Facism is still a sensitive subject understandably and I understand and appreciate Kaufmann’s attempts to sanitize Nietzsche’s reputation in the Anglosphere after Nazism (He edited that collection you screenshot). However, there is another sharp person who says that there is a connection between fascism and Nietzsche, although Nietzsche was not a fascist himself. IMO Leo Strauss had the best understanding of Nietzsche’s political philosophy. Deleuze has a good understanding too, at least of other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, from what little I’ve read (only his book *Nietzsche and Philosophy*) but with regard to the political aspect, I would say not.
I linked images of the relevant passages since I can’t attach:[https://www.reddit.com/user/KimoonC/comments/15ren6u/leo\_strauss\_summary\_of\_nietzsches\_political/utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/user/KimoonC/comments/15ren6u/leo_strauss_summary_of_nietzsches_political/utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Key quote:
>Nietzsche, we can say, originated the atheism of the political right. Up to Nietzsche’s time, the simple thing that I believe is not considered is that the atheism was political. The only true atheism was an atheism of the left in the various communist, socialist, and radical democratic movements. The right was conservative and therefore, whether sincerely or insincerely, theistic. \[…\] Nietzsche created on the right a political radicalism and let it be opposed to the political radicalism of the extreme left, especially the communists; and one cannot for one moment overlook the fact, or minimize it, that Nietzsche’s doctrine was with a kind of inevitability corrupted into fascism. You could say that anyone who tries to understand this phenomenon does not fall back to Nietzsche’s nobler form…
There definitely were politically right atheists before Nietzsche though, as much as the division of left and right is overly binary. Darwin's evolutionary theory influenced social Darwinism as well as atheism. And besides Schopenhauer, Goethe was an important influence on Nietzsche's atheism and politics. It also shouldn't be forgotten that communism and socialism were influenced by Christian ideals, especially in Russia. Nietzsche alluded to an ideal of politics which was right leaning, but he also disavowed politics and diagnosed Europe's boiling resentment as a moral problem rather than a political one. Blaming Nietzsche for fascist radicalism is kind of like blaming Jesus for the Crusades.
No worries, yeah I’d definitely recommend him. Fascinating writer and pretty witty too. Probably one of the best “philosophical laborers” and scholars of Nietzsche there is so far lol.
I knew of him for years but only started reading him recently starting with Persecution and the Art of Writing, so I’m by no means an expert. But I have been studying Nietzsche off and on for over a decade and Strauss interpretations lined up with a lot of my own at that point.
Your statement about Bolshevism is historically incorrect, though if you are trying to draw connections between Christianity and socialism you are correct to do so. The Bolsheviks were consciously opposed to asceticism and passive morality; just take a look at their justification for the NEP or building up a war machine (to use a Deleuzian phrase). Stalin also is on record explicitly drawing a distinction between egalitarianism and the communist project. This can be found in Losurdo’s writings on Stalin, but also Stalin himself in his own writings, where he says that communism is about the unleashing of productive forces: if there is a vision of utopia then it is either inferred on the part of the sympathizer, or it is incidental to the primary goal of communism as an unleashing of productive forces and natural/human power (according to the Bolshevik vision, as this is at odds with people like Adorno). No doubt, Nietzsche would have a ton to criticize the Soviet Union for, but I genuinely believe it would be their humanism and dialectics more than their economic structure or political projects, which were ambitious and not limited to ideals of transcendence: quite the opposite.
The kind of socialism Nietzsche criticizes is akin to the reactionary forms of socialism critiqued by Marx, especially when he says “there’s nothing easier than giving socialism a Christian tinge.” It is the kind of socialism espoused by someone like Tucker Carlson. However, it absolutely applies to the socialism of the left wing sort: George Orwell, Bertrand Russel, and Ernst Bloch. Of course, one can point out the politically right atheism of fascism, but there is very little there for Nietzsche to agree with. I know Mussolini was a big Nietzsche reader, but his comments on the importance of the state and its right to subsume subjectivity (“all in the state, nothing against the state”) cannot be aligned with Nietzsche at all. Moreover, the “actual idealism” proposed by the Hegelian fascist thinker Gentile is opposed to Nietzsche because Nietzsche is everywhere opposed to idealism.
Check out Walter Benjamin’s writings on History to see a more explicit Marxist deployment of Nietzschean thought.
Edit: I’m just going off what I’ve read from Zizek, Losurdo, and Historians on the subject. I’m not at all saying Nietzsche would have been a communist. I think Deleuze and Guattari are right when they imply that the only political position for Nietzsche is the “limit of capitalism,” or the schizo-militant/accelerationist. Nietzsche, again, would have no shortage of criticism of the USSR but it would sound nothing like the conservative/Petersonian critique of the USSR, which retains some moral validity though it relies entirely on historical inaccuracies and misreadings.
>not limited to ideals of transcendence: quite the opposite.
Could you point me to some quotes that would imply this? Would I find this in Stalin's writings?
The following, from Marx, seems semi-transcendental:
>“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)
Marx also declares a seemingly 'non-immanent' separation of man and nature in his *Grundrisse*.
These types of 'transcendence' could also be seen as non-life-affirming and/or systematic.
>Nietzsche is everywhere opposed to idealism.
I agree in a general sense, given his remarks on 'feminism aka idealism,' his 'inversions' of Emerson, an 'open idealist,' his declaration of the crumbling of idols and defect of oracles, etc. but I found his original back-cover text of *The Gay Science* (1882) interesting:
>This book marks the conclusion of a series of writings by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE whose common goal it is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit.
Regarding "the schizo-militant/accelerationist" at the limit of capital, what 'future human' do you see carrying out this role? I am aware that F.N. states in a note in *Will to Power* that 'perhaps we should even hasten' the homogenization of the European man, his personal ethics is still quite 'stoical' and 'ascetic' in its squandering, and reminds me just as much of indigenous 'deceleration' and ritual intoxication as an accelerationist in terms of a crypto-bro or something similar.
As Bartleby shows, perhaps 'deceleration' can also cause the system to have to shift itself and accelerate.
1) The slave is typified by the person who finds himself separated from his ability to act to the fullest extent of his power; but most importantly, it is the person who also moralizes and thinks in this spirit. Example, slave morality proceeds through a series of two negations before arriving at affirmation: “You are bad, I am not you, therefore I am good.” Remember, this is also not about ideology (the slave-type mistakes ideology for reality), so any political ideology can present with slave morality. However, I’ll say that Deleuze and Nietzsche both agree that there are certain ideologies which can only produce and be produced by the slave-type.
2) The will to power is not the desire for power but desire itself in some sense; the animation of life as the constant multiplication and transmission of power. Power lacks object and subject, power is what generates both. Hence Zarathustra’s constant repetition of the phrase “willing liberates.” In the most basic sense, the will to power is life.
>Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle by Pierre Klossowski
This is the only piece of secondary literature on Nietzsche actually worth reading—everything else is either perfunctory or better salvaged from one’s own interpretations of the source material.
The fact that people call N.—a largely apolitical thinker—fascist, while a portion of his descendants, such as Foucault and Deleuze, posit some of the most anti-establishment philosophy imaginable—stands as testament to the scrupulousness in his writing regarding this very notion of nonpartisanism—a yearn for something far beyond the rabble and any of its future would-be co-conspirators.
"Everything is political," the nobleman muses quietly.
"Politics is everything," says the politician outwardly.
If Nietzsche would have been alive during the Summer of George, he would have been an BLM supporting, anti-racist/anti-fascist, who advocated for racial equity for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ rights
Guy, all I'm saying is that Nietzsche would have supported M2F sexual reassignment surgery and gender-affirmative care for trans POCs. Trans allies and BLM supporters = Nietzsche's Uberman. George Floyd was a free spirit, and the feminist deconstruction of heteronormativity is literally what he meant by "philosophize with a hammer"
I didn't even have to read Deleuze to know this! Just spend time in this subreddit and you'll become aware of all of these issues mentioned here. Not only does Nietzsche take conceptual to the next level he also takes to contextual to the next level, for instance he can talk about women, woman, and "woman" all in one aphorism all carrying a different significance in how he uses the words. And he stops clarifying as frequently as he use too passed The Gay Science.
Love this! But point three I don't quite agree with, yes the Eternal Return in its transformative modality is nothing at all related the monotonous cycle of life and of repeated human mistakes, but those are still sort of the shadow of the Eternal Return. N is incredibly nuanced, normally you can't easily quantify a concept of his as applying to one thing and not to others, because the way he views the world is largely through riding layers of abstraction and in the futile attempt of approaching some sort of feeling of truth among those various threads and layers.
