Talk:Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche/Archive 1

message: The presentation of Nietzsche's philosophy on Wikipedia is heavily slanted and constitutes more propanganda than accurate scholarship. See the POV disputes on the other articles relating to Nietzsche.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.146.1.8 (talk • contribs) 
:Instead of taking jabs and making generalizations, please provide examples apart from original research. Each editor here has their own perspective on Nietzsche, and speaking at least for myself, have had to reserved their own interpretations for the sake of the article. I, too, had to take advice on what is and is not POV. It is debatable, but much of what is on the article also comes from deeply researched secondary sources (though there is still a huge lack in many places). For the sake of the article, and civility, please provide contextual examples instead of speculations, and constructive criticism instead of slights to everyone else working on this project. Everyone has to learn this. I had to learn it. -Bordello 03:46, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV 

message: I am delighted to see that my segment on Nietzsche's views on women (which has been moved - I think - 3 times since I wrote it more than 6 months ago) has survived more or less intact, improved and made more accurate by other contributions by my fellow Wikipedians. However, the various addings and leavings has given the segment a rather telegraphic tone, which I have set out to rectify and make more easily readable. As always, the results are subject to your comment and manipulation --Marinus 05:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A bit later I'll add a few more references and quotes to satisfy a higher standard of Wiki-correctness. --Marinus 05:54, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Here are two paragraphs I removed while editing. They kinda changed while I was working on the article, because they're complete junk, and even now I don't think they should ever go back in, obviously. The rest, however, can be dealt with.Non-vandal 07:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

text: I think you were a bit heavy-handed. The piece does need references, yes, but not as many as you had indicated (like This stands in contrast to the then-prevailing view of Woman as the receptacle of male fertility"  which was referenced, if not by a footnote). Not all of these problems are a lack of reference, either - more flags than  are needed. Those paragraphs aren't trash ( except for The implication exists that woman can take a different path than the one he has laid out, even if it contradicts her "nature", which is waffling). My edit certainly didn't decrease the degree of correctness of the article, like your reply suggests. --Marinus 05:45, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The fact of the matter is these statements do not stand on their own: please read WP:NOR to see what I mean. Anyway, if they can be substantiated, which I seriously doubt, then they can go back in the article. But they also reek of POV-mongering. As for what my reply suggests: please to not attribute some statement that you think I made to my post. I just did what I think the section needs. My reply was to you out of convenience. No reason to take it personally (and why should you? we're all here doing the same thing, I assume).Non-vandal 05:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You'll note that I voiced my concerns, but didn't charge into the article to repair my contribution, as well as the note I put here promising that references will soon be added (at worst the level of Wiki-correctness was the same as before my edit). I am acquinted with the policies you are so diligently referring to. I think you are being over-zealous - what am I supposed to cite for saying that Nietzsche is commonly called a misogynist? More precisely, which attack? Also, I've reffered to the Michel Foucault article (which had been raised as an example of an excellent article) as to how to approach the writing of such an article. My reading is that it should be an uncontentious summation of the tendencies of secondary research (which is hard to cite but doesn't need support - none of the secondary literature I've read gives referrences for common tendencies) and summaries of specific works (which isn't relevant here). As a matter of form - if I refer to particular statements in Nietzsche's work (to back up my claims of what, in particular examples, he said) do you think footnotes are the best option? Inline quotes are out of the question, in my opinion, and the use of such quotes need to be minimised, so footnotes for the single examples it would be necessary seem fitting. The secondary literature commonly uses inline quotes, but they aren't aiming at the brevity we are. --Marinus 06:24, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Call me over-zealous or not, I disagree, especially per WP:CN. Although I like what you recently did to the section, the points in question need proper sourcing (ie., the claims of Nietzsche's misogynism, etc.). Examples for specific claims shouldn't be so difficult to find (we are talking about Nietzsche, y'know?). I would also suggest you use the  tags instead of parentheticals. Using these we can be more specific where the information is and won't need to provide inline quotations, which I agree are really pointless and add too much to the article anyway.Non-vandal 07:24, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Is that better? What more needs to be done? --Marinus 06:45, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nietzsche's Views on Women 

message: Could we get an admin to protect the page from IPs? Sock-puppets are strictly prohibited. -Bordello 04:22, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPs and Protection 

message: Since this section retains its own article, I think Philosophy of... should have something different from what the Übermensch article has for an introduction. It could be much more comprehensive, helpful, and, as these things imply, better written. This is going to be a long process.Non-vandal 06:49, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Übermensch 

message: The views presented here are quasi-Marxist and un-Nietzschean. For Nietzsche, there is no dualistic separation of the biological from the spiritual and Nietzsche certainly never pretended degeneracy is 'desirable'. Rudiger Safranski is honest enough to really present Nietzsche's anti-modernist, radical-conservative, eugenic-racialist doctrine:
Safranski, Rudiger (trans. Shelley Frisch). Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Norton, 2002:
-- 63.3.10.2 (talk) 07:29, 27 May 2007 (signed by RJC Talk)
:Safranski may be correct about the philosophy, but the claim that "The statements that introduce the Uebermensch in Zarathustra are inconceivable without Darwin: 'You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm' (4, 14; Z First Part, Prologue 3)." appears to be wildly inaccurate. It's true that Nietzsche was working at a time when Ernst Haeckel was promoting his idea of Darwinismus, but if Ruse is cited correctly, Haeckel did not support natural selection, rather believing in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published his ideas of evolution between 1800 and 1822, and these had considerable influence long before Charles Darwin made evolution respectable. According to Richard Leakey, Lamarckism differed from Darwin's theory not so much in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (which Darwin accepted as a supplement to natural selection) as in Lamarck postulating a desire for change, or besoin, which caused the change in the organism which was then passed on to its offspring. This seems to me to match Nietzsche's ideas at least as well as Darwin's idea of heritable variation from unknown laws (now thought of as random mutation) being preserved or removed by natural selection, and even without Darwin the idea of evolution was still in circulation. By the way, is the rather inflammatory heading a reference to liberal Christianity? .. dave souza, talk 14:37, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gutless Liberal-Modernist Whitewashing 

message: The article claims, more than once, that the Nazis "deliberately misinterpreted" Nietzsche's views. I think this claim needs sourcing. We do know that Hitler idolized Nietzsche, raised him to prominence and built statues of him. What has not been demonstrated is that Hitler's or the Nazi's adoration of Nietzsche was in any way disingenuous from their own point of view. Whether Nietzsche would have agreed with their methods or not, they certainly seem to have genuinely believed they were in line with his philosophy. This is an important distinction. If there is evidence to the contrary it should be included, or the claim should be removed.  -- -- 67.142.130.38 (talk) 05:55, 26 June 2007 (signed by RJC Talk 23:24, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Deliberate Misinterpretation" 

message: Thanks to all for the nice article. However, i must agree with the references/OR/neutrality tags. I don't have the Nietzsche background (or research time) to make the changes myself, tho i've done what copyediting i could, but here are a couple POV problems that especially stand out for me:
* The corrently titled section on "criticisms of anti-semitism" completely ignores N's notorious anti-jewish statements, which are relevant to this article in themselves, and are necessary to make balanced sense of his anti- anti-semitism.
* While i applaud the work done on the challenging "views on women" section, incl the obvious effort to be neutral, the section is still strikingly POV.
:1.The section quotes none of his many severely "unflattering statements towards women", and only offers quotes apparantly used to soften or deny his sexism.
:2.The only "further reading" source critiques the view that N was sexist.
:3.It seems (and the fact that this is unclear and that i could be mistaken is a criticism in itself) to partially excuse or even argue against N's sexism (note that i make no case for his "misogyny") by emphasizing his statements to the effect that women are different but not inferior. This needs to be better argued (more below). But it in any case  misunderstands that, in our society, in which WP is being written, extreme different-but-not-inferior (with N we can't say "equal" ;^) ) views of the sexes (such as "men are rational and thus suited to politics, whereas women are irrational and thus should have no role in politics, but are not inferior in that they are more able than men in other areas, such as bearing and raising children") are uncontroversially and by definition sexist, because they lie outside the findings of science and our social norms. So this is a non sequitur as an argument against N's sexism. Against his misogyny, it might well be, but not against his sexism. Yes, i know that much more moderate different-but-equal views are current today and are not uncontroversially considered sexist. But N is way outside that range. And there are other similar non sequiturs, such as N calling Ibsen an "old woman" -- as if it isn't std sexism for a man to put another man down by calling him a woman. If something else is to be proved by this, it must be spelled out, not just cited rhetorically.
:4.The section is a study in words to avoid and related POV, notably: his "alleged views" (a striking tone not present in the rest of the article); the repeated "[critical view] *however* [less critical view]" rhetorical structure; falsehood on top of bias (the uncited "That Nietzsche also mocked men and manliness in the same way has not prevented charges of sexism" -- what N scholar would so equate N's views of men and women?). And numerous other points -- i could almost unpack the bias of this section sentence by sentence, but i'm already going on too long to make the simple argument for a thoro NPOV rewrite.
:5.Nonetheless, i can't resist one more point, because i think it's not only a POV problem but an interesting issue in scholarship and WP sourcing. There's a clear mismatch in this section (and there are other places where the article would benefit from reexamination on this point) between the authorities cited on different sides of the sexism issue: On the "sexist" side, Kaufmann is cited, tho probably ever major modern biographer and N specialist could be as well (so there is also a bias in the number of people cited on each side). On the other side is Derrida, and to a lesser extent, Irigaray -- the only ones WP-linked among a total of four. This is strikingly asymmetrical: the latter clearly deserve treatment in Influence and reception of Nietzsche, but they are not N specialists and are not highly regarded for their "objective" historical views of N -- and oc the postmodernist view of the impossibility or irrelevance of such historiography (pardon my shorthand) is an issue in itself. So i submit that the debate is miscast, and that in a way there is no debate (at least in the way it's laid out here): Among those who use traditional social-science/historical techniques to recover N's actual views, his sexism is uncontroversial. This is a different conversation and project from the postmodernists and reappropriators, who in their largely original works of philosophy and cultural theory may offer non-sexist readings of N.
Finally, i'll note that some more copyediting is needed, but i felt that the bigger rewriting should be addressed first. One area i was tempted to fix but have left for those who can consult the primary sources is the quotes which are rendered in italics (and with redundant quotation marks around block quotes). This is not WP usage, but i believe that N sometimes used extended italics. Could someone check on this?
I've written quickly, making a flawed but i trust adequate case. Thanks again, incl for reading this and making whatever NPOV improvements seem called for. Hope this helps, "alyosha" (talk) 02:25, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV, etc 

message: The corruption of Nietzsche's philosophy in this article by radical-left activists is insane. What better way to neutralize one's enemy than to appropriate, weaken, soften and distort him? The German Rudiger Safranski, at least, has the balls to speak the truth in a world gone mad with doctrinaire socialistic political correctness:  
"According to Nietzsche, nature produces the weak and the strong, the advantaged and disadvantaged. There is no benevolent providence and no equitable distribution of chances to get ahead in life. Before this backdrop, morality can be defined as an attempt to even out the 'injustice' of nature and create counterbalances. The power of natural destinies needs to be broken. In Nietzsche's view, Christianity represented an absolutely brilliant attempt to accomplish this aim ... Nietzsche greatly admired the power of Christianity to set values, but he was not grateful to it, because its consideration for the weak and the morality of evening things out impeded the progress and development of a higher stage of mankind.
Nietzsche could envision this higher stage of mankind only as a culmination of culture in its 'peaks of rapture,' which is to say in successful individuals and achievements. The will to power unleashes the dynamics of culmination, but it is also the will to power that forms a moral alliance on the side of the weak. This alliance works at cross-purposes with the goal of culmination and ultimately, in Nietzsche's view, leads to widespread equalization and degeneration. As a modern version of the 'Christian theory of morality,' this alliance forms the backbone of democracy and socialism. Nietzsche adamantly opposed all such movements. For him, the meaning of world history was not happiness and prosperity of the greatest possible number but individual manifestations of success in life. The culture of political and social democracy was a concern of the 'last people,' whom he disparaged. He threw overboard the state-sponsored ethics of the common welfare because he regarded such ethics as an impediment to the self-configuration of great individuals. If, however, the great personalities were to vanish, the only remaining significance of history would be lost in the process. By defending the residual significance of history, Nietzsche assailed democracy and declared what mattered was 'delaying the complete appeasement of the democratic herd-animal'(11,587; WP 125) ... Nietzsche opted against democratic life organized according to the principle of welfare. For him, a world of that sort would signal the triumph of the human herd animal...
If we are content to regard this highly personal philosophy and these maneuvers of self-configuration with fascination and perhaps even admiration, but are not willing to abandon the idea of democracy and justice, it is likely that Nietzsche would have accused us of feeble compromise, indecisiveness, and epitomizing the ominous 'blinking' of the 'last men.'" Safranski, Rudiger (trans. Shelley Frisch), Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Norton, 2002, pp. 296-298.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.3.10.2 (talk) 13:49, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Left-wing Corruption of Nietzsche

message: As regards super-trendy left-wing corruption and whitewashing of Nietzsche,see H.L. Mencken's The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908) for a fearless, harshly honest portrayal before the egalitarian demagogues and the "post-modern industry" appropriated Nietzsche for their own "civil rights" and anarchistic purposes:
"Nietzsche opposed squarely both the demand for peace and the demand for equality...he believed that war was not only necessary, but also beneficial, and that the natural system of castes was not only beneficent, but also inevitable. In the demand for universal peace he saw only the yearning of the weak and useless for protections against the righteous exploitation of the useful and strong. In the demand for equality he saw only the same thing. ... [Nietzsche's] ideal was an aristocracy which regarded the proletariat merely as a conglomeration of draft animals made to be driven, enslaved and exploited" (Mencken, 162-63).
It seems a gross abuse of scholarly equity that interpreters like Safranski, Mencken, etc. are not given fair recognition in the articles and fringe-left activists arbitrarily decide their own weird, neutralizing interpretation as the only acceptable one.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.3.10.2 (talk) 08:50, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your suggestion. When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes.  Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes — they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills.  New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to).   And getting yourself a user name will give your proposals more weight. .. dave souza, talk 09:39, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

text: When you run up against these creatures your best bet is to keep engaging them, keep providing references to the material (remember, stop injecting your own interpretation. Only those of the people you reference are allowed). The objections to original research were probably because you wanted to deliver an opinionated sermon of your own as opposed to just stating the facts of what your referenced material said. As long as you play by Wikipedia standards, if they are unjustly removing your material then you can complain about them. JettaMann (talk) 15:05, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Mencken and Leftist Distortion

message: http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol6no2/NietzschereviewTOQV6N2.pdf
[...]
Nonetheless, some in today’s left-dominated “post-modernist” academia have a more open-ended view. Homosexual Marxist philosopher and famed sadomasochist Michel Foucault, for example, insisted there was no single Nietzschean philosophy. He suggested the right question to ask was, “What serious use can we make of Nietzsche?”3 Taking Foucault’s apparently political invitation to heart, some Nietzsche scholars have decided to paint their left wing politics with a Nietzschean brush, claiming his pedigree for a variety of left-wing causes on behalf of the “oppressed,” even Communism.
In the 1970s, Tracy Strong, now professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego, suggested that Communist China and Cuba represent the “the very Nietzschean proposition of creating ‘new men.’”4 Referring to any Communist society as Nietzschean flies in the face of Nietzsche’s frequent denunciations of egalitarianism and socialism as manifestations of what he regarded as slave morality. Unfortunately, that sort of misinterpretation and
mischaracterization appears throughout Nietzsche scholarship today, and seems to go unchallenged. While not every philosophy scholar is willing to go so far as to describe Communists as Nietzschean social experimenters, some deliberately attempt to minimize or camouflage those parts of Nietzsche’s writings that contradict or undermine the egalitarian and left-wing ideologies that pervade America’s university system.
Strong himself nearly admitted as much elsewhere:
[T]hose on the democratic left who have been attracted to Nietzsche and have wanted to enlist his thought in their projects have done so by arguing that, while Nietzsche’s thought is not (really) political, his thought provides material for developing a new progressive politics. Such
interpretations thus conclude that it is necessary to set aside Nietzsche’s
particular political judgments.5 But even Strong’s candid assessment of his colleagues is accompanied by a bit of camouflage of his own. “It is hard, on the face of it,” he writes, “to find in Nietzsche support for liberal egalitarian democracy in any of its modern incarnations.”6 As an understatement, the remark is breathtaking. It is akin to suggesting that it is hard to find in Martin Luther King’s works any support for Southern slavery. The phrase “it is hard to find” implies that it might be found if one only looks hard enough. In truth, however, it is hard to find because it isn’t there.
Undermining Nietzsche’s antiegalitarian views by trying to diminish or minimize their significance appears to be common. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, authors of numerous books and essays on Nietzsche, have tried, for example, to dismiss a central tenet of Nietzsche’s antiegalitarianism by asserting “Nietzsche clearly intended the Übermensch as a fiction…”7 Walter Kaufmann, evidently embarrassed by Nietzsche’s seeming Aryan racialism in his explicit glorification of “the magnificent blond beast” described as mastering Europe, tried to explain away the reference by claiming that the blondness refers symbolically to the tawny lion, a metaphor used in Thus Spake Zarathustra to signify creative destruction.8 Kaufmann also dismissed Nietzsche’s decidedly politically incorrect views of women as “philosophically irrelevant.”9
Close examination of Nietzsche’s texts reveals the weaknesses in these claims. Solomon and Higgins argue that since Nietzsche was not a Darwinian, the Übermensch must not be a biological notion, and that Thus Spake Zarathustra (a fictionalized presentation of Nietzsche’s ideas) is the only text in which the
idea is seriously addressed. 
While it is true that he did not accept all of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Nietzsche’s concern with a higher type of man, and the idea of breeding the higher type in both a eugenic and psychological/cultural sense, emerged early in his writing career and remained an important part of his philosophy.
The Übermensch is indeed a “fiction” in the sense that such a being does not yet exist, but Nietzsche repeatedly urged its pursuit as a goal. As early as “Schopenhauer As Educator,” which appears in Untimely Meditations, his second book, Nietzsche calls for the creation of conditions under which “the individual higher exemplar, the more uncommon, more powerful, more complex, more fruitful” man can emerge.10 This was not yet the Übermensch of Zarathustra, but its beginnings are there, and Nietzsche remained committed to
the concept throughout his life. In a notebook of 1885, the year he completed part 4 of Zarathustra, he wrote of the need to create a new morality “whose intention is to breed a ruling caste – the future masters of the earth” who are
described as “a new species and caste of masters” who are the logical result of efforts by “a newer kind of ‘free spirits’” driven by their “dissatisfaction with present-day man.”11 In 1887, long after publication of Zarathustra, he wrote, “The progressive diminishment of man is what drives one to think about the breeding of a stronger race.... Not merely a master race, whose task would be limited to governing; but a race with its own sphere of life, with a surplus of
force for beauty, valor, culture, manners, right up to the highest intellectual realm...”12 He did not use the word Ubermensch, but the concept is identical. In part two of Zarathustra itself, Nietzsche makes it rather clear that he regards the Ubermensch as a very real possible creation of will, in contrast to God, which was a fictional creation.
Once you said God when you looked out onto distant seas; now, however,
I have taught you to say: Ubermensch. God is a conjecture, but I do not
want your conjectures to reach beyond your creative will.
Could you create a God? Then do not talk to me about any gods! But you
could certainly create the Ubermensch. 1
As for Kaufmann’s attempt to deny that the “blond beast” refers to any racial or ethnic group, the context disproves him. The phrase appears in a passage recounting an historical epoch. In one of those contexts where the phrase appears, Nietzsche explicitly refers to “the blond Germanic beast.”14 Nietzsche was no racialist, but the weakness in Kaufmann’s argument betrays a certain anxiety, urgency, and even desperation to prove it. Kaufmann makes it hard to avoid suspecting him of a political motive. That is especially true with regard to his dismissal of Nietzsche’s comments about women being irrelevant to his philosophy. The assertion is simply untenable, because Nietzsche’s views of women are intimately bound up with his understanding
of history and society, and his belief that social progress in which women
play a role is the decadence of modernity. In section 239 of Beyond Good and Evil he wrote:
Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: “woman as clerkess” is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which is in course of formation. While she thus appropriates
new rights, aspires to be “master,” and inscribes “progress” of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realizes itself with terrible obviousness: woman retrogrades. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has declined in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims; and the “emancipation of woman”…thus proves to
be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts.15 [Emphasis in the original]
The decline of culture through this sort of progress/decadence, of which feminism is an integral part, sets the stage for the nihilism from which Nietzsche sought to provide the West an escape with his philosophy.
One egregious example of minimizing Nietzsche’s antidemocratic views deserves special mention. In a book purporting to explain what Nietzsche
“really” meant, Solomon and Higgins admit that Nietzsche had “harsh words” for democracy, but reassure their readers that his criticism was merely “routine.”
His comments are not very different in tone or temper from the routine complaints we hear today (from democrats) about uneducated and
ignorant voters who are easily led astray by demagogues, about the irrationality of making delicate and important strategic decisions by majority vote, about the need for leadership and wisdom at the top rather than simply a popular mandate through polls.16
That characterization of his views is easily refuted by any of a number of passages in Nietzsche’s writings that refer to democracy, of which the following is typical:
I believe that the great, advancing and unstoppable democratic movement of Europe, that which calls itself ‘progress’ – and equally its preparation and moral augury, Christianity – fundamentally signifies only the tremendous, instinctive conspiracy of the whole herd against everything that is shepherd, beast of prey, hermit and Caesar, to preserve and elevate all the weak, the oppressed, the mediocre, the hard-done-by, the halffailed; as a long-drawn-out slave revolt...17
Those comments reveal a profound and radical critique, and do not sound at all like “routine complaints” about democracy. The contrast between Nietzsche’s actual comments and the characterization of them by Solomon and Higgins is quite noticeable, and forces any educated reader to question the interpretative skills of these two scholars.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.3.10.2 (talk) 12:14, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Falsity of Leftwing Democratic Nietzsche

message: On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford University Press, 1998. , p. 49:
"By way of consolation to the more delicate, perhaps in those does pain did not hurt as much as it does today. At least, that might be the conclusion of a physician who has treated Negroes* (these taken as representatives of prehistoric man--) for serious cases of internal inflammation; such inflammation would bring even the best-organized European to the brink of despair--but this is not the case with Negroes. (The curve of human capacity for pain seems in fact to fall off extraordinarily abruptly, once past the upper ten thousand or ten million of the higher culture; and I personally have no doubt that in comparison with a single painful night undergone by one hysterical little bluestocking, the total suffering of all the animals put to the knife in the interests of scientific research simply does not enter into consideration.)"
Note 49 by Douglas Smith, p. 147: "Nietzsche's terminology and views here are clearly racist, assuming an evolutionary difference between white European and black African."
James Winchester, "Nietzsche's Racial Profiling" in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy. Ed. Walls, Andrew. Cornell University Press, 2005. 255:
"At one point Nietzsche suggests that black skin may be a sign of lesser intelligence as well as a sign that one is closer to the apes (Dawn/Daybreak 241). Nietzsche clearly shares some of the basic tenets of nineteenth-century race theory ... In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that Negroes are representatives of prehistoric men (vorgeschlictlichen Menschen) who are capable of enduring pain that would drive the best-organized European to despair (Genealogy 2.7). Today most would see this claim about Africans as a prejudice. Who today would defend the claim that blacks feel pain less acutely than whites, particularly given that such a characterization could be used to justify the enslavement and maltreatment of blacks? ... William Preston uses this passage to make the claim that Nietzsche is a cruel racist, and there are in fact many places that support this claim (William A. Preston, "Nietzsche on Blacks" in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy. Gordon, Lewis. Routledge, 1997, 169). Preston also argues that Nietzsche is equating Negroes to lab animals and that Nietzsche feels that blacks are worth so little that men of distinction will not derive much pleasure in oppressing them. As we have already seen, Nietzsche states unambiguously that cruelty is essential to every 'higher' culture..."
"In On the Genealogy of Morals, we find a discussion of the Aryan race, which is, Nietzsche proclaims, white. Against Rudolf Virchow, whom Nietzsche credits with having created a careful ethnographic map of Germany, Nietzsche argues that dark-haired peoples of Germany cannot be Celtic. Germany's dark-haired people are essentially pre-Aryan. Nietzsche further argues that suppressed races are coming to the fore again in Europe, and one can see this on the basis of the emergence of darker coloring and shorter skulls. He says it is even possible that modern democracy, or even more likely modern anarchism and the inclination for the commune, 'the most primitive form of society which is now shared by all socialists in Europe', is a sign of the counter-attack of the pre-Aryan races. The Aryan race may very well be in a state of physiological decline..."
Gooding-Williams, Robert, "SUPPOSING NIETZSCHE TO BE BLACK--WHAT THEN?" in (same author) Look, a Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics. Routledge, 2005.
"While new and still newer Nietzsches continue to thrive...older Nietzsches remain-one of which is Nietzsche, the philosopher of aristocratic radicalism, but likewise the brutally scathing critic of socialism, feminism, and liberalism-indeed, of all forms of modern egalitarianism. This, for example, is the figure Georg Lukacs describes in writing that Nietzsche's 'whole life's work was a continuous polemic against Marxism and socialism' (The Destruction of Reason). Similarly, it is the figure William Preston evokes when...he insists that 'Nietzsche's whole philosophy-and not just his view of blacks-is racist.' In an essay meant for an anthology devoted to black existentialism ('Nietzsche on Blacks' in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy. Gordon, Lewis. Routledge, 1997, 169), Preston asks, 'Can Nietzsche help black existentialists find answers to their own questions?' 'No' is Preston's clear response to this question, but a careful reading of his argument urges a still stronger conclusion-namely, that progressive philosophers given to a serious engagement with issues like white supremacy, colonialism, black politics, and black identity-whether or not they are existentialists, and whether or not they are black-have no use for Nietzsche. Preston tends toward this conclusion when he claims that Nietzsche saw suffering black people as laboratory animals that he wanted 'to make ... suffer more.' In effect, Preston argues that black and other progressives have no use for Nietzsche, because Nietzsche was a 'cruel racist' and a forwardlooking, trans-European 'man of the Right.'
...In his excellent essay on Nietzsche and colonialism, Robert Holub remarks that events heralding Germany's emergence as a colonial power (Germany began to acquire colonies in Africa and the Pacific in 1884) 'reached their height during the years that Nietzsche was composing his major works' ('Nietzsche's Colonialist Imagination: Nueva Germania, Good Europeanism, and Great Politics' in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox). Holub also reminds his readers that Nietzsche became personally involved with colonialism through the adventures of his sister and brother-in-law, Elisabeth and Bernhard Forster, founders of the Paraguayan colony of Nueva Germania. Finally, and most important for my purposes, Holub recognizes that this personal involvement has 'a philosophical counterpart in [Nietzsche's] writings.' More exactly, he acknowledges that Nietzsche's philosophical imagination becomes a colonialist imagination when it conjures the images of the 'good European' and a 'great politics' to envision a caste of 'new philosophers' that would rule Europe and subjugate the entire earth. A critic of the sort of nationalism the Forsters embraced,
Nietzsche endorsed a supranationalist imperialism, and his 'untimeliness ... involves his unusual way of approaching the problems posed by foreign affairs and world politics. Eschewing the nationalist, mercantile, and utopian/idealist approach to colonization, he developed ... a conceptual framework that entailed a geopolitical perspective. In the 'good European' he found a term for a future elite that could overcome the nation-state, create a superior cultural life, and achieve domination of the world. With 'great politics' he offered an alternative to parliamentary life and actual colonial fantasies, as well as a vague blueprint for global conquest on a grand scale.'
Holub's description of Nietzsche's geopolitics helps put Preston's remarks into perspective. Thus, when Preston describes Nietzsche as a forward-looking, trans-European 'man of the Right,' he alludes to Nietzsche's colonialist fantasy of a future, European elite that would dominate the world beyond Europe. When he describes Nietzsche as a racist, he reminds us that this fantasy is, in part, the fantasy of a black Africa subjected to European rule, and that Nietzsche's antiblack racism (evident, for example, in his suggestion that the black race is less intelligent than the white races; see Daybreak, aphorism 241; On the Genealogy of Morals, second essay, aphorism 7, where Nietzsche takes blacks as representatives of prehistoric man) in tandem with his enthusiasm for breeding higher human beings, suggests that he imagined an 'imperialism of the future' as involving the domination of racially inferior black Africans by racially superior white Europeans. In short, Preston exposes the white supremacist connotations of Nietzsche's colonialist imagination."
Cf. Abir Taha, Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman: Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.131.55.73 (talk) 03:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Nietzsche's AntiBlack White Racism

message: "In his 1872 essay 'The Greek State,' Nietzsche contended that Greek artistic genius depended on the continued suffering of slaves and the lower classes...Elsewhere, he noted that such suffering was also present in modern society, as could be seen from the agitations of the socialist internationals. In both cases, he argued, it was dangerous and useless to attempt to overturn the social order: in the end, the Greek idea of 'humanity' had nothing to do with democracy or 'human rights' (Grundrechte). With this brusque rejection of political equality, Nietzsche departed sharply from the repulican ideals of eighteenth-century Philhellenism." (George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 242).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.3.10.2 (talk) 14:34, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Nietzsche's Antisocialist Defense of Slavery

message: Please disscuss the dispute here, this is getting silly. Zazaban 18:38, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Why doesn't this article have references?  Nietzsche is a very popular philosopher; this shouldn't be difficult.  I would add them in myself, but I didn't write this article.This.machinery (talk) 01:41, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oh, that's no reason not to add the references!  Be bold:  no one owns any of these articles.  RJC Talk Contribs 01:55, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't quite understand. How would you categorize these 42 items?  ~ Alcmaeonid (talk) 14:49, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, a few sections do lack sufficient citations, and a number of the references that the article does have are to Nietzsche's works; it would be more in keeping with WP:NOR and WP:V if we could get more secondary sources. RJC Talk Contribs 17:33, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit war 

message: The articles says: 
His project of a "great politics" radically opposed him to contemporary eugenist programs which purported to struggle against the "degeneration" of the "race" by improving the "elites," for whom Nietzsche only conceived despise, and eliminating the "weak" and lower classes — whereas Nietzsche only required "distance" from the "gregarious type," which included people from all social classes and "races." 
This is not true. See, for example the Nietzsche book by Safranski. So I rewrote the section and included the following pro-eugenics remarks by Nietzsche.
Twilight of the Idols (1888): Morality for physicians. -- The sick man is a parasite of society. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt--not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their patients. To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most inconsiderate pushing down and aside of degenerating life--for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live. To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. The Antichrist (1888): What is good? -- All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? -- All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? -- The feeling that power increases -- that a resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power, not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency (virtue in the Renaissance style, virth, virtue free of moralic acid.) The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so. What is more harmful than any vice? -- Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak -- Christianity .... Ecce homo (1888): The new party of life, which takes charge of the greatest of all tasks, raising up humanity, including the relentless destruction of all that is degenerate and parasitical, will gain make possible the excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state must reawaken.
I also replaced the phrase: 
It was also long thought that one central political theme running through much of Nietzsche's work was Social Darwinism — the idea that the strong have a natural right to dominate the weak, and that feelings such as compassion and mercy are burdens to be overcome. This, too, is based on a misrepresentation of his critiques of morality and politics: the "genealogical method" is, in this sense, an appeal to the possibility of different moral values rather than a defence per se of what he describes as "master" and "slave" moralities. 
by the more neutral form 
Some think that one central political theme running through much of Nietzsche's work was some sort of Social Darwinism — the idea that the strong have a natural right to dominate the weak, and that feelings such as compassion and mercy are burdens to be overcome. Others think that this is a misrepresentation of his critiques of morality and politics: the "genealogical method" is, in this sense, an appeal to the possibility of different moral values rather than a defence per se of what he describes as "master" and "slave" moralities. For the different interpretations, see Safranski. Regards, --D.H (talk) 15:11, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nietzsche and biology