NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY IS SEXIST

NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY IS SEXIST

1. NIETZSCHE THOUGHT WOMEN WERE WEAK AND SHOULD STAY OUT OF PUBLIC LIFE

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Lecturer, Modern European Philosophy, University of Warwick, NIETZSCHE, FEMINISM AND POLITICAL THEORY, 1993, p. 29-30.

In his own time Nietzsche wrote as a critic of European feminism, speaking out against what he saw as the emasculation of social life and the rise of a sentimental politics based on altruistic values. He attacked the idea that women would be emancipated once they had secured equal rights. Certain passages in his work show quite unequivocally that he regarded the whole issue of women's emancipation as a misguided one. The great danger of the women's movement in attempting to enlighten women about womanhood is that it teaches women to unlearn their fear of men. When this happens, he argues, woman--"the weaker sex"--abandons her most womanly instincts.

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Lecturer, Modern European Philosophy, University of Warwick, NIETZSCHE, FEMINISM AND POLITICAL THEORY, 1993, p. 31

Nietzsche's thought is "sexist" in that, like most traditional aristocratic thinking (Plato being the obvious exception), it excludes women from engaging in the public agon, and restricts her role to the private or domestic sphere. Woman's primary role for Nietzsche is one of adornment.

NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY IS ELITIST

1. NIETZSCHE IS MOST CONCERNED WITH FOSTERING ELITISM

Fredrick Appel, Canadian Philosopher, NIETZSCHE CONTRA DEMOCRACY, 1999, p. 1

Friedrich Nietzsche's great concern is for the flourishing of those few whom he considers exemplary of the human species. He believes that we can--and should--make qualitative distinctions between higher, admirable modes of human existence and lower, contemptible ones, and that these distinctions should compel his target readership to foster higher forms of human life at whatever cost to the many who cannot aspire thereto.

Fredrick Appel, Canadian Philosopher, NIETZSCHE CONTRA DEMOCRACY, 1999, p. 2

By attempting to help them wean themselves from values that are manifestly bad for them, Nietzsche sees himself as laying the foundation of a new, aristocratic political order in Europe in which the herdlike majority and its preferred values are put in their proper place: under the control of a self-absorbed master caste whose only concern is for the cultivation of its own excellence.
3. DISMISSALS OF NIETZSCHE'S ELITISM ARE ASSUME TOO MUCH

Fredrick Appel, Canadian Philosopher, NIETZSCHE CONTRA DEMOCRACY, 1999, p. 4

With the infinite malleability of Nietzsche's writings conveniently assumed as a point of departure, postmodern theorists of democracy approach Nietzsche with the following question in mind: to what purpose can and should we use (or abuse) his work in the pursuit of our ends? Since we happen to be interested in radicalizing democratic theory and making a more pluralistic democratic practice conceivable (so their reasoning goes), we should focus on those elements of his opus that seem especially conducive to radical democracy and jettison the rest as retrograde and unusable.

NIETZSCHE'S VIEW OF RELIGION IS FLAWED

1. NIETZSCHE OVERSIMPLIFIES JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Michael Pantazakos, Assistant Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, CARDOZO STUDIES IN LAW AND LITERATURE, Winter 1998, p. 208

Whether Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity is in any way correct or complete, whether it truly contemplates the full range of the Christian experience not as he knew it only but as it was and is lived in ways and in places with which he was unfamiliar, I cannot fully address here. Nonetheless, while I consider Nietzsche the nonpareil social critic of Western culture and affirm outright many aspects of his assault on Western spirituality, I will say that I believe his overall view was regrettably narrow in several respects, especially in his disregard of Christianity and Judaism both as essentially variegated religious phenomena.

Michael Pantazakos, Assistant Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, CARDOZO STUDIES IN LAW AND LITERATURE, Winter 1998, p.209

Nietzsche often reserved his most opprobrious verbal assault for the Jewish founders of Christianity and, although no reader of good conscience in even the worst invective could discern anything therein genuinely anti-Semitic, his attacks unfairly banish from the realm of the spiritually sound ideas that are part and parcel not only of the Jewish religion but of other faith systems around the world, from deepest antiquity to the present, not excluding Christianity. Here, unfortunately, his anti-Christian zeal outstripped his objectivity, a fact not lost on those who would later pervert, however preposterously, the anti-Judaic content of both his general and ad hominem obloquies into racist propaganda.
3. NIETZSCHE UNDERESTIMATED RELIGION'S IMPORTANCE IN SOCIAL CHANGE

Karen Armstrong, Author of A HISTORY OF GOD, NEWSWEEK, July 12, 1999, p. 54.

In one sense, the 20th century has proved Nietzsche wrong. Since the 1970s, religion has once again become a factor in public life in a way that would have once seemed inconceivable. The Iranian revolution was succeeded by an eruption of Islamic revivalist movements in the Middle East. At about the same time, the Moral Majority and the new Christian right tried to bring God back into political life in the United States, while ultra-Orthodox Jews and radical religious Zionists have done the same in Israel. Now no government can safely ignore religion. The assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt and of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel are sober reminders of the lethal danger of some forms of modern faith.

ROBERT NOZICK

LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHER (b. 1938)

The distribution of goods, economic and otherwise, has been the key problem of political philosophy in the last hundred years. Libertarianism emerged in the 20th Century as a vaguely unpopular protest against the perceived shared agreement between capitalist and socialist nations concerning distribution. Following the Great Depression, even those societies associated with market economies began to see the threat of widespread poverty as an inspiration for limited and calculated redistribution of wealth. Libertarians such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick rose up with moral arguments to counter pragmatic politics.