Nietzsche in the GDR: History of a Taboo

Nietzsche’s irrational doctrines have contributed to the emergence of self-destructive extremism on both the right and left ends of the political spectrum. The realization of his Übermensch ideal is not about achieving greatness as an individual but rather about greatness as a collective whole, specifically as a European empire. His philosophy stands in stark contrast to genuine conservatism, which is rooted in Christian principles. Keywords: conservatism, perspectivism, traditionalism, New Right, identitarian, postmodernism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, extremism, antisemitism, will to power, logos, Christianity.

Intoduction to Tracy b. Strong, ed. NIETZSCHE AND POLITICS (Ashgate, 2009),

Political Studies, 1998

Over recent years, an extraordinary number of interpretations of Nietzsche's work has appeared. I ask why he has become such an important ®gure in contemporary political debate and whether any dominant concerns can be elicited from the diverse readings of his texts. My response to both questions is that because Nietzsche has been identi®ed, by Habermas among others, as the founding father of poststructuralism, this is where debate between postmodernists and their critics is being staged. I distinguish between recent philosophical and political interpretations but argue that in both cases, what is at stake are political questions regarding authority, legitimacy and consensus. In the latter part of the article I consider attempts at reconstructing a postmodern politics out of Nietzsche's philosophy, but express some doubts about such a project.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch was interpreted by America and Germany in two notably different ways during the early 20th century, bringing about the question of which understanding is more faithful to Nietzsche’s meaning. The advent of World War I in 1914 presented America with a depiction of Nietzsche as “the apostle of German ruthlessness and barbarism,” which offered a negative view of Nietzsche and the German people as narcissistic warmongers. This outbreak of war led to these warped interpretations of Nietzsche and his philosophy, prompting the world to see only the facade of his aphorisms, not their truer meanings, for many years. Between the world wars, Germany’s reading of Nietzsche focused on the notion that the government knows what the ubermensch is: a selfless person ready to give his life for a “greater good” of the state, which was believed to be endowed with divine mandate. The American interpretation of Nietzsche is similar but believes the philosophy of the ubermensch to be one of atheism and unadulterated power, positing man as the new god, a rugged state-defined individualism that brings out the worst in man. George Santayana argued that Nietzsche’s philosophy failed to acknowledge “immense forces beyond ourselves” which endow man with will and power. This led to the American understanding that Nietzsche wrote of a German people that believed themselves to be ubermenschen and gods among men; my research leads me to believe that this is only one possible interpretation of Nietzsche. Germany’s concept of the ubermensch was remarkably close to that of Nietzsche’s philosophy except that the true ubermensch is not a god among men underneath the omnipotent state, but rather god of his own life. World War II only worsened matters as Nietzsche’s ubermenschen were often associated with the Nazi conception of an Aryan superiority. The Nazi party viewed the ubermenschen as this Aryan race: a perfect race of men who must give their all to the state. However, there were more qualities to their ubermenschen than race, as it also incorporated a loyalty to Germany – total sacrifice of self to the state, though Nietzsche expressed his anti-nationalism in “Why I am So Wise” when he describes himself as “the last anti-political German.” The Americans then saw this Aryan Übermensch and decried Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi, despite his distaste for anti-Semites and nationalism. In this paper, I will analyze the two interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy through his works “The Gay Science” and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “American Nietzsche,” and writings from German thinkers during the wars, such as Heidegger, to support my argument that the Germans were closer to understanding Nietzsche’s ubermensch than Americans at the time.

The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review

Intellectual History Review, 2016

Gustav Landauer’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche stands out as the most substantial anarchist appropriation of the German philosopher up to the present day. While his engagement has received some attention, the overall picture remains incomplete, mainly because Landauer’s numerous articles on the topic in the magazine he edited, Der Sozialist, were unavailable until recently. This paper seeks to give a full account of Landauer’s Nietzsche. I contextualise Landauer’s early reading within the emerging political reception of the German philosopher’s works and identify explicitly Nietzschean elements within his writings in order to evaluate Landauer’s ‘forerunner’ status within current post-anarchist theory. Just as contemporaries on the radical left in Wilhelmine Germany quoted Nietzsche, so did Landauer. He used the philosopher’s ideas as a code for dissidence against the powerful bureaucratic apparatus of the Social Democratic Party and to subvert their ideological dogmas. But, in contrast to many others, he did not stop there. Instead, he wrote the first Nietzsche-novel and fused various Nietzschean motifs into his anarchism, while simultaneously distancing himself from some of the problematic aspects of Nietzsche’s thought—particularly its anti-humanism, elitism, and notion of ‘hardness’.

