European/Supra-European: Cultural Encounters in Nietzsche's Philosophy

Marco Brusotti, Michael McNeal, Corinna Schubert, Herman Siemens, Marco Brusotti, Michael McNeal, Corinna Schubert, Herman Siemens

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110605235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Nietzsche says "good Europeans" must not only cultivate a "supra-national" view, but also "supra-European" perspective to transcend their European biases and see beyond the horizon of Western culture.

The volume takes up such conceptual frontier crossings and syntheses. Emphasizing Nietzsche's genealogy of European culture and his reflections upon the constitution of Europe in the broadest sense, its essays examine peoples and nations, values and arts, knowledge and religion. Nietzsche's apprehensions about the crises of nihilism and decadence and their implications for Europe's (and humankind's) future are investigated in this context.

Concerning the crossing of notional frontiers, contributors examine Nietzsche's hoped-for dismantling of Europe's state borders, the overcoming of national prejudices and rivalries, and the propagation of a revitalizing "supra-European" perspective on the continent, its culture(s) and future. They also illuminate lines of syntheses, notably the syncretism of the ancient Greeks and its possible example for the European culture to-be.

Finally certain of Europe's current problems are considered via the critical apparatus furnished by Nietzsche's philosophy and the diagnostic tools it provides.

Part I European Views

Times of the Multitude and the Antichrist

Gary Shapiro

This essay draws on the book Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2016) where some arguments of this essay are developed more fully. I gratefully acknowledge permission from the University of Chicago Press to incorporate parts of the book here.

Abstract

In Nietzsche’s Europeanism Gary Shapiro discerns key resonances of his “great politics of the Earth” out of which those capable of “re-thinking the direction of the earth” may ultimately deploy a “philosophy of the Antichrist” to realize their vision of the future. In considering how philosophers of the future may create the opportune moment in which to revalue all values in such a new direction, Shapiro accounts for Nietzsche’s rejection of the priestly philosophers’ teleological conception of time. He also explicates Nietzsche’s notion of the multitude (Menge), whose diversity contrasts with the homogenous masses and mitigates against the reactionary state.

1 World and Earth

Is the question of Europe to be posed within the discourse of Weltgeschichte or in the context of the Menschen/Erde? These are opposed perspectives. 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. Above and beyond its phenomenological sense as our immanent lifeworld (the limit of most scholarly readings), earth in Nietzsche’s writings has a political sense as the counter-concept to what Hegel and Hegelianizing philosophers call the world. Hegel’s concept of world is a unitary notion. It cannot be decoupled from the state, world history, and God. Hegel says in the Encyclopedia that those who do not live in a true state do not have a world (Hegel 1971, section 549). “World” is ultimately a concept of political theology; it finally provoked Nietzsche to articulate a philosophy of the Antichrist (Shapiro, 2016). When Nietzsche speaks of the earth (sometimes more specifically of the Menschen-Erde), he implicitly formulates a political a-theology. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche recognizes that the state must now maintain itself by propagandistic fears (HH I 472). With Carl Schmitt he agrees that the state of exception is essential to the modern state’s sovereignty, but God’s death undermines Schmitt’s theological analogy (Schmitt, 2005).

“Only after me will there be great politics on earth,” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, as he explains “Why I am a Destiny” (EH Destiny 1). It is great politics of or on the earth that is at stake, not the great politics of Weltgeschichte. The earth is the ground and site of mobile human beings, as the action of Zarathustra makes clear; Nietzsche was finding support for this orientation in his reading of works like Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropo-Geographie. The Menschen-Erde could be translated somewhat tendentiously but not altogether misleadingly as the anthropocene, the earth as humanly inhabited, transformed, and in process of transformation: as Marx called it, our exteriorized body. What shall be the Sinn der Erde? The possible directions of the Menschen-Erde are multiple. Nietzsche has Zarathustra describe humans as a skin disease on the earth, but he also imagines the earth transformed into a gigantic health resort and tree of life (Z II Soothsayer; WS 188 – 189).

Being true to the earth involves abandoning the concept of time that subordinates earthly life to a metanarrative concluding with eventual manifestation of the Idea or the Christian end of days. If the name for the world’s time is world-history, what is the time of the earth? I will approach this question by first considering political temporality in the Untimely or Unmodern Observations.

The objects of those scathing, satiric, and parodic polemics can be usefully compared to more recent “end of history” theorists, who, like David Friedrich Strauss and Eduard von Hartmann, targets of Nietzsche’s first two essays, share a Hegelian inspiration. Both pamphlets identify Hegelian philosophy as a crucial component of this thought, thus anticipating Alexander Kojève, Francis Fukuyama and others. Strauss’s and Hartmann’s versions of the theory arise from both interpreting a teleological conception of history in terms of their varying accounts of human desire, with Strauss adapting Hegel’s notion of historically cumulative recognition, while Hartmann sees history as a sequenced series of projects that progressively reveal the necessary failure of the desire for happiness, thus historicizing Schopenhauer. Strauss’s comic version celebrates an attained unity arising out of conflict; Hartmann’s tragic, story depicts humans as repeatedly attempting the impossible until overtaken by necessity.

Strauss implicitly takes the “we” with whom he identifies as the self-satisfied German imperial Bürger, with culture drawn from the newspapers, religion an ethical ghost of Christianity, and a faith in progress envisioning nothing beyond further sophistications of communication and technology. Strauss could be the last human’s philosopher, declaring “Yes, history has a meaning and it is us.” Strauss claims to be ultimately timely, to have understood the fulfilled meaning of time, indeed, as part of his “we,” to help constitute that meaning.

Hartmann’s ambitious story, moving through four great periods, was attractive to the nineteenth century’s post-Hegelian periodizing obsessions. He follows a traditional analogy between history at large and life cycle stages: childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age. In their Greco-Roman childhood, human beings simply seek happiness in this life, and naively enjoy immediate life activities as imaginatively perfected by Olympian gods. Such a life eventually disappoints, giving way to boredom and melancholy. The alternative is found in medieval adolescence, which places its hopes for happiness in fictions of immortality, in another world. After skeptical disillusion about the reality of that world beyond comes mature manhood (unreflectively gendered), post-Reformation modernity. “We” no longer seek childhood’s immediate enjoyment or fantastic adolescent ideals. Courageously shouldering its responsibilities, maturity surrenders easy hope, finding satisfaction rather in working toward a general progress of civilization that promises happiness to future generations. After several centuries of such effort, a general disillusion about the future earthly paradise sets in. Modernity is accompanied by its own discontents (too familiar to recount). Now we enter the world’s disillusioned old age and understand the failure of earlier projects of satisfaction. We become enlightened Schopenhauerians. Will is restless and insatiable; temporary satisfactions give way to melancholy or desire’s return, relaunching the cycle: desire, striving, fleeting satisfaction, repeated frustration. In old age we submit to the Weltprozess that has brought us to this pass. We should welcome the process of human extinction. Hartmann, who invoked the Biblical end of days, would no doubt have found confirmation in the anticipation of catastrophic climate change.

Hartmann calls for “total surrender of the personality to the world-process.” (UM II 9) Nietzsche responds “If only one did not eternally have to hear the hyperbole of all hyperboles, the word world, world, world, since after all, if we remain honest, everyone ought to speak of human, human, human!” (UM II 9). To call for total surrender to the world-process is to give humans the personality of the earth-flea (Erdfloh), a metaphor that appears again when Zarathustra describes the last man.

Nietzsche’s Unmodern series – which might have continued indefinitely in his budding career as public intellectual – halts abruptly after Wagner in Bayreuth, fourth of a planned thirteen. There he makes a first bungled attempt at describing a great event of the earth, a temporal caesura that would counter the illusory inevitabilities of the grand meta-narratives of Weltgeschichte. Anticipating Alain Badiou, he tells us that a great event is rare, difficult or impossible to predict or deliberately produce, and gives rise to a future. “For such an undertaking as that at Bayreuth there were no warning signs, no transitional events, nothing intermediate” (UM IV 1); it was not the result of (Hegelian) continuity and mediation. What makes this unexpected event great is its transformative power, its throwing past and future into a genuinely new perspective. Such events are so rare that Nietzsche offers only two examples. The “last great event” was Alexander’s linking of East and West, of Asia and Europe. This involved cutting the Gordian knot that separated two cultural and geographical spheres and was a syncretistic act, mixing together two previously separate domains (UM IV 4). Nietzsche describes Wagner as “the first of the counter-Alexanders” whose task is to unite and focus where Alexander had dispersed, in other words to tie together the threads of European culture in a novel, unified creation. Asia (and Christianity) will not be aufgehoben but cut loose or “subtracted.” Later we hear that this Wagner was Nietzsche. I conjecture that the series was broken off not only because of Nietzsche’s incipient estrangement from the maestro, but because the story that he had to tell there about Wagner’s becoming himself was Hegelian, all too Hegelian.

2 Time: kairos and chronos

Nietzsche’s work turns eventually (taking that word in several senses) to articulating the question of time on and of the earth, a time different from the world-models. The direction, future, and futurity of the earth become dominant concerns. Free spirits and good Europeans will take their distance from the shrunken earth of the last man with its foreclosure of the future. Among these modalities of time, thinking off the clock of world-history, is the venerable binary of kairos and chronos, of a passing opportunity to be seized or a continuous, extended duration to be endured.

I cite a section on temporality from “What is Noble?” which responds to that question by considering several possible relations to those rare opportune moments that are often recognized regretfully only when they have passed. BGE 274: “The problem of those who wait. Strokes of luck [Glücksfälle] and many incalculable factors are needed for a higher human, in whom the solution to a problem sleeps, to go into action at the right time – ‘into explosion,’ you might say.” Even higher humans need luck, and without it (the usual case) “people sit waiting, hardly knowing how much they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain.” Sometimes the alarm will ring and they must regretfully lament “‘It’s too late’”… having lost faith in themselves and being useless from that point on. – What if in the realm of genius, the ‘...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations and References
• Part I European Views
• Part II Beyond Europe: Nietzsche’s View from Afar
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names