Mankind can only now begin to hope again, now that I have lived. Thus I am necessarily a man of Destiny. For when Truth battles against the lies of millennia there will be shock waves, earthquakes, the transposition of hills and valleys such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The concept “politics” then becomes entirely absorbed into the realm of spiritual warfare. All the mighty worlds of the ancient order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
As Walter Kaufmann opined, Nietzsche is one of the few major philosophers whom many intelligent people read for pleasure. His influence is profound—on everything from intellectual shakeups to the ubiquity of aphorisms like whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. A lot of this popularity can be chalked up to the fact that Nietzsche is deceptively easy to decipher. Unlike Kant, Hegel or Heidegger, Nietzsche provides poetry, humor and personality in his writing and he directly addresses profound issues with refreshing candor. Where Kant would devote dozens of pages to a “transcendental dialectic” analyzing the question of God’s existence, Nietzsche has a madman descend from the mountains to the shout of “God is dead!” This is powerful stuff.
The Problems with Interpreting Nietzsche
This can lure a reader into a false sense of security: Nietzsche is a very difficult thinker —in part because his writing is so vivid and imagistic. This was partly by necessity, since Nietzsche’s chronic illness limited his capacity to produce the long, dense tomes many have come to expect of German philosophers. But even had he been a model of health, Nietzsche would probably still have chosen a vivid, aphoristic style; for reasons of temperament and because his work responds so directly to both Plato and the Bible: both are famous less for the architecture of their work than for their tremendous writing and imagery—including the idea that we must emerge from the darkness of the cave to the light of the eternal forms, and the drama of a paradoxical God-man crucified to save the world. Unfortunately, as with Plato and the Bible, this pictorial quality leads to serious difficulties in figuring out what Nietzsche means. Anyone who reads the parable of the madman in The Gay Science can easily project into it any meaning she wishes: from apocalyptic horror at an emerging nihilistic world to triumphant liberation from the fetters of tradition. Things get even more complex if we try to suss out any systematic lesson or philosophy from Nietzsche’s prolific writings. Nietzsche planned a magnum opus of sorts, appropriately titled The Will to Power. But the book never made it past the planning stages, and the collection of scraps and comments later published under that title were organized by his sister—an infamous Nazi supporter who had a complex relationship with her brother. This means that there is no Rosetta stone to help us put the pieces of Nietzsche’s work together into a comprehensive architecture of thought, which leaves much open to interpretation.
And interpret people have! One of the most interesting developments has been the political appropriation of Nietzsche. Following the precedent set by Hegel, it might make sense to talk about a left-Nietzschean and a right-Nietzschean interpretation.
Nietzsche and the Problem of Nihilism
Although Nietzsche never provided a systematic overview of his thinking, it is unified by an obsessive concern with a single problem: the emergence of nihilism as a philosophical and cultural condition. He traces its roots to the deepest convictions of western civilization. For Nietzsche, Plato and the other later Greek thinkers constituted a drift away from the primordial and life-affirming values of early Dionysian Greek society. Where Homer and others had admired wise Achilles, the great warrior who risked it all for a chance at historical immortality, Plato elevated the sagacious philosopher to heroic status. This was because the philosopher alone realized how vain and idle the achievements of this transient world were: a sentiment captured by the allegory of the cave, in which Plato describes the mass of human beings as mired in illusion. The point of life therefore was to see past the illusions to a higher, eternal realm beyond bodily existence, through ruminating on the abstract forms.
