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T
HE
U
SE AND
A
BUSE OF
F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
Friedrich Nietzsche
Curtis Cate
Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 2002
689 pp. (hardcover)
$37.50
Reviewed by Jerry Woodruff
S
omeone once quipped that Friedrich Nietzsche is often quoted but rarely
read—by which he meant that Nietzsche’s ideas are frequently obscured
by those who pay only superficial attention. So rich and deeply textured
was Nietzsche’s thinking that pulling a single gleaming thread out from the
larger fabric sometimes serves misinterpretation rather than understanding,
often creating the false impression that Nietzsche’s works are ambiguous or
contradictory.
Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann warned that apparent contradictions
in Nietzsche are “characteristic of legend and not typical of Nietzsche,” and
that “utterly superficial inconsistencies dissolve as soon as one checks the
quotations and recognizes the meaning they had in their original context.”
1
For Kaufmann (as for many other readers) there is a real Nietzsche and a false
Nietzsche:
[I]n the face of attempts to claim his sanction for…relativism in matters
of truth, it seems important to remember that Nietzsche himself was a
fanatical seeker after truth…His intentions are singularly unequivocal,
and he was not one to sit on both sides of the fence at once.
2
T
HE
L
EFT
’
S
N
IETZSCHE
Nonetheless, some in today’s left-dominated “post-modernist” academia
have a more open-ended view. Homosexual Marxist philosopher and famed
sadomasochist Michel Foucault, for example, insisted there was no single
Nietzschean philosophy. He suggested the right question to ask was, “What
serious use can we make of Nietzsche?”
3
Taking Foucault’s apparently political
invitation to heart, some Nietzsche scholars have decided to paint their left-
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CCIDENTAL
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wing politics with a Nietzschean brush, claiming his pedigree for a variety of
left-wing causes on behalf of the “oppressed,” even Communism.
In the 1970s, Tracy Strong, now professor of political science at the University
of California in San Diego, suggested that Communist China and Cuba represent
the “the very Nietzschean proposition of creating ‘new men.’”
4
Referring to any
Communist society as “Nietzschean” flies in the face of Nietzsche’s frequent
denunciations of egalitarianism and socialism as manifestations of what he
regarded as slave morality. Unfortunately, that sort of misinterpretation and
mischaracterization appears throughout Nietzsche scholarship today, and
seems to go unchallenged. While not every philosophy scholar is willing to go
so far as to describe Communists as Nietzschean social experimenters, some
deliberately attempt to minimize or camouflage those parts of Nietzsche’s
writings that contradict or undermine the egalitarian and left-wing ideologies
that pervade America’s university system.
Strong himself nearly admitted as much elsewhere:
[T]hose on the democratic left who have been attracted to Nietzsche
and have wanted to enlist his thought in their projects have done so
by arguing that, while Nietzsche’s thought is not (really) political, his
thought provides material for developing a new progressive politics. Such
interpretations thus conclude that it is necessary to set aside Nietzsche’s
particular political judgments.
5
But even Strong’s candid assessment of his colleagues is accompanied by
a bit of camouflage of his own. “It is hard, on the face of it,” he writes, “to find
in Nietzsche support for liberal egalitarian democracy in any of its modern
incarnations.”
6
As an understatement, the remark is breathtaking. It is akin to
suggesting that it is hard to find in Martin Luther King’s works any support
for Southern slavery. The phrase “it is hard to find” implies that it might be
found if one only looks hard enough. In truth, however, it is hard to find
because it isn’t there.
Undermining Nietzsche’s antiegalitarian views by trying to diminish or
minimize their significance appears to be common. Robert C. Solomon and
Kathleen M. Higgins, authors of numerous books and essays on Nietzsche, have
tried, for example, to dismiss a central tenet of Nietzsche’s antiegalitarianism
by asserting “Nietzsche clearly intended the
Übermensch
as a fiction…”
7
Walter
Kaufmann, evidently embarrassed by Nietzsche’s seeming Aryan racialism in
his explicit glorification of “the magnificent blond beast” described as mastering
Europe, tried to explain away the reference by claiming that the blondness refers
symbolically to the tawny lion, a metaphor used in
Thus Spake Zarathustra
to
signify creative destruction.
