Talk:Friedrich Nietzsche/Archive 6

Archive 1

←

Archive 4

Archive 5

Archive 6

Archive 7

Archive 8

→

Archive 10

Sources for future revisions

Important: Nietzsche was not anti-semetic, in fact, in the small sections he does talk about eugenics, he talks about the important inclusion of the Jews. Nietzsche also saw the state as product of the herd, he craed the breeding of human excellence, which he believed could not be compatible with a social view of equality. How he intended to implement this was never elaborated because Nietzche was not concerned with political matters in large, especially the forming of a political system. Though it is clear he advocated a aristocracy, and he did not believe in equality... though it is also clear Nietzsche believed greatness not to be caused by race, material wealth or the like. He viewed greatness as a happy accident, we sometimes devoted his though on how to achieve a stratified society in which the breeding of excellent human beings was the goal. He calls racial purity a "mendacious race swindle", he calls the idea prevailing at the time of germans being pure blooded as nonsensical , and he (aside from keeping Jewish friends like Paul Ree) alienated himself from Wagner as well as his sister after she married that Anti-semite. He held contempt for the Deutscheland uber-alles movement, as well as social Darwinists like Hurbert SPencer that promoted a 'might makes right' ethic. His overman would never be used outside of his Zarathustra, as it was merely a rhetorical mechanism to attmpt to better man, and then move past him to even better pastures. But, he did not view this in a darwinism manner, he saw Darwinism and natural selection to be advatagous to the herd and at the expense of greatness due to the fact of the great being overwhelmed by the herd. I suggest a more cogent approach to Nietzsches Philoosphy, one that includes a summary of the aims of his books. The list by concept is a good idea, but it is far from complete.

Feel free to expand this list, or add specific quotes that may be useful:

Um, I added several quotes in this section last night. Looks like somebody deleted them. Is that even allowed in the discussion page? Petrejo 16:56, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'll just add them again. Petrejo 05:51, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

They were deleted again, and I just added them a third time. Petrejo 23:11, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't like that your contributions to talk pages have been deleted, but perhaps, instead of getting into a revert war, it would be more useful to consider a different option: Relying on a secondary source that makes a fuller argument than you are capable of doing here without engaging in original research. Picking Nietzsche quotes that support your view of him, while ignoring others (whatever position you take on Nietzsche) is not good scholarship, but referring to someone who makes specific arguments on Nietzsche's views is. -Smahoney 23:15, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, I am getting to that, Smahoney; however, I need time to gather the citations you require, and I'm just one person, and clearly the majority here isn't helpful. If I didn't need to worry about my posts being *erased in the discussion page*, that would save some of my time. Please speak to the others, too. My citations should appear sometime this weekend. Petrejo 23:46, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I've definitely been in your place before, and understand your frustration. What has worked for me in the past is developing, offline, a single section and extensively citing (using secondary sources, and saying, "According to so-and-so, X is the case.") my work. -Smahoney 23:55, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Dear Smahoney, my secondary sources have been entered here. Please tell me my next step in this Wikipedia dispute resolution procedure. Thanks. Petrejo 14:33, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Scholarly

• Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism by R.H. Stephenson and Paul Bishop
• Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition edited by Paul Bishop
• Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics by Nicholas Martin
• Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche edited and translated by Christopher Middleton; Hackett, 1941
• The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence by Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche
• The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890 - 1990 by Steven E. Aschheim, 1992
• Nietzsche and the Feminine ed. Peter J. Burgard, 1994
• Why We Are Not Nietzscheans by Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, Robert de Loaiza, 1997
• Nietzsche and Jewish Culture by Jacob Golomb, 1997
• Nietzsche & the Jews: Exaltation and Denigration by Siegfried Mandel, 1998
• Zarathustra's Secret by Joachim Koehler, 2002
• I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition, ed. John Moore, 2004
• Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman by Abir Taha, 2005
• Nietzsche on Gender by Frances Nesbitt Oppel, 2005
• I Am Dynamite: A Nietzschean Anthropology of Power by Nigel Rapport; Routledge, 2003
• Nietzsche Humanist by Claude Nicholas Pavur; Marquette University Press, 1998
• Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom by Will Dudley; Cambridge University Press, 2002
• Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor by Gregory Moore; Cambridge University Press, 2002
• Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy by Gayle L. Ormiston, Alan D. Schrift; State University of New York Press, 1990
• Nietzsche's System by John Richardson; Oxford University Press, 1996
• Nietzsche's Ethics and His War on 'Morality' by Simon May; Clarendon Press, 1999
• Unpublished Letters by Kurt F. Leidecker; Philosophical Library, 1959
• Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator ed. by Christopher Janaway; Clarendon Press, 1998
• My Sister and I by Oscar Levy, 1951 (This work, usually referred to as fraudulent by scholars, is included in neither the KGW [Kritsche Gesamtausgabe Werke] nor the KSA [Kritsche Studienausgabe] (i.e., the Colli/Montinari editions), which, by implication, shows it is not a genuine work by Nietzsche but that of Levy's.)
• Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? by Jacob Golomb & Richard Wistrich, 2002
• Habermas, Nietzsche, and Critical Theory by Babette E. Babich; Humanity Books, 2004
• Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist by Peter Berkowitz; Harvard U. Press, 1995
• Nietzsche & Wagner - A Lesson in Subjugation by Joachim Koehler; Yale U. Press, 1998
• Redeeming Nietzsche by Giles Fraser; Routledge, 2002
• Nietzsche's Life Sentence by Lawrence J. Hatab; Routledge, 2005
• The Nietzsche Disappointment by Nickolas Pappas; Rowman & Littlefield, 2005

Essays

(To be filled when needed.)

Philosophical

• Nietzsche & Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
• Reason and Existenz by Jaspers
• Nietzsche by Richard Schacht
• Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology by Alistair Moles

Specific Quotations That May Be Useful

Discussion

If I could insert my two cents:

I think the quotations from Yovel below are indicative of a larger problem, that is, the difference between being anti-religion and anti-Semitic. Many critics fail to divorce his distaste for all religions, which naturally includes Judaism, from the Jewish people. Clearly I've suggested my allegiance but I think this is an important consideration that no quotes illuminate.

I think the quote from Derrida gets to the heart of the matter & is perhaps the best NPOV. That is, while Nietzsche may not have been anti-Semitic it is rather interesting that the only political realization of his views were based in Nazism. It seems to me this is about as much as can be said from a NPOV. While I side with the non-anti-Semitic camp

The real problem with all this is that there are much larger questions to be wrestled with that haven’t been openly discussed. Namely, are authors responsible for results of their work? That is, it is one thing to say Nietzsche was anti-Semitic and blame him for that and quite another thing to blame him for writing something that became a philosophical justification for Nazism.

If we say “yes, he is responsible” then the obvious result is that we have to re-consider every writer, philosopher, etc through this lens that we have created and, what in my mind, amounts to pointing fingers at what anyone has written that resulted in something we deem “inappropriate” or “evil” or “bad” or the opposite for that matter.

The problem I see with all of this is that we are also implicitly suggesting a philosophical perspective if we say “yes, he is responsible.” That is, we are siding with Hegel on the ideal-material question and saying “Ideas matter!” or “The Nazi regime would’ve never taken hold if it weren’t for Nietzsche!” And I don’t think any contemporary philosopher sees this question as resolved thus I would say we must suspend judgment and seriously curtail any arguments over how to interpret him. Arpayton 18:01, 13 July 2006 (UTC)Arpayton

I find this point very interesting and at issue with the ideas that would like to presume dominance here. One point though: Nazism is not the only political stance derivable from Nietzsche's thought as Alan D. Schrift pointed out in "Nietzsche for Democracy?" In: Nietzsche-Studien 29 (2000), pp. 220-233 (and later in his "Response to Don Dombowsky"), in which he suggests there are radical possibilities for a kind of democratic reading in Nietzsche that sounds somewhat similar to, in my opinion, Derrida's "democracy to come". I'll try find a quotation or two that is pertinent.Non-vandal 18:26, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Transferring pure philosophical thought to the political realm is always an interesting endeavor. I know exactly what you mean about democratic possibilities in Nietzsche. However, your comment made me realize I neglected to mention a couple of important points about the politics of Nietzsche. First and foremost, Kaufmann himself repeatedly suggests the "best" or most "appropriate" interpretation of Nietzsche is anti-political. Furthermore and for instance, in "Thus Spoke..." "On the New Idol" can atleast on one level be read as nothing more than an all out attack on the state and all that comes with it - clearly not in line with Nazi doctrine. In fact, to me it suggests more of an anarchistic interpretation of Nietzsche.Arpayton 19:51, 13 July 2006 (UTC)arpayton

I must state before all else: the land of idle speculation is one we must avoid. Plus, Kaufmann did not so much as say an anti-political reading is more appropriate but rather an a-political one; this of course should be read with the understanding that this is Kaufmann's reading, which cannot and should not presume dominance among the readings of Nietzsche and this would be absurd anyway. Not only this, it is even faulty to assume Nietzsche sounds "anarchistic" (and this is not even suggested by Kaufmann - at times something else is) on various points as well.Non-vandal 20:02, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

In response to Arpayton; some scholars have criticized Kaufmann for being mild in his interpretation of Nietzsche, so I'm probably not alone when I perceive great passion in Nietzsche and bourgeois morality in Kaufmann. While Nietzsche was an atheist, his criticism of Christians and Jews goes beyond anything he suggested about Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Animists, to wit, his open hatred and contempt for Christians, and for the Jews who created Christianity. This goes beyond a distaste for all religion. As for the quote by Derrida, it deserves closer scrutinty because of the enormous hatred that Hitler showed toward both Christianity and Judaism was a mirror of the hatred that Nietzsche wrote -- and it was not expressed towards Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Animists.

Perhaps it wasn't Nietzsche's fault that Hitler copied him 50 years later to produce mayhem, but perhaps it was after all, since Nietzsche's portrait of Christianity was a straw dog, just as his version of the Judaism that allegedly forged that straw dog was only another straw dog. That wasn't careful or caring scholarship, but wild emotion, Irrationalism, with perhaps a certain ressentiment against the dominant Christianity of his epoch. Nietzsche probably expressed his rage in the full knowledge that he was doing so. So, to that extent, perhaps, any author may be responsible for the results of his work if he deliberately and with intent and forethought chose to express malice and to openly call for malice, and afterwards malice arises from that. Petrejo 23:31, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

I think that it may be more useful to pick some secondary source to cite. Anything more than that borders on original research. -Smahoney 23:13, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

All right, Smahoney, I've been citing many secondary sources. Does this begin to satisfy your criteria for dispute resolution? Are we getting closer to a decree? I ask because I noticed that the Nietzsche article is no longer Protected and many changes have been made to it since we've started here. Unfortunately, those changes appear to be more one-sided, Nietzsche-apologetic POV changes. Comments? Petrejo 00:55, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Hello, Smahoney? Are you there? I've done the work that you requested, supplying dozens of quotations from secondary sources. You haven't yet commented on them. Also, you haven't commented on the recent changes to this Wikipedia article on Nietzsche, although the article is ostensibly 'Protected' by your mediation. Are you still there? Petrejo 14:21, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand my intent here. I didn't want you to gather quotes as a part of a dispute resolution, but in order to do the preparatory work for constructing an article section. And the article's being protected has nothing to do with me. As for your citations, they look fine. The next step would be to write a couple prose paragraphs, using those citations to justify claims in your writing, something I would suggest you do on the talk page. After that, it will be up to other editors to (politely) suggest changes. -Smahoney 18:50, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Smahoney, if the Protection on this article has nothing to do with you, then whom should I contact? Thanks. Petrejo 09:04, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I would suggest looking through the article's history, or scanning through this page for mention, and contacting whoever protected it. -Smahoney 18:13, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

User:Petrejo's quotations are not helpful. At all. He has cherrypicked quotations to buttress a point of view that represents the views of an insignificant minority of Nietzsche scholars. As such, it is inappropriate that this POV be represented in the article. — goethean ॐ 19:03, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that Nietzsche scholars' views are the only important ones here. Certainly, negative receptions of Nietzsche abound in the world of analytic philosophy. Likewise Kantians and Platonists and Christians (not to metion Hegelians!) have specific readings of Nietzsche that are undoubtedly negative. Historically, the Nazis tended to have a positive (to them) reading of Nietzsche, and the association, however right or wrong it may be, between Nietzsche and fascism remains. I think, basically, you're taking the wrong stance here - I'm not for saying, "Nietzsche was a Nazi" or "proto-Nazi" or that this is the correct reading of Nietzsche. What I am trying to do is to support Petrejo in properly creating a section detailing a specific way of reading Nietzsche that has historically been fairly prominent. -Smahoney 19:45, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the support, Smahoney. Because, actually, the authors of the current Wikipedia article on Nietzsche have cherrypicked a quotation from Nietzsche that works very hard to distance him from the fascist, Nazi and anti-Semitic connection. Why are they allowed to post their quotation, while I'm not allowed to post mine? Why are my relevant, scholarly quotations erased, erased, erased, dozens of times, week after week, on this single topic? Clearly the current authors have a POV that they wish to Protect, and they've used the Protection feature of Wikipedia entirely in their favor. That kind of POV contribution should be questioned on principle. Let's get some NPOV in this article. Petrejo 09:04, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Since those quotations are useless, I see no issue with deleting them permanently – and I did such. The blockquote I added below has an implicit recommendation for others to read more if they are to understand this flurry of (misguided) associations of Nietzsche with Nazism in recent scholarship. Cheers, Just passing by 13:26, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

This quote too is a POV interpretation; saying that the other interpretation is a mistake. Both views, the Nazi and non-Nazi views, need to be in the article to be NPOV. 203.255.233.127 14:35, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Now, what gave you the idea it wasn't going to be included? This is an encyclopedia after all – of course it is a "POV", but it is a source contesting the rampant Nazi-Nietzsche view and from someone well known and highly regarded in scholarship. No need for redundancy and over-literal quips. Fare it well mate, Just passing by 14:45, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

OK, Smahoney, as secondary sources are required by Wikipedia guidelines, I'll include these to support my changes. I don't feel my changes needed outside authorities since any objective reader could easily recognize my points illustrated only by Nietzsche's own words. Yet, if that disqualifies my changes as Original Research, then I've little choice but to comply. I can post some tonight, and more as the week progresses. Here we go: --Petrejo 06:49, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't know if this is how you intended your comments to be taken, but to clarify: Including secondary sources isn't a means to support your changes, they should replace your changes, ideally with some nice prose to connect them. Further, and again, just to clarify, they don't support the conclusion that there is a connection between Nietzsche and fascism, they support the conclusion that some thinkers see such a connection. -Smahoney 20:45, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, Smahoney, as long as my NPOV contribution is included in some fashion in what is so far a POV article, I'll be satisfied. Petrejo 03:51, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Nietzsche was clearly an elitist who believed in the right to rule of a 'good and healthy aristocracy,' one that would, if necessary, be ready to sacrifice untold numbers of human beings. He sometimes wrote as if nations primarily existed for the sake of producing 'a few great men,' who could not be expected to show consideration for 'normal humanity.'

— Jacob Golomb, Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? 2002, Princeton U. Press, p. 3'

Now, if...the only politics calling itself Nietzschean turned out to be a Nazi one, then this is necessarily significant...One can't falsify just anything.

— Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, ibid, p. 47

The use that the Nazis made of Nietzsche did include his treatment of the Jews.

— Menahem Brinker, Nietzsche and the Jews, 2002, ibid, p. 108

...Nietzsche reverted in The AntiChrist to his former 'positive' appreciation of the Jews [sic]. This was in contrast to his pronouncements in, On the Genealogy of Morals, which stressed the impotence of the weak and miserable Jews and their ressentiment as the sole cause of the revolution they had effected on morality.

— Menahem Brinker, Nietzsche and the Jews, 2002, ibid, p. 109

• In the metonymy of casual associations ruling political readings of Friedrich Nietzsche, it is not uncommon to connect Nietzsche and Nazism, finding and holding Nietzsche responsible for the sentimental education of no one more execrable than Adolf Hitler and perhaps every other dictator, at least in theory. Thus, the editors of a recent collection on the intersection of ideas and politics do not hesitate to title their essays around Nietzsche's influence and in just this sense, proposing him as the "godfather of fascism." Indeed, Nietzsche is the incendiary figure in the trajectory of the core irrationalism traced decades ago by Georg Lukács from F. W. J. Schelling's transcendental idealism to its all-too-real world devastation in World War II.

  In part, such readings work because they associate Nietzsche's conception of the will to power with the drive to or for power as such. This is a desire for power, expressed as power to be imposed upon others. And such an imperial will is, in turn, associated with war. Such readings have extraordinarily common currency not only in the popular mind but also in scholarly readings of Nietzsche. Nevertheless, such interpretations mistake Nietzsche's conception of the will to power.[Last two sentences, emphasis added]

  (Babette E. Babich, Introduction to Habermas, Nietzsche, and the Future of Critical Theory, Irrationality, The Will to Power, and War, p. 13 f.)

Although the recent book by Jacob Golomb and Robert Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (2002) is largely an apologetic for Nietzsche that attempts to clear him of most charges, still, it retains an objectivity and NPOV that is sufficiently modern and may serve as an example to this Wikipedia article. (Nor am I by any means through; I've much more to cite in the days to come.) Here are some quotations from their book: --Petrejo 04:46, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Various quotations

Nietzsche's attack on ancient priestly Judaism is as fierce and uncompromising as his assault on anti-Semitism.

— YirmiYahu Yovel, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ibid, p. 134

...The Jewish priests, pictured as early Christians, have created the 'slave morality' that official Christianity then propagated throughout the world. Whereas the anti-Semite accuses the Jews of having killed Christ, Nietzsche accuses them of having begotten him.

— YirmiYahu Yovel, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ibid, p. 135

...Ancient Judaism...is grounded in ressentiment and is responsible for the corruption of Europe through Christianity.

— YirmiYahu Yovel, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ibid, p. 135

[There was] something elusive in Nietzsche's fragmented, diffuse and lyrical oeuvre -- experimental in method, aphoristic in style and anti-systematic in nature -- that laid itself open to such uses and abuses, to multiple and opposed interpretations, not to say misappropriations; so much so, that it often seems difficult to ascertain who the 'real' Nietzsche was or if such a person actually existed.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 145

Nietzsche's complex relationship with Wagner which began in 1868, when at the age of 24 he first came under the maestro's spell in Tribschen, is clearly critical to any assessment of his attitude to Jews, Judaism, Germanism and Christianity.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 149

The young Nietzsche had initially been bowled over by the 'fabulously lively and fiery' Wagner. Not only was the composer witty, entertaining and a musical genius, but also a father figure to venerate and to fear. No doubt when he aped the anti-Jewish slurs of the Wagners (Cosima was at times even more virulent than her husband), he may have genuinely believed the 'Jewish press' had been persecuting his much idolized mentor.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 149

Although he was strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, Nietzsche nonetheless blamed the Jews for the 'denaturalization of natural values' implemented by Christianity. The Jews had 'made humanity into something so false that, still today, a Christian can feel anti-Semitic without understanding himself as the last stage of Judaism.'

