I had heard that Nietzsche was/is tremendously misunderstood so it’s nice to be able to work through some of the rumors.

The book lists 30 rumors. Here are a 13 I found especially interesting:

• Nietzsche was crazy. True. He did go crazy probably thanks to syphilis in his later years, but it came on quickly and none of his published books reflect this insanity.
• Nietzsche was a Nazi. Totally false. He believed in the mixing of the races, not racial purity. And he went out of his way to ridicule the Germans and their “Aryan” pretensions to racial superiority. The “blond beast” he refers to is a lion, not a blond-haired German soldier. Nietzsche did not think Germans were either super-men or masters. He lamented the fact that his native language was German.
• Nietzsche hated Jews. False. He was not an anti-Semite, in fact he once made the claim that he wanted to shoot all the anti-Semites. After he went insane, his anti-Semitic sister took care of him and took the liberty of editing The Will to Power and adding her own anti Semitic comments. Walter Kaufman has since cleaned it up. Nietzsche is critical of Judaism, but also all Western history that followed. That Richard Wagner was anti-Semitic is one of the reasons Nietzsche turned against him.
• Nietzsche was a Fascist. False. He attacks democracy and socialism, but he also attacks with equal ferocity autocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, theocracy, nationalism, militarism, racism, intolerance and political stupidity of all kinds. The only type of political notion he might have supported was aristocracy (“rule by the best”) which he shares with Socrates. But really, if he believed in any politics at all it was a politics in which there would be no need to be political.
• Nietzsche adored power. False. Nietzsche said that “power makes stupid”. He talks about will to power, but the German word he uses for power is Macht, not Reich which refers to a personal strength rather than political might. Nietzsche doesn’t write about having power or even feeling power. What he writes about is self-discipline and creative power: the need to increase one’s strength and vitality so as to do great things (like write great books on philosophy)
• Nietzsche was a Nihilist. False. Nietzsche predicted the coming of nihilism in Europe with horror and vehemently denounced what he saw as nihilism in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nietzsche believed himself to be a liberator of values, not a destroyer of them.
• Nietzsche hated Christianity. False. Like Kierkegaard, he had many words of contempt for Christianity – especially the unthinking conformists. But he did admire the Christian souls who really lived and suffered what they believed, Jesus in particular. What he disliked about Christianity was its nihilism that had contempt for the things of this world in favor of the “next world”. For Nietzsche, Christian morality is nihilistic because it is life denying and rejects human nature.
• Nietzsche was an Atheist. Not exactly. At least not in the sense of rejecting the very notion of a deity.
• Nietzsche condones cruelty. False. Nietzsche, like the Buddha in his first Noble Truth, insists on recognizing that life is suffering. It’s a part of life. When Nietzsche emphasizes the role of human suffering in human affairs, he wants to jolt us back into the recognition that not only do we suffer, but we quite consciously cause the suffering of others. This is no less true of Christianity than elsewhere.
• Nietzsche was a relativist. Not exactly. Nietzsche says the apparent world is the only one: the “true world” is merely added by a lie. If relative means “relative to our experience, and the best we can come up with given what we know so far”, then Nietzsche is a relativist but it’s difficult to understand why anyone would resent this perspectival relativism (except for maybe the dogmatists he attacks).
• Nietzsche praised war. Not exactly. He found the actual ravages of war grotesque and terrible. He was not a warmonger. Also, the wars that he speaks of in his books had not yet reached the levels of gruesome wholesale mechanical slaughter they have reached today. When he speaks admiringly of war, what he admired were people who were willing to risk their lives for their ideas. He loved the good fight. But he was not envisioning nuclear or contemporary biological warfare.
• Nietzsche was a (pre) post-modernist. False. Nietzsche demolishes certain views of the self and subjectivity only to make room for a very different notion of agency, and with it a very different notion of self. This great individualist cannot be conscientiously read as dispensing with the self and its unique perspectives.
• Nietzsche sees the Ubermensch as an Evolutionary Goal. Yes and No. Ubermensch is contrasted with the Last Man who is too risk-adverse to pursue any aim beyond comfort. He is utterly unadventurous, incapable of self-criticism, wholly caught up in his own petty pleasures, his contentment, his “happiness”. The ultimate couch potato. Ubermensch (often translated as Super-man) is presented as an alternative. The Ubermensch was intended as a fiction. The Last Man, Nietzsche thought, was all too real. What he asks his readers is presented with these two alternatives (the Ubermensch or the Last Man), which would he rather be? The Ubermensch is the ideal aim of spiritual development, not a biological goal.

Another movie Dreyfus recommended in his lecture on Kierkegaard was The Story of Adele H. I brought it with me during our vacation and managed to find some quiet time to watch it without too many interruptions. (Not easy to do when you are sharing a small hotel room with another adult and two teens - short books are far easier to manage than movies.)

It’s the true story of Victor Hugo’s daughter, Adele, who fell hopelessly in love with a French Lieutenant who had seduced her when she was very young. She travels to Halifax and then to Barbados to be with him, but he doesn’t return her love. She has run away from home to the dismay of her parents, lies about her identity, even claims to be married to the Lieutenant.

She’s beautiful, wealthy, and the daughter of a famous man. She could have whatever she wants but she wants what she can’t have (the lieutenant) and goes mad in the pursuit. Throughout, she maintains a sense of dignity - even though she is reduced to rags and has lost all sense of reality. The dignity exists because of her single-minded devotion to the lieutenant which continues even when she is no longer able to recognize him. Adele is most definitely a Knight of Resignation. She has achieved a sort of peace in her despair and has become self-sufficient, in a sense. It is also obvious that had Adele ever actually married the lieutenant, he would have become a disappointment to her.

Beautiful, haunting movie! And all the more interesting because it is true.

I recently watched two documentaries on the Conquistadors. One was an excellent documentary from PBS entitled The Conquistadors and the other an informative documentary entitled The Roads to El Dorado (from The Secrets of Archaeology series).

It’s such an incredibly sad history. Hernan Cortes was the first of the conquistadors. He managed to get a slave girl who knew both the Mayan and Aztec languages to help betray her people. I can’t help but wonder if you are a slave to your people if it is your people you are betraying? But the Mexican people to this day consider her a traitor and a whore.

It was said that the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II believed that Cortes was the god Quetzalcoatl who had been expelled from Mexico and said he would come back and regain his Kingdom in the same year as Cortes conquered. The film doesn’t say this, but I have read (and it seems likely to me), that this was a Spanish fabrication. (It’s not unlike claiming that the Bible predicts the falling of the temple in Jerusalem and then later discovering the texts referring to the fall of the temple were written after it’s fall and not before. It’s an effective means to cement “believers”.)

Cortes made alliances with enemies of the Aztecs and it was through their help that he was able to destroy a civilization virtually singlehandedly. This is almost unheard of. But the Aztecs didn’t have guns or horses. And the starvation of women and children was not a part of the Aztec idea of warfare. Unfortunately, the Spaniards had horses, guns and the starvation of women and children was part of their warfare. Cortes starved women and children in every village and this was a big part of how he was able to bring the civilization down. It’s no wonder the Aztecs viewed the Spaniards as contemptible people. They were contemptible.

Francisco Pizarro (around 1527) is another famous conquistador whose conquest was the Incas. The Incas worshiped the Sun as their God and were obedient to their rulers. They revered their ancestors and the mountain spirits which gave the Spanish Catholics justification for war - they claimed it was in order to save the souls of the Incas.

The way the Incas saw it - if the Spanish rule Spain and the Incas rule Inca civilization, all is right with the world. But, if Spain tries to rule land that is not their own, it will create disorder and the world will be upside down. The plundering of the lands of the Incas is the greatest plundering raid in history. It is a wonder that the leader of the Incas, Atahualpa, allowed the Spanish to travel freely.

A deal was made between Pizarro and Atahualpa that Atahualpa provide a large amount of gold and the Spanish would leave. Atahuala kept his word and delivered the gold, but Pizarro put Atahualpa on a mock trial - mock because the jury was Pizarro’s brothers. Not surprisingly, they found him guilty of failing to uphold his end of the deal and killed him. These events were beyond belief to the Inca people and the world had indeed been turned upside down for them. For the Incas, this was the end of sacred time and the beginning of profane time.

It is thought that the Incas came from Asia 18,000 years ago. Their territory covered Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Columbia. For the Incas, everything belonged to the state. There was no monetary taxation, but people had to pay a tax in the form of work which is likely how they built their incredible walls and buildings. Yet another great civilization came to an end through the Spaniards.

After the Spanish conquered, Spaniards flooded into Peru in search of gold. The Incas called this the “more syndrome”. “You have enough, why do you want more?” Many were in search of El Dorado which was an Inca myth the Spaniards believed was literally true.

In search of El Dorado, Pizarro took off on an expedition with Francisco de Orellana but Orellana’s ship was separated at the Napo River and Orellana ended up travelling the full extent of the Amazon.

In the sixteenth century, before Orellana arrived from Spain, the Amazon had big, well-organized towns all along it. There were well over 6 million people who lived in an elaborate series of ancient kingdoms united by the Amazon River itself. So what happened to all of these people? Today, there are only 250,000!

Of course, El Dorado was never discovered.

One of the nicer Conquistadors, Cabeza de Vaca, came to Texas (long before it was Texas, of course). He started in Florida where he met the Seminole Indians (the American tribe to never sign a peace treaty with the U.S. government). He traveled on to Galveston Island where he met the Karankawa. These were hunter gatherers and Galveston was their winter residence. The “uncivilized” men shared their food with him. And when he broke down in desparation, they cried with him which made Cabeza de Vaca recognize their common humanity.

The Karankawa saved Cabeza de Vaca to their own detriment because the Karankawa eventually vanished for good. The Spanish didn’t want human beings, they wanted slaves. But Cabeza de Vaca recognized that these people were human beings, not animals. He argued for benevolent rule but failed. He died a pauper and his only legacy is his book of travel.

The Karankawa’s compassion and Cabeza de Vaca’s efforts were not entirely in vain. Catholic Spain began questioning the Spanish conquests and a philosophical debate on the ethics of the treatment of the “New World” was organized by King Charles V. Sepulveda, a famous philosopher and theologian, argued that the conquest was a natural state of affairs. Some people are simply superior to others and so it is just and fair to make of those that are inferior, slaves: “Those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them, those, I say, are slaves of nature. It is better for them to be ruled thus.” He said the natives are “as children to parents, as women are to men, as cruel people are from mild people”

Bartoleme de las Casas was a priest who argued that all people of the world are human beings and all are rational and take pleasure in good. He said that the conquests in the New World must be stopped. The torture and genocide of the natives of the Americas and Caribbean (West Indies) was completely unethical and against the will of God.

After the debate, the King ordered that all conquests be stopped. But it didn’t matter, the conquests continued without his approval.

C.S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia

I went through a big C.S. Lewis phase last year. I guess this must have been a left-over film on my Netflix – maybe one that wasn’t available until later?

It’s a docudrama – fairly well done and a good intro. to Lewis.

Life of Buddha

Ok - this has ended up way cool so I’m still up at almost 4:00 a.m. after watching Life of Buddha. The film presents the myth alongside the archaeological findings. This is the sort of controversial stuff I love.

Nobody knows if the Buddha ever actually existed (which is the same problem we have with Jesus - there is no physical evidence that either were born). The “palace” Buddha was said to be born in cannot be proven to exist and most archaeologists claim it is an impossibility. There is a text that claims his father built walls around his kingdom and walls have been discovered in what is considered to be the place of Buddha’s birth. But if that is where Buddha was born, he was brought up in far more humble surroundings than the legends claim. Kind of ironic, really, since archaeological findings suggest that Jesus was brought up in far more worldly surroundings than the legends proclaim (Galilee was only 4 miles from Caesarea which would have made Jesus far more privy to world events than legend claims).

Clearly, both Jesus and Buddha were speaking out against the social oppression of their times. Jesus was born a Jew in the Roman Empire and Buddha a Hindu. The Jews in the Roman Empire were subject to a strict caste system and so were the Hindus. Also, the only way to be Jewish or Hindu was to be born into the religion.

Another interesting aspect is this idea of Brahman. One of my close friends is Hindu and one of the people my husband is very close to is HIndu. Both say they are Brahman. My friend considers herself to be culturally Hindu. My husband’s friend is extremely religious and is apparently quite proud of being Brahman. Both are devout vegetarians and could not possibly imagine eating meat. My friend was appalled that my husband’s friend would reveal that he is Brahman so freely and only revealed her place in the caste system through relentless questioning on my part. Apparently, she is not particularly proud of being Brahman.

It seems as though Buddha’s major issue was with the corrupt power of the Brahman. He wanted to release himself from the stranglehold that they held over everyone in his time period. After seeking out the paths of many, he set out on his own.

Nirvana is the extinguishing of desire. In a sense, isn’t that what Jesus did through his death? He said it wasn’t his will but God’s will. What is that but the letting go of egoic desire?

The temptations Buddha received are very similar to the temptations Jesus received in his 40 days of isolation. Almost makes you wonder if the story of Jesus’ temptation wasn’t influenced by the story of Buddha’s temptation which would have occured 1/2 century earlier. Or - it’s simply the story of what happens to anyone when they denounce societal norms….

In the film, Thich Nhat Hanh presents the four noble truths. He has a knack for presenting Buddhism in a way that is very accessible to Westerners.

Buddha taught that all men were equal no matter what caste they had been born into. This was Jesus’ basic message, too. The Gospel is that all humanity is a child of God, not just those born into the Jewish priestly caste.

Thich Nhat Hanh - The notion of death cannot apply to reality, because to become nothing is to become everything.

The last words of the Buddha, at the age of 80, are said to be:

“Every man is his own prison. But every many can obtain the right to escape. Never stop struggling.

The Nazi Officer’s Wife

by Liz Garbus

Another very interesting documentary from the Jewish perspective that was produced more recently (2003) is The Nazi Officer’s Wife. This is about Edith Hahn, a Jewish girl in Austria, who ends up hiding and survives through the help of kind Nazis. Her story is absolutely amazing. She wants to be deported with her mother, but her mother gets deported without her. So she goes into hiding, not knowing what else to do. She remembers a Nazi woman who had been kind to one of her friends and seeks her out. The woman tells her to go to the registrars office and tell a particular man the truth. The man tells her to find someone who is willing to pretend to lose her documentation and give it to her. She is able to get a girl she used to tutor to do this for her, and immediately moves to Munich so that there are not two people with the same identification in her town. There she meets a man who wants to marry her. She tells him the truth about her identity, and he marries her anyway. And he ends up becoming a Nazi Officer. So she goes from being the lowest of the low (a Jew) to being of high rank (A Nazi Officer’s Wife). It’s fascinating story although I don’t think it gets at the heart of what she must have gone through. I someone is making a movie about her life. Should be interesting. What amazes me most about this woman is that even through all she went through, she claims it is her experience that people are mostly kind.

Prisoner of Paradise

by Stuart Sender

A very interesting film about the making a Nazi Propoganda film is Prisoner of Paradise. It’s the story of Kurt Gerron who was a famous director in Berlin. When the Jews were rounded up in Germany during the Nazi reign, he was sent to the concentration camp Theresienstadt which was specifically for the Jews who “would be missed”. You know, the famous ones whose abscence would not go unnoticed.

It was demanded of Gerron that he produce a propoganda film for the Nazis that made Theresienstadt look like a virtual Utopia. Supposedly, this was to qualm the concerns about the neutral European countries (and anyone in the world) that were starting to ask too many questions about what was happening to the Jews. The film showed them happy and healthy in a utopian atmosphere even though that was not the case at all.

By many Jews, Gerron was considered a traitor. But how many people would have opted for death over doing what it is that they love and are good at? If you are an artist, then painting a portrait is painting a portrait. It’s easy to see how he might have gotten lost in the assignment. I’m not sure what I would have done. I wasn’t there and I can’t imagine being in his shoes. It’s an interesting question, though. He produced the film at gunpoint and was executed at Auschwitz shortly after it was produced.

Bonhoeffer

Very interesting (much better than the movie).

Something I hadn’t realized before watching these films is how involved the Protestant Church of Germany was in bringing Hitler to power and allowing these atrocities against the Jews to happen.

I’d always known that the Catholic Church had taught that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death and in that way helped to bring about the anti-semitism that made the Holocaust possible. But the protestant German Churches, although far more liberal theologically, teachings which maintained that they had a right to get rid of “alien influences” in order to uphold national and cultural integrity. They, like many Germans, equated the Jews with Communism because 3 out of 5 of the top Bolshevik leaders were Jewish, and Communism, of course was the enemy of National and Cultural integrity.

Eventually, the liberalism of German protestantism turned more fundamental and a group called the Faith Movement of German Christians was formed and decided that what would save the nation would be national devotion to Germany for which they needed a leader. The church became political and fully backed Hitler. The anti-Jew sentiments were easy to achieve because Martin Luther himself had written that he believed Jews who would not convert were worthy of being burned (See Jews and Their Lies). Hitler basically hijacked the this Christian movement and used it for his own purposes. The basic sentiment was, “National Socialism is the fulfillment of the will of God which is demonstrated to us in our blood”, and Hitler “was the redeemer in the history of the Germans,” By the time the more observant protestant ministers (like Bonhoeffer) realized what had happened, it was too late to do anything about.

Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace

by Eric Till

The movie was OK. Watched a documentary the same night entitled Bonhoeffer that was far more informative.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned

by Alan Alda

Alan Alda’s memoirs. The title, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, is based on the experience he had as a boy when his family suggested he stuff his dead pet dog. The dog came back with an ugly scowl on his face that obliterated all other memories of his dog. Which, Alda claims, is proof that memories can be easily damaged.

I’ve always liked Alan Alda and this book just made me like the guy more. I didn’t realize he’d been married to the same woman all of these years. That’s always somewhat of an amazing feat for actors. They’ve been together over 40 years.

It seems his ability to be true to himself started at a very young age. He grew up Roman Catholic. During a service when he was 14, he was supposed to stand and recite the Oath of the Legion of Decency (a rating system for determing whether it was sinful to attend particular movies). He refuesed to stand - just couldn’t move. And he had no idea where he got the nerve to do refuse to stand. He believed everything he was taught about obedience to the church authority, but he just couldn’t see how going to a movie would send him to Hell. I love stories like that. Reminds me of a friends story of being at a tent revival with her Methodist Church when she was about the same age. All of the teens were supposed to get up and recite some sort of pledge or oath about Jesus and received a beautiful white Bible for doing so. She wanted the white Bible so bad and everyone was doing it. But something in her just wouldn’t let her go forward. She was the only teen who ended up holding her ground and not doing what the adults expected of her. I think most of us have some sort of story like that to tell about our adolescence. We either find ourselves then or get swept into the “shoulds” surrounding us.

He married a nice Jewish girl, but continued to go to mass every Sunday. But at the same time, he envied his wife and her father because the didn’t need to believe what other people told them they had to believe. I can so relate to that sort of envy!

He claims to have been fascinated by the Book of Job from the Bible. “I was taken by the theme of a man challenging God and the wry recognition that the guilty are not always punished in this life but often live out their lives in comfort, surrounded by their families, while the widows of their victims go hungry.” I love that about Alan Alda. He didn’t write this in his book, but one of the things I remember him for besides being in MASH was that a man would call himself a feminist. And not only that, Alan Alda was the first (and only) guy I ever heard say that he envied a woman because she could give birth - that if he could figure out how to somehow make it possible, he’d want to experience it. What a guy!

Somewhere along the way, he gave up his religious beliefs and came to the conclusion that “life itself was an improvisation in which I was going to have to deal with what came to me and not think about what should have come.”

And with a few more years behind him, he discovers compassion. He writes, “I didn’t consciously want to become compassionate. Who in his right mind would give up his place at the center of the universe? Compassion is scary. If you open up too much to people, they have power over you and make you do things for them. Better to keep them at a distance, keep them on the otherside of the footlights. Learn to juggle - learn to fall down in funnyways. Keep them as an audience where you can be in control. Keep the curtain up, keep the play going. It holds off judgment. Seem up here? You love me, right? I’m the best, right? But if I wanted really to act, I was going to have to find the doorway to compassion, and that would ben even harder one to walk than the door of the shed.”

A few more years and he discovers something about listening: “Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in theater, this turned out to be how life works, too.”

And at 70 years of age, he learns how simple it all is - but that it can’t be put into words. It’s imagination that brings life back. It’s play that let’s it breathe again. Freud says that life is all about being able to love and work. Alda agrees, but it’s also about play, because play can bring back the past because play is now.

If you must have advice, then the advice he has to offer? Never Have Your Dog Stuffed.

I didn’t want this book to end. Very fun, witty , honest and even wise.