Nietzsche

by Roy Jackson

  d Jacques Derrida

  6 In which of Nietzsche’s works will you find the following opening: ‘Assuming that truth is a woman – what then?’

  a Beyond Good and Evil

  b The Birth of Tragedy

  c Ecce Homo

  d The Anti-Christ

  7 What is the name of the philosopher who defined existentialism as ‘existence precedes essence’?

  a Albert Camus

  b Søren Kierkegaard

  c Martin Buber

  d Jean-Paul Sartre

  8 What are the Laws of Manu?

  a Laws created by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

  b Laws of the Prussian state at the time of Nietzsche

  c Laws of Hindu origin

  d Laws of Persian origin

  Dig deeper

  Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: CUP, 1994)

  Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche and Political Thought, Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)

  Kelly A. Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (Rereading the Canon) (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998)

  Paul Patton, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1993)

  Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: CUP, 2006)

  11

  Nietzsche’s legacy

  In this chapter you will learn:

  • the reasons why Nietzsche became associated with Nazism

  • about the influence Nietzsche had on French twentieth-century philosophy

  • about his influence on the analytic tradition

  • about other influences, especially on art and literature.

  It has been said that Nietzsche was in no way a racist, except perhaps towards his own nation, the Germans. More accurately, he hated what Germany had become: a nation of nationalists rather than ‘good Europeans’ who, worse still, were discriminatory towards others. It is a sad irony, therefore, that he became the official German philosopher of the Nazi period.

  Needless to say, after the Second World War, serious academic study of Nietzsche was neglected because few wished to be associated with the ‘Nazi philosopher’. However, since the second half of the twentieth century Nietzsche’s influence has grown, and his ideas have had a major impact on many artists and writers in France and elsewhere, and also on the analytic tradition of Britain and the United States.

  Nazism

  ‘Listen to me for I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!’

  Ecce Homo, Foreword

  During the First World War, Elisabeth Nietzsche proclaimed her brother as an imperialist and a warrior who would have been proud of the Germans’ cause. She arranged for copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be sent to the troops.

  However, it was with the arrival of the dictators that she was really able to promote Nietzsche’s philosophy. She heard that the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini had claimed that Nietzsche had been a great influence on his politics, and so she made a point of establishing a regular correspondence with him. Mussolini took the notion of the Superman to mean anyone who stands out from the crowd and controls his own destiny. In fact, he saw himself as one of these Supermen, and Elisabeth praised him as the new Caesar.

  When Elisabeth chose to stage a play written by Mussolini at the Nietzsche Archive, the Italian leader was unable to attend. However, the leader of the National Socialist Party, Adolf Hitler, was present that night. This was her first introduction and she immediately fell under his spell. It was in 1933 at the Bayreuth Festival on the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death that Elisabeth Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler discussed Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche later became the official philosopher of Germany, giving Nazism the intellectual credibility it otherwise lacked. In fact, Nietzsche’s own comments on Germans and the German nation might well have resulted in imprisonment or worse during the period of Nazi Germany if they had ever been allowed to be aired in public.

  Aside from his sister’s active encouragement, there were other reasons for associating Nietzsche with Hitler:

  • Nietzsche’s association with the Wagner family

  Richard Wagner himself was an anti-Semite and the Wagners as a whole have been associated with National Socialism. As a consequence, any disciple of Wagner is an implied disciple of National Socialism, despite Nietzsche distancing himself from Wagner’s influence in the late 1870s. For example, one of the leading figures and theoretical inspirations for Nazi thought was actually an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), who became a zealous Germanophile and, significantly, wed Richard Wagner’s youngest daughter, Eva. Chamberlain wrote an extensive anti-Semitic text called Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), which was a bestseller during the rise of Hitler alongside Thus Spoke Zarathustra, so these two books were linked in the German mind.

  • The similarity of Nietzsche’s writing style to Hitler’s

  The similarity of Nietzsche’s caustic writing style to Hitler’s was especially strong during the last two years of Nietzsche’s sane life, when he became much more rhetorical, combative and violent in tone (see case study below). The language of hatred and venom used by Nietzsche in his attack on Christians is not dissimilar from the language used by Hitler to attack the Jews. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), for example, Hitler used terms such as ‘parasite’ and ‘spiritual pestilence’. However, whereas Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of prevalent Jewish and Christian values was largely peaceful in tone, focusing on a revaluation of values, Hitler’s solution was, alas, far more extreme. While their concerns were essentially the same in that both strived for a healthy culture and looked to certain sections of humanity that were considered unhealthy, they differed drastically in their methods and focus.

