Letter To The Philosopher : To Nietzsche,With Love

Dear Friedrich Nietzsche,


It feels like you are watching the live application of "There is creation within every conflict." when going through your work.At points,your opinions have been hurtful,have been contradictory to your own previously proposed notions or assertions made in the past.Your views on women have attracted controversy, beginning during his life and continuing to the present.

Ida von Miaskowski remarked in her memoir ;


In the eighties, when Nietzsche's later writings containing some of the oft-quoted sharp words against women appeared, my husband sometimes told me jokingly not to tell people of my friendly relations with Nietzsche, since this was not very flattering for me. It was just a joke. My husband, like myself, always kept friendly memories of Nietzsche [...] his behavior precisely towards women was so sensitive, so natural and comradely, that even today in old age I cannot regard Nietzsche as a despiser of women.


You wrote "From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty." You also claimed that "goodness" in women is a sign of "physiological degeneration", and that women are on the whole cleverer and more wicked than men- which in Nietzsche's view, constitutes a compliment. Yet you went on to claim that the emancipation of women, and feminists, was merely the resentment of some women against other women, who were physically better constituted and able to bear children! I do agree that men have more brotherhood within them than women do and resentment is common within us but then again,don't you think this was a result of staying shut as properties of the other sex for centuries and millenniums?How could you,being such a genius forget about the Universal Suffrage Movement? Where workers and women,the two races who have been exempted from the goodness of freedom for ages and ages hence fought hand in hand for their rights?

You mentioned "Woman's love involves injustice and blindness against everything that she does not love... Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best cows..."(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Friend) 


Well,I am not sure why would someone think of comparing a particular sex with animals.(Moreover,cats and cows can be greater friends than human beings.Let us not even get into that.)What got your ideas so misogynistic?Was it the same dominant instinct existent within men that turns into anger or animalry when unable to defend their position with logic?

"Woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant... she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine: or better, she makes the strong weak--she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong... Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the 'powerful', the 'strong', the men-" (The Will to Power - 864, Second German edition of 1906) 

It was you who said -"Sickness was what restored me to reason." in 'Why I Am So Clever'.

Depicted as a struggle, ‘health’ to you is not only medical but
also ethical in the sense that it is used as a way to evaluate our present values. By
means of ‘health’s embracement of these qualities together, indeed, the concept of
‘sickness’ in the form of ‘decadence’ can become crucial for a critique of culture.
Thus, it would be a mistake to search for exact medical uses of these terms to
catch their application in your early writings, in which the terminology of
physical and physiological is rather dominant. Nevertheless, a careful reading may
enable one to hear what is implied in the light of Nietzsche’s final works, without
falling prey to anachronism. 

So, Equation one states that "Women are sick."
And equation two states that "Sickness is what restores to reason."

From Euclid's first axiom,then,don't we have that women are logical,after all and then,very conflictingly,you call logic changeable and inconstant.Let me also point out Heraclitus' viewpoint on change - "Change is the only constant."So,changeable and inconstant are contradictory terms,too.

What could you have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose. Speculations about your sexuality abound: did he really contract syphilis at a bordello, for instance? And what about Lou Salomé: did he love her, or were his feelings towards her something she exaggerated? The answers to these questions vary,though. What can be found in your letters is that he had quite a few friendships with educated and musical women throughout his life, and that he thought about love and marriage. 
Your solitude and corresponding loneliness are often assumed to be a matter of preference, were predicaments of your nomadic years, when you had to travel to seek out the best climate for your ailing health. Even during these times, between physical suffering and intense periods of writing, you pursued the company of learned women.
Or shall I say the company of learned cats...or cows? Is it that what enriched you,pleased you,flourished you?

Some philosophers have even suggested that your philosophy cannot be understood or analyzed apart from your remarks on women. They discuss the fact that Nietzsche's work has been useful in the development of some feminist theory but ultimately conclude "While Nietzsche challenges traditional hierarchies between mind and body, reason and irrationality, nature and culture, truth and fiction - hierarchies that have been used to degrade and exclude women - his remarks about women and his use of feminine and maternal metaphors throughout his writings confound attempts simply to proclaim Nietzsche a champion of feminism or women."

In the first place,you claimed that feminists resent a part of the women population.Then why is this resentment against one half of the sky of humanity?Why this discrimination and hurling of rude words? 

It has been found out that highly creative individuals may freely display opposite gender characteristics  — may be androgynous (freer expression of feminine interests in boys, or as males they are considered ultra sensitive, or greater than usual amount of independence, assertiveness, or aggressiveness for females).
Lou Andreas-Salomé, who knew you very well, or as is said claimed that he had proposed to her (according to her, she refused him) claimed there was something feminine in Nietzsche's "spiritual nature", and that he had considered genius to be a feminine genius.

Frances Nesbitt Oppel interprets your attitude towards women as part of a rhetorical strategy.Do you think this is true? I sometimes feel like it.,an overdose of patriarchy didn't perhaps serve you a whole lot of reverence.Your knowledge was deep and vast and so were your concepts of morality,they were far,far beyond your time and culture.Why would you narrow it down to something so limited,so easily defeatable?

Your apparent misogyny is considered by some to be a part of your overall strategy to demonstrate that our attitudes toward sex-gender are thoroughly cultural, are often destructive of our own potential as individuals and as a species, and may be changed. What looks like misogyny may be understood as part of a larger strategy whereby "woman-as-such" (the universal essence of woman with timeless character traits) is shown to be a product of male desire, a construct. This is a very insightful and very deep way of viewing it and like most of your views on views of us and views about us,this is not very comprehensive in nature for most of the population.




And then one day,you witnessed a horse being beaten in the street and you were so distraught by the scene that you hugged it around the neck and started sobbing so that the cabbie beating the animal would stop. You cried, "I understand you," before collapsing on the ground. Why,why did you cry? Where was your "lust for possession" here?There was pain.Only pain.Where,where did it come from,Sir? Why did it come? What was the origin of the stream  of salty water that was rushing down your face?Was it stardust? What was their destination?What hurt that day? Whatever did happen that day was written on the 12 cm long,8 cm wide,6 cm thick organ on the left side of your chest.The history of the universe is restored there in every part of a moment.The moments that streamed through your eyes and seeped through the ground and reached its core.And went up to rain down,someday.They touched the seas and the clouds and our soul.There was no possession and no lust,there was only a flow,there were only winds,there was only freedom.

The flow so restricted broke all the gates and flooded every shore that day.That day time stood still,that day,only moans vibrated.
You lay silent on a couch for two days after the incident and uttered the phrase, "Mutter, ich bin dumm," (Mother, I am dumb) to no one in particular. She was a woman and you seeked a place of rest in that call of yours. Wasn't she inconstant?Wasn't she inferior,then?
This marked the beginning of the rapid mental deterioration that rendered you functionally vegetative for the final eleven years of your life. 

You said - "The Thought of Death gave me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life- loving people! How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling companion stands behind him! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant- ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the noise-so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all, suppose that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the near future is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life to us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. And so we will believe in our even a hundred times more worthy of their attention."


Could you recall this at the time of your death? When you entered into the oblivion of existence itself?After eleven years of a vegetative condition,does anybody feel anymore?Did you finally find the definition of love?Did you finally disagree to the existent notion of love being the same as "lust for possession"?Did you find the destination we try to reach it for? Did you find a shelter? Didn't you seek the comfort of resting your head on your ladylove's bosom like every bird at dusk goes back to its nest?What did you seek?What did you find?What did you ever choose to seek in the reaches of this planet and what's deep inside the core and inside you?Was the motion ever felt in its rhythm after that? Did you ever,ever figure out why you chose to seek the destination of this journey?

Your's unfaithfully (since that is what youconsidered women to be),
One of God's infinite mistakes



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2 Comments

  1. You hate this great man because he once insulted your gender? Pathetic.

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    1. No! Of course you can't hate Friedrich Nietzsche but you can try to comprehend him,at the least.

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