Sadler Aphorisms on Nietzsche
There is something uncanny about Nietzsche’s life. There is the insanity, of course, in which his life ends, and that has proved irresistible to both detractors and idolizers. He seemed to foretell it, while the last few years before his collapse seem to lead up to it as the fitting conclusion of his work. In the last few months of his sanity he was telling friends in letters that there were ‘no more accidents’ in his life. But perhaps there never had been. Or perhaps, as he suggested to a friend in an early letter, he had the gift of turning accidents into signposts on his path of destiny. Nietzsche’s life was governed by his sense of mission from a very early date. Although his mother lived to nurse him in his insanity in the 1890s, Nietzsche was not quite five years old when his father died in 1849. Was this death, which left Nietzsche a spiritual orphan, an accident? But there is no point setting off contingent from necessary factors in Nietzsche’s development: what is significant is the single-mindedness with which he pursued his task. Like everybody else Nietzsche had to live amidst the accidental, but he felt like a wanderer on the earth, frightfully alone, incomprehensible to everybody, held in contempt by many, pitied by most, yet sure in his mission.
Nietzsche was not who he said he was. Without a single exception in the more than one hundred and thirty years since his breakdown, Nietzsche’s biographers have embarked on their task assuming that, in essentials, Nietzsche really did what he said he did, and was who he said he was. This is the case, by default as it were, even with regard to the most impressive biography to date from the point of view of factual detail and the primary sources it provides, namely the three-volume German work by Curt Paul Janz, first published in 1978-79. Janz’s attitude to Nietzsche is not in the least cultish, enthusiastic, idolatrous, ideological, or voguish; on the contrary he is consistently sober and cautious. But Janz too is uncritical in the sense that he desists from discussing and analysing Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the end his book remains an assemblage of materials: it is invaluable for anyone who wants to think through the ‘problem of Nietzsche’ but does not itself undertake this thinking. Nietzsche was certainly a fighter, but it is necessary, if the real Nietzsche is not again to slip into myth, to avoid romantic connotations of this word suggestive of hero. Nietzsche makes an effort to question philosophy down into the depths, but he also resists or refuses philosophy, which means that he also refuses to question, and more particularly makes out to question when he does not. To recognize this is not to diminish the critical importance of Nietzsche but to enhance it, for this ‘double-headed’ attitude, this enigmatic co-existence of genuinely intellectual motives and defiant refusal of questioning, practically defines the modern soul.
What Nietzsche can and cannot do. It was a point of pride for Nietzsche to insist that nothing exists which does not somehow reduce to nature as defined by modern science. In his view, however, the proponents of modern scientific philosophy offend against this principle when in their teachings on ethics they de facto treat the human being as possessing ‘rights’ that are nowhere to be found in nature. On the other side Nietzsche’s rejection of the classical tradition in philosophy was by no means as comprehensive as he made out. Why this should be so goes to the heart of Nietzsche’s thought and of philosophy itself. He was free to say that he rejected Truth, Reason, and Morality. But could he actually reject them? Is it possible to reject them? What Nietzsche says about the norms of classical philosophy is one thing. What he shows about these norms, including when he is adamantly ‘rejecting’ them, is another.
Why Nietzsche is not understood. By far the greatest obstacle to understanding Nietzsche is the failure to comprehend the nature of philosophy. It has become common to take up Nietzsche as a rhetorical tool for advancing ideologies and confirming preconceived attitudes. Everyone can find something to like in Nietzsche. Widely different accounts have been given of the positive implications of his teachings – from Social Darwinism and National Socialism through to liberal-democratic and anarchist politics – while his hostile critique of ‘previous philosophy’ has for the most part been endorsed. There is much in Nietzsche which accords with a Zeitgeist (after centuries already) rebelling against the ‘fetters’ of theology and metaphysics. Those who feel this ‘war of liberation’ has still not been decisively won, or feel uncertain about eventual victory, find Nietzsche a formidable ally. In his writings Nietzsche reflects the feeling prevalent in modernity that the ‘old’ system of ideas, meaning religion and classical philosophy, held back progress, that human self-assertion was impeded at an individual and collective level, that the creativity of the species was crippled, even that the innocent pleasures life has to offer were denied. Nietzsche speaks to the incredulity of the modern public at thought ‘belonging to past ages’, especially in regard to the point that all systems of ‘absolute truth’ stand as discredited. For more than a century this has been the starting-point for the majority of Nietzsche’s readers and commentators. It is an uncritical starting-point, however, which pre-judges the nature of philosophy, prohibits real engagement with the manifold problems exhibited in Nietzsche’s writings, and guarantees confirmation of established prejudices. It is an inevitably unfruitful starting-point, which has led, after all these years, to the dismal productions of postmodern and post-postmodern Nietzsche commentary, a terminus where thought itself lies in humiliating defeat.
