Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau and Classical Theories of Race

Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau and Classical Theories of Race Nicholas Martin In a section of Daybreak (1881), entitled “Purification of Race”, Nietzsche writes: — There are probably no pure races, only races that have become pure, and these are very rare. The norm is crossed races [...] Crossed races are also always crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are in the main nastier, crueller and more agitated. Purity is the final result of countless adaptations, suckings-in and excretions, and the progress towards purity shows itself in the way the strength present in a race increasingly limits itself to certain selected functions [...] The Greeks provide us with the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully one day a pure European race and culture will come about. (D §272)1 In view of later bastardisations of Nietzsche’s thought, the most damaging of which were carried out by National Socialists, it is important to establish where his theory of cultural development, in so far as it relies on a racial theory, stands in relation to racial or racialist theories in late nineteenth-century Europe.2 The most influential of these was Gobineau’s. Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, who has been dubbed the “Father of Racism”, lived from 1816 to 1882 and was therefore an almost exact contemporary of Richard Wagner. In their later years the two men became acquainted and to some extent allied, despite their differences over Wagner’s Parsifal, though it was primarily after their deaths, and principally through the Bayreuth circle of Wagner’s hard-line successors and disciples that Gobineau’s theory of race and racial degeneration became more widely known.3 Gobineau wrote the bulk of his works between 1849 and 1872, while serving as a diplomat. His best-known, or most notorious work, the four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races [Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines], appeared between 1853 and 1855, while Gobineau was evidently an under-employed First Secretary at the French Legation in Berne. In the 1983 Pléiade edition of Gobineau’s complete works, the Essai fills over one thousand densely printed pages.4 It was largely ignored in France but found a receptive audience in Germany, though not until the mid-1870s. While not swallowing Gobineau’s thesis whole, Wagner was among those favourably impressed. Gobineau’s ideas were heavily modified by the Bayreuth circle and other biological racists, and in this form they eventually found their way into National Socialist theories of so-called “racial hygiene” [Rassenhygiene]. The main ideas of Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races can be summarised in one sentence: the unsubstantiated notion is advanced that races are physically, intellectually and spiritually distinct, the Germanic, or Aryan, race is declared supreme ― it is “called upon” to dominate other races, Gobineau asserts5 ―, and racial interbreeding is diagnosed as the root cause of the terminal cultural decline gripping nineteenth-century Europe.6 The entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica neatly summarises the received view of Gobineau and his influence. Its account of Gobineau’s own views is accurate enough yet it perpetuates some improbable assumptions about how ideas are transmitted, though in the case of the demonic figure of Wagner anything is possible, it seems: Of his abundant literary efforts, only his Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines (1853-55) is now remembered. In this essay Gobineau simplified to the extreme current opinions on the “racial factor” in history and the hierarchy of races, white, yellow, and black. According to him, only the white or “Aryan” race, the creator of civilization, possessed the supreme human virtues: honor, love of freedom, etc., qualities which could be perpetuated only if the race remained pure. Though he held the Jews in no particular aversion, Gobineau believed that the Latin and Semitic peoples had degenerated in the course of history through various racial intermixtures. Only the Germans had preserved their “Aryan purity”, but the evolution of the modern world condemned them, too, to crossbreeding and degeneracy. Western civilization must be resigned to its fate. The success of the Essai was posthumous and, predictably, assured by Gobineau’s German admirers. Chief of these was Richard Wagner, who shared his cultural pessimism, and the literary society of Bayreuth, followed by a group of authors and anthropologists who founded the GobineauVereinigung [Gobineau Society] in 1894. Gobineau’s influence on recent history, and especially on anti-Semitic ideology, was due less to his dilettante philosophy of history than to the construction given it by German and other fanatics.7 Bryan Magee presents a more nuanced perspective in his recent discussion of the nature and extent of Wagner’s anti-Semitism: “Many writers [...] allege that while working on Parsifal 2 Wagner came under the influence of the most notorious racial theorist of the nineteenth century, Gobineau, and that this corroborates the [supposedly] racist character of the opera. But in fact,” Magee continues, “Wagner did no more than toy with Gobineau’s ideas. As Barry Millington accurately tells us in his biography of Wagner: ‘Gobineau became a regular and favoured visitor at Wahnfried [Wagner’s mansion in Bayreuth], yet the better acquainted he and Wagner became, the more they realized that their views diverged.’” Magee concludes that “[i]n any case Wagner had put on paper a detailed scenario for Parsifal before he knew anything at all about Gobineau.”8 A number of questions present themselves: was Nietzsche influenced by Gobineau’s theory, is he in any way responsible for perpetuating it, or should Nietzsche’s name not be mentioned in the same breath as the propagators of biological racism? Was Nietzsche a racist in the sense that we now understand the term? As I hope to demonstrate, he was not, but Nietzsche’s theory of cultural development is no less problematic for that. It entails ethical, social and political consequences as unpalatable as any arguments based on race. One way of explicating Nietzsche’s theory of cultural development is to examine his view of Gobineau, such as it was, and to attempt a comparison of their respective views of “race”. There is little agreement, even in recent criticism, concerning the nature and extent of Gobineau’s influence on Nietzsche. Claims range from Römer’s assertion that Nietzsche’s theory of race owes “everything” [alles] to Gobineau,9 through Ottmann’s contention that Nietzsche’s “racist vocabulary” [rassistisches Vokabular] owes something to the Frenchman (as well opening the way to much misunderstanding),10 down to Schank’s recent statement that “Nietzsche and Gobineau are worlds apart” [Nietzsche und Gobineau sind doch durch Welten getrennt].11 Nietzsche appears to have read little, if anything of Gobineau’s work. He certainly did not possess the Essai or any other work by Gobineau, and the only references to 3 his possible interest in the Gallic count are in his sister’s Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, references which must be handled with some care.12 As for Nietzsche’s texts, Gobineau is mentioned just twice, once in a letter of December 1865 (KSB 2 p.101), requesting the Essai for Christmas (because Schopenhauer mentions it), and again, but only in passing, in a letter to Köselitz (Gast) of 10 December 1888, praising the latter’s article on Nietzsche and Wagner for the journal Kunstwart, in which Gobineau and French “noblesse” are cited as correctives to Wagner’s “German-ness” (KSB 8 p.516).13 Leaving the insoluble problem of “influence” to one side, it can be stated unequivocally that Nietzsche does not share either Gobineau’s theory of race or his pessimistic conclusions regarding the future development of mankind. Gobineau believes that what he calls the white, yellow and black races have fixed, biological characteristics. Through interbreeding the distinct characteristics of these races have become diluted, with disastrous consequences, he believes, for the “noblest” of the three, the white (Aryan, Germanic) race. Nietzsche’s understanding of race is very different. Surprisingly, perhaps, for such an unsystematic thinker, Nietzsche provides his own definition in a Nachlass fragment from the spring of 1884: Because we are the heirs of generations which have lived under the most diverse conditions [Existenz-Bedingungen] we contain in ourselves a multiplicity of instincts. Whoever claims to be “authentic” ist most likely an ass or a con man. The variety of animal characters: on average a character is the consequence of a milieu ― a firmly imprinted role, by virtue of which certain facts [Facta] are emphasised and strengthened over and over again. In the long run, there arises in this way race : i.e. provided that the surroundings do not change. With a change of milieu the universally most useful and applicable qualities come to the fore ― or they die. This shows itself as a power of assimilation, even in unfavourable situations, but at the same time as tension, caution; the form lacks beauty. The European as such a Super-Race [Über-Rasse]. The Jew likewise; it is ultimately a dominant type, though very different from the simple, ancient dominant races, which had not changed surroundings. (KSA 11 25[462] p.136) 4 Unlike Gobineau, Nietzsche understands “race” to be the product primarily of social and environmental, rather than biological factors. Humans are not fixed biological specimens, in Nietzsche’s view, but mutable and adaptable types; the mutations or adaptations may be for the worse but they have the potential to be turned to the good. Here lies the most significant difference between Gobineau and Nietzsche. While Gobineau’s Essai amounts to an elegy for the “white race” and its nobility, which is dying if not already dead, Nietzsche never tires of stressing the possibility that nobility [Vornehmheit], understood as an acquired rather than a biological characteristic, can be bred, educated