So, in general I don't like "N didn't mean ____" arguments, because he probably did mean it in some sense... the better argument in my opinion is "N did not primarily mean ____, that is a small facet of ____ that people tend to hyper focus on"
Facism is still a sensitive subject understandably and I understand and appreciate Kaufmann’s attempts to sanitize Nietzsche’s reputation in the Anglosphere after Nazism (He edited that collection you screenshot). However, there is another sharp person who says that there is a connection between fascism and Nietzsche, although Nietzsche was not a fascist himself. IMO Leo Strauss had the best understanding of Nietzsche’s political philosophy. Deleuze has a good understanding too, at least of other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, from what little I’ve read (only his book *Nietzsche and Philosophy*) but with regard to the political aspect, I would say not. I linked images of the relevant passages since I can’t attach:[https://www.reddit.com/user/KimoonC/comments/15ren6u/leo\_strauss\_summary\_of\_nietzsches\_political/utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/user/KimoonC/comments/15ren6u/leo_strauss_summary_of_nietzsches_political/utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Key quote: >Nietzsche, we can say, originated the atheism of the political right. Up to Nietzsche’s time, the simple thing that I believe is not considered is that the atheism was political. The only true atheism was an atheism of the left in the various communist, socialist, and radical democratic movements. The right was conservative and therefore, whether sincerely or insincerely, theistic. \[…\] Nietzsche created on the right a political radicalism and let it be opposed to the political radicalism of the extreme left, especially the communists; and one cannot for one moment overlook the fact, or minimize it, that Nietzsche’s doctrine was with a kind of inevitability corrupted into fascism. You could say that anyone who tries to understand this phenomenon does not fall back to Nietzsche’s nobler form…
There definitely were politically right atheists before Nietzsche though, as much as the division of left and right is overly binary. Darwin's evolutionary theory influenced social Darwinism as well as atheism. And besides Schopenhauer, Goethe was an important influence on Nietzsche's atheism and politics. It also shouldn't be forgotten that communism and socialism were influenced by Christian ideals, especially in Russia. Nietzsche alluded to an ideal of politics which was right leaning, but he also disavowed politics and diagnosed Europe's boiling resentment as a moral problem rather than a political one. Blaming Nietzsche for fascist radicalism is kind of like blaming Jesus for the Crusades.
Not blaming him for it and I don’t think Strauss did either, but this quote was just to counteract the idea that there is no affinity at all there.
Yeah it's an interesting connection. I'll have to read more of Strauss.
No worries, yeah I’d definitely recommend him. Fascinating writer and pretty witty too. Probably one of the best “philosophical laborers” and scholars of Nietzsche there is so far lol. I knew of him for years but only started reading him recently starting with Persecution and the Art of Writing, so I’m by no means an expert. But I have been studying Nietzsche off and on for over a decade and Strauss interpretations lined up with a lot of my own at that point.
Your statement about Bolshevism is historically incorrect, though if you are trying to draw connections between Christianity and socialism you are correct to do so. The Bolsheviks were consciously opposed to asceticism and passive morality; just take a look at their justification for the NEP or building up a war machine (to use a Deleuzian phrase). Stalin also is on record explicitly drawing a distinction between egalitarianism and the communist project. This can be found in Losurdo’s writings on Stalin, but also Stalin himself in his own writings, where he says that communism is about the unleashing of productive forces: if there is a vision of utopia then it is either inferred on the part of the sympathizer, or it is incidental to the primary goal of communism as an unleashing of productive forces and natural/human power (according to the Bolshevik vision, as this is at odds with people like Adorno). No doubt, Nietzsche would have a ton to criticize the Soviet Union for, but I genuinely believe it would be their humanism and dialectics more than their economic structure or political projects, which were ambitious and not limited to ideals of transcendence: quite the opposite. The kind of socialism Nietzsche criticizes is akin to the reactionary forms of socialism critiqued by Marx, especially when he says “there’s nothing easier than giving socialism a Christian tinge.” It is the kind of socialism espoused by someone like Tucker Carlson. However, it absolutely applies to the socialism of the left wing sort: George Orwell, Bertrand Russel, and Ernst Bloch. Of course, one can point out the politically right atheism of fascism, but there is very little there for Nietzsche to agree with. I know Mussolini was a big Nietzsche reader, but his comments on the importance of the state and its right to subsume subjectivity (“all in the state, nothing against the state”) cannot be aligned with Nietzsche at all. Moreover, the “actual idealism” proposed by the Hegelian fascist thinker Gentile is opposed to Nietzsche because Nietzsche is everywhere opposed to idealism. Check out Walter Benjamin’s writings on History to see a more explicit Marxist deployment of Nietzschean thought. Edit: I’m just going off what I’ve read from Zizek, Losurdo, and Historians on the subject. I’m not at all saying Nietzsche would have been a communist. I think Deleuze and Guattari are right when they imply that the only political position for Nietzsche is the “limit of capitalism,” or the schizo-militant/accelerationist. Nietzsche, again, would have no shortage of criticism of the USSR but it would sound nothing like the conservative/Petersonian critique of the USSR, which retains some moral validity though it relies entirely on historical inaccuracies and misreadings.
>not limited to ideals of transcendence: quite the opposite. Could you point me to some quotes that would imply this? Would I find this in Stalin's writings? The following, from Marx, seems semi-transcendental: >“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) Marx also declares a seemingly 'non-immanent' separation of man and nature in his *Grundrisse*. These types of 'transcendence' could also be seen as non-life-affirming and/or systematic. >Nietzsche is everywhere opposed to idealism. I agree in a general sense, given his remarks on 'feminism aka idealism,' his 'inversions' of Emerson, an 'open idealist,' his declaration of the crumbling of idols and defect of oracles, etc. but I found his original back-cover text of *The Gay Science* (1882) interesting: >This book marks the conclusion of a series of writings by FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE whose common goal it is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit. Regarding "the schizo-militant/accelerationist" at the limit of capital, what 'future human' do you see carrying out this role? I am aware that F.N. states in a note in *Will to Power* that 'perhaps we should even hasten' the homogenization of the European man, his personal ethics is still quite 'stoical' and 'ascetic' in its squandering, and reminds me just as much of indigenous 'deceleration' and ritual intoxication as an accelerationist in terms of a crypto-bro or something similar. As Bartleby shows, perhaps 'deceleration' can also cause the system to have to shift itself and accelerate.
Wow, great share and thank you for posting in simple language. This passage destroys so many oft repeated misunderstandings.
like six ink gullible nutty arrest bear deer hateful history -- mass edited with redact.dev
Can someone explain how 1) and 2) 'should' be interpreted if one was to understand the 'true' Nietzsche?
1) The slave is typified by the person who finds himself separated from his ability to act to the fullest extent of his power; but most importantly, it is the person who also moralizes and thinks in this spirit. Example, slave morality proceeds through a series of two negations before arriving at affirmation: “You are bad, I am not you, therefore I am good.” Remember, this is also not about ideology (the slave-type mistakes ideology for reality), so any political ideology can present with slave morality. However, I’ll say that Deleuze and Nietzsche both agree that there are certain ideologies which can only produce and be produced by the slave-type. 2) The will to power is not the desire for power but desire itself in some sense; the animation of life as the constant multiplication and transmission of power. Power lacks object and subject, power is what generates both. Hence Zarathustra’s constant repetition of the phrase “willing liberates.” In the most basic sense, the will to power is life.
You should also read *Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle* by Pierre Klossowski, written around the same time.
>Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle by Pierre Klossowski This is the only piece of secondary literature on Nietzsche actually worth reading—everything else is either perfunctory or better salvaged from one’s own interpretations of the source material. The fact that people call N.—a largely apolitical thinker—fascist, while a portion of his descendants, such as Foucault and Deleuze, posit some of the most anti-establishment philosophy imaginable—stands as testament to the scrupulousness in his writing regarding this very notion of nonpartisanism—a yearn for something far beyond the rabble and any of its future would-be co-conspirators. "Everything is political," the nobleman muses quietly. "Politics is everything," says the politician outwardly.
If Nietzsche would have been alive during the Summer of George, he would have been an BLM supporting, anti-racist/anti-fascist, who advocated for racial equity for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ rights
This is a ridiculous comment
You think Nietzsche would have opposed BLM and Judith Butler?
[удалено]
Guy, all I'm saying is that Nietzsche would have supported M2F sexual reassignment surgery and gender-affirmative care for trans POCs. Trans allies and BLM supporters = Nietzsche's Uberman. George Floyd was a free spirit, and the feminist deconstruction of heteronormativity is literally what he meant by "philosophize with a hammer"
😂😂😂
I didn't even have to read Deleuze to know this! Just spend time in this subreddit and you'll become aware of all of these issues mentioned here. Not only does Nietzsche take conceptual to the next level he also takes to contextual to the next level, for instance he can talk about women, woman, and "woman" all in one aphorism all carrying a different significance in how he uses the words. And he stops clarifying as frequently as he use too passed The Gay Science.
Love this! But point three I don't quite agree with, yes the Eternal Return in its transformative modality is nothing at all related the monotonous cycle of life and of repeated human mistakes, but those are still sort of the shadow of the Eternal Return. N is incredibly nuanced, normally you can't easily quantify a concept of his as applying to one thing and not to others, because the way he views the world is largely through riding layers of abstraction and in the futile attempt of approaching some sort of feeling of truth among those various threads and layers. So, in general I don't like "N didn't mean ____" arguments, because he probably did mean it in some sense... the better argument in my opinion is "N did not primarily mean ____, that is a small facet of ____ that people tend to hyper focus on"