Georg Lukács. The Destruction of Humanism in German Ideology, 1942
Written: 1942 in Tashkent;
First published: as Die Zerstörung des Humanismus in der deutschen Ideologie, in: Wie ist Deutschland zum Zentrum der reaktionären Ideologie geworden? (Veröffentlichungen des Lukács-Archivs), 1982, pp. 299-311;
Translated: by Anton P.
While even in the imperialist period there persisted in Germany a broad, open, vulgar propaganda of the politics of the ruling class: wild chauvinism, demand of a “place in the sun” for Germany, naval and colonial associations, anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism etc. etc., all this was not enough in order to win over the top of the bourgeois intelligentsia – and it is a question here of a comparatively broad and influential stratum far exceeding their numbers – and even to mobilize them for the new purposes. Thus new ideological needs arose, which were particularly evident in the turn of philosophy of the imperialist period as tendencies to overcome neo-Kantianism, as an urge for a “worldview”, as a demand for a philosophy of history, as a reassessment of Germany’s ideological history, as a new moral code, etc. Again, at the disposal of the imperialist ruling classes was a “lonely genius” of the preparatory period of imperialism, who was rapidly gaining popularity and world fame at the end of the 19th century: Nietzsche.
Indeed, Nietzsche represents a higher level of indirect apologetics of the capitalist system. He is the most important continuator and upgrader of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, with the essential difference that the clear and open anti-historicism of his master changes into a mythical, anti-scientific, anti-historical “conception of history”. This change also gradually prepares itself in Nietzsche from the time of Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 up to the eve of the imperialist period, when he falls into mental derangement. He appears as a faithful pupil of Schopenhauer, whom he glorifies alongside Richard Wagner as the man of the epoch; it is no coincidence that these first publications by Nietzsche directly refer to his interpretation of antiquity in the sense of modern times, in the sense of the liquidation of its humanistic conception, to his attack on the representative of liberal ideology, David Friedrich Strauss, to his fight against the scientific nature of history and his demand for the subordination of history, which should follow the needs of “life”.
Epistemologically, Nietzsche remained a student of Schopenhauer throughout his life, except that his teacher’s Berkeleyanism acquires a modern pseudo-realist accent in him. For Nietzsche, too, the immediate individual perception of the world is the ultimate, the actual objective reality itself, and he polemicizes with great violence against the “idealism” of those who are still looking for an objective reality independent of the perceiver “behind” the perception, behind the sensory impressions. This “realistic” formulation of extreme agnosticism arises in Nietzsche quite independently, but entirely in parallel with the endeavors of Mach and Avenarius. The correspondence is often even that of the linguistic formulations, but it was discovered only later by enthusiastic researchers.
However, Nietzsche differs from Mach and Avenarius in that he does not stop at the epistemological justification of a possible mysticism, but builds and proclaims his own world view, his own myth, on this basis. The starting point for this is Schopenhauerian: the struggle against reason. It is impossible for the latter to reach the essence of the world, uncover its connections, since the essence of the world, the true being for Nietzsche as well as for Schopenhauer, is irrational, beyond reason, the character of something separated from reason, exclusively opposed to it, into which objective reality of projected will. With Nietzsche, however, instead of the blind, completely aimless Schopenhauerian will, which causes a merely static cycle, the determined, definite, concretized, admittedly just as mystified will to power is taken as the basic fact of life.
Not unimportant concretizations of Schopenhauerian epistemology follow from this. In both, reason and emotion are mutually exclusive metaphysical opposites. But while Schopenhauer stops at the downgrading of reason, at the denunciation of its impotence, Nietzsche regards knowledge as a kind of “superstructure” of instincts and feelings, as a symptom of their pseudo-historical transformation, their “racial” character, to be examined “sociologically” or socio-psychologically. This priority of drive and emotion over intellect and reason produces in both of them a decided aristocratism in epistemology. In Schopenhauer, however, this is only the extreme exacerbation of the Romantic cult of the genius, which we encountered in the controversy between Schelling and Hegel. With Nietzsche, this aristocratic epistemology receives a pseudo-historical and pseudo-social substructure: the intuitive knowledge of the real connections is the exclusive privilege of the “higher” people, the “master race”; the slave’s ideology is necessarily distorted by resentment. The belief in the power of reason to adequately recognize objective reality, in the general accessibility of such knowledge, is one of the most important symptoms of this “priestly”, Christian, democratic, rabble-like resentment.
