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 Nietzsche contra the Nazis

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PostSubject: Nietzsche contra the Nazis   Nietzsche contra the Nazis Icon_minitimeThu Dec 15, 2011 10:11 am

I wanted to paste some thoughts I presented in a thread on ILP.


"Even accepting your [trajicomic] thesis, Hitler would be only one possibility of a value-creator. One twisted and failed one. And this destruction of the old values is not what Nietzsche suggested. Nor did he posit individualism as the antithesis to the monolithic cultural empire. The antithesis to it which he posited was world-culture, the systematization and organization of all world values from the Greeks to the Christians. How could they all be grasped systematically? Through the transvaluation, which Nietzsche tried to accomplish. This would have used the will to power as a heuristic principle for organizing all human values into a kind of hierarchy based on which values promoted the will to power the most, and which, the least. When this was accomplished, we would have a world-culture, with which to create a kind of higher culture never before seen on earth. Without this kind of knowledge there can be no real "creation" of new values. It would form a kind of science which would allow man to begin construction of new, original valuations of life."



"He [Nietzsche] was not speaking in evolutionary terms at all, I don't know where you get that. Let's drop the hostility for a moment and look at this. Uberman means overman, superman, beyond man. Not postman. There is no temporal connotation.


elevation: "überdacht" - roof-covered, roofed, [also: reconsidered, thought over]
quantity: "über 100 Meter" - more than 100 meters, "Überschall" - supersonic
superiority: "überlegen" - (adj) superior, elite, predominant. (verb) to consider
excess: "übertreiben" - to exaggerate, "überfüllt" - overcrowded


World-culture. It isn't directly political. Nietzsche's mature thought was bent on grasping systematically, organically, as a system, the entire sum of culture, throughout all time. He wanted to grasp in one system a hierarchy and organization of all human values. That system would be the basis of a "world-culture."



The destruction of the past would not have been inevitable if human beings were not so fucking stupid. Not the destruction of the old values, but their transvaluation, that is what Nietzsche wanted. He would have used (if he hadn't gone insane) the will to power as a principle to organize all human values into a system, a hierarchy starting with all the life-denying values and leading up to those which most affirmed life and promoted the will to power. Doubtlessly Nietzsche would have put the eternal return at the very top.


Once this system was developed, it would serve as a kind of science. The philosophers of the future would have used it to construct new values. There need not be any destruction of either abstract values or human beings through this process, the process Nietzsche always spoke about.



This is why Hitler failed as a creator of value. His art was not informed by techne, by a science, by the kind of system Nietzsche was trying to develop and which I just described. You can't just assert values out of thin air, they have to be based on something. And the only thing, to Nietzsche's mind, they could be based on was that system I am talking about. Hitler didn't fucking have it, and Nietzsche never was able to complete his construction of it."





"This coming phenomenon, moreover, may be connected with another to be found in every nation: I mean the diffusion of culture, and its acquisition by ever larger categories of individuals.

An attempt to predict the consequences of such diffusion, or to find whether it will or not inevitably bring on decadence, would be a delightfully complicated problem in intellectual physics.

The charm of the problem for the speculative mind proceeds, first, from its resemblance to the physical fact of diffusion and, next, from a sudden transformation into a profound difference when the thinker remembers that his primary object is men not molecules.

A drop of wine falling into water barely colors it, and tends to disappear after showing as a pink cloud. That is the physical fact. But suppose now that some time after it has vanished, gone back to limpidity, we should see, here and there in our glass -- which seemed once more to hold pure water -- drops of wine forming, dark and pure -- what a surprise!...

This phenomenon of Cana is not impossible in intellectual and social physics. We then speak of genius, and contrast it with diffusion.

Just now we are considering a curious balance that worked in inverse ratio to weight. Then we saw a liquid system pass as though spontaneously from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from intimate mingling to clear separation.... These paradoxical images give the simplest and most practical notion of the role played in the World by what -- for five or ten thousand years -- has been called Mind.

But can the European Mind -- or at least its most precious content -- be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe...must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of things?

Perhaps in seeking that freedom we may create it. But in order to seek it, we must for a time give up considering groups, and study the thinking individual in his struggle for a personal life against his life in society." - Paul Valery.






"Nietzsche's systematic presentation of all human values, the basis of a world-culture and moreover a culture of value creators (geniuses, to use Valery's language) whose creation is informed by this science, this techne or technical knowledge, was Nietzsche's answer to Valery's crisis, the diffusion of culture."
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PostSubject: Re: Nietzsche contra the Nazis   Nietzsche contra the Nazis Icon_minitimeThu Dec 15, 2011 10:15 am

It's so depressing to me how many people miss this fact. The fact of this techne or technical knowledge, this new science, which must underlie the value-creator's acts of creation, inform and make them possible, and moreover that Nietzsche left this science uncompleted.
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