Another great piece. A pleasure to read, and your overall message is exactly right - especially your remarks towards the end about Nietzsche’s “positive prescription” (about which much more can be said). I believe in today’s Right, Christians and “Nietzscheans” can only be fellow travelers for a time. The main area of mutual interest and cooperation being general resistance to the regime, perhaps especially to threats to true freedom of association. Coalitions of this general nature have existed in the past, maybe in Spain during the civil war. I’m curious to know what you think about prospects for such cooperation going forward. BAP for instance has (correctly in my opinion) taken great care not to alienate Christians too much…
I do think you are a bit too hard on Kaufmann regarding the question of the “chosen people” and the difference between the Greeks and the Jews (though I think he is right for the wrong reasons). You say that “it is clear from Nietzsche’s narrative of the Jewish moral revolutions that he sees the notion of ‘chosen people’ as a naïve self-definition dating from those centuries when the Jews were still a master race,” because “Nietzsche speaks about the Jewish concept of the ‘chosen people’ in exactly the same way he speaks about how the Aryan aristocracy understood itself”. But Nietzsche’s view is more complex than that. The description of Aryan aristocracy you quoted from GM I 5 is Nietzsche’s description of the values of warrior aristocracy, which Nietzsche distinguishes from the values of priestly aristocracy in the next two passages. And the elite in priestly aristocracies is quite different psychologically and physiologically from warrior aristocrats.
In another passage you quoted (Antichrist 27), Nietzsche directly associates the concepts “holy people” and “chosen people”. This gives at least some support to the claim that the concept of the “chosen people” is a priestly concept originating from the First Revaluation, not prior to it “from those centuries when the Jews were still a master race” as you said. The likely priestly origins of the “chosen people” concept suggests it's probably not the case this concept is exactly the same as the Aryan warrior aristocracy’s self-understanding.
More generally, even if the Jews did have a healthier “heroic period” prior to the First Revaluation, there was an enormous gulf between them and the Greeks. The Greeks were a true, full-fledged aristocratic culture, and central to such cultures is the concept of breeding through blood and education. It is the discipline of the breeding culture with its fundamental orientation towards nature which maintained the status of the conquering Aryan warriors as a distinct nobility above those they conquered, most notably in ancient Greece, leading to the strengthening, refinement, and elevation of the pathos of distance (and of the elite in general). It’s not clear the pre-First Revaluation Jews Nietzsche talks about, those “in the time of the Kingdom” and before, had any of this (though I’m not extremely well-versed in the relevant history – if you know of evidence to the contrary I’d be very interested in it).
In fact, the influence of Jacolliot’s “Chandala Jews” theory on Nietzsche suggests he would not have believed the Jews had these things at any point. The importance of the “Chandala Jews” theory is that the Jews may have had Chandala values in the form of hostility to aristocratic breeding practices from the beginning, ultimately leading to Christianity as “the immortal revenge of the Chandala as the religion of love”. That is, if the Jews were Chandala descendants, they may have been hostile to the values and practices of aristocratic breeding culture from the start.
That’s why I don’t think Kaufmann is wrong to say Nietzsche considered the ancient Jewish idea of being a chosen people fundamentally different from the aristocratic values of the Greeks (though I doubt Kaufmann had much of what I have said here in mind – he was probably trying to defend Jews from association with values he considered morally suspect).
Nietzsche did not have access to much in the pre-christian tradition. Certainly the Gnostic scriptures were unknown to him. Thus it would have been impossible for him to truly describe the pre-christian world, or for that matter, to discuss the extent to which Christianity owes its identity to the traditions it intentionally destroyed and devoured.
Such a condition would, of necessity require an assignment to a biblical people the qualities he obviously believed truly belong to humanity. Thus we can understand his position on the early Jews, and his evident conclusion of their origin in distant lands.
Certainly, the Battle of the Ten Kings completely changed the human condition, introducing both diaspora and cultural diffusion, not to mention genetic degeneration, which no matter how they might be labeled, continue stubbornly as themes within all genuine attempts to discover the history of mankind.
Let us not forget that the Christian juggernaut was unable to limit itself to destroying the records of the genius that preceded them, they also found it fulfilling to engage in repeated mass murder campaigns conveniently dismissed to this day. The very first death camp was created in Scythopolis Syria by these same Christians that declare themselves just.
In the end, it would have been fascinating to behold just what Nietzsche would have done had he had access to the ancient mystical tradition, or even some of the sacred literature that has been returned to us since his time. After all he came perilously close to rediscovering Wotan all on his own.
Another great piece. A pleasure to read, and your overall message is exactly right - especially your remarks towards the end about Nietzsche’s “positive prescription” (about which much more can be said). I believe in today’s Right, Christians and “Nietzscheans” can only be fellow travelers for a time. The main area of mutual interest and cooperation being general resistance to the regime, perhaps especially to threats to true freedom of association. Coalitions of this general nature have existed in the past, maybe in Spain during the civil war. I’m curious to know what you think about prospects for such cooperation going forward. BAP for instance has (correctly in my opinion) taken great care not to alienate Christians too much…
I do think you are a bit too hard on Kaufmann regarding the question of the “chosen people” and the difference between the Greeks and the Jews (though I think he is right for the wrong reasons). You say that “it is clear from Nietzsche’s narrative of the Jewish moral revolutions that he sees the notion of ‘chosen people’ as a naïve self-definition dating from those centuries when the Jews were still a master race,” because “Nietzsche speaks about the Jewish concept of the ‘chosen people’ in exactly the same way he speaks about how the Aryan aristocracy understood itself”. But Nietzsche’s view is more complex than that. The description of Aryan aristocracy you quoted from GM I 5 is Nietzsche’s description of the values of warrior aristocracy, which Nietzsche distinguishes from the values of priestly aristocracy in the next two passages. And the elite in priestly aristocracies is quite different psychologically and physiologically from warrior aristocrats.
In another passage you quoted (Antichrist 27), Nietzsche directly associates the concepts “holy people” and “chosen people”. This gives at least some support to the claim that the concept of the “chosen people” is a priestly concept originating from the First Revaluation, not prior to it “from those centuries when the Jews were still a master race” as you said. The likely priestly origins of the “chosen people” concept suggests it's probably not the case this concept is exactly the same as the Aryan warrior aristocracy’s self-understanding.
More generally, even if the Jews did have a healthier “heroic period” prior to the First Revaluation, there was an enormous gulf between them and the Greeks. The Greeks were a true, full-fledged aristocratic culture, and central to such cultures is the concept of breeding through blood and education. It is the discipline of the breeding culture with its fundamental orientation towards nature which maintained the status of the conquering Aryan warriors as a distinct nobility above those they conquered, most notably in ancient Greece, leading to the strengthening, refinement, and elevation of the pathos of distance (and of the elite in general). It’s not clear the pre-First Revaluation Jews Nietzsche talks about, those “in the time of the Kingdom” and before, had any of this (though I’m not extremely well-versed in the relevant history – if you know of evidence to the contrary I’d be very interested in it).
In fact, the influence of Jacolliot’s “Chandala Jews” theory on Nietzsche suggests he would not have believed the Jews had these things at any point. The importance of the “Chandala Jews” theory is that the Jews may have had Chandala values in the form of hostility to aristocratic breeding practices from the beginning, ultimately leading to Christianity as “the immortal revenge of the Chandala as the religion of love”. That is, if the Jews were Chandala descendants, they may have been hostile to the values and practices of aristocratic breeding culture from the start.
That’s why I don’t think Kaufmann is wrong to say Nietzsche considered the ancient Jewish idea of being a chosen people fundamentally different from the aristocratic values of the Greeks (though I doubt Kaufmann had much of what I have said here in mind – he was probably trying to defend Jews from association with values he considered morally suspect).
Nietzsche did not have access to much in the pre-christian tradition. Certainly the Gnostic scriptures were unknown to him. Thus it would have been impossible for him to truly describe the pre-christian world, or for that matter, to discuss the extent to which Christianity owes its identity to the traditions it intentionally destroyed and devoured.
Such a condition would, of necessity require an assignment to a biblical people the qualities he obviously believed truly belong to humanity. Thus we can understand his position on the early Jews, and his evident conclusion of their origin in distant lands.
Certainly, the Battle of the Ten Kings completely changed the human condition, introducing both diaspora and cultural diffusion, not to mention genetic degeneration, which no matter how they might be labeled, continue stubbornly as themes within all genuine attempts to discover the history of mankind.
Let us not forget that the Christian juggernaut was unable to limit itself to destroying the records of the genius that preceded them, they also found it fulfilling to engage in repeated mass murder campaigns conveniently dismissed to this day. The very first death camp was created in Scythopolis Syria by these same Christians that declare themselves just.
In the end, it would have been fascinating to behold just what Nietzsche would have done had he had access to the ancient mystical tradition, or even some of the sacred literature that has been returned to us since his time. After all he came perilously close to rediscovering Wotan all on his own.