If you think that Nietzsche would hate to be associated with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) then you are probably an academic philosopher and you know only little about NLP. If you think that NLP has very little to do with the work of Nietzsche then you are probably an NLP practitioner and you know very little about Nietzsche. For someone who is both a Licensed NLP Master Trainer™ and an academic philosopher the links between Nietzsche and NLP are clear.

This website is meant for people who are interested in NLP, know how to do at least some NLP and have a desire to understand NLP better. It is this desire for knowledge that makes them NLP philosophers in the sense that they love (philo) the wisdom (sophia) of NLP. Richard Bandler, the creator of NLP, correctly states that NLP is easy to do but hard to understand. Many people mistake NLP for a form of psychology. They are wrong unless you take psychology in the sense as it is used by Nietzsche rather than Freud. But almost nobody does that nowadays. NLP is more philosophy than psychology. NLP is an epistemology, i.e. NLP works through a specific idea of how people know, learn and unlearn stuff.

Because this website is meant for people who are interested in NLP, the explanations of NLP will be concise. This is a shame because given the wide spread of incorrect, incomplete and outdated teachings around the globe that are sold as “NLP” and in fact have little or nothing to do with NLP, a decent clarification of NLP would be wonderful. Who knows? Maybe the future will bring an opportunity to add this much needed additional layer of information to this website. For now it means that if you think that, given the summary exposition of NLP, the accompanying text of Nietzsche doesn’t fit, it is probably due to your training in NLP more than anything else. To be clear: nobody holds that against you. It is the sole responsibility of the person who trained you with whom we would like to have a word or two. Fortunately, NLP is all about learning and updating your current skills and knowledge with what works better. So you are welcome to participate in our training programmes. Also, there is more than enough room to ask questions or ventilate your opinion in the comments. One of the ideas behind this website is that it would be really healthy for the international NLP community when they would copy, even if only a little bit, of the way discussions are held within the world of academic philosophy. Even the smallest of discussions already goes a long way in terms of combatting an incomplete, incorrect and outdated reading of NLP.

If you are an academic philosopher and want to discuss whether Nietzsche has anything to do with NLP you are very welcome to do so even if this website is not meant for you. Some academic philosophers will probably argue that Nietzsche would turn around in his grave if he knew about this website or that interpreting Nietzsche’s work out of context is exactly the one thing that Nietzsche hated. All that might be the case. Nevertheless, there are three important issues that are probably overlooked in such a reaction, namely: (1) you probably don’t know enough about NLP to be able to judge this issue correctly, (2) if you know something about NLP, chance has it that it is incomplete, incorrect and outdated and finally, and most important, (3) Nietzsche was all about the individual ostracized out of the larger community and I find it highly suspect if outstanding members of such a larger community draw conclusions about the very people that the community cast out.

This website is for a large part build up from the paragraphs of Nietzsche work that star in “Neurosofie: het filosofisch fundament voor persoonlijke groei”, which is in Dutch obviously. In the Neurosofie book there are a lot more paragraphs from Nietzsche work with a very extensive explanation, in Dutch of course. For those who want to know more about NLP & Nietzsche and speak Dutch, please read the Neursofie book as there are many topics in the book that are missing from the website: