Don't Shoot the Messenger: Friedrich Nietzsche

AKG-IMAGES Don’t shoot the messenger: Friedrich Nietzsche, painted here by the German artist Curt Stoeving, diagnosed nihilism but did not endorse it 28 | NEW STATESMAN | 31 AUGUST – 6 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE NS ESSAY The return of Bad Nietzsche The great philosopher was read by Mussolini and appropriated by the Nazis. Today, his writings are an inspiration to the alt-right. Is Friedrich Nietzsche doomed to be abused and misunderstood? By Hugo Drochon sked who the most overrated Nietzsche,” Pinker writes at the end of En- was lauded for its literary style, and subse- author was in a recent interview, lightenment Now. “Drop the Nietzsche” is quently cited as having contributed to Rus- Steven Pinker, Harvard psyc- his recommendation. sell winning the Nobel Prize for Literature hologist-at-large extraordinaire, Another who blames the ills of the in 1950, the account of the various philoso- named Friedrich Nietzsche. He world on the type of postmodernism Ni- phers it discussed – including Nietzsche – Aexplained, “It’s easy to see why his socio- etzsche is often associated with is the Ca- was dismissed by specialists. pathic ravings would have inspired so many nadian academic psychologist Jordan Pe- A well-known pacifist who at first op- repugnant movements of the 20th and 21st terson, who has become the darling of the posed the war – although he later accepted centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bol- alt-right. Peterson presents himself as the it as the lesser of two evils when compared shevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of liber- defender of “traditionalism” or “classical to Hitler taking over Europe – much of Rus- tarianism, and the American alt-right and liberalism”. Beyond his online lecture se- sell’s History was his personal response to neo-Nazi movements today.” ries, what brought Peterson to international it. So part of what he was trying to do was For Pinker, the British analytical philoso- attention was his railing against a Cana- to understand the rise of Hitler, and to that pher Bertrand Russell got Nietzsche right dian law that would enforce gender-neutral he found an answer: Nietzsche. The Sec- in his 1945 book A History of Western Phi- pronouns. His colleague at the University ond World War, Russell declared, was “Ni- losophy when he pointed out that he would of Toronto, Ronald Beiner, a professor of etzsche’s War”. With Donald Trump in the rather have lived in the Athens of Pericles or political science, explicitly links Nietzsche White House and the alt-right in the streets, the Florence of the Medici than today. That to the alt-right in his book Dangerous many commentators have started to ask he would rather live in the past than the Minds. Beiner argues that Nietzsche’s rejec- whether fascism has finally arrived in Amer- present – and in eras known respectively for tion of the Enlightenment has influenced ica. As such it is no surprise to see the 1930s the birth of democracy and the Renaissance right-wing ideologues from Richard Spen- return as the historical moment to compare no less – is, according to Pinker, suspect, cer to Steve Bannon. to the present era. Mussolini claimed he was because on every measure human life has From the nemesis of the Enlightenment influenced by Nietzsche, and Hitler pre- today become longer, healthier, safer, hap- to the inspiration for the alt-right: why is sented himself as a Nietzschean superman pier, more peaceful, more stimulating and Nietzsche in the bad books again? leading his Aryan master race to victory. more prosperous (he has made 75 graphs To understand why Nietzsche has been Nietzsche died in 1900 after suffering a to prove it). “If one wanted to single out a so misunderstood, Russell’s A History mental breakdown in 1889 – legend has it he thinker who represented the opposite of of Western Philosophy is a good place to broke down in Turin after seeing a horse be- humanism (indeed, of pretty much every start. He wrote the book during the Sec- ing flogged by its owner, wrapping his arms argument in this book), one couldn’t do bet- ond World War while at Bryn Mawr Col- around it to protect it. The great political ter than the German philologist Friedrich lege near Philadelphia. Although the book figures of his day were neither Hitler nor t 31 AUGUST – 6 SEPTEMBER 2018 | NEW STATESMAN | 29 t Mussolini but Bismarck, and its politics success, and a “slave” morality that values who published a collection of his final note- was neither fascism nor National Socialism kindness, empathy, sympathy. The latter he books as Will to Power. but the “power politics” of German unifica- strongly associated with Christianity. Nietzsche was quite close to his sister, tion and the European balance of power. But he didn’t leave it at that: he used his two years his junior, when he was younger, Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the small theories and ideas to analyse the politics of but their relationship soured when she tried town of Röcken in the German province of his time. Bismarck’s aim was to unify Ger- to intervene in his doomed courtship of Lou Saxony. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died many so that it might have a seat at the table Andreas-Salomé, whom she considered to at quite a young age, of a “softening of the with the other great nations – France, Great be “immoral”. But the definite break came brain”, which Nietzsche himself might have Britain and Russia – who were dividing the when she married Bernhard Förster, a rabid been afflicted by in later life. He was a pre- world between them. But Nietzsche reject- anti-Semite who tried to found a “pure” Ar- cocious student, gaining a chair in philology ed a politics based on nationalism, xeno- yan colony “Nueva Germania” in Paraguay. at the age of 24 at the University of Basel. phobia, philistinism and the fragmentation In a letter to his sister, Nietzsche denounced But he was plagued by ill-health for most of of Europe: it was the political manifestation Förster as part of an “anti-Semitic canaille”, his life and had to resign his position, after of the slave morality he so brilliantly dis- and they never spoke again. For the rest of which he became a wandering intellectual. sected in the Genealogy. Instead, he posited his life Nietzsche considered himself to be He met some of the most important peo- his own master morality “great politics” an “anti-anti-Semite”. The colony in Paraguay was a failure: Förster committed suicide and Elisabeth We no longer have a shared morality returned to Germany in the early 1890s heavily in debt. But she saw an opportunity around which to organise our lives; in the new-found celebrity of her brother (who had since had his mental breakdown). we are left instead with nihilism The great Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, who was Jewish, had started lec- turing on Nietzsche in Copenhagen. Elisa- ple of his time, including the composer that aimed at the unification of (continen- beth set herself up as the guardian of her Richard Wagner, whom he would later fall tal) Europe to be led by a new, transnational brother’s literary estate. From this came out with over the latter’s pan-Germanism, elite. Their aim would not solely be to lead a collection of his last notes, which Elisa- anti-Semitism and rallying to Christian- Europe into what Rudyard Kipling later beth edited and presented as the “magnum ity. He also knew the psychoanalyst and called the “great game” – namely the power opus” he had intended to complete, even later lover and muse of Sigmund Freud, struggle between Britain and Russia over though Nietzsche claimed to have “fin- Lou Andreas-Salomé, whom he fell in love Afghanistan and northern India (the “jewel ished” his final book with The Antichrist. with (like everyone else). Nietzsche pro- in the crown”) – but more importantly to The Nazis claimed Nietzsche as their own posed to her at least twice, but instead she participate in the creation of a new, truly philosopher and in 1934 Hitler visited the ran off with his friend Paul Rée. He also vol- European, high culture. Nietzsche archive set up by Elisabeth in unteered as a cavalry officer in the Franco- Weimar, and she offered him her brother’s Prussian War of 1870-71, the last of the wars ow did Nietzsche become the walking stick. Bismarck waged to unify Germany into the philosopher of the Third Re- Although from this period we only re- first German Reich with Prussia at its head. ich? It was Alfred Baeumler, member the so-called Nazi-Nietzsche, the Nazi court philosopher, Baeumler’s was not the only voice. For in- t would be hard to overestimate the who transformed him into a stance the psychologist and existentialist influence Nietzsche had on the cul- H“Hitler prophecy”, as the German writer philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote what many ture of the 20th century. His literary Thomas Mann put it. Nietzsche was recast consider to be the first serious scholarly style influenced Albert Camus, An- as a philosopher of the German state and of study of Nietzsche in 1936, and he explained dré Gide, DH Lawrence, Jack London, German racial purity. Baeumler was aided that he “intended to marshal against the IThomas Mann, Yukio Mishima, Eugene and abetted by Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, National Socialists the world of thought O’Neill, William Butler Yeats, Wyndham of the man whom they had proclaimed as Lewis and George Bernard Shaw; his phi- their own philosopher”.

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