Friedrich Nietzsche and Jakob Friedrich Fries
he name “Friesian” comes from the German philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries. I explained in an earlier post how Kelley Ross railed on Nietzsche for being anti-Semitic while at the same time downplaing Fries’ own contribution to Nazi ideology. The funny thing is, you could read half the articles on his site and not know who Fries is. Fries’ own bibliography page is ironically minute for such a massive site. It’s shorter than his Nietzsche page and his Nietzsche and the Nazis page. This may have more to with the fact that Fries, along with Kant, were the main influences behindLeonard Nelson‘s ethics, Sir Karl Popper‘s economics, as shown by his family tree of Kant-Friesian Philosophies.
Yet for all his talk of epistemology and the foundations of value, it appears that he basically makes most judgment calls based on a person’s economic philosophy. Thus, Noam Chomsky is a “lunatic” for his “crusade against capitalism,” but Ayn Rand, whose Objectivist movement began “taking on more and more of the authoritarian or totalitarian overtones of the very ideologies it was supposedly opposing” is nevertheless “An inspiring advocate for the free market and for the creativity of the autonomous individual.”
Ross writes that he suspects the “major reason for the popularity of Nietzsche among trendy intellectuals of the last century has been his critique and dismissal of Christianity.” This is certainly true of high schoolers, but “trendy intellectuals” are typically more interested in his dismissal of Plato and his themes of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian. Ross goes on to say that “Nietzsche’s anti-Christian critique simply follows from his anti-Jewish critique. Trendy intellectuals, however, would never want to admit that Nazi anti-Semitism owed any genuine, rather than merely a confused and misrepresented, debt to Nietzsche.” He then takes a rather long critque aimed against Jewish Christianity and argues that because Nietzsche was “incautious in his use of his terminology” by calling Jewish hatred “evil” instead of “bad” after complaining that the idea of “evil” was based on “slave morals,” it must mean that Nietzsche hated all Jews.
On his “Nietzsche and the Nazis” page, he points out that the Nazis adopted Nietzsche’s philosophy as their own: “Nazis were not stupid and that Nazi ideology appealed to a larger literate, educated, and informed audience of Germans. If the Nazis and their supporters got Nietzsche wrong on important issues, how intelligent and educated can they have been?” Thus, he concludes that the “Nazis seem to be reasonably faithful Nietzscheans.”
Ross also criticizes another philosopher, Stephen Hicks, for being “in an apologetic mode when it comes to anti-Semitism and Nietzsche’s attitude towards the Jews.” Hicks points to a quote saying: “the Jews are beyond doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race now living in Europe” and could actually take over Europe if they wanted to, but Ross interprets this as an “anti-Semitic fantasy, since the Jews are neither a race nor ‘pure’ (Russian Jews with red hair, while Yemeni Jews look like Arabs), and were never in any position to “have the ascendency, in fact literally the supremacy, over Europe if they wanted it.”
On his bibliography page about Fries, he writes:
“In criticizing Fries, Shlomo Avineri… has correctly pointed out that German nationalism was already displaying some of its worst tendencies, including the book burning at the Wartburg Festival, and anti-Semitism — with Fries himself contributing an anti-Semitic tract. The horrifying overtones of this led Avineri to dismiss Fries and the Burschenschaften, not as “liberal, idealistic,” but as proto-Nazis; and he attributed the affinity between them all to the subjectivism and irrationality of Fries’ thought… Politically, there is certainly enough blame to go around. The mix of ideas found later in National Socialism owes as much to Hegel as to the evils advocated or practiced by Fries and the Burschenschaften. From the Neoplatonic (and perhaps Aristotelian) doctrine that God only knows universals, Hegel produced the modern totalitarian idea of the state, where the individual as such is “abstract” and irrational — only the State, as the historical expression of Geist, “spirit” or “mind,” is real and rational…. The new element into the mix was later the anti-Semitism of Marx himself, for whom Jews now were class enemies, symbolic and more, of Capitalist exploitation…. So if Fries was simply anti-Semitic, this means all his thought is just discredited? Right? Well, anti-Semitism, while repellent in Fries or anyone, tends to be excused or ignored when found in those who are more politically favored or fashionable, or where the rest of their ideas are regarded as worthy in themselves and unrelated to attitudes towards the Jews. Thus, anti-Semitism expressed or practiced by Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, Gottlob Frege, or Martin Heidegger is therefore hardly even noticed by their advocates…. Anti-Semitism as a form of racist ideology was essential to the political theory of the Nazis; yet such racism is missing in Heidegger [which is what I thought until recently; but now see the revelations of Emmanuel Faye] and also in Fries — especially since such ideology didn’t exist yet in the early 19th century. It is not missing in Nietzsche, who freely uses expressions like die Herren Rasse, the “Master Race,” or “Race of Masters.”
