On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Chip Berlet wrote:
> The case that Elizabeth was more antisemitic and altered her brother's
> work when she edited it? Even if this is true, Friedrich still
> articulated the idea of Will to Power and the idea of a superior type of
> man. No?
Well yes, but both were almost entirely philosophical notions. The Will to Power is an assertion that everyone, including you and me, define the world in categories that make us look good and our enemies look bad. We can't help ourselves. Even when we are being honest we are trying to win. And every framework, while illuminating part of reality, distorts other parts.
The superior sort of man is one who can admit this sort of perspectivalism and still carry on thinking and acting and judging rather than getting vertigo and giving in to despair or the need to believe in an ultimate truth.
That's putting a huge amount in a nutshell, of course. But it's a lot closer to the truth than saying he was the father of Nazism. He was an anti-anti-semite and an anti-German-nationalist. Those were Elizabeth's emendments, along with others designed to make it look like he celebrated bloody war rather than philosophical war.
Mind you, there is a lot of slack in there. He very much enjoyed using the perspective of barbarians as an example; he was quite tied up with the heroic period of the Indo-European hypothesis (aka at that time as the Indo-Aryan hypothesis); and he didn't like mass democracy and is full of reactionary bon mots. Also he loved paradoxical and slap-in-the-face formulations. And he left a mountain of unpublished stuff, he wrote in fragments, and he went crazy at the end. And then there's his friendship with Wagner. Elements like this complicate interpretation and make it possible for an Elizabeth to support her case, and for a causal reader to come away thinking he was the exponent of a new barbarism.* But if you want to say that someone is the father of the Nazi use of the term Uebermensch, then I think it's fair to say that'd be Elizabeth.
But why not just leave that square out of the chart entirely and just say that Master Race theory started with Nazism? Because if you want to go back before that, as far as I understand it, German scientific racism came chiefly out of German anthropology, which had nothing to do with Nietzsche, except insofar as they can both partially be traced back to the same roots in the developing phase of the Indo-European hypothesis, when linguistic unity was conflated with national and racial unity -- and whence their common use of term Aryan.
Michael
* This reminds me of my favorite casual reader of Nietzsche joke, which seems germane to a chart about right wing crazies. It was in the movie A Fish Called Wanda. Jamie Lee Curtis calls Kevin Kline a mindless gorilla who always uses force when there are better ways. He says "I'm not a gorilla! Gorillas don't read Nietzsche!" And she answers "Yes they do! They just don't understand him!"