Nazi ideology ran counter to Nietzsche’s brand of forceful individualism. Its platitudes, ludicrous theories of racial privilege, and exhortations of state power in no way echo the perspectives the philosopher voiced in his books. He despised submission to mass movements, and prized, above all else, revelation through introspection. “I love the great despisers” he writes, “for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other bank.” Self-mastery is impossible if one is in ideological service to the state, regardless of whether the overarching structure prizes racial extremism or demands more banal forms of conformity. Original meaning and true power can proceed only from an individual’s investigations of self. Put another way, power in the Nietzschen paradigm is never the brutal leverage SS guards exercised over concentration camp inmates, nor can it be found in the barrel of a gun or at the end of a bayonet. Rather, it is the experience of original, highly personal revelation. In this sense, one’s will to power is indivisible from Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, in which only moments of individual supremacy have the privilege of returning, forever and ever in the universe’s mysterious orbit, as they alone justify one’s existence.- Discourse by Eliott McCormick
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 16:54:09 +0000
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