Who Is Friedrich Nietzsche, What Did He Believe In, and Why Is He Important?

University of Wisconsin professor Jennifer Ratner Rosen Hagen who is Frederick Nietzsche Frederick Nietzsche was a German 19th century German philosopher who wrote many many many many books a philosophy in all sorts of different forms and all of them to some aphoristic some essay istic some longer form critiques and all of them had something to do with the challenge of universal truth so he he he took as his enemy the notion of universal truth and pretty much all of his work has something to do with his effort to tear it down excavate it look at the history of that idea and to show that anything that we take to be universal like Oh God are human creations but they're not rooted in nature or necessity they're not mirrors of reality he wrote at one time God is dead and he wrote that God is dead and this make first makes its appearance in his gay science and in it the gay science in it it's a an aphorism and it's called the madman and so the aphorism is he's playing with this this idea that a madman runs into the to the town square and says god is dead god is dead we have killed him you and I and everybody says oh he's crazy oh he's crazy and he realizes oh my time has not come yet and so there he's announcing what what's gonna be basically his intellectual project for the rest of his his writing life before he goes insane and that is the notion that God is dead what troubled Nietzsche was that in over the course of 19th century as in particular Germans became more modern and more secular that they continued to go to church and pray to a god that they didn't really believe in anymore in other words he thought that modern thought modern science the forces of modernity were undermining the basis of religion and yet he said people still held held onto it they still clutched onto it because they were too terrified to live without it and this he found really despicable and that's that's that's what he tries to work out in his philosophy where did we teach how did he come about was he well known at this time Nietzsche well we have to sort of separate the myth from the the from the reality which is that Nietzsche did have moments of modest Fame actually his first book the birth of tragedy had a pretty big reception but then he did fade into obscurity he was a philosopher in Basel so a professor of language history of language the genealogy of language but the academic life wasn't for him he he suffered from a lot of physical ailments ailments pardon me so I mean historians and philosophers debate why did he why did he have such a tough time in the Academy although some of us in the Academy and I would say still under that much but anyway Nietzsche taught for ten years in Basel with some success but due to reasons that we can only sort of imperfectly suss out was it his health was it what he said which is that he needed to break free Nietzsche breaks free lives on a pension the rest of his life and gets to inhabit the image of the free thinker that he so exalts and worships in his own philosophy so but Nietzsche didn't have a huge readership for for most of his productive life and I say productive life because in 1889 he has a nervous collapse and spends the last 11 years of his life in a very declining state I mean and ends up in a totally vegetative state and dies in 1900 he's discovered so how does nature become Nietzsche he's discovered precisely in those months when his health is declining shortly before this mental collapse so one of the terrible ironies of Friedrich Nietzsche's life and the posthumous life of his ideas is that it's in the moment when his when intellectually and mentally you know there's a closing of accounts for him that's the moment when the floodgates open and he becomes the superstar that he is today who discovered him how was he - he was discovered this is a little tricky because there's always a quest for a priority people were reading Nietzsche but were those people being read but I think it's fair to say that the the Danish critic George Brandis who himself had a big audience in the late 19th century he is credited with discovering each and I think that's a fair assessment that he brings the most famed to Nietzsche and they actually do have a brief correspondence in that last year just as madness is closing in on Nietzsche and Nietzsche thinks finally finally someone recognizes my genius and then lo and behold he has mental collapse in Turin and that's pretty much the end of his productive life so Brandes is credited largely with kind of getting the word out in northern european circles that Nietzsche's Nietzsche's one to watch and that's when each his reputation boom really takes off who followed him who liked his work what kind of people what kind of everybody everybody atheists religionists the left the right women men black whites old people young people so Nietzsche that's not immediate because he needs to be translated yeah Nietzsche's not translated in earnest until the late into the 1896 1897 is the first round of translations then there's another major effort of translations that happen in the early 20th century of course in the late 19th century in early 20th century a lot of educated Americans could read German so people were reading him you know in the original but it really did require the translations for him to take off Henry who had eight why am i calling him Henry HL Mencken you've seen the code by Henry eight Menken has a lot to do with Nietzsche's superstardom no it's not to say that there weren't other folks who were reading niche and popularizing Nietzsche in the United States before Menken but Menken is the one who writes the first full-length monograph on Nietzsche in 1908 and that's where we get a kind of full-on synopsis about Nietzsche's life his travails his struggles with Christianity his struggles with health we get a little bit about each of sexuality it wouldn't be Minkin if there wasn't a little something racy thrown in and then we get Nietzsche's ideas boom and this book sold widely and sold well and it helped do two things it helped really establish in each his reputation in America but it did something else which is of course it helped men can become Menken so if somebody says I love friedrich nietzsche i agree with him what are they saying to you professor if they're just saying that not much because someone I'm going to use the example of chest-thumping atheists and Bible something Christians could both make that claim about Nietzsche and that's what's so startling about his reception is that he doesn't track right or left he doesn't track religious or secular he tracks or rather he tracks all over our intellectual spectrum so just the statement I love Nietzsche doesn't tell me much of anything other than that's an utterly conventional experience a - you know find Nietzsche so powerful in fact I think what's so so interesting is how many people will say and have said over the course of the late 19th 20th century of course until our own time how they felt when they read Nietzsche he was speaking to them personally so one of the things I argue in the book is that Nietzsche becomes a superstar public philosopher by way of private longings and private fears you have a strange you have a disturbed look on your face who wouldn't like Friedrich Nietzsche them oh there are plenty of people who don't like Friedrich who don't like Friedrich Nietzsche and there were things not to like he didn't say very nice things about democracy he didn't say very nice things about women he didn't say very nice things about equality and so if these are things that matter to you you're gonna take issue with him so let me give you a concrete example of what's what's to like and what's not to like about Nietzsche and oh gosh I can take any anyone but I'll take one of the more spectacular examples and that is the Leopold and Loeb trial of 1924 so Leopold and Loeb are two University of Chicago students who think that they are the uber mentioned that they are what Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote about the uber mention and they wanted to prove it to themselves just beyond the ubermensch is the the Superman it gets translated as the Superman in fact the Superman as in Superman comic which we tend to think of as you know Americana has its roots and Nietzsche's ubermensch in fact the two men the two boys are men who come up with Superman were readers of Nietzsche so that's just a little and there's many cases like that I mean even I think the fact that we have the word uber you know but uber I think comes into our language in the way that it does by way of the ubermensch anyway but that we're talking about an example where we have two views that say they have the right Nietzsche and that is Leopold and Loeb they read Nietzsche they think that he's the they're the Superman he had in mind and so they want to prove it to themselves and so they kill they kidnap and kill a fourteen-year-old boy Bobby Franks and the south side of Chicago they get caught it turns out that they weren't so uber as they thought Clarence Darrow the famed trial attorney becomes their defense lawyer and he's also a reader of Nietzsche but he's not a murderer in fact he's quite sure that that's not what Nietzsche had in mind and so the interesting thing about the whole Leopold and Loeb trial which is trying to save these boys from these young men from being killed themselves is how Darrow had to not make to both say the reason why they did this is because Nietzsche is toxic and the dangerous thinker and they misunderstood him and yet Nietzsche is an important thinker that we need in modern life but we need to handle him with care so so it's I'm just something like that the Leopold and Loeb trial you see those sorts of negotiations where a Nietzsche is both you know public enemy number one as we see with with a murder but we also see with a Clarence Darrow saying no Nietzsche is the thinker that we Americans need in order to embrace modern life political movements that have co-opted Nietzsche oh so many I think the one that I mean really the the whole 20th century is a story of co-optation I think the one that surprises my readers the most or at least when I get letters from readers or I get or come into contact with readers its Nietzsche the hidden Nietzschean origins of black power so Huey P Newton was a reader of Friedrich Nietzsche and in Nietzsche he discovered he discovered a lot of things in Nietzsche but what he understood from Nietzsche is he needed an e to tell him that the things that your culture tell you are true and are universal it's in fact made up or it's a it's a product of history it's a product of chance it's somewhat arbitrary but it's not true and so don't take the voice of a racist culture as the voice of your own inner conscience yeah and this is what Sochi for Huey P Newton this is what Nietzsche did for African America is to help them hear that they no longer had to pray to the white man's God they no longer had to make themselves prostrate to a religion and in his view that made them supplicants and that they shouldn't take this morality which tries to discipline them and keep them down as something universal as something timeless and so Huey P Newton is is really intellectually if you will cutting his teeth on Nietzsche as he and Bobby Seale are coming together and formulating the basis of black power World War two no the the reason why I say is there are I don't know of any other philosopher in history that's blamed for two world wars but Nietzsche was so you can't just quickly world war two I actually think is the more interesting story here because all the ways in which in each his reputation is just so terribly damaged but just quickly if I'm a world war one Nietzsche when World War one breaks out and this is so shocking to American observers it starts to come out you know its Nietzsche its Nietzsche its nature rumors of German ministers preaching Nietzsche from their pulpits it wasn't hard to listen and hear traces of Nietzsche and philosophy behind the blood and iron imperialism of World War Germany during World War one and so Nietzsche is yoked to World War one and has a very hard time well those who want to try to save his reputation and say this wasn't what he intended this is just the misuse of Nietzsche had a really hard hard time afterwards then of course Leopold and Loeb don't do much for his reputation and then with the rise of Hitler not not Mussolini initially who was a reader of Nietzsche and an enthusiast of Nietzsche Hitler the rise of Hitler in particular was the more I think those sort of the more terrifying development so over the course of the 1930s as we see the specter of Nazism and then later as Americans started to see Mussolini as a greater threat than they initially had it was not hard to find nietzsche and traces behind Nazi philosophy and Mussolini's fascism and so lo and behold Nietzsche you know yet again is seen as the the author and visionary of what would become world war two of course Nietzsche wrote up things that were not so hard to turn into to make him implicated he wrote of the rise of the blond Beast so which people thought it took to be his celebration of the Aryan race his sister actually was a proto Nazi and in her her closing years she welcomes Hitler to the Nietzsche archive so there's a there's a linkage to Hitler and some very unfortunate pictures of Hitler and Elizabeth Forrester Nietzsche with the Nietzsche bust at the nature archive so in the American imagination Lee Nietzsche really gets linked to World War two and the entire Nazi ideology that not here we have the Germans who didn't just want an uber mensch but they wanted an uber race and we know the language of unter mention the subhuman people which was all throughout germany during during world war ii nietzsche was just implicated in all of this what's his reputation today in hood who's the anti Nietzsche philosopher whose ins is there such a thing oh there's plenty yeah but I don't think there is interesting sure I mean George Santayana is not a thinker that we talk about much today though we should because he was a towering intellectual a towering philosopher and poet and novelist in the early 20th century he thought Nietzsche was thing that was wrong with what he called the German mind that hypertrophied self yeah the hyper aggrandize self he thought that that German the German what he called the German mind or the German temperament and he traces this back to content up through Hegel and the Nietzsche becomes the great exemplar is an intellectual or a mind that just didn't couldn't deal with limits so he actually referred to Nietzsche's amateurish and adolescent so he is pretty dismissive of Nietzsche and that's an example of a thinker who I think is a very robust thinker and a careful thinker there are plenty there are plenty others I actually think an interesting case here is an example the example of Alan bloom who in the reception of his famous book the the closing of the American mind you know a blockbuster book Alan bloom says you know what's the wrong with higher education it's killing the souls of our children they're getting all this pluralism they're getting all this multiculturalism but what they're not getting is great ideas and they're not getting the the challenges of those great ideas so it's how that how higher education is impoverishing our nature our the the the souls of our of our children and nietzsche is right there all along he even talks about the Nietzschean ization of american intellectual life and according to bloom he thinks that so much of what is wrong in late night late 20th century intellectual life is that intellectuals are reading their Nietzsche and kind of like what George Santayana says they're tired of universal truth they're tired of power they're of someone else's power they're tired of Authority and so he he says that all that the counterculture of the 1960s is nursed on Nietzschean I'm anti authoritarianism and he said this is it's one thing to have these kinds of protests in the streets it's another thing to bring them into the Academy and make such a ruckus so he's very critical of the uses of Nietzsche so I hit the his button here if you read how everyone's talking about Allen Bloom's book and they were talking and they were talking and they were talking because as you know it was a major major major blockbuster people picked up on it aha you know nietzsche of Allan bloom blames Nietzsche you know it's the Nietzschean ization of our American intellectual life blah blah blah blah blah so you would think that Alan bloom you know