ABSTRACT
In commenting on the growth of Nazism from the spirit of youthful revolt prior to the First World War, Karl Lowith exposes its Nietzschean roots: The ultimate motivation of this will to revolution and awakening, of this newly politicized youth movement from before the First World War, however, is to be found in the awareness of ruin and decline, in European nihilism. It is most significant that only a German, Nietzsche, had elevated "European" nihilism to the rank of principal philosophical theme. Nihilism as the End is no final end because Nietzsche, the perfect nihilist, can accept the meaninglessness of the world and affirm it as "eternal recurrence". Nietzsche's epistemology is based on the trinitarian formula: truth is power, knowledge is power, and reason is power. Nietzsche pretends to a no less objectivist assessment of will to power when he treats it as a synonym for life or some function of life, such as "life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding".
