Mick Hartley

Yes, Pinker again. At the TLS, Twenty Questions with Steven Pinker.

I liked this:

Which author (living or dead) do you think is most overrated?

Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s easy to see why his sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-Right and neo-Nazi movements today. Less easy to see is why he continues to be a darling of the academic humanities. True, he was a punchy stylist, and, as his apologists note, he extolled the individual superman rather than a master race. But as Bertrand Russell pointed out in A History of Western Philosophy, the intellectual content is slim: it “might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: ‘I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici’.”

My own contribution to Nietzsche studies:

Every time you read something about Nietzsche, it'll be accompanied by some expression of regret at the way he was appropriated by the Nazis. Fair enough no doubt, and of course he could have had no idea how his views would appear in the light of what the Nazis did, but you can't help thinking that, with the Übermensch, and his views on master and slave moralities, the question of why some of the more philosophically inclined Nazis might have seen him as a precursor was never going to be one of life's great mysteries.