Nietzsche & the Alt-Right
Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche
Presented to the Wheaton College Philosophy Club
April 17, 2019
by
Jason Giannetti
“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
- T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is a sculpture of the Bodhisattva Guanyin. This particular piece was acquired by the museum in 1920. The best estimate of its origin is that it came from the Shanxi Province of norther China, originally carved in the early 12th century. In China, it was not a museum piece, of course, but was a devotional icon used in a Buddhist temple. For the many centuries that it was there, it had to undergo numerous refurbishments. Occasionally new artists would add to it and paint it. In 1999 it was put in storage because of various problems and deterioration of the piece. In 2014 the museum embarked upon an ambitious conservation project, the goal of which was not to restore it to its original state, but to make informed choices about how to best present the work. The conservationist’s role is not an easy one, especially given a project such as Guanyin with its many layers of historical development. What would it mean to restore it to its “original” state? Which layer of the statue is most authentic? One could return it to pure wood, prior to any embellishment of paint or jewels. These are not easy questions to answer when dealing with a piece of art whose history is bound up with its existence.
In a similar way, the thinker today is faced with a daunting task when taking up the legacy of a complex and multivalent philosopher such as Nietzsche. T.S. Eliot said in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that the introduction of a truly new work into the canon alters all the works that came before it. After Duchamp’s “Mona Lisa” (L.H.O.O.Q.), we can no longer see Davinci’s Mona Lisa exactly the same way as we did before. The same holds true for the unfolding of thought through time. Just as the ever-widening ring of a drop of water in a still lake does not merely extend outward, but becomes distorted by the echoing waves returning upon the source from the objects encountered in the lake or upon the shore, so too does the echo of thought through later thinkers ever alter the mysterious origin.
Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps more than any recent philosopher, is a figure who presents less a philosophy than a problem. He problematizes philosophy, causing us to wonder just what philosophy is. In addition to that, his reception through the generations has compounded the problem of Who was Nietzsche? and What did he think?
In his own time Nietzsche was almost a non-entity. A brilliant star at the university that burned so brightly his illumination seemed destined to be brief. Though, at twenty-four, when he received a professorship, he was a prodigy at the University of Basel’s philology department, enrollment in his courses steadily dwindled during his tenure there. His first work, much anticipated among his philologist colleagues, was almost universally rejected, mainly because it was not a work of philology at all. It was, perhaps, Nietzsche’s best work, or at least his most joyful, because untainted by the many wounds he would incur in the next eighteen years. After ten years at the University of Basel, Nietzsche submitted his resignation to the university, claiming that his various health issues prevented him from carrying out his duties.
For the next thirteen years, Nietzsche would lead a nomadic life, ever in search of weather conducive to his convalescence. During this time he authored nine works, some of which were self-published due to his lack of a readership and therefore, lack of a publisher willing to bear the expense of publishing them. It was only toward the very end of his productive life that the Danish scholar and critic, George Brandes, took note of Nietzsche and gave a series of lectures on him. Despite being passed over by the intelligentsia of his time, Nietzsche was unphased in his own estimation of himself, as the chapters of his last work and philosophical autobiography demonstrate: Why I Am So Wise; Why I Am So Clever; Why I Write Such Good Books; Why I Am a Destiny.
Much speculation has been offered as to the nature and cause of Nietzsche’s ailments. He suffered from bouts of physical incapacity and intense migraine headaches that could result in projectile vomiting. His eyes were often strained and pained to the point that he couldn’t read or write. Yet, when he fell in love with Lou Salomé, he was able to pen the first part of his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in ten days of inspired creativity. And in the last year of his life, in a spurt of creative fecundity, he wrote five books before his ultimate mental break, after which he was relegated to an incommunicative state and placed in the care of his sister.
It was at that point that the history of an error begins. Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, with whom he had a very strained relationship, took over the curation and cultivation of Nietzsche’s reputation — his “branding” — after his mental collapse. During his lucid years, Fritz and Elisabeth could be on cordial terms, but beginning with his infatuation with Salomé, which Elisabeth disapproved of, and certainly by 1885, when Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, whom Nietzsche abhorred, their relationship was openly antagonistic. Bernhard Förster was a rabid anti-Semite. Almost a decade before Elisabeth married Bernhard, Nietzsche had split with his greatest defender and benefactor, Richard Wagner, at least in part over Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Förster and his wife had moved to Paraguay with other anti-Semitic “pioneers” in 1886 to found an “Aryan colony.” It failed, he went bankrupt, and eventually he committed suicide in 1889. Elisabeth returned to Germany in 1893 and she took over care of her invalid brother, capitalizing on the new-found fame of the “insane philosopher” and turning his misfortune into a profit-making venture.
Besides allowing her brother’s bushy mustache to grow to a ridiculous length, and allowing admission of guests to gawk at the philosopher who lost his mind, she also perverted his writings by pandering to the anti-Semites with distortions and quoting out of context. Though Fritz died in 1900, his sister lived a long life — long enough to promote Nietzsche as the state philosopher to the Third Reich and meet Hitler for a photo-op at the Nietzsche Archives in the thirties where she presented him with the Nietzsche walking stick. Hitler, in turn, not only adopted Nietzsche as the philosopher of National Socialism, but attended Elisabeth’s funeral in 1935.
This began the sorted history of Nietzsche and his appropriation by various factions. It didn’t help Nietzsche’s reputation that in the thirties, when National Socialism became the state mandated party, the preeminent philosopher of the time, Martin Heidegger, who espoused the German ideology, offered a series of lectures on Nietzsche as the culmination of Western metaphysics.
Following the Second World War, Nietzsche’s firmly ensconced association with the Nazis made him a persona non grata with British and American schools, at least until Walter Kaufmann attempted to resuscitate his reputation through a full-throated defense of the maligned philosopher. Gradually, Nietzsche’s reputation as a nationalist and anti-Semite began to give way to a new accolade: the harbinger of postmodernism. This shift of Nietzsche from the extreme right to the extreme left began in France and spread westward. Thinkers such as Sartre, Camus, Foucault, and Derrida were all heavily influenced by Nietzsche.
This new wave of Nietzsche scholars in the 50’s and the 60’s gave rise to what Lyotard called “The Postmodern Condition” in 1979. There are a number of characteristics about this “condition” that can be outlined, all of which have their origins, at least in part, with Nietzsche:
· Debunking of “Grand Narratives”
· Loss of capital ‘T’ Truth
· Pervasive permutations of power, i.e., politics
· Philosophy and psychology of “suspicion”
· Calling into question the discipline of philosophy
All of the characteristics of postmodernism are interrelated and not easily teased apart, however, they all stem from Nietzsche’s central hypothesis of The Will to Power.
Nietzsche’s writings are notoriously difficult to distil, hence, this very attempt at understanding the history of misunderstanding Nietzsche. A good part of the difficulty is Nietzsche’s avowed resistance to systems. As he says in Twilight of the Idols, “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”[1] This antipathy to systematic philosophy is part of Nietzsche’s radical approach to philosophy. Prior to Nietzsche, a philosophy or philosopher would often be judged by the philosophy’s internal consistency. One could understand that consistency as “integrity.” Nietzsche would turn this on its head. Nietzsche’s approach to philosophy was more akin to the sciences. He believed in experimentation. To experiment with thought means to take different perspectives and not become dogmatic and stuck. As he said, “a metaphysician’s ambition to hold a hopeless position, may participate and ultimately prefer even a handful of ‘certainty’ to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities.”[2] Nietzsche’s experimental philosophy, in its radical openness to experimentation and fluid abundance, places it in the hidden, but common territory shared by both art and science.
Though there are various explanations for Nietzsche’s frequent use of aphorisms rather than essays or book-length treatments, one possibility is that the aphoristic style is resistant to any systematizing by interpreters with a will to make Nietzscheism of Nietzsche. Aphorisms, even in form, are not a coherent, unified, “integral” whole, but rather, a series of fragments, not necessarily in any order, either of importance, development, or theme. They are, like thought itself and like all systems (as Gödel has demonstrated), incomplete.
In this case, form follows function, for one of the repeated lines of attack in Nietzsche is upon the notion of capital ‘T’ Truth. Such a philosophical notion presumes perfect objectivity and Nietzsche chips away at this presumption and goal of philosophy in two ways. First, by observing the obvious: All philosophers are human and all humans err, thus no philosopher has access to an objective account of the world, or Truth. Second, Nietzsche claimed that the Will to Truth is only one manifestation of the larger Will to Power. As such, claims of Truth are tacitly or explicitly claims of power.
Both of these objections to Truth are put forth in the following passage:
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this — what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?[3]
All the philosophical systems prior to Nietzsche and all the good philosophical pursuits of objectivity and their pronouncements about the world, couched in confident, even dogmatic propositions, are what Lyotard means by “grand narratives” or “metanarratives.” These include not only the field of philosophy, but also history, myth, and right down to the objective “style” of news reporting.
Nietzsche views all of these narratives with “suspicion.” That means, in part, not only asking questions of the content of the narrative, but also asking questions of the origin. Not asking, “Is what Descartes said true?” but asking, “Why was Descartes so concerned with certainty? What was his great need?” Or, as Nietzsche puts it, “Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hide-out, every word is also a mask.”[4] Thus, Nietzsche not only described himself as a philologist (which he was by training), that is, as one very careful about words, language, and the history or genealogy of its development, and not only did he describe himself as a philosopher, but he very frequently described himself as a psychologist.
There are a number of philosophical problems with this, if one accepts as “philosophy” a certain grand narrative of what its proper content is and how it is to go about approaching that content (method). One could accuse Nietzsche of ad homonym arguments — debunking the philosopher in order to debunk the philosopher’s philosophy. One could also easily ask of Nietzsche, “Is it true that there is no truth?” In other words, is not Nietzsche’s claim self-defeating and self-contradictory? Isn’t Nietzsche making a grand narrative, objective pronouncement about grand narratives and objectivity?
Nietzsche evades both of these criticisms. To the first, the ad homonym argument, Nietzsche simply laughs. Laughter is not a good, rigorous, sound philosophical argument. To which objection, Nietzsche might laugh again, even louder this time for our failure to understand his first laugh. In Nietzsche’s laughter, which he pronounced holy, he is critical of philosophy from a perspective “outside” of philosophy, from the standpoint of beyond philosophy perhaps. Perhaps from the standpoint of psychology. It could be that he is saying that if you failed to see how asking about the need of the philosopher strikes at the heart of a larger problem, then you may be so caught up in your own needs (the need for logical argument, for playing “by the rules,” for refuting Nietzsche) that you are blind to the target of Nietzsche’s arrow.
To attempt to be more discursive than Nietzsche and his holy laughter, Nietzsche is not necessarily taking issue with arguments (for instance, Descartes’ claim that we have an a priori knowledge of perfection and therefore God must exist), but with the underlying assumptions and presuppositions of those arguments (that I need certainty, that there is an “I” or an ego, that thinking has a subject that thinks). This peering “behind” the argument is what is meant by a philosophy or psychology of “suspicion.”
This hermeneutics of suspicion (as it’s come to be known) is tied into his notion of “perspectivism” and perspectivism also is his answer to the second criticism; that of the truth of no Truth. The psychological approach, that is, asking about one’s need, is one way of pointing out that philosophical inquiry, as much as it would like to approach objectivity (that is, has a need for it), is bound to the limited, mortal, fallible, and subjective views of its practitioners. Furthermore, all of those views are motivated by a need and needs stem from a Will to Power. This dual claim means that the debunking of truth applies just as much to Nietzsche’s claims as anyone else’s. It is not “true” that there is no Truth. Rather, as in science, that is a hypothesis, a position, a perspective. One among many. One which is self-aware of its power dynamics and points out that many other claims to truth in the Western philosophical tradition were unaware of their own power dynamics.
Claims of truth, claims of what constitutes philosophy, what constitutes a valid and sound argument, and disavowal of “interest” (that is, claims of objectivity), lead to knowing or naïve exercises of power. Such claims stifle many voices, traditionally non-white, women, and the poor. Nietzsche’s perspectivism inevitably leads to pluralism and a widening of the circle of what counts as philosophy (even if he is elitist and concerned with the peaks, not the plains or the pits).
As least since Plato, Western philosophers have been preoccupied with words, language, discourse — in a word, logos. Nietzsche, with his frequent invocations of dance, laughter, music, and even silence, is moving in a direction away from language and thought, into a realm of the body, the earth, and, most of all, joy — what he would call “The Great Health.” In the work that he penned before his first published work, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche makes the argument that philosophy itself is a need that only comes about after a decay from health. The healthy do not need philosophy. If they need anything at all, it is tragedy. They look for and thrive on the primordial pain and conflict at the heart of Being that speaks in all the modes of Greek theater: music, dance, and poetry.
If one philosophizes at all from this state of great health, it is, like Zarathustra’s overabundant sun, due to a superfluity, an exuberance, an excess of joy, creativity, and power that spills forth, probably in poetry, like Zarathustra itself did when Nietzsche was in the thralls of love.
