Over the next year, I will be travelling around the world for some lecturing.
I begin in Chicago at the Midwest Political Science Association convention on April 14 and Prairie State College on April 17. At the MWPSA convention, I will present a paper on "Nietzsche's Darwinian Liberalism." At Prairie State, I will lead a discussion in George Streeter's philosophy class, which is a class on Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud.
I then go to the Galapagos Islands where I will lecture at a Mont Pelerin Society conference on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty," June 22-29. My wife and I will also do some touring on a yacht around the Galapagos, following Darwin's path, and then we will go to Machu Picchu and the Ecuadorean Amazonian area for a few weeks.
In the fall, I will be lecturing at the University of Notre Dame for the political theory workshop there (September 13) and at Lone Star College in Houston (October 10). I was invited to Notre Dame by Michael Zuckert. I was invited to Lone Star by John Barr, the author of Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present (forthcoming from LSU Press). I was one of the reviewers of Barr's book for LSU, and I recommend it as one of the best new books on Lincoln, which offers a stunning panorama of the whole anti-Lincoln tradition.
In December, I will go to Freiburg, Germany, where I will be lecturing 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). There will be lots of smart people at this workshop, all interested in the implications of evolutionary science for economics, morality, and politics. We'll be at a beautiful conference center at the foot of the Black Forest Mountains.
Perhaps I'll meet the Geist of Martin Heidegger in a clearing in the forest. If so, I'll explain to him where he went wrong.
In all of this work, I'll be thinking through my arguments for Darwinian liberalism.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Saturday, March 23, 2013
The Religious Longing for Myth in Nietzsche and Nazism
The contradictory and incoherent character of Friedrich Nietzsche's writings arises from his ambivalent stance in the debate between Platonic idealism and Darwinian naturalism.
The writings of his middle period--such as Human, All Too Human--were largely free from contradiction and incoherence, because he fully embraced Darwinism and rejected Platonism. But in his earlier and later writings, he was caught in the contradiction of denying the Platonic dualism of Being and Becoming while affirming a Platonic longing for a religious transcendence or redemption of life that goes beyond the Heraclitean flux of the natural world. So, for example, in The Birth of Tragedy (sec. 23), Nietzsche lamented the "secularization" of modern life, and he hoped for a "rebirth of German myth" that would support a German state rooted in a unified culture of myth that would impress "the stamp of the eternal" on life and thus become "desecularized." Later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, he created new myths--eternal recurrence, will to power, the Superman, and the religion of Dionysus--that would constitute the new faith for the redemption of the earth. Thus, in his earlier and later writings, Nietzsche manifested a religious "need for redemption" that he rejected in Human, All Too Human (27, 141, 222, 476).
In his recent book--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich--William Altman offers a good study of Nietzsche's self-contradictory longing for Platonic transcendence without Platonic metaphysics (xix, 56-57, 107, 114-15, 129-33, 143, 149-51, 157-58, 164-65). But Altman does not see how the Darwinian Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human escapes from this self-contradictory position. Nor does he see that it's the Platonic idealism of Nietzsche's earlier and later writings that was appropriated by the Nazis.
Nietzsche's life-long struggle with Platonism and Darwinism is illuminated by considering the influence of his reading of Friedrich Lange's book The History of Materialism. Although there are no references to Lange in Nietzsche's published writings, George Stack's Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983) has shown the pervasive influence of Lange's book on Nietzsche. Lange's book includes detailed surveys of the latest scientific research--particularly in cosmology, physics, Darwinian evolution, and neurophysiology--that bears on the debate over materialism and idealism. One can see here one source for Nietzsche's study of natural science.
It becomes clear that in his early and late writings, Nietzsche agrees with Lange in rejecting metaphysical Platonism as contrary to empirical science while embracing mythopoetic Platonism as satisfying their religious longings. And yet the Darwinian naturalism of Human, All Too Human departs from Lange's Platonism, a point that Stack ignores.
Lange initiated the tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy at the University of Marburg. Adopting what Stack calls "materio-idealism," Lange combined skeptical phenomenalism and mythopoetic idealism, and this same tense combination can be found in Nietzsche's early and late writings.
SKEPTICAL PHENOMENALISM AND EVOLUTIONARY REALISM
Beginning with the atomism of Democritus, materialism assumes that matter alone is real, and therefore the only true knowledge is understanding matter in motion as determined by the causal laws of physical nature. In telling the history of materialism, Lange shows that a crucial turn was the move from materialism to sensationalism, which began with Protagoras, and this Protagorean sensationalism was a move towards idealism.
The materialist seeks to know the material things that constitute the outer world of nature. But the sensationalist denies that we can have any direct knowledge of matter as it is in itself, because all that we have immediately given to us is our sensations of the eternal world, and thus we can know the material world as it appears to us in our sensations, but we cannot know how the material world might be in itself independently of our sensations. Consequently, Protagoras taught, man is the measure of all things: of those that are that they are; of those that are not that they are not.
So while Democritus started from the material objects of external nature, Protagoras started from the subjective consciousness of internal human experience. Lange sees this Protagorean move as the first step in a tradition of antimaterialism that culminated in Kantian idealism. Contrary to the claim of the Democritean materialist, we cannot know material objects as things in themselves, because through our sensations, we know only the phenomenal world, the world as it appears to us, and so we cannot know the noumenal world, the world as it really is in itself.
Lange argues that the empirical science of the physiology of the sense-organs confirms the Protagorean teaching that man is the measure of all things. Hermann Helmholtz and other psychophysiologists have shown that our sense experience is entirely conditioned by the constitution of our sensory faculties. How the external world appears to us depends upon the organization of our sensory systems, and the same external world would appear differently to different organisms with different sensory faculties. Consequently, the world as it is in itself is unknowable.
For example, Lange points to the opposition between hearing a tone and the vibrations of the string that occasions it. That we turn the vibration into a tone arises from the organization of our auditory faculties as setting the a priori conditions for such sensory experience. If we had no sense but hearing, we would conclude that all phenomena are sound. Even within this realm of experience, our sensations are limited in that some animals can hear a range of sounds that we cannot.
Similarly, our visual experience is conditioned by the organization of our visual systems--the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual centers of the brain. We see colors only because our human visual system is organized to divide waves of light into a spectrum of colors. Other animals with different visual systems see the world differently from the way we do.
Nietzsche adopts this argument in much of his writing to claim that our senses deceive us in giving us an illusory account of the world. We cannot know the reality of the external world as it might be in itself, because in our sense experience, we must translate nerve stimuli into images that are actually metaphors, and then we translate those sensory metaphors into the linguistic metaphors of language. Thus we are caught within the web of appearances that we ourselves have created, because we have no direct access to the reality of the external world. We cannot even know ourselves as we really are, because our experience of ourselves as thinking and feeling beings--as conscious selves--is itself a poetic construction of our brains. This suggestion that what we think we know about our external and internal worlds is only a fictional creation leads to nihilism.
But if one accepts the evolutionary account of life, as Lange and Nietzsche do, then it is possible to overcome epistemological nihilism through evolutionary realism. If human cognitive faculties are products of an evolutionary history of adaptations for survival and reproduction, then we can predict that those cognitive faculties have been shaped by an evolutionary process of interaction between human ancestors as physical, active, and perceiving animals and the reality of the physical and social worlds in which they have lived. Those human ancestors whose cognitive faculties gave them utterly delusional images of the world would have been less likely to survive and reproduce. And yet we could also predict that cognitive faculties adapted for evolutionary success will be selective in gathering and interpreting information relevant to success in the ecological niche of human adaptation, and thus ignoring information about the world that has no adaptive relevance. From this, we can predict that our evolved mental capacities will be reliable but fallible.
Such an evolutionary epistemology supports a hypothetical realism. Assuming that our evolved mental grasp of reality is reliable but fallible, we can test the limits of our comprehension by testing hypotheses about our evolved psychology. For example, we cannot see ultraviolent light, but bees can, because bees have evolved a visual system that detects ultraviolent light so that they can navigate by the sun even on cloudy days, which is an evolutionary adaptation for bees but not for human beings. And yet human beings can use scientific reasoning with experiments and special instruments to detect the full spectrum of light and to uncover the special visual capacities of bees and other animals.
This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks in Human, All Too Human about the perspectival character of knowledge and how natural science can expand our knowledge by uncovering new perspectives. Even if empirical science cannot give us absolute knowledge of the world, it can allow us to reach ever greater approximations to the truth about things. Science can even help us to see the world through the eyes of a bee.
Is there any good alternative to evolutionary naturalism? Will Altman says the alternative is Platonic dualism: the only true knowledge is reason's grasp of the eternal ideas that belong to the intelligible world of Being, as opposed to the sensory experiences of the momentary impressions that belong to the sensible world of Becoming.
But as Plato indicated in the Parmenides, this radical dualism creates insoluble problems. Socrates cannot explain how the unchanging, purely intelligible Ideas are related to the changing, sensible experience of mortal human beings. Either Becoming must take on the absolute fixity of Being, or Being must take on the absolute flux of Becoming. But that would deny the dualistic separation of Being and Becoming.
MYTHOPOETIC IDEALISM AND EVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS
Whenever Plato in his dialogues fails in his efforts to provide an intellectually coherent account of his metaphysical dualism, he turns from rational proof to mythic imagery. Lange sees this as showing that while Platonic idealism fails as metaphysics, it succeeds as myth; and this mythopoetic idealism captures the true core of religion in a way that is compatible with empirical science.
Would Leo Strauss and the Straussians agree with this--that Plato's Idealism is more a matter of mythic poetry than metaphysical truth?
Lange writes:
The spiritual appeal of mythic poetry that does not claim any metaphysical truth is what Lange calls "the standpoint of the ideal." He writes:
In his middle writings, Nietzsche recognizes the power of the "need for redemption" that has been satisfied in the past by religion and art. But he wonders whether the progress in the scientific understanding of human evolution will show that this was an artificial need, and that new institutions might evolve to serve the "common, true needs of all men" (HH, 27, 153, 475-76). He recognizes that with the modern weakening of traditional religion and metaphysics, romantic artists (like Richard Wagner) will satisfy the religious longings of people who want to feel religious emotions without having to believe religious doctrines. But he warns that the religious intoxication of romantic art and the romantic worship of artists thought to be geniuses can become delusional (HH, 145-64).
In his later writings, however, Nietzsche himself fell into a delusional state of Dionysian frenzy induced by his mythic belief in eternal recurrence and the will to power as teachings that would redeem humanity.
An evolutionary science of aesthetics might explain our natural desire for making sense of the world through story-telling and the anthropomorphic projection of agency and intelligent design onto the universe. But determining whether this anthropomorphic belief in cosmic purposefulness is metaphysically true or only mythically appealing is beyond natural science.
In any case, we should recognize the moral and political dangers that can arise from a delusional longing for mythic redemption.
THE LONGING FOR MYTH IN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Lange was a socialist who worried about the atomistic individualism of liberalism. In fact, much of his attack on materialism and support for idealism seemed to be directed ultimately at what he saw as the egoistic materialism of the classical liberal political economy initiated by Adam Smith (III, 233-68).
For Lange, Smith's moral and political philosophy was based entirely on a narrow egoism to support the conclusion that government has no proper role beyond maintaining freedom for the selfish competition of interests. Even Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is egoistic, according to Lange, because while Smith grounds morality in sympathy, he understands sympathy as merely an extension of one's self-love to embrace one's family, friends, and others to whom one feels some attachment and concern.
By contrast, Lange argues that a sense of moral community requires mythopoetic idealism that will teach a Christian ethic of self-denial and selfless altruism. This became the basis for Lange's ethical socialism.
Against this, Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human declares that "egoism is not evil," because we all act for the sake of what we believe will be desirable or good for us. The idea of "selflessness" of morality is illusory, because seemingly selfless acts are actually acts in which we sacrifice one part of ourselves to serve another part of ourselves that we love more (57, 101-102). The Christian need for redemption arises from the illusion of imagining a totally selfless way of thinking and then feeling dissatisfied and imperfect because we cannot attain such selflessness (132-33).
In arguing against the claim that morality requires complete selflessness, Nietzsche defends an egoistic individualism that is similar to the moral thought of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, in which our evolved mammalian tendency to self-love is extended to a sympathetic concern for others to whom we feel some attachment.
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche defends a liberal conception of the state: "The state is a clever institution for protecting individuals from one another; if one goes too far in ennobling it, the individual is ultimately weakened by it, even dissolved--and thus the original purpose of the state is most thoroughly thwarted" (235). By contrast, Nietzsche observes, the socialist conception of the ideal state strives for the "destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, and which it intends to improve into an expedient organ of the community." Nietzsche foresees that socialism will require a brutal terrorism in striving for "the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed" (473).
Hitler's National Socialism employed a mythic symbolism to achieve this subordination of individuals to the community of the Volk. Alfred Rosenberg shows this in his Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930). As an early member of the Nazi Party, he wrote this book as a general statement of Nazi thought. Echoing the Nietzsche of the early and later writings, Rosenberg lamented that the German people had become "mythless." What they needed was a "new myth" that would inspire heroic political activity. He declared: "The longing to give the Nordic race soul its form as a German church under the sign of the Volksmythos, that is for me the greatest task of our century."
The religious myth favored by the Nazis was developed by Ernst Haeckel and the Monist movement. Daniel Gasman has shown that Haeckel was the primary ideological influence on both National Socialism and fascism. Haeckel promoted a mystical pantheism of nature that united scientific materialism and religious spirituality. The fundamental premise of his pantheistic religion was that "there lives one spirit in all things," which is a "divine spirit." He defended this romantic religion of nature as superior to the dualist metaphysics of Christianity, which denigrated earthly life and the natural world.
Under Haeckel's influence, Hitler promoted this pantheistic religion. He proclaimed: "Man has discovered in nature the wonderful notion of that all-mighty being whose law he worships. Fundamentally, in everyone there is the feeling for this all-mighty, which we call God." This romantic pantheism was a pervasive part of National Socialism (see Robert Pois, National Socialism and Religion of Nature, 1986), and this mythic pantheism echoes the Dionysian myth of Nietzsche.
This same mythopoetic idealism is evident in Martin Heidegger's mythic positing of Dasein and in his Rectoral Address at the University of Freiburg. Even after the defeat of Nazism, he continued to declare: "Only a god can save us now."
