What's wrong with Nietzsche's philosophy from a modern perspective?

What's wrong with Nietzsche's philosophy from a modern perspective?

I will answer this honestly and without embellishment. I will answer looking on modernity, and what it is, from the outside (or, as modern people should say, objectively).

What is wrong with Nietzsche’s philosophy is that he’s an intellectual elitist. What is wrong with it is that it is not modern, it is not democratic, it is not vulgar. People are constantly failing to read him in proper context, or add context that shouldn’t be there. Intertextuality is a fine thing, but only once we properly understand it. If you want to understand Homer, you must not first read Vergil. And if you want to properly understand Nietzsche, please don’t be the butt-wad that brings in post-modernism. A post-modernist can talk about Nietzsche, a Nietzschean must try very hard to ignore post-modernism, lest he sees things that are simply not there. To put it plainly: it is quite okay to use Nietzsche and his ideas for your own work, but it is rather lacking in taste to subject a serious interpretation of Nietzsche to anachronistic concepts – those will not give you what Nietzsche intended, but what you can take from him regardless.

But also, if you want to properly understand Vergil, you must first read Homer. Arma virumque cano directly references both μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος (the opening line of the Iliad), as well as ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον (the opening line of the Odyssey); and if we are to truly understand what Vergil is saying here, we must know those lines. We must know that ‘Arms and the man I sing’ is a merging of ‘The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles’ and ‘Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices’, to understand Vergil is saying he’ll compose a work that is both the Iliad and the Odyssey; that he’s saying he’ll try to topple Homer and best him at his own game.

In that same vein, Nietzsche must be understood in the context of the works that influenced him. That is about 3000 years’ worth of literature. Now, I’m not saying we must read everything written in the last 3000 years; we could ignore Spanish lit entirely and not be any worse off. But one can hardly attempt to interpret Nietzsche without a thorough understanding of the Ancients (an understanding that is deeper than I myself possess, even though I’m working on it intensively). For example (and at this point I feel like I’m saying this every time I write about Nietzsche), he draws heavily from Theognis of Megara, a Greek elegiac poet from the Archaic period, who is utterly unknown to nearly every philosopher. And why should they be familiar with some long dead noble that was wont to write about drinking, partying and how the vulgar rabble of Megara took all his stuff in their popular revolution and made him a pauper? Like anyone would ever take seriously his ethical stances on what is proper behaviour for a noble, and how most people are too accursed to ever live up to that, so their morality is different, more vulgar, pleasure obsessed and filled with hate for their betters. To take such observations as relevant, one would have to assume they can tell us something about what can be thought of as sociology of ethics - an observational approach to how morality comes to be in a community and how it develops further.

“Um… Who would do that? Like, we all totally know that morality is like, something that bad to the bone philosophers make up, when they go all lame-o-rama. Gag me with a spoon. And stop spazzing with the natural sciences and sociology, that’s like totally last year, this Nietzsche guy sure as heck wasn’t doing something so grody to the max. Like whatever.” – Chelsey from the Valley

And, like I said elsewhere, most modern philosophers today don’t bother with anything older than Descartes. And it shows in that, even if they are sufficiently familiar with Greek philosophy to know a thing or two about Herakleitos, they don’t take him seriously to such extreme, they can’t comprehend that anyone else could, and should therefore be interpreted in a similar way. After all, what value could there be in Hreakleitos Skoteinos, or, in Latin translation, Heraclitus the Obscure? That his idea of the fundamental principle of the universe aligns well with the current state of affairs in quantum mechanics be damned. He’s old, he’s outdated, he’s weird and difficult to understand, and why should we bother with something that for a thousand years of Christianity was soundly ignored? So these modern philosophers fail to understand Nietzsche, and that may very well be considered his greatest offense in the context of modernity.

But those parts that are at least partially understood, those go against the delicate and cowardly* taste of modernity as well. Nietzsche likes war, as is sometimes mentioned, and people today just don’t have the stomach for it. Nietzsche detests democracy, and equality. And people today can’t stand that. They all fear that if democracy were taken from them, they would be among the ones found lacking in whatever quality we might use to decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t. Intelligence would be a good idea, and most people will agree – as long as they think their level of intelligence would be sufficient to retain their voting rights. They also don’t like to ask the hard questions about equality. Let’s give an example we’re all familiar with: American Civil War. I think we can all agree that slavery is bad and that we think Lincoln’s heart was in the right place about freeing them. But here’s the twist: he failed. The equality that most people think of when they talk about that war, is equality on paper. “Lincoln freed the slaves,” they say. “Lincoln fucked the slaves” I reply. Equality of that kind means squat, or the 60s wouldn’t have happened. Those people were freed, they were made equal. But anyone who’s lived a hard life knows that most of us would rather not be equal and have a roof over our head, than go hungry and cold, and “enjoy” some abstract equality. It is on that account that Athenian peasants hated Solon, when he passed a law preventing them to sell themselves into indentured slavery. But, it’s out of fashion, to think about such things, much less say them, and don’t even think about writing them. If, after all that, you even sign them, don’t be surprised.**

One last thing. Anthropologists have long since come to the conclusion, that progress is not a linear thing. That people and societies can develop in different directions. But most people today still think in terms of a linear progress, mostly because their idea of progress is predominantly technological. Nietzsche went in a different direction than nearly any philosopher before him. It is also a different direction than the one taken by most modern philosophers. But, as they think philosophy is a zero sum game, they think Nietzsche is wrong. In this, even modern philosophers are no better than the people who thought that being Christians made them better than those people that weren’t, or that having gunpowder made the better than those people that didn’t have it.

So what’s wrong with Nietzsche from a modern perspective? That he’s not modern.

*I plan to further expound on the presence of cowardice in modern mentality (especially ethics) and my objection to it in the near future, if my obligations will allow, in a post on one of my blogs. So be on the lookout, if you’re interested in this.

**This is a reference to an old Soviet joke among the intelligentsia: Don’t think. If you think, don’t say. If you say, don’t write. If you write, don’t sign. If you think, say, write and sign, don’t be surprised.