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 154

The Jewish priests had spread spurious ideas of a 'moral world order,' sin guilt, punishment, repentance, pity, and the love of neighbor. According to this debasing Judeo-Christianity, the wretched, the poor, the lowly, the humble, the meek, the sick, and the weak are those who truly deserve salvation -- not the strong, the healthy, the brave and the beautiful.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 154

According to Nietzsche...'Jewish hatred' was the trunk of that tree of vengefulness that had created new ideals and values, beginning with Christian love, which was not the antithesis of its parent, but rather its fulfillment.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 155

Who were the members of the Holy Quartet? Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the rug weaver Paul, and Mary, the mother of Jesus -- all of them Jews!

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 155

It is also true that the Nietzschean image of Judeo-Christianity as 'the vampire of the Roman Empire' was a stereotype that found more than an echo in the Christophobia of leading Nazis like Hitler, Bormann, Rosenberg, Ley and Himmler.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 163

For instance, on July 11-12, 1941...Hitler called the coming of Christianity 'the heaviest blow that had ever struck humanity...' Like Bolshevism, Christianity had been invented by the Jews -- so he asserted -- to subvert and destroy the foundations of culture... Hitler, like Nietzsche, was obsessed with the Apostle Paul, whom he crassly described as 'the first man to take advantage of using a religion as a means of propaganda.'

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 163

For Hitler, this wicked Judeo-Christian monotheistic creed was part of a conspiracy to undermine the natural order, where the strong must always prevail over the weak and power alone can guarantee right.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 163

When Hitler further denounced Judeo-Christian morality as antithetical to the life-force and the instinct for self-preservation, or when he praised the healthy pagan values of classical antiquity, he seemed to come uncomfortably close to echoing Nietzsche without ever quoting him.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 163

More quotations from, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (2002) which is a series of essays, largely apologetic for Nietzsche, that retain a sense of objectivity and NPOV. (I am perhaps 40% done.) --Petrejo 05:54, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

It is a historical fact that Nietzsche was widely admired by 20th century fascists. Mussolini was an avid fan of Nietzsche's teachings...Hitler, too, was eager to associate his regime with Nietzsche's name and reputation.

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 173

Although his enmity for the anti-Semites occasionally eclipsed his suspicions of the Jews, his Judeophobia was deeper and more complex.

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 175

The most illuminating evidence of Nietzsche's imperial aspirations is found in the context of his lavish praise for the Roman Empire...The regarded the Roman Empire not merely as the zenith of European culture on a grand scale, but also as the source of European renewals to come...In this light, his overtures toward the Jews take on a distinctly sinister cast.

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 182

It is no coincidence that Nietzsche admired Pontius Pilate above all other imperial figures (except Julius Caesar)...Pilate refused to lower his hyperopic gaze to consider seriously the local struggles of the Jews. He was unsentimental, 'nobly scornful,' indifferent, and loyal only to the Roman Empire.'

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 183

In fact it was not Pilate who targeted the Jews for indifference and noble scorn, but Nietzsche. He regarded the Jews as the most potent enemies of the Roman Empire...His homage to Pilate thus involves a bit of creative ventriloquy and more than a bit of indirect self-congratulation.

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 183

Here it becomes clear that Nietzsche's claims to an enlightened cosmopolitanism were often exaggerated. In many respects, in fact, his understanding of the Jews differed little from those of the anti-Semites whom he meant to oppose...He described the Jews as asocial wanderers, cheaters in the grand game of cultural advancement, falsifiers of nature, resentful spoilers of empire, cunning necromancers...and so on.

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 186

As evidence of the 'priestly' inheritance of modern Jews, Nietzsche cites their otherwise inexplicable weakness of will: they could master Europe, but they choose not to do so. They want to assimilate, but they cling to their exclusionary customs. They long to cease their wandering, but they remain nomadic. They wish to prevail 'under favorable conditions,' but they are accustomed to prevail 'even better' 'under the worst conditions.'

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 187

Nietzsche fits into National Socialist needs both in what he damned and what he praised. He damned democracy, pacifism, individualism, Christianity, humanitarianism, both as abstract ideals and as, in some vague way, actual descriptions of modern European society. He praised authority, racial purity, the warrior spirit and practice, the stern life, the great health, and urged his fellow citizens a complete break with their old bad habits and ideas.

— Nietzsche, Crane Brinton, ibid, p. 216

But if Nietzsche was going to be purged of his fascistoid image, there had to be some explanation for how he had been recruited so readily for such nefarious purposes...Scholars...were aided enormously in their efforts by being able to point to the existence of a person closely connected with Nietzsche and his writings, a person who came to exercise a domineering influence over his works and reception, and who had also tampered with the manuscripts, fabricated evidence about Nietzsche and his life, and defied the accepted traditions and voices of the scholarly community. This person was Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 217

Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche was a perfect target for postwar scholars wishing to explain away Nietzsche's unfortunate reception. It is therefore not surprising that the chief postwar rehabilitators frequently attack her in their publications.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 218

In the United States and throughout the English-speaking world, Walter Kaufmann was the rehabilitator who played the most important role...He complains at length about Elisabeth's editorial practices...And he is most outraged at the publication of The Will To Power as Nietzsche's magnum opus, although in a strange turnabout he himself published an English edition of the same work in 1967.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 219

The Elisabeth legend has become so widespread and powerful that it is hardly ever questioned...Examples of the propagation of unfounded charges against Elisabeth abound...Nietzsche has been consistently extricated from his Nazi entanglements by regarding Elisabeth as the chief architect of his fascistic reputation. The legend that currently circulates is as spurious as the one that the postwar scholars destroyed, and as false as the Nietzsche legend that Elisabeth propagated.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, pp. 220-221

But Elisabeth, for all her good and bad qualities, did not bias her brother's work in a way that made him acceptable to fascism. She did not distort his thought on issues essential to National Socialism, and she cannot be held responsible -- certainly not to the degree that she has been held responsible since the fifties -- for the fact that Nietzsche was widely identified with the Nazi political regime.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 221

quotes go into wikiquote and are linked in that manner--Buridan 12:27, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

These are not quotations by Nietzsche, they are quotations for the improvement of the article, so they don't belong at Wikiquote. In any case, here's another interesting point made by Babich. Just passing by 02:16, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

• A student of the art of language, Nietzsche achieved not only a theoretical but also and remarkably for it is this accession that remains rare a practical mastery of the art of written composition or style.

  In fact, this mastery does not necessarily make Nietzsche easier to read. However, it does mean that much more is going on in his texts than is manifest at a first encounter or even after many such encounters. In part this has to do with Nietzsche, in part this has to do with his audience.

  (Babette E. Babich; "Nietzsche's göttliche Eidechsen: 'Divine Lizards,' Greene Lyons, and Music." in Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph Acampora, eds., A Nietzschean Bestiary. (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). Pp. 204-268. Linked here.)

No matter how wonderful Nietzsche's style, Justpassingby, style alone does not qualify anyone for the title of Philosopher. His wonderful style is not questioned by anyone, rather, it's the obvious content that's questioned -- and the question deepens everytime you erase direct quotations from Nietzsche in order to prevent objective readers from reading his actual texts. Petrejo 03:51, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, yes, we've already read this POV of yours, so it is no longer worth mentioning or vaunting with brow and beating chest. It doesn't float, mate, so just try to up the ante, it won't get you far at all. I'm sure that person who called me a "coward", no less due to a similar POV as your own, was in fact yourself (which was kindly removed by another user) -- you might want to grow up before doing anything serious in scholarship or philosophy in general (and yes, I ignore WP:AGF on this: who else could have wrote such an imbecilic remark?). And what that anonymous individual called "cowardice" was extreme care and good taste, which is a very unfamiliar notion to many a popularly-minded individual. Just passing by 04:10, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

You're way off base, Justpassingby, since I have no idea who called you a coward. You asked me to be civil with you, and I agreed -- and I expect you to be civil with me as well. Petrejo 00:59, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

"Way off base" as perhaps concerns that anonymous individual but not when noting my point: as Babich pointed out in that quotation, one cannot simply hope to understand Nietzsche through single pieces of quotations of his work or notes -- and so you see the relevance behind my "extreme care and good taste" when it comes to an evaluation of Nietzsche's thought. And I never "asked [you] to be civil", it goes without saying. Whatever the matter, I would also like to note Nietzsche's idea of race is not at all biologistic (the Nazis however made it such), and so Dr. Aschheim's conflation of Nietzsche with Nazism is patently absurd; a lot of the scholarship supports this, so don't take Dr. Aschheim's thought too seriously. Indeed, your additions of Jung to the fray aren't all too enlightening since Jung was not a philosopher -- but a psychologist (who is also known for such bizarre, putative psychologising of dead people), so it is clearly unlikely he would have been able to seive such differences. Heidegger among Nietzsche scholarship is known, like Deleuze, as an idiosyncratic reader of Nietzsche, and was quite possibly more influenced by the Nazis than Nietzsche, so whatever such "influence" Nietzsche had is dubious at best. See you chaps later, Just passing by 23:56, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Here's a final volley of quotations from, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (2002) and its largely apologetic essays for Nietzsche that yet offer a dimension of objectivity and NPOV. (I presume consent to edit my typos; I'm about 50% done now.) --Petrejo 03:43, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Elisabeth did not slant her depiction of Nietzsche toward anti-Semitism because she knew that he was virulently opposed to it. With regard to his view on Jews and anti-Semites there is absolutely no evidence that she attempted to falsify the record.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 226

In the book, Wagner and Nietzsche at the Time of Their Friendship (1915) Elisabeth...again argues that Nietzsche's anti-Jewish statements were meant to please Wagner: "In his letters there are attacks on the Jews that were an expression of Wagner's views, not his own."

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 226

Above all, Elisabeth was not an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to Foerster...She claims that she temporarily adopted anti-Semitic positions out of respect for her husband...but she adds that anti-Semitism 'was always unpleasant' for her and that she 'did not have the slightest reason' to be an anti-Semite.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, pp. 228-229

But Nietzsche also wrote about war and cruelty in an extremely positive and troubling fashion, praising the warrior ethos and promulgating a European hegemony over the entire earth. Finally, Nietzsche was against all movements of his time that promoted equality in the social, political or economic realm. He railed against democracy, parliamentary systems, the feminist movement, and socialism. He incessantly lauded hierarchy and declared himself, if necessary, in favor of slavery...Some of his views...were quite susceptible to exploitation by the 3rd Reich.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, pp. 228-229

It is time we ceased scapegoating Elisabeth for the Nazi version of Nietzsche and understand this unfortunate chapter in his reception as an effort to which Nietzsche himself and a host of his perhaps unwanted disciples made the most seminal contributions.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 231

Walter Kaufmann and some other anti-Nazi intellectuals have...denied that there is any connection between Nietzsche and the Nazis. Their view has prevailed in the educated public, certainly in the United States, where many who followed Kaufmann's example neglected to notice Nietzsche's passion and ferocity, or turned to those aspects of his work in which the question of fascism plays no role at all. Nietzsche has in fact been de-Nazified...Nietzsche was not that unrelated to Hitler and Nazism, contrary to what the Kaufmann school has implied.

— A Godfather Too: Nazism as a Nietzschean Experiment, Kurt Rudolph Fischer, ibid, p. 294

...One may concede that Nietzsche was a godfather or forerunner of Nazism as he is of so much else in this century without having to maintain that he would have been an Nazi, had he lived in the Third rather than in the Second Reich...As Crane Brinton once put it, 'Nietzsche was half a Nazi and half an anti-Nazi.

— A Godfather Too: Nazism as a Nietzschean Experiment, Kurt Rudolph Fischer, ibid, p. 295

Walter Kaufmann's readings of Nietzsche are invariably 'gentle.'

— A Godfather Too: Nazism as a Nietzschean Experiment, Kurt Rudolph Fischer, ibid, p. 297

There are more identities and similarities of content in the writings of Nietzsche and in the writings, speeches and conversations and particularly in the actions of Hitler...Many of these definite parallels have been catalogued by E. Sandovoss in, Hitler and Nietzsche.

— A Godfather Too: Nazism as a Nietzschean Experiment, Kurt Rudolph Fischer, ibid, p. 297

I will now present an initial salvo of several quotations from Dr. Steven E. Aschheim's The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (U.C. Press, Berkeley, 1992). Dr. Aschheim's scholarship is new but is becoming widely known. He surveys a hundred years of history to present a factual account of Nietzsche's role in the German reactionary experience. (I am perhaps 75% through.) Petrejo 22:41, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

In the new legal order of the Third Reich, medical practitioners of child euthanasia -- such as Dr. Werner Catel -- rested on Nietzsche as justification for their work.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 243

Breeding and selection in the service of higher development, Kurt Kassler reminded his readers, permeated all of Nietzsche's writings, and was linked to his deep concern with decadence, degeneration and decline. Nietzsche...led the struggle against the deteriorization of European blood.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 244

Kassler did not deny the difficulties but argued that Nietzsche was nevertheless useful in articulating the outlines of a race society.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 244

If Nietzsche had no closed racial system in the current sense, wrote another Nazi commentator, he was still a powerful pioneer of race culture. It was Nietzsche who had rediscovered biology for philosophy.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 244

His promoters highlighted Nietzsche's re-assertion of instinct, his discovery of the body, and above all his naturalistic trans-valuation in which the biological ethic replaced the moral one.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 244

Nietzsche's comments on the Jews were particularly relevant. He was hailed for performing a service to the history of the world with his insight into the history of Israel as 'the de-naturalization of natural values.' Nazism was clearly the counter-movement leading to drive to re-naturalization.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 244

...In his own way, Nietzsche was the most acute anti-Semite that ever was: he was the most radical discoverer of the unholy role that Judaism played in the spiritual history of Europe. His demonstration that Christianity was the ultimate Jewish blood poisoning made the Jews the most fateful people of world history.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 245

Through this road Nietzsche was brought to the race problem, opening the door to racial hygiene in an attempt to break the degeneration of a thousand years.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 245

Nazified Nietzscheanism...was diffused along the broad spectra of Nazi society. After appropriate editing, Nietzsche's works were published and distributed at a dizzy pace. They were integrated into the general school system...

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 245

If Nietzsche figured centrally as an inspirational force in World War I, then by World War II he was officially enshrined in the state's war-exalting ideology. Steven Aschheim, 1992

— The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 246

Under National socialism, German youth, as one writer put it, was putting the Nietzschean conception of war as healthy liberator into practice. Both Nietzsche's thought and deed had living mythical import for the destiny of the German present.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 246

As the tide went against Germany...Nietzsche was increasingly called upon in the apocalyptic 'struggle against the pernicious forces of bolshevism and world Jewry. With defeat looming, his injunction to 'Love your destiny' -- to be prepared for sacrifice -- became a leitmotif.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 246

National socialism, Alfred Rosenberg proclaimed, stood before the rest of the world in exactly the way Nietzsche had confronted the forces of his own time. Two forces, the destructive Bolshevik Jewish and the rejuvenative National socialist European -- were locked in mortal combat, the stakes a massive experiment around nature and life.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 246

In response to Klaus Mann's imprecations against Nazi "barbarism"...Gottfried Benn handily invoked Nietzsche who had posed the problem, "Where are the barbarians of the 20th century?" and preceded it with the dictum, 'A dominating race can grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 247

As a propagandist for the SS, Marc Augier reflected: "One felt as if one had arrived at the outermost periphery of the Nietzschean thought world and its creative passion...A victory of the SS...would have given birth to a world that...would have been totally novel and probably truly great...In this Hildesheimer cloister...Nietzsche's trans-valuation of all values was being prepared."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 248

As Marcel Deat put it: "Nietzsche's idea of the selection of 'good Europeans' is now being realized on the battlefield, by the LFV and the Waffen SS. An aristocracy, a knighthood is being created by the war which will be the hard, pure nucleus of the Europe of the future."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 248

After The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's...goal became ever more clear -- not pacifism and world-citizenship, but 'great war' and, above all, the war for the leadership of Europe and the challenge to the German Volk to create it anew.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 248

Those most closely associated with the Nazification of Nietzsche were fully aware of the...need for some kind of interpretation...because the 'real' Nietzschean message had either been previously misunderstood or willfully distorted by Nietzsche's earlier, literary and nihilist -- usually Jewish -- devotees.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 249

One only had to consult the Genealogy of Morals to see that Nietzsche talked in historical categories such as species, races, nations and classes.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 250

Nietzsche only dismissed that anti-Semitism which was limited to the confessional, economic and social domains, overlooking the biological dimension...Nietzsche became a crucial source for that radicalized drive designated by Uriel Tal as 'anti-Christian anti-Semitism.'

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 251

...Radical distinctions between Greco-Jewish logocentric and Greco-Germanic biocentric principles -- abounded in the Third Reich...Irrationalist, tragi-Dionysian Nietzschean culture counter-acted traditional conceptions of Western morality and rationalist Enlightenment and Marxist notions of progress.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 252

All right, I'll now present a second volley of quotations from Steven Aschheim that offers a penetrating survey of the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche upon three of the most famous German writers of the Nazi period, namely, Karl Jaspers, Carl G. Jung, and Martin Heidegger. (I am perhaps 90% through.) Petrejo 23:49, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

The Neo-Kantians...were fully aware of Nietzsche's axial role in the political and philosophical reality of the Third Reich. The debate had to be conducted in Nietzsche's terms. The great minds of the time -- Jaspers, Jung and Heidegger -- all chose Nietzsche for sustained analysis.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 256

Karl Jasper's patently non-Nazi Nietzsche of 1936 [made an] impassioned plea for a non-ideological Nietzsche...Walter Kaufmann criticized Jaspers for his purely epistemological Nietzsche shorn of any positive vision or system.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, pp. 256-267

The looming background of Nazism helps to explain the marathon 1934-1939 Zurich seminar C.G. Jung held on Zarathustra. Nietzsche was, if anything, proof of the existence (and vitality) of the Jungian collective unconscious.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, pp. 258-259

...Jung consistently regarded Nazism as a kind of Nietzschean project. Were not the SS schools at Ordensburgen...projects in molding Nietzsche's new nobility?