Nietzsche, modernity’s therapist? He said he was at war with God and Nothingness, but while he viewed himself as the spearhead of this historic struggle, his idolizers have interpreted him as a therapist of the transition to godlessness. For Nietzsche himself, the problem of God and Nothingness was a philosophical problem of truth or untruth. But the Zeitgeist, since Nietzsche’s time, has rolled on, and Nietzsche’s problems have become non-problems, or, more precisely, have transmuted from philosophical to psychological problems. Nowadays one views the victory over both God and Nothingness – accomplished somehow, at some time – as a fact, and one looks to Nietzsche to ‘celebrate’ this as the ground of a new cultural dispensation.
The noise around Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s writings considered as a whole amount to one of the most extraordinary happenings in the history of philosophy. But as Nietzsche’s prophet declares in Thus Spake Zarathustra, ‘they speak of me, but nobody thinks – of me! […] their clamour about me spreads a mantle over my thoughts’. Nietzsche has been used ideologically by the right and the left. In academia he has been domesticated and made into a resource for an industry he despised. The noise around Nietzsche, and the institutionalization of Nietzsche, reflect the state of modern assumptions about God, truth, knowledge and moral values. That there is still such a noise when it is so widely assumed that the battle around God and Nothingness is concluded, is not paradoxical, for it is the noise of celebration, and of frustration at a stubborn ‘reactionary’ rump that will not go away. The noise around Nietzsche functions to shout down this rump and to shut down the exploration of Nietzsche’s philosophical problems in order to live in a condition of godlessness that tells itself that it is something other than nihilism.
Nietzsche’s real contradiction. It is well-known that Nietzsche’s writings are full of ‘contradictions’. He is aware of this and not infrequently boasts of it, stressing that this reflects the fact that his psyche is a ‘multiplicity’. But too easily has the notion of Nietzsche as a ‘philosopher of contradictions’ become a cliché and obstacle to fruitful engagement with him. It is said that Nietzsche rejects system in philosophy, that he is an inveterate experimenter, that he is flexible enough to change his opinions, that he is sensitive enough to the enigma of reality to hold contradictory opinions at the same time, that the whole point of his thought is to undermine the desire for finality and fixed dogma. All this obscures the fundamental meaning of Nietzsche’s contradictions by viewing them as psychological and theoretical rather than as what they are, namely philosophical and existential. This barrier to understanding stems from the assumption that God and Nothingness have been defeated by Nietzsche and modern culture, so that only one level plane exists upon which contradictions can be situated. But a different view of Nietzsche’s contradictions is possible, which takes them as reducing to one: between Nietzsche as God-seeker and Truth-seeker on the one side, and as rebelling against God and Truth on the other side. Nietzsche misunderstood himself in this, struggling mightily to avoid clarity about what was going on in his own soul. But precisely this was the condition of his experiment: he had to obscure himself to himself. This was even a productive obfuscation in the sense that it allowed the fundamental contradiction of his life and thought to play itself out in practice.
Nietzsche still hardly known. Nietzsche’s works and life are at bottom one continuous intensely personal struggle for and against philosophy. At the level of his thought, and at the personal level, Nietzsche’s mission ended in tragic failure, but a failure which, just because the present age (since the late nineteenth century) is so Nietzschean, is rich in meaning. The Nietzschean temper of the times, of course, does not want to hear of the failure of Nietzscheanism, and neither do his admirers accept that his life was anything less than heroic. But the Nietzsche-myth is stale. It has been told too many times in too many variations. With Nietzsche it seems the same as with modern culture and modern philosophy: the tale is being dragged out, tediously. Nothing is more telling about the current state of philosophy than that the worn, familiar Nietzscheanism is endlessly recapitulated to both confirm the Death of God and conjure away the threat of Nothingness. Not only does this flatten-out philosophy into opinion-making, usually for ideological purposes, but it robs Nietzsche of all vitality. The real Nietzsche, the non-hero Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who did not slay dragons, the Nietzsche who did not achieve his goal but who presents us with his struggles, trials, doubts and passions – this Nietzsche who, even at this late date, incredible to say, is still hardly known.
