Hegel: Has reasons for saying Germans were exemplary, i.e., not mere prejudices.
Nietzsche: Denies reason and truth. Denies the measure of good and bad.
Yet listening to lectures on Hegel's philosophy, it was immediately
obvious that his philosophy could be interpreted as supporting
nationalism in general and German nationalism in particular.
I can only provide a crude sketch to give the reader a outline of the work that would be involved in understanding this issue properly:
As Leo Strauss said it, there is no racial aspect in Hegel. No racism of any kind. The point being, everything in some sense can be made to appear anything else. For example that softness can be said to be like hardness, for the reason that they both involve the sense of solidity or touch. But if we understand a philosopher, a philosophic work, we go beyond the semblance and the sophistic use of it. For Hegel, prior to the biological notion of race, there was no notion of organic defects, the driving issue in Nazi eugenics. For Hegel anyone could, so to say, turn, and join the consciousness of another civilization, or as we say today, culture. Had nothing to do with biology. Except in a very small sense, in the way a redwood planted in the north might turn out different than one in a southern clime. Same with weather's effect on man as universorum, of man as man.
So if one looks at it philosophically one agrees with Schmitt, Hegel died on the day the Nazi's came to power. By contrast to Hegel, the great Rationalist, i.e., one who held there was a moral development leading to a universal common good of all men, the end of moral or, one could say, cultural, development of man as man, Nietzsche held there was no such universal end. So, if there is no universal delineation of laws, manners of acting, in short no universal way of life, then it follows that anything goes. This kind of bewilderment, which still persists in our own time, whereby anyone who says anything in the style of a dogmatic is quickly informed that one has the right to one's own opinion on everything. Nietzsche was greatly responsible for articulating this view, which, during the Weimar manifested as the most free, de facto, society that ever existed (considering the censorship in America was in fact very great and legal for the states, not for the Federal authority, during that period) and so the cauldron from which Nazism came.
This is a sketch by which I intend to show the reader how, in essential antipathy to the non-philosophic reader, who sees in everything, as it were, everything, and especially the reflection of the current optic which assumes, e.g., race has always been race, the serious reader, which is more closely approximated by the university account, reads according to the way the texts were understood by their authors and by people at the time.
The spirit now grasps the infinite positivity of its own inwardness,
the principle of the unity of divine and human nature and the
reconciliation of the objective truth and freedom which have appeared
within self-consciousness and subjectivity. The task of accomplishing
this reconciliation is assigned to the Nordic principle of the
Germanic peoples.
Hegel welcomes all to join the rational society, the one that has achieved the moral peak. That's no different for him than if one were to say that the discoveries of Descartes can be taught to anyone, the anylitical geometry, for instance. But, yet, it was derived by a Frenchman, and one wants to prove that in the development of World History, it had to be so. That is the point of the particularization of the Germans, not Nationalism or Jingoism, and of the whole work of Hegel. One might, to see things as Hegel did, consider the fact of post-Hegelian German scientific inventions, not as a matter of Patriotism, but of sheer wert-frei, value-free, reality.
