One of the greatest first-rate intellects in history

Bloom's other bookend on Enlightenment criticism

Friedrich Nietzsche. I mentioned him in paired reference (with Rousseau) as the putative top critics of the Enlightenment. As with Chekov’s gun, once introduced he cannot be ignored. But unlike the construction of story-line in a play (which is purely a product of the playwright’s creativity), attempting to capture the lightning that is Nietzsche is both difficult and dangerous¹.

I have shared with a select audience (whom I thank for reading and gently critiquing) my adventures to date (all post-retirement) in reading Nietzsche. Firstly, there is the challenge in his styles of writing, and he employs several and none of them come to you naturally. A number of his works are a series of aphorisms (some short, others almost too lengthy to fit the definition), generally ironic and often oxymoronic. A few are reasonably straightforward rhetoric/prose. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for me, is better approached as epic poetry than a tract of philosophical rhetoric. When I first dove into it expecting the latter, it was a struggle²; as I began to appreciate it in the light of the former it at least became easier to read and eventually almost sang to me. Which brings us to secondly, how much of what you have learned in your life are you open to unlearning? Can you wrestle with questions that most of us neither need nor want to consider? This is nothing new for it harkens back to the roots of Western philosophy and culture with Socrates challenge regarding life and self-knowledge. Trust me, Nietzsche, if you give him a fair reading, will demand much of you. One aspect being, don’t expect to read anything he wrote just one time and that you will grasp all of what he is saying. I’ve only been through Zarathustra once so far, and I know I need to read it at least once more, probably three or four times over. That is not a product of poor reading comprehension, it is the sheer density of his thought (and in the case of Zarathustra the power of the imagery). Thirdly, Nietzsche wrote quite a bit³, and not with absolute consistency of thought or perspective across his whole body of work. I will not read The Will to Power, because that was not a finished work and in fact he wanted his notes and manuscript destroyed after his death⁴. Even reading his work that was purely his own, you will be left to wrestle with some contradictions (and one or two, possibly more, things you find flat out wrong); I certainly have yet to resolve those for myself and even if I had, I wouldn’t presume to tell you what the correct resolution is. Which brings me to fourthly and finally, anything I have to say about Nietzsche’s works is as much about me as it is about him⁵. You must read him for yourself if you really want to know what he said, otherwise you are getting Nietzsche through someone else’s filter. And it is quite likely, given the volume of material to consider that although some consensus may be had in two or more people’s interpretations, there is equally likely, a diversity of opinion. This must be expected and accepted. No one, no matter how much they study the man and his writings can ever be trusted as the authority on him. Nor, if you have selectively read him or commentary on him, you are in a poor position to decide the worth of his work.

Now, you may have noticed (in that rather lengthy paragraph) that I did not praise Nietzsche for building a comprehensive philosophy, a guide to life. He was brilliant as a critic, as a questioner - but, he set a task which he himself was unable to accomplish and which no successor has yet done either: the transvaluation of all values. That task is no less than creating a new Western culture - a set of values - decoupled from the Judeo-Christian values that have dominated and that he saw already in decay⁶. When he proclaimed “God is dead” it was not necessarily as a challenge or a declaration of victory, but his perception that we had killed Him. The Enlightenment had drained authority from belief - reason was to guide, not faith. The idea that both can be harnessed equally is all but a contradiction - neither cedes ultimate authority to the other. One must be subservient (and thus weakened) if both are to be observed. Biblical authority by its own terms stands, or falls, on this - as one cannot serve two masters. Nietzsche did not see the decay of these values as an altogether bad thing, since in his dichotomy⁷, they were the values of a slave morality, not a master morality (which would be his preference in the transvaluation). What he feared was the slide into nihilism; which makes the not uncommon charge of being a nihilist himself a misconception.

I do believe I can safely say that democracy was no less spared from Nietzsche’s critical eye than any other aspect of Western culture, and here I think it un-necessary to warn you of the danger and the difficulty. Whereas Rousseau was firmly in the Platonic realm, Nietzsche was not an Aristotelian (the roughly natural counterpart) - and most certainly not an orthodox one. Nietzsche had been Chair of Classical Philology (before having even completed his doctoral studies), the youngest ever, at the University of Basel. In his writing, you will frequently encounter quotes in classical Greek or discussions about particular words. He never fell into subservience to any of the schools of thought, finding of value what he did, and being quite dismissive of treating any of it as dogma. I am still interested in skepticism (Pyrrhonian in particular) despite his dismissal of it. If there is a dichotomy I am susceptible to, it is the absolute/uncertainty (or order/chaos) pairing. I think that humanity is dominated by the desire for absolutes and is, at the least, made uncomfortable by uncertainty (and Nietzsche was a splendid counter example⁸). This drives us in predictable (and generally dangerous) directions by making us very susceptible to manipulation by someone offering certainty (or playing on fear - which is rooted in uncertainty and/or irrationality). This ties back to democracy, and the ever present risk of majoritarian excess, which our Constitution is intended to guard against. Democracy presumes a certain degree of equality (at least before the law) but is unprotected from excess (or absolute) equality⁹, such as desired by Rousseau. Nietzsche had no use for equality at all. If you are as inculcated in traditional Anglo-American values (classical liberalism) as I am - that is one bitter pill to swallow, and a very difficult question to face.

I clearly reject the idea of absolute equality (or as Nisbet called it the New Equality). Oddly, even the woke reject that idea - for their goal is to simply invert the mechanism and standards of oppression, and thus rise to the top of the social hierarchy, not to actually accept a result that doesn’t place them in charge¹⁰. See Lorenzo Warby for the details. So peeling back the equality onion, that’s one layer, and we might even say it is the outer, inedible one. How much more can be peeled away, and at what cost (and to what benefit)? Equality before the law is, to be frank, a legal fiction. It only exists and is necessary because of the legal system we have¹¹. So that equality is only necessary and relevant in that context; there goes another layer (insofar as how we think about equality, I would not willingly give that up within our legal system - unless it is proven a lie). What of equality of outcomes/results? Well, are we all endowed equally with the same talents, aptitudes and intellects? As a young man I loved basketball - both playing and watching those who were better at it than I. Why should some be ‘allowed the privilege’ to be professionals and not myself? And no, dedication without talent does not yield the same result as the two combined (though certainly talent can be, and is, squandered). This is obviously unequal, just by nature. We could of course ‘remedy’ that by applying the logic of Harrison Bergeron.

The fact is that our base notion of equality was smuggled into Western culture via Protestant theology (so a rather late edition to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition) - that we are all equal in God’s eye (and from Calvinism - it is that we are all equally depraved and in need of redemption). Nor was this entirely novel within Christendom - the Albigensians (Cathars) had preached an equality that challenged the Princes of the Church, and were brutally wiped out for such heresy. So what was, and is, a spiritual presumption about God becomes a rather mutated conceit (e.g. the Handicapper General) the further it drifts off from that anchor. As the push for equality grows, it by necessity demands an ever lower common denominator. Equality amongst 100 is entirely different than equality amongst 100 million. Now, have I made the entire onion of equality disappear? Perhaps¹². Nietzsche didn’t tell me this, but he asked hard questions and made me think about it, and who knows, I could be wrong. It was an uncomfortable process and I can’t say with any certainty that I am right. I am open to the possibility that I am, as much as that unpins me from other people and values. As I said at the top, difficult and dangerous.

If we don’t do some hard work, we are bound to ride our values into the death throes of the Enlightenment (and for all I know, I’m not predicting some distant future but describing right this moment). Nietzsche saw it over a century ago, and we ignore it now at our peril, as the Romans ignored the barbarians until the gates could not hold them back. The alternative to difficult and dangerous is just as bleak. Fortunately, we have a brilliant mind who has, with his questions (and a more positive outlook than he is generally credited with¹³), opened a possible path for us to a not so bleak future. If we have the courage to walk it.

1. That Nietzsche has been selectively cited approvingly by both Nazis and Trotskyites should certainly convince one of the dangers.

2. This was in fact the first work of his that I read, as I had read that he himself considered it his best, and in later works he does sprinkle references to it. He cross references his work quite a bit and that too is a challenge.

3. In contrast, Rousseau’s First and Second Discourses share the signal virtue of brevity. So though they are wrong, it doesn’t take you a ridiculous amount of time to get through them. Nor does Rousseau ever vary greatly from the foundation laid therein.

4. His sister, with whom he had a very contentious relationship, wanted to build and profit on a cult of his personality even before he died. It was she that built the association between Nietzsche and Nazism which the man himself would’ve denounced on multiple grounds (antisemitism being the most obvious, but his plethora of criticism of the German volk no less). The Will to Power was as much her product as his and as such I can’t for myself allow it as truly capturing Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts, particularly when his desire was for its destruction.

5. I will here mention one illustrative example. I read Nietzsche as being individualistic and that is probably outside of the general consensus on him; which tends to run more collective speaking. He does indeed talk a lot of peoples/races and to a lesser extent classes, but his self-proclaimed pinnacle Zarathustra is about one man.

6. This illustrates his keen observation and the depth of his intellect and why I find him even more relevant today than he was in his own lifetime. He might be one of the few people in history who would not be surprised at the state of our culture in this day.

7. At some point I do intend to write more on this, as it seems to me to be a binary that needn’t be viewed as purely either/or. The emphasis thus given is all to coercion and whether you are the employer of coercion, or the coerced. As with Hobbes, this is too simplified of a view of something more complex.

8. Yet here is a cautionary note. Nietzsche suffered ill health - physical and mental - nearly his entire life; after an extraordinarily productive burst of four years (and four works, two of which would be published posthumously) he had a total physical and mental breakdown. He never recovered and would be under his sister’s care until his death. Is it possible that he had simply “gazed into the abyss” too long? Dangerous indeed.

9. “The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.” — de Toqueville, Democracy in America

10. Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy notes the faction within socialist advocacy that would reject any socialism that failed to place them in charge. And those were just the ones honest enough to admit to it - I would suspect that it is a larger share than he posited. He did in fact exclude the entire Marxist branch from the question (given their intractable demand for proletarian revolution, and with the Trotskyites - continuous revolution).

11. That is presuming we actually do have a single track justice system, and not one that provides for the elite differently than it provides for the masses. That system would be a worse hypocrisy with respect to equal before the law than having one bereft of such a lie.

12. I’m sure someone will be tempted to argue on utilitarian grounds but that is no more solid metaphysics than Protestant theology. Nietzsche might ask - where in nature do you see equality between the hunting beast and it’s prey? The problem with purely natural grounds is although we are a product of nature, we don’t simply abide by its standards when we form (or better evolve) societies with rules and values. The rules and values are purely human artifacts - whatever we decide they will be.

13. Certainly he had a cynical streak, but he was hardly a dour young man (or a true ‘Sturm und Drang’ kind of German). You cannot read Thus Spoke Zarathustra without being struck by its optimism, its sense of a mankind pregnant with possibilities, yearning to be freed.