Episode 8: Nietzsche

Friedrich, like, a single woman badly reviewed your book.

You gotta get over yourself.

Like, that doesn't mean feminism is dominant in the culture.

Yes, you had access to a typewriter.

Oh no.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

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

So Adrian, what are we talking about today?

So today, this is going to be the deepest of dives we've done yet on the show, I think.

We're going to go quite far back in time.

Well, we're not going to go to the beginnings of philosophical misogyny because honestly, where do you even start?

Yes.

How much time do we have?

Why, this podcast could be endless.

This is fantastic.

Yeah.

Subscribe to our Patreon for never-ending reading of history.

And then the next thing happened.

It was also vaguely misogynist.

We do not have a deck for them.

But what we do have on deck for you today is Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher, definitely in the top three misogynists of the 19th century, a century that is not known for its dearth of misogynists and all-around kind of interesting thinker.

You know, I'm frequently out of my depth when I'm talking to Adrian.

Adrian is a PhD.

He is a teacher of German history, as well as being like a German speaker and a German citizen.

And I am like a person with a Twitter account.

So I am,

you know, I am like often, I think, in these conversations where you take the lead, Adrian, sort of playing the role of the audience.

You know, I'm like a hopefully smart but kind of ignorant interlocutor.

But, you know, I like only kind of know who Otto von Bitzmann is.

You know, my

understanding of German history is, you know, sub-Wikipedia level.

So I'm going to probably be jumping in here to ask you for more explanation than I normally would.

And, you know, maybe I'm not a credible stand-in for the listener because the listeners might know a little bit more than I do.

But I was interested reading through your show notes in sort of the resonance of Nietzsche to contemporary debates about gender and sort of the like rise of some of these masculinist ideologies that we're seeing in the new right.

Could you like tell me a little bit about how his influence is emerging now?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, as you are kind of alluding to, there are people, I think I would put it in three buckets, buckets, right?

Like, Leshou loves three buckets.

Like, there are people who just explicitly invoke him, right?

There's a lot of kind of thinkers that cast themselves as these neo-Nietzeans, especially sort of incel types, tend to really, like, there's a lot to hold on to.

We'll get some quotes later on that are just basically like, yep, you could put that in an incel forum and people would probably hit follow and or like and subscribe or whatever.

But that's only part of it.

His legacy is pretty clear.

and pretty acknowledged among various intellectual traditions.

And that's the interesting thing.

Like there are both deeply feminist traditions, I think, that recur to Nietzsche and that find him really generative and interesting, and like the most obvious anti-feminists.

Like we'll see that Jordan Peterson cribs a lot of stuff from there, but so do, you know, a lot of French feminists.

The final thing that I think is sort of interesting for us, you know, we've come up again and again in the last couple of weeks against sort of like traditional quote-unquote forms of misogyny, right?

Where it's like, well, this is how it's supposed to be because that's how it's always been.

And we've come across explanations that are Christian.

Well, nietzsche is a right winger very clearly but he's as about as anti-christian and as non-traditional as you're gonna get right this is someone who both thinks horrible things about women but also thinks that christians are just like wusses and that you know tradition is bunk right but that doesn't make him an ally right so like i think that's really interesting and then finally i think that nietzsche is kind of having a moment then again he's kind of always having a moment uh basically since like 1880 like there's always someone like you you know, who's really cool you should read?

Friedrich Nietzsche.

And I guess the main thing I would point to is like, we're going to try to give a full accounting.

Like, I can't do justice to everything this guy wrote.

And so, if there are any Nietzsche fans listening, my apologies in advance.

But, like, the important point is that this is about selection, right?

That, like, people who use Nietzsche in the way that someone like Jordan Peterson uses Nietzsche, like, have to be selective, right?

They have to pick a couple of things, decide that's what they are going to focus on, and ignore some pretty obvious things that he also thought were bullshit or stupid or whatever.

Just to give you an idea, right?

Like, people sort of pick and choose where they want Nietzsche to apply and what they want him to mean, right?

So, in right-winger's hands, he can be this great individualist, even though he didn't really believe in the concept of a coherent individual at all, right?

He can be this stalking horse for anti-egalitarianism, which he was very much, even though it's also super unclear what he means by like hierarchies, like whether what he thinks was supposed to happen with those, right?

He can be super political and totally apolitical at the same time.

So like you're gonna put your foot wrong no matter where you stand with this guy.

So it sounds to me like, you know, you're identifying a really capacious thinker who was

thought is

not coherent to one like political project in our current terms, right?

Could you give me like just a gloss of what Nietzsche understood his posture to be?

How much did he contradict himself?

How much did he have a coherent project in his time?

And I'm asking you to summarize the career of one of the 19th century's most important philosophers in like, you know, two, three sentences.

So I assume you're going to be a little bit reductive here.

I'll try and give you the sort of super zoom out version of this, and then we're going to, we can walk through his career in a little bit more detail.

But like...

The way he himself thought of it, one of his books has the subtitle, How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

That's what he took himself to be doing.

He thought that he was going to be slaughtering the sacred cow of of Western metaphysics.

That was his project.

And he thought that it had a political dimension, but he didn't think it was primarily something that he was worried about politically.

He just thought people had thought dumb things.

And here was Friedrich Nietzsche with his hammer to tell them they were wrong.

The interesting thing, of course, is that like...

The interesting thing, of course, is that even though he didn't sort of think of this as political, like in the hands of his contemporaries, like it almost immediately became political.

And of course, like he has all these political opinions.

He hated socialism, he hated feminism, he hated right like but he also wasn't wild about nationalism right like he was just an all-around corrosive he just couldn't look at anything and be like yeah i don't think that's how that works right he like had this curmudgeonly kind of almost stance but that made it so that you know which nietzsche you read and what you read him on and what you agreed with him on like would influence quite strongly what kind of political project you imputed to him.

And then the other thing that we briefly have to talk about, I don't know how much philosophy our listeners read, but like there is no such thing as like like one philosophical style of presentation.

But Nietzsche definitely goes well beyond any of the things that you would recognize as a philosophy book, right?

Like we'll talk a little bit about a book called Dusbuck Zarathustra that's like written basically as this like pseudo-Bible that he decided to come up with.

He loves the essay.

He loves aphorisms, right?

And like, as you say, like, how do you reconstruct a coherent project here?

Well, that's really hard.

If someone's like, no, that's also why there's no such thing as causality.

End a sentence and then it's like paragraph 59.

You're like, wait,

I'm sorry.

Can we, can we just back this truck up to where like there is no causality?

It's like, nope, we're on to like, my socialism is dumb, right?

It's not meant to be assimilable in this way.

And he made it as difficult as possible to kind of substrate a coherent project out of these texts.

You know, what we have today are the pretty definitive texts that he meant to write.

As we'll see, around 1900, when a lot of the people who sort of filtered Nietzsche for a a broader audience sort of got interested in him, including people like Sigmund Freud, like they were dealing with, you know, the books put out by a bunch of grifters around this dude who was still alive, but like was,

for all intents and purposes, you know, not a real help in governing his own estate, given that he was like...

insane, right?

I'm beginning to see parallels to the modern right already.

Yes, yes, yeah.

So we've got this guy who is got a posture of sort of universal skepticism, you know, bordering on contempt.

He's writing across a whole bunch of different genres.

Yes.

And he is being presented to the public after the end of his life by people who are maybe,

you know, committed to interests other than a faceful interpretation of the work.

Right.

So what we have is a guy who was difficult to assimilate generally, who had a sort of indefinable and vast intellectual project, and who has come down to us through this like game of telephone.

So like when we talk about appropriations of Nietzsche now, we're almost necessarily talking about misreadings, you know, ranging from the deliberate to the sort of like understandable or over-determined misreadings and like partial readings of Nietzsche that exclude other parts of his oeuvre and his stance.

Exactly.

And I mean, but at the same time, like we shouldn't just say like, oh, poor Nietzsche, he was misunderstood.

Like today, we have a vocabulary for talking about his energy.

He has enormous troll energy.

The dude just like loved pushing buttons, right?

And so like, it's not an accident that people kind of came away with these, you know, very strident opinions.

It's like, well, he,

yeah, he was a, he was a hot taker, definitely.

We'll talk about that.

He, like, he would have killed at slate pitches is all I'm saying.

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

Like, who is making this guy relevant to like a project like our podcast?

Yeah, so I mean just to give a couple of examples, there's a Harvey Mansfield book, Manliness from what is that, 2005, 6.

Mansfield dwells on Nietzsche quite a bit, doesn't follow him.

Nietzsche for him is sort of a road not taken.

I'll quote from Mansfield here.

Nietzsche is the philosopher of modern times.

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

And Mansfield, I should say, is kind of critical, actually, of this position.

It's interesting, right?

Like Mansfield, I should say, like, 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.

But he's onto something here, the idea that Nietzsche is a masculinist thinker.

He thinks that masculinity will, in some way, is the way forward.

But Nietzsche's ideal of masculinity has nothing to do with Christianity.

It's explicitly anti-Christian.

He basically thought that Christianity was like...

cuck shit basically right like it was just like it was weak it was beta stuff right as a lot of contemporary conservatives also feel about exactly yeah and i think which is exactly the the manfield book for for those who haven't read it stands exactly on the inflection point there where like he's still trying to identify a form of manliness that is not just like chauvinism right and like i think that that's right that like our current styles of masculinity have often embraced this kind of position that basically you know we talked about a few in a you know in our episode about the creeps and the creatures we ended up talking a lot about like people wanting a masculinity outside of christianity outside of tradition and then the second second point here that I think Mansfield also emphasizes is Nietzsche is to some extent a naturalist, right?

He thinks that morality is a poor guide for what's good and what's bad.

He basically thinks that what's natural, right?

Does it feel good?

Is it healthy to you, et cetera, et cetera, is a much more useful guide.

to what to do than like some rule that like a priest or a philosopher came up with.

Again, something that I think we get from these sort of latter-day social Darwinians today or from evolutionary psychologists, right, who are like, oh, you know, this is what we're supposed to be doing.

Therefore, you should just do it, right?

Normatively, it's probably the right thing to do.

The natural as a moral imperative or a normative imperative,

without a lot of defining of those terms or interrogation of how you got to them, is also like a very frequent anti-feminist talking point.

Exactly.

And then the final point that I think Mansfield is pointing to in his book, which is really good, is he points out that while it can sometimes seem that Nietzsche is looking backwards, right?

He's like, oh, what did we do on the savannah?

This kind of, like, as you were saying, this kind of right-wing talking point, that's not quite what Nietzsche does.

Meinfield says that Nietzsche does not, quote, presuppose a natural order of rank in which manliness makes sense and deserves respect, right?

He's not saying once upon a time we understood how to treat men right or something like that.

He's saying masculinity is the way forward, but that means that's not traditional masculinity.

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

What the hell that means, I don't know, but like he's very clear.

He's not saying like, we're not going back.

This is a forward-looking kind of masculinism.

And this strikes me as in contrast to a lot of the ideas about masculinity that we discussed in our crisis of masculinity piece, right?

In which like women's equality has victimized men and emasculated them, and women now have a like moral or social obligation to retreat from aspirations to equality so that men can flourish.

I think that's the subtext of a lot of that kind of argument.

Yeah, exactly.

Nietzsche would not buy that.

He's like, well, if you're not succeeding, it's because, you know, you're weak.

It's not an order that precedes

power and its legitimacy.

Power creates legitimacy.

Exactly.

It's not an ontological kind of hierarchy.

On the other hand, Nietzsche developed his thought.

He's part of the first generation of European philosophers that are really in dialogue with literal feminists, right?

Women who are like, we want to vote, we want full civil rights.

Also, we're going to publish books about you, you know, buddy.

And he doesn't handle it super well.

Yeah, he's living in the second half of the 19th century in Germany.

So there are, there is a feminist movement.

There are women in public, at least like upper and middle class women, who, you know, can read what he's writing about them and talk back, which

men always respond to so well.

You may have just a second ago given him a little too much credit, right?

Like he wants to be committed to this idea that like, oh, I don't actually want to go back to traditional hierarchies.

I'm not saying anything like that.

But then he's super upset when women kind of turn traditional hierarchies like on their head or something like that.

He's like, what the fuck?

Not like that.

No, no, no, no.

That's not what I was talking about.

Right.

And these feminists like call him on it mercilessly.

I found a very, a couple of very, very nice quotes where they're like, no, I mean, like, we hear, we hear you, but it seems like you're kind of traditional when you're like, oh,

can you just like make me some soup?

Right.

It's like, well, it seems like you're actually more traditionalist than you give yourself credit for than you claim for yourself right but we're gonna get to his roasting pretty soon oh yeah but we also have another you know like self-identified nietzsche disciple in jordan peterson that's right jordan peterson loves friedrich nietzsche and his nietzsche is really really interesting in that he like almost sort of positions him as a great critic of christianity and a great questioner that's something that you get a lot on the right where it's like the stuff that you like in Nietzsche, you say, like, oh, he destroyed that.

And like, now we can no longer use that.

Like, he made clear why that's pointless or why this is not no longer actionable or why this no longer should dominate our politics or our morality or our thinking or our debates, right?

With stuff that you like, you're like, well, yeah, he challenged it.

