221
Nietzsche’s writings were edited
and censored by his anti-semitic sister
Elizabeth, who controlled his archive
after he became insane. This allowed
the Nazis to wilfully misinterpret them.THE MODERN WORLD
illusions, the old idea of “man” can
be surpassed. The Superman is
Nietzsche’s vision of a fundamentally
life-affirming way of being. It is one
that can become the bearer of
meaning not in the world beyond,
but here; Superman is “the
meaning of the Earth.”
Creating ourselves
Nietzsche’s writings did not reach
a large audience in his lifetime, so
much so that he had to pay for the
publication of the final part of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra himself. But
around 30 years after his death in
1900, the idea of the Superman fed
into the rhetoric of Nazism through
Hitler’s readings of Nietzsche’s
work. Nietzsche’s ideas about the
Superman, and particularly his call
for an eradication of the Jewish-
Christian morality that held sway
throughout Europe would have been
attractive to Hitler as validation for
his own aims. But where Nietzsche
seemed to be searching for a return
to the more rustic, life-affirming
values of pagan Europe, Hitler
took his writings as an excuse for
unbridled violence and transgression
on a grand scale. The consensus
amongst scholars is that Nietzsche
himself would have been horrified
by this turn of events. Writing in
an era of extraordinary nationalism,
patriotism, and colonial expansion,
Nietzsche was one of the few
thinkers to call these assumptions
into question. At one point in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra he makes it
clear that he considers nationalism
a form of alienation or failure. “Only
where the state ends,” Zarathustra
says, “there begins the human
being who is not superfluous”.
Nietzsche’s open-ended idea of
human possibility was important
to many philosophers in the period
following World War II. His ideas
about religion and the importance
of self-evaluation can be traced
especially in the work of succeeding
existentialists such as the French
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Like
Nietzsche’s Superman, Sartre says
that we must each define the
meaning of our own existence.Nietzsche’s damning criticisms of
the Western philosophical tradition
have had a huge impact not only on
philosophy, but also on European
and world culture, and they went
on to influence countless artists
and writers in the 20th century. ■The degree of
introspection achieved by
Nietzsche had never been
achieved by anyone.
Sigmund Freud