Nietzsche's Earth

Great Events, Great Politics

Gary Shapiro

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226394596
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche's thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche's powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places.
           
Shapiro explores Nietzsche's rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche's prescient vision of today's massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state's desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche's vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche's "philosophy of the Antichrist, " by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck's Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche's Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history.
 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction:

Toward Earth’s “Great Politics”

The time for petty politics is over: the next century will bring the struggle for dominion of the earth (Erd-Herrschaft)—the compulsion to great politics.

NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil, 208

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche offered a self-consciously extravagant, grandiose, histrionic account of his work and its significance. The extravagance is underscored by the title, with its allusion to Jesus’s appearance before Pilate and its concluding question and response: “Have I been understood?—Dionysus versus the Crucified” (EH Destiny 9).1 Later we will find reasons for emphasizing that, for the late Nietzsche, Dionysus is the name of the Antichrist. It is easy to be distracted by the fireworks and “dynamite” of this text. Yet allowing for the hyperbolic and parodic modes of which Nietzsche was notoriously a master, there are exclamations and declarations that have uncannily become more chilling and meaningful with time, especially those speaking of political upheaval and possibility, such as this gloss on “Why I Am a Destiny”:

When truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures (Machtgebilde) of the old society will have been exploded—all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. Only beginning with me is there great politics on earth (EH Destiny 1).

Since Nietzsche wrote these words, finally published a few years before World War I, many have read them as prescient prophecy of the new wars that succeeded the relatively limited wars of European nation-states in the 250 years following the Peace of Westphalia that established the context and ground rules of the old politics and “power structure.”2 Certainly, wars have expanded in scope and consequences. New weapons (biological and aerial), new ideologies promulgated by new media (Nazi radio and jihadist social media), threats of global destruction and environmental devastation, new religious wars, war on civilians, the looming specter of wars for the most elementary resources (such as food and water)—all of these could be seen as realizing Nietzsche’s oracular utterance. This book inquires into Nietzsche’s conjunction of the rethinking of the political on earth. It is not concerned with the specific lineaments of his future and our present, but with the way in which thinking “great politics on earth” means reconceiving human futurity. What is a great politics of the earth? How can we begin not so much to envision specific futures as to incorporate the always indeterminate futurity of the earth into our concept of the political?

All too many of those who have written about Nietzsche’s political thought have easily assimilated it to patterns and concepts with which they were already familiar. They took sides on questions having to do with the state, race, democracy, and other themes, asking just where Nietzsche could be placed within a spectrum of possible positions that, they assumed, had already been mapped out. In some cases (as I’ll document later) the assumptions of Anglophone scholars as to what Nietzsche was talking about were so deeply embedded as to lead to mistranslations of some crucial terms in his political vocabulary; albeit unconsciously they created misreadings which were structurally similar, if differing in content, to the notorious distortions by Nazi or proto-Nazi enthusiasts like those promoted by Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth and her associates.

Too much time has been spent attacking or praising Nietzsche’s political thought for its supposed affinities with a specific form of polity or regime. In contrast, I argue that we should be attending to his struggle to keep the political future open. We need to understand the prominence of earth in his political thought and its relation to his analysis of the state, temporality, and the residues of political theology. Whether commentators see Nietzsche as attempting to renew the ancient Greek polis or the Roman imperium, delineating a new form of aristocracy, or providing grounds for anarchism, democracy, or even revolutionary socialism, these efforts, I believe, miss the most radical dimension of the “philosophy of the future” that he preludes in Beyond Good and Evil.3 While some of these Nietzsche readings are important antidotes to reactionary or nostalgic ones that see him simply as spokesman for a revived form of slavery and tyranny, they show, more importantly, that he was capable of thinking of something new and different. This is so even if he sometimes expressed this fancifully, as in his notebook suggestions that Germany should conquer and colonize Mexico or his published wish for intermarriage between the Prussian officer class and wealthy Jews (KSA 9.546; BGE 251). I mean to concentrate on his thought of futurity in a broadly political context, futurity in the sense of that which has yet to be, of the unknown and unknowable which may arise, the “great event” or “great politics” of the earth that become insistent themes of his later work. Those attuned to futurity are open to seizing the gift of fortune, the moment of opportunity, the fleeting moment of great possibilities that the ancients call kairos (Machiavelli’s occasione). What gives Zarathustra the horrors in the specter of the last human is the foreclosure of futurity. These last humans no longer remember what nobility and distinction are. History has come to an end for them in a regulated alternation of work that is not too onerous and play that never touches the danger zone, their little pleasures for the day and the night.

