ALL TO HUMAN
The Long Shadow of Friedrich Nietzche
‘Nietzsche has been re-appropriated by just about everyone: ‘existentialists, phenomenologists, and then increasingly, during the 1960s and 1970s . . . critical theorists, post-structuralists and deconstructionists’. Not to mention anarchists, libertarians, hippies, yippies, radical psychiatrists, religious cultists... .’*
In individual’s insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, epochs it is the norm.’ Friedrich Nietzsche.
I first came across Nietzsche when I was 16, in the former of an essay by AJP Taylor.[1]In this he made the rather trite and lazy observation that Nietzsche’s ideas logically led to his going mad. That this was certainly untrue, Nietzsche suffered from a degenerative brain disease of the kind that had killed his father, was not allowed to get in the way of a neat narrative. Still, my appetite was whetted.
Nietzsche is the great liberator amongst philosophers, and though his last work was completed in the final decade of the nineteenth century he belongs very much to the twentieth. Nietzsche’s great tragedy was to have a sister who appropriated his writing for the Nazi cause. That he should become synonymous with the vilest form of German nationalism, a nationalism which he found abhorrent, would have struck him as a curse as great as his madness and decline. Though he did foresee something like it and would not have been, given his wry outlook, greatly surprised. Moreover, he surely recognised that ideas such as The Will to Power and the Übermensch were hostages to fortune. He also consistently attacked the growth of liberalism, popular participation in society and the expansion of democracy, whilst this very same liberalism allowed him to write and speak out as he did. Unfortunately for him, nobody at the time was listening, later, unfortunately for us, all the wrong people were, and drawing all the wrong conclusions.
Rescuing Nietzsche from the Nazi’s, or more accurately his sister’s malign grasp, has been a long process and ‘I am Dynamite’# surely presents a Nietzsche that is both fully human and places his developing thought in context and sweeps away the layers of misrepresentation. Far from being a proto-Nazi Nietzsche despised the collective as opposed to the individual will and loathed, the then growing current trend, of antisemitism and pretended sometimes to be a Pole rather than a German. Although he served in the Franco-Prussian war bravely – as a medic, - he was far from enamoured of its outcome. First and foremost, he saw himself as a European, preferring France and Italy to Germany. He lost his German citizenship when he became a professor in Basle and never mourned the loss or attempted to regain it. He was an intellectual aristocrat who ignored national boundaries.
As a man, he had many fine qualities, was kind, courageous, honest and, unusual for the age treated women as his intellectual equals, - the misogyny of his later writing was undoubtedly triggered by the treatment he received at the hands of several women. He was also plagued by illness, became practically blind and was sometimes inflicted with severe pain for days on end. All this he bore stoically and with an equanimity inconceivable by most people.
His most famous pronouncement was, of course, ‘God is dead.’ The formulation was, as Taylor pointed out,[2] exact. He did not say ‘I no longer believe in God,’ this was not a statement of atheism, nor did he say, ‘God does not exist. He said that God was dead, and goes on to say that it is man who killed him. This is the most modern of pronouncements, for he continues that with God gone only his shadow remains. But it is this shadow, like a statue, symbol of absence, that haunts him. Put another way, as Orwell once observed, modern man, is like a fly, cruelly cut in half, that continues to nibble away at the sugar on the table oblivious to the fact that a great chunk of itself is missing. Nietzsche understood that without God man would have to deal with the burdens of existence alone. To some extent, all of Nietzsche’s later philosophy seeks to address this issue. To his great credit his response, he never prescribed any specific course of action, was both life-affirming and celebratory.
Does this very necessary step of wrenching Nietzsche away from the grip of the Nazis reveal him to be a soft and cuddly humanist? It does not. Nietzsche’s ideas have too often proved dynamite in the wrong hands for that. His observations about the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity are, I believe, both profoundly insightful and correct, however, misinterpreted and in the wrong hands, they can all to easily lead to the barbarism of concentration camps and gas chambers. So yes he was right, his ideas are dynamite and should, as Ronald Beiner illustrates in ‘Dangerous Minds, Nietzsche Heidegger and the Rise of the Far Right’, should be treated with eyes open and great care.
However, the bracketing of Nietzsche with Heidegger does the former a great disservice. As, to put it bluntly, Heidegger was a disgrace as a human being and openly embraced the Nazis and antisemitism. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was kind and generous and despised antisemitism and German nationalism.
I have read several books on Nietzsche but this one is streets ahead when it comes to understanding the man and his ideas. If it has a fault it is a tendency to downplay the implications of some of his ideas, but there are surely enough correctives to that to hand.
Along with Marx and Freud Nietzsche’s ideas have permeated every level of thinking, influencing even those who have never heard of him. For this reason alone, he is worth reading.
#I am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux is published by Faber.
*Jenny Diski Reviewing Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche by Carol Diethe London Review of Books Vol. 25 No. 18 · 25 September 2003
NOTES
Ronald Beiner’s Dangerous Minds is an examination of the dangers that Nietzsche’s and Heidegger ideas are currently being put by the far right. Though he is better on Heidegger than Nietzsche. In fact, his book, possibly paradoxically provides a brilliant introduction to Heidegger.
