Friedrich Nietzsche & Fort Worth

Last week I wrote a blog in which I was talking about an article in the Seattle P-I that I thought was of a sophisticated nature, the likes of which you'd never see in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, both due to the elevated level of the critique and some of the polysyllabic words and references used, such as a reference to Nietzsche.

I suggested that so few of the Star-Telegram's readers would have a clue as to who or what Nietzsche was or is, that you'd never see a reference to someone such as Nietzsche.

As a public service, in my ongoing attempt to raise the erudition level of my few Fort Worth readers, let me explain, Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, born in 1844, died in 1900. He wrote about religion, morality, culture, philosophy and science. While some attention was paid to him while he was alive, his greater fame and influence would come after his death.

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia about Nietzsche....

Readers have responded to Nietzsche's work in complex and sometimes controversial ways. Many Germans eventually discovered his appeals for greater individualism and personality development in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but responded to those appeals divergently. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; in 1894–95 German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive. During the late 19th century Nietzsche's ideas were commonly associated with anarchist movements and appear to have had influence within them, particularly in France and the United States.

By World War I, however, he had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for right-wing German militarism. German soldiers even received copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I. The Dreyfus Affair provides another example of his reception: the French anti-semitic Right labelled the Jewish and Leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans".

Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas. However, it is not always possible to determine whether or not they actually read his work. Hitler, for example, probably never read Nietzsche, and if he did, his reading was not extensive. However, the Nazis made very selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy; this association with National Socialism caused Nietzsche's reputation to suffer following World War II. Mussolini certainly read Nietzsche, as did Charles de Gaulle. It has been suggested that Theodore Roosevelt read Nietzsche and was profoundly influenced by him, and in more recent years, Richard Nixon read Nietzsche avidly.

Nietzschean ideas exercised a major influence on several prominent European philosophers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the Anglo-American tradition, the scholarship of Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale rehabilitated Nietzsche as a philosopher, and analytic philosophers such as Alexander Nehamas, William E. Connolly and Brian Leiter continue to study him today. A vocal minority of recent Nietzschean interpreters (Bruce Detwiler, Fredrick Appel, Domenico Losurdo, Abir Taha) have contested what they consider the popular but erroneous egalitarian misrepresentation of Nietzsche's "aristocratic radicalism". Bertrand Russell in his epic History of Western Philosophy was scathing in his chapter on Nietzsche, calling his work the "mere power-phantasies of an invalid" and referring to Nietzsche as a "megalomaniac".

So, now you know, Nietzsche influenced people as widely disparate as Mussolini, Charles De Gaulle, Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. And Hitler. He may even have helped bring about the Hippies in the 60s. I don't know if Fort Worth had Hippies during the 60s.