NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900), German philosopher.

With his declaration that "God is dead" and his ideal of the superman, which in the 1930s dominated Nazi thought in Germany but also flew into the United States as the comic-strip figure "Man of Steel," Friedrich Nietzsche is probably the most recognizable modern philosopher. He celebrated the intoxicating "Dionysian" side of life expressed in myth, dance, and music; wandered the Swiss Alps; wrote compulsively in dingy hotel rooms; and finally, in 1889, went incurably mad at the age of forty-four at the sight of a man beating a horse on the streets of Turin, Italy. He had little intellectual influence in his lifetime: his "drama was played to a finish before empty seats," wrote the critic Stefan Zweig (p. 445). Yet after his death in 1900, Nietzsche emerged as one of the most influential philosophers in Europe, his thought deeply entwined in the political projects and intellectual debates of the twentieth century.

Readers took up Nietzsche's books because they were so unfamiliar and so wicked—one Swiss critic suggested placing the warning "Danger: dynamite" on Nietzsche's work. In his fragmentary pieces, Nietzsche blasted apart the conventions that regulated social interaction and mocked the public responsibilities of government. He wrote about gods with a passion his secular age found obsolescent. At a time when the certainty that the sciences would come to know the world went virtually unquestioned, Nietzsche held all systematic knowledge to be metaphorical, thus erroneous, and ultimately a matter of fancy. If the great nineteenth-century thinkers Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud proposed valid laws drawn from the observation of the natural world to apply to human behavior, Nietzsche imagined new worlds of the mind that might still be inhabited. He conjured up an alter-ego Zarathustra who came down from the mountains to invite people to explore endless horizons and roilsome seas. No other major philosopher wrote like this and no other was so at odds with his time. While most nineteenth-century Europeans believed themselves to be at the pinnacle of progress, Nietzsche saw a dead-end.

Nietzsche repudiated the fundamental premises of liberalism and democracy, which sought to create more fair and equal forms of collective life. He thought that European societies had turned into sick rooms, good for caring for the weak but unable to live adventurously. The nineteenth century was particularly odious to him because its inhabitants had come to believe they lived in the very best, most comfortable, and most advanced period imaginable. Nietzsche loathed the puny ambition of modern politics that was to make people even more cozy. This ferocious attack on the present condition appealed to revolutionaries. However it was not socialists who picked up Nietzsche, but dissidents of a different kind who proliferated in the unsettled decades around 1900: conservatives who rejected democracy's enfranchisement of the masses, aristocrats who despised liberalism's reforming spirit, and nationalists, who envisioned a more heroic collective history. Nietzsche's most notorious political heirs were the Nazis, who in the 1930s frequently quoted Nietzsche (with the blessing of his sister, Elizabeth Förester-Nietzsche, the keeper of Nietzsche's papers) as they constructed the Third Reich and its hierarchies of racial superiors and racial inferiors. Nietzsche remains tainted with their violence and pitilessness.

What made Nietzsche so compelling was not simply his criticism of Western civilization but also his conviction that human beings could recover what made them human if they acknowledged their ability to remake themselves. He saw people as potential masters and lamented that they remained slaves. Nietzsche's most lasting influence was on those individuals who were willing to question received wisdom. In the fin-de-siècle period, he was avidly taken up by proponents of new lifestyles: anarchists, feminists, and atheists, the prophets of religious cults and the enthusiasts of physical culture, and most of all young people anxious to find a distinctive and vital voice for their generation. For the nineteenth century, which prized maturity rather than youth, foundations over questions, Nietzsche was particularly explosive, but his thought has beckoned all those on a journey. No other philosopher can claim such a wide readership.

"god is dead"

At the center of Nietzsche's thought is his audacious statement "God is dead." Throughout his writings, he returned repeatedly to the theme that Christianity had corrupted human beings. For the last two thousand years, he argued, Western civilization had been humiliated by a God who had made sinners out of mortals. The only way for human beings to recover their full potential was to reject God and the stifling moralities imposed in his name. These ideas were very offensive to many readers. But they are the key to Nietzsche's philosophy because Nietzsche believed that it was humans who created moral systems, who invented supernatural powers and deities, and who therefore could get rid of God as easily as they had made him up. This conviction led Nietzsche to an even more radical proposition, which was that concepts and beliefs were simply imaginative descriptions of the world. There was no real world beyond our creative rendering of it. Nietzsche believed this insight to be extraordinarily liberating because it meant that humanity was not headed toward one single authoritative or true comprehension of reality but could endlessly conjure up different places. And just as it had fashioned Christianity in one audacious step two thousand years ago, it could invent something else with another step. What Nietzsche called his perspectivism basically corresponds to the relativism of postmodernism in the early twenty-first century, which also puts forward the idea that interactions with the world depend on descriptions of it. Twentieth-century philosophy is very much the product of and a response to Nietzsche's radical perspectivism and his defiant immoralism. His contention that there is no world outside the interpretations of the world continues to attract, astonish, and anger readers.

Nietzsche also enticed readers because he wrote in an utterly new way. He used words in order to jolt readers, to dynamite them out of their preconceptions. Precisely because Nietzsche believed that language was composed of common expressions that inhibited creative thought, he experimented with different and shocking ways of saying things. His hyperbole, in which people kill God, supermen are cruel, truth is error—all this is designed to shake assumptions loose from his readers; he claims to be "writing in blood" (quoted in Solomon, p. 24). Moreover, his images and metaphors restlessly change. Sometimes Nietzsche prefers to think with mountains, altitudes, and stairs; elsewhere he is in the desert with camels or dancing around statues. Among his favorite images are eyes, which blink or remain awake, and see and resee the world anew.

This emphasis on eyes is much in keeping with Nietzsche's belief that human beings can only interact with the world they have interpreted and that they move on to new experiences by redescribing the world. His poetic and figurative uses of language all signal the fabricated, changeable, and fundamentally unstable nature of meanings.

The declaration that "God is dead" is a useful entryway into Nietzsche's ideas. It introduces his condemnation of Christian morality and the modern age, his perspectival theory of knowledge, and his quest for new mythical ways of living. It also recalls Nietzsche's personal background: Nietzsche's father and maternal grandfather were German pastors in the Kingdom of Saxony and Nietzsche very much remained a preacher's son. He impresses readers as a consequential thinker, one who put great stock in his own interpretation of texts and was highly suspicious of received wisdom and traditional authority, as Luther had been of Rome. He shared with his fellow Protestants the "extravagant belief in one's ability," and also the terror of doubt and skepticism (Aschheim, p. 22).

Born in the small town of Röcken, Saxony, in 1844, Friedrich Nietzsche acquired his atheism early, while still in high school. A brilliant, if unorthodox student of Greek philology at the university in Leipzig, Nietzsche won a university post in Basel, Switzerland, at the startlingly young age of twenty-five. The conformist atmosphere of the university left him unhappy, however, and soon enough Nietzsche abandoned his professorship, set off on his journeys, and wrote with difficulty but without rest the ten or so books that make up his work before his mental collapse early in 1889 and his death in 1900. The role of the gods is a central motif in each of Nietzsche's books, from The Birth of Tragedy (1872), to the highly personal Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), his most well-known text, through the powerful syntheses, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and finally to his last autobiographical fragments in Ecce Homo (1889); his announcement of the death of God was first detonated in The Gay Science, published in 1882.

What does it mean for Nietzsche to say "God is dead"? The proposition is introduced in the parable "The madman" in The Gay Science and it surprises readers because it is different from the more familiar insistence "There is no God." "God is dead" implies that God was once alive. Moreover, the madmen goes on to explain the death of God: "we have killed him—you and I" (sec. 125). What is important for Nietzsche is not to debate whether there is or is not a God, but for people to see themselves as the murderers of God. Nietzsche wants to expose the murderers, not the victim; the momentous act of killing, not the mute result of a dead God. He wants the people to see themselves as murderers because that would enable them to see themselves as a people who can make and destroy God and thus a people who are strong and creative and have taken control of every aspect of their lives.

Nietzsche has nothing but scorn for those atheists who took the death of God to be an unveiling of the "real" material world and thus lived on as if God had never existed. Rather, Nietzsche wants to shake contemporaries so that they see themselves as people who are able to create gods and thus are strong enough to be fully human by giving form and meaning to the world. For Nietzsche, the truthfulness of truth is not important; the audacity to make truthlike statements and live by them is. What Nietzsche often refers to as the "decadence" of his age is knowing about the death of God without knowing oneself to be the murderer of God and the creator of all concepts and ideas about the world.

Given that the God who is now dead was once alive, Nietzsche attempts to reconstruct the history of God. He does this by means of a genealogical method that looks at the historical origins of belief. There is no otherworldly or metaphysical realm. "God is dead" thus leads Nietzsche to a dramatic theory of knowledge, which can be briefly described as perspectivism. Perspectivism does not make claims about truth; it exposes new and richer ways of thinking about the world based on looking at things in a different way. In Nietzsche's view, what separates humans from other animals is collective life in a society in which members must communicate in order to survive. In order to express themselves, humans developed common languages, and these languages in turn provided humans with the tools by which they could explore and know themselves. Without language there is no knowledge, and as a result, men and women only knew themselves through the words and concepts with which they named their feelings and described the world around them.

Across time and space, each group constituted its own language and its own myths. Each was a self-contained universe. There is no common or real world "out there" because there is always the irreducible presence of different cultures and languages that enable unique interpretations. According to Nietzsche, everything humans experience is comprehended and passed on in terms of the distinct vocabularies that the groups they belong to have fashioned. "What, then, is truth?" Nietzsche asks: "A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthromorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically" (quoted in Allison, p. 78). What this means is that there is no world aside from interpretations of it—"as though there would be a world left over once we subtracted the perspectival!" (quoted in Danto, p. 76).

systems of morality

Nietzsche is dazzled by these audacious acts of creation. The infinite capacity for creativity is what makes human beings fully human. However, Nietzsche does not just want to propose an anthropological theory of knowledge; he wants to criticize the need for certainty which kept individuals in his own time from exploring new ways of thinking about the world, and he especially wants to attack Christian morality. To do this, Nietzsche distinguishes between two systems of morality, one characterized by the distinction between good and bad, which Nietzsche identifies with the Greeks and other ancient cultures, and the other characterized by the distinction between good and evil, for which western Christianity and nineteenth-century Europe are the primary examples. That the second system succeeded the first is an extraordinary example of creative transformation, something Nietzsche cherishes in a formal way. But this particular succession Nietzsche never ceases to condemn as a crime against the potentialities of men and women because it has produced the "slave morality" of the West.

In the ancient morality of good and bad what is good is what distinguishes humans from other animals: their ability to name the universe and their desire to play in the world they have created. Anything that expands the powers of men and women to feel masterful is good. By contrast, what is bad are those things that keep people from creating and re-creating the sense of mastery, everything that is ordinary, satisfied, and comfortable. What this distinction implies is that good and bad are not judgments on the intentions of protagonists but judgments on how well the actions of protagonists have enhanced what it might mean to be human.

It is ancient Greece that for Nietzsche best expresses the enhancement of life. The Greek city-states and particularly Athens had long been cherished by Europeans as the cradle of Western civilization, but Nietzsche loves them differently. He reveres exactly what distinguished Greece from the overarching authority of Christianity that followed: the sheer variety of Greek culture; the scale of emotional registers in Greek comedy and tragedy, and the polytheistic, many-sided relations the Greeks maintained with their gods. By inventing many gods, some who celebrated exuberant passion such as Dionysius and others who honored self-discipline such as Apollo, the Greeks developed "a plurality of norms." Polytheism invited experimentation by encouraging "the free-spiriting and manyspiriting of man" and by providing examples of "the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes—and ever again new eyes that are even more our own" (Nietzsche, Gay Science, sec. 143). This wonderful sentence is a clear statement of what makes people distinctively human: the will to see things from fresh perspectives. Greek culture facilitated this; Christianity did not.

If the morality of good and bad cherishes mastery and experimentation, the morality of good and evil emphasizes virtue and charity. A fascinating parable in Thus Spoke Zarathustra gets to the heart of the matter. Zarathustra, the prophet through whom Nietzsche preferred to speak, strolled "over the great bridge" where at once "cripples and beggars surrounded him" (pp. 137–138). A hunchback offers Zarathustra the opportunity to "heal the blind and make the lame walk." But Zarathustra refuses to do so. He rejects pity because he believes that the victims have become what he calls "inverse cripples." Zarathustra explains, telling about his encounters with cripples who identifiy themselves completely with what they do not have. Rather than remain men, they have become the leg that they do not have, the eye that no longer sees, the belly that is not filled. Nietzsche is rather cruel (and funny) in the way he makes his point: "when I … crossed over this bridge for the first time I did not trust my eyes and looked again and again." What he saw was "an ear as big as a man." "The tremendous ear was attached to a small, thin stalk," legs, trunk, and arms. And "if one used a magnifying glass one could even recognize a tiny envious face." These are the horrible products of the morality of pity. Across the world, Zarathustra reports, he has walked "among men as among the fragments and limbs of men." For Nietzsche, the cripples and beggars who speak to Zarathustra only in terms of what they do not have are little more than the body pieces they lack. They see themselves only in the magnified reflection of their debility and they thus walk around the world as giant eyes or tremendous ears.

The transvaluation of good and bad into good and evil is accomplished when cripples and beggars see themselves as legs and bellies and convince society to make up the losses they have suffered. What Nietzsche describes in The Genealogy of Morals as the morality of the "sickroom" is fueled by the resentment of the have-nots and is designed to compensate them (third essay, sec. 14). It is important to remember that Nietzsche is not separating out the weak from the strong or the poor from the rich. Rather he is condemning the centrality that suffering plays in ideas about the meaning of life.

It was the early Christians who took the biggest step in codifying the morality of good and evil and speaking in the name of the victim. While Christians could not actually undo the misfortunes of life, they created a morality that valued the meek and powerless and demeaned the strong. By inventing the concept of sin, Christianity enabled the weak to take revenge on the strong, whose freely chosen lifestyle was now regarded as a contravention of God's will. Step by step, priests reined in the nobles with the convictions of sin, and the nobles in turn developed what Nietzsche calls a "bad conscience." Nietzsche provides striking images of the former master with a guilty conscience: "this deprived creature," "this animal that rubbed itself raw against the bars of its cage" (second essay, sec. 16). Christianity also extended the promise of a glorious afterlife to compensate for a lamentable this-worldly life. Henceforth, the promise of God's rewards justified the acceptance of God's punishments, with priests serving as accountants of God's moral balance sheets. A single, all-powerful God established a single moral law that was inscribed onto the tablets of monotheism.

The morality of good and evil was the singular achievement of the great monotheistic religions. Yet it is the very break that Christianity achieved, the world-historical difference it made, that actually gave Nietzsche confidence in his view of the world as a series of utterly innovative beginnings in which men and women create for themselves their "own new eyes." "From now on," he writes in the Genealogy of Morals, there can be no doubt, "man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus' 'great child,' be he called Zeus or chance." For all the pessimism with which Nietzsche regards Christianity, it is contained in a more sweeping optimism about the "great promise" of humankind (second essay, sec. 16). This is why Nietzsche wants people to see themselves as the murderers of God—so they will continue to play the game of dice.

Nietzsche is overwhelmed by the sheer staying power of Christian morality. He lauds the scientific spirit of Renaissance inquiry, if not the certainty it places in the answers it provides, and he grudgingly notes the value the Protestant Reformation placed in the individual interpretation of sacred texts, although not its insistence on humanity's sinfulness. But the big picture is the same: the slave morality of resentment remains pervasive in the present day, even as scientists and philosophers claim that they no longer believe in God. Even the Enlightenment is fundamentally misguided because it regards its insights into the natural world and human affairs as real knowledge not just different descriptions. Thus Nietzsche cannot accept the conceit of modernity, which is its certainty of its superiority over the cultures of the past and its cleverness in understanding nature. Precisely because modern Europeans are so sure that they are at the zenith of intellectual development they are completely unwilling to imagine themselves with "new eyes." This incomprehension of anything but what is constitutes modernity's biggest flaw. With this critique, Nietzsche stands out as one of the few thinkers of his age to think outside of the modernity ushered in by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the scientific and industrial revolutions.

superman

If most people blink, and accept the world around them, the true hero stays completely awake in order to gain new knowledge. This hero Nietzsche named the Übermensch, superman (or more accurately, but clumsily, overman). What is superman? For many of Nietzsche's twentieth-century readers, superman was a frightening figure, reminiscent of everything that is cruel and ruthless in life. But the superman is a deliberately hyperbolic designation conjured up by Nietzsche to push readers to ceaselessly examine the prescriptions of their lives. The most famous account of the superman comes in Nietzsche's work of prophecy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he published in 1883. Nietzsche chose the figure Zarathustra to be his "son" who would speak his philosophy from Zoroaster, the Persian prophet in the sixth century b.c.e. who first introduced the morality of good and evil. If Zoroaster created "this most calamitious error," it would be Nietzsche's Zarathustra who would undo it.

