For a scholarly argument that Nietzsche expected humanity to literally be divided between those who could bear the eternal return, and those who couldn’t, apparently Paul Loeb is the person to read.
I think there was a great effort to bury political readings of Nietzsche, after his science-fictional musings about future humanity being culled by the thought of the eternal return, were subsumed into Nazi ideology. Thus the modern emphasis on literary and individualist interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself was a mild-mannered loner who never actually published a political program, so one is free to focus on his completed works as containing the true Nietzsche, and to regard his fleeting futurology as symbolism or madness that was appropriated and amplified by fascists.
If I had time to be an actual Nietzsche scholar, I might write something on the passage from the German Nietzsche of racial supremacy, to the French Nietzsche of critical theory, to the American Nietzsche of techno-optimism, and how they draw on different parts of his work.
For a scholarly argument that Nietzsche expected humanity to literally be divided between those who could bear the eternal return, and those who couldn’t, apparently Paul Loeb is the person to read.
I think there was a great effort to bury political readings of Nietzsche, after his science-fictional musings about future humanity being culled by the thought of the eternal return, were subsumed into Nazi ideology. Thus the modern emphasis on literary and individualist interpretations of Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself was a mild-mannered loner who never actually published a political program, so one is free to focus on his completed works as containing the true Nietzsche, and to regard his fleeting futurology as symbolism or madness that was appropriated and amplified by fascists.
If I had time to be an actual Nietzsche scholar, I might write something on the passage from the German Nietzsche of racial supremacy, to the French Nietzsche of critical theory, to the American Nietzsche of techno-optimism, and how they draw on different parts of his work.