Part 8 of Beyond Good and Evil is titled “Peoples and Fatherlands.”
It runs about 25 pages, from sections 240 to 256.
Nietzsche opens and closes this part with observations on Wagner and his music.
In between he discusses the characteristics of Europeans, Germans, Jews, the English,
and the French.
He begins by reminiscing about Wagner’s music, its strengths and weaknesses.
In it there is “something German in the best and worst senses of the word,” both
young and old, elegant and barbarous.
Like Wagner’s music, the German spirit is of the past and of the future, but has no present.
Nietzsche’s remarks on Europeans include a dialogue about whether Bismarck is a great
leader for forcing political greatness on the reluctant German peoples.
The lesson Nietzsche draws from it is that “the spiritual flattening [or shallowing]
of one people often leads to the deepening of another.”
So the spiritual decline of Bismarck’s Reich might be met by greater spiritual energy in France.
Modern Europeans are undergoing a physiological evolution, becoming more alike, more generic.
“A supra-national and nomadic type of man” is rising, adaptable above all else, but unrooted.
This turn may have unexpected results, for the same conditions that produce herd men
also produce rare exceptional spirits.
In short, democratization breeds tyrants, spiritually as well as politically.
Next, Nietzsche proposes a “vivisection of the German soul” to uncover the sources
of their supposed profundity.
The German soul is complex, manifold, product of a mixture of races.
It is full of spiritual caverns, hideouts, and dungeons.
It is not quite right to say the German “is”—rather, he “develops.”
He is full of puzzles and contradictions; Hegel saw this.
And yet German profundity, even when ridiculous, is preferable to Prussian daring.
German music since Schumann has been in danger of losing its European voice, of lapsing into
“mere fatherlandishness.”
In language and rhetoric, modern Germans have lost their feel for the rhythms of speech;
German books are clumsy and dull.
In section 246, Nietzsche makes these points while showing off his skills as a prose stylist.
Kaufmann notes the difficulties of translating him here.
Perhaps surprisingly, Nietzsche tells us the only Germans who know how to speak with attention
to language and rhythm are the preachers.
(It is worth remembering that Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran pastor who died when
he was four years old.)
The real masterpiece of German prose is Luther’s translation of the Bible.
It seems that in both music and linguistic style, modern Germans are in a long decline.
Given Nietzsche’s association in the popular mind with Naziism and brutality, we might
also be surprised by some of his observations about the Jews.
He begins by distinguishing two types of genius in a people: active/masculine and passive/feminine.
The former we associate with virility, the latter with pregnancy and its problems.
Nietzsche puts the French and the ancient Greeks in the feminine, bringing forth, group.
In the masculine, begetting group he places the Romans, the Germans, and the Jews.
This is an unusual inversion of his time’s scholarship, which held the Greeks to be creative
and active, and of popular prejudice, which held the Jews to be passive and culturally parasitical.
We might remember that 1886, the year this book was published, was also the year Nietzsche’s
sister Elizabeth moved to South America with her anti-Semite husband, to found a racially
pure Aryan colony.
Some of Nietzsche’s attacks on anti-Semites here clearly have in mind his sister and brother-in-law
and their followers.
The rest of his remarks on the Jews are generally positive.
Europe inherits from the Jews the grand style in morality, something for which artists and
great spirits are grateful.
“The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now
living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions….”
They prevail through their virtues, most especially a rejection of and lack of shame before modern ideas.
Like the Russians, the Jews change only when necessary, and then very slowly.
For this reason, Nietzsche thinks the Russians and the Jews may be key to the European future.
Modern European nations are artificial and unreal.
He suggests expelling the anti-Semites and integrating and accommodating the Jews, for
the good of Germany and of Europe.
At the end of section 251, he announces what he calls “the European problem… the cultivation
of a new caste that will rule Europe.”
Nietzsche then briefly considers the national characters of the English and the French.
The English are a non-philosophical people, lacking spiritual profundity.
The German spirit fights against “English-mechanistic doltification,” [Welt-Vertölpelung, literally
world-duping].
This shallowness explains why the English cling to Christianity: they have not yet outgrown it.
Nietzsche also disdains the domination of English midwit ideas, naming specifically
Darwin, Mill, and Spencer.
And he points out a crucial methodological difference: the empirical habit of poring
over collections of small facts looking for patterns, ill suited to “spirits of a high
type that soar on their own paths.”
Most modern ideas are of English origin, and this is a trend the German spirit fights.
Nietzsche praises French spirit and culture, especially as they ignore the democratic-bourgeois crowd.
The French have the will to resist spiritual Germanization, but not the ability.
As a result it seems modern France may be the new home of Schopenhauerian pessimism.
He praises three things in particular about the French: their artistic passion, their
old moralistic culture, manifested in a widespread curiosity not shared by Germans or Englishmen,
and their synthesis of north and south European cultures, especially by contrast with the
Germans, who are too northern.
This France presents a better possibility for accommodating the rare high spirits who
are not at home with modern German “fatherlandishness.”
In the final two sections of Part 8, Nietzsche returns to German music and to Wagner, who
had died three years previously.
As expected, we see him distinguish his work from Wagner’s, first with an emphasis on
his (Nietzsche’s) attachment to southern Europe and Mediterranean culture, as a remedy
for the corrupting influence of northern German music.
Nietzsche groups Wagner ultimately with the romantics, with those who transcend reason
in feeling, but who are ultimately just “successful plebians” without noble spirit, “antinomians
and rebels against custom” who finally, exhausted, break and embrace Christianity.
Nietzsche ends by suggesting that Wagner in his final years was on a path towards Catholicism,
presenting “Rome’s faith without the text.”
That brings us to the end of Part 8 of Beyond Good and Evil.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.