Dangerous Minds

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right

Ronald Beiner

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780812295412
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order.In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right.Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.

Chapter 1

Reading Nietzsche in an Age of Resurgent Fascism

The sort of unqualified and utterly unsuitable people who may one day come to invoke my authority is a thought that fills me with dread.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

As is well known, the intellectual left has found much to its liking in the philosophies of ultraright thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt.1 Why this is so is hardly obvious, and one cannot help wondering about where one should look for the full story on this curious feature of intellectual life in recent decades. Whether this is something that has an intraintellectual explanation or whether it has a kind of “sociology of knowledge” explanation is not something I will attempt to pursue here. I’m only saying it merits further reflection. But what I will pursue in the following discussion (and I will do something similar in the next chapter) is a reexamination of one of these thinkers whom many of us have read and been excited by in our youth, asking whether we can any longer afford to read him while filtering out the ultraright dimensions of his thought. It’s all too easy to read Nietzsche, appreciating the stuff one likes while taking with a grain of salt all the unpleasant stuff that doesn’t suit contemporary tastes. But if the far right is making a comeback today (which I believe it is), then this starts to look like an intolerable intellectual luxury.

***

I first started reading Nietzsche around 1973. By some unaccountable Nietzsche-style fatality, I stumbled on a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the stacks at McGill University. I was an enthusiast right from the start. (What better antidote to growing up amid the banality and conformism of suburban life in North America?) Occasionally, one would come across critics highlighting the protofascist dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought.2 There may be scary lines scattered throughout his works. But on the whole, Nietzsche seemed to present himself as—to borrow Tracy Strong’s phrase—“a voice for liberation.”3

There is a repellent though famous photograph (by Heinrich Hoffmann) that we contemporary readers of Nietzsche must confront. It features Hitler in 1934 at the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar.4 No one who respects the mind or literary genius of Nietzsche will find it easy to look at that horrible image. But we have to be resolute in asking ourselves, Why was Hitler motivated to stage the taking of that photograph? It was a deliberate act of statecraft,5 and whether or not Nietzsche would have welcomed being enlisted in those ideological purposes (it is a virtual certainty that it would have caused him significant pain), he was nonetheless complicit in the Hitlerite appropriation of his legacy because there were things in his oeuvre that invited that appropriation and that made it attractive for Hitler to lay claim to him just as Lenin and Stalin had laid claim to Marx. And take note: the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche didn’t end with Hitler. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, an authority on Aryan cults and “esoteric Nazism,” writes that “The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche’s trenchant rejection of Christianity written in 1888, is now current as an anti-Christian manifesto among white power activists in America and Europe.”6

Similarly, we need to think hardheadedly and concretely about exactly what Nietzsche may have intended when he spoke, both in Beyond Good and Evil (§ 208) and in Ecce Homo (“Why I Am a Destiny,” § 1), about the coming age of groβe Politik and about himself as the prophet of groβe Politik.7 Apart from emphasizing its Pan-European character and its not being limited to petty-nationalistic horizons, Nietzsche never really elaborated what this kind of politics would look like in concrete terms. Clearly, the implication was that it was a kind of imperial political project, gesturing back to glory-oriented empires of the past.8 In other words, this was a blank check, and a distinctly dangerous one, given the projects of the politics of empire that were (as he predicted) to appear on the scene a few short decades later. When Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols (“Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” § 39), affirms the need for cultural norms that are “anti-liberal to the point of malice,” he means exactly what he says. When Nietzsche wrote in § 251 of Beyond Good and Evil that what defines the European problem as he understands it (“what is serious for me”) is “the cultivation of a new caste to rule over Europe,” he really meant “caste” (Kaste), he really meant “rule” (regierenden), and he really meant “Europe.” These were not metaphors for something “spiritual.” This is politically innocent only on the assumption that Nietzsche would never be read by people who took him at his word. We surely know by now that this assumption is untenable.

Hans-Georg Gadamer once wrote, “I am in favor of a government and politics that would allow for mutual understanding and the freedom of all. . . . [This] has been self-evident to any European since the French Revolution, since Hegel and Kant.”9 This statement is in fact quite false (and Gadamer should have known that it was false). The reality is that there has been in Europe a long succession of radical thinkers who rejected the liberal egalitarianism of the French Revolution root and branch. (Gadamer ought to have known this because his own philosophical mentor, Martin Heidegger, was one of these radical thinkers and also because he lived for twelve horrendous years under a regime that expressed the same ideological rejection.10) Almost certainly the most important of these philosophers associated with the tradition of resolute repudiation of liberal modernity in all its moral, political, and cultural dimensions is Friedrich Nietzsche. Generations of readers of Nietzsche have never failed to find ways to “launder” or “sanitize” or at least take the edge off his hatred of freedom and equality as interpreted by modernity. Reading Nietzsche as benign or even as emancipatory would be tolerable if we could be assured that we wouldn’t face a second attempt at putting Nietzschean extremism into practice with extremely malevolent consequences for the world. But the recent and unexpected rise of the populist far right tells us, on the contrary, that we must fear and be vigilant about (to quote Conor Cruise O’Brien again) “what his messages might effect when they reached minds which were as bold in action as he was bold in thought.”

Julius Evola’s Nietzsche

I am no man, I am dynamite.

—Friedrich Nietzsche11

When a representative of the twentieth-century European far right such as Julius Evola reads Nietzsche, what does he absorb as the pertinent political-cultural message? In the very first reference to Nietzsche in Ride the Tiger, Evola cites him as “a great precursor.”12 Nietzsche was right that what was promised by bourgeois civilization is a complete fraud: it delivers “a soulless, mechanistic, and purely earthly civilization” that is in its “terminal state.”13 The civilizational ends privileged by liberalism and democracy are brought to fruition by socialism—namely, an era of the last man accurately depicted by Nietzsche: “a human integrity traded for that which might suit socialized cattle.”14 In common with Nietzsche, Evola’s view is that the making available of “a plentiful, easy, and comfortable existence” (the ideal of life shared between Marxism and Western liberalism) counts for nothing: “Hegel rightly wrote that the epochs of material well-being are blank pages in the history book.”15 “True leaders do not exist today” because, as Nietzsche rightly perceived, the supposed ruling class is in fact dedicated to “the virtues of the serfs.”16 The core problem is that living in a world governed by “the regime of the masses” (the regime of “the mediocre soul”), where one ought to have hierarchies of “rank and spiritual superiority,” one instead has merely hierarchies defined by technical expertise.17 This, for Evola, constitutes “the absurdity of modern existence,”18 although exactly how fascism is meant to supply an antidote to this absurdity remains a mystery. “The general situation characterized by Nietzsche remains: ‘The struggle for supremacy amidst conditions that are worth nothing: this civilization of great cities, newspapers, fever, uselessness.’”19 Knowing oneself to be inhabiting a civilization that is worthless, the Nietzschean aristocrat in a society of slaves “feels himself belonging to a different humanity and recognizes the desert around himself.”20 To be sure, Evola regards Nietzsche’s vitalism as a “pseudosolution” and suggests that Nietzsche’s failure to move from immanence to transcendence “generates a higher voltage than the circuit can sustain,” quoting an 1881 letter from Nietzsche to Peter Gast in which Nietzsche describes himself as “one of those machines that might explode.”21 In any case, the post-1789 world is collapsing precipitously, and insofar as one can contribute to speeding up rather than postponing its demise, anything that might “prop it up and prolong its existence artificially” should be avoided.22

We know that Nietzsche longed for “barbarians of the twentieth century.” Would he have hoped to inspire, for instance, far-right terrorists in the 1970s? Perhaps not. But we know that Nietzsche’s votary, Julius Evola, was perfectly happy performing the role of a guru for terrorists: “Young postwar neo-fascists sat at Evola’s feet to hear this oracle of aristocratic values and war with modernity.” Inspired by Evola’s “philosophy of total war,” these disciples of Nietzsche’s disciple “unleashed a surge of black terrorism in Italy.”23 The thought by which Nietzsche was “filled with dread” (namely, vulgar Nietzscheanism) was not an idle one.

The Challenge of Nietzsche

How do we respond, humanly speaking, to a thinker who simply doesn’t believe in human dignity or the equal rights of all human beings? Who self-consciously denounces the whole moral universe conjured up by the French Revolution and believes that it didn’t secure a higher status for humanity but on the contrary incalculably diminished our stature? Who believes that in order to redeem such a thing as human dignity, we need to strive for something far beyond our current humanity, and in order to do that, need to restore the conceptions of radical hierarchy that were banished by the French Revolution and the whole post–French Revolution moral universe? We would barely know what to make of such a creature—we wouldn’t really be able to comprehend him even if he were staring us in the face! Stranger still, imagine that such a thinker went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century and was championed to a very large extent by intellectuals of the left! Bizarre! Yet I am not sketching some hypothetical philosopher on Mars; this is Friedrich Nietzsche, who has influenced and shaped contemporary culture and intellectual life to a staggering degree. What do we make of all this?

