What Nietzsche Really Said by Robert C. Solomon

Author:Robert C. Solomon [Solomon, Robert C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82837-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

Nietzsche Ad Hominem

(Nietzsche’s “Top Ten”)

ALTHOUGH NIETZSCHE spent most of his career in solitude, he was not one of those hermetic thinkers whose universe wholly consisted of a lonely self with grandiose ideas. He was in the constant company of the great (and some not-so-great) thinkers of his times and of the past. He knew them only through their words, through books and reports, but he was actively engaged with them, even if the engagement was decidedly one-sided. Although he was certainly no “humanist” in the usual sense, Nietzsche delighted in understanding and writing about other people. His most brilliant and biting comments, observations and essays involve a keen insight into people, both as individuals and as types. He wondered what made people “tick,” and he rightly suspected that what they thought and said about themselves and their ideals was almost always misleading, mistaken, or just plain fraudulent. In Ecce Homo he wrote that “a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings,”1 but this claim has not always been taken as seriously as it ought to be. Philosophical doctrines carry a strong sense of universality and necessity, while psychological analyses remain inevitably bound to the particular contingencies of a personality or a people. But Nietzsche was suspicious of claims to universality and necessity, and he almost always preferred the witty or dazzling or even offensive psychological insight to the grand philosophical thesis, for example, his comment that Socrates was ugly,2 that Kant was decadent,3 that moral leaders are resentful,4 and “How much beer there is in the German intelligence!”5

Nietzsche saw himself as a diagnostician, and his philosophy consists to a very large extent of speculative diagnoses, concerning the virtues and vices of those whom he read and read about, whose influence determined the temper of the times. His central strategy, accordingly, was the use of the ad hominem argument, a rhetorical technique often dismissed as a “fallacy,” an attack on the character, the motives, and the emotions of his interlocuters rather than a refutation of their ideas as such. Of Socrates, he writes, “[W]e can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation.”6 Such ad hominem arguments pervade Nietzsche’s writings. Indeed, much more of Nietzsche’s work is devoted to his “skirmishes” with other thinkers than we are usually led to believe, and one might well plot the course of his philosophy by tracing it through his various comments, caustic and otherwise, about other people. With that in mind, we decided to present a short catalogue of those figures on whom Nietzsche lavished the most (though not always the most flattering) attention.

Many years ago, Crane Brinton organized his early book about Nietzsche under the twin titles, “What Nietzsche Loved” and “What Nietzsche Hated.” To be sure, Nietzsche would disapprove of such dichotomous thinking; nevertheless, it is hard to think of this most passionate thinker without thinking in such personal and vehement emotional terms. Nietzsche loved and hated throughout his career—mainly people he knew only through their writings.

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