Unlike the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil belonged to an idealist tradition of longing for myth that prepared the way for Heidegger, Hitler, and the Nazis. George Williamson has shown how Nietzsche fits into this tradition in his book The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Williamson concludes:
Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The writings of his middle period--such as Human, All Too Human--were largely free from contradiction and incoherence, because he fully embraced Darwinism and rejected Platonism. But in his earlier and later writings, he was caught in the contradiction of denying the Platonic dualism of Being and Becoming while affirming a Platonic longing for a religious transcendence or redemption of life that goes beyond the Heraclitean flux of the natural world. So, for example, in The Birth of Tragedy (sec. 23), Nietzsche lamented the "secularization" of modern life, and he hoped for a "rebirth of German myth" that would support a German state rooted in a unified culture of myth that would impress "the stamp of the eternal" on life and thus become "desecularized." Later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, he created new myths--eternal recurrence, will to power, the Superman, and the religion of Dionysus--that would constitute the new faith for the redemption of the earth. Thus, in his earlier and later writings, Nietzsche manifested a religious "need for redemption" that he rejected in Human, All Too Human (27, 141, 222, 476).
In his recent book--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich--William Altman offers a good study of Nietzsche's self-contradictory longing for Platonic transcendence without Platonic metaphysics (xix, 56-57, 107, 114-15, 129-33, 143, 149-51, 157-58, 164-65). But Altman does not see how the Darwinian Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human escapes from this self-contradictory position. Nor does he see that it's the Platonic idealism of Nietzsche's earlier and later writings that was appropriated by the Nazis.
Nietzsche's life-long struggle with Platonism and Darwinism is illuminated by considering the influence of his reading of Friedrich Lange's book The History of Materialism. Although there are no references to Lange in Nietzsche's published writings, George Stack's Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983) has shown the pervasive influence of Lange's book on Nietzsche. Lange's book includes detailed surveys of the latest scientific research--particularly in cosmology, physics, Darwinian evolution, and neurophysiology--that bears on the debate over materialism and idealism. One can see here one source for Nietzsche's study of natural science.
It becomes clear that in his early and late writings, Nietzsche agrees with Lange in rejecting metaphysical Platonism as contrary to empirical science while embracing mythopoetic Platonism as satisfying their religious longings. And yet the Darwinian naturalism of Human, All Too Human departs from Lange's Platonism, a point that Stack ignores.
Lange initiated the tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy at the University of Marburg. Adopting what Stack calls "materio-idealism," Lange combined skeptical phenomenalism and mythopoetic idealism, and this same tense combination can be found in Nietzsche's early and late writings.
SKEPTICAL PHENOMENALISM AND EVOLUTIONARY REALISM
Beginning with the atomism of Democritus, materialism assumes that matter alone is real, and therefore the only true knowledge is understanding matter in motion as determined by the causal laws of physical nature. In telling the history of materialism, Lange shows that a crucial turn was the move from materialism to sensationalism, which began with Protagoras, and this Protagorean sensationalism was a move towards idealism.
The materialist seeks to know the material things that constitute the outer world of nature. But the sensationalist denies that we can have any direct knowledge of matter as it is in itself, because all that we have immediately given to us is our sensations of the eternal world, and thus we can know the material world as it appears to us in our sensations, but we cannot know how the material world might be in itself independently of our sensations. Consequently, Protagoras taught, man is the measure of all things: of those that are that they are; of those that are not that they are not.
So while Democritus started from the material objects of external nature, Protagoras started from the subjective consciousness of internal human experience. Lange sees this Protagorean move as the first step in a tradition of antimaterialism that culminated in Kantian idealism. Contrary to the claim of the Democritean materialist, we cannot know material objects as things in themselves, because through our sensations, we know only the phenomenal world, the world as it appears to us, and so we cannot know the noumenal world, the world as it really is in itself.
Lange argues that the empirical science of the physiology of the sense-organs confirms the Protagorean teaching that man is the measure of all things. Hermann Helmholtz and other psychophysiologists have shown that our sense experience is entirely conditioned by the constitution of our sensory faculties. How the external world appears to us depends upon the organization of our sensory systems, and the same external world would appear differently to different organisms with different sensory faculties. Consequently, the world as it is in itself is unknowable.
For example, Lange points to the opposition between hearing a tone and the vibrations of the string that occasions it. That we turn the vibration into a tone arises from the organization of our auditory faculties as setting the a priori conditions for such sensory experience. If we had no sense but hearing, we would conclude that all phenomena are sound. Even within this realm of experience, our sensations are limited in that some animals can hear a range of sounds that we cannot.
Similarly, our visual experience is conditioned by the organization of our visual systems--the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual centers of the brain. We see colors only because our human visual system is organized to divide waves of light into a spectrum of colors. Other animals with different visual systems see the world differently from the way we do.
Nietzsche adopts this argument in much of his writing to claim that our senses deceive us in giving us an illusory account of the world. We cannot know the reality of the external world as it might be in itself, because in our sense experience, we must translate nerve stimuli into images that are actually metaphors, and then we translate those sensory metaphors into the linguistic metaphors of language. Thus we are caught within the web of appearances that we ourselves have created, because we have no direct access to the reality of the external world. We cannot even know ourselves as we really are, because our experience of ourselves as thinking and feeling beings--as conscious selves--is itself a poetic construction of our brains. This suggestion that what we think we know about our external and internal worlds is only a fictional creation leads to nihilism.
But if one accepts the evolutionary account of life, as Lange and Nietzsche do, then it is possible to overcome epistemological nihilism through evolutionary realism. If human cognitive faculties are products of an evolutionary history of adaptations for survival and reproduction, then we can predict that those cognitive faculties have been shaped by an evolutionary process of interaction between human ancestors as physical, active, and perceiving animals and the reality of the physical and social worlds in which they have lived. Those human ancestors whose cognitive faculties gave them utterly delusional images of the world would have been less likely to survive and reproduce. And yet we could also predict that cognitive faculties adapted for evolutionary success will be selective in gathering and interpreting information relevant to success in the ecological niche of human adaptation, and thus ignoring information about the world that has no adaptive relevance. From this, we can predict that our evolved mental capacities will be reliable but fallible.
Such an evolutionary epistemology supports a hypothetical realism. Assuming that our evolved mental grasp of reality is reliable but fallible, we can test the limits of our comprehension by testing hypotheses about our evolved psychology. For example, we cannot see ultraviolent light, but bees can, because bees have evolved a visual system that detects ultraviolent light so that they can navigate by the sun even on cloudy days, which is an evolutionary adaptation for bees but not for human beings. And yet human beings can use scientific reasoning with experiments and special instruments to detect the full spectrum of light and to uncover the special visual capacities of bees and other animals.
This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks in Human, All Too Human about the perspectival character of knowledge and how natural science can expand our knowledge by uncovering new perspectives. Even if empirical science cannot give us absolute knowledge of the world, it can allow us to reach ever greater approximations to the truth about things. Science can even help us to see the world through the eyes of a bee.
Is there any good alternative to evolutionary naturalism? Will Altman says the alternative is Platonic dualism: the only true knowledge is reason's grasp of the eternal ideas that belong to the intelligible world of Being, as opposed to the sensory experiences of the momentary impressions that belong to the sensible world of Becoming.
But as Plato indicated in the Parmenides, this radical dualism creates insoluble problems. Socrates cannot explain how the unchanging, purely intelligible Ideas are related to the changing, sensible experience of mortal human beings. Either Becoming must take on the absolute fixity of Being, or Being must take on the absolute flux of Becoming. But that would deny the dualistic separation of Being and Becoming.
MYTHOPOETIC IDEALISM AND EVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS
Whenever Plato in his dialogues fails in his efforts to provide an intellectually coherent account of his metaphysical dualism, he turns from rational proof to mythic imagery. Lange sees this as showing that while Platonic idealism fails as metaphysics, it succeeds as myth; and this mythopoetic idealism captures the true core of religion in a way that is compatible with empirical science.
Would Leo Strauss and the Straussians agree with this--that Plato's Idealism is more a matter of mythic poetry than metaphysical truth?
Lange writes:
"We cannot imagine a lion as such, a rose as such; but we may represent in imagination a definitely-outlined picture of a lion or a rose, wholly free from all those accidents of individual formation which may collectively be regarded as deviations from this norm, as imperfections. This is, however, not the Platonic idea of the lion or the rose, but an ideal that is a creation of the senses, intended to express the abstract idea as perfectly as possible. The idea itself is invisible, for everything that is visible belongs to the fleeting world of mere phenomena: it has no forms in space, for the supersensuous cannot be linked with space. Similarly, nothing whatever positive can be expressed of the ideas without conceiving them in some sensuous fashion. They cannot be called pure, sovereign, perfect, eternal, without our connecting with them by these very words ideas of sense. So Plato, in his ideal theory, is obliged to have recourse to mythus, and so, at a single step we pass from the highest abstraction to the true life-element of all mysticism--the sensuous supersensuous. The mythus is, however, to have only a figurative or metaphorical force. By its means, what is in itself only an object of the pure reason is to be represented in the forms of the phenomenal world; but what kind of figure can that be of which the original cannot be supplied?" (I, 77-78)While Lange dismisses the Platonic Ideas as "cobwebs of the brain" and "fabulous," he accepts Plato's mythic idealism as "a poetical exaltation of the spirit" and "not knowledge but poesy," which serves religious and moral ends, and which "often indirectly affords a new impulse to scientific research" (I, 78-80). As long as this mythic idealism is understood to be "not knowledge but poesy," it makes no metaphysical claims that would contradict empirical science, And yet it satisfies a spiritual longing that cannot be satisfied by empirical science. Platonic poesy "is a necessary offspring of the soul, arising from the deepest life-roots of the race, and a complete counterbalance to the pessimism which springs from an exclusive acquaintance with reality" (II, 232).
The spiritual appeal of mythic poetry that does not claim any metaphysical truth is what Lange calls "the standpoint of the ideal." He writes:
"Pessimism, which likewise clings to the whole, is a product of reflexion. The thousand contrarieties of life, the cold cruelty of nature, the pains and imperfections of all creatures, are collected in their individual features, and the sum of these observations is contrasted with the ideal picture of Optimism as a terrible indictment of the universe. A complete picture of the universe, however, is not reached in this way. Only the Optimist picture of the world is destroyed, and this involves a great service, if Optimism is inclined to become dogmatic and to pass itself as the representative of truth and reality. All those beautiful ideas of the individual disharmony which is resolved into the harmony of the great whole, of higher, divine contemplation of the world, in which all riddles are solved and all difficulties disappear, are successfully destroyed by Pessimism; but this destruction affects the dogma only, not the ideal. It cannot do away with the fact that our mind is so constituted as ever anew to produce within itself a harmonious picture of the world; that here as everywhere it places its ideal beside and above the reality, and recreates from the struggles and necessities of life by rising in thought to a world of all perfections." (III, 341)Lange thinks that Friedrich Schiller's poetry manifests mythic idealism, particularly in his generalizing the Christian doctrine of redemption into the idea of an "aesthetical redemption." "The elevation of the soul in faith here becomes the flight into the idea-land of beauty, where all labour finds its rest, every struggle and every want their peace and their reconciliation" (III, 345). This purely aesthetic appeal to our emotional need for redemption cannot be refuted by empirical science.
"Who will refute a Mass of Palestrina, or who will convict Raphael's Madonna of error? The 'Gloria in Excelsis' remains a universal power, and will ring through the centuries so long as our nerves can quiver under the awe of the sublime. And those simple fundamental ideas of the redemption of the individual man by the surrendering of his own will to the will that guides the whole; those images of death and resurrection which express the highest and most thrilling emotions that stir the human breast, when no prose is capable of uttering in cold words the fullness of the heart." (III, 360)Nietzsche quoted from this passage in a letter in 1866 expressing his excitement in reading Lange's book. In his early and later writings, Nietzsche used his power for philosophical poetry to create new myths that would provide "aesthetical redemption" for humanity.
In his middle writings, Nietzsche recognizes the power of the "need for redemption" that has been satisfied in the past by religion and art. But he wonders whether the progress in the scientific understanding of human evolution will show that this was an artificial need, and that new institutions might evolve to serve the "common, true needs of all men" (HH, 27, 153, 475-76). He recognizes that with the modern weakening of traditional religion and metaphysics, romantic artists (like Richard Wagner) will satisfy the religious longings of people who want to feel religious emotions without having to believe religious doctrines. But he warns that the religious intoxication of romantic art and the romantic worship of artists thought to be geniuses can become delusional (HH, 145-64).
In his later writings, however, Nietzsche himself fell into a delusional state of Dionysian frenzy induced by his mythic belief in eternal recurrence and the will to power as teachings that would redeem humanity.
An evolutionary science of aesthetics might explain our natural desire for making sense of the world through story-telling and the anthropomorphic projection of agency and intelligent design onto the universe. But determining whether this anthropomorphic belief in cosmic purposefulness is metaphysically true or only mythically appealing is beyond natural science.
In any case, we should recognize the moral and political dangers that can arise from a delusional longing for mythic redemption.
THE LONGING FOR MYTH IN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Lange was a socialist who worried about the atomistic individualism of liberalism. In fact, much of his attack on materialism and support for idealism seemed to be directed ultimately at what he saw as the egoistic materialism of the classical liberal political economy initiated by Adam Smith (III, 233-68).
For Lange, Smith's moral and political philosophy was based entirely on a narrow egoism to support the conclusion that government has no proper role beyond maintaining freedom for the selfish competition of interests. Even Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is egoistic, according to Lange, because while Smith grounds morality in sympathy, he understands sympathy as merely an extension of one's self-love to embrace one's family, friends, and others to whom one feels some attachment and concern.
By contrast, Lange argues that a sense of moral community requires mythopoetic idealism that will teach a Christian ethic of self-denial and selfless altruism. This became the basis for Lange's ethical socialism.
Against this, Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human declares that "egoism is not evil," because we all act for the sake of what we believe will be desirable or good for us. The idea of "selflessness" of morality is illusory, because seemingly selfless acts are actually acts in which we sacrifice one part of ourselves to serve another part of ourselves that we love more (57, 101-102). The Christian need for redemption arises from the illusion of imagining a totally selfless way of thinking and then feeling dissatisfied and imperfect because we cannot attain such selflessness (132-33).
In arguing against the claim that morality requires complete selflessness, Nietzsche defends an egoistic individualism that is similar to the moral thought of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, in which our evolved mammalian tendency to self-love is extended to a sympathetic concern for others to whom we feel some attachment.
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche defends a liberal conception of the state: "The state is a clever institution for protecting individuals from one another; if one goes too far in ennobling it, the individual is ultimately weakened by it, even dissolved--and thus the original purpose of the state is most thoroughly thwarted" (235). By contrast, Nietzsche observes, the socialist conception of the ideal state strives for the "destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, and which it intends to improve into an expedient organ of the community." Nietzsche foresees that socialism will require a brutal terrorism in striving for "the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed" (473).
Hitler's National Socialism employed a mythic symbolism to achieve this subordination of individuals to the community of the Volk. Alfred Rosenberg shows this in his Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930). As an early member of the Nazi Party, he wrote this book as a general statement of Nazi thought. Echoing the Nietzsche of the early and later writings, Rosenberg lamented that the German people had become "mythless." What they needed was a "new myth" that would inspire heroic political activity. He declared: "The longing to give the Nordic race soul its form as a German church under the sign of the Volksmythos, that is for me the greatest task of our century."
The religious myth favored by the Nazis was developed by Ernst Haeckel and the Monist movement. Daniel Gasman has shown that Haeckel was the primary ideological influence on both National Socialism and fascism. Haeckel promoted a mystical pantheism of nature that united scientific materialism and religious spirituality. The fundamental premise of his pantheistic religion was that "there lives one spirit in all things," which is a "divine spirit." He defended this romantic religion of nature as superior to the dualist metaphysics of Christianity, which denigrated earthly life and the natural world.
Under Haeckel's influence, Hitler promoted this pantheistic religion. He proclaimed: "Man has discovered in nature the wonderful notion of that all-mighty being whose law he worships. Fundamentally, in everyone there is the feeling for this all-mighty, which we call God." This romantic pantheism was a pervasive part of National Socialism (see Robert Pois, National Socialism and Religion of Nature, 1986), and this mythic pantheism echoes the Dionysian myth of Nietzsche.
This same mythopoetic idealism is evident in Martin Heidegger's mythic positing of Dasein and in his Rectoral Address at the University of Freiburg. Even after the defeat of Nazism, he continued to declare: "Only a god can save us now."
Unlike the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil belonged to an idealist tradition of longing for myth that prepared the way for Heidegger, Hitler, and the Nazis. George Williamson has shown how Nietzsche fits into this tradition in his book The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Williamson concludes:
"Mythological thought, it must be emphasized, did not create National Socialism or anti-Semitism, nor did it ensure their victory in 1933--here the factors of war, economic blight, and fear of Bolshevism played the dominant role--but in its Wagnerian or volkisch guise myth offered a way of thinking about art, religion, and the nation that was particularly suited to the political fantasies of Hitler and the racist policies of the Nazi state." (293)By contrast, the Darwinian liberalism of Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human gave no encouragement to the myth-making of Hitler and the Nazis.
Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Friday, March 08, 2013
Nietzsche's Aristocratic Liberalism
In the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche's middle period, when his thinking was shaped by Darwinian science, he embraced what I will call "aristocratic liberalism." I use that term 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 (BGE 44, 201-202, 257).
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.
FOR CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY
Nietzsche sees the democratization of European politics as an irresistible power (HH, 438; WS, 275). Increasingly, the offices of king and emperor are being hollowed out; and the only way monarchs can hold on to any dignity is through declaring states of emergency during war to slow the growing constraints on monarchic power from constitutional democracy (WS, 281).
Nietzsche declares: "Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring" (WS, 289). That he identifies democratic restraints on the lust for tyranny as "very boring" might suggest the scorn for democracy as "herd-animalization" that runs through his later writings (BGE, 201-202, 242; TI, 9:38; WP, 890, 898). But, in fact, the Nietzsche of the middle writings warns that the despisers of "herd humanity" are foolish in thinking that they can escape being harmed by the herd by running away from them (AOM, 233). Instead of that, he recommends, the superior human beings should put on the mask of mediocrity and modesty, and adopt the virtue of moderation, so as not to provoke the great majority (WS, 175; HH, 464).
In a constitutional democracy, the state has no metaphysical or religious justification, because the state is founded on the mutual contract of individuals for their own interests (HH, 441). Over time, the functions of the democratic state are taken over by private contractors, and thus the state itself falls into decline, as the power of the state shrinks (HH, 472). (Remarkably, Nietzsche's talk about how governmental functions could be turned over to private contractors and thus bring a decline in the state sounds a lot like the reasoning of liberal anarchists such as Gustave de Molinari.)
This weakening of the state is good, because "the state is a prudent institution for the protection of individuals against one another: if it is completed and perfected too far, it will in the end enfeeble the individual and, indeed, dissolve him--that is to say, thwart the original purpose of the state in the most thorough way possible" (HH, 235).
FOR LIBERAL PLURALISM
Some scholarly commentators (like Brian Leiter, for example) have said that Nietzsche is not a political philosopher at all, because he thinks culture is more important than politics. One might see indications of this in Human, All Too Human, because while it contains one of the longest sections on politics in Nietzsche's writing--Chapter 8, secs. 438-82--the title of the chapter is "A Glance at the State," suggesting that a "glance" is all the state deserves, and this chapter is followed by the last chapter of the book on "Man Alone with Himself." The preoccupation with culture is indicated by the title of the central chapter--"Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture."
And yet this claim that Nietzsche's elevation of culture over politics shows him to be an anti-political philosopher misses the fundamental point that liberal politics secures the freedom of culture from political supervision. The liberal state is a limited state, because it refrains from imposing a monolithic moral order on society, which allows for cultural pluralism. The liberal state demands only a "glance," because the cultural formation of life occurs in civil society largely free from the coercive intervention of the state.
In a liberal democracy, all political parties must become demagogic in their appeal to the masses, and this requires a stupid simplification in all political rhetoric. Nietzsche sees no point in resisting this, because "if the purpose of all politics really is to make like endurable for as many as possible, then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an endurable life." If the multitude of people are happy to live a narrow life based on the few simple ideas that they can understand, there is no reason for a free-spirited thinker like Nietzsche to object, as long as "this narrow-mindedness does not go so far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that everyone should live and work according to such a standard." A few people must be allowed "to refrain from politics and to step a little aside." These few will not take the happiness of the many very seriously, and they will sometimes be "guilty of an ironic posture," because what they take seriously and the happiness they seek must be very different from that of the great multitude. All that the free-spirited few ask for politically is "permission to speak": "a moment when they emerge from their silent solitude and again try the power of their lungs: for then they call to one another like those gone astray in a wood in order to locate and encourage one another; whereby much becomes audible, to be sure, that sounds ill to ears for which it is not intended.--Soon afterwards, though, it is again still in the wood, so still that the buzzing, humming, and fluttering of the countless insects that live in, above, and beneath it can again clearly be heard" (HH, 438). Freedom of speech in a liberal democracy allows for both demagogic rhetoric and philosophic discourse.
This sounds a lot like the life of a Socrates living in a democracy. This section of Human, All Too Human is immediately preceded by a reference to Socrates, who is generally identified as a free spirited philosopher (HH, 65, 361, 437; WS, 86). This also sounds a lot like what Socrates says in Plato's Republic about how philosophers in a democracy might withdraw from politics ("the madness of the many") and mind their own business (496a-d), and how democracy is the one imperfect regime that secures freedom for all ways of life, including the philosophic life (557b-d). Indeed, I see Human, All Too Human as Nietzsche's elaboration of this Platonic suggestion as to how a liberal democracy might provide freedom for Socratic philosophy and science.
Such a liberal regime provides the conditions for a higher culture in allowing for two castes in society--a working class and a leisured class (HH, 439). Previously, the leisured class was largely a class based on inherited noble lineage. But now this position has been taken by merchants and industrialists who command the work of wage-laborers. Whereas previously, in feudal societies, subordination was based on the belief in unconditional and superhuman authority, subordination in a free society will be based on mutual contract (HH, 440-41). The vulgar manners of manufacturers and entrepreneurs make it hard for them to win the respectful obedience of their employees, who are consequently attracted by the rhetoric of socialist revolutionaries. So to reduce the appeal of socialism, employers will have to learn how to show the noble manners that win the respect of their employees. And while most people in a free society will work in order to be paid, a few people--artists, thinkers, and other people of leisure--will work only when the work is intrinsically pleasurable for them (GS, 40-42).
FOR RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
Nietzsche sees that part of liberal pluralism is religious liberty. For as long as the state is conceived as exercising a paternalistic guardianship over its subjects, because the great mass of people are treated as children, the state will need the support of religion to sanctify government and thus give it legitimacy. "Thus absolute tutelary government and the careful preservation of religion necessarily go together" (HH, 472). But democratic states teach a different conception of government: government becomes a mere instrument of popular will, and thus government can no longer claim transcendent authority coming from a state religion. Religion then becomes a private matter determined by the conscience and habits of every individual, and thus liberal democracy requires religious liberty.
Nietzsche believes that the first consequence of this religious liberty is likely to be an increase in religious enthusiasm, because the religious movements that were previously suppressed by government will now freely express themselves as a multiplicity of sects. But then this very diversity of religious groups will expose their weaknesses, because no single religious group can claim unquestioned authority. As a result, the more gifted people will embrace irreligion, and this hostility to religion will take over the minds of those in government. Those people who are still religious will be suspicious of government. This then will further weaken the state, and increasingly the functions of the state will be taken over by private contractors. Thus, "the sovereignty of the people serves then to banish the last remnant of magic and superstition from this realm of feeling; modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the state." This is not necessarily a bad thing, because as the state begins to shrink to insignificance around the world, prudent self-interest might eventually lead to the invention of new institutional forms to take the place of the state (HH, 472).
FOR COSMOPOLITAN GLOBALIZATION
Nietzsche suggests that those new institutional forms of governance might arise from the growing networks of international trade and cooperation. Commerce will grow more cosmopolitan to the point that a merchant in London will have to learn many languages to do business, and eventually there will be international languages for commerce and for intellectual discourse (HH, 267). Nations that have been enemies can become trading partners and thus increase their wealth and well-being (WS, 190).
Nietzsche writes: "European man and the abolition of nations.--Trade and industry, the post and the book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid changing of home and scene, the nomadic life now lived by all who do not own land--these circumstances are necessarily bringing with them a weakening and finally an abolition of nations, at least the European: so that as a consequence of continual crossing a mixed race, that of European man, must come into being out of them" (HH, 475).
Nietzsche foresees that one likely outcome of the spread of democratization across Europe is a European league of nations, in which each nation will become a governmental canton (WS, 292). This merging of nations in Europe will foster a sense of European culture in which individuals will increasing see themselves as "good Europeans."
This looks a lot like what Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, and others have identified as a growing cosmopolitan culture with declining violence fostered by global cooperation based on liberal capitalism, which fulfills Darwin's forecast of an evolutionary extension of the social instincts and sympathies to embrace all of humanity as bound together by networks of exchange.
To be continued . . .
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.
FOR CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY
Nietzsche sees the democratization of European politics as an irresistible power (HH, 438; WS, 275). Increasingly, the offices of king and emperor are being hollowed out; and the only way monarchs can hold on to any dignity is through declaring states of emergency during war to slow the growing constraints on monarchic power from constitutional democracy (WS, 281).
Nietzsche declares: "Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring" (WS, 289). That he identifies democratic restraints on the lust for tyranny as "very boring" might suggest the scorn for democracy as "herd-animalization" that runs through his later writings (BGE, 201-202, 242; TI, 9:38; WP, 890, 898). But, in fact, the Nietzsche of the middle writings warns that the despisers of "herd humanity" are foolish in thinking that they can escape being harmed by the herd by running away from them (AOM, 233). Instead of that, he recommends, the superior human beings should put on the mask of mediocrity and modesty, and adopt the virtue of moderation, so as not to provoke the great majority (WS, 175; HH, 464).
In a constitutional democracy, the state has no metaphysical or religious justification, because the state is founded on the mutual contract of individuals for their own interests (HH, 441). Over time, the functions of the democratic state are taken over by private contractors, and thus the state itself falls into decline, as the power of the state shrinks (HH, 472). (Remarkably, Nietzsche's talk about how governmental functions could be turned over to private contractors and thus bring a decline in the state sounds a lot like the reasoning of liberal anarchists such as Gustave de Molinari.)
This weakening of the state is good, because "the state is a prudent institution for the protection of individuals against one another: if it is completed and perfected too far, it will in the end enfeeble the individual and, indeed, dissolve him--that is to say, thwart the original purpose of the state in the most thorough way possible" (HH, 235).
FOR LIBERAL PLURALISM
Some scholarly commentators (like Brian Leiter, for example) have said that Nietzsche is not a political philosopher at all, because he thinks culture is more important than politics. One might see indications of this in Human, All Too Human, because while it contains one of the longest sections on politics in Nietzsche's writing--Chapter 8, secs. 438-82--the title of the chapter is "A Glance at the State," suggesting that a "glance" is all the state deserves, and this chapter is followed by the last chapter of the book on "Man Alone with Himself." The preoccupation with culture is indicated by the title of the central chapter--"Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture."
And yet this claim that Nietzsche's elevation of culture over politics shows him to be an anti-political philosopher misses the fundamental point that liberal politics secures the freedom of culture from political supervision. The liberal state is a limited state, because it refrains from imposing a monolithic moral order on society, which allows for cultural pluralism. The liberal state demands only a "glance," because the cultural formation of life occurs in civil society largely free from the coercive intervention of the state.
In a liberal democracy, all political parties must become demagogic in their appeal to the masses, and this requires a stupid simplification in all political rhetoric. Nietzsche sees no point in resisting this, because "if the purpose of all politics really is to make like endurable for as many as possible, then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an endurable life." If the multitude of people are happy to live a narrow life based on the few simple ideas that they can understand, there is no reason for a free-spirited thinker like Nietzsche to object, as long as "this narrow-mindedness does not go so far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that everyone should live and work according to such a standard." A few people must be allowed "to refrain from politics and to step a little aside." These few will not take the happiness of the many very seriously, and they will sometimes be "guilty of an ironic posture," because what they take seriously and the happiness they seek must be very different from that of the great multitude. All that the free-spirited few ask for politically is "permission to speak": "a moment when they emerge from their silent solitude and again try the power of their lungs: for then they call to one another like those gone astray in a wood in order to locate and encourage one another; whereby much becomes audible, to be sure, that sounds ill to ears for which it is not intended.--Soon afterwards, though, it is again still in the wood, so still that the buzzing, humming, and fluttering of the countless insects that live in, above, and beneath it can again clearly be heard" (HH, 438). Freedom of speech in a liberal democracy allows for both demagogic rhetoric and philosophic discourse.
