We’ve seen that the use
of Nietzsche by the Nazis, both past and present, imposes two interpretive
tasks, one of correctly interpreting Nietzsche and
one of describing the sediment, the layers, of political misinterpretation over
the years since he wrote. We shouldn’t be bothered that the Nietzsche we find cannot easily be
appropriated by either the left or the right. The main point is that the racist
elements of the far right today have to misread Nietzsche’s work in order to
gain support and energy from it. It’s necessary to redescribe historically the misinterpretations
on which those misreadings rely. But first let’s get clear about what
Nietzsche’s work does, in fact, imply for political philosophy. What were
Nietzsche’s own political thoughts, as a man of his own times, before his
sister, Spengler, Carl Schmitt, the Nazis, Richard
Spencer et al, misappropriated them?
Nietzsche wanted aristocracy. That’s a political
form from before the left vs. right system existed, an anachronism in most
nations, even in Germany in Nietzsche’s own times. Nietzsche’s neither on the left nor on the right
for the same kind of reason that Machiavelli is so. Their political ideologies
are more or less realist, rather than ideological. The difference, however, is
that Nietzsche recovered this older, premodern sense of human politics from his
grasp of history, whereas Machiavelli simply lived and worked during a period
way before the French revolution. That means that Nietzsche’s politics are a deliberate
rejection of the modern political ideology of liberalism, and also of the
(optimistic) view of human nature on which it rests, for he holds “that human beings are not morally equal,” which is a fundamental thesis of liberalism.
It’s no accident that Nietzsche’s politics,
like Heidegger's politics, has reemerged in the context of today’s deep crisis in democracy, the
same crisis that accounts for the emergence of the Alt-Right itself. But the
question now is why “the far right, as evidenced by
Spencer and his ilk, is very much interested in Nietzsche as he was originally
understood by 20th-century Fascists.” One can well take Nietzsche as an extreme conservative, a reactionary
who believed that aristocracy was both the most natural and the most creative
form of human social life. But his concepts of master and slave morality, of
the Übermensch and so forth, are not based in racial differences but in the
difference between a truly creative, dynamic culture and bourgeois exhaustion
and decadence; “from the fact that Nietzsche rejected the moral equality of
persons, it does not follow that he embraced some natural and determined hierarchy of races.” Nietzsche’s views of what we call race were essentially Greco-Roman;
climactic variations among humans are not the key difference; it’s degree,
accomplishment, social status under conditions of merit, the amount of creative
power wielded, that count as the important variation among people. “At the centre of all these noble races the beast of prey,
the splendid blond beast avidly prowling around for spoil and victory; this
hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must
return to the wild – Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric
heroes, Scandinavian Vikings – in this requirement they are all alike.”[1]
We see from the assortment of “racial types” in this passage from 1887
that Nietzsche’s concept of “race” is unusable for racists as we know them
today.
The fact is that Nietzsche’s politics, while certainly not based on liberté, égalité, fraternité, nonetheless
had no place for racism, nationalism, or antisemitism. He saw these as elements
of bourgeoisie decadence and shallowness, preferring the cosmopolitan, worldly
“good European” who more closely resembles the aristocrats of early modern
Europe than the parochial SA of Bavaria. His elitism is based on the greatness
of a culture, on excellence, and nothing else. In 1887 Nietzsche wrote “we are
not nearly ‘German’ enough, in the sense in which the word ‘German’ is
constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to
be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood
poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade
themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine” (The Gay Science 377). The philosopher had overcome, within himself, the antisemitism of his
own early (Wagner) years, and within his philosophy, the antsemitsm of his own times. We can blame Nietzsche for a more or less
nostalgic sense of a return to aristocratic values that were disappearing in
his own time, and that nostalgia goes quite a way to explain why the right, in
both extreme and traditional conservative forms, has been attracted to his politics.
But at the same time, he must be credited with refusing much of what was worst
in 19th century thought.
