Professor Ken Gemes
Nietzsche, Jews, and Germans: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Professor Ken Gemes - Nietzsche, Jews, and Germans: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
- Okay, hello, everybody. I see Wendy. I don’t see me. I’m taking it you can all see me. I want to thank Wendy and Lauren for organising this. This talk is on Nietzsche, Jews, and Germans. What could possibly go wrong? And it’s going to be followed up by a talk: “Weininger, Jews, and Women: How It All Went Wrong.” Think that’s in about two weeks’ time. Lauren, could you go to the next slide? Oh, are we not on? Okay, yeah. Okay, what this lecture is doing is it’s examining Nietzsche’s very strange and ambiguous place in the rhetoric of verjudung. Verjudung is a term that comes from Wagner. It’s best translated as Jewification, and I want to show how he takes a idiosyncratic and nuanced approach. This lecture is dedicated… It’s a version of a lecture I gave at Riverside University in memory of Bernd Magnus, a very famous Nietzsche scholar, and he, near the age of five, escaped, with his parents, from a train which had been bombed by the Allies. That’s what allowed him to escape. It was bound for Auschwitz. And it’s also dedicated to my half sister Zsuszika Goldfischer, who died age five in Auschwitz. Lauren, could you… Next slide. Okay, picture of Nietzsche, and I’ve got another picture of Nietzsche coming up which I always like to show the students, which is kind of relevant to this thing because a lot of Nietzsche scholars try to duck the question of Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism. So next slide, please, Lauren: “Nietzsche Duck.” Okay, so now for the serious business.
Next slide, Lauren. Okay, there’s some pieces I need to put on the board before we get onto Nietzsche and anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism means something and ressentiment more than the anti-Semites. But the way we today think of anti-Semitism is that we think of anti-Semitism as prejudice against the Jews, and in that sense, I’m not going to, pff, make any excuses. Nietzsche was an anti-Semite. He talks about the smells of the Jews. He talks about their handling with money, the usual rubbish that one hears from casual anti-Semites and serious anti-Semites. But what I need to impress upon you is, in the 19th-century Germany, anti-Semitism was identified with a nationalist political movement that blamed a lot of the problems with the current society, the current world, on Jews and alleged Jewish influence of the day and that anti-Semitism Nietzsche unequivocally rejected. We also need to think about separating the question of whether a person is anti-Semitic from the question of whether their work is. Very famously, the philosopher Frege is very important for analytic philosophy. He’s the founder, really, of modern logic. He was an anti-Semite, but there’s none of it in his work, because his work was on logic. Or take a philosopher like Kant. Kant, in the sense I’ve just described, can be said to be prejudiced against the Jews, but in his way, his work was very emancipatory because Kant taught a fundamental lesson, which, unfortunately, Nietzsche rejected, that every human is worthy of respect.
Every human should be treated as an end in itself, and that thought had incredibly emancipatory effects for the Jews over the period of jurisprudence following Kant ‘cause there are so many lawyers and others influenced by Kant who made this argument that the Jews are essentially rational being, humans, and hence worthy of respect. And that led to laws of emancipation; nevertheless, Kant himself was, like Nietzsche, prejudiced against the Jews. 'Kay, so now what I need to do is, before I get onto, again, Nietzsche’s what he said about the Jews, I have to give some of you an idea of why Nietzsche is important 'cause I imagine many of out there don’t know much about Nietzsche. Next slide, Lauren.
[Lauren] Slow down. Hold on. I think it’s .
Next slide. Ooh.
[Lauren] Ooh.
No, we’re not… Good on you, Lauren. Okay, Nietzsche is very, very famous being known as the philosopher of the death of God. There’s a very famous passage in a book called “The Gay Science”; it’s “Gay Science” 125; where a madman runs into the marketplace and says, “I seek God. I seek God,” and the audience all whoop it up because they’re all like the village atheist and they think this is a big joke. And they say, “Where has he gone? Has he emigrated? Is he on holiday?” and it’s a big joke to them. But then, he pierces them with these questions, and he says, “Who has wiped away the entire horizon? Who has unchained the Earth from its sun?” and all these dramatic metaphors. And at the end, he says, “This deed is farthest from them, yet they have done it themselves,” okay? So the point is, look, Nietzsche’s the philosopher of the death of God not because he’s an atheist. There have been plenty of atheist before Nietzsche. What is really important about Nietzsche is he presses what is the full meaning of the death of God. That’s his point about saying, “This deed is farthest from them, yet they have done it themselves,” because he says, “These people don’t really understand what it means to lose God,” because to lose God isn’t just to lose that benevolent father figure in the sky but it’s to lose everything that rested on him.
Now, they’ve given up the father figure in the sky, but they’ve kept what Nietzsche thinks is the most important part of the Judeo-Christian world, and that is its values. For Nietzsche, the core of Christianity, or, we might say, of Judeo-Christianity, both Judaism and Christianity, are not its ontological commitments. Ontology’s about what exists. The core of Judaism or the core of Christianity, for Nietzsche, is not a belief in a benevolent father figure in the sky or belief in an eternal soul or belief in a divine act of creation, but rather, the core of Christianity and of Judaism is its moral commitments. And Nietzsche says its fundamental moral commitments are to compassion, “Love thy neighbour as you would have them love,” sorry, “Love your neighbour as you have them love you,” and the overriding value of truth that Nietzsche says… “Nietzsche.” Jesus says, “I am the and the truth, and no one comes to the Father except through me.” So he says those are the two fundamental commitments, he thinks, of the Judeo-Christian outlook. What he want to say to the atheists… He says, “Look, you given up belief in God and the immortal soul, but you’ve kept the core of Christianity, its commitment to compassion and the overriding value of truth.” And just so you should see how deep this critique is, think about atheists of the day, people like Richard Dawkins. What do they care about more than anything else? They say everything must be given to the truth.
The truth is the one overriding value, the one value that overrides every other value. “And it’s because we’re committed to truth,” says Dawkins, “that we have to recognise there is no God.” So Dawkins says what’s really important is truth, objectivity, and science, and one of the reasons he thinks science is important is because it gives us the means to better our existence, to improve the lot of everyone, in other words an exercise of compassion. Okay, Schopenhauer was also an atheist, like Nietzsche, but for Nietzsche, he still belongs to one of those members of the crowd of the marketplace, those village atheists, because he still had that commitment to compassion. And one of the things that Schopenhauer taught was that the world ought not to be, “because,” he says, “it invariably contained a surfeit of suffering over pleasure.” So Schopenhauer disaffirmed the right of this world to exist. He said the world ought not to exist. And Nietzsche was trying to resist Schopenhauer’s conclusion that the world ought not to exist, and one of the ways he does it.
[Lauren] Slow down.
Is by denying the… Sorry, one of the ways he tries to do it is he tries to affirm this world by denying that the presence of pleasure and the absence of suffering should be our only measure of value. Says, “Look, Schopenhauer, you have got this hedonistic assumption that alls that counts is pleasure and the absence of pain. And then, you have this premise that the world is full of pain; therefore, you conclude the world ought not to be, but there are other ways for measuring value”; for instance, what Nietzsche cares about, particularly, is creativity and genius, and he often says creativity and genius exist together with suffering. But Nietzsche doesn’t just argue against Schopenhauer. He also argues against Christianity because he says Christianity is itself fundamentally, he thinks, the response to the problem of suffering. Says, “There are people who suffer in the world. They cannot bear the suffering, so they make up a story that tries to redeem this suffering by saying this suffering will be rewarded in a world to come.” As they say here, he tries… Sorry, the Christian tries to palliate our suffering in this world by telling us that this is not the real, ultimate world and our suffering here will be rewarded in the world to come, the real world. One of the things Nietzsche holds against Christianity is, he says, “It belittles the world by saying this isn’t the real world. The real world is the world to come.” Next slide. Okay, one of the most interesting things that Nietzsche does in rejecting Schopenhauer’s view is by saying, “Schopenhauer, you are wrong to think that we are fundamentally interested in suffering.”
He says, “Man is fundamentally not an animal that’s seeking pleasure. But rather, it’s an animal that seeks meaning.” You can think, “What separates us from the animals?” One version is we’ve got a God-given soul. Hey, but Nietzsche’s an atheist. Well, another version is that we are the rational animal, but Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, doubts exactly how rational we are and also doubts the premise that the animals don’t have some form of rationality. You could think that what Nietzsche is adding to the picture is what is special about man, what separates him from the other animals, is man is the animal that seeks meaning. He says, “Man, the bravest animal and the most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering in itself. He wants it. He even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning to it, a 'to this end’ of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering itself, was the curse that thus far stretched over humanity.” That’s from “Genealogy of Morals,” essay three, section 28. One of the reason we say Nietzsche is the philosopher of modernity is that he sees what’s special about our modern times is that we are faced with a clash between our commitment to truth, which he thinks came from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and our need… See, Nietzsche actually says, and it shows you part of his respect for Christian. He’s known as a critic of Christianity, but he also deeply respects it. He said, of Christianity, all great things bring about their end, and he said, “The commitment to truth that in the end gets pronounced against the ontological dogmas of Christianity: the existence of an immortal soul, the existence of God.” But he says, “That commitment of truth eviscerates the world of all meaning.” It leads to what we call a disenchanted world, but he says that represents a clash with our need for meaning.
And one thing I want you to see is it’s very hard for anyone to see: how can you question the value of truth? But Nietzsche shows us a way. He says we are also animals that need to find meaning and sometimes our will to truth can eviscerate this world of meaning. I might add just a sidebar here. You might think this is one of the things that might explain the rise of these populists, people like Donald Trump in America or Boris Johnson in England, because they pretend, I would say, or they offer to a certain people a sense of meaning. I’m not going to say I agree with any of that meaning, but I want to say that Nietzsche allows us to see why they have possibilities: because they appeal to our need of meaning and they often eviscerate any commitment to truth. Okay, as I say, our commitment to truth leads to the destruction of all those myths, narratives, that give life existential meaning. By existential meaning, I say that what Christianity does, what any religion does, is it tries to give meaning to the whole of existence. Now, you might find personal meaning in your family, your career, et cetera, but that’s not the meaning I’m talking about. I’m talking about that the whole shebang, all of existence, should have meaning, and that’s what mythologies do. That’s what religions do, and what Nietzsche predicted is… He said, with the loss of those narratives, most will fall into what he called nihilism. That’s the absence of values capable of conferring existential meaning. He said, “In fact, we’ll be a people who find the world without value, and we will just fall into this nihilism of saying there are no ultimate values,” and he said that will be the history of Europe for the next 200 years, and in some sense, he was very prescient. Next slide.
[Lauren] Slow down.
Okay, I want to talk a bit about Richard Wagner. The two great influences on Nietzsche were Schopenhauer, throughout his life, and Richard Wagner, first as a kind of disciple and then as a kind of enemy. But Wagner is important for us because he introduced the very term verjudung. Next slide, please, Lauren. Next slide.
[Lauren] Sorry, I think there’s a bit of a delay.
Okay. Okay, as I say, the term verjudung has generally been attributed to Wagner’s horrible essay “Judaism in Music.” And this essay involves various motifs of religious anti-Semitism, including that of the notorious blood libel, and its last line references the biblical figure Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, who’s cursed by Christ to remain on Earth till the Second Coming. Famously, Ahasuerus saw Christ carrying his cross to the road to Golgotha and said, “Look, you’re in my way. Can ya hurry it up a bit?” And Christ says to him, “I shall go, but you shall remain.” That’s meant to be a curse, that the Jews remain but remain in the past. Anyhow, generally, what Wagner does in “Judaism in Music” as does Marx in another piece of verjudung, called “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx… He argues that the Jews have infected modernity with a crass materialism, so it’s the opposition between mere matter, the body, which is represented by the Jews, Christians who have ascended to the Spirit.
[Lauren] Ken, you’ve frozen.
Can you hear me now?
Oh, you’re back.
[Lauren] I can, thank you.
Oh, “who bothers to notice that these innocent pieces of paper money are stained with the blood of countless generations? What the great artist toiled to bring into being for 2,000 unhappy years, the Jew today turns into the art business.” This is the idea. Art, for Wagner, is the home of the spiritual, but the Jews just turn it into a business to make money. Wagner also, as I say here, presses standard anti-Semitic tropes that the Jews do not have a language of their own. This is very important to a lot of 19th-century anti-Semitism because to be authentic, to be genuinely creative, is to have your own language, and the idea was “oh, the Jews, they’ve lost Hebrew. Alls they speak is a debased German,” which is called , often called the language of the thieves. As I say, Wagner maintains that the Jews speak inauthentically: “They’re incapable of originality. Alls they can do is parrot others.” And it’s interesting to see the philosopher Wittgenstein, who himself was a Jew, would also run the same line in his book “Language and Cultures.” These were the unpublished notes, oh, sorry, “Culture and Value,” where he says; I think it’s 19e; that a Jew can never create something, he can just imitate something that someone else has created and maybe take it a level up. This all part of the old anti-Semitic trope that somehow Jews murder language, that they use it for deception, not for communication. Yeah, there’s this wonderful thing from Johann Christian Wagenseil, from whom Wagner took material for his opera “The Meistersinger from Nuernberg.” Wagenseil, writing in 1699, puts it very strongly: “The Jews have dealt with no language as sinfully, as one says, as with our German language. They have given it a totally foreign intonation and pronunciation. They have mutilated good German words. They have tortured them.”
Okay, that’s the idea of the Jews do host desecration, they take the wafer that represents Christ bodies, and they put nails into it so that Christ’s pain can continue. It’s obviously a reference to that. Next slide, please. I’m not going to go through all of this slide, because of time considerations, but the main thing I want to get across is this notion that what Wagner tries to do is he tries to make us feel viscerally revolted with the Jews. Course, we’ll see how Nietzsche uses the same methodology. So I’ll just read this middle quote: “We are repelled, in particular, by the purely oral aspect of Jewish speech, the shrill sibilant buzzing of his voice, unbearably muddled nonsense. When we listen to a Jew talking, we are unconsciously upset by the complete lack of purely human expression in his speech.” Wagner uses language which tries to get you at an affective visceral level. It’s almost meant to bypass your rationality and make you revolted by Jews. Our next slide, please. Okay, just some preface here. In his book “The Genealogy of Morals”; that’s the GM you see dotted all over this slide; Nietzsche tells a story about a war between two moralities. The first morality he calls master morality or noble morality, and you can think of this as what’s practised by the pagans, the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans. And he says this was a life-affirming morality where what was considered to be good was to be powerful, to be strong, to be beautiful, to be able to smite your enemies, and what was considered to be bad? Well, anything that’s not us, anything that’s not who’s a noble, not strong, anything that’s common, anything that’s poor, whatever, that’s ugly, okay. “And against this,” he says, “there arose a slave morality,” and the slave morality… The master morality had an opposition between good and bad. Remember the bad was just an afterthought.
It was never the point of the good to obliterate the bad. Someone who was good, say, Achilles, wouldn’t battle the bad. He would battle someone else who was good, someone else of his class, someone like Hector. The bad, that is, the slaves, the people, you might say, who were doing badly, were needed, basically, to do the grunt work, but this new morality, which was invented by the slaves slash priests, ‘cause Nietzsche says the priests were the leaders of the slave revolt… He says this new morality, slave morality, opposes not good and bad but good and evil. And then, the first thought is “what is evil?” It’s everything those masters are. It’s to be rich. It’s to oppress the poor. It’s to be noble. It’s to be strong. It’s to be victorious. It’s to be active, et cetera. And what is good? It’s to be meek. It’s to be humble. It’s to turn the other cheek. And it’s the aim of the good to convert everyone to be the good. Okay, he poses these two moralities, and when you first read it, you think, “Well, he clearly favours master, or noble, morality,” but it actually turns out to be much more complicated than that. But I’ll just read to you some of the quotations that make one think, some of the passages, that Nietzsche is basically advocating for the master morality, and importantly for us, he says this slave morality was the invention of Jewish priests. The suggestion is the Jews were oppressed by the Romans but they couldn’t take it out and they couldn’t revenge themself physically so what they did is they did this subversive thing of creating a whole new value system that would get the Romans to give up their own power. I’ll read these quotations, and these are quotations of, obviously, Jewification: “Nothing is worthy of mention in comparison with what the Jews have done against them: the nobles, the mighty, the lords.” “The Jews, that priestly people who, in the end, were able to obtain satisfaction from their enemies and conquer them through a radical reevaluation of values, through an act of spiritual revenge.” “With the Jews, slave revolt in morality begins.” “Jewish hate, the deepest and most sublime hate.”
Hmm, think that’s also from section seven. But what’s important for us is, after saying these Jewish priests subverted the Romans with this inversion of morality, he doesn’t go on to say merely negative things but he starts saying positive things. He refers to “an ideal-creating, value-shaping hate whose like has never existed on Earth,” and for Nietzsche, ideal-creating and value-shaping are very positive terms. After all, that’s what he aspired to do. He aspired to create new values. He aspired to be a value-shaper. And also, what’s important for us is this is implicitly a rejection of a central claim of much of the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the 19th century endorsed by Wagner and Marx; for instance, Marx, in “On the Jewish Question,” said, “Judaism could not create a world. It could only draw new creations and relationship of the world into the sphere of its own industry.” The important point is Nietzsche configures the Jews as fundamentally creative. I’ll quote again for “The Genealogy of Morals”: “It was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form,” which for him is a Jewish form, “that man first became an interesting animal.” And in section seven of the first essay, he said, “Human history would be much too stupid an affair without the spirit that has entered into it through the powerless.” What Nietzsche wants to say is this slave revolt made man interesting. He thinks it made him conflicting because it taught man to suppress a lot of his own nature. And so, man became conflicted with . That’s what gave man depth and made him interesting, totally against the normal rhetoric of verjudung, which says, “No, there’s nothing creative about the Jews.” Next slide, please, Lauren.
[Lauren] Slow down if you can.
Mkay. I think I’m going pretty slowly.
[Lauren] No. I dunno. Are you?
He says, in section 16, “The Jews were that priestly people of ressentiment.” Remember ressentiment is this festering vengeful hatred against one’s alleged oppressors. “The Jews were that priestly people of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt a popular moral genius”; note genius; “without parallel. Just compare the peoples with related talents, for instance, the Chinese or the Germans, with the Jews in order to feel what is first and what is fifth rank,” meaning the Jews are first rank in their creative genius; Chinese and German are fifth rank. And so, he’s being careful here because he knows how the anti-Semites might twist some of his stuff, and he often does this in his work. He wants to signal out and say, “Don’t class me with those anti-Semites. I’m not saying what they’re saying.” As I say, the clearly creative moral genius resonates with his earlier suggestion that those instincts of reaction and ressentiment with the help of which the noble dynasties, together with their ideals, were finally brought into ruin and overwhelmed are the actual tools of culture, so the idea is that the instruments of culture is more or less antithetical to the conventional rhetoric of verjudung, which characterises them as purveyors of a superficial civilization and the destroyers of genuine culture. A lot of the anti-Semites, like Wilhelm Marr and Houston Stewart Chamberlain; Marr was the inventor of the term anti-Semitism; often had this distinction between , which we German has, and superficial civilization, which the Jews have.
But Nietzsche sees the Jews as creators of culture. Next slide, please, Lauren. Okay, that slave revolt, whereby slave morality replaced master morality, there are two different readings of it. One I call, in my writings, a cognitive dissonance reading, and that says the fundamental point is the slaves need to make sense of their suffering. They’re being oppressed by the nobles. They’re suffering, and the hardest thing, as Nietzsche said, is not suffering itself but the meaninglessness suffering, so they need to give meaning to their suffering. And so, on this reading, the reason they create this new morality and talk about this world to come where they’ll be rewarded for their suffering is not out of revenge but merely as an attempt to give meaning to their suffering. The alternative reading is what we call the strategic reading, which stresses how the weak, in particular the weak Jewish priest, strategized to overcome their physically stronger masters, the Romans, and here’s a taste of that strategic reading, why it’s possible, from Nietzsche’s text, to attribute to him the strategic reading. In section eight of “The Genealogy of Morals,” Nietzsche argues that the Jews deliberately repudiate Christ so that the idiot Romans would take the bait.
And you’ll notice this is posed as a question, and this is a funny thing about Nietzsche. He often poses a rhetorical question where his answer is actually no, but he knows his audience is going to answer it differently. Remember he’s writing for a mainly German audience who are susceptible to stories of Jewish conspiracies, so he says, in section eight, “Doesn’t it belong to the secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge of a far-seeing subterranean slow-working and precalculating revenge that Israel, before all the world, should deny as its mortal enemy and nail to the cross the actual tool of its revenge,” meaning Jesus, “so that all the world, namely all the opponents of Israel, could take precisely this bait without thinking twice.” Yeah, so what he’s suggesting is a totally over-the-top conspiracy theory that the Jews intentionally killed Christ so these idiot Romans would fall for the Christian bait which would make them give up their master morality and take on slave morality. I don’t think he believes this at all. That’s why it’s posed as a question. But he knows his German audience are susceptible to such conspiracy theories. Why he goes for such conspiracy theories we’ll come to. Next slide, please, Lauren. Remember I talked about how Wagner tries to make you have visceral feelings against the Jews, Nietzsche doing the same.
[Lauren] Ken, we’ve lost you again. Can you repeat that last bit?
Ooh, you hear me now? “Would anyone like to go down and take a look into the secret of how they fabricate ideals on Earth into these dark workplaces? There is a cautious out of all the corners and nooks. They are lying. A sugary mildness sticks to each sound. They talk of .” This is very much like Wagner. It resonates with that tone of Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” in that he’s trying to invoke, in his audience, feelings of disgust, referencing both the inhuman nonlanguage of the Jewish figures as they are underground plotting nook-dwellers with a foul smell… And part of this is because Nietzsche actually thinks you move people much less by rational arguments but by invoking their resonances.
[Lauren] Ken, we lost you again. Ken, can you talk again?
[Ken] Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?
Yes, you’re back. You’re back.
