He was great because he was the type of madcap, brilliant professor who could work the alchemical magic of turning an inscrutable text into a sacred one but - and I witnessed this - you put him in a grocery store and tell him to find the vanilla extract and he quickly comes to his wit’s end. On the Genealogy of Morals has stuck in my craw for a few reasons: 1) a madcap, brilliant professor-type introduced me to it. (Which is pretty much a direct quote from ol’ Freddie himself. Just cuz you’re crazy don’t mean you aint onto something. If that aint a cautionary tale re: the risks of spending your life thinking heady thoughts, what is? (Good thing me and the Anonymous Sister are on good terms…) Maybe a Nazi or two misconstrued and/or appropriated his ideas, but it’s very likely he would’ve ended up in Dauchau had he been around).Īt any rate, there’s no question the guy cracked up and spent the last few years of his life as a catatonic and drooling shade of himself, being looked after by a sister he hated and mocked when he’d had his wits about him. He was also vehemently opposed to anti-Semitism. I don’t really know about all that, one way or another (though the Nazi thing is demonstrably false - Nietzsche consistently rails against all things German, especially what he considered the Germanic tendency toward mindless group-think. People blame the Nazis on him, they say he was a misogynist, and on and on. Bertrand Russell famously dismissed him as a megalomaniac, and maybe that’s true.
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