Influence and Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche

Influence And Reception Of Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence and reception varied widely and may be roughly divided into various chronological periods. Reactions were anything but uniform, and proponents of various ideologies attempted to appropriate his work quite early. By 1937, this led Georges Bataille to argue against any 'instrumentalization' of Nietzsche's thought; Bataille felt that any simple-minded interpretation or unified ideological characterization of Nietzsche's work granting predominance to any particular aspect failed to do justice to the body of his work as a whole.

Beginning while Nietzsche was still alive, though incapacitated by mental illness, many Germans discovered his appeals for greater individualism and personality development in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but responded to those appeals in diverging ways. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; in 1894–95, German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive. During the late 19th century, Nietzsche's ideas were commonly associated with anarchist movements and appear to have had influence within them, particularly in France and the United States. Nietzsche even had a distinct appeal for many Zionist thinkers around the start of the 20th century. It has been argued the his work influenced Theodore Herzl, and Martin Buber went so far as to extol Nietzsche as a "creator" and "emissary of life".

By World War I, however, he had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for right-wing German militarism. German soldiers even received copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I. The Dreyfus Affair provides another example of his reception: the French anti-semitic Right labelled the Jewish and Leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans". Such seemingly paradoxical acceptance by diametrically opposed camps is typical of the history of the reception of Nietzsche's thought. In the context of the rise of French fascism, one researcher notes, "Although, as much recent work has stressed, Nietzsche had an important impact on "leftist" French ideology and theory, this should not obscure the fact that his work was also crucial to the right and to the neither right nor left fusions of developing French fascism.

Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas. However, it is not always possible to determine whether or not they actually read his work. Hitler, for example, probably never read Nietzsche, and if he did, his reading was not extensive. However, the Nazis made very selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy; this association with National Socialism caused Nietzsche's reputation to suffer following World War II. Mussolini certainly read Nietzsche, as did Charles de Gaulle. It has been suggested that Theodore Roosevelt read Nietzsche and was profoundly influenced by him, and in more recent years, Richard Nixon read Nietzsche with "curious interest".

Perhaps Nietzsche's greatest political legacy lies in his 20th century interpreters, among them Martin Heidegger, Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, Leo Strauss, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari), and Jacques Derrida. Foucault's later writings, for example, adopt Nietzsche's genealogical method to develop anti-foundationalist theories of power that divide and fragment rather than unite polities (as evinced in the liberal tradition of political theory). Deleuze, arguably the foremost of Nietzsche's interpreters, used the much-maligned 'will to power' thesis in tandem with Marxian notions of commodity surplus and Freudian ideas of desire to articulate concepts such as the rhizome and other 'outsides' to state power as traditionally conceived.