Tolstoy on Nietzsche

[anvi]

Despite having done a good deal of research and some writing about Nietzsche a bit more than fifteen years ago (ugh...), I had never run across the following until today.  It's a couple of quotes from a late Tolstoy essay entitled "What is Religion and of What does its Essence Exist" extolling Christian virtues.  Even outside of that context, it' an interesting, though somewhat dramatically strong, criticism, so I thought I'd post it here if anyone might like to discuss it.

"Some disjointed writings, striving after effect in a most sordid manner, appear, written by a daring, but limited and abnormal German, suffering from power mania. Neither in talent nor in their basic argument do these writings justify public attention. In the days of Kant, Leibniz, or Hume, or even fifty years ago, such writings would not only have received no attention, but they would not even have appeared..."
"Similarly, the whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation ... And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity ... But after giving it a little thought, and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is not any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche's books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the superman and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about becasue the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any remainder of virtue, or of its chief premise: self-renunciation and love - virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the ideas of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live."

[© Tweed the Younger]

Tolstoy always had powerful opinions, sometimes on both sides, given time.  appreciate them but don't be taken by them.

[shua]

I'm not surprised that Tolstoy focused on this aspect of Nietzsche and that he responded to it in this way.  He wasn't being quite fair to those who found Nietzsche interesting, though it probably applied in some cases.   Tolstoy and Nietzshe were both, I imagine, working in very different ways to find an alternative to what they felt to be civilizational malaise.

[anvi]

I'm not very well-read in Tolstoy and that's one reason I found this reaction surprising, though I think you're certainly right, shua, that it's not really such a surprise after all that Tolstoy reacted in this way.  One interesting irony is that both Tolstoy and Nietzsche both basically bought into the representation of religious mysticism found in Schopenhauer, and while Nietzsche fought against the Schopenhaurian construal of mysticism as self-renunciation, Tolstoy very much embraced it. 

[Zagg]

It's just what one one expect from Christian anarchism versus the Uebermensch.

[Burke]

Nietzsche was the archetypal idiot.

[ViaActiva]

Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God – I’ll have to sit through the Alex Rider movie again.

[Spanish Moss]

All my love to Christian anarchism :-D