Nietzsche as Forerunner of Fascist Aesthetics by Georg Lukacs 1934
Written: 1934
First Published: 1934 as Nietzsche als Vorlaeufer der faschistischen Aesthetik in: Literaturny Kritik, volume 8, pg. 27-53 (in German)
Source: mesotes.narod.ru
Translated: by Anton P.
Besides being a decadent, I am also the opposite of decadence.
– Nietzsche, Ecce homo
There is not a single motif in fascist aesthetics that does not go back directly or indirectly to Nietzsche. We will not enumerate these motives, starting with the theory of myth and anti-realism, here: when analyzing Nietzsche’s aesthetics, the reader himself will feel its affinity with fascism so clearly that we will rather emphasize the differences between them. And these features, despite the similarity of both ideologies, are generally found at almost every step. And this happens not only because Nietzsche is still a great and interesting thinker, and his fascist admirers and followers are eclectic apologists and vulgar talkers, it is much more important that Nietzsche and the fascists belong to two different periods in the development of bourgeois ideology.
Fascism seeks to eradicate all progressive elements from the bourgeois heritage; when it comes to Nietzsche, this means that the fascists must remove from him everything that manifests his subjectively honest Romantic polemic against capitalism. True, Nietzsche’s deeply pessimistic view of decadent bourgeois culture cannot be erased from his works, just as one cannot destroy the fact that his critique of bourgeois culture was the basis for the liberal-reformist tendencies of the imperialist period, so fiercely persecuted by fascism. Therefore, the official theoretician of fascism, Rosenberg, regards Nietzsche, with all his admiration for him, “critically.” He sees in him a victim of his bad, liberal, materialistic time. “There is something symbolic in the fact that Nietzsche went mad. An enormous will to create finally broke through like a stormy stream, but this same will, inwardly broken long ago, could no longer achieve creative results.” And Rosenberg sees the sign of this “crazy time” in the nature of the influence that Nietzsche exerted in his time: “Under his auspices, the poisoning of the race by all Syrians and negritos took place, although he himself strove to create a pure race. Nietzsche was used by frenzied political dreamers, which was worse than falling into the hands of a gang of robbers. The German people began to talk only about the destruction of all ties, about subjectivism, about “personality”, and not a word about discipline and a high internal order.” In a word, Rosenberg understands that Nietzsche was in the pre-fascist period a philosopher of hated liberalism.
To liquidate this liberal legacy of Nietzsche, Rosenberg is trying with rude swearing. Rosenberg’s fascist colleague, the Berlin professor Alfred Baeumler, is fighting for the same cause more subtly. He sharply opposes the image of Nietzsche, which is painted by his other fascist colleague, Ernst Bertram (a student of Stefan George). For Bertram, who in this case continues the pre-war Nietzsche tradition, Nietzsche is a “tragic revolutionary.” “Never,” says Bertram, “did the tendency of the individual to corrupt the mysteries and all his intellectual ruthlessness to every sacred twilight fight with such fatal significance against the reverent awe of the participant in the mystery, still internally religiously bound, as in this Voltairean, who rises to Zarathustra.” This characterization of Nietzsche which is a fascized development and strengthening of the Simmelian image of Nietzsche, is rejected by Baeumler in the most emphatic way. Baeumler, it is true, also criticizes Nietzsche’s “positivistic” tendencies and puts forward against his theories of myth the “deeper more authentic” theories of Goerres, Bachofen, etc., but for him Nietzsche is not a tragic figure, but, on the contrary, the thinker from whom begins a completely new period in the development of mankind. Nietzsche, according to Baeumler, is fighting on two fronts: against Enlightenment and against Romanticism, being the theoretical precursor of the double struggle of the fascists against Marxism and reaction. (A preliminary step towards this view of Nietzsche is Moeller van den Bruck’s attempt to interpret conservatism as the opposite of liberalism and reaction at the same time).
According to Baeumler, the life tragedy of Nietzsche lies in the fact that in the second German empire, in the empire of Bismarck, there were no prerequisites for understanding his philosophy, so that his entire struggle for the triumph of his principles was doomed from the very beginning to failure. And on this, the Bismarckian empire itself collapsed. “National liberalism, ideologically justified by Hegel, was the last form of that synthesis of Enlightenment and Romanticism, the destruction of which was Nietzsche’s vocation.” And what Bismarck did not see was revealed to Nietzsche’s prophetic gaze: “The history of the empire became the history of Bismarck’s spiritual defeat. The mercantile bourgeois subjugated the statesman, liberalism and Romanticism alternately directed politics, but most of all he thought about how to trade better. In the roar of the world war, this magnificent Romantic-liberal edifice collapsed and immediately the two great antagonists of the past appeared before us.” This antagonism between Bismarck and Nietzsche is, according to the Fascist philosophy of history, the deepest cause of the death of the Second Reich, and only in the Third Reich does it become possible to reconcile these two mythical heroes. The fascist writer Franz Schauwecker says, referring to today’s Germany: “The impossible, unacceptable meeting of Bismarck and Nietzsche will become a fait accompli, against which any onslaught of hostile forces will be broken.” This is a fascist myth about the synthesis of “the German soul and German power.”
The only thing true in this myth is that Nietzsche, having experienced in his youth a brief enthusiasm for the creation of the German empire, was then a lifelong enemy of Bismarck and his regime. He says of Bismarck: “This man appreciates and understands philosophy as much as any peasant or corporate student.” And about his empire, he says that “it would under all circumstances be a kingdom of the deepest mediocrity and Chineseness.”
He despises Bismarck’s political path because he sees in it a compromise between the government and the people. He criticizes Bismarck and his regime along the same lines along which he fights Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner (he initially admired the latter so enthusiastically). In all three, Nietzsche struggles with what he calls decadence. In one aphorism of his Dawn of Day, he juxtaposes these three figures–the most widely read German philosopher Schopenhauer, the most popular German composer Wagner, and the most prominent German politician Bismarck. It is known, and in the future we will have to emphasize more than once that the polemic against the artistic principles of Richard Wagner is the core of Nietzschean aesthetics, his struggle against decadence for healthy art, so the controversy with Schopenhauer and Wagner thus shows quite clearly that Nietzsche regards Bismarck as the representative of decadence in the field of public life and politics.
What is the political essence of this decadence, Nietzsche expresses with shameless clarity: “Modern democracy is the historical form of the decline of the state.” Nietzsche develops this thought in various places in his writings and in all sorts of ways. I will quote a characteristic quote from his later period: “Let us submit to the facts: the people won: either the slaves, or the rabble, or the herd. It is over with the masters ... This victory can be considered at the same time as poisoning the blood (it mixed the races) ... the liberation of the human race (from the masters) is proceeding at a rapid pace; everything clearly takes on a Jewish, or Christian, or vulgar character (the point is not in the word).”
Nietzsche sees here – like Bruno Bauer before him – the victory of modern democracy as the victory of the Jewish-Christian principle over aristocratic Rome. The Renaissance was a counterattack. But the Reformation again led to the victory of the Jewish-Christian principle. The French Revolution brought it final triumph: “The last political nobility still preserved in Europe, the nobility of the 17th-18th centuries in France, fell victim to the evil popular instincts.” The victory of this vulgar democracy leads “to the abolition of the concept of the state, to the destruction of the opposition of private and public. Private societies, step by step, absorb state affairs ... The unbridling of the private person (I hesitate to say: the individual) is a consequence of the democratic concept of the state.” It is now clear, without comment, how Nietzsche should have treated Bismarck, who had just made a compromise with the “rabble”.
We do not consider it necessary to reveal the already obvious contradictions of Nietzsche’s historical myth. But we had to briefly touch on these views of his in order to open ourselves to a correct understanding of his aesthetic views, for Nietzsche’s struggle against decadence in contemporary art is concentrated in an attack against democratically vulgar tendencies in this art, especially in the art of Richard Wagner. Nietzsche sees the main sign of this vulgar decadence in the predominant role of the actor’s element.
“The democratic age brings the actor up in Athens just as it does today. Richard Wagner went the furthest in this regard and inspired an extremely lofty concept of the actor, capable of catching terror. Music, poetry, religion, culture, book, family, fatherland, commerce – all this is, first of all, art, that is, a stage pose.” Elsewhere he says: “Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case, he was more than anything else, namely, an incomparable comedian, the greatest actor, the most amazing theatrical genius that the Germans had, our stage figure par excellence.”
Starting from this central point in his critique of decadence, Nietzsche reveals very clearly the socio-political roots of his radical hostility to the actor: “The doctrine of equality. But there is no more poisonous drug, because it seems that justice itself preaches this, but in fact this is the end of all justice ... The atmosphere of horror and blood in which the doctrine of equality developed surrounded this “modern idea” par excellence with a kind of fiery halo so that the revolution, like a spectacle, seduced even the noblest minds. However, this is not a reason to treat her with great respect. I see only one person who treated her in the right way, i.e. with disgust: this man is Goethe.”
Nietzsche fights against the artistic principles of Wagner by including him among the French Romantics; for Nietzsche Wagner it is the Victor Hugo of music as a special form of language. And in the eyes of Nietzsche, French Romanticism is a plebeian reaction of taste. Victor Hugo himself is bad and demagogic, he lies on his belly in front of all loud words and gestures, he is a flatterer of the people, addressing the evangelist’s speeches “to everything low, downtrodden, wretched, ugly and having no idea what discipline and honesty are, what intellectual conscience is. In general, this is an unconscious actor, like almost all artists of the democratic movement. His talent acts on the masses like an alcoholic drink, which both intoxicates and makes one brainless.” Nietzsche finds the same traits in Michelet, Georges Sand, etc. He gives the following critical typology of artists: “There are: 1) monologue art (or conversation with God); 2) public art: where there is high society, societe, a refined breed of people; 3) demagogic art, for example Wagner (for the German “people”), Victor Hugo.”
This art of the “sweaty plebeians” is art for the masses: by this Nietzsche expresses his deepest contempt for the whole trend. For pulchrum est paucorum (beauty is the lot of the few). In the art of the masses, the beautiful is replaced by that which excites the masses: big, sublime, gigantic, hypnotic, intoxicating, “We know the masses, we know the theater. Its best visitors – German youths, invulnerable Siegfrieds and other Wagnerians – need the sublime, the deep, the conquering.”
All these people have the same logic: “Who conquers us is strong; he exalts us, he is divine; who awakens vague aspirations in us is profound. In order to elevate people, one must be elevated oneself. Let us soar above the clouds, let us converse with the infinite, let us surround ourselves with great symbols! Sursum! Bumbum! There is no better way out. Excited chest be our argument, beautiful feeling our intercessor. Virtue is above even counterpoint.”
The same immense coarseness of the means used for the vulgar public, according to Nietzsche, is also manifested in naturalistic literature: “The author wants to force the reader to pay attention, to “rape” him; hence the many small effective features of this “naturalisme”, this is already a necessary accessory of a democratic age: rude, overworked minds must be aroused.”
This vulgar-democratic decadence is, for Nietzsche, brought into close connection with the socio-economic development of the 19th century. Not that Nietzsche understood anything about the specific economic features of capitalism, he was not even superficially interested in them. But he sees the most obvious symptoms of the capitalist economy – the introduction of machines, the ever-increasing division of labor, the growth of large cities, the destruction of small-scale production, etc. – and connects them directly, without any intermediate economic and class links, with the symptoms of cultural decay that he observes.
In his attitude to the consequences of the capitalist system, which are detrimental to culture, he takes the position of a Romantic critique of capitalism. His considerations by no means rise above the average level of this trend; in understanding the real essence of phenomena, he even lags far behind the English and French Romantic opponents of capitalism. Here, for example, are his remarks about the humiliating influence of the machine: “The machine is impersonal, it takes away from labor its pride, its individual advantages and disadvantages, which are inseparable from any non-machine work, that is, whatever humane exists in labor. Before, when things were bought from artisans, it was every time the selection of famous people whose works were included in our furnishings: household utensils and clothing thus became a symbol of mutual respect and personal bonding. Now we live as if in the midst of a nameless and impersonal slavery. You can not buy the relief of labor at too high a price.”
Nietzsche directs his main blow against the consequences of the capitalist division of labor that are detrimental to culture. And here, too, everything that relates to production itself, to the class struggle, eludes him. He is only interested in two things. The first is the fact that the capitalist division of labor has taken away from all work its former immediate meaning, that any occupation, both capitalists and workers, has become completely meaningless in modern society. And, secondly and mainly, Nietzsche is interested in the problem of leisure. He rightly considers leisure to be a subjective prerequisite for any active and receptive cultural activity: as a connoisseur of the ancient world, he perfectly understands what the leisure of a citizen meant for the development of ancient culture.
Starting from both of these problems (and not being able to penetrate their economic background), Nietzsche launches an attack against the depersonalization of man in capitalist society. Here is what he writes about the main vice of active people: “Active people usually lack higher activity, namely, individual activity ... They act like officials, merchants, scientists, i.e. as generic beings, and not as well-defined individual and unique people; in this respect they are quite bad. It is impossible, for example, to ask a banker who accumulates money about the purpose of his tireless activity: it is devoid of rational meaning. Active people roll like a stone rolls, according to the stupid laws of mechanics.”
All people are divided, both in all times and in ours, into slaves and free; for whoever does not have two-thirds of the day for himself is a slave, even if he is a statesman, merchant, official, scientist. Very interesting and characteristic is the Romantic-reactionary tone that Nietzsche acquires in the old polemic of the Enlightenment against capitalism. Ferguson already wrote that the capitalist division of labor turns all people into helots and that there are no free individuals in capitalist society.
Nietzsche narrows this critique of capitalism by, firstly, limiting it to the interests of the ruling classes, while Ferguson has in mind above all the degradation of the working people under capitalism; and secondly, Nietzsche limits his criticism almost exclusively to culture in the narrower, bourgeois sense of the word. Therefore, all his criticism boils down to the demand that capitalism should give the opportunity for a meaningful life to the creators of culture and to an educated, but economically and socially parasitic public.
The use of the ideology of the Greek polis, with its contempt for work, rooted in the economic conditions of that time, the use of this ideology, the resurrection of which during the great French Revolution had a tragic character, degenerated in Nietzsche on the eve of the imperialist period into a reactionary apologia for parasitism.