What all of this means is that both the left and the right readings can
cause, and have caused, distortions in Nietzsche’s political views. The fact is
that Nietzsche got into American life in some part from extensive use by leftist
academics, often via French and other European philosophers. These readings
tend to emphasize the creative and open-ended spirit of Nietzsche’s historicism
and his sense of the aesthetic nature of reality, and reached American
universities through Foucault, Derrida, and so on. Nietzsche served the intellectuals
of that generation by helping them back away from Marxism and find another
direction, and that sets up a conflict of interpretations between the Alt-Right
and most traditional academics over how to read Nietzsche’s politics:
“The secret of Nietzsche’s appeal to people from opposite ends of the
political spectrum is thus revealed: To the radical right, it is his rejection
of equality and the democratic ideas that are based on it that is scintillating
and rings true (besides his often and—as I have argued—misunderstood
flirtations with the concept of race); to the left, it is his anti-essentialism
with its emphasis on the plastic nature of identity that promises liberation
from societal oppression. But, as it is typical in politics, the catch is that
each side, to maintain its political ideology, has to reject the other’s
Nietzscheanism: The radical right cannot easily accept the idea that identity,
including racial identity, is dynamic and malleable, and the left, in order to
promote its progressive agenda in the democratic public forum, cannot easily
give up on the idea of the moral equality of all.”
In the hands of the Alt-Right,
the “bad Nietzsche” is back. But which bad Nietzsche are we talking about? Although Nietzsche was no
anti-Semite, and in fact attacked anti-Semitism as a form of bourgeoisie
decadence, he did belong to that masculinist German intellectual tradition that
rejected the ideals of the French Revolution, advocated aristocratic values,
and extolled war as the ultimate crucible of human character. Nietzsche did
oppose a barbaric, conquering defiance, a nostalgia for heroism, against the
liberal culture of his time. He did express a sense of crisis at the decay, the
decadence of modern times, which he took to grow out of that culture. The point
is that there are good reason for the Alt-Right to take up Nietzsche as a
critic of what they see as “the establishment,” independently of any issue of
racism or antisemitism. The philosopher’s “deep contempt for democracy” is
easily appropriated by the Alt-Right, even if their racism find no support in
his writings. Those in the Alt-Right who base their project of maintaining Western
civilization against what they see as the mediocrity of liberal bourgeoisie
culture are not wrong to find an ally in Nietzsche. The philosopher’s struggle
against nihilism, against degeneration, against decline is an essentially
cultural one. But that may also be true of those in the Alt-Right who aren’t
essentially racist, who emphasize nationalism or hypermasculuinity and so
forth, but whose ideology doesn’t emphasize ethnicity. Nevertheless, the appropriation of Nietzsche by the Alt-Right represents
their sense of “American values as something not to restore, but to replace.”
We have to conclude that both the leftist and rightist
interpretations of Nietzsche’s politics miss the mark, but that both the
rightist and leftist appropriations of Nietzsche as critic of modern liberal
politics are based on viable readings of his difficult, scattered texts. There
is no work of political philosophy per se in Nietzsche’s oeuvre; rather, a
deeper position, at the level of political culture, is developed, and one that
predates the politics of left and right as we know it. But the point here is
that the Alt-Right has picked up the “bad Nietzsche” as
an intellectual weapon in their struggle to transform America. “The
long-term goal, [Richard] Spencer says, is the establishment of a
‘post-Amercan’ white ‘ethno-state’ through a slow process of awakening ethnic
pride and instituting government policies that reflect a new white race
consciousness.” We’ve seen that this racist project is foreign to Nietzsche’s though,
but that the antiliberal orientation of that thought is more or less
accommodating to Spencer and his followers. The philosopher’s sense that the
West is in a deep crisis is appropriated by the Alt-Right and infused with a toxic
racist “solution” that recalls not Nietzsche’s own thinking, but that of how
his philosophy was misused from the beginning of its history.
[1]. Friederich Nietzsche On
the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Carol Diethe (trans.) (UK: Cambridge University,
2006) p. 23
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