For Nietzsche, this was a nihilistic gesture. Life as lived had become not good enough for people: only contemplation of a better life or eternal world beyond this one was worthy of veneration. But Platonism was too abstract and unusual an ideal for many people to grasp. Christianity was required to spread the gospel of nihilism to the masses. To Nietzsche, Christianity—Platonism for the people—was fundamentally destructive of life-affirming values. Jesus preached that the ancient heroic virtues of martial prowess, glory and nobility were sinful. Individuals who showed a genuine lust for life were ensnared in the darkness of a fallen world; or, as St. Paul puts it in Galatians, “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh.” In place of these vital ideals, Christians came to worship a little dead God, who offered his life for humanity—the ultimate loser, who allowed himself to be mocked and dragged through the streets of Jerusalem by the very people he sought to save. Nietzsche had some respect for Plato and Jesus—at one point he even calls Christ the only opponent worthy of him—as innovators genuinely committed to their principles. What made their achievements noxious is that the nihilistic core of their thinking spread to the current epoch in secularized form. Nietzsche regarded modern liberalism, socialism and the other political doctrines of his day as watered down Christianity. The moderns professed to no longer believe in God, but posed as men and women of science and reason. In a sense, the Platonic underpinnings of Christianity had finally triumphed over religious faith and love, giving way to the modern reverence for rational order. Yet we moderns still feel compelled to hold on to fundamentally Christian ideals of human equality and freedom for the masses. Liberalism and its egalitarian offshoots challenged the old aristocratic ideals in the name of moral equality, and wound up producing societies of “last men,” who believed nothing was worth fighting or dying for. Combined with modern rationalism, this led to the emergence of a society in which people demanded that their needs be met by the market or the state while they dithered around, working at menial jobs for year-end bonuses.
To counter this development, Nietzsche wanted a return to the more primal and ancient aristocratic outlook. He sometimes appeals to the Greek god Dionysius as a predecessor. While Plato and his followers revered stately Apollo, the god of reason, order and light, Nietzsche professed to be a disciple of the god of darkness, excess, fertility and madness. He prophesied the coming of the übermensch, or Superman, who would have nothing but disdain for the vulgarity of the modern era. The Superman would be a tall “blonde beast”: noble in his bearing, scorning pity, compassion and the other Christian virtues. But he would not be a creature of violent resentment, gnawing on others for the satisfaction milked from their suffering and subordination. Instead, the Superman would pursue great projects of artistic and political accomplishment, indifferent to the objections of the mediocre. His “will to power” would be unfettered by considerations of good or evil. As Nietzsche puts it in Ecce Homo:
The word Übermensch, indicates a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to ‘modern’ men, ‘good’ men, Christians and other nihilists … When I whispered into the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears.
To clear the way for the coming of the Superman, Nietzsche began a tremendous genealogical project of moral deconstruction. He aimed to expose the nihilistic core of our most deeply settled convictions by revealing their grounding in history. This meant showing that many of these ideals flow not from excellence, but from weakness, resentment and other “sick” emotions that hold people back from pursuing truly great projects. This would prove inspiring to radicals and eccentrics across the political spectrum.
On Left-Nietzschean Thinking
I am simply a Nietzschean, and I try as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts—but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean!)—what can be done in this or that domain. I attempt nothing else, but that I try to do well.—Michel Foucault, interviewed by Gilles Barbedette and André Scala, 1984
Left-Nietzschean thinking got its kick from the French appropriation of Nietzsche’s work and was further spurred on by the unusually warm reception of Heidegger by the political left in France. Nietzsche had a profound impact on existentialist authors like Sartre and Camus, and was a major influence on postmodern theorists, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Left-Nietzscheans were more inspired by the playful, skeptical and genealogical dimensions of Nietzsche’s work—the dimensions that led Paul Ricoeur to label the German philosopher a leading member of the “school of suspicion.” In The Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche tries to show that many traditions have been glamorized by a false universality and naturalness. Ordinary citizens and intellectual apologists had long thought that Christian views of morality, sexuality and political order were based on eternal truths delivered by God to his creation. Nietzsche delighted in exposing such pretensions. He relentlessly showcases the ways in which these cherished ideals came into the world as the result of specific events, were invariably backed by power and all too often inspired less by divine will than by human failings like resentment, stupidity and conformity. By contrast, Nietzsche insists that good and evil, right and wrong are often a matter of perspective and history. As he puts it in the prologue to The Genealogy:
Luckily at an early stage I learned to separate theological prejudices from moral ones, and I no longer sought the origin of evil behind the world. Some education in history and philology, along with an inherently refined sense concerning psychological questions in general, quickly changed my problem into something else: under what conditions did man invent for himself those value judgments good and evil? And what value do they inherently possess?
