I don't think you have to make Nietzsche into a paid up member of the Nazi party to do him down. Of course we know that he couldn't be, because there was no NSDAP. But it's hard to ignore that his social and political views are viciously reactionary, hostile to democracy and labour. (see him On the Labour Question - 'why was it even asked'). These views, views he wears on his sleeve, may it be said (unlike, say, Gottlob Frege, who could make a reasonable case that his authoritarian leanings were of no account to his logic), were those that were common amongst educated Germans. Much more so than anti-Semitism, anti-democracy and anti-labour were the stock in trade of the German intelligentsia in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The question then is does it make any difference to his philosophy? I think you have to say that it does, since much of the underlying irrationalism simply transposes his social reaction onto the plane of the intellect. That said, the fantastic discomfort Nietzsche (in common with his class) feels towards the status quo does make a fairly inventive philosophy that has a much greater sensitivity to historical change than ordinary apologetics. Granted the precondition is that Nietzsche can only conceptualise change as decay, because he is predisposed to be unhappy with the drift of things. Nonetheless, his historicisation of ethics in Genealogy of Morals is rightly seen as the basis of deconstruction.
In message <20020304.134748.-568959.1.farmelantj at juno.com>, Jim
Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> writes
>
>On Mon, 4 Mar 2002 09:53:16 -0800 (PST) Thomas Seay
><entheogens at yahoo.com> writes:
>> Justin, maybe you know something about this, having
>> studied under Kaufman. It's been a long time since
>> I have read anything biographical on Nietzche but
>> wasn't his sister the one that drew together the notes
>> for "Will to Power" and didn't she and her
>> proto-fascist husband have something to do with his
>> later appropriation by the Nazis?
>
>I am not Justin, but the answer is yes. His sister was married to an
>antisemitic ideologue (a man that Neitzsche himself had very much
>despised),
>and she deliberately edited his writings to make his views appear
>compatible
>with those of her husband's. Nietzsche died around 1900 but his
>sister lived on until the mid-1930s. In the 1920s, she was a stauch
>supporter of Mussolini, and in the 1930s of Hitler, and she attempted
>to show that her late brother's philosophy lent support to both fascism
>and National Socialism. When she died, Hitler gaver her a state
>funeral.
>
>Jim F.
>
>>
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>> =====
>> "The tradition of all the dead generations
>> weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
>>
>> -Karl Marx
>>
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