It was a salubrious challenge.

And now we're forging ahead like.

more awesomely or whatever, right?

Like it's this very funny thing.

And he's exactly like this, right?

Like he thinks like Nietzsche's arguments like point out that like, quote from him here, what does he say?

This is in the 12 rules for life, right?

Pointing out that Europe awoke during the Enlightenment as if from a Christian dream, noticing that everything it had theretofore taken for granted could and should be questioned.

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

He understood that we were untethered by that.

And now we have to create those maps of meaning that he keeps talking about, right?

We have to find meaning.

The other thing with Nietzsche, of course, is that he hated these kinds of lies we tell ourselves in order to live.

He just sort of thought there's extreme danger there too, right?

That's all that Peterson, and especially given that Peterson, as we talked about in our episode about him, like sort of waffles between you have to believe something or you have to believe this very specific thing, right?

Like Nietzsche would say, like, yeah, you got to believe in something.

But like very famously, Peterson sort of can't get himself to ever just make it just about like, oh, pick any map, right?

Like if it's intersectionality, that's fine too.

For Jordan Peterson, spoiler alert, it's not fine if it's intersectionality, right?

And increasingly, Peterson seems to think that secretly it's Jesus, right?

And he's just kind of got this like disavowed or like partial commitment to Christianity that he won't totally like go for, which might make him, you know, a little less plausible in his professions of interest in Nietzsche.

Yeah.

And then finally, maybe we talk briefly about Rod Dreyer, who has sort of a very similar idea, right?

Like he thinks that Christianity can be improved and transformed through like Nietzsche's challenge, right?

But he also sort of points out or uses Nietzsche to point out that being truly post-Christian is impossible, right?

Nietzsche sort of famously kind of used a mode of critique that was developed to show that Christianity was bunk, to show that a bunch of moral precepts and metaphysical theories were also bunk.

He's like, oh, this actually keeps working.

You know, this cuts any which way.

So Dreyer basically thinks that that makes it clear that like a post-Christian world makes no sense.

I'll just quote from Rod Dreyer here in the American Conservative.

The Western world after Orthodox Christianity is not going to be the paradise so many on the cultural left, including liberal religionists, think it will be.

And Christianity will likely be rather different than what Orthodox believers living in the fading afterglow experience today.

So in general, I think all three of these people, well, Mansfield, I'll exempt here a little bit from this critique, but like symptomatic for sort of right-wing readings of Nietzsche that like they think that there's something that they like, right?

Hierarchies, disruption of like established norms and moral precepts, but it's been sort of furthered and applied too broadly, right?

To things that basically he thinks are just natural that can't fly.

That's not okay.

And we'll find in our conversation today, I think that basically Nietzsche would have nothing but contempt for that, right?

He's like, that's the whole point.

You don't get to sort of pull off, you know, on that exit and be like, oh,

I don't care to follow this highway any further.

He's like, no, no, no, no, no.

This highway just keeps going.

You know, like in the end, even moral precepts you care about will be affected by this.

Like, if you're not okay with that, don't get the hammer out, basically.

Yeah, so this might be Nietzsche's virtue: his consistency, or at least the broad-reachingness in his indictment of these structures, including ones that his acolytes find sacred cows.

This might be a good moment to interject a correction that I received from one of our listeners about Rod Dreyer, who we identified as a Catholic on our previous episode.

That's right.

I noticed that too in re-listening.

He is not a Catholic.

He has converted to Orthodox Christianity.

So he, you know, is a person with a strong value system and a belief in a very specific kind of moral prescription and code that Nietzsche would maybe not

tolerate.

Exactly.

So there's a selectiveness.

You've identified like...

an overarching selectiveness in the application of Nietzschean ideology, which his contemporaries in the first wave feminist movement also identified in him and in his own work.

Exactly.

So maybe I'll talk a little bit about just who he was for folks who don't know much about him.

So his dates were 1844 till 1900.

And so maybe it's a little bit too much to say that he was sort of among the first generation that really explicitly could engage with feminists, right?

Like think of when Seneca Falls was like, people could write about this stuff.

when Nietzsche was in diapers, basically.

But still, like definitely there is an increase in visibility for feminist organizing sort of after 1848 in Europe and then also in the United States.

And so, you know, he grows up with this stuff in some way.

But he's definitely one of the first thinkers to really give feminist thought a sort of sustained place in his writing and in his public statements.

And at least some early feminist readers thought that Nietzsche's success, right, the fact that he had this immense impact on the culture of the...

turn of the 20th century, really,

he didn't have immediate impact.

I'll talk about that in a second.

Sort of like it was time delayed by about a decade.

And there were a lot of feminists who remarked on the fact that he really seized hold never of like philosophy.

Like you couldn't take a Nietzsche seminar in 1895.

But if you were to go to like a coffee house in Munich, everybody would be like, hey, you know who you should read?

This guy, Friedrich Nietzsche, he's super cool or whatever, right?

Like, so that was like, he was just like, you know, your favorite poet definitely read him.

Your favorite painter had like some Nietzsche quote somewhere, right?

I mean, like, this is the time when he's one of the few philosophers to have a piece of music.

Richard Strauss writes, thus spoke Zarathustra, right, in reaction to Nietzsche's book of the same title.

Like, that's not normal, right?

Like, you don't hear like, oh, the critique of pure reason, the symphony, right?

That doesn't tend to happen.

So he really seizes hold of like the culture much more so than of philosophy.

A lot of philosophers at the time were like, this guy's an embarrassment, or this is ridiculous.

This is supported.

This is literature.

They're like, this is pretty nice poetry, but like, this is not what we do.

But this is all like, he sort of takes over the downtown and the sort of like

hip intellectual set.

Yeah.

But is this something that happens while he's still writing or does this happen towards the end of his life?

Because is he around and able to sort of appreciate his popularity with 19th century Germany's dime square?

Or is he like sort of exiting?

Is he gone by then?

That's the freaky thing.

He's around.

People can visit him, but he's no longer able to write and communicate anything that doesn't sound just like...

batshit crazy, right?

Like, and we'll get to that.

So he's around for it, but part of his mystique clearly is that he's this figure i mean i i've never looked this up i don't know if this is true but i think his sister would usually put him behind a curtain and people would talk to him so he's like presented as a delphic oracle we should say for our

for our listeners who don't know this bit of nietzsche's biography he had a psychic break in turin in 1889 i want to say 1889 that's right and he was found weeping and clinging to a horse that's right like you do yeah as as one does it happens to the best of us But he never really recovered and was in this like quasi-catatonic state for the rest of his life.

Yeah.

Died in 1900.

So like he lived fairly long in that state.

