Nietzsche knew the Clintons (well, at least he knew their "type")

A philosopher, a prophet, a poet, a philosophical poet, Nietzsche has been many things to many people. He has even been turned into a militarist, a chauvinist and a blond beast by the heavy-handed manipulation of selected passages. When he said, “Be hard,” he meant be hard on your own weakness, slackness, indolence -- and he took his own advice heroically. He was undoubtedly fascinated by such figures as Caesar, Cesare Borgia and Napoleon, as we all are, for what they had done for themselves; but his enduring heroes were Goethe and, above all, Socrates, the self-appointed gadfly of Athens.

Nietzsche loathed smugness, complacency, mass mediocrity. He feared the silent little man of resentment who is multiplying throughout the modern world. He feared material progress with the democratic emphasis on uniformity (not on liberty), which was leading straight toward the abyss of comfort -- or universal conflagration.

In his desperate, neurotic way, he tried to be the gadfly of his time. He wanted to share that “genius of the heart” which he attributed to Socrates.

He cultivated with loving care the aphorism as his most awakening weapon, and he was in high form when he did the fourth section of Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
Houston Peterson, ed., Essays in Philosophy, Pocket Library, 1959
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Selected Aphorism, numbered (I assume) by author. I have taken liberty to slightly modify a couple of them for relevance.

79. “A soul who knows it is loved but does not love back reveals its sediment; it is turned completely bottom side up.”

82. “Compassion for all” would amount to rigor and tyranny for you, my dear neighbor!”

91. “So cold, so icy, that one burns one’s fingers on him! Every hand that touches him receives a shock. That is why some think he is burning hot.”

92. Who has not at some time or other sacrificed himself, in order to save his reputation?

97. A great man did you say? All I ever see is the actor creating his own ideal image.

107. When the mind is made up, the ear is deaf to even the best arguments. This is the sign of a strong character. In other words, an occasional will to stupidity.

120. Sensuality often grows too fast for love to keep up with. Then love’s root remains weak and is easily torn up.

130. What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is a form of cosmetics; cosmetics, too, are a hiding device.

137. When dealing with intellectuals and artists, one readily makes the opposite mistakes: beneath a remarkable intellect is often a mediocre man, but beneath a mediocre artist there is quite often a very remarkable man.

141. Man’s belly is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.

148. To seduce their neighbor into thinking well of them, and then to believe implicitly in this opinion of their neighbor: who has greater skill in this than a ~~woman~~ politician?

156. Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, peoples and times, it is the rule.

158. Not only our reason but our conscience succumbs to our strongest drive, to the tyrant within us.

166. We may lie with our lips, but we tell the truth with the face we make when we lie.

179. The consequences of our actions grab us by the back of the neck, blithely disregarding the fact that we have meanwhile “reformed”.

183. “What has shaken me is not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you now - - - “

“Aphorisms” from Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Marianne Cowan; copyright 1955, by Henry Regnery Company. Quoted in: Essays in Philosophy, edited by Houston Peterson, Pocket Books, Inc. NY, NY. 1959.

I am sorting old books, trying to make more space in my study, and while thumbing through this book (Essays in Philosophy), which was a reference used in one of my college English courses (1960!), I was struck by how many of Nietzsche’s aphorisms reminded me of the Clintons, especially the impeached one. Not exactly breaking news, but maybe useful as “one liners” to characterize the "couple that will not disappear".

The Aphorisms Galore website I cited is not the original source for the aphorisms I transcribed and included above, but can be used to find them and more. Wording may be different due to differences in translation from the German.

Leftists love Nietzche. They will tell you that he was misunderstood and he was just kidding all that time he spent at that anti-Jewish school with Wagner making anti-Jewish remarks. Leftists will also tell you those writings about the "ubermensch" and "untermensch" was misunderstood as well.

The most intriguing part is that leftists love Nietzsche's ideas on "the will to power", where one abandons all morals and creates new ones by yourself, which is moral relevacny. Sound familiar? In fact you will hear President Bush negatively invoke the exact words "will to power" when criticizing terrorists and despots.

Someone on Bush's speech writing staff gets it. Here is a sample that will go down in history from his September 20th speech to the nation:

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.

Interesting, but I am no expert on Nietzsche and do not wish to turn this into a discussion on Nietzsche. I simply thought it interesting that so many of the words he wrote over one hundred years ago brought the Clintons and their kind to mind. What it means to me is that there is very little "new under the sun", and that certain human types have always been with us and will always need to be guarded against.

"The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of positive sciences, and with this an intensification in skepticism about God and the claims of traditional religion, especially among the educated classes. This inclination became most marked after the publication of The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin ascribed man's immediate ancestry to the anthropoids, supposedly through a process of gradual evolution. Man was no longer a creature made in the image of God, but merely a natural extension of certain lower forms of life, a refined gorilla, as it were. It was these circumstances, and this intellectual milieu, that led philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to declare that "God is dead" and to predict the rise of new and terrible manisfestations of barbarism in the century that was to come. As he put it, "For ... we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which have never yet been dreamed of ... there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth." The non-believer Nietzsche would agree wholly with the Christian believer Dostoyevsky about one thing: Without faith in God, all horrors, all of man's worst... nightmares---would become possible. And so they did. What men believe really matters."

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