Was Nietzsche a strong proponent of machoism and traditional masculinity?

Question

Was Nietzsche a strong proponent of machoism and traditional masculinity?

Some quotes from Nietzsche on those matters:

"With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on "love" — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it." Twilight of the Idols

"What they sing – ‘equal rights’, ‘free society’, ‘no more masters and no more servants’ – has no allure for us. We hold it absolutely undesirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the most profound levelling down to mediocrity and chinoiserie)" Gay Science

"You go to women? Do not forget the whip!" Thus Spoke Zaruthustra

"A man should be raised for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: everything else is folly." Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"Let me declare expressly that in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now that pessimists exist..." On the Genealogy of Morals

"Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? Because it would make people unhappier than they are? Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier…" Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

Nietzsche, from Russell (History of Western Philosophy, Chapter 25 "Nietzsche"):

Nietzsche's ethic is not one of self-indulgence in any ordinary sense; he believes in Spartan discipline and the capacity to endure as well as inflict pain for important ends. He admires strength of will above all things. "I test the power of a will," he says, "according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been."

(Russell's quote comes from The Will to Power)

To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it would immediately disclose what it really is--namely, a Will to the defnial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;--but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Beyond Good and Evil

Let's take the definition of toxic masculinity given by Wikipedia:

Toxic masculinity is a set of certain male behaviors associated with harm to society and men themselves. Stereotypical aspects of traditional masculinity,[1] such as social dominance, misogyny, and homophobia,[2]: 716  can be considered "toxic" due in part to their promotion of violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence. Socialization of boys often normalizes violence, such as in the saying "boys will be boys" about bullying and aggression.

Nietzsche praised the violent domination of the strong over the weak, praised physical and psychological suffering, the barbarian impulses, and was extremely misogynistic and anti-feminist.

So I think he fits very well as a "toxic masculinity" proponent writer.

Response to answers:

An answer (by Kyle) proposed that Nietzsche was somehow an incel.

Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment and hatred, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the endorsement of violence against women and sexually active people.[5][17]

Wikipedia

The personality traits of incels according to recent research (Grunau 2020)

Self-identified Incels showed significantly stronger misogynistic views, lower extraversion, lower agreeableness and higher neuroticism than non-Incels. Furthermore, a high level of Inceldom was correlated with low conscientiousness, low extraversion, low agreeableness and high neuroticism. Agreeableness and neuroticism were found to be the most predominant personality traits linked to involuntary celibacy.

My question could be reformulated into: "Was Nietzsche a 19th century incel?"

References:

Grunau, K. (2020). Involuntary celibacy: personality traits amongst misogynistic online communities (Bachelor's thesis, University of Twente).

Answer 1

But he had a mental breakdown about the suffering of a horse being flogged.

"the perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare" -in Human, All Too Human

There is an entire Wikipedia article on Nietzsche's views on women. And you can selectively quote to support either his progressive views, or his misogynist views. But that misses the point about Nietzsche's work more generally.

People love to put Nietzsche in a box. But his whole endeavour, his guiding principle, was to provoke people into developing their own views, rather than flatter and confirm the views that any og his audience already had.

Like his point about god being dead, was much more than a poetic declaration of atheism. He was pointing at how the story of being Christian has been a source of narratives that have given us social cohesion, so while we think we can carry on just as before but without the 'god' box ticked in our model of the world, that in fact our narrative about what our society is doing and what an excellent person should be doing in it, is decohering. And we will need new narratives explaining those things, for our communities to thrive.

It is widely thought by a academics that Nietzsche was gay, or bisexual (eg Zarathustra's Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Kohler), which it is thought may have been linked to the rift with Wagner who became not only vocally antisemitic but also homophobic. Less controversially, Nietzsche celebrated Ancient Greek culture, saying things in his notes like

"Greek pederasty not unnatural, its causa finalis according to Plato is supposed to be "the generation of beautiful speeches" " -Nietzsche collected notebooks, vol. 8, p357

Nietzsche was always interested in the real drivers of our motivations, whatever they are.

"Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler." -The Gay Science

In short you recapitulate a common misreading of Nietzsche, who can easily be misrepresented if you don't look at his work as a whole. His ubermensch was above all creative force, not a macho force.

"Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play." -Beyond Good & Evil

Answer 2

A key problem with cruelty and domination isn’t that they are “toxic” (?) but rather that there is an art to them — a series of disciplines, with ascetic priestly trappings, for harnessing resentment and redirecting guilt back onto the individual. If anything Nietzsche formulates a thorough critique of the herd mentality lying beneath so much chest-thumping evidence of physical aggression or abuse of women and so on. Violent uncontrolled lashing out is precisely what becomes those in a submissive position; real domination involves not having to obscure your motivations. Taking up a practice of the self which is precisely no longer selfish — is this not what we want from our rulers?

The Cult of Joy or Healthy-Mindedness

It is in the emotional texture of life that Nietzsche seems to find a reason for his critique of values — not just which sets of optional rules for our conduct enhance our life, but also which improve our feelings about life? And he says effectively: so what if these rules rested on false beliefs, or even contradictory ones? In fact a key question here is — quid juris, who judges? On the one hand, who has experienced all the varieties of life such that they could assign it a stable value? On the other, what could be more valuable than the life we are given; what could be more lovely, to a healthy-minded sensibility, than precisely the life we have? So that we assign life at once an infinite value; and also recognize it is inestimable, since we would need to experience every form of life in order to render a judgment. This question, “who judges?” is thus the core of an ethics, in the model of Spinoza, which finds peace in holding the universe blameless and affirms the innocence of reality in its ceaseless transformation. We become what we are by realizing for ourselves the sense and value of life.

Like Spinoza, Nietzsche begins by asking in a psychological vein how human emotional reality is structured, noting that affects are extracted from changes in our body as we interact with other bodies in the world. In the ceaseless commingling of life there is a vast concentration of intensities that are lived as bodies transform one another, as spiritual or natural elements undergo contraction and expansion. The resulting vertigo of emotion coloring the world is only halted by a great effort — to see reality as it is. But this truth of reality unmoved by emotion includes necessarily our perspective on it; thus the abyss reflects back our own fears and anxieties, our thinly-repressed hate for systems that dominate us cruelly. How can we adopt a healthy-minded approach even to the cruelest aspects of reality, which affirms the innocence of existence, and doesn’t seek to punish anyone at all?

Answer 3

You are right. By the time of Genealogy of Morals he had already established morality as the excuse we give to allow people who shouldn't be alive continue existing. Increasingly he theorized mass liquidations of degenerate people and groups as necessary in order to protect the future for the overmen. So it is unsurprising that Nietzsche would also have rather antiquated, disturbing, and violent views on gender, too.

A fragment from the period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra analogizes love between men and women to slavery in antiquity:

Summer-Autumn 1882, 2[14]

A man uses love to search for an unconditional slave, a woman for unconditional slavery — love is the longing for a vanished culture and society.

Nietzsche was unambiguous about his contempt for any kind of equality, but especially of feminism, which he represented, in a way very familiar to us, as an attempt at socially castrating men.

We might even say Nietzsche was a kind of incel.

Answer 4

Nietzsche was a beta male simp that wished he was an alpha giga chad.

In his personal life Nietzsche sucked with women big time. However, in his writings he said that health is good, and anything unhealthy is bad. Pagan Greece with it's love for the strong body is healthier (and therefore better) than modern Christianity with it's emphasis on the soul and disregard for the body.

According to Nietzsche, a man should be masculine, strong, creative and macho. He said that the morning hours should not be spent on reading, but rather on exercising the body. In "Zarathustra", when the rope walking midget was about to die, Zarathustra says that his soul will die before his body, meaning the body is more real than the illusory soul.

In his writings Nietzsche promoted macho values and body health, although he had none in reality.

Answer 5

Disclaimer

Some of the views expressed in this answer were first given in diverse comments. The comments were accordingly deleted after the posting of this answer.

As explained by Philip Klöcking in the comments, many versions of Nietzche book available online and in bookstores are versions controlled by Nietzsche's sister. Normally, since the 1970s, experts have been working on the original versions. Therefore, this answer which is based on two books on Nietzsche published in 2002 and 2018 should be valid.

Nietzsche was a proponent of violent despotism and was misogynistic

A response to the criticism that seeing Nietzsche as a proponent of misogynistic and violent despotism is a common misreading.

Recent accounts of Nietzsche managed to go through all the unfathomable Nietzsche's books, and found he was a proponent of violent despotism and misogyny. One of them was made by Ronald Beiner (Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto), the other by Domenico Losurdo, an Italian historian, essayist, Marxist philosopher, and communist politician.

A passage from Ronald Beiner Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (2018) review, by marxandphilosophy.org.uk

Author Ronald Beiner connects Nietzsche’s affinities for feudalism with the philosopher’s critique of compassion, morality, and egalitarianism, and he shows how such despotism of thought was reproduced by the Nazi enthusiast Heidegger as well. (...) In Dangerous Minds, Beiner discusses the influence Nietzsche has had on notorious contemporary ultra-rightists such as the U.S.-based white supremacist Richard Spencer and the Russian neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin, as well as the historical Italian fascist Julius Evola, who was an “explicit disciple of Nietzsche” (3). Like Evola, Spencer declares himself a Nietzschean, and Dugin swears by the iconoclast’s ominous statement that “man [sic] is something that should be overcome” (2, 12). These prominent figures of an increasingly powerful Fascist International find inspiration in Nietzsche’s aristocratic differentiation between the putatively “elect” and “unfit peoples” (4) as well as the philosopher’s anticipation of Nazism’s practice of große Politik (“great [or noble] politics”) in his militaristic critique of Otto von Bismarck from the right, as György Lukács points out in The Destruction of Reason (1952), and his “imperialistic critique of nationalism” (136n2). Today’s far-rightists also admire the Nazi Heidegger, who himself took a great deal from Nietzsche, particularly his critique of liberal modernity as nihilistic. To date, reports Beiner, Dugin has dedicated four volumes to discussing Heidegger, with “more to follow” (139n27).

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/16017_dangerous-minds-nietzsche-heidegger-and-the-return-of-the-far-right-by-ronald-beiner-reviewed-by-javier-sethness/

A passage from Domenico Losurdo (2002) Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet review, by marxandphilosophy.org.uk

What singles out Losurdo’s book at this level is his unrelenting willingness to confront the darkest, most clearly reactionary strata within Nietzsche’s text: strata which he contends underlie the real, but more passing changes between his different phases, and reflect his continuing attempt to generate an intellectual “war machine” capable of uncovering the roots of, and thereby finally overcoming, contemporary progressivism in “two thousand years” of the slave revolt (28.1), looking back to the post-exilic Jewish prophets and Pauline Christianity (12.8, 15.2). These reactionary strata include Nietzsche’s early anti-Semitism or “Judaeophobia” in the years of the Wagner circle, and the later radicalization of his claims concerning the world-historical responsibility of the Jewish prophets and priests (“the most disastrous people in world history” (Nietzsche 1990, §24; 27.1; 27.3)) for inaugurating the slave revolt in morality (GM I, 8); his repeated claims concerning the timeless necessity of slavery for any higher culture (a truth which is like “the vulture that eats the liver of the Promethean promoter of culture” (Nietzsche 2009, 5; 1.12)); his unrelenting hostility to any forms of socialism, from the Paris Commune to the progressive stances of Christian and socialist anti-semites like Stöcker and Dühring in the 1880s; the profound misogyny and anti-feminism of his mature works; and most of all, the increasingly open denial of the “right to life”, and advocacy of eugenic proposals to sterilize (Nietzsche 1999b, 479; 1999a, 401–2; 19.3), control the marriages and births of (19.3; 20.1), and even instrument the “annihilation” (Vernichtung) of “millions of the malformed” (Nietzsche 1999d, 156; 19.1; 20.1; 24.4), “those who have turned out badly” (Schlechtweggekommenen), or entire “decadent races” (Nietzsche 1999c, 69, 547) in the name of breeding a new aristocracy which could reinstate rank order between human beings, and “avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before” (Nietzsche 1999c, 98; 11.1; 19.1-19.5).

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18867_nietzsche-the-aristocratic-rebel-intellectual-biography-and-critical-balance-sheet-by-domenico-losurdo-reviewed-by-matt-sharpe/

The origins of a Nietzsche-washing

Criticizing Nietzsche as a proponent of far-right ideology is often faced with irony or an advised sigh, and a short phrase which often means something like "your simple and puerile mind was not able to grasp the unlimited profoundness and sophistication of the Genius oeuvre".

What are the origins of this Nietzsche-washing, that prevents from understanding many of his own's writings (e.g. "Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society – and it will be so again and again – a society that believes in a long scale of orders of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other.” Beyond Good and Evil) as what they mean?

The answer seems to be the 1960's postmodern and critical theory philosophers.

According to the same marxandphilosophy.org.uk article synthesizing Beiner's book, Beiner also saw that Nietzsche was a great source of inspiration to thinkers such as the Frankfurt school (Horkheimer, Adorno) and the French post-structuralists (Foucault, Guattari, Deleuze).

This is also the view of Losurdo:

Despite the harshness of Nietzsche’s language in these kinds of passages, left-Nietzscheans such as Gianni Vattimo and Gilles Deleuze have attempted to allegorise or metaphorise these radical concepts on life and their relation to the will to power and the eternal return. Losurdo reveals the absurdity of such an approach that would discount any historical-social origins to the theory and ignore the brutality and danger with which Nietzsche seeks to shock his readers. Hence, the usual interpretation of Nietzsche as a ‘life-affirming’ philosopher is brought to bear on a darker political implication by Losurdo’s rendering here, knowing that where Nietzsche says life, he also states ‘the great majority of men have no right to existence’ (Nietzsche 1967: 464).

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19307_nietzsche-the-aristocratic-rebel-intellectual-biography-and-critical-balance-sheet-by-domenico-losurdo-reviewed-by-rory-jeffs/

Nietzsche and relativism

Concerning Joseph Weissman readings of Nietzsche: "In fact a key question here is — quid juris, who judges? On the one hand, who has experienced all the varieties of life such that they could assign it a stable value? On the other, what could be more valuable than the life we are given; what could be more lovely, to a healthy-minded sensibility, than precisely the life we have? So that we assign life at once an infinite value; and also recognize it is inestimable, since we would need to experience every form of life in order to render a judgment.".

Nietzsche said he was anti-nihilist, but here on the contrary it shows Nietzsche was a radical-relativist, in particular a nihilist. No common understanding of the world, no common principles according to live can be arrived at and agreed on, since understanding and values depend exclusively on each individual subjective and sensorial experience.

So this is a theory of despotism as exposed from the point of view of the despot: I impose on you and everybody my understanding and my principles because this is how I feel it and want it, and I don’t have to justify myself. Hitler & Cie did not think differently for sure.

Responses to frequent rebuttals on critics of Nietzsche

• You misinterpreted Nietzsche

"The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole." Human, All Too Human

"I am frightened, by the thought of what unqualified and unsuitable people may invoke my authority one day. Yet that is the torment of every teacher … he knows that, given the circumstances and accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind." (A letter by Nietzsche to his sister, 1884)

Most intellectuals are not misappropriated or misinterpreted. If it is the way it is for Nietzsche, at the least, he is responsible for it (he was not coherent and clear, nor efficient in conveying ideas), at the worst, it is for good reasons (he was a bipolar psychopath).

If people say bad things about him based on his self-contradictory obscure speech, it is because those people are stupid, not because he did not produce a coherent, original and likeable oeuvre. And in any way, it is not his reponsibility. What an example for generations of people and philosophers.

Anyway, like it or not, the far-right Loves Nietzsche.

• Ok Nietzsche was misinterpreted

Let's assume Nietzsche was misinterpreted. Still, the role of an intellectual is twofold: (1) to produce original and efficient ideas (2) to express his/her idea in a way that it reduces to the maximum the chance of being misinterpreted. So even from this assumed point of view, Nietzsche is a bad and dangerous intellectual.

• Nietzsche was an innocent brilliant genius, all is the fault of his sister and mother

Here is what Losurdo says about this, as synthesized by Rory Jeffs, from marxandphilosophy.org.uk:

Bearing on these sections of the book that dare to go into the eugenic question, the issue of the Nazi ‘appropriation’ is also inevitably addressed by Losurdo. He argues that the rehabilitative work of Nietzsche’s postwar editors (namely, Kaufmann and Colli and Montinari) was successful largely due to their attribution to Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, as the key instigator in rendering a Nazi-friendly Nietzsche in her assemblage and ‘forgery’ of the posthumous editions of The Will to Power (1901-06). However, Losurdo argues such defences of Nietzsche discount several important historical details. Firstly, he claims the official account of Elisabeth’s role in creating Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism is an ‘unsustainable conspiracy theory’ (711-15). Nietzsche’s defenders on this front never address Elisabeth’s own distancing of Nietzsche from anti-Semitism in her biography of him (Förster-Nietzsche 1895-1904). Furthermore, there is never any discussion of the fact that Nietzsche was attracting a right-wing audience of his published works before The Will to Power was released (566, 720-22). Whilst this does not necessarily resolve the issue of Nietzsche’s influence on Nazism, it does reveal something arbitrary about the ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ when it comes to the distinctions it makes over the ideological precursors to the Third Reich.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19307_nietzsche-the-aristocratic-rebel-intellectual-biography-and-critical-balance-sheet-by-domenico-losurdo-reviewed-by-rory-jeffs/

• Nietzsche is the Genealogy of the Moral, and this book is great

No. Nietzsche is Nietzsche, an author who wrote around 30 books, and must be judged on his whole oeuvre and his personal biography.

• Nietzsche is useful, because he proposed a criticism of the herd mentality

Yes, and Nietzsche wrote a theory for slavery-based misogynistic aristocracy instead.

The protestant reformation was much much more efficient in liberating people under the catholic church rule than Nietzsche.

• Nietzsche is great because his guiding principle was to provoke people into developing their own views.

This is not called philosophy. Philosophy, as science in general, is to propose an original interpretation of facts. This interpretation can then be criticized and improved. If this is not what Nietzsche did, ok, but then he was not a philosopher.

• Nietzsche was an artist-philosopher, "His ubermensch was above all creative force"

If for him being obscure and lyric is a way of promoting creativity, ok, go for it, but it is not philosophy, it is art and poetry. You can not say you are a philosophe when it pleases you, and then switch into saying you are a poet when people criticize what you literally said, it is just too easy.

I think it is a good technique used since the romantics (to which Nietzsche, IMO, very well belongs) to become famous and authoritative by telling obscure and ambiguous things (which often turn around violence, sex, and drama) in a grandiose manner to appear profound and original, while telling nothing really interesting underneath.

IMO, Nietzsche, when he said "God is dead", wanted to take over the influence (at least psychologically, culturally and spiritually) that the Church used to have before the Enlightenment thinkers took its power down. I think it was also the case of the romantics. That is why they all made great resort to emotions and allegory, had such fascination for the middle ages and mysticism, and such detestation toward the Enlightenment.

"Behold, I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Übermensch." Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue.