ABSTRACT
Given that Nietzsche has many severely critical things to say about Rousseau (as he does about almost everyone else), it is significant that there is a wide range of concerns where their positions are very close. We know, of course, that Nietzsche often excoriates Rousseau, 1 calling him: a “moral tarantula” (D preface 3 2 ); one of his “impossible ones” (TI-Skirmishes 1); a man of ressentiment (ibid 3 - see 6). He opens the “Skirmishes” section of Twilight of the Idols with a paragraph headlining Rousseau and comes close to ending it with a paragraph again devoted to him. He writes:
Rousseau-what did he really want to go back to [i.e.: “nature”]? Rousseau, this first modern human being, an idealist and a lowlife ( canaille ) in a single person who needed moral “worth” in order to stand the sight of himself. . . . This monster ( Missgeburt ) . . . I hate Rousseau even in the Revolution . . .
