On Being Nietzschean, III

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THE HAMMER SPEAKS
"Why so hard?" the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. "After all, are we not close kin?'
Why so soft? O, my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?
Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?
And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?
And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut and cut through, how can you one day create with me?
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on bronze-harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
This new tablet, O my bothers, I place over you: become hard!
Zarathustra

The best book for Nietzsche's ideas on morality is his;
'The Genealogy of Morality'[GM] - this was intended to expand on certain ideas contained in 'Beyond Good and Evil'[BGE], and has become a classic in its own right.

The books by Nietzsche that I would recommend from an Aryan perspective are then;

GM,
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
The Antichrist,
Twilight of the Idols,
Daybreak,
The Will to Power.

The last-named book is an interesting collection of notebooks published posthumously.

I personally favour the pre-First World War English translations of Nietzsche's works. Later translations try to make Nietzsche into a liberal/existentialist thinker, and therefore distort his work [incidentally it is the early translation of Zarathustra by T.Common that has 'Thus Spake'; the latter ones have 'Thus Spoke' - I prefer T.Common's of course].

This brings us to the question of interpretation; there are many books ABOUT Nietzsche - most of them are worthless. I would particularly avoid Kaufman's books on Nietzsche (and his translations of Nietsche's works), as he is the main culprit for that 'Nietzsche as a liberal humanist' distortion.

There are few modern Aryan thinkers who have got to grips with Nietzsche, and I can only think of the latest edition of Michael Walker's magazine 'The Scorpion', which contains some interesting material.

As a basic introduction to Nietzsche interpretation I would recommend;
Mencken's 'The Philosophy of F.W.Nietzsche', which is from about 1908, I think.

As a testimony from someone who actually knew Nietzsche, I would recommend;
Lou von Salome's 'Nietzsche' [sometimes called 'Nietzsche Through his Works']; this is from the late 19th century.

The best of all is the following;
Martin Heidegger's 'Nietzsche' (2 vols). this is from lectures given by Heidegger in the 1930s as a member of the NSDAP.

Nietzsche's main doctrines are;

The Superhuman [this can be related to the attempt to create a Higher race].

The Eternal Recurrence of the Same [this is a Cosmological Total Outlook].

Amor Fati [- this means 'love as one's fate'; it relates to the courage to face adversity in total].

The Blond Beast [this is the first civilising Race of Aryans].

Master Morality vs. Slave Morality [this is the basic moral dichotomy in human culture, relating to a Racial dichotomy].

The Will to Power [this is Nietzsche's view of the very ground of being - or rather of Becoming].


Nietzsche is not an ideological thinker, nor is he a systematic thinker. Therefore there is much in his work which may seem contradictory; but this is superficial - Nietzsche is a deep thinker who always thinks both sides of every question.


Nietzsche's influence suddenly erupted in the last years of the 19th century, and by the early 1900s Nietzsche appealed to a wide range of intellectual cultural movements.
Not just in the West, but in Japan also.

Those on the 'anarchist left' took him up for his iconoclasm; those in the Eugenics movement saw him as a philosophical champion, while 'right wing' racial nationalists and Imperialists embraced his notions of the Uebermensch (Superhumans, Lords of the Earth), and Rangordnung (Order of Rank).

Mussolini was a Nietzschean who united the anarchistic trends of Futurism with rightist nationalism; and of course, the German National Socialists saw Nietzsche as one of the spiritual founders of their movement.

The defeat of the Axis powers meant that the pre-1945 reception of Nietzsche was virtually expunged from memory.
Jews like Kaufmann worked hard to serve up a 'humanist', and 'existentialist', Nietzsche.
The only mention of the pre-1945 popularity of Nietzsche amongst radical circles was along the lines of - "the Nazis" supposed 'distortion' of Nietzsche.

We now realize that the Eugenicist, Fascist, and National Socialist take on Nietzsche was the real one, and that the version of Nietzsche in today's intellectual establishments is the distorted one.
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"The maintenance of the military state is the last means of all of acquiring or maintaining the great tradition with regard to the supreme type of man, the strong type. And all concepts that perpetuate enmity and difference of rank between states - for example nationalism, protective tariffs - may be sanctioned in that light".
[Nietzsche, Thw Will To Power, 729]




Nihilism

While Nietzsche studied Nihilism, and recognised that this Nihilism was a condition of late European culture and therefore infects us all [and he did not exempt himself from that, calling himself at one time - with that relish of irony he knew so well - a 'perfect nihilist'], his whole philosophy was engaged with OVERCOMING Nihilism.
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Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

1) General Philosophical Context:

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am'.
This means that 'I' can be sure of my Self, as subject, but I cannot be sure of the existence of the objective world.

From this position is derived Absolute Idealism, which holds that the world itself is a product of my Self - therefore there is no objective world.

This philosophy is very influential on German Romanticism.

Kant seeks to overcome this solipsistic idealism by trying to prove the existence of an objective world, or 'thing in itself'.

2) Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer's reading of Kant makes the 'Will to life' that 'thing in itself'. To Schopenhauer, 'The World' is both 'Will' to life, and my 'Idea'.
This Will is the source of all suffering, however; and here Schopenhauer takes a Buddhistic turn and claims that only by renouncing that Will can man achieve happiness.

Schopenhauer also thought that the clearest impression that man can have of this Will is in music; on this basis he developed an aesthetics which was very influential on Wagner.

It was a mutual interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy that brought a young Nietzsche and an ageing Wagner together.

3) Nietzsche

In his first books [most notably 'The Birth of Tragedy'] Nietzsche was very much a Wagnerian/Schopenhauerian. However, with his 'Human All Too Human', Nietzsche broke with both men.

4) Nietzsche's modification of Schopenhauer.

To Nietzsche, the Will was 'The Will to Power'; whereas Schopenhauer taught renunciation, Nietzsche extolled the opposite: i.e., affirmation.
To Nietzsche the higher man, the Superhuman, must embrace life in its totality and affirm it, even in destruction.
Even as the Will to Power churns on endlessy in flux, the Strong Man must impose the Hammer of Being on all this Becoming.
That is heroism.

5) Dionysian

That latter quality is Nietzsche's mature Dionysianism.
It must be noted that the Apollonian/Dionysian dualism was a feature of his early period [e.g., 'The Birth of Tragedy'].
By his magnum opus 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' he had subsumed Apollo in Dionysos, and only now talks of Dionysos which is a synthesis of the two.
He saw that all dualities were rather different poles of the same thing [see 'Beyond Good and Evil', first chapter].
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Spengler makes the point, in his 'Decline of the West', that Schopenhauer's work was commensurate with the surge in Evolutionist thinking in the 19th century.

Schopenhauer's terrifying 'Will to Life' grinds on with the weak going to the wall, while the strong and cunning have their moments of survival and procreation.

Similar ideas are to be found in Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson and G.B. Shaw. This can also be related to Nietzsche's Will to Power, of course, as well as to Hitler's Social Darwinist view of Racial Development.

Another important influence of Schopenhauer is in the field of Psychology. It was after reading Schopenhauer that S.Freud crystalised his idea of the 'Unconscious', remembering that Schopenhauer's 'Will' is a blind, remorseless, and largely unknown Force.
Schopenhauer also brought the sexual urge into the concept of Will; this drive to procreate surely links the Freudians to the Darwinians.
Nationalist philosophers will probably feel more at home with Jung's psychology than with Freud's, and we can see therefore the roots of such concepts as the 'Collective Unconscious' and the 'Race Soul' in Schopenhauer.

The great American mythographer J.Campbell was also influenced by Schopenhauer, and again, we can see how this all fits in with the above; the Will is that fundamental irrational force which we glimpse in art, dreams and mythology.

Schopenhauer was also one of the first to 'popularise' [of course, he was never 'popular' as such] the Indian Vedanta scriptures in Europe.
He held that these had the best moral system, and he poured scorn on the Jewish, Christian and Moslem religions.
It is due to Schopenhauer and others, such as Max Mueller, that we are now aware of the rich vein of Aryan culture flowing back to the Rig Vedas.

Schopenhauer was very Anti-Semitic [and aren't all great men?], and also 'racialist', by today's standards. It may be for this reason that I have yet to get hold of a complete collection of all Schopenhauer's essays.
He worked on those essays his whole long life, after completing his main philosophical treatise at the age of 28-30!
This was called 'the World as Will and Idea', and there is only one complete English translation of it in two volumes in print that I know of.
Everyman have recently brought out a useful one-volume abridgement of it.
Here he takes his main idea, as described in the title, in every direction, piling example upon example; - they don't make philosophers like that anymore!

Interestingly, the important philsosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claims that he read little philosophy in his formative years, other than Schopenhauer.
This is significant, because it is said by some that Wittgenstein succeeded in over-coming Descartes' dilemma I referred to in the above post.
Wittgenstein was, like Freud, a Jew.

Schopenhauer was a great Anglo-phile and a thorough intellectual elitist.
He bemoaned the fact that Latin was no longer the sole language of philosophy/science in Europe, seeing this lack as a terrible dumbing down - what would he think today!

He was an irascible, lonely figure who none the less lived well on private means, going to the theatre, playing the flute and reading the London Times [in English] most days in an unchanging routine of bloodymindedness.

Hitler carried Schopenhauer's works with him throughout WWI.
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The Will To Power

Nietzsche had been compiling notes for over five years towards a massive volume he intended to call 'The Will to Power.

Due to his growing illness, he was not able to finish this book and set it aside, having to write shorter works [such as The Antichrist] before his final mental collapse at the age of 44.

His sister, as the executor of all his work sought to put all of his writing out into the public domain ['complete works' etc.,].
As Nietzsche had left detailed plans of the Will to Power, she was able [with the help of Peter Gast, Nietzsche's confidente/pupil, and one of the few who could read Nietzsche's bad hand-writing] to put the book out; she never pretended it was anything else.
It was published in 1901 - some time before the formation of the National-Socialist Party!

There is no suggestion that she "twisted her brother's work towards N-S" here, so I wonder why people keep repeating this cliche without checking it out for themselves.

As always - with the holocaust and anything else - I ask for evidence.

Nietzsche's view of the Greeks turned around accepted 19th century ideas on the subject in a way that's hard to appreciate today.
He admired the Greeks, Romans and the Italians of the Renaissance far more than he did any other culture.

He longed for a synthesis of the Northern and Southern European cultures and so championed the muisc of Bizet over Wagner, for example.

He called himself a 'Good European' ...

His conception of the Dionysian included its subsuming of the Apollonian; this is the position of the Persian prophet Zarathustra in his work.

He liked the Mediterranean so much that he went to live in Italy!
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The Eternal Recurrence? You have to think 'pre-Christian' to get there.
This is because the pre-Christian out-look of pagan Europe tended to think in terms of eternal recurrence on the cosmological level.
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Islam

I think we have to see Nietzsche's comparison between Islam and Christianity [as quoted from The Antichrist, in the first post], as primarily an historical observation.

The first mention of Islam in The Antichrist is long before the one quoted, and we need to look at in in order to put the other one in context.

Nietzsche writes;

"In Christianity all the instincts of the subjugated & oppressed come to the fore: it is the lowest classes who seek their salvation in this religion ...
Here the body is despised, hygiene is repudiated as sensual; the Church repudiates even cleanliness - the first Christian measure after the banishment of the Moors was the closing of the public baths, of which Cordova alone possessed 270 ..."
[Nietzsche, A 21]

Now this is broadly true historically; the Muslim Moors ruled Spain from AD 711 to AD 1492, and scholars reckon that their university at Cordova was a great centre of learning.

As to cleanliness, [Christian] Europeans hadn't [during this period] connected a lack of hygiene with disease, and so cared little for it.
Indeed, certain Christian attitudes [anti-vanity etc.,] militated against it, whereas the Koran itself stresses cleanliness [Koran 74.4], and frequent ablutions [Koran 5.6].

Now hygiene was very important for Nietzsche, hence his attitude towards Christianity in relation to Islam here.

Lest we think this peculiar to Nietzsche, we see that Hitler felt similarly;

"I do wash my hands very frequently".
[Hitler, Table Talk, 12 Aug 1942]

Indeed, Hitler agrees with Nietzsche mainly on this general theme;

"There is something very unhealthy about Christianity".
[ib., 9 April 1942]
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"If Islam despises Christianity, it is justified a thousand times over; for Islam presupposes men".
[Nietzsche, A 59]

There is a sense in Nietzsche that Christianity had 'unmanned' and effeminised Germans in a way that Islam never would have.

One thinks again of Hitler's views on the subject;

"It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German ... one is flabbergasted to think that German human beings could have let themselves be brought to such a pass by Jewish filth & priestly twaddle ...
It angers one to think that, while in other parts of the globe religious teaching like that of Confucius, Buddha & Mohammed offers an undeniably broad basis for the religious-minded, Germans should have been duped by a theological exposition devoid of all honest depth ..."
[Hitler, TT 5 June 1942, my emphasis]

In the very act of accepting Christianity, Germans had made themselves suspect;

"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure".
[ib., 10 Oct 1941]

Clearly, National-Socialism, like Nietzscheanism, was an attempt to rectify these failings.

However, I am not for creating religious wars within the Folk over the matter, and prefer Hitler's gradualist approach to the cleansing of religious feeling.

Hitler lays out the basic steps to the future thus;

"1) First of all, to each man his private creed. Superstition shall not lose its rights.

2) The National-Socialist State is sheltered from the danger of competing with religion.

3) Religions must simply be forbidden from interfering in future with temporal matters.

4) From the tenderest age, education will be imparted in such a way that each child will know all that is important to the maintenance of the National-Socialist State ...

5) We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread teachings in conflict with the interests of that State.

6) We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National-Socialism & the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth ..."
[ib., 14 Oct 1941, adapted]

This is excerpted from a very important speech on the issue.
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"What an affirmative Aryan religion, the product of a ruling class, looks like: The Law Book of Manu ...

"What an affirmative Semitic religion, the product of a ruling class, looks like: The Law Book of Mohammed ..."
[Nietzsche, WP 145 (1884-8)]

So this actually agrees with your point; there cannot be more than one ruling idea within a single State; however, there should be a mutual respect, as you allow, between ruling ideas within a World-Order.
Aryanism and Islam should rule their respective parts of the world in a peace-ful co-existence. The reason that the West is in conflict with Islam today is because the West has been thoroughly Judaised.

The Nietzschean point is simply that Aryans [and Hitlerism is a Germanic version of Aryanism] should respect Islam as it is the product of a ruling class, like Aryanism.

But let Nietzsche continue;

"What a negative Semitic religion, the product of an oppressed class, looks like: the New Testament ...
"What a negative Aryan religion looks like, grown up among the ruling orders: Buddhism ..."
[ib.,]

Note that Nietzsche is specific; it is the New Testament to which he objects.
And note too that he does not include the concept of an Aryan oppressed class amongst his comparisons, because, as you quote him above, there can be no Aryan oppressed class, it is a contradiction in terms.

Therefore Christianity is objectionable because it was the invention of the oppressed classes.

Again, this is historically true.


The Aryan must always be above the ravings of the oppressed classes, which are beneath him;

"Let us be the only people who are immunised against the disease of Christianity".
[Hitler, Table Talk 13 Dec 1941]

Hitler did admire the Muslim methods at times;

"The rapidity with which Mustapha Kemal Ataturk rid himself of his Christian parsons makes one of the most remarkable chapters in history. He hanged thirty-nine of them out-of-hand, the rest he flung out, & St. Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum!"
[Hitler, Table Talk 1 Aug 1942]

However, I think he knew too that these were not Aryan methods.
And as Christianity was originally the product of an oppressed class, it is just a matter of relegating it to the realm of private spirituality.
While so doing, any Aryan elements which have become entangled with it historically can be rehabilitated.
These elements may rise to the top and inform the Aryan spirituality which resides in the ruling idea of what I call Aryanosophy.
Meanwhile, Christianity will slowly become Aryanised.
This is an Aryan solution.

I can think of no better guide on these difficult questions than Hitler.
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Nietzsche and Hitler shared a very similar vision when it came to the Aryan attitude towards historical Islam, and of the historical comparison of Islam to Christianity from an Aryan perspective.

However, it must be stressed that this is an historical position. It does not mean that we should view the Islam or the Chrisitianity of today in the same light.

Going back to Nietzsche, we have;

"Christianity destroyed the harvest we might have reaped from the culture of antiquity, later it also destroyed our harvest of the culture of Islam.
The wonderful Moorish world of Spanish culture, which in its essence is more closely related to us ..." "... was trampled to death ... Later on the Crusaders waged war upon something before which it would have been more seemly in them to grovel in the dust ..."
[Nietzsche A 60]

This must be compared with Hitler;

"In the Spanish people there is a mixture of Gothic, Frankish & Moorish blood ... The Arabian epoch ... was the most cultured, the most intellectual & in every way best & happiest in Spanish history. It was followed by the period of the persecutions with its unceasing atrocities".
[Hitler, TT 1 Aug 1942]

This is straightforward agreement between the two men, and when Nietzsche calls ;

"Christianity & alcohol - the two great means of corruption".
[Nietzsche ib.,]

We see that Hitler agrees with him again, having already called Christianity "unhealthy", Hitler says of alcohol that he has given it up;

"When I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water from time to time was enough".
[Hitler TT 22 Jan 1942]

And when Nietzsche writes;

" 'War with Rome to the knife! Peace & friendship with Islam': this is what that great free-spirit, that genius among German emperors, - Frederick the second, not only felt but also did".
[Nietzsche ib.,]

We find Hitler saying something very similar;

"The Church was ... at fault in its assessment of the Sicilian Frederick, who, as an Emperor at the age of twenty-one, conquered the German Reich ..."
[Hitler TT 23 April 1942]

Should we today take the Frederickian view?;

'War to the knife against the Christian Church, and friendship with Islam'.

