Abstract
Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger hold firmly entrenched places within the canon of modern philosophy. And rightly so: both are penetrating critics of liberal modernity. Yet we need to ask ourselves whether, as academics teaching these thinkers, we are doing full justice to the more disturbing aspects of their thought. They don’t simply interrogate the axioms of modern life as a subject for intellectual reflection; they have a praxis-oriented project to demolish the post-1789 moral-political dispensation that we tend to take for granted and replace it with a new radically illiberal and anti-egalitarian dispensation. The task of reconsidering the perils of going too easy on these thinkers, or giving them the benefit of the doubt, is made more urgent by the apparent return of fascist or ‘fascoid’ modes of politics, and in particular, the emergence of a far-right intelligentsia all too keen to appropriate these thinkers for far-right purposes.
It would be nice to think that fields of academic study such as philosophy and political theory are innocent, and that one could teach them without the fear of breeding monstrosities. That comforting thought is looking less reliable by the day, which is what prompted me to write a book whose title is Dangerous Minds (Beiner, 2018). Literally the first book review came from someone who is himself a dangerous mind: Greg Johnson, who runs a white-nationalist website called Counter-Currents (which is where he published the review). Subscribers to the New York Times may remember him from one of the three shocking videos accompanying the Jesse Singal report entitled ‘Undercover with the Alt-Right’: Johnson in the video argued that Jews like me should be required to move to their own ethnostate, allowing the United States to be what it by rights should be: a white ethnostate. 1 Greg Johnson’s review was 5000 words long; it took him until precisely the sixth word of this 5000-word review to identify me as Jewish. In the review he wrote the following: ‘Beiner, like many Jewish commentators, seems to feel that [Martin] Heidegger owes him a personal apology for the Holocaust.’ For Johnson, Heidegger’s ranting in the notorious Black Notebooks about a global Jewish conspiracy is not blameworthy, because Johnson himself shares the same views.
How could someone with extremist views like those held by Greg Johnson have anything to do with a humanizing discipline like philosophy? And yet Johnson in fact holds a PhD in philosophy (from Catholic University of America) – as we are informed by a report on him posted by the Southern Poverty Law Center 2 – having written a doctoral thesis on Immanuel Kant and Emmanuel Swedenborg; and he has apparently taught philosophy at a number of colleges. Evidently, Kant’s moral egalitarianism left little impression on him. Remarkably, Johnson has posted a mini-essay on the Cross-Currents site entitled ‘A Philosopher’s Education’, giving students (largely helpful) advice on how to choose philosophy programs at liberal arts institutions and celebrating the advantages of a traditional liberal education; there’s also a companion post by Johnson, on the same website, entitled ‘Graduate School with Heidegger’. Reading these intelligent blogs, one would have no reason to imagine that Johnson is anything other than a perfectly conventional humanistic scholar (which, from the abhorrent sidebars running alongside his essays, one knows he emphatically isn’t). In fact, it would be naïve to think that intellectual life can be relied upon to generate only benevolent and humanistic worldviews. Immanuel Kant gave us the immortal line, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing can ever be made straight’ (Kant, 1963: 17–18), and if the epigram is on-target, then it will inevitably encompass what goes on in the precincts of academic and intellectual life. But if that is true, then that poses a problem of pretty substantial proportions for us academics. How do we teach the canonical texts that in significant measure define our mission as educators, knowing that they often contain the potential to produce monsters?
Can one raise the largest questions in political theory and philosophy without opening a door to dangerous extremes? It has been known since Socrates, who practiced philosophy in the company of dubious figures like Critias and Alcibiades, that there is an uneasy relationship between the life of the mind and the potentially violent vortex of the political. Plato, too, played with fire by putting himself in the service of Sicilian tyrants, and he most likely wrote The Republic out of an awareness that potential tyrants are drawn to philosophy’s root-and-branch questioning of established social conventions. To this very day, there are people who read ancient texts not in spite of the fact that the ancient world embodied slavery, imperialism, and ruthless cruelty but on account of a fetishizing fascination with those very things. 3
One can’t be true to the vocation of political theory without engaging, both intellectually and pedagogically, with the most radical minds, but one must do so always with the vivid awareness that many of the thinkers who loom large within our theory canon did contribute to, even if they weren’t directly responsible for, terror and atrocity committed by those they influenced (Rousseau and Marx come immediately to mind). Of course, we could solve the problem by resolving only to teach irenic theorists such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Mill. It’s telling that even Mill himself would be mightily unhappy with that ‘solution’.
Teaching Nietzsche is particularly problematical. Undergraduates love him and hence are all too vulnerable to his seductive rhetoric. In fact, Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, openly confesses his deliberate goal of titillating and enticing the young: ‘what thrills [young men] is the sight of the zeal surrounding a cause and, so to speak, the sight of the burning match – not the cause itself. The subtler seducers therefore know how to create in them the expectation of an explosion…Reasons are not the way to win over these powder kegs!’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 106). He prided himself on being ‘dynamite’ capable of setting off unprecedented cataclysms (Kaufmann, 1968: 782). For generations, scholars of Nietzsche have tried to minimize or play down his dangerousness, but the reality is that he remains a potent resource for sinister ideologies that are currently gaining ground.
In an exchange with the Canadian political theorist George Grant, cited in my book, Leo Strauss expresses his anxieties about the dangers of popularizing Nietzsche’s philosophy: ‘Strauss strongly believed that Nietzsche was a writer of such intoxicating destructiveness that he should not be discussed in the presence of people without philosophic training: his ideas might do them harm.…Strauss said that Nietzsche had a right to think what he thought, [but] it was dubious if he ever should have written it down, and it was even further dubious that he should have ever published it’ (Christian, 1993: 281). Before rushing to assume that Strauss is exaggerating the possible hazards of exposing the young to Nietzsche’s inflammatory texts, consider Richard B. Spencer, America’s most notorious white nationalist. Spencer attended three great universities, the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Duke University, and by his own account the decisive turning-point on the path that led him to celebrity with his ‘Hail Trump’ speech soon after Trump’s election was a grad seminar on Nietzsche that he took at the second of these three universities. He famously described it, in trademark alt-right vocabulary, as his having been ‘red-pilled’ by Nietzsche. 4 When I teach a seminar on Nietzsche, is there any guarantee that a future Richard Spencer won’t be in the room?
There’s a powerful profile of Spencer (‘I See a Darkness’) by a former friend and classmate of Spencer’s named David Alm and published in 2017 in an online journal called The Point. 5 Alm discusses how Spencer would say outrageously provocative things but say them with a disarming smirk, or say them in a way that suggested that he was being ironical. As Alm began writing his story, he had a couple of phone conversations with his ex-friend: Spencer made clear that his dissembling in Chicago was a kind of Straussian esotericism (Spencer himself put it in those terms). He, as an adherent of the radical right, was in effect subject to ‘persecution’ by the decadent liberal and multicultural milieu in which he found himself (‘We’re all trapped in a multicultural, decaying world,’ Spencer said to Alm), and his smirks and irony were a way to mask his true radicalism. The dissembling via a pose of irony ended in around 2010 when Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com.: ‘I’m suggesting ideas that will change the world’; hence he decided that he should no longer cushion the harshness of what he believed in. Alm says that he allowed himself to be fooled by the pose of friendly congeniality during the time in Chicago because it was easier than facing up to the true Spencer. Alm’s concluding commentary is quite thought-provoking: ‘If we had been willing to consider [Spencer’s] worldview alongside our own, to confront our own tacit assumptions as well as his, perhaps we would have been able to better appreciate his illiberal ideas for the legitimate threat they proved to be. Maybe we would have even been able to persuade him to take a look at the world from our point of view. And maybe not.’
In any case, we would be fooling ourselves if we didn’t take with utter seriousness the Spencer trajectory, starting with Nietzsche seminars at grad school and ending with the torch-lit white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville that Spencer helped organize. (Greg Johnson, in his review, chided me and my publisher for putting Charlottesville on the cover of my book: he says that the photo of the mob of neo-Nazis besieging the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the campus of Spencer’s alma mater ‘is supposed to look sinister’. By which he meant: there is nothing intrinsically sinister about people modeling themselves after a Nazi rally.) To be sure, not many people taking seminars on the thought of Nietzsche in grad school will turn into neo-fascists. It doesn’t follow from that fact that there aren’t things in Nietzsche’s work capable of turning people into neo-fascists. This is in no way unique to Spencer; fascists from Julius Evola to Alexander Dugin today, and all of their followers, (not by accident) have always been enthusiastic Nietzscheans.
Martin Heidegger is no less worrying. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche (and to a significant degree under Nietzsche’s influence), regarded liberal democracy as a perverse and ‘de-spiritualizing’ way of life. He publicly embraced the Nazi movement and believed that it offered tremendous promise for the West’s return to spiritual health and grandeur. After the Second World War, he tried to persuade people that his commitment to Hitlerism had ceased in April 1934 when he resigned as Rector of Freiburg University; many people believed him, and some still do. But it wasn’t true. In a telling exchange of letters with Herbert Marcuse, he said that he committed himself to fascism in the cause of ‘spiritual renewal’ (Wolin, 1993: 162), and he clearly believed that spiritual renewal would indeed have been available if the Party had allowed him, rather than ideological hacks, to guide the movement. As late as the famous interview with Der Spiegel, conducted in 1966 and published ten years later, Heidegger refused to distance himself from the blatantly Nazi Rectoral Address that he delivered in 1933. In a book published in 1954, he fairly shockingly stated that the Second World War ‘decided nothing’ (Heidegger, 1968: 66), obviously because he couldn’t bring himself to accept that democracy’s defeat of fascist dictatorship was a definitive outcome. (It should be noted that Heidegger’s rhetoric of the need for an epic ‘decision’ on the part of Europe is drawn directly from Nietzsche. 6 ) These are all well-known facts, but they have done nothing to diminish the spell that Heidegger has cast, and continues to cast, over countless readers throughout the liberal world, including legions of fans and defenders within the academy.
There is one other dark aspect of the Heidegger dossier that could be mentioned and that has received less attention from students of Heidegger than it perhaps deserves. (It doesn’t get cited in my book but certainly would have been if it had come to my attention sooner.) Apparently, Heidegger copied into one of his notebooks a telling quotation from Julius Evola’s book, Revolt Against the Modern World, which appeared in a German translation in 1935. Heidegger wrote down the heading ‘race’ and then transcribed the following: ‘If a race has lost contact with what alone has and can give resistance – with the world of Beyng [a Heideggerianization of the word ‘Being’] – then the collective organisms formed from it, whatever be their size and power, sink fatefully down into the world of contingency.’ This notebook entry was brought to light by Thomas Vasek in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the end of December 2015. The intriguing possibilities opened up by this otherwise invisible intersection between Heidegger and Evola (the possibility of Heidegger ‘as a radical fascist esotericist’, as Vasek put it) actually prompted Greg Johnson to post a piece entitled ‘Notes on Heidegger and Evola’ on Counter-Currents shortly after the Vasek article appeared. Johnson concluded his blog with the following striking suggestion: ‘Heidegger’s disillusionment with National Socialism, which began in the middle of the 1930s, led him to search for a way of defining a post-totalitarian, ethnonationalist critique of globalizing, homogenizing modernity. In short, Heidegger was the first thinker of the New Right’ [emphasis added].
Nietzsche was certainly compromised by European fascism: for instance, Hitler posed for a state photograph at the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar and sent Mussolini the gift of Nietzsche’s collected works. With Heidegger, it’s much worse: he shamed the proud tradition of philosophy by wearing a Nazi uniform and giving ardently pro-Hitler speeches. Still, I don’t endorse Leo Strauss’s suggested policy concerning Nietzsche – nor did he himself observe that policy, since he obviously taught and wrote about Nietzsche. Similarly, uncompromising Heidegger critic Emmanuel Faye has controversially suggested that the hundred volumes of Heidegger’s philosophy should be moved from the history of philosophy section in university library stacks to the history of Nazism section (Faye, 2009: 319). 7 Again, this would be the wrong response, though much of what Faye writes on the subject of Heidegger is on-target. Nietzsche and Heidegger are towering thinkers, and we would be failing to educate our students about the summits of Western philosophy if we cut them out of the curriculum. Philosophy, from Plato to Spinoza to Rousseau to Marx, has always exposed the fundamental assumptions of established social and political life to radical questioning, and political theory would cease to be what it is and should be if radical thinkers (of both the left and the right) are deemed to be too dangerous to teach. We are not only citizens who have a duty to exercise prudent judgment about civic life; we are also human beings who have a duty to live fully reflective human lives. Our vocation as citizens must make us wary of the dangerous minds in our theory canon; but our vocation as reflective human beings requires dialogue with those dangerous minds, while striving to be fully alert to their dangerousness. We have to teach these books, because our students would be left under-educated in the intellectual traditions of the West if we steered clear of some of the most important books of our philosophical tradition; but that doesn’t mean that we should teach them without anxiety.
Needless to say, there are complicated scholarly debates about the intellectual legacy of these two overwhelmingly influential philosophers. The culture and intellectual life of the last century would be vastly transformed if we attempted to subtract them from that cultural and intellectual history. In fact, their influence couldn’t be effaced, even if we tried. But that certainly doesn’t mean that everyone who has read and been influenced by them is properly aware of the more dangerous aspects of their thought. When Richard Spencer reads Nietzsche, he sees things that are in fact there but that less ideological readers filter out or assume that Nietzsche couldn’t possibly have been serious about. Take slavery. In 1872, Nietzsche took it upon himself to declare the brutal truth that moderns have no wish to hear, ‘that slavery belongs to the essence of [real] culture’ (Nietzsche, 2005: 48; emphasis in original). 8 This assertion is no joke; Nietzsche is absolutely earnest about it. Fifteen years later, Nietzsche is still insisting on the same principle: ‘we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery – for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 338). As Bernhard Taureck rightly points out, ‘the endorsement of slavery is a crimson thread, running through Nietzsche’s political reflections from start to finish’ (Taureck, 2019: 91).
Or take Nietzsche’s celebrations of a caste morality. In The Antichrist he refers to it as expressive of the ‘natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank’ (Kaufmann, 1976: 644–5; emphasis in original). 9 And that’s fully consistent with what he says on that topic in other texts. In Twilight of the Idols, he condemns Christianity as ‘the [decadent] counter-movement to any [sound] morality of breeding, of race, of privilege’ (Kaufmann, 1976: 504–5), and in Beyond Good and Evil he writes that democracy came about on account of ‘the mixing of blood between masters and slaves’ (Nietzsche, 2002a: 157). Arundhati Roy, in her classic, The God of Small Things, refers back to a time ‘when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint’ (Roy, 1998: 73–4). Nietzsche, far from being shocked by a culture that so decisively rejected any kind of moral universalism, as any modern liberal would be, sides with that culture against modernity, and pronounces it to be infinitely closer to the natural order of things than anything modern. In the same vein, he writes (Beyond Good and Evil, § 263): ‘many natures have a baseness that suddenly bursts out, like dirty water, when any sort of holy vessel, any sort of treasure from a closed shrine, is carried past. It is a great achievement when the masses have finally had the feeling bred into them that they cannot touch everything, that there are holy experiences which require them to take off their shoes and keep their dirty hands away’ (Nietzsche, 2002a: 160–1).
Last but not least, there’s the intractable problem of Nietzsche’s warrant for genocide. The Antichrist, § 2, declares: ‘The weak and the failures [die Schwachen und Miβratenen] shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance’ (Kaufmann, 1976: 570; emphasis in original). This principle is announced in multiple Nietzschean texts, both unpublished and published. It’s precisely in the genocidal texts – such as Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, The Birth of Tragedy, § 4 – that we come closest to being told what groβe Politik actually means. The ‘new party of life’ will be tested in its fitness for the world-historical task assigned to it by Nietzsche by whether it can summon up the ruthlessness to exterminate those who are ‘degenerate and parasitical’ (Kaufmann, 1968: 730). And in The Will to Power, § 922, Nietzsche tells us, no less atrociously, that one can measure the extent to which ‘European pampering’ 10 is capable of being overcome by the amount of cruelty that can be applied to African ‘barbarians’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 487).
John Gray, in a review of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by English historian Tom Holland, writes: ‘Caesar killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. Across the Roman world, wailing infants could be found on the roadside, on rubbish heaps or in drains, left there to perish. Female infants who were rescued would be raised as slaves or sold to brothels. [What this bespeaks is not] simply Roman callousness [but, quoting Holland] “the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value”’ (Gray, 2019). Nietzsche’s central project was to roll the clock back to a pre-Christian dispensation – or roll it forward to a robustly post-Christian one – where the triumph of ‘Judea’ over ‘Rome’ would be reversed, and where Caesar would once again be the crowning exemplar of humanity at its highest.
This vision of things is beautifully encapsulated in what Nietzsche writes in Gay Science, § 377:
We who are homeless:…The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing: we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin ‘realities.’ We ‘conserve’ nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means ‘liberal’; we do not work for ‘progress’; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the marketplace sing of the future: their song about ‘equal rights,’ ‘a free society,’ ‘no more masters and no more servants’ has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the deepest leveling and chinoiserie); we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventures, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors…[We then get a text demanding the reinstatement of slavery that I have already quoted.] Is it not clear that with all this we are bound to feel ill at ease in an age that likes to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and the most righteous age that the sun has ever seen? (Nietzsche, 1974: 338–9)
Nietzsche was much less of an anti-Semite than Heidegger was; but that didn’t stop him from writing, in one of his last books, that ‘the Jews are the most catastrophic people of world history’ (Kaufmann, 1976: 593; emphasis in original), and that one would no more choose to associate with the first Christians than with Polish Jews: ‘they both do not smell good’ (Kaufmann, 1976: 625). Are these lines that a supposed ‘philo-Semite’ would write? (For the record, I am a descendant of Jews from precisely the vicinity to which Nietzsche refers.) Jews could rightly say of Nietzsche: With friends like this, who needs enemies?
A couple of years ago I taught an undergraduate course on politics and religion in the history of political thought. One of the texts I assigned was Nietzsche’s Antichrist, a very rich text with lots of thought-provoking ideas but also lots of truly ugly and offensive rhetoric. Sure enough, one of my students, having picked this text as the topic for his final essay, cited the book directly off a neo-Nazi website (www.nationalvanguard.org). Despite all the scholarly efforts to cleanse Nietzsche of all meaningful connections to fascism, it’s no surprise at all that contemporary Nazis love this text. (The same applies to Heidegger as well: a website called Aryanism.net offers suggested readings for people drawn to their website. Some of these are Nazi texts and some aren’t, as a lure for the unsuspecting. But among the texts on that website that decidedly are Nazi is Heidegger’s infamous Rectoral Address of 1933.)
On the cover of Hugo Drochon’s book Nietzsche’s Great Politics is a photograph of Nietzsche wearing a Prussian military uniform. It is easy to underestimate the extent to which this is integral to Nietzsche’s self-image, even if he left the Prussian nationalism behind. Nietzsche himself says so. The textual evidence is in a draft letter to Paul Rée reproduced in Rudolph Binion’s book Frau Lou. Nietzsche is furious about something Lou Salomé said to Nietzsche’s sister. He tells Rée that if a man had said to Elisabeth whatever Lou supposedly had said to her, a duel would be inevitable: ‘For I am a soldier and always will be, I can handle weapons’ (Binion, 1968: 543). The self-image captured both in the photograph and in the line in that draft letter is hard to reconcile with left-Nietzschean appropriations of Nietzsche. For just that reason it is especially important to reflect on what is left out of such appropriations.
On the other side we have the far-right appropriations, which put overwhelming emphasis on exactly the things that are absent from the leftist or liberal appropriations. The more one familiarizes oneself with the repellent discourse of the contemporary extreme right, the easier it becomes to pick up distinct echoes of Nietzschean themes and imagery. For instance, it is very hard to read Goodrick-Clarke’s book on neo-Nazi cults, Black Sun (Goodrick-Clarke, 2002), without being struck, again and again, by how Nietzsche’s work supplies – and is understood by such ideologues as supplying – an abundant reservoir of defining mythological tropes for these neo-Nazis: how he refers to ‘we Hyperboreans’ at the start of The Antichrist; how he describes the Book of Manu as an ‘absolutely Aryan work’ in a letter to Peter Gast dated 31 May 1888 (Middleton, 1969: 297–8; cf. Kaufmann, 1976: 504–5); how he talks about a return to slavery and a new caste system; how he tries to fan the sparks of a neo-pagan revival; how he denounces Judaism and Christianity as slave religions and castigates the Jewish origins of Christianity; how he resurrects Zoroaster as a symbol of anti-Christianity and mythicizes about cosmic cycles; and especially, how he offers prophecies of a race of supermen who will rescue Europe from the curse of egalitarianism.
The great test of whether one can be genuinely honest about the character of Nietzsche’s politics, and the vision of life that animates those politics, is whether one can read §§ 37–9 of ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’ in Twilight of the Idols without flinching (or without trying to pretend that he isn’t writing what he is writing). Let me present a few juicy selections, though it’s important to read the three sections in their entirety. Nietzsche begins by mocking a journal editor who is dumbfounded by Nietzsche’s elevation of Cesare Borgia to the status of an Übermensch. ‘We should be under no illusion that Cesare Borgia’s contemporaries would not laugh themselves to death at the comic spectacle of us moderns, with our thickly padded humanity, going to any length to avoid bumping into a pebble’ (Nietzsche, 2002b: 211). Nietzsche thinks that it is a mistake to believe that one can have the transcendently superior culture of the Renaissance without the imperviousness to moral scruples of the Renaissance, and modernity is inherently incapable of the former because it is inherently incapable of appreciating how culture and immorality are an inseparable package. What modernity offers is a hyper-moralized environment where ‘everyone is sick’ and ‘everyone is a nurse’: an ‘old lady morality’ where the imperative to be kind and sensitive ruins anything that might make life worth living. ‘What used to be the spice of life would be poison for us’ (Nietzsche, 2002b: 212). The liberal appeal to enhanced freedom is for Nietzsche based on a false conception of freedom: ‘nothing damages freedom more terribly or more thoroughly than liberal institutions’ (Nietzsche, 2002b: 213). If liberalism offers a false understanding of freedom, where do we look for a correct understanding of it? Nietzsche tells us very clearly: ‘war is what teaches people to be free.…Becoming indifferent to hardship, cruelty, deprivation, even to life. Being ready to sacrifice people for your cause, yourself included. Freedom means that the manly instincts which take pleasure in war and victory have gained control over the other instincts, over the instinct of “happiness,” for instance’ (Nietzsche, 2002b: 213). The appropriate test is met by warriors who ‘wipe their shoes on the miserable type of well-being that grocers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats dream about’ (Nietzsche, 2002b: 213). By what standard do we ultimately judge the pitiful horizons of life presupposed by modernity? Nietzsche again spells this out very clearly: Julius Caesar (‘the most magnificent type’)! We moderns need to be schooled by Nietzsche such that we become capable of measuring our own feebleness by seeing ourselves in the mirror of ‘those great hothouses for the strong, for the strongest type of people ever to exist, aristocratic communities in the style of Rome and Venice’ (Nietzsche, 2002b: 214). All of this is nicely encapsulated in a text in The Will to Power, § 864: ‘The honorable term for mediocre is, of course, the word “liberal”’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 462; emphasis in original).
If Heidegger is right that Nietzsche’s central teaching is that democracy = nihilism (cited in Beiner, 2018: 106), on what basis does Nietzsche believe that to be a valid conclusion? Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, § 12, offers a very clear answer to that question. ‘We suspect that things will just continue to decline, getting thinner, better-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.…In losing our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our respect for him, our hope in him and even our will to be man.…What is nihilism today if it is not that?’ (Kaufmann, 1968: 480; emphasis in original).
Nietzsche famously wrote: ‘Where are the barbarians of the twentieth century?’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 465). My view about how Nietzsche stands in relation to the Nazis, who of course supplied the horrifying answer to that question of Nietzsche’s, is captured well by something Jason Jorjani posted online when he broke with his former partner in crime, Richard Spencer. Jorjani helped found the AltRight Corporation with the lunatic idea in mind that it would contribute to the revival of an aristocratic Aryan empire centered in a reborn (de-Islamicized!) Persia. But, he lamented, Spencer turned it into ‘a magnet for white trash’. 11 Well, it occurs to me that Nietzsche would have voiced a version of the same risible complaint had he been around to witness what the vulgar rabble did with his idea of groβe Politik 33 years after his death. One can draw a similar lesson from the great Alfred Hitchcock film, Rope. 12 In it, the Leopold and Loeb characters say that the Nazis were mere vulgarians, whereas they will be the true Nietzschean aristocrats. The film teaches us that these high-minded ideas of being an Übermensch look a lot less attractive when put into practice. Interestingly, the real Leopold and Loeb were, like Spencer, students at the University of Chicago.
In an 1884 letter to his friend Malwida von Meysenbug, Nietzsche wrote the following: ‘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. Yet that is the anguish of every great teacher of mankind: he knows that, given the circumstances and the accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind’ (Middleton, 1969: 227). Here is Conor Cruise O’Brien’s perfectly apt response to that anxiety about vulgar Nietzscheanism voiced by Nietzsche himself: ‘He was sometimes frightened himself, even this most daring of thinkers. Frightened of some travesty of his thought, he said, and the gentle Nietzscheans take comfort from this. Frightened, I think myself, of what he was actually saying, and of what his messages might effect when they reached minds which were as bold in action as he was bold in thought’ (O’Brien, 1972: 63). That’s a line that may well haunt us as the politics of the far right emerges (horror-movie-like) from the grave in which we thought it was buried! In the same text (which was originally written in the late 1960s), O’Brien also remarked: it is not ‘consoling to think of what some future readers of this master may have in store for us’, as if he could already see today’s alt-right on the horizon (O’Brien, 1972: 62). In my book, I endorse Stanley Rosen’s judgment that Nietzsche, with his intended ‘destruction of Western bourgeois society’, guarantees the vulgarization that he feared – that is, himself prepares the way for his return to life in the guise of ‘a self-constructed Frankenstein’ (Rosen, 1989: 205).
For the political-philosophical tradition within which Nietzsche and Heidegger stand, the French Revolution inaugurates a moral universe where authority resides with the herd, not with the shepherd, with the mass (the ‘They’), not with the elite, and as a consequence, ultimately the whole experience of life spirals down into unbearable shallowness and meaninglessness. Ferdinand Mount, in a New York Review of Books essay on Goethe, correctly writes that Nietzsche viewed Goethe as an anticipation of the culture of the Übermensch for which Nietzsche yearned because ‘only Goethe had treated the French Revolution and the doctrine of equality with the disgust they deserved’ (Mount, 2017). National Socialism, one might say, combined Nietzsche’s doctrine of Übermenschen with Heidegger’s doctrine of the necessity of Heimat and ethnic rootedness for a properly authentic experience of the world. All of this might have seemed irrelevant during the 70 years (roughly 1945–2015) when fascism was utterly discredited. It doesn’t seem irrelevant today. On the contrary, liberal democracy seems to be increasingly on the defensive. Today we have Trumpism and Bannonism in the US; Putinism in Russia and Orbánism in Hungary; Erdoğanism in Turkey; Xiism in China; Modiism in India; Duterteism in the Philippines; Bolsonaroism in Brazil. Admittedly, none of these leaders are as bad as Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin. But at the same time, none of them are reliable guardians of liberal democracy. In the spring of 2018, Roger Cohen published a New York Times op-ed on the rise of quasi-authoritarianism in Hungary and Poland in which he quoted a former Polish Foreign Minister’s expression of disdain toward ‘those who believe history is headed inevitably toward “a new mixture of cultures and races, a world made up of cyclists and vegetarians, who only use renewable energy”’ (Cohen, 2018). The project of populist nationalists in Poland and Hungary is to defend what they take to be European Christian civilization from such pathetic wimps. This, one should not fail to recognize, is a 21st-century version of Nietzsche’s story about the last men. Here’s a little test. Ask yourself: who would be Nietzsche’s preferred political leader in the world of 2021? My suggestion is that it would almost certainly be Putin.
In Dangerous Minds, I quote Richard Spencer’s boast that what distinguishes the alt-right from the conventional conservatives despised by Spencer and by other members of the white-nationalist intelligentsia is that ‘we actually read books’. What are the books that they read? In my book I also quote a book review of a Jason Jorjani book on a far-right website (Greg Johnson’s website, in fact) that sketches the alt-right ‘canon’: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, and Alexander Dugin (see Beiner, 2018: 12). The one surprising omission from this list is Julius Evola, since he should certainly be on the list. In any case, it should be cause for at least some measure of concern that the first three philosophers listed in this canon of the ultra-right are also warmly embraced by the academic left. In 1920s Germany, there was something called ‘the Conservative Revolution’, a label given post-war currency by Armin Mohler, a far-right intellectual. Such conservative revolutionism is now back, in the guise of De Benoist, Dugin, and Steve Bannon. De Benoist, Dugin, and many others are intensely conscious of their movement being a resumption of intellectual trends from Weimar Germany in the run-up to Hitler, and the books being promoted by far-right outlets like Arktos, Radix, and Counter-Currents are a reflection of that. 13 In fact, Arktos runs a video podcast called ‘Interregnum’ – a familiar radical-right trope. What it means is that we are currently inhabiting a liberal interregnum guaranteed to come to an end with an eventual resumption of pre-1945 fascism. Liberal modernity is going down the drain, or self-destructing, just as Nietzsche and Julius Evola said it would, and the fascist vanguard is preparing the cultural ground (what they call ‘meta-politics’) for the new dispensation to come. Thomas Mann hit the nail on the head when he wrote: ‘Nietzsche himself was from the beginning…nothing other than Conservative Revolution.’ 14 What I’m suggesting in this essay (and in my book) is that we probably ought to be putting some effort into trying to grasp how some of our favorite authors are being read by people on the far right, since it should help us come to a better understanding of more sinister aspects of their thought that get missed in, or are brushed off by, liberal and leftist appropriations of them. That maybe wasn’t such an urgent task when fascism appeared to be safely deposited in the trash-bin of history. It’s looking more and more urgent today.
Politics – including theorizing about politics insofar as it generates ideas that have effects of various sorts within the political world – always has the potential to generate havoc, or worse. The stakes are perhaps particularly high in a political world as unsettled as ours: where technological change is so head-spinningly rapid; where the boundaries between different societies and cultures are being renegotiated on such an epic scale; where the internet lets loose political passions so little inhibited by norms of civility; and where until recently the most powerful man on the planet was someone as volatile as Donald Trump. What we call the liberal arts, or liberal education, are upheld by a kind of faith that engaging with ideas will indeed contribute to a more liberal, more generous-minded, moral consciousness. As a scholar and an educator, I’m not ready to surrender that faith in the humanizing power of the humanities. On the other hand, how can my confidence in the vocation of theory not be shaken a little (or more than a little) when I read the chilling words that conclude Greg Johnson’s review of my book? [Beiner] did not anticipate what would happen if his book fell into the hands of Rightist readers like me. Dangerous Minds…is a very helpful introduction to Nietzsche and Heidegger as anti-liberal thinkers. Thus I recommend it highly. And if I have anything to say about it, this book will help create a whole lot more dangerous minds, a whole new generation of Right-wing Nietzscheans and Heideggerians.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.