No getting past Nietzsche. The history of Nietzsche-reception is a sizeable slice of the history of philosophy since the 1890s. People keep coming back to Nietzsche. He keeps being rediscovered by readers of all persuasions. It seems that the modern spirit just cannot get away from Nietzsche, because it cannot get beyond him. More than any other author he lets the reader experience ‘the labyrinth of the modern soul’. Various disparate tendencies have adopted him, and tried to establish him as a kind of authority, but what they thus establish is not Nietzsche. Every species of ‘Nietzscheanism’ is inauthentic in purporting to represent a Nietzschean ‘way’: a solution, a new philosophy, a revaluation of values, sometimes a political ideal, occasionally ‘redemption’ and ‘rebirth’ as a Nietzschean Superman. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger were great philosophers, and their writings on Nietzsche are provocative, but like many lesser thinkers they use Nietzsche for their own purposes while, admittedly, not describing themselves as ‘Nietzschean’. Nietzsche is a mirror to the modern soul; his attitude resonates as do his statements on many individual points, but sometimes it seems that to ask too insistently about the fundamental meaning of his thought is to violate his spirit. Then there is the tendency, which has come to the fore since the 1960s, to equate ‘Nietzscheanism’ with the dissolution of philosophy: here the Nietzschean ‘way’ is to see that there is ‘no way’, and to embrace this fact inwardly, finally ending the quest for certainties and higher ‘consolations’. But this is a pseudo-solution that Nietzsche himself warns against. He warns against the ‘last men’ who, rejecting God, believe they have discovered happiness. He warns, from his earliest to his last works, against taking the absence of philosophy for a philosophy, the lack of a principle for a principle, the lack of strength for a new and superior type of strength. In the meantime the history of nihilism rolls on, a history, Nietzsche said, that unfolds over centuries. Unlike many of his contemporary commentators, however, Nietzsche does not admit defeat: he does not accept that philosophy is finished, he still battles with philosophy, he still ‘shudders’ at the Death of God, he does not treat the Death of God as a reason for ‘moving on’ to politics, literature, post-philosophy or anything else. He does not retreat into relativism. Nietzsche, who described his own proper task as ‘wakefulness itself’, never ‘relaxes the bow’ but continues to battle, looking for a way but never finding it.
The world was ready for Nietzsche. It was time for him. Nobody else came forward on so many fronts as he did, to hit out with such energy at so many ‘idols’. Yet, it must be asked, were the targets of Nietzsche’s onslaught still ‘idols’ in the years 1870-90? In the main the answer has to be No: Nietzsche was not ‘smashing idols’ because he was speaking in the age of the ‘twilight of the idols’. Metaphysics and Christianity had largely been discarded. Relativism was commonplace. In one vital respect, however, the answer is definitely Yes: humanitarian morality remained an idol. Nietzsche stresses this; for him it is the primary idol which remains unshaken while all the other elements of the Christian-Platonic world-system are crumbling. All the main currents of modern intellectuality saw and still see in this one remaining idol the foundation of a ‘new faith’ which can overcome nihilism, a faith drawing on modern science while rejecting religion and idealism. What Nietzsche sought to do, and what he thought he was achieving in his works of 1883-88, was to plunge modernity completely into the abyss of nihilism as preparatory for a Zarathustrian-Dionysian ‘revaluation of values’. That he went so far is Nietzsche’s uniqueness, but if he had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. The outcome of his argument was in a sense obvious; already others (notably Max Stirner) had taken it to a certain point, but they lacked Nietzsche’s breadth of vision and rhetorical powers. In a notebook entry of 1884 Nietzsche wrote: ‘We are making an experiment with the truth! Perhaps mankind will thereby be destroyed! So be it!’ The experiment had to be made.
Did Nietzsche succeed? How successful was Nietzsche’s exploration of nihilism? And did he succeed in establishing a ‘new table of values’? The two questions are inseparable, because his critique of existing or previous values bears on what resources he recognizes as relevant for reconstruction. After more than one hundred years of Nietzsche-reception commentators are no longer able to be inspired by the Superman idea, because unless it is taken ‘crudely’ it is just too nebulous. A few writers have tried to take the eternal recurrence seriously, but to no avail: either the doctrine remains an optional extra for today’s Nietzschean or it reduces to the statement of nihilism, to the point that there is no ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’. Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit’ has no clear contours, because despite his insistence that true freedom must be ‘freedom for’ rather than ‘freedom from’ he is unable to define any ‘for’ except strong willing itself, and this must collapse into nihilistic egoism. And the ‘Dionysian’ motif, with which Nietzsche opened and closed his philosophical experiment, is looked at with scepticism by most recent commentators, unless, that is, it is purged of ‘metaphysics’ by reducing to the ‘celebration of diversity’. On the negative side, it must be admitted, Nietzsche has had more ‘success’, but only in the sense that modernity has become ever more nihilistic. The belief in reason, in absolute moral ideals, in transcendental religion, in ‘absolute truth’, has been eroded to such a degree that the outcome is not foreseeable. But this has not occurred as a result of arguments or reasonings by Nietzsche or other sceptics. How, after all, could reason be undermined through a process of reason? The fatal paradox of self-reference continues to hang over modern intellectuality and continues to be ignored. Unmistakably, Nietzsche sees his philosophy as possessing coercive power for the enlightened mind; so too do the relativists and nihilists of today consider their stance to be intellectually compelling. In the meantime the discussion of nihilism, and of the ‘current state of philosophy’, goes nowhere, for without acknowledging binding norms of reason there is nowhere to go. Nietzsche began in The Birth of Tragedy looking for a new culture which could be a vehicle of self-realization, but already in this work he eschews – with his critique of ‘Socratism’ – the only possible medium of autonomous self-expression. Nothing changes through to the end except his level of frustration, which came to a head just before his mental collapse.
His renunciation of Reason. There are valid aspects to Nietzsche’s observations on philistinism, the confusion of science and scholarship with philosophy, literary plebeianism, dogmatic religion and morality, and a myriad of other topics, but in the end his renunciation of reason is fatal to every area of his thought. By constantly over-reaching, Nietzsche spoils his insights, including his critique of humanitarian morality. The misuse and abuse of the morality of pity is a topic rarely touched on by contemporary writers and is especially avoided by commentators on Nietzsche. The last important statement on this theme, still largely ignored, was by Max Scheler in his 1915 book Resentment, a statement made possible only by Scheler’s commitment to classical norms of reason and to the authentic core of the Christian idea of love. Nietzsche speaks as if nothing can be salvaged from the morality of pity, while his occasional allusions to a higher type of pity, permissible to a Superman or a Zarathustra, do not crystallize into any coherent concept. He denounces weak will but cannot distinguish strong from egoistic willing. Through all periods of his writings, and despite his polemic against ‘Socratism’, Nietzsche’s positive valuation of science and scientific method is much in evidence, but, while he does not identify philosophy with science, he fails to address the key question of where science ends and philosophy begins. Philosophy and anti-philosophy are constantly battling in his writings, but the tendency of his thought is to reduce philosophy to ‘assorted opinions and maxims’, of a certain stamp, but not founded on identifiable principles. Contemporary intellectuality also cannot get beyond this: the choice is between different ‘assortments’.
Entering into Nietzsche’s confession. At times it seems that Nietzsche does not know, and does not care, about what will happen when the ‘old system’ collapses, and that his ‘revaluation’ is merely a fig leaf for his own destructive urges. This side of Nietzsche’s thought is fittingly described in his own terminology as the reaction of violent ressentiment, the reaction of the ultra-sensitive and brilliant one-time ‘little pastor’ who discovered that ‘God is dead’ and, as a consequence, saw no reason for living, no reason for valuing anything. But there is another side to Nietzsche in which the ‘little pastor’ continues to assert himself; here he wants to validate philosophy in spite of his doubts – the doubts of his age – and especially does he exhibit the classical philosophical pathos, the idealism and love of truth about which he is so often sceptical. This internal battle over philosophy is played out repeatedly in Nietzsche’s works without him making progress. It is Nietzsche’s confession to this struggle within himself which makes him uniquely instructive, provided he is read in a way which keeps open the question of philosophy. For all Nietzsche’s repetitiveness, and his failure to find a way through, the ‘darkly creative substratum’ of his spirit (the phrase is Cosima Wagner’s) meant he never relaxed the tension. It is impossible to maintain this tension simply by imitating Nietzsche’s style or recapitulating his formulas. One cannot do justice to Nietzsche by protecting him or standing awe-struck before him, but only by overcoming him; for this one must first of all enter into him.
A philosophy of ‘Life’. From beginning to end the decisive word of Nietzsche’s philosophy is ‘life’. Like other proponents of ‘life-philosophy’ Nietzsche tries to bring to expression a primal reality and primal experience, thus to get behind the abstractions and intellectualizing of ‘Socratism’. But while it is important to expose the deficiencies of theoreticism and scholasticism in philosophy, already in his first book Nietzsche is imprisoned by his polemical intent, or rather, to identify the heart of the matter, he is caught in his ambivalence towards philosophy, so that he can express his ‘Dionysian worldview’ only by making a comprehensive denunciation of the whole philosophical tradition from Socrates to his own time. Nietzsche could affirm life only by denying reason, an attitude utterly at odds with Plato, as with the Socrates of Plato. It was Nietzsche’s anti-philosophical instinct, bolstered by ‘modern ideas’, that led him to this denial, to the extent of flagrantly falsifying the history of philosophy. Indeed so wary was he of falling back into that which he wanted to overcome that soon after The Birth of Tragedy he was wondering whether ‘the Dionysian’ was itself a ‘metaphysically’ contaminated idea. This drove him to the positivism of Human, All Too Human. Then, however, his philosophical instinct rebelled, so that in Thus Spake Zarathustra, now in possession of what he imagined to be the supremely ‘elemental thought’, he returned to Dionysianism, in substance if not in name. Still, Nietzsche never stopped wavering. He was always afraid that the ‘life’ he wanted to affirm was transcendental-metaphysical, but neither could he be content with scientific naturalism, which he saw as spelling the death of philosophy. Thrown from one side to the other, he could not find a way through, a way out beyond not just ‘the priests’ and the ‘last men’, but away too from his ‘shadow’ with its lament ‘Oh eternal Everywhere, oh eternal Nowhere, oh eternal – Vanity!’ But just this is Nietzsche’s significance: with this failure to ‘come through’ he testifies to the spiritual condition of modernity, the paralysis of the Everywhere/Nowhere.
Nietzsche’s experiment. As for the ‘life’ which Nietzsche claimed to be the first principle and substance of his philosophy, one can wonder: did he taste it? The answer, as so often with Nietzsche, has to be Yes and No. It was through music, and through intellectual activity, that he felt the mysterious vital force within himself, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is a confession of this sensation. But somehow he could not remain in touch with this force. Nietzsche, an inveterate contemplator of death since his childhood, was fixated on the ‘phenomenon’ of life, but despite all his efforts to persuade himself otherwise, life remained for him something external. This is shown by the fanaticism into which he falls in much of his writing: one feels the energy in Nietzsche, but he often seems to be banging on the door of life without gaining admittance. Nietzsche wanted ‘life’, not only without God, truth, and reason, but with the most vehement rejection of these. He tried, in the spirit of modernity, in battling against his own philosophical side, to develop an anti-philosophical philosophy, an anti-religious religion, and an anti-moral morality. The experiment failed.
The meaning of Nietzsche’s contradictions. It is well-known that Nietzsche’s writings are full of ‘contradictions’. He is aware of this and not infrequently boasts of it, stressing that this reflects the fact that his psyche is a ‘multiplicity’. But too easily and readily has the notion of Nietzsche as a ‘philosopher of contradictions’ become a cliché and barrier to fruitful engagement with him. It is said that Nietzsche rejects system in philosophy, that he is an experimenter, that he is flexible enough to change his opinions, that he is sensitive enough to the enigma of reality to hold contradictory opinions at the same time, that the whole point of his thought is to undermine the desire for finality and fixed dogma. All this, however, obscures the fundamental meaning of Nietzsche’s contradictions by viewing them as psychological and theoretical rather than as what they are, namely, philosophical and existential. The barrier to understanding is due to the assumption that God and Nothingness have been defeated by Nietzsche and modern culture, so that only one level plane exists upon which contradictions can be situated. However, a different view of Nietzsche’s contradictions is possible, which takes them as reducing to one: between Nietzsche as God-seeker and Truth-seeker on the one side, and as rebel against God and Truth on the other side. Nietzsche misunderstood himself in this, struggling mightily to avoid clarity about what was going on in his own soul. But precisely this was the condition of his experiment: he had to obscure himself to himself. Indeed this was in a sense a productive procedure, for it allowed the fundamental contradiction of his life and thought to play itself out in practice.
Nietzsche against himself. The key to understanding the individual Friedrich Nietzsche and his works (for these cannot be separated) is that he is a divided soul, to a degree not otherwise seen in the history of philosophy. In no other case has the struggle between philosophy and anti-philosophy, as this takes place within a single individual, been revealed and confessed to so passionately and instructively. To understand this, however, and to follow the extraordinary story of Nietzsche, one must put aside common presuppositions about what philosophy is. First of all one must let go of the modern assumption that God and Truth are defeated, and thus while there can be conflicts between all kinds of ‘philosophies’ there cannot be any between philosophy and anti-philosophy. One must also cease thinking of philosophy as primarily a theoretical activity or set of theories (‘ideas’ or ‘views’) put forward for their own sake or to be subsequently applied in practical life. One must overcome the childish preoccupation, common in academia, of ‘defending’ a philosophy, or picking holes in it, or more generally of working it up into a ‘discussion’. One must let oneself see behind a philosopher’s words. One must get beyond the idea of agreeing or disagreeing with a philosopher. One must stop ‘admiring’ philosophers, although at the same time it is necessary to sympathize with the philosophical spirit and in a way too with the spirit that rebels against philosophy. One must stop thinking of philosophy as something one gets from one or another philosopher, and instead search for it within. In the study of philosophers one must learn to look for what is happening in their works – for it is this that is ultimately significant, that is to say the spiritual activity working on what Nietzsche called ‘the great problems and question marks’.
The staleness of the Nietzsche myth. Nietzsche’s works and life are at bottom one continuous intensely personal struggle within and for and against philosophy. At the level of his thought, and at the personal level, Nietzsche’s mission ended in tragic failure, but a failure which, just because the present age (since the late nineteenth century) is so Nietzschean, is rich in meaning. The Nietzschean temper of the times, of course, does not want to hear of the failure of Nietzscheanism, and neither do his admirers accept that his life was anything less than heroic. But the Nietzsche myth is stale. It has been told too many times in too many variations. With Nietzsche it seems the same as with modern culture and modern philosophy: the tale is being dragged out without having anywhere to go. Nothing is more telling about the current state of philosophy than that the old familiar Nietzscheanism is endlessly recapitulated, albeit with rhetorical enhancements, to both confirm the Death of God and conjure away the threat of Nothingness. Not only does this flatten-out philosophy into opinion-making, usually for ideological purposes, but it deprives the person of Friedrich Nietzsche of all vitality. In this area truth is more interesting than fiction: the real Nietzsche, the non-heroic Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who did not slay dragons, the Nietzsche who did not achieve his goal but who presents us with his struggles, trials, doubts and passions – this Nietzsche who, even at this late date, is still hardly known.
Nietzsche’s new Commandments. Reflecting the modern Zeitgeist, Nietzsche maintains that the practical meaning of the classical tradition in philosophy has been to place restraints on human beings which thwart their potential. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he puts into the mouth of his prophet the commandments to ‘be faithful to the earth’ and abandon all ‘superterrestial hopes’. The idealist focus on ‘another world’, ‘higher world’, ‘better world’, he explains in one book after another, is a focus on the non-existent; it is negation and turning away into the void of nihilism where the highest value is nothingness. In Nietzsche’s opinion, the root of the problem is weakness, by which he means cowardice, fearfulness, slavishness and pettiness: human beings fail to embrace life unconditionally because they recoil from the suffering and uncertainty which must result therefrom. He also believes that the human disposition to weakness is cultivated and reinforced by the cultural tradition of the West, first by proto-Christian Platonism and Stoicism, then by Christianity proper, finally by the quasi-Christian morality of liberalism and democratic egalitarianism.
