Part 7: Nietzsche as a Proto-Nazi (Nietzsche and the Nazis, Part 7, Section 34)

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10 жыл бұрын

This audiobook edition of Nietzsche and the Nazis is read by the author, Dr. Stephen Hicks.
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@jozefgrunmann7998 Жыл бұрын

Mr. Hicks, congratulation, you are really an excellent lecturer. And Nietzsche was very clever man. I admire him.

@dalvi_ 3 жыл бұрын

This is extremely good stuff

@StephenHicksPhilosopher 10 жыл бұрын

Hi Rick: About "presentism" -- which thesis in particular do you think might be subject to the presentist criticism?

@likebox2 9 жыл бұрын

This is accurate, and pretty damning, but it is incomplete in my opinion. There is a major point that is glossed over, because it is a point that is shared by some who hold individualist doctrines in Capitalist states. The main thesis of Nietzsche's writing is that the egalitarian conceptions of human unity are misconcieved, and he is specifically attacking the two major competing egalitarian doctrines of his time, Christianity and Marxism. The thesis in these collective doctrines is that all of humanity is bound together in a unified meaningful project, with a teleology and an equal value on all those who contribute, whether in the body of Christ, as in the Christian conception, or in the body of workers, in the Marxist one. Nietzsche is attacking this view at the root, by attacking the monotheistic egalitarian conception of Hofstadterian superrational ethics that underlies these doctrines. He is simply suggesting that the ethics of natural law are superior to the monotheistic ethics of the Christians or the secular egalitarianism of the Marxists. Because he considers monotheism a lie to be rejected, he is sure that it could not have spontaneously evolved among people of Rome, so it must have been an imposition from outside, and he sees it as an imposition of the Jewish collective. Not individual Jews, who he sometimes admired when they stood apart from the religion, like Spinoza, but the Jewish collective, the Jewish Volk. So he has a different kind of anti-Semitism, different from Christian anti-Semitism. The Nietzschian anti-Semitism does not fault Jews for not accepting Christ as messiah, it faults Jews for foisting monotheism on a world which would be better off without it. This is ultimately a much more virulent brand of anti-Semitism, because it sees no compromise and it erects no barrier to genocide. The Nazis mingled this new kind of anti-Semitism with the old kind, as really, they were not incompatible in the early manifestations. Both wanted to enforce punitive and segregationist measures on the Jews. But the Nazis revealed their Nietzschian true colors when they began the racial genocide, because the Christian anti-Semitism, while barbaric, aimed only to convert the Jews to Christianity, not to slaughter them. The Nazis didn't care about conversion. They wanted the Jews destroyed, because the way they saw it, only the Jewish "Volk" contained within it the seeds of monotheism, and the monotheistic ethics were holding Germans back from being the masters of the world. If only there were no Jews, so the thinking goes, there would be no monotheism. This idea is insanely stupid, because monotheism is a philosophical idea which evolved several times independently of Jews, and spread independently in many different regions. It's just in Europe, where the religion is based on a Jewish conception, that it seems that Jews have a monopoly on the idea. It is intellectually bankrupt, and extremely vicious, and it is the central issue with Neitzsche's philosophy, not the other stuff mentioned here, which, while bad and incompatible with liberal democracy, is not the root disease. The problem with saying so is simply that monotheism is considered contrary to individualism too, although this is not necessarily so. The individualist doctrines do not inhibit an individual from voluntarily finding a larger task to which to devote his or her life, and whether this volluntary process is to be thought of as God imposing God's will from outside the individual on the individual, or whether this is the individual's will linking together with other individuals will to collectively form a God out of their mutually coherent actions, this is a meaningless question in light of logical positivism, and so does not admit an answer, and should not even be considered a question.

@eddymacable 9 жыл бұрын

Hmm do you think Nietzsche faults Jews because they believe in a single God or because of the moral code that characterises judaism? I don't get the impression that our boy Nietzsche cares about a person's metaphysics, only how that person's metaphysics influences their psychology. For Nietzsche monotheism doesn't matter, it's Judaeo-Christian slave morality that is the 'cancer'. It also doesn't matter that monotheism arose multiple times independently in different parts of the world, since Nietzsche is necessarily and viscerally part of the Western canon, and Western culture has really only known one brand of monotheism - Judaism.

