* From: Mark Lause Neitzsche was pretty much one, though he cared nothing for politics and probably wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over how this list would regard him.
^^^^ CB: Yes, I've been looking into N. and his commentators recently. Almost all say he didn't care about politics. However, whether he "cared" about politics or not, his writing has political content and impact, so his personal attitude in this regard is somewhat impertinent or irrelevant. And N. does have wide influence among many of today's intellectuals. Challenging him is not obscurantist. ^^^^^ For the sake of clarity, though, the anti-Semitic twist given Nietzsche was his sister, who actually changed some of what he wrote. Walter Kaufman's translations and scholarship pretty much single-handedly rescued Nietzsche from this misrepresentation. ^^^^^ CB: Yes, most say this. However, at certain points in at least one text Nietzsche just refers to "Jews" ( when he actually seems to mean "Christians" !) and on its face, it is easy to see why he would be read by some as making anti-Jewish statements. It is not hard to see that he might be read that way in a population that is already anti-Semitic. It would not be hard for his sister to use his actual words to make a distortion. We have a debate on N. on Marxist-Thaxis. Ishay Landa Nietzsche, the Chinese Workers Friend New Left Review I/236, July-August 1999 In his 1947 essay Nietzsches Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events, Thomas Mann evaluates in the following way Friedrich Nietzsches attitude to the worker: It does not testify of enmity against the workers, it testifies to the contrary when he [Nietzsche] says: The workers should learn to feel like soldiers: a fee, a salary but no payment. They should one day live like the bourgeoisie at present; but above them, distinguishing itself by its lack of needs, the higher caste, poorer and simpler, but in possession of the power. [1] Mann initially claims that the socialist touch in his vision of the postbourgeois life is as strong as the one that can be termed fascist2 and that his idea of culture has here and there a strongly socialist, in any case no longer a bourgeois, colouring.3 Further on, however, he stresses the unbridgeable distance that ultimately separates Nietzsche from socialism: His philosophy is just as meticulously organized a system as Schopenhauers philosophy, developed out of a single, allembracing basic idea. But this underlying idea is certainly radical, aesthetic art, through which alone his outlook and thought must stand in irreconcilable opposition to all socialism. There are, finally, only two dispositions and inner postures: the aesthetic and the moralistic, and socialism is a strictly moralistic world-view. Nietzsche, in comparison, is the most complete and incurable aesthete the intellectual world knows . . . 4 Thus, Mann perceives Nietzsche as opposing not the working class as such, but merely its commonly accepted political manifestation socialism. According to Manns analysis, Nietzsche promotes a social and ethical vision genuinely committed to the goals of the working class and in affinity with its tastes and sensitivities,5 while disagreeing with the official, conventional politics. This divergence has to do with the motives operating in each case: socialism is engaged with the working class because of moral considerations, whereas Nietzsches home-grown socialism is founded upon aesthetic impulses. Before examining the validity of such a conception, it is necessary to put the discussion into its context. Illustrious Nietzscheans Manns reading is by no means an isolated case within Nietzsche criticism. It rather represents a recurring hermeneutic conclusion, even if the explicitness of the German novelists claim is somewhat less typical. The general protectiveif not approbatory assessment of Nietzsches socio-political vision is certainly not an exception among thinkers broadly associated with the Left. There is not, and never was, any shortage of critics to denounce firmly the appropriation and abuse of the individualistic, rebellious and relativistic German philosopher by fascism. In fact, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, this critical approach enjoys a privileged position. To grasp its qualitative distinction, one only need supply a partial listing of those highly influential names who have assured the German philosophers predominant place in modern philosophical discourse: Freud, Weber, Bloch, Bataille, Deleuze, Sartre, Camus, Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Derrida. The very core of twentieth-century intellectual life is decidedly Nietzschean. The opposite camp is considered to be both smaller in number and less intellectually commanding; one can think of Lukács, the much vilified die-hard Marxist, whose treatment of Nietzsche became largely discredited as an example of a rigid ideological dogmatism,6 and, in more recent times, Habermas, who, in any case, could only contrast the passionate rhetoric of Nietzsche enthusiasts with a thin, if precise, critical tone. The illustrious Nietzscheans mentioned above exploited and assimilated significant Nietzschean insights in their own projects, thus founding psychoanalysis, critical theory, existentialism or deconstruction. Some of them ignored, to a greater or lesser extent, the specific elements in Nietzsches teachings that dealt with socialism and the working class; Derrida, for example, was content with disassociating Nietzsche from Heideggerian authoritative, metaphysical thinking,7 and with ingeniously transforming the German thinker, infamously renowned as a vicious misogynist, almost into an out-and-out feminist.8 Often enough, however, opinions were voiced that were generally in tune with Manns rendition of Nietzsche as friend of the worker. Horkheimer, for instance, maintained that Nietzsche, though essentially the philosopher of the dominant class, could still contribute, if read creatively, to proletarian praxis.9 At any rate, a vast number of mainstream critics in the last three decades or so adhere, frequently with considerable vigour, to the rehabilitation campaign of Nietzsches reputation, after its temporary entanglement with fascism. The most common arguments denying Nietzsches essential commitment to any reactionary and exploitative politics, as well as his hostility to socialism and/or to the working class, are the relativist and the anti-political ones, which normally complement each other. The anti-political claim is based on the view that Nietzsche was primarily interested in exalted questions of high-culture, personal ethics, the future of humankind and so forth. Hence, his contemplative eye simply had to gloss over this lowly arena of politics, where only immediate, earthly, vulgar matters are negotiated. The banner here applied is Nietzsches often quoted phrase, in which he declared himself the last anti-political German.10 The relativist interpretation, in turn, is in harmony with another well-known Nietzsche exclamation: I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.11 In this case, Nietzsche is perceived as a thinker who avoids uniformity on any subject, offering an anticipated postmodernist carnival of ever-changing outfits and outlooks. At 10:40 PM 7/30/2006 -0400, Ralph Dumain wrote: >http://www.newleftreview.net/?view=1997