This parasitic trait shows itself especially clearly where Nietzsche speaks of the most important consequences for him of the capitalist division of labor, of its consequences for art. Here, too, he proceeds from the quantitative and qualitative insufficiency of leisure. “Our conscience is the conscience of an industrious age; it prevents us from giving the best hours of the day to art, even the greatest and most worthy. We consider art an object of leisure, relaxation; we devote to it the rest of our time, our strength. This is the general fact that has changed the position of art in life: when it requires too much time and effort from the public, it meets an adversary in the conscience of industrious and efficient people and is forced to turn only to the unscrupulous and lazy, who, however, by their very nature are not hunters of great art and perceive its demands as pretensions. Therefore, for him, in essence, the end should have come, for he has nothing to breathe; in other words, great art is trying, by coarsening and disguising itself, to become related to a completely different atmosphere (or at least get used to it), to an atmosphere that is essentially a natural element only for small art, for the art of relaxation and pleasant fun.”
And here is how Nietzsche characterizes the highly developed people of the capitalist era, in contrast to previous eras: “We are therefore enriched by a sense of vast expanse, but also of vast emptiness; and the ingenuity of all the remarkable men of our age is directed to get rid of this terrible feeling of emptiness. Intoxication serves as a counterweight to this feeling ... How we register and keep a record of our small pleasures, as if by this summation of many small joys we can create a counterbalance to this emptiness, fill it – how we smear ourselves with this summing cunning.”
This characterization of the enjoyer of art in the capitalist era brings us back to Nietzsche’s aforementioned polemic against contemporary vulgar democratic art. In the passages just quoted, Nietzsche only notes those social conditions that, in his opinion, contribute to the vulgarization of art. He then combines all these aspects into a whole philosophy of culture, according to which the main sign of the new time is barbarism.
“This mobility becomes so strong that the highest culture can no longer bear fruit ... due to lack of tranquility, our civilization comes to a new barbarity.” But this, according to Nietzsche, is a meek barbarity: its characteristic features are stupidity, the destruction of beauty, the growth of slavish virtues, the already noted vulgarity in art, etc.
Nietzsche pursued this view consistently throughout his life. Already in his youthful pamphlet against David Friedrich Strauss, he mocks the aesthetician Vischer for his speech about Hölderlin, in whom Vischer found a lack of humor. Because of this shortcoming, “he (Hölderlin – G. L.) could not agree that being a philistine does not mean being a barbarian,” says Vischer. Nietzsche takes up arms against this petty-bourgeois blasphemy against the magnificent Hölderlin, he laughs at this saccharine expression of condolences. He says: “Yes, they are ready to recognize themselves as philistines, but barbarians – for nothing in the world. Unfortunately, poor Hölderlin did not make such subtle distinctions. Our esthetician obviously wants to tell us that one can be a philistine and at the same time a man of culture–this is precisely the humor that poor Hölderlin did not have, from the lack of which he perished.”
It is clear at first glance that in this struggle against culture, against art and the aesthetic theories of his time, Nietzsche continues the tradition of the Romantic critics of capitalism. Like them, he contrasts the unculturedness of his time with the high culture of the pre-capitalist or early capitalist periods. Like all Romantic accusers of the capitalist degradation of man, he takes up arms against the fetishized modern civilization, opposing to it the culture of the more primitive stages of economic and social development. He speaks directly of the evening dawn of art and comments on this fact as follows: “The best that we have is probably inherited from the sensations of former times, from sensations to which we now can hardly come directly; the sun has already set, but the sky of our life is still blooming and shining with its rays, although we no longer see it.”
This Romantic feature in the critique of modern culture is decisive in Nietzsche’s aesthetics. A number of his assessments follow directly from this basic attitude. And at the same time, Nietzsche glorifies not only the art of pre-capitalist or early capitalist times, as all Romantic opponents of capitalism do, but also those writers who, due to the special conditions of their work, due to the capitalist backwardness of their environment, became guardians of the traditions of early capitalist culture. In a cursory critical review of German prose, Nietzsche puts forward, along with Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann and Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, two books of his contemporaries: Nachsommer by Adalbert Stifter and Leute von Sedwyla by Gottfried Keller – writers whose moderate realism is in the closest connection with Romantic traditions. We will speak in detail about the contradiction between the motives that affected this assessment and other motives of Nietzsche’s evaluative aesthetic judgments below, but here we will only note, firstly, the unexpected, although by no means accidental fact that in the high assessment of the German realistic or Nietzsche’s semi-realistic late Romanticism converges with the liberal aesthetician Vischer, so mercilessly ridiculed by him. And secondly, we must now emphasize that Nietzsche could never consistently maintain the line of evaluation that we are now talking about, but often expressed diametrically opposed judgments. Thus, for example, Nietzsche writes about the composer Brahms, who in the history of music is analogous, only a larger phenomenon than Stifter in literature: “In Brahms one senses the melancholy of impotence; he does not create out of fullness, he longs for fullness.”
The historical originality of Nietzsche, however, lies in the fact that he rebels against the capitalist civilization of his time not only from these Romantic considerations. He hates, it is true, the civilization of his time, and he hates it precisely because it is based on full-scale capitalism (machine production, division of labor, etc.). But he hates this civilization also for a completely opposite reason: he hates it for the insufficient development of capitalism. Nietzsche, who lived on the eve of the imperialist period, was thus both a Romantic admirer of bygone cultural epochs and a “prophet” of imperialist development. True, this “prophecy” of his is not based on a clear understanding of the real social tendencies that led to imperialism and revealed themselves in it, but was also only a Romantic utopia. Nietzsche did not foresee the onset of real imperialism; for this he lacked, above all, the ability to see the intensification of the class struggle. He only creates from those features of the unculturedness of contemporary capitalism, against which he takes up arms for their backwardness, a picture of a different state of society – a society that has overcome these features. The lack of culture of the capitalists and the “lustfulness” of the proletarians are the two poles that he hates in the capitalism of his time.
But if in general cultural questions he constantly returns to the culture of bygone times, putting it forward as an ideal in opposition to modernity, then in the decisive question of the further development of capitalism, he does not do this. He does not dream of a limited medieval craftsman, nor of a fathers-sons relationship between capitalists and workers. On the contrary, his ideal is the domination of highly developed, cultured capitalists, shaped like Roman soldiers, over a disciplined army of militarily unpretentious workers (in this capitalist utopia of his, he is the forerunner of Spengler’s thesis of the rule of capitalist Caesars). “Relations between soldiers and bosses are still much higher than between workers and employers. Until now, at least, any military culture is still much higher than the so-called industrial culture; this latter, in its present form, is in general the lowest form of existence that has hitherto been. The simple law of need is at work here; a man wants to live and therefore must be sold, but he despises the one who takes advantage of this need and buys a worker for himself ... The manufacturers and big merchants have, apparently, hitherto had too great a shortage in all forms and signs of a high race ... If they had in their eyes and gestures the nobility of blood aristocrats, there would perhaps be no socialism of the masses. For the masses are, in essence, ready for any kind of slavery, if only the highest... could prove his innate right to command. But the absence of high form and the notorious vulgarity of the manufacturers with their red, greasy hands suggests that here one is exalted over the other only due to chance and happiness.”
For Nietzsche and for the later developed fascist ideology, it is very significant that in this reactionary-Romantic utopia about the desirable development of capitalism, although the capitalist backwardness of Germany is castigated (vulgar manufacturers with red, greasy hands), but at the same time, in conveying the country of capitalism, England, Nietzsche by no means exhibits it as a model, and even in the eyes of Nietzsche England is a living embodiment of the fussy stupidity of our civilization.
The model for him is romantically stylized militarism - Prussia, which overcame its ossification, rudeness, provinciality, becoming, without prejudice to its militaristic character, European, cultured, capable of conducting world politics (and in this respect, Nietzsche’s concept became the prototype for all later fascist theories of social development). In this Nietzsche differs from most Romantic opponents of capitalism. He rebels against the path taken by the development of capitalism, but his protest is not directed against the development of capitalism in general, he does not dream of the return of the old patriarchal relations between the capitalist and the worker.