So part of his initial, part of his initial mystique and popularity may in fact have been attributed to the fact that like, A, this is no longer a guy who's going to keep

talking and writing worse and worse books as a lot of intellectuals do as they age, right?

But he also has this sort of like, like a martyr's mystique almost like he's got this uh like legitimacy maybe even conferred by his madness this is a thinker who critiqued the very parameters by which philosophy is normally assessed reality he has championed ideas like untruth and illusion and madness right and and now here he is like actually breaking down mentally right A lot of people were like, well, it kind of feels like the logical next step, to be quite frank with you, right?

Like, it's like, you know, I'm sorry about the horse, but like, it feels like you're living your philosophy.

Like, for him to turn into like a boring college professor, like doing intro classes, like, would have been a huge letdown, right?

Like, in some way, this kind of bridge between philosophy and life was sort of cemented by the fact that he appeared to have sort of drawn an ultimate sort of consequence from what he had found in his own writings, right?

Like, people could sort of read it as like, well, it's of one piece with what he was preaching.

And that's something that it sounds like his sister was aware of and you know, leaning into at least a little bit.

You said she would like prop him up like a fortune teller in one of those machines at the fair.

Yeah, I mean, there was a Nietzsche archive, and I think the first two volumes of his biography were out by the time he was dead, right?

So, like the Nietzsche myth coexisted with the dude, right?

Like, I don't know if he like ever was asked about it and he was like, Hey, do you remember May 1883?

Were you ever in Frankfurt?

Like, I don't know if they did that, but like, like it's weird, right?

Like, that the first two volumes of your biography are out while you're like eating noodles next door right like it's it's kind of remarkable and the archive was already being compiled and people sort of visiting it and like researching this man who is like in the same house it's it's it's kind of wild to think about before we get to his sister who is like super fascinating too, I do want to point out that like feminists were by and large anti-Nietzsche and we'll talk about that in a second, but above all, they were anti-the Nietzsche cult, right?

They were like, whatever, this guy is like sitting around in Weimar, what do we care?

But the fact that all the men in our lives think this is like the cat's meow really pisses us off.

And they thought that it was indicative of something, right?

They thought that there were a bunch of feminist writers being like, the fact that people love this guy so much is part of, back to our theme, a crisis of masculinity.

They're like, there's something wrong with our men that they like this stuff.

The same way that we think, like, why is someone an incel?

Like, if that's your paragraph of masculinity, something's gone horribly wrong.

And there were a lot of feminist thinkers being like, oh, gee, if that's, if you're part of that fan club, like there's something wrong, right?

And they thought of it as a backlash.

They thought that Nietzsche was, whether he had meant to or not, an avatar for this anti-feminism backlash, basically, in the 1890s.

And they thought that his anti-feminism was a source of his popularity.

Exactly.

Yeah, so I found this very interesting quote from an essay by a Austrian feminist with the amazing name Irma von Troll-Borostiani, which I think is awesome.

Her name is Troll.

And she wrote this in the German periodical Die Frau, which is sort of one of the great organs of the first wave in Germany.

It's called On the Precipice of the 20th Century.

And she's referring to a passage in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which we already talked about from 1883.

And the passage is probably the most infamous thing Nietzsche ever wrote about women.

So I do think we have to read it to people.

My apologies.

It's written, as I mentioned earlier, in this faux biblical style.

And the figure of Zarathustra has just encountered an old woman.

I'll read this.

The old woman says, And now, as a token of my gratitude, accept a little truth.

I'm old enough for it.

Bundle it up and keep its little mouth shut.

Otherwise, it will scream loudly this little truth.

And we should mention that, like, just in case this isn't gross enough, that the Wahid truth in German is a feminine noun, meaning the old lady in the original is saying you should keep, quote, her from screaming.

Great.

Ah, lovely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

give me woman your little truth Zarathustra says and thus said the old woman and thus said the old woman you go to women don't forget the whip

thus spoke Zarathustra so yeah you don't you go to women don't forget the whip

pretty pretty pretty hard to read that any other way but so here is Irma van troll Borostiani about this passage which I think is great she says I may be wrong but I have the suspicion that among the ingenious and grotesque earth-shatteringly sublime and baldly cynical profoundly sensitive and cruelly Nero-esque ideas which Friedrich Nietzsche packed into his mystical and profound philosophical poems, that not a single one of those ideas will ever attain the same popularity as this one dictum, which presents itself stark naked in its sheer brutality.

It gives expression to the innermost core of Nietzsche's master morality clearly and precisely and without any niceties, right?

So she's saying,

Yeah, there's a reason you guys all like this guy, and it's that you're misogynists.

I mean,

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

It's like your popularity is because you've adopted this simultaneity of positions where on the one hand, you can pretend to be, you know, destroying sacred cows and revealing hard truths and telling it how it is.

Yeah, and like offending liberal polites, right?

And on the other hand, you can affirm people's priors about this like intimate high-stakes hierarchy that all of them have an investment in yeah it's like a simultaneous you know affirmation of a you know hegemonic traditionalist position or traditional position at least very old position while at the same time sort of repackaging it as transgressive exactly there are definitely passages where we'll see exactly that and so did feminists back then and notice what troll borosiani is saying here right like she kind of praises some of his ideas right they're earth-shatteringly sublime or baldly cynical they're profoundly sensitive or totally cruel.

They're ingenious and grotesque, right?

She's like, I get it.

Like, some of this stuff is cool.

I think it's just weird, like,

you know, where he's one and where he's the other, right?

That's really astutely put.

So, maybe I'll briefly talk about his path into this work and into philosophy.

Importantly, he never really was a philosopher by either training or by profession.

He was born in Merseburg, which was then in Prussian Saxony.

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

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

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

So he grew up around a bunch of women and remarked on that.

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, you know, high school English teachers

in their lives at all.

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

There's like this sort of, you know, a foiling of optimism or of liberal optimism in his very early life.

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, 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, we're attacking sort of temporal authorities by critiquing religion, right?

This is where you get things like Stirner's The Ego and Its Own, where you get something like Bauer's The Life of Jesus, right?

Where it's like, I don't even think this guy existed, you guys, right?

Like, so this idea, this impulse, this critical impulse that basically says like, oh, these things that we were taught were sacred are actually bullshit.

Like, that was very strong in the generation right before him.

And he grapples with that.

He isn't ultimately that interested in, but that style definitely is something that he kind of likes, this kind of unmasking style.

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

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

What if this, right?

Like, what if this is really that?

Something that he's very, very, to him, is like the basic impulse of philosophy.

And that's very much sort of an 1848 kind of feeling.

So he grows up in the wake of this, absorbing.

this sort of skepticism that is inherent to the intellectual milieu of Germany in like sort of the the mid-19th century.

