Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Correcting Nietzsche's error


Friedrich Nietzsche began his career by writing about the “German Spirit” and how to unblock and revive it, but as time went on Nietzsche thought that we all need to transcend the national perspective and affirm only individual great men, “good Europeans,” and supermen, downplaying or blocking nationalism.

Nietzsche's rejection of nationalism was at least to a certain extent related to Wagner's imperial brand of nationalism, or Wagner's pushy personality which took up all the oxygen in a room, and perhaps also do to Nietzsche's unfamiliarity or discomfort with male authority figures, having been raised by women only. Even great minds can brilliantly rationalize to accommodate their own weaknesses.

Correcting this error would have required an affirmation of the truths behind group-selection in the evolution of the human species and human culture. Supermen need the nation as much as the nation needs them. It seems to me that Nietzsche might have welcomed new knowledge from the evolutionary science of sociobiology had he had it.

What needs to be championed is the evolution and promotion of great men and women along with their nations, many small nations, ethnostates, with mutually agreed upon natural differences and natural separations, as we all evolve toward Godhood in the cosmos, sharing knowledge and information across a variety of nations. That is a version of "internationalism" we could live with. It seems to me that this is the better version of the new religious ethos which early Nietzsche did see as necessary to revive the fallen world.  God is not dead, Godhood has been insufficiently understood.  The Inward Path to the inward God of traditional religion leads to the Outward Path of evolution to Godhood, transformed in the Twofold Path.

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