| The Destruction of Reason. Georg Lukács
1952 |
| CHAPTER III |
| Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in
the Imperialist Period |
1 It may be postulated as a general
statement
that the decline of bourgeois ideology
set
in with the end of the 1848 revolution.
Of
course we can find many latecomers
— especially
in literature and art — for whose work
this
thesis by no means holds good (we need
only
to mention Dickens and Keller, Courbet
and
Daumier). These latter names apart,
the period
between 1848 and 1870 was rife with
significant
transitional figures who, while their
work
does reflect features of the decline,
were
in no wise party to it with regard
to the
central substance of their output (e.
g.,
Flaubert, Baudelaire). Certainly the
decline
started much earlier in the sphere
of theoretical
learning, particularly economics and
philosophy;
bourgeois economics had produced nothing
original and forward-looking since
the demise
of the Ricardo school in the 1820s,
while
bourgeois philosophy had yielded nothing
new since the demise of Hegelianism
(1830s
and 1840s). Both these fields were
completely
dominated by capitalist apologetics.
A similar
situation obtained in the historical
sciences.
The fact that the natural sciences
continued
to make enormous strides during this
period
— Darwin’s great work appeared between
1848
and 1870 — does not affect the picture
one
bit; there have been new discoveries
in this
area right up to the present. This
in itself
did not forestall a certain degeneration
of general methodology, an increasingly
reactionary
slant in the bourgeois philosophy of
natural
sciences, and an ever-growing zeal
in the
use of their findings for the propagation
of reactionary views. (We are not now
speaking
of ideological evolution in Russia.
Here
the year 1905 corresponded to 1848
in the
West — and only twelve years afterwards
came
the socialist revolution.)
Only in the light of all these facts
are
we entitled to claim — without losing
a just
sense of proportion — that the years
1870-1
marked another turning-point in the
development
of ideology. In the first place, it
was then
that the rise of the great nation-states
in Central Europe reached completion,
and
many of the most important demands
of the
bourgeois revolutions their fulfilment;
at
all events such revolutions had had
their
day in Western and Central Europe.
Some very
essential features of a real bourgeois-revolutionary
transformation were lacking in Germany
and
Italy (to say nothing of Austria and
Hungary),
and there still existed very many relics
of feudal absolutism, but from now
on it
was only thinkable that these could
be liquidated
through a revolution led by the proletariat.
And in those years, the proletarian
revolution
was already clearly delineated in the
Paris
Commune. Not only in a French but also
in
a European context, the battle of June
in
the 1848 revolution had already signified
the turning-point. Its occurrence strengthened
the bond between the bourgeoisie and
the
reactionary classes, and its outcome
sealed
the fate of every democratic revolution
of
the period. The illusion that these
bourgeois
victories had secured ‘law and order’
once
and for all was to crumble forthwith.
After
what was only a short pause, historically
considered, the movements of the working-class
masses acquired fresh life; in 1864
the First
International was founded, and in 1871
the
proletariat succeeded in gaining power,
albeit
only for a relatively short time and
on a
metropolitan scale: there came into
being
the Paris Commune, the first dictatorship
of the proletariat.
The ideological consequences of these
events
were very widespread. The polemics
of bourgeois
science and philosophy were increasingly directed against the new enemy, socialism.
While on the upsurge, bourgeois philosophy
had challenged the feudal absolutist
system,
and the interpretation of this challenge
had occasioned its controversies over
objectives,
whereas the chief enemy now was the
proletarian
world-view. This, however, changed
at once
the subject and mode of expression
of each
and every reactionary philosophy. When
bourgeois
society was a rising force, reactionary
philosophy
had defended feudal absolutism and
subsequently
the feudal remnants, the restoration.
As
we have noted, Schopenhauer’s special
position
stemmed from the fact that he was the
first
to proclaim a markedly bourgeois-reactionary
world-view. But at the same time he
remained
on a par with the feudal reactionary,
Schelling,
inasmuch as what they both considered
the
chief enemy were the progressive tendencies
of bourgeois philosophy: materialism
and
the dialectical method.
With the battle of June and with the
Paris
Commune in particular, reactionary
polemics
underwent a radical change of direction.
On the one hand, there was no longer
a progressive
bourgeois philosophy to combat. Insofar
as
ideological disputes arose — and they
figured
prominently on the surface — they related
primarily to differences of opinion
as to
how socialism could be disarmed most
effectively,
and to class differences within the
reactionary
bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the
principal
foe had already appeared in theoretical
as
well as palpable form. In spite of
all the
efforts of bourgeois learning it was
becoming
increasingly impossible to hush up
Marxism;
the bourgeoisie’s leading ideologues
sensed
with ever-growing clarity that this
constituted
their decisive line of defence, upon
which
they had to concentrate their strongest
forces.
True, the accordingly defensive character
of bourgeois philosophy only had a
slow and
paradoxical influence. The hushing-up
tactics
continued to prevail for a long while;
from
time to time it was attempted to incorporate
‘what was usable’ from historical materialism
— correspondingly distorted — in bourgeois
ideology. But this tendency assumed
a wholly
distinctive form only after the first
imperialist
world war, and after the victory of
the great
socialist October Revolution in Russia.
Right
from the start, however, the defensive
character
was manifested in the fact that bourgeois
philosophy was driven to the formulating
of questions and into methodological
controversies
which did not arise out of any intrinsic
need, but were forced upon it by virtue
of
the opponent’s existence. It goes without
saying that the solutions corresponded
in
every instance to the bourgeoisie’s
class
interests.
In Nietzsche, of course, we perceive
solely
the initial stage of this development.
But
we can already confirm some important
changes
at this stage. The most telling fact
is that
in the battle against Hegel’s idealist
dialectics,
the older irrationalists such as Schelling
and Kierkegaard were occasionally in
a position
to indicate its real flaws. Although
backward-looking
inferences inevitably resulted from
their
critique, which was only partially
accurate,
their correct critical observations
are of
significance in the history of philosophy
nonetheless. The situation was completely
altered as soon as the enemy had become
dialectical
and historical materialism. Here bourgeois
philosophy was no longer in a position
to
exercise a real critique, or even to
understand
correctly the target of its polemics.
All
that it could do was either to polemicize
— at first openly, later increasingly
surreptitiously
— against dialectics and materialism
altogether,
or else to play the demagogue in trying
to
establish a system of pseudo-dialectics
by
which to counteract genuine dialectics.
Another point to consider is that the
bourgeois
philosophers ceased to possess any
first-hand
knowledge when the great arguments
over objectives
within the bourgeoisie abated. Schelling,
Kierkegaard or Trendelenburg had still
had
an exact knowledge of Hegelian philosophy.
In criticizing Hegel without knowing
him
even superficially, Schopenhauer was
once
again a forerunner of bourgeois decadence.
It seemed that when it came to opposing
the
class enemy, no holds were barred and
all
intellectual morality vanished. Scholars
who were conscientious in other areas,
only
venturing to express themselves after
accurately
digesting their material, now permitted
themselves
the most facile assertions, which they
had
gleaned from other, similarly unfounded
expressions
of opinion. Even when presenting facts
they
never thought of resorting to the actual
sources. This further helps to explain
why
the ideological struggle against Marxism
took place on an incomparably lower
level
than did, in its own day, the reactionary
irrationalist critique of Hegelian
dialectics.
In view of this, how can we maintain
of Nietzsche
that his whole life’s work was a continuous
polemic against Marxism and socialism,
when
it is perfectly clear that he never
read
a single line of Marx and Engels? We
believe
that the claim is still feasible, for
the
reason that every philosophy’s content
and
method are determined by the class
struggles
of its age. Although philosophers —
like
scholars, artists and other ideologists
—
may more or less fail to recognize
it and
some times remain totally unaware of
it,
this conditioning of their attitude
to so-called
‘ultimate questions’ takes effect notwithstanding.
What Engels said of the lawyers is
valid
in an even acuter sense for philosophy:
‘The
reflecting of economic conditions in
legal
principles operates without impinging
on
the awareness of the agents, and the
lawyer
imagines that he is operating with
a priori
theses, whereas they are simply economic
reflexes ...’ Hence each ideology is
consciously
attached to ‘a specific intellectual
fabric
which has been transmitted by its predecessors’.[1]
But this does not alter the fact that
the
selection of these traditional strands,
one’s
attitude towards them and method of
treating
them, the results obtained from a critique
of them, etc., are, in the final reckoning,
determined by economic conditions and
the
class struggles to which they give
rise.
Philosophers know instinctively what
is theirs
to defend, and where the enemy lurks.
Instinctively
sensing the ‘dangerous’ tendencies
of their
age, they try to combat them philosophically.
We exposed in our preceding chapter
this
kind of modern reactionary defence
against
philosophical progress and the dialectical
method, and we traced the essence and
methodology
of modern irrationalism back to precisely
this type of reaction. In the observations
we have just made, we have likewise
attempted
to outline the social reasons for the
radical
change in the representation of the
enemy,
and how this change was registered
philosophically.
Now when we consider the period of
Nietzsche’s
activity, it can be clearly discerned
that
the Paris Commune, the evolution of
the socialist
parties of the masses, especially in
Germany,
as also the manner and success of the
bourgeois
struggle against them, impressed him
most
profoundly. We shall postpone until
later
a thorough examination of the relevant
details
and their manifestations in Nietzsche’s
life
and work. First we intend to moot the
general
possibility that for Nietzsche, as
for the
other philosophers of the age, socialism
as a movement and world-view had become
the
chief opponent, and that only this
change
on the social front and its philosophical
consequences enable us to portray his
outlook
in its true context.
What determined Nietzsche’s particular
position
in the development of modern irrationalism
was partly the historical situation
at the
time of his appearance, and partly
his unusual
personal gifts. With regard to the
former,
we have already touched on the most
important
social happenings of this period. Another
circumstantial factor — one favourable
to
his development — was that Nietzsche
concluded
his activity on the eve of the imperialist
age. This is to say that, on the one
hand,
he envisaged the impending conflicts
of Bismarck’s
age from every perspective. He witnessed
the founding of the German Reich, the
hopes
that were pinned to it and their disappointment,
the fall of Bismarck, and the inauguration
by Wilhelm II of an overtly aggressive
imperialism.
And at the same time he witnessed the
Paris
Commune, the origins of the great party
of
the proletarian masses, the outlawing
of
socialists, and the workers’ heroic
struggle
against it. On the other hand, however,
Nietzsche
did not personally live to see the
imperialist
period. He was thus offered a favourable
opportunity to conjecture and to solve
in
mythical form — on the reactionary
bourgeoisie’s
terms — the main problems of the subsequent
period. This mythical form furthered
his
influence not only because it was to
become
the increasingly dominant mode of philosophical
expression in the imperialist age.
It also
enabled him to pose imperialism’s cultural,
ethical and other problems in such
a general
way that he could always remain the
reactionary
bourgeoisie’s leading philosopher,
whatever
the variations in the situation and
the reactionary
tactics adopted to match them. Nietzsche
had already acquired this status before
the
first imperialist world war, and he
retained
it even after the second.
But the lasting influence whose objective
possibility we have just outlined could
never
have become a reality, were it not
for the
peculiar features of Nietzsche’s not
inconsiderable
talent. He had a special sixth sense,
an
anticipatory sensitivity to what the
parasitical
intelligentsia would need in the imperialist
age, what would inwardly move and disturb
it, and what kind of answer would most
appease
it. Thus he was able to encompass very
wide
areas of culture, to illuminate the
pressing
questions with clever aphorisms, and
to satisfy
the frustrated, indeed sometimes rebellious
instincts of this parasitical class
of intellectuals
with gestures that appeared fascinating
and
hyper-revolutionary. And at the same
time
he could answer all these questions,
or at
least indicate the answers, in such
a way
that out of all his subtleties and
fine nuances,
it was possible for the robust and
reactionary
class insignia of the imperialist bourgeoisie
to emerge.
This Jekyll-and-Hyde character corresponds
to the social existence, and hence
to the
emotional and intellectual world, of
this
class in a triple sense. Firstly, an
oscillation
between the most acute feeling for
nuance,
the keenest over sensitivity, and a
suddenly
erupting, often hysterical brutality
is always
an intrinsic sign of decadence. Secondly,
it is very closely linked with a deep
dissatisfaction
concerning contemporary culture: an
‘unease
about culture’ in Freud’s phrase, a
revolt
against it. Under no circumstances,
however,
would the ‘rebel’ stomach any interference
with his own parasitical privileges
and their
basis in society. He therefore waxes
enthusiastic
if the revolutionary character of his
discontent
receives a philosophical sanction,
but is
at the same time deflected — with regard
to its social substance — into a rebuttal
of democracy and socialism. And thirdly,
it was just at the time of Nietzsche’s
activity
that the class decline, the decadent
tendencies
reached such a pitch that their subjective
evaluation within the bourgeois class
also
underwent a significant change. For
a long
while, only the progressive opposition
critics
had been exposing and condemning the
symptoms
of decadence, whereas the vast majority
of
the bourgeois intelligentsia clung
to the
illusion of living in the ‘best of
all worlds’,
defending what they supposed to be
the ‘healthy
condition’ and the progressive nature
of
their ideology. Now, however, an insight
into their own decadence was becoming
more
and more the hub of these intellectuals’
self-knowledge. This change manifested
itself
above all in a complacent, narcissistic,
playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism,
etc. But in the case of honest intellectuals,
these often turned into sincere despair
and
a consequent mood of revolt (Messianism,
etc.).
Now as a diviner of the cultural psyche,
as aesthetician and moralist, Nietzsche
was
perhaps the cleverest and most versatile
exponent of this decadent self-knowledge.
But his significance went further:
in acknowledging
decadence as the basic phenomenon of
bourgeois
development in his time, he undertook
to
chart the course of its self-conquest.
For
in the most spirited and vigilant intellectuals
who succumbed to the influence of the
decadent
outlook, there ineluctably arose a
desire
to conquer it. Such a desire rendered
the
struggles of the burgeoning new class,
the
proletariat, extremely attractive for
most
of these intellectuals. Here, and particularly
with regard to personal conduct and
morality,
they perceived auguries of a possible
social
recovery and, in connection with it
— naturally
this thought was uppermost — of their
own
recovery. At the same time, the majority
of the intellectuals had no inkling
of the
economic and social implications of
a real
socialist transformation. Since they
contemplated
it in purely ideological terms, they
had
no clear notion how far and how profoundly
such a realignment would mean a radical
break
with their own class; or how such a
break,
once accomplished, would affect the
lives
of the persons concerned. Confused
though
this movement may have been, it did
embrace
wide sections of the more advanced
bourgeois
intelligentsia. Naturally enough, it
revealed
itself with particular vehemence in
times
of crisis (for instance, the ban on
socialists,
the fate of Naturalism, the First World
War
and the Expressionist movement in Germany,
boulangisme and the Dreyfus Affair
in France,
etc.).
Nietzsche’s philosophy performed the
‘social
task’ of ‘rescuing’ and ‘redeeming’
this
type of bourgeois mind. It offered
a road
which avoided the need for any break,
or
indeed any serious conflict, with the
bourgeoisie.
It was a road whereby the pleasant
moral
feeling of being a rebel could be sustained
and even intensified, whilst a ‘more
thorough’,
‘cosmic biological’ revolution was
enticingly
projected in contrast to the ‘superficial’,
‘external’ social revolution. A ‘revolution’,
that is, which would fully preserve
the bourgeoisie’s
privileges, and would passionately
defend
the privileged existence of the parasitical
and imperialist intelligentsia first
and
foremost. A ‘revolution’ directed against
the masses and lending an expression
compounded
of pathos and aggressiveness to the
veiled
egotistic fears of the economically
and culturally
privileged. The road indicated by Nietzsche
never departed from the decadence proliferating
in the intellectual and emotional life
of
this class. But the new-found self-knowledge
placed it in a new light: it was precisely
in decadence that the true progressive
seeds
of a genuine, thorough-going renewal
of mankind
were deemed to lie. This ‘social task’
found
itself in pre-established harmony,
as it
were, with Nietzsche’s talents, his
deepest
intellectual inclinations and his learning.
Like those sections of society at whom
his
work was aimed, Nietzsche himself was
principally
concerned with cultural problems, notably
art and individual morality. Politics
always
appeared as though on an abstract,
mythicized
horizon, and Nietzsche’s ignorance
of economics
was as great as that of the average
contemporary
intellectual. Mehring was quite right
to
point out that his arguments against
socialism
never surpassed the level of Leo, Treitschke,
etc.[2] But the very association of
a coarsely
humdrum anti-socialism with a refined,
ingenious,
sometimes even accurate critique of
culture
and art (for example the critiques
of Wagner
and Naturalism) was what made Nietzsche’s
subject-matter and modes of exposition
so
seductive for the imperialist intelligentsia.
We can see how great the temptation
was right
through the imperialist period. Beginning
with Georg Brandes, Strindberg and
Gerhart
Hauptmann’s generation, its influence
extended
to Gide and Malraux. And it was by
no means
limited to the reactionary part of
the intelligentsia.
In the essence of their overall work,
decidedly
progressive writers like Heinrich and
Thomas
Mann or Bernard Shaw were equally prey
to
this influence. Indeed it was even
capable
of making a strong impression on some
Marxist
intellectuals. Even Mehring — for the
time
being — assessed it as follows: ‘The
Nietzsche
cult is still more useful to socialism
in
another respect. No doubt Nietzsche’s
writings
have their pitfalls for the few young
people
of literary talent who may still be
growing
up within the bourgeois classes, and
are
initially labouring under bourgeois
class-prejudices.
But for such people, Nietzsche is only
a
transitional stage on the way to socialism.’[3]
We have, however, explained only the
class
basis and the intensity of Nietzsche’s
influence,
and not its long duration. This rests
on
his undoubted philosophical abilities.
From
Julius Langbehn (author of Rembrandt
als
Erzieher) to Koestler and Burnham in
our
own day, the standard pamphleteers
of the
reactionary wing have never done more
than
satisfy, with more or less skilful
demagogics,
whatever happened to be the bourgeoisie’s
tactical needs. But Nietzsche, as we
shall
see in more detail later, was able
to enshrine
and formulate in his works some of
the most
important lasting features of reactionary
attitudes to the imperialist period,
and
to the age of world wars and revolutions.
To perceive his standing in this field,
one
has only to compare him with his contemporary,
Eduard von Hartmann. The latter epitomized
as a philosopher the ordinary, reactionary-bourgeois
prejudices of the age after 1870, the
prejudices
of the ‘healthy’ (i. e., sated) bourgeois.
This is why he at first enjoyed a much
greater
success than Nietzsche, and also why
he fell
into complete oblivion in the imperialist
period.
Certainly Nietzsche, as we have already
noted,
achieved everything in a mythicizing
form.
This alone enabled him to comprehend
and
define prevailing tendencies because,
lacking
any understanding of capitalist economics,
he was solely capable of observing,
describing
and expressing the symptoms of the
superstructure.
But the myth-form also results from
the fact
that Nietzsche, the leading philosopher
of
the imperialist reaction, did not live
to
see imperialism. Exactly like Schopenhauer
as the philosopher of the bourgeois
reactionaries
after 1848, he wrote in an age that
was nurturing
only the first shoots and buds of what
was
to come. For a thinker incapable of
recognizing
the real generative forces, these could
only
be portrayed in a utopian, mythical
manner.
True, his task was facilitated both
by the
expressive mode of myth and by its
aphoristic
form, whose characteristics we are
about
to discuss. This is because such myths
and
aphorisms, depending on the bourgeoisie’s
immediate interests and their ideologues’
endeavours, could be arranged and interpreted
in the most diverse, often diametrically
opposed ways. But the constant harking
back
to Nietzsche — in each instance a ‘new’
Nietzsche
— shows that there was a definite continuity
beneath it all. It was the continuity
of
the basic problems of imperialism in
its
entirety from the standpoint of the
reactionary
bourgeoisie’s lasting interests, viewed
and
interpreted in the light of the permanent
needs of the parasitical bourgeois
intelligentsia.
There can be no doubt that such an
intellectual
anticipation betokens a not inconsiderable
gift of observation, sense of the problematic,
and capacity for abstraction. In this
respect
Nietzsche’s historical position is
analogous
to that of Schopenhauer. The two are
also
closely associated in the fundamental
tenor
of their philosophy. We shall refrain
here
from raising the historio-philological
questions
of influence, etc. The current attempts
to
dissociate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer’s
irrationalism, and to connect him with
the
Enlightenment and Hegel, I regard as
childish,
or rather, as an expression of history-fudging
in the service of American imperialism
on
the lowest level yet see. Of course
there
exist differences between Schopenhauer
and
Nietzsche, growing ever deeper as Nietzsche
clarified his efforts in the course
of his
development. But they are more in the
nature
of differences of period: differences
in
the methods of combating social progress.
From Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche
took
over the principle of the methodological
coherence in his intellectual structure,
merely modifying and extending it to
suit
the age and the opponent. It amounted
to
what we identified in our second chapter
as the indirect apologetics of capitalism.
Naturally this basic principle partly
assumed
new concrete forms in consequence of
the
conditions of a more acutely developed
class
struggle. Schopenhauer’s struggle against
the progressive thinking of his times
could
be summed up by saying that he condemned
all action as intellectually and morally
inferior. Nietzsche, on the contrary,
called
for active participation on behalf
of reaction,
of imperialism. This in itself obliged
him
to cast aside the whole Schopenhauerian
duality
of Vorstellung and Wille, and to replace
the Buddhist myth of will-power with
the
myth of the will-to-power. Similarly,
a further
consequence of the heightened class
struggle
was his inability to make anything
of Schopenhauer’s
abstract rejection of history in general.
A real history, of course, did not
exist
for Nietzsche any more than for Schopenhauer,
yet his apologetics of aggressive imperialism
take the form of a mythicizing of history.
Lastly — here we can only enumerate
the most
essential points — while Schopenhauer’s
apologetics
were indirect with regard to form,
he voiced
his socio-politically reactionary sympathies
in an open, even provocatively cynical
manner.
With Nietzsche, on the contrary, the
principle
of indirect apologetics also permeates
the
mode of exposition, his aggressively
reactionary
siding with imperialism being expressed
in
the form of a hyper-revolutionary gesture.
The fight against democracy and socialism,
the imperialist myth and the summons
to barbarous
action are intended to appear as an
unprecedented
reversal, a ‘transvaluation of all
values’,
a ‘twilight of the false gods’; and
the indirect
apologetics of imperialism as a demagogically
effective pseudo-revolution.
This content and method of Nietzschean
philosophy
were most intimately connected with
his literary
manner of expression, namely the aphorism.
Such a literary form made the element
of
change possible within the context
of his
lasting influence. When a shift in
interpretation
has become a social necessity — as,
for example,
in the age immediately preparatory
to Hitlerism,
and as again today, after Hitler’s
downfall
— there are no obstacles to the revision
of the enduring content such as we
find with
thinkers who have expressed the coherence
of their intellectual world in a systematic
form. (Granted, the fate of Descartes,
Kant
and Hegel in the imperialist period
shows
that the reactionary is capable of
surmounting
even these obstacles.) With Nietzsche,
however,
the task was far simpler: at each stage
different
aphorisms would be singled out and
brought
together, in accordance with the needs
of
the moment. There is one further point
to
consider as well. Much as the basic
objectives
accorded with the ideological outlook
of
the parasitical intelligentsia, to
voice
them in a systematic, brutal and open
fashion
would have repelled a wide and not
insignificant
circle. Thus it is far from an accident
that,
with but few exceptions (notably the
immediate
pioneers of Hitlerian fascism), Nietzsche-exegesis
has stuck to his cultural critique,
moral
psychology and so forth, and has seen
in
Nietzsche an ‘innocent’ thinker concerned
only with the spiritual problems of
an intellectual
and moral ‘élite’. Brandes and Simmel
saw
him thus, as did Bertram and Jaspers
later,
and as does Kaufmann today. And correctly
so from the class standpoint, since
the overwhelming
majority thereby won for Nietzsche
has later
been ready to take practical steps
matching
this outlook. Writers like Heinrich
and Thomas
Mann have been exceptions.
This, however, is merely the result
of the
aphoristic mode of expression. Let
us now
consider the mode itself. Academic
schools
of thought have often reproached Nietzsche
with having no system, something they
held
to be necessary to a real philosopher.
Nietzsche
himself roundly condemned all systems:
‘I
mistrust all systematic thinkers and
give
them a wide berth. A deliberate systematization
means a lack of honesty.’[4] This tendency
we have already observed in Kierkegaard,
and it is not fortuitous. The bourgeoisie’s
philosophical crisis, as evidenced
in the
demise of Hegelianism, amounted to
far more
than the recognition of a given system’s
inadequacy; it signified the breakdown
of
a concept that had swayed men for thousands
of years. When the Hegelian system
collapsed,
so did the whole endeavour to co-ordinate,
and so to comprehend, the world’s totality
and its principle of growth from idealist
sources, i. e., from elements of the
human
consciousness. This is not the place
to give
even a rough outline of the fundamental
changes
resulting from this final breakdown
of the
idealist system-concept. Granted, we
know
that even after Hegel academic systems
were
created (Wundt, Cohen, Rickert, etc.),
but
we know also that they were totally
insignificant
for the evolution of philosophy. We
know
too that the demise of the system in
bourgeois
thought prompted the outbreak of a
bottomless
relativism and agnosticism, as though
the
now obligatory renunciation of idealist
systematizing
were at the same time to mean renouncing
the objectivity of knowledge, a real
coherence
of the actual world, and the possibility
of knowing this. But equally we know
that
the burial once and for all of the
idealist
system coincided with the discovery
of the
real framework of objective reality,
namely
dialectical materialism. Engels, polemicizing
against Nietzsche’s contemporary Eugen
Düuhring,
formulated the new philosophical position
thus: ‘The real unity of the world
lies in
its materiality ...[5] This unity the
individual
branches of learning seek (with ever
greater
accuracy) both to reflect and to embrace
conceptually; the principles and laws
of
this cognitive process are summed up
by philosophy.
So the systematic framework has not
disappeared.
It no longer appears, however, in the
form,
of idealist ‘essences’, but always
as an
approximating reflection of that unity,
that
coherence, that set of laws which is
objectively
— or independently of our consciousness
—
present and operative in reality itself.
Nietzsche’s rejection of systems arose
out
of the relativistic, agnosticizing
tendencies
of his age. The point that he was the
first
and most influential thinker with whom
this
agnosticism turned into the sphere
of myth
we shall investigate later. To this
outlook
his aphoristic mode of expression is
no doubt
intimately related. But he also had
another
motive beyond this. It is a general
phenomenon
in ideological history that thinkers
who
can observe a social development only
in
embryo, but who can already perceive
the
new element in it and who — especially
in
the moral area — are striving for an
intellectual
grasp of it prefer the essayistic,
aphoristic
forms. The reason is that these forms
guarantee
the expression most fitted to a mixture
of
a mere scenting of future developments
on
the one hand, and an acute observation
and
evaluation of their symptoms on the
other.
We see this in Montaigne and Mandeville,
and in the French moralists from La
Rochefoucauld
to Vauvenargues and Chamfort. Stylistically,
Nietzsche had a great liking for most
of
these authors. But a contrast in the
basic
tenor of the content accompanied this
formal
preference. The important moralists
had already
criticized — the majority in a progressive
way — the morality of capitalism from
within
an absolutist, feudal society. Nietzsche’s
anticipation of the future was, on
the contrary,
approvingly oriented to an impending
reactionary
movement, qualitatively heightened,
that
is to say imperialist reaction. It
was solely
the abstract fact of the anticipation
which
determined the formal affinity.
We must now ask whether, in Nietzsche’s
case,
we are justified in speaking of a system.
Are we entitled to interpret his individual
aphorisms in a systematic context?
We believe
that the systematic coherence of a
philosopher’s
thoughts is an older phenomenon than
the
idealist systems and can still survive
when
they have collapsed. No matter whether
this
systematic framework is an approximately
correct reflection of the real world
or one
distorted by class considerations,
idealist
notions and so forth, such a systematic
framework
is to be found in every philosopher
worth
his salt. Admittedly, it does not tally
with
the structure which the individual
philosopher
himself intends to give his work. While
indicating
the need thus to reconstruct the real,
consistency
in the fragments of Heraclitus and
Epicurus,
Marx added: ‘Even with philosophers
who give
their works a systematic form, Spinoza
for
instance, the actual inner structure
of the
system is quite different from the
form in
which they consciously present it.’[6]
We
shall now venture to show that such
a systematic
coherence may be detected behind Nietzsche’s
aphorisms
2
In our view, it was only little by
little
that the nodal point in the framework
of
Nietzsche’s ideas took definite shape:
the
resistance to socialism, the effort
to create
an imperial Germany. There is ample
evidence
that in his youth, Nietzsche was an
ardent
Prussian patriot. This enthusiasm is
one
of the most significant factors in
his early
philosophy. It cannot possibly be regarded
as a matter of chance or youthful whim
that
he wanted to be involved in the war
of 1870-1;
nor that, since a Basle professor could
not
enlist as a soldier, he at least took
part
as a volunteer nurse. It is at any
rate characteristic
that his sister (although we must view
her
statements in a highly critical light)
recorded
the following memory of the war. At
that
time, she wrote, he first sensed ‘that
the
strongest and highest will-to-live
is expressed
not in a wretched struggle for survival,
but as the will to fight, the will
to power
and super-power’.[7] At all events
this bellicose
philosophical state of mind, which
was an
extremely Prussian one, in no way contradicts
the young Nietzsche’s other views.
In his
papers of autumn 1873, for example,
we find
the following: ‘My starting-point is
the
Prussian soldier: here we have a true
convention,
we have coercion, earnestness and discipline,
and that also goes for the form.’[8]
Just as distinct as the source of the
young
Nietzsche’s enthusiasm are the features
of
his principal enemy. Directly after
the fall
of the Paris Commune he wrote to his
friend,
Baron von Gersdorff:
Hope is possible again! Our German
mission
isn’t over yet! I’m in better spirit
than
ever, for not yet everything has capitulated
to Franco-Jewish levelling and ‘elegance’,
and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit
(‘now-time’). There is still bravery,
and
it’s a German bravery that has something
else to it than the élan of our lamentable
neighbours. Over and above the war
between
nations, that international hydra which
suddenly
raised its fearsome heads has alarmed
us
by heralding quite different battles
to come.[9]
And the content of this battle, which
initially
was waged directly against the movement
obstructing
the full fruition of his ideology,
Nietsche
moreover defined in the draft, several
months
earlier, of his letter dedicating The
Birth
of Tragedy to Richard Wagner. Once
more the
Prussian victory was his point of departure.
From it he drew such conclusions as
these:
‘... because that power will destroy
something
which we loathe as the real enemy of
all
profounder philosophy and aesthetics.
This
something is a disease from which German
life has had to suffer since the great
French
Revolution in particular; ever-recurring
in spasmodic fits, it has afflicted
even
the best type of German, to say nothing
of
the great mass of people among whom
that
affliction, in vile desecration of
an honourable
word, goes under the name of liberalism.’[10]
The connection between the battle against
liberalism and that against socialism
very
soon became apparent. The Strauss pamphlet
attacked the liberal ‘cultural philistine’,
and did so with such energy and brilliance
that it succeeded in deceiving even
such
a Marxist as Mehring about its true
nature,
for Mehring thought that ‘indisputably’
Nietzsche
had here defended ‘the most glorious
traditions
of German civilization’.[11] But Nietzsche
himself wrote in his notes for the
lectures
‘On the Future of our Cultural Institutions’
(1871-3): ‘The most widespread culture,
i.
e., barbarity is just what Communism
presumes
... universal culture turns into a
hate of
genuine culture ... To have no wants,
Lassalle
once said, is a people’s greatest misfortune.
Hence the workers’ cultural associations,
whose aim has been often described
to me
as that of creating wants ... The drive,
therefore, to disseminate culture as
widely
as possible has its origins in a total
secularization,
by which culture is reduced to a means
of
gain and of earthly happiness in the
vulgar
sense.’[12] As we see, Nietzsche’s
philosophical
thinking was opposed to democracy and
socialism
from the beginning.
This attitude and these perspectives
form
the basis of Nietzsche’s understanding
of
Ancient Greece. Here his opposition
to the
revolutionary traditions of bourgeois
development
is quite plainly perceptible. We are
not
thinking mainly of the Dionysian principle
which made Nietzsche’s first writings
famous,
for there the idea was still, in his
own
words, part of his ‘artist metaphysics’.
It took on actual significance only
after
the conquest of decadence had become
a central
problem for the mature Nietzsche. We
want
to put the chief emphasis on the principles
upon which his new image of Ancient
Greece
was founded in the first place. And
prominent
among these is the idea that slavery
is necessary
to any real civilization.
If Nietzsche had stressed the role
of slavery
in Greek culture merely from the historical
standpoint, this perfectly correct
observation
would be of no great importance; he
himself
referred to Friedrich Wolf, who had
made
it before him.[13] It was bound to
gain an
even wider currency, and not only because
of progress in historical studies.
It followed
also from a review of the ‘heroic illusions’
of the French Revolution, whose ideologists
had ignored the slavery issue in order
to
create out of the democratic city-state
the
model of a modern revolutionary democracy.
(These same views influenced the German
image
of Ancient Greece in the period from
Winckelmann
to Hegel.) What is new in Nietzsche
is that
he used slavery as a vehicle for his
critique
of contemporary civilization: ‘And
while
it may be true that the Greeks perished
because
of their slave-holding, it is far more
certain
that we shall perish because of the
absence
of slavery.’[14]
So if Nietzsche — showing certain methodological
affinities with Romantic anti-capitalism
— contrasts a great bygone period with
the
capitalist present which he was criticizing,
it is not the same thing as Sismondi’s
contrast
between the peaceful, simple trade
in goods
and an age of crisis and mass unemployment.
Nor is it the same as ordered and purposeful
artisan labour in the Middle Ages,
as contrasted
by the young Carlyle with the division
of
labour and an age of anarchy. What
Nietzsche
contrasts with present times is the
Greek
dictatorship of an élite which clearly
recognizes
‘that work is an ignominy’, and which
creates
immortal art-works at its leisure.
‘In more
recent times’, he wrote, ‘it is not
the person
who needs art but the slave who has
determined
the general outlook. Such phantoms
as the
dignity of man, the dignity of labour
are
the shabby products of a slave mentality
hiding from its own nature. Unhappy
the age
in which the slave needs such ideas
and is
spurred to reflect upon himself and
the world
around him. Wretched the seducers who
have
deprived the slave of his innocence
by means
of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge!’[15]
Now what are the qualities of this
‘élite’
whose revival, assisted by a return
of slavery,
aroused in the young Nietzsche the
hope of
a cultural renaissance on a utopian
and mythical
plane? That it springs up from a barbarian
condition is some thing we might accept
as
confirming historical facts. Indeed
Nietzsche
depicted it in the most lurid colours
in
‘Homer’s Contest’ (1871-2). But if
we are
to understand Greek civilization, stated
Nietzsche in a polemic against the
Orphic
thinkers — who held that ‘a life rooted
in
such an urge is not worth living’ —
then
‘we must start out from the idea that
the
Greek genius accepted this so fearfully
active
urge and regarded it as justified’.[16]
Thus
it is a matter not of conquering, civilizing
and humanizing the barbarian instincts,
but
of constructing the great civilization
on
their bedrock and diverting them into
suitable
channels. Only in this context, not
from
the standpoint of some vague ‘artist
metaphysics’,
can the Dionysian principle be properly
grasped
and appreciated. Moreover, Nietzsche
rightly
said in a later draft of the preface
to his
debut work on the Dionysian principle:
‘What
a disadvantage my timidity is when
I speak
as a scholar of a subject of which
I might
have spoken from “experience”.’[17]
For the young Nietzsche, the organ
for the
social utilization of the barbarian
instincts
is the contest (agon). This, as we
are about
to note from Nietzsche’s own statements,
was a mythicizing of capitalist competition.
He quotes from Pausanias the Hesiod
passage
about the two goddesses Eris: ‘She
(the good
Eris, G. L.) spurs even the inept to
work;
and if a man without property sees
a wealthy
man, he will make haste to sow and
plant
likewise and to put his house in good
order;
neighbour competes with neighbour in
striving
for prosperity. This Eris is beneficial
for
mankind. One potter will resent another,
one carpenter the other, beggar envies
beggar
and singer envies singer.’[18] And
this state
of affairs he contrasted with modern
depravity:
‘Nowadays self-seeking is feared as
“the
devil incarnate” ’, whereas for the
ancients
the goal of the agonal training was
‘the
welfare of the whole, the commonwealth’.[19]
If we now return to slavery as the
alleged
bedrock of any genuine civilization,
we can
see how much of the later Nietzsche
this
early work — albeit in an immature
manner
— anticipated. In this context the
Schopenhauer
and Wagner portraits which he produced
with
such fervent eloquence resemble mythicized
pretexts for expressing something not
yet
fully developed, half in poetic and
half
in philosophical form. His own later
criticism
of his first writings — especially
in Ecce
homo — all tended in this direction:
‘...
that what I learnt from Wagner about
music
in those years has nothing at all to
do with
Wagner; that when I described Dionysian
music
I was describing the music that I had
heard,
— that I had instinctively to transpose
and
transfigure into the new spirit all
that
was latent within me. The proof of
this,
the strongest possible proof, is my
piece
Wagner in Bayreuth: I am the sole subject
in all the psychologically crucial
pas sages
— one may automatically read my own
name
or the word “Zarathustra” wherever
the text
reads “Wagner” ... the latter himself
sensed
this; he was unable to recognize himself
in the piece.’[20] Modified somewhat,
this
also applies to the Schopenhauer portrait
in the work of Nietzsche’s youth. The
third,
similarly mythologized, Socrates portrait
is a totally different matter. In the
debut
work the great antithesis was already
‘The
Dionysian and the Socratic’.[21] And
Nietzsche
— at first in predominantly aesthetic
terms
— enlarged this antithesis to encompass
that
of instinct and reason. In Ecce homo
he reached
his conclusion: the discovery that
Socrates
was a ‘décadent’ and that one must
rate ‘morality
itself as a symptom of decadence’ the
mature
Nietzsche regarded as ‘an innovation,
a discovery
of the first order in the history of
knowledge’.[22]
When investigating in general the determining
causes of Nietzsche’s further development,
one usually lays the chief stress on
the
Wagner disappointment. But the points
just
raised concerning Nietzsche’s attitude
to
Wagner already show us that it was
a symptom
of his shift rather than its actual
cause.
In Wagner, and with increasing acuteness,
Nietzsche challenged the art of his
own German
period in the name of the imperialist
future.
When, especially after the First World
War,
it became the fashion to challenge
the nineteenth
century’s ideology (the age of ‘security’)
in the name of the twentieth, Nietzsche’s
split with Wagner and late polemics
against
him furnished the methodological ‘model’
for this conflict. The fact that the
ideological
spokesmen of the Hitler period continued
this tradition, though linking it with
Wagner
idolatry, does not prove anything.
Their
rejection of ‘security’ was combined
also
with the glorification of Bismarck,
whom
Nietzsche in his final period nearly
always
attacked in conjunction with Wagner.
For
the older Nietzsche, Wagner was the
greatest
artistic expression of that decadence
whose
most important political representative
he
saw in Bismarck. And in going beyond
the
philosophy of Schopenhauer he followed
the
same direction. We must not forget
that even
the young Nietzsche was never a really
orthodox
disciple of Schopenhauer with regard
to radical
a-historicism. From the start he had
toyed
with a mythicizing of history, whereas
his
master had totally avoided history.
This
tendency, already present in The Birth
of
Tragedy, grew more pronounced in the
second
Untimely Consideration. Activism —
of the
counter-revolutionary variety — was
more
over gaining in significance for Nietzsche.
And thus, along with Wagner and Bismarck,
Schopenhauer too came more and more
within
the area of that decadence he wanted
to conquer.
This, naturally enough, did not prevent
Nietzsche
from adhering all his life to Berkeley-Schopenhauer
epistemology, as we are likewise soon
to
see. He adapted it, however, to suit
his
own particular purpose.
Now where do we look for the real causes
behind Nietzsche’s development, and
for the
basic features of his so-called second
period?
It is our belief that they can be found
in
the aggravation of those socio-political
conflicts which governed the second
half
of the seventies (cultural conflict,
but
above all the anti-socialist laws).
We have
observed how strongly Nietzsche’s first
works
were affected by the war of 1870-1
and hopes
of a general cultural regeneration
in the
aftermath of victory. We have further
observed
how tenuous the young Nietzsche’s hopes
were
and how apolitical his perspectives,
despite
his general social and historico-philosophical
stand in favour of slavery. Now this
changed
quite decisively in the second half
of the
seventies. Not that Nietzsche by now
had
acquired clear ideas on politics and
more
particularly on their underlying economics;
we shall soon see his naive ignorance
when
it came to the latter. But in spite
of all
the facts speaking against him and
the confusion
in his views, Nietzsche’s cultural
and historico-philosophical
studies were moving in a direction
oriented
towards the concrete present and future.
Let us anticipate for a moment what
we are
going to amplify on this subject. Nietzsche’s
new political position was centred
upon the
idea of rebutting and disarming the
socialist
threat, his chief adversary now as
before,
with the aid of democracy. Here we
must note
that Nietzsche regarded Bismarck’s
Germany
as a democracy. And so — no matter
how far
Nietzsche was aware of it — his hope
that
here lay the cure for socialism was
very
closely connected with Bismarckian
politics.
We cannot take it as pure coincidence
that
his first work of this period, Human,
All-Too-Human,
appeared roughly half a year before
the promulgation
of the socialist ban. To be sure, this
was
also the date of the centenary of Voltaire’s
death. And very far-reaching conclusions
have been drawn from the dedication
with
which Nietzsche prefaced his first
edition
on this occasion. Their validity, however,
is extremely limited. For if we read
Nietzsche’s
Voltaire treatise we perceive that
it was
still dealing with the same conflict
we have
defined as the most important in his
life.
But with the difference, characteristic
of
this period, that Nietzsche now thought
the
evolution which he praised Voltaire
for representing
was the surest antidote to revolution
(i.
e., socialism). In this light he drew
his
parallel between Voltaire and Rousseau
(the
aphorism’s title, ‘A Falsity in the
Doctrine
of Revolution’, is typical of Nietzsche
at
the time). ‘Not Voltaire’s moderate
nature
with its bias towards ordering, purifying
and reconstructing, but Rousseau’s
passionate
follies and half-truths have awakened
the
optimistic revolutionary spirit, and
against
it I cry, “écrasez l’infâme!” It has
long
been responsible for banishing the
spirit
of enlightenment and progressive development.’[23]
Nietzsche was to persist in this view
of
Voltaire long after he had overcome
the illusions
of Human, All-Too-Human. Indeed, in
line
with his later radicalism, he now saw
Voltaire’s
universal historical significance solely
in this opposition to Rousseau and
revolution.
