transcript of a great interveiw i heard on the radio.


Alan Saunders: Hello, Alan Saunders here with you for Radio National summer, and we begin today with a little challenge.


Can you name the philosopher who said that 'A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.' He also argued that 'Fear is the mother of morality'. And this: 'All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth'.
Hmm. And this clanger ( he was good at the odd clanger): 'Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent'.


I'll give you a couple of quick clues: he was German and he lived during the 19th century.


So can you guess who we're talking about this week on The Philosopher's Zone?


The answer is Friedrich Nietzsche, the man who coined the term 'ubermensch' or superman.


Nietzsche came up with so many colourful one-liners that it is not surprising that he's one of those philosophers that university undergraduates still carry in their back pockets to parties.


But of course his ideas are more interesting than just his pithy sayings, so today we find out what's so important about Friedrich Nietzsche.


Ruth Abbey is Associate Professor at Notre Dame University in the United States.


Ruth is also the author of a book on Nietzsche's thoughts, so what for her, is the prevailing significance of Nietzsche's thought? Why should we continue to be interested in him?


Ruth Abbey: I think the main thing that continues to attract readers to Nietzsche's thought is unerring and relentless in its questioning of things that we too readily take for granted. So Nietzsche really encourages us to re-think everything from the foundations upwards, and so he poses to his readers the challenge of an ongoing quest to think, to reconsider, to doubt, everything.


Alan Saunders: Now the interesting thing is that this doubter, he was born in Prussia in 1844, and he was in fact the son of a Lutheran pastor. Was that background important to him?


Ruth Abbey: Very important to him. And he would be the first to admit this. Not only was Nietzsche's own father a Lutheran pastor, there were Lutheran pastors going back on his father's side, a couple of generations. And when he was a child and an adolescent I suppose, Nietzsche himself was very pious, very dutiful, very well-behaved. So much so that he earned the nickname 'The Little Priest' when he was a young person. So this background had a very powerful influence on him, and to some extent he was reacting against it for much of his adult thinking life. But he also finds it impossible to leave it behind completely. One of the things you discover when you read Nietzsche carefully is that there is a persistence of religious imagery and motifs and religious concerns throughout the whole of his writing.


Alan Saunders: It's difficult to talk about Nietzsche without talking about his mental instability, which more or less overcame him towards the end of his life. But was that instability important to his philosophy?


Ruth Abbey: Well the mental instability is, some people would say, part and parcel of a sort of suffering that he inflicted upon himself, for the whole of his adult life, and that was his relentless determination to never let himself get too comfortable in his thinking or in his ideas. He talks about convictions being the enemy of free-thinking. He talks about the need for the free spirit, which is a figure that he creates and admires very much, needing always to tear himself (perhaps herself) away from the things that they believe, and to try on new ideas, to experiment with new attitudes, new possibilities.


And it seems to me that someone who puts themselves through that sort of very rigorous and relentless intellectual discipline, intellectual hardship, is creating by design a sort of mental instability for themselves. And it's possible that by the end of his life, it just all became too much for him. Of course there were physiological bases for the illness that eventually caused him to collapse ten years before his death, and which finally caused his death; I'm not saying that it was just his ideas that drove him mad, but you can see that it would have been very hard to live with the sort of mental habits that someone like Nietzsche had, constantly punishing himself, constantly challenging and doubting and questioning himself.


Alan Saunders: Well let's look at some of his key concepts. One of the key concepts is the will to power. But what does this mean? It's not simply, is it, my personal desire to control other people or to control my world?


Ruth Abbey: Nietzsche's commentators disagree about exactly what he means with the claim 'the will to power', and some people think that it is a psychological disposition, that it's a craving on the part of all individuals to increase power. Whether this means power over others or power over themselves, the ability to change and re-make and redesign and overcome the self, is a matter for question. But some people think that it does represent a psychological attitude, a psychological quest for power.


