animals for the people and the gods. Many other themes are also reflected in these two stories: the Indo-European fascination with binary doublings combined with triplets, two's and three's, which reappeared again and again, even in the metric structure of Indo-European poetry; the theme of pairs who represented magical and legal power (Twin and Man, Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr); and the partition of society and the cosmos between three great functions or roles: the priest (in both his magical and legal aspects), the warrior (the Third Man), and the herder/cultivator (the cow or cattle). For the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, domesticated cattle were basic symbols of the generosity of the gods and the productivity of the earth. Humans were created from a piece of the primordial cow. The ritual duties that defined "proper" behavior revolved around the value, both moral and economic, of cattle. Proto-Indo-European mythology was, at its core, the worldview of a male-centered, cattle-raising people-not necessarily cattle nomads but certainly people who held sons and cattle in the highest esteem." [Anthony, 133-4] Nietzsche does not praise the Law of Manu! He comments on it as a historical example of the violent cruelty that morality has done to humanity such as Female Genital Mutilation. "Let us take the other case of so-called morality, the breeding of a particular race or type. The most magnificent example can be found in Indian morality, where it is given religious sanction as the 'law of Manu'. This law sets the task of breeding no fewer than four races at once: a priestly race, a warrior race, a merchant and agricultural race, and finally a servant race, the Sudras. Clearly, we are not talking about taming animals anymore: even to conceive of a breeding scheme like this presupposes a type of person who is a hundred times gentler and more reasonable. You breathe freely again when you leave the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeon and enter this healthier, higher, more expansive world. What a miserable book the New Testament is in comparison with Manu, how bad it smells! But even this system found it necessary to be terrible - not (as before) in the struggle against beasts, but rather with its own opposite, the unbred people, the human hodgepodge, the Chandala. And again, the only way it was able to render these people harmless, to make them weak, was to make them sick, - it was a fight against the 'great number'. Perhaps nothing is more opposed to our sensibility than these protective measures of lndian morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Sastra I), 'on impure vegetables', decrees that the only foods the Chandala are allowed to have are garlic and onions, since the holy scripture says that they cannot be given grain, or fruits with grains, or water or fire. The same edict proclaims that they cannot get their water from rivers or wells or ponds, but only from the entrances to swamps or from pits formed by animal footprints. They are also forbidden from washing their laundry or even washing themselves, since any water that is conceded to them as an act of special mercy can only be used to quench thirst. Finally, the Sudra women are forbidden to come to the aid of Chandala women in childbirth, who are, furthermore, not even allowed to help each other ... -Sanitary policing like this is bound to succeed: -deadly epidemics, hideous sexual diseases, followed again by the 'law of the knife', ordering circumcision for male children, removal of the labia for female children. - Manu himself says: 'the Chandalas are the fruits of adultery, incest and crime [- these as the necessary consequence of the concept of breeding]. The only clothes they can have are rags from corpses, the only dishes are broken pots, the only jewelry is old iron, and they can only worship evil spirits; they will wander perpetually from one place to the next. They are not allowed to write from left to right and cannot write with their right hand: the use of the right hand and writing from left to right is reserved for the virtuous, for people with breeding.'” [Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols, ‘Improving Humanity’ Section 3] This brings us to the most helpful, yet missing, piece of the puzzle. Nietzsche hated his sister. It’s not just that he said things like "My sister is a vengeful, anti-Semitic goose!" He also publicly said so in his autobiography. "When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, -it would blaspheme my divinity to think that I am related to this sort of canaille [riff-raff]. The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror: a real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt - in my highest moments. . ." [Ecce Homo, Why I am So Wise, Section 3] More significantly, In a letter to his sister, he wrote "It strikes me as one of those puzzles I have sometimes thought about--how it is possible that we are blood related? Whatever had occupied me, worried me, and elevated me has never brought me a co-knower and friend! It is a pity that there is no God, so that at least one knower would exist--As long as I am