And then what happens?

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.

Wait, what?

I'm sorry.

You had to do a scar on his nose.

You had to do what to get into a fraternity?

Duel.

They don't just make you like drink beer or something.

Like you have to like fight somebody yes the butt chugging of the 19th century in germany were the so-called schmiss you had to basically

you had to get cut with i don't know what that is an epe or a rapier or something like that like with sabers at dawn basically that's so dorky that's like it's i mean be careful this still exists as you can imagine these groups are fash as hell and so uh well so the important thing here i think is that like you know he goes from this all-female environment to an all-male environment and seems to get along quite swimmingly there.

Although I should say he did quit, I believe, the fraternity very quickly.

He also quit the University of Bonn and he quit Protestant theology very quickly.

But like he tangles with the idea of like, hey, what if I only hang out with dudes for a while?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe dudes rock instead, you know.

Then he moves to Leipzig, so that's in East Germany, to study philology.

So classical philology, right?

Like just like the Greek classics.

He's basically a scholar of ancient Greek.

He's then drafted into the Prussian army in 1867, but got discharged a year later after falling off a horse.

I don't know if it's the same horse.

I don't think it's the same horse.

Different horse.

He blazed his glory.

It's probably a different horse.

This poor horse.

He's like not great to horses.

Yeah, poor guy.

Yeah.

Nietzsche and horses.

This sounds to me like a pretty conventional pathway for like a 19th century intellectual.

Yeah.

This is.

Yeah, absolutely.

A guy who's going to be a professor.

So like, how does he launch his actual career?

You're absolutely right.

Picking up on that, that conventionality there, there's a great book by the historian Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History, which is not about classical philologists, but about historians.

But it's the same thing kind of applies, where she kind of points out that, like, the habits of mind and the habits of research, that what they thought was real research, what was the job of a philologist or a historian, had all these gendered connotations that they never reflected on because it went back to like the fact that they all like, you know, had gone to these all-male boarding schools, that they like missed mommy.

There's all these interesting sort of psychological aspects there where Nietzsche, like she, I don't think she has Nietzsche in that book, but like basically he would fit right in.

But he's fairly unconventional in how he navigates this kind of career.

And he kind of, in a way that sort of points forward to the second half of the 19th century, where like everyone seems to do this stuff, like where no one sort of fits in anymore and everyone is just kind of like, kind of fucking up all the time, right?

So in the mid-1860s, he discovers the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer for himself.

I don't know if you've read much Schopenhauer, but you know, huge pessimist, subjective idealist, gigantic curmudgeon, basically, I don't know if Larry David was a philosopher, basically.

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

Also, in terms of, by the way, with Schopenhauer, huge misogynist, lesbian sister.

I report you decide.

His sister was like, was like, get the fuck out of my house, hold on.

I met a nice woman.

And he's like, you know who I I hate?

The ladies.

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

The other big encounter for him in the 1860s is the composer Richard Wagner, who some listeners may be familiar with.

He was a huge fan of Wagner for some time.

And they meet.

They meet, yeah.

Going back to 1848, they meet in Tripschen on Lake Lucerne because that's where Wagner is.

in exile.

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, relocated to Switzerland, which basically was non-extradition country or whatever, and set up there on the shores of Lake Lucerne.

The house is still there, and would eventually only leave when, in a development that gives you a good sense of how the radicals of 48 kind of aged poorly at times, like he only left Switzerland when the king of Bavaria was like, hey, the builder of Neusch Weinstein Castle, right?

It's like, hey, I want you to build me an opera house.

And he's like, cool.

Yeah, I'll do that.

Was I talking about cutting people's heads off

I will cash you a check Wagner very committed to his politics that's right that's right so Nietzsche makes he goes to Wagner he makes this like pilgrimage to Switzerland and meets him pilgrimage exactly Wagner was born in 1818 I want to say so quite a bit older than Nietzsche is just like excited about this young fan and the first books that Nietzsche writes are very much still under the influence of Wagner and then he makes a real turn and starts hating on Wagner we can talk about that a little bit too.

Basically, this is where sort of the unconventional Nietzsche really comes through.

In 1869, he takes a job at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

And as he leaves for Switzerland, he renounces his Prussian citizenship and is basically stateless from there on out.

Which, like, I don't know how common that was in the 19th century.

Why does he do that?

I don't know, but it's kind of remarkable, right?

Like, there's a real individualist streak to this guy.

In the 1870s, he briefly serves as a medic during the Franco-Prussian War.

So, this is the war in which Prussia unites Germany under the banner of the German Empire, right?

The second German Empire.

And Nietzsche is like super unenthused about that.

And he's like, these people are idiots, like, this sucks.

We don't need an emperor, et cetera, et cetera.

And then in 1876, Wagner starts the Bayreuth Festival, right?

So the first time that his operas are going to be performed in the space that he envisioned for them, that he had built with King Ludwig's money in the town of Bayreuth.

And Nietzsche goes, and Nietzsche is like, this sucks.

He just completely hates it and

just really, really turns against his erstwhile idol.

So the important works from this time, from Nietzsche's life, are, I'm just going to name a couple, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, the essay on Truth and Lying in an Extra Moral Sense in 1873, The Untimely Meditations of 1876, Human, All Too Human, 1878, The Gay Science, 1882, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 83, Beyond Good and Evil in 86, On the Genealogy of Morals in 87, The Case of Wagner in 88, Twilight of the Idols, 88, and The Antichrist in 88.

So you can already tell, like, he quits the university basically.

There's no tenure in Friedrich Nietzsche's future, because like, these are not the kinds of books you're supposed to be writing at this time, right?

Like, these are meant to be read by people who are not.

professional philosophers, right?

These are the titles are great.

Subtitles are even better.

Like I already mentioned, like how to philosophize with a hammer.

That's just a killer subtitle.

I mean, like, and so from the beginning like his own colleagues are like this guy's nuts and more and more artists and musicians and poets kind of discover uh this thought for themselves it's also he's writing so prolifically this is all this is what like so many books in just like a 15 16 year period he's just churning them out yeah some of it is repetition but not much i mean part of it is that he doesn't bother to cite anyone and it's in this kind of like essayistic aphoristic style sometimes in this kind of almost pseudo-biblical style but it's it's true like he he's able to really sort of he's on a tear there and part of the reception of this Eeuvre once he has this breakdown in 1989 is German feminism right so there are German feminists reading this we have anecdotal evidence of Nietzsche reading groups organized by women I found out in an article that I was something I didn't know that there was this phenomenon of women wearing bobs who were called Nichiana, so female Nicheans, right?

So, there were a lot of people in the mainstream women's movement who were like, this guy is a false friend and you should not be reading him, probably.

