Date: Mon, 3 Feb 1997 15:29:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-I: Evil Germans? 



My last word on Nietzsche.

I agree that N.'s philosophy is overall reactionary. But N. is important
enough that we get right why he is reactionary.

Doug is closer to the truth on this when he tracks N.'s conecction to pomo
than Barklay is in persisting in the Nietzsche-as-Nazi legend. Barkley's
last attempt to tie connect N. to the Nazis is through Wagner: Hitler was
a failed artist and may--we don't know (and we certainly have no evidence
that he was ever influenced by N.) have been influenced by Wagner's
antisemitism. In his youth, before writing a devastating attack on Wagner,
N. was influenced by W.... Now, with this sort of connection, I can
probably prove that anyone is a proto-Nazi. All that is just silly. I
repear: read N.: you will not find in his concept of the uebermensch any
warrant for racist genocide. The uebermensch in N. wiuld be too busy
wandering around high mountains doing vaguely artistic things to be
bothered with exterminating anyone. And he would have transcended the
resentment that underlay Nazi racism.

Doug is right, though, that N.'s attack on the subject is troubling,
although it's more complex that Doug makes out. N. rejects Descartes's
self-as-substance, but then so do most philosphers. He thinks that the
self is an act of creation, an artistic product; the uebermensch's
greatest creation is himself. So N. does not take the position of some
pomos that nobody's home. Rather he thinks taht selves are made and not
found. ACtually, put that way, I don't se why Marxists should object.

Dough thinks that N.'s "politics" provides a warrant for a hierarchical
society based on the will to power. I think it's rather an exaggeration to
say that N. has a developed political view at all, despite Tracy Strong
having made heroic efforts to extract a political theory from N's
writings. Certainly N. does not think that the best society is a socialist
democracy. But he hated bourgeois society with a really passionate
intensity, and though that the aristocratic Junkers were the scum of the
earth. He doesn't advocate any sort of collective action to change
society ina ny direction. Rather, his is a picture of personal aesthetic
self-improvement.

And that's what reactionary about him: his political quietism and placing
all hope in the personal. That's the connection to pomo, too. 

The will to power, in this context, is not a will for some people to
dominate and exploiut others--that's an _expression_ of the WtP for N.,
nut so is everything else. N's metaphysics is Schopenhauer's monistic
belief that everything that exists is a "representation" of the WtP,
stripped of the idea that there's anything essential to anything, an
extreme nominalism in which everything is what it is an not something
else--an idae which is probably inconsistent with the view that everything
is really WtP. N's preferred expression of the WtyP is artistic
self-creation, a fairly harmless activity if one that doesn't actually
help anyone every much, not that N. would care much about that.

One might infer backwards to the sort of society that N. might advocate,
if he were in the business of doing that, the kind that would allow
uebermenschen to go about their solitray self-perfection. FRom what N
says, it would not be a democracy, but the uebermenschen wouldn't run
things either. It would probably have to be exploitative because the
uebermenschen have to be fged and clothed, and probably couldn't be
bothered to work. On the other hand N. mentions taht they aren't likely to
be very many of them and their needs are few, since they don't care for
materail wealth ot indeed power over others. As to its economic basis,
that's a mystery. Maybe it would be a quasi-feudal order based in
agriculture. But this is just guesswork. N. never really says. Reactionary
it is. Nazi it's not.

--jks






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