340 Epilogue
Aryan master race was miles apart from the image of nobility that had
guided him. This disparity did not escape the attention of many
National Socialists, who continued to use Nietzsche while warning
against his free-spiritedness. Ernst Krieck, an influential National
Socialist philosopher, remarked ironically: "All in all, Nietzsche was an
opponent of socialism, an opponent of nationalism, and an opponent
of racial thinking. Apart from these three bents of mind, he might have
made an outstanding Nazi" (Riedel 131).
During the National Socialist era, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger
used the regime's official recognition of Nietzsche to bring a different,
non-ideological Nietzsche into play and to develop in his wake ideas that
could go beyond the scope of ideology, or at least not be limited by it.
Theirs was a subversive reading.
Jaspers' 1936 book portrayed Nietzsche as a philosopher whose pas-
sion for knowledge drove him away from any ideological school. His
Nietzsche was essentially an experimental philosopher drawn to the
"magic of the extreme" (Jaspers 425). Jaspers admired Nietzsche for
relinquishing transcendence but not transcending, and for exploring the
possibilities of boundless thinking. Nietzsche favored the process of
thinking over its products. In Jaspers' view, Nietzsche had crossed the
desert of nihilism and in the process created a new receptivity to the
miracle of existence. Jaspers expressed his assessment in somewhat
vague and tentative terms: "In this case, Nietzsche's greatness consists
in an awareness of nothingness which enables him to speak more clearly
and passionately of the other—of being—and to know it better than
those who perhaps share in it without even being sure of it and conse-
quendy remain inarticulate" (Jaspers 427). Jaspers sensitively portrayed
the drama of this immoderate thinking and proceeded to the point at
which "the fullness of being is lacking" and the "buffoon" (Jaspers 428)
is manifest. Evidendy he considered Nietzsche's unconstrained philoso-
phy of power "buffoonery." He hinted at this view but did not express
it directly. Had he done so, he would have clashed too obviously with the
official version. This caution notwithstanding, Jaspers was barely toler-