Or there's other things you can do with your time.

But even they kind of spoke of this sort of hypnotic spell that he was putting on women, right?

One article in the same journal I was quoting from earlier called him a pied piper of Hamelin, right?

So, like, he's seducing people with these

cool-sounding, pseudo-intellectual, or like seemingly deep philosophizing, this is not actually a good idea to follow him down out of Hamelin.

We all know what happens to the children that follow the Pied Piper.

You know, I can see a rationale for this.

If you are, you know, in 19th-century terms, a newly liberated woman, you're going in public, you're wearing your bob, it probably has a lot of appeal to be, you know, cynically or skeptically critiquing all of these, you know, received notions that are among the ones that kept you repressed in the home, like excluded from public life, right?

And

that is potentially particularly appealing posture for like sort of emerging woman intellectual, even

in spite of it, including his anti-feminism, which as we know can also be very appealing to women.

Yeah, there is that.

There are women anti-feminists who quote Nietzsche too, but I think you're exactly right that like there were plenty of feminists thinking, especially socialist feminists, right, who were like, look, I don't care about this stupid whip thing but like he's mostly saying that a bunch of our social conventions are outmoded and

like i don't see how i have much to lose from more people being convinced of this right like right sure right like that's that's fine i'm not hot on tradition either so yeah like like i'm i'm i'm fine with that i mean we should do a whole episode on feminists and nietzsche if at some point if we want to or early early feminism and these kind of thinkers in general.

But here's a little sample from Hidwig Dom's book, The Anti-Feminists from 1902.

dom's dates are 1833 to 1919 so she's a little bit older than nietzsche himself so she first quotes nietzsche always have to quote nietzsche because he's actually quite quotable man creates an image of woman and the woman creates herself in its image which like by the way that is almost a feminist point like you can tell by dome's like oh okay

Yeah, that could be Simone de Beauvoir.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's like really like, yeah, this is like an androcentic fantasy that then real women are supposed to accommodate themselves to.

Like, thanks, Friedrich.

That's That's not half bad, right?

But that's not quite what he means by it.

But still, Dom's commentary on this.

How?

According to Nietzsche's characterization, woman should naturally be made according to God's design, full of lies and deceit, enemy of the truth, full of sly accommodation, like a wild animal.

Can anyone imagine a stronger argument for the modern women's movement than this opinion of Nietzsche's?

We'll get back to what she's arguing here at the end of the episode, I think.

But her main point is, and I want to flag that for folks, that she's pointing to this weird status of nature in Nietzsche's thought.

Is nature the thing that we're striving for, naturalness, or is it something we're trying to get away from?

Is natural good or bad?

Is it evidence of a well-ordered cosmos worthy of affirmation?

Or is it basically a sign that shit is really fucked up?

Right.

And is it set in stone or is it capable of transcendence, basically?

Yeah, this is like incredibly common on the right, this kind of contradiction about what nature is, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

We talked about this, I think, before we started recording.

Like, this is Jordan Peterson's posture, right?

Nature is both this

feminizing, chaotic force that needs to be subdued with like masculinist human logical order.

And also

it is this immutable force that is, you know, something more legitimate and more true about ourselves and our like civilized illusions that we need to submit to and particularly needs to submit to in the form of a gendered hierarchy in which men exert like private and social control over women.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And so I think, I, again, think Dome absolutely has his number on this.

I think the how is like the, it's like perfect.

He's like, I'm sorry.

Like, how?

It's gotta be one of these two.

It's gotta be one of these two things, but I don't see how it could be both, right?

Yeah, you can't have it both ways, buddy.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So I mentioned that, like, you know, basically he's, he's interacting with the women's movement, but he's also like, he's got all these really kind of powerful women in his life.

And I think that's, that's something we should also briefly talk about.

One of his first sponsors is this woman, Marvida von Meisenburg, who's fantastic, who's this philosophically really interested and very involved with Hegelianism.

She's kind of interested in socialism, part of the 1848 revolution as well.

She's also a little bit older.

She's sort of, I think she's almost exactly Wagner's contemporary.

She's maybe like one or two years older than him.

He was also friends with Cosima Wagner.

So that's the second wife.

of Richard.

Wagner.

Unfortunately, kind of a horrible person, one should say.

The Wagner clan, for those, I don't know how much you know about Wagner, but like imagine, I don't want to speak ill of the Adams family.

They're basically the Adams family, but evil.

Like they're a bunch of freaks, and they also turn out to be all kind of proto-Nazis, right?

So they're just like, they're anti-Semitic as shit.

Like some of this obviously gets worse with time as like actual Nazis enter the picture, but like they're letters ain't great.

Like it's not, it's not fantastic.

So Wagner's daughter, close friend of Nietzsche, not a great, not a great brad.

Yeah, Wagner's wife.

Oh, Wagner's wife.

I'm sorry, daughter of Franz Liszt.

The daughter of Franz Liszt, yeah, the famous pianist and composer.

But he has better friends.

Like he's friends with Lou Andreas Zalome, a much younger contemporary, 1861 to 37, right?

Brilliant writer, essayist, and friend of Rana Maria Rilke, and became a psychoanalyst later in life, big friend of Freud.

And he kind of interacts with this philosopher that I've written about recently, Helene von Bruskowitz.

Her dates are 1856 to 1918, who basically like wanted to be the female Nietzsche and took his books to the cleaner in her own books.

She's phenomenal.

It is quite possible that like a lot of his diatribes of women thinkers are just like that he's mad at Druskovic because she like, you know, published something about like this guy sucks.

She embarrassed him in print.

And so

he did the mature thing and went on a 500 tweet storm.

Yeah.

And other fun fact about Druskovic, also a long-term partner with a soprano, with a female opera singer for quite a long time wrote a final book which i is the one i wrote about basically about how masculinity is a virus and the only way to get rid of it was maybe discontinuing the human species so she like she literally did scum manifesto like 60 years before valerie solanas yeah i was gonna say a proto-solanis in germany she's austrian but she's she's terrific she's coupled up with her soprano okay she's yeah yeah she's she's she's amazing and so that's the thing right like so he's he's in dialogue with women who kind of have his number and kind of push back.

And I think that shows in these works too.

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

Here, a passage about his mother and his sister from the book Eche Homo.

Reference to Jesus, by the way, because he's a humble guy.

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

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

That sounds to me like diary rantings of a 13-year-old who's been told to clean up his room.

Mom is being a total beacon.

To be fair, Elisabeth Firsta Nietzsche, his sister, is indeed kind of a demon girl boss, I'm sorry to say.

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.

This is 1880s Germany.

Like, think of how anti-Semitic you have to be for them to be like, Bernard, Bernard, kiddo, you got to go.

This is too much.