This sounds a lot like the life of a Socrates living in a democracy. This section of Human, All Too Human is immediately preceded by a reference to Socrates, who is generally identified as a free spirited philosopher (HH, 65, 361, 437; WS, 86). This also sounds a lot like what Socrates says in Plato's Republic about how philosophers in a democracy might withdraw from politics ("the madness of the many") and mind their own business (496a-d), and how democracy is the one imperfect regime that secures freedom for all ways of life, including the philosophic life (557b-d). Indeed, I see Human, All Too Human as Nietzsche's elaboration of this Platonic suggestion as to how a liberal democracy might provide freedom for Socratic philosophy and science.
Such a liberal regime provides the conditions for a higher culture in allowing for two castes in society--a working class and a leisured class (HH, 439). Previously, the leisured class was largely a class based on inherited noble lineage. But now this position has been taken by merchants and industrialists who command the work of wage-laborers. Whereas previously, in feudal societies, subordination was based on the belief in unconditional and superhuman authority, subordination in a free society will be based on mutual contract (HH, 440-41). The vulgar manners of manufacturers and entrepreneurs make it hard for them to win the respectful obedience of their employees, who are consequently attracted by the rhetoric of socialist revolutionaries. So to reduce the appeal of socialism, employers will have to learn how to show the noble manners that win the respect of their employees. And while most people in a free society will work in order to be paid, a few people--artists, thinkers, and other people of leisure--will work only when the work is intrinsically pleasurable for them (GS, 40-42).
FOR RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
Nietzsche sees that part of liberal pluralism is religious liberty. For as long as the state is conceived as exercising a paternalistic guardianship over its subjects, because the great mass of people are treated as children, the state will need the support of religion to sanctify government and thus give it legitimacy. "Thus absolute tutelary government and the careful preservation of religion necessarily go together" (HH, 472). But democratic states teach a different conception of government: government becomes a mere instrument of popular will, and thus government can no longer claim transcendent authority coming from a state religion. Religion then becomes a private matter determined by the conscience and habits of every individual, and thus liberal democracy requires religious liberty.
Nietzsche believes that the first consequence of this religious liberty is likely to be an increase in religious enthusiasm, because the religious movements that were previously suppressed by government will now freely express themselves as a multiplicity of sects. But then this very diversity of religious groups will expose their weaknesses, because no single religious group can claim unquestioned authority. As a result, the more gifted people will embrace irreligion, and this hostility to religion will take over the minds of those in government. Those people who are still religious will be suspicious of government. This then will further weaken the state, and increasingly the functions of the state will be taken over by private contractors. Thus, "the sovereignty of the people serves then to banish the last remnant of magic and superstition from this realm of feeling; modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the state." This is not necessarily a bad thing, because as the state begins to shrink to insignificance around the world, prudent self-interest might eventually lead to the invention of new institutional forms to take the place of the state (HH, 472).
FOR COSMOPOLITAN GLOBALIZATION
Nietzsche suggests that those new institutional forms of governance might arise from the growing networks of international trade and cooperation. Commerce will grow more cosmopolitan to the point that a merchant in London will have to learn many languages to do business, and eventually there will be international languages for commerce and for intellectual discourse (HH, 267). Nations that have been enemies can become trading partners and thus increase their wealth and well-being (WS, 190).
Nietzsche writes: "European man and the abolition of nations.--Trade and industry, the post and the book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid changing of home and scene, the nomadic life now lived by all who do not own land--these circumstances are necessarily bringing with them a weakening and finally an abolition of nations, at least the European: so that as a consequence of continual crossing a mixed race, that of European man, must come into being out of them" (HH, 475).
Nietzsche foresees that one likely outcome of the spread of democratization across Europe is a European league of nations, in which each nation will become a governmental canton (WS, 292). This merging of nations in Europe will foster a sense of European culture in which individuals will increasing see themselves as "good Europeans."
This looks a lot like what Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, and others have identified as a growing cosmopolitan culture with declining violence fostered by global cooperation based on liberal capitalism, which fulfills Darwin's forecast of an evolutionary extension of the social instincts and sympathies to embrace all of humanity as bound together by networks of exchange.
To be continued . . .
Monday, March 04, 2013
Incest Taboos as Secular Transcendence
In October of 2006, I wrote a post with the title "So What's Wrong with Incest?"
For the past six and a half years, that post has regularly had more pageviews than any other post that I have ever written. Apparently, people are Googling "What is wrong with incest?" and my post pops up. A lot of people are struggling with their incestuous thoughts and looking for some way to overcome the taboo against incest. Unfortunately, my post has even turned up on a porno website!
Of course, sex is interesting, and prohibited sex is especially interesting. But what is notable about the incest taboo is that it's a universal prohibition of a sexual activity that most human beings in every human society never consider as a possibility. Most human beings have no sexual interest in their parents, their siblings, or their children.
So why do we need a social rule to prohibit what no one wants to do? Well, actually, as the popularity of my post on incest indicates, some people are troubled by incestuous thoughts. After all, incest is a serious social problem, particularly with fathers sexually abusing their daughters. Even here, however, there's an interesting pattern: the most common form of incest is actually child abuse. Daughters who have been sexually abused by their fathers usually break away from this as adults. Incest between consenting adults within the nuclear family is extremely rare. But once we move to more distant kinship relationships--such as cousins--the strength of the inhibition weakens, because depending upon the circumstances of rearing and kinship rules, cousin marriage might be allowed or even preferred.
As I have argued in various posts, I find Edward Westermarck's Darwinian explanation of incest avoidance and the incest taboo to be the best account of this. Elaborating on some suggestions coming from Darwin himself, Westermarck laid out the reasoning for explaining our human reaction to incest as a biological adaptation. If close inbreeding tends to create high risks for the offspring--death or mental and physical defects--then we might predict that evolution by natural selection would favor a propensity to feel no sexual interest in those with whom one has been reared from early infancy. Consequently, as people are reared together with siblings and parents, they will tend to have no sexual interest in their parents, their siblings, or their children. This emotional aversion to incest might then be expressed as a general social disapproval of incest that could become an incest taboo. How far this taboo extends beyond the nuclear family will depend upon social conditions and kinship rules.
The evidence for the Westermarck hypothesis has increased over the past sixty years as biologists and social scientists have studied some natural experiments among human beings--particularly, the history of the kibbutzim in Israel and Chinese "minor" marriages--and incest avoidance among primates and other non-human animals. This evidence has been well surveyed by people like Arthur Wolf of Stanford University.
The leading opponent of Westermarck's theory was Sigmund Freud, who assumed that far from having a natural inclination to avoid incest, human beings were naturally inclined to it (the Oedipus Complex), and therefore the incest taboo must be understood as a purely cultural invention of human beings to repress their natural animal desires for incestuous relations.
Many cultural anthropologists have adopted the Freudian position. For example, Claude Levi-Strauss declares:
As Wolf has indicated, cultural anthropologists often see human culture as having a kind of redemptive or transcendent quality to it, because it preserves human dignity through an elevated image of the human species that cannot be explained in Darwinian terms. Westermarck's Darwinian explanation of incest avoidance and the incest taboo is rejected by them because it presents a morally degrading view of human beings as merely highly evolved animals.
This might explain why debates between biological anthropologists and cultural anthropologists become so emotional. Wolf has seen this at Stanford. In 1998, the split in the Department of Anthropology had become so combative that the Department was officially separated into two distinct departments--a Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology and a Department of Anthropological Sciences. As these titles indicate, the split was between culture and science--between those who think that culture transcends biological science and those who think that culture can be explained by biological science. (In 2007, the central administration of Stanford forced these two departments to be reunited as a Department of Anthropology, but many of the faculty members were angry about this.)
The radical separation of nature and culture that one sees in the work of many cultural anthropologists arose first in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. Despite the monism of Hobbes's materialism, his political teaching presupposes a dualistic opposition between animal nature and human will or reason: in creating political order, human beings transcend and conquer nature. This dualism was explicitly developed by Kant, who originally formulated the modern concept of culture (Kultur). For Kant, culture is that uniquely human realm of artifice in which human beings escape their natural animality to express their rational humanity as the only beings who have a "supersensible faculty" for moral freedom. Through culture, human beings free themselves from the laws of nature.
Although culture has become a vague concept in the social sciences, it retains the four central features prescribed by Kant. (1) Culture is uniquely human. (2) It is uniquely human because only human beings have the understanding and the will to set purposes for themselves by free choice. (3) Culture is an autonomous human artifice that transcends nature. (4) Culture is the necessary condition for forming moral values.
Oddly enough, although Friedrich Nietzsche generally rejects Kantian dualism, the Nietzsche of the early and later writings actually embraces something like Kantian dualism in depicting human beings as capable of redeeming themselves from their animality by creating themselves through culture, allowing them to create what is "beyond" themselves. Only in the Darwinian writings of his middle period does Nietzsche escape from this "need for redemption" by accepting the animal nature of human beings.
For the past six and a half years, that post has regularly had more pageviews than any other post that I have ever written. Apparently, people are Googling "What is wrong with incest?" and my post pops up. A lot of people are struggling with their incestuous thoughts and looking for some way to overcome the taboo against incest. Unfortunately, my post has even turned up on a porno website!
Of course, sex is interesting, and prohibited sex is especially interesting. But what is notable about the incest taboo is that it's a universal prohibition of a sexual activity that most human beings in every human society never consider as a possibility. Most human beings have no sexual interest in their parents, their siblings, or their children.
So why do we need a social rule to prohibit what no one wants to do? Well, actually, as the popularity of my post on incest indicates, some people are troubled by incestuous thoughts. After all, incest is a serious social problem, particularly with fathers sexually abusing their daughters. Even here, however, there's an interesting pattern: the most common form of incest is actually child abuse. Daughters who have been sexually abused by their fathers usually break away from this as adults. Incest between consenting adults within the nuclear family is extremely rare. But once we move to more distant kinship relationships--such as cousins--the strength of the inhibition weakens, because depending upon the circumstances of rearing and kinship rules, cousin marriage might be allowed or even preferred.
As I have argued in various posts, I find Edward Westermarck's Darwinian explanation of incest avoidance and the incest taboo to be the best account of this. Elaborating on some suggestions coming from Darwin himself, Westermarck laid out the reasoning for explaining our human reaction to incest as a biological adaptation. If close inbreeding tends to create high risks for the offspring--death or mental and physical defects--then we might predict that evolution by natural selection would favor a propensity to feel no sexual interest in those with whom one has been reared from early infancy. Consequently, as people are reared together with siblings and parents, they will tend to have no sexual interest in their parents, their siblings, or their children. This emotional aversion to incest might then be expressed as a general social disapproval of incest that could become an incest taboo. How far this taboo extends beyond the nuclear family will depend upon social conditions and kinship rules.
The evidence for the Westermarck hypothesis has increased over the past sixty years as biologists and social scientists have studied some natural experiments among human beings--particularly, the history of the kibbutzim in Israel and Chinese "minor" marriages--and incest avoidance among primates and other non-human animals. This evidence has been well surveyed by people like Arthur Wolf of Stanford University.
The leading opponent of Westermarck's theory was Sigmund Freud, who assumed that far from having a natural inclination to avoid incest, human beings were naturally inclined to it (the Oedipus Complex), and therefore the incest taboo must be understood as a purely cultural invention of human beings to repress their natural animal desires for incestuous relations.
Many cultural anthropologists have adopted the Freudian position. For example, Claude Levi-Strauss declares:
"It will never be sufficiently emphasized that, if social organization had a beginning, this could only have consisted in the incest prohibition since . . . the prohibition is, in fact, a kind of remodelling of the biological conditions of mating and procreation (which know no rule, as can be seen from observing animal life) compelling them to become perpetuated only in an artificial framework of taboos and obligations. It is there, and only there, that we find a passage from nature to culture, from animal life to human life, and that we are in a position to understand the very essence of their articulation."This remarkably dramatic language--"from nature to culture, from animal life to human life"--suggests something like a Creation story of human origins, except that in this case the elevation from animal life to human life comes not through God's creative power, but from the power of human beings to create themselves through culture.
As Wolf has indicated, cultural anthropologists often see human culture as having a kind of redemptive or transcendent quality to it, because it preserves human dignity through an elevated image of the human species that cannot be explained in Darwinian terms. Westermarck's Darwinian explanation of incest avoidance and the incest taboo is rejected by them because it presents a morally degrading view of human beings as merely highly evolved animals.
This might explain why debates between biological anthropologists and cultural anthropologists become so emotional. Wolf has seen this at Stanford. In 1998, the split in the Department of Anthropology had become so combative that the Department was officially separated into two distinct departments--a Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology and a Department of Anthropological Sciences. As these titles indicate, the split was between culture and science--between those who think that culture transcends biological science and those who think that culture can be explained by biological science. (In 2007, the central administration of Stanford forced these two departments to be reunited as a Department of Anthropology, but many of the faculty members were angry about this.)
The radical separation of nature and culture that one sees in the work of many cultural anthropologists arose first in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. Despite the monism of Hobbes's materialism, his political teaching presupposes a dualistic opposition between animal nature and human will or reason: in creating political order, human beings transcend and conquer nature. This dualism was explicitly developed by Kant, who originally formulated the modern concept of culture (Kultur). For Kant, culture is that uniquely human realm of artifice in which human beings escape their natural animality to express their rational humanity as the only beings who have a "supersensible faculty" for moral freedom. Through culture, human beings free themselves from the laws of nature.
Although culture has become a vague concept in the social sciences, it retains the four central features prescribed by Kant. (1) Culture is uniquely human. (2) It is uniquely human because only human beings have the understanding and the will to set purposes for themselves by free choice. (3) Culture is an autonomous human artifice that transcends nature. (4) Culture is the necessary condition for forming moral values.
Oddly enough, although Friedrich Nietzsche generally rejects Kantian dualism, the Nietzsche of the early and later writings actually embraces something like Kantian dualism in depicting human beings as capable of redeeming themselves from their animality by creating themselves through culture, allowing them to create what is "beyond" themselves. Only in the Darwinian writings of his middle period does Nietzsche escape from this "need for redemption" by accepting the animal nature of human beings.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Lyric Opera's "Die Meistersinger" (2): Is Hans Sachs a Nihilist?
I have a nose for nihilism. I can smell a nihilist a mile away.
Years ago, when I first read the libretto of Die Meistersinger, I thought I detected the odor of nihilism around Hans Sachs, particularly in his famous monologue on Wahn. But with more study of the opera, I changed my mind and decided that this is the one opera of Wagner's that is free from nihilism, and thus free of the nihilist connection to Nazism.