@likebox2 9 жыл бұрын

eddy m The metaphysics is insignificant, only the moral code is important, both to Nietzsche, to me, and to pretty much nearly every adult believer. It's atheists who focus on the metaphysics, because the metaphysical beliefs are obvious untestable nonsense. But the metaphysics is just a scaffolding around the ethics, to make them more accessible and understandable for children. It's not that the ethics are constructed from the metaphysics, at least, not directly (as metaphysics is unobservable, and doesn't impact ethics). The metaphysics is constructed as an exegesis for the ethics. You can understand the same ethics with no fixed metaphysics whatsoever. This is what I personally needed to do, because as a logical positivist, I never saw any need for a fixed metaphysics. The way to do this is to understand the concept of superrationality, and extend it to asymmetric games. The notion that emerges is essentially equivalent to the ideas of monotheism shared by modern-day Christianity and modern-day Judaism. They really don't have any significant differences today. The Western Canon has at least two, perhaps three, somewhat distinct branches of monotheism--- Judaism and Christianity, and arguably also Marxism. Judaism and Christianity historically are somewhat separate, and only became ethically indistinguishable after the reformation. Before that, there was a certain cohesion to the Christian world that made all the Christians sort of like cells of a single body, more directed from above, while Judaism was more decentralized. Islam was sort of half-way between the two, with its own ideas, and Protestantism was completely decentralized, and usually more lax than Catholicism. But in the end, now all the denominations of Christians and the Jews pretty much don't have deep disagreements on anything except metaphysics. Since metaphysical arguments are basically idiotic, there's no difference between any of these. The Marxists had a metaphysics-free conception, and replaced it with a teleology. The God is the future limit of communism, and it was solely focused on material things. But within Marxist states, there were interesting constructions (suppressed by Lenin) which made the Marxist conception less clinical, and converged on essentially the same monotheistic idea. You can read about "God building" and Lunacharsky if you are interested. These ideas are pretty monotheistic. Modern monotheism, with its idea of a collective of people acting as one body, is really more a product of Christianity, and symbolized by the eucharist. Jewish monotheism before 100AD was more of a formal state religion, with less evolvability or malleability, and less conception of uniting a people spiritually, as it wasn't necessary, because there was a political order uniting them under a government. It became a purely spiritual religion with no secular authority after 135 AD, during the diaspora, and then it became essentially the same kind of thing as Christianity, which started out with no power. The problem with Neitzsche is the dismissal of these ethics. The most significant gain of "slave morality" is the abolition of ancient chattel slavery in Europe. The Christians did this gradually, through reform work, starting with Paul's epistle of Philemon, which made it a convention that slaves and masters are equal in Christ, and expected that freedom is to be given to Christian slaves voluntarily by Christian masters. This created a social pressure for abolition. This pressure eventually became a formal doctrine that Christians must not own Christian slaves by around 600 AD, and there was no slavery anymore by 700 AD in all of Europe. This continued until the 13th century or so, when Muslim slaves appear, and then when America is discovered, all hell breaks loose, and you get an era of another 400 years of colonial slavery, mostly Protestant. Then the Protestants get their act together and abolish slavery again, in the 19th century. The first abolition was more difficult, and it was accomplished without bloodshed at a glacial pace, and it is what I think most distinguishes the midieval era from the ancient era. The large construction projects and megalomaniacal soulless slave-art and slave-architecture of the ancient world is replaced by quiet small-scale contemplative individual personal art and transient personal construction projects. The only collective projects are cathedrals, which are constructed through tithes. You know, no more pyramids, no more colloseums, no more of those ancient slave-built abominations. It's all artisan labor, like Paul making rope or whatever. This is also the beginning of artisan small-producer capitalism, you know, before industrial capitalism. This transformation is the main point --- slave morality abolishes slavery! Neitzsche's hates slave morality, and his admirers re-established slavery. "Slave morality" is just plain morality. The authority of one person over another is the main problem, as the best actions are those which are voluntary, and an action which requires imposition of power is nearly always a monstrosity, even when the power tries to be benign. There is no separate "master morality", there is only cruddy people drunk with power abusing others who socially rank below them. The picture of this idea of a master morality was painted much better by Sade, much earlier than Nietzsche. Nietzsche is just cribbing.

@teloresumoasinomas1110 4 жыл бұрын

*You are a stupid liberal who believes in absurd falsehoods about Marxism. His absurd idealism has no feet or head. Go to a psychiatrist, lunatic.*

@jozefgrunmann7998 Жыл бұрын

Read Nietzsche once again. You are wrong not in all, but in many ideas.

@keeperofthecheese 3 жыл бұрын

Nietzsche said a lot of things which modern people would find extremely offensive, but it's invariably difficult to debunk what he says. Society simple cannot dispel his assertions.