The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  A new scientific future was exposed in the unseen but mathematically precise, even harmonious, workings of the atom. Instead of the music of the spheres, Bohr now offered the music of the quantum: no wonder he felt free to invoke Pythagoras in his 1922 Nobel Prize speech. Number now defined the parameters of a new reality, the reality of the field: a range of probabilities about where electrons will be at any given time, subject to the laws of relativity and the quantum—and the speed of light, the one remaining constant. As Einstein put it: “There is no place in this new physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.”

  It wasn’t just Newton’s mechanics and Aristotle’s matter that had been exposed as illusions. So were the dominant political ideologies of the age. Everyone, including Marx and his followers, assumed that power derived from controlling the biggest material resources, from territories and colonies to gold mines, oil wells, armies, and navies. The future would belong to those institutions able to muster and control those vast physical assets and deploy their power. And the bigger the institutions—empires, nations, corporations—the bigger the power they would wield. In politics as in sex, men at the dawn of the twentieth century said, size is destiny.

  Yet now the greatest power of all turned out to be not immensely large but infinitesimally, even invisibly, small. It lay in the unseen heart of the atom, its nucleus: a power Einstein defined precisely as mass times the speed of light squared or E=MC2. “Assuming that it were possible to effect that immense release,” Einstein told a biographer in 1921, “we should merely find ourselves in an age compared to which our coal-black present would seem golden.”39

  Thirty years after Einstein’s word and Bohrs’s pathbreaking paper, a group of scientists and engineers would gather in the New Mexico desert to put that prediction to the test. The place was Los Alamos: the test would be the first atomic bomb. The power of the unseen world had finally, definitely overthrown the visible one. It came as the latest battle between Plato and Aristotle had reached its climax—and putting Western civilization to its severest test yet.

  * * *

  * One such was American historian Henry Adams. A picture of inevitable entropy and decline pervades his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).

  † Mach’s most lasting contribution to physics was revealing what happens when a bullet or shell approaches the sound barrier and pushes a compression of air in front of it. Mach had taken photographs of the shadows of these invisible shock waves. His formula for measuring the speed of sound still carries his name—which is why we still talk about a jet plane traveling at Mach 1 or Mach 2.

  ‡ See chapter 24.

  § A good example is Max Weber, who constructed an entire sociology uncontaminated by Hegelian ideas and who proved resistant to their instinctive allegiance to an extreme German nationalism. The influence of Nietzsche, however, proved more challenging. See chapter 28.

  ‖ Why was Austria so immune to Hegel? One reason was that Kant, Hegel, and Fichte were all for a time on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books. By the time they came off, Austrian schools and universities had found other intellectual mentors, including the Catholic philosopher Franz Bretano and (thanks to the German translation by T. Gomperz) John Stuart Mill.

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): “Everything about Socrates is wrong.”

  Twenty-seven

  TRIUMPH OF THE WILL: NIETZSCHE AND THE DEATH OF REASON

  Men must become better and more evil.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  Whatever their differences, Plato and Aristotle did agree on one thing: the importance of reason in human affairs.

  In Plato’s case, the path of reason was more speculative and inward-turning, based on a search for timeless a priori principles. Aristotle celebrated a more practical version of reason, embedded in the rules of logic and science—and in empirical experience. But both assumed that distinguishing truth from falsehood was man’s most important mission, and that his mind was the surest guide for doing it.

  For more than two thousand years, their successors embraced the same idea. Christianity tended to see human reason in more Platonic terms, as a reflection of the mind of God. Following Aristotle, the Enlightenment treated it as a powerful ordering mechanism, not only generating scientific knowledge but also enabling us to grasp the basic forces governing our own history—a point with which both Hegel and Marx would have completely agreed.

  But none ever doubted that reason was the essential core of human identity. Even the Romantics, with their celebration of feelings and emotions, were chasing after a richer synthesis of our spiritual and rational natures, not the permanent overthrow of the latter.

  Then very suddenly in the 1880s, new ideologies sprang up in Germany and France arguing for just that. Their proponents asserted that it wasn’t what we know that makes us powerful, but what we believe—even if it’s a lie. Instead of knowing and analyzing reality, they proclaimed, man’s mission is to transform it in ways no previous generation could ever have imagined.

  “Other people have saints; the Greeks had sages.”

  The man who penned this aphorism in 1872, and the first exponent of the new irrationalism, was an obscure professor of classical philosophy at the University of Basel named Friedrich Nietzsche. His classes were empty. Other professors, especially the philosophers, urged students to stay away.1 They had been outraged by the book on Greek drama he had published the year before, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. However, Nietzsche’s handful of lectures about the earliest Greek thinkers—Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Parmenides, Democritus, and Nietzsche’s particular favorite, Heraclitus—reveals a good deal more about Nietzsche than does his more widely read book on tragedy and Apollinian and Dionysian man, and far more about Nietzsche’s place in what would happen next.

