In July 1874, Nietzsche attended a meeting
for the heads of the various departments at
Basel university.
The issue the 10 men discussed was whether
or not women should be allowed to enter the
university.
After 2 hours of discussion, the vote was
6-4 against women being allowed to enter the
university, with Nietzsche on the losing side.
Nietzsche had voted for women to be allowed
into Basel university.
In the book Human, All too Human he published
a few years later in 1878, he made favorable
remarks on women, saying that “The perfect
woman is a higher type than the perfect man”
and that “women can through education acquire
all the male strengths and virtues”.
From these and other remarks, we can see that
Nietzsche in this period thinks women are
just as intelligent as men, respects them
and is sympathetic to the women’s project
of emancipation.
We may even call Nietzsche in this period
of his life a feminist, or at least an admirer
of feminists.
Yet in the next decade, in 1886 in Beyond
Good and Evil, Nietzsche has completely changed
his views about women.
In his greatest philosophical work, he suddenly
launches a vehement attack upon women and
the feminists striving for emancipation.
He says that “women has much reason for
shame”, that a woman scholar has something
wrong with her sexuality and that the proper
role for women is bearing and bringing up
children.
He furthermore claims that women has no concern
for truth, that their great talent is in the
practice of lying.
These views are so comical and absurd for
us to read today, and we are only left wondering
how they could come about, especially when
Nietzsche the previous decade had been praising
women and their cause of emancipation.
So how can we explain Nietzsche’s turn from
a feminist who supports women’s emancipation
to a misogynist who showers women with hostile
abuse?
To answer this question we will turn to the
events in Nietzsche’s life between these
two completely opposite statements.
In 1882 Nietzsche met a girl called Lou Salome,
and the events surrounding her would leave
him bitter and spiteful.
It is in this affair of Salome that we will
search for the cause of Nietzsche’s turn
to a vehement misogynistic view of women.
On the 26 of April 1882, by an invitation
from his best friend Paul Ree, who had arranged
the match, Nietzsche, age 37, met Salome for
the first time.
He greeted her with the rather cheesy line
of “What stars have brought us together”
and instantly fell in love with her.
Salome was 21 years, clever and beautiful,
and pretty much every man she met wanted to
sleep with her.
The problem was that Paul Ree had also fallen
in love with her, and over the next few months
a sort of dramatic love triangle would play
out between the three.
The three also made plans to live together
platonically, that is without any sex, in
a sort of monastery of free thinking individuals.
In May the next month, Nietzsche offered Salome
his hand in marriage, but she turned it down.
Later she would say, in a fight with Nietzsche’s
sister Elizabeth, that she could sleep in
the same room with Nietzsche without getting
the least bit excited.
Lou Salome was not interested in ending up
in a submissive married role, and even told
the men she met that her love life was closed
for the duration of her life.
Yet Nietzsche and Ree still persevered in
gaining her affections, which ended with Paul
Ree leaving with Salome later that year.
This was basically an abandonment of Nietzsche,
and he was devastated.
Furthermore during this affair Nietzsche’s
sister Elisabeth had spent time with Nietzsche
and Salome, acting as a sort of chaperone
to make sure their conduct was proper.
She severely disliked Salome, and reported
to their mother Nietzche’s plans for living
together as three with Salome and Ree.
This so scandalized Nietzche’s mother that
she said to Nietzsche that he was “a disgrace
to his father’s grave”, whereupon he walked
out of the house slamming the door behind
him.
So just in the space of six months in 1882,
Nietzsche had lost his best friend, his love,
his sister and his mother.
That year he spent a miserable and lonely
winter, sending letters to Paul Ree and Salome.
The letters were mostly angry, and he even
went as far as calling Salome a “dried up,
dirty monkey with bad breath and false breasts”
and also calling her a slut.
This anger towards Salome seems to then have
extended to all women, since in a notebook
entry later that year, he was abusive of women
in general.
I have shown Nietzsche’s transformation
from a feminist to a misogynist, and a biographical
explanation based on his life has been offered.
Yet one should not reject Nietzsche’s other
philosophical remarks and condemn his person
because of these statements.
He does at least gives us a disclaimer before
his vehement remarks on women in Beyond Good
and Evil.
Here he says that, on offering truths on women,
one needs to understand that to a great extent
it is only his own personal truths.
He here thus admits a suspicion that a sort
of personal pathology or sickness has entered
his own philosophy.
He may thus have in mind that he has not recovered
from the Salome affair, and are thus very
prejudiced in his remarks, andstill full of
bitterness.
It is also interesting that despite these
remarks, Nietzsche and his writings have attracted
a great many feminists.
They were drawn, and still are drawn, to his
personal message of liberation and self-realization,
which is much like their own message of liberation.
Yet how do feminists deal with these misogynistic
remarks, these hostile remarks on women, that
we can find in Nietzsche’s works?
One strategy was to argue that it was superficial
to see Nietzsche as an anti-feminist.
That approach does not work however, since
Nietzsche insisted in letters that his remarks
should not be understood as anything but anti-feminism,
that he was in fact a “big bad wolf” to
feminists.
A second and more reasonable approach is to
treat Nietzsche’s anti-feminist statements
as a personal weakness in Nietzsche.
One feminist friend of Nietzsche said that
the statements had not made her indignant,
since “a man of Nietzsche’s breadth of
vision and sureness of instinct has the right
to get things wrong in one instance”.
Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra exhorts
his disciples to leave him, to guard against
him and even be ashamed of him.
He wants them not to remain pupils, but to
think for themselves.
By putting in these wild remarks about women,
one could argue that Nietzsche has done his
students who read him a sort of favor.
When reading Nietzsche, it is very easy to
be spell bound and fascinated with what he
is saying and how he is saying it.
But when one comes upon his sayings on women,
one is forced to regard him very critically,
and to see him as merely a human being.
These remarks on women can thus function as
sort of warnings to his readers to not follow
him blindly, to not set him up as a God or
idol, but to actually look at his life critically,
and look at the life that produced these writings.
