What Nietzsche Really Said (What They Really Said) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert C. Solomon is the Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of, among many other books, From Hegel to Existentialism.
Kathleen M. Higgins is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Together, Solomon and Higgins have written A Short History of Philosophy and Reading Nietzsche. They live in Austin.

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What Nietzsche Really Said gives us a lucid overview -- both informative and entertaining -- of perhaps the most widely read and least understood philosopher in history.

Friedrich Nietzsche's aggressive independence, flamboyance, sarcasm, and celebration of strength have struck responsive chords in contemporary culture. More people than ever are reading and discussing his writings. But Nietzsche's ideas are often overshadowed by the myths and rumors that surround his sex life, his politics, and his sanity. In this lively and comprehensive analysis, Nietzsche scholars Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins get to the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy, from his ideas on "the will to power" to his attack on religion and morality and his infamous "Ubermensch (superman).

What Nietzsche Really Said offers both guidelines and insights for reading and understanding this controversial thinker. Written with sophistication and wit, this book provides an excellent summary of the life and work of one of history's most provocative philosophers.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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ietzsche Really Said gives us a lucid overview -- both informative and entertaining -- of perhaps the most widely read and least understood philosopher in history.


Friedrich Nietzsche's aggressive independence, flamboyance, sarcasm, and celebration of strength have struck responsive chords in contemporary culture. More people than ever are reading and discussing his writings. But Nietzsche's ideas are often overshadowed by the myths and rumors that surround his sex life, his politics, and his sanity. In this lively and comprehensive analysis, Nietzsche scholars Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins get to the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy, from his ideas on "the will to power" to his attack on religion and morality and his infamous Übermensch (superman).


What Nietzsche Really Said offers both guidelines and insights for reading and understanding this controversial thinker. Written with sophistication and wit,

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Chapter One
Rumors: Wine, Women, and Wagner

Nietzsche is now the most often cited philosopher in the Western tradition. His name gets dropped in novels and movies, from Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Blazing Saddles and A Fish Called Wanda. The literature about and against Nietzsche is voluminous, but despite a great deal of good scholarship in the past half century, old myths and prejudices remain prominent in the public consciousness. The infamous ad hominem argument, "Nietzsche was crazy, so don't take anything he wrote seriously," can still be heard in some philosophy seminars. Nietzsche's supposedly right-wing political views continue to be cited and abused in intelligent street conversation, and Nietzsche's supposed hatred of women is so well established as a bulwark of patriarchy that it is accepted even by those who should know better. Nietzsche's alleged affiliation with Hitler and the Nazis survives fifty years after Walter Kaufmann debunked that vile association; and Nietzsche's imagined love of raw, brute power remains a staple of quasi-philosophical college lore.

In order to even begin to make some headway into the question of what Nietzsche really said, it is first necessary to say with some confidence what he did not say, what he did not do, what did not motivate him, what he did not think. We begin, therefore, with thirty rumors about Nietzsche, many of them prominent mainly among those who condemn him without reading him, but others common even among his more enthusiastic readers. Let us begin with:

Rumor # 1. Nietzsche Was Crazy

It is true that Nietzsche suffered from mental illness at the end of his life. For his last ten years, from 1889 until his death in 1900, he was utterly incompetent (in the clinical sense), and during this time he did not write at all. Some scholars claim to detect some craziness in his last book, Ecce Homo, but what is interpreted as impending insanity (and the key word here is impending) is much more convincingly understood as ironic, self-mocking genius. Those who attempt to make the case that Nietzsche was already mad typically interpret Nietzsche's hyperbole and bombast as indications of delusions of grandeur. For example, Nietzsche entitles the chapters of Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Wise," "Why I Am So Clever," "Why I Write Such Excellent Books," and "Why I Am a Destiny." But Nietzsche was a masterful and uninhibited wit, and irony as a form of philosophizing had its precedents. Socrates, considering the oracle's pronouncement that he was the wisest man in Athens, announced to everyone who would listen (including the jury that would condemn him) that he was the wisest only because he knew that he was completely ignorant. Nietzsche's implicit comparison with Socrates is hardly modest, but pseudo-self-aggrandizement hardly counts as "crazy."

