I spend a fair bit of my day walking in what's left of the countryside with my dogs. I have found that audiobooks greatly enhance my day by providing food for thought and in the case of Nietzsche; trenchant, amusing, incisive, companionable insight. Nietzsche composed his books whilst on rambles through the mountains and one can sense it in his pithy, musical, aphoristic style.

Occasionally he addresses the future of philosophy and its practitioners and show himself eerily prescient. Yesterday I was struck by this passage from 'Beyond Good and Evil' where he seems to hone in on what we read here on this sub of modern academia.

  • Chapter 44 (edited down a bit)

"In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at present something which makes an abuse of this name a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt—not to mention that in respect to the NEW philosophers who are appearing, they must still more be closed windows and bolted doors. Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the LEVELLERS, these wrongly named ‘free spirits’—as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’ all of them without solitude, without personal solitude, ..., only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost ALL human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed—a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their two most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called ‘Equality of Rights’ and ‘Sympathy with All Sufferers’—and suffering itself is looked upon by them as something which must be DONE AWAY WITH.

We opposite ones, however, who have opened our eye and conscience to the question how and where the plant ‘man’ has hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this has always taken place under the opposite conditions, that for this end the dangerousness of his situation had to be increased enormously, his inventive faculty and dissembling power (his ‘spirit’) had to develop into subtlety and daring under long oppression and compulsion, and his Will to Life had to be increased to the unconditioned Will to Power—we believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter’s art and devilry of every kind,— that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite..."

I think this presages our world of 'safe spaces'; the death of wild nature; and the population explosion.

I wonder if his famous aphorism 'Going to women, don't forget the whip' might not rather refer to the gynocracy rather than an individual?

  • EDIT I hasten to add that it is a metaphorical whip