Draft of translator's introduction to Nietzsche, Philosopher of Reaction: Towards a Political Biography, a translation of a short text by the late Italian scholar, historian of ideas and philosopher, Domenico Losurdo which will appear later this year or early 2023 with Historical Materialism. Losurdo's work originally appeared in Italian in 1997 bearing the title Nietzsche: Per una biografia politica (Roma: Manifesto Libri, Orme, 1997). Five years later, in 2002, Losurdo would publish his far longer study, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critic (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002). Losurdo's great book on Nietzsche represents arguably the most significant challenge to regnant liberal, postmodernist, and feminist interpretations of the latter's work, by recourse to the methodologies of contextualising intellectual history and critical hermeneutics. Yet, despite the book's immense scholarship, weight of evidence, and intellectual significance, it would take nearly two decades for Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico to appear in English translation by Gregor Benton in the Historical Materialism series at Brill. Sadly, Losurdo himself would not live to see its appearance in print, passing away in June 2018. The reader of his shorter, earlier extended essay on the German philosopher of the Second Reich will however get a very clear picture of Losurdo’s larger interpretive orientation. The striking challenge his reading of Nietzsche represents to many better-known works published or translated in the Anglosphere over the last five decades is also trenchantly clear in the less than 100 pages of this work. The aim of making this work available to anglophones was to make Losurdo’s critical work, on this philosopher who continues to animate such different cohorts as academic left-liberals and far right activists, accessible to many more people, and facilitate more balanced debates surrounding everything Nietzsche thought, wrote, and has wrought. [Author's copy, do not cite]

Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2020

Preprint version of a review essay of Hugo Drogon's Nietzsche's Great Politics and Gary Shapiro's Nietzsche and the Earth.

An Examination of the Role Played by Nietzsche's Role on Germany in the Years leading to the First World War