A key aspect of Nietzsche’s appeal (as a rhetorician, one might say, rather than as a thinker per se) is how generative he is, both with respect to new styles and with respect to provocative content, how protean he is—the sheer abundance in his writing and in his intellectual activity. There’s something for everyone! Something for every taste, as it were. There’s Nietzsche, the philosopher who demolishes the whole history of metaphysics. There’s Nietzsche, the ruthless debunker of religion and moralism. There’s Nietzsche, the affirmer of the body, severely challenging the privileging of mind or spirit going back to Plato. There’s Nietzsche, the prophet of the collapse of the cultural hollowness of modernity. And so on. There’s a radical pluralism in Nietzsche’s mode of thought that completely outflanks or trumps any preceding mode of intellectual pluralism.

On the other hand, let us recall the memorable dictum from Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche: “Each thinker thinks only one single thought.”24 That’s what makes them great thinkers. I truly believe that Heidegger was right about that. (If we were to follow Isaiah Berlin’s advice to orient theory toward pluralistic foxes rather than monistic hedgehogs, we would ultimately be left with no theory canon at all.) And if it’s true, it must be true of Nietzsche as well (especially since Heidegger formulated his principle with Nietzsche specifically in mind). So we must ask, What is the singular philosophical impulse in Nietzsche amid what looks like unbounded pluralism? Yet searching for a “true” Nietzsche or an “essential” Nietzsche (which I think we must do) looks as if it can’t possibly be squared with Nietzsche’s own emphasis on resisting singular truths or singular essences. I will treat Nietzsche’s pluralism as a rhetoric (a highly effective rhetoric!) and attempt to spell out one possible reading of the “essence” of Nietzsche’s intellectual concerns. What I’ll suggest is that all of Nietzsche’s literary virtuosity—which is undeniable, which seduces its readers and was intended to seduce them—is in the service of this essential core commitment.

Consider a passage on Nietzsche penned by Thomas Mann that I basically endorse:

Much as his largely aphoristic work glitters in a thousand colored facets, many as are the surface contradictions that can be demonstrated in his books—he was from the start a coherent whole, remained always the same. In the writings of the youthful professor—the Thoughts Out of Season, The Birth of Tragedy, and the 1873 treatise The Philosopher—are to be found more than the seeds of his later dogmas, the tidings he was to hurl down from his mountaintop. More than seeds because these dogmas—which in his opinion were glad tidings—were already contained in perfect and finished form in those works. What changed was solely the accentuation, the pitch, the gestures. These grew steadily more frantic, shriller, more grotesque and terrible. . . . [W]e cannot sufficiently stress the complete unity and coherence of Nietzsche’s life works.25

Geoff Waite quotes a letter from Nietzsche to Paul Deussen dated January 3, 1888, in which Nietzsche acknowledges that there is a “center” to his thought, a “great passion in the service of which I live.”26 That may seem like stating the obvious—how could Nietzsche have sustained his gargantuan literary output if that weren’t the case?—yet there are legions of Nietzsche’s readers who refuse to believe it. Waite’s view, for which I have much sympathy, is that this unspecified center is esoteric and that much of what Nietzsche’s readers have always associated with him is merely exoteric rhetoric intended to seduce, dupe, and ultimately hijack those readers. Let me share my own proposal with respect to what this one central, animating Nietzschean idea might be: Western civilization is going down the toilet because of too much emphasis on truth and rationality and too much emphasis on equal human dignity.

***

The initial thought on which my presentation of Nietzsche is founded is that Nietzsche’s positive philosophy is all nonsense or lunacy: Übermenschen, will to power, eternal recurrence of the same, a return to ancien régime–type European aristocracy. It’s impossible to take any of that seriously. Those wild ideas are simply the e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Nietzschean Ideologies in the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 1: Reading Nietzsche in an Age of Resurgent Fascism
• Chapter 2: Reading Heidegger in an Age of Resurgent Fascism
• Conclusion: How to Do Theory in Politically Treacherous Times
• Notes
• Acknowledgments