Aphorism #9: On Nietzsche Indiviudating Misogyny

“Though not published until August 1883, it was actually written in Rapallo the previous January—at exactly the same time as the abusive letters quoted above. Its remarks on women, in other words, are cut from the same fabric as those letters, are an act of revenge. Nietzsche more or less admits this, describing Zarathustra as a great ‘bloodletting’, by means of which he got the pain of the Salomé affair out of his system (KGB III.1: 403). The catharsis, however, was incomplete since he needed to make a second attempt in Beyond Good and Evil. Here, as we saw, ‘woman’ is described as ‘the beautiful and dangerous cat’ with ‘tiger’s claws’ concealed inside her glove. Since he repeatedly described Lou as a ‘cat’ this is as good as naming names. To know Nietzsche’s biography is to know exactly who the tiger was that had mauled his heart.”

This highlight from The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche was resurfaced to me recently by my Readwise app. It belies something that it’s worth reminding ourselves of again and again. It’s a point that Nietzsche himself wants to remind us of. Here he is in §6 of Beyond Good and Evil:

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.”

Nietzsche was a wounded lover. He wasn’t natively misogynistic. In fact, as the article in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche explores in depth, he was a bit of a pioneering Feminist. So why the sass towards women then? Because Nietzsche’s work was as much art and individuation as it was philosophy. “In the philosopher, conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal” (BGE §6).

Nietzsche was using his writing the way artists have done since time immemorial — for catharsis; as a “bloodletting”. Some of us write sappy poems or love songs; Nietzsche wrote aphorisms.