Responses to Nietzsche’s political thinking have been strangely silent or vague about what he consistently describes as the site of the political, the earth. Fidelity to the earth, being true to the earth, willingness to sacrifice oneself for the earth, vigilantly dedicating oneself to the earth’s direction or meaning (Sinn)—these are the repeated refrains of Zarathustra. The true danger of the last humans who securitize themselves against all danger is that they will further shrink the earth, obliterating its opportunities and chances. When Nietzsche has Zarathustra speak of the shrinking earth of the last humans, he thinks not only of the unifying effects of world commerce and communication that Marx and others had already seen and that we now call globalization. More emphatically he voices his fear of the disappearance of open seas and horizons. These promising future horizons, promises one might say of futurity itself, were paradoxically necessary to the very enterprises whose development made the last humans possible, enterprises such as the maritime explorations by Genoese and Venetians that he admired. Hopping about like fleas on the contracted earth, the last humans are oblivious of opportunities for decisive and innovative action that could contribute to the “great event.” For these risk-averse creatures all is calculable. They take their measured pleasures and distractions in regular doses, failing to look beyond the amusements and intoxicants of consumer culture in the stabilized state.

Nietzsche’s worry is that both the future and futurity of the earth are at stake. From Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, philosophers since Nietzsche have attempted to think related questions. They struggle, as philosophers must, against the conservatism of any given language by articulating and explicating, unfolding the pli or fold, in terms such as Er-eignis or l’a-venir in order to evoke a sense of the futural or evental. These thinkers agree with Nietzsche that the idea of the event in a strong sense is now typically suppressed by ideologies and practices that render fundamental change almost unthinkable. Impulses that cannot otherwise be contained are channeled economically into thirst for the latest device, fascination with the newest sport or singing sensation. They can be diverted “politically” into electoral charades that, whatever their rhetoric, finally offer nothing more than continued stasis, in both the ancient sense of irresolvable conflict and the modern one of an immovable status quo (or gridlock). This last is typically the effect of a struggle in which both sides have vested interests in keeping things within fairly narrow bounds, as in parliamentary democracies’ circular dance of center-right and center-left parties.

I propose that a more productive reading of Nietzsche will attend both to his thought of futurity and his call to be true to the earth, as in his lapidary but still little-understood declaration that only from his work on will there be a great politics on and of the earth. As I’ve hinted, talk about the futurity of the earth involves what may seem like unnecessary excursions into questions of linguistics and etymology. Some would say that the first issues on the agenda concerning a politics of the earth should be climate change, energy needs, globalization, and geopolitical conflicts still inflected and infected by religious and ethnic hostilities. While Nietzsche does have things to say that could help to open up our thinking about such questions, as in his notion of the human-earth as a garden, I propose that we follow the “old philologist’s” advice to begin by attending carefully to his words and discourse. So I forewarn the reader that a good deal of this book is concerned with explicating terms crucial for Nietzsche’s multilayered thought concerning the Sinn der Erde. That phrase itself, one Zarathustra introduces in his first public discourse, requires to be heard with care. It is usually translated as “the meaning of the earth.” Yet Sinn, as Günter Figal reminds us, also signifies direction.4 Where is the earth going? In what direction will you deploy your energies for earth’s sake? To be loyal to the earth, to give it your Treue (or troth), means to accept discipline, to be ready to sacrifice. And how should we understand Nietzsche’s concept of the earth? I will argue that above and beyond what we might call its phenomenological sense as our immanent lifeworld (the limit of most scholarly readings), the earth in Nietzsche’s writings has a political sense as the counterconcept to what Hegel and Hegelianizing philosophers call the world. Hegel’s concept of world, we will see, is a unitary notion. It cannot be decoupled from those of the state, world history, and God. It is ultimately a concept of political theology, which finally provoked Nietzsche to articulate a philosophy of the Antichrist. When Nietzsche speaks of the earth (sometimes more specifically of the Menschen-Erde), he is at least implicitly formulating a political atheology, an understanding of the sphere or territory of human habitation; Nietzsche’s war for the sake of the earth must involve an attack, parody, and inversion of political theology. The earth in this perspective is radically plural. It is neither intrinsically defined by the nation-state (like Hegel’s world), nor, as in the Weltprozess of Eduard von Hartmann (the largely forgotten target of Nietzsche’s Unmodern Observation on history) the site of an inexorable teleology. Such a contrast of earth and world is very close to Deleuze and Guattari’s methodological protocol of subordinating history to geography.

This book can be read then as a series of philological commentaries, taking philology in Nietzsche’s sense of a critical discrimination of meanings and texts informed by a genealogy of power. The most schematic form of these commentaries revolves around five contrasting pairs of terms, including world and earth. The others, to be explored in some depth, are: states and nomads, masses and multitude, kairos and chronos, Christ and Antichrist. In many cases even some of Nietzsche’s most astute readers have neglected or even seriously mistranslated some of these. For example, Nietzsche says emphatically in a crucial passage of Beyond Good and Evil that “this is the century of the multitude (Menge)” (BGE 256), but even respectable translators render this as “masses,” although elsewhere Nietzsche repeatedly makes a clear distinction between the two terms with respect to the masses’ homogeneity and the multitude’s diversity.5 Other scholars blunt the force of Nietzsche’s deliberately outrageous invocation of the ominous Christian figure of the Antichrist, with its accumulated legends and its crucial role in Christian political theology, by rewriting the term as “anti-Christian.” The latter is a possible meaning, and is indeed ingredient in the personification of Christ’s opposite and ultimate enemy, but it is not what Nietzsche intends, I’ll argue, when he speaks of a “philosophy of the Antichrist” in the aphorism that concludes his examination of “Peoples and Fatherlands.” The Antichrist is the lord of the earth, an earth that persists and eternally recurs in Nietzsche’s atheology, rather than passing away, as in the Biblical text (Apocalypse or Revelation) he parodies.

Reading Nietzsche philologically should also involve reading him historically, that is, triangulating his thought between his time and ours. Nietzsche was responding both explicitly and implicitly to themes and problems relevant to both: nationalism, the consolidation of state power, the theory and practice we’ve come to call globalization, the dispersion and nomadic movements of peoples, the threat of enormous unpaid and unpayable debt, the emergence of mass media and entertainments, the continuing power of older religious hatred and the looming possibility of nihilism, which he sometimes describes as European Buddhism.6 As cultural physician, Nietzsche diagnoses his time by taking his scalpel to lay bare and dissect its (presumed) virtues. While we rightly suspect some of his radical suggestions for a cure, we still have work to do to decipher the language of his analysis and prescriptions, and the problems do not all arise from Dr. Nietzsche’s notoriously difficult handwriting on the Rx forms (or to put it more prosaically, his finely tuned style).

Consider, for example, the contours of Nietzsche’s conception of the earth—sometimes called with emphasis the human-earth. These emerge more clearly when we see it developing as a running critique of the Hegelian idea of world-history. The nineteenth century was the era of world-history, with philosophy morphing into journalism as both professors and popular writers competed to provide the most up-to-date, modern accounts (zeitmässig is Nietzsche’s term) of the meaning of history. Nietzsche himself, in his later preface to The Birth of Tragedy, confessed that he too had given in to such world-historical temptations when he foresaw a Wagnerian cultural renaissance. Whether the meaning of history is thought to lie in democracy, socialism, or technological “progress,” it seems important to bolster the sense of inevitability with a persuasive and seductive metanarrative. It is not only Marxist socialism that has followed this path. The brand of American exceptionalism that from Woodrow Wilson on heralds the United States as the avant-garde of a globally irresistible democratic freedom has a similar (if non-dialectical) deep structure, as do the many technocratic fantasies of total mastery of nature.

“Earth,” I want to suggest, is not so much the telos of Nietzsche’s own metanarrative as the signature of his alternative to metanarrative, a genre he sees as essentially Christian (and thus vulnerable to being undermined through his inversion of the Antichrist topos). In writings of his last productive years, Nietzsche regularly associates earth and the political. “Only after me will there be great politics on the earth,” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, as he explains, “Why I Am a Destiny (1).”7 Much thought has been expended in attempts to make sense of the content of “great politics.” Is it a politics of race, nations, class, or ideology? Is it a politics aiming at helping Europe to become one, perhaps under the sway of a new ruling caste? Where does great politics lie on a spectrum that includes tyranny, mass democracy, and anarchism? Are these the right questions to be asking? As Bruno Bosteels observes, there is a great disproportion between Nietzsche’s few brief references to great politics and the many lengthy commentaries on this theme.8 Since many of Nietzsche’s dramatic claims of this sort were made in the last year before his mental collapse, in writings marked by a hyperbolic sense of his self-ascribed importance, it is tempting to discount them as symptoms of the coming personal catastrophe. We might read Nietzsche’s rhetoric of political catastrophe, involving new kinds of wars and the total trembling of old orders, likened to earthquakes, as transcriptions of his individual mania onto a larger canvas. I resist such premature psycho-biographical reductionism, while noting that current fears of earth’s ruination through climate change, pandemic, overpopulation, and new forms of war have overtones of the apocalyptic motif that Nietzsche evokes in deploying the Antichrist theme.

For now I propose to minimize two forms of speculation that either ascr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Nietzsche’s Works
• Key to References
• 1 · Introduction: Toward Earth’s “Great Politics”
• 2 · Unmodern Thinking: Globalization, the End of History, Great Events
• 3 · Living on the Earth: States, Nomads, Multitude
• 4 · Whose Time Is It? Kairos, Chronos, Debt
• 5 · “The World Awaits You as a Garden”: A Political Aesthetic of the Anthropocene?
• 6 · Earth, World, Antichrist: Nietzsche after Political Theology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index