Nature or Nietzsche?
Or, is Nietzsche a friend to Stoicism?
As an admirer of and advocate for Stoicism, I want to say that I am not sure that Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is a friend to Stoicism. This confession is controversial, not least since many people I like are also Nietzscheans, at least in their theoretical thinking.
So, I’d better explain.
Nietzsche, with Karl Marx, is probably the most influential Western philosopher of the last two hundred years. After being central to the ideologies of fascism and National Socialism, his work has been rejuvenated in the liberal Western academy since 1945, and his ideas have flooded into pop culture.
Today, the German thinker is a widely taught figure in liberal arts programs. He continues to attract enthusiasts from across the cultural and political spectrum: from airy aesthetes, via disenchanted youths, to dedicated Alt-Right extremists like Richard Spencer.
From a philosophy as a way of life perspective, Nietzsche is especially interesting. Trained as a philologist, he began his working life writing on the Greeks. Nietzsche continued to idolize different aspects of the ancient world, up until his descent into madness in 1888–89.
Nietzsche hence knew that the ancient philosophies led by Stoicism involved life projects, not just intellectual prospects.
In what scholars call his middle period, roughly 1878–1882, Nietzsche in addition experimented with Stoic and Epicurean cures for his own maladies. Pierre Hadot for one is fond of quoting his Notebooks, where Nietzsche writes:
The results of all the [ancient philosophical] schools and of all their experiments belong legitimately to us. We will not hesitate to adopt a Stoic formula on the pretext that we have previously profited from Epicurean formulas.
So, if Stoicism was (at least in part, and for some time) good for Nietzsche, is Nietzscheanism good for Stoics?
The question is meant to be provocative, and even a bit fatuous. Stoics interested in understanding the world, and our history, should read influential philosophers. It is also good to read people we disagree with, especially since this is an art (or ascesis) which is presently at a premium.
Nietzsche, this “father of postmodernism”, is such a large cultural presence that when, in the 1990s, a group of French scholars wrote critically on him, they felt they needed to collect their essays under the title Why We Are Not Nietzscheans. We can’t understand the 20th century, and where we are culturally today, if we don’t read a thinker as popularly-read as Nietzsche.
Nevertheless, as Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that it is important not to expect figs in winter (Meds. XI, 33), so I think that it is important that, as philosophers, we remind ourselves to continue to make distinctions between different, indeed opposing perspectives.
Nietzsche himself hardly pulled punches when it came to criticizing opponents. Any author who calls himself “dynamite” does not want to be read as anything less than explosive. It seems to me that to read Nietzsche well must also be to honor his antagonistic spirit.
The truth is that Nietzsche himself, in his later years, became highly critical of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. After some ambivalence in his middle years, he also rekindled his early hostility to Socrates, the Stoics’ idol.
Socrates, the young Nietzsche argued, represented a turning point in world history. His commitment to reason, dialectic, and self-examination as necessary for the good life represented a striking philosophical challenge to earlier Hellenic, Homeric ideals of happiness.
Socrates, as presented in the Platonic dialogues, inaugurated a new cultural type, the “theoretical man”. Nietzsche believed that the optimistic faith of this new figure in rational discussion, and eventually science, was deeply responsible for the lamentable “nihilism” of Western culture, up to and including the clamors of the French revolution, with its modernist ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Christianity meanwhile would come to be famously thought of by Nietzsche as “Platonism for the people”. It shares with Plato, Socrates’ pupil, a hostility to the body and its desires, and more widely, to the beauty and value of this world. It shares with “the people” a hostility to what he calls the “rank ordering” between more and less capable human beings.
Thus, at least, spake Nietzsche.
As for Stoicism, and its emphases on accepting what one cannot control, and seeking out serenity through virtue? The later Nietzsche came to see Stoic philosophy (indeed, all post-Socratic philosophy) as the product of cultural atrophy and decline.
As always, he is actually fairly blunt about things:
the philosopher’s claim to wisdom … is a hiding place in which the philosopher saves himself owing to his weariness, age, growing cold, hardening — as a wisdom of that instinct which the animals have before death — they go off alone, become silent, choose solitude, crawl into caves, become wise (Gay Science, 359).
One becomes a Stoic on this model because one is tired and fearful of uncertainty, rather than joyously wanting to embrace what life has to offer, including all of its challenges. Through Stoic spiritual exercises, Nietzsche claims, we risk becoming:
impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of the soul! And indeed from all further instruction! For one must be able to lose oneself if one wants to learn something from things that we ourselves are not (Gay Science, 305).
If Nietzsche is right, let me say that I for one would be the first to turn away from Stoicism. But one thing I agree with him about is that his mature position is decisively inconsistent with Stoic thought.
To begin to see why, take this characteristic comment from Daybreak about the good life in the preSocratic Greeks whom Nietzsche celebrates. As ever, this is compared (unfavorably) with the Socratic approach which led to Stoicism:
when Socrates went so far as to say ‘the virtuous man is the happiest man’ they did not believe their ears and fancied they had heard something insane. For when he pictures the happiest man, every man of noble origin included in the picture the perfect ruthlessness and devilry of the tyrant who sacrifices everyone and everything to his arrogance and pleasure. (Daybreak, 199)
As a student of classical antiquity, I have to say that this picture of the traditional nobility strikes me as deeply contestable, if not fanciful. It makes of a caste that produced figures like Themistocles, Nicias, Cicero, the Catos, or Aristides the Just, so many tyranny-loving would-be sophists like Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias and Thrasymachus in the Republic.
Such “nobility” really isn’t “noble” at all. The very word “noble” or “fine” (kalos) in Greek (as in English) carries at its heart the sense of a person’s or actions’ willingness to stand up for some cause greater than anyone’s “arrogance and pleasure”. It was Stoicism’s continuity with ancient noble ideals (and later with romanitas), not its break with this culture, which explains its great success amongst the republican Roman elites, contra Nietzsche.
So, what of slavery?
It is true that the Stoics did not oppose slavery. Marcus Aurelius as emperor did not end it. Slavery only came to its end in the Western colonies (as fate would have it) in the very years (the late 1880s) of Nietzsche’s final works, after more than a century of abolitionist struggles.
Yet, here is Seneca on slavery, drawing from Stoic cosmopolitanism, and the deep Stoic principle that all human beings participate in rationality (the Logos), and as such are worthy of respect:
‘They are slaves,’ people declare. Nay, rather they are men. … Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. (Letters to Lucilius XLVII.1, 10)
Nietzsche, by contrast, believed that overthrowing modern nihilism and returning to classical antiquity must involve biting the bullet when it came to the ancient institution of slavery.
A revealing early essay (“The Greek State”) makes clear that, if we are to produce those kinds of great men and works of art that Nietzsche believes alone can truly justify an existence without God, we must accept with eyes open that:
slavery belongs to the essence of a culture … the misery of those that live from the sweat of their brow has to be increased even further, to make possible for a small number of Olympian men the production of a world of art.
There is a veritable subindustry of scholars who work on Nietzsche. As soon as one cites this and the many other drastic passages in his work, one hears cries of “cherry picking!” So I am thankful here that I only need to propose that any thinking capable of informing such passages is inconsistent with pretty basic Stoic commitments. I mean Zeno’s, Seneca’s, Epictetus’, Marcus’s, Musonius’s, and other Stoics’ principled defense of fundamental human dignity.
The same goes for Nietzsche’s embrace of cruelty (and, in many passages, war). Nietzsche is insightful in denouncing the life-denying cruelty which different forms of asceticism, in Christianity and more widely, visit on their practitioners. But we are mistaken if we think this is because Nietzsche holds cruelty to be avoidable, or even bad by itself.
Frequent instead are the passages in his oeuvre in which he enjoins that the new “complementary man” or “overman” his philosophy looks to create must be “terrible” (“[w]hat is with a people that does not know how to be terrible?” (KSA XIII, 523)), and capable of acting without any sympathy for those beneath them, in ways which verge into the most open callousness.
How after all can we consider this, from his Notebooks, with anything like Stoic eyes?:
He that as a knowing person has acknowledged that in us, alongside growth of all kinds, the law of perishing is at the same time in force, and that annihilation and decay inexorably impose themselves at the end of every creation and generation: he must learn to experience a kind of joy at such a sight, in order to bear it, or he is no longer good for knowing. That is, he must be capable of a refined cruelty and get used to it with a resolute heart. If his force is even higher in the rank-ordering of forces, he himself is one of the creators and not just a spectator: so it is not enough that he is capable of cruelty only in seeing so much suffering, so much extinction, so much destruction; such a human being must be able to create pain with pleasure, to be cruel with hand and deed (and not just with the eyes of the spirit). (KSA XIII, 43)
In fact, Nietzsche’s anti-Stoic position in the later, post-Zarathrusta works is clear. The goal of society is to produce the “over/superman”, or “six or seven great men”, who can then do truly great, memorable and monumental things beyond the imaginings of the vast majority of less gifted human beings.
The problem is that up to now, the emergence of such figures has been subject to chance. It’s a once or twice in a century shot that you get an Alcibiades, a Caesar, or a Napoleon Bonaparte.
But after Darwinism, with the pseudo-science of eugenics which Nietzsche was reading after the mid-1870s, the possibility of ruling elites taking control of selective breeding to breed “higher types” had seemingly emerged.
As far as Nietzsche was concerned, this possibility should be embraced, as a way to give new meaning to the world after the “death of God”, and with it, the decline of an egalitarian religion (Christianity) which had enabled the weak for too long to flourish, holding back the strong.
What was needed was what the later texts call a “revaluation of all values”. This would push back against, and indeed undo, the two-millennia-long “slave revolt in morality” championed in Greece by Socrates (the ugly son of a plebeian stone mason) and then the Hellenistic schools, and more widely since by Christianity. This momentous event would see:
the revaluation of … the gospel preached to the poor and the base, the general revolt of the downtrodden, the miserable, the malformed, the failures, against anyone with ‘breeding’ — the eternal vengeance of the Chandala [i.e. a Hindu slave caste] as a religion of love (Twilight of the Idols, 4).
It should go without saying that counter-revolution on such a scale cannot be achieved with good intentions alone! Nor can it be effected solely through the peaceful, ethical self-transformation of a few readers of good books.
Nietzsche is hence increasingly clear about the “hard” means he envisages and recommends to “free spirits” to achieve these world-historical ends.
“The weak and the failed should perish […] And one should help them to do this!” (AC, 2), he writes early in The Anti-Christ. The free spirits of a new “party of life” should not shy away from the “annihilation of millions of the malformed”, whom it is necessary to “destroy without concern for the regard of God” (KSA XII, 31).
“Here,” Nietzsche underlines, “it cannot be a question of pacts: here, one must destroy, annihilate, make war” (KSA XIII, 220), fostering:
The enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of breeding (Züchtung) and also by means of the extermination of millions of the bungled and botched (Vernichtung von Millionen Mißratenen), and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before. (KSA XI, 98 = Will to Power, 964; cf. 862; 734; 960)
As an admirer of the Stoics, as a human being, I can only confess my horror at these (and many other Nietzschean) passages. For all the efforts to soften Nietzsche’s thinking since 1945, it is impossible not to hear the echoes of the first half of the twentieth century resounding in these declamations, mingled with myriad silent screams.
I can hence understand why Nietzschean commentators want in different ways to sideline them, at the price of neutering Nietzsche. But then, one could also forthrightly not be a Nietzschean, but something else.
To be clear, I don’t want to say Nietzsche was not a “great philosopher” — if a philosopher (which is contestable) is only someone who has a largescale, consistent vision, and is not afraid to follow his vision to the farthest reaches of what it necessitates or makes possible.
If “greatness” has any traditional moral content, however, as Nietzsche knew that the Stoics upheld, then I do believe that he himself would not wish us to hold him up as “great”.
And if philosophy as a way of life necessarily involves, as for the Stoics, a commitment to the equal educability and dignity of all people[s], then Nietzsche was no Stoic. Perhaps he was no philosopher in the traditional sense.
Indeed, as an admirer of and advocate for Stoicism today, I can only read Nietzsche as one of the most profound, and certainly the most profoundly troubling, of anti-Stoics.
