[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] will tell that to someone who is in a boat risking their nest trying to get from libya to lampedusa. That is a make me want to read him again, have to tell you. To me that is just playing with words. So, i think unless unless someone has an absolutely depressing thing, thank you for your attention. [applause]. [inaudible] thank you for coming out. Book tv is on instagram, follow us for publishing news, schedule updates and behind the scene pictures and videos. Instagram. Com book underscore tv. University of wisconsin professor jennifer, it is good to meet you. He was a german philosopher who wrote many books on philosophy and all sorts of different forms. All of them, some essay, some longer forms, critiques, all of them had something to do with the challenge of universal truth. He took his enemy and the notion of universal truth and all of his work has something to do with his effort to tear it down, expedite it, look at at the history of that idea, and to show that anything we take to the the universal like oh, god our human creations. But they are not of nature theyre not mayors of reality. Host he wrote one time god is dead. Guest hero god is dead and it first makes appearance in gay science. The gay science and it is an aphorism and it is called the madman. The aphorism is that he is playing with it madman that runs into a times square and says god is dead, and everybody says he is crazy and he realizes my time has not come yet. So there he is announcing what is going to be basically an intellectual project for the rest of his writing life before he goes insane. That is the notion that god is dead. What over the course of the 19th century in particular german became more modern and more secular but they continue to go to church and pray to a god that they did not really believe in anymore. In other words he thought modern thoughts and the forces were undermining the basis of religion. People still held onto it because they are too terrified to live without it. This may sound despicable but that is what he tries to work out in his philosophy. Host where does he teach . How did he come about, was he wellknown in his time . Well we have to sort of separate the myth from the reality which is that he did have moments of modest pain. His first book, the birth of tragedy had a big reception but then he did fade into impurity. He was a theology professor, so a professor of language, the genealogy of language. The academic life was not for him. He suffered from physical elements, so historians of floss first abate why he had such a tough time in the candidate me but he taught for ten years in basel with some success. Due to reasons we can only think about wasnt his help, what he he said that he needed to break free, he breaks free and lives on a pension the rest of his life and gets to inhabit the image of the freethinker that he so exalts and worships in his own philosophy. He did not have a huge readership for most of his productive life and i say that because in 1889 he has a nervous collapse nervous collapse and bends the last 11 years of his life in a very declining state. He ends up in a vegetative state. He dies in 1900. He has discovered so how did he become himself, he discovered precisely in those month and his health is declining, shortly before this mental collapse. One of the terrible ironies of his life and the posthumous life of his idea is it is in the moment when intellectually and mentally there is closing up accounts for him. That is the moment floodgates open and he becomes the superstar that he is today. Host who discovered him . Guest this is a little tricky because theres a quest for priority. People were reading him about i think its fair to say that the daesh critic who himself had a big audience in the late 19th century, he is credited with discovering him and i think thats a fair fair assessment. He brings the most fame. Theres a brief correspondence and that last year just as its closing in on nietzsche and he thinks someone is finally recognizes my genius and then he has a mental collapse. Thats pretty much the and of his productive life. So hes credited largely with getting the word out in Northern European circle that nietzsche is one to watch. Thats when his reputation takes off. Spee1 who followed him . Who liked his work, his work, what kind of people . Guest everybody. Atheists, religionists, the left, the right, women, men, black, white men, black, white people, old people, young people. Thats not immediate because he needs to be translated. He is not translated in the earnest into the late 1897 is the first round of translation. Theres more translation that happened in the early 20th century. In the late 19th century a lot of educated americans could read german. Some people were reading him in the original but really did require the translation for him to take off. Hl mencken has a lot to do with nietzsches superstardom. Thats not to to say there werent other folks reading him and popularizing him but mencken is the one who writes the first fulllength monograph on nietzsche in 19 oh eight. That is where we get a full synopsis of nietzsches life, his struggles with christianity, struggles with health, we get we get a little bit of his sexuality, and then we get nietzsches ideas. This book sold widely and sold well and it helped due to things, and helped really establish nietzsches repetition in america but it did Something Else which is it help mencken become mencken. Host so somebody says i love friedrich nietzsche, i agree with him, what are they saying to you . Guest if theyre just saying that, not much. Because i give the example of check something atheists and bible something christians could both make that claim about nietzsche. That is what is startling about his reception is that he does not track right or left, he does not track religious or secular, or rather he tracks all over our intellectual spectrum. So just the statement i love nietzsche does not tell me much of anything other than that is an utterly conventional experience. To find nietzsche so powerful, in fact what i think is so interesting is how many people will say and have set over the course of the late 19 and 20th century how they felt when they read nietzsche, he was speaking to them personally. One of the things i argue in the book is nietzsche becomes a superstar, public philosopher by way of private longings and private fears. So, you have a disturbed look on your face. Host who wouldnt like nietzsche then . Spee2. Guest theres plenty people who do not like friedrich nietzsche. And there are things