Against Nietzsche

I must be direct: if you have any respect for Friedrich Nietzsche, you’ve fucked up. There are three options. The best is that you’re the victim of a con. The next best is that you’re at least a bit stupid. The worst is that you’re consciously a monster. There aren’t other options. I don’t base this on his obvious fascism but on the face-punching shallowness of his scholarship and his argumentation. The fact that he’s still taken seriously is an embarrassment for the discipline of philosophy. It’s also an indictment on the inert brains of conservatives and fascists, as you’d think given almost 100 years you could rally around someone whose brain wasn’t liquid from the second he got out of the womb.

What I am going to do is go through the first essay in On the Genealogy of Morals and no more because, very honestly, this is already a waste of my time. The first thing I will mention is that I can find absolutely zero evidence for his claim that ancient words meaning “bad” did not include the sense of “worth condemnation”. It seems that any word for “bad” could also have been used to mean what he would categorize as “evil”. To me, this feels obvious. Now, I could go through and support this claim but I won’t because here’s the thing: neither does he. And remember, my point is not “I know what these things actually are”, my point is “Nietzsche is not doing scholarship of any kind here, this is not serious philosophy, this is not an analysis of anything, this is just a political screed”.

Alright, let’s go.

Section 1: Not even worth responding to. He lays out the project and, moreover, lays out the vindictiveness which is the real driver of it. Extraordinarily narcissistic, disdainful to the point of revealing jealousy. I can’t imagine writing a piece that would make me look more pathetic than if I’d written this graph.

Section 2: He objects to the way that “the English psychologists” define good but doesn’t actually support this assertion. He didn’t need to make a factual historical argument, he could have made a mechanistic philosophical one: that is, he could have made a proposition, supported the proposition enough to make it plausible, then moved to the next proposition, continuing this until his theory is built out. The reason you would do this is that, in the absence of clear historical facts (and Nietzsche is never in danger of presenting a fact) you need to lay out clearly why one statement would lead to another. He does not do this. He simply says that the English blokes are wrong and then he gives his answer. How is this supposed to help anyone find anything out?

This is how he starts the next paragraph: “But secondly: quite apart from the fact that that hypothesis about the descent of the value judgment ‘good’ is historically untenable…” And, again, he has not demonstrated in any way why that value judgment is “historically untenable”. It’s an empty assertion.

Section 3: He finishes the first sentence of 3: “it also suffers from an inner psychological contradiction. The usefulness of unegoistic behaviour is supposed to be the origin of the esteem in which it is held, and this origin is supposed to have been forgotten: – but how was such forgetting possible?” This is pure dumb guy logic: being incapable of reading into implications and confusing that incapability for insight. By saying that an origin of good is forgotten, that doesn’t really imply that nobody has any idea of why it is called good. People have conjectures, lots of them. In fact, you could say that finding this out is a big part of what philosophy is about. The point is that no one has a book of the first words & references that we can definitively say why X thing is called good. It’s like saying that a soap “kills 99.9% of germs”: we’re pretty sure about this but we don’t need you acting weird because you found an exception. If someone said “we definitely know why all things are called good” then you have to prove it by going through all things that are called good and saying why they are good, and I hope it is obvious to any reader that every mortal person would fail this test. Nietzsche, of course, is too stupid to avoid suggesting this.

Section 4: Dictionary definitions here: Spanish mala (from Latin malus, probably from Proto-Indo-European *mel- “to deceive”), English bad (“wicked, evil, depraved”), Italian cattiva (from Latin captīvus “captive” → “caught by the devil” → “bad”), French mauvaise (from Late Latin malifātius “unfortunate”, 4th c., from Latin malus “bad” + fātum “fate”), Russian плохой (probably from Proto-Slavic polxъ “fearful”). These are simply to provide counter-examples for a claim that he makes sweepingly, and these are important because he bases his claim is that “bad” originally meant “plain/common” on linguistics. The fact that he doesn’t bother to cite any languages outside of German suggests that he didn’t actually look around to see what else was out there. I am very prepared to believe that Nietzsche was a lazy scholar, it explains a lot of his “work”.

Section 5: While it appears that Nietzsche is doing more linguistics here, he isn’t. I don’t really think that kakos (κᾰκός) does imply cowardice in a linguistic sense, and the malus bit is actively laughable. The blonde Celts stuff is pure racist historical fantasy, an entirely blonde peoples isn’t a thing primarily because blonde hair is a recessive genetic trait, meaning it’s not as likely to show up especially considering that there seems never to have been a people who were entirely blonde (so non-blonde people would always have existed and therefore likely always been a larger part of any population than blonde people). If someone says “Aryan” and they’re not a Theosophical Society member you can safely assume that the main reason that they’re speaking is racism. And honestly, even then.

Section 6: This paragraph is likely to excite you if you still love epic bacon takedowns of Christian grifters. The priests are unhealthy! They do quack cures! They make things dangerous! Does he provide anything to back this up, even an anecdote? Of course not. Is he making any sort of philosophical argument? No. He just doesn’t like priests and he’s done a paragraph on them. You could do this paragraph as part of your bit at Joe Rogan’s Mothership or whatever. He talks about the pure/impure division which, again, this type of thing is all conjecture and also only matters if you need to build a scaffolding for all the bullshitting that you’re doing. It’s not explanatory of anything to say “good means pure and bad means impure”, it doesn’t show any shift in the way people understood these terms. Is it impossible to demonstrate? No, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that he does not demonstrate it.

