Charles, you wrote:
> For some reason, the article I linked before (or
> another one by the same group directly on Nietzsche)
> says Hitler posed for a picture at the Nietzsche
> museum in front of a bust of Nietzsche. I think
> it says claiming he was a follower of Nietzsche.
> I'll look again.
Hitler certainly did this, although it's important to know that Nietzsche's sister took charge of his literary estate upon his death (maybe even when he fell into madness?) and took great pains to paint her brother as a proto-National Socialist. For example, she suppressed the publication of his "autobiography" (more a series of bizarre essays on his previous writings), _Ecce Homo_ because of the swipes against anti-semitism it contained.
I'm pretty sure his sister was still alive and in charge of the Nietzsche museum when the incident you cite took place. She also handed der Fuhrer her brother's walking stick. Those with ears to detect it could hear her brother turning over in his grave to vomit.
Nietzsche broke off contact with his sister for her marriage to one Bernard Foster, an avowed anti-semite who founded an "Arian" community in South America called "New Germany." Foster took his life after a scandal involving his mishandling of the funds for the community.
Nietzsche remained opposed to anti-semites even in his madness. A passage from a letter (to Cosima Wagner?) he wrote in the asylum states: "It is a beautiful day; I have just ordered the Kaiser and all the anti-semites shot..."
Walter Kaufman may not be the most fashionable Nietzsche scholar these days, but his book on Nietzsche is very good for debunking these misconceptions.
Justin, you wrote:
> As I said, he's complex: a perspectivist voluntarist who chooses the
> perspective of materialism.
I don't know what you mean by "prespectivist voluntarist," although I would agree that he is more materialist than not. I suppose this depends on how one interprets the strong Will to Power thesis ("Everything is a Will to Power.")
My own notion, however cockeyed, this: he wanted to do Heraclitus one better and not only deny being, but deny substances. In their place, he put a single *force* capable of numerous, transient manifestations. It also seems to me that this force had unchanging dynamics; he was a strict determinist, and the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is an expression of this. (I don't buy the Deleuze-Klossowski reading of the eternal return for a second. And I'll always feel that way ;-)
> Well, he's not a Marxist historical materialist. But he does offer
> materialist, indeed class-based, accounts of the origin of morality.
Punishment as recompense for bad debits in _Genealogy of Morals_, yes? I've wondered if anyone tried to work that account into an explicitly Marxian framework--heck, for all I know, you may have already done it...
-- Curtiss