Those who have studied Nietzsche’s works rightly regard him as one of the greatest psychologists of his time, perhaps even greater than Dostoyevsky. Few understand Nietzsche, largely because of his bombastic style.
It so happens, however, that hardly any gentile philosopher understood Judaism as well as Nietzsche. Unlike his sister, he was not an anti-Semite; indeed, he despised anti-Semites like Wagner. His contempt for German culture is punctuated by penetrating humor. Perhaps Nietzsche’s most serious flaw as a philosopher is his unrestrained rhetoric, which armed the wicked, including the Nazis.
Nietzsche saw in modernity what he famously called in Zarathustra, the “last man”— man steeped comfort and complacency and devoid of any noble aspiration. This stands in striking contrast with Nietzsche’s definition of man as “the esteeming animal.”
Nietzsche is often referred to as a nihilist or moral relativist. This is superficial. For Nietzsche, relativism is true but deadly, and therefore false. The reason is this: relativism undermines creativity, and no one will be truly creative—will undertake the arduous task of creating new values—unless he believed in their absolute worth and validity. It is precisely creativity that distinguishes the human from the subhuman, i.e., the “last man.”
Like other serious gentile thinkers, Nietzsche regarded the Jews as the most creative of people. In his Will to Power, he says the Jews brought reason to mankind. And in The Gay Science, he expresses the fond hope that the Chosen People will yet save Europe from decadence.
But let me go back to his definition of man as “the esteeming animal.” In Beyond Good and Evil, he defines man as “the beast with red cheeks”—signifying that man alone has a sense of shame. These two definitions of man are correlative.
Turn now to the renowned Lebanese-born scholar, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University. In The Dream Palace of the Arabs, Ajami portrays the most prominent literati of the Arab-Islamic world as men who sorrowfully behold the “death of Arab civilization.” Ajami himself writes, “Arab society had run through most of its myths, and what remained in the wake of the word, of the many proud statements people had made about themselves and their history, was a new world of cruelty, waste, and confusion.” In short, Arab culture is decadent, devoid of creativity.
The conscious or subconscious awareness of this decadence has resurrected the cruelty exemplified by the life of Muhammad—for Muslims, the personification of all that is good and noble. Accompanying this cruelty is the love of death—a nihilism that drives Muslims to suicidal, murderous insanity.
There is, of course, a non-violent form of nihilism, the nihilism that permeates the universities of the democratic world. One sees this nihilism manifested in the Jewish self-effacement of Israel’s government, whose politicians lack the stamina to uphold the cause of Judaism or even of its truncated form, political or territorial Zionism. These politicians can think of nothing more exalted than peace—which for them means nothing more than comfortable self-preservation. These are Nietzsche’s “last men”—nihilists anxious to make peace with Islam’s nihilistic culture of death.
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