Nietzsche--Aristocratic Radical or Aristocratic Liberal?

Bruce Detwiler's Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 1990) is the best single study of Nietzsche as a political philosopher.

I have three reasons for saying that.  First, Detwiler makes a good case for aristocratic radicalism as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  Second, he recognizes that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Third, Detwiler concludes his book with some of the best criticisms of Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism.

My step beyond Detwiler is to argue that the political teaching of the middle period is superior--morally, politically, and intellectually--to the political teaching of the early and late writings, because the teaching of the middle period is rooted in a Darwinian anthropology that supports an aristocratic liberalism that escapes the criticisms that Detwiler directs at Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism.

In November of 1887, the Danish scholar George Brandes wrote a letter to Nietzsche praising his writings and endorsing his "aristocratic radicalism."  Nietzsche responded by accepting this label: "The expression Aristocratic Radicalism, which you employ, is very good.  It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself."  Detwiler's insight was to adopt this expression as the best term for conveying Nietzsche's political teaching.  On the one hand, Nietzsche was not an "aristocratic conservative," because he was an atheistic radical in affirming the death of God and the death of all ultimate standards.  On the other hand, Nietzsche was not an "egalitarian radical," because he was aristocratic in affirming that there was an order of rank by which one could recognize a few human beings as "higher men" who deserve to rule over the inferior majority of human beings.  Nietzsche thus became "the first avowed atheist of the far Right" (189-90). 

This is, I think, Leo Strauss's Nietzsche as initiating the "third wave of modernity" that led to fascism and National Socialism (see 83-84).  The Straussian influence on Detwiler could have come through Werner Dannhauser, who directed Detwiler's dissertation at Cornell.

The fundamental idea of aristocratic radicalism is that "Nietzsche's response to the demise of all ultimate ends is to make the highest human being the ultimate end" (191), and that highest human being is the Dionysian artist-philosopher who exercises his will to power by tyrannically legislating new values for all of humanity.  This is most clearly expressed in Beyond Good and Evil and The Will to Power.  European democracy must ultimately transform itself into "a new and sublime development of slavery," in which the "herd animal" is enslaved to the "leader animal" (WP, 954, 956).  Thus, "the democratization of Europe is . . . an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants--taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual" (BGE, 242).

This tyrannical rule of the artist-philosophers will require "conscious breeding experiments," "terrible means of compulsion," and even "the annihilation of millions of failures."  This is necessary for the "domination of the earth" by a "new, tremendous aristocracy . . . in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millenia," and the rule of this "new caste" over Europe will unify it into "one will" (BGE, 208, 251; WP, 764, 954, 960, 964).

But after showing how this aristocratic radicalism constitutes the fundamental political teaching in all of Nietzsche's early and late writings, Detwiler admits (in chapter 8) that this teaching is contradicted by Nietzsche's apparent endorsement of liberal democracy in his middle writings--especially, Human, All Too Human and The Wanderer and His Shadow.  In this middle period, Nietzsche was committed to a modern natural science of history in which the highest life is the dispassionate pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake.  This free-spirited science refutes the metaphysical and religious claims to superhuman authority that have supported the traditional state's legitimacy in subordinating individuals to its rule.  Consequently, the state as "a mysterium, a supernatural institution" must disappear, and increasingly individuals will judge the state as either useful or harmful to them (HH, 472).  This favors modern liberal democracy, which claims no superhuman authority, because it is understood as merely instrumental to the security and freedom of the individuals that it serves.

This conception of the liberal state defended in the middle period contradicts the aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche's early and late writings, because this latter requires "a new kind of superhuman authority"--the superhuman authority of the Superman or the artist-philosopher who must create a new religion for humanity.  Here the indispensable goal is "the establishment of a sense of devotion to the superhuman in a world without God" (187-88).

Detwiler sees no way around this contradiction--"in the middle period, Nietzsche appears to turn suspiciously against himself" (183).  The contrast with the rest of his writing is stark:

"Although there is little enthusiasm for democracy in The Wanderer and His Shadow, there is no advocacy of new ruling castes or master races or conscious breeding experiments, and there is no talk about the domination of the earth or the annihilation of millions of failures or about philosophers working as artists upon men to produce a higher sovereign species.  Indeed, democracy does not appear as a new, subtle form of slavery in The Wanderer and His Shadow; rather, democracy appears as a bulwark 'against physical and spiritual enslavement,' and as that which sees 'independence for as many as possible.'" (177-78)
 

Well, yes, I would say, and doesn't this show the superiority of the middle Nietzsche over the early and late Nietzsche?  Isn't it sensible not to advocate master races, breeding experiments, the annihilation of millions of human beings, and the creation of artistic-philosophical tyrants?  Isn't it reasonable to defend democracy if it can protect us "against physical and spiritual enslavement" and promote "independence for as many as possible"?

Detwiler doesn't consider this possibility.  Nor does he consider the importance of Nietzsche's Darwinism in his middle period as shaping his aristocratic liberalism during that period.

And yet, Detwiler does indicate the serious problems with Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism.  At the end of his book, he offers five criticisms of Nietzsche.  First, he suggests that Nietzsche shows "an impoverished sensibility" when he denies that the lives of most human beings have any value--that "the majority of mortals" are "physiologically deformed and deranged," and that "a people is a detour of nature to get six or seven great men" (GM, 3.1; BGE, 126).  It shows a strange blindness to the reality of human experience to say that there is nothing worthwhile in the ordinary lives of ordinary human beings (193-94).

Detwiler's second criticism is that Nietzsche never offers a convincing argument for his claim that life is will to power.  He offers no empirical proof for this as either a metaphysical or psychological hypothesis (194-95).  In fact, much of what Nietzsche says about the will to power is clearly deficient as an account of human experience.  As one can see, for example, when he claims that love is just will to power, because love is "at bottom, the deadly hatred of the sexes" (EH, "Why I Write Such Good Books," 5).

His third criticism is that Nietzsche's teaching that the human drives are totally chaotic with no innate order at all is empirically false (195).  Surely, the human drives show neither total harmony nor total disorder.  Even if we are the "undetermined animal," in that nature does not perfectly define or arrange our drives, and thus psychic definition or arrangement depends on social culture and individual choices, it is still likely that there is "a significant level of innate order among the drives, and even a significant level of order common to all human beings."  By totally separating art from nature, Nietzsche makes his Dionysian philosopher an omnipotent god.  But this denies what we know by experience as to how human nature puts limits or constraints on human art.

