Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was stuck on a dead-end road. Mr. Ego, as I have come to call him, was a gifted musician, scholar, professor, philologist, philosopher and writer. Reading his stuff, one comes to just accept the fact that he agrees with no one about anything. Every other thinker, every other philosophical tradition, these folk have led the world astray, they got it wrong and he gladly shares their failures with us. How did he get so adorably opinionated?
Please allow me to make a guess. Walter Kaufmann, who is the expert who translated all his German stuff, gives Nietzsche’s birth circumstances only a passing note but to me they are pivotal. Freddy, (no disrespect), was a preacher’s kid, born to a Lutheran clergyman. We preacher’s kids always have a marked father issue, some of us fit into the mold and others of us throw the mold in the garbage. Freddy possibly rejected the spiritual priority of his birth family because his father died when his only son was five years old. Without his believing father, whom he probably resented for dying, Nietzsche never got to see a workable faith in God.
Loosing his father, the second factor came into play. Freddy was raised by a cackle of females, mother, sisters and aunts, the only rooster in the henhouse, so to speak. In this family Freddy would either become an effeminate social butterfly or take on the strong opinionated male role, the leader of the household in the making. Nietzsche chose to be a man to the max. Growing up he excelled at his studies and one might consider his thought patterns mature at age 24, when he began the duties of a university professor.
Both these factors were to push him, gifted as he was, into a Godless world view and a power hungry natural life motive for we humans.
G.Goslaw
Landers, CA