So Fries may have been anti-Semitic (really anti-Jewish), but the German philosopher Hegel contributed just as much to Nazi ideology because his statist philosophy denegrated people as individuals, which apparently is the first step to becoming a totalitarian state, while Voltaire and Marx were just as anti-Semitic yet everyone gave them a pass.
So in November of 2010, I wrote:
Letter 3: “‘Drudgery’ these days will more accurately describe the lives of the wealthy than of wage-earners”
You have written several articles denouncing Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi and defending Jakob Fries against himself being a proto-Nazi. The opposite is true.
Nietzsche made numerous statements criticizing Anti-Semitism, Pan-Germanism, racism, and nationalism and even broke off all communication with his editor, his good friend Richard Wagner, and even his own sister over their own anti-Semitism and pro-Aryan ideals. Following Nietzsche’s death, his sister re-edited and published his post-humous work, The Will to Power, which Nietzsche had originally abandoned. After the Nazis came to power, she created the Nietzsche Archive, which received financial support and publicity from the Nazis so that it could be used to promote their ideology, but Nietzsche himself was horrified at the idea that his works were being used by anti-Semites within his own lifetime. In Christmas of 1887, he wrote his sister, saying:
“You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy…. It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Förster, as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all…. It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I have favored secretly—and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times.”
In The Gay Science, he writes:
“No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly “German” enough, in the sense in which the word “German” is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine…. We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being “modern men,” and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the “historical sense.”
He wrote that the reason he broke with his editor because he didn’t want his writings
“completely buried and unexhumeable in this anti-Semitic dump.”
Because of this, he was forced to self-publish Beyond Good and Evil, which says:
We “good Europeans,” we also have hours when we allow ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow views–I have just given an example of it [in Wagner’s Mastersingers]– hours of national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old-fashioned floods of sentiment…. This process of the EVOLVING EUROPEAN, which can be retarded in its TEMPO by great relapses, but will perhaps just gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depth–the still-raging storm and stress of “national sentiment” pertains to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at present–this process will probably arrive at results on which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of “modern ideas,” would least care to reckon…
In the same chapter he writes:
It must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and disturbances–in short, slight attacks of stupidity–pass over the spirit of a people that suffers and WANTS to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition: for instance, among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly, the Christian-romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly, the Prussian folly (just look at those poor historians, the Sybels and Treitschkes, and their closely bandaged heads), and whatever else these little obscurations of the German spirit and conscience may be called.
In The Geneaology of Morals, he says that anti-Semites
“…are all men of resentment, these physiologically impaired and worm-eaten men, a totally quivering earthly kingdom of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in its outbursts against the fortunate, and equally in its masquerades of revenge, its pretexts for revenge. When would they attain their ultimate, most refined, most sublime triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, if they could succeed in pushing their own wretchedness, all misery in general, into the consciences of the fortunate, so that the latter one day might begin to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps would say to themselves, “It’s a shameful to be fortunate. There’s too much misery!”
In a letter 1887 letter to Theodor Fritsch, he writes:
“Believe me: this abominable “wanting to have a say” of noisy dilettantes about the value of people and races, this subjection to “authorities” who are utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind (e.g., E. Dühring, R. Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, P. de Lagarde—who among these in questions of morality and history is the most unqualified, the most unjust?), these constant, absurd falsifications and rationalizations of vague concepts “germanic,” “semitic,” “aryan,” “christian,” “German”—all of that could in the long run cause me to lose my temper and bring me out of the ironic benevolence with which I have hitherto observed the virtuous velleities and pharisaisms of modern Germans.
— And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites?”
Regarding racists and German nationalists, he said:
“every great crime against culture for the last four hundred years lies on their conscience.”
A quick note he wrote to his friend Overbeck shortly before his insanity says:
“Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot.”
Rather than being an anti-Semite, it would be more true to call Nietzsche an anti-anti-Semite. This is hardly a liberal whitewash. Even the fact-eschewing Conservapedia, which humorously suggests Nietzsche may have gone insane because of his atheism, says that he denounced German nationalism, “abhorred” anti-Semitism, and that it was his sister who provided the “distorted version of culled and misquoted statements which later provided an intellectual fig leaf for the Nazis and Italian Fascists.”
The glorification of battle and warriors by Nietzsche, as in “On War and Warriors” in Thus Spake Zarathustra is symbolic of philosophical battles, proven by the fact that it is immediately followed up by an attack on the state as “The New Idol,” as explained by Walter Arnold Kaufmann in his book, Nietzsche, philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (p.386). Other scholars have pointed out that the “tough guy” rhetoric was probably psychologically conditioned by the fact that Nietzsche was very sickly and suffered throughout his life from partial blindness, headaches, and gastrointestinal problems, forcing him to constantly relocate himself to more conducive climates, a fact that in itself dismisses your allegation that Nietzsche had “contempt for the sick and suffering.” Most of your other complaints regarding Nietzsche are similar to the generic moral complaints leveled against Darwin and Freud in that his writings describe how he believed the world is and not what he believed the world should be. For example, Nietzsche did not believe people should adopt “master morality” as you imply, but that the revaluation of morals would correct the inconsistencies in both “master” and “slave morality.”
You also manage to make the lame complaint that Nietzsche saying “the Jews are beyond doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race now living in Europe” which could actually take over Europe if they wanted to, is itself an “anti-Semitic fantasy,” because the Jews aren’t a race (Some Jews would disagree; are they anti-Semitic?) and because the Jews couldn’t conquer Europe if they wanted to (So what? Most anti-Semites would balk at such a statement regardless).
Despite this hair-splitting regarding Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism, your defense of Jakob Fries is nowhere near as descriptive. You admit that Fries was a German nationalist who wrote an anti-Semitic tract, but are horrified that some historians call Fries a proto-Nazi, yet you somehow fail to point out that Fries’ anti-Semitic tract advocates Jews being marked with a distinct sign so that they could be identified in public! How un-Nazi of him!!
The tract itself was a reply to another tract published in 1816 by Friedrich Ruhs published which argued that Jews had “human rights” but not “citizen rights,” and that unless the Jews convert to Christianity, they should be forced to remain separate from the general population and pay protection money to the state. This was not far enough for Fries, who said Jews were unworthy even of state protection and should either abandon their religion, dismantle the legal authority of the rabbis, quit their occupations in finance and trade, or be exiled from Germany just as the Pharaoh of Egypt had done.
Though you quote Nietzsche in excess to try to make some far-reaching arguments on his anti-Semitism, your Friesian site strangely lacks many quotes from Fries himself. Here is one I think you should post on your site:
“The first concerns the prejudice that the Jews were persecuted by us with blind rage and unjust religious zeal during the Middle Ages as well as down to the present. This, Herr Ruhs has incontrovertibly disproved. To be sure, due to the more coarse manners of an earlier age, people alternated between rash, superstitious patronage and cruel excesses in their behavior toward the Jews. Princes almost always favored them too much, while cruelty originated from the common people. This cruelty, however, was not due to an inexplicable hatred for those who lived by deceit–those insidious second-hand dealers and exploiters of the common people. The ideas that the Jews were excessively oppressed in civic matters derives from this [erroneous belief that the Jews were treated with blind hatred]. If they were only to receive more civic rights, it is held, they would thus improve themselves. Ruhs has clearly shown that the opposite is true by using examples from history. Both in Germany and abroad the Jews dwelt in free states where they enjoyed every right, and even countries where they reigned–but their sordidness, their mania for deceitful, second-hand dealing always remained the same. They shy away from industrious occupations not because they are hindered from pursuing them but simply because they do not want to.
“The second prejudice is the kind that can easily deceive human understanding with regard to the most important things. An abstract, general expression is replaced with the reality of a particular one. In this case, the [terms] Jews, Jewry and Judaism are interchanged. We declare war not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Judaism. Should one we love be stricken by the plague, is it not proper that we wish him deliverance from it? Should we abuse those who, stricken by the plague, lament its horrors and conjecture how to free themselves from it? Judaism is a residue from the uncultured past, which instead of being restricted should be completely extirpated. In fact, improving the condition of the Jews in society means rooting out Judaism, destroying the whole lot of deceitful, second-hand peddlers and hawkers. Judaism is the sickness of a people who are rapidly multiplying. Jewry will acquire power through money wherever oppressive, public ransoms become necessary; wherever the well-bring of the citizen is so endangered that indebtedness on a small scale grows ever worse. Finally, the Jews also gain power where many unproductive countries are wasteful. The idle, stagnant capital of these countries is devoured by the Jews like worm gnawing on rotting matter.” -“On the Danger to the Well-Being and Character of the Germans Presented by the Jews”, 1816
Fries also claimed every farmer and city dweller hated the Jews because
“they corrupt the people through their depravity and steal their bread from them.”
Definitely not the person I would choose to name my philosophy website after.
As if it isn’t bad enough these words come from a philosopher of theology and ethics, these screeds by Ruhs and Fries were echoed throughout Germany’s taverns, helping spark the 1819 Hep-Hep Riots, which brought a great deal of death and destruction upon the Jews. Four hundred Jews had to be led out of Wurzburg by armed escort to live in tents until the carnage died down, but it did not end there, as Jewish persecution spread rapidly from that city to Frankfurt am Main, Koblenz, Darmstadt, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, and Berlin. Although the German authorities thankfully attempted to protect the Jews against the rioters against Fries’ better judgment, the riots themselves gave the authorities the ability to argue that if this much unrest was caused by the mere suggestion that Jews be granted equal rights, then the actual granting of rights would bring catastrophe.
You also try to claim that Fries’ anti-Semtitism was no worse than that of Marx or Voltaire in order to prove it was as much a problem on the Left as it was on the Right. This is also false.
A student of Hegel and teacher of Marx, Bruno Bauer, wrote an essay called “The Jewish Question,” arguing that Prussian Jews seeking emancipation could not achieve their desire until Germany was emancipated from all religion, both Jewish and Christian. Marx replied with his own critique called “On the Jewish Question,” arguing in favor of Jewish emancipation by using the United States as an example of a politically emancipated state that has “neither a state religion nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another.” Despite Marx’s overall objective of defending the religious tolerance Fries objected to as well as the fact that Marx himself came from a formerly Jewish family, he did argue that capitalism was the triumph of Judaism and that the Jews worshiped not God but money. It’s overall importance, however, is so minor that the Jewish Encyclopedia does not bother to mention it, although it does include a short article on the anti-Semitism of Fries (despite his obscurity, and with nothing regarding [h]is philosophy).
Voltaire likewise bitterly attacked religious bigotry in a treatise on religious tolerance following the trial of a persecuted Protestant in Catholic France, yet after being duped out of 20,000 francs by a Jewish banker, accused Jews of being greedy and selfish, saying that their only ideals are children and money. The Jewish Encyclopedia says that while the incident “hardly had the effect of filling him with anti-Jewish sentiments,” it did give him “an opportunity to display his humorous satire and give him a chance to attack the Bible,” after which he wrote an apology for the Jews explaining that he had no intention of antagonizing them.
You likewise claim that Nazi ideology is descended as much from Hegel as Fries because Hegel conceived of the totalitarian concept of the state as “Geist” where the individual should be subsumed into the state, but this contradicts Hegel’s multiple references on how the privacy of the family was sacred and that the independence of civil society from the state was one of the important features of his times, though obviously not in Nazi ideology. Hegel argued that full civil rights should be extended to the Jews so as to prevent them from remaining “in that isolation with which they have been reproached” so as to bring them to their “desired assimilation in terms of attitude and disposition.” Hegel also criticized the idea of explaining human behavior through “exterior and accidental” characteristics of the body. Hegel was even accused by German nationalists of being unpatriotic and Hitler himself rejected Hegel’s philosophy in his Table Talks of 1940.
To summarize, Nietzsche, Marx, Voltaire and Hegel believed that Jews should be allowed to practice their religion freely despite the anti-Semitism of the their times, while Fries chose to spur it on even more by arguing that human rights were too good for them. One can draw a straight line from Fries’ vile rhetoric to the oppression and death of innocent Jews killed in the Hep-Hep riots, and his ideas on nationalism and on marking and expelling the Jews from Germany are in perfect adherence to Nazi ideology. The most you can place at the door of Nietzsche, Marx, Voltaire and Hegel are some hurt feelings. You ask, “So if Fries was simply anti-Semitic, this means all his thought is just discredited?” Fries is not “simply anti-Semitic,” but the answer to your question is no: just his thoughts on politics, theology, and ethics.
Jefferey Querner
Dear Mr. Querner,
So let me get this straight: did or did not the Jews effect the “slave revolt” in morals by reversing aristocratic values, according to which a hereditary and racially superior aristocracy (whether Aryans or “other aristocratic races,” like the Arabs or Japanese) rules the “black hair” classes?
Did Nietzsche, or do you, believe that moral right and wrong are rules that protect the weak from the strong? Do the weak, indeed, have a moral right to be protected from the strong?
KR
The rights of the weak were believed by Nietzsche to be unrealistic sentiments which did not adequately describe human behavior. To him, all societies were created by weak people who sought to pay taxes to aristocratic “strong men” as an alternative to surrendering their goods to brigands. To him, no society could survive without “slaves,” whether they be called serfs, farmhands, garbage collectors, or whatever, and it was as much an illusion to think that the workers of the world could obtain real “freedom” from drudgery as it was to believe that humans are “equal” by some innate “right” which is flagrantly violated every day in all human and animal societies. Thus, to him, Darwin was more realistic than Marx. Nietzsche also acknowledged your complaint regarding Buddhism’s similarity to Christianity, saying the basic distincton between two “decadence” religions was that “Buddhism makes no promises but keeps them, Christianity promises everything but keeps nothing.”
To Nietzsche, identifying something as “exploitation” is a moral value rather than a scientific one, which seems to me similar to your own complaint against Scientific American regarding child labor. In his view, righting wrongs in the name of a “common good” is impossible as there was no such thing as “common” good. Protecting the weak from the strong are associated with the Liberalization and Democratization of society, which he believed to be the breeding grounds for tyranny in the same vein as your own beliefs regarding Socialism. He saw the Socialists of his time as having beliefs similar to Plato’s claim that all selfishness would disappear if private property were eliminated and thus criticized them as proposing the commandment to not steal be changed to “Thou shalt have no property.” The endgame of making all men equal is Communism, which can not work because man is naturally careless with that which he doesn’t possess.
In contrast to this, he believed that property ownership inspired confidence, so measures should be taken to encourage easy access to small amounts of property and to limit sudden effortless enrichment. Branches of trade and commerce that accumulated vast fortunes through the handling of money should be removed from private individuals or companies, and those who owned too much should be viewed as inherently dangerous as those who owned nothing. So despite his antipathy towards the Socialism of his own time, he’d probably be considered a Socialist by today’s standards.
Nobility of birth was no guarantee of noble-mindedness, which was courageous and sought no honors, in opposition to the arrogant posturing of smug aristocrats who regarded their superiority as a birthright and who mistook the external trappings of “respectability” for true “nobility” of thought and sentiment, which like “altrusim” was a form of self-delusion masking genuine inner warmth. In regards to race, he believed race-mixing to be an overall positive force.
The “slave revolt” in morality was not enacted by all Jews but the Messianic Jews during the Roman era in response to their (black haired) oppressors, the Romans, whom Nietzsche identified, along with the Greeks, as the foremost example of “Master morality.” Nietzsche also blamed Plato for enacting the same “re-sentiment,” though it would be just as foolish to call him anti-Greek. In Human, All Too Human, he writes:
Even assuming the very worst about Nietzsche — in fact, even if we twisted most of those insults to the anti-Semites of his own time which I cited and redirected them at the Jews — it would still be a grave mistake to defend Fries as not being a proto-Nazi while calling the Nazis “reasonably faithful Nietzscheans” since Nietzshe never suggested, as Fries did, that they should be marked or exiled, or argued against their political emancipation. In fact, he argued that it would be better that the nationalists calling for Jewish exile to be exiled.
Jefferey Querner
Yes Mr. Querner, how can you deny reality with such outrage against the silent majority?
Dear Mr. Querner,
It is called “right and wrong.” The “rights of theweak” are the rights of all. If you don’t know the difference, you may not pass the legal test for sanity. Nietzsche, after all, flunked the test. That “cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude,” as Nietzsche says, may simply be an actual moral sense.
The irony, however, is to see Nietzsche apologists bent out of shape lest Nietzsche be thought of as an anti-Semite, a racist, a sexist, orhomophobe, whatever. In other words, he must have been an exemplary politically correct liberal. I think Nietzsche would just get a good laugh out of this, especially when the liberal reaction to “racism” etc. displays a “moral attitude” whose degree of self-righteousness makes fundamentalist Christians look like, well, Nietzscheans.
But, after all, who are you? Nietzsche says, “One must be born to any superior world — to make it plainer, one must be bred for it. One has a right to philosophy (taking the word in its greatest sense) only by virtue of one’s breeding. One’s ancestors, one’s ‘blood’ decides this, too.” So, obviously, you have no business writing about these philosophical issue unless you have some breeding to show for yourself. The ancien regime French aristocracy, so admired by Nietzsche, didn’t just allow Schwarzkopf commoners to wander in.
Oh, but maybe you wouldn’t want “aristocratic values” applied to you, to your disadvantage. Well, that is justwhere we are, aren’t we, with everything “Judaized, or Christianized, or mob-ized — the word makes no difference…” It’s that Judeo-Christian mob that believed in this equality-before-the-law business.
Since you go on and on, I’ll have to address the rest of your e-mail later.
Yours truly,
Kelley Ross
My first email argued that Nietzsche was more anti-anti-Semite than anti-Semite and that your comparison of Fries’ anti-Semitism to Hegel, Marx, and Voltaire was completely invalid since Fries advocated withdrawing not just “state rights” but “human rights” from the Jews, marking Jews as the Nazis did, forcing them to quit their jobs in trade and finance, and exiling them. In doing so helped rile anti-Semitic hatred in many German cities which ultimately resulting in innocent Jews being killed in the Hep Hep riots. The other three philosophers said some hurtful things about Jews. The Jewish Encyclopedia agrees Voltaire was not anti-Semitic and fails to label Marx an anti-Semite, but speaks of nothing but Fries’ anti-Semitism. It is therefore ridiculous to say Fries was not a proto-Nazi but Nietzsche was. This is what I wanted you to address.
You replied with two questions, the first implying Nietzsche hated the Jews because they started the “slave revolt” in morals, and the second implying Nietzsche didn’t believe in the strong protecting the weak (which had nothing to do with the argument). I replied that the “slave revolt” was caused not by all Jews but by Messianic Jews of the Roman Era and that Nietzsche thought Plato did the same (and he obviously didn’t hate all Greeks). I tried to lay out what your second question meant to Nietzsche, but you simply gushed out four paragraphs after focusing on nothing but the first sentence.
Replying to an email before you read it fully is inefficient because it leads you to bring up subjects already breached. This is especially bad when you try to mind read someone as a substitute to reading what they said. My reply included the fact that Nietzsche was against the Democratization and Liberalization of society so I obviously don’t think of him as a “politically correct liberal.”
Your complaint that Nietzsche didn’t believe in the rights of the weak being protected by the strong is hypocritical since you complain bitterly numerous times that the Constitution contains nothing about “social justice.” Your attempt to infer that I am crazy for being a “Nietzsche apologist” is ridiculous, considering you claim to have been heavily inspired by Ayn Rand, who herself took much from Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche is not my favorite philosopher (unlike him, I prefer the New Testament to the Old Testament, Buddhism to Hinduism, modernity to aristocracy) and my intent is not to apologize for him but to correct gross errors on your website. But your interpretations that Nietzsche hated sick people and that only aristocrats could be philosophers is absurd since Nietzsche was sickly his whole life and was born to a Protestant minister in a small town.
Dear Mr. Querner,
At 01:24 PM 12/4/2010, you wrote:
I think you’re confusing Nietzsche with Hobbes and Locke. Aristocratic values do not include pay. The “weak people” do not create a social contract society with taxes when the Erorberer-und Herren conquerors can conquer and subjugate. The Alans, Suevi, and Vandals who crossed the Rhine in 407 were not looking for jobs. They were on a ravage. They were the “brigands.” The government of aristocrats means ownership of land and people. There were no “taxes” in the familiar sense when there wasn’t a cash economy in the Middle Ages. Money for taxes implies the existence of non-aristocratic Burgers as well as, you know, Jews.
Slavery means ownership. People working for wages are “slaves” to Marx, but they can quit, move, start their ownbusiness, etc. If you want to conflate serfdom with “wage slavery,” this may be another example of turning Nietzsche into, not just a good liberal, but a good Marxist — perhaps with the intention of reproducing Trotskyite slave-labor in Nietzschean garb (a project perfectly recognizable in someone like Marcuse). And, as it happens, “drudgery” these days will more accurately describe the lives of the wealthy than of wage-earners, since hours worked correlates strongly with income. Only people like the trust-fund Kennedies can avoid that. But according to aristocratic values, and Nietzsche’s values, the “working class” means both capitalists and proletariat. Neither liberal society nor socialism are what he had in mind. You are right to the extent of seeing wage laborers as Nietzschean slaves, but then their employers are Nietzschean slaves also.
This is about as bogus as your Nietzsche social contract theory. Jewish morality preexisted the Zealots. And the Zealots almost all died. The Jewish revenge for their conquest presumably came from living collaborators like Josephus. The Romans may indeed have actually been “black haired,” but not to Nietzsche, since he refers to the “black-haired (‘hic nigerest’), as the pre-Aryan settler of the Italian soil, notably distinguished from the new blond conqueror race by his color.” The Romans were the Aryan “conqueror race” in Italy.
Just as your own interpretation of Nietzsche is incoherent, so is Nietzsche’s original theory. Jewish morality not only long preexisted the final breaking of the Jewish spirit of resistance in the Bar Kochba rebellion (132-135 AD), but Christianity, as the supposed cat’s paw of the Jewish slave revolt, preexisted even the first Jewish rebellion in 66-73 AD. So the whole theory of Jewish vengeance through the “slave revolt” is historically ridiculous. But then Nietzsche is not the kind of thinker who is very worried about historical accuracy. And he also knows that morality as something to protect all persons, weak or otherwise, can be found in Buddhism and Confucianism (or, for that matter, in the Egyptian “Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” which Nietzsche may not have known of) as much as in a Judeo-Christian tradition. Since he doesn’t express the same animus towards Buddhism or Confucianism that he does towards Judaism and Christianity, there is something deeply irrational going on there, which charitably might be interpreted as the earliest evidence of his insanity.
Yours truly,
Kelley Ross
P.S. If you starting answering my replies before I have finished them, especially with your typical prolixity (I see you have just sent a 13K reply since yesterday), your chances of ever getting another answer diminish rapidly. But you really don’t need more responses from me. A word to the wise should be sufficient, and the sense of the quotes in your original e-mail (at least one of which I quote myself) was actually addressed on the Nietzsche webpage in question(http://www.friesian.com/nietzsch.htm). You have your own axe to grind, with your own idiosyncratic interpretations (the social contract, the Zealots) of Nietzsche, and you obviously have no interest in Kant-Friesian philosophy. So there is really no point to this.
KR
—————
The Proceedings of the Friesian School
http://www.friesian.com/
All boils down to entitlement… from the high to the low.
The reason I responded before you finished your reply is because you are completely evading the original email in order to go off on a tangent to prove how bad Nietzsche’s philosophy is, which I really don’t care about. The only reason I used Nietzsche was because that’s the philosopher you obsessed about (moreso than even Fries).
My interest is in why you say the Nazis are Nietzscheans but Fries is not a proto-Nazi, despite the fact that he called on the Jews being marked, bring taken from their jobs in trade and finance, and exiled from Germany. Even assuming you’re right, do you really think saying the Jews caused the “slave revolt” in morals is worse than helping fuel the Hep Hep Riots?
