ROBERT S. WISTRI CH
217
too benign or politically correct. He was no admirer of modernity or of
the liberal vision of progress. He was certainly no democrat. Nietzsche
adamantly repudiated the doctrine of equality, and he was no "human–
ist" in the conventional sense of that term. His thinking lacked any con–
crete social anchor and his solution to the problem of nihilism
ultimately led to a cul-de-sac. But he was also a man of remarkable
integrity and a bold thinker who in Freud's words "had a more pene–
trating knowledge of himself than any other man who had ever lived or
was likely to live." That other great psychologist, Carl Gustav lung,
astutely suggested that Nietzsche's own tragic life and the unresolvable
contradictions in his personality were in some uncanny way a forecast
of the fate of Germany and its self-destruction through Nazism. No
other contemporary saw as deeply into the pathologies of fin de siecie
German and European culture or seemed to intuit so surely the cata–
strophe that was to come. A hundred years after his death we are still
facing a similar crisis of values and the frightening spiritual vacuum that
Friedrich Nietzsche so acutely diagnosed at the heart of Western civi–
lization. The warning of Zarathustra that if nothing is true, then all is
permitted, still haunts our future .
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