The superman is not so much strong as unblinking. Again and again, Nietzsche moves the the discussion away from strength toward sightfulness, as he had with the cripples and beggars at the great bridge. It is not a particular victor, or identity, or outcome that interests Nietzsche, but the willingness to move away from the triumph of the winners, from someone else's description of yourself, and away from the comforts of home. This spur to new knowledge is what characterizes the free spirits.

The first step is to assume the role of the annihilator who breaks old tablets. Nietzsche wants his readers to see the commandments of morality broken up on the ground. Do not "act 'for your neighbor"' Zarathustra urges. "Plug up your ears" when you hear moral authority demand that you do things "'for' and 'in order' and 'because"' (pp. 290–291). There is something quite belligerent about this uncompromising annihilator, but he is twinned with a more sympathetic figure who appears repeatedly in Zarathustra. This is the dancer who takes many steps, joyously, playfully. "Yes, I recognize Zarathustra.… Does he not walk like a dancer" (p. 11), which is to say he moves "crookedly," without purpose, and thereby evades custom and common sense. The dancer's opposite is the statue, "stiff, stupid, and stony," a "column" in the temple of moral authority (p. 294). What dancing represents for Nietzsche is the defiance of the "spirit of gravity" (p. 41), the effort to escape the frozen identities of statues. The dancer is a wonderful way to capture the unceasing, constantly turning quest for new knowledge and new ways of looking at things. The dancer is Nietzsche in his most congenial form and he is what most strongly appealed to readers in the two decades before World War I. He offered dissidents justification for alternative lifestyles and different readings of the world, and he encouraged individuals to make an endless journey of self-discovery.

Nietzsche also repeatedly introduces a third figure, the child. This is a very different image because the child does not acquire knowledge, but wakes up in a world that it sees for the first time. This fresh view is the naive belief in belief and facilitates the acquisition of new myths and new gods. For Nietzsche's readers this opened up a new realm of political and spiritual possibilities and for Nietzsche's reputation it opened a Pandora's box of troubles because it seemed he sanctioned myth-making effort of any kind.

In Zarathustra's speech "on the three metamorphoses of the spirit," the first two are pretty clear. First the camel, an animal well-adapted to take up the burdens of truth-seeking in the desert, and second the lion, whose strong spirit can oppose the "thou shalt" with "I will" and do battle with the "last god," the god of monotheism. But "to create new values—that even the lion cannot do," Nietzsche observes. The task of creation is left to the child, for "the child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning" (pp. 26–27). Unlike the camel and the lion, the child does not leave behind or fight what is old, but wakes up to a completely new reality without the memory of having abandoned an older version. With the metamorphoses into the child, the free spirit exists inside a new myth without the self-defeating knowledge that the universe is just something made up and thus still possesses the complete confidence of living vigorously.

Many late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century commentators are not impressed with the innocent child. The objection is that the child does not and cannot have the difficult genealogical knowledge of the origins of morality and of the fundamentally fictional nature of describing and redescribing the universe and is thus not a satisfying incarnation of Nietzsche's ideas. According to the American philosopher Richard Rorty, with the spirit's final metamorphoses, Nietzsche has "fobbed us off with the suggestion" that the child will "have all the advantages of thought with none of the disadvantages of speaking some particular language" (p. 112). Rorty repeatedly asserts that Nietzsche is good for individuals to think through in order "to make the best selves for ourselves we can" through the continual activity of redescription (p. 80), basically the business of the camel and the lion. But Nietzsche is not a useful guide to creating a good and just society, and Rorty has little patience with Nietzsche's invitation to construct new myths via the child's innocence because they undo all the genealogical work that Nietzsche has made such an effort to undertake. However, Nietzsche himself is very taken with the idea of creating new myths for society to live by and even of inventing new gods to inhabit those myths. He refers to "premature births of an as yet unproven future" (Gay Science, sec. 382) and to the "firstborn of the twentieth century" (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 214), images which suggest that Nietzsche is thinking in insistently social terms. Nietzsche's brilliant commentary, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," published in 1874, takes as its subject the collective health of society. In it Nietzsche repeatedly attacks the nineteenth century for lacking vitality. In his view, modern men and women were not capable of imagining a future fundamentally different from the present they inhabited. For a time, Nietzsche believed that Richard Wagner, who had created a grand cycle or ring of operas that featured medieval Germanic heroes, might be able to create a new, modern myth to live by. But if Nietzsche initally believed that Wagner's art represented "the path of a German paganism … a specifically un-Christian way of viewing the world" (Williamson, p. 274), Nietzsche's actual exposure to Wagner's artistic circle at Bayreuth in newly unified Germany in 1876 convinced him that Wagner and his supporters simply performed an exaggerated, self-satisfied Geman nationalism. Nietzsche eventually turned his attention to uncovering the genealogy of morals, underscoring the erroneous, tendentious, and even conformist aspect to all collective interpretations. In the end, Nietzsche pursued the principle of difference. Almost everything Nietzsche wrote in the 1880s was directed against the iteration of a particular identity and against the experience of a single authentic self. Nietzsche lauds the act of creation, but does so as the premise for further movement; he values differentiation, but in order to admit the foreign and strange.

reception

Nietzsche's general celebration of the world-making ability of cultures, his criticism of the spiritual emptiness of the contemporary world, and his initial exaltation of Wagner as a source of modern myth preoccupied the reception of Nietzsche's work in the two decades after World War I. It was not the unblinking individual, but the suffering collective that was the object of attention. Moreover, in Germany, Nietzsche's contempt for the idea of global humanity reinforced the tendency to see German history as a special path from the catastrophe of military defeat to the redemption of total victory. Enthralled readers in Germany itself and curious half-alarmed readers elsewhere in Europe consistently interpreted Nietzsche's myths as national myths. Not surprisingly, the Nazis appropriated Nietzsche and elevated Thus Spoke Zarathustra into a canonical "Aryan text." Given Nietzsche's outspoken attack on anti-Semitism and on essential or authentic identities, Nietzsche is misplaced as a Nazi prophet. Yet his insistence on the value of creating new rules to live by, his acceptance of violent political campaigns in the case of the ancient Greeks, and his general contempt for those who cast their lives in terms of their suffering suggest how it was possible for readers in the interwar period to Nazify Nietzsche.

The main thrust of Nietzsche's thought is not the urge to kill gods or even to invent them. His emphasis is on perspective, which is why he makes so much of the state of wakefulness, condemns the weak-willed who blink, and cherishes men and women who have created for themselves their own new eyes "and ever again new eyes." It is this Nietzsche who inspired existentialist thinkers in France and Germany beginning in the 1930s and 1940s and to whom contemporary philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty return again and again. His attention to both the contingency of knowledge and the possibility of new angles of perception remain highly pertinent topics in the debates about truth, ethics, and representation. Nietzsche remains so radical because he does not operate inside the dominant rational and scientific framework of the modern era, which holds that critical thought and scientific method are actually revealing the state of the world. Rather he ascertains that all cultures and all peoples live inside the languages and perspectives and myths they have fashioned and that these forms are both life-enhancing and life-denying and are both authoritative and breakable. Moreover, the search for "the" truth is misguided, and the expectation for complete clarity is impossible. Truth is not obtainable because meaning has to be produced by human beings in their own vocabularies and these meanings will be utterly different. That superman at one point speaks in a stammer poignantly indicates the sheer effort of the individual to say something new about the world: "Then speak and stammer, 'This is my good; this I love…. I do not want it as divine law; I do not want it as human statue"' (Zarathustra, p. 36). The stammerer is a fitting image with which to conclude this entry. It recalls Nietzsche's overriding interest not in defining the world in any particular way but in telling his readers that the world we know is encompassed by ordinary language; that it is a hard struggle to think in new ways because we speak in "old tongues"; and that any such struggle is intense and highly personal and difficult to translate. The stammerer displaces superman and his strength and restores to view the individual who struggles with new sounds and new possibilities.

See alsoFreud, Sigmund; Germany; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Marx, Karl; Schopenhauer, Arthur; Secularization.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, 1966.

——. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, 1974.

——. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, 1967.

——. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, 1966.

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Peter Fritzsche