Philosophical minds much more accomplished than you or I have made commentary on Nietzche's writings ad nauseum:
"The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value. But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgments at all." (
C. S. Lewis, in
The Abolition of Man (1943) Chapter 2. The Way)
"Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did not crave in the least either wealth or empire. What he loved was solitude, nature, music, books. But his imagination, like his judgment, was captious; it could not dwell on reality, but reacted furiously against it. Accordingly, when he speaks of the will to be powerful, power is merely an eloquent word on his lips. It symbolises the escape from mediocrity. What power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond his horizon. What meets us everywhere is the sense of impotence and a passionate rebellion against it." (
George Santayana,
Egotism In German Philosophy (1915), Chapter XII)
"Speaking of
Spinoza he [Nietzsche] says: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!" Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. "[Thou goest to woman?] Forget not thy whip"—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks." (
Bertrand Russell,
A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part II, Chapter XXV, "Nietzsche," p. 767)
Russell goes on to say...
"It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His "noble" man—who is himself in day-dreams—is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: "I will do such things—What they are yet I know not—but they shall be the terror of the earth." This is Nietzsche's philosophy in a nutshell." (
Bertrand Russell,
A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part II, Chapter XXV, "Nietzsche," p. 767)
"I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die." (
Bertrand Russell,
A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part II, Chapter XXV, "Nietzsche," p. 773)
"If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain." (
G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy (1908), Chapter III - The Suicide of Thought)
The following link gives an excerpt of G.K. Chesterton's full-throated rebuttal of Nietzche and his philosophies and his own defense of Christianity against Nietzcheism.
http://www.anthonyflood.com/mulloychestertonnietzsche.htm