At the end of the Second Act, Sachs interferes with Beckmesser's attempt to serenade Eva with a love song at night, which is to be his rehearsal for the singing contest the next day. It turns out that the woman he's serenading is actually Magdalene, Eva's nurse and the fiance of David, Sach's apprentice. When David sees what's happening, he attacks Beckmesser, and the noise of their altercation draws many townspeople into the streets, who then pick fights with one another, starting a general riot that stops only when the night-watchman appears.
At the beginning of the Third Act, Sachs is in his house reading a book of world history and apparently pondering the riot of the previous night. After speaking briefly with David, who apologizes for starting the fight, Sachs is left alone, and he launches into a dark, meditative monologue on how everything is full of Wahn. This German word cannot be easily translated into a single English word, because it can variously mean "delusion," "madness," "feigning," "folly," or "irrationality." Here's a translation of this monologue, leaving the word Wahn untranslated:
Schopenhauer adopts Kant's dualistic metaphysics that separates the phenomenal world of nature (things as they appear to us) from the noumenal world of freedom (things as they are in themselves). The apparent world of nature is ruled by the natural necessity of each individual to preserve himself. This is the world of egoism in which each individual wills his own life in conflict with the will to life of others, which is the world of the Hobbesian war of all against all. This is the world of suffering and unfulfilled longing. The only escape from this world is for the will to renounce itself--to will not to will--which frees us from the apparent world into a world of empty nothingness. Schopenhauer sees this as a metaphysical statement of the Christian dogma of human life as ruined by the original sin of willful self-assertion and as redeemed by the denial of all willing in self-renunciation.
In 1862, while he was working on Die Meistersinger, Wagner expressed his version of this Schopenhauerean teaching in an essay "On the State and Religion," in which he formulates this teaching through the idea of Wahn. To overcome the destructiveness of human egoism, we need the Wahn of patriotism to delude us into sacrificing for the state as if this were in our selfish interest. But the state cannot satisfy the deepest human longings. For that we need "true religion," and its "inmost kernel is denial of the world--that is, recognition of the world as a fleeting and dreamlike condition reposing merely on illusion--and struggle for redemption from it, prepared for by renunciation, attained by faith." As religious belief fades in the modern world, the redemptive function of religion can be carried on through art, by which we enter a "conscious Wahn in place of the reality": through art, we can willingly deceive ourselves while accepting "the nothingness of the world," and escaping from that world through an ecstatic self-annihilation (like that of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, whose frenzied erotic longing was finally consummated in death).
Here we see Wagner's Gnostic nihilism--the thought that the world as we know it, the world of ordinary human experience, is an illusory world of suffering and unfulfilled longing, but that we can free ourselves from the prison of this world through a redemptive self-renunciation. As Nietzsche and others have seen, this theme of redemption runs through Wagner's operas, in which art takes the place of religion in appealing to the transcendent longings traditionally served by Biblical religion.
And yet Die Meistersinger is the one opera that departs from this Wagnerian theme of Gnostic redemption from the world. Many commentators think they see redemption in Sach's decision to give up his chance to win the song contest and marry Eva, and instead he choses to teach Walther how to use the Wahn of artful and beautiful singing to win the contest and marriage to Eva. But there is no ecstatic self-annihilation in Die Meistersinger like that in Tristan und Isolde. In Die Meistersinger, there is no fleeing from the world, but rather a healing reaffirmation of the world of ordinary experience.
Sachs explains to Walther that while it's easy for a young man with the erotic longings of springtime to sing a beautiful love song, it's hard for older men to sing once they have experienced the stresses and suffering of married life, children, work, and business. The older men who become Mastersingers have developed the formal rules of poetry and music so that they can sing even when the erotic passions of youth have faded.
We see this early in Act Three:
Through their singing art, Sachs explains, the Mastersingers preserve the memory "of all the springs that once they knew." When Walther asks how these men can recover their image of spring once their spring has been long over, Sachs answers: "They start afresh as best they can."
M. Owen Lee is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who became famous for his opera commentary, particularly during intermissions of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. He is a fan of Wagner's operas, and he regards Die Meistersinger as perhaps his best. Although I always find his remarks on Wagner insightful, I think he is wrong in claiming that the theme of redemption from the world runs through Die Meistersinger as it does through all of Wagner's operas.
The contrast between Die Meistersinger and the other operas can be seen by comparing two passages from Lee giving overviews of Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde:
Like the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde, the Nietzsche of his early and later writings shows a need for redemption from the world that leads him to an atheistic religiosity expressed in the Dionysian ecstasy of Wagner's music or Zarathustra's poetry. But like the Wagner of Die Meistersinger, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human rejects the need for redemption as showing a sickly refusal to accept life as it is--even in all its transience, vulnerability, and pain--as having a natural sweetness that makes it all worth living.
Years ago, when I first read the libretto of Die Meistersinger, I thought I detected the odor of nihilism around Hans Sachs, particularly in his famous monologue on Wahn. But with more study of the opera, I changed my mind and decided that this is the one opera of Wagner's that is free from nihilism, and thus free of the nihilist connection to Nazism.
At the end of the Second Act, Sachs interferes with Beckmesser's attempt to serenade Eva with a love song at night, which is to be his rehearsal for the singing contest the next day. It turns out that the woman he's serenading is actually Magdalene, Eva's nurse and the fiance of David, Sach's apprentice. When David sees what's happening, he attacks Beckmesser, and the noise of their altercation draws many townspeople into the streets, who then pick fights with one another, starting a general riot that stops only when the night-watchman appears.
At the beginning of the Third Act, Sachs is in his house reading a book of world history and apparently pondering the riot of the previous night. After speaking briefly with David, who apologizes for starting the fight, Sachs is left alone, and he launches into a dark, meditative monologue on how everything is full of Wahn. This German word cannot be easily translated into a single English word, because it can variously mean "delusion," "madness," "feigning," "folly," or "irrationality." Here's a translation of this monologue, leaving the word Wahn untranslated:
"Wahn! Wahn! Everywhere Wahn! Wherever I search in city and world chronicles, to discover the reason why, till they draw blood, people harass and torment one another in useless, foolish rage! No one has reward or thanks for it. Driven to flight, he deludes himself that he is the hunter; he does not hear his own cry of pain; when he digs into his own flesh, he is deluded that he gives himself pleasure! Who will give it a name? It's the old Wahn, without which nothing can happen, either to change or to preserve. If it halts somewhere in its course, it sleeps only to gain new strength: it suddenly awakens, and then, see who can master it!"
"How peaceful, with its sound customs, contented in deed and work, there lies in the middle of Germany my beloved Nuremberg! But late one evening, to prevent a mishap caused by youthful ardour, a man does not know what to do; a cobbler in his shop plucks at the thread of Wahn; how quickly in alleys and streets it begins to rage! Man, woman, journeyman and child fall on each other as if mad and blind, and if the Wahn will bless it, it must now rain blows, with cuffs, punches and thrashings to quench the fire of rage. God knows how that came about? A goblin must have helped there: a glow-worm failed to find its mate; it set the trouble off. It was the elder tree: Midsummer Eve!"
"But now is come Midsummer's Day! Now let's see how Hans Sachs can manage to guide the Wahn subtly to perform a nobler task. For if it will not leave us in peace, even here in Nuremberg, then let it be for such a work that seldom in commonplace matters, and never without touch of Wahn, is achieved."This monologue shows the influence on Wagner of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. Lucy Beckett has shown this very clearly in her essay "Sachs and Schopenhauer" (in John Warrack, Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg [Cambridge University Press, 1994], 66-82).
Schopenhauer adopts Kant's dualistic metaphysics that separates the phenomenal world of nature (things as they appear to us) from the noumenal world of freedom (things as they are in themselves). The apparent world of nature is ruled by the natural necessity of each individual to preserve himself. This is the world of egoism in which each individual wills his own life in conflict with the will to life of others, which is the world of the Hobbesian war of all against all. This is the world of suffering and unfulfilled longing. The only escape from this world is for the will to renounce itself--to will not to will--which frees us from the apparent world into a world of empty nothingness. Schopenhauer sees this as a metaphysical statement of the Christian dogma of human life as ruined by the original sin of willful self-assertion and as redeemed by the denial of all willing in self-renunciation.
In 1862, while he was working on Die Meistersinger, Wagner expressed his version of this Schopenhauerean teaching in an essay "On the State and Religion," in which he formulates this teaching through the idea of Wahn. To overcome the destructiveness of human egoism, we need the Wahn of patriotism to delude us into sacrificing for the state as if this were in our selfish interest. But the state cannot satisfy the deepest human longings. For that we need "true religion," and its "inmost kernel is denial of the world--that is, recognition of the world as a fleeting and dreamlike condition reposing merely on illusion--and struggle for redemption from it, prepared for by renunciation, attained by faith." As religious belief fades in the modern world, the redemptive function of religion can be carried on through art, by which we enter a "conscious Wahn in place of the reality": through art, we can willingly deceive ourselves while accepting "the nothingness of the world," and escaping from that world through an ecstatic self-annihilation (like that of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, whose frenzied erotic longing was finally consummated in death).
Here we see Wagner's Gnostic nihilism--the thought that the world as we know it, the world of ordinary human experience, is an illusory world of suffering and unfulfilled longing, but that we can free ourselves from the prison of this world through a redemptive self-renunciation. As Nietzsche and others have seen, this theme of redemption runs through Wagner's operas, in which art takes the place of religion in appealing to the transcendent longings traditionally served by Biblical religion.
And yet Die Meistersinger is the one opera that departs from this Wagnerian theme of Gnostic redemption from the world. Many commentators think they see redemption in Sach's decision to give up his chance to win the song contest and marry Eva, and instead he choses to teach Walther how to use the Wahn of artful and beautiful singing to win the contest and marriage to Eva. But there is no ecstatic self-annihilation in Die Meistersinger like that in Tristan und Isolde. In Die Meistersinger, there is no fleeing from the world, but rather a healing reaffirmation of the world of ordinary experience.
Sachs explains to Walther that while it's easy for a young man with the erotic longings of springtime to sing a beautiful love song, it's hard for older men to sing once they have experienced the stresses and suffering of married life, children, work, and business. The older men who become Mastersingers have developed the formal rules of poetry and music so that they can sing even when the erotic passions of youth have faded.
We see this early in Act Three:
SACHS: Follow my advice, short and good: fashion your mood into a Mastersong.
WALTHER: A beautiful song, a Mastersong . . . What's the difference?
SACHS (softly): My friend, in the charming time of youth, when from powerful sprouts, we are captured in our first love, when the heart is beating and swelling, to sing a beautiful song is granted to most: spring sings for us. Through summer, fall, and winter's time, when trouble and care press on our life, though at the same time, as marital happiness, with children's christenings, business, discord, and strife, only those who still manage to sing a beautiful song will be called Masters.
Through their singing art, Sachs explains, the Mastersingers preserve the memory "of all the springs that once they knew." When Walther asks how these men can recover their image of spring once their spring has been long over, Sachs answers: "They start afresh as best they can."
M. Owen Lee is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who became famous for his opera commentary, particularly during intermissions of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. He is a fan of Wagner's operas, and he regards Die Meistersinger as perhaps his best. Although I always find his remarks on Wagner insightful, I think he is wrong in claiming that the theme of redemption from the world runs through Die Meistersinger as it does through all of Wagner's operas.
The contrast between Die Meistersinger and the other operas can be seen by comparing two passages from Lee giving overviews of Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde:
"The wounded, haunted Tristan comes painfully to see that the human condition, inherited from father and mother, nurtured by ambition, intensified by sexual passion, never fulfilled, driving him ever onward, is not the real world, and he summons up all his strength to renounce it. Only then is he rewarded with a vision of Isolde coming to him, walking over the sea on waves of flowers. Tristan at that moment has suffered through to what Wagner thought, at that time of his life, was the ultimate human truth, buried deep in the unconscious, but clearly stated in the wisdom of the East--that only when a man renounces his insatiable desires can he find the Nirvana-peace which is his true fulfillment." (Wagner, The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art, University of Toronto Press, 2007, p. 53)
"Can we sum up Wagner's aesthetic, as expressed in Die Meistersinger, in the half-minute that remains to us before we listen to the rest of his opera? If we read the music and the metaphors rightly, we can say five things. Art, for Richard Wagner, is fashioned from both intuition and honest craftsmanship, from both innovating spirit and respect for tradition. It can speak powerfully to us if we have within ourselves the capacity to respond to it. It can survive the fall of empires to speak to future civilizations about the civilization that produced it. It can tell us what we need to know about ourselves, perhaps most of all about the flaw in human nature that makes mysteries of our lives. And it can help us to accept the inevitable sadness in life--as well as to sing like songbirds from the sheer joy of being alive." (Wagner and the Wonder of Art: An Introduction to Die Meistersinger, University of Toronto Press, 2007, p. 85)So, in Tristan und Isolde, the "human condition"--the world of human love, marital bonding, parental care, and ambitious striving--"is not the real world." To reach the "real world," we must renounce all of our natural desires to achieve the annihilation of "Nirvana-peace." By contrast, Die Meistersinger affirms the natural goodness of our human, all too human life, even with all its flaws and suffering, so that we can "accept the inevitable sadness in life--as well as to sing like songbirds from the sheer joy of being alive."
Like the Wagner of Tristan und Isolde, the Nietzsche of his early and later writings shows a need for redemption from the world that leads him to an atheistic religiosity expressed in the Dionysian ecstasy of Wagner's music or Zarathustra's poetry. But like the Wagner of Die Meistersinger, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human rejects the need for redemption as showing a sickly refusal to accept life as it is--even in all its transience, vulnerability, and pain--as having a natural sweetness that makes it all worth living.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Lyric Opera's "Die Meistersinger": Wagner, Hitler, and the Nightwatchman State
The most striking phrase coined by Leo Strauss is reductio ad Hitlerum. In National Right and History, Strauss argues that Max Weber's teaching about values leads to nihilism. Just as he begins to make this argument, Strauss observes:
I thought about that Saturday night while attending a performance of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. This was Hitler's favorite opera, and it was often performed in the Third Reich with Nazi sponsorship. Consequently, many people have been disturbed by the thought that this opera promotes the anti-Semitism, the German nationalism, and the nihilism that led to Hitler's movement.
Of course, a similar reductio ad Hitlerum has been used to criticize Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche. Just as Wagner provided Hitler his music, it is said, Darwin provided him his science, and Nietzsche provided him his philosophy. And thus Wagner, Darwin, and Nietzsche are all refuted by their connection to Hitler. Even if this is a fallacy, it is surely reasonable to question any view of the world that supports such evil.
As I have argued on this blog, there is nothing in Darwin's writing that leads directly to Hitler. In fact, as far as I know, Hitler never even mentioned Darwin's name, although he did use some of the phrases associated with Darwin. Even when Richard Weikart argues that there is a history of movement "from Darwin to Hitler," he must admit that there really is no clear connection between Darwin's writings and Hitler.
By comparison, Hitler's connection to Nietzsche and Wagner seems much clearer. Even so, as I have been arguing on this blog, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human provides no encouragement to Hitler and the Nazis. And Wagner's Die Meistersinger is his one opera that presents a view of the world similar to that of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. Neither of these two works support the anti-Semitism, the fanatical nationalism, or the nihilism of Hitler and the Nazis.
It's significant that just as Die Meistersinger is generally the least popular of Wagner's operas among the Wagnerites, Human, All Too Human is generally the least popular of Nietzsche's books among the Nietzscheans. My view is just the opposite--that Die Meistersinger is Wagner's best opera, and Human, All Too Human is Nietzsche's best book. It all depends on whether you prefer explosive frenzy, as the Nietzscheans and Wagnerites do, or sensible moderation, as I do.
Die Meistersinger was first performed in 1868. Of the ten operas of Wagner's mature work, this is the only comedy and the only opera not based on myth. The story of the opera is set in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. The guild of Mastersingers in Nuremberg preserves a proud tradition of German singing governed by rigorous rules. On Midsummer's Day (St. John's Day), they will conduct a song contest. The contest is sponsored by Veit Pogner (a wealthy silversmith), and he offers as a prize for the winner marriage to his beautiful daughter Eva. Eva is free to reject the winner if she chooses, but whoever she marries must be a Mastersinger. Walther von Stolzing is a young man who has recently arrived in town, and he and Eva have quickly fallen in love. So Walther must win the contest if he and Eva are to marry. The problem is that although he can sing beautiful love songs in a passionate style, Walther does not know--and does not appreciate--the complex rules for singing enforced by the Mastersingers. To win the contest, he will need to follow the wise instruction of Hans Sachs, an older man who is equally skilled in making shoes and mastersinging, and who is the most respected man in town. In fact, Hans Sachs really did exist as a famous poet and singer in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. (For the Lyric Opera performances, the role of Sachs has been sung by James Morris, one of the greatest Wagnerian singers of our time.)
Walther's primary challenger in the contest is Sixtus Beckmesser, an older Mastersinger who wants to marry Eva. While Beckmesser has mastered the rules of mastersinging, his pedantic stiffness lacks the intuitive insight and youthful passion of Walther's singing.
Although Sachs does teach Walther the art of mastersinging, while helping him compose the song that will win the contest for him, Sach feels some conflict about this. Sachs has helped to rear Eva from the time that she was an infant. And now that she is grown up, he has developed romantic feelings for her, which she reciprocates. Sachs is a widower whose wife and children have all died. Marrying Eva would give him both a wife and a child at the same time. After some struggle with himself, Sachs decides that the marriage of Eva to Walther would be best for everyone, and that he must restrain his longings for Eva in serving the greater good of his community through her marriage.
There are at least three features of the opera that have been seen as points of contact with Hitler's Nazism. First, Beckmesser has been said to be an ugly anti-Semitic depiction of a Jew who earns a humiliating defeat in his German town. Second, the opera ends with a speech by Sachs warning that German art needs to be defended from Germany's enemies, which sounds like the German nationalistic rhetoric that favored the rise of Nazism. The third point brings up the deepest philosophical issue of the opera: Sachs muses darkly about how all of life is ruled by delusion and madness, for which there is no cure except using the noble delusion of art to redeem human beings from the ugly truth that all that seems real to us is only illusion. This looking into the nothingness of the world seems to be the nihilism that Strauss saw as primary source of Nazism as a product of the Third Wave of Modernity.
On the first point, it's clear that the anti-Semitic remarks by Wagner in his prose writings provided plenty of material for the Nazis. For this reason, many people have looked for anti-Semitism in Wagner's operas. But if one were unaware of what Wagner had said in his prose writings, one would not see any clear evidence of anti-Semitism in his operas. Particularly, in Die Meistersinger, Beckmesser is never identified as a Jew. Furthermore, even though he is depicted as ridiculously foolish--the sort of fool we expect to find in a comedy--he also elicits some sympathy from us, and he is a respected and honored member of his community.
Similarly, while one can easily find some anti-Semitism in some of Nietzsche's writings, especially in his attacks on the Jewish sources of "slave morality," Human, All Too Human and other writings of his middle period contain passages where he praises the Jews for what they have contributed to the evolution of culture. Examples of this would be section 475 of Human, All Too Human and section 205 of Dawn.
The second point--the reference to Germany and its enemies in Sach's final speech--is a more serious problem for the defender of Die Meistersinger.
After Walther has won the singing contest, Pogner offers him a golden chain with three medals. Walther refuses the chain, because he is still bitter about the earlier rejection of his singing by the Mastersingers. Sachs grabs him by the hand and exhorts him to respect the Masters for what they do in preserving their art. Sachs then warns:
This opera premiered in 1868, just two years before the Franco-Prussian War, at a time when a war between France and Prussia was widely expected. So this final speech by Sachs could easily have been interpreted as an exhortation to German militaristic nationalism. Similarly, when Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy announced in 1872 a rebirth of tragedy in Germany through Wagner's music, this appeared to be a clear reference to the Prussian victory over France and the proclamation of the Second German Reich.
At one point in his revising of the libretto, Wagner struck out this final speech by Sachs. But then he was persuaded by his wife Cosima to restore it. So Wagner had his doubts about whether this ending to the opera was appropriate.
In any case, one should see that Wagner's patriotism here is more cultural than political, and not at all militaristic. After all, it's clear in the opera that art is more important for preserving the German nation than is military or political power.
Furthermore, what one sees in Die Meistersinger is a depiction of a self-governing bourgeois city that is organized primarily through the institutions of civil society--family, church, and voluntary associations. The only sign of governmental force is the minimal power of Nuremberg's night-watchman. When a violent riot breaks out at the end of Act 2, the crowd disperses when the night-watchman walks through on his rounds.
It was in 1862, only six years before the premier of Die Meistersinger, that the German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle ridiculed the classical liberals for advocating "the night-watchman state"--the idea that government should be limited to punishing violence and fraud to protect property, liberty, and peace. Some of the proponents of classical liberalism have actually embraced the phrase "night-watchman state" as a good label for their position. In his book Liberalism (3rd edition, 1985), Ludwig von Mises observed: "it is difficult to see why the night-watchman state should be any more ridiculous or worse than the state that concerns itself with the preparation of sauerkraut, with the manufacture of trouser buttons, or with the publication of newspapers" (37).
In a liberal regime, the cultivation of the arts and of cultural life generally comes from the natural and voluntary associations of a free society that requires only limited governmental intervention. That's the case in Hans Sach's Nuremberg.
In the same way, Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human endorses a largely liberal view of society and government in which "higher culture" and the excellence of "higher men" is fostered by the freedom of civil society. Culture is largely free from political regimentation, and culture is more important than politics. According to Nietzsche, "the state is a prudent institution for protecting individuals from one another," but any ennobling of the state into a "perfect state" tends to bring a dangerous suppression of the individual (HH, 235).
Just as is the case in Sach's Nuremberg, Nietzsche presents the majority of people as devoted to the ordinary concerns of life, and they display little human excellence, but a few people with higher aspirations and talents can develop their moral and intellectual virtues through the self-regulating order of civil society.
Much of the appeal of National Socialism came from the claim that liberalism is degrading in its bourgeois mediocrity and thus cannot cultivate the heroic human excellence that goes beyond the base materialism of the "Last Man."
Wagner's Die Meistersinger and Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human deny this claim by showing how a free society can foster the full range of human virtue, from the low to the high, including the virtuous cultural activities of art, science, and philosophy.
I will take up the third point about the connection of Meistersinger to Nazism--the apparent nihilism of Sachs--in my next post.
One of the best performances of Die Meistersinger--in 2001 at the Metropolitan Opera with James Morris as Sachs--can be seen as an online video at the "Met on Demand" website. There's a free seven-day trial that allows immediate access. You need to be well rested before you watch this opera. If you take two 30-minute intermissions, the opera will take five and a half hours!
I recommend watching it with a good bottle of pinot noir. My wife and I had two bottles over dinner before the opera and snacks during the intermissions at the Pederson Room at the Lyric Opera House. A very civilized evening indeed.
". . . In following this movement toward its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler. Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler." (42-43)As Will Altman has noted, Strauss never again mentions Hitler in the book, which leaves the reader wondering where exactly in the book "the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler." We might also wonder, as Altman suggests, why Strauss doesn't identify this fallacy as a noble fallacy. After all, why isn't it good that our scorn for Hitler is so deep that we assume that a view is refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler?
I thought about that Saturday night while attending a performance of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. This was Hitler's favorite opera, and it was often performed in the Third Reich with Nazi sponsorship. Consequently, many people have been disturbed by the thought that this opera promotes the anti-Semitism, the German nationalism, and the nihilism that led to Hitler's movement.
Of course, a similar reductio ad Hitlerum has been used to criticize Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche. Just as Wagner provided Hitler his music, it is said, Darwin provided him his science, and Nietzsche provided him his philosophy. And thus Wagner, Darwin, and Nietzsche are all refuted by their connection to Hitler. Even if this is a fallacy, it is surely reasonable to question any view of the world that supports such evil.
As I have argued on this blog, there is nothing in Darwin's writing that leads directly to Hitler. In fact, as far as I know, Hitler never even mentioned Darwin's name, although he did use some of the phrases associated with Darwin. Even when Richard Weikart argues that there is a history of movement "from Darwin to Hitler," he must admit that there really is no clear connection between Darwin's writings and Hitler.
By comparison, Hitler's connection to Nietzsche and Wagner seems much clearer. Even so, as I have been arguing on this blog, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human provides no encouragement to Hitler and the Nazis. And Wagner's Die Meistersinger is his one opera that presents a view of the world similar to that of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human. Neither of these two works support the anti-Semitism, the fanatical nationalism, or the nihilism of Hitler and the Nazis.
It's significant that just as Die Meistersinger is generally the least popular of Wagner's operas among the Wagnerites, Human, All Too Human is generally the least popular of Nietzsche's books among the Nietzscheans. My view is just the opposite--that Die Meistersinger is Wagner's best opera, and Human, All Too Human is Nietzsche's best book. It all depends on whether you prefer explosive frenzy, as the Nietzscheans and Wagnerites do, or sensible moderation, as I do.
Die Meistersinger was first performed in 1868. Of the ten operas of Wagner's mature work, this is the only comedy and the only opera not based on myth. The story of the opera is set in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. The guild of Mastersingers in Nuremberg preserves a proud tradition of German singing governed by rigorous rules. On Midsummer's Day (St. John's Day), they will conduct a song contest. The contest is sponsored by Veit Pogner (a wealthy silversmith), and he offers as a prize for the winner marriage to his beautiful daughter Eva. Eva is free to reject the winner if she chooses, but whoever she marries must be a Mastersinger. Walther von Stolzing is a young man who has recently arrived in town, and he and Eva have quickly fallen in love. So Walther must win the contest if he and Eva are to marry. The problem is that although he can sing beautiful love songs in a passionate style, Walther does not know--and does not appreciate--the complex rules for singing enforced by the Mastersingers. To win the contest, he will need to follow the wise instruction of Hans Sachs, an older man who is equally skilled in making shoes and mastersinging, and who is the most respected man in town. In fact, Hans Sachs really did exist as a famous poet and singer in sixteenth-century Nuremberg. (For the Lyric Opera performances, the role of Sachs has been sung by James Morris, one of the greatest Wagnerian singers of our time.)
Walther's primary challenger in the contest is Sixtus Beckmesser, an older Mastersinger who wants to marry Eva. While Beckmesser has mastered the rules of mastersinging, his pedantic stiffness lacks the intuitive insight and youthful passion of Walther's singing.
Although Sachs does teach Walther the art of mastersinging, while helping him compose the song that will win the contest for him, Sach feels some conflict about this. Sachs has helped to rear Eva from the time that she was an infant. And now that she is grown up, he has developed romantic feelings for her, which she reciprocates. Sachs is a widower whose wife and children have all died. Marrying Eva would give him both a wife and a child at the same time. After some struggle with himself, Sachs decides that the marriage of Eva to Walther would be best for everyone, and that he must restrain his longings for Eva in serving the greater good of his community through her marriage.
There are at least three features of the opera that have been seen as points of contact with Hitler's Nazism. First, Beckmesser has been said to be an ugly anti-Semitic depiction of a Jew who earns a humiliating defeat in his German town. Second, the opera ends with a speech by Sachs warning that German art needs to be defended from Germany's enemies, which sounds like the German nationalistic rhetoric that favored the rise of Nazism. The third point brings up the deepest philosophical issue of the opera: Sachs muses darkly about how all of life is ruled by delusion and madness, for which there is no cure except using the noble delusion of art to redeem human beings from the ugly truth that all that seems real to us is only illusion. This looking into the nothingness of the world seems to be the nihilism that Strauss saw as primary source of Nazism as a product of the Third Wave of Modernity.
On the first point, it's clear that the anti-Semitic remarks by Wagner in his prose writings provided plenty of material for the Nazis. For this reason, many people have looked for anti-Semitism in Wagner's operas. But if one were unaware of what Wagner had said in his prose writings, one would not see any clear evidence of anti-Semitism in his operas. Particularly, in Die Meistersinger, Beckmesser is never identified as a Jew. Furthermore, even though he is depicted as ridiculously foolish--the sort of fool we expect to find in a comedy--he also elicits some sympathy from us, and he is a respected and honored member of his community.
Similarly, while one can easily find some anti-Semitism in some of Nietzsche's writings, especially in his attacks on the Jewish sources of "slave morality," Human, All Too Human and other writings of his middle period contain passages where he praises the Jews for what they have contributed to the evolution of culture. Examples of this would be section 475 of Human, All Too Human and section 205 of Dawn.
The second point--the reference to Germany and its enemies in Sach's final speech--is a more serious problem for the defender of Die Meistersinger.
After Walther has won the singing contest, Pogner offers him a golden chain with three medals. Walther refuses the chain, because he is still bitter about the earlier rejection of his singing by the Mastersingers. Sachs grabs him by the hand and exhorts him to respect the Masters for what they do in preserving their art. Sachs then warns:
"Take heed! Ill times now threaten all; and if the German folk [Volk] and Reich should fall, and foreigners should rule our land, no king his folk would understand, and foreign rule and foreign ways would darken all our German ways; what's German and true could not abide were't not for German Masters' pride! I beg of you: honor your German Masters, and thus you will ban disasters! And if you have their work at heart, though the Holy German Reich fell, there still will remain the holy German art!"Walther then accepts the golden chain. The Masters pay homage to Sachs with upraised hands, and all join the people of the town in singing praise for Sach: "Heil Sachs! Hans Sachs! Heil Nuremberg's poet Sachs!"
This opera premiered in 1868, just two years before the Franco-Prussian War, at a time when a war between France and Prussia was widely expected. So this final speech by Sachs could easily have been interpreted as an exhortation to German militaristic nationalism. Similarly, when Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy announced in 1872 a rebirth of tragedy in Germany through Wagner's music, this appeared to be a clear reference to the Prussian victory over France and the proclamation of the Second German Reich.
At one point in his revising of the libretto, Wagner struck out this final speech by Sachs. But then he was persuaded by his wife Cosima to restore it. So Wagner had his doubts about whether this ending to the opera was appropriate.
In any case, one should see that Wagner's patriotism here is more cultural than political, and not at all militaristic. After all, it's clear in the opera that art is more important for preserving the German nation than is military or political power.
Furthermore, what one sees in Die Meistersinger is a depiction of a self-governing bourgeois city that is organized primarily through the institutions of civil society--family, church, and voluntary associations. The only sign of governmental force is the minimal power of Nuremberg's night-watchman. When a violent riot breaks out at the end of Act 2, the crowd disperses when the night-watchman walks through on his rounds.
It was in 1862, only six years before the premier of Die Meistersinger, that the German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle ridiculed the classical liberals for advocating "the night-watchman state"--the idea that government should be limited to punishing violence and fraud to protect property, liberty, and peace. Some of the proponents of classical liberalism have actually embraced the phrase "night-watchman state" as a good label for their position. In his book Liberalism (3rd edition, 1985), Ludwig von Mises observed: "it is difficult to see why the night-watchman state should be any more ridiculous or worse than the state that concerns itself with the preparation of sauerkraut, with the manufacture of trouser buttons, or with the publication of newspapers" (37).
In a liberal regime, the cultivation of the arts and of cultural life generally comes from the natural and voluntary associations of a free society that requires only limited governmental intervention. That's the case in Hans Sach's Nuremberg.
In the same way, Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human endorses a largely liberal view of society and government in which "higher culture" and the excellence of "higher men" is fostered by the freedom of civil society. Culture is largely free from political regimentation, and culture is more important than politics. According to Nietzsche, "the state is a prudent institution for protecting individuals from one another," but any ennobling of the state into a "perfect state" tends to bring a dangerous suppression of the individual (HH, 235).
Just as is the case in Sach's Nuremberg, Nietzsche presents the majority of people as devoted to the ordinary concerns of life, and they display little human excellence, but a few people with higher aspirations and talents can develop their moral and intellectual virtues through the self-regulating order of civil society.
Much of the appeal of National Socialism came from the claim that liberalism is degrading in its bourgeois mediocrity and thus cannot cultivate the heroic human excellence that goes beyond the base materialism of the "Last Man."
Wagner's Die Meistersinger and Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human deny this claim by showing how a free society can foster the full range of human virtue, from the low to the high, including the virtuous cultural activities of art, science, and philosophy.
I will take up the third point about the connection of Meistersinger to Nazism--the apparent nihilism of Sachs--in my next post.
One of the best performances of Die Meistersinger--in 2001 at the Metropolitan Opera with James Morris as Sachs--can be seen as an online video at the "Met on Demand" website. There's a free seven-day trial that allows immediate access. You need to be well rested before you watch this opera. If you take two 30-minute intermissions, the opera will take five and a half hours!
I recommend watching it with a good bottle of pinot noir. My wife and I had two bottles over dinner before the opera and snacks during the intermissions at the Pederson Room at the Lyric Opera House. A very civilized evening indeed.
Monday, February 18, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Will Altman's German Trilogy and Leo Strauss's Third Wave of Modernity
At the end of the summer, the American Political Science Association will be meeting in Chicago. For that meeting, I have proposed a panel on William Altman's book The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (2011), which makes the provocative argument that Strauss was the secret theoretician of National Socialism.
Last year, I wrote a series of posts on Altman's book on Strauss. I argued that Altman does not prove his strongest claim--that Strauss was "remarkably successful" in his project "to take Germany's western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy's faith in itself" (516). But I also conceded that Altman does show a disturbing refusal of Strauss to clearly and emphatically state his defense of liberal democracy against the anti-liberal position of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. By contrast, Strauss's friend Hans Jonas was very clear and emphatic in his criticism of Heidegger for failing to apologize for his endorsement of Nazism.
If my panel proposal is approved, my contribution will be to indicate how Altman's book on Strauss needs to be read in conjunction with the other three books that Altman has published in the last three years (all published by Lexington Books): Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (2012), Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration (2012), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (2013). (To have published four books in three years that show impressive scholarship and intellectual depth would be a great achievement for any university professor, and so it's remarkable that Altman is a public high school teacher!)
In the Preface to his Nietzsche book, Altman indicates that this book along with his books on Heidegger and Strauss can be seen as a "German trilogy," 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. But if each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave? Surely, Altman suggests, it must be Strauss. 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.
Consequently, Altman's books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss can be understood as a "German trilogy" that works through the three stages of the Third Wave of modernity as the consummation of the crisis of liberalism and the emergence of an anti-liberal alternative.
If Strauss was completing what Nietzsche had started, then we should see all the elements of Strauss's critique of liberalism in Nietzsche's writings. And, in fact, Altman claims, we see in Nietzsche the five components of National Socialism as Strauss understood it:
Altman suggests that Pope Benedict XVII agrees with his interpretation of National Socialism. He quotes from the Pope's remarks in 2006 during a visit to the Auschwitz Camp:
I will have more to say about Altman's account of Nietzsche in my next post. As you might expect from my previous posts on Nietzsche, I will defend the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period as morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the early and late writings of Nietzsche, and thus I will disagree with Altman in his playing down the distinctiveness of Nietzsche's Darwinian middle period.
My previous posts on Altman can be found here, here, and here. My previous posts on Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity" can be found here and here.
Last year, I wrote a series of posts on Altman's book on Strauss. I argued that Altman does not prove his strongest claim--that Strauss was "remarkably successful" in his project "to take Germany's western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy's faith in itself" (516). But I also conceded that Altman does show a disturbing refusal of Strauss to clearly and emphatically state his defense of liberal democracy against the anti-liberal position of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. By contrast, Strauss's friend Hans Jonas was very clear and emphatic in his criticism of Heidegger for failing to apologize for his endorsement of Nazism.
If my panel proposal is approved, my contribution will be to indicate how Altman's book on Strauss needs to be read in conjunction with the other three books that Altman has published in the last three years (all published by Lexington Books): Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (2012), Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration (2012), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (2013). (To have published four books in three years that show impressive scholarship and intellectual depth would be a great achievement for any university professor, and so it's remarkable that Altman is a public high school teacher!)
In the Preface to his Nietzsche book, Altman indicates that this book along with his books on Heidegger and Strauss can be seen as a "German trilogy," 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. But if each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave? Surely, Altman suggests, it must be Strauss. 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.
Consequently, Altman's books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss can be understood as a "German trilogy" that works through the three stages of the Third Wave of modernity as the consummation of the crisis of liberalism and the emergence of an anti-liberal alternative.
If Strauss was completing what Nietzsche had started, then we should see all the elements of Strauss's critique of liberalism in Nietzsche's writings. And, in fact, Altman claims, we see in Nietzsche the five components of National Socialism as Strauss understood it:
"(1) a radical anti-Christianity that explains even Nietzsche's rejection of Christian anti-Judaism, (2) a crystal clear sense of the Jewish origins of Christianity, (3) an interest in the use of exotericism, (4) a rejection of racialist anti-Semitism, and (5) the valorization of Israel's kings as opposed to her prophets." (xiv-xv)Most fundamental for all of these components of National Socialism is a monistic metaphysics of secularization that rejects the dualistic metaphysics of Plato as expressed in Judaism and Christianity as a Jewish religion. For this reason, Altman's book on Plato is connected to his "German trilogy" of books, because Altman defends Plato as the proponent of a metaphysical dualism that supports the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and liberal democracy. Thus does Altman defend a transcendentalist dualism that is Platonic, Jewish, Christian, and liberal against a materialist monism that is anti-Platonic, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, and anti-liberal.
Altman suggests that Pope Benedict XVII agrees with his interpretation of National Socialism. He quotes from the Pope's remarks in 2006 during a visit to the Auschwitz Camp:
"By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they [sc. the Nazis] ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."Yes, Altman argues, that's exactly what Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss wanted to do.
I will have more to say about Altman's account of Nietzsche in my next post. As you might expect from my previous posts on Nietzsche, I will defend the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period as morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the early and late writings of Nietzsche, and thus I will disagree with Altman in his playing down the distinctiveness of Nietzsche's Darwinian middle period.
My previous posts on Altman can be found here, here, and here. My previous posts on Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity" can be found here and here.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
The Birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln
It's that time of the year when I traditionally
observe the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, who were born on
February 12, 1809.
As I have indicated in previous years, I see at least six points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.
(1) Both saw the universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) Both abhorred slavery as immoral. (6) Both were moral realists.
I have elaborated some of these points here and here, which include links to even more posts on the Lincoln-Darwin connection.
As I have indicated in previous years, I see at least six points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.
(1) Both saw the universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) Both abhorred slavery as immoral. (6) Both were moral realists.
I have elaborated some of these points here and here, which include links to even more posts on the Lincoln-Darwin connection.
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Part 7 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"
Concluding this series of posts, I draw your attention to what Nietzsche says in Dawn (aph. 26) about the evolved animal origins of prudence:
As shaped by evolutionary history, animals must gather information about themselves and about their physical and social environments, and then they must assess that information as it bears upon their needs, so that they can make practical decisions about what they need to do to survive and reproduce. The human moral and intellectual virtue of prudence arises from this pragmatic mental capacity for detecting and responding to threats and opportunities in ways that secure one's well-being.
For social animals, this practical intelligence is largely social intelligence, because the most complex intellectual problem for the social animal is assessing the movements and intentions of one's fellow animals as friends or foes. This can even require "mind-reading"--projecting oneself into the thoughts and feelings of other animals so that one can predict their behavior in alternative scenarios of action in the future.
Some people like Thomas Nagel and Alvin Plantinga see a problem with such an explanation of the human mind as emerging from the evolutionary adaptation of the animal mind. If the mind has evolved as a purely pragmatic instrument for survival and reproduction, then the mind has been designed for practical success but not for true beliefs, because one can imagine that an animal's practical success might come from erroneous beliefs about the world. (In fact, doesn't Nietzsche himself speak of the history of human culture as the history of errors?) If so, then one has no reason to trust the human mind as producing valid knowledge, and thus one has no reason to trust the mind's belief in the theory of evolution. In this way, Nagel and Plantinga argue, an evolutionary naturalism becomes self-defeating.
The only escape from this, they insist, is either the theistic belief (Plantinga) that the human mind can be trusted because it was created in the image of the Divine Mind, or a Platonic belief (Nagel) that the human mind can be trusted because it fulfils a cosmic end or purpose as guided somehow by a cosmic mind.
Nietzsche in the writings of his middle period rejects both positions as lacking any scientific support, and he defends the evolutionary account of the mind as showing how the human mind could arise from animal minds as fallible and yet reliable.
I agree with Nietzsche about this, for reasons that I have elaborated here, here, here, here, and here.
"Even the sense for truth, which is really the sense for security, man has in common with animals: one does not want to let oneself be deceived, does not want to mislead oneself, one hearkens mistrustfully to the promptings of one's own passions, one constrains oneself and lies in wait for oneself; the animal understands all this just as man does, with it too self-control springs from the sense for what is real (from prudence). It likewise assesses the effect it produces upon the perceptions of other animals and from this learns to look back upon itself, to take itself 'objectively,' it too has its degree of self-knowledge. The animal assesses the movements of its friends and foes, it learns their peculiarities by heart, it prepares itself for them."So the virtue of prudence evolves from the animal "sense for truth," which is actually the "sense for security," which is also a "sense for what is real" that supports self-control.
As shaped by evolutionary history, animals must gather information about themselves and about their physical and social environments, and then they must assess that information as it bears upon their needs, so that they can make practical decisions about what they need to do to survive and reproduce. The human moral and intellectual virtue of prudence arises from this pragmatic mental capacity for detecting and responding to threats and opportunities in ways that secure one's well-being.
For social animals, this practical intelligence is largely social intelligence, because the most complex intellectual problem for the social animal is assessing the movements and intentions of one's fellow animals as friends or foes. This can even require "mind-reading"--projecting oneself into the thoughts and feelings of other animals so that one can predict their behavior in alternative scenarios of action in the future.
Some people like Thomas Nagel and Alvin Plantinga see a problem with such an explanation of the human mind as emerging from the evolutionary adaptation of the animal mind. If the mind has evolved as a purely pragmatic instrument for survival and reproduction, then the mind has been designed for practical success but not for true beliefs, because one can imagine that an animal's practical success might come from erroneous beliefs about the world. (In fact, doesn't Nietzsche himself speak of the history of human culture as the history of errors?) If so, then one has no reason to trust the human mind as producing valid knowledge, and thus one has no reason to trust the mind's belief in the theory of evolution. In this way, Nagel and Plantinga argue, an evolutionary naturalism becomes self-defeating.
The only escape from this, they insist, is either the theistic belief (Plantinga) that the human mind can be trusted because it was created in the image of the Divine Mind, or a Platonic belief (Nagel) that the human mind can be trusted because it fulfils a cosmic end or purpose as guided somehow by a cosmic mind.
Nietzsche in the writings of his middle period rejects both positions as lacking any scientific support, and he defends the evolutionary account of the mind as showing how the human mind could arise from animal minds as fallible and yet reliable.
I agree with Nietzsche about this, for reasons that I have elaborated here, here, here, here, and here.
Monday, February 04, 2013
Part 6 of "Nietzsche's Sociobiology of Animal Morality"
Nietzsche's sociobiology of animal morality includes evolutionary accounts of the four cardinal virtues--justice, moderation, courage, and prudence.
By comparing what he says about these virtues in his middle writings and what he says about them in his later writings, we can see that his turn away from the Darwinian free-spirited science of his middle writings explains why his later writings became so popular with the Nazis, who would have found nothing appealing to them in his middle writings.
I will consider here two of these virtues--justice and moderation.
JUSTICE
Nietzsche claims that justice originates as exchange or barter (HH, 92). He sees this as the lesson of Thucydides' story of the meeting of the Athenian and Melian envoys: justice arises among those who are roughly equal in power, so that to avoid mutual injury, the parties negotiate the claims on both sides. "Each satisfies the other in that each gets what he values more than the other. Each man gives the other what he wants, to keep henceforth, and receives in turn that which he wishes. Thus, justice is requital and exchange on the assumption of approximately equal positions of strength. For this reason, revenge belongs initially to the realm of justice: it is an exchange. Likewise gratitude."
Thus, justice is initially "insightful self-preservation," but later this egoistic origin of justice is forgotten, and justice is assumed to be selflessness.
Of course, the disturbing teaching of the Melian dialogue is that where power is not equal, the stronger rules over the weaker. But Nietzsche points out that when the Melians refused to surrender, the Athenians were forced to fight them in a year-long siege, and thus the Athenian victory was costly. This shows us how the weaker gain rights against the stronger, Nietzsche observes, because the power of the weaker to inflict some damage on the stronger creates a kind of equalization of powers that can be the basis of rights (HH, 93). Even slaves can have some rights if the resistance of the slave to the master's exploitation can inflict some damage on the master. Nietzsche concludes from this that Spinoza was correct in declaring that "each has as much right as he has power" (Theological-Political Treatise, chapter 16). "The rights of others constitute a concession on the part of our sense of power to the sense of power of those others," and thus changes in power-relationships bring changes in the natural history of rights and duties (D, 112).
This is similar to what I have argued in some previous posts about how might does make right, in the sense that the natural human resistance to oppression forces oppressors to limit their oppression, and thus we derive rights from wrongs, deriving justice from our violent resistance to injustice. Animals do this in fighting those who would injure them. Human beings do this, but they can also use their mental powers of reason and language to formulate social rules of right and wrong that express this natural resistance to injury, and the sense that it's to the advantage of all to agree to norms of mutually beneficial exchange.
If neighboring societies fight one another for many years, Nietzsche suggests, and if their power is roughly equal, then neither side gains a decisive victory, and both sides suffer losses. If it's possible for some third party to mediate their dispute and establish peace between them, then they might become trading-partners, which increases their welfare and prosperity (D, 190).
The cultures of the past, Nietzsche thinks, have been based on violence. But what we need now is a gradual change of thinking and feeling so that "justice must become greater in everyone, and the violent instinct weaker" (HH, 452). A big part of this change comes as the "man of convictions" is replaced by the "man of science" (HH, 630). Conviction is the belief that one possesses absolute truth, and the struggle between conflicting convictions provoked a long history of violence. This explains, for example, the history of cruelty in persecuting heretics: "what is the burning of one man compared with the eternal pains of Hell for nearly everyone!" (HH, 101). A growing scientific skepticism about absolute truth weakens such motivation to violent cruelty.
Moreover, much of the unjust cruelty in past cultures came from a failure to feel or understand the suffering of the victims of cruelty. "That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely" (HH, 101). Thus, the cultural evolution in understanding and feeling the suffering of others promotes an expansion of sympathy that brings a progressive expansion of justice.
As we have seen, Darwin also saw this expansion of sympathy as crucial for moral progress. Matt Ridley shows how this works through the expansion of exchange and the division of labor leading eventually to global networks of trade that foster peaceful cooperation. Steven Pinker shows how this cultural evolution of liberal humanism has brought a remarkable decline of violence both within and between societies.
While this conception of moral progress towards greater justice as manifested in declining violence and increasing cooperation is affirmed by Nietzsche in his middle period, he scorns it in his later writing as the "herd morality of timidity," which is expressed as "Hurt no one; rather, help all as much as you can," or as "We want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of" (BGE, 186, 201). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche sneers at this. "Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality," which is the morality of the "democratic movement." He yearns for "higher moralities" than this (BGE, 202).
The Nietzsche of the later writings is nauseated by "this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims," and he looks to the new philosophers of the future acting as "leaders" (Fuhrer) to do a revaluation of values that will create a new aristocratic morality for higher men (BGE, 203).
MODERATION
Similarly, Nietzsche affirms the virtue of moderation in his middle writings, but then he rejects it in his later writings as a disgusting virtue of herd morality.
In his middle period, Nietzsche sees free-spirited thinking as promoting moderation--particularly, in the cautious restraint in one's practical and intellectual life that avoids the religious inclination to intoxication or frenzy (Rausch) (HH, 114, 139, 149, 464, 631; WS, 212). The moderation of the free-spirit should not be confused with mediocrity or boredom, because this virtue actually belongs to a cheerful disposition of those who are cautiously self-controlled because they don't want an overheated enthusiasm to cloud their clear view of the world as it truly is (HH, 34; AOM, 230, 326). Modern evolutionary science helps us to know ourselves as we truly are by teaching us that since we have evolved as mortal animals on earth, we cannot pass over into a higher order beyond the transitoriness of human life on earth. Understanding and accepting our evolutionary transience as animals evolved from apes can protect us from that "faith in intoxication"--in the ecstatic feeling of exaltation--that has ruined the religious and artistic cultures of the past with delusional fantasies (D, 48-50).
Nietzsche explains that we need moderation as a moral and intellectual virtue to avoid the delusion that there are religious, artistic, or political geniuses who are "superhuman" (ubermenschliches) (HH, 143, 164, 441, 461; D, 548-49). Napoleon, for example, was eventually ruined by his delusions of superhuman grandeur. Evolutionary science refutes any belief that human beings as evolved animals can become superhuman (D, 49). Rather, they are human, all too human.
But in both his earlier and later writings, Nietzsche rejects moderation and yearns for Dionysian frenzy and intoxication (Rausch) (BT, 1; TI.ix, 8-10). This immoderate frenzy finally expresses itself in Nietzsche's ecstatic proclamation of the Superman, the Ubermensch, as a revelation that will redeem humanity and give eternal meaning to life: "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that shall be overcome" (Z, prologue, 3).
Nietzsche's Zarathustra is nauseated by the fact that "small people need small virtues" like the mediocrity of moderation. "At bottom, these simpletons want a single thing most of all: that nobody should hurt them." Their virtues have clever fingers. "But they lack fists, their fingers do not know how to hide behind fists. Virtue to them is that which makes modest and tame: with that they have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into man's best domestic animal" (Z, 3:5.2).
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche scorns moderation as a virtue of "the herd man in Europe." Such virtues of the herd cannot satisfy the human need for leadership--for a Fuhrer like Napoleon, who had a superhuman genius for commanding. Parliamentary constitutions fail because of the futility of attempting "to add together clever herd men by way of replacing commanders" (BGE, 199; TI, ix, 37-44).
Later, Carl Schmitt was to elaborate this Nietzschean Fuhrer principle in denouncing the Weimar republic for its parliamentary weakness, and the decadence of its "last man" culture, and then in promoting the heroic leadership of the Nazis, moved by ideological frenzy free from any restraining moderation.
Of course, Nietzsche's defenders will say that the Nazis were guilty of a vulgar distortion of Nietzsche's teachings. But that only confirms a warning from Nietzsche in his middle period:
By comparing what he says about these virtues in his middle writings and what he says about them in his later writings, we can see that his turn away from the Darwinian free-spirited science of his middle writings explains why his later writings became so popular with the Nazis, who would have found nothing appealing to them in his middle writings.
I will consider here two of these virtues--justice and moderation.
JUSTICE
Nietzsche claims that justice originates as exchange or barter (HH, 92). He sees this as the lesson of Thucydides' story of the meeting of the Athenian and Melian envoys: justice arises among those who are roughly equal in power, so that to avoid mutual injury, the parties negotiate the claims on both sides. "Each satisfies the other in that each gets what he values more than the other. Each man gives the other what he wants, to keep henceforth, and receives in turn that which he wishes. Thus, justice is requital and exchange on the assumption of approximately equal positions of strength. For this reason, revenge belongs initially to the realm of justice: it is an exchange. Likewise gratitude."
Thus, justice is initially "insightful self-preservation," but later this egoistic origin of justice is forgotten, and justice is assumed to be selflessness.
Of course, the disturbing teaching of the Melian dialogue is that where power is not equal, the stronger rules over the weaker. But Nietzsche points out that when the Melians refused to surrender, the Athenians were forced to fight them in a year-long siege, and thus the Athenian victory was costly. This shows us how the weaker gain rights against the stronger, Nietzsche observes, because the power of the weaker to inflict some damage on the stronger creates a kind of equalization of powers that can be the basis of rights (HH, 93). Even slaves can have some rights if the resistance of the slave to the master's exploitation can inflict some damage on the master. Nietzsche concludes from this that Spinoza was correct in declaring that "each has as much right as he has power" (Theological-Political Treatise, chapter 16). "The rights of others constitute a concession on the part of our sense of power to the sense of power of those others," and thus changes in power-relationships bring changes in the natural history of rights and duties (D, 112).
This is similar to what I have argued in some previous posts about how might does make right, in the sense that the natural human resistance to oppression forces oppressors to limit their oppression, and thus we derive rights from wrongs, deriving justice from our violent resistance to injustice. Animals do this in fighting those who would injure them. Human beings do this, but they can also use their mental powers of reason and language to formulate social rules of right and wrong that express this natural resistance to injury, and the sense that it's to the advantage of all to agree to norms of mutually beneficial exchange.
If neighboring societies fight one another for many years, Nietzsche suggests, and if their power is roughly equal, then neither side gains a decisive victory, and both sides suffer losses. If it's possible for some third party to mediate their dispute and establish peace between them, then they might become trading-partners, which increases their welfare and prosperity (D, 190).
The cultures of the past, Nietzsche thinks, have been based on violence. But what we need now is a gradual change of thinking and feeling so that "justice must become greater in everyone, and the violent instinct weaker" (HH, 452). A big part of this change comes as the "man of convictions" is replaced by the "man of science" (HH, 630). Conviction is the belief that one possesses absolute truth, and the struggle between conflicting convictions provoked a long history of violence. This explains, for example, the history of cruelty in persecuting heretics: "what is the burning of one man compared with the eternal pains of Hell for nearly everyone!" (HH, 101). A growing scientific skepticism about absolute truth weakens such motivation to violent cruelty.
Moreover, much of the unjust cruelty in past cultures came from a failure to feel or understand the suffering of the victims of cruelty. "That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely" (HH, 101). Thus, the cultural evolution in understanding and feeling the suffering of others promotes an expansion of sympathy that brings a progressive expansion of justice.
As we have seen, Darwin also saw this expansion of sympathy as crucial for moral progress. Matt Ridley shows how this works through the expansion of exchange and the division of labor leading eventually to global networks of trade that foster peaceful cooperation. Steven Pinker shows how this cultural evolution of liberal humanism has brought a remarkable decline of violence both within and between societies.
While this conception of moral progress towards greater justice as manifested in declining violence and increasing cooperation is affirmed by Nietzsche in his middle period, he scorns it in his later writing as the "herd morality of timidity," which is expressed as "Hurt no one; rather, help all as much as you can," or as "We want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of" (BGE, 186, 201). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche sneers at this. "Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality," which is the morality of the "democratic movement." He yearns for "higher moralities" than this (BGE, 202).
The Nietzsche of the later writings is nauseated by "this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims," and he looks to the new philosophers of the future acting as "leaders" (Fuhrer) to do a revaluation of values that will create a new aristocratic morality for higher men (BGE, 203).
MODERATION
Similarly, Nietzsche affirms the virtue of moderation in his middle writings, but then he rejects it in his later writings as a disgusting virtue of herd morality.
In his middle period, Nietzsche sees free-spirited thinking as promoting moderation--particularly, in the cautious restraint in one's practical and intellectual life that avoids the religious inclination to intoxication or frenzy (Rausch) (HH, 114, 139, 149, 464, 631; WS, 212). The moderation of the free-spirit should not be confused with mediocrity or boredom, because this virtue actually belongs to a cheerful disposition of those who are cautiously self-controlled because they don't want an overheated enthusiasm to cloud their clear view of the world as it truly is (HH, 34; AOM, 230, 326). Modern evolutionary science helps us to know ourselves as we truly are by teaching us that since we have evolved as mortal animals on earth, we cannot pass over into a higher order beyond the transitoriness of human life on earth. Understanding and accepting our evolutionary transience as animals evolved from apes can protect us from that "faith in intoxication"--in the ecstatic feeling of exaltation--that has ruined the religious and artistic cultures of the past with delusional fantasies (D, 48-50).
Nietzsche explains that we need moderation as a moral and intellectual virtue to avoid the delusion that there are religious, artistic, or political geniuses who are "superhuman" (ubermenschliches) (HH, 143, 164, 441, 461; D, 548-49). Napoleon, for example, was eventually ruined by his delusions of superhuman grandeur. Evolutionary science refutes any belief that human beings as evolved animals can become superhuman (D, 49). Rather, they are human, all too human.
But in both his earlier and later writings, Nietzsche rejects moderation and yearns for Dionysian frenzy and intoxication (Rausch) (BT, 1; TI.ix, 8-10). This immoderate frenzy finally expresses itself in Nietzsche's ecstatic proclamation of the Superman, the Ubermensch, as a revelation that will redeem humanity and give eternal meaning to life: "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that shall be overcome" (Z, prologue, 3).
Nietzsche's Zarathustra is nauseated by the fact that "small people need small virtues" like the mediocrity of moderation. "At bottom, these simpletons want a single thing most of all: that nobody should hurt them." Their virtues have clever fingers. "But they lack fists, their fingers do not know how to hide behind fists. Virtue to them is that which makes modest and tame: with that they have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into man's best domestic animal" (Z, 3:5.2).
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche scorns moderation as a virtue of "the herd man in Europe." Such virtues of the herd cannot satisfy the human need for leadership--for a Fuhrer like Napoleon, who had a superhuman genius for commanding. Parliamentary constitutions fail because of the futility of attempting "to add together clever herd men by way of replacing commanders" (BGE, 199; TI, ix, 37-44).
Later, Carl Schmitt was to elaborate this Nietzschean Fuhrer principle in denouncing the Weimar republic for its parliamentary weakness, and the decadence of its "last man" culture, and then in promoting the heroic leadership of the Nazis, moved by ideological frenzy free from any restraining moderation.
Of course, Nietzsche's defenders will say that the Nazis were guilty of a vulgar distortion of Nietzsche's teachings. But that only confirms a warning from Nietzsche in his middle period:
"For the despisers of 'herd humanity'.--He who regards men as a herd and flees from them as fast as he can will certainly be overtaken by them and gored by their horns." (AOM, 233)
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