healthy, I retain sufficient good humor in order to play my role and to hide from the world within that role, for instance as a Basel professor. Sadly enough, I have been very ill and would hate, unspeakably, the people I have come to know, myself Included. My dear sister, let all this remain between ourselves--and you may promptly burn this letter. If I were not such a good example of a play-actor, I could not bear to live another hour. For people like myself, marriage does not fit into the picture: it could only be in the style of our Goethe. When I have shown you great rage, it is because you forced me to relinquish the last human beings [Lou and Ree] with whom I could speak without Tartuffery. Now--I am alone. With them, I had been able to converse without a mask about things which interested me. What they thought of me was quite immaterial to me. Hide this letter from our mother and-. . . Do not be angry over this letter. There is more civility in it than if, as usual, I were to play a comedy." [published in the translator’s introduction to Lou Andreas-Salome’s Nietzsche Life and Work, trans. Siegfried Mandel] The notion that Elisabeth Förster went back to "take care" of her brother is problematic. The story speaks for itself… First, before Elisabeth Förster came back to Germany she went to San Bernardino where she attempted to cover up the cause of her husband's death. She did not directly return after her husband died because she need to hide his suicide. "Klingbeil’s accusations lay heavily on Förster’s mind. Daily wandering the rim of the financial abyss, he was drinking heavily. Finally, on 3 June, he gave up the struggle and killed himself in an hotel room in San Bernardino, by swallowing a mixture of strychnine and morphine. Newspapers had already reported his death as suicide by strychnine poisoning when Elisabeth arrived in San Bernardino. Her one purpose was to repudiate the suicide. She had no idea that Förster had posted what amounted to a suicide note to Max Schubert, the director of the Chemnitz Colonial Society: ‘… This is my last request: Please continue to put your considerable talents, your strength and your youthful enthusiasm in the service of the worthy enterprise that I have started. Perhaps it will prosper better without me than with me.” [Prideaux] Second, she had to fraudulently settle her husband's estate before losing control of the colony and returning home under false pretenses. "Elisabeth settled her late husband’s San Bernardino hotel bill with a deed to land she did not own and set about organising a funeral that would do justice to a warrior-hero on his way to Valhalla. Her letter to her mother describing Förster’s burial recalls the earlier letter describing her own triumphant entry into the colony. ‘Sixty horsemen followed the coffin and fired a salute over his grave.’ The untrue report of his suicide had been put out by the Jewish press Elisabeth remained in Paraguay, trying hard to raise money to keep control of the colony until finally, in August 1890, she lost her battle. Ownership passed to the Sociedad Colonizadora Nueva Germania en el Paraguay. In December she returned to Naumburg to drum up support to regain German control of the colony. Franziska believed she was returning to look after her brother." [Prideaux] Third, Elisabeth Förster did not help take care of Nietzsche but used the time to try and win back control of the racist colony she helped found using Trumped up rhetoric. "Elisabeth remained in the family home, writing innumerable letters, petitioning colonial societies and government officials and scolding anti-Semitic organisations for their lack of support. She now changed the name she used to sign her articles: ‘Eli Förster’ became ‘Frau Doktor Förster’. She published her first book, Dr Bernhard Förster’s Kolonie Neu-Germania in Paraguay. It rebutted Klingbeil’s accusations and it appealed to her fellow-countrymen to support a weak, broken-hearted widow by setting up a corporation to buy back the shares from the foul foreigner. When the book was published, in late spring 1891, the existing colonists of Nueva Germania were particularly indignant that she repeated her husband’s original and notoriously untrue claims concerning the unimaginable fertility of the soil and the marvellous abundance of clean water.” [ibid] Fourth, before she edited or published anything under Nietzsche's name, his sister and mother attempted to suppress publication of Part 4 of Thus Spake Zarathustra because of their fear of its 'heretical' content. "During the six months it took her to write the book, the question arose of her brother’s unpublished books, the last works hastily written in Turin. By the end of March the printer/publisher Naumann had Zarathustra IV bound, printed and ready to send to the bookshops. A copy was sent to Franziska. She and her brother Edmund Oehler, an undistinguished cleric, had assumed the legal guardianship of Nietzsche but Franziska had no literary pretensions and she left Gast and Overbeck to manage publishing matters on an informal basis. Gast and Overbeck were convinced of the importance of the unpublished manuscripts, and they encouraged Naumann to go to print. But when Zarathustra IV was sent to Franziska, both she and Elisabeth were shocked and horrified by the plainly blasphemous passages. Elisabeth frightened Franziska by telling her that she would be open to criminal charges if the book were published. Franziska and Oehler refused permission.” [ibid] Fifth, Nietzsche's sister went back to the colony in 1892 to settle her affairs before returning home, once again under false pretenses. The fascist colony that she and her husband founded exiled her. She fabricated an excuse to leave by having her mother send a telegram requesting Elisabeth's return to Germany, lying that it was to take care of her brother. "Stalemate settled over Nueva Germania. Elisabeth remained in the Försterhof with her cooks and her servants, trading acrimonious letters with the colonists through third parties and newspaper columns until the following April, when she succeeded in selling the mansion to a Baron von Frankenberg-Lüttwitz. Thus she managed to regain some of her dowry that she had sunk into the Paraguayan venture. Money secured, she briefed Franziska to send her a telegram saying that she was urgently needed at home to look after her sick brother. The Colonial News printed what amounted to an expulsion notice: ‘The first requirement for any effective improvement in the affairs of Nueva Germania is the removal of Frau Doktor Förster.’ By the time it was published, thanks to her mother’s telegram, Elisabeth had already left the colony on her sisterly errand of mercy. In September 1893, she returned from Paraguay to Naumburg, and Dr Elisabeth Förster became Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche." [ibid] Sixth, Nietzsche's mother took as good care of him as possible under the circumstances. Nietzsche's sister tried to legally seize control of Nietzsche's care. Nietzsche's sister then coerced their mother to give her control over Nietzsche's literary estate. "As the progressive paralysis spread through both brain and body the outbursts had become too violent and too unpredictable for Franziska to continue the programme of therapeutic walks in the open air…. Franziska dreaded that her beloved, insane son would be discovered by the authorities and snatched away from her… Things had grown impossible between mother and daughter. The contrast within the house between Franziska and Alwine ministering to the inert Nietzsche upstairs and Elisabeth’s lively musical salon downstairs was intolerable. Elisabeth wrote a ten-page letter denouncing Franziska as unfit to care for Nietzsche. She wished to become his custodian and transfer him to a new archive along with his works, but the family doctor refused to support Elisabeth’s claim against her mother… In December 1895, Elisabeth drew up a contract to give her sole copyright of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and papers. She offered her mother thirty thousand marks for all the rights and royalties from his works. Franziska conceded reluctantly. She did not want to give her daughter complete power over the literary estate but on the other hand, the money ought to be sufficient to guarantee a secure future for herself and her son." [ibid] Seventh, Nietzsche's sister was more interested in publicity and fame than the health of her brother. "Taking care" of Nietzsche meant showing off his body for her own personal gain and feeding him cake. Her behavior was so intolerable that Nietzsche's actual friend who paid for the house for Nietzsche to retire in had to break off contact rather than see the abuse. "The archives of both Goethe and Schiller were housed in Weimar, and Elisabeth calculated that sharing in this glory would further the chance of the Nietzsche archive attaining equality with Cosima’s Wagner archive in Bayreuth, which she viewed with piqued admiration. To sell a small house in Naumburg and buy a big one in Weimar… required money. Meta von Salis-Marschlins was happy to pay. How better to repay Nietzsche for the summers they had spent together in Sils-Maria?...To Meta, it seemed a most suitable location for her dear friend. She purchased the villa and its grounds for thirty-nine thousand marks. Without informing her, Elisabeth embarked on an extravagant building programme, throwing out a bathroom here, a balcony there, and sending the bill to Meta, who was outraged to be charged for unnecessary cosmetic improvements. But what she found worse was Elissabeth’s mania for publicity. Meta read an article by a journalist describing how Nietzsche had been put on display for his benefit: first sleeping, then awake, then crouched in a chair and fed pieces of cake. It was too much for her. She broke off the connection." [ibid] We think it is abundantly clear that Nietzsche's sister was an abusive monster who should not have been allowed anywhere near Nietzsche or his literary estate. You say "Elisabeth edited and published some of the books that now bear Nietzsche's name. So after World War 2 there was a bit of an attempt to pin the antisemitic stuff on her." Elisabeth Förster had 32 years to significantly manipulate Nietzsche's literary estate with the deceptive publication of "The Will to Power" and Martin Heidegger insisted on the priority of the unpublished fragments so he could contort Nietzsche's notebooks into a mouthpiece for fascism. "Up on her own green hill, Elisabeth felt she had at last attained equal status with Cosima. Cosima died in 1930 and Elisabeth in 1935, by which time her period in charge of Nietzsche’s output was more than twice as long as the sixteen years between him publishing his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and writing his last, Ecce Homo. During those years Elisabeth was the spider at the centre of the Nietzsche archive, weaving her brother’s words into her own web and inflating her own reputation through presenting her brother as the mystic prophet of her own convictions.…In 1901, only a year after Nietzsche had died, Elisabeth published The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht) as Volume XV of the collected works. It consisted of a collection of 483 aphorisms selected from the Nachlass, the notes and drafts that Nietzsche never intended to be read by anybody else, let alone published. Nietzsche was always neurotically scrupulous concerning what was eventually published, as one sees from his correspondence with Gast and with his publishers. What Elisabeth published in The Will to Power did not represent his final views on anything. By the time of its 1906 reprinting, Elisabeth had tripled the book in size: 483 aphorisms had swelled to 1,067. Elisabeth was revelling in her posthumous editorial control." [ibid] If nothing else, we agree that no favors are done by ignoring what happens to be in the text. We hope that, after reading these various citations, you agree that they belong in the public record so that your viewers have an opportunity to see the positive, joyful, comforting(!) contribution Nietzsche has made to actually make sense of the fascist sickness that so manifestly plagues our current times. Regards, All and None Signed, Navot
Curlington Q Curls
2025-03-17 15:46:14 +0000 UTCWhen do we get part 2 of this?
David Crowe
2025-03-03 14:53:36 +0000 UTCBrilliant. I'm always learning something new or looking at things in a new way with these videos
SeraphGraves
2025-02-13 14:19:51 +0000 UTCRight? Can we please find out what that is, so I can get them myself and look way less gorgeous in them? 😄
jantaria
2025-02-12 21:20:38 +0000 UTCA malenky bit of Ludwig Van at the end. Horrorshow!
Paul Thompson
2025-02-12 10:39:14 +0000 UTCDamn what a cliffhanger
AC
2025-02-11 18:17:54 +0000 UTCMy name mentioned! Yay credits! also all that before was pretty neat and entertaining and informative. Looking forward to the next one!
Stefan Wilde
2025-02-09 21:12:32 +0000 UTCThe Fit is outstanding. And big chunky brain things for my brains. Thank you!
Jay P Hailey
2025-02-09 07:07:32 +0000 UTCHi Azalea! Didn't realize you were a patron 🤯
Natalie
2025-02-09 03:23:17 +0000 UTCI already know the answer: it's complicated.
Philip Leitch
2025-02-09 00:30:53 +0000 UTCEven with Jewish people, which he does devote quite a lot of time to in On The Geneology of Morals, Nietzsche has a very specific kind of antisemitism - as Abi says, he thinks the "Old Testament Jewish" stuff is absolutely great, he just hates everything after that (which is consistent with his general theme in later works that you're a great people if you're going around beating up your neighbours and also writing poetry) - but even in Geneology, which absolutely has some horrible passages, probably the worst of this kind of thing in his writing, he does develop a theme that Jesus himself was also great (he blames Paul for all the bits of Christianity he doesn't like). In his previous work - Beyond Good and Evil - he comes out with (of modern Jewish people in Europe, and by contrast with the "modern German"), "The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe", which feels very contradictory to the kind of stuff he ends up writing in Geneology only a short while later. From what I've seen of his notebooks, he also contradicts himself a lot in them, too... and that's really why people have managed to successfully argue in both directions with him - there's always *some* material you can point at, because he disagreed strongly even with himself - although he also got worse in his later life, too.
Sam Skipsey
2025-02-08 23:28:20 +0000 UTCNot gonna lie, I kind of miss when we all watched the video live at the same time when it premiered... except for the Nebula subscribers I guess. Will watch this one now, but it won't be quite the same! :)
Amyphist
2025-02-08 21:49:31 +0000 UTCI don't think that Nietzsche has to be interpreted as saying that certain races are superior to other races. The quotes that Abigail uses could equally imply that certain INDIVIDUALS have natural abilities that make them candidates for being Ubermenschen, and that those individuals can be scattered throughout various races, even if they may be clustered more prominently in certain ethnic groups. Skipsey's quotes about Arabs and Japanese can arguably be interpreted that way. I've also never seen any quotes where N specifically says that Black Africans are inherently inferior to Europeans, although I'd welcome any corrections from anyone who has such quotes.
