Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) proved again this week that he remains the only 19th-century philosopher, aside from Karl Marx, who can disturb the 21st century. Those familiar with the fate of his ideas won't be surprised to learn that Jared Loughner, the 22-year-charged with six murders in Tucson last Saturday, reads Nietzsche.
The psychological underbrush that creates madmen also provides fertile ground for a simple-minded version of Nietzsche. On Tuesday, Zane Gutierrez, a former friend, told a New York Times reporter that Loughner talked about The Will To Power.
We can imagine how a lonely young man could warm to a philosopher writing about power. In people already alienated, Nietzsche's phrase, "philosophy with a hammer," can stir dangerous impulses. He wrote with more clarity than most philosophers, so anyone can read a little of him and perhaps draw ugly conclusions.
Nietzsche believed that humans strive persistently to control others. Whatever we do reflects an irresistible desire to bring people within our grasp. Christianity insists that it acts out of love but that's because, he taught, Christians don't understand their motives. According to Nietzsche, "This world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!"
That means (if we accept it) that altruism is impossible and so is morality. Exactly what a rebellious boy would love to tell his parents. A more careful reading reveals Nietzsche's other obsessions, such as his ecstatic admiration of ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Jittery young fans may not have the time to give him the attention his work requires.
This is not the first appearance of Nietzsche's name in a crime report. It famously cropped up in 1924, when a Chicago teenager was kidnapped and murdered by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two bright 19-year-olds from prosperous families. Reading Nietzsche, Leopold decided he recognized himself as an Übermensch, a superior human described by Nietzsche, not subject to ordinary rules of conduct. He persuaded Loeb that they should certify their status as superior by committing a perfect crime. But one of them left his prescription glasses near the body, the police found them and the conspirators went to prison, their murder labelled "the crime of the century."
Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History, wrote recently that "Whether we acknowledge it or not, we continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche." Post-modernism as taught in contemporary universities reflects the way various theorists have re-interpreted Nietzsche on power. Cultural relativism, a key part of 21st-century thinking, has its roots in him. Any attack on bourgeois morality can be traced to him. So can our post-Christian habit of referring to all our beliefs and ethical rules as "values."
All philosophers imagine they will influence events, but Nietzsche is one for whom it happens, decade after decade — though of course not always in ways he might have imagined.
For most of a century, Nietzsche's apparent connection to the Nazis has unfairly distorted his reputation. In his mature years, Nietzsche despised German chauvinism and considered anti-Semitism disgusting. But when insanity ended his career in 1889, his sister Elisabeth hijacked his writings for her purposes. A vicious anti-Semite and a passionate German nationalist, she became a Nazi cheerleader. Hitler may not have read Nietzsche but called him his favourite philosopher. He loved Elisabeth, mainly because she believed the Nazis carried on her brother's tradition. When she died in 1935, two years after Hitler assumed power, he gratefully attended her funeral. Storm troopers lined the road to the swastika-draped church.
Nietzsche lived in some ways a wretched life. He failed in his only serious attempt to find a wife and he suffered from incapacitating headaches, severe problems of digestion and progressive blindness that allowed him only a couple of hours of work a day. Any biography of him demonstrates that his will to be heard was powerful and, till he became hopelessly ill, indomitable. In his 30s he had to surrender his university appointment and move restlessly between Switzerland and the south of France, searching for weather to improve his health.
He was writing, he thought, "a prelude to the philosophy of the future." A sceptic about the progress that was commonly celebrated in his time, he was pessimistic about human development but convinced that his ideas, though they attracted little attention during his lifetime, would in time impress the world, maybe even change the world's way of thinking. And so they did.