Looking for ‘a way out’. In May 1887, nineteen months before his mental collapse, Nietzsche wrote to his old university friend Erwin Rohde that despite being a thoroughgoing ‘nihilist’ he did not despair at ‘finding a way out and the gap through which one arrives at “something”’. Nietzsche had been trying to find this ‘way out’ ever since his schooldays. At the age of eighteen he made his first statement on the problem of God and Nothingness in a fragmentary essay: ‘Great transformations lie ahead when the masses begin to understand that the whole of Christianity is built on assumptions – the existence of God, immortality, the authority of the Bible, and others – which will always remain problematic. I have tried to deny everything: oh, tearing down is easy, but building! […] From hour to hour the hand of the clock is moving forward to twelve, to begin its course anew: a new world-period is dawning.’ With these words Nietzsche struck the note for his lifework. Already he believed that with the Death of God European culture rests on thin ice, and already this was an existential problem for him, a personal problem of the highest order. The shudder he felt at the Death of God is evident throughout his later school years, in his own poetry, his occupation with Byron and Hölderlin, and his search for a new worldview in the Germanic-Nordic sagas of the Nibelungenlied and the Edda. The sensation of ‘homelessness’ he expressed in a poem ‘Without a Homeland’, written in 1859 while a few months short of his fifteenth birthday, stayed with him until the end. In 1887, in Book Five of The Gay Science, he will speak of ‘we who are homeless’: those who are out on an ‘open sea’ where the sense of excitement is inseparable from that of danger and doubt, for what, after the Death of God, is their destination?
Why Nietzsche fails. Nietzsche declares that the difficulty so many people have in ‘freeing’ themselves from the traditional philosophy he attacks is that it provides them with a prop in their constitutional and cultivated weakness. This is a common judgement, which is also applied to those who ‘cannot give up religion’. Nietzsche himself, nevertheless, belies this attitude, not only by recurring ‘pious’ tones in his writings which sometimes make him sound like Plato, but by the vigour and relentlessness of his engagement with philosophy. This is not an inconsistency in Nietzsche. It is not a remnant of false consciousness inhibiting his full breakout to a ‘new philosophy’. Rather does it reflect what classical philosophy itself asserts with its doctrine of the ‘two natures’ within human beings that are and must be perennially in conflict. Nietzsche too recognizes this conflict, but because he is so concerned to represent and defend the self-assertive side of human nature he wrongly takes it as the conflict between the strong and the weak sides of the human being: thus he sees self-overcoming not as the overcoming of the self-assertive self but as the triumph of the same. Nietzsche resists philosophy so vigorously because he feels so keenly the grip that the ‘philosophical imperative’ has on him, an insatiable ‘erotic’ yearning at once emotional and intellectual. While he is not free to ignore the authoritative claim of philosophy he rebels against this, for the sake of his self-assertive self, and for the sake of his ideal of the Superman who ‘creates’ his own self and ‘submits’ to nothing, not truth, not reason, not reality. There could be no other outcome but failure, but it is a failure which not only exhibits what is at stake with philosophy but mirrors the modern mind in its debilitating conflict between intoxicating self-affirmation (driven to the point of self-deification) and the sobering ‘pull’ of reason and truth
Is Nietzsche a sophist? At the beginning of philosophy with Plato the conflict between philosophy and anti-philosophy is a central theme, because philosophy, owing to the kind of thing it is, inevitably provokes opposition – the defence not just of some particular philosophical thesis, but of philosophy as such, is necessarily pitted against the forces, impulses, and ideas of anti-philosophy. The Platonic-Aristotelian concept of sophistry does not refer exactly to anti-philosophy but is closely related to it: sophistry is the attempt of anti-philosophy to assume the status of philosophy and to confound philosophy in this way. Wherever anti-philosophy becomes articulate it turns into sophistry, and already in Plato’s time, in response to the recent emergence of philosophy in Greece, anti-philosophy in the form of sophistry became a major cultural force. It has become a far more powerful force in modern culture, and Nietzsche too has a great deal of the sophist about him. But he is not only a sophist – he is a philosopher at the same time, battling for philosophy against sophistry.
Nietzsche’s dual passion. Nietzsche’s passion is double-sided, both for philosophy and against it. He detests and combats the philistinism and laziness and cowardice of those who avoid philosophy, but at the same time, in the service of his own individual self-assertion and for the sake of the Supermen, he revolts against philosophy, recapitulating the scornful claim of the Greek sophist Callicles that ‘self-control’ is a cover for weak will and that the ‘manly’ man will give himself over to self-assertion without limit. Commentators on Nietzsche usually try to iron out his inconsistencies, or they refer to different stages of his thought whereby his opinion changes, or they ‘celebrate’ his inconsistencies as reflective of ‘post-dogmatic’ thinking. Such procedures are superficial, because they take for logical inconsistencies what in truth are opposing real forces, of philosophy and anti-philosophy, locked in struggle.