However, the Christian Church is in a very different position today compared to a century or so ago, as is Islam.
We need to present a modified view of these things which apply to today [just as Hitler did in his day].

We must weigh up the actual threat presented to an Aryan revival by both Christianity and Islam in today's Europe, and compare them to other anti-Aryan forces, before taking up a philosophic position which may differ from both Nietzsche and Hitler's.

So I might ask, is the Christian Church the same kind of threat today as it was 500 years or so ago?
Is it even the same kind of threat as it was 70 years ago?

Is not the Christian Faith in Germanic regions fading away today?

And is it not rather the residue of that historical faith that needs to be attacked?
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The question of the Human is far wider.

Now I certainly believe that the Human must be overthrown.

I admit that the phrase "Aryanise Christianity" is something of an euphemism. It really means the gradual, but eventually the complete, eradication of Christianity from Europe, and its transmogrification into a purely Aryan spirituality.
This is to be achieved over time [i.e., it will not be a 'revolution', but rather a 'transvaluation'], and will be furthered by the increasing 'rediscovery' [and re-invention] of European pagan forms.

There are Christians who are of the type who want to see an Aryan revival!
I have no issue with those Christians at all!

Now mainstream Christians, who are anti-Aryan and pro-multiculturalist/multiracialist, - of course we should do battle with them.
But there are none here!
Therefore I will not follow the tangent which suggests a whole-scale war against Christianity.

This is not because I don't want to get into a fight: it is simply that I want to fight the right people.

I regard the lack of racial belief to be far more of a threat today than anything else, as it implicitly denies every and any order-of-rank.
[And we might reflect that in Nietzsche's time and before, belief in race was commonplace, even amongst Christians].

Concerning Islam in Europe, we see that historically, Nietzsche regarded the Islamic rule of Spain which covered around 800 years (!) to be superior to the Christian rule in that country.

Indeed, Nietzsche thought that Islam was generally closer to Aryan values than Christianity simply because the former was the product of a ruling class.

This has already been said, and I have shown that Hitler in his private talks was in full agreement with this. [Incidentally, the concord between Hitler's words and Nietzsche's must surely disprove those who constantly say that Hitler didn't read Nietzsche - but now I am going off at a tangent myself].

But there is an important note of disagreement between Nietzsche and Hitler which mustn't be papered-over.

It is this - Nietzsche thought that the Germans had always been at fault, historically, for preserving Christianity. He blamed the Germanic element for the Crusades, and for the Reformation, for example. When Pagan values stood a chance of re-surfacing, Nietzsche finds the Germans ready to charge in and reaffirm the Bible.

Now this is a thesis not shared by Hitler [and was surely disproved by him]! And it is not one that will run very far on this Forum committed as it is to Germanic values.
It is not a thesis that I would want to argue either [here or anywhere else] as I think that it is peculiar to Nietzsche, and it is unsound. I take it to be an exaggeration based on his lack of appreciation in his home country, Germany.
And anyway, Nietzsche himself says that 'Germans can't be Christians'!

So what do I get from all this?
I believe in the pagan essence of Germanism and the wider possibility of an Aryan revival.
That racialism is essential and the most important aspect today.
That the war against Islam is largely a Judeaocratic affair, and we shouldn't be sucked into the 'Islamophobia' promoted by the Jewspapers.
I also believe that Christianity is dying a slow death and that only a spirituality based on Race will suffice for the future.
And yes, that Racial spirituality will lead to a rejection of the Human altogether; in favour of the Overhuman [or Master Race].
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"Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Islamic civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (--I do not say by what sort of feet--) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin--because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life! . . . The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust--a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile."--What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich. . . . Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to be won . . . The German noble, always the "Swiss guard" of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church--but well paid. . . Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious. . . Christianity, alcohol--the two great means of corruption. . . . Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Hebrew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not. . . . "War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!": this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel decently? I can't make out how a German could ever feel Christian...." [Nietzche, Antichrist 60.]





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On Evola and the Ubermensch

Evola is only apollinian, and rejects the dyonisian. The solar over the lunar. Rosenberg also rejects the 'lunar', in his 'Myth of the 20th Century'.