had a problem with Nietzsche he didn't he thought Nietzsche was a genius he loved Nietzsche he wrote beautifully about Nietzsche he wrote longingly about Nietzsche he thought Nietzsche was a genius and his problem was that he thought he was in a culture of intellectual pygmies who could not appreciate the genius of Nietzsche so and so what he's actually doing in the closing of the American mind which i think is such an interesting move he's not really blaming Nietzsche for the impoverishment of American intellectual life he had the sort of anti-authoritarianism that he finds so despicable he's blaming what he says is readers who just aren't up to the task of truly understanding this great genius so again that's not someone who's critical of Nietzsche per se although he has a reputation for having you know pinned all the failures of late 20th century American intellectual life on Nietzsche quite the opposite what he's trying to do is keep his own private Nietzsche a Nietzsche in his own image against what he sees as the slavish inadequate impoverished American intellectual life that just can't handle these powerful ideas Jennifer Ratner Rosen Hagen you've written a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche are you a fan if I may I would say I that I would people call it a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche but it's actually a biography of his ideas as they come to life in America so one of the things I say in the book is that it's not this is not actually a book about Nietzsche in fact some readers have been disappointed of course he crops up quite a bit but the book is not about Nietzsche I'm an American historian I'm an American intellectual and cultural historian my interest is the history of American thought and culture over 19th and 20th century what I discovered is you can't when you get to the late 19th century in the 20th through the 20th century you can't talk about American intellectual life without talking about Nietzsche's presence his curious presence really and his influence so anyways it's just a little modest correction here it's not about Nietzsche it's about us so every reading of Nietzsche I'm not listening whether HL Mencken or Clarence Darrow or Walter Kaufmann who become so important to redeem neech after World War 2 or Shoei P Newton or Alan bloom are getting him right or wrong I don't think that's the interesting question for a historian to ask what I'm trying to do is listen in to what they have to say about Nietzsche to listen to see what that tells us about American intellectual life in that particular moment so the book is actually not about Nietzsche it's about us it's about our intellectual life and it's about our coming to coming to our own ideas about truth about democracy about Christianity about God by way of Nietzsche but I'm dodging the question has he in your view been a positive influence in American political and cultural life uh you know what that's incredible I've never been asked that question I think he's a necessary influence because I think he's right I mean I think there's a lot of Duncan what he says there's a lot of grandstanding in my chisme but you clear away some of that gunk and the the the ideas I think are ideas that we had to him had to come to terms with which is again to just repeat what I had said earlier the notion that so much of week what we take to be universally true whether it be God whether it be democracy whether it would be whatever it is Nietzsche gave us a way of looking at those ideas those truth claims to see their origin and their genealogy and Nietzsche helped Americans to see that so many truth claims are not rooted in reality they're rooted and power they're rooted in needs they're rooted in fear they're rooted in longing but they're not necessarily rooted in truth and I think this is this is necessary I mean they for any culture truthfully but especially American culture because we have from the start been a very pluralistic culture of many languages of many religions of many ethnicities of different races and so part of what it means to be American right from our earliest years here is contested truth is a pluralistic sensibility is a land of many religions and many beliefs and we haven't we never did a good job of negotiating or we didn't do it that great a job of negotiating this prior to Nietzsche but Nietzsche becomes his ideas become important as we negotiate this moving forward so in answer to your question do you I think is a positive force yeah and he's also been a negative force although he had nothing to do with it because he was long dead but and his ideas have been read in all sorts of curious ways but I think as I as I said I think he was a necessary force and in that regard salutary force because he helped Americans to confront fundamental problems that we've had which is problems of living in a pluralistic society and doing so in a humane way and and and and for that I think we'll here I'll just because they story many people were grateful in the 20th century that they had Nietzsche to think with about these issues University of Wisconsin professor Jennifer Ratner Rosen Hagin teaches history here at the University here's her book American Nietzsche the history of an 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Keywords: education, college, university, student, loan, debt, philosophy, science, medicine, history, social science, surveys, america, united states, 20th century

Id: OFOb8CJOhYs

Length: 26min 27sec (1587 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2017