Left-Nietzscheans appropriated these dimensions of his philosophy to undermine the more authoritarian and socially conservative traditions of western states, arguing that, when right-wingers rail against declining sexual standards or a loss of shared traditions, they aren’t speaking in the name of anything objectively true, but, at best, reflecting the prejudices of the mediocre, often backed up by various forms of state discipline and even legal prohibition. For instance, when anti-LBGT activists talk about how gay relationships are unnatural or irreligious, all they’re doing is invoking highfalutin rhetoric to dignify empty expressions of outrage and disgust. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault uses Nietzsche’s genealogical method to point out that—far from being natural and eternal—different societies have conceived of human sexuality in very distinct ways. This undermines the claims of the powerful to be upholding timeless human standards of decency. When pious defenders of capitalism treat the market like a natural phenomenon that emerged from the depths of human nature, they’re also doing little more than reflecting the shallow tropes of their time. Nietzsche ridicules the vulgarity of the liberal-capitalist order, dismissing it as a society of mediocre “last men” (of a kind who would treat the arrival of the next iPhone like an event of religious significance). Leftist interpreters of Nietzsche, like Terry Eagleton and Theodor Adorno, heartily agreed. Following Nietzsche—with plenty of Marx in the blend—they railed against the inhuman and stultifying effects of consumer societies and the culture industry in producing masses of one-dimensional drones, passively indifferent to their domination by capital.
There is much to be said for this interpretation of Nietzsche as a master of suspicion and a valuable intellectual ally in combatting authoritarian traditionalism, prejudice and ahistoricism. He continuously directs attention to the ways in which people try to portray as natural the contingent structures of power and ideology. Also, contra some of Nietzsche’s fans on the alt-right, he was a vehement anti-nationalist—even calling himself a “good European” in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil. But there are substantial problems with interpreting him as a progressive. As Ronald Beiner points out in his excellent recent book Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (reviewed here) Nietzsche was far from an egalitarian. This is where the justifications for a right-Nietzschean interpretation come in.
Right-Nietzschean Thinking
The great majority of men have no right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect among our race; I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are even unfit peoples.—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The right-Nietzschean interpretation tends to be far less playful, and more focused on his support for hierarchy. To his most reactionary interpreters—the Nazis and the contemporary alt-right, Nietzsche is the philosopher of decline and fall from a noble, aristocratic past to a decayed, egalitarian present. Moderate interpreters like Max Weber and F. A. Hayek see Nietzsche as offering resources to combat the burgeoning bureaucratic state, which demands uniformity with mediocre and life-dampening policies. Firm reactionaries like Oswald Spengler and Heidegger read Nietzsche as describing how modern Western societies crumbled from within, as their existential vigor and yearning for power settled into the easy relativism and materialism of liberal democracy. Many on the contemporary alt-right agree with these criticisms, as they view the surge of cultural progressivism as an inevitable symptom of rot, as western civilization has become ever more permissive and focused on rights, rather than virtues and excellence.
