On Tue, 4 Oct 2005 08:50:00 -0600 Michael Pugliese
<michael.098762001 at gmail.com> writes:
> On 10/4/05, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> > CB: Give me examples of smart ideas that Posner, Schmitt ,Strauss
> and
> > Nietzsche had.
>
> Reminder to Charles. You ever get around to pulling out of library
> stacks these books on Nietzsche I recommended to you a while back?
> And
> your usage of "public intellectual, " is incorrect, at least as the
> term was used by Russell Jacoby. Your habitual, "Enemy of the People,
> " orthodox M-L style thought, to indicate the fascistoid essence of
> anyone to your Right, is tiresome. Public intellectuals can be any
> variety of leftist, rightist, centrist.
> http://old.thing.net/ttreview/images/corpse.jpg ,
> "Nietzsche's Corps/E: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, Or, the
> Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life, " by Geoff Waite, a
> post-modern communist reading (Waite was in the PLP when Hilary
> Putnam
> was. A "stupid party, " {"Marcuse: Cop or Cop-Out?"} but, I suppose
> they had their reasons.
> "Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary, " by Bernice
> Glatzer Rosenthal and, "New Myth, New World
> >From Nietzsche to Stalinism, " by the same scholar.
> http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02218-3.html
> >...The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. The
> Superman, the "will to power," Nietzsche's equation of bourgeois
> democracy and decadence, and his denigration of reason were staples
> of
> Nazi propaganda. Communists also used and misused Nietzsche, but that
> fact is largely unknown because Soviet propagandists invoked reason
> and labeled Nietzsche the "philosopher of fascism," even while
> covertly appropriating his ideas. In this pioneering book, Bernice
> Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean
> ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other
> elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism
> and
> Stalinism.
>
> Nietzsche made a difference. He furnished intellectual ammunition for
> a prolonged conflict about culture, society, and politics that began
> around the turn of the century. His first Russian admirers were
> poets,
> philosophers, and political activists. They responded to the changes
> transforming their society by espousing new values and seeking a new
> faith by which to live and work. This response resulted in new
> aesthetic and political amalgams, such as Symbolism, Futurism,
> Nietzschean Christianity, and Nietzschean Marxism. The ensuing
> debates
> between and among their partisans reverberated throughout the wider
> culture and therefore also into Bolshevism, becoming the subject of
> an
> uninterrupted polemic between Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and
> among
> Bolsheviks, that continued into the 1930s.
Nietzche was, as Rosenthal points outs, one of the intellectual figures who loomed large among Russian intellectuals and artists during the period following the failed 1905 revolution. Russian intellectuals of all stripes during this period, including the Russian Marxists, were strongly influenced by him. Indeed some of the most interesting debates concerning Nietzsche occured within the Bolshevik faction during this period. It was, as it so happens, those Bolsheviks who were intrigued by Ernst Mach's work in epistemology and the philosophy of science, who were also attracted to Nietzsche's work (I.e. Alexander Bogdanov and especially Anatoli Lunarcharsky). Lunacharsky, in particular proposed the creation of a socialist religion. Inspired by ideas drawn from Nietzsche, Feuerbach, and Comte, he believed that such a religion would make it possible to harness the religious sentiments of the masses to the creation of a socialist society. In essence, he proposed the creation of a humanist, nontheistic religion which would offset the cold, cerebral nature of Marxism by appealing to the emotions of the people.
Lunarcharsky's proposals were embraced by a number of people within or close to the Bolshevik faction. The novelist, Maxim Gorky, was probably the most famous of the "god-builders." Lunacharsky and other god-builders like Bazarov were also very much influenced by Nietzche's analysis of morality. They embraced his critique of 'slave morality' and they saw his romantic individualism as something that could be adapted to the needs of a socialist society.
Lenin, of course, would have none of this. And he took great exception to Lunacharsky's proposals for a socialist religion. In Lenin's view, such proposals were inherently reactionary, and would make it possible after kicking traditional religion out through the front door, for the more traditional religion to reappear through the back door.
>
> In Stalin's time, unacknowledged Nietzschean ideas were used to
> mobilize the masses for the great tasks of the first Five-Year Plan
> and the Cultural Revolution, which was intended to eradicate
> "bourgeois" values and attitudes from Soviet life and to construct a
> distinctly Socialist culture. Nietzsche's belief that people need
> illusions to shield them from reality underlay Socialist Realism, the
> official Soviet aesthetic from 1934 on.
Lunacharsky dropped his proposals for a socialist religion after Lenin had condemned them. But arguably something like his proposed socialist religion did appear in the Soviet Union following Lenin's death. The placing of Lenin's embalmed body on public display for veneration and indeed the creation, under Stalin, of what was in effect, a cult of Lenin, suggests that Lunacharsky's proposals could not be completely rejected. And there was renewed attention paid to Lunacharsky's writings on religion during the 1960s when Khruschchev renewed the Soviet campaign against religion.
>
> In the aftermath of de-Stalinization, the government cast Nietzsche
> as
> the personification of "bourgeois" nihilism and "bourgeois"
> individualism. Soviet intellectuals wishing to reappropriate their
> lost cultural heritage discovered the Nietzsche-influenced
> intellectuals of late Imperial Russia and reopened discussion on the
> issues they had posed.
>
> More than an exercise in historical rediscovery, New Myth, New World
> offers a new interpretation of modern Russian history. By uncovering
> the buried influence of Nietzschean ideas on Soviet culture and
> politics, Rosenthal opens new avenues for understanding Soviet
> ideology and its influence on the twentieth century.
>
>
> Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal is Professor of History at Fordham
> University. She is the editor of three prior books that have paved
> the
> way for this study—Nietzsche in Russia (1986), Nietzsche and Soviet
> Culture: Ally and Adversary (1994), and The Occult in Russian and
> Soviet Culture (1997). She is also the co-author of A Revolution of
> the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890-1924 (1990).
>
> All those Heidegger buffs on the academic left just Fascists?
> "Left
> in form, Right in Essence?"
>
>
> --
> Michael Pugliese
>
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>
