History from below: Women and Nietzsche View

The "history from below" approach in historiography takes women into account as a group mostly overlooked or largely marginalized by conventional historical accounts. Women have always been disregarded by world historians and philosophers from Aristotle to contemporary wits who did not bother to address them in humiliating terms from time to time.
In "history of below", the story is completely different and efforts have been made to make up for the historical ignorance towards women by critically reviewing the conventional historical texts. In effect, the approach targets to rewrite history from the female viewpoint which opposes what has always been the trend when men tell historical stories.
Friedrich Nietzsche is viewed as one of the most recent influential thinkers who downplayed women's status in the society and life just like Aristotle and many other scholastic philosophers did in their writings. He presented an approach which is a classic opponent of the "history from below" approach.
Nietzsche was an unconventional philosopher who presented himself as an iconoclast who intended to reestablish the value system in Christianity and capitalism and replace it with novel, reformed values. He was openly anti-women and assumed pregnancy and delivery as the primal duties women are created for by the nature. On the other hand, he argued, men's only responsibility towards women was to make the pregnant!
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explicitly mortifies women and their rights as human beings.
He wrote: "The struggle for equal rights is even a symptom of disease; every doctor knows this. The more womanly a woman is, the more she fights tooth and nail against rights in general: the natural order of things, the eternal war between the sexes, assigns to her by far the foremost rank. Have people had ears to hear my definition of love? It is the only definition worthy of a philosopher. Love, in its means, is war: in its foundation, it is the mortal hatred of the sexed. Have you heard my reply to the question how a women can be cured, "saved" in fact?—Give her a child! A woman needs children, man is always only a means— thus spake Zarathustra. "The emancipation of women”—this is the instinctive hatred of physiologically defective—that is to say barren, women—for those women who are well constituted: the fight against "man” is always only a means, a pretext, a piece of strategy. By trying to rise to "Woman in herself” to "Higher Woman” to the "Ideal Woman” all they wish to do is to lower the general level of women’s rank: and there are no more certain means to this end than university education, trousers and the rights of voting cattle. In truth, the emancipated are the anarchists in the world of the "eternally feminine”, the most deep-rooted instinct of whom is revenge. A whole species of the most malicious "idealism”—which by the way also manifests itself in men in."
Nietzsche spent most of his youth with promiscuity and during his final years suffered the diseases that were left with his from his young ages. During his life, he repeatedly fell in love with different women and girls, which could be sort of the reason for his humiliating approach towards women. He never married and is known as a classic example of a misogynist.

By Seyyed Ghasem Yahusseini
Translated by Abbas Hajihashemi

 
Number of Visits: 3941