However, do Evola [or Rosenberg] actually deal with Nietzsche's very profound and philosophical notion that the Dionysian is the sub-stratum upon which the Apollonian necessarily doth arise?

I think it folly to try and disown the Dionysian, especially when so much in the Wotan archetype is similarly 'lunar'.

I am not decided myself whether or not the Dionysian is completely Aryan, but ...


Evola claimed that Nietzsche did not go 'beyond good & evil', but rather invented his own 'good & evil', as if this suggests a self-contradiction on the part of Nietzsche.

And yet, surely Evola is aware that Nietzsche separated the system of 'good & evil' from the system of 'good & bad' [the two basic forms of morality as he saw it]!

The latter system of 'good & bad' he called Master Morality and clearly held it in high esteem.]
Whereas the former system of 'good & evil' was to him the antithesis of 'good & bad', and caused by "the slave revolt in morals".

So Nietzsche always called for a return to 'good & bad', and said [in his Genealogy, I think] that " 'beyond good & evil' did not mean, 'beyond good & bad'!"

Therefore Nietzsche was not only pulling down (a particular) morality [slave-morality], he was also openly putting up another kind of morality, Master Morality, in its place.


Nietzsche's way of getting out from under Nihilism was his promulgation of the ancient [and traditonal!] doctrine of the Eternal Return.

Of course, some argue that there is a contradiction between the 'eternal return [of the same]' and the Superman doctrine, as the latter must already have come been and gone 'ad infinitum' if everything has returned [and will return] eternally.

The so-called 'anti-Nazis' like to make much of Nietzsche's sister's publishing of 'The Will to Power', and pretend she distorted this work.
This just isn't true; the 'The Will to Power' was compiled from plans, notes, and passages in Nietzsche's own hand, much of the copyist work being done by Nietzsche's closest friend and trusted amenuensis, the musician Peter Gast; and Gast was one of the few who could actually read Nietzsche's handwriting [as well as knowing his philosophy intimately].

I certainly believe that Hitler was close to a Nietzschean Superman - indeed, Nietzsche's sister told Hitler that her brother would've thought so too!

It is worth noting that the very perceptive CG Jung felt that despite Nietzsche's use of Zarathustra and Dionysus, in fact his conception was quintessentially Germanic!

In other words, try as he might, Nietzsche couldn't fool the world that his Ubermensch was as Germanic as was Goethe's Faust!

And I think that is the truth of the matter.

The Ubermensch strikes me as something that only a German could really come up!

Do not Germans sing Germany "Uber" all?

And why not?

I do not condemn such pride, and I wish that Europe as a whole was more 'German' in many respects.

And can you really imagine a French, English, Spanish, or Italian philosopher [pre-Zarathustra] coming up with the Uber-mensch?

My point is that Nietzsche, for all his avowed criticism of things Germanic, was a Teutonicist despite himself.

This is why I think that the notion that Nietzsche himself distanced the Ubermensch concept from Germanicism is not such a good one unless one takes into account this repressed Teutonicism in Nietzsche's work.

As Jung said, Nietzsche may as well have called his 'Zarathustra' Wotan, as that would have been closer to its flavour.
But then Nietzsche's break with Wagner meant that he sublimated his Germanicism to an extent.

From here, I take the position that the Ubermensch is a starkly Germanic concept.
Of course, it can be applied to some non-Germans, but even then we might say that such figures have Germanic traits and aspire to Germanicism.

Of course, the "Übermensch" is ultimately about exceeding and going beyond the 'Human'.

However, this is primarily a Germanic [Faustian] concept, and it is no accident that Nietzsche played on the various nuances of the pre-fix which cannot be satisfactorily translated into English [that alone should suggest that the concept is more German than it is English].

Nietzsche said that, 'had Jesus lived longer, he might have become Noble'. This is not tantamount to describing Jesus as an Ubermensch. Indeed, Nietzsche said that if you wanted to get a truer picture of the Ubermensch, then look at someone like Cesar Borgia!

England is not wholly Germanic in my view, and has immersed itself for too long in the sentimental and hypocritical morality which it derived from Christianity. This is why the nearest the English come to an Ubermensch is in a moralistic monster like Oliver Cromwell.

Ultimately, the Ubermensch must be able to encompass and personify Master Morality.

So I don't disagree that a non-Germanic can be an Ubermensch - it would be silly to say otherwise.
However, I do not think that this implies that the concept is not, therefore, a Germanic one; on the contrary, it most certainly is.
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