By Crispin Sartwell

I bow to no one in my admiration of Friedrich Nietzsche. He's the reason I got into philosophy in the first place; I was galvanized by his writings when I was in high school. In many ways he's what I would most aspire to be: a deeply original and revolutionary thinker.

But I also believe that there are terrible problems in his writings, and that the attempt to defend him from a variety of charges has falsified his work.

It is true that he attacked anti-semitism, especially the idiotic variety embodied by his sister and his husband. It is true that he would have despised Hitler as a prodigy of resentment.

It is also true that he regarded the Jewish "slave revolt in morality" as history's signal disaster, and thought that Jews were a people devoured by hatred.

His vision of the superman was not a vision of an Aryan master race, but of a people joyfully affirming the world. And yet the values he believed such people might forge included predation, war-likeness, and the oppression of their inferiors. There were reasons besides distortion and misapprehension why he was thought of as the patron philosopher of the Third Reich.

He was deeply anti-democratic, and indeed opposed on principle to political freedom of almost any sort. He envisioned an aristocracy of merit that would entail new and deeper forms of oppression.

Nietzsche's work has of course (though not lately) been dismissed as mad. Their beauty and profundity is not compatible with madness. But he did go mad, and took to signing his letters alternately "God" and "the Anti-Christ." And there are hints of madness in many places after "Birth of Tragedy." By the time we fetch up at "Ecce Homo," the man is psychotic, with moments of clarity.

The attempt to make Nietzsche rational, moderate, and cuddly simply reads out much that, as he would have himself put it, is questionable and dangerous.

What we need to do is maintain his bizarreness and reprehensibility in our minds, and love him anyway, and use him how we can.