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 250

Nietzsche's conception of life as amor fati, self-sacrifice, Jung argued, "is the attitude now prevailing in Germany; it is the inner meaning of National Socialism...When you hear the really serious people talk, you realize that Nietzsche simply anticipated that style."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 260

Jung argued..."One can say that it is all pathological, or that it is a divine or a demonical madness, but that is exactly the madness Nietzsche means. So Nietzsche is in a way the great prophet of what is actually happening in Germany."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 260

Heidegger's explicit turn to Nietzsche coincided with his attraction to the anti-democratic, radical-right thought of the Weimar Republic in 1929...If some major Heidegger scholars are to be believed, these kinds of political and ideological motifs "entered into the heart of Heidegger's philosophy itself."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 263

Throughout the 1930's and 1940's, Heidegger's categories and thematics...depended on the Nietzschean frame. Heidegger inherited Nietzsche's conviction that the history of philosophy had come to an end and that a new era was emerging.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 263

Heidegger's initial solution for the overcoming of nihilism -- through a heroic, existential, self-affirmative will -- was unexceptionally Nietzschean.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 263

As Karl Loewith had already noted in 1939, the perception of decline and impending European catastrophe with its concomitant "will to rupture, revolution and awakening" was not an idiosyncratic Heideggerian whim, but part and parcel of the post-1914 radical-right stock-in-trade."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 264

In his famous 1933 rectorate speech, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," the great transformation of German being was linked to the creative possibilities of the nihilistic movement -- "if what the passionate seeker of God and the last German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said is true: God is dead."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 265

Heidegger's linguistic tonalities and suggested resolutions reverberated with (a suitably nationalized) Nietzsche.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 265

Heidegger proclaimed in his 1936 lectures..."Mussolini and Hitler have learned from Nietzsche, each in an essentially different way."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 266

The Overman, Heidegger told his students, "lives because the new mankind wills the Being of beings as will to power." Heidegger's analysis of the Overman as the new embodiment of the will to power expressed in "domination of the earth" was stated, after all, within a meta-discourse tailored to the prevailing political reality.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, pp. 267-268

The Overman, Heidegger emphasized, belonged to the "grand style" of human breeding and social organization in which the "sole meaning of the one who as legislator first posits the conditions of domination over the earth consists precisely in not being defined by such conditions."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 268

Heidegger initially greeted the Nietzschean trans-valuations of values as the proper philosophical answer to the nihilist predicament and the activist will to power of the Nazi revolution as the appropriate political counter-movement to nihilism.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 250

As George Steiner has suggested, Heidegger's refusal to come to terms with the Holocaust stemmed from his refusal to derive ethical principles from the 'thinking of Being.' Heideggerian thought..."neither contains nor implies any ethics." This too...must be regarded as part of Heidegger's radicalization of the Nietzschean enterprise, a project who stated task was, after all, to think in terms of categories beyond good and evil.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 250

On the occasion of our USA Independence Day holiday, I take pride in expressing my own freedom of thought and celebrating the freedom of the press by helping to expose the fascist side of this darling of the postmodern literary set, Herr Friedrich Nietzsche. (As always I presume the privilege to edit any typos here as necessary.) This is my final salvo of quotations to help writers decide how to transform this painfully POV Wikipedia article into a careful, NPOV expression of the whole truth. Petrejo 05:14, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

D. Gawronsky...wrote in 1935: Friedrich Nietzsche is held to be the pioneer, the ideological founder of the Third Reich. With no other thinker does National Socialist ideology feel so closely related, so internally linked as with Nietzsche. The leading spirits of the Third Reich call upon him incessantly.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 272

In 1929 Kurt Tucholsky wrote: "Some illiterate Nazis who want to be considered part of the Hitler intelligentsia...claim Nietzsche for their own. Who cannot claim him for their own? Tell me what you need and I will supply you with a Nietzsche citation...for Germany and against Germany; for peace and against peace; for literature and against literature -- whatever you want. What I possess to a high degree is a mistrust against false heroes and I hold Nietzsche to be a secret weakling. He heroizes like one masturbates."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 274

In 1935 Hans Gunther wrote in his, The Case of Nietzsche, that "the German ruling class was essentially backward: Nietzsche's thought was an ideational expression of that condition. Nietzsche's brutal thought reflected Germany's economic and political retardation."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 275

Georg Lukacs wrote, "Nietzsche's retreat into the sphere of myth, his substitution of interpretation for knowledge, and his denial of the existence of an objective external world, knowledge of which could point the way to human redemption, were nothing but reflections of a class situation and not inherently worthy philosophical truths."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 277

Anti-socialist irrationalism for Lukacs was an international phenomenon of the imperialist period. Given the delayed development of German capitalism it was most developed there and exemplified by "Nietzsche, who became the paradigm in content and methodology of irrationalist philosophical reaction from the USA to Tsarist Russia, and whose influence could not and cannot be rivaled by a single other reactionary ideologist."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 278

Lukacs wrote: "This mythical form furthered Nietzsche's influence not only because it was to become the increasingly dominant mode of philosophical expression in the imperialist age. It also enabled him to pose imperialism's cultural, ethical and other problems in such a general way that he could always remain the reactionary bourgeoisie's leading philosopher, whatever the variations in the situation and the reactionary tactics adopted to match them.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 279

Lukacs viewed Nazism as virtually indistinguishable from its Nietzschean philosophical reflection and expression. Nietzsche's call for the transvaluation of all values, his cry to unleash the instincts, his belief in barbarity as a savior were all examples.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 280

Thomas Mann wrote in 1943: "Intellectual-spiritual fascism, throwing off of humane principles, recourse to violence, blood-lust, irrationalism, cruelty, Dionysiac denial of truth and justice, self-abandonment to the instincts and unrestrained 'Life' which in fact is death...this fascism is a devil-given departure...which leads through adventures of drunkenly intense subjective feeling and super-greatness to mental collapse and spiritual death, and soon to physical death.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p.281

Maurice Samuel's 1940 studies in anti-Semitism -- the core and centre of Nazism-Fascism as a revolutionary ideal -- identified the anti-Christian nature of revolutionary Nazi anti-Semitism and insisted upon Nietzsche's central shaping role."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 282

Otto Flake ironically argued that it was not good enough to categorize Nietzsche as 'endlessly ambiguous.' Nietzsche's predisposition towards ambiguity had simply reinforced a fateful German tendency to be imprecise and indecisive. This ideological tendency was a component of the German problem. For four centuries the whole nation had increasingly lacked concrete thinking -- Nietzsche was the culmination.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 298

Alfred von Martin wrote in 1948: "Nietzsche's radicalized doctrine of the will to power and his atheism had destroyed not only God but the idea of humanness. While other radical critics of religion like Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss had left altruism intact, nothing was forbidden to Nietzsche's Overman."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 298

Nietzsche, concluded von Martin, believed that nihilism could be overcome and that re-barbarization was curative. Yet what had begun as the great 'Yes,' the dream of an elevated life, had ended up in complete demonism.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 299

The hermeneutical question concerning 'the real Nietzsche' since 1945 has been indissolubly linked to his relationship with Nazism. The issue is still with us. The dominant postwar images -- embodied in the opposed representations of Georg Lukacs and Walter Kaufmann -- have either condemned Nietzsche as centrally complicit in the Nazi evil or lauded him for being unblemished and opposed to all Nazism's intentions and actions.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 315

Walter Kaufmann's 'gentle,' sterilized portrait so ignored or de-natured the power-political dimensions of Nietzsche, Walter Sokel has suggested, that readers must have felt baffled that anyone could possibly have attempted to make the Nietzsche-Nazi connection.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 316

Martin Jay wrote in 1988: "The potential for the specific distortions that do occur can be understood as latent in the original text. Thus, while it may be questionable to saddle Marx with responsibility for the Gulag Archipelago or blame Nietzsche for Auschwitz, it is nevertheless true that their writing could be misread as justifications for these horrors in a way that, say, those of John Stuart Mill or Alexis de Toqueville could not."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 316

The explosive and experimental Nietzsche corpus contained myriad possibilities that profoundly affected almost every vital area of twentieth-century postliberal consciousness and political culture including, quite patently, Nazism.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 318

An exceptionally wide range of contemporary critics, philosophers, and historians continue to sense a profound affinity, positing in various ways and at different levels of complexity the complicity of Nietzschean impulses within Nazism.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 320

Continuing through the present time no other philosophical figure has been more repeatedly invoked in historical explanation, none has served as a more fruitful springboard for speculative metahistorical notions of Nazism and its central murderous drives.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 320

J.P. Stern's Hitler ...carefully spells out the differences and qualifications, yet in the final analysis his Hitler is best comprehended as a man animated by a concentrated and politicized ideology of the will derived from and in (parodistic) symmetry with Nietzsche.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 321

Karl Dietrich Bracher's view of Nazism as a revolutionary and perverted reversal of ordinary moral values designed to serve an ideological system of terror and extermination is conceived in similarly affiliative Nietzschean terms: "Hitler himself, with his ideological fixation and his sense of mission as savior of a world doomed by racist decline, was the prototype of such a transvaluation, taking literally Nietzsche's vision of "a reassessment of values and transcending bourgeois morality."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 321

In drafts for a sequel to Zarathustra and on the basis of his definition of the new Enlightenment's credo that "nothing is true, everything is permitted," Nietzsche went even further: "The consequences of your doctrine must wreak fearful havoc: but countless are destined to perish from them. We are submitting truth to an experiment! Maybe mankind will perish in the process! So be it!"

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 323

Ernst Nolte wrote in 1963: "Nietzsche's real enemy is obviously the concept of realization; it is at this that he aims such terms as ressentiment, decadence, and total degeneration. From a philosophical standpoint there is only one unassailable counter-concept: that of the wholly non-decadent man, the "beast of prey, the magnificent, roaming blond beast lusting for booty and victory," the magnificent animality of "the pack of blond beasts of prey."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 324

Ernst Nolte wrote: "Nietzsche is not in a banal sense the spiritual father of fascism; but he was the first to give voice to that spiritual focal point towards which all fascism must gravitate; the assault on practical and theoretical transcendence, for the sake of a more beautiful form of life."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 324

The Nazi exterminations were thus best understood by Nolte as the most desperate (and essentially Nietzschean) "assault ever made upon the human being and the transcendence within him." Although Nolte himself did not demonstrate the connections, we have already seen that this closely resembled how various Nietzschean Nazi sources defined their own project as the creation of an immanent, renaturalized and anti-transcendental society.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 325

Ernst Nolte quoted from Ecce Homo: "Let us look ahead a century and assume the case that my attempt to assassinate two millennia of anti-nature and human disfiguration has succeeded. That new party of life which would take the greatest of all tasks into its hands, the higher breeding of humanity, including the merciless extermination of everything degenerating and parasitic, would make possible again that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian state will grow again."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 326

The list of Nietzsche's anti-life opponents -- Christian priests, vulgar Enlighteners, democrats, socialists, the degenerate masses -- is so great, Nolte now argues, that it dwarfs the Nazi 'implementation.' If Nietzsche's 'extermination' is understood literally, the result must be a mass murder, in comparison with which the later real 'Final Solution' of the National Socialists assumes almost microscopic proportions.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 326

Nietzsche is thus ensconced in Nolte's dubious reduction of Nazism and its atrocities to a reaction to an earlier Marxist version of the same thinking, and in which the Holocaust is an anticipatory act of German self-defense against the perception of Jewish genocidal intentions.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 327

In Britain and the United States the perception of Nietzsche as the major force behind the creation of a radicalized, novel, and uniquely murderous form of anti-Semitism has had to contend with Walter Kaufmann's interpretive hegemony and thus only recently has found its historians. The fashionable notion that Nietzsche was not anti-Jewish but anti-Christian, they argue, ignores the fact that what Nietzsche most bitterly detested in Christianity was its Jewish origins.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 327

These writers stress that Nietzsche is the decisive force in the fateful switch from a limited Christian anti-Semitism to an unlimited, secular anti-Christian brand, which concretely paved the way towards Nazism and the Holocaust. Hitler, Conor Cruise O'Brien writes, learned from Nietzsche "that the traditional Christian limit on anti-Semitism was itself part of a Jewish trick. When the values that the Jews had revered were restored, there would be no limits and no Jews."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 328

This Nietzsche, George Lichtheim argued, provided a section of the intellectual elite with the necessary Worldview -- including its most radical form of anti-Christian anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 329

For Lichtheim, Nietzsche's radical atheism had nothing to do with the Feuerbachian tradition that sought to replace theism with humanism. This anti-humanist atheism, moreover, "did away with the old naive and self-contradictory Christian anti-Semitism by indicting the Jews collectively as the original inspirers of that poisonous infection known as belief in Christ."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 329

All this was wholly consistent with Hitler's long-term aims: "It is not too much to say," Lichtheim argued, "that but for Nietzsche the SS -- Hilter's shock troops and the core of the whole movement -- would have lacked the inspiration which enabled them to carry out their programme of mass murder in Eastern Europe."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 329

Nietzsche will retain a central place in such accounts. There are many reasons for this, but above all he will remain relevant as a key to explaining National Socialism's attraction to the outmost limits, its arrival at a grotesque novum of human experience. Naggingly, the thematic resemblances represent themselves.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 330

EvilPicklesI am not sure where this goes I'm quite the newbie, I just do not feel like reading all this already, something somewhere said start this with 3 tilda keys, so I did. I noticed that someone has vandalised the page, if you read the 2nd to 9th pages, the information about his position at the university is quite inconsistent and contradictory, please someone fix it. PS: arpayton you made a good point, what you said in your first post was quite helpful to me. ^_^

Protected

Article is now protected. Please discuss and reach some kind of consensus. When you are ready to resume editing, you can place a request for unprotection at WP:RFPP. Have a nice weekend. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 15:39, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

"Quotations wars" are nor uncommon. One side adding a quote, the other adding another for "balance" and so forth. A neverending and zero-sum game. My view is that it is better to leave quotations in Wikiquote, and making this article NPOV by referring to what other reputable sources have said about Nietzsche's work. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 15:43, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Dear Jossi, as one who disputed the NPOV of this article and so initiated the Protected status, I was expecting some kind of consensus that included myself before the Protected status was lifted. I was not informed (not in this page nor in any other medium) that the Protected status was lifted, yet there have been many changes to this article since the Protection was first placed. How is that possible? Please direct me to the Wikipedia policy that allows the lifting of Protection without a resolution or any consensus obtained. Thanks. Petrejo 04:15, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

The trouble is that one user is adding quotes from 'the will to power', a work which was compiled by his sister, and is believed to distort nietzsche's views. Personally, I'm not fond of using quotations. If people want to read his works, they can do so--we have links for that. No need for quotations on a page this long. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dume7 (talk • contribs)

Excellent and definitive points.Amerindianarts 15:51, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

I've already expressed my views in "A word of caution" but I am inclined toward the deletion of all quotations, for they are not essential, in order that we move ahead with the article which, contrary to the other party's assumption, is my aim. — ^ignis _scripta 16:01, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Also, Petrejo is not trying to add 'a quote', he is trying to add a raft of quotes, all of which are carefully picked to make a POV anti-Nietzsche case. This has no place in an encyclopedia. We should see it for the POV, original research that it is and not think that because he is quoting that he is reporting. mgekelly 17:19, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I added various numbers of quotes, including a single quote in one section and another quote in another section. Those single quotes alone were enough to draw the ire of the POV advocates. Why? Because Nietzsche really and truly said those things, and they are relevant, and they argue eloquently for the my point. So they were ripped out with great haste and prejudice. Petrejo 03:24, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

These are my sentiments precisely. More to say, Petrejo's selections from the outset are construed to a faulty personal viewpoint, and this I have explicitly stated in my posts above. — ^ignis _scripta 17:28, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

You have claimed that my view is faulty, and insisted that it is POV, but you haven't demonstrated it, Igni. Petrejo 03:24, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

::I'm fed up with this, frankly. Petrejo is a POV vandal who hides his POV behind the act of quoting. He is unwilling to reach a consensus, because there is nothing to reach a consensus on. No-one has any objection to adding material about criticisms of Nietzsche, but that is not what Petrejo wants - he wants to add his criticisms of Nietzsche, albeit in the form of 'neutral' quotation, which cannot be allowed on Wikipedia. Once this protection nonsense is ended, I suggest we start issuing vandalism warnings and appealing for administrator intervention if he keeps doing it. mgekelly 18:21, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, havign looked at WP:-(, I don't think we can class this as vandalism. We should clearly go through dispute resolution. mgekelly 18:30, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that or WP policy is swiss cheese. (I'll abide by the former meanwhile.) — ^ignis _scripta 19:31, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

NB: it is astonishing how one falsely overassertive user, who also seems to be doing the same at Martin Heidegger, can impel (e.g., through "moral obligation") such havoc at one article—I lose any potential respect for this system's functional integrity and the competencies of its enforcers—when the situation is not difficult to put an end to in any way. All of my posts (here and here; and by others', too) suggest this, but alas, no serious action has been undertaken to halt this absurdity which has now led to the protection of the article. Surely, past situations at other articles' may resemble this case, but a judge is required to view a problem as unique in every feature hidden within its idiosyncrasy.

Be that as it may, I will be more available for the article's, currently dubious, development next week, perhaps by then this ailment would be overcome. — ^ignis _scripta 20:00, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

If you refer to me, Igni, my views are neither false nor overassertive. They are balancing to a Nietzsche-advocate POV. As far as Martin Heidegger is concerned, that is related because Heidegger (a former Nazi) was an avid Nietzsche-advocate. Although most Encyclopedias falsely repeat that Heidegger built his system upon Husserl's system, the facts are these: (a) Heidegger was a Nazi; (b) Husserl was Jewish; (c) the Party replaced Husserl with Heidegger; (d) Husserl always complained that Heidegger didn't understand his work. This is relevant to Nietzsche studies insofar as writers in the Nazi period -- especially Heidegger and also Hitler himself -- refer to Nietzsche directly as a support for their ideology. That's not vandalism to point out the facts -- even though most Encyclopedias since 1945 have white-washed the facts and continue to do so. (Tom Rockmore is only one of many scholars who press this point, and it deserves to be viewed in the NPOV Wikipedia.) Nietzsche-advocates are too quick and hasty to absolve Nietzsche of any affiliation with that sorry period, so the charges have hardly had a hearing. The POV that persists in *most* Encyclopedias about Nietzsche (and Heidegger) should *certainly* be balanced by a fair NPOV. Petrejo 17:11, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Although most Encyclopedias falsely repeat that Heidegger built his system upon Husserl's system, the facts are these

If you replaced "most Encyclopedias" with "the vast majority of contemporary Heidegger scholarship", this clause would still be accurate. In other words, your quarrel is with the relevant reliable sources, and your contribution here constitutes original research. — goethean ॐ 20:51, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Not true -- my quarrel is with tradition, and with petrified opinions. Scholars often repeat each other uncritically. Why do Encyclopedias change from time to time? Because their 'reliable' sources can indeed prove to be unreliable. Still, the changes in Knowledge discovered by younger scholars come into view only slowly and with struggle. This is the case with Nietzsche and Heidegger studies. The future will shed more light on them than the 20th century ever dreamed. Petrejo 03:24, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

And boy O boy is it not what you would expect. Ignor-ANT.