Cool it with the anti-Semitism.

That is far more than the acceptable amount of anti-Semitism in 1880s Germany.

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

Another pioneer in the

20th century trends in the 19th century German-speaking world.

Yeah, we got Scum Manifesto.

We got a German anti-Semite moving to South America.

We've got all of it.

That's right.

Before it was cool.

Before the rat line, yeah.

Yeah.

And the colony turned out to be A, a shit show in that like no one was like vaccinated against anything.

And B, probably a financial scam.

And once this sort of was figured out by the press, Fresser killed himself.

So, and at the same time, Felix Nietzsche had his breakdown in Turin.

And so Elisabeth came back

to Germany and cared for her her brother full-time and became sort of his executor, right?

Wrote the biography and then sort of assembled his sort of posthumous works.

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?

And so Elisabeth Ferster Nietzsche is very clearly like a proto-Nazi.

It's just like, there's no way around that, right?

She like, like, if you're founding an Aryan colony in Paraguay, like a certain Rubicon of anti-Semitism has been crossed, even in 1880s Germany.

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.

He's like this nationalist sage for them, right?

And so she's a big reason why he basically is so indelibly...

entwined with the thinking of the Nazis and with Hitler.

That being said, right, as any time on this pod when a woman appears to be at fault for a dude's bad reputation, it's worth taking a step back and sort of thinking, huh?

Also super convenient after 1945 that you can blame Elisabeth Fersta Nietzsche for every horrible thing that her brother had become associated with, right?

Nietzsche did say and write many, if not all, those things.

He did defend slavery.

He did seem eugenics curious, et cetera, et cetera.

It's just that he also hated anti-Semitism.

He also thought that German nationalism was dumb, right?

You hated Germany as a country, etc., etc.

So, again, it's like the selection thing, right?

Elizabeth had not really distorted her brother, as far as I can tell.

She had just sort of curbed his toxicity artificially in certain arenas.

She'd 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.

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?

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

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 other, about like 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?

Like, you should read it, but like, obviously don't don't take that seriously, right?

Like, there are people who read Hegel and Kant that way and are like, look, I'm not defending this, but like, I think the stuff about morals is pretty good, right?

You can disagree or agree with that, doesn't matter, but like, you know, that's definitely available for Nietzsche and there are people doing that.

He's definitely making it harder than some of these other people.

It's just, you know, he is just kind of a troll.

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

Like

a lot of the people sort of championing Nietzsche after 45 and especially after 68, 1945 and 1968 are leftists, right?

And they're like, yeah, I'm not endorsing half of this.

Most of them are Jews, right?

They're like,

I don't love what he's saying about me, but like, I still think that essay is pretty good.

You know, that could have happened a lot earlier.

But on the other hand, like, no, that stuff's there.

I think it's very hard to get around that.

And the only reason why I think we get around that when it comes to sexism is that it's so priced in right again that like you can find that for any philosopher that he said terrible male philosopher, that he said terrible things about women.

And so people are like, well, yada, yada, yada.

For a number of women.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, I guess that's true.

But it's true that like what, you know, the two women we've already quoted sort of point to, they're like, it feels more central than that.

You know, it's not an aside.

It's not a footnote.

It feels like he's really mad at us.

And,

you know, he's like, how dare you speak up in public?

What is that?

A book review of me?

Right.

Like,

this feels more than that.

And I think they're right I think I think it's possible to read around it but it takes a little bit more than you know the sexism in Immanuel Kant who is like famously most likely never

had never interacted with a woman in a sexual manner judging from his descriptions we're like oh Emmanuel Emmanuel that's that's not how half of this works and so nietzsche is nietzsche is quite quite different there maybe i'll dive in and like you know just lay it on you like some some nietzsche on ladies yeah tell me about the king on on gender.

How did he approach it?

Yeah, so like, yeah, or as I like to call it, the metaphysics of yikes.

Here's a passage.

I'll pick a couple.

I mean, there's too much to choose from, but this is from Beyond Good and Evil, part of an entire book of that, of that volume, book seven, I believe, that's basically about the 19th century as a period of decline.

And he's especially sort of going after socialism and feminism.

Here is Nietzsche.

I'm not saying this.

Nietzsche is saying this.

But it'll be very clear.

Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to enlighten men about woman as she is.

This is one of the worst developments of the general uglifying of Europe.

For what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificness and self-exposure bring to light?

Woman has so much cause for shame.

In women there is so much concealed pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion.

Study only women's behavior towards children, which has really been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear of man.

Fun.

Yeah, I like the fact that like it doesn't go like, yeah, mom, right?

It's like, still the only one who wants to behave towards children.

It's like, Friedrich, we get it.

Like, yeah, like, was she, was she

inherited?

Is that what's happening?

Well, you know, he does a few things here.

He like collapses like gender hierarchy into beauty.

Yeah.

And feminism is specifically positioned as opposed to beauty, which is like, you know, the same idea that Under Gerd's when, you know, Tucker Carlson freaks out about the green MM wearing sneakers instead of heels.

And he's like, this, this, you know, cartoon corporate mascot is not fuckable enough.

But, you know, like contemporary conservatives attribute this uglifying force.

to feminism, but he collapses feminism with all women in general.

He doesn't seem to like hold out hope for a redeemable, virtuous kind of womanhood.

Yeah.

He like

ascribes these failures to all women.

Well, that's true.

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

Why he's smarter than Tucker Carlson.

He's a little more honest.

Exactly, because what he's saying here, he's saying women are naturally not like this, right?

But they have the good sense to pretend.

Who the fuck would want to know what they're really like, right?

That's his idea.

Like, the sexes need to lie to each other because otherwise they will never be able to have sex sex with each other and have children.

Well, he's not,

he's not saying that.

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

He says that they're being restrained by the threat of sex violence.

I think that's different.

And that's much more of a justification for a violent enforcement of gender hierarchy.

That's like a like, this is why you have to beat your wife argument.

And I think, you know, we're back to the whip implicitly.

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

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

Like, he does think that like violence is part of the sexual relationship in a way that like, like, obviously you're right.

Like, this is barbative.

On the other hand, it's also interesting that, like, I think I can see why certain early feminists saw something to like here, because they're like, We get all these philosophical theories of marriage that never talk about the fact that women are physically afraid of their husbands, right?

And he's like, yeah, that's the principle of the thing.

And they're like, thank you.

Like, that's

important.

Yeah.

There is a kind of recurring theme in a lot of my own approaches to like conservative thought about gender, you know, from like a radical feminist perspective, is that the diagnoses of the feminists and the conservatives are the same.

They describe the same.

Yeah, they describe the same state of affairs.

They're like, yeah, there's pervasive violence.