As for supposed lib[e]ral ideology, even Conservapedia (which also hates Nietzsche and calls Relativity a liberal plot) acknowledges that Nietzsche would have loathed the Nazis. [] the Jewish Encyclopedia, which says Voltaire is not an anti-Semite, does not identify Marx as an anti-Semite, but says nothing of Fries except his anti-Semitism. Are Conservapedia and the [J]ewish Encyclopedia also part of the liberal plot? This is the third time I’ve asked these questions.
I suppose anyone who believes they are right has an axe to grind, but my scholastic degrees are not in philosophy, I have not written a website based on any philosophers, and if Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi or completely irredeemable, it would have no effect on my own belief system, so I think you have more to lose. I am interested enough in Kant-Friesian philosophy to have read your website and have spent some time attempting to understand it, but the LSU library has only one (fictional) book by Fries, one book about him (shared with Kant), and but a few books that mention him. I found his political tract, “On the Danger to the Well-Being and Character of the Germans Presented by the Jews” on Google Books. His name definitely shows up a lot more in discussions of historic anti-Semitism than it does in philosophy, which is more than I can say about Marx, Voltaire, and Hegel (a subject you have yet to address).
The Zealots were but one facet of Messianic Judaism just as “Simon the Zealot” was but one “disciple” of the gospel Jesus. Jewish morality did exist before the Zealots, and Nietzsche admired it, which is why he liked the Old Testament. And I must have missed the part where Nietzsche said the Romans had blond hair. It’s possible some Indo-European peoples took hold of Italy in prehistory, but races mix with time, which Nietzsche believed was a good thing, unlike the Nazis or any other people obsessed with racial purity.
The assumption here seems to be that the Jews were completely sympathetic to their Roman conquerers before the first Jewish rebellion, which is silly. The “slave revolt” was about adopting contempt for the values of one’s masters, which would have been possible as soon as Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C. (or really even before that since the Seleucids, Macedonians, Persians, and Chaldeans had ruled over them before Rome). Even if you were right, the gospels were written after the first Jewish rebellion and Nietzsche, following the theology of David Strauss and Bruno Bauer, blamed Jesus’ Messianic followers, not Jesus himself, for Christianity’s adoption of the “slave revolt.” As I quoted earlier, he believed it to be “Jewish freethinkers” who saved Europe from being “Asiatic Cloud” during the “darkest medieval times,” and there’s nothing you’ve quoted that criticizes the Jews of his own time, so your quarrel is really with his conception of history, not his similarity to the Nazis.
As far as anyone knows, Nietzsche didn’t kill or rape anyone, so I guess that would mean Nietzsche thought of himself as “virtual castrati.” Ayn Rand took a lot of her own beliefs from Nietzsche and also broached the subject of the “heroic rapist” and “heroic murderer,” but I don’t think you consider her insane. I don’t agree with a lot of Nietzche’s (or Ayn Rand’s) views of history and power, but it doesn’t mean that the Nazis were “reasonably faithful Nietzcheans.” If he hated Judaism, he certainly did a good job of hiding it considering his constant vitriol towards the proto-Nazis of his own day, including Wagner, his publisher, and his brother-in-law. As you say, this all has to do with history. Every conquest by Alexander the Great I’ve ever heard from historians has either been described in either neutral or positive terms. The “Five Good Emperors” of Rome weren’t called “Good” because of their ethical writings (except maybe Marcus Aurelius).
Since Nietzsche’s philosophy of not protecting the weak is [at] the heart of what is so repugnant to you, I was wondering if there is any modern example you can give of any particular political belief that you have adopted that may exhibit an important contrast to this. For example, were you in favor of the United States taking military action in regards to Darfur? Did you back George W. Bush’s decision to send AIDS relief to Africa? Or do you consider those situations to be completely different than what you’re talking about?
[End of correspondence]
One really weird thing is that while looking through his pages on Nietzsche, I found yet another page with Nietzsche (but not Fries), and this ome says:
This seems very different than saying that Nazis were “reasonably faithful Nietzscheans.” I thought maybe he wrote this afterwards but the last copyright dated is 2007. However, he does seem to have changed his Nietzsche bibliography page in 2011, probably adding more insults at “trendy intellectuals” like myself.
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