CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900)

CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900)

‘Nietzsche,’ wrote Eric Voegelin, ‘has the distinction of being the only philosopher who ever has been considered the major cause of a world war.’ In fact, he has been blamed for two, since his ideas supposedly provided a justification for the Prussian militarism that inspired the First World War as well as being one of the major intellectual sources of Nazism. The passionate wars of words that still rage over the meaning of Nietzsche’s ideas have seen them (or rather, some of them) being used to justify fascism, anti- fascism, eugenics, libertarianism, feminism, anti-feminism, liberalism, post-liberalism, environmentalism and cyborg theory; that is to say, just about anything and everything. The literature on Nietzsche is enormous and grows apace. But then one would expect nothing less from a philosopher who has coined so many familiar phrases: ‘God is dead’, ‘become what you are’, ‘the will to power’, the ‘übermensch’ (superman), ‘slave morality’, the ‘eternal return’, the ‘blond beast’, the ‘free spirit’, the ‘good European’, the ‘Anti-Christ’ and the ‘revaluation of all values’ have all passed into the vernacular. What these slogans mean is of course the source of the confusion.

Nietzsche was born in Röcken in Saxony in 1844, the son of a pastor. Educated at the famous school at Pforta, he excelled in Classical Studies, and went on to study Theology and Philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. In 1868 he became an ardent follower of the musician Richard Wagner, and in the following year was appointed to the chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. From 1871 he began to suffer from exhaustion; in 1876 he was granted extended leave from his duties and in 1879 retired on a pension on the grounds of ill health. Thereafter he spent much time in Italy, Nice and Sils-Maria in Switzerland, until collapsing in Turin in 1889 and losing his sanity. The last 11 years of his life were spent in the care of his mother and, after her death in 1897, in care in the Villa Silberblick in Weimar. He died in 1900.

Commentators have from the beginning of his reception divided Nietzsche’s corpus into two periods: an early period before 1880 when his radical ideas were starting to emerge based on his consideration of philological and pedagogical questions (The Birth of Tragedy; Untimely Meditations; Human, All too Human); and the later period, following his break with Wagner and before his collapse into madness, when the ‘visionary’ works were written (The Gay Science; Thus Spake Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; The Case of Wagner, The Anti-Christ; Ecce Homo; Nietzsche contra Wagner, Twilight of the Idols) . The Nachlass (unpublished writings) included numerous fragments and notebooks, many of which were subsequently compiled by Nietzsche’s editors, among them his sister, into what is probably his most famous book, whose title, The Will to Power, has passed into legend.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 488 Several principal themes emerge from this work: the genealogical method; the theory

of Judeo-Christianity and the ‘slave revolt in morals’; the notion of the Superman and the ‘eternal return’. The first, the so-called ‘genealogical method’ has since Nietzsche been put to use most famously by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his studies of the emergence of hospitals, asylums and prisons. It is based on the careful, detailed analysis of the histories of different words and concepts, finally drawing these separate analyses together, showing how they interact. The concepts do not need to be opposites, nor are they impersonal historical forces, hence the method is not dialectical. It seeks to show how the historical connections between ostensibly unrelated subjects comprise the substratum of the ideas and conditions that created the modern world, the substratum that is usually taken as given and hence left unanalysed. For Nietzsche, this meant bringing together the history of good and evil, and the history of morality and law, showing how both are the products of thought that shaped society, not aspects of an inexorable law of history. And he concludes that both have contributed to the parlous condition of Western civilization that he describes throughout his later writings.

The second major theme is the concept of ‘slave morality’. Nietzsche’s attack on the morality of Western civilization has often been construed as a form of nihilism, though in Nietzsche’s eyes it was precisely modern nihilism that he felt he was combating. Nietzsche hailed ancient societies, especially Sparta, as societies that valued the strong, and promoted excellence in all spheres: physical, intellectual, moral, sexual and religious. But with the development of Judaism, and especially with the emergence of Christianity (which he saw as a kind of Judaism for the masses), there grew up a way of thinking that promoted the weak at the expense of the strong, encouraged philanthropy and led inextricably to the feminization and degeneration of the concept of aristocratic will to power. This decadence brought about by the rise of the masses to prominence Nietzsche called the ‘slave revolt in morality’. Modern society, based upon the values of Judeo- Christianity, Nietzsche called ‘nihilistic’ because he believed that unless its values were reversed, they would lead to the eventual demise of that civilization under the weight of the ‘rabble’ and its homogeneous drabness.

In other words, Nietzsche subjected common assumptions to close historical scrutiny. That is not to say that most historians would find much to agree with in Nietzsche, but nevertheless the genealogical method permitted Nietzsche to make insights into the make-up of society that other fields of study would not. For example, on the question of sin, Nietzsche argued (in The Gay Science) that it held sway wherever Christianity was dominant, but that it was in fact a Jewish invention. This claim was another arrow in his quiver that was used not merely to show the connections between Judaism and Christianity, but to argue that Christianity aimed to ‘Judaize’ the world, that is, to make its values the dominant values in Western society.

To combat this decadent system of morality Nietzsche turned to several related themes. The prophetic figure of Zarathustra, though superficially similar to the Zoroaster of the Persian religion that bears his name and that—like Nietzsche—conceives of the world as a struggle between good and evil, is an allegory for the concept of the Superman. No concept in the Nietzschean corpus has received so much attention. The Superman (‘Overman’ would be a better translation of Übermensch, since ‘Superman’ has obviously Darwinian and mythical connotations) has been variously seen as a Golem- like homunculus, as the embodiment of the eugenic dream of breeding a superior race of

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human beings and as a metaphor for man’s overcoming of himself and his received values. Whether Nietzsche meant the Superman to be a real or an allegorical figure (naturally, it is possible to find textual evidence to defend both points of view), he is clearly intended as a counter to the degenerate, stultified morality of Western nihilism. Thus, when Zarathustra comes down from the mountains to proclaim ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’, it is clear that only by the production of men like the Superman can this death of God, this demise of previously guiding values, adequately

be dealt with. In God’s place, Zarathustra proclaims the ‘will to power’, the will to risk one’s life in quest of one’s self-chosen values.

Apart from these three major themes, Nietzsche’s contribution to philosophy lies in his challenge to epistemology (the theory of knowledge). His claims make him key to the development of both modernism and post-modernism, since he argues that there is no objective viewpoint from which to make judgements about the world; that there is no coherent, stable self; and that there is no temporal continuity between events. These claims have led to him being labelled a nihilist or relativist. But whilst he recognized that it was hard (thanks to the ‘old habit’ of associating every event with the guiding hand of a God) not to think that even aimlessness must be intended, Nietzsche does not make this argument in order to promote anarchy or randomness. Rather he explicitly says that the lack of objectivity is what allows us really to ‘become what we are’, because it means that each person must face up to the challenge of life, and must learn to judge for himself.

‘Once you know that there are no purposes,’ he wrote in The Gay Science ( 109), ‘you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that that the word “accident” has meaning.’ The principle of the ‘eternal return’—the claim that everything that happens has happened before and will happen again, in exactly the same way—was Nietzsche’s way of removing the notion of purpose or ends from the world, and replacing it with an emphasis on states of becoming. Hence his new maxim: ‘so live that you must wish to live again’. Should one not do so, one is faced with the terrifying prospect of making the same mistakes again and again in endless replay. Nietzsche’s philosophy, therefore, far from being a rejection of morality and an explosive transgression of the law, is in fact a frantic attempt to fill the void left by the death of earlier certainties (admittedly, ones whose death he has himself proclaimed); it is a search for human values in a purely human world.

Nietzsche has been accused of promoting amorality and nihilism, of glorifying warfare and advocating the murder of the weak, of hatred for women and scorn for Christianity, if not religion per se. Whilst there is some truth to all of these claims, to focus on any one of them is fundamentally to miss the point of Nietzsche’s call for an ‘Umwertungaller Werte’ (a revaluation of all values). This may have been, following Schopenhauer, based on a pessimistic diagnosis, but it was by no means a call for amorality, which would be a form of radical relativism where the value of nothing could be judged, and Nietzsche was quite clear about his likes and dislikes. Even Schopenhauer’s theory of the will to live he eventually found too emotionally deadening, and replaced it with the ‘will to power’.

