On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Dan Minette wrote:
> Well, I'll agree that Nietzsche's work is more complicated than simple
> proto-Nazi. Indeed, he may be discussing individual ubermen, instead of a
> nation of them. But, I think I can still argue that the fundamentals of his
> work need to be only slightly modified to form a basis for Nazism.
...and I'd say that you'd have to take those fundamentals and turn
them upside down and eviscerate them. :-)
Nazi Nietzsche
---- ---------
pure-blood racism let the races mix; be "good Europeans"
exterminate Jews Jews are fine
mass conformity radical individualism
burn books, kill scholars take inquiry to new heights
worship the state nation-states are obsolete
Wagner's writings and the popular forms of anti-Semitism at the time,
however, form a perfect and unambiguous basis for Nazism.
> In that sense, his work is not the foundation of Nazism, but a reflection of
> the culture of Germany at that time.
In a way; except that Nietzsche insists over and over that his goal is to
repudiate and overcome the culture of Germany (and much of Europe) at that
time. Of course he can't help but be a product of his time in some ways,
e.g. he believes in race as a valid term for discussing differences
between human cultures, and since he is searching for the meaning of moral
values in the history of human culture, he can't avoid using the concept
in ways we would now find inappropriate. As a rule, though, one can
substitute culture for race and come up with the same meaning in a less
rankling form.
> >
> > (BTW, does this mean I'm obliged to go and read Kant's Critique of
> > Practical Reason? I'm not sure I have the stamina....)
> >
>
> Oh, no. That work requires a reading of the Critique of Pure reason to
> fully appreciate. If you read that Critique, and are willing to discuss it
> in detail, that should be enough. <evil grin>,
Oh, I wish you hadn't done that. Now every time I'm in a book store I'm
going to wander over to the philosophy section and think, "Gee, the
Critiques are just a pair of 800-page books of unending sentences with
paragraph breaks every third mile...it'll be fun!"
Ego vs. Laziness...fight!
(Kant *is* brilliant, btw...I remember reading the Prolegomena to Any
Future Metaphysics and The Metaphysics of Morals and being in absolute
awe. The only problem is that I'm pretty sure that morals don't really
have a metaphysical origin & there's no such thing as a noumenon, so
I can't help but feel that Kant, though brilliant, is in all likelihood
wrong.)
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