I'm looking at this very heated discussion and would like to add a few things real quick. Calling Nietzsche a mysogenist for his time period is not a telling criticism. Most of the notable scholars of that time period were mysogonists, including Hegel if you read is Phenomenology of the Spirit and his interpretation of the family dynamic in Antigone. Quoting Nietzshe on a scholarly level requires that you have read previous parts of his works. For example, if you read Geneology of the Morals without understanding that he is justifying the current morality his day as a slave morality that stifles creativity, and see him more as someone who advocates relativism, you have not done your homework and you will hopelessly misunderstand him. Nietzsche can be deceptively easy to read, the problem is that there are levels of meaning only people that have read all his works thoroughly can unravel. I will say nothing to the double meanings he loves to use in the German. As a non native German speaker I still struggle with them. StarShadow 02:55, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Again, this is a very nice note, and I agree. It doesn't even constitute a criticism when one looks at historical context unless one takes it into account much more broadly. Yes, as for the lack of understanding some would like to obscure, reading all of Nietzsche's work is the minimum requisite even to begin thinking about him. Not only that but trying to judge him based on, for example, Hegel's scales, is far from being insightful and even worth noting.Non-vandal 06:55, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

The Hegel quotation is worth noting -- it disqualifies Nietzsche from the History of Philosophy. Let Nietzsche be heard in the Literature Department, where he rightfully belongs. Nietzsche's emotional problems over his mother (and her religion) and his sister erupt into outbursts of hatred against Women here and there. If one can find milder quotations here and there, then also post the heated quotations -- don't be so POV. Petrejo 04:13, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Mmmm... troll bait. Why don't you make more dead end accounts at the Heidegger talk page? I'm sure you'll find a suitable audience there.Non-vandal 09:58, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Heidegger? Heidegger worshippers are just as dizzy over Nietzsche as over their other quasi-Nazi hero. They've never been receptive to a dialectical critique of their hero. Anyway, I do criticize them, yet the NPOV mission calls here more loudly than there. Petrejo 06:17, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, that's untrue. Just to cite an example I know personally, the professor Marco Aurélio Werle, who translated many of Hegel's works to Portuguese, has just recently finished his course on Hegel and Heidegger. Not only did he, an explicit hegelian, treated Heidegger's thought with respect, but also demonstrated how many of Heidegger's concepts were also present in Hegel. Furthermore, even if Heidegger and Nietzsche could be characterized as nazists (I disagree with this characterization, but let's admit it for the sake of the argument), that does not readily invalidates their oeuvre and, more importantly, does not mean they are not philosophers. Even if Heidegger and Nietzsche were nazists, it is still a fact that Foucault, Deleuze, Sartre, Camus, to stay just in the French scenario, were all heavily influenced by the two of them and, moreover, considered them to be philosophers. Heck, even Bertrand Russell included Nietzsche in his History of Western Philosophy, despite being extremely critical of his ideas.

You say Nietzsche is not a philosopher, because he did not develop a system. Yet, he wrote about epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics; as far as I know, these subjects all pertain to philosophy. The question of a system is irrelevant - systematically or not, Nietzsche clearly wrote about philosophical topics and held philosophical views. It's not even the case of a writer who briefly touched those subjects - his oeuvre is composed entirely of philosophical writings! If he is not a philosopher... then what the heck is he? Your assertion that he should be studied in the Literature departments is in the least ridiculous: aside from the Zarathustra, he did not write any other piece of fiction. How is it the Literature department to study an author who did not write literature and who did not deal (primarily) with literary criticism?

Finally, you claim that Nietzsche was a proto-nazist because of Hitler's appropriation of him. This is scarcely convincing; by the same "logic", Husserl would be a proto-heideggerian, since Heidegger used some things from his system. Fact is, the Nazist use of Nietzsche reveals nothing about the (supposed) political affiliations of the German thinker. Nevertheless, it is an issue that should be dealt. Personally, I think that Nietzsche's despise for militarism, nationalism, anti-semitism and statism are more than enough to demonstrate how he is not a Nazi. In spite of this, the Nietzsche-nazi controversy is a serious issue that must be dealt accordingly; not by mutilating his quotes, but both addressing the original text in context and also the current scholarship (which I believe to be rather unanimous in the veridict).

Well, I hope we manage to reach a consensus here... Daniel Nagase 04:13, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Dear Daniel Nagase, thanks for your calm response to my criticisms. Actually, my characterization remains true, despite your professor who attempts to reconcile Hegel and Heidegger. I've read both writers thoroughly and I can say without hesitation that such a reconciliation is untenable. Heidegger wrote four extended essays about Hegel, each one more superficial than the last, and each attempted to belittle Hegel. That's not a polemical statement, but an observation of naked fact.

Further, there is no question of whether Heidegger (who was a stellar advocate of Nietzsche) was a Nazi -- he was a Party member, and he went about his leadership of his University wearing a swastika and shouting 'Heil Hitler!' even in his speeches to his students. (This is a matter of historical record.) Here is the world famous writer who advocated Nietzsche to a new generation.

Furthermore, if Heidegger (and by proxy Nietzsche) are closely associated with the Nazi era, it would not invalidate their work if they were *material* scientists, e.g. if ideology had nothing to do with their product. If they were philologists, or even architects or composers, the ideology of hatred and chauvanism may have played no part in their work. However, they claimed a stake in Philosophy -- the realm of ideas and ethics. So it is tautologically impossible for their ideology to have had no effect upon their product.

Furthermore, simply because most famous writers and ideologists of the 20th century have used Nietzsche and Heidegger as supports for their own writings, that proves nothing at all. Indeed, it may tell us how weak 20th century 'philosophy' really was, and may give us many insights into its weaknesses.

Also, the fact that Bertrand Russell included Nietzsche in his History of Western Philosophy, doesn't impress me because Bertrand Russell was a mathematician and a formal logician who didn't wander too far from his speciality. He was hardly in a position to be Philosophy's Historian, in my view. Russell excelled in formal logic, but he never extended that to a Science of Nature or to a Science of Ethics, i.e. he had no System. (His famous agnosticism was nothing but an evasion of that great and classical challenge.)

Also, I do say that Nietzsche is not a philosopher, but not merely because he had no system. My reasoning goes deeper than that, and I've explained why in these discussion pages. (It's not just that he had no system -- he didn't even refer to somebody else's system. He divorced himself from Philosophy proper when he said that "the will to a system is a lack of integrity." That may sound like a clever quip, but it's ultimately shallow.)

Also, any talented journalist can *mention* the philosophical topics of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics, but that does not make them philosophers. More is required. Much more. Nor is it enough simply to 'hold a philosophical view.' Millions do, but they aren't philosophers. Philosophers are identified by the *contribution* they make to the status of the formal Philosophy of their century.

I say Nietzsche isn't a Philosopher because all he offered were his *opinions*. Nor did he bother to prove any of them -- that was beneath him. He felt free (as any talented journalist does) to express his opinions even if they involved insults, chauvanism and hatred. That, Daniel, isn't Philosophy. It's journalism. It's not Philosophy. I stand by that.

You say that Nietzsche's work is 'composed entirely of philosophical writings.' That's simply incorrect. He published *no* formal review of Kant (as he should have), nor of Hegel, nor even of Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz nor the key figures of his day. He may have dropped their names here and there -- but that's not enough. He knew the Greek philosophers (as any Philologist must), but that was not enough in 1850. Far more was needed. He just didn't have the specific talent needed.

One critic of mine cited one of Nietzsche's quips and insults about Kant. Sadly, it showed how little Nietzsche grasped about Kant's work, as Nietzsche charged Kant with metaphysics and with reifying the thing-in-itself. Yet Kant was the first critic of metaphysics, and the first to show the world the error of reifying the thing-in-itself!

So, what was Nietzsche? He was a journalist. He was a Philologist. He was a poet. He was an anti-Christ. He was an emotional (decidedly) writer with a brilliant talent for words. Yet he simply didn't produce the literature that qualifies to count him among Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel or Philosophy proper.

I still say Nietzsche should be studied in the Literature Department, which certainly includes works of non-fiction as well as works of fiction. (The writings of H.L. Mencken and other journalists are good examples here.)

Also, your claim that Heidegger used some ideas from Husserl's system falls flat -- Husserl himself denied it. The myth that Heidegger (the Nazi) built upon the works of Husserl (the Jew) is one of those 20th century myths that must die hard.

Finally -- it's not simply a question that Nietzsche's work was appropriated by the Nazi Party 40 years after. The question arises not from *their* words but from *his* words. His words include hate-mongering. I've showed this several times in this Wikipedia article, only to see them erased *quickly* again and again. (That's obviously the psychological phenomenon of denial at work.) Again -- I don't care if a large majority disagrees with me. I know what I see. Most Encyclopedias are obsequious to Nietzsche. I think the Wikipedia's NPOV calling deserves more than that.

I also hope we manage to reach a consensus here. Thanks again, Daniel Nagase, for your calm argumentation. Petrejo 05:32, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, we've already seen your reasoning, and the fact remains it is your reasoning which disqualifies it from inclusion to the article. Why do you not understand this? Everyone has said it countless times and each time you've denounced them (emotially and irrationally) as someone holding a pro-Nietzsche POV. This is how Wikipedia functions and you've constantly ignored it. No one denies your opinionated view, but it needs substance, and you aren't delivering. Everyone (consensus) still says your attempts to construct a straw Nietzsche by randomly quoting him is also a part of your POV, and it gets this article nowhere (a talk page is not a forum for your ideas, however strongly you are convinced of them). I also find it ironic you endlessly characterize Nietzsche as a journalist while Hegel was one at a time -- care to give us a reputable source for this "journalism" of Nietzsche's? I suppose you never will, because you think this place is a forum for your ideas and each of them does not have their place here (however "intuitive" they are). "Formal philosophy"? "Philosophy proper"? There's more to philosophy than your characterization of "formality" and that has been indicated time and again. Sadly, you give no demonstrable "truth" to your claims, least of all in the context of an encyclopedia.Non-vandal 06:53, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Mr. Petrejo, I've been observing your discussion about Nietzsche, and I would like to offer you my insights on some particular points you have made. First of all, I would like to know where I can find the ad hominem attacks, which you so much emphasizes, Nietzsche allegedly employs against Kant and other philosophers. I've read almost all of the Nietzsche's works and sincerely, while I recognize his abrasive style is somewhat unusual and seemingly counterproductive in dealing with some issues, I haven't seen anything remotely like what you described. Curiously enough, most of your criticism against Nietzsche seems to me pure ad hominem.

You have made some very misleading statements about his relationship to other philosophers, and some of them impressed me with your degree of misinformation and ignorance. For example, you asserted that Nietzsche didn't grasp Kant's philosophy, because he charged the latter "with metaphysics and with reifying (I think you meant "reviving") the thing-in-itself." In fact, Nietzsche, like any other (former) Schopenhaurian, did recognize Kant's wonderful work on refuting traditional metaphysics: but he charges Kant with limiting himself again by concepts he himself had once refuted. And then you wrote that Kant was "the first to show the world the error of reifying (sic.) the thing-in-itself." This is utterly false. Please read a bit of Schopenhauer's main works so you can have an idea of the nonsense you posted.

You have also charged Nietzsche with being a mere "journalist" and by no means a true philosopher, because he supposedly doesn't do anything other than stating his own opinions about philosophical issues (as if after Hume it was possible to pretend to be a rationalist). In fact, Nietzsche had his philosophical motives for not being a "rationalist" (I think everyone who knows his works, knows what I'm talking about). Moreover, if you want to be honest and coherent, you should charge Schopenhauer with the same accusations you use to dismiss Nietzsche. By the way, since when, in order to be considered a philosopher, one must write a study case about some other philosopher? (Kant, for one, had never done such a thing.) And because of Nietzsche's aphorismatical style, this would not be possible to take place in his main works. He indeed, however, wrote pieces criticizing idealistic and kantian epistemology, traditional morality, aesthetics, etc., in a fragmentical manner.

And then there's your plainly childish and quite desperate attempts to definitely link Nietzsche to Nazism. I'm not going to discuss this case, but your persistence on this theme only proves to me you are only emotionally trying to dismiss Nietzsche. --.Guinsberg 24 July 2006

Dear Guinsberg, did you really think to offer insights? But anybody who knows Nietzsche's works knows it's chock full of ad hominem attacks. Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, even Ecce Homo contain ad hominem jabs. Socrates is often the butt of Nietzsche's sarcasm. Plato as well. St. Paul very often. What about Richard Wagner? Kant, also, for harking back to Plato. Even Schopenhauer, his erstwhile mentor of his youth, had to endure Nietzsche's sarcasm. Rene Descartes also bore the brunt of his personal remark. Martin Luther, also, was taunted for his leading role in Christianity. Hegel (rather, the Hegel of the 1870's intelligenstia) was also Nietzsche's target.

You admit that "his abrasive style is somewhat unusual," yet I submit that his style goes beyond the counterproductive and simply abandons the project of Philosophy proper. It's journalistic literature. It lacks the depth of a legitimate Philosophical tome, in my view. If you haven't seen "anything remotely like" this, Guinsberg, then perhaps you might try another look.

My argument for a critique of Nietzsche isn't ad hominem -- and I cite scholarly sources who are quite serious about their research (as I am about mine). Nor was my characterization of Nietzsche's remarks about Kant a misunderstanding. Nietzsche didn't grasp Kant's anti-metaphysics and so he accused Kant of holding to a metaphysics and to a reification (not a revival), that is to say, a hypostatization of the thing-in-itself. Yet that is exactly what Kant himself warned against -- indeed was the first in Philosophy to warn against. If you say Nietzsche was being ambiguous, again, that's the privilege of the journalist -- but a proper Philosopher seeks clarity (c.f. Hegel, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates).

Nor did Nietzsche, as you say, "charge Kant with limiting himself again by concepts he himself had once refuted." He simply misunderstood Kant, and that's quite plain from the text. (Nor did Schopenhauer, that too-late pre-Kantian, rise to the level of Kant well enough to judge an argument about him.)

Further, Nietzsche is completely content with expressing his opinions, one after the other, endlessly. Any notion of proving his opinions is alien to his writing -- to his style -- and so he himself divorces himself from the project of Philosophy. Nor is it any excuse to fall back upon Hume as an excuse, as if Skepticism has the last word in Philosophy -- except to Skeptics.

If Nietzsche had actual Philosophical motives for not being a "rationalist," he didn't clarify them -- instead, he acted them out in obviously emotional terms. Nor does Schopenhauer deserve the same criticism that I apply to Nietzsche, simply because Schopenhauer -- despite his aphoristic style -- made at least some effort to argue, to prove, to cite his opponents objectively. (Although Schopenhauer did let loose with fits of cantankerous prose, and so to some degree he is to blame for encouraging students to mistake such emotional outbursts with the project of Philosophy proper.)

Nor is it mandatory to write a case-study tome about another Philosopher to earn one's degree in Philosophy -- however, it is mandatory to demonstrate with clarity that one does indeed understand the current Philosophical writings of one's day, and not simply the ancient Greeks, and not simply dropping names, and not simply ad hominem wisecracks. Kant, as you noted, never wrote a case-study about another Philosopher, but he did demonstrate his mastery of their writings with his clarity of formal prose. Kant took great pains to prove what he wrote. That was the mark of his Philosophical genius as it is of all Philosophical genius.

Nietzsche's aphoristic style may not be used as an excuse to absolve him of his duty to strive for clarity and proofs. He didn't intend this -- he intended to write Dionysian Poetry, and that is exactly what that genius actually did. But that simply isn't Philosophy.

Nor are random aphorisms here and there that deal (poorly) with Kant's ideas, or that attack Christianity endlessly, amount to Philosophy proper. He doesn't qualify, I say, going by objective standards that can apply to all legitimate figures in Western Philosophy. (Again, Guinsberg, give you Hegel's Introduction to the History of Philosophy as a source.)

Nor is my citation of numerous scholars (e.g. Aschheim from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) regarding Nietzsche's connection to Nazism "childish" nor "desperate" nor "emotional" nor anything like it. You won't discuss the case, perhaps, because you'd have to address a great many modern scholars. My persistence on this topic is merely a single-minded intention to allow the other side of the current POV to obtain a proper hearing. That's more than an emotional response. Petrejo 03:03, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Mr. Petrejo, I recommend you Schopenhauer's essay Criticism of Kantian Philosophy. Kant set limits to metaphysics, as he believed it was not possible to achieve knowledge of the thing-in-itself, which is very different from saying that Kant criticized the concept of the thing-in-itself.

I'm not going to argue Nietzsche's charactarization of Socrates was dense and definitely unpolite, but take a look of what he writes about Plato: he criticizes the platonic Idea of Good and Plato's and Socrate's misinterpretation of the role of morality -- as well as its nature -- in men's life. That's it. You criticize Nietzsche because he allegedly doesn't do anything other than state his own opinions over and over, but you can't stop parroting your biased opinions on his work. You see his analysis of the New Testament, and especially of St. Paul's letters, as "ad hominem attack"; I see it as a valid psychological scrutinizing of this Book, and indeed in The Antichrist he made his point -- that the Christian morality was influenced by its fathers' indiossincratic inclinations -- by citing excerpts of the New Testament. This analysis indeed was very important to his views on the opposition of the two kinds of moral.

You wrote:

He simply misunderstood Kant, and that's quite plain from the text

This is nonsense. Please, read the 335th section of The Gay Science and the prologue to Daybreak. If there is someone who misunderstands Kant, it is you.

but a proper Philosopher seeks clarity (c.f. Hegel, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates).

Should I ask you what do you think about Kant and Heraclitus?

If Nietzsche had actual Philosophical motives for not being a "rationalist," he didn't clarify them

Which of his books have you actually read?

Further, Nietzsche is completely content with expressing his opinions, one after the other, endlessly. Any notion of proving his opinions is alien to his writing

I think you are comparing his theories to mere opinons, in the usual sense of this word. Nietzsche's philosophy was build upon his psychological views on the human nature -- and, as such, they are based upon the descriptions of the different kinds of forces that interact with each other. Schopenhauer did something similar: his philosophy was based upon the description of the inner reality of the living beings and then, from this 'inner reality', as he saw it, he tried to explain his "outside" world. There is no attempt to prove 'objectively' anything through dialectics in either Nietzsche's nor Schopenhauer's books. And this is equally true when it comes to other pragmatical philosophers.

Nor does Schopenhauer deserve the same criticism that I apply to Nietzsche, simply because Schopenhauer -- despite his aphoristic style -- made at least some effort to argue, to prove, to cite his opponents objectively.

What do you mean by "to cite his opponents objectively"? Even considering his "hostile style" of writing, as far as I can see, Nietzsche never failed to correctly grasp his predecessors philosophical views and citing them accordignly. Actually, Schopenhauer was the one failed to do so. And... dialectical Schopenhauer? I think I missed that part of his work. The big picture in here is that you are confusing philosophy with dialectics. Both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, as romantic thinkers, were subjectivist and rabid anti-dialectical philosophers. And, as I said before, Nietzsche had his reasons to move away from dialectics and traditional logic. (There are a few interesting articles on Nietzsche's approach to logic on the internet. You might enjoy them.) Does Nietzsche only state his own opinions? He would say so, since he believed that even the so called philosophical or 'rational reasoning' is conditioned by the thinker's unconcious mental processes. But then, according to him, all other philosophers didn't do anything else than state their own opinions! And this is the core of the entire pragmatical philosophy. -- Guinsberg, 9 August 2006.

