This the fourth instalment in a series of essays by Matt McManus examining the work and legacies of the totalitarian philosophers.

In Ecce Homo, the autobiographical self-examination written shortly before his descent into madness on the streets of Turin in 1889, Nietzsche cheekily opined that he was a “destiny.” It must have seemed like an almost tragic act of self-aggrandizement at the time. When he collapsed near the height of intellectual powers, Nietzsche was a sick and lonely man. His books, many of them self-published at Nietzsche’s expense, were barely selling and he often depended on charity from his friends. A few years earlier Nietzsche’s one firm romantic attachment, Lou-Salome, had rejected his proposal of marriage and rebounded on vacation with the philosopher’s friend Paul Ree. His sister Elizabeth and her husband were increasingly flirting with forms of nationalism and anti-Semitism that the cosmopolitan Nietzsche found extremely vulgar. Ironically, she would assume responsibility for Nietzsche’s care throughout his illness, editing many of his books and falsely presenting her brother as a proto-Nazi icon. It must have seemed at the time that Nietzsche’s “destiny” was to live out his remaining days as a vegetative invalid and quaint intellectual curiosity.

Yet, only a few decades later, Martin Heidegger would declare that in Nietzsche’s thought, the history of Western metaphysics had finally reached its climax. If Plato was the originator of Western metaphysics, then in Nietzsche every Platonic insight had been inverted and the story had moved from one extreme to the next. Many at the time might have agreed, as new artistic, intellectual, and political movements claiming Nietzsche as a predecessor were emerging with tremendous rapidity. Unfortunately, not all of these were admirable and many would stain the philosopher’s reputation for many decades to come. Most infamously, many fascist and Nazi figures saw in Nietzsche a clear precursor to their outlook. Perhaps the most infamous example is Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will, which depicts Adolph Hitler as a pseudo-superman descending like Zarathustra from the clouds to greet the German people. As a result, Nietzsche’s initial reception in liberal democratic and progressive circles was often chilly. He was regarded as an inegalitarian philosopher who celebrated strength and cruelty, or a shrill proponent of irrationalism. In his 1945 work A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell spoke for many at the time when he wrote:

I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die.

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Nietzsche and Politics

The goal of humanity lies in its highest specimens.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

Unlike the controversy surrounding Marx and Heidegger, the outrage associated with Nietzsche has given way to ubiquitous and lavish praise. Since the end of the Second World War, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of interpreters like Walter Kaufmann, there has been a flurry of more rigorous and charitable interpretations of Nietzsche. The range is truly impressive; perhaps no other philosopher has influenced so many different opinions. Nietzsche was a profound influence on figures like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault who have become prominently associated with the political Left, who supported overcoming society’s remaining moral and traditional barriers to self-creation. Other figures influenced by Nietzsche moved to the political Right, including the libertarian Ayn Rand and the classicist Leo Strauss. Artists have invoked his work to call for radical new aesthetic forms to emerge, while others have appealed to him to decry the decadence of modern art and feeling. Perhaps most interestingly, Nietzsche has even gained some popular traction, with his books selling millions of copies despite their strange topics and myriad styles. Despite this, Nietzsche remains a thinker very much at odds with many of the political positions at play today. This is perhaps inevitable, as Nietzsche was ever the contrarian and would likely have approved of Kierkegaard’s solemn maxim that “when you label me, you negate me.”

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Firstly, Nietzsche was certainly in no way a progressive in gestation. He would almost certainly have had nothing but contempt for the postmodern proponents of difference and toleration who invoke aspects of his thought. Nietzsche was a staunch elitist who frequently derided the “herd” which made up most of mankind. And he was openly contemptuous of many cultural practices and traditions; lampooning Buddhism, dismissing the British as a nation of mediocre shopkeepers, and of course endlessly denigrating Judeo-Christianity as religions of “resentment” oriented by a “slave” morality. Moreover, Nietzsche had little good to say about either socialism or radical democracy, regarding them as little more than watered down efforts at secularizing vulgar Christian tropes.

Secondly, Nietzsche would not have been fond of contemporary liberalism—classical or egalitarian—and liberal rights, either. For Nietzsche, the call for rights—whether to private property or welfare—were simply slavish demands by the weak for protection from the worthy and strong. As John Rawls pointed out in his critique of Nietzschian “perfectionism,” there is a strong sense in Nietzsche that society does not exist to benefit all of its members. Instead, it exists to enable the few truly great men and women to rise and establish new and almost god-like kinds of values. It was offensive that such figures must be held back by the mediocrity of humankind; great men like Napoleon cared little for the rights and welfare of others as they rode out to remake the world. This, of course, did not mean that such individuals wanted to trample over others as a sign of their greatness. Rather, as he put in On the Genealogy of Morals, the great “eagle” devotes very little thought one way or another to the “lambs” beneath it. But that includes feelings of pity where the lamb lies between the eagle and its goals.

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, ‘These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever of the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?’ there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument—though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, ‘We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.’

Thirdly, Nietzsche would hardly be a friend of the contemporary Right either, in any of its various forms. Despite some rejigging by figures like Ayn Rand, Nietzsche was hardly a proto-libertarian or classical liberal. Nietzsche disdained consumer culture and capitalism, seeing it as producing vulgar and decadent societies of “last men” focused on the pursuit of meaningless wealth and menial satisfactions. These last men lived out their days in material affluence, but were committed to no truly great projects, mostly concerned with issues like “health” and physical appearance. One can think of the Wall Street icons ridiculed by Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho, each thinking he was lord of the world and each in fact tedious and indistinguishable from on another. Nietzsche was also dismissive of nationalism, sharing Schopenhauer’s opinion that it was an infantile outlook for individuals not strong enough to will their own destiny without banding together with the rest of the “herd.” Part of this is due to Nietzsche’s personal disdain for German nationalism, and his preference for pan-Europeanism. Whether this means he would be fond of the contemporary European Union, with its liberal outlook and social democratic policies, one can only guess. But he would have certainly regarded the idea of moving away from the nation-state model appealing.

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Finally, Nietzsche would have found the invocations by the far Right—past and present—infuriating. He often looked at his sister Elizabeth’s gradual descent into German nationalism and later Nazism with an uncharacteristic mixture of pity and scorn. Had Nietzsche lived to see the rise of Hitler, he would likely have immediately recognized the Austrian dropout as the mean and resentful creature he was. He would likely have been horrified to see his work on the will to power and the great man transformed into a kind of racist eugenics, insisting that his work was about the individual self and not collective genetic overcoming. And, of course, Nietzsche would regard the deindividuation of totalitarianism, its attempt to completely assimilate the single person into the nation, as nihilistic. Today, no doubt Nietzsche would have lambasted the alt-right efforts to associate his work with concerns about immigration and the racial makeup of society.

So what then did Nietzsche believe politically? In some respects it is difficult to say a priori, since if one could give a strict formula for how to produce the “highest specimens” of humanity then they would cease to be the highest. Instead their greatness and creativity would be manufactured and predictable. As Nietzsche sometimes puts it, a priori formulas must occasionally give way to the nobility of the “nose,” which recognizes the scent of greatness and vulgarity when it is near. My sense is that Nietzsche is best understood as a radical individualist; one who insists passionately that our duty in life is to become what we are. But what kind of person is that? And how can we avoid false paths? I think the deepest clue lies in his profound treatment of resentment, which is well described by Gilles Deleuze in his classic book Nietzsche: