Beyond good and evil frederick5/23/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() This is not to say that Nietzsche would approve of the societies that his ideas have shaped so profoundly. As Erich Heller put it, Nietzsche has “drawn the fever-chart of an epoch.” So, too, is his enthusiasm for violence, cruelty, and the irrational. ![]() ![]() Nietzsche’s glorification of power and his contention that “there are altogether no moral facts” are grim signatures of the age. Indeed, as more and more of the political regimes erected under the banner of Marxism repudiate Marx’s ideas, it becomes ever clearer that much of what makes the modern world modern also makes it Nietzschean. And not even Marx has exercised the intellectual and spiritual fascination commanded by his unhappy countryman. Of all nineteenth-century thinkers, perhaps only Karl Marx has surpassed Nietzsche in his influence on the twentieth century. In pursuance of this ideal man becomes a hybrid thing, a brute-spirit, whose cruel mentality exerts a horrible spell upon weaklings. That life is in truth the ultimate attainment of the barbarian, and unfortunately in these days of civilization’s withering it has won a great many adherents. The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of supreme strength, of a life of maximum vigor, which has also been called the ideal of aesthetic greatness. ![]()
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