and mobilised in the service of an, admittedly ill-defined, future. Nietzsche’s view of race unconsciously opposes Gobineau’s pessimism (the “pessimism of weakness”, in Nietzsche’s terminology) with his own “pessimism of strength”. Further evidence of Nietzsche’s distance from Gobineau lies in his theory of cultural development, where Nietzsche’s understanding of race comes into its own. The centrality of ancient Greece in Nietzsche’s outlook is crucial to any discussion of his theory of culture and its position relative to the racial discourse of his time. In his preparatory notes of 1875 to an essay entitled We Philologists (Wir Philologen), which Nietzsche hoped would become the fifth Untimely Meditation (it never appeared), he attacks once again the principal targets of his early cultural criticism: first, the shortcomings of the German education system, principally its production of classically educated epigones rather than classically educated creators; second, his fellow philologists’ alleged view of antiquity as a corpus of dead material fit only for dissection; and, finally, the complacency of what passed for German culture in the 1870s, which Nietzsche believed had been bordering on arrogance since the Prussian victory over France in 1871 and the subsequent unification of Germany.14 More importantly, these preparatory notes to We Philologists (KSA 8 pp.11-127) also contain a great deal of material on the exemplary nature of Greece. Nietzsche’s preoccupation with the 5 Greek cultural achievement began very early in his life and continued until the end. According to Nietzsche, the Greeks are the people touched by genius, they are naïve (in Schiller’s sense of possessing childlike spontaneity and creativity), and they are inquisitive and passionate.15 The conquerors of what would eventually be Greece had preserved their aggressive energy and mysterious mythology. The conquered were, in turn, able to redirect and channel the dark, aggressive energies of their new masters without stemming them altogether. This, Nietzsche asserts, underlies the creativity and cultural glory of pre-Socratic Greece, in other words of sixth-century Greece, not the later and, in Nietzsche’s eyes, already decadent “Golden Age”. The importance of antiquity to theories of culture is nothing new, of course, but Nietzsche’s conception of ancient Greece was genuinely original and immediately establishes a gulf between him and the majority of German Hellenists before him. Nietzsche accepts that Greeks of the Golden Age were serene (heiter). Unlike earlier Hellenists, however, with the important exception of Hölderlin, Nietzsche does not accept this serenity at face value.16 He does not doubt that the Greek character was serene, but he disputes that this serenity was of untroubled origin. He emphatically rejects the received view that the ancient Greeks were a race of carefree Olympians. Their serenity, he claims, was in truth an Apollonian veil drawn over the dark, Dionysian depths of the Greek spirit. It was a hard-fought victory over despair and, in overlooking this storm before the calm, earlier Philhellenes, notably Goethe and Schiller and Winckelmann, had “failed to penetrate to the core of Hellenism and forge a lasting bond of love between German and Greek culture.” (BT §20) This core or essence of the Greek experience, which Nietzsche believed had been distilled in Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy, was a stark and desperate pessimism, veiled and made triumphantly bearable by Apollonian illusion. 6 The Greek achievement, according to Nietzsche, had been to confront and then overcome the dark wisdom of Silenus, as he explains early in The Birth of Tragedy. Silenus, Dionysus’s companion, is eventually captured by King Midas who asks him what is the best and most desirable thing for man. With a hideous cackle Silenus retorts: “‘The best of all things is something entirely beyond your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you ― is to die soon.’” (BT §3) [See Sophocles, ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, ll. 1224ff. Theognis expresses a similar view in his Elegies: ‘For man the best thing is never to be born, / Never to look upon the hot sun’s rays, / Next best, to speed at once through Hades’ gates / And lie beneath a piled-up heap of earth’ (ll. 425-28), in Hesiod and Theognis, trans. Dorothea Wender (New York: Penguin Books, 1973) p. 111.] By means of Apollonian art, Nietzsche asserts, the Greeks had been able to stand this desperate wisdom on its feet and say, “‘the worst thing of all would be to die soon, the second-worst to die at all.’” (ibid.) This speculative insight ― that the Greek character was based on the ordering of chaos ― informs Nietzsche’s account of Greek cultural development and provides him with a model for the future racial and cultural development of Europe. As he writes in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, “[w]e must desire that life retain its violent character, that wild [Dionysian] power and energy be called forth” (MA §235); and in an earlier note he comments, “[t]he judgment concerning the worth of existence is the supreme result of the most powerful tension in chaos.” (KSA 8 5[188] p.93 ― my emphasis) This chaos of races and cultures, which was resolved by a more highly developed synthesis, is evident in Nietzsche’s picture of early Greek history, where he speculates about events in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., for which there is next to no historical evidence. Deliberately challenging the by now clichéd view of the pure-bred, marbled Greeks’ “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”,17 Nietzsche characterises the “original inhabitants of Greek soil” as of Mongolian extraction with tree and snake cult. The coast [was] garnished with a Semitic strip. Here and there Thracians. The Greeks took all these components into 7 their blood ― including all the gods and myths (in the Odysseus legends, some [are] Mongolian). The Doric migration is a follow-up, for everything had already been gradually inundated earlier. What are “pure-bred Greeks”? Is is not enough to assume that Italian peoples, coupled with Thracian and Semitic elements, became Greeks?18 This racial history of Greece is itself a synthesis, an amalgam of many sources.19 As his own personal library and the borrowing records of the Basle University library reveal, Nietzsche was an avid reader of contemporary works in the fields of ethnology, anthropology, and the history of religion.20 He may well have borrowed some of Gobineau’s ideas for his racial history of Greece, though Nietzsche’s interpretation of, and extrapolation from, that history differs markedly from the Frenchman’s culturally pessimistic outlook. Nietzsche’s claim that there were “Mongolian” elements in Greece is consonant with Gobineau’s assertion that there were eight racial components in the Greek population, which in turn derived from the three fundamental elements of the human race, namely, the white, the yellow and the black.21 Nietzsche’s formulation that “the coast [of Greece was] garnished with a Semitic strip” also seems to echo Gobineau’s statement in the Essai that Semites settled “along the coast of Greece”.22 According to Nietzsche’s hypothesis, the migrants who came to the land that was to become Greece were not “pure-bred Greeks” or fully-fledged Hellenes. Greek ethnic and cultural identity developed in Greece itself through a fortuitous but also fortunate mixing of races. This hypothesis rules out any explanation for the Greek achievement along the lines of fixed Indo-Germanic racial characteristics. In other words, Nietzsche explicitly rejects the notion that Greek culture was possible because the Greeks shared Indo-Germanic (i.e. nineteenth-century European) bloodlines. This “Indo-Germanic” theory was widespread by the late nineteenth century and lent a spurious racial underpinning to the notion that “the Greeks were like us, only better at it”. Nietzsche had no time for this smug and mistaken belief. 8 So far, so good, from a liberal twenty-first century perspective. Nietzsche’s theory of culture ― based on his Greek model ― becomes somewhat murkier, however, when he turns his attention to the political organisation of the Greek state as he construed it. This is most clearly articulated in his brief, unpublished essay The Greek State of 1872 (KSA 1 pp.76477). Nietzsche posits a state, in which that conquering Dionysian energy is allied or married to the form-giving, Apollonian impulse of the conquered. The energy was fundamental, however, not least to keep in check the enormous number of slaves required for the production of great culture. Freed from daily toil, a small number of Greeks (approximately one-fifth of the population) was driven by this same energy to rivalry with one another and to the highest cultural achievements. In this manner, Nietzsche says quite openly, slavery was justified aesthetically, by the cultural products of the slave state.23 The cultural producers had themselves been bred through a process of cultivation, and at times in his early writings Nietzsche appears to present this as a viable template for Europe’s future development. The production of genius and, by extension, great culture is Nietzsche’s touchstone and in turn provides a yardstick for what he later desired: the Übermensch (man conceived as a self-generating and self-renewing work of art), and the “Transvaluation of all Values” [Umwertung aller Werte]. Peace, general prosperity, socialism, the modern state, democracy and short-term educational reform do not satisfy Nietzsche’s criteria for the production of genius. The reverse is true, he argues, because these levelling conditions tend to deaden the instincts of the exceptional, the culturally productive few. Genius can only arise, Nietzsche suggests, on the back of conditions as harsh and ruthless as those obtaining in nature itself. Yet, however questionable Nietzsche’s vision of the Greek state may be, both as history and as a model for a political theory, it is not racist and nor is his study of anthropology, ethnology and folklore. What needs to be faced now is the charge that Nietzsche makes 9 political use of his anthropological and philological findings in order to propagate destructive caricatures or stereotypes of ethnic groups, with the aim of inciting fear and loathing. Traditionally, a happy hunting-ground for Nietzsche’s critics has been the first essay of his 1887 work On the Genealogy of Morals [Zur Genealogie der Moral]. The most notorious passage in the Genealogy is Nietzsche’s discussion of the “blond beast” in section 11 of that first essay, and is the one most often cited as “proof” that Nietzsche is an advocate of Aryan supremacy.24 In fact, the blond beast is a metaphor ― it is a lion ― and does not refer to the physical characteristics of any particular race. (It is intriguing to contemplate the interpretations that might have resulted, had Nietzsche chosen a black panther as his metaphor instead of a lion.) The historical examples cited by Nietzsche of leonine men include Homeric heroes, Vikings, but also Roman, Arab, Germanic and Japanese nobles. (KSA 5 p.275) The offending passage comes a few lines later, though the inconvenient parenthesis is usually omitted: The deep and icy mistrust which the German [der Germane] arouses as soon as he comes to power, which we see again even today ― is still the aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries (although between the old Germanic peoples and us Germans there is scarcely an idea in common, let alone a blood relationship). (KSA 5 pp.275-76 ― my emphasis) The difficulty here is that Nietzsche has driven a coach and horses through his own image by interpolating “Germanic” between “blond” and “beast”, turning a metaphorical “Germanic lion” (a noble human being, who happens to be Germanic) into a literal description, or a racial stereotype, of a blond-haired Germanic man who has naturally bestial qualities. Nowhere else does Nietzsche argue for Germanic racial supremacy, so it is perhaps a slip of the pen. Taken out of context, however, it has proved a powerful weapon for both Nietzsche’s critics and racially motivated adherents.25 10 In this first essay Nietzsche argues ― or rather states ― that, before the advent of Judaeo-Christian values, humanity was composed of the strong and the weak, as it is now, but that before this watershed the strong naturally dominated the weak. Alluding to the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73 B.C., Nietzsche asserts that in the Roman period this natural hierarchy was inverted and the weak came to dominate the strong by outwitting them. In the seventh section he calls this “the slave uprising in morality” (der Sklavenaufstand in der Moral). Judaeo-Christian values are an invention, Nietzsche claims, to justify the dominion of the weak and the meek. The weak now dub themselves “good” and their former masters, the strong, are labelled “evil”, whereas before the strong were “the good” and the weak simply “the bad”. Nonsense, perhaps, but at least Nietzsche recognises that the status quo ante of “good” and “bad” cannot be restored. Even if it were possible to reverse historical processes, Nietzsche would not desire a return to the age of marauding Huns and Vandals. He admires their brute strength and raw energy but is simultaneously aware, as careful reading of that first essay shows, that these noble conquerors are also barbarians and therefore, by definition, uncultured. Nietzsche’s ambivalent forays into the racial history of both ancient Greece and the Dark Ages were aimed at reshaping what he took to be an endangered present. In the social and political programmes of democrats, anarchists and socialists he detected the levelling, anti-cultural instincts of “slaves”, of the “weak”, reemerging in different guises. He links the historical “slave revolt in morality” to Jews but does not construct an anti-Semitic myth from this. On the contrary, in Nietzsche’s Greek-inspired model for Europe’s future, Jews have a vital role to play. He despised anti-Semites, though it has to be admitted that his contempt was on a sliding scale determined by the relative vulgarity or sophistication of the antiSemitic remarks in question. For example, Nietzsche became acquainted as early as 1868 with the works of the polymath, self-publicist and anti-Semite Eugen Dühring (he of 11 Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring of 1877). At the same time as preparing We Philologists in 1875 Nietzsche wrote scathing notes on anti-Semitic passages in Dühring’s book On the Value of Life (Der Wert des Lebens (1865)). Dühring argues that there is a necessary correspondence of race, character and religion, claims that Christ was not a full-blooded Jew, and conducts arguments over the extent to which Europe has already been “Judaised”. In his extensive notes on Dühring’s book Nietzsche goes to some lengths to distance himself from such views.26 Nietzsche blames Judaeo-Christianity for bringing about an unhealthy, “life-denying” inversion of human values. He distances himself from both religions and fashions his own secular, “life-affirming” counter-framework, in which Dionysus, Zarathustra and the Übermensch are the chief emblems. Nietzsche’s fundamental quarrel, though, was with Christianity rather than Judaism. There is nothing directed against Jews in his writings to match the ferocity of the work he wrote almost as his epitaph, The Antichrist, which is subtitled “A Curse on Christianity” and ends with a piece of Nietzschean “legislation”, subtitled “War to the Death against Vice: Vice is Christianity” (KSA 6 p.254) . Nevertheless, he tends to treat Christianity as an extension of Judaism, or even as its last stage (AC §§2427). Christian anti-Semitism is therefore doubly repugnant to him. Anti-Jewish remarks in Nietzsche’s writings are usually but not always associated with attacks on Christianity. He undoubtedly shared some of the anti-Semitic prejudices of his time, notably the idea that Jews controlled both the press and the financial system, though not all of Nietzsche’s remarks on Jews and money are anti-Semitic.27 Positive comments on Jews in Nietzsche’s writings are less hard to find. In a Nachlass note from 1885, for example, he declares the distinction between “Aryan” and “Semitic” races to be false and empty; the source of great culture, he says, is to be found precisely 12 where races mix;28 and, in Beyond Good and Evil, he begins a discussion by paraphrasing the anti-Semites of his day (and, indeed, our own) before demolishing their position: About the Jews, for example: listen. ― I have never met a German who was favourably inclined towards the Jews; and however unconditionally all cautious and politic men may have repudiated real anti-Semitism, even this caution and policy is not directed against this class of feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation, and especially against the distasteful and shameful way in which this immoderate feeling is expressed ― one must not deceive oneself about that [...] The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest toughest and purest race at present living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (better even than under favourable ones), by means of virtues which one would like to stamp as vices - thanks above all to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before “modern ideas” [...] A thinker who has the future of Europe on his conscience will, in all the designs he makes for this future, take the Jews into account as he will take the Russians, as the immediately surest and most probable factors in the great game and struggle of forces [...] it would perhaps be a good idea to eject the antiSemitic ranters from the country. (BGE §251)29 However welcome or even surprising these remarks may be, they are a long way from the liberal embrace of other cultures and beliefs. Jews have a function to perform in creating Nietzsche’s new Europe, which is to breed with other “healthy” Europeans so that their “best” elements or features may combine to form a new aristocratic caste. It is clear that Nietzsche had a comparatively thorough knowledge of contemporary biology, evolutionary theory and Darwinism (which he despised),30 as well of racial doctrines and commonplaces in the humanities, comparative linguistics, the comparative history of religion and ethnology. His own encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek texts and recorded history, whether he chose to adhere to it or not, should also not be overlooked. Nietzsche’s belief that acquired characteristics could be passed on, and the related claim that the “purity” of a race was a late, hard-fought achievement rather than an innate quality, are central to his racial and cultural theory. Nietzsche’s Greek model makes it easier to see the place of Jews and Slavs in his racial history and posited future of Europe. Just as “pure-bred Greeks”, the greatest cultural 13 producers yet seen, were the result of a lengthy process, so Jews and Slavs would have to be “digested” or “ingested” in Europe by careful, intelligent crossing that would serve to “breed in” their good characteristics. It should be noted that, characteristically, Nietzsche never discusses the practical modalities of this process. Anti-Semitic propaganda and strident nationalism, as well as being fatuous, are inimical to this process, Nietzsche maintains, as they tend to drive their targets into isolation and resistance. Nietzsche was never philoSemitic, the most that can be said is that he was an anti-anti-Semite.31 Yet Jews, and indeed all Europeans, remain subservient to Nietzsche’s vision of breeding a new aristocratic caste in Europe in line with his understanding of how the glory of Greece came about. 14 1 “— Es giebt wahrscheinlich keine reinen, sondern nur reingewordene Rassen, und diese in grosser Seltenheit. Das Gewöhnliche sind die gekreuzten Rassen [. . .] Gekreuzte Rassen sind stets zugleich auch gekreuzte Culturen, gekreuzte Moralitäten: sie sind meistens böser, grausamer, unruhiger. Die Reinheit ist das letzte Resultat von zahllosen Anpassungen, Einsaugungen und Ausscheidungen, und der Fortschritt zur Reinheit zeigt sich darin, dass die in einer Rasse vorhandene Kraft sich immer mehr auf einzelne ausgewählte Functionen beschränkt [. . .] — Die Griechen geben uns das Muster einer reingewordenen Rasse und Cultur: und hoffentlich gelingt einmal auch eine reine europäische Rasse und Cultur.” (KSA 3 pp.213-14) Translations are my own. 2 A model example of the Nazi exploitation of Nietzsche’s thought is Heinrich Härtle, Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1937), which seeks to align Nietzsche with National Socialist ideas, or at least to claim him as an important precursor of them. For discussions of this appropriation, see K. R. Fischer, “Nazism as a Nietzschean ‘Experiment’”, Nietzsche-Studien, 8 (1979), 116-22, and Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “The Nazi Appropriation of Nietzsche”, Nietzsche-Studien, 12 (1983), 428-35. 3 For Nietzsche’s scathing view of these disciples and their organ, the Bayreuther Blätter, see The Wagner Case, ‘Postscript’ (KSA 6 p.44). The Bayreuther Blätter published more than sixty articles on Gobineau between 1878 and 1938, which are listed in Annette Hein, “Es ist viel ‘Hitler’ in Wagner”. Rassismus und antisemitische Deutschtumsideologie in den “Bayreuther Blättern”, Conditio Judaica, 13 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), pp. 403-05. 4 Gobineau, Œuvres, ed. Jean Gaulmier, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), i, pp. 133-1166. 5 “The Germanic race was provided with with all the energy of the Aryan type. This was necesssary for it to carry out the role to which it was called.” (“La race germanique était pourvue de toute l’énergie de la variété ariane. Il le fallait pour qu’elle pût remplir le rôle auquel elle était appelée.” (Gobineau, Essai, i, p. 1161)) 6 “The white race, considered in the abstract, has henceforth vanished from the face of the earth. […] it is now represented only by hybrids; […] the proportion of Aryan blood, already subdivided so many times, which still exists in our lands and which alone sustains our society is daily heading for the absolute limits of its power to be absorbed.” (“L’espèce blanche, considérée abstractivement, a désormais disparu de la face du monde. […] elle n’est plus maintenant représentée que par des hybrides; […] la part de sang arian, subdivisée déjà tant de fois, qui existe encore dans nos contrées, et qui soutient seule notre société, s’achemine chaque jour vers les termes extrêmes de son absorption.” (ibid., p. 1163)) 7 Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972). Gobineau also applies his “colour-scheme” to social classes, where white stands for the aristocracy, yellow for the bourgeoisie, and black for the proletariat; apparently, Gobineau had been traumatised by the sight of workers’ filthy black aprons and overalls during the 1848 revolution. 8 Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 379-80. 9 Ruth Römer, Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie in Deutschland (Munich: Fink, 1989), p. 33; Römer provides no evidence from Nietzsche’s texts for this claim. 10 Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche, Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung, 17 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1987), p. 248. 11 Gerd Schank, “Rasse” und “Züchtung” bei Nietzsche, Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung, 44 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2000), p. 426. 12 Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, 3 vols (Leipzig: Naumann, 1895-97), ii, 869, 886, 889. 13 Nietzsche’s apparent lack of interest in Gobineau is well documented by Schank, pp. 426-33. 14 See, for example, the opening to Nietzsche’s essay on David Strauß in 1873. (UM I §1: KSA 1 pp.159-60) 15 In a preparatory note to The Birth of Tragedy in 1871 Nietzsche writes, “the Greek world is more sincere and simple than that of other peoples and ages: what the Greeks have in common with geniuses is that, like children and as children, they are true and truthful.” (“die griechische Welt [ist] aufrichtiger und einfacher als die anderer Völker und Zeiten: wie überhaupt die Griechen das mit den Genien gemein haben, daß sie wie die Kinder und als Kinder treu und wahrhaftig sind.” (KSA 7, p. 168, 7[121])). For further discussion of Nietzsche’s notion of Greek naïveté, see Nicholas Martin, Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 31-35. 16 For further discussion of Hölderlin’s and Nietzsche’s views of ancient Greece, see Edouard Gaède (ed.), Nietzsche, Hölderlin et la Grèce, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Nice, 34, (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988). 17 The term “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (“edle Einfalt und stille Grösse”) was originally coined by the German Hellenist J. J. Winckelmann in 1755, in the course of his argument for the superiority of Greek over 15 Roman art; see Ludwig Uhlig (ed.), Griechenland als Ideal: Winckelmann und seine Rezeption in Deutschland (Tübingen: Narr, 1988), pp. 36-37. 18 “Urbevölkerung griechischen Bodens: mongolischer Abkunft mit Baum- und Schlangenkult. Die Küste mit einem semitischen Streifen verbrämt. Hier und da Thrakier. Die Griechen haben alle diese Bestandtheile in ihr Blut aufgenommen, auch alle Götter und Mythen mit (in den Odysseusfabeln manches Mongolische). Die dorische Wanderung ist ein Nachstoß, nachdem schon früher alles allmählich überfluthet war. Was sind ‘Rassegriechen’? Genügt es nicht anzunehmen, daß Italiker mit thrakischen und semitischen Elementen gepaart Griechen geworden sind?” (KSA 8 5[198] p.96) 19 Nietzsche gives a summary of this racial history, and references to his sources for it, in the notes to the final part of his lecture course “Encyclopaedia of Classical Philology” (Encyclopaedie der klass. Philologie), held at Basle in 1871 (KGW 2.3, pp.428-35). 20 Cf. Giuliano Campioni, Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2002), and Curt Paul Janz, ‘Friedrich Nietzsches akademische Lehrtätigkeit in Basel von 1869 bis 1879’, NietzscheStudien, 3 (1974), 192-203. 21 The eight racial components of the Greek population identified by Gobineau are: aborigines, Hellenes, Thracians, Phoenicians, Arabs and Hebrews, Philistines, Libyans, Cretans and other islanders (Gobineau, Essai, i, pp. 664-65). None of these elements was “pure”, according to Gobineau, and he claims that “(t)he glory of Greece was the work of its Aryan component, allied to Semitic blood; while the great exterior bulk of this nation resulted from the action of the somewhat Mongolised populations of the north.” (“La gloire de la Grèce fut l’œuvre de la fraction ariane, alliée au sang sémitique; tandis que la grande prépondérance extérieure de ce pays résulta de l’action des populations quelque peu mongolisées du nord.” (ibid., pp. 661-62)). 22 “[Des colonies de Sémites] s’étendirent […] le long du littoral de la Grèce.” (Gobineau, Essai, i, p. 364) 23 “The misery of the toiling people must be increased still further, in order to allow a small number of Olympian individuals to produce the world of art.” (“Das Elend der mühsam lebenden Menschen muß noch gesteigert werden, um einer geringen Anzahl olympischer Menschen die Produktion einer Kunstwelt zu ermöglichen.” (KSA 1, p.767)) 24 Härtle, for example, cites the passage to this end (Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus, p. 62). 25 For further discussion of this unfortunate metaphor, see Detlef Brennecke, ‘“Die blonde Bestie”’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 20 (1970), 467-69, and T. J. Reed, ‘Nietzsche’s Animals: Idea, Image, and Influence’, in Malcolm Pasley (ed.), Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought. A Collection of Essays (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 159-219 (pp. 163-67). 26 Nietzsche’s notes on Dühring can be found in KSA 8 9[1], pp.131-81. 27 See the following Nachlass notes: KSA 7 32[39] p. 766; KSA 9 p.185; KSA 10 9[29] p.354; KSA 11 26[335] p.238 and 34[11] p.457; KSA 13 14[182] p.365 and p.369. 28 “NB. Gegen Arisch und Semitisch. Wo Rassen gemischt sind, der Quell großer Cultur.” (KSA 12 p.45) Ottmann correctly interprets this statement as evidence that Nietzsche was clearly an “anti-Gobineauist” (Ottmann, p. 251). 29 “Ich bin noch keinem Deutschen begegnet, der den Juden gewogen gewesen wäre; und so unbedingt auch die Ablehnung der eigentlichen Antisemiterei von Seiten aller Vorsichtigen und Politischen sein mag, so richtet sich doch auch diese Vorsicht und Politik nicht etwa gegen die Gattung des Gefühls selber, sondern nur gegen seine gefährliche Unmässigkeit, insbesondere gegen den abgeschmackten und schandbaren Ausdruck dieses unmässigen Gefühls, ― darüber darf man sich nicht täuschen. [...] Die Juden sind aber ohne allen Zweifel die stärkste, zäheste und reinste Rasse, die jetzt in Europa lebt; sie verstehen es, selbst noch unter den schlimmsten Bedingungen sich durchzusetzen (besser sogar, als unter günstigen), vermöge irgend welcher Tugenden, die man heute gern zu Lastern stempeln möchte, ― Dank, vor Allem, einem resoluten Glauben, der sich vor den “modernen Ideen” nicht zu schämen braucht; [...] Ein Denker, der die Zukunft Europa’s auf seinem Gewissen hat, wird, bei allen Entwürfen, welche er bei sich über diese Zukunft macht, mit den Juden rechnen wie mit den Russen, als den zunächst sichersten und wahrscheinlichsten Faktoren im grossen Spiel und Kampf der Kräfte. […] wozu es vielleicht nützlich und billig wäre, die antisemitischen Schreihälse des Landes zu verweisen.” (KSA 5, pp.193-94) 30 In the David Strauss essay (1873) Nietzsche disparages Darwin as “the greatest benefactor of the most recent kind of humanity” (“der grösste Wohlthäter der allerneuesten Menschheit” (UM I §9)), and he later dismisses Darwin, Mill and Spencer as “upright but mediocre Englishmen” (“achtbare, aber mittelmäßige Engländer” (BGE §253)); for a detailed consideration of this issue, see Werner Stegmaier, ‘Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-Studien, 16 (1987), 264-87. 31 For an analysis of Nietzsche’s six principal objections to anti-Semitism, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Sublimity and Ressentiment: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews”, Jewish Social Studies, 3.3 (1997) <http://www.uiuc.edu/unit/reec/wittgenstein/antisemitismvienna.html> [accessed 18 December 2002] (para. 63 of 85); cf. also Schank, pp. 22-24. 16