  Case study: Nietzsche’s violent language

  ‘The priest himself is recognized for what he is: the most dangerous kind of parasite, the actual poison-spider of life.’ (The Anti-Christ, 38)

  ‘[St Paul was] … a hate-obsessed false-coiner [counterfeiter].’ (The Anti-Christ, 42)

  ‘Wherever there is anything small and sick and scabby, there they crawl like lice; and only my disgust stops me from cracking them.’ (Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, ‘Of the Virtue That Makes Small’, Part 3.3)

  ‘One does well to put on gloves on reading the New Testament.’ (The Anti-Christ, 46)

  ‘The ascetic ideal, with its sublime moral cult, with its brilliant and irresponsible use of the emotions for holy purposes, has etched itself on the memory of mankind terribly and unforgettably. I can think of no development that has had a more pernicious effect upon the health of the race, and especially the European race, than this.’

  On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay 3, 21

  • Nietzsche’s belief in community, in the Volk

  Another possible reason for Nietzsche’s association with National Socialism is that, although he was anti-German in many of his remarks, he was a strong believer in community, in the Volk. Nietzsche contrasts this form of German Romanticism with the seeming emptiness and plurality of modernism. The poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) – whom Nietzsche read voraciously – wrote of the ‘destitution’ of modernity and Nietzsche shared this hostility towards modernity, with its emphasis on Enlightenment reason, and stressed instead the importance of community and the role of religion within it (see Chapter 9), but he distanced himself from the Romantic association with nationalism. Volkish thinking became indelibly linked with German nationalism and figures such as Heinrich Riehl (1823–97), Paul de Lagarde (1827–91) and, importantly, Richard Wagner. Coupled with this German nationalism was anti-Semitism. Despite Nietzsche’s own remarks, he was inevitably associated with these figures.

  Twentieth-century French philosophy

  ‘It is really only small number of older Frenchmen to whom I return again an
d again: I believe only in French culture and consider everything else in Europe that calls itself “culture” a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture…’

  Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, 3

  It could reasonably be argued that to understand twentieth-century French philosophy you have to understand Nietzsche. As already stated, Nietzsche hated German nationalism and, to some extent, was not that keen on Germany either. Nietzsche, travelling from one country to another for much of his life, was a true European, and it was French culture especially that he had a soft spot for, despite the fact he spent little time there. Of course, he likewise often spoke admiringly of Islamic countries and culture, yet never spent any time at all in an Islamic country.

  For its part, France was slow to take on Nietzsche in the philosophy departments, but when it did, it did so by storm. In fact, it was not so much the philosophy departments that took up Nietzsche to begin with, but the country’s writers and artists. One such writer, although something of a philosopher, was Georges Bataille (1897–1962). Under the influence of Nietzsche’s views on the Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy (see Chapter 3), Bataille presented a vision of the world as one that should be Dionysian in character: one in which there is overflowing ecstasy, excess and waste. He believed that the production of waste products was a necessity of life, and so he would have despaired at modern-day attempts to recycle and create a self-contained equilibrium as the equivalent of an Apollonian, rational monster.

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905–80)

  This view of the world as essentially a result of waste products, of a world of dead bodies, flies, dirt, mucus, urine, pus, phlegm, vomit, dandruff and so on was the reality portrayed by the existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre. This world is difficult to face unless we comfort ourselves by creating ideals – illusions in which to cope with the mundane and horrific. The experience of ‘nausea’ described in his novel Nausea is actually a form of enlightenment, an awareness of what it means to be alive. In Nausea, the character of Roquentin encounters the world of people and inanimate objects and sees things as having the stamp of his existence upon them. This gives existence a nauseating quality, and ‘nausea’ is an expression also used by Nietzsche in works such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Coupled with this concept of nausea is the realization that attempts to deal with objects, situations and people in a rational matter are absurd, and this led to a whole school of Absurdist literature.

  ALBERT CAMUS (1913–60)

  In the case of the Algerian-born French author, philosopher and journalist Albert Camus, for life to be meaningful we must live every moment like a person who has just come out of prison and smells the fresh air, feels the sunlight and the ground below. This life-affirming attitude is akin to Nietzsche’s, and Camus considered his thoughts to be a reaction against nihilism. While Camus tried to disassociate himself from any philosophical schools, he was, as a result of his own writings, inevitably linked with existentialism and the Absurd. While Camus never provides a specific doctrine of the Absurd, he nonetheless writes of experiencing the Absurd in, for example, his novel The Outsider and his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. In this essay, Camus highlights the absurdity of existence by demonstrating that we live a life of paradox: on the one hand valuing our own lives and striving to make something of them, while on the other hand being aware that we are all mortal and so our endeavours will ultimately come to nothing.

  Camus’s aim was not to depress everybody, but rather to consider how we face such absurdity. In fact, he didn’t think that life was meaningless: meaning can be created by our own decisions and perspectives, even if this is a temporary thing. This focus on no universals and the death of God – and therefore the death of any kind of absolutes – again was the concern of Nietzsche, who likewise rejected nihilism as an option. Camus’s philosophical novel The Fall considers the will to power in the context of the weak who, as a final resort, gain a sense of being better than others because they admit they are riddled with guilt.

  HENRI BERGSON (1859–1941)

  The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) is the French philosopher Bergson’s only published work that mentions Nietzsche by name, but Bergson’s philosophy is Nietzschean in many respects. Like Nietzsche, Bergson sets out to reverse Platonism by presenting what has been referred to as process philosophy. That is to say, philosophy does not unravel permanent truths – which would be Platonism – but rather truth is a process involving time, perception, change, memory and intuition. Like Nietzsche’s critique of modernity, Bergson attacked the mechanistic philosophy of his time, arguing for intelligence as evolutionary and adaptable. Interestingly, Bergson’s philosophy had a major influence on the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis (1885–1957), who also read Nietzsche and produced a version of process theology, expressed in his major work Zorba the Greek. According to Kazantzakis, when we look at the source of religion we see that God is the product of whatever people value.

  GILLES DELEUZE (1925–95)

  Nietzsche’s influence on the French philosopher Deleuze is particularly (though by no means exclusively) evident in his ethics and politics, in that he took up Nietzsche’s emphasis on ethical naturalism (see Chapter 4). Like Nietzsche, Deleuze sets out to understand the moral actions and beliefs of people as deriving from their desires and quest for power. To live well is to fully express one’s power – that is, to go to the limits of your own potential rather than look for transcendent, universal standards to live by. In Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze outlines what we must do in the face of a world that is one of flux and difference: ‘Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgement. What expert judgement, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?’

  MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–84)

  Perhaps no other French philosopher is more closely associated with Nietzsche than Foucault. Like Nietzsche, he interpreted the world in terms of the will to power and, again, like Nietzsche, had a genealogical agenda that he referred to as ‘archaeology’: an experimental method that he employed to study aspects of modernity. In the same way as an archaeologist literally digs to put together how a society lived, Foucault ‘digs’ at the form and content of language used in fields of knowledge to reveal the hidden interests of those engaged in discourse – that is, in the dissemination of knowledge. For example, as he states in his work Discipline and Punish, when experts (lawyers, psychologists, parole officers and so on) judge on a person’s criminality, Foucault sees this as an exercise of power over the criminal. In actual fact, Foucault argues, there is no objective valuation of what a criminal is, and what counts as criminal behaviour in one culture and at one time can be regarded as legal in another.

  Like Nietzsche, Foucault attacked Enlightenment attitudes to such concepts as inalienable rights, for Foucault would argue that there is no such thing as a universal good. While arguing for no absolutes, Foucault would not allow himself to be drawn into an ethical system or a political agenda. Foucault saw it as his mission to investigate, not to advocate.

  Spotlight

  For someone new to his work, Nietzsche can be an immediately appealing writer, though for others he can be very frustrating! You may need to give him time. Try to read him slowly at first and digest what he is saying. Much of his legacy is a result of his particular writing style that crosses the boundary between philosophy and literature, and you may find it helpful to approach his work as you would a poem.

  The analytic tradition

  The analytic movement dominated philosophy in Britain and the United States for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Like existentialism, it is difficult to identify specific tenets of this movement, although most analytic philosophers argue that the primary aim of philosophy is, or should be, to look to how language is used. L
anguage, it is argued, is the basis for all our knowledge, and so when we use concepts, the important thing is to consider how those concepts are used in the context of language.

  It is interesting that, whereas existentialism tends to emphasize the irrational and emotional side, the analytic tradition is much more rationalist and logical. Yet Nietzsche succeeds in straddling both traditions. Although Nietzsche is not such a direct influence upon the analytic tradition, much of his philosophy is considered to be firmly within this tradition, particularly his criticism of past philosophers for preoccupying themselves with metaphysical questions and also his view that it is not whether something is ‘true’ or ‘false’ that is important but whether a claim makes sense. Further, Nietzsche understood the importance of language in defining our world.

  One branch of the analytic movement is called logical positivism, which adopted a criterion of meaning which stated that, unless a statement can be verified by experience (for example, ‘all bachelors are happy’) or is true by definition (for example, ‘a bachelor is an unmarried man’), then it is meaningless. This inevitably results in metaphysical statements being discarded as irrelevant to philosophy because such statements as ‘God is wise’ cannot be proven by experience and nor is it by definition the case that ‘God’ and ‘wisdom’ are synonymous (although some have argued that in fact they are synonymous).

  Case study: Thomas Altizer (1927–)

  The influence of Nietzsche on theology is also evident in the writings of Thomas Altizer, who helped to create a ‘death of God’ theology. This may strike some as something of an oxymoron, but it was nonetheless an attempt to address Nietzsche’s concern that the Christianity of the time was leading to nihilism. By God’s ‘death’, Altizer is actually referring to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which, he says, resulted in the pouring out of God’s spirit into the world. God’s spirit, then, is not transcendent any more, but immanent: it exists in the material world, in the here and now.