I think I approached this at the wrong angle, so to speak. If you wish to discuss the validity of Nietzsche and Heidegger and their involvement with the Nazi party, we can do this either by email (dan.nagase@gmail.com) or in a public forum (http://forums.philosophyforums.com/). Now, I have two questions for you: what is your opinion on the philosophical status of analytic philosophy and, in particular, the latter Wittgenstein? What criterias did you use to determine this? I ask this because you seem to be using a very strict criteria to separate what is and what isn't philosophy, a criteria that seemingly ignore the 20th century philosophy, as you yourself have stated. The problem is that, quite obviously, most 20th century philosophers (or pseudo-philosophers, in your view) and interpreters disagree with it. Since, in order to determine what is and what isn't philosophy, I think many of us report to 20th century scholarship and its developments in this field, it is clear that there is an impasse here. This is not to be solved by arguing if Nietzsche or Heidegger, in particular, are "worthy" of being philosophers, but rather by the more general approach of what criteria we, as contributers to Wikipedia (in opposition with our own research), should adopt. Hence, my two questions above. Daniel Nagase 21:02, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The approach toward philosophy must indeed be rooted in the rudimentary criteria of admissability and assimilation, and if we are to do this, it would ab ovo lead us to the simplest formulation (or perhaps one could say the "most complex and varied")—an all inclusive denominaton. For here (Wikipedia) all textual characterizations are based upon WP:NPOV, and therefore we all must be inclined, according to whatever sources we work from, to present those bounden statements in scholarship and so on and so forth. The whole of this very long discussion appears to have attempted to exculpate the simple observation that a person's private ideas are not welcome here—one must needs speak through a text, and this cannot be bypassed for the credibility of the encyclopedia is put to close scrutiny (see WP:OR), and rightly so. Straightaway, we must thereby use a formula of "philosophy" as an all inclusive field—to put it mildly, human narrowness and one-sided, apolaustic views are not the means through which this is to be ascertained, and these most certainly will not be accepted by the functionaries of Wikipedia (those who abide by the policies of Wikipedia, viz., almost everyone). — ^ignis _scripta 21:55, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

To Daniel Nagase, I've little time for outside threads, so I'll stick to the relevant issues of this debate about Nietzsche. You asked about my opinion of analytic philosophy's Wittgenstein, and my criteria. I don't count Wittgenstein as a Philosopher, using two criteria: (1) Wittgenstein's own, evasive (yet famous) dictum #7: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." How silly, actually, to claim to tell humanity 'whereof one cannot speak'. It's self-contradictory, frankly and makes Wittgenstein's claim to analytic philosophy ludicrous. And (2) Hegel's argument in his Science of Logic (Miller, p. 41) that discounts any Philosophical project that relies upon Axioms. As if Philosophy could simply be asserted instead of proved! Philosophy isn't math just as it isn't journalism. It's quite silly when we reflect on it -- Hegel concludes: "Technically it is unjustifiable simply to presuppose and straightway assume such propositions. Still more, it reveals ignorance of the fact that it is the requirement and the business of Logic to inquire into just this." (Hegel, p. 41)

As for defining who is a Philosopher, once again, the majority opinion cannot be the deciding factor! (The majority in the Congress voted against signing the Kyoto Treaty -- so was the majority in the right? Who says yes?) It's fruitless to keep playing the 'majority' card. Philosophy isn't a numbers game. Our sense of *reason* and our well-formed arguments must make or break our case. That's what Nietzsche fails to do -- and what his followers therefore feel justified in avoiding. Nietzsche cast his insults freely about, so his followers cast their insults freely about. The need to make well-formed arguments is simply evaded.

Instead we have this silly 'argument by Authority'. As if Philosophy ever had anything to do with that!

To determine what is and what isn't Philosophy we should be more careful. The 20th century ideology first fell prey to Marxism and its massive, global political movement, and then it resorted to the equal-but-opposite force of anti-Marxism. That's when the Nazi period became relevant, and that's when Nietzsche was revived -- Nietzsche, whose writings clearly lend themselves to anti-Marxism (e.g. the emotional expression of inequality). That obviously is a *degeneration* of Philosophy, on both sides. Reason was sent begging in the 20th century -- and still must fight for a hearing.

I'm certainly not alone in my demand to go back to the 19th century -- where things fell off the track -- and return to Reason. There's nothing unique or original about this perspective. Nor am I arguing to dominate this Nietzsche article with this perspective -- I only seek a paragraph or two in the article. My request is based on the NPOV ideals of the Wikipedia itself.

So, Daniel, you ask what criteria we should adopt. That question is already answered -- NPOV. That should be given. So, I trust my answers to your two questions above are clear, and I trust that they show that a reliance upon the majority or upon Authority is exactly what is questioned in this debate about Nietzsche.

What should be our starting point? I have said from the very beginning it should be this quotation by Walter Kaufmann: "It is evident at once that Nietzsche is far superior to Kant and Hegel as a stylist; but it also seems that as a philosopher he represents a sharp decline.

That's the starting point. Now, unfortunately, Kaufmann didn't develop that obvious truth -- nor did he end that sentence with a period. Rather, he continued that sentence with a secondary clause with fewer teeth -- a straw man. Kaufmann continued "--and men have not been lacking who have not considered him a philosopher at all -- because he had no 'system.'"

The problem is that this secondary clause is easy to debate, and so Kaufmann deftly changes the topic to this easier debate. Many erstwhile Philosophers have no systems (though they often refer to systems of others), but more importantly, Kaufmann concludes, "one must add that he had strong philosophic reasons for not having a system" (Kaufmann, II, p. 79). Strong philosophic reasons? That's debatable, obviously. Especially since it contradicts his very own first clause that compares Nietzsche unfavorably with two very properly titled Philosophers who created the systems that guide Philosophy proper today.

Finally, to Ignis: Your defense of Nietzsche there accidently includes a defense of my own position against your own POV. Please reflect upon that for a moment. Petrejo 05:24, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

What you call a "defense" was effectively, and not "accidentally", an implicit attack upon the weaknesses of your arguments that have so long ran amok on this talk page; therefore, I would invite you to reflect on this matter with a minimum level of discretion but that would be, wittingly or unwittingly, too unreasonable of me. At this point I am pleased to see your response (your latest one under "The list") as a genuine one—a response to the governances of Wikipedia that are ever present—and I look forward to whatever references you might compile in light of the demands of Wikipedia.

In addition to this, my statement was no assertion of majority rule but a simple matter of principle, however unfashionable that seems to be nowadays, that there are those who have adduced their arguments for and against Nietzsche (Kaufmann is not the only "for" and hitherto you still have not given a cogent argument "against": see the penultimate paragraph in this post), and thus the treatment of the subject would have to be coloured accordingly (i.e., "neutrally" in the sense of NPOV). In short, your constant attempts to say I have a "POV" is thoroughly unfounded and is rooted in your assumptions of philosophy and so forth, to which I readily admit I do not hold; the façade of this characterisation of my positon I also feel constitutes a personal attack, for it does little to permit understanding of my inclinations and associates me with a motive I do not harbour. In other words, I would hope you cease such attempts to categorise me simply due to a disagreement (perhaps you could do likewise with your dealings with others)—since such a misplacement in this state of affairs does thoroughgoing violence and misleads us from the origin under which this talk page was fashioned—namely, the article's improvement—rather than being simply a roundtable for vengeful remarks.

As an aside but no less apposite here, I find it inaccurate how you describe Nietzsche's writings—including his Nachlass—as those which "clearly lend themselves to anti-Marxism"; if anything, his views are rooted in considerations outside of the Nazi's project (including outside anything dubiously attributed to Nietzsche's writings as "political"; P. Bishop and R. Stephenson's Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism and another Nietzsche and Antiquity are two irrefragable cases in point about Nietzsche's views), however you feel otherwise, and placing them within this questionable and false dichotomy of Marxism and anti-Marxism/Nazism further muddles what he wrote. You are essentially reliant upon generalities that are not suitable to the subject at hand; or to put it differently, you falsely presuppose that since the Nazis took Nietzsche in (firstly distilled and thoroughly distorted in a number of key modes) that somehow degrades him as a "philosopher" and appropriately correlates him with their ideologies (and even if they could be correlated that would invalidate little of what he wrote). This is inaccurate for it is operative only while one overemphasises historicity in a sweeping manner rather than giving careful attention to Nietzsche's writings, with which you yourself have already demonstrably indicated a lack of familiarity and have dismissed them out of hand (e.g., your attempts at quoting Nietzsche in an ad hominem mannerism, as if that was somehow germane to the body of Nietzsche's philosophical thought—and here I attribute Schacht's Nietzsche as one case in point against this absurd construal). This unfortunate weakness of your proposal is undoubtedly indicated by your dogmatic views of Hegel as well, which are invalid means of making a case against Nietzsche and while doing so here in particular. In conclusion, it is my suggestion such speculative "arguments" are to be done away with which will thereby permit focus upon solid scholarship where such views are treated more adequately, that is, befitting to their nature (cf. OR)—this also connotes the use of less time so that we may efficaciously get to the bottom of this matter.

(Another note: I removed some colons at the beginning of your paragraphs above; you need only add one colon to the number of the previous author's statement, doing so permits a more freely flowing discourse, and I hope you don't mind my small alteration.) — ^ignis _scripta 13:06, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Do get yourself those references. You'll need your AUTHORITIES.Just passing by 07:18, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

In response to this quotation by Nietzsche himself, from Beyond Good and Evil, one can say that far from adopting a Philosophical attitude or even the properly Critical attitude (in the sense of Kant's famous Critique), Nietzsche conflates the whole business with sardonic opinions. Nietzsche is cracking wise, folks. (Dunna ya' see it? Dunna ya' see it?) By standing on his high soap box, looking down at all the Philosophers of the world, he doesn't so much participate inside Philosophy as he makes Journal entries outside of it. If he were living today perhaps we'd call him a stand-up comic. His remarks are witty, cute, and toothless. Nothing at all of actual Philosophy is to be found in them. His contribution approaches zero, excepting, surely, in the eyes of beginners and amateurs. Petrejo 03:59, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

To Ignis -- It's not inaccurate or irrelevant to recognize the historical usage to which the writings of Nietzsche have been appropriated. Since the Nazi Party used his writings in many ways, a NPOV would admit that his writings lent themselves to their purposes. Insofar as Nietzsche was cited as an Authority by the German Fuehrer himself, and since the Fuehrer rose to power on his claims to "anti-Marxism", then my connection remains accurate. Nietzsche's views are not outside the Nazi project insofar as Nietzsche promoted hate-language-disguised-as-scholarship.

Further, the hatred of Christianity that Nietzsche expresses in The AntiChrist was repeated by the Fuehrer almost word for word. Anybody who believes that the Fuehrer remained a Christian at all simply doesn't grasp the extent to which Nietzsche's extremism pushed him over the edge. Here are some quotes from the Fuehrer's Table Talk of the 1940's, to help make my point:

The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: smallpox and Christianity.

— Adolf Hitler, Table Talk, October 19, 1941'

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -- already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity! -- then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.

— Adolf Hitler, Table Talk, August 28, 1942'

Lest anybody imagine that these familiar sounding words by the Fuehrer had little to do with the words of Nietzsche's AntiChrist, one should also know the scholastic pedigree of the Fuehrer:

In the Great Hall of the Linz Library are the busts of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the greatest of our thinkers, in comparison with whom the British, the French and the Americans have nothing to offer...It is on the foundation of Kant's theory of knowledge that Schopenhauer...annihilated the pragmatism of Hegel. I carried Schopenhauer's works with me throughout the whole of WW1. Schopenhauer...has been far surpassed by Nietzsche.

— Adolf Hitler, Table Talk, May 16, 1944'

Nietzsche's books didn't move outside the Nazi project. The hatred of Christianity directly expressed by Nietzsche was taken up in a hero-worshipping manner by the by the Fuehrer himself, and with him, the whole Nazi SS. It's no coincidence that some of today's Aryan leaders of India, or some of the Muslim leaders of the Middle East, continue to read Nietzsche and to promote his scholarship as the greatest of Western 'philosophers'. It serves their political causes well.

When the USA was desperate to be part of the anti-Marxist movement, perhaps it was useful to make the writings of Nietzsche into a bulwark against that abstract-egalitarianism-without-nuances. But now that the USSR has fallen and China presents a new middle class, the politically useful days of Nietzsche would appear to be over for the USA.

Europe may be a different case -- they seem to wish to continue to follow the Fuehrer down his Mohammedan path.

Finally, the megalomania of Nietzsche's self-evaluation is arguably related to the Fuehrer's own megalomania. Hear Nietzsche when he compares his Zarathustra with the Bible, when he describes it as a 'fifth Gospel' and as 'the most exalted book ever written,' that marked the zenith of German philosophy and the culmination of the German language! In his own evaluation of Zarathustra, 'the phenomenon of Man, by contrast, lies in unconscionable depths beneath it.'

So, it's not inaccurate to make these references and connections in this context, Ignis. What's inaccurate is to conflate these efforts with a personal attack on Nietzsche. My wish is to show the NPOV Nietzsche, warts and all, and to resist the 20th century hero-worship POV that would hide the facts of his case. Petrejo 14:42, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

It is still my contention your references and juxtapositions are inaccurate, do not befit the context, and are wide of the mark. You continue to bolster presumed parallels that hardly remain demonstrable of the case for this so far ambiguous "hero-worship POV" (now referring to Hitler with a perplexing connexion to the USA among other things). First of all by way of giving no mention to how Nietzsche was appropriated by the Nazis (among other things), you therewith adumbrate, and have attempted to do so ab ovo, a picture as though it were Nietzsche himself (i.e., this is a part of your aims, contrary to your attempt to separate it from them, to confine Nietzsche to non-Philosophy as well, which are mostly founded upon your confusion of "philosophical" form with "philosophical" content and has already been emphatically repudiated by myself much besides)—or as you have had it hitherto, "warts and all"—who intrinsically precipitated the entire eventuality of such a gross occurrence in historicity ("the facts of his case" to which you refer), which no one has apparently attempted to "hide" or to mitigate except yourself, where "the facts of his case" are, in the final analysis, infinitely more interwoven, and troubling, than you make them appear. That is more to say, this is only possible if one gives little-to-no attention to the whole of Nietzsche's writings (let alone the developments in Nietzsche scholarship), the manner in which they were jaundiced by and for the Nazi's, and this is further compounded by Förster-Nietzsche's gratuitous and adventitious assistance in the matter. It is enough to say his writings in toto do not qualitatively "clearly lend themselves to [the false, dichotomous relation of Marxism versus] anti-Marxism[/Nazism]", for there is a great deal of contrast against Nationalsozialismus within them that fundamentally resists any such subsumption, even if they prognosticate it and were (and perhaps continue to be) ab- and mis-used in similar modes due to the aforesaid lack of attention to what Nietzsche is saying. Inasmuch as you postulate a case, I see nothing of import nor of fundamental interest whatsoever, only that which you hope to pass off as "the facts" and "NPOV" (all of which are your POV) and a dreadful abuse and misuse of Wikipedia's resources; therefore, I will not henceforth persist in any discourse if you find making such useless and speculative "arguments" as I mentioned in my previous post inescapable. I look forward to your answer after the weekend has ended.

One final point but not necessarily the last, I've deleted your quotations of Nietzsche on this talk page for they are not useful here and they comprise your, utterly ad hominem and contextually dismissive, original research. — ^ignis _scripta 22:19, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

WHAT?! You deleted my quotations of Nietzsche himself -- from the discussion page?! Can't you see what a psychological denial that is, Ignis? You can't confront the very words of your hero! They're too much for you to allow others to read! You know very well how they will be taken -- exactly as Nietzsche intended for them to be taken! I've little recourse now but to: (a) replace them again for other readers to read; and (b) ask the moderator to intervene in your quasi-vandalism. You can't see the import or interest of my case merely because you refuse to see it, and you refuse to allow others to see it. You believe you are justified in your quasi-vandalism, yet that is itself a symptom (indeed, the principal symptom) of your POV. Petrejo 23:07, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

If a personal attack is all to which you can resort, then there is clearly nothing more to say on the matter; those quotations at best constitute your POV-driven original research. — ^ignis _scripta 23:27, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Ignis, I was busy gathering and posting dozens of secondary sources, at the request of the Wikipedia dispute resolution procedure, so I'm only now replying to your long post of 24Jun06.

As my many secondary sources demonstrate, my own references and juxapositions were in fact, accurate. They nicely fit the context of an article on Nietzsche, and are exactly on the mark. All the parallels that I raised are now demonstrated by secondary sources. It's your turn to respond. Any silence on your part now only confirms suspicions of your POV up to and including charges of hero-worship one-sided POV.

The secondary sources I cited expound at length upon how Nietzsche was appropriated by the Nazis, and how Nietzsche's attacks on Judaism as the creator of Christianity, which Nietzsche 'condemns' and regards as the 'one immortal blemish of humanity' is a self-evident form of anti-Semitism by Nietzsche himself.

As for Non-vandal's charge that I confuse the Content of Philosophy with the Form of Philosophy, it's way off base. I'm not only criticizing Nietzsche's Form (after all even Schopenhauer used the aphoristic Form). I'm also criticizing Nietzsche's Content because it lacks substance. As I've already said, merely dropping the names of Socrates, Kant and Hegel along with a few witty insults doesn't demonstrate a mastery of Philosophy.

Further, Nietzsche's very few remarks about Philosophy amounts to a few ad hominem attacks on a few Philosophers. If that sort of Content were allowed to flourish (as in the 20th century) then any dilettante could claim the title of Philosopher (as in the 20th century). You claim to reject ad hominem arguments, but in fact Nietzsche is the king of the ad hominem argument, and you wish to allow him to speak without any criticism at all. So your POV is entirely self-contradictory.

I'm aware that you, Ignis, and many others have 'emphatically repudiated' my contribution here, but you haven't demonstrated adequate reasons for doing so, except that you object, you object strongly, and you are willing to erase anything I contribute with or without an explanation. When an explanation is offered, it contains no other reason than you folks felt like it, it was 'useless' to you, and the like. You lack scholarly reasons for your erasures. You evidently follow a Will to Power, and don't feel you need reasons in Philosophy. But that's the POV method, and it violates the NPOV rules of Wikipedia.

Your POV continues to hide the facts of the case, and to erase direct quotes from Nietzsche himself which are obvious, blatant and clear to any objective reader. You ask for more attention to developments in Nietzsche scholarship, so I've provided dozens of quotations from very current scholarship. It's your turn to show that you pay attention to these recent developments in Nietzsche scholarship.

The fallacy that the Nazi-Nietzsche connection is to be blamed on Förster-Nietzsche is also dealt with and refuted.

You continue to deny any import or interest in my NPOV case, or in the historical facts, and you continue to insist that your intense Nietzsche-advocacy POV is anything but a clear "abuse and misuse of Wikipedia's resources".

You wish to discontinue these discussions -- but you haven't made any point yet. I'm obliged to make all my points in formal terms, but when it comes to you and your POV team, you somehow absolve yourselves of the same duty. You repeat your POV, and you insist on your POV, and you think you're done. Well, you're not.

You say you looked forward to my answer, so there it is now, posted clearly for your perusal. I now await for your answer.

