The Trivialization of Friedrich Nietzsche
Dannhauser, Werner J.
THE AM ERICAN SPECTATOR ~ ] ~ ' VOL. 15, NO. 5 / M AY 1982 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....
...What can a man learn about the choice of a job or a mate, about the hope for immortality and the fear of death, about the tension or correlation between feeling good and doing good, about a hundreddaily questions it is in our nature to confront--what can one learn about such things from Marx except possibly that they are trivial and will take care of themselves ? Marx does not seem to touch the core of our being, but Nietzsche does, no matter how much he may annoy us in the process...
...If the person one commands is stupid and unable to take care of himself, if he is one of Aristotle's natural slaves, no "pathos of distance" can come into play...
...George Bernard Shaw and Mencken took part in this Nietzsche festival...
...The trouble is that on the way to the trivialization ofNietzsche, Heidegger must also suffer a trivialization and, it almost goes without saying, a de-politicalization...
...from Harvard, and even managed, at Harvard, to cop the fabled Bowdoin Prize...
...Nordau, who is (fortunately) better remembered as a Zionist, sought to show that Nietzsche had not succumbed to madness at all...
...Like much of what Derrida writes, it is ultimately about Derrida himself...
...we merely have a quantity of words that can best be used to ignite the r e a d e r ' s own engine of creativity...
...In theory, though, it means the study of Marx and, before him, of Hegel...
...When Hayman does discuss Nietzsche and politics--which means Nietzsche and Nazism--he seems to see no connection between the two...
...Before looking again at The New Nietzscbe, a volume which is the crowning glory of those who would trivialize Nietzsche and make him acceptable, we should perhaps survey the doings in one other track of Nietzsche scholarship, and see how it contributes to the trend...
...Nobody is likely to deny that Nietzsche was one of the two great immediate influences on Heidegger, the other being Kierkegaard...
...Dannhauser THE TRIVIALIZATION OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE The newest o f t h e new N i e t z s c h e s is most t h i n g s to all men-e x c e p t a p r e c u r s o r o f H i t l e r . Of making many books there is no end, Koheleth teaches, and writers about Nietzsche continue to prove him right...
...Now, no serious man has ever doubted that the Nazis both used and abused Nietzs.che, that there is an immeasurable distance between Nietzsche's superman and the frenzied genius that was Hitler, that Nietzsche would have met an untimely end had he lived to see the Third Reich...
...Zarathustra equates the preference of the ancients for peace with their preference for being over becoming, rest over motion, contemplation over the life of action--all of which he considers part of a sleepy doctrine inimical to the glorious vitality preached by Z a r a t h u s t r a . The consistent glorification of war cannot be explained as metaphorical...
...It is a fascinating subject, especially since Nietzsche leans in the direction of viewing women as inferior by nature without having any clear place for nature in his thought...
...The s t a t e m e n t proves nothing about Nietzsche and his predecessors...
...The above charges can fairly be accused of unfairness...
...the new Nietzsche was the true Nietzsche...
...The essays in The New Nietzsche and kindred ventures almost demand an affirmative answer to the question...
...To a considerable extent Hayman's admiration of Nietzsche is based on the iatter's anticipation of Wittgenstein, just as his reservations all seem to center on one or another "linguistic dilemma" in which he thinks Nietzsche ensnared...
...What this means, however, is that Heidegger protects Nietzsche from vulgar Nazism, not from Nazism as such...
...Alas, Hayman d o e s much to trivialize Nietzsche and to make him acceptable...
...First of all, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra speaks for Nietzsche, abounds with stated preferences for war over peace...
...Is it not rather a matter of bringing as much intelligence, common sense, and attentiveness as possible to bear on a text...
...The book Nietzsche is part of his self-deNazification, as it were...
...Thrasymachus could learn from Socrates and all the above-mentioned writers could learn from Nietzsche...
...One t h e r e f o r e turns with r e l i e f to Ronald Hayman's Nietzscbe: A Critical Life,~ especially since it has been some time since the annual avalanche of Nietzs.che books has included a full-scale biography of the man and since "I-layman has had the advantage of drawing on at least the first two parts of Curt Paul J a n z ' s massive attempt in German at a definitive book on Nietzsche's life...
...At first sight it seems a good idea for the editor and contributors to take their bearings by Heidegger, since he is head and shoulders above all the other writers, though some--more of this later--would place Derrida on his level at least...