Why does Nietzsche use this classical figure of the plotting Jew? Really, he wants… I think it’s all a tactic to distance his audience because the one thing his German audience knows is they’re not Jews. Remember this is in the period in the 1870-1880s, and Germany had just recently become a single nation. Protestant North and Catholic South have different religions, and they’d been fighting many a war over that. And they barely had a common language. A Northern German could barely understand someone from Bayern, from Southern Germany, what they were saying, so German identity was a very vexed question. Arguably, the one thing the Germans of this period had in common that they could tell themself is “well, we’re not Jews,” but what Nietzsche tells them is “no, you, as Germans, as Christians, Catholic or Protestant, you were invented by the Jews.” So what Nietzsche wants to do, and it’s a very ugly game, is to tar Christianity by associating it with the hated figure of the Jew. He wants to transfer German disgust with Jews onto Christianity itself. His target isn’t the Jews. His target is Christianity, but he plays this ugly game. Next slide. Please, Lauren.
[Lauren] Just slow down.
Okay. One of the interesting things I’ve tried to convey to you about Nietzsche is he tries to tell us that people who are secular, people who are atheist, are still Christians because they hang on to Christian values; that is, they hang on to the value of compassion. Judeo-Christian values I mean. And they hang on to the value of truth. And I really think the punchline of “The Genealogy of Morals,” his most well-known book today, is in section 23 where he says the following. He’s thinking of what is the other goal to the religious ascetic ideal, the idea that a good life is to be humiliated, to be humble, and to renounce the flesh, so to speak? “Where is the other one goal? People tell me that the counterpart isn’t missing, claiming that it has not only fought a long and successful war with the religious ascetic ideal but has also already mastered that ideal, all major points, that all our modern scientific knowledge is a testament to this. Modern science, which is a true philosophy of reality, evidently believes only in itself, possesses courage and will in itself, and has got along up to this point well enough without God.”
But then, Nietzsche says, “Precisely the opposite of what is claimed here is the truth. Science is not the opposite of the religious ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and noblest form,” so what Nietzsche is arguing, he’s saying our modern will to truth and science, the idea that truth is to be valued as the ultimate good that trumps all other goods, that everything should be sacrificed to the truth, is actually a manifestation of the religious ascetic ideals. He thinks it’s both otherworldly and valorizing a certain kind of passivity. He says, “Science also rests on the same ground as a religious ascetic ideal when calculated physiologically, a certain impoverishment of life is a presupposition here as well. The affects become cool,” because think about what the scientific mind wants. It says, “You should be guided completely by your reason. You shouldn’t let your emotions, your affects, be expressed. It should be no part of science. Science has to be purely objective.” That for Nietzsche is just a continuation of the religious ascetic ideal which he says is bent on a suppression of our actual nature. So what Nietzsche is doing in this section of “The Genealogy of Morals,” it’s like the punchline, for me, of the whole book because a lot of his audience could be secularists, and they could be saying, “Yeah, Jews, Christians, who cares?” And he tells them, “No, you modern secularists with your science, your socialism, your democracy, whatever, your modern ideals, you’re just a continuation of Christianity.” And that is why he wants to tar Christianity: because it’s part of his tarring modern ideals with which he disagrees. Next slide, please, Lauren. For Nietzsche, the defining Christianity of Christianity is not its ontological commitments, existence of God, et cetera, but its moral commitments. The Enlightenment’s commitments to truth and compassion are, for Nietzsche, just Christianity without the ontology. And what is it more? These commitments, he says, are a Jewish invention, so he’s saying, “You people of the Enlightenment are the dupes of the Jews”; thus, he says, in section nine of “The Genealogy of Morals” in the first essay, “Everything is Jewifying.” And in “The Antichrist,” he’s even more exact about it. He says, “The Christian, the ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more, even thrice more,” obviously making a pun on the Trinity, and the same is true, for Nietzsche, of the secular enlightened atheist humanist.
But he says, “At least the Jews were original, inventing these values. The Christian and the secularist are just pale imitators. The invention of, even the dupes of, the Jews.” Next slide, please, Lauren. Okay, one of the interesting thing about “The Genealogy of Morals” is it’s not very exact about when this so-called slave revolt began. It seems to have begun with the Jews and then to be taken further with the Jewish Christians, Jesus and Paul, and at one point, he says, in “The Genealogy,” “One will already have guessed how easily the priestly manner of valuation can branch off from the knightly or aristocratic,” the priestly being slave morality, the knightly aristocratic being this master morality, “and then develop into its opposite. This process is especially given an impetus every time the priestly caste and the warrior caste confront each other jealously and are unable to agree upon a price.” Now, in the context of the Jews of Rome, sorry, the Jews of Jerusalem ruled by Rome, in the century of Christ, it’s hard to make sense of this, who this warrior class could be. At this time, the Jews and King Herod actually had no warriors. They had mercenaries that they hired. And as for the Roman warrior class, well, why should they care what a bunch of Jewish priests says? The whole timing of “The Genealogy of Morals” is hard to take; for instance, the Jews of the period of the Roman occupation actually weren’t literally slaves. Next slide. Please, Lauren. In fact, in his book “The Antichrist,” you get a different story. It’s a story borrowed from the historian Wellhausen, and what he wants to say is that, originally, the Jews had what he calls a natural relationship. I’ll just read the quotation from “The Antichrist,” 25: “Originally, particularly at the time of the kings, Israel had a correct, which is to say natural, relation to all things. Its Yahweh expressed a consciousness of power, Israel’s joy in itself, and hope for itself. Yahweh allowed people to expect victory and salvation, but all these hopes were unfilled. The old god could not do things he used to do.
