Fred is Dead
Nietzsche is more trouble than he’s worth. (And he’s probably wrong, too.)
“His wisdom is to keep awake in order to sleep well. And verily, if life had no sense, and had I to choose nonsense, this would be the desirablest nonsense for me also.”
— Nietzsche
“American society today is so just fundamentally bourgeois. It’s just so, pardon my French … it’s so fucking middle-class in its values. There is no value higher than having a pension and dying in bed. I find that profoundly pathetic.”
— Richard B. Spencer
Anyone who convincingly bashes middle-class complacency is bound to find an audience among the young. And anyone who does it with martial panache will draw a crowd of angry young men. In this, Nietzsche — while notably efficient — is far from unique.
But what about this efficiency? Why is Nietzsche so damn popular with — and effective at exciting — loathsome assholes? And is there enough good stuff in Nietzsche to make his periodic restoration worth the effort?
Slate is the latest to make the case that Nietzsche is misunderstood.
In the text introducing this (in its way) entirely accurate video, we read that, “In reality, Nietzsche was a very subtle thinker.” (Emphasis mine.)
This warns us that we are about to encounter an Appeal to Infinite Subtlety, a fallacy endemic to academic discussions of controversial thinkers. If you are not familiar with how — or why — this fallacy works, here are the nuts and bolts.
Academic philosophers (and many leaders of Buddhist sanghas) don’t pursue the true, the beautiful, and the good without fear or favor. (I know, right?) Instead, they take up a single historical figure — like Nietzsche — and learn everything about them, develop a reading marginally different from previous readings, and then defend their figure against all comers (sometimes with explainer videos).
Why do they do this? Because the figure’s insights are indispensable? Because the attacks are so wrong? Perhaps, but an important motivation is that they have invested so much time and effort into their figure that if their figure falls out of fashion, their careers will be in serious trouble. (I’ve talked about this before in connection with critics of all stripes, who are always already compromised by the bare premise that what they are criticizing is not a pox to begin with.)
Enter the Appeal to Infinite Subtlety. According to this appeal, if you introduce a seemingly devastating objection to the appellant’s figure, they will argue that clearly — just by the fact that you have raised this objection — you do not understand their figure subtly enough. Furthermore, this subtlety, being infinite, ensures the appellant will never be forced to concede that an objection is a function of their figure rather than of a subtlety deficiency on behalf of the objector.
Think Buddhism is life-denying — as Nietzsche did — because it literally states that life is suffering? Oh, neophyte. You have much to learn. Think Heidegger is peddling a deliberately mystifying neo-Catholicism that comports so well with National Socialism you almost can’t believe it? Sorry, you just need to learn to think him more deeply. Perhaps turn down the lights a bit.
Why? Why not take what we like and get the hell out of here? Though there is a promising trend toward doing just this with Heidegger (as in Graham Harman’s analysis of “tool-being”), the decades-long shamanic coddling of the author of The Black Notebooks is an intellectual embarrassment.
Where does this put us with Nietzsche? As the video above argues— and I do not contest it — the right wing reading of Nietzsche is not necessarily the most subtle or even the best. But it is, let’s face it, the most compelling, and by far the most titillating to impressionable young men. Just ask Loeb and Leopold.
Because while it is possible, and probably desirable, to construct from the Nietzschean corpus an Übermensch who overcomes masculinity, gender, sexual orientation, monogamy, capitalism and all else that ails The Last Man (which we must by now be, no?), Nietzsche’s presentation in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals is going to fight you very, very hard.
A representative passage:
All that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers,” fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge.
In Nietszche’s juxtapostion of Rome and Judea, he fetishizes the health and immediacy of the former, while lampooning the fiendishness of the latter for having invented interiority. In short, the privileged are victims.
This is an appealing, if retrograde, message for angry young men on the cusp of socialization, pulled back at the last moment and told: don’t worry, don’t go inward, don’t evolve, stay here, fight. And then Nietzschean bile is vomited forth in the form of misogyny and racism on SJWs who (the apprentice Übermensch believes) are conspiring to deform his soul.
It is a compelling story, well told, and any Roman soldier who tells you he has not felt its pull is trying to get you into bed. But it is not the inevitable reading of the scene Nietzsche describes, and it has not been the reading offered by thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Angela Davis.
Nietzsche hints at this in §9 when he allows a democratic interlocutor to interrupt and suggest that “‘The masters’ have been disposed of; the morality of common man has won.” And what is wrong with that? Is not the Judeo-Christian invention of inwardness — and its Eastern predecessors of the Axial Age — the most miraculous and unexpected event in civilization? Is it not, in fact, an evolutionary adaptation of the spirit occasioned by urbanization and followed by the subsequent flowering of mankind?
Nietzsche dismisses this out of hand and denies his interlocutor a full-throated defense of the spirit, having him concede its inherent “blood-poisoning” in his second breath.
In this way, Nietzsche is a rank nostalgist, like Mao or Pol Pot. And his “alt-right” adherents, despite their re-branding, are no more attractive than Archie Bunker, that great critic of self-reflection. (And in reality, they are not much younger, despite vocal exceptions.)
And to the extent that Nietzsche provides high-brow cover for revanchism, anti-intellectualism, and nostalgic Roman supremacy — to just that extent, Fred is dead to me.