Thus he wrote in The Will to Power:
‘Only
at this point does Voltaire (hitherto
a mere
bel esprit) become the man of his century,
the philosopher and representative
of tolerance
and unbelief.’[24]
Thus in the second half of the seventies,
Nietzsche became a ‘democrat’, ‘liberal’
and evolutionist precisely because
he found
in this the most effective counterpoise
to
socialism. His enthusiasm for this
— as he
then believed — inevitable transitional
step
was very temperate; one must, he wrote,
‘adapt
oneself to the new circumstances as
one adapts
when an earthquake dislocates the earth’s
old borders and contours’.[25] But
in the
second part of the same work he thought
it
possible ‘that the democratization
of Europe
is one link in the chain of those enormous
prophylactic measures constituting
the idea
of the new times and dividing us from
the
Middle Ages. Only now has the era of
Cyclopean
structures arrived! At last we have
stable
foundations on which the whole future
can
safely build! Impossible, henceforth,
for
wild and sense less mountain waters
once
more to ruin the fertile fields of
civilization
overnight! Stone dams and bulwarks
against
barbarians, pestilence, physical and
mental
thraldom!’[26] In this vein Nietzsche
went
so far as even to condemn exploitation
as
stupid and futile: ‘The exploitation
of the
worker was, as we now recognize, a
piece
of stupidity, a maverick enterprise
at the
future’s expense which imperilled society.
Now we are already on the verge of
war: from
now on, at all events, there will be
a very
high price to pay for maintaining peace,
sealing contracts and winning confidence,
because the exploiters’ foolishness
was very
great and long-lasting.’ [27] The new
form
of government — and here he expressly
sided
with Bismarck — was to be an admittedly
unhistorical
but shrewd and useful compromise with
the
people, whereby all human relations
would
undergo a gradual transformation.
In Nietzsche’s opinion — one which
fully
harmonized with the views just quoted
— the
positive value of such ‘democratic
evolution’
rested in its ability to rear a new
‘elite’.
Thus in completing the turn to ‘democracy’
à la Bismarck, Nietzsche gave up none
of
his youthful aristocratic convictions.
For
now he still saw the salvation of culture
solely in a more resolute bestowal
of privileges
on a minority, one whose leisure was
based
on the hard physical labour of the
majority,
the masses. He wrote: ‘A higher civilization
can only come about when there are
two distinct
social castes: that of the working
people
and that of the leisured, those capable
of
true leisure; or, to put it more strongly,
the caste of forced labour and the
caste
of free labour.’[28] So close to liberalism
was he coming that temporarily he even
appropriated
its concept of the State. He wrote
the oft-quoted
sentence: ‘Modern democracy is the
historical
form of the decay of the State.’ But
just
how Nietzsche amplified this idea is
seldom
quoted: ‘The prospect opened up by
this assured
decay is not, however, a gloomy one
in every
respect: of all human attributes, shrewdness
and self-seeking are the most highly
developed;
when the State is no longer a match
for these
forces’ demands, chaos will be the
least
likely result. It is more likely that
the
State will be defeated by an even more
practical
invention than itself.’[29]
Here it becomes palpably clear why
Nietzsche
arrived at the views he did. No longer
did
he consider socialism to be an ally
of liberalism
and democracy, their consummation carried
to radical extremes — in which guise
he had
previously opposed it along with the
other
two. Socialism was now ‘the imaginative
younger
brother of the near-defunct despotism’.[30]
And Nietzsche ended the aphorism in
such
a way that his current attitude to
the State
is quite plain to behold: ‘Socialism
can
serve to teach men most brutally and
forcefully
the danger of all accumulations of
State
authority, and so inspire a distrust
of the
State itself. When its hoarse voice
mingles
with the battle-cries of “as much State
power
as possible”, these will at first become
louder than ever: but soon the opposite
cry
will ring out all the more strongly
— “as
little State power as possible”.’[31]
It is not worth examining more closely
how
Nietzsche envisaged this democracy
in concrete
terms. To do so would merely reveal
his political
naivety and economic ignorance. If,
in conclusion,
we quote one more statement by him,
this
will clearly illustrate not only both
the
aforesaid points but also the constant
leitmotif
of all stages in Nietzsche’s development:
the campaign against socialism, the
chief
adversary. In the second part of Human,
All-Too-Human,
Nietzsche maintained that democracy
would
of all parties profit most from the
general
dread of socialism, and he concluded:
‘The
people are the farthest away from socialism
as a doctrine of reform in the acquisition
of property: and should they ever have
access
to the taxation screw through their
parliaments
large majorities, they will assault
the principality
of capitalists, businessmen and stock
exchanges
with progressive taxation, thus in
fact slowly
creating a middle class which may forget
about socialism as it would a disease
it
has recovered from.’[32] That was the
focal
point of Nietzsche’s utopian dream
of this
period: to achieve a society where
socialism
could be forgotten as easily as ‘a
past illness’.
For this dream’s sake he regarded Bismarck’s
‘democracy’ with — qualified — benevolence:
the ‘democracy’ of the anti-socialist
laws
and the professed social policies,
the ‘democracy’
of the carrot and the stick.
How far these views were associated
with
reactionary illusions about the socialist
ban is indicated by the new and final
turn
they took. Again this occurred side
by side
with the bourgeoisie’s disillusionment
as
a result of the growing, and increasingly
successful, courageous resistance of
the
German working class. Assuming more
and more
passionate forms, Nietzsche’s new line
of
thought reached its peak in his final
works.
We shall not retrace it step by step;
our
concern here is the essential social
content,
above all the fact that, despite the
chopping
and changing, the actual pivot and
real centre
never shifted, but was still hostility
to
socialism.
The estrangement from the ‘democratic’
illusions
of the transitional period already
takes
a very distinct form in the Joyful
Science
(1882). In a passage that the fascists
have
often quoted, and with understandable
enthusiasm,
Nietzsche sided with military command
and
subordination, officers and soldiers,
playing
off this hierarchy against the capitalist
exploiters’ want of refinement and
aristocratic
character. Indeed he saw in the lack
of aristocratic
form the very reason for the rise of
the
socialists: ‘Were they
(namely the capitalists — G. L.) to
share
the hereditary nobility’s distinction
in
glance and gesture, then perhaps there
would
be no socialism of the masses.’[33]
What
determined the sharper tone and mounting
passion was that Nietzsche, becoming
more
and more sceptical about the chances
of putting
down the workers by time-honoured methods,
strongly feared — at least for the
time being
— a workers’ victory. Thus he wrote
in The
Genealogy of Morals (1887): ‘Let us
face
facts: the people have triumphed —
or the
slaves, the mob, the herd or what ever
you
like to call them ... Masters have
been abolished;
the morals of the common man have triumphed
... Mankind’s ‘redemption’ (namely
from its
masters) is well under way; everything
is
becoming visibly Judified or Christified
or mobified (what do words matter!).
To arrest
this poison’s progress throughout the
body
of mankind seems impossible ...’[34]
At this point it might be quite interesting
to glance at the differences and similarities
in the careers of Nietzsche and Franz
Mehring.
We may then see what the socialist
ban and
the German proletariat’s resistance
meant
to the crisis in bourgeois ideology.
Both
authors — although always proceeding
from
totally different starting-points and
on
equally different lines — had a period
of
illusionary perspectives: Mehring wrote
a
pamphlet attacking social democracy,
while
Nietzsche entered upon his ‘democratic’
phase.
Both under went a crisis during the
workers’
ever-mounting and increasingly successful
resistance. But whereas this crisis
led Mehring
into the socialist camp, it exacerbated
Nietzsche’s
hostility to socialism to the point
of fury
and brought about the final formulation
of
his mythical foreshadowing of imperialist
barbarity. ‘Whom do I hate most’, said
Nietzsche
in his Anti-Christ, ‘among the rabble
of
today? The socialist rabble, the Shandala
disciples undermining the worker’s
sound
instinct, good spirits and sense of
contentment
— making him envious and instructing
him
in vengeance ... Injustice never lies
in
unequal rights; it lies in the claim
to equal
rights ...’[35] And it is typical of
Nietzsche’s
shift that in his last period, in the
Twilight
of the Idols, he expressly returned
to the
statement we quoted earlier, concerning
democracy
as the decaying form of the State;
but this
time he made it in a decidedly condemnatory
sense.[36]
In summing up, it only remains for
us to
show how Nietzsche described his attitude
to the worker question in The Twilight
of
the Idols:
The stupidity, at bottom the degenerate
instinct,
which today is the cause of all stupidities,
rests in the fact that there is a worker
problem at all. There are certain questions
that one does not ask: number one imperative
of the instinct. I quite fail to see
what
we wish to do with the European worker
once
he has become a problem. The worker
is faring
far too well not gradually to start
asking
more questions and to ask them less
modestly.
In the last resort he has the strength
of
numbers in his favour. We have said
good-bye
to the hope that here a humble and
contented
kind of man, a Chinese type might form
an
emergent class: and that would have
made
sense, and would have been a downright
necessity.
But what have we done? Everything to
nip
in the bud even the first requirement
— through
the most irresponsible thoughtlessness,
we
have killed outright the instincts
enabling
the worker to exist as a class, enabling
the worker himself to exist. We have
taught
him military efficiency and given him
the
coalition right and the political vote:
so
why be surprised if now the worker
is already
regarding his condition as a deprived
one
(in moral terms, an injustice)? But
I ask
once more: what is it we want? If we
have
some end in view we must also wish
for the
means. If it is slaves we want, we
are fools
to raise them as masters.[37]
Two points in Nietzsche’s thought warrant
particular emphasis. Firstly, the fact
that
he considered the whole ‘worker problem’
to be a purely ideological issue: the
ruling-class
ideologues were to decide the course
of conduct
that the workers should follow. Nietzsche
quite overlooked the fact that the
question
had objective economic foundations.
The sole
deciding factor, for him, was how the
‘masters’
stood on the question; they could achieve
anything if they were determined enough.
(Here Nietzsche was a direct forerunner
of
the Hitlerian view.) Secondly, this
passage
unwittingly provides a historical summary
of the constant and inconstant elements
in
Nietzsche’s thoughts on this central
problem.
It is evident both that the ‘breeding’
of
a slave type adapted to modern circumstances
was his permanent social ideal, and
that
his hostility was directed against
those
— the socialists — who were frustrating
this
development. But the inconstant element
is
equally clear: if Nietzsche was levelling
sharp criticisms against others of
his class,
he was at the same time practising
self-criticism
and overcoming the illusions of his
Human,
All-Too-Human period.
At all events, since the crumbling
of his
‘democratic’ illusions Nietzsche had
been
predicting an era of great wars, revolutions
and counter-revolutions. Only out of
the
resulting chaos could his ideal arise:
absolute
rule by the ‘lords of the earth’ over
a henceforth
compliant herd, the suitably cowed
slaves.
In Nietzsche’s jottings from the time
of
The Genealogy of Morals we already
find:
‘The problem — whither now? The need
is for
a new reign of terror.’[38] And in
the prolegomenon
to The Will to Power he said of the
new barbarians
and future overlords: ‘Obviously they
will
come into view and consolidate themselves
only after immense socialistic crises.’[39]
The older Nietzsche’s optimistic perspectives
derived from this vision of the future
(of
imperialism): ‘The sight of the present
European
affords me much hope: a daring master
race
is being formed upon the broad basis
of an
extremely intelligent herd of the masses.’[40]
And whilst dreaming up these goals
and the
path that would lead to them, he occasionally
conceived of the future in images whose
content
directly anticipates the Hitlerian
saga:
‘The putrid ruling classes have corrupted
the image of the ruler. For the State
to
exercise jurisdiction is cowardice,
because
it lacks the great man who can serve
as a
criterion. There is so much uncertainty
in
the end that men will kow-tow to any
old
will power that issues the orders.’[41]
In order to be completely clear about
Nietzsche’s
socio-political line, it only remains
for
us to cast some light on his attitude
to
Bismarck. This is not an irrelevant
question;
indeed it is central both to his influence
on basically Left-oriented circles
and to
his role in fascist ideology.
The Left saw the problem thus: Nietzsche
criticized Bismarck very sharply —
hence
he could not possibly be a reactionary.
Since
this was a case of mistaking criticism
from
the Right for criticism from the Left,
our
concrete treatment of the Nietzsche-Bismarck
relationship will tacitly answer this
question
to the effect that he always criticized
Bismarck
from a Right-wing standpoint, and considered
Bismarck to be not decidedly enough
the imperialist
reactionary.
The fascist ideologists too started
out from
the contrasts between Nietzsche and
Bismarck.
But since the Third Reich needed a
synthesis
of all the reactionary currents in
German
history, it had to regard itself as
a fusion
of Nietzsche and Bismarck on a higher
(i.
e., reactionary) level. Franz Schauwecker,
for example, said of the need to reconcile
Nietzsche and Bismarck in the Third
Reich:
‘It will be an empire guaranteeing
the ultimate
world-order. It will be the empire
in which
Frederick the Prussian and Goethe the
German
are at one. Then the meeting which
was prevented
from taking place between Bismarck
and Nietzsche
will be a fait accompli strong enough
to
withstand all attacks by hostile powers.’[42]
Hitler’s official philosophical ideologue,
Alfred Baeumler, for his part used
Nietzsche’s
Bismarck critique — entirely in the
spirit
of Mein Kampf — to prove the Third
Reich’s
superiority to the Bismarck-Hohenzollern
empire. Accordingly he passed over
all Nietzsche’s
chopping and changing, and summed up
his
views thus: ‘The history of the Empire
became
the story of Bismarck’s intellectual
defeat.
This process took place before the
horrified
eyes of the other great realist (namely
Nietzsche,
G. L.) ... The empire prospered, but
it was
a sham prosperity, and the concomitant
philosophy
(“ethical idealism”) was a sham philosophy.
In the world war the ostentatious romantic-liberal
structure collapsed, and in the same
instant
the two great contestants from the
past became
visible.’[43]
Now let us look at Nietzsche’s Bismarck
critique
itself. Both men were so-called ‘up-to-date’
reactionaries who, along with the usual
weapons
of popular subjugation and brutal terror
— although this remained the favourite
weapon
of both — attempted above all to employ
individual
‘democratic’ measures or institutions
against
the chief adversary, the proletariat.
(Universal
suffrage, etc., in Bismarck’s case.)
Bismarck,
however, being essentially a diplomat
of
the Bonapartist period, was only briefly
carried beyond the narrow aims of a
Prussian
reactionary policy by the movement
for German
unity. He failed to grasp the German
bourgeoisie’s
imperialistic aspirations, based on
the reactionary
foundation of the Empire and now gradually
gaining in momentum. Nietzsche, on
the contrary,
was the ideologist and prophet of this
very
tendency. Hence his often bitterly
ironical,
scornful criticism of Bismarck, and
hence
— precisely in the last years of his
active
life — his opposition to him. What
Nietzsche
found wanting in Bismarck was a grasp
of
the principle of the will to power,
which
was why he said that he knew as little
about
philosophy as ‘a farmer or an army
recruit’.
[44]
But that was simply a polemical invective.
The essence of Nietzsche’s quarrel
with Bismarck
comprised two complexes of ideas. Firstly,
in the domain of home affairs Nietzsche
called
for a determined break with the semblance
of a democracy and with that form of
demagogic
flirting with democracy, that is to
say parliamentarianism,
which Bismarck represented. For Nietzsche
the crucial question was this: ‘The
increasing
emergence of democratic man, and the
consequent
stultification of Europe and belittling
of
European man. Hence his precept: ‘A
break
with the English principle of popular
representation:
it is the big interests which need
to be
represented.’[45] Here Nietzsche anticipated
the fascist ‘class State’. The second
complex
of ideas covered world affairs. In
Beyond
Good and Evil — significantly, and
in contrast
to Bismarck’s policy at the time, in
the
form of a demand that Europe unite
against
Russia — Nietzsche declared: ‘The time
for
small politics is over: the very next
century
will bring a struggle for dominion
over the
earth, the obligation for great politics.’[46]
This era which Nietzsche accused Bismarck
of failing to understand was to be
the era
of great wars. In Ecce homo Nietzsche
expressed
himself thus on the subject: ‘There
will
be wars the like of which have never
been
seen on earth before. Great politics
on earth
are only beginning with me.’[47] That
is
why Bismarck was not militaristic enough
for Nietzsche. Exactly like Hitler,
he believed
that Germany’s salvation depended on
renewing
in up-to-date form the traditions of
the
Prussian military State: ‘The upholding
of
the military State is the ultimate
means
of adopting or sustaining the great
tradition
with regard to the highest type of
person,
the type that is strong.’[48] As these
few
passages show us perfectly plainly,
Nietzsche’s
Bismarck critique rested solely on
the contention
that Bismarck did not grasp the problems
of the impending imperialist period,
and
was incapable of solving them by way
of reactionary
aggression. He was, there fore, criticizing
Bismarck from the Right.
3
Only on the basis of the aforesaid
can we
apprehend both the unity behind Nietzsche’s
philosophy and its various changes.
It implied
an active rejection of the chief enemy,
namely
the working class and socialism. And
as the
class struggle intensified and one
illusion
crumbled after another, it expanded
into
an intellectual anticipation of the
imperialist
phase in capitalist evolution. Only
in an
imperialist bourgeois state of a decidedly
aggressive reactionary hue could Nietzsche
find a sufficiently strong defence
against
the socialist danger; only the emergence
of such a power inspired in him the
hope
of succeeding in neutralizing the working
class once and for all. His bitterness
about
the Germany of his time stemmed from
its
failure to adopt this measure and its
continued
hesitancy in doing so.
These tendencies are best seen in Nietzsche’s
ethics. That is because Nietzsche,
in view
of his class situation, his ignorance
of
economics and the fact that his activity
pre-dated imperialism, was naturally
in no
position to foreshadow imperialism
in economic
and social terms. In his works he portrayed
the bourgeoisie’s consistent imperialist
morality all the more clearly for that.
Indeed
he here anticipated in theory the true
course
of developments. Most of his statements
on
ethics became a dreadful reality under
the
Hitler régime, and they also retain
a validity
as an account of ethics in the present
‘American
age’.
Nietzsche was frequently associated
with
the Romantic movement. The assumption
is
correct inasmuch as many motives of
Romantic
anti-capitalism — e. g., the struggle
against
the capitalist division of labour and
its
consequences for bourgeois culture
and morals
— played a considerable part in his
thinking.
The setting up of a past age as an
ideal
for the present age to realize also
belonged
to the intellectual armoury of Romantic
anti-capitalism.
Nietzsche’s activity, however, fell
within
the period after the proletariat’s
first
seizure of power, after the Paris Commune.
Crisis and dissolution, Romantic anti-capitalism’s
development into capitalist apologetics,
the fate of Carlyle during and after
the
1848 revolution — these already lay
far behind
Nietzsche in the dusty past. Thus the
young
Carlyle had contrasted capitalism’s
cruelty
and inhumanity with the Middle Ages
as an
epoch of popular prosperity, a happy
age
for those who laboured; whereas Nietzsche
began, as we have noted, by extolling
as
a model the ancient slave economy.
And so
the reactionary utopia which Carlyle
envisioned
after 1848 he also found naive and
long outdated.
Admittedly the aristocratic bias of
both
had similar social foundations: in
the attempt
to ensure the leading social position
of
the bourgeoisie and to account for
that position
philosophically. But the different
conditions
surrounding Nietzsche’s work lent to
his
aristocratic leanings a fundamentally
different
content and totally different colouring
from
that of Romantic anti-capitalism. True,
remnants
of Romanticism (from Schopenhauer,
Richard
Wagner) are still palpable in the young
Nietzsche.
But these he proceeded to overcome
as he
developed, even if — with regard to
the crucially
important method of indirect apologetics
— he still remained a pupil of Schopenhauer
and preserved as his basic concept
the irrational
one of the Dionysian principle (against
reason,
for instinct); but not without significant
modifications, as we shall see. Hence
an
increasingly energetic dissociation
from
Romanticism is perceptible in the course
of Nietzsche’s development. While the
Romantic
he identified more and more passionately
with decadence (of the bad kind), the
Dionysian
became a concept increasingly antithetical
to Romanticism, a parallel for the
surmounting
of decadence and a symbol of the ‘good’
kind
of decadence, the kind he approved.
With regard therefore to the philosophy
of
human behaviour (ethics, psychology
and social
philosophy always coalesce in Nietzsche),
he harked back to the epoch paving
the way
for bourgeois ascendancy, to the Renaissance,
French classicism and the Enlightenment.
These interests are important because
they
offered connecting links both for Nietzsche’s
admirers from the bourgeois Left, and
for
his updating in the service of ideological
preparations for a third imperialist
world
war. Kaufmann, for instance, treated
Nietzsche
as the consummator of great philosophy
after
Descartes (indeed after Aristotle),
intending
to depict him as carrying on the Enlightenment
traditions.[49] Having been apparently
compromised
by the Hitlerists’ enthusiasm, he was
— in
company with Hjalmar Schacht and General
Guderian — to be ‘denazified’ to suit
the
purposes of American imperialism.
The reader will have already observed
the
scientific worth of such essays from
our
previous quotation concerning Voltaire
and
Rousseau. Voltaire, whose work formed
a great
focal point for the mobilization of
all the
progressive forces of his age, was
— according
to Nietzsche — to become the spiritual
head
of the anti-revolutionary brigade.
And it
is extremely characteristic of this
so-called
link with the Enlightenment that Nietzsche,
seeking an analogy with Voltaire’s
conduct,
found one in the life of Schopenhauer
— who
was, he stated, ‘unsullied as no German
philosopher
before him, living and dying a Voltairean’.[50]
We are asked to believe that Voltaire,
who
used his world-wide fame effectively
to combat
the antediluvian feudal absolutism
of his
times, and who risked his neck to save
the
innocent victims of the clerical-absolutist
reactionary party (or at least to preserve
their memory), led a life comparable
to that
of Schopenhauer, whose only personal
conflict
involved a family squabble over his
inheritance;
who in 1848 offered the counter-revolutionary
officers his opera-glasses to help
them shoot
at those fighting on the barricades;
who
bequeathed part of his wealth to the
counter-revolution’s
disabled, etc. It is not, I think,
worth
adducing similar proof with respect
to all
Nietzsche’s supposed ties with earlier
progressive
traditions; to do so would be only
too easy.
It will suffice if we quote, in conclusion,
Nietzsche’s own comment about the relationship
of his ‘new Enlightenment’ to the ‘old’
for
Nietzsche, in contrast to his hypocritical
imperialist interpreters, expressed
his views
with a candour leaving nothing to be
desired.
He said: ‘... the old movement was
in the
spirit of the democratic herd: a universal
levelling. The new Enlightenment aims
at
showing dominant natures the way; inasmuch
as to these (as to the State), everything
is permitted that is barred to the
herd mentality.’[51]
Quite contrary to those commentators
who
sought to bring Nietzsche into close
alignment
with the Enlightenment, he actually
stood
— after the brief episode of relative
propinquity
in the ‘Democratic Phase’ we have examined
— at extreme loggerheads with such
Enlightenment
epigones as Mill, Guyau and others.
The inconsistent
development in the period of bourgeois
ideology’s
decline found expression in this conflict.
The Enlightenment itself, under the
illusion
that it was establishing the empire
of reason,
had opposed the theology and the irrationalism
of feudal traditions. The bourgeoisie’s
victory
in the great French Revolution meant
a realization
of these ideals, but the necessary
consequence
was, as Engels says,[52] that the empire
of reason proved to be the bourgeois
empire
idealized, with all its insoluble contradictions.
Marx says tellingly of the difference
between
Helvétius and Bentham: ‘Bentham only
reproduces
dully what Helvétius and other eighteenth-century
Frenchmen had expressed with wit.’[53]
The
contrast of wit and dullness was not
just
a matter of their respective talents,
however.
It illustrates two different stages
in the
development of capitalism and, accordingly,
in that of bourgeois ideology. Helvétius
was capable of wit because a clairvoyant
loathing of the decayed feudal-absolutist
society, the obscurantism of church
and religion,
and the ruling classes’ hypocrisy lent
wings
to his thinking. Bentham was bound
to grow
dull because he was doggedly defending
a
capitalism that had already triumphed,
and
to do this he had to overlook the most
significant
social phenomena or distort reality
with
the aid of rose-tinted spectacles.
With the
epigonal Bentham’s own epigones, the
positivists
Mill and Spencer, Comte and Guyau,
the bourgeoisie’s
further decline could only hasten this
tendency
to superficiality and dullness. Nietzsche,
in turn, could become witty once more
because,
as a result of his method of indirect
apologetics,
he commanded a wide field for ruthless
criticism,
especially in the cultural sphere.
From the
artistic character of such criticism
derived
his aesthetic preference for individual
Enlightenment
authors, and the French moralists in
particular.
But this professional, formal allegiance
must not be allowed to conceal the
ideological
antithesis in their basic lines of
thought.
Occasionally Nietzsche voiced these
contrasts
quite openly, as for instance when
— as early
as the time of Human, All-Too-Human
— he
discovered an ally of Christianity
in La
Rochefoucauld’s moral critique.[54]
The connecting link between Nietzsche’s
ethics
and those of the Enlightenment, the
French
moralists and so on is the fact that
they
all perceived in the egotism of the
‘capitalist’
individual the central phenomenon of
social
life. Since, however, they were writing
in
different periods, the historical development
of the class struggle produced qualitative
differences in content and indeed incompatible
elements in orientation and evaluation.
As
progressive ideologists of the era
leading
up to the bourgeois-democratic revolution,
the rationalists were bound to idealize
bourgeois
society and, first and foremost, the
social
functions of egotism. Without any knowledge,
for the most part, of classical British
economics
and often before they appeared, these
ideologists
expressed in their ethics Adam Smith’s
basic
economic tenet that the individual’s
economically
self-seeking actions are the mainspring
of
the productive forces’ development,
leading
necessarily, in the last resort, to
a harmonizing
of the collective interests of society.
(Here
we lack space even to outline the complicated
paradoxes occasioned by ‘theory of
utility’,
the ethics of ‘rational egotism’ which
flourished
in this soil among the Enlightenment’s
great
representatives.) It is clear, however,
that
after the Adam Smith doctrine had itself
foundered on the real facts of capitalism,
it could only be preserved in economics
in
the shape of popular economics (starting
with Say), and in ethics and sociology
in
the form of direct apologetics for
capitalism
(starting with Bentham). The Positivists’
dull-wittedness and eclecticism are
indicated
by, among other factors, their inability
to adopt an unequivocal line on the
question
of egotism. Their position amounted
to a
generally obfuscating ‘on the one hand
...
on the other hand’. Now if Nietzsche,
standing
for indirect apologetics, took up once
more
the question of whether to commend
egotism
— and we see that in his youth, this
policy
played an important role in the mythicizing
modernization of the agon and the ‘good
Eris’
— it was no longer, in his case, an
idealization
of a rising, still progressive, and
indeed
revolutionary, bourgeois society. He
was,
on the contrary, idealizing those egotistic
tendencies in the declining bourgeoisie
that
were burgeoning in his own lifetime
and became
truly, universally prevalent in the
imperialist
period. That is to say, it was the
egotism
of a class which, having been condemned
by
history to its doom, was mobilizing
all mankind’s
barbaric instincts in its desperate
struggles
with its grave-diggers, the proletariat,
and was founding its ‘ethics’ on these
instincts.
We know that in his so-called Voltaire
phase,
Nietzsche was for a short while closely
associated
with Paul Rée, a Positivist epigone
of Enlightenment
ethics, and even fell temporarily under
his
influence. Hence the motives behind
his rift
and critical controversy with Rée are
most
instructive with regard to our problem.
He
voiced them with unambiguous clarity:
‘I
challenge the idea that egotism is
harmful
and reprehensible: I want to give egotism
a clear conscience.’[55]
The chief task of Nietzsche’s mature
period,
then, was to extend the ethics (the
psychology
and, so Nietzsche thought, the physiology
as well) of this new egotism. In drafts
for
a sequel to Zarathustra he set out
perhaps
the most revealing programme for the
task.
And significantly, he began with his
aforementioned
definition of the ‘new Enlightenment’:
‘
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
Zarathustra: “I deprived you of everything,
a god, a duty — now you must provide
the
greatest proof of a noble action. For
here
is the open road for the impious —
behold!”
— A contest for dominance, with the
herd
still more of a herd in the end, and
the
tyrant still more of a tyrant. — No
secret
society! The consequences of your doctrine
must wreak fearful havoc: but countless
are
destined to perish from them. — We
are submitting
truth to an experiment! Maybe mankind
will
perish in the process! So be it!’[56]
To accomplish this upheaval, this ‘transvaluation
of all values’ new men were needed.
Nietzsche
intended his ethics to effect their
selection,
education, breeding. But this called
for
a liberation of the instincts before
all
else. In Nietzsche’s opinion, each
previous
religion, philosophy, morality, and
so forth,
had the function of opposing a liberation
of the instincts, of suppressing, neglecting
and perverting them. Only with his
own ethics
did the liberating process commence:
‘Every
sound morality is governed by a life
instinct
... Unnatural morality, i. e., nearly
every
morality that has been hitherto inculcated,
venerated and preached, is aimed, conversely,
directly against the vital instincts
— it
is a condemnation, sometimes clandestine
and sometimes loud and bold, of these
instincts.’[57]
Here Nietzsche emerges as a vigorous
critic
of ethics past and present, philosophical
and above all Kantian as well as Christian-theological.
Taking a purely formal view, one might
at
first glance assume that he had in
mind a
link with the great ethical ideas of
earlier
men, such as Spinoza’s doctrine of
the emotions.
But as soon as we consider content
and programmatic
bias in concrete terms, we see how
appearances
can deceived With Spinoza, the dialectics
of the conquest of one’s own emotions
were
an endeavour to project the ideal of
a harmonious,
humanistic, self-controlled social
being
through mastery over (not just the
suppression
of, as in Kant) mere instinct and the
anti-social
passions. With Nietzsche, on the contrary,
as we have seen already and will see
again
in more detail, we have a veritable
conception
of an unleashing of the instincts:
the declining
bourgeoisie, he maintained, had to
let loose
all that was bad and bestial in man
so as
to obtain militant activists who could
save
its dominion.
That is why the acknowledgement of
the criminal
type was so important to Nietzsche.
Here
too there is a surface affinity with
certain
tendencies in the earlier literature
of the
period of the bourgeois rise (the young
Schiller’s
Robbers, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas,
Pushkin’s
Dubrovsky, Balzac’s Vautrin, etc.),
but once
again with a radically different content.
At that time, the injustices of feudal-absolutist
society were driving high-principled
men
into crime, and the study of such criminals
constituted an attack on that society.
Granted,
Nietzsche too was bent on attacking.
But
where he put the emphasis was on deforming
a specific human type, on transforming
it
into the criminal type. And his chief
concern
was to give even the criminal a clear
conscience
and thus to cancel out his degeneration
and
make him a member of the new élite.
In The
Twilight of the Idols he stated: ‘The
criminal
type is the strong type under unfavourable
conditions, a strong man rendered sickly.
What he lacks is the jungle, a certain
freer
and more dangerous form of nature and
existence
where all that serves as arms and armour
— in the strong man’s instinctive view
—
is his by right. His virtues society
has
prohibited; the liveliest impulses
he has
borne within him are quickly entangled
with
the crushing emotions of suspicion,
fear
and ignominy.’[58] And then in The
Will to
Power, the necessary, organic connection
between greatness, in Nietzsche’s sense,
and criminality (which means belonging
to
the criminal type) was distinctly stated:
‘In our civilized world we are almost
solely
acquainted with the stunted criminal,
weighed
down by society’s curse and contempt,
mistrusting
himself, often belittling and calumniating
his own deed, a failed criminal type;
and
we find it repugnant to think that
all great
men were criminals (but in the grand
manner,
not miserably) and that crime belongs
to
greatness ...’[59]
Here already Nietzsche has very plainly
raised
and answered the question of ‘sickness’
and
‘health’, so central to his mature
philosophy.
If we complement these statements with
a
further one from his drafts for his
final
works, it will not be for the sake
of comprehensiveness,
for we could devote many more pages
to such
quotations. We shall do so because
many of
Nietzsche’s interpreters, especially
in recent
times, have been eager to water down
all
his tendencies towards the revival
of barbarity,
glorification of the white terror and
moral
sanction of cruelty and bestiality
— eager
indeed to eliminate them from his works.
Often they give one the impression
that the
‘blond beast’ is only a harmless metaphor
within a delicate cultural critique.
To counter
such distortions we must always refer
back
to Nietzsche himself whop in all such
matters,
— and in this he was a sincere thinker,
no
hypocrite or sneak — wrote with a downright
cynical candour. Thus he stated in
the aforesaid
passage: ‘Beasts of prey and the primeval
forest show that depravity can be very
healthy
and works wonders for the body. Were
the
predatory species beset by inner torments,
they would have become stunted and
degenerate
long ago. The dog (which moans and
whines
so much) is a degenerate predator,
and so
is the cat. Innumerable good-natured,
depressed
people are the living proof that kindliness
is connected with a lessening of vital
powers:
their feelings of anxiety predominate
and
govern their organisms.’[60] As we
shall
see, the biological language too is
in complete
accord with the mature Nietzsche’s
basic
philosophical bias. But this terminology
only serves a mythicizing purpose,
for the
beast of prey’s ‘depravity’ is of course
a myth attendant on the imperialist
glorification
of the bad instincts.
All this contains an explicit avowal
of belief
in a revival of barbarity as the means
of
saving mankind. (It is irrelevant that
in
his early writings, and occasionally
later,
Nietzsche also used the word ‘barbarity’
in a pejorative sense; in such instances
he meant cultural philistinism, narrow-mindedness
in general.) Nietzsche stated in the
same
drafts that ‘today we are tired of
civilization’.[61]
In even Nietzsche’s eyes, to be sure,
this
would simply be chaos, a state of decadence.
But it is interesting to observe the
constant
growth of his optimism concerning the
future
as he foresaw it. Where was the way
out of
the chaos? Here again Nietzsche gave
an unequivocally
clear reply: the era of ‘great politics’,
wars and revolutions would compel men
(i.
e., the ruling class) to reverse their
course.
The crucial signs of this saving transformation
would appear in no other guise than
that
of the revival of barbarity. We have
already
quoted several important comments by
Nietzsche
on this subject in the previous paragraph.
Admirers of the ‘purified’ Nietzsche
have
been hard put to unite his sanctioning
of
barbarity with an often subtle and
rarefied
cultural critique. But we can easily
dispose
of this dichotomy. In the first place,
the
union of ultra-refinement and brutality
was
by no means a personal quirk requiring
psychological
elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral
distinguishing mark of imperialist
decadence.
I have demonstrated the kinship of
these
contrasting qualities in other contexts
in
the oeuvre of Rilke, who practised
a far
greater refinement still.[62] Secondly,
in
the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche gave
an
excellent description of the type he
favoured.
Unlike the passages previously quoted,
it
not only reveals its psychology and
ethics,
but also sheds much light on the subterranean
class basis of this contrasting duality
and
unity. Here Nietzsche examined pairs
of moral
opposites: the aristocratic concept
of good
and bad, and the concept of good and
evil
dictated by plebeian disapproval. And
to
the question of how the concept of
evil arose
he replied as follows:
To answer with all severity: it is
precisely
the other code’s ‘good man’, noble,
powerful
and dominant, only given a different
hue,
meaning and perspective by malicious,
resentful
eyes. Here we are glad to admit that
anyone
getting to know those ‘good men’ only
as
enemies would find them evil enemies
indeed.
The very men whom etiquette, respectful
feelings,
custom and gratitude keep strictly
within
the pale, as do mutual surveillance
and jealousy
to an even greater extent, who, on
the other
hand, prove so resourceful in consideration,
self-control, tact, loyalty, pride
and friendship
— once estranged from these confines,
they
will behave little better than predatory
beasts at large. For then they will
enjoy
a freedom from all social constraints;
out
in the jungle they are immune from
the tensions
caused by long incarceration and domesticating
in the calm of the community. They
step back
into the wild animal’s state of innocence,
the kind of exuberant monsters that
might
quit a horrible scene of murder, arson,
rape
and torture with the high humour and
equanimity
appropriate to a student prank. They
would
do so in the conviction that the poets
would
have plenty to celebrate again. Behind
all
these noble breeds there is no mistaking
the beast of prey, the magnificent
blond
beast in greedy search of spoils and
conquest
... It is the noble races that have
left
the word ‘barbarian’ in their tracks
wherever
they prowled; even their highest culture
betrays this awareness and their pride
in
the fact.[63]
To sum up: we find aesthetic, moral
and cultural
refinement within the ruling class,
brutality,
cruelty, barbarity towards ‘the alien
element’,
i. e., the oppressed and those it means
to
oppress. As we see, the young Nietzsche’s
enthusiasm about slavery in ancient
times
remained a constant — indeed constantly
heightened
— motive of his philosophical work.
To be
sure, a romantic element thus entered
into
his ‘prophetic’ anticipation of the
imperialist
future. For Nietzsche’s prototype,
for instance
the slave-holding and culturally refined
Pericles, adapts itself most awkwardly
to
such persons as Hitler and Göring,
McCarthy
and Ridgway. Apologetic aims aside,
his ignorance
of the socio-economic differences between
two ages necessarily led to this romantic
idealism. Certainly it is no coincidence
that Nietzsche lapsed into romantic
fatuity
in this particular area; after all,
it is
the main problem in his philosophizing.
Nietzsche’s
cultural concern was definitely not
just
the bait for the decadent intelligentsia,
but always occupied a central place
in his
life, emotions and thoughts. In challenging
cultural decline and in trying to pioneer
a future revival he was no doubt sincere
in his own mind, albeit personally
sincere
from an extremely reactionary class
standpoint.
In this light the romantic dream of
a culturally
highly-developed ruling stratum, representing
at the same time an indispensable barbarity,
takes on a special colouring. And the
subjective
sincerity of this false prophetship
was itself
an important source of Nietzsche’s
fascination
for the parasitic intelligentsia of
the imperialist
period. With his assistance it was
able to
conceal its cowardice, compliance with
imperialism’s
most repugnant forms and mortal fear
of the
proletarian revolution behind the mask
of
a ‘concern about culture’.
But we can leave this subject and still
find
ourselves at the heart of Nietzsche’s
philosophy.
Superficial commentaries have interpreted
his ‘Superman’ as a biologically more
highly
developed form of man, a view which
certain
remarks in Zarathustra tend to support.
But
in the Anti-Christ Nietzsche very firmly
disavowed such a reading: ‘Not what
is to
supersede man in the biological series
is
the problem which I am now posing (man
is
an end), but what type of man we should
be
breeding, willing into existence, a
superior
being more worthy of life and more
assured
of a future. This superior type has
already
dwelt among us frequently enough, but
as
a stroke of good fortune, an exception,
and
never something willed.’[64] But in
this
case the ‘Superman’ is identical with
the
‘lords of the earth’ and the ‘blond
beast’
whose barbaric morality we have just
examined.
Nietzsche plainly indicates that this
type
has repeatedly existed in isolation,
seeking
deliberately to make the rearing of
it the
focal point of the social will of the
ruling
class.
With this construction, Nietzsche foreshadowed
in the most concrete fashion possible
both
Hitler’s fascism and the moral ideology
of
the ‘American age’. And likewise, the
fact
that barbarity and bestiality are the
very
essence of such ‘Supermen’ was plainly
stated
in The Will to Power: ‘Man is a brute
and
super-brute; the higher man is the
monster
and Superman: thus the two go together.
Whenever
man adds to his greatness and stature
he
also increases in lowness and fearsomeness.
The one is not to be desired without
the
other — or rather, the more thoroughly
you
want the one, the more thoroughly you
will
achieve the other.’[65]
What Nietzsche provided here was a
morality
for the socially militant bourgeoisie
and
middle-class intelligentsia of imperialism.
In this he again occupied a unique
historical
position. From the objective, social
angle,
there had of course been a morality
of the
class struggle in bourgeois ideology
from
the beginning. But during the campaign
against
feudal absolutism it had a universal
human,
universally humanitarian character.
Because
of this bias it was progressive in
its main
orientation. The abstract generalizing
—
which, as regards facts, often distorted
the problems — had its own social justification
too, since it was a reflection of actual
class conditions, albeit one that never
attained
to proper consciousness. For, on the
one
hand, the bourgeoisie at this time
was truly
the spearhead of all those classes
challenging
the feudal remnants of absolutism,
and thus
had a certain right to identify its
own interests
with those of social evolution considered
as a whole. Admittedly this was only
so up
to a point. Conflicts of policy, for
example
within the Enlightenment, clearly show
that
a differentiation within the ‘third
estate’
had already set in, at least on the
ideological
plane, before the French Revolution;
typically
for this social situation, each faction
claimed
to represent the common interests of
society
(Holbach, Helvétius, Diderot, Rousseau).
And, on the other hand, those who were
acting
as the spokes men for collective capitalist
interests were equally able to declare
themselves
for this commonalty with a certain
subjectively
sincere, and relatively justified,
pathos.
For they also identified it with society,
as opposed to the isolated endeavours
of
individual capitalists or capitalist
sectors
(among such spokesmen were Ricardo
and moralists
like Mandeville or Ferguson).
In the nineteenth century this relative
justification,
and the subjectively sincere pathos
in which
it found expression, both ceased to
exist.
True, capitalist ideologists spoke
ever more
volubly of society’s collective interests
and the universal principles of progress
and humanism. But such talk was growing
increasingly
apologetic and dissembling, becoming
more
and more obliged to hush up, gloss
over and
misrepresent the actual facts of social
life
and their immanent contradictions.
The clash
of class interests between bourgeoisie
and
proletariat in particular was disappearing
from these treatises, and doing so
to precisely
the degree that it was moving towards
the
centre of social events in objective
reality.
The ethics of Nietzsche which we have
briefly
outlined have the historical significance
that they are exclusively a morality
of the
ruling, oppressing and exploiting class,
a morality whose content and method
were
determined by this explicitly militant
position.
Here Nietzsche’s extension of indirect
apologetics
in the ethical domain took concrete
shape,
and two elements need stressing in
particular.
The first point is that even here Nietzsche
defended capitalism through apologetics
on
behalf of its ‘bad sides’. Whereas
the popular
fellow-apologists, concentrating on
an idealization
of capitalist man, strove to dismiss
all
capitalism’s darker aspects and contradictions,
Nietzsche’s writings centred exactly
on what
was problematic about capitalist society,
on everything that was bad in it. Of
course
he too went in for idealizing; but
what he
emphasized with his ironic criticism
and
poeticizing pathos were the capitalist’s
egotistic, barbaric and bestial features,
seen as attributes of a type desirable
for
the good of mankind (i. e., capitalism).
Thus Nietzsche likewise spoke of mankind’s
interests and identified them with
capitalism.
However, and this is the second point
to
be stressed, unlike the neo-Kantians
or Positivists,
etc., Nietzsche had absolutely no wish
to
establish a morality valid for all.
On the
contrary, his ethics were expressly
and consciously
an exclusive code of the ruling class:
beside
it and below it there was a qualitatively
differing morality — that of the oppressed
— which Nietzsche passionately rejected
and
opposed. The conflict between two moral
codes
which, although changing according
to historical
conditions, in essence stood for two
permanent
types of morality, determined all the
crucial
historical questions to Nietzsche’s
way of
thinking. His ethics thereby acknowledged
the fact of the class struggle to a
certain
extent, again in violent contrast to
direct
apologetics, which sought to banish
the whole
idea or at least to lower its moral
tone
with the very weapon of a code eternally
valid for all. Nor would Nietzsche
tolerate
such a toning down; once again he levelled
against his age the criticism that
democracy
was blunting the struggle between masters
and mob, and that the master-race morality
was making too many concessions to
slave
morality. In his campaign against socialism,
therefore, Nietzsche did come to recognize
up to a point the fact of the class
struggle
as underlying the nature and transformation
of all morality.
Far be it from us to suggest that he
had
even partially enlightened views about
classes
and the class struggle. Without a doubt,
the class struggle appeared to Nietzsche
to be a conflict between higher and
lower
races. This formulation, of course,
already
points towards the fascist takeover
of bourgeois
ideology. All those seeking to absolve
Nietzsche
from any connection with Hitler now
cling
to the assertion that his racial concept
was utterly different from the Gobineau
Chamberlain-Rosenberg
view. And unquestionably there is indeed
a considerable difference. This holds
good
in spite of the fact that Nietzsche
too gave
his social categories a ‘biological’
basis,
that his ethics take as their premise
and
seek to prove a supposedly radical
and permanent
inequality between men, and that the
racial
theories of Nietzsche and Gobineau
fundamentally
agree, therefore, in their moral and
social
conclusions. They differ in that the
supremacy
of the ‘Aryan’ race carried no weight
with
Nietzsche. Understanding master races
and
slave races only in a very general
and mythicized
sense, he took into account only ethico-social
considerations. Hence in this respect
he
was a direct forerunner of Spengler
rather
than Rosenberg. [66] Today, however,
the
stressing of this difference is only
a means
of ‘denazifying’ Nietzsche. Since,
as we
have noted, Nietzsche drew the same
barbaric
imperialist conclusions from a racial
theory
as did Rosenberg from Chamberlain’s,
the
difference is — to borrow Lenin’s phrase
— merely that between a yellow devil
and
a blue one. We must also remember that
the
obfuscating and disordering of the
social
sciences in the imperialist age proceeded
largely along the lines of racial theory
(race replacing class). And in this
area,
too, Nietzsche gave rise to the same
obscurantist
irrationalism as Gobineau or H. S.
Chamberlain.
Nietzsche’s ethics further differ from
those
of the idealist and Positivist epigones
in
that he treated problems of the individual
as inseparable from social problems.
Questions
which play a decisive part in, for
instance,
neo-Kantian thought, such as those
of legality
and morality, never even occur in his
work.
To be sure, he was undertaking not
a practical
deduction of individual morals from
concrete
social conditions, but an intuitive,
irrational
association of highly personal psychological
and moral problems with a society and
a history
transferred to mythical realms. But
just
this philosophical approach — deliberately
witty in form, in content serving the
permanent
interests of the most reactionary monopoly
capitalism — is one of the most important
reasons for Nietzsche’s lasting influence
in the imperialist period. Neo-Kantians
(and
also neo-Hegelians) too often derived
their
propositions from the age of ‘security’
and
too openly aimed at consolidating capitalism
for them to be of any real use to the
bourgeoisie
in the great new ages of global crisis
and
revolution. On the other hand, those
decadent-intellectual
movements which had many affinities
with
Nietzsche, and which often were in
some measure
influenced by him (Gide’s acte gratuit,
existentialism,
etc.), proceeded all too exclusively
and
narrowly from the ideological needs
of the
individualistic, parasitic intelligentsia.
While expressing a nihilism similar
to Nietzsche’s,
though at a still higher pitch of inner
disintegration,
they were however much more limited
and specific
in their propositions and conclusions.
They
lent themselves more readily to a philosophy
of the ‘third way’ than to a philosophy
of
the reactionary avant-garde. Just this
union
of an ingeniously decadent individualism
with an imperialist commonalty of reactionary
hue — a union full of tensions and
paradoxes
— decided the duration of Nietzsche’s
influence
in the imperialist age and caused it
to survive
particularities.
For similar reasons Nietzsche’s influence
outstripped those equally resolute
reactionaries
who resorted to more direct methods
(e. g.,
the Pan-Germans, reactionaries in the
mould
of Treitschke). Whereas the latter
found
their starting-point in the type of
the ‘normal’
petty bourgeois, Nietzsche took his
from
the type of the decadent intellectual.
The
moral disintegration of bourgeois and
petty
bourgeois, which became increasingly
marked
as imperialist economics and politics
gained
ground, confirmed the ‘prophetic’ foresight
of Nietzsche’s ethics. And his lasting
influence
had not a little to do with the fact
that
he went a long way towards catering
for the
needs of the decadent wing. He brought
up
questions from within its sphere of
interests,
answered them in its own spirit. Above
all
he commended and encouraged its decadent
instincts, professing that this was
just
the way to conquer decadence. Hence
Nietzsche’s
‘dialectics’ in this respect lay in
a simultaneous
acceptance and rejection of the decadent
movement, whereby he could enable the
militant
reactionaries to reap the benefits.
For his
own part, Nietzsche gave his blessing
to
these dialectics; in his Ecce homo
he said:
‘For granted that I am a décadent,
I am also
the antithesis.’[67]
This antithesis is represented in the
ethics
of barbarism which we have portrayed
above.
And Nietzsche turned the whole problem
of
decadence firmly on its head when he
defined
as its most important sign the view
that
‘we are fed up with egotism’.[68] For
patently
the predominance of individualist-egotistic
propensities over social ones was among
the
movement’s most significant features.
But
it was possible for Nietzsche to ‘salve’
the decadents, i. e., to induce in
them absolute
self-confidence and give them a clear
conscience
without fundamentally altering their
psychological-moral
structure. And he did so precisely
by suggesting
that they were not over-egotistic but
rather
lacking in egotism, and that they must
—
with a good conscience — become more
egotistic
still.
Now we can also clearly discern the
‘social
task’ which we mentioned initially,
namely
that of diverting discontented intellectuals
from socialism and driving them towards
reactionary
extremes. Whereas socialism called
for both
an outward and an inward change of
position
(a break with one s own class plus
a reform
of personal attitudes), no radical
reform
was needed to conquer decadence in
the manner
Nietzsche proclaimed. One could go
on as
before (with fewer inhibitions and
a clearer
conscience) and feel oneself to be
much more
revolutionary than the socialists.
And an
additional point is the socio-historical
nature of Nietzsche’s answers in his
ethics.
The chief manifestations of decadence
he
perceived quite correctly: ‘What does
nihilism
signify? — That the highest values
are depreciated.
A goal is absent; an answer is absent
to
the question “Why?” ’[69] It is on
this very
point that the ‘Superman’, the ‘lords
of
the earth’ and company provided the
decadent
intellectual of the imperialist age
with
the perspective he needed and hitherto
lacked.
This handful of examples may suffice
to illuminate
the methodology behind Nietzsche’s
relationship
to the intelligentsia, one of the most
important
sources of his lasting influence. We
could
give umpteen examples, but they would
add
nothing basically new. By actively
serving
the most extreme imperialist forces
of reaction
(Hitler’s), decadence ‘overcame’ itself
and
became ‘healthy’ without having undergone
any inner change beyond releasing its
worst
instincts, instincts that were previously
half or wholly suppressed.
4
Only if we proceed from Nietzsche’s
ethics
can we comprehend his attitude to what
are
called the ‘ultimate questions’ of
philosophy,
to religious belief or unbelief. As
is widely
known, Nietzsche declared a fervent
allegiance
to atheism; and with the same fervour
he
denounced all religions, but especially
Christianity.
That was of great importance for his
influence
on the intelligentsia, large sections
of
which were increasingly breaking away
from
the old religions. Nonetheless, as
we have
shown in the case of Schopenhauer,
the resultant
movement split up into quite different
directions.
On the one hand, we have an atheism
truly
materialist in character and based
primarily
on the development of natural sciences.
This,
although Darwinian theory gave it a
strong
temporary impetus (E. Haeckel), always
exhibited
major weaknesses on account of its
inability
to provide a materialist explanation
for
social (and hence moral, political,
etc.)
phenomena. Bounded by a narrowly bourgeois
horizon, it usually remained in perpetual
oscillation between pessimism and apologetics
with regard to such questions. There
can
be no question of a widespread influence
of dialectical and historical materialism
upon the bourgeois classes; even within
the
workers’ parties its significance —
except
in Russia — was continually played
down through
philosophical revisionism in the imperialist
age. ‘Religious atheism’, on the other
hand,
was constantly gaining in strength.
It had
the function of satisfying the religious
need of those classes that had broken
with
positive religions, and it did so in
the
form of polemics against them which
became
very forceful at times. This accounts
for
the semblance of an ‘independent’,
‘non-conformist’,
indeed ‘revolutionary’ attitude in
its adherents.
But at the same time, it had to preserve
the vague religiosity that mattered
to the
survival of capitalist society. Thus
‘religious
atheism’ is another manifestation of
indirect
apologetics.
Occupying a special position in this
development,
Nietzsche carried religious atheism
far beyond
the Schopenhauerian stage. We see this
from
a negative angle above all in the fact
that
Nietzsche transformed the argument
of his
atheism into myth to an even greater
extent
than was the case with Schopenhauer’s
Buddhism.
He dissociated himself more strongly
still
from the connection with the natural
sciences,
and his views ran increasingly and
more deliberately
counter to ‘vulgar’ (scientifically
based
equals materialistically based) atheism.
A famous passage in the Joyful Science
states
that God is dead, indeed that men have
murdered
him.[70] That is to say that there
used to
be a God, only he no longer exists
today.
Thus Nietzsche was expressly arguing
that
atheism is not a result of the incompatibility
of our scientifically acquired world-view
with the idea of God (in which event
the
new knowledge would have retrospective
validity
for the past). On the contrary, he
asserted,
it is the moral conduct of men in our
time
that rules out the existence of God,
which
hitherto accorded with it and found
a veritable
support in it — to be sure, Nietzsche
was
here referring to the long dominance
of slave
morals (Christianity). Nietzsche’s
atheism
had therefore a pronounced tendency
to base
itself exclusively upon ethics. And
these,
as we have noted, meant to him both
the philosophy
of history and social philosophy. On
occasion
he voiced this thought quite clearly:
‘The
refutation of God: to tell the truth,
we
are only refuting the moral God.’[71]
No doubt traces of Feuerbach are visible
in this conception. The contrasts,
however,
appear of far greater moment than the
similarities.
For with the materialist Feuerbach,
the idea
of God (and God for him is never more
than
a human concept) was causally derived
from
man’s real being. Nietzsche, on the
other
hand, laid down only an ineluctable
reciprocal
relationship between specific moral
forms
of human behaviour and mankind’s gods.
Whether
such gods existed independently of
man’s
imagining or were only projected figments
of this imagining remained — true to
the
essence of Nietzsche’s method, the
creating
of myths — deliberately obscure. Granted,
the connecting threads are not limited
to
a mere concrete co-existence — unexplained
as far as Nietzsche is concerned. Nietzsche
took over from Feuerbach the weakest,
most
ideological side of his philosophizing:
that
which assumed that the change in men’s
religious
ideas constituted the most important
and
decisive part of history. Even here,
though,
there is the significant difference
that
for Feuerbach the man-God relationship,
while
stemming from life, was in character
a product
of thought and contemplation, whereas
for
Nietzsche the essential determining
factor
of the relation ship was to be found
in men’s
social actions, in their morality.
As our detailed study of Nietzsche’s
ethics
has demonstrated, he linked atheism
— saying
that Zarathustra had deprived men of
God
— with the new ethics of ‘All is permitted’.
The killing of God was only one means
of
liberating men from the restraints
acquired
in the course of millennia and turning
them
into those immoralists which the tyrannic
ally ruling class of the future was
to become
in opposition to the herd. When Nietzsche
happened to touch on the theme of ‘Back
to
nature’ he at once stressed the contrast
with Rousseau. For Nietzsche, there
is only
one way that some thing purposeful
can come
of this: ‘nature, i. e., daring to
be as
immoral as nature’.[72] And it would
be equally
false to draw a parallel between such
passages
and Hobbes’s natural state, for the
latter
was concerned with the starting-point
of
man’s development, with a ‘Whence?’,
whereas
Nietzsche’s concern was the goal to
be realized,
the ‘Whither?’. So here again we may
clearly
observe the contrast with the Enlightenment,
with which individual commentators
have tried
to associate Nietzsche because of his
atheism.
In the Enlightenment, the idea was
to prove
that belief in God might not signify
any
kind of moral imperative for mankind,
that
the moral laws would operate in a society
of atheists just as much as in one
where
religious patronage held sway (Bayle).
Nietzsche,
on the contrary, wanted to show that
the
demise of the idea of God (or the death
of
God) would entail a moral renaissance
in
the sense we have noted above. Apart,
therefore,
from the other ethical contradictions
in
the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Enlightenment,
about
which we again already know Nietzsche’s
opinion,
we find another contrast here in respect
of the socio-ethical role of religion.
The
‘old’ Enlightenment regarded the religious
concept as irrelevant to men’s morality,
actions, views etc., which in reality
were
adequately determined by a combination
of
society and men’s reason. On the other
hand,
Nietzsche — and here he far exceeded
all
Feuerbach’s weaknesses in the realm
of historico-philosophical
idealism — regarded the switch to atheism
as a turning-point for morality. (At
this
point let us just briefly remark that
here
Nietzsche’s world-view is very close
to certain
tendencies in Dostoievsky. Since he
had only
read the Notes from the Underground,
the
Memoirs from a House of the Dead and
The
Insulted and Injured, and none of Dostoievsky’s
major novels,[73] the parallels in
the relationship
of religious atheism and morality appear
all the more striking.)
The extremely subjective and idealistic
character
of Nietzsche’s atheism needs stressing
immediately
because on the most important philosophical
questions, he continually and effectively
stood against idealism. Later, when
we discuss
the close affinity of his epistemology
with
that of Mach and Avenarius, we shall
see
how Nietzsche, like these, attacked
idealism
passionately but mendaciously in order
to
mask his principal campaign against
materialism.
He was always striving to give the
impression
that his philosophy represented something
new, a ‘third solution’ contrasting
with
idealism as well as materialism. In
the circumstances
we deem it necessary to point out the
striking
parallels which also exist between
Nietzsche
and Mach on the question of God. Just
as,
for example, the Russian Machists (Lunacharsky,
etc.) gave currency to an interpretation
of religious atheism as the search
for a
‘new god’, as the creation of a god,
thus
drawing from the Nietzschean death
of God
the inference of his possible resurrection
in a new form, so too did Nietzsche
himself.
Here too his position is contradictory,
opalescent.
On the one hand, we read in his Zarathustra
notes: ‘You call it God’s self-dissolution:
but it is only his fleecing — he is
peeling
off his moral skin! And you shall soon
see
him again, beyond good and evil.’[74]
And
later, in The Will to Power: ‘Again
we say:
how many new gods are still possible!’
Here,
to be sure, Nietzsche is expressing
his own
doubts under Zarathustra’s hat, and
Zarathustra
is ‘merely an ancient atheist believing
in
neither old nor new gods’. But he ended
the
train of thought with the words: ‘A
God-type
corresponding to the type of the “great
men’s”
creative minds.’[75] These comments
suffice
to give a clear indication of the whole
nature
and historical position of Nietzsche’s
atheism.
But in his last writings, on the other
hand,
the antagonist he Conceived to Christianity
and the Crucified is not a world liberated
from all gods, not atheism or at least
not
only that, but also — as we shall later
observe
in detail — the new god, Dionuso?.
So, then, this kind of ‘radical’ atheism
blurs all religion’s dividing lines
and —
within specific limits which we are
coming
to — offers an open house to the most
diverse
religious tendencies. Here again the
uniqueness
of Nietzsche’s influence stands out:
what
he created was a blanket ideology for
all
the imperialist age’s firmly reactionary
tendencies. Socially and hence ethically,
his mythos was quite unequivocal. In
every
other respect, however, it was wrapped
in
a mental haze which admitted of any
interpretation
one chose; and this lack of intellectual
definition did not take away the immediate
suggestive power of Nietzsche’s symbols.
That is why it was equally possible
to find
in Nietzsche a prop for the (fascist)
myth
of ‘one’s own kind’ as opposed to the
‘foreign’
(Christian) myth, as Baeumler[76] does,
and
to bring his ‘radical’ atheism into
an amicable
rapport with Christianity itself. This
Nietzsche’s
sister tried from the start to achieve
by
heavy-handed Pan-Germanic methods;
later
minds found for the same bent a stylistically
more refined expression. Thus Jaspers,
for
instance, writes of Nietzsche’s relationship
to Christianity: ‘Although we may reproach
Nietzsche with atheism and point to
his “Anti-Christ”,
Nietzsche’s atheism is not a flat straightforward
denial of God, nor is it the indifference
of a man so far from God, and so far
from
seeking him out, that God does not
exist.
The very manner in which Nietzsche
decrees
for his age that “God is dead” conveys
his
emotion ... And even when he ... is
straightforward
to the point of a radical No to all
faith
in God whatsoever, Nietzsche is still
remarkably
close to Christianity: “It is after
all the
best piece of idealism with which I
have
really become familiar: since childhood
I
have pursued it into many nooks and
crannies,
and I believe I have never dealt it
an unfair
blow at heart” ’ (to Peter Gast, 21
July
1881).[77] And for a contemporary American
such as Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s conformity
with Christianity outweighs his departures
from it.
All these seemingly very marked contradictions
are resolved if we consider more closely
the socio-ethical content of Nietzsche’s
anti-Christian polemics. Here too we
must
refrain from taking tone and style
as our
criterion, or else we could easily
say with
Baeumler: ‘He felt with acute clarity
that
his own position was infinitely bolder,
infinitely
more perilous than that of the eighteenth-century
Church’s most daring rationalist opponents.’[78]
This paradox is not hard to account
for.
Even in the case of Voltaire, no atheist,
the Enlightenment’s attack on the Church
was chiefly directed against the real
central
pillar of feudal absolutism. And hence
its
content embraced every area of human
life
and thought; it extended from the most
general
questions of philosophy and epistemology
to the fields of ethics and aesthetics.
Nietzsche’s
polemics, on the other hand, railed
exclusively
against the putative ideological forerunners
of democracy and socialism, against
the spokesmen
for slave morality. The whole struggle
against
Christianity thereby took on a very
narrow
and firmly reactionary character, but
apart
from that, it also lost its social
reality.
The Enlightenment was challenging the
real
ideological pillar of absolute monarchy;
but was Nietzsche not berating ideologies
and institutions that were actually
his best
allies in his central campaign against
socialism
and democracy? Of course there are
elements
in Christian teaching, and occasional
proclivities
in the development of Christian religion,
where the idea of the equality of all
human
beings — which Nietzsche hated — finds
powerful
expression. But the churches’ development,
and also that of the dominant religious
mood,
tends towards completely disarming
that idea
in the social sphere by so interpreting
it
that it lends itself perfectly to the
system
of exploitation and oppression currently
obtaining, and to supporting the resultant
inequality. That is the social basis
of the
reason why Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
was
just as assiduous as Jaspers or Kaufmann
in detecting links between Nietzsche
and
Christianity or the Christian Church.
And
in this they are absolutely right from
the
social angle, for the political praxis
of
the Pope, Cardinal Spellman, etc.,
has been
in total agreement with the Nietzschean
ethics
we have outlined. The fact that the
theoretical-ethical
declarations accompanying this praxis
hardly
bear Nietzsche’s frankly cynical tone
is
a secondary point compared with the
essential
unanimity. Hitlerian propaganda, on
the other
hand, could directly exploit just this
side
of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity.
We may now confine ourselves to the
brief
citing of several crucial passages
from Nietzsche’s
works. They distinctly show that the
theme
we have emphasized was not one picked
at
random from others of equal value,
but the
very core of Nietzsche’s anti-Christianity.
We shall begin by quoting some concluding
sentences of Ecce homo. Significantly,
all
that comes afterwards is the antithesis
which
was decisive for Nietzsche at the close
of
his career: ‘Dionysos versus the Crucified’.
It is equally characteristic that the
passage
about to be quoted ends with Voltaire’s
phrase
‘écrasez l’infâme!’ Precisely this
passage
illustrates in the grossest way the
extreme
contrast between that which Voltaire
wanted
to abolish in Christianity, and that
which
Nietzsche thought should be abolished.
Nietzsche
wrote as follows:
The discovery of Christian morals is
an event
without parallel, a veritable catastrophe
... The concept of God, devised as
a rival
concept to life — it makes a horrible
union
of everything harmful, poisonous and
deceitful,
the whole deathly conspiracy against
life!