He should’ve been let go. What happened? His concept was altered.” I won’t read the whole of the quotation, 'cause of time considerations, but what he’s saying here, developed from Wellhausen, is just the real original slave revolt, we should think, what he calls the slave revolt in morality, really began in the period of the exile, in the Babylonian exile, because the idea is that, originally, the Jews were a warrior people and their god was a token figure they took into battle to guarantee them victory. He was the one who guaranteed good harvest, but the Jews were defeated. All hopes was lost. First, they were defeated by the Assyrians, the Assyrian exile, 740 to 720, then the Babylonian exile. Around 586 to 539 I think it is. And then, all hope was lost. Normally, when a people are conquered, what they do is they either demote their god to a lesser god and take on the god of the conquering people or they get rid of their god. He says part of the genius of the Jews was not that they demoted their god but they altered his concept. They said, “No, Yahweh’s not the God who guarantees us victory in war. Yahweh is the god who is a god of everybody, not our local god, and he uses other people, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, to punish us for our hubris and our sins.” This is an idea that was actually originally developed by the prophets, who originally are rejected by the priestly class, so when Nietzsche talks about warriors and priests eyeing each other jealously, I think it’s best to think of the Babylonian exile when there was, in Israel, a battle between the priests and the kind and the nobles, also in exile, about who should be the leaders of the Jewish people, 'cause, after all, the priest could argue, “Yo, you should be our leaders? You’re the one who got us exiled here in Babylon. You’re failures.” And some have argued, and there’s a lot of evidence for this, this is the real period where Jews actually entered a world of monotheism.
Before the exile, it’s not at all clear that the Jews were genuinely monotheistic, but it’s in the exile that the priests developed the Judaism that we know or began to develop the Judaism we know. Next slide, please. And this is what Nietzsche says, and you can see this positive idea: “The Jews are the most remarkable people in the world in world history. When faced with the question of being or nonbeing, they showed an absolute uncanny awareness and chose being at any price. This price the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness.” So it’s an act of genius that, instead of demoting their God, they reinterpreted it. He’s actually historically wrong about this. This was a known move done by other ancient people, but he thought it was unique to the Jews. And he said, “So the Jews, basically, are falsifying nature in order to survive.” Why he thinks this is a falsification of nature is 'cause he thinks Judaism and Christianity get us to repudiate the body to a certain extent. Some people have argued he’s wrong about Judaism on this score. Let’s go to the next slide for time considerations. It’s important to recognise that Nietzsche, in “The Genealogy of Morals” and “The Antichrist,” is criticising the Jews of history, of ancient times, for what they, in the past, have done with the slave revolt and the subsequent invention of Christianity, but this totally separates him from the anti-Semites of the 19th century: Wagner, Marx, Wilhelm Marr, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the famous anti-Semites, and countless others from that period, who claim that the Jews of the present day or the alleged Jewishness of the day is a current threat.
For the Nietzsche, the damage was done long ago. I’ll skip the next quote too for time considerations. Let’s go to the next slide. This is the important points in summary of Nietzsche’s relationship to the rhetoric of verjudung, four essential points. Unlike conventional users of the rhetoric, such as Wagner, Marx, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Wilhelm Marr, Nietzsche figures the Jews as creative. In fact, they created us, said from a Christian point of view. He also says their creative act, the invention of this so-called slave morality, gave man complexity and depth that makes him interesting. Third point, this is all a matter of history long passed, and this is removed from any suggestion of a current threat of Jewification from the Jews of his day. He just did not configure the Jews of his day as a problem. The last point, Nietzsche really uses the rhetoric of Jewification not aiming to foster prejudice against the Jews but to reveal to his audience, and this is his own beautiful phrase, that they are strangers to themselves. So he plays this game of saying, “You repudiate the Jews? You hate the Jews? You are the Jews.” It’s a nasty game, but he’s doing it not to attack the Jews but to attack our current values, the current values of his German audience. Next slide, please. I want to show you parts of Nietzsche’s texts which are ugly, which do repudiate values that I think are very healthy values.
They’re very Kant… Well, Kant doesn’t care about compassion, but Kant cares about respecting each individual. Kant respects each individual because they’re a locus of reason which is of value. Others like Schopenhauer respect other people out of compassion. This is what he has to say: “Compassion, on the whole, thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction.” This is the ugly part of Nietzsche. I’ll just do a bit of the next quote: “A sick person is a parasite on society. Once one has reached a certain state, it is indecent to live any longer.” I’ll just read, “Creating a new kind of responsibility.” He says, “The physicians, to apply in all cases where the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands that degenerating life be ruthlessly pushed down and aside, for example, in the case of the right to procreate, the right to be born, the right to live.” This is the ugly Nietzsche that talks about getting rid of the worst off, and I’ll read from “Ecce Homo”: “Let us glance ahead a century and assume the case that my attempt to assassinate two millennia of antinature and desecration of man were to succeed. The new party of life, which would take the greatest of all task into its hand, the higher breeding of humanity, including the relentless extermination of everything that was degenerate and parasitic, would again make possible that excess of life on Earth.” This is the ugly Nietzsche. It’s not completely coincidence that it was appropriated by horrible people in the 20th century 'cause he talks about this language of exterminating the weak, so to speak. Taken the wrong way as it so easily is, it can have horrible, horrible consequences, but in the end, I want to suggest this is not Nietzsche’s real notion of health.
His real notion of health, which is repeated in many different works, is not a notion of elimination but a notion of incorporation. Next slide, please, Lauren. There’s a passage where Nietzsche talks about ennoblement through degeneration. Now, for most 19th-century people, degeneration was nothing but negative. Degenerates are the ones we need to get rid of. Nietzsche’s previous talk from that previous slide would suggest that, but this is a theme that is very common in Nietzsche. I think it’s his pronounced voice. His pronounced voice says health involves not getting rid of the degenerate elements but incorporating. He says, “History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles.” That’s talking about a notion of a people who are conformist, but note what he says: “The danger to these communities, founded on individuals of strong and similar,” that is, conforming, “character is that of a gradually increasing stupidity through transmission, which follows stability like its shadow.” In other words, stability is not, for him, a positive thing, 'cause Nietzsche is a philosopher who always demands change, and he says, “It is on the more unrestricted, more uncertain, and morally weaker individuals that depends the spiritual progress of such communities. It is those who attempt all that is new and manifold. Precisely in this sore and weakened place, the community is inoculated with something new, but its general strength must be great enough to absorb and assimilate this new thing into its blood.” And remember the Jews were often seen as deviating natures: “Deviating natures are of the utmost importance wherever there is to be progress. Every wholesale progress must be preceded by a partial weakening. It is precisely the weaker nature, as the more delicate and freer, that makes all progress possible. A people that is crumbling and weak in any one part but, as a whole, were strong and healthy is able to absorb the infection of what is new and incorporate it into its advantage.”
So I think Nietzsche’s idea of what he calls a greater health is not this idea of pushing aside those who are separate, those who are different, but incorporating them into a greater whole. Next slide, please, Lauren, and I’ll try to wrap up very quickly. And you’ll notice this… Nietzsche says this in “Beyond Good and Evil.” That’s the BGE. “It must be taken into the bargain if all sorts of clouds and disturbances; in brief, little attacks of a stupidity; pass over the spirit of a people that is suffering and wants to suffer of nationalistic nerve fever and political ambition. Example among the Germans today include now the anti-French stupidity, now the anti-Jewish. I, too, did not altogether escape this disease,” 'cause he knows, especially under Wagner’s influence, he had this prejudice against the Jews but now he wants to separate himself from that prejudiced and from the anti-Semitism. You know, it’s interesting. In the same place, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 251, Nietzsche contrasts the Germans’ inability to absorb Jews with the Italians’, French, and English greater success on this front, and he attributes this capacity to the latter’s stronger digestion, so Nietzsche’s ideal, both on a singular, personal level but also for societies, the strength of the society, is to take the foreign elements, not expel them, incorporate them into the greater whole. That is his notion of health. Last slide, please. Hope it’s the last slide .
[Lauren] You’re okay. We have five minutes.
Okay, I want to concede that Nietzsche is an irresponsible genius. I want to say it’s typical of a genius, such as Nietzsche, to take tropes and attempt to give them a new direction. Nietzsche was completely aware of the received meaning of the rhetoric of verjudung, Jewification, of the rhetoric of degeneration, which I talked about in an earlier lecture, and prevalence of notions of health that configured it in terms of a freedom from infection, rather than in notion of incorporating the infection. But he sought to give the rhetorics of verjudung, Jewification, degeneration, and health a completely different set of resonances and valences, but he knew full well that, his more flat-footed readers, they would miss the point. And as part of his irresponsibility, he just didn’t care what he thought idiots would make of him, what such readers would make of him. In his book “Gay Science,” in section 371, he says interestingly that he’s misunderstood and partially because he has driven his roots more powerfully into the depth, into evil, and in 381 of the same book, he notes, “Every more noble spirit and taste selects its audience, and it wishes to communicate itself. And in choosing them, it, at the same time, erects barriers against the others.” Well, the irresponsibility is that these others could easily take those parts of Nietzsche where he talks about elimination, where he talks about certain people as a sickness, where he talks about the Jews as making us sick. And he knew what flat-footed readers would make of this, and he just didn’t care, and that is his deep, deep irresponsibility. But as I say, he’s not to be taken as the normal anti-Semite of the 19th century, because he sees the Jew as creative, as having a moral genius. He also sees an infection, but he also sees infections as part of the road to a greater health. And I’ll finish there.
[Lauren] You so much, Ken. Do you have time for a few questions? Or not so much?
Oh, I can’t hear you now.
Up to you. Oh, sorry, do you have any time for questions?
I have all the time for questions.
Q&A and Comments:
- [Lauren] Sure. We’ll just read through as many as we can get through in the next five or six minutes.
Q: Elliot has a question about semantics. He says, “Aren’t the Muslims also Semites? Shouldn’t the world anti-Jewish instead?”
A: - Well, I’m speaking as a Nietzsche scholar, and Nietzsche talks about anti-Semites where the reference was, as I say, from Wilhelm Marr, and that was specifically referring to the Jews. I think you have to see it because… The Muslims weren’t on the radar of Germans in the 19th century, because the Muslims were not seen as people living amongst us, a strange people living amongst us. But the Jews were seen very much, in Germans, as these strangers living amongst us and, for people like Wilhelm Marr and others, as a threat. Muslims were a bit off the radar.
Q: - [Lauren] Thank you. Arlene says that she read that he was not anti-Semitic: “When he died, his anti-Semitic sister, who inherited his property, rewrote his ideas into hers. Could you comment on that?”
A: - His sister was an opportunist, and she needed money. And she was friends with Hitler, and Hitler would come to the house that she kept, preserving Nietzsche’s memory. She was married to a notorious anti-Semite called Foerster, who did this Nazi colony ‘cause “I wanted to get away from the world of Jews,” Germany, as they saw it. And they did this neo-Nazi colony in Paraguay, and he was very angry at his sister for being involved with Foerster. Foerster really crystallised in his mind how horrible anti-Semites were, but as I tried to say in the beginning of the lecture, Nietzsche was… He claimed to be an anti-anti-Semite, and that is true. He was against the anti-Semite. He keeps saying negative things about key anti-Semites, like Duehring and like Foerster, but being an anti-Semite is separate from being prejudiced against the Jews, and he was prejudiced in the Jews. You mainly see this in asides when he talks about the smell of Jews, the Jews’ interest in money matters, and stuff like that. But yes, Nietzsche was an anti-Semite. So Nietzsche was an anti-anti-Semite, and his sister was the one who created a reputation for him as being in favour of the anti-Semites. That’s quite right.