8
Kaufmann also dismissed Nietzsche’s decidedly
politically incorrect views of women as “philosophically irrelevant.”
9
Close examination of Nietzsche’s texts reveals the weaknesses in these
claims. Solomon and Higgins argue that since Nietzsche was not a Darwinian,
the
Übermensch
must not be a biological notion, and that
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Summer 2006 / Woodruff
57
(a fictionalized presentation of Nietzsche’s ideas) is the only text in which the
idea is seriously addressed. While it is true that he did not accept all of Darwin’s
theory of evolution, Nietzsche’s concern with a “higher” type of man, and the
idea of breeding the higher type in both a eugenic and psychological/cultural
sense, emerged early in his writing career and remained an important part of
his philosophy. The
Übermensch
is indeed a “fiction” in the sense that such a
being does not yet exist, but Nietzsche repeatedly urged its pursuit as a goal. As
early as “Schopenhauer As Educator,” which appears in
Untimely Meditations,
his second book, Nietzsche calls for the creation of conditions under which
“the individual higher exemplar, the more uncommon, more powerful, more
complex, more fruitful” man can emerge.
10
This was not yet the
Übermensch
of
Zarathustra,
but its beginnings are there, and Nietzsche remained committed to
the concept throughout his life. In a notebook of 1885, the year he completed
part 4 of
Zarathustra,
he wrote of the need to create a new morality “whose
intention is to breed a ruling caste – the future masters of the earth” who are
described as “a
new species
and caste of masters” who are the logical result of
efforts by “a newer kind of ‘free spirits’” driven by their “dissatisfaction with
present-day man.”
11
In 1887, long after publication of
Zarathustra
, he wrote,
“The progressive diminishment of man is what drives one to think about the
breeding of a stronger race.... Not merely a master race, whose task would be
limited to governing; but a race with its own sphere of life, with a surplus of
force for beauty, valor, culture, manners, right up to the highest intellectual
realm...”
12
He did not use the word
Ubermensch,
but the concept is identical. In
part two of
Zarathustra
itself, Nietzsche makes it rather clear that he regards the
Ubermensch
as a very real possible creation of will, in contrast to God, which
was a fictional creation.
Once you said God when you looked out onto distant seas; now, however,
I have taught you to say:
Ubermensch.
God is a conjecture, but I do not
want your conjectures to reach beyond your creative will.
Could you
create
a God? Then do not talk to me about any gods! But you
could certainly create the
Ubermensch.
13
As for Kaufmann’s attempt to deny that the “blond beast” refers to any
racial or ethnic group, the context disproves him. The phrase appears in a
passage recounting an historical epoch. In one of those contexts where the
phrase appears, Nietzsche explicitly refers to “the blond Germanic beast.”
14
Nietzsche was no racialist, but the weakness in Kaufmann’s argument betrays
a certain anxiety, urgency, and even desperation to prove it. Kaufmann makes
it hard to avoid suspecting him of a political motive. That is especially true
with regard to his dismissal of Nietzsche’s comments about women being
irrelevant to his philosophy. The assertion is simply untenable, because
Nietzsche’s views of women are intimately bound up with his understanding
of history and society, and his belief that social “progress” in which women
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play a role is the decadence of modernity. In section 239 of
Beyond Good and
Evil
he wrote:
Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aris-
tocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence
of a clerk: “woman as clerkess” is inscribed on the portal of the modern
society which is in course of formation. While she thus appropriates
new rights, aspires to be “master,” and inscribes “progress” of woman
on her flags and banners, the very opposite realizes itself with terrible
obviousness:
woman retrogrades.
Since the French Revolution the influence
of woman in Europe has
declined
in proportion as she has increased her
rights and claims; and the “emancipation of woman”…thus proves to
be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening
of the most womanly instincts.
15
[Emphasis in the original]
The decline of culture through this sort of progress/decadence, of which
feminism is an integral part, sets the stage for the nihilism from which Nietzsche
sought to provide the West an escape with his philosophy.
One egregious example of minimizing Nietzsche’s antidemocratic views
deserves special mention. In a book purporting to explain what Nietzsche
“really” meant, Solomon and Higgins admit that Nietzsche had “harsh
words” for democracy, but reassure their readers that his criticism was merely
“routine.”
His comments are not very different in tone or temper from the routine
complaints we hear today (from democrats) about uneducated and
ignorant voters who are easily led astray by demagogues, about the
irrationality of making delicate and important strategic decisions by
majority vote, about the need for leadership and wisdom at the top rather
than simply a popular mandate through polls.
16
That characterization of his views is easily refuted by any of a number of
passages in Nietzsche’s writings that refer to democracy, of which the following
is typical:
I believe that the great, advancing and unstoppable democratic movement
of Europe, that which calls itself ‘progress’ – and equally its prepara-
tion and moral augury, Christianity – fundamentally signifies only the
tremendous, instinctive conspiracy of the whole herd against everything
that is shepherd, beast of prey, hermit and Caesar, to preserve and elevate
all the weak, the oppressed, the mediocre, the hard-done-by, the half-
failed; as a long-drawn-out slave revolt...
17
Those comments reveal a profound and radical critique, and do not sound
at all like “routine complaints” about democracy. The contrast between
Nietzsche’s actual comments and the characterization of them by Solomon
and Higgins is quite noticeable, and forces any educated reader to question
the interpretative skills of these two scholars.
It would be tiresome to continue to produce examples from democratic
egalitarian works on Nietzsche simply to refute them with quotations from
Summer 2006 / Woodruff
59
Nietzsche’s texts. Suffice it to say that the Nietzsche most nonspecialists
are familiar with today is largely a mass-market product of the left-wing
university system, and should be regarded with the same sort of healthy
skepticism that other effluences from the left inspire among the cultivated
and discriminating.
G
ETTING
N
IETZSCHE
R
IGHT
That’s one reason why this new biography from Curtis Cate is such a
welcome addition to the available literature on Nietzsche. It can be seen as a
first small tentative step toward a commonsense—even conservative—rescue of
Nietzsche’s legacy from the claws of the academic left. Although this biography
is not, strictly speaking, a philosophical biography, Cate’s Nietzsche emerges
convincingly as the cultural conservative he was.
In his preface, Cate explains that his biography is not “written for ‘profes-
sionals,’ for university professors or teachers of philosophy.” Instead, he wrote
it “for non-specialists and ‘laymen’…for the benefit of those who may never
have read a single book of [Nietzsche’s] and for whom Nietzsche is little more
than a name: that of a blasphemer who had the gall to proclaim that ‘God is
dead!’”
Consistent with this mission, Cate makes an effort to connect Nietzsche
and his ideas to contemporary social and cultural problems, and includes
intelligent, relatively sophisticated discussions of Nietzsche’s books and ideas
in the main text. The prose is fluid and highly readable.
To Cate, Nietzsche “foresaw with prophetic clarity” the increasing decadence
“all over the Western world.” For Cate, some of the symptoms are these:
Parents abdicate before their undisciplined children, teachers before
their lawless pupils, priests before their restless, time-rationed congre-
gations, politicians before their assiduously flattered voters
…
No area
of life is spared. All “traditional” values are challenged, any trace of
“elitism” becomes instantly suspect. Ugliness, precisely because it is
the opposite of the traditionally “beautiful” is accorded an honorable
status, just as what is incomprehensible
…
receives the stamp of profound
“significance” by cultural snobs in frantic search of “originality.” The
once elegant “art” of
haute couture
is dragged down to the sordid level
of
basse couture
…
Cate apparently has his own conservative leanings. He is a Harvard-
educated historian and former European editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
who
has written for the paleoconservative journal
Chronicles.
He wonders, “what
will happen to the Western world if the present drift cannot be halted, and to
what sordid depths of pornographically publicized vulgarity will our shame-
lessly transparent culture, or what remains of it, continue to descend, while
those who care about such matters look on in impotent dismay?”

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