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Introduction: On Reading Nietzsche
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12969 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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5 / 1987 |
789 Words |
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The Currents in Modern Thought section this month features several essays on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), a cultural and social critic remembered for his ironic epigrams and rhapsodic prophecy. Inspiring disciples across the political spectrum and within various philosophical schools, Nietzsche's writings, particularly the poetic Thus Spake Zarathustra, have yielded multiple and conflicting interpretations. Two of our contributors, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal and Robert Steuckers, observe that many of Nietzsche's early admirers belonged to the revolutionary Left in Germany and Russia. Stressing Nietzsche's plea for new values in place of supposedly corroded middle-class taboos and his elevation of will over mere reflectiveness, European anarchists and socialists embraced his teaching enthusiastically albeit selectively.
By the interwar period, a new Nietzsche was coming to overshadow the old one. Social conservatives, like the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, identified the decline of European civilization with excessive faith in reason, technology, and democratic equality. Nietzsche had already assailed the same icons. In the 1920s, moreover, a revolutionary Right had established itself in Latin European countries, which the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, sees taking shape s early as the 1880s. The spokesmen for this revolutionary Right, which Sternhell associates with the background of Spanish, Italian, and French fascism but not Nazism, were cultural pessimists, who appealed to a heroic ethic and scorned liberal and social democratic values. Both Nietzsche and the French anarchist Georges Sorel occupied privileged positions within the pantheon of the revolutionary Right: Sorel for advocating direct action as an antidote to "institutionalized bourgeois decadence"; and Nietzsche for exalting pagan fatalism and the creative power of will.
Unfortunately, Nietzsche also found admirers among the defenders of Nazi Germany. Though Nazis made questionable and opportunistic use of his writings and ideas, their appropriation of them threatened to discredit Nietzsche permanently in the eyes of Western educators. The presence of his sister, Elisabeth Nietzsche-Forster, among Hitler's followers and the correspondence between the philosopher and his sister, which yielded evidence of his proto-Nazi thinking, confirmed the widely perceived link between Nietzsche and the Third Reich. At the same time, the existentialist Martin Heidegger, who used Nietzsche to construct his theory of being, became an early (though quickly disaffected) supporter of Hitler's regime.
Since World War II, Nietzsche has had a comeback
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