  The pre-Socratics were a strange subject for serious lectures. After twenty-five hundred years, the written works of these earliest Greek thinkers had almost vanished. About all that survived were fragments quoted by Plato and Aristotle, largely in order to refute them. However, enough survived to allow scholars to get a broad idea of their theories: Parmenides’s belief in the unity of Being, for example, and Democritus’s atomism.*

  The question the pre-Socratics had rallied around was: What is reality? As we saw, Socrates had changed the key philosophical question to: How should I live? All the same, the pre-Socratics’ answers to the first, Nietzsche suggested, already implied the second. It’s just that their approach took them in a sharply different direction from Socrates’s: one that put a premium on man’s place in the world, instead of above or apart from it, which to Plato and Aristotle was the consequence of his possessing reason.

  Now Nietzsche proclaimed that Plato and Aristotle had been wrong all along. The pre-Socratics were the real geniuses of Greek civilization. When their works were lost, he believed, “indescribable riches were lost to us.” However, enough remained to show they understood reality had little to do with the mind, and a lot to do with being in the here and now.2

  For Nietzsche, the most important of the pre-Socratics was Heraclitus. “Heraclitus’s regal possession is his extraordinary power to think intuitively” rather than through the mediation of formal categories, or “the rope ladder of logic.” Heraclitus denied any separation of mind and matter, body and spirit; “he altogether denied Being”—that obsession of Greek philosophers after Parmenides, including Socrates and Plato. Heraclitus was the first to realize that “good and bad are identical” in the constant flux that is existence.

  Of course, the consequences of Heraclitus’s most famous saying, “All things change,” or Panta rhei, can appear paralyzing to the human mind. It means nothing is permanent, even from moment to moment. Nietzsche likened it to a mental earthquake. But the impermanence of everything, including the universe, should be a formula for serenity rather than despair. “It takes great strength” to realize that we are d
estined to ride the hurricane of change alone and to accept the ceaseless fluctuation of everything we see or touch or hold dear. However, when we do, we will be prepared to see life as a whole, including ourselves.3

  “Let the wheel of time roll where it will,” Nietzsche affirms, “it can never escape truth.” Nor, will we. Modern man will realize that mind and body, good and evil, Being and Becoming, the Many and the One, are all false choices. “They are but the flash and spark of drawn swords, the quick radiance of victory in the struggle of opposites,” without end or beginning. This is why, Nietzsche concludes, “the world forever needs Heraclitus.” The greatest of pre-Socratic thinkers raised the curtain on history’s greatest secret, the bleak truth behind the Delphic motto “Know thyself.”4

  Ride the hurricane. It is not hard to hear in all this the voice of Romanticism recast as a reading of early Greek philosophy. It appears also in Nietzsche’s other great influential work, the Birth of Tragedy (1872), his celebration of the Greek god Dionysus as the presiding spirit of spontaneity and creative insight, versus Apollo as the symbol of bloodless reason. It certainly had a Byronic ring, as does his evocation of genius as the life force of civilization, with “each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time”—a line he might have stolen from Percy Shelley but that in fact comes from Schopenhauer.5

  Yet Nietzsche’s project became far more radical. It involved a wholesale tearing down of every familiar landmark of Western thought, starting with its first philosopher-martyr, Socrates. “Everything about Socrates is wrong,” he would write.6 Nietzsche saw him not just as some dead figure out of the pages of a philosophy text, but as a living, baneful presence in the modern world, to be argued with, refuted, and ultimately overthrown. He devoted his life to purging Socrates’s influence on Western man, compared to whom Plato and Aristotle were minor cast characters.

  Why Socrates?7 Because, Nietzsche charged, it was Socrates who first elevated the importance of reason over instinct. It was Socrates who first made men look to the heavens for truth and happiness instead of being content to ride the ceaseless flux.

  It was also Socrates who introduced that shoddiest and most misleading of all false daemons, the voice of conscience, which convinces us we need to feel guilty about what actually makes us feel good. For Nietzsche, Socrates is the original father of Western decadence, an issue that consumed him until Nietzsche finally went mad. Nietzsche concluded that Socrates’s enemies might have been right. “Could Socrates have been the corrupter of youth after all?” he asked bitterly. “Did he deserve that cup of hemlock?”8 Nietzsche answered with an enthusiastic “Yes!”

  Then came Plato, who only completed what Socrates had started. Plato taught Western culture to think of reason, self-denial, and the realm of spirit as good and spontaneity, pleasure, music and art (“Plato is the greatest enemy of art Europe has ever known”), and the world of the senses as bad. Plato’s works mark the birth of good and evil that Christianity would go on to inherit—and with it the death of freedom.9

  The result was that Western man was divided against himself. The free, spontaneous spirit of Dionysian man and pre-Socratic Greek civilization, which inspired its finest music, art, poetry, and drama, was steadily crushed out under the cold, calculating gaze of Plato and his cultural offspring, Apollonian man.† “The dying Socrates became the new ideal,” along with the theoretical man, who thinks rather than feels and who prefers martyrdom (as the early Christians did) to resistance. Aristotle followed this up by reifying reason into science, forcing the natural world to bend to the mind’s instinct for system and order; while “virtue” (meaning obeying the law and getting along with others) became the focus of social and political life.

  From there, the story of the West goes quickly downhill. At the edge of the Roman world, an obscure Jewish priestly caste turned Plato’s ascetic formula into the ethical outlook of an entire society called Christianity. “Christianity,” Nietzsche snorted, “is Platonism for the masses”—a sentence Origen himself might have uttered, but in a very different tone. The Christian Middle Ages relegated all human spontaneity and vitality to the cultural margins, like the vagabond troubadours. Except for a short burst of freedom in the Renaissance of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the Enlightenment and the modern age remained trapped in Plato’s icy grip.

  “The tempo of life slowed down, dialectics [took the] place of instinct, seriousness [was] imprinted on faces and gestures.” Men became obsessed with making themselves useful through science and commerce; a de-Christianized conscience became a weak-willed sink of pity open to every humanitarian cause. Then came “the advent of democracy; international courts instead of war; equal rights for women … whatever symptoms of declining life there are.” Nietzsche did not hesitate to throw in Hegel (with his obsession with ideas as the only reality) and Marx as two more sorry specimens from the same decadent cesspool.10

  Instead of a history of progress, for Nietzsche the history of the West since Plato has been a history of decadence and diminishing vitality, “an age of exhaustion, of [growing] evening and twilight.” If Western man is to save himself from the final darkness, Nietzsche predicted, he will have to recapture that clean sense of drive and energy of the pre-Socratic age: what Nietzsche dubbed the will to power.

  The early Greeks, the Homeric heroes and Heraclitean sages, had it. The German barbarian tribes, those “blond beasts” who destroyed a previous decadent exhausted civilization, the Roman Empire, had it. The Japanese samurai, Genghis Khan, the medieval freebooting knight, the Renaissance condottiere: All had led “a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture” but emerge “exhilarated and undisturbed of soul.” This is because they possess that will to power, that spark of vitality that in history is “the privilege of the strong” and is embodied in “war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity”;11 and in them, as it does not in modern man, it remained undimmed and unchecked.

  Did Nietzsche really believe that the last best hope for humankind would be bands of these violent warriors, the moral equivalent of today’s Hell’s Angels or Crips and Bloods? Yes, he did, because he saw in them the true dynamic of historical change. Nietzsche’s analysis was able to go far beyond Rousseau’s admiration for the “noble savage,” thanks in large part (ironically) to Hegel. Historical progress for Hegel is thoroughly blood soaked; so is it for Nietzsche. The founders of all great civilizations are “men of prey,” Nietzsche asserted, men “still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, [who] hurled themselves on weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races”—those who, like the modern West, had been made more peaceful because their inner vitality had died out.

  So in the final analysis, Nietzsche’s version of “the cunning of history” looks a lot like Hegel’s and Plato’s, except in reverse. The so-called winners in history, like modern Europe, turn out to be its biggest losers and vice versa. To most readers (and very few people read Nietzsche’s book until after his death), this must have seemed an absurd paradox. In 1881, when Nietzsche wrote the bulk of his most renowned work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, European civilization never seemed more powerful or permanent. Its factories belched forth goods that traveled by rail and from seaports to every corner of the globe. Its colonial empires ruled three-quarters of the earth’s inhabited surface. Its science, literature, music, and philosophy set the standard of high human achievement. It breathed the spirit of Progress from every angle. Yet Nietzsche sensed that it had reached a tipping point, not in its outer strength but inside its head. He believed the instrument of its destruction would be the very thing that gave Victorian Europe its great sense of pride: its reliance on science.

  The new scientific outlook of Darwin’s evolution and Ernst Mach’s physics had demonstrated to all concerned that there was no heaven above, only an open, empty sky.‡ “Metaphysical reality” was a self-contradiction.12 Science had left Western man standing alo
ne on an empty train platform, with all the emotional and intellectual baggage left by a Christianity that had been based on a myth and had absorbed a lie: Plato’s assertion that man had a “higher” rational self, when all it was was his own fear of life.

  It was a shattering revelation. Nietzsche summed it up by the phrase “God is dead.” At almost the same time, the characters in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels were pointing out that if God was truly dead, then everything is permitted. Dostoyevsky wrote these words with something approaching despair. Nietzsche says it with the shuddering glee of a man singing under the bracing spray of an ice-cold shower.

  “What does not destroy us,” he was fond of saying, “makes us stronger,” including the death of God and Socratic reason. Now was the time for European man to recover his vital roots, he proclaimed. Now was the time for Europeans to become once again a race of Dionysian “free spirits.”

  Nietzsche had seen the evolution of Greek culture as a battle between vital Dionysian man and rational Apollinian man. By the time he wrote On the Genealogy of Morals in 1887, he was seeing it as the battle between Plato and his pre-Socratic predecessors.13 Plato had won, or so it seemed. Now with the death of God, the West has a chance to replay the match. The result would be an intellectual revolution more sweeping than any in history, a “transvaluation of all values,” as Nietzsche put it, in which Western man would finally realize that asceticism, self-sacrifice, humility, industry, and pity are actually evil because they are the enemies of human vitality. Joyous spontaneity and the will to power, on the other hand, the desire to rule and dominate and plunge headlong into the great adventure of the endless flux, would be revealed to be good because they express the sources (if not necessarily the fruits) of vitality and life.