This ended up being pretty long, so I'll divide it into 3 posts. ----------- Since better thinkers than me still disagree about precisely what all Nietzsche really means, and since trying to defend his philosohpy as such is a job well beyond the scope of an email, I really just want to offer some counterexamples to the the following notions: that he was a nationalist of any stripe (regional or race-based) and that he was an anti-Semite by the standards of his day or our own. As for the accusation that his morality is evil, I can only say that Nietzsche would agree with you, Dan, and probably smile mischeivously. But he would not mean by "evil" what you probably mean by it, not entirely anyway. It should be noted that quite a lot of Nietzsche's correspondence, with his family and publishers and his few friends, still exists. So I'll start with a secondary source that relies on that correspondence and then work in some quotations from Nietzsche himself. Walter Kaufmann, in _Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist_, writes about Nietzsche's relationship with Richard Wagner: "Nietzsche, who was then [around the time of Wagner's Bayreuth festival] championing the ideals of Voltaire and the Enlightenment, advocating intermarriage between different races, and propogating the vision of the 'Good European'---views which, we shall see, he never repudiated---considered intellectual integrity one of the cardinal virtues." p. 39 "Hitler, of course, knew fifty times as much about Wagner as he did about Nietzsche, and Wagner's essays, unlike Nietzsche's, did not have to be expurgated by the Nazis before being used in schools." p. 41 Kaufmann describes Nietzsche's horror at his sister Elisabeth's decision to marry Berhard Forster, one of Victorian Germany's most rabid anti-Semites, and quotes his letters: "You have gone over to my antipodes . . . I will not conceal that I consider this engagement an insult---or a stupidity which will harm you as much as me." Nietzsche to Elisabeth, 1885 p. 43 "One of the greatest stupidities you have committed---for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy. . . . It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely *opposed*, as I am in my writings." Nietzsche to Elisabeth, 1887 p. 45 -------------- Marvin Long Austin, Texas