This gender is a hierarchy

and it is enforced strictly and brutally.

And the difference actually is that conservatives think that's good and the radical feminists are like this is wrong and has to be demolished.

And the conservatives say this is essential to our way of life and has to be maintained.

Yeah.

And I think he sort of falls in the middle.

He would just say it's just the truth.

right he would just say that's just what the facts are and it's neither worthy of affirmation nor of hiding behind anything right?

He hates basically the mystification of sexuality, right?

He thinks the relationship of men and women is about power and about domination.

And he thinks, I think, that women ought to resent the hell out of that.

But he especially hates the stories we tell ourselves to hide from that fact, right?

So he's both a huge anti-feminist and this kind of obsessive debunker of like the stories men tell themselves, right?

Like about like, well, not our relationship.

He's like, nope, yours too.

Right?

He says, this is another from Beyond Good and Evil.

To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of man and woman, to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligation, that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness.

This, by the way, very close to Peterson, who also doesn't even attack feminism on its own terms, but sees it as a sign of a broader problem.

And Nietzsche is the same thing, right?

He doesn't think that feminists are doing this.

He thinks feminists are a symptom of something bigger.

Right, because women don't have their own ideas or agencies.

They are tools of these larger forces.

Exactly.

Exactly.

We'll see exactly how he thinks that works.

Maybe we'll leave it there.

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.

Oh my God, really?

And on this kind of, yeah, and on the kind of naturalizing immoralism that he has, right?

It's pure pickup artist shit, right?

I mean, like, we haven't even mentioned those guys yet, but like, this is, this feels like, like, pickup artist shit.

And that's definitely in here, but it is, I think, more complicated than that.

And that's what those feminist thinkers that we've already talked about and that what queer thinkers kind of picked up on right away, right?

That like there is something here that pulls a kind of veneer of tradition off of these relationships and makes a very feminist point.

These are above all power relationships.

And therefore, like Nietzsche thinks that that doesn't make them susceptible to critique.

But like everyone on the feminist left who read him was like, yeah, I mean, like, obviously, like, this is where our critique can start, right?

Like, the idea that our ideas of sexual morality are basically these agreed-upon fictions that are just used to like keep people in their place like was something that like especially early queer activists, I could really, or like lesbian and gay activists could draw on and be like, yeah, that sounds right to me.

I think you just all decided that I'm sick and I feel no such thing, right?

And Nietzsche gives me vocabulary for saying exactly that.

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

Exactly, exactly, right?

Like Foucault is this idea of a genealogy, it comes through straight in Foucault's theory of sexuality, exactly.

At the same time, I think it is important to note, and I think you've already mentioned this several times, and so have first wave feminist thinkers that I've been quoting.

Nietzsche is great at these gestures where it seems like he's slaughtering a holy cow, right?

Like everyone thought this, but here is Nietzsche to tell you it's bullshit, right?

Right.

This is this philosophizing with a hammer, which to be fair, some of Nietzsche is quite counterintuitive and unconventional, almost to a fault.

And sometimes his thinking about sex and gender can be that.

But it's important to note that when he's describing women, you know, in the middle of all this almost compulsive edgelordism, his idea of what women are like is actually insanely conventional, right?

He's like, women are like birds, they're like plants, they're like flowers, they're like trees, they only know emotions, they have no will or too much will, right?

It's so fucking garden variety, like misogyny in the middle of all this stuff that can feel like, whoa, whoa, I can imagine that no one's actually ever said that before.

Yeah, it's not very inventive as misogyny.

You're pointing out it like relies on a lot of

sort of tigered metaphors, you know, received like

slanders of their moral character.

You know, it's just, it's, it's not even inventive on women-hating terms.

Yeah.

Just to give an example, this is from Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution.

It is called pregnancy.

It's like,

this is like the oldest fucking shit in the book.

This is so tired.

It's a funny line, I guess, right?

This is again like Nietzsche the Edge Lord, right?

Like, but, and I think this is an important part of his legacy in its own right.

He perfected this pose of dissidence while reinforcing these massively tired tropes, right?

In his followers, this goes one of two ways, right?

Either they go with the unconventional stuff and like just chuck the convention and like, whatever, he's just dumb here.

I don't care, right?

And they use Nietzsche to argue for like gay rights, against the patriarchy, nudism, veganism, et cetera, et cetera.

Or they regurgitate the most tired, like stale tropes about gender and sexuality and claim that they're positioning it against, you know, the well-meaning, the bienpensant, the politically correct, the shit libs or whatever, right?

And like, this is such a, right, this is the politically incorrect position of today, where it's like, I shoot from the hip and I'm an unconventional thinker.

What are your unconventional thoughts?

Oh, it's that women should be in the home and like, you know, that, like, right.

And it's like, great.

So it's basically 30,000 years of tradition.

That's your, that's your unconventional thought is convention, right?

Like, and Nietzsche has like, is like, has been, unfortunately, a great teacher for how to make yourself believe that shit.

That like, oh, I'm being so, I'm, you know, I'm being so contrarian.

It's like, what's your contrarian take?

Basically, the existing power structure, it's bad.

I am brave and unconventional enough to regurgitate the opinions of

like, you know, my uncle whose kids don't talk to him anymore and cash peters health check.

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?

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, he also has this kind of like narcissistic

tendency to frame convention as transgressive.

And this is like, you know, this is the

intellectual shield that I see a lot of right-wing misogyny taking now is

positioning feminism as somehow powerful and hegemonic and like overstating its conventional acceptance and taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people will sort of like profess feminist principles as like a right-thinking stance while not,

you know, quite believing them or certainly not acting upon them.

This is like, you know, the Ashton Kutcher problem.

Yeah.

And, you know, this is a liberal hypocrisy that conservatives like to take advantage of, right?

Like they know that their actual positions hold power over real people's lives, but a lot of those people in positions of sort of like, you know, elite comfort or

soft power do like to profess feminism, even if they don't live it.

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

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

Exactly.

Even though he's doing it at a time when the feminist movement is extremely marginal, and that's the interesting thing, right?

Like these, this pose is kind of context independent.

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, you know, hide your kids.

There's a problem of proportionality in anti-feminism.

And anti-feminists always accuse feminists of being disproportionate, right?

Like, and not of

understanding their objections in a 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.

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.

It's exactly how it's become this codified way of interacting with

the mainstream.

And I love the way you're pointing that out, kind of pretending that it's new, pretending that like, oh, now we have these like internet trolls and like we've never had anything like that before.

It's like, yeah, no, we have.

It's a very tired position that you can step into.

And like, it's been available for quite some time.

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

All right.

So I guess we'll dig in a little deeper next time, but thank you for listening to us.

We've been In Bed with the Right.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfis.