Talk:Nietzsche contra Wagner
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[edit] Expand!
Please, someone, anyone with more knowledge than me on this, with better skills than I have-- feel free to expand this article!
-Bordello 10:05, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
Well first, the one-sided and oversimplifying philosemitic final conclusion is unneeded. Nietzsche opposed populist Christian anti-Semitism but espoused his own aristocratic anti-Semitism and denied the Jews their Judaism to dissolve the worthier Jews, like a drop in the sea, into his imagined pan-European Master Caste of the future. Scholar Hubert Cancik sums up Nietzsche's highly complex positions:
The Christian was "only a Jew of a 'freer' confession of faith" - Christians and Jews were "related, racially related" (AC 44), and Christianity was a form of Judaism raised "yet one time" higher through negation (AC 27: "the small rebellious movement, which is baptised in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, is the Jewish instinct once more"). Nietzsche wrote: Christianity is to be understood entirely in terms of the soil from which is grew - it is not a countermovement to the Jewish instinct; it is the successor itself, a further step in its [i.e., the Jewish instinct's] frightening logic. (AC 24) Nietzsche's fight against the "denaturalization of natural values" (AC 25), his "transvaluation of all values" was directed against Jews and Christians. Because Nietzsche argued against both, Christian antiSemitism was especially offensive for him. The Jews, Nietzsche maintained, were nevertheless guilty: They had "made humanity into something so false that, still today, a Christian can feel antiSemitic without understanding himself as the last stage of Judaism". (AC 24)
...
A short essay (section 251) in Nietzsche's "Philosophy of the Future" - Beyond Good and Evil (1885/6) - belongs to the "positive" parts. Here, "the breeding of a new caste to rule over Europe", definitely a current "European problem", according to Nietzsche, is discussed. The breeding of this caste follows the "Greek model": the foreign elements are "imbibed" and either assimilated or "excreted" - thus does a "pure European race and culture come into being". With the Jews, however, Germany was going to have difficulty, for Germany had "amply enough Jews" (so wrote Nietzsche in 1885/6): "that the German stomach, the German blood, is having difficulty (and for a long time yet will continue to have difficulty) finishing even this quantity of 'Jews'." Other European countries had finished with the Jews "because of a more strenuous digestion"; in Germany, however, there were simply too many. Nietzsche demanded what all anti-Semites demanded at that time: "Allow no more Jews in! And, especially, close the gates to the east (including the one between Germany and Austria!"... For anti-Semitism itself, Nietzsche had complete understanding; he was simply - like "all careful and judicious people" - against the "dangerous extravagance" of this feeling, "especially against the tasteless and scandalous expression of this extravagant feeling". (By asking moderation in the expression of anti-Semitism, which he considers as principally justified, Nietzsche takes the same posltlon as the later Wagner and Wolzogen.) Nietzsche had a measured and tasteful manner of expressing this "feeling". And his solution to the problem was also mild: the Jews are to be bred in. They even desire it themselves, "to be in Europe, to be imbibed and absorbed". As for the "antiSemitic complainers", those who might hinder this gentle final solution with their radical words, Nietzsche wanted to have them expelled from the country. And then, he thought, one could - "with great care" and "with selectivity" - cross an intelligent Jewish woman with an "aristocratic officer from the Mark" (i.e., a Prussian aristocratic officer)... In this elevated, fine, tasteful, gentle anti-Semitism, a thematic communality between Wagner and Nietzsche reveals itself, one going deeper than any disagreement in other areas, whether personal, musical or religious. (Hubert Cancik, "MONGOLS, SEMITES AND THE PURE-BRED GREEKS": Nietzsche's handling of the racial doctrines of his time)
--So, irrelevantly bringing up the issue of Nietzsche's relationship to anti-Semitism in such a glibly conclusive and needlessly apologetic manner is obviously propagandistic.
Nietzsche also subtly implies Wagner was a Jew in this work, as a form of anti-Jewish polemics--should you include that too?
- Blast. I hope you don't mind, but I'm simply not going to read that but will disagree with it anyway. Cheers. -Bordello 21:54, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Nietzsche's Death
Bordello, please please please, before RE-inserting the phrase "five years after his death", look at Nietzsche, why dont you, or check ANY book. Nietzsche died in 1900, therefore, 1895, the date of publication, is five years BEFORE, NOT after, his death. Druworos 19:40, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
- I screwed up. Sorry. Don't get your panties in a bundle and I won't mine. Cool?
-Bordello 01:10, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
