Nietzsche: Servant of Nazism, Critic of Nazism - Steven E. Aschheim: The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. x, 337. $40.00.) (original) (raw)
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Anti-Nietzsche : A Critique of Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s irrational doctrines have contributed to the emergence of self-destructive extremism on both the right and left ends of the political spectrum. The realization of his Übermensch ideal is not about achieving greatness as an individual but rather about greatness as a collective whole, specifically as a European empire. His philosophy stands in stark contrast to genuine conservatism, which is rooted in Christian principles. Keywords: conservatism, perspectivism, traditionalism, New Right, identitarian, postmodernism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, extremism, antisemitism, will to power, logos, Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch was interpreted by America and Germany in two notably different ways during the early 20th century, bringing about the question of which understanding is more faithful to Nietzsche’s meaning. The advent of World War I in 1914 presented America with a depiction of Nietzsche as “the apostle of German ruthlessness and barbarism,” which offered a negative view of Nietzsche and the German people as narcissistic warmongers. This outbreak of war led to these warped interpretations of Nietzsche and his philosophy, prompting the world to see only the facade of his aphorisms, not their truer meanings, for many years. Between the world wars, Germany’s reading of Nietzsche focused on the notion that the government knows what the ubermensch is: a selfless person ready to give his life for a “greater good” of the state, which was believed to be endowed with divine mandate. The American interpretation of Nietzsche is similar but believes the philosophy of the ubermensch to be one of atheism and unadulterated power, positing man as the new god, a rugged state-defined individualism that brings out the worst in man. George Santayana argued that Nietzsche’s philosophy failed to acknowledge “immense forces beyond ourselves” which endow man with will and power. This led to the American understanding that Nietzsche wrote of a German people that believed themselves to be ubermenschen and gods among men; my research leads me to believe that this is only one possible interpretation of Nietzsche. Germany’s concept of the ubermensch was remarkably close to that of Nietzsche’s philosophy except that the true ubermensch is not a god among men underneath the omnipotent state, but rather god of his own life. World War II only worsened matters as Nietzsche’s ubermenschen were often associated with the Nazi conception of an Aryan superiority. The Nazi party viewed the ubermenschen as this Aryan race: a perfect race of men who must give their all to the state. However, there were more qualities to their ubermenschen than race, as it also incorporated a loyalty to Germany – total sacrifice of self to the state, though Nietzsche expressed his anti-nationalism in “Why I am So Wise” when he describes himself as “the last anti-political German.” The Americans then saw this Aryan Übermensch and decried Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi, despite his distaste for anti-Semites and nationalism. In this paper, I will analyze the two interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy through his works “The Gay Science” and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “American Nietzsche,” and writings from German thinkers during the wars, such as Heidegger, to support my argument that the Germans were closer to understanding Nietzsche’s ubermensch than Americans at the time.
Friedrich Nietzsche and the politics of history
Choice Reviews Online, 2009
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History Christian J. Emden Frontmatter More information A natural history of moral communities 237 Sovereign individuals and the ethic of responsibility 248 The task of genealogy 260 "To translate humanity back into nature" 269 6 The idea of Europe and the limits of genealogy 286 "The creation of the European individual" 287 Beyond the modern nation state 299 Political realities in Imperial Germany 308 Modernity and the limits of genealogy 316 Bibliography 324 Index 366 Contents x
Review: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History By Christian J. Emden
In his later books Nietzsche repeatedly complains that philosophers have no sense of history. On a more modest level and with gentler and more respectful remonstrance, Christian J. Emden makes a similar claim. Surveying recent discussions of Nietzsche's political thought in English, he remarks that they show little awareness of the political context in which Nietzsche lived and to which his views responded. It should not be forgotten that Nietzsche lived through several of the more tumultuous turning points in German history: the Revolution of 1848, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, the creation of the new German state, and the subsequent economic boom, which brought in its train panics and a search for scapegoats.