not to like. He he did not say very nice things about democracy, he didnt say very nice things about women, about equality. So these are things that matter to you you will take issue to him. Let me give you a concrete example of what is to like and what is not to like about nietzsche. I can take anyone but i will take one of the more spectacular examples and that is the leopold trial of 1924. So leopold and lowell are two university of chicago students and they are what nietzsche had a minds and they wanted to prove it to themselves the uber mention, the superman that get translated to the superman. In fact the superman comic which we tend to think of as americana has its roots in nietzsche, in fact the two men who come up with superman were readers of nietzsche. So that is a little and theres many cases like that. When i think of the word uber, i think huber think huber comes into our language and the way it does but were talking about an example where we have two views that say they have the right nietzsche, and that is leopold and lo, they think hes a superman they had in mind that they want to prove it to themselves. So they kidnap and kill a 14yearold boy,yearold boy, bobby franks on the south side of chicago. They get caught. It turns out they were not sober as they thought. Clarence darrow, the famed Trial Attorney becomes their defense lawyer and he is also a reader of nietzsche but he is not a murder. In fact hes quite sure that that is not what nietzsche had a mine. The interesting thing about the whole leopold and lowell trial which is trying to save these young men from being killed themselves is how darrell had to the way what he had to say is that nietzsche was a dangerous thinker and they misunderstood good him. And yes nietzsche is a important thinker that we need a modern light but we need to handle him with care. So Something Like that the leopold and lowell trial where you see any chance such a public enemy number one as we see with the murder but we also see with the clarence dare think that nietzsche is a thinker that we americans need in order to embrace modern life. Host political movements that have coopted nietzsche . Guest i think, the entire 20th century, i think the one that surprises my readers the most or at least when i get letters from readers or from come into contact with readers is nietzsche, the hidden nietzsche and black power. So he was a reader of nietzsche and in nietzsche he discovered a lot of things. But what he understood from nietzsche is he needed nietzsche to stay that it is in fact made up, or the product of history, the product of chance is arbitrary but it is not true, so do not hate the voice of a racist culture as a voice of your own inner conscience. So this is what nietzsche did for africanamericans. That is to help them here that they no longer had to pray to the white mans god. They know hot to like make themselves to press straight to religion and they should not take this morality which tries to discipline them and keep them down at something universal and timeless. So he repeat newton is really intellectually cutting his teeth on nietzsche as they are formulating the basis of black power. Host world war ii. Guest the reason i sigh is i dont know of any other philosopher in history that is going for two world wars. But nietzsche was. You cannot, i think world war ii is more interesting story here because of all the ways in which nietzsches reputation is just so terribly damaged. Quickly if i may, world war i nietzsche, when world war i breaks out and it so shocking to american observers, starts to come out, its nietzsche, rumors of german ministers preaching nietzsche from their pulpits, it was not hard to listen and hear traces of the nietzsche philosophy behind the imperialism of world war i. So nietzsche is yoked to world war i and has a very hard time, those who want to try to save his reputation and say this is not what he intended, this is just a misuse of niche or, they they had a hard time afterward. Then leopold and lowell dont you much for his reputation. Then with the rise of hitler, not mussolini and initially who was a reader of nietzsche, hitler, the rise of hitler in particular was the more terrifying developments. Over the course of the 1930s of we see the spectrum of naziism and as we started to see miscellaneous as a greater threat than initial it was not hard to find niche in traces behind nietzsche. So then again nietzsche is seen as the author and visionary of what would become world war ii. Of course nietzsche wrote of things that were not so hard to implicate it. He wrote of the rise of the blonde beast so what people thought to be a celebration of the aryan race, his sister was actually a proto nazi, and her closing use she welcomed his hitler to the nietzsche archives so there is the linkage and over the force so the american imagination need to really get slang to World War Two and the entire nazi reality that here we have the german who did not just wanted uber mention but they wanted in huber race and we know the language of the subhuman people which was all throughout germany during world war ii, nietzsche was just implicated in all of this. Host which is his reputation today and who is the anti nietzsche philosopher . Is there such a thing . Host oh there is plenty. But i dont think there is interesting. Sure, George Fontana is not a thinker we talk about much today but we should because he was a towering intellectual and philosopher. He was a poet and novelist in the earlier 20th century he thought nietzsche was everything wrong with what he called the german mind that hypertrophied self, the hyper grand isil. He thought that the german minds in the german temperament and he traces this back and then nietzsche becomes the great exemplar is an intellectual or a mind that just cannot deal with limits so he actually referred to nietzsches adolescence. Hes pretty pretty dismissive of nietzsche and thats an example of a thinker who is a very robust and careful thinker. There are plenty others. I think an interesting case here is an example of alan bloom, who the reception of his famous clothing of the American Mind, the blockbuster book alan bloom says whats wrong with Higher Education is killing the souls of our children theyre getting all of this multiculturalism but what theyre not getting as great ideas and they are not getting the challenges of those great ideas so it is how Higher Education is impoverishing our souls of the our children. Nietzsche is right there all along, he even talks about the American Intellectual life and according to bloom he thinks that so much of what is wrong in late 20th century is in intellectuals are reading nietzsche and what George Fontana says they are tired of universal truth. They are tired of someone elses power, theyre tired of authority and so he says of all the counterculture of the 1960 is nursed on antiauthoritarianism. He said there is one thing to have these kind of protest in the streets, its another thing to bring them into the academy and bring such a ruckus. He is very critical of the uses of nietzsche. So i hit the pause button here. If you read how everybody is talking about alan blooms book and they were talking and talking because as you know it was a major blockbuster, people picked on a hot bloom blamed nietzsche. So you think that alan bloom had a problem with nietzsche. He didnt. He thought nietzsche was a genius. He loved nietzsche. He wrote beautifully about nietzsche. He wrote longingly about nietzsche. He thought nietzsche was a genius. Genius. The problem was he thought he was in a cultural of intellectual pygmies who could not appreciate the genius of nietzsche. So what he is actually doing in the closing of the American Mind because its such an interesting move, hes not really blaming nietzsche for the impoverishment of American Life that he find so despicable. Hes blaming readers who are not to the task of truly understanding this great genius. So again thats not someone who is critical of nietzsche per se, although he has a reputation for having penned all the failures of late 20th century American Life on nietzsche. Quite the opposite what hes trying to do is keep nietzsche in his own image. Against what he sees as the slavish and adequate, impoverished American Intellectual life. That just cannot just cannot handle these powerful ideas. Host jennifer, you have written a biography of friedrich nietzsche, are you a fan. Guest people call it a biography of friedrich nietzsche, but but its actually a biography of his ideas as they come to life in america one of the things i say in the book is this is not actually a book about nietzsche. In in fact some readers have been disappointed, of course he crops up point quite a bit but the book is not about nietzsche. Im an american historian, my interest is the history of american thought and culture over 19th and 20 century, what i discovered is when you get the late 19 centuries, you cannot talk about American Intellectual life without talking about nietzsches presence, his, his curious presence really and his influence. So thats a little modest correction here. Its not about nietzsche comments about us so every reading of nietzsche, im not listening whether hl mencken or Clarence Darrow have become so important after world war ii. Or alan bloom are getting him right or wrong, i dont think thats the interesting question for a historian to ask. What im trying to do is listen in to what they have to say about nietzsche, to listen to the what that tells us about American Intellectual life in that particular moment, so the book is actually not about nietzsche, its about about us. Its about our intellectual life and are coming to our own ideas, but the truth about democracy about christianity about god, about by the way of nietzsche, but im dodging the question. Host has in your view been a positive influence in american political and cultural life . Guest have never been asked that question. I think hes a necessary influence because i think he is right. I think theres a lot of junk and what he says, but but you clear away some of that junk and the idea i think our ideas that we had to come to terms with which is it again to repeat what i said earlier, the notion that so much of what we take to be universally true, whether it be god democracy, whatever it is, nietzsche gave us a way of looking at those ideas, those true claims to see their origins in their genealogy. Nietzsche helped americans see that so many truth claims are not rooted in reality, there rooted in power, there rooted in need, there rooted in fear, but theyre not necessarily rooted in truth. I think this is necessary for any culture, but a set especially American Culture because we had from the start been a very pluralistic culture of many languages, many religions, of different races, so part of what it means to be american right from the earliest years here is contested truth. Its a pluralistic sensibility, land a land of many religions and many beliefs, we never did a good job of negotiating this prior to nietzsche, but nietzsche his ideas become important as we negotiate this moving forward, so in answer to your question to i think is a positive force, yes that but hes also been a negative force but he had nothing to do with it because he was long dead. His ideas have been read in all sorts of curious ways, as i said, i think think he was a Necessary Force and in that regards because he helped americans confront fundamental problems that we have had which is the problem of living in the plural ballistic society and doing so in a humane way. And for that and it many people were grateful in the 20th century that they had nietzsche to think with with these issues. Host university of wisconsin professor, jennifer teaches history here at the university, here is her book, american nietzsche, the history of an icon and his ideas. You his ideas. You are watching book to be as hes been to. Youre watching book tv on cspan two, with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend, book tv, television for serious readers. News reports eight u. S. Supreme Court Justice anson scalia was found dead earlier today at a west texas ranch. He was a guest at a resort in the big bend region just as glee arrived on the ranch friday and attended a private party with 40 people when he did not appear for breakfast. Up person Person Associated with the ranch and found his body. The u. S. Marshals service, the sheriff and the upbeat guy are involved in the yet investigation. A federal official who has not to be named told one newspaper that there is no evidence of foul play and it appeared scalia died of natural causes. Is the longest serving justice on the court was nominated in 1986 by president ronald reagan, Justice Antonin Scalia was 79. He. He spoke with book tv in 2008 about his book, making your case. What most annoys me . I think any judge will tell you it is councils evasion of questions, trying to avoid giving us straight and civil answer. Instead of saying yes or no they go into a long explanation. You have a whole chapter in your book about making the case for evidence. Never heard judges complain that an argument was too
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