Nietzsche is not a nationalist, and shows no excessive admiration for Germany. He wants an
international ruling race, who are to be the lords of the earth: "a new vast aristocracy based upon
the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants
will be stamped upon thousands of years."
He is also not definitely anti-Semitic, though he thinks Germany contains as many Jews as it can
assimilate, and ought not to permit any further influx of Jews. He dislikes the New Testament, but
not the Old, of which he speaks in terms of the highest admiration. In justice to Nietzsche it must
be emphasized that many modern developments which have a certain connection with his general
ethical outlook are contrary to his clearly expressed opinions.
Two applications of his ethic deserve notice: first, his contempt for women; second, his bitter
critique of Christianity.
He is never tired of inveighing against women. In his pseudoprophetical book, Thus Spake
Zarathustra, he says that women are not, as yet, capable of friendship; they are still cats, or birds,
or at best cows. "Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All
else is folly." The recreation of the warrior is to be of a peculiar sort if one may trust his most
emphatic aphorism on this subject: "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip."
He is not always quite so fierce, though always equally contemptuous. In the Will to Power he
says: "We take pleasure in woman as in a perhaps daintier, more delicate, and more ethereal kind
of creature. What a treat it is to meet creatures who have only dancing and nonsense and finery in
their minds! They have always been the delight of every tense and profound male soul." However,
even these graces are only to be found in women so long as they are kept in order by manly men;
as soon as they achieve any independence they become intolerable. "Woman has so much cause
for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty
presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed... which has really been best restrained
and dominated hitherto by the fear of man." So he says in Beyond Good and Evil, where he adds
that we should think of women as property, as Orientals do. The whole of his abuse of women is
offered as self-evident truth; it is not backed up by evidence from history or from his own
experience, which, so far as women were concerned, was almost confined to his sister.