Petr
01-12-2006, 03:45 AM
Nietzsche subscribed to some historical ideas that are today so embarrassingly false ...
Hyper-Nordicist theorizing:
(from Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln, 1999), pg 104-105:
"Early in the Genealogy of Morals (1#5), a few paragraphs before the beast first appears (1#11), he spoke of "the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race" (der herrschend gewordnen blonden, nämlich arischen Eroberer-Rasse) while engaging in some etymological play that is as revealing as it is philologically dubious.
The Latin malus ("bad") (beside which I set melas ("black")) may designate the common man as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired man ("hic niger est-"), as the pre-Aryan occupant of the soil of Italy who was distinguished most obviously from the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race by his color; Gaelic, at any rate, offers us a similar case - fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguished word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed, in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabitants. The Celts, by the way, were definitely a blond race; it is wrong to associate traces of an essentially dark-haired people which appear on the more careful ethnographical maps of Germany with any sort of Celtic origin or blood-mixture, as Virchow still does: it is rather the pre-Aryan people of Germany who emerge in these places. (The same is true of virtually all Europe: the suppressed race has gradually recovered the upper hand again, in coloring, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can say whether modern social democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially that inclination for "commune," for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack - and that the conqueror and master race, The Aryan (die Eroberer- und Herren-Rasse, die der Arier), is not succumbing physiologically too?) 10
"In this passage, Nietzsche used two thin and misguided pieces of "evidence" - the phonologically impossible comparison of Latin malus ("bad") to Greek melas ("black"), and the tendentious translation of Irish finn as "blond" rather than "fair, shining, brilliant" - as the basis for some far-ranging conclusions. 11
(footnote, pg. 252)
11: The name Fingal, which Nietzsche invoked, also has its problems. Ostensibly, it means "the blond Gael" or "the shining Celt," but the name is unattested in genuine Celtic literature. Rather, this is the warrior hero of James MacPherson's fraudulent "Ossian", discussed in chap. 3."
Seemingly, on this fragile basis, he equated blond hair with Aryan conquerors and the moral good, dark hair with their opposite: not Semites, but sickly pre-Aryans of unspecified sort. The closing sentence of the passage is also worth attention. Disarmingly framed as a parenthesis, it contains Nietzsche's racial recoding of political movements he viewed with distaste: democracy, anarchism, socialism, and communism, all of which he depicted as the revenge of short-skulled, dark-haired, pre-Aryan masses. 12
Yeah right - social democracy has nowhere penetrated the society and masses deeper than in Scandinavia...
Even Nietzsche's most rabid Nazi fans today do not like to advertise how Nietzsche promoted such patent nonsense.
Silly Indomania and amateurish dabbling with Hindu scriptures:
(ibid., pg. 107-109)
III
Some months after completing On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche discovered the Laws of Manu (Manava Dharmasastra), an ancient Indian treatise on ethics, religion, and social structure that excited him greatly. 20 In a letter of 31 May 1888 to Peter Gast, he waxed enthusiastic.
I owe to these last weeks a very important lesson: I found Manu's book of laws in a French translation done in India under strict supervision from the most eminent priests and scholars there. This absolutely Aryan work, a priestly codex of morality based on the Vedas, on the idea of caste and very ancient tradition - supplements my views on religion in the most remarkable way. I confess having the impression that everything else that we have by way of moral lawgiving seems to me an imitation and even caricature of it - preeminently, Egypticism does; but even Plato seems to me in all the main points simply to have been well instructed by a Brahmin. It makes the Jews look like a Chandala race which learns from its masters the principles of making a priestly caste the master which organizes the people. 21
"As Anacleto Verrecchia and Cristiano Grottanelli have recognized, the translation that fell into Nietzsche's hands was the 1876 edition of Louis Jacolliot (1837-90). 22 In contrast to the pioneering version of Sir William Jones (1794) and all subsequent translations, this curious work was based on Tamil rather than Sanskrit texts, which Jacolliot - following the southern pandits with whom he studied - mistakenly took to be the most ancient and authentic. His copious notes also develop an extravagantly idiosyncratic argument, which unfolds in several stages. Thus, he idealized the original religion and culture in India and took the caste system to be a secondary development. In his view, the discourse and practices constitutive of caste were fostered by Brahmans and were the means through which they assumed direction fo civil, political, and religious life, reducing others to subordinate status. Of those victimized through caste, none suffered so much as the outcastes or pariahs termed Candalas in Sanskrit, many of whom, he argued, extricated themselves from their oppressive situation by migrating to the north and west. Different groups of Candalas thus settled in Mesopotamia, where they became the ancestors of Babylonians, Chaldeans, and all others falsely called "Semites", including the Hebrews, who emigrated a secong time from Chaldea to Israel. "Those whom official science calls Semites," Jacolliot preferred to think as "Indo-Asiatic" peoples. While all the world's people originated from India, those of the West - Egyptians and Europeans - came from the higher castes, and for them he reserved the title of "Indo-Europeans." 23 Although he showed sympathy for the Candalas of India, his attitude towards their expatriate descendants was much more condescending, even contemptuous at times. Nowhere was this truer than in his treatment of their religion: "The so-called Semites were themselves so much emigrant Candala slaves that they could never raise themselves above the vulgar conceptions they brought with them form their mother-country. The ignorant Candalas had only seen the outer manifestations of the Hindu cult that we open to the plebs. Nothing left to us by the Chaldaeans, their descendants, suggests that they had been raised on the philosophical and spiritual beliefs of the Brahmans." 24
"Building on, but significantly modifying, Jacolliot's views, Nietzsche imputed fierce resentment to the Candalas and their descendants, then went on to differentiate two kinds of moral project, both of which he associated with the institution of caste. The first of these he called "breeding" (Züchtung), and he saw this as the task undertaken by the Laws of Manu: the cultivation of human subjects for the four sanctioned castes and the forceful subordination of Candalas. The second, he called "taming" (Zähnung) and he associated it with the reaaction of resentful Candalas, particularly when they became priests in a system of their own making. Relatively ignorant of the Indic data and not terribly interested in them for their own sake, Nietzsche appropriated Jacolliot's quirky views in order to apply them to another example: the way (he imagined) medieval priests, Christians descended from Jews, themselves descended from Chaldaeans, and ultimately from Candalas - broke the spirit of the ancient Germans."
I wonder how many pagan Nazis who today gloating cite Nietzsche's evaluation of "Laws of Manu" as completely superior to the New Testament are aware that his thesis rested on the laughable notion that Semites originated from the lower castes of India?
Or that Jacolliot's version of "Manu" (which Nietzsche relied upon) was prepared under the supervision of dark-skinned Dravidian Tamil Brahmins instead of some Sanskrit-speaking ur-Aryans?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_people
Petr
Hyper-Nordicist theorizing:
(from Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln, 1999), pg 104-105:
"Early in the Genealogy of Morals (1#5), a few paragraphs before the beast first appears (1#11), he spoke of "the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race" (der herrschend gewordnen blonden, nämlich arischen Eroberer-Rasse) while engaging in some etymological play that is as revealing as it is philologically dubious.
The Latin malus ("bad") (beside which I set melas ("black")) may designate the common man as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired man ("hic niger est-"), as the pre-Aryan occupant of the soil of Italy who was distinguished most obviously from the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race by his color; Gaelic, at any rate, offers us a similar case - fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguished word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed, in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabitants. The Celts, by the way, were definitely a blond race; it is wrong to associate traces of an essentially dark-haired people which appear on the more careful ethnographical maps of Germany with any sort of Celtic origin or blood-mixture, as Virchow still does: it is rather the pre-Aryan people of Germany who emerge in these places. (The same is true of virtually all Europe: the suppressed race has gradually recovered the upper hand again, in coloring, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can say whether modern social democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially that inclination for "commune," for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack - and that the conqueror and master race, The Aryan (die Eroberer- und Herren-Rasse, die der Arier), is not succumbing physiologically too?) 10
"In this passage, Nietzsche used two thin and misguided pieces of "evidence" - the phonologically impossible comparison of Latin malus ("bad") to Greek melas ("black"), and the tendentious translation of Irish finn as "blond" rather than "fair, shining, brilliant" - as the basis for some far-ranging conclusions. 11
(footnote, pg. 252)
11: The name Fingal, which Nietzsche invoked, also has its problems. Ostensibly, it means "the blond Gael" or "the shining Celt," but the name is unattested in genuine Celtic literature. Rather, this is the warrior hero of James MacPherson's fraudulent "Ossian", discussed in chap. 3."
Seemingly, on this fragile basis, he equated blond hair with Aryan conquerors and the moral good, dark hair with their opposite: not Semites, but sickly pre-Aryans of unspecified sort. The closing sentence of the passage is also worth attention. Disarmingly framed as a parenthesis, it contains Nietzsche's racial recoding of political movements he viewed with distaste: democracy, anarchism, socialism, and communism, all of which he depicted as the revenge of short-skulled, dark-haired, pre-Aryan masses. 12
Yeah right - social democracy has nowhere penetrated the society and masses deeper than in Scandinavia...
Even Nietzsche's most rabid Nazi fans today do not like to advertise how Nietzsche promoted such patent nonsense.
Silly Indomania and amateurish dabbling with Hindu scriptures:
(ibid., pg. 107-109)
III
Some months after completing On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche discovered the Laws of Manu (Manava Dharmasastra), an ancient Indian treatise on ethics, religion, and social structure that excited him greatly. 20 In a letter of 31 May 1888 to Peter Gast, he waxed enthusiastic.
I owe to these last weeks a very important lesson: I found Manu's book of laws in a French translation done in India under strict supervision from the most eminent priests and scholars there. This absolutely Aryan work, a priestly codex of morality based on the Vedas, on the idea of caste and very ancient tradition - supplements my views on religion in the most remarkable way. I confess having the impression that everything else that we have by way of moral lawgiving seems to me an imitation and even caricature of it - preeminently, Egypticism does; but even Plato seems to me in all the main points simply to have been well instructed by a Brahmin. It makes the Jews look like a Chandala race which learns from its masters the principles of making a priestly caste the master which organizes the people. 21
"As Anacleto Verrecchia and Cristiano Grottanelli have recognized, the translation that fell into Nietzsche's hands was the 1876 edition of Louis Jacolliot (1837-90). 22 In contrast to the pioneering version of Sir William Jones (1794) and all subsequent translations, this curious work was based on Tamil rather than Sanskrit texts, which Jacolliot - following the southern pandits with whom he studied - mistakenly took to be the most ancient and authentic. His copious notes also develop an extravagantly idiosyncratic argument, which unfolds in several stages. Thus, he idealized the original religion and culture in India and took the caste system to be a secondary development. In his view, the discourse and practices constitutive of caste were fostered by Brahmans and were the means through which they assumed direction fo civil, political, and religious life, reducing others to subordinate status. Of those victimized through caste, none suffered so much as the outcastes or pariahs termed Candalas in Sanskrit, many of whom, he argued, extricated themselves from their oppressive situation by migrating to the north and west. Different groups of Candalas thus settled in Mesopotamia, where they became the ancestors of Babylonians, Chaldeans, and all others falsely called "Semites", including the Hebrews, who emigrated a secong time from Chaldea to Israel. "Those whom official science calls Semites," Jacolliot preferred to think as "Indo-Asiatic" peoples. While all the world's people originated from India, those of the West - Egyptians and Europeans - came from the higher castes, and for them he reserved the title of "Indo-Europeans." 23 Although he showed sympathy for the Candalas of India, his attitude towards their expatriate descendants was much more condescending, even contemptuous at times. Nowhere was this truer than in his treatment of their religion: "The so-called Semites were themselves so much emigrant Candala slaves that they could never raise themselves above the vulgar conceptions they brought with them form their mother-country. The ignorant Candalas had only seen the outer manifestations of the Hindu cult that we open to the plebs. Nothing left to us by the Chaldaeans, their descendants, suggests that they had been raised on the philosophical and spiritual beliefs of the Brahmans." 24
"Building on, but significantly modifying, Jacolliot's views, Nietzsche imputed fierce resentment to the Candalas and their descendants, then went on to differentiate two kinds of moral project, both of which he associated with the institution of caste. The first of these he called "breeding" (Züchtung), and he saw this as the task undertaken by the Laws of Manu: the cultivation of human subjects for the four sanctioned castes and the forceful subordination of Candalas. The second, he called "taming" (Zähnung) and he associated it with the reaaction of resentful Candalas, particularly when they became priests in a system of their own making. Relatively ignorant of the Indic data and not terribly interested in them for their own sake, Nietzsche appropriated Jacolliot's quirky views in order to apply them to another example: the way (he imagined) medieval priests, Christians descended from Jews, themselves descended from Chaldaeans, and ultimately from Candalas - broke the spirit of the ancient Germans."
I wonder how many pagan Nazis who today gloating cite Nietzsche's evaluation of "Laws of Manu" as completely superior to the New Testament are aware that his thesis rested on the laughable notion that Semites originated from the lower castes of India?
Or that Jacolliot's version of "Manu" (which Nietzsche relied upon) was prepared under the supervision of dark-skinned Dravidian Tamil Brahmins instead of some Sanskrit-speaking ur-Aryans?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_people
Petr