In passing, you suggest in the same essay ('Nietzsche’s Antidemocratic Rhetoric') that, if you had space, you would argue for the stronger claim that democratic political institutions are valued by Nietzsche. Why is this?

What I had in mind is that Nietzsche is committed to science and that he makes clear that science belongs with democracy (Twilight: “Skirmishes” 2). In Gay Science 348 he says that scholars in Europe (clearly including scientists) grow out of all kinds of classes and social conditions and that they therefore belong “by their very nature and quite involuntarily to the carriers of the democratic idea.” So a strictly aristocratic society, in which only the aristocracy is educated, is incompatible with the advanced level of scholarship and science that Europe has (and had). To have science at that level, education cannot be restricted to those of means. Indeed, GS 349 claims that the ancestors of most natural scientists were “poor and undistinguished people.” And once you have the level of education necessary for science, the “democratic idea” is in place and democratic political institutions will be difficult to avoid except by force.

In your essay “Nietzsche’s Misogyny,” you focus on Nietzsche’s frequent denigrations of women. Here, you suggest that his misogyny is a reason for the lack of engagement with his work by feminist philosophers working in the Anglo-American tradition. However, in contrast to some commentators, you argue that his anti-feminist strand does not dogmatically or destructively negatively determine his philosophical views but rather, in particular in passages in his Beyond Good and Evil, exhibits an intellectual honesty. Could you say a bit more about what you mean by this, and what you take Nietzsche’s stance on feminism to be more generally?

I started out assuming that Nietzsche’s remarks about women expressed a sexism that he shared with most 19th century European males, and which was exacerbated by his ressentiment against Lou Salome (a concept he seems not to have had a name for until after she jilted him). But because I had been able to make sense of most of his other views, I did not see his apparent sexism as undermining them, anymore than I see Kant’s apparent racism as undermining his categorical imperative. I wrote “Nietzsche’s Misogyny” to figure out if there was anything more going on in Nietzsche’s comments on women, thinking that the best way to do that was to examine his one extended discussion of women, which occurs in chapter 7 of Beyond Good and Evil. Actually there is also a fairly extended discussion in Gay Science, but it is relatively sympathetic to women. I wanted to examine his clearly negative comments on women, and that is what we apparently find in BGE. What I discovered, however, is that if one reads carefully, his actual claim do not appear to be sexist, much less misogynistic. For instance, he is not saying, as he seems to be, that women (die Frauen) do not care about truth and are only interested in making themselves look beautiful; he says this about woman (das Weib), which I take to be the social construction of the feminine. That construction appears to be a contradiction in terms on his account, with females being both more natural (hence less spiritual) and more spiritual than males. If so, no individual woman could embody it and Nietzsche’s criticism of the construction is not a criticism of actual women. And when he insists on “the necessity of an eternally hostile tension” between “man and woman’” (BGE 238), I take him to be referring to the tension that necessarily exists between those who attempt to be embodiments of the social constructions of masculinity and femininity.

And yet, even if his criticism of the construction is not a criticism of women, it seems fairly clear that he has “feelings” about woman – hostile feelings – that are being expressed here. Even if what he actually says – appropriately interpreted - is not sexist, he seems to be satisfying his hostile feelings towards women by keeping his real meaning fairly well hidden and requiring the reader to do considerable work to arrive at that meaning. And so he must have personal motives for believing the things about women that he seems to be saying about them. So I take what he is doing here as an exhibition of his honesty about his own feelings and as a demonstration of his overcoming of them. As to his stance on feminism, I think if you put together what Young says in his article on the topic in the recent Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche with what I have to say here, Nietzsche seems at least pretty close to being a 19th century feminist, but one who is against arguing for feminism on moral grounds. Of course, as I see it, he is against arguing for anything on moral grounds. Ethical grounds is a different matter. Does he think the world would be a better place if men and women were regarded as equal? Not in itself, because that leaves out too much of what the world will be like otherwise. But he thinks that there is much to be gained, for both men and women, in freeing women from the constraints of patriarchal society, as he perhaps indicated by voting, on the losing side and against his hero, Jacob Burckhardt, for the admission of women to the University of Basel in 1874. Nietzsche’s main concern is what our ideals will be, for men and for women and for people in general. I think he wants to encourage both males and females to invent new ideals for themselves. And he even seems to recognize the possibility of other genders, although in a difficult-to-interpret passage sometimes considered “absurd” (GS 75).