He accepts this development itself and rejects only its vulgar-democratic character, the destruction of the correct hierarchical connection between the capitalist and the worker. He would like “a modest and unpretentious breed of people to develop here, a breed of the Chinese type: this would make sense, it would be downright necessary.” But concessions to democracy, flirting with the revolution, Jewish-Christian cultural tendencies, etc., pushed development into a different, opposite path. “The worker has been made a good warrior, he has been given the right to coalition, the right to vote politically – is it any wonder that the worker already now perceives his existence as a disaster (morally speaking: as an injustice)? He who strives for a certain goal must also strive for the appropriate means: whoever wants to have slaves will be a fool if he starts to educate people for the role of masters.” Until the radical turn that he preached (and symbolized by him in the image of the superman) comes, until then “it will inevitably have to go forward, i.e. with each step deeper into decadence (that’s my definition of modern “progress”).” When the fascist interpreter of Nietzsche, Baeumler, says that the antipode of the superman, the last man in Zarathustra is none other than “the functionary of a democratic socialist society”, these conclusions indeed follow from Nietzsche’s propositions.
We have expounded in such detail both of these contradictory series of Nietzsche’s thoughts because their parallel existence in his thinking constitutes the key to understanding the contradictory nature of his entire worldview. The Romantic critique of capitalist civilization is the center of Nietzschean philosophy and, consequently, of aesthetics. But this criticism proceeds, as we have seen, from two diametrically opposed points of view. Nietzsche is dissatisfied with capitalist civilization both because it is too capitalistic and because it is not capitalistic enough.
He criticizes capitalist civilization both from the point of view of the romantically idealized early capitalism and from the point of view of the Romantic utopia of the coming imperialism, i.e., simultaneously from the point of view of the past and future of the same capitalist civilization. The basic contradiction of all the Romantic opponents of capitalism, which is that, for all their striving to be free and independent of capitalist categories, they always criticize capitalism from the same capitalist point of view–this contradiction is repeated by Nietzsche at an even higher level. Romantic opponents of conventional capitalism inevitably fall into eclecticism, putting forward the “good sides” of capitalism against its “bad sides”. It is true that Nietzsche assimilates all these motifs, and therefore he also involuntarily becomes an eclecticist; insofar as he combines this series of motives with the opposite tendency with a Romantic-utopian glorification of fully developed capitalism, his attempt to unite these contradictory tendencies inevitably acquires a mythological character. And the predominance of the second series of motives over the first leads to the fact that Nietzsche cannot stop at emphasizing the good sides of capitalism. On the contrary, his whole way of thinking is such that the bad side of capitalism must certainly come to the center of his utopian myth. Thus, the fact that Nietzsche expresses diametrically opposed views on almost all individual questions of culture in general and aesthetics in particular is neither an accident nor an expression of a simple inconsistency of thought, with which he was accused by many university philosophers of the imperialist period, who found him a thinker “witty” but incapable of systematic unity.
The contradictions in Nietzsche’s thinking actually stem from the fact that Nietzsche, striving for a mythical synthesis of incompatible ideological tendencies, always carried to the extreme the motive that at the given moment dominated his consciousness–brought it to a deliberate paradox, without being afraid of external inconsistency, firmly believing in the synthetic power of his myth. The incompatibility of contradictory tendencies, of course, only increased from this, and no myth could unite these contradictions except with the help of a pompously eclectic phrase. However, this pathetic-paradoxical eclecticism is still infinitely higher than the flat eclecticism of the university professors of the imperialist period, who apologetically smoothed out every contradiction beyond recognition in order to only cobble together a “harmonious” system.
Turning now to a concrete analysis of the most important contradictions in Nietzsche’s aesthetic theories, we must first of all remind the reader of Nietzsche’s view of the barbarism of the modern age, which has already been outlined. Along with this view, Nietzsche meets another, completely opposite view, which is a theoretical assertion of barbarism. On the plane of the doctrine of society, this theory proceeds from the affirmation of war. Here we are mainly interested in its general philosophical and aesthetic premises and consequences. In defense of war, Nietzsche writes: “It barbarizes in both directions just mentioned (in the direction of stupidity and malice – G. L.) and thereby makes people more natural; it has the meaning of sleep or winter time for culture, a person comes out of it stronger for good and evil.” And he further sums up his thought as follows: “Culture can by no means do without passions, vices and crimes; temporary relapses of barbarism are necessary for people so that they do not lose their culture and their very existence because of the means of culture.”
Substantiating these theses of his, Nietzsche shows very clearly what he means by the vices and passions necessary for culture: this is “deep impersonal hatred, cold-blooded readiness to kill with a clear conscience, general organizing enthusiasm for the destruction of the enemy, proud indifference to great losses, to his own life and to the life of his friend”. Such are the inevitable features of barbarism introduced by war into a culture that would otherwise be mired in a petty-bourgeois swamp. Nietzsche pursues this theory of barbarism with great consistency in his aesthetics. He furiously attacks the “humanity” of Kantian and Schopenhauerian aesthetics and formulates his own view with his characteristic paradoxical harshness: “The refinement of cruelty is one of the sources of art.” Developing this idea, Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that precisely that feature of art, which he previously considered as a characteristic sign of the democratic barbarism of the French Romantics and Richard Wagner, and which consists in the forcible conquest of the public, this feature turns with him now into an essential and affirmed sign of any art.
In contrast to the “disinterestedness” of Kant’s aesthetics, Nietzsche writes: “Art is a highly interested and shamelessly interested reshaping of things ... Passion for violent conquest through the investment of meaning ... The aesthetic spectator admits violent conquest, he reacts here differently than in other cases when something from the outside is approaching him.” So, the same artistic principle, which was earlier sharply rejected as a sign of the meek barbarity of modern civilization, is now elevated to the basic principle of Nietzsche’s entire aesthetics.
We will meet the same antinomy in even more vivid form when we turn to the central problem of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, the problem of decadence. Nietzsche considered the fight against decadence in all areas the main task of his philosophical activity. He saw his main merit in the struggle he had begun against the ever more spreading disease of capitalist civilization. Thus, his central task was to defend the right of health against the general disease. When he puts forward Bizet’s Carmen against Wagner, he does so in the name of the following slogans: “Return to nature, health, cheerfulness, youth, valor.” His polemic against Wagner is centered around the issue of Wagner’s sickness. The philosopher of decadence, Schopenhauer, drew Wagner to him and turned him into a typical artist of decadence. “And then I get serious. I won’t sit back and watch this decadent spoil our health – and music to boot. And is it even possible to call Wagner a man? Isn’t he more like a disease? He makes everything he touches sick, he even made music sick.”
But just as Nietzsche, in order to expose the vulgarity of Wagner, put him on a par with the French Romantics, with Victor Hugo and others, so now, in order to expose his decadence, he is trying to reveal his affinity with European decadence: with Baudelaire, Goncourt, Flaubert. He proposes to use the following method when studying the “mythical content” of the Wagnerian texts: “Let us turn Wagner into a real, modern way, let us be even more cruel, turn him into a bourgeois way. What will become of Wagner then? What surprises will be revealed then? Would you believe that the Wagnerian heroines, if only the heroic shell is removed from them, are all completely similar to Madame Bovary to the point of indistinguishability. On the other hand, it is quite easy to understand that Flaubert could have recast his heroine in a Scandinavian or Carthaginian way and, in such a mythologized form, offer her to Wagner as a libretto. On the whole, Wagner did not seem to be interested in any other problems than those that interest little Parisian decadents. Always no more than five steps from the hospital!”
The European success of Wagner is explained here precisely by this decadent character of his. “How close Wagner must be to the entire European decadence, since he is not even perceived by it as a decadent! He belongs to her, he is her protagonist, her loudest name ... By the fact that he is exalted to heaven, they exalt themselves. Wagner’s lack of resistance is itself a sign of decadence. The instinct is weakened; what should be feared attracts. People fall with their lips to that which only carries them faster into the abyss.” And Nietzsche gives further, proceeding from the criticism of the Wagnerian style, a detailed characterization of the aesthetic manifestation of decadence, a characterization of the general style of morbidity. The central point of his reasoning is that in decadence any understanding of unity and wholeness disappears. What characterizes every literary decadence? Nietzsche asks. “The fact that life flies away from the whole. The word becomes autocratic and jumps out of the sentence, the sentence outgrows its limits and obscures the meaning of the page, the page begins to live at the expense of the whole, the whole ceases to be a whole. But this is significant for every decadent style: it is always the anarchy of atoms, the disarray of the will, the “freedom of the individual”, in the language of morality – and if you expand it to political theory, you get “equal rights for all.” Life, vitality, trembling and excess of life are pushed into the smallest cells; everything else is poor life. Everywhere there is stiffness, hard work, stupor or hostility and chaos, both of which are more striking the higher you climb the steps of organization. The whole ceases to live altogether; it is composed of parts, calculated, artificially created.”
Proceeding from this devastating critique of decadence, Nietzsche can only say something in praise of Wagner that again exposes him as a decadent: “Wagner is amazing, beautiful only in creating the smallest, in working out the details – here we have every right to proclaim him the master of the first rank, our greatest miniaturist in music.”
This critique of decadence, which undoubtedly contains many correct and well-aimed remarks, has, however, a very interesting downside. Nietzsche’s discussion of decadence just quoted is curious in two respects. First, as Nietzsche’s fascist biographer Ernst Bertram has shown, it is borrowed in all essentials from an essay by Paul Bourget, a writer whom Nietzsche himself regards as a typical representative of contemporary decadence. And secondly, anyone who is at least somewhat familiar with Nietzsche, probably immediately noticed, reading the above quotations, that they contain not only a correct criticism of the decadent stylelessness and decay of the Wagnerian style, but at the same time an apt characterization of Nietzsche himself as a thinker and writer. Nietzsche’s inner connection with literary and artistic decadence did not remain hidden (as the epigraph to this article shows) from Nietzsche himself. He was well aware of how deeply he himself was connected with everything that he condemned as decadence; he understood that his thinking was, in its intentions and pretensions, a self-overcoming of decadence. And it is extremely characteristic that in the same period of his development, when he put forward the healthy Bizet against the sick Wagner, he contrasted the German health with the sickness of the Parisian decadents, as something higher. “For an artist, as such, there is no other home in Europe than Paris ... I don’t know in what century history could recruit such inquisitive and at the same time such subtle psychologists as they live now in Paris; I will name only at random, because their number is by no means small: Messrs. Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp Melac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre ... I prefer, between us, this generation even to its great teachers.” If in his work Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888) Nietzsche attacks Wagner for having fallen from Feuerbach’s healthy sensibility to Christian decadence and pathology in Parsifal, then in Ecce homo (1888 volume) he attacks him from the diametrically opposite side. He speaks here of the impression that Wagner’s Tristan produced on him: “The world is poor for someone who has never been sick enough for infernal voluptuousness. This work is undeniably Wagner’s ne plus ultra; he recovered from it in the Meistersinger and the Ring. Recovery is a step back for such a nature as Wagner.” In the last period, Nietzsche considered himself, of course, “recovered” and looked at his former decadent “illness” as a transitional stage.
However, just as his critique of the Wagnerian style was at the same time his own self-criticism, his just quoted words about Wagner apply to him in exactly the same way. True, they are only hypothetical for him (as well as for Wagner), because Nietzsche never became healthy in the sense in which he himself understood this expression.
It is known that the mature Nietzsche, simultaneously with the struggle against Wagner, as an artist of decadence, waged a struggle against Schopenhauer, as a philosopher of decadence. Pessimism is for Nietzsche’s last period the most characteristic symptom of decadence. The evolution of Richard Wagner towards pessimism, his evolution from Feuerbach to Schopenhauer, from Siegfried to Parsifal, is in Nietzsche’s eyes the most striking symptom of the decadent character of Wagnerian art, and Schopenhauer, with his pessimistic philosophy, is for him the musagete of European decadence.
All this is clear enough from what has been said. But now we have to take a closer look at the other side of the coin. We have already noted that the peculiarity of Nietzschean philosophical position lies in his attempt to justify capitalism by affirming its bad side, from which his assertion of barbarism came out quite consistently. The duality of Nietzschean philosophy now shows itself in the fact that this affirmation of life, proceeding from the bad side of life, leads to the contradictory and paradoxical task of justifying life on the basis of pessimism. We cannot here enter into an analysis of the philosophical contradictions arising from this position of Nietzsche; For our purposes, it is enough to see that Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, sees the essence of art in that it transforms an existence that is worthless in itself, to which a thinker can only be pessimistic, and makes it beautiful in a work of art.
The only difference is that Schopenhauer, as a straightforward and consistent pessimist, considers art to be one of the forms of renunciation of life, while Nietzsche makes a paradoxical attempt to use the mentioned function of art as a means for his pessimistic assertion of life (this pessimistic assertion of life is the source of that heroic realism of Nietzsche, which his current fascist admirers especially zealously glorify).
Even Nietzsche’s youthful work The Birth of Tragedy, written under the strong influence of Schopenhauer, is devoted to this problem. In a late draft of a new preface to this book, Nietzsche characterizes his then basic problem as follows: “The question of the relation of art to truth was the first thing I thought about, and even now I stand in holy horror before this split. My first book was dedicated to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art based on a different faith, the belief that it is impossible to live the truth; that the “will to truth” is already a symptom of degeneration.” This basic problem remains at the center of Nietzsche’s aesthetic views. Even in his last period he speaks almost in Schopenhauerian terms: “Only aesthetically is the justification of the world possible.”
And according to this basic view of his, he defines art as follows: “Remaking the world so that it becomes possible to survive in it is the driving motive; therefore, the premise is a great sense of contradiction ... “I’m getting rid of interest and ego” is nonsense and an inaccurate observation. We are delighted, on the contrary, that we are finally in our world, that we are freed from the fear of the alien.” Thus, Nietzsche’s philosophical interpretation of the essence of art remains pessimistic-Schopenhauerian even after he has completely overcome Schopenhauer’s philosophy with its decadent pessimism. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, the ideological premise of art is also the attitude to the world as chaos, as a meaningless game of irrational and hostile forces, which in themselves are unacceptable and can turn into a worthy object of contemplation only under the condition of a covering and distorting artistic stylization.
This view puts Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, in direct opposition to all the traditions of the revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie, to all German aesthetics from Kant to Hegel, which, with all the differences between individual thinkers, has always proceeded from the conviction that the task of art is to depict the rational essence of the world, that artistic stylization consists only in the liberation of this essence from the empirical details that obscure it.
True, in Nietzsche we observe a rather strong tendency towards rapprochement with this line of classical aesthetics. In the course of his struggle against Wagner-Schopenhauer-Bismarckian decadentism, Nietzsche rises at times to a freer and more reasonable view of Hegelian philosophy than he held in his youth. But due to the socio-historical roots of his own philosophy, this does not lead Nietzsche to overcome the contradictions in his thinking, but, on the contrary, strengthens the antinomy of his aesthetics and his assessments of individual artists and works of art.
The fact is that in the struggle against Wagner and artistic decadence, Nietzsche is forced to put forward the demand for a real classical grand style against the vulgar monumentality of Wagner. And in substantiating this demand of his, he must speak out against Wagner, in defense of the reasonableness of a work of art, in defense of logic, as the principle of constructing great art. “In the illogical, in the semi-logical, there is a lot of seductiveness – Wagner guessed this as well as possible ... He was denied masculinity and rigor of logical development; but he found something more effective ... Drama requires rigid logic; but what does Wagner care about logic in general!”
This very principled polemic, directed against the entire irrationalist development of German drama after the classics and against the entire development of modern literature in general, this polemic contains, of course, along with the fundamental emphasis on the component of rationality in artistic creativity, also some historical justification. Nietzsche emphasizes more than once that Wagner’s audience itself is no longer the same as the former audience of Corneille. Nietzsche’s attraction to the literature and art of France, his anti-Wagnerian slogan Il faut mediterraniser la musique (Music must be Mediterranized) are concentrated in the glorification of classical French literature with its strict, logical architectonics. Nietzsche even goes so far as to say: “My artistic taste takes, not without anger, under its protection the names of Moliere, Racine and Corneille against such an unbridled genius as Shakespeare.” Elsewhere, he refers to Byron’s polemic against recognizing Shakespeare as a model and quotes the following words from him: “we all adhere to an internally false revolutionary system ... I consider Shakespeare the worst example, although the most extraordinary poet.” In the same connection, Nietzsche returns to the classical traditions of Goethe and Schiller (although he names only Goethe). He says that true art must be re-extracted from under the rubble and ruins of the false art of the 19th century: “Not individuals, but more or less ideal masks; not reality, but allegorical universality; modern characters, local colors are muted to almost complete invisibility and turned into something mythical; the modern way of feeling and the problems of modern society are reduced to their simplest forms, freed from their irritating, tense, pathological properties, annulled in every other way than the purely artistic; the absence of new themes and characters, but the constant new revitalization and transformation of old and long-familiar – this is what art is, as Goethe later began to understand it, as it was created by the Greeks, as well as the French.” And Nietzsche sums up his view of the truly exemplary great style in the following words: “The great style arises when the beautiful triumphs over the colossal.”
This stream in the aesthetics and aesthetic criticism of Nietzsche, despite all the opposition to his assessments already known to us, is by no means something of secondary importance for him. Nietzsche is an admirer not only of French tragedy, but also of its last great successor, Voltaire. His book Human, All Too Human was first dedicated to the memory of Voltaire, and he repeatedly praises the extraordinary artistic wisdom of Voltaire’s tragedies, especially Mahomet. The opposition between Voltaire and Rousseau, in whom Nietzsche sees the spiritual father of all the false tendencies of the 19th century, is in his eyes not only an artistic, but also an ideological and political opposition. In an aphorism entitled Delusion in the Doctrine of the Revolution, Nietzsche writes of Voltaire and Rousseau: “It was not Voltaire’s moderate nature, prone to order, cleanliness and restructuring, but Rousseau’s passionate folly and semi-deceitful speeches that aroused the optimistic spirit of the revolution, against which I exclaim: Ecrasez l’infame. They were for a long time frightened away by the spirit of enlightenment and gradual development; let us see – each for himself – whether it is possible to return it back.”
The main line of this aesthetic trend of Nietzsche is, therefore, in saving logic and reason from the irrational emotionality of the 19th century, in saving the aristocratic-traditional character of art from the plebeian-democratic infection. But Nietzsche finds this line in irresolvable contradiction with his general pessimistic-irrationalist tendencies: we have just seen that for Nietzsche Rousseau’s optimism was an expression of vulgar revolutionaryism. The aristocratic, traditional, logical tendency in Nietzsche is associated with deep pessimism, with corrupting skepticism; especially in the question of the possibility and value of knowledge of the external world. Here we cannot speak in detail about Nietzsche’s agnostic theory of knowledge, which is extremely close to Machism and which had a strong influence on fascist neo-Machism.
“Not the world as a thing in itself – this latter is empty, meaningless and worthy of Homeric laughter – but the world as a delusion is significant, deep, wonderful, fraught with happiness and unhappiness.” And Nietzsche draws from this agnostic position the most decisive conclusions on the question of the value of science and scientificity. “What should science become under such prerequisites? What will it be? Pretty much almost anti-truth; for it is optimistic, for it believes in logic.”
Everything Nietzsche says about art has as its premise this unknowability of the external world. The artist, writes Nietzsche, “in regard to the knowledge of truth is morally weaker than the thinker.” The great art of the past was, according to Nietzsche, closely connected with the artist’s belief in false “eternal truths”. But he is not satisfied with such historical statements, but tries to show on concrete problems of aesthetics that the creative method of art has as its objective basis the unknowability of the external world and the uselessness of such knowledge. Here, for example, is how subtly he analyzes the issue of creating human images in art: “When they say that a playwright (and an artist in general) creates real characters, this is just a beautiful illusion. In fact, we understand very little in a really living person and generalize very superficially, when we attribute to it this or that character; this very imperfect understanding of man corresponds to the activity of an artist who makes (in this sense “creates”) sketches of people as superficially as our knowledge of people is superficial ... Art comes from the natural ignorance of a person in everything that concerns his own being (bodily and spiritually)”. From this point of view, Nietzsche quite consistently sees, as we have seen, the essence of art in the shameless reshaping of things.
Arguing against classical German aesthetics, he says: “The object of aesthetic contemplation is thoroughly falsified.” And this view, no matter how much it contradicts Nietzsche’s “logical classicism”, follows again with absolute necessity from his basic pessimistic attitude. In the face of the world as Nietzsche sees it, the task of art can only be “inventing and constructing a world in which we assert ourselves in our deepest needs.”
The hopeless antinomy of Nietzschean philosophy and aesthetics leads him, with paradoxical consistency, to the conclusion that such a statement is possible only on the basis of the falsification of the world and man, because man cannot live with truth, in truth. Nietzsche, this selfless fighter against the falsity of modern decadent art, thus becomes himself the mouthpiece of an aesthetic based on a principled lie. He becomes the founder of modern anti-realism.
The same antinomies are revealed, of course, in determining the place occupied by art in the general development of culture. Nietzsche wrote at the height of those tendencies in European literature, on the banner of which was written “art for art’s sake.” And it will not surprise us now that he was both the most bitter opponent and the most extreme representative of these tendencies, which sought to turn art into a purely formal artistic skill. Nietzschean formalistic tendencies should be clear to the reader from the foregoing.
His pessimistic agnosticism makes him ignore all questions of content in aesthetics and emphasize exclusively on form (as every defender of the principle “art for art’s sake” does). And although his sympathies for classicism were caused by very far-reaching political considerations, however, his criteria for evaluation remain purely formal. The severity of form, coercion, difficulty, he considers those moments from which only a healthy development of art can arise. “Dancing in chains” is his ideal. “About every Greek artist, poet and writer, one can ask: what is the new compulsion that he imposes on himself ... Dance in chains, make it difficult for himself to work and then throw an illusion of lightness on it – that’s what should hit us.” And he considers the strict stiffness in classical drama, the demand for the unity of place and time, the coherence in verse and in the structure of the phrase, the coherence of music by counterpoint and the form of the fugue, the coherence of Greek rhetoric by the figures of Stefan George, etc., as a series of means to achieve formal perfection. “So you gradually learn to move with grace even on narrow bridges thrown over dizzying abysses, and in the end you acquire the highest flexibility of movements.”
This basic aesthetic tendency of Nietzsche is, however, in irreconcilable contradiction with his general philosophy of art. He vigorously opposes the “art of works of art”. “Art must first and foremost make life beautiful, that is, to make ourselves tolerable, if possible even pleasing to others ... Further, art must hide or reinterpret everything ugly ... In comparison with this great, immensely great task of art, the so-called art in the proper sense, the art of works of art, is only an appendage.” From this general point of view, Nietzsche condemns modern art, for the poets are no longer the teachers of mankind.
The old artists were tamers of the will, transformers of animals, creators of people and, in general, architects who built and rebuilt life; the glory of the present consists only in the fact that they take off the harness, break the chains, crush. From this point of view, art thus does not exist for its own sake, and what is important in it is not purely artistic moments, not a masterful solution of the problems of form: art should be a means for the further development of mankind, according to Nietzschean theory, for its further biological upsurge. Poets now turn out to be guides to the future, their task is to creatively improve the beautiful image of man; the true purpose of a poetic work is not to copy the present, not to revive and condense the past, but to indicate the path to the future. This function of art is now for Nietzsche the only component that determines the value of art, just as previously artistic-formal perfection was his only criterion for evaluating works of art and artists.
All these contradictions, the number of which, if desired, could be increased as desired, for Nietzschean philosophy reveals the same antinomic structure in almost every point of it, lead us back to its basis, to Nietzsche’s socio-historical position.
We have already characterized this position in the sense that Nietzsche, in his critique of capitalist development and especially of capitalist culture, proceeds, unconsciously, from two points of view: he criticizes the present from the perspective of the early capitalist past and from the perspective of a utopian idea of the coming imperialism. As for any Romantic opponent of capitalism, so for Nietzsche, the central fact is the humiliation and corruption of man as a result of capitalist reification. But in comparison with the other and greater Romantic opponents of the capitalist system, Nietzsche lives in a period of much more developed capitalism and a much more developed class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
As a result of this, his criticism, on the one hand, is much more ideological and abstract (in the economic problems of capitalism, he understands nothing and is not at all interested in them); on the other hand, the degrading influence of the capitalist system is already much more pronounced in his time than in the heyday of Romantic criticism of capitalism.
That is why Nietzsche, who criticizes capitalist culture exclusively in terms of its manifestations and symptoms in the mental life and activity of a person, sees the contradictions of this culture in a much more detailed and vivid form than most of his Romantic predecessors. The antinomic structure of Nietzschean thinking is revealed here with complete clarity. His view of the degradation of man can be succinctly formulated as follows: capitalist development reduces and perverts man both in his emotional life and in his mental activity. In the emotional realm, it gives rise to an excess of useless, groundless, unrooted feelings and experiences leading to nothing, as well as a general impoverishment of the entire emotional life of a person. And the same is true in the field of mental activity.
This meaningful presentation of the ugliness of modern man makes Nietzsche’s polemic against decadence very interesting. For no matter how false his starting points, his conclusions, his goals, etc., nevertheless, in his many-sided observation of the symptoms of decadence, he really reveals a number of important features that characterize the ideology of decaying capitalism. True, the aptness of these polemical remarks of his is closely connected with the most reactionary side of his philosophical position.
We have already noted as a characteristic feature of Nietzsche the fact that, in contrast to most of the Romantic opponents of capitalism, he does not create utopias from the good sides of the capitalist system, but, on the contrary, defends and glorifies the latter, proceeding from its bad sides. In view of the ever-increasing obviousness and irreconcilability of capitalist contradictions, with the complete impossibility of hoping for a return to the feudal order, the ideology of liberalism and old-style Romanticism became more and more fruitless, empty and phrase-mongering. Schopenhauer is already embarking on a new path of apologetics for capitalism, the path of indirect apologetics, apologetics in the form of a general critique of being. Nietzsche (and before him, Jacob Burkhardt) gives Schopenhauer’s philosophy a historical bias.
If Schopenhauer saw all existence as meaningless chaos, so that any special criticism of the capitalist system would be, from his point of view, a ridiculously petty undertaking, then Nietzsche concentrates his pessimism on the problem of history. The general nonsense of being remains with him as a metaphysical background, but in certain periods, humanity still managed, in his opinion, to extract some subjective meaning from this objective nonsense (Greece, the Renaissance, etc.). Only in the 19th century, only after the French Revolution, did humanity come into complete decline. Nietzsche calls for a fight against this decline. Giving pessimism a historical character, Nietzsche at the same time makes it active, in contrast to the passive-ascetic tendencies of Schopenhauer.
But where is the point of application for this activism? Since Nietzsche cannot and does not want to understand the objective reasons for the degradation of man that he observes, a man cut off from his social foundations inevitably turns into a mythical figure in him. The type of man now prevailing, the decadent, corrupted by Christianity, by Socrates, by Rousseau, etc., must be opposed by the new man. It is not in vain that Nietzsche always proudly calls himself a psychologist. His whole philosophy is nothing but the mythologized psychology of his own development: the development of a man who was at first captivated by modern decadentism (admiration for Schopenhauer and Wagner, illusions about the Bismarckian empire), but then realized the falsity of these trends and thanks to this “recovered”, overcame decadence.
This self-experience of the psychological crisis that led to the overcoming of decadence, Nietzsche expands into a whole philosophy of history and culture. This personal experience informs his objective-apologetic philosophy of the subjective character of vitality, authenticity and sincerity. Objectively, Nietzsche’s experience hides only the illusion that the contradictions of real capitalism can be overcome with the help of the myth of some kind of fictitious capitalism.
So, the essence of Nietzschean mythologizing method lies in the fact that in him opposite historical principles turn into opposite human types, and the task of the philosopher is reduced to a psychological study of these types. This mythological method hides from Nietzsche the contradictions in his own understanding and evaluation of capitalist reality. And on the basis of his agnosticism, which turns into mysticism, the same method gives rise to the illusion of realistic understanding, the illusion of scientificity (the mythologization of Darwinism, biologism, etc.). Finally, this mythologization allows Nietzsche to disguise the capitalist character of the utopias he advances against capitalism. For example, he rejects capitalist competition; but at the same time he raises the struggle for existence into a mythological principle, the Greek agon (struggle) into the mythological form of any healthy society, not noticing that in this way he only contrasts, according to the old Romantic custom, bad competition with good competition. The same is true of the superman and other figures of his myth. This disguise goes even further: Nietzsche’s myth, which remains essentially capitalist, seems not only to be something different from capitalism, but also something historically new; the defense of the capitalist system acquires the appearance of a radical attack on modern society, turns into an imaginary revolutionary pose.
It is on this psychological-mythological ground that Nietzsche’s “overcoming” of decadence takes place. Just as Nietzsche was deluded about himself, thinking that he personally managed to overcome decadence, so he imagined that with the help of his mythologized psychology of history, decadence could be overcome from within, psychologically. This explains his special attitude to the problem of decadence: he does not condemn it entirely, as limited defenders of the earlier stages of development, and does not feel safe in the swamp of decadence, as degraded ordinary writers. In contrast to both, he sees in decadence an inevitable transitional step towards the “improvement” of mankind, and his path consists in the fact that he consistently brings to the end the inconsistency of his initial philosophical positions. It is precisely through the strengthening of decadence that he wants to rise above decadence. The very elements that in ordinary decadence corrupt and mortify life can, if their power and energy be strengthened, go over into the opposite of decadence. “It is, after all, a question of strength: some super-gifted and powerful-willed artist could completely bend all this Romantic art into anti-romanticism, or, using my formula, into Dionysianism – just like every kind of pessimism and nihilism becomes in the hands of the strongest an extra hammer and tool to build a new ladder to happiness.”
In all this, Nietzsche’s deep connection with the traditions of Romantic criticism of capitalism is clearly revealed: Nietzsche fights against Romanticism, but in such a way that he opposes bad, decadent Romanticism to good Romanticism, the Dionysian principle. True, from the point of view of content, the Nietzschean method is the opposite of that of the old Romantic opponents of capitalist culture. He is an apologist for the bad sides of capitalism.
This position gives him the opportunity to criticize modern culture in the most radical way, mercilessly (apparently) to expose its internal contradictions. And it may seem that at this point Nietzsche comes into contact with the early bourgeois “cynic” critics of capitalism. But that is just how it seems. For these latter (let us recall, for example, Mandeville) are fully aware of the objectively revolutionary character of capitalist development, and this consciousness of the great historical mission of their class gives them the courage to speak frankly, with cynical clarity, about the dirty and bloody, but historically inevitable path of this development. On the contrary, Nietzsche undertakes an apologia for capitalism based on its bad sides because he is too shrewd not to see that all direct apologetics are tenable only with the help of credo quia absurdum (I believe, because it is ridiculous).
It is precisely for the sake of the ideological salvation of capitalism that Nietzsche exposes all the pathetic baseness of its manifestations in the field of culture; to this decline he opposes, in order to defend the system as a whole, the whole baseness of his historical myth, his blond beast, his Cesare Borgia on the papal throne. Thus the central core of the Nietzschean historical myth is the myth of the barbarity of downward capitalism.
With all the tendencies of his philosophy characterized, Nietzsche initiates the development of bourgeois ideology, which in the period of post-war imperialism ends with fascist preaching. There is not a single motif in all of fascist philosophy and aesthetics that does not go back to Nietzsche as its main source. At the same time, it is not so much the direct similarity of individual statements and assessments that is important, but the general approach to issues of culture and art.
The social demagogy of the fascists is just as much a continuation of Nietzschean indirect apologetics for capitalism, just as the entire fascist concept of the chosen ones is a direct deduction from the Nietzschean antithesis of higher and lower people, from his theory of social malice, etc. Fascism, therefore, sees in Nietzsche, with complete right, one of his most important ancestors. But at the same time, as we have already noted, it is somewhat distrustful of individual features of his method and his conclusions. And this is quite understandable: fascism is separated from Nietzsche by several decades of the ideological decline of the bourgeoisie.
Nietzsche’s utopian dream of imperialism has managed to turn into a terrible reality during this time. The paradoxical boldness of Nietzsche’s thought has become in many respects no longer possible for modern fascists. Externally magnificent, but internally wretched and thoroughly false, the eclecticism of fascism seeks to bring Nietzsche’s contradictions to a crude and superficial, demagogic “synthesis”. Fascism cannot do without the “great figures” Bismarck and Wagner, it must certainly “reconcile” them with Nietzsche.
For fascism, Nietzsche’s unconditional recognition of Romanesque culture, his demand for a Latin-clear and precise mode of expression is unacceptable (based on this requirement, Nietzsche saw in Heine the only truly great German writer after Goethe). Fascism vulgarizes Nietzsche’s anti-realist tendency in aesthetics; Nietzsche’s “brazenly interested reshaping of things” is transformed by the fascists into a crudely apologetic glorification of the barbarism of decaying monopoly capitalism, into its glorification with the help of superficially eclectic journalistic myths.
From this attitude of fascism towards Nietzsche, the place occupied by Nietzsche in the development of German bourgeois ideology is most clearly revealed. Nietzsche, on the one hand. is the first widely influential German thinker, in whom the overtly reactionary tendencies of decadent capitalism found their expression; he is the first philosophical spokesman for imperialist barbarism.
On the other hand, Nietzsche is the last thinker of the German bourgeoisie, in whom the traditions of its classical period are still alive. True, they live in him in a distorted and distorting form. Between the classical epoch and Nietzsche lies the period of Romantic obscuration of these traditions in the years of the “holy alliance”, there lies the betrayal of the bourgeoisie to its own bourgeois revolution in 1848 and in the following years, there lies its capitulation to the “Bonapartist monarchy” (Engels) of the Hohenzollerns. Nietzsche perceives the legacy of the classical period through the prism of all these reactionary phenomena. And if he, the last major thinker of Germany, still retains a living connection with this heritage, then it is precisely because of the liveliness of this connection, thanks to the subjective passion with which he assimilates this heritage in his own way, that he becomes the gravedigger of classical traditions in Germany.
His controversy destroys both the empty academicism of the liberals, who have discolored the ancient traditions of the German classics, and the short-sighted admiration for the Middle Ages, the obscurant foolishness of the Romantics. But at the same time, he transforms the entire classical heritage – ancient Greece, Renaissance, French 17th and 18th centuries, German Classicism – into the world of decadent barbarism.
This reinterpretation of the classical traditions according to their content goes hand in hand with Nietzsche’s methodological destruction of all paths to the elaboration of cultural heritage. Nietzsche decomposes the boring philological method of this study, he destroys the banal historicism of both liberals and late Romantics. But in its place, he puts the method of arbitrary constructions, the reinterpretation of history into myths, the “witty” comparison of historical events, people and periods. The connection of great historical figures with the real struggle of the respective epochs disappears in Nietzsche to an even greater extent than in his flat and banal antipodes.
For Nietzsche, each historical figure breaks down into separate psychological features, from which, depending on the need, any myth can be constructed. As a subjectively sincere thinker, Nietzsche was perfectly aware of this method of his. “Only the personal remains eternally irrefutable. From three anecdotes, one can build an image of a person; I try to pick out three anecdotes from each system and sacrifice everything else.”
Thus, Nietzsche becomes the ancestor of all arbitrary historical constructions and myth-making formations of the monopolist-imperialist era: from Impressionism to Expressionism, from Simmel to Gundolf and, further, to Spengler, to Moeller van den Bruck, to Juenger, and finally to Rosenberg and Goebbels, there is one long and ominous path, a path which in Germany was first consciously entered by Nietzsche.
In fascism, this path ends with the fact that the entire historical heritage is reduced to an arbitrary set of demagogic poster slogans. The progressive heritage of human history in its form and content has been destroyed for the bourgeoisie by fascism. But fascism is in this case only the latest result of a long process of development, at the beginning of which stands Nietzsche and in which many bourgeois opponents of fascism also took part, unwittingly and unconsciously.
However great the difference in ideological level between Nietzsche and his fascist followers, this cannot obscure the historical fact that Nietzsche is one of the most important ancestors of fascism.