Talk:Nihilism/@comment-3338975-20120710015904/@comment-3338975-20120719025445

If I were you, I'd be suspicious of anything that says Nietzche himself was liberal in terms of women's sufferage, as that's almost necessarily a contrived position which distorts some aspects of the historical Nietzche's perspective on the world in favor of the liberal elements of Nietzche's philosophy which are useful to the feminist cause. I say this because Nietzche repeatedly emphasizes that he sees his historical role as the Dionysian philosophical devotee and opponent of the historical tradition of Christian moral interpertation of the world ("Dionysius against the Crucified", as he says at the end of Ecce Homo), and when he speaks of women he asks rhetorically whether he can be said to know women and answers that he does as his Dionysian inheritance, proceeding with a misogynist picture of women and an attack on woman's sufferage. Furthermore, when he says "these are my truths" when he speaks of women, this cannot mean that he does not want other people to agree with him on the subject; he sees his misogynist position as a result of his Dionysian inheritance, which he emphatically does want people to adopt as the best possible mythos for sustaining life. Accepting the doctrine of eternal recurrence of one's mind out of the same body as Nietzche's personal esoteric philosophy demands that one repeatedly acquire the same gender and never the other, and so the loss of an essential spiritual "femaleness" that a consistent application of Nietzche's philosophy does demand (just as the Nietzchean feminists insist) nevertheless is overridden by the necessity of a tragic embrace of the eternal seperation of the gendered bodies and the minds which arise out of them. A better argument can be made for Jesus, whose personal viewpoint on the world Nietzche also attempted to attack, historically being a proto-feminist for his generation, and indeed Nietzche saw feminism as one of the disowned descedants of the Christian moral interpetation of the universe and as one of the reasons he adamantly opposed said worldview. It is indeed true that Nietzche often used irony throughout his works, but that does not excuse credulous acceptance of ad hoc invocations of "Nietzchean irony" whenever one's preferences do not allow it, as this merely conflates one's own "little" viewpoints with Nietzche's self-acclaimed "superior" ones (which he would have been utterly disgusted with) as I believe I have shown the feminist interpertations are certainly doing.

It can certianly be said that Nietzcheans can also be feminists, in the sense that they co-opt liberalizing aspects of his philosophy for the feminist cause, so long as they are truthful about the fact that this is what they are doing, but it is doubtful that a thorough going assenter to the worldview of the historical Nietzchean himself could ever be a feminist.