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Nietzsche's dark side is well known. He glorified war, and promoted the idea of a "superman" immune to humanity's most distinguishing characteristic -compassion for the sick and the poor. He rejected conventional morality in favour of acknowledging and indulging an unashamed "will to power" - the desire of humans to dominate, exploit and expropriate those weaker than themselves. He advocated the subjugation of women, who were there only for reproduction and the recreation of warriors.

But Nietzsche cannot be summed up in one paragraph or even in a dozen, He was not a coherent philosopher: he did not set out to create a solid philosophical system. Indeed he could hardly write an argument at book length, and most of his works were strings of short passages. But he was a brilliant and mercurial writer, an iconoclast of all idols, and a forerunner of many later movements: of modernism and of post-modernism, of Freud and of Adler, of futurism, of fascism, of modern atheism, humanism, and sexual liberation.

Although (or perhaps because) he was the son of a protestant clergyman, Nietzsche saw Christianity as a life-denying religion which suppressed our connection to nature and to our own lives and instincts, and glorified self-abasement and abstinence. He produced some of the most biting attacks on transcendental religion ever written.

In reality human life, the earth, the universe, have no purpose or meaning. Thus Nietzsche's enterprise begins as nihilism, as negation of traditional ethics and religion.

At the same time the underlying motive for this denial is a burning love of life, a deep sensual love of everything that exists, and of the whole of experience, good and bad, pleasure and pain. We don't have to feel we are on trial for our eternal lives, we don't have to prove anything to an invisible judge in the sky. That realization can be a liberation.

So then on the far side of the tunnel, nihilism turns into its opposite: affirmation of all that exists, despite or even because it has no purpose. Nihilism becomes a kind of salvation - a rescuing of the world from the oppressive and corrosive idea of a personal judging God.

Nietzsche never publicly called his own position pantheism. But he was an admirer of Spinoza and above all of Heraclitus. He realized that his world-affirmation came close to pantheism - and even toyed with the idea of a pantheism of his own kind - a pantheism without ethics, but joyously accepting every moment of existence.

In both these respects - his hatred of Christianity and his affirmation of earth - Nietzsche clearly had a powerful influence on D. H. Lawrence. In Nietzsche's case this affirmation is so powerfully felt that he wants everything, every part of his life, to be repeated over and over again in its smallest details.

Unfortunately he was not content with simple affirmation, and still hankered after the lost purpose and meaning that Christianity appeared to provide. The enjoyment of ordinary life was insufficient - Nietzsche felt the need to replace the divine purpose of Christianity, with a purpose that humans themselves would create - the insane goal of moving beyond humanity to a "higher" man, the superman.