There's another way of reading the will to power, which sees it as more of a metaphysical thesis for Nietzsche. He sometimes says that the world itself is will to power, and you yourself are nothing but will to power. So from this point of view the will to power is a drive or an urge that runs through the whole of nature, and runs through human beings because we are natural beings.


Alan Saunders: The notion that the world is will to power, this sounds very much like Arthur Schopenhauer; is that where the idea comes from?


Ruth Abbey: Exactly. Yes, that's where the idea comes from. Schopenhauer distinguishes between the world as real and representation, and some of Nietzsche's formulations of the idea that the world is will to power really echo that Schopenhauerian point. Nietzsche might not want to admit that, because in the later stages of his life he presents himself as being very critical of Schopenhauer, but he also was in many ways indebted to Schopenhauer. So yes, for those who think the will to power is a metaphysical postulate, it's very easy to trace that idea back to Schopenhauer.


Alan Saunders: And what does this idea have to tell us about another key notion in Nietzsche's thought, which is the master and the slave morality?


Ruth Abbey: The master and slave morality is something that Nietzsche develops half-way through his thinking, a bit later into his career. And the idea here is, he first formulates it most clearly in a work called Beyond Good and Evil. And what he says is that having conducted a comparative study of moralities from different times, different places and different cultures, he can break down all those differences into two major differences: some moralities are master moralities, some moralities are slave moralities. And he puts Christianity and democracy on the side of slave morality.


One of the things about slave morality is that it tries to articulate a set of moral values that apply equally to all individuals. So slave moralities are universal by design and ambition. One size fits all. There's a common standard of value of what is good and what is evil, that should apply to all individuals.


Master moralities, by contrast, are very clear that they are applicable only to an elite group of society's or culture's higher human beings. So master moralities apply only to a limited stratum of society, and other people, lower people, slaves, must live according to a different moral code.


Alan Saunders: Now the idea of trying to universalise essentially the slave morality, which he thinks Christianity does, and which he in fact sees as an expression of the will to power, this relates to what he calls (using a French word) resentiment. Tell us about that.


Ruth Abbey: Yes. Well all moralities are driven by the will to power. One of the things about Christianity is that it denies this dimension of itself. Christianity would say that it is motivated by love. By love of God, love of one's neighbour, love of one's neighbour because he or she is made in the image and likeness of God. So one of the things that Nietzsche is trying to do with the will to power hypothesis, is to challenge the self understanding of Christianity, which is meant to be based on love, self-denial, self-abasement and so forth, and show that what really is driving it is this desire for power.


But as you just mentioned, another important motivation for Christianity, according to Nietzsche is what he calls resentiment. We can just translate that I think without any loss of meaning by saying 'resentment'. And what Nietzsche thinks is going on with resentiment is that people can see that lower forms of life, ordinary people, ordinary mortals, can see the differences between themselves and truly great individuals. They can see that, they don't respect it, they resent it. And so part of what's going on in the drive to universalise their morality, is to reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator.


Again, people who advocate slave morality, would never acknowledge that this is what they're doing. Nietzsche was engaging in and uncovering a revelation of what he thinks are the hidden motives of Christianity, but the idea is to bring great people down to the same level as ordinary, weak, herdish, slavish individuals. And Nietzsche sees the mass of human beings as falling into this category of ordinary slavish, herdish individuals. So resentiment is a desire to knock down the tall poppy, if you like, to use Australian parlance to describe this.


Alan Saunders: So he sees resentiment as operating in Christianity and in democracy. Does this mean he's anti-democratic?


Ruth Abbey: There's a debate among Nietzsche's interpreters about this matter, as there is about almost every matter of Nietzsche interpretation, but it's hard not to read him as being anti-democratic. Or at least, very worried about the fate of modern western cultures with the spread of democratisation. Because he thinks that democratisation makes people equal. Now nothing is ever going to make equal for Nietzsche, so there's something of a myth or an illusion behind every doctrine of equality. But he fears that by constantly promulgating the idea that we are all equal, that we can all achieve the same sort of thing, that's going to acquire the status of a self-fulfilling prophecy. That, if you tell everyone that they're equal, people who are capable of more and better and greater, will eventually internalise this belief that they're just equal to everyone else. And so they will stop aspiring, stop trying to do more, better and greater things. So Nietzsche's very worried about democratisation which he sees spreading through modern Western Europe, is a levelling force, and it's a levelling-down force. So he worries that the more democratisation we have, the more mediocrity we're going to have.


Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking to Ruth Abbey, Associate Professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana, USA, about the thought of that troubled and troubling figure, Friedrich Nietzsche.


Ruth, a difficulty that some of us might have with Nietzsche's views, is that he's interested not only in the objective claims of moral opinions, but also with what he calls their genealogy, that's to say the psychological story of their origins.


Ruth Abbey: That's right, exactly. And so it's his genealogical investigations into Christianity that causes him to come up with the idea of resentiment. So in conducting a genealogy of morality, as Nietzsche says he's doing, what he does is to try to go back to the hidden, concealed, covered over, origins of lofty moral concepts. And what he finds at the beginning of many of the lofty moral concepts that we live by, are drives and desires that we wouldn't consider especially noble. Drives and desires for power, drives and desires that reflect self-interest, and so forth.


So there's always a puncturing ambition, always a deflationary ambition in Nietzsche's writings. Part of what he's doing to his modern readers is saying, 'Well you think that you are so progressive, that you've achieved so much, well I'm here to show you that you shouldn't be quite so proud of the things you take so much pride in.' Part of the image that he is attacking here is the Hegelian image of the end of history, the idea that people living in the modern world represent the culmination of humanity. Nietzsche's absolutely horrified by this idea, and his horror is here informed by his studies of the ancient Greek and Roman world, because he repeatedly holds those earlier cultures up as models of real human excellence and achievement. And so he thinks by comparison to those wonderful ancient cultures, what the modern world represents is not the pinnacle of human achievement at all, but it's a very low level of human achievement.


Alan Saunders: One of his other key ideas which we have to talk about I think, is the idea of 'the ubermensch' or 'the superman'. Now the question that arises about the ubermensch is similar to the idea that arises over the will to power. What makes the superman super? Is it that he's achieved control over others or is it that he's achieved control over himself? And I use the masculine pronoun because it kind of seems right for Nietzsche.


Ruth Abbey: Yes, I agree. Certainly any of the models that Nietzsche has of the ubermensch in his writing are masculine models, and you can try to make an argument if you like, that women could have fitted this model, but I think that Nietzsche has men firmly in mind when he's thinking about ubermenschen. The crucial thing about an ubermensch is to have power over the self.


Great people, according to Nietzsche, don't seek power over other people, they might achieve power over people, but that's never their goal. Their goal is always something outside. They're not interested in insulating or putting other people down, they're always aspiring for some form of greatness - cultural, political, artistic, literary, what-have-you. They're not driven by the desire to be judged by the standards of others, and this is one of the things that distinguishes masters from slaves. So the ubermensch is not motivated by control over other people, he might achieve that, but that would never be his primary motivation.


But it's also important to acknowledge here that great people can fail, according to Nietzsche, without that making them any less great. So their greatness doesn't even have to be measured by objective standards, or external achievements or deeds. And there are many very poignant passages where Nietzsche talks about the fragility of the great human being, particularly in the modern world where all the forces of conformity, uniformity and mediocrity, are striving against the realisation of true individualism. So he's very worried about the fate of great individuals, and they're just as likely to fail as they are to succeed, so we can't necessarily measure their greatness by their deeds or by their achievements, it's more a psychological disposition.


Alan Saunders: When you say this, you make him sound distinctly un-Nazi, but we do have to address the question of his adoption by the Nazis. He was their philosophical poster-boy. Were they finding in his thoughts something they wanted to find, or were they finding something that was in fact there all along?