Nietzsche’s battle with philosophy. The early interpreters of Nietzsche are closer to his spirit than the more recent commentators. But both fail to grasp what is most significant in him. The first group, reflecting their own time, were anxious to promote a new positive vision for humanity, usually under the title of the Superman, while the second group, shaken by the experience of Nazi ideology and the Second World War, have sought shelter in what they conceive as a hyper-pluralistic mode of thought which rejects ‘absolute’ standards. This development does not have to do with Nietzsche alone: it reflects a deep cultural tendency which, while reinforced by the trauma of 1933-45, is independent even of that. For a long time modernity has been losing the sense of what philosophy is and can be. By the late twentieth century, within the most fashionable intellectual circles, this process had reached an apparent terminus: not so much by the demonstration that ‘previous’ philosophy is misconceived as by the sense that demonstration is no longer necessary, so that philosophy appears to be now finished. It is understandable that those who think in this way appeal to Nietzsche and use him, for one side of his thought points in that direction. But such commentators are resistant or blind to the most important side of Nietzsche, which, even while ‘overcoming philosophy’, is nevertheless seized by the spirit of endless questioning and striving for truth. Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy’ itself has no ‘outcome’: his writings are the record of an unresolved battle.
Why Nietzsche is repetitive. If one comes to Nietzsche looking for ‘a philosophy’ to be fully or partly accepted or rejected one will miss what is most essential; rather does the gain to be had from Nietzsche come from attending to what happens in his writings. It is true that Nietzsche sometimes falls back into anti-philosophical complacency, but he always ‘comes to himself again’: in his philosophizing he runs up against his own anti-philosophy, while in his strident refusal of philosophy he is confuted by his own philosophical spirit. It is this which explains the repetitiveness of Nietzsche, for without being able to triumph over philosophy, or to make philosophy triumph, he cannot break out of the circle of his inner conflictedness. This conflictedness, moreover, is ‘psychological’ only at a secondary level – Nietzsche’s psyche reflects the tension at the heart of philosophy. The ‘battle with philosophy’ is necessitated by philosophy itself, belonging to philosophy and attesting to philosophy.
Is God dead? It is too simple to divide all Nietzsche’s interpreters into liberal and illiberal. The fundamental division, which with every passing decade has been more and more overlooked, is between those who endorse his premise of the Death of God and those who do not. Through the whole history of his reception, the majority, even the great majority, of both illiberal and liberal writers on Nietzsche have agreed with him on the Death of God. Nietzsche himself does not present the Death of God as a novelty. He means two things: firstly that not just God in the traditional sense but all ‘absolutes’, especially the transcendental values posited by theology and metaphysics, do not exist and never have existed; secondly that due to this ‘fact’ becoming recognized by modern educated people the days are over, or rapidly coming to an end, when ‘belief in God’ can function as the basis of culture. The cultural fact of growing disbelief is incontestable and even Nietzsche’s most severe theological critics have always admitted it. Whether this disbelief is justified is a different question. Nietzsche shares in the consensus of disbelief – he is an atheist and anti-metaphysician like most other modern philosophers. But he is also different, because he thinks that the full implications of the Death of God have not been understood, especially in regard to morality. The usual opinion, according to Nietzsche, is that despite the Death of God the moral values affirmed by Christianity and classical philosophy can and should continue on in modernity, in secularized humanitarianism (universal love, pity) and egalitarian politics (democracy and socialism). Now Nietzsche has very great contempt for those who hold this usual opinion–much more so, in fact, than for the old-style thinkers who do not accept the Death of God and so endorse traditional morality from its traditional premise. The whole negative side of Nietzsche’s philosophy is concerned with showing that the Death of God must spell the end of humanitarian morality. The illiberal Nietzscheans prior to and during the Second World War, accepting the Death of God, also accepted the implications drawn by Nietzsche himself. By contrast the liberal Nietzscheans, early and late, have seen fit to ignore Nietzsche’s stern warnings and while in no uncertain terms avowing the Death of God have continued to espouse humanitarian morality.