Episode #448 from 12:55
Nazism
If we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche's thought, the idea he first introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the Übermensch. That's another one that's very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it's about power. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races. And the dominion of the superior Aryans. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was partly because Nietzsche's work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So Nietzsche of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement. But Nietzsche actually said that he really said something like the unifying ethos under which we've organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by, well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity. There's a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the enlightenment view, let's say, and the classic religious view, and that there will be dire consequences for that. And Nietzsche knew like Dostoevsky knew that, see, there's a proclivity for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity because the cost of disunity is high.
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Why this moment matters
If we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche's thought, the idea he first introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the Übermensch. That's another one that's very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it's about power. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races. And the dominion of the superior Aryans. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was partly because Nietzsche's work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So Nietzsche of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement. But Nietzsche actually said that he really said something like the unifying ethos under which we've organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by, well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity. There's a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the enlightenment view, let's say, and the classic religious view, and that there will be dire consequences for that. And Nietzsche knew like Dostoevsky knew that, see, there's a proclivity for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity because the cost of disunity is high.
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