Abstract
Between the wars, particularly in Germany, Nietzsche’s work exerted a particular fascination. The passion of his judgments and his prejudices, the catchy formulation of his philosophy of decadence, and the seductive affirmative of his “yes-saying affect” determined the intellectual character and the critical questions of a whole generation of pseudo-radical intellectuals at odds with the Western tradition. Thinkers as various as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, and even Arnold Gehlen show affinity with this background. They are examples of an influence which communicated itself more strongly by Nietzsche’s gesture than by his particular argument. At that time he had formed and empowered a mentality which certainly in no way was limited to the “revolutionary of the right.” All of that lies behind us and is already almost unintelligible. Nietzsche is no longer contagious.
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Notes
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power,trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), Preface 4. [Hereafter WP in the text: numbers refer to paragraph numbers]
Exceptions are, in a way, Hans Barth and Michael Landmann.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom,” in Philosophy and Truth, trans. and ed. D. Breazeale ( New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979 ), p. 141.
Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations,trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 87. [Further references to this translation will be abbreviated UM in the text.]
See H.G Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1986), part II; see also my treatment in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (Cambridge MA.: MIT Press, 1988). [German begins on pp. 149 ff].
See K. Schlechta and A. Anders, F. Nietzsche, Von den verborgenen Anfängen des Philosophierens ( Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann, 1962 ).
Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, trans. A. Ludovici ( New York: Russell & Russell, 1964 ), pp. 20 – 21.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1954), paragraph 20. [Hereafter BGE.]
See my treatment in Chapter Twelve of Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
K. Lorenz gives an interesting example for this theoretical approach in “Gestaltwahrnehmung als Quelle wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis (1959),” in Über tierisches und menschliches Verhalten, Vol. II (Munich, 1966 ), pp. 255 – 300.
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Habermas, J. (1999). On Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge: A Postscript from 1968. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 203. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2430-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2430-2_15
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