Q: - [Lauren] Elliot says, “How are you defining truth? Is there a totality to truth? Can we ever know it?”
A: - These are very, very big philosophical question. I actually believe in truth. If you like, I believe in truth as correspondence with reality, that famous definition given by Aristotle. Nietzsche himself, I’ll say, he actually says when he’s talking about, for instance, psychologists who get the psychology of morality wrong… He says there are truths. A lot of postmodernists appropriate Nietzsche as an enemy of truth. I think Nietzsche believed there are truths. I think he thought he was getting to the psychological truth behind the Christian worldview and the Judeo-Christian worldview. Totality of truth, well, it’s a totality we’ll never get to, and presumably, in some sense, it’s not a totality, because there are an infinite number of truths and they’re unknowable in that sense. Some truths, I think, we can be very sure of: that I’ve got a hand in front of me, that there’s a computer in front of me. Other, scientific truths, we give a high probability to. But I’m answering in my own right ‘cause I actually was originally a philosopher of science, not a Nietzsche scholar, but I think Nietzsche also believed in the truth and he also thought science never gets us dogma, never gets us certainty, but he was a respecter of science as getting us closer to truth, though no totality of truth.
Q: - [Lauren] Someone is asking, “Was Hitler influenced by Nietzsche?”
A: - Less so than people think. Alfred Rosenberg wrote a book called “The Myth of the Twentieth Century.” Hitler and Rosenberg were always competing about whose books sold the most. Rosenberg read Nietzsche and was very influenced by him; hence, he talks about the myth. And one of the things that Hitler hated about Rosenberg was… He said, “It’s not myth. It’s all the truth.” All that stuff about race, Hitler actually believed it. I’ve said this before. Nietzsche was an idealist; that is, he was someone motivated by ideas, horrible ideas, but he believes in the ideas. So someone like Rosenberg, who was influenced by Nietzsche, who talked about mythology and the need for mythology, Hitler didn’t even like. Hitler did not have that big an acquaintance of Nietzsche; nevertheless, it’s true that… Look, what one has to acknowledge is that Nietzsche is one of the philosophers who attacked the notion of, for instance, democracy and attacked the notion of compassion. And then, the Nazis were fellow travellers down that road, and Nietzsche paved the way from him. In that way, I won’t deny his responsibility. Hitler’s knowledge of Nietzsche, not so good, but he did know of Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra.” He advocated its publication and helped it be published and republished. He didn’t have a great knowledge of Nietzsche. Other Nazis did. A lot of Nazi theorists looked to Nietzsche, looked, for instance, to his notion of mythology, looked to this talk about we have to kill compassion, that compassion is a dangerous thing. Nietzsche was a developer and furtherer of some ideas that have a very natural trajectory to lead to terrible ends, and that’s part of his irresponsibility.
Q: - [Lauren] Romi wants to know if you think his notion of the uebermensch influenced the Nazis and did Nietzsche see the uebermensch as a literal being.
A: - Okay, it’s a good question. The uebermensch is mainly talked about “Zarathustra,” and that is the book the Nazis liked to distribute. He doesn’t actually talk about the uebermensch so much, but uebermensch is the overman, and one of the things Nietzsche says is he says, “So many philosophy, like Platonism, like Christianity, they want a world of eternal permanence.” Plato talked about the eternal forms. The Christian talks about the eternal Heaven, whereas Nietzsche says, “I’m a philosopher who can vindicate and affirm this world, which is the world of constant change.” The best way to think of the… The overman can’t be like, “Oh, that’s the goal. And then, we stop,” because Nietzsche says, “We never stop. We have to keep overcoming. All great things overcome themselves.” He was putting the uebermensch as a idea as how we should try to overcome our own current humanity not to get to the end place but just to have a goal beyond ourselves, and once that reach, we’d get a goal beyond that. Nietzsche was always saying, “Have a goal beyond yourself.” Pursuing that goal may be difficult. It may lead to suffering, but he doesn’t care about suffering, but having a goal beyond yourself is the way to a worthwhile life, according to Nietzsche. Uebermensch is no end product, and it’s not terminus. It’s just the idea of having a goal beyond ourselves, and really, he didn’t talk that much about in any of his writing.
Q: - [Lauren] Thank you, and one last question: “Did Nietzsche know any Jews?”
A: - That is a very good question. One of his biggest interlocutors, actually, one of the philosophers who argued that compassion was the basis of morality, is a chap called Paul Ree, and he actually had a bit of a struggle with Paul Ree over a notorious female intellectual called Lou Salome, who actually preferred Ree to Nietzsche. So some people have stories to be told here. He also had some young… Pleneth? Plenetha. I’ve got the name wrong. He had a young Jewish follower who he really quite liked. Yeah, Nietzsche knew a few Jews, but I’m not going to say he knew a lot of Jews. But Paul Ree, whose philosophy of compassion he repudiated, was a very close interlocutor of him for a good while, but he was really a secular Jew. A better question would be “did he know any religious Jews?” Nah, I don’t think so.
[Lauren] Great, well, thank you so much for your time, Ken, and I hope you have a great rest of your vacation. And to all of our listeners.
Thanks.
[Lauren] Thank you so much and good night.
Thanks for your great questions. Bye now.