“Philosophy,” as it has been traditionally understood, is then made questionable.
From these strains of thought found in Nietzsche, we can see how the five characteristics of the postmodern condition listed above are inherent in Nietzsche’s work. But these very radical breaks with the traditional project of philosophy has also led to an upheaval in the cultural, social, and political fabric of society. All of which, it might be noted, Nietzsche anticipated. As he prophetically stated, “I am dynamite.”[5]
Let us take as our starting point the demise of grand narratives and Truth. As suggested above, this recognition of the overt or covert political (that is, power) agenda in all truth claims has led to a reevaluation of values (another Nietzsche project). After Nietzsche (and one might add, after Freud, who was himself influenced heavily by Nietzsche, and after Marx), the work of history could no longer be the same. The reliable narrator of the text had now come under suspicion. Seemingly benign and simple things, such as terms like “The East” and “The West,” could now be put into a larger political context. “The East” is east of where? “The West” is west of where? That means that a certain point is “the center” and that point is not a-political. It is a point of view, a perspective, and one that is very much interested, not disinterested or objective.
Further, in the latter part of the Twentieth Century, news and “facts” were held in the hands of a limited few — large conglomerates of newspapers, network television stations, and other corporations that had a very deep-seated interest in certain configurations of power. The network news anchors spoke in an authoritative voice without the possibility of question or doubt. This is another sort of metanarrative. The advent of technology, most notably the internet, has advanced Nietzsche’s thought in practice in ways never before possible. Now news is increasingly decentralized, perspectival, and under scrutiny from all corners (and there are many corners and fewer and fewer centers).
This postmodern condition is also a “post-Truth” condition. Nietzsche laid the groundwork for the critique of Truth, but if truth claims are reducible to power claims, then that leaves the field open for battles over “facts” and “alternative facts” — something the alt-right has used to great advantage.
After being resuscitated by the “left” of postmodernism, Nietzsche is again being claimed by the “right,” the extreme right, the “alt-right” and self-proclaimed nationalists, white nationalists, and white supremacists. Richard Spencer, an American white nationalist leader, has said, “You could say that I was red-pilled by Nietzsche.”[6] A reference, of course, to the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which Neo Anderson wakes up from his Platonic cave existence in the Matrix to discover reality by taking the red pill offered to him by Morpheus when he says to him, “Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” A statement, that, in the context of Nietzsche and postmodernism, sounds ironic (and, in the context of the trilogy of Matrix films, becomes complicated and ironic).
Without a doubt, there is much in Nietzsche to provide the white supremacists material to feed upon. Nietzsche is unabashedly “elitist.” He has a scathing critique of democracy (and communism/socialism) as a mechanism of mediocrity. He derides morality as a cunning invention by a slave class in order to restrict the power of the noble class, like so many Lilliputians tying down a Gulliver. And, of course, he is all about power.
However, though all this material lays out a feast of “red pills” for Fascism, racists, anti-Semites, anti-Muslims, nationalists, isolationists, and Nazis, Nietzsche himself warns his readers time and time again to be careful with his words; to read as a philologist, not a pundit.
It would seem that Nietzsche has painted himself into one of his own proverbial perspectival corners. By critiquing, even debunking morality, has he not also thereby opened the doors to allow all the demons to play and wreak havoc? How can he (figuratively speaking) criticize Wagner for his anti-Semitism, the Nazis for their atrocities, and the white supremacists for their bankrupt ideology of hate? Wouldn’t doing that merely re-inscribe the very morality he has worked so hard to smash?
Throughout Nietzsche’s writings, one finds that he does not engage in evaluative terms such as “moral” or “immoral,” but rather, he employs the terms “healthy” and “unhealthy.” One of the major problems with morality is that it prescribes to all as if all were reduced to the least common denominator. But with health it is otherwise. Prescriptions, as we learn from Plato’s Phaedrus, cannot be legislated. One woman’s medicine is another’s poison. One man’s healthy diet is another’s demise.
Along these same lines, Nietzsche admonishes us very strongly that he does not want readers of his works, he wants us to be more “bovine” and to be ruminators. He wants us not only to masticate over each word, but to ruminate. That is, we must be like cows.
Rumination derives from the Latin ruminationem, “chewing the cud,” and describes the digestive process of well over a hundred ruminants. . . . After a ruminant ingests food, it travels into the first two parts of a four-part stomach, the rumen and the reticulum, where it clumps together into balls (or boli), which are better known as cud. The cud moves back into the mouth where it is chewed and broken down. After this second chewing, it can then make its way into the omasum and then the main stomach (the abomasum). If a ruminant cannot ruminate, if it cannot chew the cud, it cannot digest the cud. Without rumination, what provides nutrition remains poisonous.[7]
This is all a fancy way of saying not only careful reading, but a retroactive reading. In order to understand Nietzsche, you have to first read all of Nietzsche and then go back and re-read Nietzsche (at least once). If not, that so-called red pill is a dead pill. It is not the path to over abundant health, but to a diseased and deadly misinterpretation.
The name of this talk is “Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche.” It is derived, not subtly, from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. What is beyond good and evil for Nietzsche? Power. Both “good” and “evil” and their uses and abuses are manifestations and enactments of a will to power. Where the alt-right gets Nietzsche most wrong is precisely what attracts them most to him — his tearing away of the curtains of convention in order to lay bare the engine of power behind it. But Nietzsche’s understanding of power is very different from how the Nazis, Fascists, and white supremacists understand it. A careful study of Nietzsche’s terms demonstrates this. There is a distinction to be made between power (Macht) and force (Kraft).[8] The greatest expression of power (Macht) is not the use of force (Kraft) over others, but rather, the power of self-discipline that makes one’s “second nature” a “first nature.” Another name for this, in Nietzsche, is self-overcoming.
But most of all, where most of Nietzsche’s later interpreters fall afoul of Nietzsche, both on the left and on the right, is in their failure to appreciate Nietzsche’s radical opposition to herd mentality and the will to a system. As mentioned above, Nietzsche is hard. He resists systematizing through his style of aphorisms. And most of all, Nietzsche was opposed to -isms. He would have nothing but scorn for “Nietzscheism,” be it in the form of Nazism, Socialism, Communism, Nationalism, or even postmodernism. As he famously said in one of his last letters, now that you have found me, “The difficulty now is to get rid of me.”[9]
And so we return to the opening passage of this essay, the description of the conservation of Guanyin. None of us may be able to restore some “original,” “authentic,” or “true” version of Nietzsche under all the masks. What would that even mean? Would not that project itself be committing the power-play of objectivity? As if there is an essential Nietzsche to be had. Which Nietzsche are we in search of? The Nietzsche of 1888 is much different from the Nietzsche who penned The Birth of Tragedy.
That project is a fool’s errand. Rather, the best we can do is to give an account of the various stages of Nietzsche and his legacy — a legacy that impacts the thinker in a reverse cause-and-effect, as described by T.S. Eliot. But, perhaps we should learn from Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion who is best known for hearing the cries of those in trouble. In reading Nietzsche, we can try to hear him with a sympathetic ear, an ear that is trained like an expert musician’s, to hear beyond the demolition of Nietzsche’s hammer to the tuning fork. His hammer would instruct us to destroy idols, just as we are told in Zen that if we see the Buddha, kill the Buddha. But he tells us that he destroys idols “with a hammer as with a tuning fork.”[10] It is not merely a destructive project, but constructive as well, or what Derrida would call, “deconstruction.”
In a jotting from his notebook, Nietzsche once claimed, “I could be the Buddha of Europe: though admittedly an antipode to the Indian Buddha,”[11] Nietzsche has more in common with Buddha than he might suspect. For instance, the Buddha enjoins his disciples not to take his word for anything, but to test his words and judge them by their own experience. Only if, through your own experimentation, you find them to be conducive to good health, then accept them. Beyond the Good Nietzsche or the Evil Nietzsche, we each should be questing for what in Nietzsche is able to bring about the Great Health and then leave behind doctor Nietzsche.
[1] Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” #26, p. 35.
[2] Beyond Good and Evil, Part 1, §10, p. 16.
[3] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Trans. Walter Kaufmann, Third Essay, §12, p. 119.
[4] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §212.
[5] Nietzsche, Trans. Walter Kaufmann, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny,” §1, p. 326.
[6] The Atlantic, June 2017 Issue, “His Kampf,” Graeme Wood.
[7] Wirth, Jason, Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy, p. xxx.
[8] See Jacob Golomb’s “Philosophical Anthropology,” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? : On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, editors Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich.
[9] Letter to George Brandes, January 4, 1889.
[10] Twilight of the Idols, forward, p. 32, emphasis added.
[11] KWG VII, I; 4 (2), 111.
