I'm disappointed with what appears to be a widespread animosity towards Nietzsche among left thinkers on this list. I consider myself to be a Marxist, and yet I have always admired the thought of Nietzsche as being thought about how to live. To live without a God, without a beyond, without resentment. And I don't think he prescribed a formula for a better society that would be incompatible with a communist society.
I realize that his contempt for his age and his references to it being the age of the emancipation of the slaves, is a far different take from the far more optimistic evaluation of Marx. But Nietzsche, although, at best, indifferent towards the fate of the exploited, did not look up to any class above his own petite bourgeois social condition as a pensioner of the University of Basel. He was not resentful, which is I think part of the animus of nazi/fascism. He reviled the commercial classes and the intellectuals of his time, as well as the military and landholding elite that governed the Reich in his time.
I just don't see the incompatibilities between a philosophy of the soul, on the one hand, and a philosophy of society, on the other. In a desired communist society we would still need a philosophy of life. We would still have to make peace with the Dyonisiac in our lives.
Albert
At 08:41 AM 3/6/02 +0000, you wrote:
>In message <20020304.185906.-1707243.0.farmelantj at juno.com>, Jim
>Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> writes
>
>> The Frankfurters of course, almost
>>to a man, were great admirers of Nietzsche, as was Lukacs.
>
>I'm not sure that you can count Lukacs' sustained (and wonderful)
>diatribe against Nietzsche in Destruction of Reason as admiration. I
>suspect it is the original for the argument that Nietzsche is a
>precursor of the Nazis.
>
>As to the Frankfurters, their embrace of Nietzsche is surely a sign of
>their degeneration, and retreat from Marxism
>
>
>
>--
>James Heartfield
>Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99,
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