Nietzsche in the GDR: History of a Taboo
Nietzsche and the German Tradition, 2003
This essay examines cultural attitudes to Nietzsche in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which appeared to be changing in the mid- to late 1980s, after almost forty years of deliberate, officially sanctioned neglect of the thinker. Nietzsche's voice had been effectively silenced in the GDR and his manuscripts carefully guarded. While it was not impossible to gain access to Nietzsche's manuscripts, scholars had to tackle a bureaucratic assault course in order to reach them. Reception of Nietzsche in the GDR tended to be limited and negative. There was nothing even resembling an open discussion in the GDR of Nietzsche and his legacies before 1986, and the first Nietzsche monograph to be published there did not appear until 1989. Discussions of Nietzsche in the GDR were rare, and they tended to focus only on his alleged role in paving the way for National Socialism and/or bourgeois imperialism. The depth and intensity of official hostility to Nietzsche in the GDR can be traced, in part, to the founding ideas and self-understanding of that state. Its claims to legitimacy were based on two closely related ideas. The first was a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of historical development, according to which the GDR was the culmination of progressive ('zukunftsweisend') developments in German history. The second was the antifascist struggle of 1933-1945, which provided the GDR with its immediate raison d’être. The presence of the victorious Red Army on German soil, the sacrifices of the Soviet people in repelling the fascist invader, and the martyrdom of German antifascists in the Third Reich appeared to provide compelling evidence for both these claims to legitimacy. There was no room for Nietzsche in the ‘first antifascist state on German soil’, as his writings were perceived (and not only by communists) to have been an important underpinning of National Socialism. A debate in 1986-87 in the GDR journal *Sinn und Form* on opening up Nietzsche's work to public debate seemed to be part of a cultural thaw in East Germany. This debate in the GDR was a curiously muted and oblique version of a process which, by 1987, was already well underway in Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union: glasnost. In the event, in the GDR context it was too little, too late.
The Politics of Reading Nietzsche
Political Studies, 1998
Over recent years, an extraordinary number of interpretations of Nietzsche's work has appeared. I ask why he has become such an important ®gure in contemporary political debate and whether any dominant concerns can be elicited from the diverse readings of his texts. My response to both questions is that because Nietzsche has been identi®ed, by Habermas among others, as the founding father of poststructuralism, this is where debate between postmodernists and their critics is being staged. I distinguish between recent philosophical and political interpretations but argue that in both cases, what is at stake are political questions regarding authority, legitimacy and consensus. In the latter part of the article I consider attempts at reconstructing a postmodern politics out of Nietzsche's philosophy, but express some doubts about such a project.
A Truncated View: Nietzsche's Resistance to Neo-Liberal Democratizers
Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of values offers an important account of contemporary culture. In this essay I will examine Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, drawing out Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. This essay is intended to demonstrate the ethical consequences that arise from his critique. For the person living along with the author of this paper, Nietzsche’s prophetic warnings still carry great weight in any effort to understand and relate to the personal and political world. Democracy has, by and large, become the new political hegemon, and with it the attending notions of community and equality are utilized in speech with little reflection as to what their meaning. After first laying out Nietzsche’s method and mode of critique, the essay will provide an analysis of the real, ethical complications summoned to mind by Nietzsche, concerns either forgotten or rendered un-important by their immediate assumption in the “post-modern” present.
Reconsidering Nietzsche and Politics
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2020
Preprint version of a review essay of Hugo Drogon's Nietzsche's Great Politics and Gary Shapiro's Nietzsche and the Earth.
Nietzsche and the Engine of Politics
In this essay I provide an interpretation of the Übermensch in light of the cardinal conceptual and methodological importance of physiology in Nietzsche's thinking-not as an ideal type but as the ongoing overhuman process of physiological overcoming in which even the 'human being' is to be taken beyond the framework and typological construct of 'the human'. I argue that Nietzschean physiology is not primarily concerned with the language of man and its paradigm of the speaking or thinking subject, but rather with an overhuman physis and physiology of forces that make use and abuse of the human-in addition to nonhuman formations-as its material and medium of inscription hence articulation (a type-writing rather than a type, in this sense). Nietzsche privileges physis (growth, will-to-power) over logos (speech, human reason) in his physiology, and hence a-signifying forces over forces of (human, all too human) signification. In posing the political question of rule in terms of the physiological question of the production and direction of will-to-power, the overhuman appears to be Nietzsche's strategy for radically rethinking the place and the fate of human life-forms in relation to wider non-signifiying, nonconscious, non-human, often inhuman as well as transhuman 'form-shaping forces'. In the present arguments, I draw largely from François Laruelle's little-known tour-de-force, Nietzsche