Nietzsche

. . . to be so prominent yet so incomprehensible . . . ??

Re: the “uberman” stuff and his alleged contempt for the proletariat, this article says: “By the end of World War II, many were convinced Nietzsche was a Nazi thinker.”

https://jacobin.com/2024/01/nietzsche-right-wing-thought-philosophy

But some critique-of-civilization theorists focus on something else: It can be interpreted that Nietzsche was sympathetic to the commoners and railing against what society (and Christianity) does to them to make them so “unter.”

He was railing against over-domestication. Modern humans over-domesticate everything . . . the flora, fauna, and themselves. It can be interpreted that Nietzsche was early to recognize this. His idea of “greatness” can be interpreted as “much-ness” or “thriving-ness.” Instead of thriving-ness our repressive, over-socialized culture results in a tamed, slavish humanity — truncated, inhibited, conformist — where life is much more banal and arid than it ought to be.

Of interest: Nietzsche died in 1900 and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild was published in 1903.

So: Was Nietzsche contemptuous of the common person or contemptuous of the over-civilized culture that diminishes the life experience of the common person?

If the latter, great, but his expression of it did not exactly yield clarity.

(And, anyway . . . this type of and level of critique is hard to grapple with for us moderns. It could be said that even Ayn Rand had an intimation of it, but, as the article linked above mentions, an idiosyncratic interpretation: The Call of Self-Expressive Capitalism. It all suggests that the Left should understand how the Right can conflate a critique of over-socialization with an aversion to their imagined levelling-down, mediocrity-producing socialism. Valid aspects of that aversion help to explain why early portrayals of socialist-universalist collectivism lacked appeal. Nietzsche happened to be a critic of both capitalism and that dreary early portrayal of socialism.)