2023

There is a widespread feeling that modernity has come to an end, which is often accompanied by a certain anxiety. The idea that history reached its zenith with a particular thinker, say Hegel or Marx, is no longer credible. In fact, despite recent books on the “End of History,” we see that history goes on. The angst is perhaps due to the ingrained conviction that there is no absolute moment, no possibility of discovering something true and unchangeable about politics, morality or society. There is no moment in the past when the truth about man, morality and the world was revealed. We take for granted that each individual may have his or her own ethical, political and social “values”. Values, such as goodness, justice, equality, erudition, even mental health or education, are not something “given” by reality; rather, they are a historical human creation (something that may seem paradoxical, since, if man is a historical being, then the very idea that man is historical is itself historical and contingent). This historicity of history can be better understood if we compare it with past ideas about history. In ancient times, history was conceived of as a set of inquiries about what happened or as a chronicle of journeys. Even thinkers like the Sophists or Plato, who recognized the importance of change, did not expressly reflect on the “historical process”. The Stoics and Medieval thinkers, on the contrary, believed in divine providence and reflected on history and eschatology, but for them time was only “the measure of change according to before and after,” and not the essence of things. Only with Hegel does history come to be seen as the innermost core of reality, something that determines all intellectual structures and all life. However, both Hegel and those who followed him (including Marx) still perceive history as a process moving towards an ending or a perfect state – be it the attainment of absolute knowledge and the realization of the spirit in history, or the classless society. Today, however, we consider that all understanding is itself historical and related to a given cultural context. The idea of an end to history and of a “teleology” inscribed in reality appears to us as dated or outdated. We see the ideas in history as historical, and the historical process itself no longer appears to us as something we can grasp in its meaning (as if we saw it from the outside and knew where it comes from and where it is going); instead, we see it as something in the middle of which we find ourselves and whose dynamics we cannot fully understand. In fact, it would not even make sense to try to understand it, since this is not a process that occurs independently of us, but rather a process that we experience from within and for whose development we are responsible. In a sense, it is we who make history and determine it, and this making is open-ended as to its direction and purpose. This change in perspective also applies to the motivations that underlie and determine the historical process. Such motivations are no longer seen as transcendent or latent, but rather as motivations that arise from life itself and that in many cases may not be entirely rational, or may even be constitutively irrational. In fact, the entire historical process is no longer seen as rational, so that the very idea of progress has become questionable. We no longer think that we are moving toward some perfect state and that each new stage brings us closer to that. We recognize that there may have been losses, and even significant losses. They are part of the process and may even become prevalent. This becomes particularly evident if we consider the fact that modern times are often experienced or seen as a period of decadence–an idea we find already in Romanticism and which has taken different forms throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The oft-repeated thesis that today we live in the post-truth era is only one of its latest manifestations. There is, then, no baseline from which we can understand history and obtain a secure orientation as to what we should do. As Jean-François Lyotard pointed out, it is no longer possible to think of any grand narrative or metanarrative, as was always the case up to this point. The future and future ways of understanding are therefore completely open and have to be constructed both individually and socially. Nietzsche is the first to develop this way of seeing the relationship between history and life, and takes it to its ultimate consequences. Indeed, when he criticizes philosophers for their lack of historical sense, he is not only criticizing the fact that philosophers have not realized that our way of seeing things changes over time. He is also criticizing the fact that philosophers have not understood that the historicity of ideas involves the very irrationality and incomprehensibility of the historical process.

Perspectives on Politics, 2018

2023

This paper takes it starting point from the basic assertions of Martha Nussbaum’s 1997 paper “Is Nietzsche a political thinker?". In the paper she argues that seven criteria are necessary for a serious political philosophy: 1) understanding of material need; 2) procedural justification; 3) liberty and its worth; 4) racial, ethnic and religious difference; 5) gender and family; 6) justice between nations; and 7) moral psychology. She argues, that on the first six criteria, Nietzsche has nothing to offer but does make significant contributions on the seventh. In her estimation, then, we should forget about Nietzsche as a political thinker and instead focus on the enlightenment political philosophers he found to be so boring instead. Her basic conclusion is threefold: either Nietzsche is a racialist, inegalitarian, misogynistic, and elitist, he is puerile, or he is incoherent (Nussbaum 6-9). In opposition to Nussbaum's appraisal of Nietzsche's political thought, I argue that he is in fact a serious political thinker. To present the case I focus on the inclusion of Nussbaum's six criteria in Nietzsche's Zarathustra. My focus on this work is motivated by Nussbaum's own recognition that in this work Nietzsche makes numerous allusions to Plato's Republic, a seminal work of political thought in the tradition. Surprisingly, however, Nussbaum doesn't consider Zarathustra in her appraisal of the lack of political thought in Nietzsche.

Review of Politics

Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies, 2020

Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a contested, yet essential place of privilege in modern political philosophy. His poetic exhortations to readers to take personal responsibility for their beliefs and actions reveals an unsurpassed appreciation for individual liberty, but many contemporary theorists understand Nietzsche as dangerously inegalitarian, on account of his view that not all individuals are fit to achieve the highest freedom of self-creation. Nietzsche’s tolerance of, and even preference for, hierarchies of power and human worth seem to put him at odds with modern liberalism: both see individual liberty as a central goal, but liberalism also strives uncompromisingly for the general reduction of suffering and equal political participation. Nietzsche’s apparent apathy towards these latter two goals makes him a problematic ally for modern theorists, many of whom write him off as apolitical, insufficiently liberal, or even inherently facist. This essay argues that such one-dimensional interpretations of Nietzsche overlook a fundamental affinity between Nietzsche and modern liberals such as Richard Rorty and threaten to obscure essential conceptual resources that contemporary political theorists would do well to avail themselves of.