Understanding Nietzscheanism

Ashley Woodward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317547792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Nietzsche's critiques of traditional modes of thinking, valuing and living, as well as his radical proposals for new alternatives, have been vastly influential in a wide variety of areas, such that an understanding of his philosophy and its influence is important for grasping many aspects of contemporary thought and culture. However Nietzsche's thought is complex and elusive, and has been interpreted in many ways. Moreover, he has influenced starkly contrasting movements and schools of thought, from atheism to theology, from existentialism to poststructuralism, and from Nazism to feminism. This book charts Nietzsche's influence, both historically and thematically, across a variety of these contrasting disciplines and schools of interpretation. It provides both an accessible introduction to Nietzsche's thought and its impact and an overview of contemporary approaches to Nietzsche.

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Nietzscheanism and existentialism

As we thus reject Christian interpretation and condemn its “meaning” as counterfeit, Schopenhauer’s question immediately comes at us in a terrifying way: Does existence have any meaning at all? A few centuries will be needed before this question can ever be heard completely and in its full depth.

(GS 357)

Existentialism is one of the most widely known forms of philosophy outside the academic world. While now frequently considered passé, it enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, it remains one of the intellectual and cultural trends with which Nietzsche’s name is often associated in the popular imagination. The accuracy and usefulness of characterizing Nietzsche as an existentialist is now a matter of debate, and some contemporary Nietzsche scholars would prefer this association to be forgotten (for further discussion of this point, see Ansell-Pearson [2011]). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that in an important chapter of Nietzsche’s reception and influence, he was understood as an existentialist, or at least an important precursor to existentialism. In a work entitled Reason and Existence, for example, the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) identifies Nietzsche (alongside Kierkegaard) as one of the original existential thinkers:

The contemporary philosophical situation is determined by the fact that two philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who did not count in their times and, for a long time, remained without influence in the history of philosophy, have continually grown in significance.

(Jaspers 1955: 23)

Similarly, the American philosopher Walter Kaufmann argues that “In the story of existentialism, Nietzsche occupies a central place: Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre are unthinkable without him, and the conclusion of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus sounds like a distant echo of Nietzsche” (1975: 21). These examples index the fact that in the period following the Second World War, the image of Nietzsche as a proto-existentialist dominated in both continental European and Anglo-American scholarship. Moreover, the impact of Nietzsche’s thought on twentieth-century existentialist philosophers means that, in many of its forms at least, existentialism was a form of Nietzscheanism: one of the most influential forms of Nietzscheanism of the last century.

In this chapter, we shall trace the reception of Nietzsche as an existential thinker, framing the existentialist interpretations of his work with precursors and successors to that movement. First, we shall consider Nietzsche’s deep influence on two important trends in German philosophy that pre-dated existentialism: life-philosophy and value-theory. We shall then introduce existentialism as such, and examine Jaspers’s reading of Nietzsche. Following this we shall consider Nietzsche’s influence on French existentialism, focusing on the presence of Nietzsche in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and of Albert Camus. Then, we shall consider the Anglo-American reception of Nietzsche as an existentialist through the works of Kaufmann, his most important post-war translator and interpreter. We shall then summarize the rationale for positioning Nietzsche as an existentialist, before concluding the chapter with an outline of Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation. While Heidegger holds an important place in existentialist thought because of his early work, his Nietzsche interpretation coincides with his turn away from existentialist themes, and lays the foundation for post-existentialist readings of Nietzsche.

Before existentialism: life-philosophy and value-theory

Before Nietzsche became widely associated with existentialism, in Germany his work was extremely influential in two movements that can be understood as precursors to existentialism: life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) and value-theory. These movements and the philosophers primarily associated with them are not usually included in histories of existentialism, and most of the twentieth-century existentialists were not directly influenced by them. However, they deserve a brief mention here because some of the central themes in Nietzsche’s works that were taken up by the existentialists first found an audience with the life-philosophers and value-theorists. Thus, rather than having any direct line of influence, life-philosophy and value-theory may be considered precursors to existentialism because of their common source in certain Nietzschean themes, and their common impulse to respond to particular needs and problems.

While little known today, life-philosophy was the dominant trend in German philosophy (as well as culture more broadly) between roughly 1870 and 1930. Its origins can be traced back to critical reactions to the Enlightenment in the works of philosophers such as J. G. Hamann (1730–88) and J. G. Herder (1744–1803), and movements such as “Storm and Stress” (Sturm und Drang; late 1760s to early 1780s) and German Romanticism (late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) (Gaiger 1998: 488). According to Herbert Schnädelbach (1984), however, the history of life-philosophy proper only began with the late works of F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), in which the principle of “life” is opposed to the principles of philosophical idealism (typified most famously by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel [1770–1831]). Its most important “fathers” were then Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Nietzsche.

What, then, is life-philosophy? In a very general sense, life-philosophy is “a philosophy which asks after the meaning, value, and purpose of life” (Gaiger 1998: 487). More specifically, however, life-philosophy turns “life” into a foundational and all-encompassing principle, and understands this principle as something fundamentally irrational: life is thus opposed to rationality. (This is why Schnädelbach identifies its origin with Schelling’s opposition of life to idealism; since philosophical idealism elevates reason.) Accordingly, life-philosophy rejects theoretical abstractions, giving preference to a philosophy of feelings and intuitions. Moreover, as Schnädelbach (1984: 141) further suggests, life itself is understood in a metaphysical sense by the life-philosophers, so life-philosophy may be defined as a metaphysics of the irrational. Life-philosophy is associated with a movement in biological science known as “vitalism”, which opposed purely mechanistic understandings of life (the idea that living beings are just complex arrangements of inorganic matter) by asserting that there is something unique that living beings possess: a “life force”. (Notable proponents of vitalism included the embryologist Hans Driesch [1867–1941] and Bergson.) Life-philosophy privileges a metaphysics of life based on a biological model rather than the model of physics, and this biological or organic model is extended to all forms of life (for example, the author of the hugely influential book The Decline of the West [1932], Oswald Spengler [1880–1936], understood human societies as organisms with a life cycle of growth and decline).

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, life-philosophy construed “life” as the ultimate normative criterion for making any and all types of judgement, whether concerning knowledge, aesthetics, ethics or politics. Life-philosophers typically developed systems of evaluative oppositions, opposing life to death, growth to decay, dynamism to stasis and so on. In short, the healthy, that which enhances life and is identified with the true and the good, is opposed to the sick, that which diminishes life and is identified with falsity and evil. Schnädelbach notes that for most, if not all, life-philosophers, this normative antithesis inclines towards “a glorification of the healthy and the strong, of force and of man as a robber-beast” (1984: 145). These normative antitheses were often deployed as the basis for a cultural critique, allowing aspects of culture to be criticized as sick or decadent, others to be praised as life-enhancing, and allowing an overall political programme of cultural renewal or regeneration in the name of eliminating sickness and promoting health (a programme realized in numerous ways both culturally and philosophically in this period in Germany, from nudism to National Socialism).

Nietzsche was an essential reference and inspiration for life-philosophy for a number of reasons. First, he can be credited with introducing life as an ultimate criterion for all judgements and values. Already in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, the central problems are posed as the respective values of knowledge and art from the point of view of life. In a later commentary, he identifies one of its main novelties, the identification of Socratic rationalism, as the introduction of decadence into Hellenic culture: “‘Rationality’ against instinct. ‘Rationality’ at any price as dangerous, as a force undermining life!” (EH “The Birth of Tragedy” 1). Throughout his works, life acts as a criterion for his evaluations of historicism, culture, morality, religion and so on. Nietzsche is particularly notable in this regard for placing truth and knowledge in the service of life, for questioning their value from the perspective of life and for defending error over truth if it is life enhancing. Moreover, Nietzsche often associates that which is life enhancing with the irrational: the body, the unconscious, the emotions, music and art, states of intoxication and so on. Moreover, he analyses the way rationality and consciousness can turn against life, stifling it in rigid metaphysical and moral categories, and negating its value through the belief in a superior world of rational Ideas (as with Platonism). Nietzsche is also responsible for introducing the normative antithesis between the healthy and the sick or decadent central to life-philosophy (although, arguably, this distinction is far more subtle in Nietzsche than it was for most of the life-philosophers). Nietzsche employed these criteria for a full-scale critique of culture, and he was interpreted by some life-philosophers (e.g. Wilhelm Dilthey [1833–1911]) as essentially a cultural critic rather than a philosopher. Finally, Nietzsche associated dynamism with life and stasis with death, and his doctrine of the will to power could be understood as a dynamic and irrational metaphysics of life.

Many of the important currents of twentieth-century continental philosophy have engaged in a critique of rationalism in a way that seems indebted to life-philosophy, even if unconsciously. We can sum up what is essential to life-philosophy by noting, with Schnädelbach, the nature of this debt:

[S]ubject and object, consciousness and what it is conscious of, are themselves seen as derivative and grounded in an antecedent whole, which it is possible to ascertain only by means of intuition. Pre-and non-objective lived experience, moods, the neutrality of what is experienced are supposed to precede all objectivity; analysis, dichotomisation, the hiatus between intuition and concept – all are supposed to come about only by means of secondary exposition of that whole, which up until Heidegger was called “life”.

(1984: 147)

Despite its one-time prominence, and more recent philosophy’s unconscious debt, life-philosophy declined to the point where it is today all but forgotten, for two main reasons. First, many of the streams of life-philosophy (both philosophical and cultural) fed into the disaster that was National Socialism. In particular, the combination of biologism and cultural criticism centring on the antithesis of the healthy and the sick paved the way for a racist politics that could justify exterminating Jews, gypsies, invalids and so on, in the name of “cultural hygiene”. Consequently, life-philosophy, and particularly its biologistic and critical-cultural tendencies, were suppressed and forgotten with the post-Second World War de-Nazification of Germany. (Nietzsche’s relation to National Socialism will be further considered in Chapter 3.) Second, the more general impulses towards developing a philosophy that seeks out the value and meaning of life were taken up in existentialism, which thereby superseded life-philosophy. (This will be taken up shortly in the following section.)

Value-theory can be treated more briefly, since while it was inspired by Nietzsche’s rhetoric of nihilism and the “revaluation of all values”, the primary proponents of value-theory were themselves far more influenced by philosophers such as Kant and Hegel than by Nietzsche’s own approach to the problem of values. The term “value” was taken over from political economy (where it referred to the monetary value of goods, etc.) by Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–81) in the 1840s. However, it was Nietzsche’s work that gave rise to the prominence of this concept in philosophy. For Nietzsche, nihilism – the decadence of the current age – can by understood as a crisis of values, brought about by the fact that “the highest values devaluate themselves” (WP 2). Briefly put, for Nietzsche the highest values so far posited in Western culture consisted of a combination of belief in a transcendent metaphysical world (Plato’s world of the Forms, etc.) and “slave” morality, a combination he sometimes referred to with the shorthand expression, the “Christian-moral interpretation”. One of the key values of the Christian-moral interpretation is truth, but Nietzsche believed that in his own era the pursuit of the value of truth had undermined the Christian-moral interpretation itself because it had revealed that we have no sound reason for believing in the existence of the true world. This results in nihilism because it is no longer possible to believe in anything. Thus, he calls for a revaluation of all values to renew culture by placing our values on a firmer footing.

Following Nietzsche, many philosophers tried to find a new foundation for values. Lotze’s own value-theory is a form of idealism, in which values (what ought to be the case) have an ideal existence above and beyond the “real” existence of the universe as examined by science in terms of mechanistic materialism. This position is indebted to (although distinguished from) the idealism of Plato and Hegel. Transcendental philosophies of value, exemplified by the works of Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) were a form of neo-Kantianism that attempted to ground values by examining the subjective conditions necessary for objective values to be posited. A final important school of value-theory, the phenomenological, sought to use Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method (a rigorous examination of consciousness) to isolate the essences of values and arrange them hierarchically. The most important representatives of the phenomenological philosophy of values were Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950). Arguably, although inspired by Nietzsche, none of the major proponents of value-theory followed his own radical views on value. The value-theorists all wanted to ground values as objective, as more than things posited by subjective, willing individuals. As we shall see, it was this far more subjective approach to values that was taken up by the existentialists.

The philosophy of existence

As mentioned above, one of the reasons that life-philosophy disappeared in Ger...