Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T01:51:40.205Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau, and Classical Theories of Race

from Section 1 - The Classical Greeks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Nicholas Martin
Affiliation:
University of St. Andrews
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Nietzsche and Antiquity
His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition
, pp. 40 - 53
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×