Finally, Ignis, your deletion of those offensive quotations of Nietzsche himself on this talk page was shocking to me. You say they're "not useful" but in fact they aren't useful only for your POV. They're eminently useful for any NPOV argument dealing with Nietzsche's life and work.Petrejo 15:15, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Leafy gutters you encountered: (1) Igni's userpage shows he'll be unable to contribute for a while. (2) It was Igni's claim you got philosophical form and content confused, not mine pal, so thanks for that false statement. (3) As for the Foerster-Nietzsche connection, it is FAR FROM REFUTED. (4) You don't seem to understand those same quotations, from an "objective" standpoint, can even be used to demonstrate a very different point of view. You look quite ridiculous with such a heated reply; care to be more emotional (or "formal") in your response? Such impatience and fearful delusion. You still haven't even understood what he was trying to say, but you persist in characterizing him. Boy, this conversation has gone nowhere. I hope you had a nutty Independence Day.Non-vandal 20:14, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Gardener's here: (1) I can wait for Igni as he struggles to catch up with my arguments in the past two weeks; (2) You also shot the formality/content argument on 21Jun06, in this very section, evidently before Igni, so it appeared he used you as his support; (3) the Foerster-Nietzsche connection is, as Aschheim showed, the first resort of those like Walter Kaufmann who prefer to portray a mild, bourgeois Nietzsche; (4) I'm quite aware that my selected quotations are rich with nuances, and also that one-sided POV advocates like yourself would prefer to view them entirely from your own side. The question is -- do you POV advocates have the courage to post them at all? BTW, my Independence Day celebration was joyous.Petrejo 21:50, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Bad gardening: (2) if Igni drew "support" from my completely unrelated statement, don't you think he would have said as much? (3) You here overgeneralize in a laughable manner - are you saying those like Montinari and co. made a "bourgeois Nietzsche" by tracing all of Elizabeth's alterations of Nietzsche's MS (letters, publications, etc.)? If so, that is hardly "their fault" but your own (did Aschheim say this or is it your own faulty original research conclusion?) for taking it as such; (4) Yes, such splendid nuances that are hardly "proven" by the quotations themselves and barely even establish a sensible relation to N's work, but no matter if you seem so content with your laudable work. Your last question is so utterly ridiculous I'm speechless. ClosedNon-vandal 13:11, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with User:Non-Vandal except for his use of the terms "laudable" and "work" to refer to Pretejo's actions on this page. — goethean ॐ 14:46, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

That's why I feel justified in presuming that if I did make another contribution for this Wikipedia article, it would simply be dismissed out of hand by a prejudiced POV. So I'll continue to keep the dispute open. You're not willing to look at the other side of this clearly two-sided issue, folks. (Also, you demand civility from me, but you've never bothered showing it yourselves, and that's also vital to this dispute.) Here's the bottom line -- your article posts a very select quotation from Nietzsche that attempts to purify him of actual contact with the Nazi, anti-Semitic and fascist history. That's not scholarly because there are many other quotations that can be cited from Nietzsche and from recent scholarship -- and I've cited many of them for many weeks now -- to show the precisely opposite case. The opposite case deserves a hearing. But you censor that NPOV. That's the dispute, and it's going to stay open as long as Wikipedia rules permit it. Petrejo 08:55, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Again with (Anti-)Wagnerism

I don't like bringing up the dead issue of Nietzsche's categorisation as Wagnerite and Anti-Wagnerite, but I want to make sure the meanings are not being misconstrued. I am well aware that Nietzsche underwent a falling out with Wagner, but of its capacity I am ignorant. Did Nietzsche actually reject the aesthetics of Wagner or simply his anti-Semitism and political alignment? -- I don't think the distinction is trivial. Apparently Nietzsche dismissed the dramatic content of Wagner's Parsifal for its quasi-Christian themes, but he admitted to the music and other artistic qualities being superb; so it seems that if it is only Wagner's anti-Semitism, Pan-Germanism, and worldliness (and perhaps his relapse into a Christian moral-framework of questionable sincerity) that repulsed Nietzsche, wouldn't it be incorrect to call him an anti-Wagnerite? It seems necessary to discriminate between personal disagreements and artistic compromises, no? - gikar, 6-8-06

Nietzsche rejected Wagner's entire worldview quite vehemently. He wrote two books on the subject, The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner. (He only wrote one whose title was specifically anti-Christian!) In the former he says that the problem with Wagner is one of "optics" -- he sees things incorrectly. In the latter, he says that his (Nietzsche's) entire philosophy can be summed up as "Dionysus versus the crucified". So his differences with Wagner are quite profound. But the themes that you mention in Wagner do play a pivotal role in Nietzsche's rejection of him. — goethean ॐ 18:26, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

It's silly to imagine that Nietzsche had a falling out with Wagner over Wagner's loud and boistrous anti-Semitism, when one recognizes that their relationship lasted for 10 years and that Wagner was an obnoxious anti-Semite for the entire time. According to Nietzsche's sister, Nietzsche was offended when he tried his hand at music composition and Wagner laughed at him. Also, when young Nietzsche would visit Wagner's lavish home as a guest, he always came without a female companion, which caused Wagner to mock him mercilessly. Further, Wagner would exploit Nietzsche as a file clerk and as a publicist to write articles about his Operas -- all without pay and with plenty of pressure. For 10 years Nietzsche put up with these indignities, but then he simply couldn't stand it anymore and announced their split with his famous journal entry on aesthetics. In a word, the anti-Semitism had nothing to do with it. Nietzsche disliked *other* anti-Semites, but he tolerated Wagner just fine. And Nietzsche himself had nasty things to say about Jews -- so don't believe the apologetic POV. Petrejo 11:16, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Your depiction of events looks comical (not to mention questionable based on Nietzsche's sister as a source). Let's look at what Nietzsche has to say on the matter from his notebooks:

As regards Richard Wagner: I have not recovered from the disappointment of summer 1876. All at once there was too much imperfection in the work and the man for me – I fled. Later I came to understand that one distances oneself from an artist most thoroughly when one has seen his ideal. After such a vision, which was mine in youth (my remaining, short text on Richard Wagner bears witness to it), I had no choice but to bid farewell, dismayed and gnashing my teeth, to what I had suddenly begun to find an ‘unbearable reality’. – It does not concern me that he, grown old, transformed himself: almost all Romantics of that kind end up under the sign of the cross – I loved only the Wagner I knew, i.e., an honest atheist and immoralist who invented the figure of Siegfried, a very free man. Since then, from the humble corner of his Bayreuther Blätter [the journal of the Wagner circle, published from 1878 on], he has sufficiently given to understand how highly he values the blood of the Saviour, and – he has been understood. Many Germans, many pure and impure fools [allusion to Wagner's Parsifal, who is referred to as the ‘pure fool’] of every kind, have since begun to blieve in Richard Wagner as their ‘saviour’. I find all this distasteful. –
It goes without saying that I don't easily grant anyone the right to make this, my estimation, his own, and the disrespectful mob with which the body of today's society is crawling like lice should not be permitted even to pronounce such a great name as Richard Wagner’s, whether to praise or to object.

— April – June 1885, 34[205]; trans. Kate Sturge

Your estimation of events is above all baseless. You make it appear as though the two were never in any friendship at all but in a perverse domination-love affair. Whatever the matter, Nietzsche is emphatic here, and Goethean's post is confirmed quite soundly (Wagner's anti-Semitism also became more pronounced as their relationship diverged). I suggest you get a less biased picture of how things occurred between the two before dragging this discussion into nothingness.Non-vandal 21:36, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Whatever else my estimation may be, it isn't baseless. The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence speaks volumes about these facts. Your repetition and insistence upon the apologetic argument that Nietzsche left Wagner over anti-Semitism is what is baseless, actually. The facts belie it. The Nietzsche-Wagner correspondence clearly shows their relationship at its peak during Wagner's anti-Semite rantings about Judaism and Music, and waning in the 1880's when Wagner began to have second thoughts and began to show feelings for Christianity again. After leading Nietzsche down the atheist road for 10 years, and then turning toward Christ again -- *that* was what outraged Nietzsche and caused the actual break -- not anti-Semitism. The mighty hero faltered. Petrejo 19:56, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

How is it "repetition"? How is it "apologetic"? Are you so inadvertently blind to be unable to see the tenets underlying my post, or are you simply aiming to state derogatively I've said nothing that is different from Goethean's statement? Look, if you can't get past your desire to appear "all mighty", I see no reason to discuss this with you. To elaborate: I quoted directly how Nietzsche fell out from Wagner, from the disappointment of the Parsifal display in Basel (including the aesthetics of it and other such things). You cannot so swiftly change the basis of your position, as you seem wont to obsure all else here. You stated that Nietzsche "simply couldn't stand [these indignities]" as if they were "indignities" and Nietzsche's aesthetic view grew from that, and then in your second post you go directly to what I quoted from Nietzsche's notebooks... Affectation on your part? I don't know, but it isn't significant. Not only this, you said "anti-Semitism had nothing to do with it." Well, that is not true. It played a secondary role in his falling out with Wagner, "apologetic" or not.Non-vandal 23:37, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Non-vandal, if anti-Semitism was such a significant factor in their break, then why did Nietzsche retain his relationship with Wagner for 10 years? The history shows that Wagner was a boistrous anti-Semite, *especially* in his younger years. Your hero-worship one-sided POV blinds you to the historical facts: Wagner was old enough to be Nietzsche's father; Nietzsche had been raised by his mother; Wagner was a superstar, a Superman, he was also proud and a law unto himself, caring nothing for bourgeois morality. Wagner flirted with atheism and led the young Nietzsche over. Wagner was Nietzsche's hero in his youth. Nietzsche did many chores for Wagner, as their own correspondence *amply* shows. It's well-known that Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite. But that didn't bother Nietzsche one little bit for TEN FULL YEARS. Does the disapppointment over a play performance sound like a believable reason to end a 10 year friendship? Not for a moment. Wagner changed his *beliefs*. Get over the hero-worship, Non-vandal, so you can see beyond one-sided POV, Non-vandal, and help this article attain NPOV. Petrejo 04:09, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Speak in generalisations and it leads to where we began. If you are at all serious, I suggest you get down to the real points rather than using such broad strokes... turning anything worth observing into garbage. Of course, I mean your POV.Non-vandal 10:00, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, Non-vandal, my points are real and detailed -- you're missing them probably because you're in denial. After 10 years of friendship with this notorious anti-Semite, Nietzsche suggests he broke with Wagner over the disappointing summer Opera performances of 1876. 'All at once,' he says, 'I fled.' The man was too 'imperfect' and his work was too 'imperfect.' Yet for 10 years this boistrous anti-Semite was perfectly acceptable. That's the point and don't gloss over it. The break wasn't about anti-Semitism, nor did Nietzsche himself ever say that it was. The mythology that Nietzsche was offended by Wagner like some bourgeois moralist is comical at the very least. My strokes are *detailed* and historical. Your hero-worshipping one-sided POV, Non-vandal, leads you to little more then random insults. Petrejo 06:11, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Once again you miss the point and go back to saying I have a "hero-worshipping POV". What I was trying to say was essentially how Nietzsche fell out due to his views of Wagner, and that the second(-ary) falling out was in due to his disgust with anti-Semitism as was revealed afterward. Nothing more. Nothing less. And please remain civil. Falsely accussing users of whatnot (as you have constantly been doing) goes against policy.Non-vandal 07:00, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

If you'll be civil with me, Non-vandal, then I'll surely be civil with you. Let's stick to the issues. Nothing at all in the citation you provided demonstrated that Nietzsche broke with Wagner over Wagner's loud and offensive anti-Semitism. Nor does it explain in the slightest why Nietzsche tolerated that same anti-Semitism for 10 long years. That's why I claim that you simply repeat yourself and re-assert your sentences; but you don't demonstrate them. We're still waiting for a proper demonstration. Petrejo 06:00, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

According to Joachim Koehler, Nietzsche broke with Wagner just as Elisabeth said -- except that she was too mild and polite about the incident. Actually, Nietzsche had been getting on Wagner's nerves for being a part of his inner-circle for so many years and yet never had a female companion. Wagner nagged Nietzsche about it continually, and so did Cosima. Now, Nietzsche had a favorite doctor, and Wagner one day decided to pay that doctor a call. Using all his powers of persuasion, charm and stature as a super-star, Wagner got Nietzsche's doctor to betray the doctor-patient confidentiality, and confirmed his suspicions -- Nietzsche was a compulsive masturbator. In those days, Joachim Koehler suggests, masturbation was far more offensive a practice than it is today, and it was quickly associated with homosexuality, perversion and pedophilia. Wagner quickly confronted Nietzsche with his findings, and insisted that Nietzsche permit him and Cosima to find Nietzsche a suitable wife -- quickly. Nietzsche was shocked by this turn of events. He evaded the Wagners for a long time, but the break didn't come yet. Later, on the occasion of the grand opening of Wagner's grand opera house in Bayreuth, Nietzsche made his appearance -- without a female companion. The event was attended by great throngs of aristocrats and social lions. Although Nietzsche was a famous writer by this time, nobody came to greet him. Instead, people turned away, they whispered among themselves, and pretended not to see Nietzsche. Nietzsche endured this humiliation for the entirety of the Bayreuth festival. The truth dawned on him -- the Wagners had slipped his little secret all over Germany. *That* was the real reason for the break between Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, and that's why Nietzsche cited the festival as the reason for their break. Petrejo 02:18, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I've stopped participating in Wikipedia but I will answer this one time. Yes, I've heard this wonderful and hilarious narrative of N's alleged masturbation. Two problems: it is far from constituting a break and far from being verifiable (and looks more like an insult to N than anything else); so Koehler is off his rocker if he said these things (if not, then just yourself). It's funny how idling and ressentiment leads such "free thinking" squirrels into leafy gutters. Anyway have a nutty Independence Day.Non-vandal 06:42, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, Non-vandal, Joachim Koehler is a highly regarded scholar and his book, Zarathustra's Secret, was published by Yale University. Your hero-worship one-sided POV prevents you from looking at the hermeneutic truth of the matter. You should also make an effort to read Nietzsche's alleged final book, the long-supressed, My Sister and I (1890), in which Nietzsche poetically and lucidly reflects upon his childhood, and confesses that he and Elisabeth practiced incest as children. In that same book, Nietzsche also confesses that he was a compulsive masturbator. These are medical facts, historical facts, medical and historical theories based on that hotly disputed final autobiography, Non-vandal, but your hero-worship prevents you from seeing the truth one-sided POV prevents you from even glancing over your fence. Petrejo 13:48, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

You are so confused in your delusion that you think I was stating something as "fact" whereas (as your subsequent edit to the post to which I am now responding shows) it is you whom your "POV" disallows the "glance over your fence". (In a word, yours is a baseless characterization.) My Sister and I wasn't even written by N but by Oscar Levy. Hell, there isn't even an original MS in German. Saying it has been "supressed" is a red herring, and a serious claim at that. Care to back it up? If it wasn't (and isn't) even included in the KSW (ie., it wasn't written by N), its contents are surely far from being verifiable and undoubtedly do not constitute a break - but do for those of whom appearances bar the level of reality. Please continue with your blatant falsifications and outright denials.Non-vandal 13:11, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

(Non-vandal, would you please knock off the personal attacks? It isn't productive. That said, I'm happy to back up what I wrote.) Oscar Levy was a celebrated British scholar of Nietzsche's works, and insofar as he claims to have translated this long-lost autobiography of Nietzsche, it should be so noted. Although Walter Kaufmann (who has always tried to scrub Nietzsche as clean as any bourgeois moralist) has disputed the authorship of My Sister and I, Walter K. Stewart, another notable British scholar, criticizes Kaufmann's methods and intentions. Stewart is willing to keep a more open mind about this long-lost book on the basis of objective evidence. It was well known that Elisabeth sued anybody who published anything about her brother without her permission, so that's a viable reason for the underground nature of the original German, alleged text. It's also viable that, as publisher Samuel Roth claims, the New York Vice Squad seized the original copy of My Sister and I when they raided his offices in 1927, prompted by a court order to seize any copies of James Joyce's Ulysses and basically all the manuscripts Roth possessed, for burning. Finally, given enough scholarly attention to the Oscar Levy alleged translation, it will eventually be verified. Petrejo 09:27, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Max Stirner

What are other users feelings towards a mentioning of the debate over whether Nietzsche came in contact with Stirner's thought? It is currently undergoing a revival as a topic for Nietzschean scholars and historians. I remember there being something written about it on the page in the past, i was wondering why it has been edited out and what other user's thoughts are for some information, however brief or extensive, being added to this article about it? Whatever your thoughts are on the matter i believe it is worth including some (unbiased) information about it in the article. This may seem irrelevant but if you can read German you will find that German online philosophy encyclopaedias and the like often give generous space in their articles on Nietzsche to the topic, which shows how the developments made in Germany on the topic have increased the importance of the matter to Nietzscheans and Philosophy students. --Itafroma 13:45, 30 June 2006 (UTC)itafroma

See here. — goethean ॐ 18:01, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

While you're at it, why not add a reference to Max Stirner's best friend (the only one who attended his funeral), namely, Bruno Bauer. A direct student of Hegel's, Bauer was also a tutor to a 19-year old Karl Marx, and a mentor to a very young Friedrich Nietzsche who at that time called Bauer, 'my entire reading public.' Also, Bauer's banned book, CHRISTIANITY EXPOSED! (1843) was believed by Karl Lowith to be a model for Nietzsche's THE ANTICHRIST which appeared a half-century later. I mean, the personal connection between Bauer and Nietzshce is direct -- while Stirner's connection may be more difficult to demonstrate. (The rift between Bauer and Nietzsche probably came when Nietzsche, following Wagner, rejected Hegel and turned to Schopenhauer as a beacon. Bauer always remained a Hegelian. Petrejo 05:54, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

---

• @ Petrejo: 1) I don't think you can give any evidence that Bauer was ever a mentor of N. N's scarce mentionings of Bauer's name in his later years may be seen as reminiscences to his young years when he was keenly interested in pre-1848 young hegelian philosophy - until (with good plausibilty) he was confronted with Stirner as the logical end of that philosophy which made him turn to Schopenhauer. -- 2) Bauer's book Das entdeckte Christentum (1843, after Holbach's Le christianisme dévoilé) was immediately confiscated and destroyed. Only very few people were able to read it, one of them was Max Stirner, who criticized it in his Ego. A surviving copy was found by the theologian Ernst Barnikol and edited anew in 1927.

• @ itafroma: As to the inclusion of N's possible encounter with Stirner's book you'll have read the discussion here two or three months ago. You may also consult the German Wikipaedia where I also had a long discussion on this topic, in the end with a different result.

--Nescio* 13:49, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, Nescio, I can offer the evidence you seek: (1) Karl Lowith found a letter written by a very young Friedrich Nietzsche in which he confides to a friend that "Bruno Bauer is my entire reading public." The bright young Nietzsche was evidently looking for mentors and perhaps a father-figure because his own father died so young. Later, Wagner filled that bill (Wagner was about the same age as Bauer and far more famous); also (2) I know a lot about Das entdeckte Christentum (1843), because I led the first and only project to translate that book into English. Perhaps your local college library may be interested in a copy -- here's a link at amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0773471839/sr=8-1/qid=1153577039/ref=sr_1_1/002-2084133-6405612?ie=UTF8 Petrejo 14:13, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

If you read [1] and, in German, [2] you can see, that I emphasize young N's early interest in atheist young hegelian philosophy. But I found the only mentions of Bauer by N in his later years, in the 1880s. Therefore I'm very keen to get the exact source of the letter you mention. -- Thanks for the hint to Bauer's Das entdeckte Christentum in English, but fortunately I can read it in its original German. --Nescio* 09:58, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Nescio here, at least the KSB does not seem to include such a letter. Could you, Petrejo, please be more specific about this? In which book, on which page does Löwith quote exactly what from this letter?--Chef aka Pangloss 19:34, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

By all means; although I'll need another day to access my library resources. Petrejo 04:47, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

OK, Nescio and Chef aka Pangloss, I have the citation. It's from Karl Lowith's 1941 book, From Hegel to Nietzsche, in the 1964 English translation by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. pp. 186-187. Here's what the famous atheist Karl Lowith wrote: Petrejo 03:44, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Nietzsche had a direct connection to the Hegelian school through his relationship with Bruno Bauer...In letters to Taine, Brandes and Gast, he lauds Bauer as his only reader, indeed as his "entire public," besides Wagner, Burckhardt, and G. Keller...The correspondences between Nietzsche's Antichrist (1895) and Bauer's Entdecktes Christentum (1843) are so obvious that they at least indicate a subterranean movement in the course of the nineteenth century...

— Karl Lowith, 1941

Read what your "..." after Bauer say: This is from Ecce homo, a product of the late 1880s, as well as the letters mentioned. And check if you can find evidence that Bauer did read N from 1873 onwards.

But now back to the topic itafroma brought in again: about whether Nietzsche came in contact with Stirner's thought. Anyone, especially those who participated in the debate here [3], are invited to read the debate I had with Chef aka Pangloss at the discussion page of the German article on Nietzsche [4] and the consensus we arrived at, a result IMO worth of being pondered for inclusion to the English page. --Nescio* 08:10, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, these are known letters, and not at all from a "very young" Nietzsche. For completeness, a list with all Nietzsche letters in the KSB that contain direct or indirect links to Bauer:

• vol. 6, no. 94, to Köselitz, 20-III-1881 (quotes from "Die Aera Bismarcks" without dropping Bauer's name)
• vol. 6, no. 195, to Köselitz, 5-II-1882 (praises introduction to Schmeitzner's "Journal" without naming the author, Bauer)
• vol. 6, no. 224, to Schmeitzner, 8-V-1882 (dito)
• vol. 6, no. 286, to Theodor Curti, ca. July/August 1882 (mentions Bauer's recent death and Bauer's short reception of Nietzsche)
• vol. 7, no. 767, to Seydlitz, before 26-X-1886 ("Im Grunde habe ich drei Leser, nämlich Bruno Bauer, J. Burckhardt, Henri [sic!] Taine, und von denen ist der Erste todt.") !
• vol. 7, no. 771, draft to unknown, ca. end of October 1886 (almost the same sentence as before) !
• vol. 8, no. 872, to Taine, 4-VII-1887 ("hat es mir [...] niemals an einzelnen ausgezeichneten und mir sehr zugethanen Lesern gefehlt (es waren immer alte Männer), darunter zum Beispiel Richard Wagner, den alten Hegelianer Bruno Bauer, [Burckhardt, and Keller]") !
• vol. 8, no. 960, to Brandes, 2-XII-1887 ([names his living readers Burckhardt, Bülow, Taine, Keller and:] "von den Todten den alten Hegelianer Bruno Bauer und Richard Wagner") !
• vol. 8, no. 988, to Spitteler, 10-II-1888 (mentions Bruno Bauer's positive reaction to his first Untimely against Strauss)
• vol. 8, no. 1071, to Spitteler, 25-VII-1888 (dito about his anti-Strauss book: "Der alte Hegelianer Bruno Bauer war seitdem Nietzschianer.")

The ones with an ! seem to be the ones Löwith has in mind. You were wrong.--Chef aka Pangloss 23:25, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I feel that it is worth mentioning that there is at least a debate about his connections to Stirner- RainyDayCrow

Modernist Liberal Democratic Cowardly Unscholarliness

The essence of Nietzsche's philosophy has been totally eviscerated into nothingness here. Not one bit of reality is left unsuppressed by the mediocre creatures Nietzsche labeled in one of his letters as "Franco-Judaic levelers", with their newfound sheer sexual perversion and Foucaultian nihilism...

Nietzsche was the ultimate heretic of the modern liberal hedonistic democratic Iron Age. Modern people still haven't the courage to honestly encounter Nietzsche AS HE IS: he praised and philosophically defended rigorous feudal stratification, Aryan racialism and imperialism, aristocratic anti-Semitism, and eugenic raciation. Nietzsche ultimately wished for a purified, Pan-European promethean master race of the future to annihilate the farce of plutodemocracy and reign over a new Western Empire... this would be the preparation of the Overman...

Intelligent study of the following passages will show the extent to which the real content of Nietzsche's unambiguous philosophy of Aryanist racialism, anti-miscegenation, eugenics, exalted European imperialism, aristocratic anti-Semitism and neo-feudal hierarchy has here been quasi-criminally whitewashed and suppressed by 'Franco-Judaic' pseudo-scholarly levelers and decadents...Nietzsche dedicated his whole life against fighting the filth of the modern world, and Wikipedia and its Jewish-Christian mob-politics and systematic reality-denial embodies the mendacious, distortive spirit of the age at its worst. --

Man, elevating himself to the rank of the Titans, acquires his culture by his own efforts and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his self-sufficient wisdom he has their existence and their limits in his hand... The legend of Prometheus is an original possession of the entire Aryan family of races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic... Man's highest good must be bought with a crime and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering which the offended divinities visit upon the human race in its noble ambition. An austere notion, this, which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall--a myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue... The tragedy at the heart of things, which the thoughtful Aryan is not disposed to quibble away, the contrariety at the center of the universe, is seen by him as an interpenetration of several worlds, as for instance a divine and a human, each individually in the right but each, as it encroaches upon the other, having to suffer for its individuality. The individual, in the course of his heroic striving towards universality, de-individuation, comes up against that primordial contradiction and learns both to sin and to suffer. Accordingly, crime is understood by the Aryans to be a man, sin by the Semites a woman; as also, the original crime is committed by man, the original sin by woman... The innermost core of the tale of Prometheus is the necessity of crime imposed on the titanically striving individual. (The Birth of Tragedy, Section 9)

Fear and intelligence. - If it is true, as is now most definitely asserted that the cause of black skin pigmentation is not to be sought in the action of light, could it perhaps not be the ultimate effect of frequent attacks of rage (and undercurrents of blood beneath the skin) accumulated over thousands of years? While with the other, more intelligent races an equally frequent terror and growing pallid has finally resulted in white skin? - For degree of timidity is a measure of intelligence, and frequently to give way to blind rage a sign that animality is still quite close and would like to take over again. (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 241)

The purification of the race.- There are probably no pure races but only races that have become pure, even these being extremely rare. What is normal is crossed races, in which, together with a disharmony of physical features (when eye and mouth do not correspond with one another, for example), there must always go a disharmony of habits and value-concepts. (Livingstone heard someone say: 'God created white and black men but the Devil created the half-breeds.') Crossed races always mean at the same time crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are usually more evil, crueller, more restless … Races that have become pure have always also become stronger and more beautiful.-The Greeks offer us the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully we shall one day also achieve a pure European race and culture. (Daybreak, Section 272)

The man of an era of dissolution which mixes the races together and who therefore contains within him the inheritance of a diversified descent…such a man of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a rather weak man: his fundamental desire is that the war which he is should come to an end... (Beyond Good and Evil 200)

For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition called in ordinary language nervous debility and sickliness; it arises whenever races or classes long separated from one another are decisively and suddenly crossed. In the new generation, which has as it were inherited varying standards and values in its blood, all is unrest, disorder, doubt, experiment; the most vital forces have a retarding effect, the virtues themselves will not let one another grow and become strong, equilibrium, center of balance, upright certainty are lacking in body and soul. But that which becomes most profoundly sick and degenerates in such hybrids is the will: they no longer have any conception of independence of decision, of the valiant feeling of pleasure in willing—even in their dreams they doubt the "freedom of the will." Our Europe of today, the scene of a senselessly sudden attempt at radical class—and consequently race-mixture, is as a result skeptical from top to bottom, now with that agile skepticism which springs impatiently and greedily from branch to branch, now gloomily like a cloud overcharged with question marks and often sick to death of its will! Paralysis of will: where does one not find this cripple sitting today! (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 208)

The most frequent practice is for those of higher rank to name themselves according to their superiority in matters of power (as 'the powerful, 'the masters', 'those who command'), or according to the most visible sign of this superiority, as, for example, 'the wealthy', 'the owners' (that is the meaning of ARYA; and similar formulations can be found in Persian and Slavic)....The Latin malus [bad] (beside which I set melas [Greek: black, dark]) may designate the vulgar man as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired man ("hic niger est—" [From Horace's Satires]), as the pre-Aryan occupant of the soil of Italy who was distinguished most obviously from the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race by his color; Gaelic, at any rate, offers us a precisely similar case—fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguishing word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed, in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabitants. The Celts, incidentally, were a thoroughly blond race; it is wrong to associate traces of an essentially dark-haired people which appear on the more careful ethnographical maps of Germany with any sort of Celtic origin or blood-mixture, as Virchow still does: it is rather the pre-Aryan people of Germany who emerge in these places. (The same is true of virtually all Europe: the suppressed race has gradually recovered the upper hand again, in coloring, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can say whether modern democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially that inclination for "commune," for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack—and that the conqueror and MASTER RACE, the Aryan, is not succumbing physiologically, too?....Our German gut [good] even: does it not signify "THE GODLIKE," the man of "GODLIKE RACE"? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble) name of the Goths? (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 5)

By way of comfort to the milksops, I would also venture the suggestion that in those days pain did not hurt as much as it does today; at least, that might be the conclusion of a physician who has treated Negroes (these taken as representative of primitive man--) for serious cases of internal inflammation; such inflammation would bring even the best organized European to the brink of despair--but this is not the case with Negroes. (On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 7)

Such a feeling of depression…may be the result of the miscegenation of too heterogeneous races (or of classes—genealogical and racial differences are also brought out in the classes: the European `Weltschmerz,' the `Pessimism' of the nineteenth century, is really the result of an absurd and sudden class-mixture. (On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, 17)

The last few weeks have brought me an essential teaching: I found the Lawbook of Manu . . . This absolutely Aryan product, a priestly codex of primeval heritage -- not pessimistic, however priestly it may be--expands my notions about religion in the most remarkable way. I cannot escape the impression that everything else that we possess about great moral regulations appears to me to be an imitation and even a caricature of this book: above all Egyptianism; but even Plato appears to me in all his main points to be simply well educated by a Brahman. The Jews appear to be a chandala race that learned from their masters the principles according to which a priestly caste becomes master and a people is organized . . . . Medieval organization seems like a strange and halting attempt to regain the notions on which the ancient Indian-Aryan society rested -- but with pessimistic values that have their origin in the soil of race decadence. -- The Jews appear to be merely "mediators" -- they invented nothing. (Nietzsche, letter to Peter Gast, Samtliche Briefe, vol. VIII, 325.)

It is quite in order that we possess no religion of oppressed Aryan races, for that is a contradiction: a master race is either on top or it is destroyed. (The Will to Power, 145)

The Jews tried to prevail after they had lost two of their castes, that of the warrior and that of the peasant; in this sense they are the `castrated' ones: they have the priests—and then immediately the chandala—... Because they knew the warrior only as their master, they brought into their religion enmity toward the noble, toward the exalted and proud, toward power, toward the ruling orders—: they are pessimists from indignation—Thus they created an important new posture: the priest at the head of the chandala—against the noble orders—...(WTP 184)

The Jewish instinct of the `chosen': they claim all the virtues for themselves without further ado, and count the rest of the world their opposites; a profound sign of a vulgar soul. (WTP 197)

People of the basest origin, in part rabble, outcasts not only from good but also from respectable society, raised away from even the smell of culture, without discipline, without knowledge, without the remotest suspicion that there is such a thing as conscience in spiritual matters; simply - Jews[.] (WTP 199)

I point to something new: certainly for such a democratic type there exists the danger of the barbarian, but one has looked for it only in the depths. There exists also another type of barbarian, who comes from the heights: a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold. Prometheus was this kind of barbarian. (WTP 900)

What means one has to employ with rude peoples, and that 'barbarous' means are not arbitrary and capricious, becomes palpable in practice as soon as one is placed, with all one's European pampering, in the necessity of keeping control over barbarians, in the Congo or elsewhere. (WTP 922)

There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. (I am not speaking here of the little word "von" or of the Almanach de Gotha [Genealogy reference book of the royal families of Europe.]: parenthesis for asses.) When one speaks of "aristocrats of the spirit," reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something; as is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble; rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit.-- What then is required? Blood. (WTP, 942)

The real issue is the production of the synthetic man… Lower men, the tremendous majority, are merely preludes and rehearsals out of whose medley the whole man appears here and there, the milestone man who indicates how far humanity has advanced so far. (The Will to Power, 881)

A question constantly keeps coming back to us, a seductive and wicked question perhaps: may it be whispered into the ears of those who have a right to such questionable questions, the strongest souls of today, whose best control is over themselves: is it not time, now that the type `herd animal' is being evolved more and more in Europe, to make the experiment of a fundamental, artificial and conscious breeding of the opposite type and its virtues? And would it not be a kind of goal, redemption, and justification of the democratic movement itself if someone arrived who could make use of it—by finally producing beside its new and sublime development of slavery (--that is what European democracy must become ultimately) a higher kind of dominating and Caesarian spirits who would stand upon it, maintain themselves by it, and elevate themselves through it? To new, hitherto impossible prospects, to their own prospects? (The Will to Power, 954)

I write for a species of man that does not yet exist: for the `masters of the earth.' (The Will to Power, 958)

There, that feels better, doesn't it? --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 08:57, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

it should be noted that this is an article about the person. there are other articles about his philosophy. --Buridan 17:22, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I find your 'liberalism' as incompatible with modernism as i find your devotion to Hitler, in so far as modernism has much more evidently been tied to Marxism or Adornoan post-enlightment. Greetings from 'the gay modernist science'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.223.55.97 (talk • contribs)

This writer, who declined to sign his or her contribution, shared 19 direct quotes from Nietzsche's writings in order to give substance to his or her own neo-Nazi POV. The whole contribution harmonizes with the recent scholarship that I cited from Yovel, Aschheim, Wistrich, Derrida and others, which finds Nietzsche's writings so compatible with anti-Semitism and fascism. Notice how smoothly the quotations fit the politics of the writer. One should at least admit that this writer knows how to quote Friedrich Nietzsche to make the radical right-wing case. Petrejo 05:50, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Nietzsche was not anti-semetic, in fact, in the small sections he does talk about eugenics, he talks about the important inclusion of the Jews. Nietzsche also saw the state as product of the herd, he craed the breeding of human excellence, which he believed could not be compatible with a social view of equality. How he intended to implement this was never elaborated because Nietzche was not concerned with political matters in large, especially the forming of a political system. Though it is clear he advocated a aristocracy, and he did not believe in equality... though it is also clear Nietzsche believed greatness not to be caused by race, material wealth or the like. He viewed greatness as a happy accident, we sometimes devoted his though on how to achieve a stratified society in which the breeding of excellent human beings was the goal. He calls racial purity a "mendacious race swindle", he calls the idea prevailing at the time of germans being pure blooded as nonsensical , and he (aside from keeping Jewish friends like Paul Ree) alienated himself from Wagner as well as his sister after she married that Anti-semite. He held contempt for the Deutscheland uber-alles movement, as well as social Darwinists like Hurbert SPencer that promoted a 'might makes right' ethic. His overman would never be used outside of his Zarathustra, as it was merely a rhetorical mechanism to attmpt to better man, and then move past him to even better pastures. But, he did not view this in a darwinism manner, he saw Darwinism and natural selection to be advatagous to the herd and at the expense of greatness due to the fact of the great being overwhelmed by the herd. I suggest a more cogent approach to Nietzsches Philoosphy, one that includes a summary of the aims of his books. The list by concept is a good idea, but it is far from complete.

In support of the user above, I fail to see why an attack of Judaism should be considered an attack against ethnic Jewishness? Especially the user who started the section should ask himself, why an attack against the history of Judaism, something already-done, should have anything to do with support for action against Jews, something to be must-done. Neither did Nietzsche completely seem to ignore Wagner's anti-semitism, as previously argued, but his hostility towards the "reichdeutsch", as he called Wagner in Ecce Homo, was against the concept of a German "volk". The german ideal agains the french (exact quote missing) - was what he heard in the overture of Die Meistersinger. User:The Gay Modernist Science

Photo

Would anyone mind if I found a different photo to use for the article? I've never seen the one that's currently being used before, and I don't think it's as iconic as some of the ones I've seen. Like this one: http://vietsciences.free.fr/biographie/artists/writers/images/nietzsche.jpgEnigma00 19:21, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

The 'canonical' Nietzsche images are so well-used on book covers that I (personally) am bored of them. I like the current image. Add other images by all means, (the images stop half way through the article), but I'd say keep the current top image. Other opinions? --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 23:25, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough; you're right that the usual ones are somewhat over-used, and this one certainly is different, but I suppose I just like the more iconic ones better, heh. We'll see if anybody else has anything to say about it; it's not really a huge deal.Enigma00 16:05, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I like the current photo. — goethean ॐ 16:05, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

We need a photo that displays Nietzsche's diminutive earflaps and obvious moustachic overcompensation. .Lestrade 16:20, 7 July 2006 (UTC)Lestrade

It sounds like you enjoy the catatonic pictures most of all. — goethean ॐ 16:37, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I found them supremely sad in that a man of such hyper-brilliance could be reduced to such a low condition.Lestrade 16:47, 7 July 2006 (UTC)Lestrade

POV

I read the archives of the talk page and failed to find a comprehensive summary of what is actually POV in the article. In other words, can anyone summarize the arguments why this article is POV and what is needed to make it NPOV? Please keep your arguments brief and don't put kilobytes of quotations here. (Igny 19:25, 13 July 2006 (UTC))

I believe the major source of the POV complaint is that the article is remarkably uncritical of Nietzsche, especially given the history of interpreting him as a sort of forefather of Nazism. -Smahoney 01:48, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

I am removing the POV tag. Those editors who believe the article needs NPOV'ng please state proposals to move forward. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 18:04, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I believe the article needs NPOV'ing, Jossi, and I'll state my proposal below, in detail, in the form of paragraphs and quotations from secondary sources. Petrejo 01:38, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

To summarize this suggestion/criticism (posted in more detail below). There is a controversy about Nietzsche versus Judaism and/or Antisemitism which has to be addressed in the article. I think a few sentences with a few quotes should suffice, right? Otherwise, a whole new article may be written (similar to Nietzsche's social and political views). (Igny 13:20, 17 July 2006 (UTC))

Suggested addition

In the interest of Wikipedia procedures for editing a controversial article, I'm submitting a few paragraphs for group consideration and editing. These paragraphs deal with the material that I've already contributed that has been erased several times, except that these paragraphs use quotations from secondary sources instead of from Nietzsche himself. Under the Wikipedia rules, I'm willing to presume 'good faith', and try again. (My quotations below are a select few of those already posted in this discussion list, viz. essays within Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? , and also The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990.) Here are my proposed paragraphs:

Although Nietzsche attacked anti-Semites throughout his literature, we may not conclude from this fact that he was also a supporter of the Jewish race and culture. Although Nietzsche often said flattering things about the Jewish race and culture, even that is not sufficient evidence to conclude that he was also their supporter, because Nietzsche also said many negative and harmful things about Jews in his writings.