Nietzsche, while in Turin, in January 1889, is said to have "collapsed" into madness when he saw a horse being beaten by its driver. He walked up to the horse, attempted to protect it by hugging it, and lost consciousness. After he was taken back to where he was staying, Nietzsche wrote some peculiar letters to friends, who, consequently, became worried about his sanity. The letter that resulted in his institutionalization was written to Jakob Burckhardt, who had been Nietzsche's colleague while he was a classics professor in Basel. This letter, dated January 6, 1889, began.
Dear Professor:
In the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices however and wherever one lives. . . .
Nietzsche's writing in the voice of God the Creator, who has restrained his egoism enough to be content in that role, distressed Burckhardt. He showed it to another of Nietzsche's friends, Franz Overbeck, who had also received a letter from Nietzsche, this one signed "Dionysus" and claiming "I am just having all anti-Semites shot." Overbeck went to Turin and took Nietzsche to a nursing home in Basel, eventually arranging for his hospitalization in an asylum in Jena (in the eastern part of Germany). Nietzsche was released a short while later into the care of his mother. After her death responsibility for him fell to his sister Elisabeth, who moved him to Weimar and quite literally put him on display for visitors in her efforts to develop a cult around him and his philosophy. These efforts were sufficiently successful that she later got Hitler interested in Nietzsche's writings.

Nietzsche may have been "crazy," in the vernacular sense, in the last years of his life, but this does not mean that he was mentally ill before 1889. But even if he displayed symptoms of mental disturbance (and how many of history's great philosophers have not been neurotic, at least?), one must nevertheless admit that much of what he says, though often extreme, is hardly insane.

Rumor # 2. Nietzsche Hated Women

Nietzsche's alleged misogyny is still the target of routine feminist attacks, but the truth is that Nietzsche struggled with many of the same ideas feminists today have been grappling with. He recognized the importance of education in determining the specifics of gender roles, for example, and he suggested that men and women have different perspectives that affect their understanding of the world. Because he shares a number of concerns with our era's feminists, a number of feminist thinkers are currently reinvestigating Nietzsche's ideas about sex and gender.


It is certainly true that Nietzsche shared at least some of the male chauvinism of his times, and he was no doubt influenced by his mentor Arthur Schopenhauer, who made many disparaging comments about women. Nietzsche's personal relationships with women were complex, but they do not betray signs of hatred so much as confusion. Twice he proposed marriage to women so early on in the relationship that he could not reasonably have expected an acceptance. A more likely diagnosis is that he panicked, that he sought relief rather than acceptance, that he did not really want to get married.

Despite his romantic record and his largely solitary lifestyle, Nietzsche was close friends with several women of exceptional talent. One of his would-be fiancées, Lou Andreas-Salomé, was an accomplished writer and critic in her own right, and the two developed an intimate friendship of great significance to both of them, although the romance itself lasted only a few months. In a famous photograph with Nietzsche and their mutual friend (and Nietzsche's rival) Paul Rée, Lou is perched in a wagon, holding a whip over the two men. This picture is often "Exhibit A" in the case against Nietzsche for his sexism. But Nietzsche himself posed the picture, and we should not forget who holds the whip, nor the joking spirit in which the picture was made.

The photograph with Lou may have added a dimension of private humor (most likely black humor) to a scene in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that Nietzsche wrote shortly after their estrangement. This scene presents Nietzsche's protagonist Zarathustra's reporting of a conversation with an old woman, which concluded with her comment, "You are going to women? Don't forget your whip." As in the photograph, the whip is introduced here by a woman, and the scene is far more complex than the usual out-of-context quote would reveal. Given that Zarathustra has been rhapsodizing about his own fantasies of heterosexual love, the old woman's suggestion hints that she does not think that women will participate so readily. Far from endorsing...