An example of what happens when one picks up on only one aspect of Nietzsche’s rich, complex and even self-contradictory thought is provided by the history of his association with Nazism. It is this association more than any other that has given rise to much heated debate. As well as being blamed for the outbreak of the Great War (he was mistakenly held to form with HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE a kind of warmongering

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duumvirate) a rather selective sample of his ideas was promoted around the world by the eugenics movement, which saw in the notion of the Superman a philosophical counterpart to the science of the ‘well born’ race inspired by the Englishman FRANCIS GALTON and his protégé Karl Pearson. This science aimed to promote ‘consciousness in evolution’ and is indeed superficially akin to Nietzsche’s call for the strong to become masters of the world (if one does not stop for too long to consider who Nietzsche means by ‘the strong’) and his advocacy in Ecce Homo of the ‘merciless annihilation of all degenerate and parasitic elements’ (‘schonungslose Vernichtung alles Entartenden und Parasitischen’) . The fact that Nietzsche himself rarely used the word ‘race’ did not prevent his early English (mis)translators making free with the word. Later these same ideas were picked up in Germany by the Nazis themselves, who pounced on the concept of promoting the strong at the expense of the weak, and saw Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity as a history of moral evolution to set alongside DARWIN’S and HUXLEY’S explanations for biological evolution.

Long before the Nazis came to power, foremost in the efforts to ‘Nazify’ Nietzsche in Germany was Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a violent anti-Semite who, together with her husband, the Wagnerite Bernard Förster, set up a human breeding colony in Paraguay that aspired to create racially pure Aryan children. Like her, the Nazis were able to promote Nietzsche’s thought only by hiding substantial parts of it. Nietzsche’s swingeing attacks on the narrow-minded Romanticism of German nationalism, his scoffing at the boringly uniform, self-satisfied, ‘homesick’ state of German culture and his belief in the gifts of the Jews (this philo-Semitism relying on remarkably similar stereotypes as the anti-Semites) were all rather inconvenient for the Nazis. Under the ‘guidance’ of Professor Alfred Bäumler, carefully manipulated editions of Nietzsche’s writings were produced in the Third Reich, in which the guilt of the Jews for introducing monotheism and the ‘slave morality’ into ancient civilization were present, but the claims that only the Jews had the ability to overcome the problems facing Western civilization were not. These mendacious publications were to blame for the long-held belief that Nietzsche was a direct forerunner of Nazism. Only the efforts of scholars such as Walter Kaufmann after the Second World War slowly managed to get the facts straight, so that now, whilst the meaning of Nietzsche is open to debate, we at least have reliable texts. Even so, not only the Nazis have engaged in the systematic manipulation of Nietzsche’s words; nor have they alone tried to claim that the books published during his lifetime did not represent his real opinions. Contemporary philosophers and politicians regularly engage in attempts to tell us ‘what Nietzsche really meant’.

Nietzsche was described by one of his first exegetes, the Danish critic George Brandes, as an ‘aristocratic radical’. Whilst reading his coruscating books is an exhilarating experience, it is well to remember that Nietzsche was not the Superman he wanted to promote. After the Holocaust, appealing to Nietzsche to ‘live dangerously’ or to advocate ‘daring’ forms of transgressive behaviour can only seem puerile at best and scandalous at worst. Nietzsche was no fascist; indeed his scorn for political anti-Semitism and German nationalism was explicit. Yet he was fiercely anti-democratic, anti-Christian, misogynist and attracted by the rhetoric of eugenics, at least metaphorically. Hence his thought—philosophizing with a hammer, as he put it—remains dangerous, as the

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continuing fight to lay claim to it illustrates. In this dangerous, because indeterminate, aspect of Nietzsche’s thought lies the frisson of its appeal and its repellent fascination.