Rick asked:

What is the connection between Nietzsche and Social Darwinism, Nazism, and eugenics? What did
Nietzsche have to say about the principles these topics embody?

============

Nietzsche's working life spans the 15 years from 1873-1888. This was a time of a great boom in
Germany, after German troops had won the wars against Austria (1866) and France (1870) and
Bismarck had founded "The Reich" (1871). So Nietzsche could have been contend with those
achievements as were most of his fellow Germans. But Nietzsche despised this gold rush in a similar
mood as did Marcuse 90 years later: There was much gold around, but this was devils-gold, since the
soul of men has not been freed but hardened and disabled for the true life of love and joy. This was
the core of Nietzsche's critique.

Nietzsche was no Social Darwinist, though — and no Nazi either. The Nazis even understood that.
Nietzsche admired Schopenhauer for his daring thesis, preceding Freud, that man is driven by his
voluptuous desires of all sorts, mainly sexual. Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers in
Europe allowing sex and the theory of the Buddha of the human suffering from greed and longing to
enter his philosophy. But while Schopenhauer's world-view got pessimistic, Nietzsche thought, there
could be an optimistic equivalent: Where Schopenhauer following the Buddha said "no" to life and
advised renunciation from all clinging to its cheating beauties, Nietzsche said (tried to say) "yes",
even "a great yes" to life and to "the will to live". That was his programme.

And now you understand why Nietzsche didn't think much of socialisms of all sorts — including the
Marxian and christian versions of his day — and would have despised the nationalistic versions of
socialism, as Mussolini and Hitler propagated them, likewise. His aim was a society of free men and
not a society of happy sheep, as he took the socialists ideal to be. But "free men" for Nietzsche did
not mean so much business people and entrepreneurs but a new sort of the Renaissance "uomo
universale" exemplified in Leonardo da Vinci. Nietzsche was in Basel as a professor befriended to his
colleague Jacob Burckhardt, who had published an up to this day famous book on the Renaissance
in Italy, and Nietzsche himself was professor of Greek Antiquity. So Nietzsche's idea of the free man
had nothing to do with free entrepreneurship and nearly nothing with Marcusean communes or with
Hesse's "Siddharta" either, but with a free and able personality as was the ideal of the Greek and the
Renaissance.

I don't think he openly would have spoken in favor of "active" eugenics, but he would have favored
"passive" eugenics saying "let the disabled and weak die." There always has been eugenics from the
oldest times and with all peoples and mostly passive. But you see that one could understand and
defend Nietzsche's position without favouring active eugenics.

Hubertus Fremerey

18