Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Nietzsche, Homer, and the Classical Tradition
- “Unhistorical Greeks”: Myth, History, and the Uses of Antiquity
- Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau, and Classical Theories of Race
- Ecce Philologus: Nietzsche and Pindar's Second Pythian Ode
- Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Propositional Discourse
- “Politeia” 1871: Young Nietzsche on the Greek State
- Nietzsche and Democritus: The Origins of Ethical Eudaimonism
- “Full of Gods”: Nietzsche on Greek Polytheism and Culture
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau, and Classical Theories of Race
from Section 1 - The Classical Greeks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section 1 The Classical Greeks
- Nietzsche, Homer, and the Classical Tradition
- “Unhistorical Greeks”: Myth, History, and the Uses of Antiquity
- Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau, and Classical Theories of Race
- Ecce Philologus: Nietzsche and Pindar's Second Pythian Ode
- Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Propositional Discourse
- “Politeia” 1871: Young Nietzsche on the Greek State
- Nietzsche and Democritus: The Origins of Ethical Eudaimonism
- “Full of Gods”: Nietzsche on Greek Polytheism and Culture
- Section 2 Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics, and Stoics
- Section 3 Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition
- Section 4 Contestations
- Section 5 German Classicism
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
In a section of Daybreak (1881), entitled “Purification of Race,” Nietzsche writes:
—There are probably no pure races, only races that have become pure, and these are very rare. The norm is crossed races […]. Crossed races are also always crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are in the main nastier, crueller and more agitated. Purity is the final result of countless adaptations, suckings-in and excretions, and the progress towards purity shows itself in the way the strength present in a race increasingly limits itself to certain selected functions […]. The Greeks provide us with the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully one day a pure European race and culture will come about.
(D §272)In view of later bastardizations of Nietzsche's thought, the most damaging of which were carried out by National Socialists, it is important to establish where his theory of cultural development, insofar as it relies on a racial theory, stands in relation to racial or racialist theories in late nineteenth-century Europe. The most influential of these was Gobineau's. Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, who has been dubbed the “Father of Racism,” lived from 1816 to 1882 and was therefore an almost exact contemporary of Richard Wagner. In their later years the two men became acquainted and to some extent allied, despite their differences over Wagner's Parsifal, though it was primarily after their deaths, and principally through the Bayreuth circle of Wagner's hard-line successors and disciples that Gobineau's theory of race and racial degeneration became more widely known.
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- Information
- Nietzsche and AntiquityHis Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, pp. 40 - 53Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004