Frederick Nietzsche
prophet of the modern
1844-1900
THE HAMMER SPEAKS
"Why so
hard?" the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. "After all,
are we not close kin?'
Why so soft? O, my brothers, thus I ask you: are you
not after all my brothers?
Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so
much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?
And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable
ones, how can you one day triumph with me.
And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut
and cut through, how can you one day create with me?
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness
to you to impress your hand on millennia as on bronze-harder than bronze, nobler
than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
This new table, O my bothers, I place over you: become
hard!
Frederick Nietzsche
Zarathustra, III .29
FREDERICK NIETZSCHE:
THE WILL TO POWER - BECOME HARD
"I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers
of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared
not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks
and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."
Viktor
Frankl
The Doctor and the Soul
"[In place of religious belief] Nietzsche
rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what
he called the "Will To Power," which offered a far more comprehensive
and in the end more plausible explanation of human behavior than
either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would
be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the
totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And,
above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah,
uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an
unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the
old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe,
was a summons to such gangster-statesmen to emerge. They were
not slow to make their appearance."
Paul Johnson
Modern Times
The SS cultivated and honored the ability to kill human beings en
masse without any remorse for the greater glory of the Nazi
cause.
Let us
acknowledge unprejudiced how every higher civilization hitherto
had originated! Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in
every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession
of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves
upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or
cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in
which the vital forces was flickering out in a brilliant fireworks
of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble casts was
always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first
of all in their physical, but in their psychical power - they were
complete men (which at every point also implies the same as "more
complete beasts").
It is impossible not to recognize
at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of
prey; the magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil
and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time
to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into
the wilderness - the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese
nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are
all alike in this need... They enjoy their freedom from all
social control, they feel that in the wilderness they can
give vent with impunity to that tension which is produced
by enclosure and imprisonment in the peace of society, they
revert to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience,
like jubilant monsters, who perhaps come from a ghostly bout
of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral
equanimity, as though merely some wild student's prank had
been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now
an ample theme to sing and celebrate.
Frederick Nietzsche
The Genealogy of Mortals
MEMBERS OF A "WEAKER RACE?"
Holocaust victims of Adolf
Hitler's Third Reich lay piled on top of one another.
(This correspondence between Rich
Geib and John
Barich deals with whether or G.W.F. Hegel and Frederick
Nietzsche had anything to do with the rise of totalitarian
governments in the 20th century.)
"Take but degree away, untune that
string,
And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy:...
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite."
William Shakespeare
Los Angeles, California
April 15, 1995
Dear John,
One could say that the most deadly
threat a prophet or philosopher runs is the risk of being misunderstood
or misinterpreted. And understood in a vacuum, religion is one
of the most noble and uplifting of the human discourses, undoubtedly
a support and consolation to untold numbers. However, perhaps
no other single source has caused more bloodshed and misery in
human history. Untold numbers of atrocities have been committed
in the name of religion, with the perpetrators firmly convinced
that what they were doing was sanctioned in the eyes of God.
Perhaps it is a paradox of mankind that so many of the beautiful
ideas and moral laws invented by the mind of man have been so
corrupted and misshapen in their application in the world of
men. Notwithstanding the daily importance of religion to so many,
I tend to share the view of Lucretius: "Religion is a disease
born of fear and a source of untold misery." And although
ideas may be born in the antiseptic world of thought and contemplation,
they have consequences out in an imperfect world replete with
messiness, strife, and evil.
I grant you the argument that to
personally blame Frederick Nietzsche or G.W.F. Hegel for the
sins of 20th century Germany is a mistake, as well as a gross
oversimplification. Both were men of letters who surely would
have shirked from naked violence and cruelty. Understood in the
correct historical context, their philosophies both seek to bring
about what they individually saw as a greater good. The Nietzschian "superman" and
the Hegelian concept of the unity of the Absolute Idea are both
arguments for a mankind that is improved and enlightened. The
problem is that these highly sophisticated philosophers and their
ideas are to be read and interpreted by men who will see in them
what is important to them. In their enactment in the world of
man, "pure" ideas are often distorted and used for self-serving
purposes. This is a key problem of intellectuals: they lack a
common sense in the world outside of the mind, and ideas are
all too vulnerable in the context of money, war, and power. In
taking thought out of the ordered world of the intellect and
trying to enact it in the flawed world of mankind, too often
the spirit of the thing is killed with disastrous results. As Pinkerton (in
my opinion) accurately states in his article, "Ideas may start
in ivory towers, but they have consequences for real people."
To read Nietzsche is to come under
his spell. His peculiar power may come from his fusing the power
of the prophet with the epic lyricism of the poet. His writing
is pregnant with image and an emotive power that is dangerous
for a philosopher and there is a glorification of the heroic
and spontaneous which calls to something deep in the primal heart
of man the animal. Can we be surprised that so much of what he
wrote appealed to the worst in mankind?
Nietzsche called for the Superman. Mussolini
and Hitler answered
the call. It does not matter that in all probability Nietzsche
would have scorned them as perverters of his doctrine, would
have opposed them bitterly. It does not even matter that
had Nietzsche never written these men would in all probability
have come to power much as they did. They have found a use
for Nietzsche, a use he probably never intended his words
to provide.
Crane Brinton, Nietzsche
As you noted, Nietzsche was an unparalleled master
at dissecting what was wrong with European Christianity: how people
simply mouthed the slogans without believing in them ("God is
dead"). And it is true that his ideas landed like bombs among
the comfortable bourgeoisie of the liberal democracies.
But in attacking so powerfully
what was wrong with the "slave morality" of Christianity,
Nietzsche opens the way for disaster by glorifying so powerfully
a radical individualism and self-assertiveness. A university
professor might argue this point by arguing the historical
context and author's intent, but I argue that in the real
world of mankind - full of brooding souls with animal passions
residing just below the veneer of civility - there exists
dangerous forces that when not controlled can lead to disaster.
Nietzsche must be understood as against Christianity; to
see him as ultimately in favor of anything else definitive
is to mistake his intent and enter perilous territory. He
simply argues the Will to Power, for the unleashing of the Dionysian spirit
to run joyfully upon the earth. In real life, this all too
often means slaughter and domination. It is precisely the
Christian precepts of love of neighbor and humility which
serve as a check to the darker side of man. What does this
instinct to Power inflame in the breast of man? The best
or the worst? To what end should power ultimately serve?
Nietzsche does not directly address these questions, although
one may assume and draw inferences. I argue that in real
life such fever-pitched emotional pleas for assertiveness
and unbridled individualism speak directly to what can be
worst in man, unleashing his animal side unchecked. You mentioned
that a Christian country (the United States) defeated a Nazi
Germany embodying such rabidly aggressive values. But you
forget the Germans were fighting almost the whole world.
And they almost won.
Frederick Nietzsche was a man
of books and universities who grew up surrounded by doting
female love in a strictly pious Christian household. Professionally,
he was first a university professor and then a recluse writer/philosopher
who never had a family, nor love affair worthy of the name.
In short, he never was much of an active participator in
the world of men. So much of what he writes glorifies the Dionysian aspect
of mankind, the man of destiny impressing his will upon the
wax of history. This is one thing in the sanitary world of
pure thought, and quite another in the world of politics,
war, and power. Nietzsche never served as a soldier, never
killed anyone, nor watched anyone die a violent death. If
he had, he may have been more cautious in extolling the virtues
of the strong and the powerful (understanding better the
price and the pain). And the feverish and intemperate tone
of Nietzsche's prose is as important as what he says - can
people hardly be blamed for misinterpreting him?
The "superman", in real life,
finds its more likely incarnation in Napoleon in the 19th
century and more dynamic dictators in the 20th - an age,
in part due to the prophet Nietzsche, where traditional ideas
of history and justice were turned on their head and everything
was permitted. The
Good, the True, and the Beautiful were cast aside with
contempt as questions of power and politics became pervasive
and all-important. The modern era began with the person of
Napoleon, claims French historian Jean-Richard Bloch, and
it is an age defined by its unlimitedness, its concept of
power without religious or moral counterweight. It has seen
a vigorous rejection of reason and liberalism and a consequent
return to the older and darker worldview of Hobbes where
mankind suffers "a perpetual and restless desire of power
after power, that ceaseth only in death." I look at the
old black and white newsreels from the inter-war period of
the 1930s punctuated with speechifying jackbooted thugs gesticulating
wildly appearing to bark gunpowder, and other machine-like
leather jacketed revolutionaries grimly promising death to "class
enemies" everywhere around the world, and my hearts sinks
through my shoes. Humanity seemed on the verge of plunging
into a new Dark Age of ubiquitous violence and cruelty! Was
this progress?
When I read Nietzsche, I am reminded
of watching a training film in the Sheriff's Academy where
a prison gangmember tells of stabbing another inmate to death.
Standing triumphantly over the dying man and watching his
life blood flow out, the gangmember seems to transcend his
own mortality: "Man, I felt like a God!" Flush with
the power to take a life, to play God on earth, unrestrained
by moral constraints, indomitable and immortal; when Nietzsche
preaches so eloquently in favor of the Will to Power in his
writings, he preaches precisely to this aspect of humanity
in real life. Once more: to read Nietzche is all too often
to fall under his strange spell; his prose possesses a beauty
and power unrelated to the logic of his philosophy, it being
so strident with the spirit of poetry. As a philosopher Nietzche
writes perhaps too well for his own good - one is captivated
by his passion and emotion almost more than by his reasoning.
Nietzsche is spiritually akin to Homer, praising the mighty
Odysseus with Priam and his family murdered at his feet.
Yet no matter what the reason or need, for those possessing
a moral sense and an active conscience the killing of another
human being is always a grave and tragic thing.
To question religion and the
existence of God is one thing. To take it a step farther
and call into question any morality we may have inherited
from our Judeo-Christian heritage is another more dangerous
step which has led to barbarism and spectacular crimes in
the 20th century, in my opinion. While rejecting and attempting
to destroy the "degenerate" bourgeois order of the late 19th
century, Nietzsche never put much up in way of an alternative.
Like the baby-boomers of America in the 1960s, Nietzsche
broke down traditions without establishing anything in their
place. Nihilism was the result, and new unscrupulous forces
rushed in to fill the vacuum. As Walter Lippman observed, "When
men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized,
become humanists." With his call for mankind to transcend
its "weakness," can Nietzsche call himself a humanist?
I agree with T.S. Eliot when
he talks of a certain "wisdom of our ancestors"; and we reject en
masse this wisdom at our own peril, in my opinion. Realistic
and effective control of evil and disorder, Milton wrote
in Aeropagitica, depends heavily on "those unwritten,
or at least unconstraining laws of virtuous education, religious
and civil nurture." This sense of tradition and custom, as
Plato recognized, are "the bonds and ligaments of the commonwealth,
the pillars and sustainers of every written statue." When
a society cuts itself off from the past by seeking its transcendence,
it stands poised to plunge into the abyss. As the French
and Russian Revolutions, Nazi dictatorship, and many other
instances of political violence in the last two hundred years
have shown, the dream of burning everything down to build
up a "new society" or "new mankind" on its ashes has proven
a nightmare.
As for my part, I will love man
as I find him: both hard and soft, good and evil, infinitely
complex and ambivalent - and not something to be "overcome." And
unlike Nietzsche, I have seen people die violent deaths in
pain, screaming and crying. I have seen many die this way
- as well as meet the people who murdered them in what might
be the most humbling and sobering experiences of my entire
life. For this reason, I cannot help when I read Nietzsche
to feel a certain disgust and contempt. We are all flawed
and frail creatures, including Nietzsche. Christian compassion
and charity starts from exactly this point of reckoning.
Also a university professor,
G.W.F. Hegel suffers from some of the same defects as Nietzsche.
Hegel was not the first nor the last intellectual to see
in the victories of Napoleon over the old aristocratic order
of Europe the dawning of a new age defined by the principles
of liberty, fraternity, and egalitarianism enunciated during
the French
Revolution. And in the context of late-18th century Germany
full of tiny backward and decadent fiefdoms, the phenomenon
of a powerful unified State under the direction of an enlightened
ruler seemed a desirable idea. Hegel held that the Enlightenment
principles of reason, liberty, and freedom could be propagated
upon a superstitious and ignorant world by a powerful centralized
government animated by beneficent motivations. It is easy
to see the superficial attractiveness of this specious reasoning.
Yet it is well to examine what
happened to so many of the Romantics after the fall of Napoleon:
the sense of betrayal by embittered writers and artists disillusioned
by Napoleon's crowning himself Emperor, his violating the
principles of the French revolution, and Europe left yet
again bloodied and in rubble in the name of tyranny and a
greed for power. No matter the casuistry or noble intentions
of his thought, Hegel is fundamentally flawed in constructing
a theory of history placing the State in so central a place
in the unraveling of world history. Hegel argues for a time
in the future when conflicting Ideas (the "dialectic")
will end in a fusion of the "Absolute Idea" - a sort
of unity of all rational ideas equaling the totality of all
human experience and knowledge. Truly only a paradise that
a philosopher could love, Hegel writes of a type of utopia
brought about under the aegis of the Nation-State where mankind
is to be united as a whole in the Absolute Idea. The heaven
of Hegel is to be a state of mind where reason and pure thought
reign supreme, and the mind of man is finally unified in
the One. Hegel rejects individualism and political democracy
as producing alienation and a lack of community in man; the
important is the culture of a race ("volksgeist")
embodied in the State during a particular stage in the unfolding
of human history moving towards the One. "All the worth
which the human being possesses in all spiritual reality,
he possesses only through the State...," Hegel writes, "The
basis of the State is the power of reason actualizing itself
as Will." Wrong. In a totalitarian country, the basis
of the State is naked power - the propagation and corroboration
of power, and the accumulation of more power. In defining
the State as the principal actor in the flow of history and
the key to a future union with the Absolute Idea, Hegel makes
the argument in real life for totalitarian government.
More damaging still is the powerful
influence Hegel had on Karl
Marx and his subsequent development of communism, having
such profoundly damaging effects on world history. How many
people have been slaughtered by communist state organs under
the ideological
justification that the Party need perform its historical
role in bringing about the end of the human "dialectic" ushering
in the ensuing paradise that is consequently promised? How
many millions
of Communist Party faithful were weaned on the sustenance
of "scientific socialism" and "objectively historical
laws," deriving the germ of its idea from the philosophy
of Hegel? I am not arguing that Hegel is directly responsible
for the crimes of communism throughout history. I am simply
arguing that through naiveté and a lack of common sense Hegel
indirectly helped to construe a political system whose natural
application in the real world was a poison the world has
only just begun to expunge from its system. Hegel was in
effect one of the first modern constructors of the totalitarian
ideology. The mixing of an impersonal ideology with the awesome
power of an aggressive modern State was an idea unfortunately
whose time had truly arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries.
With perfect 20/20 hindsight, today we see clearly that in
giving such unlimited power to the State we are paving the
way to unmitigated disaster.
It is through the practical genius
of such political thinkers as John
Locke and the Baron
de Montesquieu that was conceived a State with divided
powers and checks and balances. It is an ideology of limited
government that is structurally designed to resist tyranny
with certain "inalienable rights" encoded in law. Encapsulated
in the United
States Constitution, this has provided a success in real
life that none of the totalitarian
governments has enjoyed. Enlightenment Anglo-Saxon and
French political thought moved to praise and protect the
individual and the minority rights of citizens. It is the freedom
from government oppression and tyranny.
On the other hand, the Germanic
romantic thinkers such as Hegel, Fichte, Schiller all stressed
the importance of the individual's duty to the collective.
Individual success is defined in the success of the collective,
and concepts such as obedience, loyalty, and devotion are
idolized. The highest calling an individual has is to the
State, in serving the needs of the State; it is the freedom
to obey the State. They do not concern themselves with
individuals as such, but rather look at nations as individual
actors with their respective roles in the historical process.
Nations and cultures are the important organisms of this
world view, possessing their own unique personalities and
psychologies. Not surprisingly, the premier people - or "volk" -
was the Germanic one, supposedly possessing a special role
in the unfolding of world history. A role, of course, they
did play - albeit a bloody and ignominious one. How far is
it from such early Prussian nationalist rhetoric to Adolf
Hitler and his creed: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer?" (One
people, one empire, one leader.) Is Hitler an
aberration, or is he a uniquely German creation?
You wrote to me, "A democratic
state may have evolved in Germany if not for its late unification
and tragic leap into World War I..." Where are the
intellectual roots for a liberal democracy in German intellectual
thought? Was democracy ever very strong in Germany before
the end of World War II? Extreme nationalism in the 19th
century was not a purely German phenomenon, and was powerful
throughout Europe. But the all too common outgrowth of
nationalism, totalitarianism, found powerful ideological
justifications in such early 19th century German romantic
thinkers like Hegel. I have no doubt that Hegel would have
been shocked and dismayed to see the legacy of his philosophy.
Yet it is precisely Hegel's flawed judgment in calling
for the establishment of an all-powerful State that helped
to create a basis for subsequent political ideologies such
as communism and fascism. And it is directly the proliferation
of such ultra-authoritarian States that has precipitated
so much of the rape of the individual by the collective
that so besmirches our age. As George Orwell so poignantly
put it in his quintessentially 20th century novel, "1984": "If
you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping
on a human face --- forever."
"Conversation enriches the
understanding, but solitude is the school of genius," wrote historian
Edward Gibbon of another philosopher (Mohammed), just
a short period before the rise of Napoleon and the dawn
of the Modern Age. It is from the realm of pure thought
that man has sought to understand the movement of the stars
overhead, unleash the power
of the atom, and conceive of a moral
law which separates us from the animals. Yet the ordered
and logical world of pure thought is much different from
the world one finds in the society of man. All too often
in formulating their theses, intellectuals (like Nietzsche
and Hegel) have come to show themselves as intensely brilliant
in the former and spectacularly ignorant in the latter.
Sincerely,
Richard
"Society cannot exist unless a controlling
power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the
less of it there is within, the more there must be without...
men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge
their fetters."
Edmund
Burke
from Betrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy"
"But egoistic passions, when once
let loose, are not easily brought again into subjection to the
needs of society. Christianity had succeeded, to some extent,
in taming the Ego, but economic, political, and intellectual
causes stimulated revolt against the Churches, and the romantic
movement brought the revolt into the sphere of morals. By encouraging
a new lawless Ego it made social cooperation impossible, and
left its disciples faced with the alternative of anarchy or despotism.
Egoism, at first, made men expect from others a parental tenderness;
but when they discovered, with indignation, that others had their
own Ego, the disappointed desire for tenderness turned to hatred
and violence. Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social
life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle
of ethics."
Buddha
versus Nietzsche
as envisioned by Betrand Russell
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