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Is Nietzsche an antidote to liberalism?
John F. writes:
I am surprised how little you mention Nietzsche.
To me, there is no more powerful antidote to liberalism than the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A lot of his other stuff too, such as, master-morality and slave-morality.
LA replies:
Interesting. I’ve studied Nietzsche and care about him and have written a fair amount about him. However, I would disagree with you that Nietzsche represents an adequate or effective response to liberalism. I will try to reply to your point in near future.
John F. replies:
We at least have some common ground, since you mention in your “Reading List” post “a particular quality of experiencing life that he inspired in me.” Precisely what I mean about the prologue to Zarathustra.
Is Nietzsche “adequate,” perhaps not entirely, but you have to build on something.
For convenience, here are the links I’ve been using lately.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Beyond Good and Evil
On the Genealogy of Morals
Antichrist
Case of Wagner / Nietzsche Contra Wagner
LA replies:
Of course, Zarathustra’s Prologue, there’s nothing like it, the call to a new kind of human life, the devastating critique of the Last Man, of liberalism. Nietzsche shows the possibility of something higher and instills a hunger for it and certainly implies a total rejection of liberalism (though the left has adopted Nietzsche in recent decades). His ecstasy, his striving for something higher than ordinary life, makes many readers think that he is religious.
The basic problem with Nietzsche, as I’ve written, is that once you go beyond the experiential excitement of reading him (and I personally had blissful experiences that came both from simply reading him and, later, from applying his ideas in my own experience, namely in the form of a kind of a non-judgmental flow of consciousness) and understand what he’s really saying, you realize that he’s lost, and that what his philosophy comes down to in practical terms is affirming the lostness. His starting point is the nihilistic denial of any moral truth, the elevation of power and success over truth. Not only does he not provide a basis for any viable politics or form of society, his thinking precludes any possible society, let alone any kind of conservatism or traditionalism. He is par excellence the modern thinker who having rejected Christianity and indeed the very idea of truth, tries to construct some substitute (i.e., the eternal return and the superman), and it simply doesn’t work. You end up with Zarathustra’s “Night Song,” complete isolation from the universe.
I have a particular understanding of this because of the two phases I went through with Nietzsche that I mention in the reading list. First, I read him in purely psychological terms, not understanding or paying attention to his stuff about denying morality and so on. In the second phase, I read him more carefully, and saw the complete nihilism that was there.
And remember, nihilism does not mean simply “being against everything.” Since there’s no such thing as a person who is against everything, if that’s what nihilism meant, it would be a useless and meaningless concept. Nihilism, as Nietzsche himself says (and as is explained in Seraphim Rose’s short book on Nihilism), is the denial of any moral truth. Nihilists “affirm” all kinds of things; they affirm rock music, they affirm the greatness of the German nation, they affirm art, vacations, bicycling, sex clubs, they affirm science, material progress, education, racial equality, they affirm the eternal return and the superman. But they deny that there’s any moral truth in existence. That’s what makes them nihilists. And the explicit denial of moral truth is incompatible with the sustained existence of any human society.
So, one can be awakened by Nietzsche to the possibility of a higher way of being and to a disdain for modern equality and comfort worship, and that’s great. But one cannot travel with him anywhere, he is not a guide to anything solid. His ideas, taken seriously, lead to the void.
- end of initial entry -
Bill Carpenter writes:
Nietzsche as Educator: Human, All Too Human is an essay I would like to see from your pen. A rich and subtle spirit he was indeed, and a great teacher of subtlety and skepticism—but seduced by the Mephistopheles he summoned up and lured over the beetling precipice. He is a partial antidote to liberalism, and a valuable teacher of criticism and creativity for traditionalists and properly grounded classical liberals. He is a teacher of civilization. But he is also a pied piper to the vilest, most narcissistic atheism. Will he be read in the remnant communities of the faithful in the West? Maybe not. But I think both you and I could testify that he was a valuable teacher along our Providential path to Truth—as pagan Virgil led Dante along the first stage of his heavenly journey.
LA replies:
I hope that my criticisms of Nietzsche don’t make it sound as though I am dismissing him. The key factor, as you have said, is “properly grounded.” If one is properly grounded, then one can read him and be inspired by him and learn from his great style, without being seduced over the precipice.
Mark K. writes:
This is really funny—VFR as philosophical burlesque. One VFR regular promotes Christ and Christianity as the bulwark against Islam while another one suggests Nietzsche as the antidote to liberalism. Ah, the dialectics of VFR… defending the faith of and in Western civilization from mutually opposing viewpoints. Such consistency and rigor!
LA replies:
Those are different comments by different people. Is Mark saying that different commenters at this site have to have the same views, and if they don’t, that shows that VFR, i.e., I, am inconsistent? Further, Mark seems to have missed the fact that I was disagreeing with the idea that Niezsche is the antidote fo liberalism.
In any case, when people make criticisms of me that are this weak, it starts to give me the feeling that people don’t have good criticisms of me. Which is not good for my spiritual health.
[Note: in the preceding comment I had originally said that I thought Mark K. was still angry with me over my criticisms of Sarah Palin last year. He then wrote to me insisting that he never complained about my discussion of Palin. I’ve looked, and there were in fact several e-mails between us on that subject, but they had not been posted at VFR, so it was inappropriate for me to mention that exchange, and I’ve removed my reference to it.]
Ed writes:
I have just read your article on Nietzsche. I have a very difficult time understanding “the law of eternal recurrence”. This concept also appears in Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and the writings of Maurice Nicoll M.D. Could you explain it in understandable terms.
LA replies:
In this comment I summarize Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the idea of the eternal return, in 253 words.
Nietzsche was a nihilist of the vitalist type (of which there are a variety of subtypes). For him meaning came not from any inherent truth of existence, but from the will to power. Each people and culture has its own will to power, its own goals and gods. Each of these belief systems has value in that it enhances life. But none of them is really true, and in fact the will to life of each culture requires the _suppression_ of the will to truth. But now we’ve entered the modern, scientific age, in which the will to truth has emerged as a force in its own right. And this will to truth expresses itself in a new type of man, the superman. The superman sees (as the people of the past cultures did not) that there is no truth. Furthermore, he sees that this cosmos that lacks any essence _repeats itself eternally_. So not only is there the pain and meaninglessness of existence, but man must keep living through the same cycle of pain and meaninglessness forever. However, if he says YES to this Eternal Return, if he embraces all existence, despite its eternal cycle of meaninglessness and suffering, then he rises above the suffering to joy, and becomes a superman.
It is a perfect inversion of Christianity. Instead of fulfilling himself by finding his true self in God, the superman fulfills himself by saying Yes to eternal meaninglessness and horror in a world without God. It is the supreme nihilistic vision.
Ouspensky got the idea of the eternal return from Nietzsche but gave it a very different meaning. But let’s first deal with Nietzsche.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 28, 2009 08:59 AM | Send
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