Excerpts from my novel We Are Like Fire (now with a brand-new cover!) regarding the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
chapter 8.
Denver
June 20, 1958
I’m at Neusteter’s department store buying a pair of dress shoes. The guy selling me the shoes, a couple years younger than me, has a mild German accent.
“What kind of work do you do?” he asks.
“I’m a psychotherapist.”
“Excellent. I earned my bachelor’s degree in psychology in Frankfurt.”
“Really? That’s great.”
“What kind of psychology do you practice?”
“Maslow-inspired therapy, using some techniques of Carl Rogers. Third Force psychology. Familiar with it?”
“Da. A little. I know the hierarchy of needs.”
I complete my purchase of the shoes.
“How’d you like to join me for lunch?”
“Sure. I’m free in five minutes.”
I reach out my hand. “Ren Prothero.”
His handshake is firm. “Dieter Ulrich.”
We’ve settled in at a nearby diner. After we eat, he initiates our conversation about psychology and philosophy.
“So you’re a Maslow man. I’m a Nietzsche man.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Sorry to hear that.”
“Why? Maslow advocates for higher men. He calls for people to become strong and magnificent. So did Nietzsche. Maslow and Nietzsche – they stand for the same thing.”
My jaw drops. “What!?”
“Sure. What’s the difference, Ren? You believe in self-actualization, like becoming a race of Nietzsche’s Super-Men.”
I clench my hands. “What an appalling, repugnant thought! No! Maslow and Nietzsche offer us opposing views. They couldn’t be further apart! We must choose one and reject the other.”
“Then I reject Maslow.”
“I’ll change your –”
“—I really don’t see the difference.”
I half-recover as the waiter takes our plates away.
“Maslow is nothing like Nietzsche, Dieter. Maslow is calling us to identify with the entire human race and to be good, kind, generous, compassionate, benevolent, and loving.”
Dieter cocks his head, raises his eyebrows, then turns even more stone-faced. “We Germans don’t need all this guilt you Americans want us to feel. We need strength. We don’t need modesty. We need a strong will.”
I lean in. “This much is true: One has to choose between a version of Nazism or universal justice and care.”
“Perhaps so.”
chapter 11.
Denver
August 13, 1958
I’ve struggled for weeks to bring out the best of the human spirit in my new friend. I can see Dieter’s potential so clearly and I have what it takes to help him actualize it, but first I have to break through his wall of denial about Nietzsche.
We’ve been debating in my home study for an hour now, and this has escalated into our most vigorous argument yet. I’m sure I can convert him.
“My father’s a Nietzsche man and I think of myself as a Nietzsche man.”
“You’re going to be a Nietzschean by default? Mindlessly align with your father?”
“I can think for myself. I’m a Catholic and he’s an atheist. So I’m a Nietzschean. What do you Maslow-inspired therapists call yourselves, anyway? Maslow-ians?”
“Maslovians.”
I’m loaded for bear today. I grab six books from my bookshelves one at a time and set them on my desk.
Dieter glances at the titles. “Hmm. This ought to be interesting.”
I begin my attack.
“Friedrich Nietzsche’s Super-Man is tough and strong, revels in his superiority, imposes his will over everyone else, ruthlessly masters and exploits the weak, lets his instincts govern him, moves beyond our notions of good and evil to create a new set of values, and welcomes conflict.”
Dieter gives me a stone face and crosses his arms over his chest.
I grab Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil and read quotes I’ve marked:
We think that . . . everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does.
Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.
The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values . . . he creates values. Such a morality is self-glorification.
I look at Dieter as he raises his eyebrows.
“How do you reconcile Nietzsche with your Catholic faith?”
“I respect your Quaker faith, Ren. You should respect my faith.”
“You know I respect your faith. I’m asking you how you reconcile Nietzsche with your faith.”
“Never tried. Never thought much about it.”
I look down at Human, All Too Human and open it. “Nietzsche also asked, ‘Can all values be turned around? And is good perhaps evil?’”
Dieter squirms.
I open Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals and read two more statements:
Humanity as a mass sacrificed to the prosperity of the one stronger species of humans – that would be a progress.
Some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace.
Dieter’s frowning.
I open Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “And how about this gem by your father’s philosopher?”:
We who dare to live in a dismoralized world, we pagans are also the first to imagine higher creatures than man, but beyond good and evil; to consider all being higher as also being immoral.
Dieter coughs.
I open up The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche and read:
What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.
Not contentedness but power. Not peace but war. Not virtue but fitness.
Dieter shakes his head firmly. “I took my esteem for Nietzsche second-hand, from my father, without reading his works thoroughly for myself. It appears that Father has been mistaken.”
Lastly, I pick up The Will to Power and read all my marked quotes by Nietzsche:
I regard Christianity as the most fatal seductive lie that has yet existed, as the great unholy lie.
I do not like at all about that Jesus of Nazareth or his apostle Paul that they put so many ideas into the heads of little people, as if their modest virtues were of any consequence.
For what does one have to atone most? For one’s modesty. One never afterward forgives oneself for this lack of genuine egoism.
Not “humanity” but Super-Man is the goal!
The great man is necessarily a skeptic, provided that greatness consists in this: to will something great and the means to it. Freedom from any kind of conviction is part of the strength of his will.
Dieter gasps and places his hand over his forehead. I carry on:
A great man, what is he? He is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of “opinion”; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and respectability. He wants no “sympathetic” heart, but servants, tools.
Man is beast and super-beast; the higher man is inhuman and superhuman: these belong together. With every increase of greatness and height in man, there is also an increase in depth and terribleness; one ought not to desire the one without the other.
A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed!
The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.
What determines rank, sets off rank, is only quanta of power, and nothing else.
There is nothing in life that has value except the degree of power. Willing is nothing else but willing to become stronger.
For spirit alone does not make noble; rather, there should be something to ennoble the spirit. What is then required? Blood.
“Nein!” yells Dieter. “No, no, no! Terrible.”
“Just three more, my friend.” I recite my last passages of Nietzsche to him:
Integrity, dignity, sense of duty, justice, humanity, honesty, good conscience – are certain qualities really affirmed and approved for their own sake with these well-sounding words? Or is it a case of qualities and states, in themselves and of no particular value? Does the value of these qualities reside in them or in the use of advantage to which they lead?
The righteous no longer has a right to existence. He is no longer necessary. Perhaps desirability lies on precisely the other side: to create conditions in which the “righteous man” is reduced to the modest position of a “useful tool”.
We teach estrangement in every sense, we open up gulfs such as have never existed before, we desire that man should become more evil than he has ever been before.
Dieter places his head in his hands and shakes it vigorously from side to side. “All right, my friend, you’ve pulverized him. There’s nothing left of him.”
“Nietzsche is dead?”
He pulls his head out of his hands, looks up. “Nietzsche is dead. Really, what a ridiculous, awful man! It’s false. It’s sick! And what a deplorable influence he’s been! Yes, yes, Nietzsche is dead!”