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Tuesday 27 December 2005

In early 20th century Nietzsche studies, the Christ/Caesar formula importuned many thinkers and doers. The Nietzsche-influenced thinker Spengler proclaimed his historical/philosophic doctrine of 'Caesarism' ;
"The coming phase of history will henceforth be lived out far above economic crises and the ideals of domestic politics. Elemental forces of life itself are now entering the fray where the stakes are all or nothing. The prototypes of Caesarism will soon become more clearly defined, more conscious, more brazen. The masks surviving from the parliamentary age of transition will fall away entirely. All attempts to determine the shape of the future within political parties will be forgotten. The fascist formulations of these decades will turn into new ones as yet unpredictable, and even nationalism as we know it will disappear...The Legions of Caesar are reawakening ". [Spengler, 'Years of Decision',1933]

Spengler was always prophetic, but we can see that his Caesarism lacks the mastery of the Christ Soul. It is a barren Caesarism.Karl Jaspers in 1938 wrote 'Nietzsche and Christianity'. A quote from this is very suggestive to our line of inquiry;
"The most amazing attempts to bring togather again into a higher unity what Nietzsche has first separated and opposed to each other...the synthesis of the ultimate opposition".
We have already argued that Nietzsche rejects 'antithetical values', and so can't quite go along with what Jaspers says here, but we at least think that Nietzsche intended to carry forward the Christ Soul in his Transvaluation.

Jasper's talk of synthesis, higher unities, is Hegelian, and is typical of how Nietzsche was interpreted by those men of thought and action in the 1920's and 30's.

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