Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, and God

Leo Strauss claims that Nietzsche asserts that the doctrine of Will to Power is a "vindication of God". His primary textual evidence for the claim is #37 in Beyond Good and Evil, in which Nietzsche's response to the hypothesis that in the doctrine of Will to Power, "God is refuted, but not the devil", is "To the contrary!" In other words, according to Strauss, the "contrary" of "God is refuted, but not the devil" is "God is vindicated". The first problem with this interpretation is the word "vindication", which is unmotivated by the logic of the sequence, is not systematically related to Will to Power, and, in contrast with, say, 'affirmation', smacks of the 'spirit of revenge' that is a fundamental and frequent object of Nietzsche's attacks. Second, the more apt "contrary" in the context is 'both God and the devil are refuted', because, like Good-Evil, God-Devil is a conjoined conceptual pair in the tradition that Nietzsche repudiates, so the refutation of one conjunct entails that of the other. Third, while an affirmation of the Judaeo-Christian "God" is difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche's Dionysian theology, the assimilation of Dionysus to the former would serve Strauss's own undeniable purpose--rendering Nietzsche more palatable to American neo-Conservativism, to which Nietzsche's inegalitarianism and his defense of lying are more immediately appealing than his apparent 'Atheism'. Finally, if there is a deity that Will to Power vindicates, it is Apollo, who disappears from Nietzsche's consideration after Birth of Tragedy, but as the god of Form, arguably becomes relevant to form-imposing Will to Power. Indeed, Strauss does praise the 'beauty' of Beyond Good and Evil, but without considering the potential implications regarding the god of Beauty, i. e. Apollo. Still, the vindication of even Apollo does not occur at #37. Nevertheless, despite the multifaceted frailty of Strauss's interpretation, it is still worthy of serious scholarly attention. For, as a species of the appropriation of Nietzsche for right-wing political purposes, by a student of Heidegger, no less, Strauss's presentation constitutes an historical link between Auschwitz and Baghdad.