Friday, August 18, 2017

Nietzsche and the alt.right

Vox has an article with the following heading and subheading:
The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too.

 The alt-right is obsessed with the 19th-century German philosopher. They don’t understand him.
It's of interest, but it doesn't really dissuade me from my view that there is likely ittle for me to gain from reading Nietzsche.   I'm happy to go along with his quasi-redemption in the second half of the 20th century as more misunderstood than malicious, but as even this writer says at the end:
Nietzsche was a lot of things — iconoclast, recluse, misanthrope — but he wasn’t a racist or a fascist. He would have shunned the white identity politics of the Nazis and the alt-right. That he’s been hijacked by racists and fascists is partly his fault, though. His writings are riddled with contradictions and puzzles. And his fixation on the future of humankind is easily confused with a kind of social Darwinism. 

But in the end, people find in Nietzsche’s work what they went into it already believing.
Which reads to me like a big warning sign - if it's that much work working out what he really meant, isn't that a sign of a failed philosopher?   What's more, if he was so unclear that he was able to be  adopted by fascists (and, as this writer admits, it's not hard to see how they took parts of his writings as supportive)  there doesn't seem much to me worth admiring about his efforts.

I think I might have said something similar here before.   But nothing seems to have changed.

No comments: