From: (Anonymous)	Date: November 22nd, 2005 09:58 am (UTC)		(Link)
Nietzsche, Individualism and Fascism

Hi Vexen,

I am a philosophy student and I appreciate your separation of Nietzsche from what is popularly understood to be Fascism/National Socialism, however the idea that Nietzsche was an individualist is a misperception that can be obtained from a cursory reading of Nietzsche.

You've hit on one of his main philosophical propositions, which is life affirmation. The other is that since "God is Dead", humans have a transcendental imperative. They can and should fill this vacuum.

Nietzsche can be described as a personalist. He did not believe that everyone should be an "individualist", simply because not everyone COULD be an "individualist". In some cases, he clearly thought that a communitarian model could better serve the transcendent cause. He did not believe in the destruction of the communitarian/orthodoxy model but in the subordination of the communitarian/orthodoxy model to the "individualist"/heretic. Of course, the "individualist"/heretic requires a new wisdom to rise to this level (and this is why I've been using the ""), primarily the wisdom of recognizing the necessity of communities, and then also of giving it a directions, the means to an end, the transcendence of the human type.

And there are certainly ways in which Nietzsche and Fascism could intersect, if one for example did away with the neurotic national chauvinism and with its moralistic persecutions, one could achieve something of a Nietzschean Fascism. Most certainly a liberal democracy is as far from Nietzsche as nothing else could be.

From 'Beyond Good and Evil'

203 We, who have a different faith ‑ we, to whom the democratic movement is not merely a form assumed by political organization in decay but also a form assumed by man in decay, that is to say in diminishment, in process of becoming mediocre and losing his value: whither must the direct our hopes? ‑ Towards new philosophers, we have no other choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to make a start on antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse `eternal values'; towards heralds and forerunners, towards men of the future who in the present knot together the constraint which compels the will of millennia on to new paths. To teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and breeding so as to make an end of that gruesome dominion of chance and nonsense that has hitherto been called `history' ‑ the nonsense of the `greatest number' is only its latest form for that a new kind of philosopher and commander will some time be needed, in face of whom whatever has existed on earth of hidden, dreadful and benevolent spirits may well look pale and dwarfed. It is the image of such leaders which hovers before our eyes ‑ may I say that aloud, you free spirits?