The Destruction of Reason. Georg Lukács 1952
Written: by Georg Lukacs, completed in 1952;
First Published: in German in 1962 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag GmBH;
Source: Destruction of Reason, by Georg Lukacs, published by Merlin Press, ISBN 085036 247 4;
Translated: by Peter R. Palmer, 1980;
Transcribed: by Robert Cymbala, 2005 and published here with the permission of Merlin Press.
It may be postulated as a general statement that the decline of bourgeois ideology set in with the end of the 1848 revolution. Of course we can find many latecomers — especially in literature and art — for whose work this thesis by no means holds good (we need only to mention Dickens and Keller, Courbet and Daumier). These latter names apart, the period between 1848 and 1870 was rife with significant transitional figures who, while their work does reflect features of the decline, were in no wise party to it with regard to the central substance of their output (e.g., Flaubert, Baudelaire). Certainly the decline started much earlier in the sphere of theoretical learning, particularly economics and philosophy; bourgeois economics had produced nothing original and forward-looking since the demise of the Ricardo school in the 1820s, while bourgeois philosophy had yielded nothing new since the demise of Hegelianism (1830s and 1840s). Both these fields were completely dominated by capitalist apologetics. A similar situation obtained in the historical sciences. The fact that the natural sciences continued to make enormous strides during this period — Darwin’s great work appeared between 1848 and 1870 — does not affect the picture one bit; there have been new discoveries in this area right up to the present. This in itself did not forestall a certain degeneration of general methodology, an increasingly reactionary slant in the bourgeois philosophy of natural sciences, and an ever-growing zeal in the use of their findings for the propagation of reactionary views. (We are not now speaking of ideological evolution in Russia. Here the year 1905 corresponded to 1848 in the West — and only twelve years afterwards came the socialist revolution.)
Only in the light of all these facts are we entitled to claim — without losing a just sense of proportion — that the years 1870-1 marked another turning-point in the development of ideology. In the first place, it was then that the rise of the great nation-states in Central Europe reached completion, and many of the most important demands of the bourgeois revolutions their fulfilment; at all events such revolutions had had their day in Western and Central Europe. Some very essential features of a real bourgeois-revolutionary transformation were lacking in Germany and Italy (to say nothing of Austria and Hungary), and there still existed very many relics of feudal absolutism, but from now on it was only thinkable that these could be liquidated through a revolution led by the proletariat. And in those years, the proletarian revolution was already clearly delineated in the Paris Commune. Not only in a French but also in a European context, the battle of June in the 1848 revolution had already signified the turning-point. Its occurrence strengthened the bond between the bourgeoisie and the reactionary classes, and its outcome sealed the fate of every democratic revolution of the period. The illusion that these bourgeois victories had secured ‘law and order’ once and for all was to crumble forthwith. After what was only a short pause, historically considered, the movements of the working-class masses acquired fresh life; in 1864 the First International was founded, and in 1871 the proletariat succeeded in gaining power, albeit only for a relatively short time and on a metropolitan scale: there came into being the Paris Commune, the first dictatorship of the proletariat.
The ideological consequences of these events were very widespread. The polemics of bourgeois science and philosophy were increasingly directed against the new enemy, socialism. While on the upsurge, bourgeois philosophy had challenged the feudal absolutist system, and the interpretation of this challenge had occasioned its controversies over objectives, whereas the chief enemy now was the proletarian world-view. This, however, changed at once the subject and mode of expression of each and every reactionary philosophy. When bourgeois society was a rising force, reactionary philosophy had defended feudal absolutism and subsequently the feudal remnants, the restoration. As we have noted, Schopenhauer’s special position stemmed from the fact that he was the first to proclaim a markedly bourgeois-reactionary world-view. But at the same time he remained on a par with the feudal reactionary, Schelling, inasmuch as what they both considered the chief enemy were the progressive tendencies of bourgeois philosophy: materialism and the dialectical method.
With the battle of June and with the Paris Commune in particular, reactionary polemics underwent a radical change of direction. On the one hand, there was no longer a progressive bourgeois philosophy to combat. Insofar as ideological disputes arose — and they figured prominently on the surface — they related primarily to differences of opinion as to how socialism could be disarmed most effectively, and to class differences within the reactionary bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the principal foe had already appeared in theoretical as well as palpable form. In spite of all the efforts of bourgeois learning it was becoming increasingly impossible to hush up Marxism; the bourgeoisie’s leading ideologues sensed with ever-growing clarity that this constituted their decisive line of defence, upon which they had to concentrate their strongest forces. True, the accordingly defensive character of bourgeois philosophy only had a slow and paradoxical influence. The hushing-up tactics continued to prevail for a long while; from time to time it was attempted to incorporate ‘what was usable’ from historical materialism — correspondingly distorted — in bourgeois ideology. But this tendency assumed a wholly distinctive form only after the first imperialist world war, and after the victory of the great socialist October Revolution in Russia. Right from the start, however, the defensive character was manifested in the fact that bourgeois philosophy was driven to the formulating of questions and into methodological controversies which did not arise out of any intrinsic need, but were forced upon it by virtue of the opponent’s existence. It goes without saying that the solutions corresponded in every instance to the bourgeoisie’s class interests.
In Nietzsche, of course, we perceive solely the initial stage of this development. But we can already confirm some important changes at this stage. The most telling fact is that in the battle against Hegel’s idealist dialectics, the older irrationalists such as Schelling and Kierkegaard were occasionally in a position to indicate its real flaws. Although backward-looking inferences inevitably resulted from their critique, which was only partially accurate, their correct critical observations are of significance in the history of philosophy nonetheless. The situation was completely altered as soon as the enemy had become dialectical and historical materialism. Here bourgeois philosophy was no longer in a position to exercise a real critique, or even to understand correctly the target of its polemics. All that it could do was either to polemicize — at first openly, later increasingly surreptitiously — against dialectics and materialism altogether, or else to play the demagogue in trying to establish a system of pseudo-dialectics by which to counteract genuine dialectics.
Another point to consider is that the bourgeois philosophers ceased to possess any first-hand knowledge when the great arguments over objectives within the bourgeoisie abated. Schelling, Kierkegaard or Trendelenburg had still had an exact knowledge of Hegelian philosophy. In criticizing Hegel without knowing him even superficially, Schopenhauer was once again a forerunner of bourgeois decadence. It seemed that when it came to opposing the class enemy, no holds were barred and all intellectual morality vanished. Scholars who were conscientious in other areas, only venturing to express themselves after accurately digesting their material, now permitted themselves the most facile assertions, which they had gleaned from other, similarly unfounded expressions of opinion. Even when presenting facts they never thought of resorting to the actual sources. This further helps to explain why the ideological struggle against Marxism took place on an incomparably lower level than did, in its own day, the reactionary irrationalist critique of Hegelian dialectics.
In view of this, how can we maintain of Nietzsche that his whole life’s work was a continuous polemic against Marxism and socialism, when it is perfectly clear that he never read a single line of Marx and Engels? We believe that the claim is still feasible, for the reason that every philosophy’s content and method are determined by the class struggles of its age. Although philosophers — like scholars, artists and other ideologists — may more or less fail to recognize it and some times remain totally unaware of it, this conditioning of their attitude to so-called ‘ultimate questions’ takes effect notwithstanding. What Engels said of the lawyers is valid in an even acuter sense for philosophy: ‘The reflecting of economic conditions in legal principles operates without impinging on the awareness of the agents, and the lawyer imagines that he is operating with a priori theses, whereas they are simply economic reflexes ...’ Hence each ideology is consciously attached to ‘a specific intellectual fabric which has been transmitted by its predecessors’.[1] But this does not alter the fact that the selection of these traditional strands, one’s attitude towards them and method of treating them, the results obtained from a critique of them, etc., are, in the final reckoning, determined by economic conditions and the class struggles to which they give rise. Philosophers know instinctively what is theirs to defend, and where the enemy lurks. Instinctively sensing the ‘dangerous’ tendencies of their age, they try to combat them philosophically.
We exposed in our preceding chapter this kind of modern reactionary defence against philosophical progress and the dialectical method, and we traced the essence and methodology of modern irrationalism back to precisely this type of reaction. In the observations we have just made, we have likewise attempted to outline the social reasons for the radical change in the representation of the enemy, and how this change was registered philosophically. Now when we consider the period of Nietzsche’s activity, it can be clearly discerned that the Paris Commune, the evolution of the socialist parties of the masses, especially in Germany, as also the manner and success of the bourgeois struggle against them, impressed him most profoundly. We shall postpone until later a thorough examination of the relevant details and their manifestations in Nietzsche’s life and work. First we intend to moot the general possibility that for Nietzsche, as for the other philosophers of the age, socialism as a movement and world-view had become the chief opponent, and that only this change on the social front and its philosophical consequences enable us to portray his outlook in its true context.
What determined Nietzsche’s particular position in the development of modern irrationalism was partly the historical situation at the time of his appearance, and partly his unusual personal gifts. With regard to the former, we have already touched on the most important social happenings of this period. Another circumstantial factor — one favourable to his development — was that Nietzsche concluded his activity on the eve of the imperialist age. This is to say that, on the one hand, he envisaged the impending conflicts of Bismarck’s age from every perspective. He witnessed the founding of the German Reich, the hopes that were pinned to it and their disappointment, the fall of Bismarck, and the inauguration by Wilhelm II of an overtly aggressive imperialism. And at the same time he witnessed the Paris Commune, the origins of the great party of the proletarian masses, the outlawing of socialists, and the workers’ heroic struggle against it. On the other hand, however, Nietzsche did not personally live to see the imperialist period. He was thus offered a favourable opportunity to conjecture and to solve in mythical form — on the reactionary bourgeoisie’s terms — the main problems of the subsequent period. This mythical form furthered his influence not only because it was to become the increasingly dominant mode of philosophical expression in the imperialist age. It also enabled him to pose imperialism’s cultural, ethical and other problems in such a general way that he could always remain the reactionary bourgeoisie’s leading philosopher, whatever the variations in the situation and the reactionary tactics adopted to match them. Nietzsche had already acquired this status before the first imperialist world war, and he retained it even after the second.
But the lasting influence whose objective possibility we have just outlined could never have become a reality, were it not for the peculiar features of Nietzsche’s not inconsiderable talent. He had a special sixth sense, an anticipatory sensitivity to what the parasitical intelligentsia would need in the imperialist age, what would inwardly move and disturb it, and what kind of answer would most appease it. Thus he was able to encompass very wide areas of culture, to illuminate the pressing questions with clever aphorisms, and to satisfy the frustrated, indeed sometimes rebellious instincts of this parasitical class of intellectuals with gestures that appeared fascinating and hyper-revolutionary. And at the same time he could answer all these questions, or at least indicate the answers, in such a way that out of all his subtleties and fine nuances, it was possible for the robust and reactionary class insignia of the imperialist bourgeoisie to emerge.
This Jekyll-and-Hyde character corresponds to the social existence, and hence to the emotional and intellectual world, of this class in a triple sense. Firstly, an oscillation between the most acute feeling for nuance, the keenest over sensitivity, and a suddenly erupting, often hysterical brutality is always an intrinsic sign of decadence. Secondly, it is very closely linked with a deep dissatisfaction concerning contemporary culture: an ‘unease about culture’ in Freud’s phrase, a revolt against it. Under no circumstances, however, would the ‘rebel’ stomach any interference with his own parasitical privileges and their basis in society. He therefore waxes enthusiastic if the revolutionary character of his discontent receives a philosophical sanction, but is at the same time deflected — with regard to its social substance — into a rebuttal of democracy and socialism. And thirdly, it was just at the time of Nietzsche’s activity that the class decline, the decadent tendencies reached such a pitch that their subjective evaluation within the bourgeois class also underwent a significant change. For a long while, only the progressive opposition critics had been exposing and condemning the symptoms of decadence, whereas the vast majority of the bourgeois intelligentsia clung to the illusion of living in the ‘best of all worlds’, defending what they supposed to be the ‘healthy condition’ and the progressive nature of their ideology. Now, however, an insight into their own decadence was becoming more and more the hub of these intellectuals’ self-knowledge. This change manifested itself above all in a complacent, narcissistic, playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism, etc. But in the case of honest intellectuals, these often turned into sincere despair and a consequent mood of revolt (Messianism, etc.).
Now as a diviner of the cultural psyche, as aesthetician and moralist, Nietzsche was perhaps the cleverest and most versatile exponent of this decadent self-knowledge. But his significance went further: in acknowledging decadence as the basic phenomenon of bourgeois development in his time, he undertook to chart the course of its self-conquest. For in the most spirited and vigilant intellectuals who succumbed to the influence of the decadent outlook, there ineluctably arose a desire to conquer it. Such a desire rendered the struggles of the burgeoning new class, the proletariat, extremely attractive for most of these intellectuals. Here, and particularly with regard to personal conduct and morality, they perceived auguries of a possible social recovery and, in connection with it — naturally this thought was uppermost — of their own recovery. At the same time, the majority of the intellectuals had no inkling of the economic and social implications of a real socialist transformation. Since they contemplated it in purely ideological terms, they had no clear notion how far and how profoundly such a realignment would mean a radical break with their own class; or how such a break, once accomplished, would affect the lives of the persons concerned. Confused though this movement may have been, it did embrace wide sections of the more advanced bourgeois intelligentsia. Naturally enough, it revealed itself with particular vehemence in times of crisis (for instance, the ban on socialists, the fate of Naturalism, the First World War and the Expressionist movement in Germany, boulangisme and the Dreyfus Affair in France, etc.).
Nietzsche’s philosophy performed the ‘social task’ of ‘rescuing’ and ‘redeeming’ this type of bourgeois mind. It offered a road which avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with the bourgeoisie. It was a road whereby the pleasant moral feeling of being a rebel could be sustained and even intensified, whilst a ‘more thorough’, ‘cosmic biological’ revolution was enticingly projected in contrast to the ‘superficial’, ‘external’ social revolution. A ‘revolution’, that is, which would fully preserve the bourgeoisie’s privileges, and would passionately defend the privileged existence of the parasitical and imperialist intelligentsia first and foremost. A ‘revolution’ directed against the masses and lending an expression compounded of pathos and aggressiveness to the veiled egotistic fears of the economically and culturally privileged. The road indicated by Nietzsche never departed from the decadence proliferating in the intellectual and emotional life of this class. But the new-found self-knowledge placed it in a new light: it was precisely in decadence that the true progressive seeds of a genuine, thorough-going renewal of mankind were deemed to lie. This ‘social task’ found itself in pre-established harmony, as it were, with Nietzsche’s talents, his deepest intellectual inclinations and his learning. Like those sections of society at whom his work was aimed, Nietzsche himself was principally concerned with cultural problems, notably art and individual morality. Politics always appeared as though on an abstract, mythicized horizon, and Nietzsche’s ignorance of economics was as great as that of the average contemporary intellectual. Mehring was quite right to point out that his arguments against socialism never surpassed the level of Leo, Treitschke, etc.[2] But the very association of a coarsely humdrum anti-socialism with a refined, ingenious, sometimes even accurate critique of culture and art (for example the critiques of Wagner and Naturalism) was what made Nietzsche’s subject-matter and modes of exposition so seductive for the imperialist intelligentsia. We can see how great the temptation was right through the imperialist period. Beginning with Georg Brandes, Strindberg and Gerhart Hauptmann’s generation, its influence extended to Gide and Malraux. And it was by no means limited to the reactionary part of the intelligentsia. In the essence of their overall work, decidedly progressive writers like Heinrich and Thomas Mann or Bernard Shaw were equally prey to this influence. Indeed it was even capable of making a strong impression on some Marxist intellectuals. Even Mehring — for the time being — assessed it as follows: ‘The Nietzsche cult is still more useful to socialism in another respect. No doubt Nietzsche’s writings have their pitfalls for the few young people of literary talent who may still be growing up within the bourgeois classes, and are initially labouring under bourgeois class-prejudices. But for such people, Nietzsche is only a transitional stage on the way to socialism.’[3]
We have, however, explained only the class basis and the intensity of Nietzsche’s influence, and not its long duration. This rests on his undoubted philosophical abilities. From Julius Langbehn (author of Rembrandt als Erzieher) to Koestler and Burnham in our own day, the standard pamphleteers of the reactionary wing have never done more than satisfy, with more or less skilful demagogics, whatever happened to be the bourgeoisie’s tactical needs. But Nietzsche, as we shall see in more detail later, was able to enshrine and formulate in his works some of the most important lasting features of reactionary attitudes to the imperialist period, and to the age of world wars and revolutions. To perceive his standing in this field, one has only to compare him with his contemporary, Eduard von Hartmann. The latter epitomized as a philosopher the ordinary, reactionary-bourgeois prejudices of the age after 1870, the prejudices of the ‘healthy’ (i.e., sated) bourgeois. This is why he at first enjoyed a much greater success than Nietzsche, and also why he fell into complete oblivion in the imperialist period.
Certainly Nietzsche, as we have already noted, achieved everything in a mythicizing form. This alone enabled him to comprehend and define prevailing tendencies because, lacking any understanding of capitalist economics, he was solely capable of observing, describing and expressing the symptoms of the superstructure. But the myth-form also results from the fact that Nietzsche, the leading philosopher of the imperialist reaction, did not live to see imperialism. Exactly like Schopenhauer as the philosopher of the bourgeois reactionaries after 1848, he wrote in an age that was nurturing only the first shoots and buds of what was to come. For a thinker incapable of recognizing the real generative forces, these could only be portrayed in a utopian, mythical manner. True, his task was facilitated both by the expressive mode of myth and by its aphoristic form, whose characteristics we are about to discuss. This is because such myths and aphorisms, depending on the bourgeoisie’s immediate interests and their ideologues’ endeavours, could be arranged and interpreted in the most diverse, often diametrically opposed ways. But the constant harking back to Nietzsche — in each instance a ‘new’ Nietzsche — shows that there was a definite continuity beneath it all. It was the continuity of the basic problems of imperialism in its entirety from the standpoint of the reactionary bourgeoisie’s lasting interests, viewed and interpreted in the light of the permanent needs of the parasitical bourgeois intelligentsia.
There can be no doubt that such an intellectual anticipation betokens a not inconsiderable gift of observation, sense of the problematic, and capacity for abstraction. In this respect Nietzsche’s historical position is analogous to that of Schopenhauer. The two are also closely associated in the fundamental tenor of their philosophy. We shall refrain here from raising the historio-philological questions of influence, etc. The current attempts to dissociate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer’s irrationalism, and to connect him with the Enlightenment and Hegel, I regard as childish, or rather, as an expression of history-fudging in the service of American imperialism on the lowest level yet see. Of course there exist differences between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, growing ever deeper as Nietzsche clarified his efforts in the course of his development. But they are more in the nature of differences of period: differences in the methods of combating social progress.
From Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche took over the principle of the methodological coherence in his intellectual structure, merely modifying and extending it to suit the age and the opponent. It amounted to what we identified in our second chapter as the indirect apologetics of capitalism. Naturally this basic principle partly assumed new concrete forms in consequence of the conditions of a more acutely developed class struggle. Schopenhauer’s struggle against the progressive thinking of his times could be summed up by saying that he condemned all action as intellectually and morally inferior. Nietzsche, on the contrary, called for active participation on behalf of reaction, of imperialism. This in itself obliged him to cast aside the whole Schopenhauerian duality of Vorstellung and Wille, and to replace the Buddhist myth of will-power with the myth of the will-to-power. Similarly, a further consequence of the heightened class struggle was his inability to make anything of Schopenhauer’s abstract rejection of history in general. A real history, of course, did not exist for Nietzsche any more than for Schopenhauer, yet his apologetics of aggressive imperialism take the form of a mythicizing of history. Lastly — here we can only enumerate the most essential points — while Schopenhauer’s apologetics were indirect with regard to form, he voiced his socio-politically reactionary sympathies in an open, even provocatively cynical manner. With Nietzsche, on the contrary, the principle of indirect apologetics also permeates the mode of exposition, his aggressively reactionary siding with imperialism being expressed in the form of a hyper-revolutionary gesture. The fight against democracy and socialism, the imperialist myth and the summons to barbarous action are intended to appear as an unprecedented reversal, a ‘transvaluation of all values’, a ‘twilight of the false gods’; and the indirect apologetics of imperialism as a demagogically effective pseudo-revolution.
This content and method of Nietzschean philosophy were most intimately connected with his literary manner of expression, namely the aphorism. Such a literary form made the element of change possible within the context of his lasting influence. When a shift in interpretation has become a social necessity — as, for example, in the age immediately preparatory to Hitlerism, and as again today, after Hitler’s downfall — there are no obstacles to the revision of the enduring content such as we find with thinkers who have expressed the coherence of their intellectual world in a systematic form. (Granted, the fate of Descartes, Kant and Hegel in the imperialist period shows that the reactionary is capable of surmounting even these obstacles.) With Nietzsche, however, the task was far simpler: at each stage different aphorisms would be singled out and brought together, in accordance with the needs of the moment. There is one further point to consider as well. Much as the basic objectives accorded with the ideological outlook of the parasitical intelligentsia, to voice them in a systematic, brutal and open fashion would have repelled a wide and not insignificant circle. Thus it is far from an accident that, with but few exceptions (notably the immediate pioneers of Hitlerian fascism), Nietzsche-exegesis has stuck to his cultural critique, moral psychology and so forth, and has seen in Nietzsche an ‘innocent’ thinker concerned only with the spiritual problems of an intellectual and moral ‘élite’. Brandes and Simmel saw him thus, as did Bertram and Jaspers later, and as does Kaufmann today. And correctly so from the class standpoint, since the overwhelming majority thereby won for Nietzsche has later been ready to take practical steps matching this outlook. Writers like Heinrich and Thomas Mann have been exceptions.
This, however, is merely the result of the aphoristic mode of expression. Let us now consider the mode itself. Academic schools of thought have often reproached Nietzsche with having no system, something they held to be necessary to a real philosopher. Nietzsche himself roundly condemned all systems: ‘I mistrust all systematic thinkers and give them a wide berth. A deliberate systematization means a lack of honesty.’[4] This tendency we have already observed in Kierkegaard, and it is not fortuitous. The bourgeoisie’s philosophical crisis, as evidenced in the demise of Hegelianism, amounted to far more than the recognition of a given system’s inadequacy; it signified the breakdown of a concept that had swayed men for thousands of years. When the Hegelian system collapsed, so did the whole endeavour to co-ordinate, and so to comprehend, the world’s totality and its principle of growth from idealist sources, i.e., from elements of the human consciousness. This is not the place to give even a rough outline of the fundamental changes resulting from this final breakdown of the idealist system-concept. Granted, we know that even after Hegel academic systems were created (Wundt, Cohen, Rickert, etc.), but we know also that they were totally insignificant for the evolution of philosophy. We know too that the demise of the system in bourgeois thought prompted the outbreak of a bottomless relativism and agnosticism, as though the now obligatory renunciation of idealist systematizing were at the same time to mean renouncing the objectivity of knowledge, a real coherence of the actual world, and the possibility of knowing this. But equally we know that the burial once and for all of the idealist system coincided with the discovery of the real framework of objective reality, namely dialectical materialism. Engels, polemicizing against Nietzsche’s contemporary Eugen Düuhring, formulated the new philosophical position thus: ‘The real unity of the world lies in its materiality ...[5] This unity the individual branches of learning seek (with ever greater accuracy) both to reflect and to embrace conceptually; the principles and laws of this cognitive process are summed up by philosophy. So the systematic framework has not disappeared. It no longer appears, however, in the form, of idealist ‘essences’, but always as an approximating reflection of that unity, that coherence, that set of laws which is objectively — or independently of our consciousness — present and operative in reality itself.
Nietzsche’s rejection of systems arose out of the relativistic, agnosticizing tendencies of his age. The point that he was the first and most influential thinker with whom this agnosticism turned into the sphere of myth we shall investigate later. To this outlook his aphoristic mode of expression is no doubt intimately related. But he also had another motive beyond this. It is a general phenomenon in ideological history that thinkers who can observe a social development only in embryo, but who can already perceive the new element in it and who — especially in the moral area — are striving for an intellectual grasp of it prefer the essayistic, aphoristic forms. The reason is that these forms guarantee the expression most fitted to a mixture of a mere scenting of future developments on the one hand, and an acute observation and evaluation of their symptoms on the other. We see this in Montaigne and Mandeville, and in the French moralists from La Rochefoucauld to Vauvenargues and Chamfort. Stylistically, Nietzsche had a great liking for most of these authors. But a contrast in the basic tenor of the content accompanied this formal preference. The important moralists had already criticized — the majority in a progressive way — the morality of capitalism from within an absolutist, feudal society. Nietzsche’s anticipation of the future was, on the contrary, approvingly oriented to an impending reactionary movement, qualitatively heightened, that is to say imperialist reaction. It was solely the abstract fact of the anticipation which determined the formal affinity.
We must now ask whether, in Nietzsche’s case, we are justified in speaking of a system. Are we entitled to interpret his individual aphorisms in a systematic context? We believe that the systematic coherence of a philosopher’s thoughts is an older phenomenon than the idealist systems and can still survive when they have collapsed. No matter whether this systematic framework is an approximately correct reflection of the real world or one distorted by class considerations, idealist notions and so forth, such a systematic framework is to be found in every philosopher worth his salt. Admittedly, it does not tally with the structure which the individual philosopher himself intends to give his work. While indicating the need thus to reconstruct the real, consistency in the fragments of Heraclitus and Epicurus, Marx added: ‘Even with philosophers who give their works a systematic form, Spinoza for instance, the actual inner structure of the system is quite different from the form in which they consciously present it.’[6] We shall now venture to show that such a systematic coherence may be detected behind Nietzsche’s aphorisms
In our view, it was only little by little that the nodal point in the framework of Nietzsche’s ideas took definite shape: the resistance to socialism, the effort to create an imperial Germany. There is ample evidence that in his youth, Nietzsche was an ardent Prussian patriot. This enthusiasm is one of the most significant factors in his early philosophy. It cannot possibly be regarded as a matter of chance or youthful whim that he wanted to be involved in the war of 1870-1; nor that, since a Basle professor could not enlist as a soldier, he at least took part as a volunteer nurse. It is at any rate characteristic that his sister (although we must view her statements in a highly critical light) recorded the following memory of the war. At that time, she wrote, he first sensed ‘that the strongest and highest will-to-live is expressed not in a wretched struggle for survival, but as the will to fight, the will to power and super-power’.[7] At all events this bellicose philosophical state of mind, which was an extremely Prussian one, in no way contradicts the young Nietzsche’s other views. In his papers of autumn 1873, for example, we find the following: ‘My starting-point is the Prussian soldier: here we have a true convention, we have coercion, earnestness and discipline, and that also goes for the form.’[8]
Just as distinct as the source of the young Nietzsche’s enthusiasm are the features of his principal enemy. Directly after the fall of the Paris Commune he wrote to his friend, Baron von Gersdorff:
Hope is possible again! Our German mission isn’t over yet! I’m in better spirit than ever, for not yet everything has capitulated to Franco-Jewish levelling and ‘elegance’, and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit (‘now-time’). There is still bravery, and it’s a German bravery that has something else to it than the élan of our lamentable neighbours. Over and above the war between nations, that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come.[9]
And the content of this battle, which initially was waged directly against the movement obstructing the full fruition of his ideology, Nietsche moreover defined in the draft, several months earlier, of his letter dedicating The Birth of Tragedy to Richard Wagner. Once more the Prussian victory was his point of departure. From it he drew such conclusions as these: ‘... because that power will destroy something which we loathe as the real enemy of all profounder philosophy and aesthetics. This something is a disease from which German life has had to suffer since the great French Revolution in particular; ever-recurring in spasmodic fits, it has afflicted even the best type of German, to say nothing of the great mass of people among whom that affliction, in vile desecration of an honourable word, goes under the name of liberalism.’[10]
The connection between the battle against liberalism and that against socialism very soon became apparent. The Strauss pamphlet attacked the liberal ‘cultural philistine’, and did so with such energy and brilliance that it succeeded in deceiving even such a Marxist as Mehring about its true nature, for Mehring thought that ‘indisputably’ Nietzsche had here defended ‘the most glorious traditions of German civilization’.[11] But Nietzsche himself wrote in his notes for the lectures ‘On the Future of our Cultural Institutions’ (1871-3): ‘The most widespread culture, i.e., barbarity is just what Communism presumes ... universal culture turns into a hate of genuine culture ... To have no wants, Lassalle once said, is a people’s greatest misfortune. Hence the workers’ cultural associations, whose aim has been often described to me as that of creating wants ... The drive, therefore, to disseminate culture as widely as possible has its origins in a total secularization, by which culture is reduced to a means of gain and of earthly happiness in the vulgar sense.’[12] As we see, Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking was opposed to democracy and socialism from the beginning.
This attitude and these perspectives form the basis of Nietzsche’s understanding of Ancient Greece. Here his opposition to the revolutionary traditions of bourgeois development is quite plainly perceptible. We are not thinking mainly of the Dionysian principle which made Nietzsche’s first writings famous, for there the idea was still, in his own words, part of his ‘artist metaphysics’. It took on actual significance only after the conquest of decadence had become a central problem for the mature Nietzsche. We want to put the chief emphasis on the principles upon which his new image of Ancient Greece was founded in the first place. And prominent among these is the idea that slavery is necessary to any real civilization.
If Nietzsche had stressed the role of slavery in Greek culture merely from the historical standpoint, this perfectly correct observation would be of no great importance; he himself referred to Friedrich Wolf, who had made it before him.[13] It was bound to gain an even wider currency, and not only because of progress in historical studies. It followed also from a review of the ‘heroic illusions’ of the French Revolution, whose ideologists had ignored the slavery issue in order to create out of the democratic city-state the model of a modern revolutionary democracy. (These same views influenced the German image of Ancient Greece in the period from Winckelmann to Hegel.) What is new in Nietzsche is that he used slavery as a vehicle for his critique of contemporary civilization: ‘And while it may be true that the Greeks perished because of their slave-holding, it is far more certain that we shall perish because of the absence of slavery.’[14]
So if Nietzsche — showing certain methodological affinities with Romantic anti-capitalism — contrasts a great bygone period with the capitalist present which he was criticizing, it is not the same thing as Sismondi’s contrast between the peaceful, simple trade in goods and an age of crisis and mass unemployment. Nor is it the same as ordered and purposeful artisan labour in the Middle Ages, as contrasted by the young Carlyle with the division of labour and an age of anarchy. What Nietzsche contrasts with present times is the Greek dictatorship of an élite which clearly recognizes ‘that work is an ignominy’, and which creates immortal art-works at its leisure. ‘In more recent times’, he wrote, ‘it is not the person who needs art but the slave who has determined the general outlook. Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour are the shabby products of a slave mentality hiding from its own nature. Unhappy the age in which the slave needs such ideas and is spurred to reflect upon himself and the world around him. Wretched the seducers who have deprived the slave of his innocence by means of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge!’[15]
Now what are the qualities of this ‘élite’ whose revival, assisted by a return of slavery, aroused in the young Nietzsche the hope of a cultural renaissance on a utopian and mythical plane? That it springs up from a barbarian condition is some thing we might accept as confirming historical facts. Indeed Nietzsche depicted it in the most lurid colours in ‘Homer’s Contest’ (1871-2). But if we are to understand Greek civilization, stated Nietzsche in a polemic against the Orphic thinkers — who held that ‘a life rooted in such an urge is not worth living’ — then ‘we must start out from the idea that the Greek genius accepted this so fearfully active urge and regarded it as justified’.[16] Thus it is a matter not of conquering, civilizing and humanizing the barbarian instincts, but of constructing the great civilization on their bedrock and diverting them into suitable channels. Only in this context, not from the standpoint of some vague ‘artist metaphysics’, can the Dionysian principle be properly grasped and appreciated. Moreover, Nietzsche rightly said in a later draft of the preface to his debut work on the Dionysian principle: ‘What a disadvantage my timidity is when I speak as a scholar of a subject of which I might have spoken from “experience”.’[17]
For the young Nietzsche, the organ for the social utilization of the barbarian instincts is the contest (agon). This, as we are about to note from Nietzsche’s own statements, was a mythicizing of capitalist competition. He quotes from Pausanias the Hesiod passage about the two goddesses Eris: ‘She (the good Eris, G.L.) spurs even the inept to work; and if a man without property sees a wealthy man, he will make haste to sow and plant likewise and to put his house in good order; neighbour competes with neighbour in striving for prosperity. This Eris is beneficial for mankind. One potter will resent another, one carpenter the other, beggar envies beggar and singer envies singer.’[18] And this state of affairs he contrasted with modern depravity: ‘Nowadays self-seeking is feared as “the devil incarnate” ’, whereas for the ancients the goal of the agonal training was ‘the welfare of the whole, the commonwealth’.[19]
If we now return to slavery as the alleged bedrock of any genuine civilization, we can see how much of the later Nietzsche this early work — albeit in an immature manner — anticipated. In this context the Schopenhauer and Wagner portraits which he produced with such fervent eloquence resemble mythicized pretexts for expressing something not yet fully developed, half in poetic and half in philosophical form. His own later criticism of his first writings — especially in Ecce homo — all tended in this direction: ‘... that what I learnt from Wagner about music in those years has nothing at all to do with Wagner; that when I described Dionysian music I was describing the music that I had heard, — that I had instinctively to transpose and transfigure into the new spirit all that was latent within me. The proof of this, the strongest possible proof, is my piece Wagner in Bayreuth: I am the sole subject in all the psychologically crucial pas sages — one may automatically read my own name or the word “Zarathustra” wherever the text reads “Wagner” ... the latter himself sensed this; he was unable to recognize himself in the piece.’[20] Modified somewhat, this also applies to the Schopenhauer portrait in the work of Nietzsche’s youth. The third, similarly mythologized, Socrates portrait is a totally different matter. In the debut work the great antithesis was already ‘The Dionysian and the Socratic’.[21] And Nietzsche — at first in predominantly aesthetic terms — enlarged this antithesis to encompass that of instinct and reason. In Ecce homo he reached his conclusion: the discovery that Socrates was a ‘décadent’ and that one must rate ‘morality itself as a symptom of decadence’ the mature Nietzsche regarded as ‘an innovation, a discovery of the first order in the history of knowledge’.[22]
When investigating in general the determining causes of Nietzsche’s further development, one usually lays the chief stress on the Wagner disappointment. But the points just raised concerning Nietzsche’s attitude to Wagner already show us that it was a symptom of his shift rather than its actual cause. In Wagner, and with increasing acuteness, Nietzsche challenged the art of his own German period in the name of the imperialist future. When, especially after the First World War, it became the fashion to challenge the nineteenth century’s ideology (the age of ‘security’) in the name of the twentieth, Nietzsche’s split with Wagner and late polemics against him furnished the methodological ‘model’ for this conflict. The fact that the ideological spokesmen of the Hitler period continued this tradition, though linking it with Wagner idolatry, does not prove anything. Their rejection of ‘security’ was combined also with the glorification of Bismarck, whom Nietzsche in his final period nearly always attacked in conjunction with Wagner. For the older Nietzsche, Wagner was the greatest artistic expression of that decadence whose most important political representative he saw in Bismarck. And in going beyond the philosophy of Schopenhauer he followed the same direction. We must not forget that even the young Nietzsche was never a really orthodox disciple of Schopenhauer with regard to radical a-historicism. From the start he had toyed with a mythicizing of history, whereas his master had totally avoided history. This tendency, already present in The Birth of Tragedy, grew more pronounced in the second Untimely Consideration. Activism — of the counter-revolutionary variety — was more over gaining in significance for Nietzsche. And thus, along with Wagner and Bismarck, Schopenhauer too came more and more within the area of that decadence he wanted to conquer. This, naturally enough, did not prevent Nietzsche from adhering all his life to Berkeley-Schopenhauer epistemology, as we are likewise soon to see. He adapted it, however, to suit his own particular purpose.
Now where do we look for the real causes behind Nietzsche’s development, and for the basic features of his so-called second period? It is our belief that they can be found in the aggravation of those socio-political conflicts which governed the second half of the seventies (cultural conflict, but above all the anti-socialist laws). We have observed how strongly Nietzsche’s first works were affected by the war of 1870-1 and hopes of a general cultural regeneration in the aftermath of victory. We have further observed how tenuous the young Nietzsche’s hopes were and how apolitical his perspectives, despite his general social and historico-philosophical stand in favour of slavery. Now this changed quite decisively in the second half of the seventies. Not that Nietzsche by now had acquired clear ideas on politics and more particularly on their underlying economics; we shall soon see his naive ignorance when it came to the latter. But in spite of all the facts speaking against him and the confusion in his views, Nietzsche’s cultural and historico-philosophical studies were moving in a direction oriented towards the concrete present and future.
Let us anticipate for a moment what we are going to amplify on this subject. Nietzsche’s new political position was centred upon the idea of rebutting and disarming the socialist threat, his chief adversary now as before, with the aid of democracy. Here we must note that Nietzsche regarded Bismarck’s Germany as a democracy. And so — no matter how far Nietzsche was aware of it — his hope that here lay the cure for socialism was very closely connected with Bismarckian politics. We cannot take it as pure coincidence that his first work of this period, Human, All-Too-Human, appeared roughly half a year before the promulgation of the socialist ban. To be sure, this was also the date of the centenary of Voltaire’s death. And very far-reaching conclusions have been drawn from the dedication with which Nietzsche prefaced his first edition on this occasion. Their validity, however, is extremely limited. For if we read Nietzsche’s Voltaire treatise we perceive that it was still dealing with the same conflict we have defined as the most important in his life. But with the difference, characteristic of this period, that Nietzsche now thought the evolution which he praised Voltaire for representing was the surest antidote to revolution (i.e., socialism). In this light he drew his parallel between Voltaire and Rousseau (the aphorism’s title, ‘A Falsity in the Doctrine of Revolution’, is typical of Nietzsche at the time). ‘Not Voltaire’s moderate nature with its bias towards ordering, purifying and reconstructing, but Rousseau’s passionate follies and half-truths have awakened the optimistic revolutionary spirit, and against it I cry, “écrasez l’infâme!” It has long been responsible for banishing the spirit of enlightenment and progressive development.’[23] Nietzsche was to persist in this view of Voltaire long after he had overcome the illusions of Human, All-Too-Human. Indeed, in line with his later radicalism, he now saw Voltaire’s universal historical significance solely in this opposition to Rousseau and revolution. Thus he wrote in The Will to Power: ‘Only at this point does Voltaire (hitherto a mere bel esprit) become the man of his century, the philosopher and representative of tolerance and unbelief.’[24]
Thus in the second half of the seventies, Nietzsche became a ‘democrat’, ‘liberal’ and evolutionist precisely because he found in this the most effective counterpoise to socialism. His enthusiasm for this — as he then believed — inevitable transitional step was very temperate; one must, he wrote, ‘adapt oneself to the new circumstances as one adapts when an earthquake dislocates the earth’s old borders and contours’.[25] But in the second part of the same work he thought it possible ‘that the democratization of Europe is one link in the chain of those enormous prophylactic measures constituting the idea of the new times and dividing us from the Middle Ages. Only now has the era of Cyclopean structures arrived! At last we have stable foundations on which the whole future can safely build! Impossible, henceforth, for wild and sense less mountain waters once more to ruin the fertile fields of civilization overnight! Stone dams and bulwarks against barbarians, pestilence, physical and mental thraldom!’[26] In this vein Nietzsche went so far as even to condemn exploitation as stupid and futile: ‘The exploitation of the worker was, as we now recognize, a piece of stupidity, a maverick enterprise at the future’s expense which imperilled society. Now we are already on the verge of war: from now on, at all events, there will be a very high price to pay for maintaining peace, sealing contracts and winning confidence, because the exploiters’ foolishness was very great and long-lasting.’[27] The new form of government — and here he expressly sided with Bismarck — was to be an admittedly unhistorical but shrewd and useful compromise with the people, whereby all human relations would undergo a gradual transformation.
In Nietzsche’s opinion — one which fully harmonized with the views just quoted — the positive value of such ‘democratic evolution’ rested in its ability to rear a new ‘elite’. Thus in completing the turn to ‘democracy’ à la Bismarck, Nietzsche gave up none of his youthful aristocratic convictions. For now he still saw the salvation of culture solely in a more resolute bestowal of privileges on a minority, one whose leisure was based on the hard physical labour of the majority, the masses. He wrote: ‘A higher civilization can only come about when there are two distinct social castes: that of the working people and that of the leisured, those capable of true leisure; or, to put it more strongly, the caste of forced labour and the caste of free labour.’[28] So close to liberalism was he coming that temporarily he even appropriated its concept of the State. He wrote the oft-quoted sentence: ‘Modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the State.’ But just how Nietzsche amplified this idea is seldom quoted: ‘The prospect opened up by this assured decay is not, however, a gloomy one in every respect: of all human attributes, shrewdness and self-seeking are the most highly developed; when the State is no longer a match for these forces’ demands, chaos will be the least likely result. It is more likely that the State will be defeated by an even more practical invention than itself.’[29]
Here it becomes palpably clear why Nietzsche arrived at the views he did. No longer did he consider socialism to be an ally of liberalism and democracy, their consummation carried to radical extremes — in which guise he had previously opposed it along with the other two. Socialism was now ‘the imaginative younger brother of the near-defunct despotism’.[30] And Nietzsche ended the aphorism in such a way that his current attitude to the State is quite plain to behold: ‘Socialism can serve to teach men most brutally and forcefully the danger of all accumulations of State authority, and so inspire a distrust of the State itself. When its hoarse voice mingles with the battle-cries of “as much State power as possible”, these will at first become louder than ever: but soon the opposite cry will ring out all the more strongly — “as little State power as possible”.’[31]
It is not worth examining more closely how Nietzsche envisaged this democracy in concrete terms. To do so would merely reveal his political naivety and economic ignorance. If, in conclusion, we quote one more statement by him, this will clearly illustrate not only both the aforesaid points but also the constant leitmotif of all stages in Nietzsche’s development: the campaign against socialism, the chief adversary. In the second part of Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche maintained that democracy would of all parties profit most from the general dread of socialism, and he concluded: ‘The people are the farthest away from socialism as a doctrine of reform in the acquisition of property: and should they ever have access to the taxation screw through their parliaments large majorities, they will assault the principality of capitalists, businessmen and stock exchanges with progressive taxation, thus in fact slowly creating a middle class which may forget about socialism as it would a disease it has recovered from.’[32] That was the focal point of Nietzsche’s utopian dream of this period: to achieve a society where socialism could be forgotten as easily as ‘a past illness’. For this dream’s sake he regarded Bismarck’s ‘democracy’ with — qualified — benevolence: the ‘democracy’ of the anti-socialist laws and the professed social policies, the ‘democracy’ of the carrot and the stick.
How far these views were associated with reactionary illusions about the socialist ban is indicated by the new and final turn they took. Again this occurred side by side with the bourgeoisie’s disillusionment as a result of the growing, and increasingly successful, courageous resistance of the German working class. Assuming more and more passionate forms, Nietzsche’s new line of thought reached its peak in his final works. We shall not retrace it step by step; our concern here is the essential social content, above all the fact that, despite the chopping and changing, the actual pivot and real centre never shifted, but was still hostility to socialism.
The estrangement from the ‘democratic’ illusions of the transitional period already takes a very distinct form in the Joyful Science (1882). In a passage that the fascists have often quoted, and with understandable enthusiasm, Nietzsche sided with military command and subordination, officers and soldiers, playing off this hierarchy against the capitalist exploiters’ want of refinement and aristocratic character. Indeed he saw in the lack of aristocratic form the very reason for the rise of the socialists: ‘Were they (namely the capitalists — G.L.) to share the hereditary nobility’s distinction in glance and gesture, then perhaps there would be no socialism of the masses.’[33] What determined the sharper tone and mounting passion was that Nietzsche, becoming more and more sceptical about the chances of putting down the workers by time-honoured methods, strongly feared — at least for the time being — a workers’ victory. Thus he wrote in The Genealogy of Morals (1887): ‘Let us face facts: the people have triumphed — or the slaves, the mob, the herd or what ever you like to call them ... Masters have been abolished; the morals of the common man have triumphed ... Mankind’s ‘redemption’ (namely from its masters) is well under way; everything is becoming visibly Judified or Christified or mobified (what do words matter!). To arrest this poison’s progress throughout the body of mankind seems impossible ...’[34]
At this point it might be quite interesting to glance at the differences and similarities in the careers of Nietzsche and Franz Mehring. We may then see what the socialist ban and the German proletariat’s resistance meant to the crisis in bourgeois ideology. Both authors — although always proceeding from totally different starting-points and on equally different lines — had a period of illusionary perspectives: Mehring wrote a pamphlet attacking social democracy, while Nietzsche entered upon his ‘democratic’ phase. Both under went a crisis during the workers’ ever-mounting and increasingly successful resistance. But whereas this crisis led Mehring into the socialist camp, it exacerbated Nietzsche’s hostility to socialism to the point of fury and brought about the final formulation of his mythical foreshadowing of imperialist barbarity. ‘Whom do I hate most’, said Nietzsche in his Anti-Christ, ‘among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the Shandala disciples undermining the worker’s sound instinct, good spirits and sense of contentment — making him envious and instructing him in vengeance ... Injustice never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the claim to equal rights ...’[35] And it is typical of Nietzsche’s shift that in his last period, in the Twilight of the Idols, he expressly returned to the statement we quoted earlier, concerning democracy as the decaying form of the State; but this time he made it in a decidedly condemnatory sense.[36]
In summing up, it only remains for us to show how Nietzsche described his attitude to the worker question in The Twilight of the Idols:
The stupidity, at bottom the degenerate instinct, which today is the cause of all stupidities, rests in the fact that there is a worker problem at all. There are certain questions that one does not ask: number one imperative of the instinct. I quite fail to see what we wish to do with the European worker once he has become a problem. The worker is faring far too well not gradually to start asking more questions and to ask them less modestly. In the last resort he has the strength of numbers in his favour. We have said good-bye to the hope that here a humble and contented kind of man, a Chinese type might form an emergent class: and that would have made sense, and would have been a downright necessity. But what have we done? Everything to nip in the bud even the first requirement — through the most irresponsible thoughtlessness, we have killed outright the instincts enabling the worker to exist as a class, enabling the worker himself to exist. We have taught him military efficiency and given him the coalition right and the political vote: so why be surprised if now the worker is already regarding his condition as a deprived one (in moral terms, an injustice)? But I ask once more: what is it we want? If we have some end in view we must also wish for the means. If it is slaves we want, we are fools to raise them as masters.[37]
Two points in Nietzsche’s thought warrant particular emphasis. Firstly, the fact that he considered the whole ‘worker problem’ to be a purely ideological issue: the ruling-class ideologues were to decide the course of conduct that the workers should follow. Nietzsche quite overlooked the fact that the question had objective economic foundations. The sole deciding factor, for him, was how the ‘masters’ stood on the question; they could achieve anything if they were determined enough. (Here Nietzsche was a direct forerunner of the Hitlerian view.) Secondly, this passage unwittingly provides a historical summary of the constant and inconstant elements in Nietzsche’s thoughts on this central problem. It is evident both that the ‘breeding’ of a slave type adapted to modern circumstances was his permanent social ideal, and that his hostility was directed against those — the socialists — who were frustrating this development. But the inconstant element is equally clear: if Nietzsche was levelling sharp criticisms against others of his class, he was at the same time practising self-criticism and overcoming the illusions of his Human, All-Too-Human period.
At all events, since the crumbling of his ‘democratic’ illusions Nietzsche had been predicting an era of great wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Only out of the resulting chaos could his ideal arise: absolute rule by the ‘lords of the earth’ over a henceforth compliant herd, the suitably cowed slaves. In Nietzsche’s jottings from the time of The Genealogy of Morals we already find: ‘The problem — whither now? The need is for a new reign of terror.’[38] And in the prolegomenon to The Will to Power he said of the new barbarians and future overlords: ‘Obviously they will come into view and consolidate themselves only after immense socialistic crises.’[39] The older Nietzsche’s optimistic perspectives derived from this vision of the future (of imperialism): ‘The sight of the present European affords me much hope: a daring master race is being formed upon the broad basis of an extremely intelligent herd of the masses.’[40] And whilst dreaming up these goals and the path that would lead to them, he occasionally conceived of the future in images whose content directly anticipates the Hitlerian saga: ‘The putrid ruling classes have corrupted the image of the ruler. For the State to exercise jurisdiction is cowardice, because it lacks the great man who can serve as a criterion. There is so much uncertainty in the end that men will kow-tow to any old will power that issues the orders.’[41]
In order to be completely clear about Nietzsche’s socio-political line, it only remains for us to cast some light on his attitude to Bismarck. This is not an irrelevant question; indeed it is central both to his influence on basically Left-oriented circles and to his role in fascist ideology.
The Left saw the problem thus: Nietzsche criticized Bismarck very sharply — hence he could not possibly be a reactionary. Since this was a case of mistaking criticism from the Right for criticism from the Left, our concrete treatment of the Nietzsche-Bismarck relationship will tacitly answer this question to the effect that he always criticized Bismarck from a Right-wing standpoint, and considered Bismarck to be not decidedly enough the imperialist reactionary.
The fascist ideologists too started out from the contrasts between Nietzsche and Bismarck. But since the Third Reich needed a synthesis of all the reactionary currents in German history, it had to regard itself as a fusion of Nietzsche and Bismarck on a higher (i.e., reactionary) level. Franz Schauwecker, for example, said of the need to reconcile Nietzsche and Bismarck in the Third Reich: ‘It will be an empire guaranteeing the ultimate world-order. It will be the empire in which Frederick the Prussian and Goethe the German are at one. Then the meeting which was prevented from taking place between Bismarck and Nietzsche will be a fait accompli strong enough to withstand all attacks by hostile powers.’[42] Hitler’s official philosophical ideologue, Alfred Baeumler, for his part used Nietzsche’s Bismarck critique — entirely in the spirit of Mein Kampf — to prove the Third Reich’s superiority to the Bismarck-Hohenzollern empire. Accordingly he passed over all Nietzsche’s chopping and changing, and summed up his views thus: ‘The history of the Empire became the story of Bismarck’s intellectual defeat. This process took place before the horrified eyes of the other great realist (namely Nietzsche, G.L.) ... The empire prospered, but it was a sham prosperity, and the concomitant philosophy (“ethical idealism”) was a sham philosophy. In the world war the ostentatious romantic-liberal structure collapsed, and in the same instant the two great contestants from the past became visible.’[43]
Now let us look at Nietzsche’s Bismarck critique itself. Both men were so-called ‘up-to-date’ reactionaries who, along with the usual weapons of popular subjugation and brutal terror — although this remained the favourite weapon of both — attempted above all to employ individual ‘democratic’ measures or institutions against the chief adversary, the proletariat. (Universal suffrage, etc., in Bismarck’s case.) Bismarck, however, being essentially a diplomat of the Bonapartist period, was only briefly carried beyond the narrow aims of a Prussian reactionary policy by the movement for German unity. He failed to grasp the German bourgeoisie’s imperialistic aspirations, based on the reactionary foundation of the Empire and now gradually gaining in momentum. Nietzsche, on the contrary, was the ideologist and prophet of this very tendency. Hence his often bitterly ironical, scornful criticism of Bismarck, and hence — precisely in the last years of his active life — his opposition to him. What Nietzsche found wanting in Bismarck was a grasp of the principle of the will to power, which was why he said that he knew as little about philosophy as ‘a farmer or an army recruit’.[44]
But that was simply a polemical invective. The essence of Nietzsche’s quarrel with Bismarck comprised two complexes of ideas. Firstly, in the domain of home affairs Nietzsche called for a determined break with the semblance of a democracy and with that form of demagogic flirting with democracy, that is to say parliamentarianism, which Bismarck represented. For Nietzsche the crucial question was this: ‘The increasing emergence of democratic man, and the consequent stultification of Europe and belittling of European man. Hence his precept: ‘A break with the English principle of popular representation: it is the big interests which need to be represented.’[45] Here Nietzsche anticipated the fascist ‘class State’. The second complex of ideas covered world affairs. In Beyond Good and Evil — significantly, and in contrast to Bismarck’s policy at the time, in the form of a demand that Europe unite against Russia — Nietzsche declared: ‘The time for small politics is over: the very next century will bring a struggle for dominion over the earth, the obligation for great politics.’[46] This era which Nietzsche accused Bismarck of failing to understand was to be the era of great wars. In Ecce homo Nietzsche expressed himself thus on the subject: ‘There will be wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before. Great politics on earth are only beginning with me.’[47] That is why Bismarck was not militaristic enough for Nietzsche. Exactly like Hitler, he believed that Germany’s salvation depended on renewing in up-to-date form the traditions of the Prussian military State: ‘The upholding of the military State is the ultimate means of adopting or sustaining the great tradition with regard to the highest type of person, the type that is strong.’[48] As these few passages show us perfectly plainly, Nietzsche’s Bismarck critique rested solely on the contention that Bismarck did not grasp the problems of the impending imperialist period, and was incapable of solving them by way of reactionary aggression. He was, there fore, criticizing Bismarck from the Right.
Only on the basis of the aforesaid can we apprehend both the unity behind Nietzsche’s philosophy and its various changes. It implied an active rejection of the chief enemy, namely the working class and socialism. And as the class struggle intensified and one illusion crumbled after another, it expanded into an intellectual anticipation of the imperialist phase in capitalist evolution. Only in an imperialist bourgeois state of a decidedly aggressive reactionary hue could Nietzsche find a sufficiently strong defence against the socialist danger; only the emergence of such a power inspired in him the hope of succeeding in neutralizing the working class once and for all. His bitterness about the Germany of his time stemmed from its failure to adopt this measure and its continued hesitancy in doing so.
These tendencies are best seen in Nietzsche’s ethics. That is because Nietzsche, in view of his class situation, his ignorance of economics and the fact that his activity pre-dated imperialism, was naturally in no position to foreshadow imperialism in economic and social terms. In his works he portrayed the bourgeoisie’s consistent imperialist morality all the more clearly for that. Indeed he here anticipated in theory the true course of developments. Most of his statements on ethics became a dreadful reality under the Hitler régime, and they also retain a validity as an account of ethics in the present ‘American age’.
Nietzsche was frequently associated with the Romantic movement. The assumption is correct inasmuch as many motives of Romantic anti-capitalism — e.g., the struggle against the capitalist division of labour and its consequences for bourgeois culture and morals — played a considerable part in his thinking. The setting up of a past age as an ideal for the present age to realize also belonged to the intellectual armoury of Romantic anti-capitalism. Nietzsche’s activity, however, fell within the period after the proletariat’s first seizure of power, after the Paris Commune. Crisis and dissolution, Romantic anti-capitalism’s development into capitalist apologetics, the fate of Carlyle during and after the 1848 revolution — these already lay far behind Nietzsche in the dusty past. Thus the young Carlyle had contrasted capitalism’s cruelty and inhumanity with the Middle Ages as an epoch of popular prosperity, a happy age for those who laboured; whereas Nietzsche began, as we have noted, by extolling as a model the ancient slave economy. And so the reactionary utopia which Carlyle envisioned after 1848 he also found naive and long outdated. Admittedly the aristocratic bias of both had similar social foundations: in the attempt to ensure the leading social position of the bourgeoisie and to account for that position philosophically. But the different conditions surrounding Nietzsche’s work lent to his aristocratic leanings a fundamentally different content and totally different colouring from that of Romantic anti-capitalism. True, remnants of Romanticism (from Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner) are still palpable in the young Nietzsche. But these he proceeded to overcome as he developed, even if — with regard to the crucially important method of indirect apologetics — he still remained a pupil of Schopenhauer and preserved as his basic concept the irrational one of the Dionysian principle (against reason, for instinct); but not without significant modifications, as we shall see. Hence an increasingly energetic dissociation from Romanticism is perceptible in the course of Nietzsche’s development. While the Romantic he identified more and more passionately with decadence (of the bad kind), the Dionysian became a concept increasingly antithetical to Romanticism, a parallel for the surmounting of decadence and a symbol of the ‘good’ kind of decadence, the kind he approved.
With regard therefore to the philosophy of human behaviour (ethics, psychology and social philosophy always coalesce in Nietzsche), he harked back to the epoch paving the way for bourgeois ascendancy, to the Renaissance, French classicism and the Enlightenment. These interests are important because they offered connecting links both for Nietzsche’s admirers from the bourgeois Left, and for his updating in the service of ideological preparations for a third imperialist world war. Kaufmann, for instance, treated Nietzsche as the consummator of great philosophy after Descartes (indeed after Aristotle), intending to depict him as carrying on the Enlightenment traditions.[49] Having been apparently compromised by the Hitlerists’ enthusiasm, he was — in company with Hjalmar Schacht and General Guderian — to be ‘denazified’ to suit the purposes of American imperialism.
The reader will have already observed the scientific worth of such essays from our previous quotation concerning Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire, whose work formed a great focal point for the mobilization of all the progressive forces of his age, was — according to Nietzsche — to become the spiritual head of the anti-revolutionary brigade. And it is extremely characteristic of this so-called link with the Enlightenment that Nietzsche, seeking an analogy with Voltaire’s conduct, found one in the life of Schopenhauer — who was, he stated, ‘unsullied as no German philosopher before him, living and dying a Voltairean’.[50] We are asked to believe that Voltaire, who used his world-wide fame effectively to combat the antediluvian feudal absolutism of his times, and who risked his neck to save the innocent victims of the clerical-absolutist reactionary party (or at least to preserve their memory), led a life comparable to that of Schopenhauer, whose only personal conflict involved a family squabble over his inheritance; who in 1848 offered the counter-revolutionary officers his opera-glasses to help them shoot at those fighting on the barricades; who bequeathed part of his wealth to the counter-revolution’s disabled, etc. It is not, I think, worth adducing similar proof with respect to all Nietzsche’s supposed ties with earlier progressive traditions; to do so would be only too easy. It will suffice if we quote, in conclusion, Nietzsche’s own comment about the relationship of his ‘new Enlightenment’ to the ‘old’ for Nietzsche, in contrast to his hypocritical imperialist interpreters, expressed his views with a candour leaving nothing to be desired. He said: ‘... the old movement was in the spirit of the democratic herd: a universal levelling. The new Enlightenment aims at showing dominant natures the way; inasmuch as to these (as to the State), everything is permitted that is barred to the herd mentality.’[51]
Quite contrary to those commentators who sought to bring Nietzsche into close alignment with the Enlightenment, he actually stood — after the brief episode of relative propinquity in the ‘Democratic Phase’ we have examined — at extreme loggerheads with such Enlightenment epigones as Mill, Guyau and others. The inconsistent development in the period of bourgeois ideology’s decline found expression in this conflict. The Enlightenment itself, under the illusion that it was establishing the empire of reason, had opposed the theology and the irrationalism of feudal traditions. The bourgeoisie’s victory in the great French Revolution meant a realization of these ideals, but the necessary consequence was, as Engels says,[52] that the empire of reason proved to be the bourgeois empire idealized, with all its insoluble contradictions. Marx says tellingly of the difference between Helvétius and Bentham: ‘Bentham only reproduces dully what Helvétius and other eighteenth-century Frenchmen had expressed with wit.’[53] The contrast of wit and dullness was not just a matter of their respective talents, however. It illustrates two different stages in the development of capitalism and, accordingly, in that of bourgeois ideology. Helvétius was capable of wit because a clairvoyant loathing of the decayed feudal-absolutist society, the obscurantism of church and religion, and the ruling classes’ hypocrisy lent wings to his thinking. Bentham was bound to grow dull because he was doggedly defending a capitalism that had already triumphed, and to do this he had to overlook the most significant social phenomena or distort reality with the aid of rose-tinted spectacles. With the epigonal Bentham’s own epigones, the positivists Mill and Spencer, Comte and Guyau, the bourgeoisie’s further decline could only hasten this tendency to superficiality and dullness. Nietzsche, in turn, could become witty once more because, as a result of his method of indirect apologetics, he commanded a wide field for ruthless criticism, especially in the cultural sphere. From the artistic character of such criticism derived his aesthetic preference for individual Enlightenment authors, and the French moralists in particular. But this professional, formal allegiance must not be allowed to conceal the ideological antithesis in their basic lines of thought. Occasionally Nietzsche voiced these contrasts quite openly, as for instance when — as early as the time of Human, All-Too-Human — he discovered an ally of Christianity in La Rochefoucauld’s moral critique.[54]
The connecting link between Nietzsche’s ethics and those of the Enlightenment, the French moralists and so on is the fact that they all perceived in the egotism of the ‘capitalist’ individual the central phenomenon of social life. Since, however, they were writing in different periods, the historical development of the class struggle produced qualitative differences in content and indeed incompatible elements in orientation and evaluation. As progressive ideologists of the era leading up to the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the rationalists were bound to idealize bourgeois society and, first and foremost, the social functions of egotism. Without any knowledge, for the most part, of classical British economics and often before they appeared, these ideologists expressed in their ethics Adam Smith’s basic economic tenet that the individual’s economically self-seeking actions are the mainspring of the productive forces’ development, leading necessarily, in the last resort, to a harmonizing of the collective interests of society. (Here we lack space even to outline the complicated paradoxes occasioned by ‘theory of utility’, the ethics of ‘rational egotism’ which flourished in this soil among the Enlightenment’s great representatives.) It is clear, however, that after the Adam Smith doctrine had itself foundered on the real facts of capitalism, it could only be preserved in economics in the shape of popular economics (starting with Say), and in ethics and sociology in the form of direct apologetics for capitalism (starting with Bentham). The Positivists’ dull-wittedness and eclecticism are indicated by, among other factors, their inability to adopt an unequivocal line on the question of egotism. Their position amounted to a generally obfuscating ‘on the one hand ... on the other hand’. Now if Nietzsche, standing for indirect apologetics, took up once more the question of whether to commend egotism — and we see that in his youth, this policy played an important role in the mythicizing modernization of the agon and the ‘good Eris’ — it was no longer, in his case, an idealization of a rising, still progressive, and indeed revolutionary, bourgeois society. He was, on the contrary, idealizing those egotistic tendencies in the declining bourgeoisie that were burgeoning in his own lifetime and became truly, universally prevalent in the imperialist period. That is to say, it was the egotism of a class which, having been condemned by history to its doom, was mobilizing all mankind’s barbaric instincts in its desperate struggles with its grave-diggers, the proletariat, and was founding its ‘ethics’ on these instincts.
We know that in his so-called Voltaire phase, Nietzsche was for a short while closely associated with Paul Rée, a Positivist epigone of Enlightenment ethics, and even fell temporarily under his influence. Hence the motives behind his rift and critical controversy with Rée are most instructive with regard to our problem. He voiced them with unambiguous clarity: ‘I challenge the idea that egotism is harmful and reprehensible: I want to give egotism a clear conscience.’[55]
The chief task of Nietzsche’s mature period, then, was to extend the ethics (the psychology and, so Nietzsche thought, the physiology as well) of this new egotism. In drafts for a sequel to Zarathustra he set out perhaps the most revealing programme for the task. And significantly, he began with his aforementioned definition of the ‘new Enlightenment’: ‘ “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Zarathustra: “I deprived you of everything, a god, a duty — now you must provide the greatest proof of a noble action. For here is the open road for the impious — behold!” — A contest for dominance, with the herd still more of a herd in the end, and the tyrant still more of a tyrant. — No secret society! The consequences of your doctrine must wreak fearful havoc: but countless are destined to perish from them. — We are submitting truth to an experiment! Maybe mankind will perish in the process! So be it!’[56]
To accomplish this upheaval, this ‘transvaluation of all values’ new men were needed. Nietzsche intended his ethics to effect their selection, education, breeding. But this called for a liberation of the instincts before all else. In Nietzsche’s opinion, each previous religion, philosophy, morality, and so forth, had the function of opposing a liberation of the instincts, of suppressing, neglecting and perverting them. Only with his own ethics did the liberating process commence: ‘Every sound morality is governed by a life instinct ... Unnatural morality, i.e., nearly every morality that has been hitherto inculcated, venerated and preached, is aimed, conversely, directly against the vital instincts — it is a condemnation, sometimes clandestine and sometimes loud and bold, of these instincts.’[57] Here Nietzsche emerges as a vigorous critic of ethics past and present, philosophical and above all Kantian as well as Christian-theological. Taking a purely formal view, one might at first glance assume that he had in mind a link with the great ethical ideas of earlier men, such as Spinoza’s doctrine of the emotions. But as soon as we consider content and programmatic bias in concrete terms, we see how appearances can deceived With Spinoza, the dialectics of the conquest of one’s own emotions were an endeavour to project the ideal of a harmonious, humanistic, self-controlled social being through mastery over (not just the suppression of, as in Kant) mere instinct and the anti-social passions. With Nietzsche, on the contrary, as we have seen already and will see again in more detail, we have a veritable conception of an unleashing of the instincts: the declining bourgeoisie, he maintained, had to let loose all that was bad and bestial in man so as to obtain militant activists who could save its dominion.
That is why the acknowledgement of the criminal type was so important to Nietzsche. Here too there is a surface affinity with certain tendencies in the earlier literature of the period of the bourgeois rise (the young Schiller’s Robbers, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Pushkin’s Dubrovsky, Balzac’s Vautrin, etc.), but once again with a radically different content. At that time, the injustices of feudal-absolutist society were driving high-principled men into crime, and the study of such criminals constituted an attack on that society. Granted, Nietzsche too was bent on attacking. But where he put the emphasis was on deforming a specific human type, on transforming it into the criminal type. And his chief concern was to give even the criminal a clear conscience and thus to cancel out his degeneration and make him a member of the new élite. In The Twilight of the Idols he stated: ‘The criminal type is the strong type under unfavourable conditions, a strong man rendered sickly. What he lacks is the jungle, a certain freer and more dangerous form of nature and existence where all that serves as arms and armour — in the strong man’s instinctive view — is his by right. His virtues society has prohibited; the liveliest impulses he has borne within him are quickly entangled with the crushing emotions of suspicion, fear and ignominy.’[58] And then in The Will to Power, the necessary, organic connection between greatness, in Nietzsche’s sense, and criminality (which means belonging to the criminal type) was distinctly stated: ‘In our civilized world we are almost solely acquainted with the stunted criminal, weighed down by society’s curse and contempt, mistrusting himself, often belittling and calumniating his own deed, a failed criminal type; and we find it repugnant to think that all great men were criminals (but in the grand manner, not miserably) and that crime belongs to greatness ...’[59]
Here already Nietzsche has very plainly raised and answered the question of ‘sickness’ and ‘health’, so central to his mature philosophy. If we complement these statements with a further one from his drafts for his final works, it will not be for the sake of comprehensiveness, for we could devote many more pages to such quotations. We shall do so because many of Nietzsche’s interpreters, especially in recent times, have been eager to water down all his tendencies towards the revival of barbarity, glorification of the white terror and moral sanction of cruelty and bestiality — eager indeed to eliminate them from his works. Often they give one the impression that the ‘blond beast’ is only a harmless metaphor within a delicate cultural critique. To counter such distortions we must always refer back to Nietzsche himself whop in all such matters, — and in this he was a sincere thinker, no hypocrite or sneak — wrote with a downright cynical candour. Thus he stated in the aforesaid passage: ‘Beasts of prey and the primeval forest show that depravity can be very healthy and works wonders for the body. Were the predatory species beset by inner torments, they would have become stunted and degenerate long ago. The dog (which moans and whines so much) is a degenerate predator, and so is the cat. Innumerable good-natured, depressed people are the living proof that kindliness is connected with a lessening of vital powers: their feelings of anxiety predominate and govern their organisms.’[60] As we shall see, the biological language too is in complete accord with the mature Nietzsche’s basic philosophical bias. But this terminology only serves a mythicizing purpose, for the beast of prey’s ‘depravity’ is of course a myth attendant on the imperialist glorification of the bad instincts.
All this contains an explicit avowal of belief in a revival of barbarity as the means of saving mankind. (It is irrelevant that in his early writings, and occasionally later, Nietzsche also used the word ‘barbarity’ in a pejorative sense; in such instances he meant cultural philistinism, narrow-mindedness in general.) Nietzsche stated in the same drafts that ‘today we are tired of civilization’.[61] In even Nietzsche’s eyes, to be sure, this would simply be chaos, a state of decadence. But it is interesting to observe the constant growth of his optimism concerning the future as he foresaw it. Where was the way out of the chaos? Here again Nietzsche gave an unequivocally clear reply: the era of ‘great politics’, wars and revolutions would compel men (i.e., the ruling class) to reverse their course. The crucial signs of this saving transformation would appear in no other guise than that of the revival of barbarity. We have already quoted several important comments by Nietzsche on this subject in the previous paragraph.
Admirers of the ‘purified’ Nietzsche have been hard put to unite his sanctioning of barbarity with an often subtle and rarefied cultural critique. But we can easily dispose of this dichotomy. In the first place, the union of ultra-refinement and brutality was by no means a personal quirk requiring psychological elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral distinguishing mark of imperialist decadence. I have demonstrated the kinship of these contrasting qualities in other contexts in the oeuvre of Rilke, who practised a far greater refinement still.[62] Secondly, in the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche gave an excellent description of the type he favoured. Unlike the passages previously quoted, it not only reveals its psychology and ethics, but also sheds much light on the subterranean class basis of this contrasting duality and unity. Here Nietzsche examined pairs of moral opposites: the aristocratic concept of good and bad, and the concept of good and evil dictated by plebeian disapproval. And to the question of how the concept of evil arose he replied as follows:
To answer with all severity: it is precisely the other code’s ‘good man’, noble, powerful and dominant, only given a different hue, meaning and perspective by malicious, resentful eyes. Here we are glad to admit that anyone getting to know those ‘good men’ only as enemies would find them evil enemies indeed. The very men whom etiquette, respectful feelings, custom and gratitude keep strictly within the pale, as do mutual surveillance and jealousy to an even greater extent, who, on the other hand, prove so resourceful in consideration, self-control, tact, loyalty, pride and friendship — once estranged from these confines, they will behave little better than predatory beasts at large. For then they will enjoy a freedom from all social constraints; out in the jungle they are immune from the tensions caused by long incarceration and domesticating in the calm of the community. They step back into the wild animal’s state of innocence, the kind of exuberant monsters that might quit a horrible scene of murder, arson, rape and torture with the high humour and equanimity appropriate to a student prank. They would do so in the conviction that the poets would have plenty to celebrate again. Behind all these noble breeds there is no mistaking the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast in greedy search of spoils and conquest ... It is the noble races that have left the word ‘barbarian’ in their tracks wherever they prowled; even their highest culture betrays this awareness and their pride in the fact.[63]
To sum up: we find aesthetic, moral and cultural refinement within the ruling class, brutality, cruelty, barbarity towards ‘the alien element’, i.e., the oppressed and those it means to oppress. As we see, the young Nietzsche’s enthusiasm about slavery in ancient times remained a constant — indeed constantly heightened — motive of his philosophical work. To be sure, a romantic element thus entered into his ‘prophetic’ anticipation of the imperialist future. For Nietzsche’s prototype, for instance the slave-holding and culturally refined Pericles, adapts itself most awkwardly to such persons as Hitler and Göring, McCarthy and Ridgway. Apologetic aims aside, his ignorance of the socio-economic differences between two ages necessarily led to this romantic idealism. Certainly it is no coincidence that Nietzsche lapsed into romantic fatuity in this particular area; after all, it is the main problem in his philosophizing. Nietzsche’s cultural concern was definitely not just the bait for the decadent intelligentsia, but always occupied a central place in his life, emotions and thoughts. In challenging cultural decline and in trying to pioneer a future revival he was no doubt sincere in his own mind, albeit personally sincere from an extremely reactionary class standpoint. In this light the romantic dream of a culturally highly-developed ruling stratum, representing at the same time an indispensable barbarity, takes on a special colouring. And the subjective sincerity of this false prophetship was itself an important source of Nietzsche’s fascination for the parasitic intelligentsia of the imperialist period. With his assistance it was able to conceal its cowardice, compliance with imperialism’s most repugnant forms and mortal fear of the proletarian revolution behind the mask of a ‘concern about culture’.
But we can leave this subject and still find ourselves at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Superficial commentaries have interpreted his ‘Superman’ as a biologically more highly developed form of man, a view which certain remarks in Zarathustra tend to support. But in the Anti-Christ Nietzsche very firmly disavowed such a reading: ‘Not what is to supersede man in the biological series is the problem which I am now posing (man is an end), but what type of man we should be breeding, willing into existence, a superior being more worthy of life and more assured of a future. This superior type has already dwelt among us frequently enough, but as a stroke of good fortune, an exception, and never something willed.’[64] But in this case the ‘Superman’ is identical with the ‘lords of the earth’ and the ‘blond beast’ whose barbaric morality we have just examined. Nietzsche plainly indicates that this type has repeatedly existed in isolation, seeking deliberately to make the rearing of it the focal point of the social will of the ruling class.
With this construction, Nietzsche foreshadowed in the most concrete fashion possible both Hitler’s fascism and the moral ideology of the ‘American age’. And likewise, the fact that barbarity and bestiality are the very essence of such ‘Supermen’ was plainly stated in The Will to Power: ‘Man is a brute and super-brute; the higher man is the monster and Superman: thus the two go together. Whenever man adds to his greatness and stature he also increases in lowness and fearsomeness. The one is not to be desired without the other — or rather, the more thoroughly you want the one, the more thoroughly you will achieve the other.’[65]
What Nietzsche provided here was a morality for the socially militant bourgeoisie and middle-class intelligentsia of imperialism. In this he again occupied a unique historical position. From the objective, social angle, there had of course been a morality of the class struggle in bourgeois ideology from the beginning. But during the campaign against feudal absolutism it had a universal human, universally humanitarian character. Because of this bias it was progressive in its main orientation. The abstract generalizing — which, as regards facts, often distorted the problems — had its own social justification too, since it was a reflection of actual class conditions, albeit one that never attained to proper consciousness. For, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie at this time was truly the spearhead of all those classes challenging the feudal remnants of absolutism, and thus had a certain right to identify its own interests with those of social evolution considered as a whole. Admittedly this was only so up to a point. Conflicts of policy, for example within the Enlightenment, clearly show that a differentiation within the ‘third estate’ had already set in, at least on the ideological plane, before the French Revolution; typically for this social situation, each faction claimed to represent the common interests of society (Holbach, Helvétius, Diderot, Rousseau). And, on the other hand, those who were acting as the spokes men for collective capitalist interests were equally able to declare themselves for this commonalty with a certain subjectively sincere, and relatively justified, pathos. For they also identified it with society, as opposed to the isolated endeavours of individual capitalists or capitalist sectors (among such spokesmen were Ricardo and moralists like Mandeville or Ferguson).
In the nineteenth century this relative justification, and the subjectively sincere pathos in which it found expression, both ceased to exist. True, capitalist ideologists spoke ever more volubly of society’s collective interests and the universal principles of progress and humanism. But such talk was growing increasingly apologetic and dissembling, becoming more and more obliged to hush up, gloss over and misrepresent the actual facts of social life and their immanent contradictions. The clash of class interests between bourgeoisie and proletariat in particular was disappearing from these treatises, and doing so to precisely the degree that it was moving towards the centre of social events in objective reality.
The ethics of Nietzsche which we have briefly outlined have the historical significance that they are exclusively a morality of the ruling, oppressing and exploiting class, a morality whose content and method were determined by this explicitly militant position. Here Nietzsche’s extension of indirect apologetics in the ethical domain took concrete shape, and two elements need stressing in particular. The first point is that even here Nietzsche defended capitalism through apologetics on behalf of its ‘bad sides’. Whereas the popular fellow-apologists, concentrating on an idealization of capitalist man, strove to dismiss all capitalism’s darker aspects and contradictions, Nietzsche’s writings centred exactly on what was problematic about capitalist society, on everything that was bad in it. Of course he too went in for idealizing; but what he emphasized with his ironic criticism and poeticizing pathos were the capitalist’s egotistic, barbaric and bestial features, seen as attributes of a type desirable for the good of mankind (i.e., capitalism). Thus Nietzsche likewise spoke of mankind’s interests and identified them with capitalism.
However, and this is the second point to be stressed, unlike the neo-Kantians or Positivists, etc., Nietzsche had absolutely no wish to establish a morality valid for all. On the contrary, his ethics were expressly and consciously an exclusive code of the ruling class: beside it and below it there was a qualitatively differing morality — that of the oppressed — which Nietzsche passionately rejected and opposed. The conflict between two moral codes which, although changing according to historical conditions, in essence stood for two permanent types of morality, determined all the crucial historical questions to Nietzsche’s way of thinking. His ethics thereby acknowledged the fact of the class struggle to a certain extent, again in violent contrast to direct apologetics, which sought to banish the whole idea or at least to lower its moral tone with the very weapon of a code eternally valid for all. Nor would Nietzsche tolerate such a toning down; once again he levelled against his age the criticism that democracy was blunting the struggle between masters and mob, and that the master-race morality was making too many concessions to slave morality. In his campaign against socialism, therefore, Nietzsche did come to recognize up to a point the fact of the class struggle as underlying the nature and transformation of all morality.
Far be it from us to suggest that he had even partially enlightened views about classes and the class struggle. Without a doubt, the class struggle appeared to Nietzsche to be a conflict between higher and lower races. This formulation, of course, already points towards the fascist takeover of bourgeois ideology. All those seeking to absolve Nietzsche from any connection with Hitler now cling to the assertion that his racial concept was utterly different from the Gobineau Chamberlain-Rosenberg view. And unquestionably there is indeed a considerable difference. This holds good in spite of the fact that Nietzsche too gave his social categories a ‘biological’ basis, that his ethics take as their premise and seek to prove a supposedly radical and permanent inequality between men, and that the racial theories of Nietzsche and Gobineau fundamentally agree, therefore, in their moral and social conclusions. They differ in that the supremacy of the ‘Aryan’ race carried no weight with Nietzsche. Understanding master races and slave races only in a very general and mythicized sense, he took into account only ethico-social considerations. Hence in this respect he was a direct forerunner of Spengler rather than Rosenberg.[66] Today, however, the stressing of this difference is only a means of ‘denazifying’ Nietzsche. Since, as we have noted, Nietzsche drew the same barbaric imperialist conclusions from a racial theory as did Rosenberg from Chamberlain’s, the difference is — to borrow Lenin’s phrase — merely that between a yellow devil and a blue one. We must also remember that the obfuscating and disordering of the social sciences in the imperialist age proceeded largely along the lines of racial theory (race replacing class). And in this area, too, Nietzsche gave rise to the same obscurantist irrationalism as Gobineau or H.S. Chamberlain.
Nietzsche’s ethics further differ from those of the idealist and Positivist epigones in that he treated problems of the individual as inseparable from social problems. Questions which play a decisive part in, for instance, neo-Kantian thought, such as those of legality and morality, never even occur in his work. To be sure, he was undertaking not a practical deduction of individual morals from concrete social conditions, but an intuitive, irrational association of highly personal psychological and moral problems with a society and a history transferred to mythical realms. But just this philosophical approach — deliberately witty in form, in content serving the permanent interests of the most reactionary monopoly capitalism — is one of the most important reasons for Nietzsche’s lasting influence in the imperialist period. Neo-Kantians (and also neo-Hegelians) too often derived their propositions from the age of ‘security’ and too openly aimed at consolidating capitalism for them to be of any real use to the bourgeoisie in the great new ages of global crisis and revolution. On the other hand, those decadent-intellectual movements which had many affinities with Nietzsche, and which often were in some measure influenced by him (Gide’s acte gratuit, existentialism, etc.), proceeded all too exclusively and narrowly from the ideological needs of the individualistic, parasitic intelligentsia. While expressing a nihilism similar to Nietzsche’s, though at a still higher pitch of inner disintegration, they were however much more limited and specific in their propositions and conclusions. They lent themselves more readily to a philosophy of the ‘third way’ than to a philosophy of the reactionary avant-garde. Just this union of an ingeniously decadent individualism with an imperialist commonalty of reactionary hue — a union full of tensions and paradoxes — decided the duration of Nietzsche’s influence in the imperialist age and caused it to survive particularities.
For similar reasons Nietzsche’s influence outstripped those equally resolute reactionaries who resorted to more direct methods (e.g., the Pan-Germans, reactionaries in the mould of Treitschke). Whereas the latter found their starting-point in the type of the ‘normal’ petty bourgeois, Nietzsche took his from the type of the decadent intellectual. The moral disintegration of bourgeois and petty bourgeois, which became increasingly marked as imperialist economics and politics gained ground, confirmed the ‘prophetic’ foresight of Nietzsche’s ethics. And his lasting influence had not a little to do with the fact that he went a long way towards catering for the needs of the decadent wing. He brought up questions from within its sphere of interests, answered them in its own spirit. Above all he commended and encouraged its decadent instincts, professing that this was just the way to conquer decadence. Hence Nietzsche’s ‘dialectics’ in this respect lay in a simultaneous acceptance and rejection of the decadent movement, whereby he could enable the militant reactionaries to reap the benefits. For his own part, Nietzsche gave his blessing to these dialectics; in his Ecce homo he said: ‘For granted that I am a décadent, I am also the antithesis.’[67]
This antithesis is represented in the ethics of barbarism which we have portrayed above. And Nietzsche turned the whole problem of decadence firmly on its head when he defined as its most important sign the view that ‘we are fed up with egotism’.[68] For patently the predominance of individualist-egotistic propensities over social ones was among the movement’s most significant features. But it was possible for Nietzsche to ‘salve’ the decadents, i.e., to induce in them absolute self-confidence and give them a clear conscience without fundamentally altering their psychological-moral structure. And he did so precisely by suggesting that they were not over-egotistic but rather lacking in egotism, and that they must — with a good conscience — become more egotistic still.
Now we can also clearly discern the ‘social task’ which we mentioned initially, namely that of diverting discontented intellectuals from socialism and driving them towards reactionary extremes. Whereas socialism called for both an outward and an inward change of position (a break with one s own class plus a reform of personal attitudes), no radical reform was needed to conquer decadence in the manner Nietzsche proclaimed. One could go on as before (with fewer inhibitions and a clearer conscience) and feel oneself to be much more revolutionary than the socialists. And an additional point is the socio-historical nature of Nietzsche’s answers in his ethics. The chief manifestations of decadence he perceived quite correctly: ‘What does nihilism signify? — That the highest values are depreciated. A goal is absent; an answer is absent to the question “Why?” ’[69] It is on this very point that the ‘Superman’, the ‘lords of the earth’ and company provided the decadent intellectual of the imperialist age with the perspective he needed and hitherto lacked. This handful of examples may suffice to illuminate the methodology behind Nietzsche’s relationship to the intelligentsia, one of the most important sources of his lasting influence. We could give umpteen examples, but they would add nothing basically new. By actively serving the most extreme imperialist forces of reaction (Hitler’s), decadence ‘overcame’ itself and became ‘healthy’ without having undergone any inner change beyond releasing its worst instincts, instincts that were previously half or wholly suppressed.
Only if we proceed from Nietzsche’s ethics can we comprehend his attitude to what are called the ‘ultimate questions’ of philosophy, to religious belief or unbelief. As is widely known, Nietzsche declared a fervent allegiance to atheism; and with the same fervour he denounced all religions, but especially Christianity. That was of great importance for his influence on the intelligentsia, large sections of which were increasingly breaking away from the old religions. Nonetheless, as we have shown in the case of Schopenhauer, the resultant movement split up into quite different directions. On the one hand, we have an atheism truly materialist in character and based primarily on the development of natural sciences. This, although Darwinian theory gave it a strong temporary impetus (E. Haeckel), always exhibited major weaknesses on account of its inability to provide a materialist explanation for social (and hence moral, political, etc.) phenomena. Bounded by a narrowly bourgeois horizon, it usually remained in perpetual oscillation between pessimism and apologetics with regard to such questions. There can be no question of a widespread influence of dialectical and historical materialism upon the bourgeois classes; even within the workers’ parties its significance — except in Russia — was continually played down through philosophical revisionism in the imperialist age. ‘Religious atheism’, on the other hand, was constantly gaining in strength. It had the function of satisfying the religious need of those classes that had broken with positive religions, and it did so in the form of polemics against them which became very forceful at times. This accounts for the semblance of an ‘independent’, ‘non-conformist’, indeed ‘revolutionary’ attitude in its adherents. But at the same time, it had to preserve the vague religiosity that mattered to the survival of capitalist society. Thus ‘religious atheism’ is another manifestation of indirect apologetics.
Occupying a special position in this development, Nietzsche carried religious atheism far beyond the Schopenhauerian stage. We see this from a negative angle above all in the fact that Nietzsche transformed the argument of his atheism into myth to an even greater extent than was the case with Schopenhauer’s Buddhism. He dissociated himself more strongly still from the connection with the natural sciences, and his views ran increasingly and more deliberately counter to ‘vulgar’ (scientifically based equals materialistically based) atheism. A famous passage in the Joyful Science states that God is dead, indeed that men have murdered him.[70] That is to say that there used to be a God, only he no longer exists today. Thus Nietzsche was expressly arguing that atheism is not a result of the incompatibility of our scientifically acquired world-view with the idea of God (in which event the new knowledge would have retrospective validity for the past). On the contrary, he asserted, it is the moral conduct of men in our time that rules out the existence of God, which hitherto accorded with it and found a veritable support in it — to be sure, Nietzsche was here referring to the long dominance of slave morals (Christianity). Nietzsche’s atheism had therefore a pronounced tendency to base itself exclusively upon ethics. And these, as we have noted, meant to him both the philosophy of history and social philosophy. On occasion he voiced this thought quite clearly: ‘The refutation of God: to tell the truth, we are only refuting the moral God.’[71]
No doubt traces of Feuerbach are visible in this conception. The contrasts, however, appear of far greater moment than the similarities. For with the materialist Feuerbach, the idea of God (and God for him is never more than a human concept) was causally derived from man’s real being. Nietzsche, on the other hand, laid down only an ineluctable reciprocal relationship between specific moral forms of human behaviour and mankind’s gods. Whether such gods existed independently of man’s imagining or were only projected figments of this imagining remained — true to the essence of Nietzsche’s method, the creating of myths — deliberately obscure. Granted, the connecting threads are not limited to a mere concrete co-existence — unexplained as far as Nietzsche is concerned. Nietzsche took over from Feuerbach the weakest, most ideological side of his philosophizing: that which assumed that the change in men’s religious ideas constituted the most important and decisive part of history. Even here, though, there is the significant difference that for Feuerbach the man-God relationship, while stemming from life, was in character a product of thought and contemplation, whereas for Nietzsche the essential determining factor of the relation ship was to be found in men’s social actions, in their morality.
As our detailed study of Nietzsche’s ethics has demonstrated, he linked atheism — saying that Zarathustra had deprived men of God — with the new ethics of ‘All is permitted’. The killing of God was only one means of liberating men from the restraints acquired in the course of millennia and turning them into those immoralists which the tyrannic ally ruling class of the future was to become in opposition to the herd. When Nietzsche happened to touch on the theme of ‘Back to nature’ he at once stressed the contrast with Rousseau. For Nietzsche, there is only one way that some thing purposeful can come of this: ‘nature, i.e., daring to be as immoral as nature’.[72] And it would be equally false to draw a parallel between such passages and Hobbes’s natural state, for the latter was concerned with the starting-point of man’s development, with a ‘Whence?’, whereas Nietzsche’s concern was the goal to be realized, the ‘Whither?’. So here again we may clearly observe the contrast with the Enlightenment, with which individual commentators have tried to associate Nietzsche because of his atheism. In the Enlightenment, the idea was to prove that belief in God might not signify any kind of moral imperative for mankind, that the moral laws would operate in a society of atheists just as much as in one where religious patronage held sway (Bayle). Nietzsche, on the contrary, wanted to show that the demise of the idea of God (or the death of God) would entail a moral renaissance in the sense we have noted above. Apart, therefore, from the other ethical contradictions in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Enlightenment, about which we again already know Nietzsche’s opinion, we find another contrast here in respect of the socio-ethical role of religion. The ‘old’ Enlightenment regarded the religious concept as irrelevant to men’s morality, actions, views etc., which in reality were adequately determined by a combination of society and men’s reason. On the other hand, Nietzsche — and here he far exceeded all Feuerbach’s weaknesses in the realm of historico-philosophical idealism — regarded the switch to atheism as a turning-point for morality. (At this point let us just briefly remark that here Nietzsche’s world-view is very close to certain tendencies in Dostoievsky. Since he had only read the Notes from the Underground, the Memoirs from a House of the Dead and The Insulted and Injured, and none of Dostoievsky’s major novels,[73] the parallels in the relationship of religious atheism and morality appear all the more striking.)
The extremely subjective and idealistic character of Nietzsche’s atheism needs stressing immediately because on the most important philosophical questions, he continually and effectively stood against idealism. Later, when we discuss the close affinity of his epistemology with that of Mach and Avenarius, we shall see how Nietzsche, like these, attacked idealism passionately but mendaciously in order to mask his principal campaign against materialism. He was always striving to give the impression that his philosophy represented something new, a ‘third solution’ contrasting with idealism as well as materialism. In the circumstances we deem it necessary to point out the striking parallels which also exist between Nietzsche and Mach on the question of God. Just as, for example, the Russian Machists (Lunacharsky, etc.) gave currency to an interpretation of religious atheism as the search for a ‘new god’, as the creation of a god, thus drawing from the Nietzschean death of God the inference of his possible resurrection in a new form, so too did Nietzsche himself. Here too his position is contradictory, opalescent. On the one hand, we read in his Zarathustra notes: ‘You call it God’s self-dissolution: but it is only his fleecing — he is peeling off his moral skin! And you shall soon see him again, beyond good and evil.’[74] And later, in The Will to Power: ‘Again we say: how many new gods are still possible!’ Here, to be sure, Nietzsche is expressing his own doubts under Zarathustra’s hat, and Zarathustra is ‘merely an ancient atheist believing in neither old nor new gods’. But he ended the train of thought with the words: ‘A God-type corresponding to the type of the “great men’s” creative minds.’[75] These comments suffice to give a clear indication of the whole nature and historical position of Nietzsche’s atheism. But in his last writings, on the other hand, the antagonist he Conceived to Christianity and the Crucified is not a world liberated from all gods, not atheism or at least not only that, but also — as we shall later observe in detail — the new god, Dionusoς.
So, then, this kind of ‘radical’ atheism blurs all religion’s dividing lines and — within specific limits which we are coming to — offers an open house to the most diverse religious tendencies. Here again the uniqueness of Nietzsche’s influence stands out: what he created was a blanket ideology for all the imperialist age’s firmly reactionary tendencies. Socially and hence ethically, his mythos was quite unequivocal. In every other respect, however, it was wrapped in a mental haze which admitted of any interpretation one chose; and this lack of intellectual definition did not take away the immediate suggestive power of Nietzsche’s symbols. That is why it was equally possible to find in Nietzsche a prop for the (fascist) myth of ‘one’s own kind’ as opposed to the ‘foreign’ (Christian) myth, as Baeumler[76] does, and to bring his ‘radical’ atheism into an amicable rapport with Christianity itself. This Nietzsche’s sister tried from the start to achieve by heavy-handed Pan-Germanic methods; later minds found for the same bent a stylistically more refined expression. Thus Jaspers, for instance, writes of Nietzsche’s relationship to Christianity: ‘Although we may reproach Nietzsche with atheism and point to his “Anti-Christ”, Nietzsche’s atheism is not a flat straightforward denial of God, nor is it the indifference of a man so far from God, and so far from seeking him out, that God does not exist. The very manner in