Nietzsche’s Long Shadow

Abstract

That the concept of nihilism came to play such a crucial role in the philosophico-political critique of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany is owing above all to the publication of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power (1901; enlarged edition 1906), a volume that is not to be mistaken for the work that Nietzsche himself promised under that title in On the Genealogy of Morals. In the first part of The Will to Power, Nietzsche’s editors collected together under the title ‘European Nihilism’ fragments from his notebooks relating to that topic, thereby giving the impression that the question of nihilism lay at the very heart of his later thought. The fundamental misconception to which this led is clear from the future Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler’s postscript to the 1930 Kröner edition of The Will to Power, in which he declares it to be ‘Nietzsche’s philosophical magnum opus. All the fundamental results of his thinking are brought together in this book’ (Baeumler in Nietzsche 1968: xiii). When Martin Heidegger came to lecture on Nietzsche in 1936–40, he paid far more attention to The Will to Power than to any work actually published by Nietzsche. Prior to Nietzsche’s appropriation by Nazi ideologues in the 1930s, however, The Will to Power, and in particular the concept of nihilism therein, was already playing a determining role in the work of conservative revolutionaries in the immediate post-war period.KeywordsFrench RevolutionTotal MobilizationGerman PeopleNegative DialecticNazi IdeologueThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.