Nietzsche: The Gamma Philosopher
The self-styled superman was the ultimate Gamma
An interview with the late writer E.M. Cioran reveals the quintessential Gammatude of the faux-philosopher and fantasist Friedrich Nietzsche.
LA TIMES: Were you reading Nietzsche then?
CIORAN: When I was studying philosophy I wasn’t reading Nietzsche. I read “serious” philosophers. It’s when I finished studying it, at the point when I stopped believing in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realized that he wasn’t a philosopher, he was more: a temperament. So, I read him but never systematically. Now and then I’d read things by him, but really I don’t read him anymore. What I consider his most authentic work is his letters, because in them he’s truthful, while in his other work he’s prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he’s just a poor guy, that he’s ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed.
LA TIMES: You write in The Trouble with Being Born that you stopped reading him because you found him “too naïve.”
CIORAN: That’s a bit excessive, yes. It’s because that whole vision, of the will to power and all that, he imposed that grandiose vision on himself because he was a pitiful invalid. Its whole basis was false, nonexistent. His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he’s pathetic, it’s very touching, like a character out of Chekhov. I was attached to him in my youth, but not after. He’s a great writer, though, a great stylist.
The crazy thing about Nietzsche is that a lot of people actually took him seriously, when in truth he was never anything more than a talented scribbler of navel-gazing fantasy fiction about himself. His entire ouevre is one gargantuan delusion bubble, or, as Cioran correctly describes it, “an unspeakable megalomania”.
Every writer writes about what he knows, but the only thing Nietzsche knew was his narcissistic fantasies and his burning hatred for the Christian civilization that forced him to be aware that he was a pathetic nonentity of little accomplishment who was repulsive to women. Little wonder that he died an insane syphilitic; he would have been the original involuntary celibate had he not been able to afford the occasional prostitute.
Friedrich Nietzsche was not a superman, he was merely a supergamma. He was a forerunner of the New Atheists. If he lived today he would have been this guy.
In a future post, I’ll quote the passage from one of Robert Anton Wilson’s novels in which he absolutely skewers what little remains of the intellectual corpse of the great Gamma philosopher. It’s downright hilarious.
Exactly. And Nietzsche has almost nothing to say about marriage and family. That's a gamma giveaway sign too.
Two audiobooks I listened to several years ago were A Confederacy of Dunces and a work by Nietzsche. I thought Nietzsche sounded rather like Ignatius J. Reilly, except more Wall of Texty and incoherent.