...The view that Nietzsche taught dangerous things r e t u r n e d with a vengeance when the Nazis used and abused him, so that after the end of World War II he had to be saved from the pedestrian denigrations of Crane Brinton and the Marxist denunciations of Luk~cs...
...One finds much moaning about the fatal constraints posed by the demands of reason, logic, and comprehensibility...
...Now that the Frankfurt School can be said to have peaked, it has become apparent that in some ways Nietzsche was not sanitized enough...
...In the case at hand, that can only mean Jacques Derrida's "Nietzsche, Life as Metaphor...
...the idea of progress, dialectical or otherwise, just has nothing to recommend it when it comes to areas like art...
...The margins of both the French and the Englisti text are left unj u s t i f i e d , which may be meaningful according to arcane deconstructionist principles...
...We are unable to live with Nietzsche and we are unable to live without him...
...Then, too, an open-minded r e a d e r of Marx will find that Marx is patently wrong once too often...
...can, to repeat, be summarily dismissed...
...The same question once more rears its head: What happened here...
...It would be wrong to assume that substituting Nietzsche for Marx is merely a pedagogical tactic, an academic convenience...
...In practice today it means +the Gulag Archipela'go, the spread of barbarism, and darkness at noon...
...Let us then think of why we "can't live without him...
...Writers on Nietzsche very frequently ignore the periodization of Nietzsche's thought, though Nietzsche himself points to it often enough: from the early follower of Schopenhauer and Wagner, to the disillusioned admirer of Voltaire, to the " f i n a l " Nietzsche of Thus Spoke Zarathustra...
...The unbiased reader of this handsome book will soon discover that Jacques Derrida is a man of some talent...
...It has been charged with some justice that when Heidegger writes about other philosophers he teaches the reader a great deal about himself...
...Then he came to America, finding his way almost immediately to the right places and hooking up with the right people...
...Was his consciousness raised by the Arab oil embargo of the winter of 1973-74...
...It does, however, serve to hurl Nietzsche backhandedly into the never-never land of trivia...
...The debt to Heidegger is by no means confined to his own contribution...
...Two examples must suffice to show that a connection between Nietzsche and Fascism really exists, though doing so means picking from a rich supply and resembles proving once more that the world is round...
...Such a process was necessary after World War II...
...In a curious way, Nietzsche rode back to r e s p e c t a b i l i t y (and away from politics) on the coattails of Martin Heidegger...
...We can leave the difficult details to intellectual historians and turn t o a more important question...
...That can hardly be their intention...
...How did a thinker whose collected works were presented by Hitler to Mussolini, a thinker whose archives are the only philosophical shrine known to be visited by Hitler, how did such a thinker become the darling of young left-wing radicals and their older professors ? The details of this tale amount to another unwritten chapter of intellectual history...
...Finally, however, the contributors are bound to get to the subject matter announced by the ti'~les of their essays: "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," "The Will to Power," and so on...
...the working men loved the homelands they were supposed to despise...
...Heidegger is a cautious writer, not to say a cowardly one, and he is writing, it will be remembered, during a period of his "inner emigration...
...Its editors and contributors would surely dispute any insinuation that they are unwilling to learn from Nietzsche, but that does not dispose of the quesdon of whether they are willing to learn what Nietzsche has to teach...
...During this time he gave the lectures on Nietzsche he was later to fashion into his book...
...All signs pointed to a distinguished career in the bureaucracy of English t e a c h e r s , and, indeed, Said was soon at Columbia, learning the art of rigorous and tedious criticism from the g r e a t master, Lionel Trilling...
...The links between Nietzsche's call for planetary rule by a new global nobility and the stench of Auschwitz have been severed as much as they can possibly be...
...8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 Some men of H e i d e g g e r ' s own s t a t u r e refused to speak to him, and all tentative suggestions to bring him to these shores encountered vehement opposition...
...that more than 20 centuries (count 'em) before Marx, Aristotle was able to write a b o u t the fundamental political significance of the economic differences between wealth and poverty...
...Well, "Previously it had been taken for granted that words could convey the objective truth about external reality' ' - - b u t not by young Nietzsche...
...The predictable result was that Nietzsche had to be sanitized in order to be used...
...One of the texts that spawned hermeneutics has it that "ye shall know them by their f r u i t s " (Matthew 7:16...
...He views Nietzsche mainly as a precursor of o t h e r t h e o r i s t s , r a t h e r than an original thinker in his own right...
...What he said was little more than that he had no real choice and--that some of his best friends were Jews...
...Rumor has it that in France, Derrida's reputation is already waning, but on these shores deconstructionism is definitely the hottest commodity on the academic market, more in demand than strucmralism, functionalism, existentialism, Marxism, or any other current ism...
...Marx had almost c e r t a i n l y never heard of Nietzsche, who was anything but a household word when Marx died in 1883...
...Suffice it to say that the working day has not lengthened...
...He received his early schooling there and, after life for an Arab in Jerusalem became uncomfortable in the forties, in Egypt...
...Yet no book containing Heidegger's dazzling essay "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra...
...Nordau's crude slanders were followed by reams of praise for Nietzsche as the man who issued the twentieth c e n t u r y ' s clarion call to individual creativity and in the process heaped on bourgeois philistines the scorn they deserved...
...The level on which Heidegger discusses Nietzsche is simply too metaphysical to permit of ready application to the everyday world...
...On the whole, though, Nietzsche has certainly been domesticated...
...He writes magisterially...
...And indeed there.is...
...Some time a f t e r World War II it somehow became convenient for men of the most diverse pglitical orientation to divest Nietzsche as much as possible of the political orientation that had brought about World War If...
...His second, Beginnings: Intention and Method, caused a crisis in Said's academic trophy case: In 1976, it won the first annual Lionel Trilling Award...
...He has no trouble in dismissing Nietzsche's sister as "Fascistic" and blaming her for more than is reasonable, but his final judgment on the whole matter is that "it is easy to exaggerate Nietzsche's political influence on our century...
...Heidegger, of course, succeeded in regaining r e s p e c t a b i l i t y . Hannah Arendt certified his honorableness in the New York Review of Books...
...Style: swallows up substance...
...The fancy term inadvertently points to the bombast of the new venture...
...Ordinarily one might object to the above strictures on the ground that a book of essays is entitled to be judged not by its average contribution but rather by its best or at least most authoritative selection...
...for both, liberal democracy stands in the way of tomorrow's liberation...
...Nevertheless, if Marx may yet be proved right in the end, it will be a case of being right only in the end, which is not yet here, and the road to the true conclusion will be littered with false premises...
...The morass of subjectivity has reached such depths that a new human right may have to be found to accommodate it, the right of every man (or person, perhaps) to his (or her) own Nietzsche...
...It may, in part, be the case that Marxism, "when it is ascending, appeals to an appalling whorishness of the psyche, which loves to jump on bandwagons, and that when it is in control, the rest is silence...
...the depth of the writer's imagination swallows up the real surface of Nietzsche, also known as Nietzsche's text...
...By contrast Nietzsche avoids any recourse to justification by nature, which his whole philosophy renders dubious anyhow...
...To put it crudely: By putting all his eggs in the historicaleconomic basket, Marx neglected vast areas of human interest and concern...
...Nietzsche merely means that "the noble human is naturally rapacious...
...By way of some quirky d e t o u r s , the essay meanders toward its conclusion, a kind of meditation oh a sentence found, in quotation marks, in one of Nietzsche's notebooks: "I have forgotten my umbrella...
...For another, they are far more heavily populated by the youthful denizens of academia--to be precise, the huddled scholars of Columbia and Barnard Colleges, so many of them hot in pursuit of knowledge and yet trying to keep cool by wearing T-shirts in search of a laundromat...
...A second example is brief enough so that Nietzsche can speak for himself...
...Marx is not enough in a number of other senses as well...
...Nietzsche has much to teach us, including, and especially, things about intellectual probity...
...sive s t a t e s - in brief simply the enhancement of the type "'man," the continual "self-overcoming of man," to use a moral formula in a supramoral sense "The matchless eloquence and unquestionable yearning for excellence should not blind anybody to the fact that here Nietzsche opts for slavery, in a more ruthless way than could ever be attributed to the ancients by their most mean-spirited critics...
...I0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 Nietzsche had anything to do with the Nazis...
...He shows flashes of wit and appears to be enjoying himself...
...Maybe they mean to suggest that to the true explicator of texts the text he explicates must partake of the sacred...
...When reading a philosopher seriously we are honor-bound to suspect that he is right...
...Nevertheless, the attempt to render Nietzsche's thought consistent can only be described as heroic, and its dubious validity puts many a certitude to shame...
...it can only be explained away, and the preference for war over peace is a most frightening and a most profound part of Fascism...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 7 to the trivialization of Nietzsche0 not least because they so cavalierly dismiss any possible connection between Nietzsche and Fascism...
...The errors, ranging from mistaken equations to absurd predictions, have all been pointed out by competent men and women...
...No sustained thought about Nietzsche's position is in evidence...
...consider the endless talk about meaninglessness, dreadful freedom, the abyss, and a b s u r d i t y . But they have tried to strip Nietzsche of his medical credentials as soon as he went from diagnosing the sickness of our times to prescribing remedies...
...The book beginswith a n introduction by Stefano Agosto which sounds like a parody of the m a s t e r himself, and it contains notes so that an essay which takes up less than 15 pages in The New Nietzsche is transfigured into a slender, elegant volume...
...It is a methodological m6untain forever giving birth to a substantive mouse, usually of Freudian, Marxist, or Heideggerian origin...
...The non-Fascist existentialist descendants of Heidegger can be said to have accepted the diagnosis Nietzsche rendered of our time...
...They do not yield what is precious without forcing us'to consider what is pernicious...
...drew on Spengler, on Heidegger, on certain strands of Judaism, but especially on Nietzsche, who after all had been, as it were, the " h o r s e ' s mouth" from which Spengler and Heidegger had learned so much...
...Shall we then stop reading Nietzsche, or at least stop taking him seriously...
...Although no volume that includes selections from both Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger can simply be dismissed as trivial, such collections have indeed led "The New Ntetzsche: Contemporary Styles of lnterpretatton...
...he was already a lunatic when he wrote the books we now celebrate as modern masterpieces...
...It is more difficult to deny that he was born in 1844, which is more than a state of mind but a period of time between 1843 and 1845...
...Why not...
...misery has not accumulated...
...So Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, et al...
...Now, ofcoerse, it is next to impossible to "'Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, U n i v e r s i t y o f Chicago Press, $8.95...
...But it is equally true that he could write o f " t h e inner truth and greatness" of the National Socialist movement as late as 1953...
...What is more, the subject matter is not even Nietzsche but the interpretation of Nietzsche...
...Ordinarily those aspects, like the praise of cruelty, would be hard to overlook...
...Most of these apologetics fail to carry conviction...
...What is certain, however, is that in the mid-t970s the Parr Professor of English and Comparative L i t e r a t u r e , his THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 13...
...He surely pursues different goals, desiring no abolition of the division of labor, no withering away of the state, dreading rampant egalitarianism, and celebrating a different future...
...he sounds not like one of the scribes but as one who has authority...
...Biographies would seem to offer a sane way to escape this march into the obscurantism of " a n y t h i n g g o e s " Nietzsche i n t e r p r e t a t i o n . After all, it is relatively easy to argue that when Nietzsche wrote about the will to power he meant primarily such activities as children's finger-painting at-our most enlightened schools...
...Until a few years ago it was obligatory for any author who presented a new Nietzsche to insist he had merely set the record straight...
...one needs a bit of training in deconstruction or some o t h e r a b s t r a c t methodology to be more obtuse than one is meant by nature to be...
...And he actually has Nietzsche invent linguistic philosophy in 1873, in an essay the revolutionary nature of which Nietzsche somehow failed to realize for he never published it...
...Nietzsche tends to divide his critics into two camps...
...Eliot's Sweeney put all this alleged profundity more succinctly and beautifully when he complained that "I gotta use words when I talk to you...
...His writings on Nietzsche must be judged guilty of the charge that is falsely made about Heidegger's writings on Nietzsche...
...For many years Professor Said seemed to be content with his lot...
...It is somewhat more difficult, but quite instructive, to try to discover why the attempt was made in the first place and why it has succeeded to such an amazing extent...
...Perhaps it is foolish to expect any more f~'om Derrida and others who do their best to turn Nietzsche into nothing more than a Rorschach test for childish adults, but it is important to note that the c a r e l e s s n e s s involves costs...
...l'What follows is h e a v i l y i n d e b t e d to an exc e l l e n t new book by George Friedman, The Political Pbtlosophy of the Frankfurt School, Cornell University Press, $17.50...
...After all, Aristotle took care to distinguish between natural and conventional slavery, primarily defending the former variety...
...I t ought to go without saying that this . kind of higher nonsense exacts a considerable price when applied ~o the interp r e t a t i o n of Nietzsche...
...We must content ourselves with the realization that we already know that a good case can be made for Communism...
...That is an admirable tenet to use for genuine critics and commentators...
...To begin with, we may safely rule out any kind of conspiracy...
...In this respect Derrida merely provides a representative sample...
...He thus forces open one of the world's most open doors...
...So honored, and still so young . . . was Said bored...
...Hayman apparently views any attempt to establish a connection between the virulent hatred of modern mediocrity and Fascism as a "misunderstanding...
...Those of us who teach the young know, for example, that it is difficult to get them really to read Marx...
...He has the 23-year-old Nietzsche "writing philosophical aphorisms with an economy, lucidity, precision, and incisiveness that- look forward to Wittgenstein"-though Nietzsche was then more than a decade away from publishing aphorisms and Wittgenstein is not that great a stylist...
...Nietzsche's thought becomes a matter of metaphors, semaphores, unconscious patterns, verbal "rites...
...Of course, a dissonant note resounded after World War I. Thousands of copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra were evidently passed out to German soldiers, and Nietzsche was traduced as a Hun, in spite of the inadv e r t e n t aid he gave to the Allies by weighting down the knapsacks of their enemies, who surely had better things to do at night than ponder Zarathustra...
...In Derrida it serves instead as an entering wedge into trendiness and/or a display of cleverness...
...from Princeton, his M.A...
...This way of dealing with Nietzsche may not...
...It will be easy enough to show the futility of such an attempt, and the cost it exacts...
...It is also necessary because, more and more, the young seem to be imbibing their Nietzsche from sources as chic as this one...
...He was not the worst of men...
...The Nietzsche beloved by existentialists has also been cleansed of the Fascist connection to the fullest extent feasible...
...As a result a "new N i c t z s c h e " seems to appear at regular intervals...
...Without the pathos ofdzstance which grows out of the ingrained dit[er,.'nce be(wcen stra',a-when the caste constantly looks after and looks down upon subjects and ,nstruments and just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a d i s t a n c e - - t h a t other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up e i t h e r - - t h e craving for an ever new 12 Tl:tl: AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of e v e r h i g h e r , r a r e r , more remote, further-stretching, more comprehen...
...The positive parts of his teaching (which included speculations on the virtues of eugenics programs) were conveniently dismissed as metaphysical relapses into a discredited philosophical tradition...
...They refuse to distinguish what Nietzsche himself published from what appeared only posthumously, capriciously giving the most weight to what suits their predilection...
...blushing Sophists are really to be p r e f e r r e d to unblushing ones...
...We do not and should not let the reality of Stalinism deprive us from learning what those titans have to teach us...
...The praise of resoluteness is difficult enough to distinguish from a fanatical praise of fanaticism, and the dark broodings on matters like one's native hearth are bound to arouse dark memories of the Nazi slogan of "blood and ~soil...
...To study both Nietzsche and Marx is to realize that it is impossible for both to be right, though it is indeed possible that both are wrong...
...Yet we are unable to embrace Fascism...
...and that men had thought long and hard about the passions in general and the erotic in particular well before Freud came along...
...Thus Michael Haar can easily devote a section of his essay (on "Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language") to nihilism without ever coming close to mentioning Fascism...
...Nietzsche nowhere mentions Marx...
...It might begin with Max Nordau's tirade, Degeneration, which appeared in 1895 and amounted to an attempt to demolish the growing reputation of Nietzsche as major thinker...
...No further proof is r e q u i r e d than that Heidegger published a massive two-volume study of Nietzsche (now in the course of being translated into four English volumes...
...the revolution did not begin in Germany...
...In the case of a thinker of Marx's stature, one ought to smile when one says that, especially since Marx may well be right in the final a n a l y s i s i f o r who can say that the fight between Communism and the Free World is not the final conflict and that the Free World is winning that fight...
...Hayman seems to belong to the club of starry-eyed historians of ideas who express astonishment that Democritus could talk about atoms thousands of years before Einstein...
...For example, Heidegger does in passing deal with Nietzsche's fatefully ambiguous concePt of " g r e a t politics" but only to show that it is not here yet and that one ought not to vulgarize the notion...
...Derrida shows conclusively that finding out what Nietzsche means is no easy matter...
...they used him...
...It takes these writers much longer to approximate that sentiment...
...Did the news of Egyptian troops crossing the Bar-Lev line inspire him...
...And there is a third distinctive difference...
...most recent book...
...Well-meaning middlemen like Walter Kaufmann certainly labored mightily on his behalf, but the final stamp of approval had to come from the Left...
...Intellectual probity precludes that choice...
...For the newest of the new Nietzsches is most things to all men--except a p r e c u r s o r of Hitler...
...Fair enough...
...In other words, it suits H e i d e g g e r ' s rhetorical strategies .to leave Nietzsche's fundamental political orientation shrouded in vagueness, to point ever so delicately to the abuse of Nietzsche, while keeping quiet about his use...
...In a volume which--conveniently enough for our p u r p o s e - - i s called The New Nietzsche," one of the contributors, Professor Gilles Deleuze, magisterially declares the whole subject closed: There was a time when it was important to show that Nietzsche had been'misappropriated and completely deformed by the fascists . . . . But today this is iio longer necessary...
...The l a t t e r constantly insisted on "'philological cleanliness" but in the case of all too many critics that goes by the board at once...
...His first book was Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography...
...Edited and introduced by David B. Allison...
...Werner J. Dannhauser is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center...
...Sorel, however, acknowledges Nietzsche's influence, and passages in Lenin, with t h e i r resolute determination to downgrade the mechanical evolution of economic circumstances and to s t r e s s the power of will, certainly sound Nietzschean, to say the least...
...Said is silent...
...Most of the-time, Derrida resembles a man who .rides a bicycle on a tightrope and shouts, "Look, Ma, no hands," but once in a while he does stoop to write about Nietzsche...
...Notwithstanding all this, Heidegger's book on Nietzsche remains quite simply the best book about Ni.etzsche ever written...
...The obvious problem is that little of the essay really concerns Nietzsche...
...He brings more wit, more esprit, more deftness to this task than Marx, who is no match for Nietzsche when it comes to style...
...That question has a simple, though admittedly i n a d e q u a t e , answer: Marx was not enough...
...The Nietzsche who emerges from Heidegger's titanic effort is certainly no Nazi, but that does not prove as much as it seems to prove...
...Heidegger has...
...The students on Morningside Heights are apt to fall under the tutelage of Professor Edward W. Said, who would rather be in the Hills of Judea, in the land he calls Palestine...
...and Ph.D...
...many things to teach modern man but in The New Nietzscbe he appears primarily as a pioneer of a new hermeneutics...
...By employing abstract hermeneutics, these authors succeed only in producing abstract interpretations...
...One should trace the above-mentioned intersection of views by beginning with the thought of the Right at its highest...
...The most terrifying thing about the pasgage is Nietzsche's unflinching call for conventional slavery...
...In the case of both of them we have nothing to gain and much to lose by refusing to think their thoughts through as deeply as we can...
...At this point an enterprising professor might reason that Marx's main purpose is to proclaim the death of bourgeois life, and to hasten its demise...
...the proletariat has not increased...
...Why there should be so many Marxists nevertheless is a problem of the psychopathology of the human mind we cannot hope to solve here...
...Similarly, the reality of Hitler should not deprive us of the wisdom of Nietzsche...
...Unfortunately, it is more necessary today than ever to think through the connection between Nietzsche and the Nazis~ That is because, contrary to Deleuze, the Nazis did not simply abuse Nietzsche...
...to no o t h e r p r e d e c e s s o r did he pay such homage, Many, including writers of the caliber of Hannah Arendt, have on the other hand argued e i t h e r that Heidegger was only tinged with Nazism, or that it was a tri,~ial episode in his life, or that it surely had no effect on the core of his philosophy...
...the concept of superstructure either turns out to be just another name for the real world in which we really live or else raises ten questions for every answer it supplies...
...Unfortunately, the fruits as they appear in The New Nietzscbe must be ju.dged as either unripe or rotten...
...Hayman makes his case rather relentlessly...
...T h i s brings us back at last to the new Nietzsche of The New Nietzscbe...
...It could even serve as an entering wedge into the d e e p e s t stratum of the political dimension of N i e t z s c h e ' s thought...
...in showing that Nietzscbe was no devil he came all too close to portraying him as an angel...
...As of now, one word must'once more stand for a decisive answer: Auschwitz...
...Of course, one could always maintain that hermeneutics refers not simply to interpretation but to a science of interpretation, but that would raise the question of whether such a. thing is really possible, or even desirable...
...Mitchell S. Ross ALLAH AND MAN AT COLUMBIA Edward Said is a rare bird, a free man yearning to be tyrannized...
...In the typical case, the reader is thereupon numbed by formalistic jargon...
...He was born in .jerusalem (,Jerusalem, Palestine, as it says in the "about the author" section of his Mitchell S. Ross is author o f The Literary Politicians andAn Invitation to Our Times...
...What one finds here is pyrotechnics, a showing off that puts the subject m a t t e r in second place...
...His inaugural address was so full of ambiguity that, according to Karl LSwith, the members of the audience could not be sure whether the speaker was urging them to study the pre-Socratics or to join the Storm Troopers...
...That being the case, however, why not let Nietzsche do Marx's work in excoriating the philistines...
...Then, too, the trivialization of Nietzsche has in one way or another been helped along by genuinely honorable men who exercised all due c a r e to serve truth or, if they were subjectivists who saw no truth to serve, at least took good care to see to it that their hearts would not reproach them so long as they lived...
...The Frankfurt School proved especially sensitive to the errors of Marxism, since in many ways it was a superstructure built on THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 9 an increasingly Marxist infrastructure.t Ultimately committed to the fundamental truths of Marxism, its members sought to bring the latter in line with stubborn reality by a series of basic amendments, much as the Ptolemaic view of the universe had been kept alive by the attribution of epicycles to the movements of heavenly bodies...
...Obviously, no thinker worthy of the name ever took anything of the kind for granted...
...Kaufmann may have done more than necessary...
...I n the thinking of the mature Nietzsche, there is nothing that can accurately be described as Fascist . . . . " (It goes without saying that the author fails to provide a clue as to what an accurately described Fascist position would be...
...Here is the beginning of aphorism 257 of Beyond Good and Evil, as t r a n s l a t e d by Walter Kaufmann: Every enhancen~enc of the type "man" has so far been the work ef an aristocratic ~ociety-a'nd it wdl bc so again and again- a society that believes in a long ladder of an order of rank and dif'ferr in value between m,',n and rn;,n, and that needs s l a v c r v in some 5er, se or ocher...
...Derrida's essay was evidently conTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 1 t sidered too monumental and seminal to be exclusively encased in an anthology of modest appearance...
...What, then, has happened...
...There are those who admire him and thus refuse to admit he had anything to do with Fascism, and there are those who denounce him as a Fascist and thus refuse to concede that he has anything worthwhile to teach...
...In the absence of a plot, we must seek out the various conflicting "interests" that met at one point: the unpolitical or depoliticized Nietzsche...
...After all, by ennobling Nietzsche, Heidegger manages to ennoble himself...
...He even possesses a correct sense of the sphinx-like quality of much of Nietzsche's writing...
...as a result there is endless communication about the difficulties of Communication, and it seems obligatory to begin every commentary with a rumination about the futility of commentaries...
...He is acknowledged again and again by various contributors and sometimes is present in unacknowledged ways...
...he characterizes Nietzsche's notorious and admiring reference to "the blond beast" as a "much misunderstood phrase...
...A history of changing Nietzsche interpretations remains to be written...
...Nor can it be plausibly maintained that the core of Heidegger's thought remained uncontaminated by the ugly periphery encasing it...
...It proved tO be a prudent stipulation, for Heidegger gave a rather sorry account of himself...
...endlessly reminded that Nietzsche had a unique way of saying things, the reader is endlessly invited to forget that what he said really matters...
...The umbrella is understood (by Derrida, not Nietzsche) to be--surprise--a penis...
...The l a t e s t wave of books denies that a true Nietzsche can be found...
...and history is both the final, unerring, infallible bar of judgmentiand forever going wrong...
...Perhaps they take a shine to the term "hermeneutics" because it used to refer primarily to the interpretation of Scripture...
...How and why did the Left need Nietzsche...
...Matters become even more complex if one adheres to the old-fashioned notion that one ought to try to understand a thinker the way he wishes to be understood...
...The Heights of Morningside, on the island of Manhattan, are quite unlike the Hills of Judea, in the land of Israel...
...Marx is not enough in a number of diff e r e n t ways...
...For all that, Nietzsche rivals Marx in the latter's hatred of all that is bourgeois...
...Delta Books, 1977+ $3.95...
...This is tantamount to saying that one should begin with Martin Heidegger...
...He was, of course, c e r t i f i e d as acceptable along with Heidegger, but who was doing the certifying...
...Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and became the first Rector of the University of Freiburg under Hitler's rule...
...Alienation is an important subject (and it sounds ever so much more profound to speak of it r a t h e r than of unhappiness) but Marx happens to write of alienation in forbidding prose that borders on the impenetrable...
...As a result the production rate of new Nietzsches has skyrocketed, yet something important has changed...
...For one thing, the trend involves too many prima donnas, writers who would not knowingly contribute to any trend if only because their very reputation depends on their bucking any real or imaginary trend they spot...
...The editor, however, is nothing if not lavish in his praise...
...yet a good deal of the time he thinks the thoughts of Nietzsche, allowing the latter's depth to surface...
...Nietzsche himself may not be culpal~le for the inferiority of most of these many books, but the combination of his significance and obscurity may at least account for their existence...
...the blond beast " i s frightening' but does less damage than the atrophied mediocrity of the modern world...
...It is safest to begin with the simplest facts...
...To put it as crudely as possible: Hayman is one of the many writers who are hell-bent to deny that ~:Reviewed by John Wettergreen in the May 1981 American Spectator...
...But it will simply not do to look away from the dangerous Nietzsche to the trivialized one...
...We are not yet done with the strange fate of Nietzsche's rehabilitation...
...Are there really any general rules for finding out what an author means...
...To study these men today is to encounter the pain that is part of the way to the pleasure of being liberally educated...
...We are approaching a state of irresolution that can be formulated as a clichg...
...He began to publish...
...It is too late t o explicate the errors of Marxism when one lives in a Marxist country...
...Or, at least, the right of almost every man to his own Nietzsche...
...Th.e book may ultimately have to be judged a failure because it attempts to equate Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power, according to which man is the absolute sovereign of the earth, with the doctrine of the e t e r n a l return of the same, which implies the absolute impotence of human willing...
...Nietzsche continues to stand in need of explanation, and the ambiguity of much of what he wrote can lend minimal credence to an indefinite number of conflicting interpretations...
...The answer is plain enough though discomforting...
...But is it not fair to call anybody who so forthrightly and with such abandon offers the many as cannon fodder for a few a Fascist...
...5 / M AY 1982 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WernerJ...
...Readers of P l a t o ' s Republic know that when caught out by Socrates, Thrasymachus blushed...
...For Nietzsche, the master has to realize the uncanny arbitrariness which places him in command and forces the slaves to obey...
...At this point, too, it becomes evident that Nietzsche at least in part shares this intention...
...What are we to do when engaging a thinker with a Fascist hue about him...
...He earned his B.A...
...To take Nietzsche seriously is to admit that there is a case to be made for Fascism...
...Notwithstanding his evident paganism, he came to exercise a good deal of influence on modern Christian theology...
...I am speaking of Nietzsche biography...
...It is true that soon thereafter Heidegger effected an "inner emigration" and gradually lost favor with the regime...
...writean essay ostensibly about Nietzsche without saying something'about him...
...In his Nietzsche, he overcomes this regrettable tendency, or at least he transcends it...
...And t h a t , for p r e s e n t and practical purposes, is all we need to know about deconstructionism...
...At any rate ifNietzsche now suffers from anything it is excessive admiration, by poets, psychoanalysts, existentialists, members of the New Left, linguistics theorists, and, it appears, everyone in France with more than a high school education...
...One gradually comes to notice only the trivial aspects of Nietzsche (and trivia is not to be equated with detail) while becoming necessarily blind to the very serious'political aspects of Nietzsche's thought...
...For example, Marcuse's writings betray a kind of aestheticism, a preference for art over politics which, according to the Frankfurt School itself, is a hallmark of Fascism...
...The main subject of the essay, when Derrida remembers it, is Nietzsche's view of women...
...The writers mentioned and the schools to which they belong still read Nietzsche for what he had to say and still tried to learn what he sought to teach...
...An expanded version is now enshrined in hard c o v e r . " This is a bilingual edition...
...One will then assign the book Marx thought of as his masterwork, Das Kapital, and watch the eyeballs of the young glaze over...
...He deigned to give an interview on the "controversial" aspects of his career to Der Sptegel only under the condition that it remain unpublished until after his death...
...somehow the more ordinary word "interpretadon" no longer suffices...
...the second sentence of the " P r e f a c e " asserts that with the publication in 1960 of Heidegger's two-volume study, "Nietzsche finally emerged as one of the prodigious thinkers of the modern age...
...He is forced to admit, albeit just once, that Nietzsche glorifies ruthlessness, but this reminds him "only" of de Sade...
...For one thing, they are shorter...
...Of course, Sorel, Berggon, Shaw, Gide, Mann, and many others had divined that Nietzsche was fairly prodigious, but never mind that...
...have been accidental...
...Had they been shown that their interpretations were absurd they would have felt shame...
...The use of the term "hermeneutics" is in itself significant...
...That growth was then just beginning: When Nietzsche succumbed to insanity in 1889, he was a rather obscure figure...
...And how did this astounding breakthrough occur...
...The man who came to his rescue most brilliantly was the late Walter Kaufmann, not only with a fulllength study of Nietzsche but with a series of excellent t r a n s l a t i o n s of the l a t t e r ' s major works...
Vol. 15 • May 1982 • No. 5