Detwiler's fourth criticism is his questioning of whether Nietzsche is correct in asserting that all gods have died, and therefore that all the foundations of morality in the Western world are gone (195).  Is it possible that Nietzsche has not properly understood the foundations of Western morality?

Detwiler's fifth criticism is that Nietzsche's immoralism is so excessive in its immoderation that we should all rightly reject it because it is so disturbing (195-96).

My response to all of this is to point out that in the writings of his middle period, Nietzsche embraced a Darwinian liberalism that escaped all five of these criticisms.

First, his Darwinan liberalism recognized human inequality and the excellence of those few human beings who devote themselves to scientific and philosophic inquiry, but it also recognized the dignity or worth of ordinary human beings living ordinary lives that can display some of the beauty and sweetness of human life.  Darwinian liberalism affirmed the individual freedom of a liberal society as the primary condition for the diverse expression of human excellence at all levels of human potentiality. 

Second, Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism did not try to explain all life as will to power, although it did recognize the drive for domination and warn about the need to control it. 

Third, Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism recognized "a significant level of innate order among the drives, and even a significant level of order common to all human beings."  Nietzsche's Darwinian science saw that evolved human nature constrains but does not determine human culture, and that human nature and human culture together constrain but do not determine human judgment.  Our natural desires--perhaps the twenty natural desires that I have identified--constitute an innate order that is universal to the human species, although there is cultural and individual variation in the particular expressions of that universal human nature.  Consequently, a Darwinian political science requires a complex study of the interaction of natural history, cultural history, and individual history.  Although  the innate order of the human drives does not precisely determine the moral and political orders of human life, it is not true that those human drives are so completely chaotic as to impose no constraints at all on a supposedly superhuman Dionysian philosophy.  Indeed, Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism denies that any human being can claim to be "superhuman" (ubermenschlich), because we are all human, all too human.

Fourth, Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism denies that all the foundations of Western morality have collapsed, because it affirms the reality of human morality as rooted in evolved human nature.  And while Darwinian liberalism allows for religious belief as a possible support for morality, it does not make such religious belief indispensable for moral and political life.

Fifth, Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism denies immoralism by affirming the natural moral sense as a product of human evolution.

Finally, as I have indicated in some previous posts, Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism is based on a Darwinian anthropology that is open to empirical verification or falsification, while his aristocratic radicalism is based on mythopoetic fictions--the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Ubermensch, and Dionysian religiosity--that are beyond empirical testing.

From all of this, I conclude that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism.

Some of my other posts on Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism are here, here, and here.

A Thousand Posts (5)

2013
This was the year of my Darwinian Grand Tour--from Chicago to the Galapagos to Houston to Atlanta to Freiburg, and a few places in between. 

In April, I presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Convention in Chicago on "Nietzsche's Darwinian Liberalism." 

In June, I was travelling in Peru, Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands.  The trip to the Galapagos began with a week-long yacht tour of five of the larger islands, followed by a week in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on the island of San Cristobal, where I participated in the Mont Pelerin Society meetings on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty."  For those MPS meetings, I wrote a paper on "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism." 

In October, I lectured at Lone Star College-Kingwood, where John Barr was teaching a remarkable course entitled "The Emancipators: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and the Making of the Modern World." 

Also in October, I spoke at the Philadelphia Society meeting on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things" in Atlanta. 

In December, I went to Freiburg, Germany, where I lectured for a workshop on "Liberalism and the Evolutionary Agenda," organized by Ulrich Witt, the Director of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max Planck Institute (Jena). 

I saw the MPS meetings and the Freiburg workshop as especially important moments in the recent intellectual history of evolutionary classical liberalism.

January 1 was the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and so I began the year with a post on "Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in Evolutionary History," in which I showed how Lincoln's classical liberalism was based on an evolutionary understanding of human history.

Then, I wrote a long series of posts on Nietzsche (from January to April, in September, and in December).  This work on Nietzsche was connected with my graduate seminar on Nietzsche that I taught in the fall semester.

My main argument is that the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period (1878-1882)--particularly, Human, All Too Human (1878)--is superior to Nietzsche's earlier and later writings. 

I first began to see this from my reading of Lou Salome's book on Nietzsche, the first book ever written on Nietzsche, and in some ways still the best book.  Lou had insights that came from her brief friendship with Nietzsche (April to October, 1882), when Nietzsche repeatedly proposed marriage, and she turned him down.  She saw that once Nietzsche broke off his friendships with her and Paul Ree, he moved away from the evolutionary science that dominated his middle period.

The Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period is morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the mythic metaphysics of his early and late writings.  This Darwinian science is morally superior because it promotes a sober morality of moderation that restrains tendencies to intoxicated extremism.  This science is politically superior because it promotes a prudent respect for liberal democracy that restrains tendencies to tyrannical power-seeing.  And this science is intellectually superior because it can be grounded in empirical evidence and methodical reasoning rather than the delusions of enthusiastic fantasizing.  In contrast to the Darwinian science of the middle period, the distinctive teachings of the late Nietzsche--the will to power, eternal return, and the Ubermensch--are morally corrupting, politically dangerous, and intellectually confused.

In Nietzsche's later writings, we can see how the Darwinian refutation of the universe as a moral cosmology provoked a turn to art and an atheistic religiosity as mythmaking to escape from this "deadly truth."

The attraction of Nietzsche's later writings and rejection of the free-spirited evolutionary science of his middle period is evident among the Nazis and the Straussians.

I wrote a series of posts on Nietzsche's "Sociobiology of Animal Morality" and on his "Aristocratic Liberalism."

I use the term "aristocratic liberalism" to convey the thought that while a liberal regime secures equal liberty under the rule of law, it also thereby secures inequality of results in allowing for "the natural aristocracy of virtues and talents" (as Thomas Jefferson called it).  Aristocratic liberalism can thus combine the ancient concern for social virtue and the modern concern for individual liberty.  The aristocratic liberalism of Nietzsche's middle period is in contrast to the aristocratic anti-liberalism of his later writings.

Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism can be sketched out as four affirmations and four negations:  affirming constitutional democracy, liberal pluralism, religious liberty, and cosmopolitan globalization, while denying socialist statism, "great politics," anti-Semitism, and atheistic religiosity.

Nietzsche's evolutionary aristocratic liberalism is very similar to what Douglass North and his colleagues identify as the modern "open access society," which was the subject of a post in April.

Also in April, I defended Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism in his middle period as superior to the aristocratic radicalism that Bruce Detwiler saw in Nietzsche's later period.  Detwiler failed to see that his good criticisms of Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism don't apply to Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism.  Detwiler also failed to see how that aristocratic liberalism was rooted in the Darwinian science that Nietzsche embraced in his middle period.

I also pointed out that Strauss failed to see how his account of Nietzsche as surfing the "third wave of modernity" that led to Nazism does not apply to the Darwinian liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings.

In the first half of July, I wrote a series of 6 posts as "An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos" that was based on my tour of the islands on the Cormorant.  (In early February of 2017, I did a second tour of the Galapagos on the Cormorant; and I wrote another series of 12 posts on "Thinking About Galapagos.")

In the second half of July, I wrote a series of 14 posts on the lectures and discussions at the Mont Pelerin Society conference.  The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1946 by Friedrich Hayek as an organization for people who wanted to think about classical liberalism in the modern world.  Hayek saw classical liberalism as rooted in an evolutionary science of liberty and spontaneous order.  In recent years, there has been growing interest in how contemporary sociobiology and evolutionary science might apply to Hayek's evolutionary conception of liberalism.  This was the concern of the MPS meetings in the Galapagos, which brought together some of the leading evolutionary scientists and classical liberal thinkers. 

In my paper for the conference--"The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism"--I argued that evolutionary moral psychology has largely confirmed the truth of the liberalism defended by Adam Smith and Hayek.  But I also argued that Hayek's socialist "atavism" thesis--that socialism appeals to our evolved instincts, but liberalism does not--is mistaken.  I made the same argument at the Freiburg workshop.

From the end of July into the first week of August, I wrote a series of 6 posts on the book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension, edited by Stephen Dilley, which had recently been published by Lexington Books.  Of the 13 authors in this book, 9 are opponents of Darwinian classical liberalism, and most of their criticisms are directed at me.  2 of the authors seem neutral, and 2 seem to be defenders (somewhat) of Darwinian liberalism.

The argument that seems to be embraced by the nine critics can be called Dilley's Syllogism, because it's stated by Dilley in his introductory chapter:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

Consequently, the nine critics are proponents of what they call "Christian classical liberalism" or "theistic classical liberalism."  They also identify this with the liberal political thought of the American founders, and so they defend "the rich theistic classical liberalism embodied in the American founding."  I have inserted "Lockean" into the syllogism because the nine critics generally appeal to John Locke as "the quintessential classical liberal," although they also often identify Adam Smith as a paradigmatic classical liberal.

The nine critics say that they are attacking "Darwinian conservatism," which "integrates a Darwinian conception of human nature with the essentials of classical liberalism, drawing on the work of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and others."  They identify the most prominent proponents of Darwinian conservatism as me, Thomas Sowell, Robert McShea, James Q. Wilson, Michael Shermer, and Francis Fukuyama.  Most of their attacks, however, are directed at me.

Most of the nine critics are associated with the Discovery Institute, and most of what they say conforms to the famous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute, which lays out a strategy for saving Christian civilization from the moral and political degradation promoted by Darwinian science, a strategy that depends on "intelligent design theory" as the alternative to Darwinian evolution.

In my series of posts, I answer their criticisms.

One of my posts on the MPS meetings was on Richard Wrangham's lecture on his "chimpanzee model" for explaining the evolution of war.  This is part of an intense debate among biologists and social scientists over whether Hobbes was right that the state of nature is a state of war or whether Rousseau was right that it was a state of peace.  Those on the Hobbesian side think that war has been natural for chimpanzees and human foragers.  Those on the Rousseauean side deny this. 

Although I agree with Wrangham and lean towards the Hobbesian side, I argue that the opponents in this debate end up agreeing on a position that is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauean but Lockean.  Thus does the evolutionary anthropology of war and peace confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of government.  Hobbes was partly right.  Rousseau was mostly wrong. And Locke was mostly right.  I wrote posts on this in August and September.  (This became part of my paper "The Biopolitical Science of Locke's State of Nature" that I presented at the 2015 meetings of the American Political Science Association.)

I have written a long series of posts on the evolution of war among chimps and humans (August of 2013, September and November of 2014, June of 2015, January of 2016).

In September and October, I wrote about my participation in the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Atlanta on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things."

In my lecture, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not permanent is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.

That’s not enough, however, for a metaphysical conservatism that appeals to a transcendent moral cosmology of eternal order as intelligently designed by the Creator.

This contrast between evolutionary conservatism and metaphysical conservatism was displayed in the debate between Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk at the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. 

At the Philadelphia Society meeting, I was disturbed by how many of the speakers assumed a divine command theory of ethics, so that we cannot know what is right or wrong except by obeying God's commands, particularly in the Hebrew Bible.  As I suggested in my remarks, this is dangerous, because it would mean accepting slavery and the brutal despotism of Mosaic law.

Almost all of the speakers at the meeting were uncritical in their praise of Kirk.  The only critics were me and Alan Charles Kors.  Kors is a prominent historian at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his studies of the intellectual history of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.  Kors defended the French Enlightenment, which was a bold move before an audience of Kirkian conservatives.  I defended Friedrich Hayek's evolutionary conservatism as an alternative to Kirk's metaphysical conservatism.

Kors and I were in complete agreement.  That might seem odd, particularly since Hayek presented his Burkean evolutionary conservatism as rooted in the British and Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the French Enlightenment. 

But Kors argued that what Burkean conservatives criticize as the excesses of the French Revolution--the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror--manifest the intellectual legacy of Rousseau rather than the philosophes.  After all, Rousseau was a vehement opponent of the philosophes.  Leaders of the French Enlightenment like Voltaire and Montesquieu opposed every form of despotism and supported the tolerance, liberty, and commercial spirit that they saw in Great Britain.  Robespierre's "Republic of Virtue" was inspired not by the thought of Voltaire or Montesquieu but by Rousseau's Social Contract.  For example, Robespierre's "Religion of the Supreme Being" was explicitly an attempt to enforce Rousseau's teaching that all citizens must embrace a deistic religion, and that neither atheists nor Christians can be true citizens.

In his speech, Kors often referred to Hayek in ways that suggested that most of French Enlightenment thought was in agreement with Hayek's evolutionary liberalism, which I defended in my speech.

In December, I wrote 6 posts on the Freiburg workshop on liberalism and evolution.

One of the benefits for me of this workshop was that it helped me to think through my ambivalence about Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.  I am persuaded by Hayek's claim that Darwinian science supports the fundamental idea of classical liberalism that social order--including morals, markets, and laws--can arise as a largely spontaneous  or unintended order from the interactions of individuals acting to satisfy their individual desires.  But I am not persuaded by Hayek's account of exactly how cultural evolution produces the modern liberal order. 

My conclusion is that we need to see how Darwinian science corrects the mistakes in Hayek's account while confirming Hayek's insight about how liberal thought can be rooted in an evolutionary science of spontaneous order.  Naomi Beck was one of the participants in the workshop, and I saw her critique of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism as reinforcing this conclusion.

At least half or more of the participants were proponents of Hayekian classical liberalism who were interested in the possibility of grounding liberalism in evolutionary science, although they were unsure as to whether Hayek was correct in the details of his evolutionary theory of liberalism.  A few of the participants--including Beck--were opponents of Hayek and of liberalism in general.  This was similar to the situation at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in the Galapagos Islands last summer, where much of the discussion turned on the assessment of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.

In the discussions at the MPS meetings and at the Freiburg workshop, I criticized Hayek’s suggestion that the market order requires a suppression of our natural human desires.  This is what I have identified as Hayek’s Freudian theory of human evolution, in which civilization requires the repression of our evolved human instincts.  Here is where Hayek’s argument for liberalism becomes incoherent.  

If a liberal society is so painful because it requires the suppression of our deepest natural instincts, why does it succeed?  And if a socialist society satisfies our deepest natural instincts, why does it fail?  

As I have indicated in various posts, I see the same incoherence in the “mismatch theory” of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.  At the MPS meeting, Cosmides and Tooby indicated their agreement with Hayek on this point.  At times, they seemed to say that Karl Marx was right about the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherers, but at other times, they seemed to say that Marx was wrong, because even hunter-gatherers show only conditional sharing or reciprocation, and therefore their sharing is not indiscriminate.  Moreover, Tooby and Cosmides seemed to agree with John Locke and Adam Smith in seeing trading behavior in hunter-gatherers that would provide the natural basis for the modern commercial society.

At the Freiburg workshop, I agreed with Naomi Beck in criticizing Hayek for not reading Darwin and considering his theory of cultural evolution.  Remarkably, Hayek in The Fatal Conceit dismisses Darwin as having nothing important to say about cultural evolution, although Hayek never cites Darwin, and thus leaves the reader with the suspicion that Hayek never read Darwin. 

Darwin's Descent of Man offers an elaborate account of the evolution of morality that should have been important for Hayek.  Darwin presents the evolution of morality as moving through three interacting levels--natural instincts, cultural traditions, and individual reason.  To me, this seems more reasonable than Hayek's attempt to deny instinct and reason in elevating culture as the only ground of morality.  That was one of my arguments in my paper for the Freiburg workshop.

A portion of my Freiburg paper was published in the Journal of Bioeconomics (2015) 17:3-15.  I reprinted this as a post in May of 2015.

I have written many posts on how Darwinian biology supports Aristotelian teleology. One of the best of these posts was written in September with the title "The Biological Teleology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand."  It highlights the remarkable work of Allan Gotthelf in showing how Darwinian evolutionary biology restored Aristotelian teleology to biology and thus showed how modern biology can sustain Aristotelian natural right.  Strauss claimed that the "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."  Gotthelf demonstrated that Strauss was mistaken about this.

In October and November, I wrote some posts on the foolishness of longing for immortality and the wisdom of Wallace Stevens' insight that "death is the mother of beauty."

I also wrote some posts on music--Wagner's Die Meistersinger (February) and Parsifal (November) and Handel's Messiah (December).

How Nietzsche Conquered America: Ratner-Rosenhagen and the False Dichotomy of Absolutism and Nihilism

In 1987, Allan Bloom published an article in The Wilson Quarterly on "How Nietzsche Conquered America," an article based on excerpts from his book The Closing of the American Mind.  The article and the book elaborated Leo Strauss's argument that Friedrich Nietzsche had initiated a "third wave of modernity" that had created a "crisis of liberal democracy" by promoting a nihilism or value relativism that made it impossible to defend modern liberalism.  Bloom offered an intellectual history of how Nietzsche's thought had permeated American culture in a manner that subverted American liberal democracy.  He asked "Why, then, could ideas contrary to American ideals so easily take root?"

Now, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, in her book American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (University of Chicago Press, 2012), has extended Bloom's project by laying out the most detailed intellectual history of Nietzsche's reception by Americans that has ever been written.

Despite their differing points of view, Bloom, Strauss, and Ratner-Rosenhagen agree in framing their account of Nietzsche's influence in America within a sharp intellectual alternative--absolutism or nihilism.  They thus fail to consider the possibility that this is a false dichotomy and that Nietzsche himself suggested a third possibility in the writings of his middle period--particularly in Human, All Too Human.

Strauss says that until recently all known ideals--including the ideals of American liberalism--"claimed to have an objective support: in nature or in god or in reason."  But now Nietzsche's historicist relativism makes it impossible for us to believe in any absolute objective standards rooted in Nature, God, or Reason, because we see that all standards are human creations or cultural projects with no eternal grounding.  To see this is to fall into the abyss of nihilism by seeing that there is no real grounding for our standards at all, which become purely arbitrary products of individual will or cultural invention.  This is what Nietzsche means by his warning about the dangerous consequences of recognizing that "God is dead."

Similarly, Ratner-Rosenhagen sees Nietzsche as teaching "anti-foundationalism" and thus denying the traditional "foundationalist" claims that our moral, political, and intellectual standards can be grounded on the cosmic foundations of the eternal order of nature, God, or reason.  This anti-foundationalist thinking denies the traditional support for American liberal democracy as grounded on "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."  This becomes part of Nietzsche's attack on liberal democracy and his advocacy of a new anti-democratic aristocracy that will create a new set of values for a new nobility.  But as she indicates, many of the Americans who have embraced Nietzsche's anti-foundationalism--like Richard Rorty, for example--want to hold onto American liberal democracy, even as they admit that it has no objective support.

Nietzsche and Bloom denounced the decadence coming from moral relativism in liberal democracy--the dehumanizing decadence of "last men" who have no transcendent longings for anything high or noble.  For Bloom, this was confirmed by his students, who showed "souls without longings."  For Nietzsche, the only escape from this liberal democratic decadence was to create a new antiliberal aristocracy of supermen who would rule tyrannically over the earth.

Ratner-Rosenhagen rejects Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism and defends the nobility of liberal democracy, but her reasoning for this position is vague.  She seems to see a "persistent longing for meaning in a world without foundations" (146).  Bloom himself "wanted transcendence," but "for an author so critical of relativism's ill effects, Bloom gave little discussion to the virtue of moral absolutes" (309-10).  Bloom "admired Nietzsche for the way he turned to the resources in himself to fight the nihilistic implications of his own relativism" (311).  But while Nietzsche's fight against nihilism required creating a new aristocratic caste to rule the earth as tyrants exercising master morality, Ratner-Rosenhagen and Bloom seem to be looking for a liberal democratic alternative, but they never explain exactly how this would work.

In the final lines of her book, Ratner-Rosenhagen writes: "Nietzsche, who took Emerson as his educator, understood what an education after absolutes might look like.  It would provoke, not instruct, young souls to shoot arrows of longing over the yawning resentiment of intellectual belatedness, and over the abyss of antifoundationalism.  That longing, from Emerson to Nietzsche and indeed down to Bloom, is a longing worth longing for" (312).

So it's good for us to have a longing for longing?  A longing for what?  For absolutes?  No, because we should know that there are no absolutes.  If it's not absolutes, then what's the target for our "arrows of longing"?  Ratner-Rosenhagen doesn't say.

If our choice is between foundationalist absolutism and antifoundationalist nihilism, and if we must reject the first as clearly false, then I don't see how we can shoot any arrows of longing over the abyss of nihilism except through some delusional belief in absolutes.

In recent years, I have written many posts arguing that the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human and other writings of his middle period escapes this false dichotomy of absolutism versus nihilism.  I have also argued that the Darwinian aristocratic liberalism of Human, All Too Human is more sensible than the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of the early and late Nietzsche. 

Ratner-Rosenhagen does not consider this possibility because she does not see the distinctiveness of Nietzsche's middle writings.  Nietzsche's friend Lou Salome was the first commentator to see the differences between the early, middle, and late Nietzsche, and to see that the middle Nietzsche was the most defensible Nietzsche.  Ratner-Rosenhagen acknowledges this analysis of Nietzsche's writing into three stages in a brief footnote (352, n. 77), but she ignores this point throughout her book.

Instead of assuming that the only choice is between absolutism and nihilism, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human recognizes that the natural historical science of evolution allows us to understand the changing but enduring order of evolving life.  This Nietzsche accepts a Darwinian evolutionary psychology in which human nature is understood as shaped by prehistoric evolutionary history, so that human nature is enduring but not eternal.  Consequently, "there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths."  But there are "humble truths" that are discoverable by the strict methods of modern evolutionary science (HATH, 1-3).

This evolutionary science of Human, All Too Human supports liberal democracy as the political regime that secures the individual liberty that allows for the fullest satisfaction of the evolved natural desires of human beings.  The purpose of the state is to protect individuals from one another (HATH, 235), which protects the majority from the tyranny of the minority, while also protecting the few (including "free spirits" like Nietzsche) from the tyranny of the majority.  This allows for the emergence of a higher culture in which free spirits can develop their superior talents without tyrannizing over others (HATH, 438-39).

Previously, Nietzsche indicates, the state claimed a transcendent religious authority to exercise absolute paternalistic rule over the people.  But now liberal democratic states claim no such transcendent authority, because they secure individual liberty, which includes the liberty for religious belief as part of private life free from governmental interference.  By contrast, Nietzsche warns against socialist regimes as tyrannical in claiming absolute state power, which will require brutal reigns of terror (HATH, 472-73).

Ratner-Rosenhagen notices that the first translations of Nietzsche's texts in America were published in Benjamin Tucker's periodical Liberty, beginning in 1892 and 1893.  Liberty was the leading American journal for advocating individualist anarchism and libertarianism.  It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the translations of Nietzsche in the journal were passages from Human, All Too Human.  The longest single passage was a complete translation of sections 472-473 of Human, All Too Human, which argued for limiting the power of the state and rejecting socialism (in Liberty, January 7, 1893).  At the same time, however, Tucker recognized that Nietzsche in his later writings turned away from the liberal individualism of his middle writings and embraced an illiberal stance that supported tyrannical statism (see Liberty, July, 1899).  Thus, Tucker saw how the aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche's later writings could be appropriated by right-wing statists.

Ratner-Rosenhagen notices Tucker's ambivalence about Nietzsche, but she doesn't notice how this arises from the contrast between the liberal individualism of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human and the illiberal statism of his later writings (37-39).  Moreover, she does not notice how Nietzsche's liberalism was rooted in the Darwinian science of Human, All Too Human.

The recent revival and elaboration of Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests the possibility of appealing to advances in Darwinian science as supporting Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism.

Many of my points here have been elaborated in previous posts that can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The complete archive of Tucker's Liberty can be found online.

Nietzsche's Darwinian Aristocratic Liberalism

In a long series of posts earlier this year (from January to April), I argued that the Darwinian aristocratic liberalism of Friedrich Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human (1878) is superior to the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his later writings.  If Nietzsche had written only Human, All Too Human, Hitler and the Nazis would never have adopted him as their philosopher, because he would have been seen as a proponent of classical liberalism in the tradition of Eugen Richter (the leading German liberal in the Second Reich).

Now I am again reading Human, All Too Human for my graduate seminar on Nietzsche, and I am again amazed that the scholars of Nietzsche's political thought give almost no attention to section 8 of that book--"A Glance at the State."  This is the longest section in all of Nietzsche's writings in which he speaks about political institutions, and it's his strongest endorsement of liberal democracy. 

By contrast, in his later writings, he scorns liberalism as "herd-animalization" that "undermines the will to power" (Twilight of the Idols,  "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," 38).  This is the Nietzsche embraced by Leo Strauss as leading the "third wave of modernity" in provoking the "crisis of liberalism," because he sees that liberalism promotes a base hedonism and egalitarianism that has no place for human excellence.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche defends an aristocratic liberalism based on the idea that a liberal culture cultivates human moral and intellectual excellence, including the Socratic life of the "free spirits" who live only for scientific inquiry.  In "A Glance at the State," his reasoning for this can be summarized as six affirmations and six rejections.

Affirming liberal democracy (438).  Nietzsche accepts the modern triumph of democracy as combining democratic government, freedom of speech, and cultural pluralism.  This liberal freedom protects the life of the Socratic free spirits, who are free to speak in public, although they normally prefer to live a private life of theoretical inquiry.  All political parties are demagogic in their crude appeal to the masses, but this demagogic politics is no threat to the Socratic free spirits who enjoy the freedom of a liberal society.

Affirming cultural aristocracy, but not political aristocracy (439, 465, 480).  A liberal society allows for the emergence of free spirits as "higher men," who  constitute a cultural aristocracy, but not a political aristocracy, because they do not wish to rule politically.

Affirming the separation of church and state and the privatization of religion (472).  Previously, governments were legitimated by divine right, by some claim that political authority was sanctioned by some religious or metaphysical cosmology.  In a liberal regime, political authority arises by popular consent without any need for metaphysical claims.  Metaphysical or religious beliefs become purely private matters, and there's a multiplicity of religious sects that are free to compete with one another.

Affirming limited government and the "decline of the state" (472-73).  Since a liberal government makes no transcendent claims, it is limited in its ends, so limited that much of its work can be taken over by private contractors, and thus state power declines.

Affirming cosmopolitan globalization and liberal peace (475).  Global capitalism promotes international trade in ways that foster a cosmopolitan culture and peace among nations, because warfare seems unnecessarily disruptive to global commerce.

Affirming cultural evolution as a largely spontaneous order separated from the state (465, 474, 480).  "Culture owes its highest achievements to politically weakened times."  Liberalism separates culture from the state, and this fosters the moral and intellectual excellence of human beings by freeing them from political regimentation.

Rejecting socialism (452, 473).  Nietzsche forecasts that socialist states will have to employ terrorism in subjugating all citizens to absolute rule, which will provoke a reaction for reducing state power.  Socialism degrades cultural life by suppressing outstanding individuals.

Rejecting nationalism (475, 480).  In Nietzsche's day, the nationalist parties were the opponents of the socialist parties.  He rejects both because both use state power for the regimentation of culture, which denies the individual freedom necessary for the evolution of higher culture.

Rejecting militaristic "great politics" (442, 481).  In contrast to his celebration of "great politics" in his later writings (BGE, 208; EH, 4.1), Nietzsche rejects Bismarckian "great politics" because its militarism impedes the cultivation of cultural excellence by outstanding individuals.  (Oddly, this thought is contradicted by aphorism 477, with its claim that "the greatest and most terrible wars" are essential for culture.)

Rejecting anti-Semitism (475).  Liberal globalization will promote the "European man" as a "mixed race," and one benefit of this is that it will solve "the problem of the Jews," because the Jews will be part of this European mixed race.  This is good because the Jews show a higher intelligence, having produced "the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral code in the world."

Rejecting the illiberalism of the Athenian democratic polis and Plato's "ideal state" (474).  Although the Athenian polis was democratic, it was illiberal in its statist supervision of culture, just like Plato's "city in speech" in The Republic and The Laws.  Nietzsche rejects this because higher cultural life flourishes only when it is free from political control.

Rejecting the aristocracy of the "Superman" (441, 461).  While Nietzsche thinks a liberal society fosters the "higher culture" of "higher men," he rejects the idea that some human beings can become "superhuman" (ubermenschliche).  He thus rejects the most famous teaching of his later writings--that the only alternative to modern democratic degradation is the noble rule of the "Superman" (Ubermensch).  In Human, All Too Human, he repeatedly warns against the belief in the "superhuman" ability of the great "leader" (Fuhrer) as a dangerous delusion that will promote tyranny (143, 164, 441, 461; D, 49, 548).  The history of the 20th century confirmed his prophetic warning.

Nietzsche, Liberalism, and the Second Reich

In contrast to the common association of Nietzsche with the Third Reich, William Altman's book on Nietzsche makes a brilliant argument for seeing Nietzsche as the philosopher of the Second Reich.

Nietzsche's first book--The Birth of Tragedy--was written in 1871, and it was in January of 1871 that the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War led to the proclamation in Versailles of the Second German Reich, with Wilhelm I as the Emperor and Otto von Bismarck as the Chancellor.  Nietzsche's last books were written in 1888, before his collapse into insanity at the beginning of 1889.  In 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm I died, his son Frederick III became emperor, but then Frederick died three months later, and his son Wilhelm II became emperor.  In 1890, Bismarck was forced to resign, leaving Wilhelm II as the dominant ruler until the defeat of Germany in the war in 1918 brought the end of the Second Reich.  Thus, Nietzsche's intellectual career coincided with the Bismarckian period of the Second Reich.

Altman shows how Nietzsche's thinking was shaped by the political events of his time, despite his pose of "untimeliness."  Moreover, by the time of the First World War, Nietzsche had become so influential that he was seen by many people inside and outside Germany as the philosopher of German culture.  Many German soldiers took copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into their trenches, and the daring courage of the "storm troopers" looked a lot like the military heroism that Nietzsche had foreseen as necessary for the future triumph of the "higher men."

Altman makes a persuasive argument that Nietzsche's thinking illuminates the history of the Second Reich, just as the history of the Second Reich illuminates Nietzsche's thinking.  That mutual illumination leads to the general conclusion that both Nietzsche and the Second Reich suffered from internal contradictions that led to their destruction--Nietzsche's mental breakdown in 1889 and the Second Reich's military and political breakdown in 1918.

Although I generally agree with Altman's reasoning, I disagree with him about two points.

The first point of disagreement is that I am not convinced that in showing Nietzsche's entanglement with the Second Reich, Altman has thereby shown that Nietzsche was not entangled with the Third Reich.  In fact, Altman admits in his Preface that Nietzsche provided all of the intellectual components of National Socialism as understood by Leo Strauss, although Altman insists that these Nietzschean components "did not even come close to being crystallized into the final form that Strauss eventually gave them" (xiv).

My second point of disagreement is that unlike Altman, I see Nietzsche in his middle period (Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science) as providing an alternative--based on his Darwinian liberalism--to the positions he took in his early and late writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian writings do not suffer from the contradictions that Altman rightly sees in his other writings.  Nor do the Darwinian writings provide any encouragement to the Nazis who appropriated ideas from the other writings.

In his reading of those writings that began with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Altman sees continuity with the free-spirited science of Nietzsche's middle period--"there is little here that Nietzsche could not have said, and did not in fact say, in Human, All Too Human" (21).  But this ignores the fact that the writings of Nietzsche's middle period reject almost all of the fundamental teachings of his later writings--the celebration of "great politics," Dionysian intoxication, the eternalizing of becoming through Eternal Return, the scorn for democratic "herd-animalization" and equality of rights, the supernatural heroism of genius and the Ubermensch, atheistic religiosity, and the will to power.

Actually, Altman himself occasionally admits that the Darwinian science of the middle period really does look very different from the teachings in the early and late writings.  Altman sees this in the scorn for "great politics" when Nietzsche was "sailing under the flag of Darwinism" (35-36, 75-76, 134-36).

And yet Altman does not see the opening for liberal democracy in Nietzsche's middle period.  Particularly in Human, All Too Human (92-93, 438-482) and in The Wanderer and His Shadow (275-293), one can see a aristocratic liberalism that is very similar to the classical liberalism of someone like Eugen Richter, the leader of "Left Liberalism" in the Second Reich and a leading critic of Bismarck's policies.  Richter's arguments for constitutional democracy, liberal pluralism, and religious liberty and his arguments against socialism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and militarism all find support in Nietzsche's middle writings.

If the Second Reich had moved toward Richter's classical liberalism, which could have happened if Frederick III had lived long enough to promote his liberal ideas, then Germany might have avoided the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century.

Darwinian Conservatism, Darwinian Liberalism, and the Welfare State: A Reply to Govert Schuller

During my teaching career at Northern Illinois University, I was privileged to have many smart students who taught me a lot.  I designed my courses around three requirements: peer-response journal writing, class discussions, and a final argumentative essay.  For each week there was a reading assignment.  Each student had to bring to the first class each week a journal entry--two typed pages--on the reading for that week.  The journal entry would answer a series of questions.  What is the author saying?  Does the author present good evidence and arguments to support his position?  Or is there an alternative position that is more persuasive?  Each student would bring three copies of this journal entry--one for me and two for the two members of the student's journal group.  Then, at the second class meeting of the week, students would bring two one-page responses to the two journal entries they had received at the first class meeting.  In these responses, the students would express their points of agreement or disagreement with other students in their journal group.  This journal writing guaranteed that each student came to class prepared: they had not only read the assigned reading, but they had also thought about it in a critical way; and so they were ready to engage in a lively class discussion.

I never lectured for long periods.  Instead, I raised questions to stimulate class discussion.  And often my questions came from the students' journal writing.  The only requirement for the discussions was that the students had to support their positions with evidence and argumentation.  Occasionally, some of the assigned reading would be some writing of mine, and the students were free to disagree with me.  (This pedagogy of Socratic questioning is conveyed in my book Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.)

The final requirement for each of my courses was a paper that I called an "argumentative essay."  Each student would take up some controversial question that had come up in the readings or the class discussions.  The writer would have to develop at least three arguments supporting the author's answer to the question.  The writer would also have to state, and answer, at least two objections to the writer's position.

Typically, by the end of the semester, each student would have written at least 65 typed pages for the journals and the final paper.  Consequently, the students had a lot of practice in writing clearly and rigorously about some of the deepest questions in political science.

I was reminded of this this week when I saw that one of my former students--Govert Schuller--had just published two of his essays for me at his blog "Alpheus."  The first one--"Darwinian Conservatism and the Liberal Welfare State"--was written for my course on "Biopolitics and Human Nature" in the spring of 2013.  The second--"Nietzsche's Reluctant Acceptance of Liberal Democracy (and Later Rejection)"--was written for my seminar on "Nietzsche and Politics," also in the spring of 2013.

DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM AND THE LIBERAL WELFARE STATE

One of the readings for "Biopolitics and Human Nature" was my book Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question.  In his paper, Schuller criticizes my argument in that book.  Darwinian biology supports conservatism, I argued, in five ways.  (1) It supports the conservative view of ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, customary traditions, and prudential judgments.  (2)  It supports the conservative view of the moral sense as fundamental for the moral order of liberty.  (3)  It supports the conservative view of sexual differences, family life, and parental care as fundamental for the social order of liberty.  (4) It supports the conservative view of property as fundamental for the economic order of liberty.  (5) And it supports the conservative view of limited government as fundamental for the political order of liberty.

Schuller agrees with me that a good social order must conform to the natural desires of our evolved human nature, and that the utopian socialist and Marxist ideologies must be rejected insofar as they deny that evolved human nature.  And yet he makes three arguments to show that a Darwinian account of human nature does not necessarily support conservatism.

First, he claims that my criticism of utopian leftist thinking is a straw-man argument, because there are realistic leftist positions that are not utopian--particularly, the welfare-state liberalism of European social democracy, as manifested in countries like the Netherlands.

Second, he claims that I do not look at the comparative research that shows that welfare-state regimes like the Netherlands can satisfy the twenty natural desires.  Thus, I ignore the evidence that by many measurements of social health, the European social democracies rank higher than more conservative regimes like the United States.

Third, he disagrees with my suggestion that the ranking of the natural desires must be rightly left to the judgment of individuals, and so a social order cannot properly enforce a prescribed ranking.  On the contrary, he thinks that Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs is a good ranking of our natural desires--starting with physiological needs and moving up to security needs, then social needs, and finally self-actualization.  Moreover, he asserts that the European social democracies do a good job of securing the basic biological needs (food, health, and shelter), while also securing the conditions for satisfying the other needs as well.  This is clearly seen, he thinks, in the Netherlands.

What Schuller does not see is that my Darwinian conservatism is a liberal conservatism that can embrace a liberal welfare state.  In previous posts, I have written (here) about Darwinian conservatism as a fusion of traditionalist conservatism (like that of Russell Kirk) and classical liberalism (like that of Friedrich Hayek).  Classical liberals like Hayek reject pure socialism and communism because these systems deny the individual liberty necessary for a free society.  But liberals like Hayek can endorse those welfare state policies that are compatible with individual liberty.  One can see this in the third part of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, which is entitled "Freedom in the Welfare State."

As I have argued (here), the welfare state systems that one sees in the European social democracies are actually capitalist welfare states with private property and free markets.  And while these welfare state regimes do restrain individual liberty in many ways, they are largely free societies.  Schuller points to this in describing how the European welfare state secures the natural human desires: "A right to work and a minimum living wage would take care of the basic needs, including housing, and a non-corrupt government can provide safety, health insurance and affordable education.  At the same time there should be a maximum of freedom for people to pursue their social, romantic, vocational, economic, creative and spiritual needs."

When Eduard Bernstein, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, first defended social welfare policies as "evolutionary socialism," he was criticized by the Marxists as a "revisionist."  Rosa Luxemburg complained that his so-called socialism was really a "variety of liberalism."

That she was right about this should be clear from looking at the Human Freedom Index--devised by the Cato Institute as an empirical measurement of liberty as defined by classical liberals like Hayek--and noticing that the European social democracies (including the Netherlands) rank high on that index.  As I have said in previous posts (here), this shows the human progress towards social orders that secure individual liberty

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN ARISTOCRATIC LIBERALISM

In my Nietzsche seminar, we read texts from the three periods of Nietzsche's writing--early (The Birth of Tragedy), middle (Human, All Too Human), and late (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil).  We saw that Human, All Too Human differs from much of his earlier and later writing in two ways.  First, he embraces a Darwinian evolutionary science: "everything has evolved" (HATH, secs. 2-3).  And he shows a moderate acceptance of liberal democratic politics and institutions, while strongly rejecting socialism.

Schuller chose to write about this second point.  He rightly sees in Human, All Too Human a "qualified endorsement of liberal democracy" as "the least bad form of government."  And he also rightly sees Nietzsche turning away from this in his later writing:

"if such ideas like democracy and human rights are tossed, then he can 'overcome' his previous reluctant acceptance of liberal democracy and go all out with a cruel, self-assertive, self-legislating, 'value-creating' (BGE, 260) upper class and reduce the rest of mankind to the status of Untermensch to be exploited, which is fine because exploitation 'belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life' (BGE, 259).  Here we can unfortunately see the foreshadows of a fascist ideology."

As I have indicated in a previous post (here), I believe that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism in Human, All Too Human can be shown to be superior--morally, politically, and intellectually--to the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his later writings.  That is the best answer to the Nazi and fascist interpreters of Nietzsche (like Martin Heidegger).

How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.

Are the Straussian Fascists Showing that Will Altman Was Right About Leo Strauss?

I have written about Bronze Age Pervert's Bronze Age Mindset (here and here).  So I was interested in the recent essay by Blake Smith identifying Bronze Age Pervert as Costin Alamariu, who wrote a doctoral dissertation--The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in Plato and Nietzsche--under the supervision of Steven Smith, a Straussian political theorist at Yale University.  Blake Smith shows how Alamariu's dissertation explains the Straussian philosophic grounding for Bronze Age Mindset.

This connection of Alamariu's Nietzschean fascism to Strauss fits a remarkable pattern of Straussian influence with other contemporary exponents of Nietzschean fascism that I have considered on this blog.  Richard Spencer studied under Michael Gillespie at Duke University.  Michael Millerman studied under Clifford Orwin at the University of Toronto, although Orwin resigned from his dissertation committee after some newspaper stories publicized Millerman's fascist political philosophy.  Alamariu, Spencer, and Millerman were all shaped in their thinking by Leo Strauss's interpretation of Nietzsche's fascism as the best illiberal alternative to liberal democracy.

This seems to confirm what William Altman was arguing ten years ago--in a series of three books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss--that Strauss was the secret theoretician of National Socialism.  Altman presented his "German trilogy" of books as following a tripartite structure suggested by Strauss in his "Three Waves of Modernity."  According to Strauss, the First Wave of modernity came with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the Second Wave came with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel; and the Third Wave came with Nietzsche and Heidegger.  If each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave?  Surely, Altman suggested, it must be Strauss himself.  And if the Third Wave leads to fascism, as Strauss indicated, then this would point to Strauss as the thinker who most fully worked out the theory of fascism or Nazism as the anti-liberal solution to the crisis of liberal democracy.

As I have indicated in my posts on Altman, I have found him to be an insightful commentator on Strauss.  But I do disagree with him on two points.  First, I think he overstates his Strauss-as-a-Jewish-Nazi thesis.  In fact, he implicitly concedes some of the weaknesses in this thesis.  He recognizes that Strauss regarded Hitler as a fool.  He also recognizes that there is no evidence that Strauss ever developed any positive program for moving towards a National Socialist society.

Still, I am persuaded that Altman has shown that Strauss is open to the criticism that he was not emphatic enough in defending liberal democracy against the ideas of Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger.  Strauss never really offered a thorough refutation of these ideas, and instead he showed some attraction to them--most clearly in his lectures on "German Nihilism" and the "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism."  Significantly, these lectures were not published until after Strauss's death.

My second point of disagreement is that unlike Altman and Strauss, I see Nietzsche in his middle period (Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science) as providing an alternative--based on his Darwinian liberalism--to the positions he took in his early and late writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian writings do not suffer from the contradictions that Altman rightly sees in his other writings.  Nor do the Darwinian writings provide any encouragement to the Nazis who appropriated ideas from the other writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is intellectually, morally, and politically superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism.  Strauss and the Straussians fail to see this as the Nietzschean way to defend liberalism against its illiberal critics.