Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
Nietzsche and Objectivism

Unit Three: March 20 - April 16

D.J. Glombowski's Review Essay
on Nihilism and Connections to Naziism
In Friedrich Nietzsche's
The Will to Power and Beyond Good and Evil

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2000 9:45 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: DJG Review Essay-Part 3

[From: D.J. Glombowski ]

First Review Essay-Part 3


Abstract:
In this essay, I explore Nietzsche's position that
nihilism is the result of the absolutism of the
Judeo-Christians values after the influence of God has
withered away from the philosophical trends of a
culture. I also address the issue of Nietzsche's
influence on National Socialism and defend Nietzsche
anti-Semitism as deeper, intellectually, then the
German anti-Semitic tradition.

I. Nietzsche and Nihilism

In Part I of "Will To Power," I see the existentialist
roots fully exposed to the light of day. I see
Nietzsche's concept of the will to power, with its
primal urges, instincts and the unconscious in a quest
for life power, as an existentialist walk down the
path between the "absolute" values of Christian
morality and nihilism. For Neitzche, it would take a
superman, backed by a fully developed new morality or
"revaluation of all values", to be able to clear the
way and endure such a path.

Nietzsche saw nihilism as the consequence of the
"death of God." God's influence was no longer as
fundamental to the European culture in its every day
existence. God no longer mattered to the culture as
deeply as in the history of man. This void left by the
absence of God's influence caused the descent into
nihilism to take hold of European man. With the
absence of absolute values (Judeo-Christian values),
man was left with the emptiness and meaninglessness of
nihilism, or in Nietzshe's words, it's "against
meaninglessness on the one hand, against moral value
judgements on the other, " (WTP 1) and "morality was
the great antidote against practical and theoretical
nihilism," (WTP 4).

The belief in God placed values into another
realm, unreachable by man from this realm. When
European man broke from the yoke of the influence of
God, he awoke to a yearning for values and, failing to
discover an objective code of values, fell into the
meaningless void of nihilism. (Perhaps this was
inevitable since the full effects of Industrial
Revolution had not yet taken place, which was vitally
important for Ayn Rand, as she admitted, in
formulating her philosophy.) Though, according to
Nietzche, every purely moral system.ends in nihilism,
(WTP 19.)

Nietzsche briefly describes this either-or
scenario of absolute value or meaningless nihilism in
section 55 of Will to Power. "Extreme positions are
not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme
positions of the opposite kind. Thus the belief in
the absolute immorality of nature, in aim- and
meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary
affect once the belief in God and an essentially moral
order becomes untenable. Nihilism appears at that
point, not that the displeasure at existence has
become greater than before but because one has come to
mistrust any 'meaning' in existence. One
interpretation is collapsed; but because the
interpretation it now seems as if there were no
meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in
vain."

From this walk between absolute values and
nihilism, I see where writers like Albert Camus and
Jean -Paul Sartre got their versions of
existentialism. However, instead of seeing man as
caught up in an absurd struggle unable to rely on any
code of values, he envisions a morality that will lift
mankind beyond good and evil. Through the life force
of the will to power, developed from the Schopenhauer
will into a will that is an end in itself, the
creativity created by the life force becomes the life
power in the purposeful pursuit of existence. It is
the will to power that is the influence all of human
behavior but this will to power is not simply the will
to power over others, it is the very life force that
drives the human condition. "There is nothing in life
that is a value, except the degree of value-assuming
that life itself is the will to power."

In regards to Nietzsche's position regarding
nihilism, I contend that he thinks nihilism is bad,
along with the absolute values of Christianity and
Judaism. Nihilism, Nietzsche contends, is a result
from a faith in values that are ready made for another
realm, beyond man's grasp. After God's influence
withered, the philosophical pendulum swings toward the
meaninglessness and lack of values of nihilism.
Nietzsche rejects this opposite sides of the same coin
dilemma as a false choice. It leads Nietzsche to call
for the new philosophers of the future to carry his
morality on.

The final result is Nietzsche's own version,
(though, probably, by no means done consciously) of
the Hegelian Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. The
thesis/antithesis being Christian Absolute
values/Nihilism and the synthesis is the revaluation
of values and the will to power. Nietzsche thought
the way to rise out of the ashes of nihilism was in
the blaze of a better morality, one free of the
mistakes and prejudices in the history of the
philosophers before it.

Nietzsche calls for a new breed of philosophers who
will be strong enough to carry his philosophy of the
future into existence, which reminds me of Ayn Rand's
call for a new intellectual who is strong enough to
follow reason and practice the virtue of rationality
and selfishness. Nietzshe's new intellectual would see past
the prides and prejudices of the history of
philosophers, identifying the will to power as the
life force and superior morality and its placement
beyond good and evil. Nietzsche's new intellectual,
however, is not for the many, but for a limited few
who are strong enough to carry his new morality.

Like we see throughout part I of "Will To Power,"
Nietzsche is again calling for a revaluation of
morality in "Beyond Good and Evil." The Christian
values held the good as those who sacrifice for others
and evil as those who inflict harm through
selfishness. Good and evil are related because they
are "flip sides" of each other. The will to power and
its master morality is the elevation beyond good and
evil.

From the will to power everything comes.
Thinking, feelings or sensations are derivative of
this will to power, where feeling and thinking are
merely its ingredients. Nietzsche calls us both the
commanding and obeying parties in the relationship to
the will. Man can be driven by it, yet he does possess
a faculty of volition. In other words, both master
and slave to the will.

* * *

II. Nietzsche and Nazism

At this point, I would like to shift gears and
address the question #10, raised by Stephen Hicks in
the introduction to part 3. To what extent were the
Nazis justified in seeing Nietzsche as a precursor?
One can hardly doubt his influence when ones sees
aspects of his thought that are contained within the
Nazi philosophy. The division of the strong and the
weak can surely be seen reflected in the Nazi thought.
However, I think his influence is merely part of the
total influence on Hitler and National Socialism.

Richard Wagner and his opera/drama "The Ring of
the Nibelung," with its implicit critique of
capitalism and promise of a better race after Valhalla
burns, also had a heavy influence upon Hitler's
philosophy and the German culture. Though Nietszche
may have had anti-Semitic implications tangled in his
philosophy, Hitler's brand of anti-Semitism grew, in
part, from the influence of the book "The Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion" which preached of a Jewish
conspiracy to take over the world. As pointed out by
Leonard Peikoff in his book "the Ominous Parallels,"
the major philosophical influence of the German
culture in Pre-Nazi Germany and beyond was Kantian
self-sacrifice, with a sense duty to sacrifice oneself
to the collective as the ideal. It would be
incomplete and misleading to advance the notion that
Nietzsche is a precursor of the Nazis, much like it
would be incomplete to single out Wagner, Kant and
various other implications throughout the totality of
the history of philosophy as precursors.
Nietzsche may have prescribed the sacrifice of
the weak to the strong or the slave to the master, but
he doesn't advance the Kantian notion of sacrifice
that was the major influence to the German culture.
Nietzsche, too, identifies the Kantian influence on
the German culture in "BGE" (11). Nietzsche's
influence on the National Socialist philosophy was
merely a part of an integrated whole philosophy with
aspects of different German influences and
philosophers.

Though Nietszche saw Judaism as a source of
contemporary weakness, I don't think he was simply a
continuation of the German anti-Semitic tradition.
Nietzsche also held the same low regard for Christian
values and its traditions. As I stated in the
beginning of this essay, Nietzsche saw all such
absolute moralities as false values that lead to
nihilism. Nietzsche was anti-Semitic as much as he
was anti-Christian.

Further down the road in part 8 of BGE (251),
Nietzsche makes his greatest defense of not simply
being a continuation of German anti-Semitic as he
explicitly says the Jewish race is "beyond any doubt
the strongest, and purest race now living in Europe."
I think Nietzsche had problems with Judaism as a
philosophy, not with the Jewish people as a race.
Hitler, in contrast, with his paranoia of a Jewish
conspiracy from "Protocols" and other sources, was
anti-Semitic in the German tradition.

In conclusion, Nietszche saw that absolute
values would inevitably collapse into nihilism after
the influence of God is significantly reduced in the
lives of the people. The solution for Nietzsche is in
the recognition of the will to power and a revaluation
of values into a better morality. In regard to
Nietzche's influence on National Socialism, it would
be best described as only one of many philosophical
influences; his anti-Semitic arguments are
intellectual in nature and not necessarily aligned
with the German tradition of anti-Semitism.

D.J. Glombowski
Plymouth, MI




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Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
cybersem@objectivistcenter.org

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