Teed Rockwell
2025-02-08 19:11:39 +0000 UTCI love this more chaotic and 'loose' style of essay. Also Abi slays so hard in that dress and jacket. ❤️
Hamokk
2025-02-08 14:49:42 +0000 UTCWell, this is the difficult thing about Nietzsche (and, to be honest, quite a lot of other European philosophers of around the period) - there's a mix of quite interesting stuff (in Nietzsche's case, the proto-Existentialism and almost cosmic aspects of the eternal return - and his early stuff about Greek tragedy) and some appalling stuff (Nietzsche's sort of proto-scientific racism - which is more complicated than presented here [he takes out time to approve of the Japanese and of Arabs, and explicitly say that they're like the "blond beast" that he mostly talks about in Europe, and is mostly focused on Europe because he's obsessed with what he sees as being the collapse of German culture in particular] but absolutely antisemitic in character.).
Sam Skipsey
2025-02-08 08:02:04 +0000 UTCYou arguably should have said something about Walter Kaufmann, whose book "Nietzsche: philosopher,psychologist, anti-Christ" was the primary source for the post world war two Nietzsche who has nothing but bad things to say about antisemitism. I didn't like Nietzsche much until I read Kauffmann's book, and after that I loved Nietzsche. Kaufmann's Nietzsche is not racist or anti-Semitic or pro Hitler or much of anything else bad. He is speaking to individuals and has no interest in politics.I'm now beginning to recognize that Kaufmann whitewashed a lot of Nietzsche's bad qualities. On the other hand, there's nothing in Kauffmann's original writings to believe he was capable of creating that Nietzsche I love so much, so I think we have to recognize that Kauffmann's Nietzsche is really one aspect of Nietzsche.
Teed Rockwell
2025-02-08 04:46:33 +0000 UTCThe answer in the envelope read my mind!
Azalea Jane
2025-02-08 03:32:52 +0000 UTCMy 2 cents for the follow-up: (late period) Nietzsche would have kinda approved of Trump basically doing what he wants regardless of how moral it is (very Master morality of him, but not very Ubermensch), but disapproved of *MAGA* as a movement because once again, it's people following someone else rather than doing their own thing. (And because MAGA's ideology is founded on ressentiment, fundamentally - it's *full* of Evil boogymen keeping them all down.)
Sam Skipsey
2025-02-07 23:27:24 +0000 UTCI dunno, I think what I said was just a long winded way of saying, "who cares." 11 out of 8 stars. This was fantastic as I expected.
Contraryon
2025-02-07 23:08:11 +0000 UTCI read this title in German "vas Nietzsche voke?"
Wren
2025-02-07 22:43:28 +0000 UTCI called it from the start what the answer in the envelope was going to be! Can't wait for how Part Two goes
Alex W.
2025-02-07 21:31:41 +0000 UTCExcellent episode, can't wait for the promised follow-up!
Arizona Hanson
2025-02-07 21:15:42 +0000 UTCBefore I watch the video, I'm going to drop my opinion: Assuming all else is equal—what ever that means in this context—Nietzsche would be neither "woke" nor "anti-woke." What he would see is the culmination of his greatest fears: an age utterly consumed by ressentiment on all sides. He'd be just as isolated in our time as he was in his.
Contraryon
2025-02-07 20:16:30 +0000 UTCWow this is weird. I'm afraid I might learn something.
FredShoey
2025-02-07 19:09:48 +0000 UTCI really, really need to do a whole video of my own on Nietzsche, just to roast him.
phastinemoon
2025-02-07 18:13:15 +0000 UTCLove that dress-blazer combo. Seeing the quote attributions being given to subreddits and comment sections was hilarious.
ComicTF
2025-02-07 18:11:46 +0000 UTCI watched this on nebula. I loved it.
Glenn Shambach
2025-02-07 18:06:28 +0000 UTC
