Brian Leiter Quotes

Even if you're not as illiberal as Nietzsche, you might be worried if Nietzsche's right that certain kinds of traditional moral values are incompatible with the existence of people like Beethoven. That's the strong psychological [psycho-physiological] claim he makes – that you can't really be a creative genius like Beethoven and take morality seriously. I think even good old democratic egalitarian liberals could worry a bit about that, if it were true. It's a very striking and pessimistic challenge, because the liberal post-Enlightenment vision is that we can have our liberal democratic egalitarian ethos and everyone will be able to flourish. Nietzsche thinks there's a profound tension between the values that traditional morality holds up and the conditions necessary for creative genius.
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The illiberal attitudes and the elitism was really central to the way he looked at things. The suffering of mankind at large was not a significant ethical concern in his view, it was largely a matter of indifference – in fact it was to be welcomed because there's nothing better than a good dose of suffering to get the creative juices flowing.

Nietzsche would rather persuade select readers to the fatalism of Goethe by co-opting the language of freedom itself to commend to them an attitude that is premised on its denial in the most profound sense: a denial of the Enlightenment ideal that men, through free will and their rational capacities, can all become equal. Like the illiberal idea that 'Der freie Mensch ist Krieger' or that to be free is to be big, brave and indifferent to suffering, this key passage from 'Twilight of the Idols' persuasively redefines 'freedom' in the service of Nietzschean values: in this case, the illiberal idea that to be truly free is to be not just reconciled to, but to affirm, the essential inequality of persons.