Section 7: The line “The greatest haters in world history… have always been priests” is going to stay with me forever. He says that priests make the “most evil enemies” because they are the most powerless. Now, my first instinct was to try to disprove this statement, but as I read it again, it’s a totally incoherent statement. Believing that “priests = powerless” requires you to ignore almost all of world history which proves the opposite. He says that the Jews have done the most harm to “the noble” etc. #1, in Judah/Palestine, the priests were the nobles. The Maccabees were originally a line of priests. So again, the idea that priests of the Jews were not both the powerful and associated with nobility is just pathetic from an academic. #2, at the time of Nietzsche’s writing, Jewish history already revolved around the events of the Babylonian captivity, the exile in Egypt, the Assyrian sack of Jerusalem, Roman rule over Palestine, and centuries worth of pogroms in Europe alone. Now, of course, Nietzsche doesn’t venture as far as to say what the Jews have really done that equals the scales to all that because, while he is remarkably stupid, he is not so stupid that he doesn’t know when he just doesn’t have a fucking shot. The thing is, when you actually lay out what types of things are going on — the centuries-long oppression of the Jews on the one of your two hands, and on the other of your two hands, poorer people are mean to the wealthy now — this entire project cannot help but look like what it is: a complete farce.

Section 8: From even before indulging this nonsense, before I knew just how racist Nietzsche was, the major problem I had with Nietzsche was his characterization of Christ dying on the cross as a kind of pathetic display. Now, this type of reading didn’t originate with Nietzsche, the Romans et. al. were doing it, too. But here’s the thing: Nietzsche doesn’t actually have any issue with Jesus’s sacrifice. He’s not concerned with that, he denigrates it merely to support his actual point: Jesus makes you more Jewish. That’s what he wants to get at here.

Sections 9 & 10: This is all I have to say about that: if you are enslaved, why would you want to remain that way? Is Nietzsche claiming that he would be a happy slave? Why is revolting against the system not “saying yes” to itself? Is the moral choice to remain enslaved? Nietzsche’s ideology is patently absurd, it doesn’t make any sense as a general way to understand the world. The only way it is possible to really read this is that if you are a slave you have to stay a slave, as doing otherwise is “saying no” for some reason. And if you are going to argue with me that “saying no” always means something bad, then why is he characterizing the “slave revolt” as an unwanted outcome? Any honest, liberty loving person wants to not be enslaved. This dope loves to suck Roman dick and even the Romans fucking understood this. The rest of this is just an extended insult.

Section 11: I feel like I’ve been rewriting this same point over and over and it’s because Nietzsche never really evolves, it’s just that he’s still talking. He’s not explaining anything. So here we have ressentiment. Okay. For this nonsense to work, in the first place, from his first supposition, you have to assume that everyone is in this ideal state. That’s the only way where it makes sense to say that the poor naming something “evil” comes first. Working along his own logic, what actually comes first is the oppression of the poor by the rich, and after that “evil” is formulated. If we’re going to say that forming the concept of evil is unfavorable, we can only assume so if there was no reason for it to be invented. If there was a reason, then “evil” wasn’t the first principle. Also, to say that the rich/noble first formulate “good” and the poor/bad first formulate “evil” cannot be considered separately when the rich’s pursuit of their “good” involves the subjugation of and extraction from the poor, something which is not a “maybe” but a definite: the rich’s prosperity is always built on the backs of the poor, this is not even a subject of debate among anyone serious. A billion dollar company got that way because a lot of much poorer people work there and a lot of much poorer people buy their products.

Section 12: What if Nietzsche had just fucking died in the middle of writing this. That fuckin bad air got in and he just croaked. God. One great thing about being a human is that I have an imagination.

Section 13: I already fuckin did this. This fucking idiot. The reason to fight evil is not a question of blame. If the rich are so unbothered about all the lambs they keep stealing, then why the fuck did they draft idiots like this to justify what they’re doing? It seems like the birds aren’t really doing that derisive chuckle he’s talking about.

Section 14: What’s the word I’m looking for. Puerile. That’s it.

Section 15: This is naked fascism, direct fascism. This is Nietzsche’s reveal that he believes power is an object, which is the central tenet of fascist ideology. This paragraph is like driving past a homeless person and saying to your friend “you know the homeless are actually looking down on me because I live in a big mansion and drive a nice car, they’re doing oppression to me”.

Sections 16 & 17: I didn’t even bother reading this shit, I’ve already wasted enough of my day.

This was fucking awful, Nietzsche is so fucking stupid it’s astounding. Until about two days ago I was of the belief that Nietzsche may have said some racist shit but he was still an important philosopher that was worth studying, I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Now? Now I know that everyone who said he was a fascist was right, he’s much MUCH more racist than I thought he was, and on top of all of that, the content of his thought is absolutely zero. The only reason that you need to be familiar with this idiot is because fascists are going to ask you about his ideas in an effort to seem smart. Nietzsche is a thinker on the level of Ayn Rand. Philosophy should be embarrassed.