Part 7: Nietzsche as a Proto-Nazi (Nietzsche and the Nazis, Part 7, Section 34)

This audiobook edition of Nietzsche and the Nazis is read by the author, Dr. Stephen Hicks.

To download MP3s of the audiobook or for more information, visit Dr. Stephen Hicks's Nietzsche and the Nazis page:

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[jozefgrunmann]

Mr. Hicks, congratulation, you are really an excellent lecturer. And Nietzsche was very clever man. I admire him.

[howardpope]

At last someone tells the truth about Nietzsche!

[keeperofthecheese]

Nietzsche said a lot of things which modern people would find extremely offensive, but it's invariably difficult to debunk what he says. Society simple cannot dispel his assertions.

[likebox]

This is accurate, and pretty damning, but it is incomplete in my opinion. There is a major point that is glossed over, because it is a point that is shared by some who hold individualist doctrines in Capitalist states.

The main thesis of Nietzsche's writing is that the egalitarian conceptions of human unity are misconcieved, and he is specifically attacking the two major competing egalitarian doctrines of his time, Christianity and Marxism. The thesis in these collective doctrines is that all of humanity is bound together in a unified meaningful project, with a teleology and an equal value on all those who contribute, whether in the body of Christ, as in the Christian conception, or in the body of workers, in the Marxist one.

Nietzsche is attacking this view at the root, by attacking the monotheistic egalitarian conception of Hofstadterian superrational ethics that underlies these doctrines. He is simply suggesting that the ethics of natural law are superior to the monotheistic ethics of the Christians or the secular egalitarianism of the Marxists. Because he considers monotheism a lie to be rejected, he is sure that it could not have spontaneously evolved among people of Rome, so it must have been an imposition from outside, and he sees it as an imposition of the Jewish collective. Not individual Jews, who he sometimes admired when they stood apart from the religion, like Spinoza, but the Jewish collective, the Jewish Volk. So he has a different kind of anti-Semitism, different from Christian anti-Semitism. The Nietzschian anti-Semitism does not fault Jews for not accepting Christ as messiah, it faults Jews for foisting monotheism on a world which would be better off without it. This is ultimately a much more virulent brand of anti-Semitism, because it sees no compromise and it erects no barrier to genocide.

The Nazis mingled this new kind of anti-Semitism with the old kind, as really, they were not incompatible in the early manifestations. Both wanted to enforce punitive and segregationist measures on the Jews. But the Nazis revealed their Nietzschian true colors when they began the racial genocide, because the Christian anti-Semitism, while barbaric, aimed only to convert the Jews to Christianity, not to slaughter them. The Nazis didn't care about conversion. They wanted the Jews destroyed, because the way they saw it, only the Jewish "Volk" contained within it the seeds of monotheism, and the monotheistic ethics were holding Germans back from being the masters of the world. If only there were no Jews, so the thinking goes, there would be no monotheism.

This idea is insanely stupid, because monotheism is a philosophical idea which evolved several times independently of Jews, and spread independently in many different regions. It's just in Europe, where the religion is based on a Jewish conception, that it seems that Jews have a monopoly on the idea. It is intellectually bankrupt, and extremely vicious, and it is the central issue with Neitzsche's philosophy, not the other stuff mentioned here, which, while bad and incompatible with liberal democracy, is not the root disease.

The problem with saying so is simply that monotheism is considered contrary to individualism too, although this is not necessarily so. The individualist doctrines do not inhibit an individual from voluntarily finding a larger task to which to devote his or her life, and whether this volluntary process is to be thought of as God imposing God's will from outside the individual on the individual, or whether this is the individual's will linking together with other individuals will to collectively form a God out of their mutually coherent actions, this is a meaningless question in light of logical positivism, and so does not admit an answer, and should not even be considered a question.

[StephenHicksPhilosopher]

Hi Rick: About "presentism" -- which thesis in particular do you think might be subject to the presentist criticism?

[jkonrad]

Great series although I’m kind of lost.

[jamesstevenson]

Correction: Nietzsche and Hitler hated Socialism, Nietzsche was anti collectivist, Hitler was pro capitalism. Get your facts straight!!