Ruth Abbey: I think it's something of a combination of both. There is certainly in Nietzsche's writings from the middle period onward, there is no glorification of anything like German nationalism.


Alan Saunders: This is despite his early enthusiasm for Wagner?


Ruth Abbey: That's right. He outgrew that. And from the middle-period writings onward, he's a staunch critic of German nationalism, German culture, the German people. So as seems to be always the case with Nietzsche, he can never quite give up a preoccupation that he once had, but he turns against it. So he had great hopes for the revival of German culture through the work of Richard Wagner, but he abandons that hope and becomes extremely critical of his compatriots and German culture in general.


So the Nazis insofar as they get any defence of German nationalism out of Nietzsche, are really misconstruing the great bulk of his writing. Nor is there a defence, I think, of anti-Semitism in Nietzsche's writings. If anything I think what you find again in the later works, is a sort of anti-anti-Semitism. Nietzsche knew some fairly virulent anti-Semites first-hand, and was not an admirer of these people. And so he's frequently critical of anti-Semitism.


And one of the interesting moves that he makes in his writings, is to routinely point us to the Jewish origins of Christianity. And some of the claims that he makes when he's doing this, don't always add up, but I think his rhetorical purpose here is illuminating, and he's trying to say to Christian anti-Semites of his own era that Well actually, a lot of early Christian faith, early Christian culture, originated in Jewish culture. So there's a certain hypocrisy involved for you in being anti-Semitic.


And he can be read as glorifying violence in some passages. He can be read as defending a sort of cruelty. And what I mean by this is that he thinks that one of the problems with modern culture, modern civilisation is that we're very scared of suffering, emotional suffering, physical suffering; what we seek always is comfort. And Nietzsche believes that the true realisation of greatness is impossible without a great deal of suffering also. And so if you're afraid of suffering, you're never going to reach the pinnacles of human achievement, and suffering can sometimes involve cruelty. You need to be able to experience your own suffering, you need to be able to endure the sight of other people suffering. So there is sometimes a rhetoric that defends suffering and violence in Nietzsche's writings, and that could have nourished Nazi sensibilities.


Alan Saunders: Well talking about suffering, it's difficult to avoid some mention of the first step of his decline into mental instability. The famous, almost mythologised episode of striking pity for a horse. Tell us about that.


Ruth Abbey: Well for much of his career, Nietzsche was a great critic of the idea of pity, for some of the reasons that I've just been suggesting. He also thought that this was one of the signature concepts of Christianity, that we must constantly be receptive to the suffering of other people in always trying to alleviate their suffering. And as I just mentioned, Nietzsche thinks that suffering is part and parcel of great human achievements. So he's an implacable critic of pity. And yet there are moments in his writing where he confesses that he is extremely vulnerable to pit himself.


So part of what he's doing in these attacks on the morality of pity, only part of it, but an important part of it, is trying to persuade himself not to feel for the suffering of other human beings, in this case, not to feel for the suffering of other animals. It's part and parcel of the process of what he would call 'self-overcoming'. In order to engage in self-overcoming, you need to have a realistic sense of who you are, what your motivations are, what sort of person you are, and you need to try to overcome the things that you think will make you weak, and Nietzsche fears that excessive sensibility for the suffering of other people is going to make you weak.


Alan Saunders: And the story is that before they led him away, he'd thrown his arms around a coach-horse that was being whipped by its driver.


Ruth Abbey: That's right. In the streets of Turin. This is, as you were saying, it's the episode that really announced to his friends that he was in a complete state of mental decline, and for ten years after that episode, he was non compos for a lot of the time, fading in and out of lucidity, recognised, but sometimes didn't recognise his family members and people caring for him. So it really was if not the beginning of the end, the middle of the end at this stage.


Alan Saunders: It's a sad, though in a way also slightly warming note to end on. Ruth Abbey, thank you very much indeed for joining us today.


Ruth Abbey: Thank you.