/lit/ - Literature

Because the greatest reader of Nietzsche was a Nazi

>Europe still wants to cling to “democracy” and does not want to learn to see that this would be its historical death. For as Nietzsche saw clearly, democracy is just a derivative of nihilism, that is, the devaluation of the highest values in such a way that they are henceforward just that and only that—“values”—and no longer formgiving powers. “The ascendancy of the rabble,” “the social mish-mash,” “equal men,” “means once again the ascendancy of the old values” (WzM n. ; ./). There- fore “God is dead” is not an atheistic dogma, but rather the formulation for the grounding experience of an event of Western history. I took up this phrase in full awareness in my  rectoral address.
>Taken at an even deeper level, this saying demands the knowing of the event of nihilism, and for Nietzsche, knowing means at the same time the will to overcome this event, and this from originary grounds and questions. To evaluate science according to its creative strength, and neither according to an immediate usefulness nor ac- cording to an empty eternal meaning; to evaluate this very creativity according to the originality with which it reaches down into Being itself, neither as the mere accomplishment of the individual nor as diversion for the many. To be able to value—and this means being able to act according to the essence of Being—is itself the highest creating, for it is the preparing of the preparedness for the gods, the Yes to Being.
>“The Overman” is the human being who grounds Being anew in the severity of knowing and in the harshness of creating. The “Overman” is not for sentimental dreamers who fancy themselves significant but who in fact can be understood only through a knowledge of the “last man.”
>Only a knowing that comes from originary grounds and questions grants a firm vision and decisiveness against the most dangerous nihilistic powers—those, that is, which hide themselves behind bourgeois cultural “activity” and artistic and religious reform movements. Those who appeal to what has been great up to now can do nothing for this greatness because they deny its innermost ground: the necessity of creating. For they cannot bear what is essential to creating: the necessity of destruction [Zerstören-Müssen]. And the greatest destruction lays hold of the creator himself. He must first cease to be his own contemporary, because he belongs least of all to himself, but rather to the becoming of Being. It was the knowledge of the fate of creators, in union with the knowledge of the death of God, that granted to Nietzsche, to the Dasein of the thinker, his great assurance in the midst of every upheaval and collapse.

>Thinking <that is> opposed to "values" does not hold that all that one explains as "values"--"culture," "art," "science," "the dignity of man," "world," "God"--is worthless. On the contrary, it matters <to such thinking> to understand that, by the very characterization of something as a "value," what has been judged to be such <a "value"> has been robbed of its worth. That is to say, through the evaluation of something as a value, what has been judged to be so becomes accepted as merely an object for valuation by man. But that which something is in its be[-ing] is not exhausted in its being opposite <to something else>, especially not when objectivity has the character of a value. All valuing, even where it values positively, is a kind of subjectifying. It [valuing] does not let <any kind of> be-ing <just> be, but instead valuing lets <every kind of> be-ing, solely as the object of its conduct <as valuing>, pass. The remarkable effort to demonstrate the objectivity of values does not know what it is doing. When one finally proclaims "God" to be "the highest value," that is indeed a degradation of God's essence. Here and as a rule, thinking in <terms of> values is the greatest blasphemy that can be thought of vis- à-vis be[-ing]. To think in opposition to values therefore does not mean to beat the drum for the worthlessness and invalidity of be-ing, but rather <it> means to bring the illumination of the truth of be[-ing] into the presence of thinking in opposition to the subjectifying of be-ing <[of any kind> to <the status of> a mere object.
Nietzsche can’t recover from this