In its moderate interpretations influenced by the Austrian school, right-Nietzschean thinking views the marketplace as the site where exceptional people can make their mark in a peaceful and law-governed way. They endeavour to reconcile Nietzsche’s seemingly illiberal appeals to nobility with liberal capitalism by contending that capitalists are a proxy for the Superman, recreating the world in his image. The more hierarchical elements of Nietzsche’s writings are echoed in their suspicion of democracy and the welfare state, which they see as potentially holding back the truly productive members of society. More radical right-Nietzscheans reject the conceit that liberal capitalism can be reconciled with Nietzsche’s outlook. They contend that liberalism is little better than its egalitarian competitors, since everyone from liberals to Marxists agree that people are fundamentally moral equals. Their only substantial disagreements are whether moral equality demands higher or lower levels of basic material equality for all. To radicals like Heidegger, Nietzsche helped show that liberalism and Marxism are “metaphysically the same” in their nihilistic egalitarianism and materialism. Consequently, both need to be rejected in favour of a more just and noble hierarchy where superior men—and for radical right-Nietzscheans it should almost always be men—rule over their inferiors. This will make everyone better off, since it is only these superior men who can bring genuinely life-affirming values into the world and provide a sense of meaning amid a dangerous and nihilistic existence.
I dismissed the right-Nietzschean interpretation for a long time, until Beiner’s work convinced me that it is the more accurate way of reading Nietzsche. This poses a major challenge for progressives who want to interpret him in an emancipatory fashion, since we need to decouple what is useful in his writing from a great deal of inegalitarian and reactionary virulence. But, despite this, Nietzsche’s work has helped pilot many through the strange tides of modernity and postmodernity. This makes interpreting him properly an important theoretical task.
8 comments
(From my own perspective, an non-academic perspective)
Interested in the fact that Nietzsche – who was called the little pastor – did not receive any help in his application.
His father and grandfather were priests, so his future was set early … (?)
Nietzsche’s God is dead reasoning applies to cultural Christianity he saw up close ….
A Different Nietzsche Book is Bruce Ellis Benson – Pious Nietzsche, Decadence and Dionysian Faith (2007)
He could not kill God and apparently no one else can – do it today….
Rolf Östlund Sweden
Thanks for Areo – no “fast food” magazine, I appreciate that
Q: If Nietzsche were alive today, why would he become a taxi driver?
A: So that he could be an Uber-mensch!
Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known metahistorical vision of a passive, feminized, ascetic, world- and life-denying Jewish and Christian “slave-morality” displacing the virile, world- and life-affirming aristocratic ethos of the ancient Greeks actually reflects the same naïve, provincial Eurocentrism as the other similarly Eurocentric 19th century metahistories of G.W.F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx.
Already in the first half of the 20th century, scholars like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee began transcending this provincial Eurocentricity, placing Judea, Greece, Rome, and mediaeval & modern Europe in a far wider context also including the Middle East, India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia as major players. After World War II, Spengler’s and Toynbee’s insights into the world-wide comparative histories of religions, world-views, and value-systems have been extended by the work of writers like Karl Jaspers, Ernest Gellner, Robert A. Bellah, and Karen Armstrong. My remarks in the next few paragraphs reflect a synthesis of the views of Jaspers, Gellner, Bellah, and Armstrong. Briefly, Nietzsche’s so-called Jewish and Christian “slave revolt” was no narrowly Jewish, Christian, or Mediterranean-basin affair, but one of many challenges throughout the whole ancient world, from Greece to India and Japan, to the social inequities of ancient civilization. Likewise, his “Übermensch” ideal reflects an attempt to revive the ethos of warrior-aristocrat classes throughout the whole ancient “Agro-Literate” world.
Human history across a wide swatch of the Old World “Oikoumene,” from Europe and the Mediterranean basin across the Middle East to India and China in the last 5,000–6,000 years, can roughly be divided into what Ernest Gellner (“Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History,” 1988) called the Hunting-Gathering, Agro-Literate, and Industrial stages. In the first millennium B.C., roughly from 1,000 to 200 B.C., Eurasia’s Agro-Literate societies, from Greece across Israel/Palestine to India and China, underwent what Karl Jaspers (and after him Gellner, Bellah, and Armstrong) called the Axial Age in response to the social dislocations of the early first millennium BC Bronze Age-Iron Age transition, giving rise to philosophy and the birth of the so-called higher, world, or salvation religions. Europe, in the course of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, passed from Gellner’s “Agraria” into modernity, into Gellner’s “Industria” or modern industrial society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Industria” began spreading across the whole globe, in what is usually called “Westernization” or “modernization,” increasingly displacing the traditional Agro-Literate social structures, outlooks, and value-systems of the Middle East, India, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. (In large parts of the Islamic Middle East, this has now largely given way for the time being to a latter-day revival in high-tech guise of that region’s traditional Islamic Agro-Literate society and culture).
Agro-Literate society or “Agraria,” beginning around 4,000-3,000 B.C, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, and Mesopotamia (and a little later in NW India’s Indus Valley), and spreading in the next couple of millennia into Southern Europe, Persia, India, and China, gave rise to cities, writing, metal-working, polytheistic religions of distinctly human-like gods and goddesses served by privileged temple priesthoods, and above all, to SOCIAL HIERARCHY, to human history’s first true full-fledged CLASS OR CASTE SOCIETIES. Hunting-Gathering society’s shamanistic religions of spirits, ancestors, or a generalized impersonal “mana,” contacted and manipulated or placated for human benefit by shamans, “medicine-men,” “witch-doctors”, or “wise women,”gave way in Agro-Literate times to gods and goddesses with vividly well-defined human-like personalities and mythic adventures served by well-organized priesthoods in impressive temples. So too “Agraria” replaced the rough primitive quasi-equality of Hunting-Gathering tribes with the first real distinctions of rulers and ruled, rich and poor, “haves” and “have-nots.”
From ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to mediaeval and early-modern Europe and the traditional pre-colonial Middle East, India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, Agro-Literate civilizations generally had a threefold social order of three main social classes with the respective social functions (in a widespread traditional terminology) of “laboring,” “fighting,” and “praying,” or, in Ernest Gellner’s terminology, of “production,” “coercion,” and “cognition.” Agro-Literate societies normally consisted of a vast mass of subsistence-level peasants ruled by a small landowning warrior-aristocracy supported by a literate “clerisy” (Gellner’s term borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge) of priests (or China’s Confucian scholar-gentlemen) and scribes providing ideological legitimation and also record-keeping, accounting, and bureaucratic services–i.e., respectively Gellner’s three basic functions of “production,” “coercion,” and “cognition” (mediaeval Europe’s “laboratores,” “pugnatores,” and “oratores”). There was also usually a small intermediate stratum of traders and craftsmen. We can see all this, for instance, in traditional India’s caste system of Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and princes), Vaisyas (merchants), and Sudras (peasant cultivators)–though India somewhat altered the general Agro-Literate scheme by placing the priests and religious scholars above the warriors and princes.
The Eurasia-wide transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, ca. 1,000 to 500 B.C., was marked by widespread chaos, turbulence, social dislocation, and aggravation of the Bronze Age’s already harsh and dramatic socio-econonomic inequities, leading to previously unknown extremes of luxury and squalor, privilege and penury, hedonism and bare survival. All this led, in the next several centuries, for most of the first millennium B.C., to Karl Jaspers’, Ernest Gellner’s, Robert Bellah’s, and Karen Armstrong’s “Axial Age,” a previously unprecedented period of skeptical, often anguished question of traditional beliefs, customs, and assumptions, even of the very value of life itself, to a degree rarely observed in the Bronze Age. The Axial Age was the era of the early Greek philosophers and tragedians, of the Hebrew prophets, of Zoroaster in Persia, of the Upanishadic forest sages, the Buddha, and Jaina Mahavira in India, and of Kong Fuzi (“Confucius”) and Laozi in China. Thales, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Democritus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the spiritual contemporaries of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, of Zoroaster, of Gautama Buddha, and of Kong Fuzi and Laozi. Both rational philosophy and mystical or prophetic religion first arose in the Axial Age, attempting to answer the questions aroused by the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition.
The aristocratic and nouveau riche pursuit of wealth, luxury, violence, martial prowess, and “honor” was first pointedly and radically attacked by India’s Brahmin, Buddhist, and Jain sages and ascetics–Robert Bellah’s and Karen Armstrong’s “renouncers”–followed in a somewhat different style or key by the Hebrew prophets–and then also (quite possibly under Indian influence) by Greek thinkers like Pythagoras, Parmenides, Socrates ans Plato, a bit later also Zeno and Epicurus (and echoed by Laozi and the Daoists in China). All these severally and distinctly, in a wide arc from Greece to India and China, independently developed the so-called the so-called “slave revolt” so eloquently and vitriolically devoured by Nietzsche. The Jews he blamed were merely one of several quite independent and separate but closely parallel sets of players spread through the whole Eurasian “Oikoumene.” And in all cases, this “slave revolt,” this rejection of the so-called “virile” ideals of Agro-Literate warlord-landlords, was a perfectly natural reaction to the drastic social dislocations and inequities of the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition.
The transition since the 17th and 18th centuries from “Agraria” to “modernity,” to Gellner’s “Industria,” has produced its own profound social, cultural, and idelogical disruptions and upheavals, so that Karen Armstromg and others have suggested that we might be living in a “Second Axial Age.” The Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and spread of naturalist, materialist, positivist, and secular world-views might be seen as a parallel to the First Axial Age’s creation of philosophy and other-worldly salvation-religions. Likewise, modern liberal, democratic, and egalitarian ideologies parallel the First Axial Age’s Indian “renouncers,” Hebrew prophets, and Christian saints–again, as as a perfectly natural response to the social dislocations of the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition, to the often quite socially dysfunctional violence and luxury of the Agro-Literate warlord-landlords whom Nietzsche glorified as models for his “Übermenschen”!
“The great majority of men have no right to life, …” — reading this gender specifically, wouldn’t some feminists or incel haters agree, at least with respect to *fulfilling* life?
Thanks Matt. Hafta read that again. Mind, you hafta read Nietzsche again and again.
Well, Nietsches striked me as a profoundly individualist thinker. What is at the center of its outlook and of is preoccupation is the individual, and particularly the way to make each individual shine in its own way. That is why he is an aristocrat : not everyone can shine, not everyone can access and express its true self. In that he is not so far from Plato (not everyone can be a philosopher, much less a philosopher king).
But, in order to shine the individual has to break the chains that imprison him. Those chains are the society, the rules, habits, prejudice of society and civilization. Thus the genealogy of moral to show that all moral rule, habit, and prejudice are in fact made by and for groups, and made by and for all those people that did not succeed or cannot success. Thus Nietzsches had to deconstruct all that in order to liberate the potential übermensch.
One can see what appeal to the left in that : the idea of liberation of the construction of society. But the left always has been more – in my mind – about masses and group than about individual. So Nietzsches is for the left a very useful tool, but it is like a burning stick. It is useful to underpin the actual society, to show how much of it, in fact all, is factice, false, artificial and human made, but in the same time, the logical following of this stick opposes to what the left ought to do. How can one follows Nietzsches and and want a society with social security, providence state… The value used at the core of the left are being corroded by Nietzsches as much as the conservatives value were deconstructed and corroded…
On the other side, Nietzsces strikes a cord with the individualist on the right. But there too, it is a dangerous thinker : conservatism is not compatible with him.
As a conclusion, I would say that he is a great thinker, at least he is always an inspirationnal one and a stimulating one. But one cannot construct with him. One way or another you cannot make politics with him as a basis
asd
Great article. My main exposure to Nietzsche–besides reading the Geneaology in college–was reading HL Mencken’s “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.” That book gave me the strong impression that Nietzsche was more aligned with the political right than the left–I think that’s because of the book’s focus on the Ubermensch and Nietzsche’s vision of an ideal society. At the same time, I knew that Nietzsche influenced thinkers on the left like Foucault and didn’t quite understand how to reconcile that. This article helped me make sense of that.