Why Friedrich Nietzsche was not a Nazi

I don't much care for the writings and ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche: his thinking is too atomized and, ultimately, too vague for my tastes. So too does his style offend me. Whereas many Continental philosophers espouse ideas in highly-literate, silken prose, Nietzsche seems bent on polemic. Reading him amounts to an assault on the senses. This was, I'm sure, his intention, yet I can't help but think that constant emphasis and incessant ardour become tired and absorb meaning, leaving only the vitriol. In spite of all this I am prepared to defend him from those who exploit and manipulate the inherent ambiguity of his work to justify all manner of crimes and depredations. The most salient example, of course, is that of Nazism. Nietzsche was held up by the Third Reich as a champion of the cause; it was assumed that he was a proto-Nazi and that his writings, particularly his discussion of master- and slave-morality, could be invoked as a philosophical justification for the villainy perpetrated by Hitler's thugs. To be fair, a less than thorough reading of On the Genealogy of Morals is sure to leave a sour taste; his discussion of masters and slaves, barbarians and the mob, is eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric expounded by Goebbels and other propagandists of the Third Reich. This is not the case. The Nazis had it wrong.

Nietzsche's contempt for metaphysical slaves – a condition inherent to the Third Reich as we shall see – vindicates him from allegations of Nazism. Although his ultimate end seems to be the Übermensch (Overman), introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there can be no question that he valued autonomous self-expression over exogenous definition. Any use of his work to defend the crimes of the regime is both unfounded and spurious. Consider this passage from On the Genealogy of Morals (1887, trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1967):

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye–this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself – is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all–its action is fundamentally reaction.

Underpinning the "philosophy" of Nazism is the simple fact that the whole of the Third Reich was predicated on a notion similar to Nietzsche's ressentiment. Nazism is "quite the contrary of what the noble man does, who conceives the basic concept 'good' in advance and spontaneously out of himself and only then creates for himself an idea of 'bad'!" The Nazis stand in diametrical opposition to Nietzsche's ideal view of the noble barbarian:

...the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks its opposite so only as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly – its negative concept "low," "common," "bad" is only a subsequently-invented pale, contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept – filled with life and passion through and through.

The Nazi edifice was constructed not on the self-assertion of the noble barbarian, but on the foundation of ressentiment. In speciously holding up the innocent as avowed enemies, the Third Reich revealed its allegiances. Rather than expressing good from within, the regime defined itself as good in reaction to artificially-created evil. The Nazis proclaimed their status as slaves – "the 'tame man,' the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man" – by defining themselves and their movement from without: "[w]hen the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: 'let us be different from the evil, namely good!"

Nietzsche was not a Nazi, and any attempt to justify such a movement as the apotheosis of master-morality is risible; it is a perversion of an otherwise sound idea. They were (and, sadly, still are) no more the archetype of the "blond Germanic beast" than the lamb is the ideal bird of prey.