Overview
Part 8 is the strangest and, in some ways, the most ambitious stretch of Beyond Good and Evil.
On its surface it is a tour of national stereotypes — the Germans, the English, the French, the Jews. Read that way it can be off-putting or simply puzzling. But what’s really happening here is that Nietzsche is deliberately adopting the vocabulary of nineteenth-century nationalism in order to dismantle it from the inside out, and to add an important piece to his development of what he calls the “good European”. This serves his general project of outlining the cultural conditions under which a future philosophy might become possible.
The title of Part 8 is “Völker und Vaterländer”, or “peoples and fatherlands”. The word Volk is chosen intentionally as one that is saturated with German nationalist sentiments. The dream of Nationalism is that a people should be one and the nation united. At the time of his writing, the nationalist impulse was shared across nations.
Nietzsche wants to …