These writings, moreover, go beyond his disputed, Will to Power, which was published post-mortem by his sister, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, whose openly anti-Semitic husband clashed with Nietzsche on this topic. Remarks hostile to Judaism can be found in Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and Beyond Good and Evil. For example, Dr. YirmiYahu Yovel writes:

Nietzsche's attack on ancient priestly Judaism is as fierce and uncompromising as his assault on anti-Semitism.

— YirmiYahu Yovel, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ibid, p. 134

And also,

...The Jewish priests, pictured as early Christians, have created the 'slave morality' that official Christianity then propagated throughout the world. Whereas the anti-Semite accuses the Jews of having killed Christ, Nietzsche accuses them of having begotten him...Ancient Judaism...is grounded in ressentiment and is responsible for the corruption of Europe through Christianity.

— YirmiYahu Yovel, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ibid, p. 135

As Jacques Derria wrote:

Now, if...the only politics calling itself Nietzschean turned out to be a Nazi one, then this is necessarily significant...One can't falsify just anything.

— Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, p. 47

The question of Nietzsche's harmonic with the Nazi era was rarely dealt with in America in the past 50 years, partly due to the influence of Professor Walter Kaufmann. K.R. Fischer writes:

Walter Kaufmann and some other anti-Nazi intellectuals have...denied that there is any connection between Nietzsche and the Nazis. Their view has prevailed in the educated public, certainly in the United States, where many who followed Kaufmann's example neglected to notice Nietzsche's passion and ferocity, or turned to those aspects of his work in which the question of fascism plays no role at all...Nietzsche was not that unrelated to Hitler and Nazism, contrary to what the Kaufmann school has implied.

— Kurt Rudolph Fischer, A Godfather Too: Nazism as a Nietzschean Experiment, ibid, p. 294

And also,

Walter Kaufmann's readings of Nietzsche are invariably 'gentle.'

— Kurt Rudolph Fischer, A Godfather Too: Nazism as a Nietzschean Experiment, ibid, p. 297

The same criticism of Walter Kaufmann was also expressed by other scholars. For example, Steven Aschheim writes:

The hermeneutical question concerning 'the real Nietzsche' since 1945 has been indissolubly linked to his relationship with Nazism. The issue is still with us. The dominant postwar images -- embodied in the opposed representations of Georg Lukacs and Walter Kaufmann -- have either condemned Nietzsche as centrally complicit in the Nazi evil or lauded him for being unblemished and opposed to all Nazism's intentions and actions.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 315

And also,

Walter Kaufmann's 'gentle,' sterilized portrait so ignored or de-natured the power-political dimensions of Nietzsche, as Walter Sokel has suggested, that readers must have felt baffled that anyone could possibly have attempted to make the Nietzsche-Nazi connection.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 316

Setting Walter Kaufmann's mild reading of Nietzsche aside for a moment, we can peruse the writings of a number of scholars who find more than a passing connection between the anti-Christian writings of Nietzsche and the Christophobic writings of the Nazi leaders. R.S. Wistrich writes:

[There was] something elusive in Nietzsche's fragmented, diffuse and lyrical oeuvre -- experimental in method, aphoristic in style and anti-systematic in nature -- that laid itself open to such uses and abuses, to multiple and opposed interpretations, not to say misappropriations; so much so, that it often seems difficult to ascertain who the 'real' Nietzsche was or if such a person actually existed.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 145

Steven Aschheim (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) adds an interesting perspective to Nietzsche’s alleged anti-Semitism:

Nietzsche's comments on the Jews were particularly relevant. He was hailed for performing a service to the history of the world with his insight into the history of Israel as 'the de-naturalization of natural values.' Nazism was clearly the counter-movement leading to drive to re-naturalization.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 244

And also,

...In his own way, Nietzsche was the most acute anti-Semite that ever was: he was the most radical discoverer of the unholy role that Judaism played in the spiritual history of Europe. His demonstration that Christianity was the ultimate Jewish blood poisoning made the Jews the most fateful people of world history.

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 245

And also,

Nietzsche only dismissed that anti-Semitism which was limited to the confessional, economic and social domains, overlooking the biological dimension...Nietzsche became a crucial source for that radicalized drive designated by Uriel Tal as 'anti-Christian anti-Semitism.'

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 251

And also,

Maurice Samuel's 1940 studies in anti-Semitism...identified the anti-Christian nature of revolutionary Nazi anti-Semitism and insisted upon Nietzsche's central shaping role."

— Steven Aschheim, 1992, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990, p. 282

In view of this, the popular notion that Nietzsche broke with composer Richard Wagner over anti-Semitism should be reviewed. If Nietzsche had a falling out with Wagner over Wagner's loud and boisterous anti-Semitism, one cannot well explain why Nietzsche maintained their relationship for ten years, since Wagner was an ardent anti-Semite all his life. Evidently, Nietzsche disliked most anti-Semites, however he tolerated Wagner for ten years. In support of this view I would cite Robert Wistrich, who wrote:

Nietzsche's complex relationship with Wagner which began in 1868, when at the age of 24 he first came under the maestro's spell in Tribschen, is clearly critical to any assessment of his attitude to Jews, Judaism, Germanism and Christianity.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 149

And also,

The young Nietzsche had initially been bowled over by the 'fabulously lively and fiery' Wagner. Not only was the composer witty, entertaining and a musical genius, but also a father figure to venerate and to fear. No doubt when he aped the anti-Jewish slurs of the Wagners (Cosima was at times even more virulent than her husband), he may have genuinely believed the 'Jewish press' had been persecuting his much idolized mentor.

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 149

And also,

Although he was strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, Nietzsche nonetheless blamed the Jews for the 'denaturalization of natural values' implemented by Christianity. The Jews had 'made humanity into something so false that, still today, a Christian can feel anti-Semitic without understanding himself as the last stage of Judaism.'

— Robert S. Wistrich, Between the Cross and the Swastika: a Nietzschean Perspective, ibid, p. 154

We can more carefully review Nietzsche's own anti-Semitic leanings from the vantage of a wider reading in Nietzsche’s impassioned prose. For example, Daniel W. Conway wrote:

Although his enmity for the anti-Semites occasionally eclipsed Nietzsche's suspicions of the Jews, his Judeophobia was deeper and more complex.

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 175

And also,

...Nietzsche's claims to an enlightened cosmopolitanism were often exaggerated. In many respects, in fact, his understanding of the Jews differed little from those of the anti-Semites whom he meant to oppose...He described the Jews as asocial wanderers, cheaters in the grand game of cultural advancement, falsifiers of nature, resentful spoilers of empire, cunning necromancers...and so on.

— Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations, Daniel W. Conway, ibid, p. 186

In view of this, we should also reconsider the popular notion that Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, is to blame for forgeries that made Nietzsche appear to be an anti-Semite. For example, R.C. Holub writes:

The Elisabeth legend has become so widespread and powerful that it is hardly ever questioned...Examples of the propagation of unfounded charges against Elisabeth abound...Nietzsche has been consistently extricated from his Nazi entanglements by regarding Elisabeth as the chief architect of his fascistic reputation. The legend that currently circulates is as spurious as the one that the postwar scholars destroyed, and as false as the Nietzsche legend that Elisabeth propagated.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, pp. 220-221

And also,

But Elisabeth, for all her good and bad qualities, did not bias her brother's work in a way that made him acceptable to fascism. She did not distort his thought on issues essential to National Socialism, and she cannot be held responsible -- certainly not to the degree that she has been held responsible since the fifties -- for the fact that Nietzsche was widely identified with the Nazi political regime.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 221

And also,

Elisabeth did not slant her depiction of Nietzsche toward anti-Semitism because she knew that he was virulently opposed to it. With regard to his view on Jews and anti-Semites there is absolutely no evidence that she attempted to falsify the record.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 226

And also,

But Nietzsche also wrote about war and cruelty in an extremely positive and troubling fashion, praising the warrior ethos and promulgating a European hegemony over the entire earth. Finally, Nietzsche was against all movements of his time that promoted equality in the social, political or economic realm. He railed against democracy, parliamentary systems, the feminist movement, and socialism. He incessantly lauded hierarchy and declared himself, if necessary, in favor of slavery...Some of his views...were quite susceptible to exploitation by the 3rd Reich.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, pp. 228-229

And also,

It is time we ceased scapegoating Elisabeth for the Nazi version of Nietzsche and understand this unfortunate chapter in his reception as an effort to which Nietzsche himself and a host of his perhaps unwanted disciples made the most seminal contributions.

— The Elisabeth Legend, Robert C. Holub, ibid, p. 231

There is ample current scholarship on these topics to raise doubts about the mild moralist portrait that Walter Kaufmann bequeathed to us about Friedrich Nietzsche. It should be included in any balanced evaluation of Nietzsche's asserted contribution to the science of Ethics. Petrejo 01:38, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I have some issues with this suggestion. The first is stylistic - references should be footnoted, not in the form of inline quotes. One or two, at most, inline quotes in a given section is more than sufficient. Second, and this is also partly stylistic, I'm not sure what case you're trying to make. Are you specifically arguing against a particular interpretation of Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner, or are you arguing that Nietzsche himself had anti-Semitic beliefs? Or are you arguing that there is some relationship between Nietzsche and Nazism? This brings me to my final issue, which has to do with what is appropriate here, and what isn't: Regardless of what you're arguing here, it is clear that you are arguing something. The problem with this is that you don't really get a voice when writing an encyclopedia article - your sole task here is to arrange bits of information in order to provide an account of whatever topic you are dealing with, and it is very much clear that you are trying to do more than that here. You are making recommendations to the reader as to what s/he should believe, and as to how they should be reading the texts. You are referring to yourself, the author, in the first person, and you are making a case for something. There's a fine line between presenting information in a cogent way and making an argument, and it is fairly clear that you have crossed it here. My advice would be to identify one or two major arguments made in your sources, describe them and the readings that accompany them, adequately cite those descriptions, and leave it at that. -Smahoney 02:26, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I would agree with Smahoney. You can have a section about Nietzsche and antisemitism, and describe the controversy by summarizing it and provide citations of secondrary sources as footnotes. Inclusion of carefuly selected quotes, without describing opposing views by citing other sources that assert a different viewpoint, can be construed as non-encyclopedic and in contradiction to WP:NOT and WP:NPOV. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 02:49, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, and somewhat more details may be included into Nietzsche's social and political views.(Igny 13:25, 17 July 2006 (UTC))

OK, I've taken your advice, folks, and wrote a second draft. One difference: I've included one in-line quote, and that's because it's already included in the current article as an in-line quote. Your comments are welcome. Petrejo 03:54, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Suggested addition - 2nd draft

The following quotation from a letter Nietzsche wrote to his sister, Elisabeth, is often counted as adequate to demonstrate with conclusiveness that Nietzsche not only disliked anti-Semites, but he was also sympathetic to Jews and Judaism:

You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. … It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well) is as pronounced as possible.

— - Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to His Sister, Christmas 1887

However, recent scholarship has reversed challenged this view. Nietzsche also said many negative and harmful things about Jews in his writings, and these should also be accounted for. YirmiYahu Yovel (2004) identified remarks hostile to Judaism in Nietzsche's writings other than his Will to Power (which several writers in the mid-20th century have attempted to blame on Elisabeth, citing her marriage to an anti-Semitic fanatic citation needed). According to Yovel, the anti-Semite accuses Jews of having killed Christ, but Nietzsche accuses Jews of having begotten Christ. citation needed

Note: We don't need to tell readers what should be accounted for.

Walter Kaufmann firmly denied any connection between Nietzsche and anti-Semitism, and his view has prevailed among the educated public, especially in the United States. Yet Kurt R. Fischer (2002) suggests that Americans who followed Kaufmann's example haven't noticed "Nietzsche's passion and ferocity". citation needed' Fischer held that Kaufmann's readings of Nietzsche are always gentle, and Steven Aschheim (1992) called Kaufmann's portrait of Nietzsche, "gentle", citation needed and "sterilized," citation needed while Walter Sokel (1990) said that Kaufmann's portrait of Nietzsche was "de-natured."

Note: If this is to be included, it needs to be made clear what these authors meant by applying these attributes to Nietzsche's writing.'

Certainly Kaufmann lauds Nietzsche for being unblemished and opposed to all Nazi intents and acts. However, Steven Aschheim called Nietzsche, "the most acute anti-Semite that ever was." citation needed This is because in his book, The Antichrist, Nietzsche postulated a most unholy role which Judaism played in Europe's spiritual history, namely, that Christianity was the ultimate Jewish blood poisoning, giving birth to Christianity, and so, according to him, the Jews were the most fateful people of world history.

Although it is true that Nietzsche did dislike anti-Semites intensely, and Nietzsche did say many flattering things about Jews -- things which Nazi leaders attempted to suppress citation needed -- as early as 1940, Maurice Samuel's studies in anti-Semitism pinpointed the specifically Antichrist nature of Nazi anti-Semitism, and he insisted upon Nietzsche's central role in shaping it. citation needed

To counter views like this it is often cited that Nietzsche broke his relationship with the composer Richard Wagner because Wagner expressed an outlandish form of anti-Semitism. However, Robert Wistrich (1998) wrote that Nietzsche was only 24 when he began his tutelage under Richard Wagner, and he was 34 years old when he broke with him. Wistrich finds this fact to be clearly critical to any assessment of Nietzsche's attitude towards Jews and Judaism, because Wagner was a loud and boisterous anti-Semite for all of those 10 years. When Nietzsche served as Wagner's press writer for many of those years, he would himself write anti-Jewish slurs in sympathy with Wagner, and would blame the "Jewish press" for critical opera reviews. citation needed

Wistrich frankly admits that Nietzsche was strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, but he also asks us to balance this view with opposing facts. For example, according to Daniel W. Conway, though Nietzsche's contempt for anti-Semites sometimes obscured Nietzsche's suspicions of the Jews, Nietzsche exhibited a deeper and more complex "Judeophobia". citation needed

In response to the popular notion that Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, is to blame for forgeries that made Nietzsche appear to be an anti-Semite, Robert C. Holub (1999) complains of an "Elisabeth legend" that is so widespread that it is hardly ever questioned. Holub does not defend all of Foerster-Nietzsche's behavior, but he firmly denies that she twisted Nietzsche's writings to adapt them to fascism. Also, Holub insists that she didn't put any anti-Semitic words into Nietzsche's pages because she was very aware that he was hotly opposed to it.

Rather, says Holub, it was Nietzsche himself who wrote about war and cruelty in a positive and most troubling manner, praising the warrior ethic and advancing the notion of European hegemony over the whole world. Nietzsche denounced any movements that promoted social, political or economic equality, including democracy, parliaments, feminism and socialism. Nietzsche continually praised hierarchy and even, in certain cases, advocated slavery. These things were written before Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche had control of the Nietzsche archive.

There appears to be ample scholarship today to question the efforts of those who would scrub Nietzsche's writings clean of any and all attraction to fascists, anti-Semites and Nazi partisans. As Jacques Derrida wrote:

Now, if...the only politics calling itself Nietzschean turned out to be a Nazi one, then this is necessarily significant...One can't falsify just anything.

— — Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other p. 47

Petrejo 03:54, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

I made some suggested corrections. As a final suggestion, pick one or two strong points and focus on those - this section is far too long (the article is going to be fairly long already). -Smahoney 01:16, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Allow me to proceed methodically with your corrections, Smahoney. First, you've asked for a number of citations -- and you said earlier that you don't want them in-line. Those citations were already supplied in my 1st draft, so we have them ready-to-hand; my question is, what's the exact format that you require? Is there a Wikipedia model? Secondly, as for the lines you deleted, I can accept that. So, let's see what this addition looks like after these corrections are completed, Smahoney, and that will help me take further steps. Thanks for your input. Petrejo 05:21, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

For an idea of how references should look (in the final version - footnotes would only complicate things here), check out [5]. Here's the gist: When you're quoting someone or referring to something specific that someone said, you need page numbers. Every quote or reference needs a citation when it refers to a different quotation, section, or idea, even if its in the same paragraph. When you're referring to a book, you need a citation to that book. When you're referring to a general idea contained in a book, you don't need page numbers, but you do need all the rest of the info. While they're still being worked on, you can find information on wikipedia policies regarding sources at Wikipedia:Cite your sources, Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Common knowledge, and Wikipedia: Reliable sources. For technical information on how the citation notation works, see [6].

Finally, I'm urging you once again to consider the length of this section in relation to what will already be a long article - it is just too long, and will likely be trimmed by other editors, so if there are one or two key ideas that you would like to get across, I would suggest writing a couple paragraphs focusing on those. -Smahoney 20:37, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Very well, Smahoney, I've taken all your advice; I used the reference model that you shared, as I read it, and I reduced the length of my section by about half. My third draft is below. I appreciate your comments, and I invite other editors to express their views. Thanks again. Petrejo 05:18, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

It's been some days now, Smahoney, and nobody has edited my 3rd draft. Does that suggest that I can finally post it to the article now, with some assurance that it won't be continually erased? Petrejo 07:55, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Suggested addition - 3nd draft

There's another dimension of Nietzche's attitudes toward the Jews that should be considered. (Not really necessary, stylistically inappropriate)

According to Yovel (YirmiYahu Yovel 2002, p. 134), Nietzsche's attack on ancient priestly Judaism was as fierce and uncompromising as his assault on anti-Semitism. Yovel also wrote (ibid. p. 135), that the anti-Semite accused Jews of having killed Christ, but Nietzsche accused Jews of having begotten Christ. According to Yovel, Nietzsche said that ancient Judaism is grounded in ressentiment and is responsible for the corruption of Europe through Christianity.

Walter Kaufmann had defended Nietzsche from all charges of anti-Semitism, and his view has prevailed in the educated public, especially in the USA. Yet Fischer (Kurt R. Fischer 2002, p. 294), suggests that Americans who followed Kaufmann's example haven't noticed "Nietzsche's passion and ferocity." Fischer held that Kaufmann's readings of Nietzsche are always gentle. (Doesn't really add anything)

Also, Steven Aschheim (Steven Aschheim 1992, p. 315) called Walter Kaufmann's portrait of Nietzsche "gentle," and "sterilized," and he said Sokel (Walter Sokel, ibid. p. 316)characterized Kaufmann's portrait of Nietzsche as "de-natured." (Nature of this criticism isn't clear, so it doesn't add anything)

Kaufmann praised Nietzsche as unblemished and opposed to all Nazi intents and acts. However, Steven Aschheim (Steven Aschheim 1992, p. 245) called Nietzsche, "the most acute anti-Semite that ever was," because in The Antichrist, Nietzsche imagined a most unholy role that Judaism played in Europe's spiritual history, namely, Christianity itself, making the Jews "the most fateful people of world history." This new variety of anti-Semitism he called, "anti-Christian anti-Semitism." (This "new variety of anti-Semitism" is hardly new - Voltaire, for example, engaged in it as well)

Also, Conway wrote (Daniel W. Conway 2002, p. 175) that although Nietzsche's contempt for anti-Semites sometimes obscured his suspicions of the Jews, Nietzsche exhibited a "deeper and more complex Judeophobia". (This, as is, is little more than an ad hominem - if there were some argument by Conway to suppoort it, that might be fine)

A rising chorus among scholars today questions those who would scrub Nietzsche's writings clean of any and all attraction to anti-Semitism. (Stylistically inappropriate, and doesn't add anything)

Petrejo 05:18, 26 July 2006 (UTC)