The concept of the Beyond and the true
world,
invented to devalue the only world
that there
is — leaving no purpose, reason or
task for
for earth-reality! The concept of soul,
spirit
and, to cap it all, immortal soul,
invented
to pour scorn on the body and to make
it
sick — ‘holy’ ... The concept of sin,
invented
along with the instrument of torture
attaching
to it, the concept of free will, so
as to
bemuse the instincts and make one’s
distrust
of them second nature! In the concept
of
selflessness, self-denial: the real
mark
of décadence, the process of being
enticed
by what is harmful, the inability to
see
one’s purpose any more, self-destruction
being made the very sign of one’s worth,
a duty, a thing that is ‘sacred’ and
‘divine’
in man! Finally — the most dreadful
thing
of all — in the concept of the good
person,
supporting all that is feeble, sick,
botched,
the own cause of its suffering, all
that
is intended to perish — the law of
selection
con founded, an ideal born of gainsaying
the proud and well-fashioned man, yea-saying,
confident, guardian of the future —
this
man is now called the evil one ...
And all
this passed for morality! — ‘écrasez
l’infâme!’[79]
This hate-inspired lyrical effusion
finds
the requisite factual, ethico-social
and
historical rounding-out in Nietzsche’s
Anti-Christ,
which also appeared in his last period.
We
do not need direct quotation to show
that
here Nietzsche, from first to last,
was trying
to make the idea of human equality
intellectually
contemptible and to wipe it out: that
was
his basic aim throughout his career.
Let
us just point out once more that Nietzsche
never, of course, rejected equality
out of
general ethical considerations; his
attitude
was the direct result of his stance
with
regard to democracy, revolution and
socialism,
which to his mind were necessary fruits
of
the dominion of Christianity. Nietzsche
wrote:
‘And let us not underestimate the destiny
that has crept all the way from Christianity
into politics! Today, nobody has any
longer
the courage of special rights, or rights
of command, or a sense of respect towards
oneself and one’s peers — a pathos
of distance
... Our politics are sick through this
absence
of courage! The fib of the equality
of souls
undermined the aristocratic outlook
in the
most insidious way; and while faith
in the
“prerogative of the most” is making
and will
make revolutions — it is Christianity,
let
there be no mistake about it, and it
is Christian
judgements that turn every revolution
into
mere crime and bloodshed! Christianity
is
the revolt of all grovelling creatures
against
that which has stature: the gospel
of the
“lowly” makes for lowliness ...’[80]
And
as a kind of historico-typological
rider
to this statement he added somewhat
later:
‘The pathological limitation of his
perception
turns a man of conviction into a fanatic
— Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre,
Saint-Simon — the opposite type to
the strong
mind, the mind become free. But the
grand
attitude struck by these sick minds,
these
intellectual epileptics, acts upon
the broad
masses — fanatics are picturesque,
and mankind
would rather see gestures than hear
arguments
...’[81] The basic thinking is patent:
out
of Christianity came the French Revolution,
out of this came democracy, and out
of this
came socialism. When, therefore, Nietzsche
takes his stand as an atheist, the
truth
is that he is out to destroy socialism.
5
In Nietzsche’s polemics against Christianity,
as indeed in all his social and ethical
writings,
the naive reader will gain the impression
that all these phenomena are being
examined
as they are manifested in real, material
existence, from the angle of biological
needs
and laws. But this is an illusion,
and it
is highly likely that Nietzsche was
labouring
under it himself. Specific branches
of classical
philology apart, Nietzsche’s knowledge
was
certainly very extensive, and his grasp
of
it lively and vivid, but this knowledge
was
always superficial and acquired at
second
or third hand. Jaspers concedes as
much even
for the philosophical classics with
which
Nietzsche was in vigorous dispute throughout
his life.[82] But much more than just
superficiality
is involved. For Nietzsche, biology
was one
of the means of arguing and making
concrete
on quasi-scientific lines an essential
element
in his methodology. The method itself,
of
course, came into being long before
him.
In all reactionary biologist social
theories
(it may be no accident that the two
make
a regular habit of appearing together),
the
‘biological law’ — the ‘organic’ in
Restauration
philosophy, the ‘struggle for survival’
in
Social Darwinism — constantly appears
as
the basis from which the most diverse
regressive
conclusions are drawn in the fields
of society,
morals, etc. In reality the situation
is
the reverse of this. Out of the ‘restoration’
need to create a concept of society
which
— logically and ontologically — precluded
any revolution a priori, there arose
that
notion of the ‘organic’ which this
philosophy
thereupon took as its basis without
worrying
about whether the analogy was possible
and
arguable in scientific terms. Any analogy
will fit the bill if, as has happened
from
Adam Müuller to Othmar Spann, the corresponding
reactionary conclusions can be drawn
with
some semblance of plausibility. Scientifically
speaking, this methodology has not
advanced
since the famous fable of Menenius
Agrippa.
In Nietzsche’s time, Social Darwinism
emerged
as one such ideology supporting the
reactionary
presentation of social processes. The
term
‘reactionary’ still holds good where
the
thinkers concerned, e. g., F. A. Lange
in
Germany, subjectively placed themselves
on
the side of progress. These thinkers
chose
a method which did not lead to a concrete
examination of social phenomena; on
the contrary
it diverted them from concrete perception
because, in every period, the ‘universal
law’ of the ‘struggle for survival’
explains
every event in the same way, i. e.,
it explains
nothing at all. And with this methodology
they supported the bias of declining
liberalism:
they substituted for class warfare
various
freely invented forms of the ‘laws
of motion’
of society.[83]
In books on Nietzsche there was at
one time
a violent ( controversy as to whether
and
how far Nietzsche should be considered
a
Darwinist. We regard this discussion
as idle
for two reasons. In the first place,
Nietzsche
was never more than a social Darwinist
in
the aforesaid sense of the term.) And
secondly,
his relationship to Darwinism is the
clearest
illustration of the fact that it was
not
scientific discoveries and knowledge
that
guided his thinking into specific channels
and forced specific roles upon him.
On the
contrary, it illustrates that the development
of his struggle against socialism determined
every single one of his pseudo-scientific
attitudes. He only differed from his
like-minded
contemporaries in that the programmatic
arbitrariness
of the ‘scientific’ argumentation emerged,
in his case, with cynical frankness
and did
not put on a mask of objectivity with
the
aid of a pseudo-scientific apparatus.
If we recall our study of Nietzsche’s
interpretation
of ancient society, we will realize
that
Social Darwinism strongly influenced
his
view of the agon, Eris, and so on.
Darwinism
accordingly receives a positive emphasis
in this phase. For example, Nietzsche
reproached
D. F. Strauss with praising Darwinism
in
general terms without having the courage
to apply it rigorously to moral problems,
and so taking refuge in a form of idealism.[84]
Occasionally, moreover, and quite as
a matter
of course, he used images borrowed
from Darwinism
in order to elucidate individual phenomena:
‘Darwinism is also right with regard
to thinking
in images: the stronger image devours
the
weaker ones.’[85] Darwinism played
a far
slighter role for Nietzsche in the
period
of Human, All-Too-Human. Although he
did
not polemicize against it, he drew
on it
in his explanations far less often.
This
consigning of it to the background
is understandable
if we consider at the same time the
evolutionist
tendencies of this transitional phase
that
we stressed earlier. Only when Nietzsche
had over come this illusion did he
adopt
a dismissive attitude of increasing
sharpness
towards Darwin and Darwinism. As early
as
the Joyful Science he treated Darwinism
with
irony on account of its plebeianness:
‘The
whole of English Darwinism smacks of
England’s
stuffy air of over-population, of a
provincial
whiff of misery and close confinement.’
This
ironic argument ad hominem is, however,
only
a prelude to the theoretical rejection:
‘The
struggle for survival is only an exception,
a temporary restriction of the life-will;
big or small, the struggle revolves
everywhere
around ascendancy, around growth and
expansion,
around might in accordance with the
will
to power, which is nothing other than
the
life-will.’[86]
But we can study the actual content
of this
shift only in the more detailed statements
of the last works and sketches, where
its
real motives are voiced with Nietzschean
candour. In The Twilight of the Idols
and
The Will to Power the decisive motive
of
his — new — anti-Darwinism is now clearly
expressed. Here again it becomes patent
how
Nietzsche resembled and how he differed
from
the general run of ‘Social Darwinists’.
Instead
of considering the facts of natural
evolution
itself, both sides used ‘the phrase
of the
struggle for survival’ (Marx) from
the standpoint
of their assessment of the perspective
on
the present and future resulting, they
thought,
from the class struggle between bourgeoisie
and proletariat. Capitalism’s ordinary
‘Darwinist’
apologists started with the experiences
of
the age after 1860, which they superficially
generalized. If, they thought, the
‘struggle
for survival’ operated in society unchecked,
it would end ineluctably in the victory
of
the ‘strong’ (the capitalists). This
is where
Nietzsche’s sceptical, pessimistic
critique
begins. ‘Normal’ conditions for the
social
struggle for survival will inevitably
lead
the ‘weak’ (the workers, the masses,
socialism)
to a position of command. Very special
measures
must be taken to prevent this. Here
Nietzsche
was not only, as in his ethics, a ‘prophet’
of imperialist barbarity, but was moreover
looking for those new types of forms
of dominion
which could thwart the rise of the
proletariat.
The accent is on the word ‘new’ because
Nietzsche,
as we have seen, was highly sceptical
about
those methods of oppression practised
in
his own times (he had witnessed the
failure
of the anti-socialist laws). He did
not believe
that the contemporary capitalists,
politically
conservative as they were, were capable
of
Carrying out such a policy. That calling
awaited none else than the ‘lords of
the
earth’ whose deliberate training was
the
principal idea behind Nietzsche’s ethics.
(Here we see that he anticipated in
his thinking
not only imperialism, but also fascism
to
boot. Of course it was impossible for
this
to happen in an even relatively concrete
form; it was only possible on a mythical,
universal level.) Now that we have
presented
the sharp contrast between Nietzsche
and
the ordinary direct apologists of capitalism,
we must briefly remark on the methods
they
shared in connection with Darwinism.
Each
side started out not by examining the
objective
correctness and applicability of Darwinism
in respect of social phenomena, but
from
its own political aims and the perspectives
which these provided. Thus in the last
resort,
it boils down to the same method whether
the ordinary apologists, out of a narrow
optimism about capitalist evolution,
are
commending Darwin, or whether Nietzsche,
as a result of the scepticism we have
just
indicated, is rejecting and attacking
him.
In both cases, Darwinism was only a
mythologized
pretext for the ideological war against
the
proletariat.
It was in the light of such considerations
that Nietzsche taxed Darwin as follows
in
The Twilight of the Idols: ‘Darwin
has forgotten
men’s wits (how English of him!), the
weak
have their wits more about them ...
One must
need wit in order to acquire it — one
loses
one’s wits when they are no longer
needed.
He who has strength on his side forgoes
his
wits (“Never mind all that!” is current
thinking
in Germany, “we shall still have the
Empire”
...). As you see, by wit I mean caution,
patience, cunning, dissimulation, great
self-control
and everything under the heading of
mimicry[87]
(which covers a large part of so-called
virtue).’
In the above statements Nietzsche was,
as
we have already noted, contesting the
struggle
for survival as a universal phenomenon;
the
latter, for him, was the will to power,
and
the former only an exceptional instance.
From this there now follows his pro
grammatic
rejection of the Social Darwinism of
his
contemporaries, which of course appears
in
his book as Darwinism itself: ‘But
assuming
that there is this struggle — and it
does
in fact occur — it unfortunately amounts
to the reverse of that which the Darwin
school
desires, that which one might perhaps
be
entitled to wish for: namely to the
detriment
of the strong, the privileged, the
happy
exceptions. The species do not grow
perfectly:
the weak will always become master
of the
strong — that is because they are the
great
number and they are also shrewder ...’[88]
This problem receives more detailed
treatment
in The Will to Power. So as to avoid
repetition,
we shall pick out only the motives
which
complement these statements, and which,
indeed,
became very significant for the development
of the militantly reactionary world-view
in the imperialist age. Nietzsche summed
up his opposition to Darwin in three
points:
‘First thesis: man is not progressing
as
a species. Higher types may well be
reached,
but they are not enduring. The level
of the
species is not being raised.’[89] It
is clear
how this thesis derives from the social
reflections
we have just cited: since the class
struggle
(the struggle for survival) does not
automatically
bring about the higher type of human
being
Nietzsche desired, it cannot possibly
be
the law of evolution in nature and
society.
But over and beyond this, Nietzsche’s
thesis
points to the reactionary future: mankind’s
peak achievements are of equivalent
merit,
and the spontaneous dynamics of society
can
only corrupt them and condemn them
to perish.
Everything depends on creating devices
whereby
these peak achievements of nature can
be
not only preserved but also systematically
produced. Here we have the methodological
‘model’ for fascist racial theory and
in
particular for its practical application.
The significance of Nietzschean ideology
for Hitlerian philosophy is in no way
diminished
by the fact that the latter derives
from
Chamberlain’s racial theory, and not
Nietzsche’s;
we have already remarked on the difference
between them.
The subsequent thesis contains, on
the basis
of the same reflections upon the fragility
and vulnerability of the higher type,
a bland
denial of any development in nature
and history.
Nietzsche states that ‘man as a species
represents
no advance in comparison to any other
animal.
The entire animal and plant world does
not
develop from the lower to the higher
...
but everything at once, one thing over
and
through and against another.’[90] This
thesis
too, although objectively it does not
go
beyond the commonest anti Darwinist
argumentation,
likewise assumed no little importance
in
the development of the imperialist
age’s
reactionary views. As we have noted,
when
Nietzsche advanced beyond Schopenhauer
in
indirect apologetics he made their
historicizing
the main point of his advance. And
we have
also indicated the cause of this change
of
method, which lay in the fact that
it was
now no longer the bourgeois idea of
progress
which constituted the chief adversary
(Schopenhauer’s
denial of all historicity could serve
as
a weapon against this). The new adversary
was the socialist idea of progress
pointing
beyond a capitalist society. To this
dialectical
view of history, irrationalism had
to reply
with another, though again historical-seeming
explanation of reality if it wanted
to remain
up-to-date and effective within the
reactionary
sphere. But at the same time, the reactionary
content, the apologetic defence of
capitalist
society as the unsurpassable peak and
final
end of human evolution had to bring
about
the repeal of history, evolution and
progress.
This simulated keeping in step with
needs
of the times (which diverted attention
from
objective reality), along with a mythicizing
of history in nature and society leading
not only to the emergence of other
reactionary
evolutionist contents and aims, but
also
to the self annulment of evolution
in the
mythical presentation — this was the
most
fundamental intellectual attainment
of Nietzsche
the irrationalist.
The third thesis includes nothing that
is
especially new for us. In it Nietzsche
is
chiefly opposed to the liberal interpreters
of Social Darwinism, such as Spencer,
who
perceived in the — as Nietzsche put
it —
‘domestication’ of man, in the taming
of
barbaric instincts, an important area
over
which Darwinian doctrine could be applied
to social evolution. Nietzsche wrote:
‘Man’s
domestication (his “culture”) has no
depth
to it ... Where it does go deep, it
immediately
means degeneracy (the type: Christ).
The
“savage” man (or, in moral terms: the
evil
man) means a return to nature — and,
in a
certain sense, his recuperation or
convalescence
from “culture” ...’[91] Nietzsche was
scoring
a valid point against the liberal apologists
inasmuch as the humanizing of the instincts
cannot possibly go truly deep in capitalism.
But it is perfectly evident from this
very
point how exclusively both Spencer
and Nietzsche
projected their own ideals on to Darwinism,
from which they gained no fresh insights.
This apart, it merely shows us once
more
the great extent to which — notwithstanding
the aphoristic form — Nietzsche’s work
has
a systematic intellectual coherence,
although
it is only from the real social core
that
we may discern its ramifications.
The method we have described can be
precisely
traced in all Nietzsche’s statements
in scientific
vein. These have considerable significance
for imperialist philosophy in that
here again
his boldness, coupled with a rigour
touching
on cynicism, made him the forerunner
of methods
and theories which did not come into
the
open until much later. As we have mentioned
(we shall go into details shortly),
Nietzsche’s
epistemology was closely related to
that
of Machism. Initially, however, Machism
emerged
in the guise of an agnostic ‘neutrality’
regarding concrete solutions to concrete
questions; behind it, of course, lay
an allegiance
to subjective idealism. To be sure,
this
‘neutrality’ was already manifesting
itself
in the period before the imperialist
world
war: for Duhem, the Ptolemaic and Copernican
theories were equally true, while Simmel,
from his ‘perspective of the future’,
placed
the great nineteenth-century discoveries
in the natural sciences on the same
level
as the belief in witchcraft. But an
open
mythicizing of the natural sciences
on this
basis — as in the theory of the free
will
of atomic particles — is, after all,
a product
of a far more advanced irrationalist
subversion
of scientific thinking. Thus, here
again,
Nietzsche’s special position is characterized
by the fact that as early as the eighties
he was resolutely starting to mythicize
all
scientific categories. Having resolutely
projected the main principles of his
social
philosophy on to natural phenomena,
he then
read these principles in them in order
to
bestow a mighty ‘cosmic’ background
on his
constructions and to present them as
manifestations
of a general world-principle. As paradigms
of this method let me quote the well-known
passage from Beyond Good and Evil where
Nietzsche
claims to prove the indestructability,
harmlessness
and positive merits of exploitation
by demonstrating
— through the method outlined above
— that
exploitation contains an irrefutably
basic
and universal principle of every form
of
life, which naturally includes every
form
of social life. ‘Here’, he stated,
‘one must
think things through thoroughly and
beware
of all weak sensitivity: life itself
is in
essence appropriation, doing injury,
over
powering the alien and the weaker,
oppression,
hardness, the imposing of one’s own
forms
upon others, physical adoption and
at the
least, at the mildest, exploitation
... “Exploitation”
does not belong to a corrupt or undeveloped
and primitive society: it lies in the
essence
of living things as a basic organic
function,
it is a consequence of the actual will-to-power,
which is precisely the life-will.’[92]
Once this method has been devised,
it is
child’s play to arrive at that world-view
whereby everything animate and inanimate
is just as much a manifestation of
the will-to-power
as it was a manifestation of the will
for
Schopenhauer. The basic principle’s
mythical
concretization, applied with an equal
degree
of arbitrariness, brings about the
matching
acts of concretization that we have
already
discussed. It naturally follows that
the
body itself is a ‘power structure’;
[93]
that ‘the supposed “natural laws” are
formulae
for power relationships’;[94] that
the will-to-power
governs the whole of physics: ‘It is
my idea
that every specific body is striving
for
mastery over the whole of space, to
expand
its strength (its will-to-power) and
to repel
everything which resists its expansion.
But
it continually meets with other bodies
that
are likewise engaged and finishes by
adjusting
(“uniting”) itself to those which have
enough
affinity with it: thus they then conspire
to achieve power. And the process goes
on
...’,[95] etc. And in Beyond Good and
Evil
Nietzsche — with some reservations
in respect
of verifiability that are wholly absent
from
his later statements — formulated his
programme
for natural philosophy: ‘The world
seen from
within, the world determined and designated
with regard to its “intelligible character”
— this would be sheer “will-to-power”
and
nothing else.’[96]
All these tendencies revolve round
the pith
of Nietzschean philosophy, the doctrine
of
‘eternal recurrence’. In its farrago
of pseudo-science
and wild fantasy, this doctrine has
caused
many Nietzsche interpreters a lot of
embarrassment.
Baeumler even tries to take it right
out
of Nietzsche’s ‘authentic’ fascist
system.[97]
And he was quite correct from that
particular
standpoint. For ‘national socialist
philosophy’
had a fully adequate substitute for
the crucial
social function of eternal recurrence
in
Nietzsche’s thought, the function of
denying
that history could produce anything
that
was new in principle (such as socialism
after
the class society). This substitute
was the
dogma of racial immutability, which
taught
that the ‘Third Reich’ was only a consciously
induced renewal of primal racial energies
that had never changed. Other bourgeois
commentators
were hard put to treat eternal recurrence
as a harmless intellectual affair.
Kaufmann,
for example, regards it as a glorification
of the passing moment (even drawing
a parallel
with Faust) or as a training method;
of course
he always keeps silent about Nietzsche’s
purpose behind this training.[98]
For Nietzsche himself, eternal recurrence
is the decisive counter-idea to the
concept
of becoming. This counter balance was
needed
because Becoming cannot give rise to
something
new (in the context of capitalist society)
without betraying its function in Nietzsche’s
system. We have already encountered
the tendency
to transform Becoming into a simulated
movement,
to assign to it the mere role of providing
variations within the ‘eternally cosmic’
laws of the will-to-power. Eternal
recurrence
narrows the scope even more: the emergence
of something new is a ‘cosmic’ impossibility.
‘The rotating cycle’, wrote Nietzsche
no
later than the time of his Joyful Science,
‘is not something that has he come
but a
first principle, just as mass is a
first
principle, without exception or transgression.
All Becoming is within the cycle and
mass.’[99]
One of the most detailed passages in
the
late sketches gives a clear picture
of this.
There is small interest for us in Nietzsche’s
allegedly scientific argumentation,[100]
which counts for as little as his other
sorties
in this field. Far more important are
his
conclusions; Nietzsche regards as theologians
all who acknowledge the origination
of some
thing new in the world.
‘This notion — that the world is deliberately
evading a goal and can even prevent
artificially
the entry into a cyclical process —
is one
to which all those must succumb who
would
like to decree upon the world the power
of
eternal innovation, i. e., to invest
such
a finite, specific, constant and immutable
force as “the world” with a miraculous
capacity
for the infinite shaping anew of its
forms
and conditions. They insist that the
world,
even though bereft of a God, must be
capable
of divine creativity, the infinite
power
of transformation. It must deliberately
restrain
itself from reverting to one of its
old forms,
and must have not only the intention
but
also the means of preserving itself
from
all repetition ...’[101]
We have laid stress on the ‘becoming’
in
Nietzsche’s ethics. This, we believe,
is
right because it contains the immediate
reasoning
behind these ethics and particularly
their
revolutionary gestures such as the
transvaluation
of all values. In order to break the
old
moral ‘tablets’ on which ‘eternal laws’
of
morality were inscribed, Nietzsche
used the
concept of becoming — which he often
traced
back to Heraclitus — as a philosophical
battering-ram.
The ‘innocence of becoming’ was the
immediate
prerequisite for Nietzsche’s activism,
his
reactionary militancy, his conquest
of Schopenhauerian
passivity. Hence the Nietzschean concept
of becoming had to surpass Schopenhauer’s
wholly senseless, patently merely apparent
agitation of ‘the world as appearance’.
But
it is of the very essence of Nietzschean
philosophy that all this can be only
a prelude.
Let us recall the structure of Zarathustra,
where the idea of becoming reigns supreme
in the first part, e. g., in the call
to
create the Superman, but where the
same type’s
recurrence forms the crowning conclusion
in the ‘Drunken Song’. (That the idea
of
recurrence figures in several earlier
episodes
does not affect the under lying construction.)
Baeumler is thinking in a very shallow
and
anti-Nietzschean manner when he scents
in
this a contradiction of the will-to-power.
For here Nietzsche is quite lucid about
the
true hierarchy of his system. In The
Will
to Power we read: ‘To impress on Becoming
the character of Being — that is the
highest
will-to-power ... The fact that everything
recurs is the very nearest approach
of a
world of Becoming to the world of Being
—
a contemplative peak.’[102] For Nietzsche,
moreover, the will-to-power, though
admittedly
the moving principle of all Becoming,
is
in itself — like Schopenhauer’s will
— something
that has not come into being: ‘One
cannot
locate the cause of the fact that there
is
any development at all by following
the same
road in one’s investigation; one must
not
attempt to grasp it as “becoming”,
and even
less as that which has become ... The
Will
to Power cannot have come into being.’[103]
Here we plainly see how superficially
Nietzsche
treated all Becoming, all historical
events:
as merely a manifestation of ‘eternal’
principles.
In itself, of course, this hierarchy
is —
if regarded logically — a crass contradiction.
At the same time, it is also the philosophical
expression of the fact that, after
subjective
idealism and irrationalism had triumphed
over Hegel, bourgeois philosophy became
incapable
of any dialectical linking of becoming
and
being, freedom and necessity; it could
express
their mutual relationship only as an
insoluble
antagonism or an eclectic amalgam.
Neither
in purely logical nor in general philosophical
terms did Nietzsche surmount this irrationalist
barrier either. His myth of eternal
recurrence
as the highest fulfilment of the will-to-power
combines, we might say, hard antagonism
and
picturesquely blurred eclecticism.
The two
extremes, however, perform a single
function
from the viewpoint of his central polemical
stance, his fight against socialism
and for
imperialist barbarity. They have the
function
of removing all moral restraints with
a view
to the ruthless termination of this
social
conflict. As we have noted, Nietzsche’s
boundless
freedom created for the ‘lords of the
earth’
the principle that everything is permitted;
fatalistic necessity led, in his view,
to
the same result. In The Twilight of
the Idols
he quite unequivocally posed this question:
‘What can our only doctrine be? That
nobody
gives man his attributes, neither God
nor
society nor his parents and fore fathers,
nor he himself ... Nobody is responsible
for his being here at all, his disposition
to this and that, his existing in these
surroundings
under these conditions. The fatality
of his
essential being is not to be puzzled
out
of the fatality of all that was and
will
be ... We are necessary, a portion
of destiny,
we belong to the whole, we are in the
whole
— and there is nothing which could
judge,
measure, compare and condemn our being,
for
that would mean judging, measuring,
comparing
and condemning the whole ... But there
is
nothing outside the whole! ... Only
then
is the innocence of Becoming restored
...[104]
And the indirectly apologetic, moral
function
of eternal recurrence is exactly the
same.
In Zarathustra, in fact, by way of
introducing
the crucial proclamation of eternal
recurrence,
the ‘ugliest person’ suddenly voices
as an
inspiration the Nietzschean wisdom:
‘ “Was
that — life?” is what I would say to
death.
“Well and good! One more time!” ’[105]
Thus from the standpoint of this central
motive of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the
— logically
disjointed — series of thoughts combine
in
a unified content. From the ‘innocence
of
Becoming’ stems Nietzsche’s pseudo-revolution,
the bourgeois transition from the liberal
age of ‘security’ to that of ‘great
politics’
and the struggle for control of the
earth.
Despite all the exaggerated pathos
over the
change in values, this upheaval is
just a
sham revolution, a mere heightening
of the
reactionary contents of capitalism
tricked
out with revolutionary gestures. And
eternal
recurrence has the function of expressing
the ultimate meaning of this myth:
the barbaric
and tyrannical social order thus created
is to be a definitive order, the conscious
realization of that which was always
sought
in past history, that which usually
came
to grief and enjoyed a partial success
only
now and again. Now if we consider the
methodological
structure of this system of thought,
we see
that it fully tallies with Hitler’s,
except
that instead of eternal recurrence,
Hitler
incorporates the Chamberlain racial
theory
as the new, complementary element.
Therefore
one cannot dismiss the closeness of
Nietzsche’s
thinking to Hitler’s by disproving
false
assertions, misrepresentations, etc.,
by
Baeumler or Rosenberg. Taken objectively,
the two were even closer than these
men imagined.
6
The reader may have been struck by
the fact
that we have left Nietzsche’s epistemology
until the end of our study. In this
way,
however, we think we can adequately
represent
the real coherence of his system of
ideas.
During the rise of irrationalism, epistemological
questions played a decisive role in
philosophy.
It was in this very area that, for
instance,
crucial collisions between idealist
dialectics
and irrationalism occurred in the conflict
over the ‘intellectual intuition’,
the ‘positive
philosophy’ of Schelling. And their
outcome
deter mined — philosophically — the
Concrete
questions of the interpretation of
history,
etc. With Nietzsche this question is
completely
reversed. His philosophy takes issue
with
an adversary wholly unknown to it —
even
in the realm of philosophical theory
— that
adversary being the world-view and
scientific
method of socialism. Nietzsche had
not an
inkling of the philosophical problems
of
dialectical and historical materialism.
He
contested socialism wherever he thought
he
could confront it in the flesh: socially,
historically, morally. The concrete
contents
of these philosophical areas are therefore
primary to his system. For him epistemology
was only a tool whose character and
disposition
were dictated by the purposes it served.
This new situation too is typical not
only
of Nietzsche but of all bourgeois philosophy
in the age of its decline. The period
of
its rise, whose import was determined
by
the struggle against feudal ideology
and
by conflicts of direction within bourgeois
ideology, accordingly evinces a great
variety
of epistemological trends; idealism
and materialism,
subjective and objective idealism,
metaphysics
and dialectics vied with one another
for
predominance. Objective idealism, whose
bourgeois
perversion was considerably fostered
by the
‘heroic illusions’ of the democratic
revolution,
died out with increasing speed as this
period
came to an end. After the French Revolution,
mechanical materialism lost its earlier
universality;
Feuerbach’s purview was already much
narrower
than that of his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
predecessors.
(While developments in Russia form
an exception
to this, they were not known to contemporary
thinkers outside Russia.) After a brief
period
of supremacy in natural philosophy,
mechanical
materialism forfeited its leading position
in this sphere also. Although, as Lenin
demonstrates,
every genuine scientist’s praxis remained
spontaneously materialistic, philosophical
idealism falsified and deformed the
great
scientific discoveries. So epistemology
sank
very low precisely as a result of the
near-total
hegemony which subjective idealism
exercised
in the bourgeois philosophy of this
period.
On the surface, admittedly, epistemology
governed the con tent and method of
philosophizing
much more firmly than ever before;
it is
as though philosophy consisted of almost
nothing else. But in actual fact an
academic
scholasticism was growing up, and trivial
professorial squabbles over insignificant
nuances were replacing the great philosophical
conflicts.
The pre-imperialist period energetically
paved the way for this decline. Here
the
social grounds for subjective idealism’s
total control over bourgeois philosophy
are
also clearly visible. This idealism,
along
with the agnosticism to which it was
inseparably
linked, enabled the bourgeois ideologist
to take from the progress of science,
and
first and foremost the natural sciences,
all that served capitalist interests,
while
at the same time avoiding taking a
stand
with regard to the altered world-picture.
Hence Engels very rightly calls this
period’s
agnosticism a ‘shame-faced materialism’.[106]
In not only the imperialist period
but also
in the years immediately preceding
it, the
ideological needs of the bourgeoisie
underwent
a change. A mere ‘abstention’ from
questions
of viewpoint no longer sufficed, and
philosophy
was obliged to make a stand, above
all a
stand against materialism: more and
more
clearly the positivist agnostics’ ‘shame-faced
materialism’ was acquiring an anti-materialist
accent. Neo-Kantianism and Machism
were their
chief orientations as they completed
this
shift, which was concurrent with Nietzsche’s
activities.[107] The bourgeois ideological
position, however, permitted less and
less
of a clear and public platform on the
decisive
questions of outlook. Lenin has clearly
demonstrated
the contrast between Berkeley’s open
war
on materialism and that which the Machists
waged behind their anti-idealist camouflage.
The very fact that bourgeois thinking
was
forced — in order to defend idealism
against
materialism — to take a ‘third road’,
i.
e., to act as if it were criticizing
and
rejecting both idealism and materialism
from
a ‘higher vantage point’, indicates
that
— on the world-historical scale — it
had
been already forced into a defensive
posture.
Its propositions, methods and so forth
were
more in the nature of protective measures
than means of analysing and interpreting
objective reality in a way of its own.
It
goes without saying that this defensive
character
did not exclude the most violent attacks
on the declining bourgeoisie’s opponents
or a passionate advocacy of its class
interests,
etc. These actions even gained in intensity
with the onset of the imperialist age,
where
it is precisely the ever-growing ‘need
of
a world-view’ that characterizes the
contrast
with the age which Engels described.
The
‘world-views’ which now came about
were,
however, qualitatively different from
those
of the ideological heyday. Then, the
bourgeois
view of the world — albeit emerging
in a
more or less idealistically distorted
form
— had been designed to reflect the
essence
of objective reality. But now every
such
‘world-view’ had its basis in an agnostic
epistemology, in a denial that what
was objectively
real was perceptible. For that reason
it
could only be a myth, something subjectively
contrived with pretentions to (an epistemologically
unarguable) objectivity, an objectivity
resting
solely on an extremely subjectivist
foundation,
on intuition and the like, and so never
more
than a feigned objectivity. The bourgeoisie’s
age of decline finds a clear expression
in
this mounting and increasingly uncritical
need of myth. In the pseudo-objective
form
of myth, the bourgeoisie countered
real evolution
with wishful thinking. In its heyday,
on
the contrary, its philosophical systems
had
sought to oppose the feudal legends
precisely
by appealing to real evolutionary trends
in nature and history.
Now Nietzsche’s special position is
determined
by the fact that he, at the same time
as
Machism, introduced the new agnosticist
method
into epistemology. But in doing so
he went
much further than his contemporaries.
Anticipating
the spread of agnosticism into the
sphere
of myth, he showed in his myth-making
a careless
daring that general bourgeois developments
only came close to matching at the
end of
the first imperialist world war, as
in the
work of Spengler. Thus Nietzsche was
by no
means original in his epistemology
either;
his treatment of individual problems
is entirely
on the general level of Machism. To
be sure,
he did strike a special note in his
determination
to think reactionary bourgeois tendencies
through to the most extreme consequences
and openly to state their conclusions
in
a crude and paradoxical form. This
is connected
with an attitude in which we see the
binding
centre of Nietzsche’s philosophical
system:
with his unceasing and passionate open
warfare
against the peril of socialism. He
subordinated
all the principal contents of his thought
to the needs of this battle; he always
allowed
these needs to dictate the content.
Hence his epistemology too, though
very close
to the Machist in general, far exceeded
that
of his contemporaries and allies in
its cynically
frank conclusions. A salient example
will
clearly illustrate the similarity and
difference.
Nietzsche was in complete agreement
with
the Machists in respect of the ‘immanence’
of philosophy, of the programmatic
denial
of all ‘transcendence’. But what did
both
parties mean by the terms? ‘Immanence’
signifies
the world of our intuitions and ideas,
‘transcendence’
all that in reality goes beyond these,
i.
e., objective reality itself, existing
independently
of our consciousness. There is a further
agreement in that both parties — so
it appears
— polemicize against idealism’s purported
claims to be able to perceive objective
reality;
here, therefore, anti-idealist polemics
mask
the denial of materialism. But Nietzsche
went still further along this road
by linking
the campaign against ‘transcendence’
and
the Beyond with his anti-Christian
views.
Hence he was capable on occasion of
misleading
those who failed to see that the Christian
Heaven and the materialist view of
objective
reality are mythically synthesized
in his
concept of the Beyond. (Incidentally,
even
the Machists criticized materialism
as ‘metaphysical’
theory.) But whereas the Machists were
largely
content to present the ‘immanence’
of the
realm of ideas as the sole scientific
basis
for comprehending the world, Nietzsche,
with
nihilistic openness, formulated this
theory
in bold paradoxes. In The Twilight
of the
Idols his mocking polemics inveigh
against
the conception of a ‘true world’ (of
objective
reality), and his deductions climax
in the
sentences proclaiming the ‘end of the
longest
error’ and the ‘peak of mankind’: ‘The
true
world we have abolished: what was left?
the
apparent world, perhaps? ... But no!
Along
with the true world we have also abolished
the apparent one!’[108]
But Nietzsche was not content with
mere epistemological
statements. His whole epistemology
was for
him just one weapon in the main battle
against
socialism. Hence it follows that in
the same
work he should give a socially concrete
definition
of that which he understood by ‘immanence’,
namely not only — epistemologically
— the
world of ideas but also, inseparable
from
it on the general philosophical level,
the
actual condition of society at any
given
time: in concrete terms, capitalism.
And
anybody who stepped beyond this ‘immanence’
was in his eyes a bad reactionary from
the
philosophical angle. Here again, of
course
— as we have noted in earlier sections
—
Christians and socialists alike are
made
to look philosophically and morally
reprehensible
because they represent ‘transcendence’
and
are therefore reactionaries. ‘But’,
Nietzsche
Wrote, ‘even if the Christian condemns,
slanders
and vilifies the “world”, he does so
from
the same instinct as the socialist
worker
who condemns, slanders and vilifies
society:
the “Last Judgement” itself continues
to
offer sweet revenge — the same revolution
that the socialist worker awaits, only
carried
somewhat further ... The “Beyond” itself
— what good might a Beyond have except
as
a means of vilifying this world? ...’[109]
In the last analysis all ‘immanence’
in imperialist
bourgeois philosophy is aiming at this
target:
to deduce from epistemology the ‘everlastingness’
of capitalist society. Nietzsche was
particularly
important because he publicly voiced
in suggestive
paradoxes this common idea in imperialist
philosophy. Hence in the epistemological
field, too, he became the leading ideologist
of the militant reactionaries.
Nietzsche’s individual epistemological
statements
are of little interest. Where they
do not
jump across to the overtly social sphere,
as in the above passage, they proceed
along
well-known Machist lines. They challenge
the perceptibility of objective reality,
indeed all objectivity of knowledge
(hence
Nietzsche also opposed the materialist
side
of the Kantian Ding an sich or ‘thing-in-itself’).
They regard causality, laws, etc.,
as categories
of an idealism that has been conquered
once
and for all. Here we wish only to dwell
briefly
on those elements in which Nietzsche’s
special
historical individuality finds expression.
One such element is that Nietzsche’s
subjective
idealism and agnosticism which, while
certainly
derived via Berkeley and Schopenhauer,
belong
to modern imperialism — are avowedly
based
on Heraclitus. This lends his agnosticism
a ‘philosophical’ character that exceeds
the drily scientific and helps him
to transpose
agnosticism into myth-making. (Small
wonder
that it is precisely his fascist followers,
such as Baeumler, who lay so much stress
on his derivation from Heraclitus.
For this
makes it easier to extract him from
mainstream
bourgeois philosophy, where he belongs,
and
to make him a ‘solitary’ forerunner
of Hitler.)
But even more instructive, on the other
hand,
is the point that the Heraclitus-based
interpretations
offer a perfect example of our general
view
that in reactionary hands, dialectical
problems
turn into irrationalist myths. In his
notes
for Philosophy in the Tragic Age of
the Greeks
(1872-3), Nietzsche touches on a central
thesis of Heraclitus’s dialectics,
‘Everything
always contains its opposite’, and
Aristotle’s
polemics against this thesis. His commentary
is highly significant: ‘Heraclitus
possesses
the regal gift of the highest power
of intuitive
thinking, while showing himself cool,
insensitive
and indeed hostile towards that other
type
of thinking which is accomplished in
concepts
and logical combinations, i. e., towards
reason and he seems to take pleasure
in any
chance to contradict it with a truth
intuitively
arrived at.’[110] So we see that, for
Nietzsche,
the critique of understanding (Verstand)
through its own contrariety — Heraclitus’s
great dialectical discovery — is simply
identical
with the sovereign supremacy of intuition
over reason.[111]
Nietzsche then goes on, quite logically,
to establish a close link between Heraclitus’s
dialectics and Schopenhauer’s consciously
anti-dialectical irrationalism, whereby
he
likewise establishes the link with
Berkeley
and Mach. The Heraclitean concept of
becoming
he interprets in exactly the same con
text.
In his studies from the time of The
Birth
of Tragedy (1870-1) he wrote of it:
‘In Becoming
is manifested the ideational nature
of things:
there is nothing, nothing exists, everything
becomes, i. e., is idea.’[112] Let
us not
suppose that this view belongs only
to Nietzsche’s
youth, when he stood under Schopenhauer’s
influence. This view of Being and Becoming
dominates the whole epistemology of
Nietzsche’s
oeuvre. When, at the end of his career,
in
The Twilight of the Idols, he again
touched
on Heraclitus, he stressed the very
same
idea: ‘But Heraclitus will be forever
right
in that Being is an empty fiction.
The “apparent”
world is the one and only: the “true
world”
is only a mendacious gloss ...’[113]
Indeed
Nietzsche’s intrepid lack of concern
for
the facts of philosophical history
was continually
on the increase. In the preparatory
writings
for The Will to Power even the materialist
Democritus has to testify to Nietzschean
irrationalism. And the development
reaches
its acme — characteristically once
more —
in the Machists’ patron saint, Protagoras,
who ‘united in himself both Heraclitus
and
Democritus’.[114]
We can properly appreciate Nietzsche’s
doctrine
of eternal recurrence as a victory
of Being
over Becoming only if we review it
in the
light of these epistemological findings.
We now see that the concept of Being
employed
therein has nothing to do with real
Being
(existing independently of consciousness);
on the contrary, it is invoked purely
in
order to lend myth — which can be apprehended
only intuitively, through ‘illumination’
— a semblance of objectivity. Nietzsche’s
concept of Becoming, as we could see
in his
Heraclitus interpretations, serves
principally
to destroy all objectivity, all perceptibility
of reality. In The Will to Power he
wrote:
‘The character of the becoming world
as defying
formulation, as “false”, as “self-contradictory”.
Knowledge and Becoming are mutually
exclusive.’[115]
Quite logically for Nietzsche, the
same consideration
determines the purely fictive character
of
Being: ‘The assumption of that which
is in
being is necessary in order to be able
to
think and summarize: logic only deals
in
formulae for unchanging things. Hence
this
act of assuming could still furnish
no proof
of reality: “That which is in being”
(Das
Seiende) belongs to our optics.’[116]
But
if Being is a mere fiction, then how
can
a Being arise in eternal recurrence
which
is higher than a real Becoming — real
at
least in our idea of it?
It now grows quite clear how Nietzsche
carried
on the irrationalist tradition in comparison
to Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. These
authors,
in contesting idealist dialectics as
the
highest form of the bourgeois conception
of progress, had likewise to oppose
the dialectical
self-agitation of Being and to fall
back
on a contrastingly mythical, only intuitively
apprehensible Being. But since their
polemics
against Hegelian dialectics were only
a conflict
of orientation within bourgeois philosophy,
they could content themselves with
narrowing
and distorting dialectics in a reactionary
irrationalist spirit. (Schelling’s
distinction
between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ philosophy,
Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’.) True, the
resultant
distinctions between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’
types of Being have an anti-scientific
character
and structure, but formally they remain
—
at least until Kierkegaard’s ‘leap’
— within
the sphere of a certain logical order.
One
might say that the tattered pieces
of dialectics
taken over in garbled form from Hegel
restore,
for Schelling and Kierkegaard, the
appearance
of a modicum of rational coherence.
Nietzsche,
however, did away with the connecting
links
from the outset in his epistemology,
which
followed the line of Berkeley, Schopenhauer
and Mach. And to the extent to which
we can
speak of a logico-philosophical order
in
his work here at all, it can have but
one
meaning. The more fictive a concept
is and
the more purely subjectivist its origins,
the higher it stands and the ‘truer’
it is
in the mythical scale of values. Being,
so
long as its concept contains even the
slightest
vestiges of a relationship to a reality
independent
of our consciousness, must be displaced
by
Becoming (equals idea). Being, however,
when
freed from these shackles and viewed
purely
as fiction, as a product of the will-to-power,
may then, for Nietzsche, be a still
higher
category than Becoming: an expression
of
the intuitive pseudo-objectivity of
myth.
With Nietzsche, the special function
of such
a definition of Becoming and Being
lies in
supporting the pseudo-historicity vital
to
his indirect apologetics and in simultaneously
dismissing it, confirming philosophically
that historical Becoming can produce
nothing
that is new and outruns capitalism.
But the significance of Nietzschean
epistemology
as a structural tool for the systematic
articulation
of his thoughts exceeds this single
instance,
central though it is. It encompasses
the
full totality of his universe. To help
complete
the picture, let us take another important
example. In contrast to contemporary
neo-Kantianism
and Positivism, whose basic approach
was
a specific objectivism, an avowedly
solely
scientific abstention from any explicit
attitude
and relation ship to praxis, Nietzsche
vigorously
shifted the connection between theory
and
praxis to the centre of his whole epistemology.
Here, too, he drew all the inferences
of
agnosticism and of the relativism succeeding
it earlier and more radically than
his contemporaries.
By rejecting any criterion of truth
other
than usefulness for the biological
survival
of the individual (and the species),
he became
an important precursor of imperialist
pragmatism.
‘We have always’, he stated,
‘forgotten the main thing: why does
a philosopher
want to know? Why does he value “truth”
more
highly than appearance? This valuation
is
older than any cogito ergo sum: even
presupposing
the logical process, there is something
inside
us which affirms it and denies its
opposite.
Whence the preference? Every philosopher
has neglected to explain why he values
the
true and the good, and none has sought
to
attempt the same for the opposite.
Answer:
the True is more useful (for preserving
the
organism) — but not in itself more
acceptable.
Enough; from the very beginning we
find the
organism speaking as a whole, with
“purposes”
— there fore making value judgements.’[117]
It goes without saying that this applies
to an even greater degree to the truths
of
morality: ‘All moralists join in drawing
lines regarding good and evil, depending
on their sympathetic and egotistic
impulses.
I regard as good that which serves
some end:
but the “good end” is nonsense. For
the question
is always “good for what?” Good is
always
merely a term for a means. The “good
end”
is a good means to an end.’[118] And
in The
Will to Power, Nietzsche summed up
this doctrine
in the suggestive words: ‘Truth is
the type
of error without which a particular
type
of living being could not exist. In
the last
resort the decisive value is the value
for
living.’[119]
Nietzsche, however, was not satisfied
with
tracing the good and true back to biological
vital interests, thereby depriving
them of
all absolute, objective worth. The
object
of his endeavours went even beyond
his referring
in general to biological usefulness
for the
species, rather than merely for the
individual.
For the life of the species — this
returns
us to the sphere of Becoming — is,
firstly,
a historical process and, secondly,
as historical
content, the uninterrupted conflict
between
two human types, two races, namely
masters
and slaves. In The Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche
expressly emphasized that his starting-point
was an etymological one: the insight
that
the morally positive element is identical
with the socially eminent man, and
the negative
with the socially subordinate.[120]
But this
‘natural’ condition is dissipated in
the
course of history: there arises that
embittered
struggle between masters and herd whose
philosophical,
moral and other consequences, as well
as
its perspectives for Nietzsche, we
have portrayed
in detail in other contexts. And the
function
which all categories acquire in this
struggle
determines the degree of truth they
possess.
More precisely, the determining factor
is
their potential usefulness to the master
race in obtaining and establishing
ultimate
control. To refer back just briefly
to what
we have already expounded, let us quote
the
statement, likewise from the Genealogy:
‘Egotism
and a kind of second innocence go hand
in
hand.’[121]
Once this condition, a ‘clear conscience’
for the master race’s most extreme
egotism
and every sort of cruelty and barbarity,
has been fulfilled (‘the innocence
of Becoming’),
then — and only then this concept is
finally
established and set free in the mythical
realm through eternal recurrence. Only
for
the ‘lords of the earth’, of Course,
but
then it was only for them that Nietzsche
wanted to provide a militant philosophy.
Hence he wrote of eternal recurrence:
‘It
is the great disciplinary idea: those
races
which cannot endure it are condemned,
those
that find it of the greatest benefit
are
destined for mastery.’[122] And it
totally
accords with this conception that,
in Nietzsche’s
view, eternal recurrence must be a
deadly
poison for the herd. We have already
noted
that in defining epistemological ‘immanence’
he launched a violent attack on all
‘transcendence’,
and identified the Christian belief
in a
Beyond with socialism’s revolutionary
perspectives
on the future. But eternal recurrence
revokes,
in his opinion, all transcendence and
hence
the basis of all Christian (or socialist)
morality. Thus we read in The Will
to Power:
‘Morality protects the defeated type
from
nihilism by attributing to each person
of
this type an infinite, meta physical
worth
and by assigning each to an order which
differs
from worldly power and hierarchy: it
taught
submissiveness, humility, etc. Supposing
that faith in this morality perishes,
the
defeated would no longer have their
consolation
— and would perish.’[123]
The ‘lords of the earth’ are, of course,
the decadent parasites of imperialism.
This
definition of the decadent man as a
central
figure in future developments, and
of decadence
as a springboard for the desired future
condition,
again distinguishes Nietzsche from
the other
reactionary philosophers. The latter,
who
wanted to save capitalist society as
typified
by the ‘normal’ man (bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois),
found themselves increasingly at loggerheads
in the course of time with the capitalist
reality, with its mounting and increasingly
total distortion of man. Nietzsche
proceeded
resolutely from this distortion, which
manifested
itself in his age as world-weariness,
pessimism,
nihilism, dissipation, lack of self-belief,
lack of perspectives and so on. Recognizing
himself in these decadent types, he
regarded
them as brothers. But in his opinion,
it
was precisely these decadent attributes
which
would provide the right material for
the
new lords of the earth. As we have
noted,
he considered himself to be decadent
and
to be its antithesis at one and the
same
time. This avowal is just an epigrammatic
summary of the concluding section of
Zarathustra:
here the ‘higher men’ gather round
Zarathustra
— a gallery of the most diverse decadent
types that Nietzsche characterizes
with shrewd
psychology — and to them is addressed
the
prophetic announcement of the Superman
and
eternal recurrence. The conquest of
decadence,
or its own self-conquest, is not Nietzsche’s
aim. When he praises the philosophical
merits
of his eternal recurrence , he is chiefly
praising its nihilistic, relativistic
and
perspectiveless character. ‘Let us
think
this idea in its most fearful form:
existence
just as it is, without meaning or goal,
but
inevitably returning into nothingness
without
a finale: eternal recurrence. That
is the
most extreme form of nihilism. Nothingness
(the “meaningless”) for ever more!’[124]
Hence this new perception was intended
to
rein force decadent nihilism rather
than
to supersede it. What Nietzsche wanted
was
to obtain on this basis a change of
direction,
a turn-round, without affecting the
status
quo. All decadent attributes were to
be converted
into tools for a militant advocacy
of capitalism,
and the decadents them selves into
activists
supporting the — both outwardly and
inwardly
— aggressive and barbaric imperialist
cause.
Dionysos is the mythical symbol for
this
turn among the ruling class. Although
the
connection between the crowning figure
of
Nietzschean myth — ‘Dionysos versus
the Crucified
...’, reads the closing line of Ecce
homo[125]
— and its first, youthful version is
fairly
tenuous, a very important motive does
link
the two: the domination of understanding
and reason by the instincts (hence
Socrates
was the contrasting figure to Dionysos
in
the debut work). But with the later
Nietzsche,
the liberation of the instincts poses
much
wider questions — moral and social
— than
did his youthful, largely artistically
oriented
Dionysos sketch. At the end of his
career,
the complex of ideas is summed up again
in
this much transformed mythical figure.
Decadence
is now, to Nietzsche’s mind, a universal
problem, and Dionysos appears as a
symbol
of the forward-thrusting, commendable
type
of decadence, decadence in strength,
as opposed
to paralysing, debilitating pessimism
(Schopenhauer)
or a liberation of the instincts with
plebeian
overtones (Wagner). Nietzsche said
of this
pessimism of strength: ‘Man now needs
a “justification
of the bad” no longer, it is precisely
“justifying”
that he abhors: he enjoys the bad in
its
raw purity and finds the meaningless
bad
the most interesting ... Under such
conditions
it is precisely the good which needs
“justifying”,
i. e., it must have an evil and dangerous
undercurrent or incorporate a great
stupidity:
then it will still find favour. Animality
now no longer shocks; a lively and
cheerful
bravado in favour of the beast in man
is,
in such times, the most victorious
form of
mental activity.’[126] ‘It is part
and parcel
of this’, he stated somewhat later,
‘to grasp
the hitherto rejected sides of existence
not only as necessary but also as desirable:
and not only as desirable with regard
to
the hitherto approved sides (as, say,
their
complements or preconditions), but
for their
own sake as the mightier, more fruitful
and
truer sides of existence through which
its
will is distinctively voiced.’[127]
The god
of this decadence ‘redeemed’ for activity
is Dionysos; his distinguishing marks
are
‘sensuality and cruelty’.[128] He is
the
new God: ‘God, conceived as a state
of liberation
from morality, cramming into himself
the
whole abundance of life’s antitheses
and
redeeming, justifying them in divine
torment:
— God as the Beyond, superior to the
pitiful
workaday morality of “good and evil”.’[129]
There is no need, we think, to go into
any
further details of Nietzschean epistemology
and its application. As we can already
see,
Nietzsche hereby created for the whole
imperialist
period a methodological ‘model’ of
the indirect
apologetics of capitalism, showing
just how
a fascinating and colourful symbol-realm
of imperialist myth could be evolved
from
an extremely agnosticist epistemology,
a
theory of the most extreme nihilism.
We have
avoided dwelling — deliberately so
— on the
blatant contradictions in his myth
structures.
Were we to study Nietzsche’s statements
in
this area from a logico-philosophical
angle,
we would be confronted by a dizzy chaos
of
the most lurid assertions, arbitrary
and
violently incompatible. Nevertheless
we do
not believe that this observation contradicts
the view we developed at the outset,
the
view that Nietzsche had a consistent
system.
The binding or systematic factor lies
in
the social content of his thinking,
in the
struggle against socialism. Regarded
from
this viewpoint, Nietzsche’s brightly
variegated,
mutually irreconcilable myths will
yield
up their ideational unity, their objective
coherence: they are imperialist bourgeois
myths serving to mobilize all imperialist
forces against the chief adversary.
The fact
that the struggle of masters and herd,
of
nobles and slaves amounts to a mythical
counterpart,
in caricature form, to the class struggle
is not too hard to discern. We have
demonstrated
that Nietzsche’s challenge to Darwin
was
a myth arising from the justified fear
that
the normal course of history must lead
to
socialism. We have also shown that
behind
eternal recurrence there hides a self-consoling,
mythical decree that evolution can
produce
nothing fundamentally new (and therefore
no socialism). Another point we can
see quite
easily is that the Superman came about
in
order to steer back on to capitalist
lines,
etc., etc., the yearning spontaneously
springing
from the problems of capitalist life,
its
distortion and stunting of human beings.
And the ‘positive’ part of the Nietzschean
myths is no more than a mobilization
of all
the decadent and barbaric instincts
in men
corrupted by capitalism in order to
save
by force this parasitical paradise;
here
again, Nietzsche’s philosophy is the
imperialist
myth designed to counter socialist
humanism.
Perhaps a point which we have expounded
earlier,
viz., that the ideology of the declining
bourgeoisie was forced on the defensive,
is now becoming even clearer. It is
of the
essence of bourgeois thinking that
it cannot
manage without illusions. Now if, from
the
Renaissance to the French Revolution,
men
were projecting as a model an image
of the
Greek polis that was full of such illusions,
its nucleus was nonetheless made up
of real
evolutionary currents, the real evolutionary
trends of a rising bourgeois society;
hence
of elements of its own social life
and perspectives
of its own concrete future. But with
Nietzsche,
all his contents stem from the fear
— which
sought refuge in myth — of the fall
of his
own class, and from an inability genuinely
to measure up to the adversary in intellectual
terms. It is material from ‘enemy territory’,
problems and questions imposed by the
class
enemy which ultimately determine the
content
of his philosophy. And the aggressive
tone,
the offensive approach in each individual
instance barely disguises this underlying
structure. The epistemological appeal
to
adopt the most extreme irrationalism,
to
deny completely all knowability of
the world
and all reason, coupled with a moral
appeal
to all the bestial and barbaric instincts,
is an — unconscious — admission of
this position.
Nietzsche’s uncommon gift is manifest
in
his ability to project, on the threshold
of the imperialist period, a counter-myth
that could exert such influence for
decades.
Viewed in this light, his aphoristic
mode
of expression appears the form adequate
to
the socio historical situations. The
inner
rottenness, hollowness and mendacity
of the
whole system wrapped itself in this
motley
and formally disconnected ragbag of
ideas.
Notes
1. Engels to Conrad Schmidt, 27.10.1890.
Marx-Engels: Ausgewüahlte Briefe, Berlin
1953, p. 508ff.
2. Mehring: Works, Berlin 1929, Vol.
VI,
p. 191.
3. Mehring: Review of Kurt Eisner’s
‘Psychopathia
spiritualis’, Neue Zeit, Yr. X, Vol.
II,
pp. 668f.
4. Nietzsche: Works, Vol. VIII, p.
64. All
quotations of Nietzsche come from the
16-volume
Complete Works published by Kröner,
Leipzig.
5. Engels: Anti-Düuhring.
6. Marx to Lassalle, 31.5.1858, Ferdinand
Lassalle’s posthumous Letters and Writings,
edited by G. Mayer, Berlin 1922, Vol.
III,
p. 123.
7. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche: Der
einsame
Nietzsche, Leipzig 1914, pp. 433f.
8. Vol. X, p. 279.
9. Nietzsche to Baron von Gersdorff,
21.6.1871.
Works ed. Schlechta, III, pp. 1092f.
10. Vol. IX, p. 142.
11. Mehring: op. cit., Vol. VI, p.
182.
12. Vol. IX., p. 425.
13. Ibid., p. 268.
14. Ibid., p. 153.
15. Ibid., p. 149.
16. Ibid., p. 276.
17. Vol. XIV, p. 368.
18. Vol. IX, p. 277.
19. Ibid., p. 280.
20. Vol. XV, p. 66.
21. Vol. I, p. 86.
22. Vol. XV, p. 63.
23. Vol. II, p. 341.
24. Vol. XV, p. 215.
25. Vol. II, p. 325.
26. Vol. III, p. 338.
27. Ibid., pp. 349f.
28. Vol. II, p. 327.
29. Ibid., p. 349.
30. Ibid., p. 350.
31. Ibid., p. 351.
32. Vol. III, p. 352.
33. Vol. V, p. 77.
34. Vol. VII, pp. 315f.
35. Vol. VIII, pp. 303f.
36. Ibid., p. 151.
37. Ibid., p. 153.
38. Vol. XIV, p. 334.
39. Vol. XVI, p. 288.
40. Ibid., p. 336.
41. Ibid., p. 194.
42. Franz Schauwecker: ‘Ein Dichter
und die
Zukunft’, in Des deutschen Dichters
Sendung
in der Gegenwart, Leipzig 1933, p.
227.
43. A. Baeumler: Nietzsche, der Philosoph
und Politiker, Leipzig, n. d., p. 135.
44. Vol. VII, p. 205.
45. Vol. XIII, p. 352.
46. Vol. VII, p. 156.
47. Vol. XV, p. 117.
48. Vol. XVI, p. 180.
49. W. A. Kaufmann: Nietzsche, Princeton
1950.
50. Vol. V, p. 130.
51. Vol. XIV, p. 321.
52. Engels: Op. cit., pp. 18ff.
53. Marx: Capital 622.
54. Vol. XI, p. 34.
55. Vol. XIII, p. 111. There follows
a critique
of Guyau, ibid., p. 112.
56. Vol. XII, p. 410.
57. Vol. VIII, p. 88.
58. Ibid., p. 157.
59. Vol. XVI, pp. 184f.
60. Vol. XIV, p. 82.
61. Ibid., pp. 207f.
62. Cf.: ‘Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels
als Literaturhistoriker,’ Berlin 1952,
p.
31f. and ‘Skizze einer Geschichte der
neueren
deutschen Literatur,’ Berlin 1953,
pp. 115ff.
63. Vol. VII, pp. 321f.
64. Vol. VIII, p. 218.
65. Vol. XVI, p. 377.
66. Ibid., pp. 305f.
67. Vol. XV, p. 11.
68. Ibid., p. 147.
69. Ibid., p. 145.
70. Vol. V, pp. 163ff.
71. Vol. XIII, p. 75.
72. Vol. XV, p. 228.
73. L. Zahn, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dusseldorf
1950, p. 282.
74. Vol. XII, p. 329.
75. Vol. XVI, p. 381.
76. Baeumler: Op. cit., p. 99.
77. Karl Jaspers: Nietzsche, Berlin
1947,
pp. 431f.
78. Baeumler: Op. cit., p. 103.
79. Vol. XV, pp. 125f. Since such commentators
as Kaufmann (e. g. Op. cit., p. 329)
associate
Nietzsche’s anti-Christianity with
Heine’s,
let us briefly point out that the purpose
and content of Heine’s polemics against
Christianity
are diametrically opposed to Nietzsche’s.
The similarity to which Kaufmann draws
attention
is of a purely external, stylistic
nature.
For Heine’s world-outlook cf. my essay
in
Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts,
Berlin 1951, pp. 39ff.
80. Vol. VIII, p. 273.
81. Ibid., p. 295.
82. Jaspers: Op. cit., p. 36.
83. Marx criticizes Social Darwinism
with
annihilating acuteness in the letter
to Kugelmann,
27.6.1870, Engels at length in the
letter
to Lavrov, 12-17.11.1875. Engels emphasizes
that the Social Darwinists should be
criticized
in the first place as bad economists,
and
only then as bad natural philosophers.
84. Vol. I, pp. 220f.
85. Vol. X, p. 137.
86. Vol. V, p. 285.
87. Translator’s note. Nietzsche uses
this
English term.
88. Vol. VIII, p. 128.
89. Vol. XVI, p. 147.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., p. 148.
92. Vol. VII, pp. 237f.
93. Vol. XVI, p. 126.
94. Vol. XIII, p. 82.
95. Vol. XVI, p. 114.
96. Vol. VII, p. 58.
97. Baeumler: Op. cit., p. 79.
98. Kaufmann: Op. cit., pp. 282, 286ff.
99. Vol. XII, p. 61.
100. ‘We disallow the concept of an
infinite
force as incompatible with the concept
of
“force”. And thus — the world also
lacks
the power of eternal innovation.’ Vol.
XVI,
p. 397.
101. Vol. XVI, pp. 396f.
102. Ibid., p. 101.
103. Ibid., p. 155.
104. Ibid., Vol. VIII, pp. 100f.
105. Vol. VI, p. 462.
106. Engels: On historical materialism
in
Feuerbach, Berlin 1927, p. 85.
107. As early as 1876 Avenarius published
his ‘Prolegomena’, in 1888-90 his Critique
of Pure Experience; although Mach’s
crucial
philosophical works had not yet appeared,
he likewise emerged as a theorist in
the
seventies and eighties, as too did
Schuppe,
the leader of ‘philosophy of immanence’.
Vaihinger, the Kantian closest to this
trend,
published his Philosophy for the Common
Man
only much later, but wrote the essence
of
it between 1876-8. If this whole movement
subsequently claimed Nietzsche’s support
— Vaihinger taking the initiative —
it was
not a question of a direct influence
(for
obviously Nietzsche never even came
across
most of these works). It stemmed from
an
essential similarity in epistemological
orientation
brought about through the new ideological
needs of the bourgeoisie.
108. Vol. VIII, p. 83.
109. Ibid., p. 142.
110. Vol. X, p. 32.
111. Nietzsche had no notion of the
difference
between understanding (Verstand) and
reason
(Vernunft), which he employed as synonyms.
This indicates not only his ignorance
of
the most important philosophers, which
even
Jaspers concedes, but at the same time
—
and far more importantly — the coarser,
intellectually
inferior nature of irrationalism in
imperialist
times. Kierkegaard, for instance, contested
Hegel with a far finer intellectual
apparatus.
112. Vol. IX, p. 197.
113. Vol. VIII, p. 77.
114. Vol. XV, p. 456.
115. Vol. XVI, p. 31.
116. Ibid., pp. 30f.
117. Vol. XIV, pp. 12f.
118. Vol. XI, p. 251.
119. Vol. XVI, p. 19.
120. Vol. VII, pp. 306f.
121. Ibid., p. 388.
122. Vol. XVI, p. 393.
123. Vol. XV, p. 184.
124. Ibid., p. 182.
125. Ibid., p. 127.
126. Vol. XVI, p. 371.
127. Ibid., p. 383.
128. Ibid., p. 386.
129. Ibid., p. 379. |
Evans Experientialism 
