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TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, "What the Germans Lack" 1
"One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want
to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my
objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power *makes
stupid.* The Germans---once they were called the people of thinkers: do
they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the
Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern
for really spiritual matters. Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles---I
fear that was the end of German philosophy."
In this section Nietzsche takes a half-dozen pages to run through the
reasons he detests contemporary German culture.
GENEAOLOGY OF MORALS, III 26
". . . nor do I like these most recent speculators in idealism, the
anti-Semites, who, rolling their eyes in a Christian-Aryan-Philistine way,
seek to rouse all the bovine elements of the people through an
exasperating abuse of the cheapest means of agitation and moral attitudes
(--that every kind of intellectual swindle achieves some degree of success
in the Germany of today is linked to the virtually undeniable and already
tangible stultification of the German mind, whose cause I seek in an
all-too exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music
. . .)."
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This leaves us with a contradiction; if Nietzsche says he's not an
anti-Semite, then why does talk about all that "Jewish hatred" and "Jewish
resentment" and "Jewish revenge?" Short answer: Nietzsche wants to
account for the origins of Christianity in a purely secular and historical
way, and to do this he concludes that Christianity originates in the
response--the naturally resentful, angry, vengeful response--of the Jewish
people to being occupied and bludgeoned by Rome. Nietzsche concludes that
Christianity is the elevation of that quite understandable malice into a
transcendent metaphysics and ethics.
His quarrel with Christianity lies in his belief that what began with a
hatred of things Roman has transformed into a hatred of all things human.
The fact that Christianity was in his view borne of a particular Jewish
circumstance doesn't imply that Nietzsche thinks that contemporary Jews
are to blame for the things he dislikes about Western Christian culture,
and I think that Nietzsche goes to great pains to make that distinction.
(Simultaneously, though, he obscures his historical reasoning by lashing
out in polemics against contemporary culture; if people are confused by
reading him, then he must be at least partly to blame.)
At this point I don't really want to try to explicate or defend the whole
Genealogy of Morals. It's a complex argument in three parts that is
profound but also problematic, even if you leave out the question of
anti-Semitism. What I hope, though, is that anybody who has bothered to
read this far will stop and think, "Wait, maybe old Nietzsche wasn't a
proto-Nazi after all." If nothing else, he was far too complex a man to
make a decent Nazi. On the modern political chart he'd probably be a
libertarian secularist.
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I will say this, though, by way of comparing Kant to Nietzsche. Kant, it
seems to me, awakens from his dogmatic slumber only to return to it many
hundreds of brilliant pages later. He ends where he begins, with a
theological dualism whose unprovable assumptions have taken on more
elaborate names.
Nietzsche's project to my mind is far more ambitious: to understand the
history of human moral evolution and to project its next phase using the
tools of psychology and history and a ruthless, constant self-examination.
He doesn't want to reverse the clock and return to the so-called "master
morality" of the ancients; rather, he wants to create a new kind of
culture by synthesizing what's good of the old and new kinds of morality.
Kant wants to convince himself that it's good and proper to believe
what he already believes, but Nietzsche wants to convince us that it's
worthwhile to challenge our beliefs in the most rigorous ways and, if
those beliefs fail, to take on the challenge of crafting for ourselves new
ways of thinking and being. Nietzsche doesn't offer pat answers, but he
doesn't return to his starting point, either.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