This development of Schopenhauerian mysticism has two particularly interesting aspects for us. First, the maintenance of pessimism, especially for society and history. Pessimism, however, has a more definite, more modern, “historical” character. With Nietzsche, the will to power is indeed the basic fact of every being, just as mere will was with Schopenhauer. And while both were reactionaries when their place in the history of ideas is concerned, Nietzsche is more modern in that he concocts a mystified philosophy of nature and society from grossly distorted slogans of Darwinism.
Nietzsche’s concretization of this pessimism means that the gloomy and dark sides of life acquire a more social character than with Schopenhauer. With him, everything that was socio-historically specific to human suffering, the evil of society, faded before the “eternal perspective” of the timeless and aimless will as a thing in itself. With Nietzsche, on the other hand, there are very big differences between the individual historical epochs, his philosophy is intended to be a reassessment of history, to bring about a revaluation of all values of social morality. But the basis of this revaluation in his case is a similar, only more concrete and modern “perpetuation”, “naturalization” of the specific character of capitalist society and its evils. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the stranger and weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at the very least, exploitation. Exploitation does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of life, as a basic organic function, it is a consequence of the real will to power, which is precisely the will of life. Assuming that this is an innovation as a theory – as a reality it is the primal fact of all history: let’s be honest with ourselves so far!” It is easy to see that the mystification of the basic facts of the capitalist world has become primal facts of human existence, indeed of every being here on a higher level, more concrete and mystical than with Schopenhauer.
Secondly, it follows – and this is also an important further development of Schopenhauerian philosophy – a moral apology for the anti-human instincts. Nietzsche wants to establish a morality of “nobility”. Above all, however, this nobility includes a ruthless egoism that is not inhibited by any scruples of conscience, any good conscience in the oppression and exploitation of those who are condemned to do so by the will to power. “The essence of a good and healthy aristocracy is ... that it ... accepts with a clear conscience the sacrifice of a great number of people who, for their sake, must be reduced and diminished into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into tools.” For Nietzsche, this good conscience means corruption, decadence, and since this good conscience of exploitation and oppression presupposes the dominance of egoistic, even barbaric and bestial instincts in man, decadence means a weakening of this healthy barbarism.
As can be seen, the evil character of the world and the necessary relation of morality to the primal fact of evil receive a completely different accent in Nietzsche than in Schopenhauer, although it is evident that not only did his philosophy grow organically from that of Schopenhauer, but also his readings of Schopenhauer had trained him to be receptive to it. In Schopenhauerian morality, the appropriate response to the evil character of the world is Buddhist compassion, that is, stepping out of this machine, assuming the position of a distinguished, unconcerned, compassionate spectator. Nietzschean philosophy, on the other hand, calls for participation in evil, since it sees the nobility, the possibility of a higher education for mankind, precisely in the affirmation of evil. At the end of the book Beyond Good and Evil, from which we take the above quotes, Nietzsche lets the divine patron saint of his philosophy, the god Dionysus, appear. And the god now announces to his philosopher that he is bringing people forward by wants to make them stronger, more evil, deeper and more beautiful. It is clear that in this context the concepts of depth and beauty also acquire a new, anti-human, barbaric meaning. (In Nietzsche’s aesthetics, for example, “refined cruelty” plays a major role as the essence of art.)
Through this “historical concretization” the indirect apologetics, corresponding to the needs of the imperialist period, is raised to a higher level. Capitalist society, the class stratification of society in general, appears as “natural”, not because it represents harmony, not because of any “well-understood interest” of all people, but on the contrary, because it destroys all harmony, because it is inherently, “naturally” evil. The good conscience of the exploiters and the oppressors analyzed above is based on the fact that, according to Nietzsche’s philosophy, people are by nature unequal, that they belong to two fundamentally different races, the masters and the slaves. With this, racial theory moves into the forefront of German philosophy, whereas until then it had only been a means of propaganda of crude anti-Semitism.
Of course, Nietzsche’s concept of race is far from that of fascism. It is much more distinguished, refined, more international than its later demagogic coarsening. Nietzsche, too, characterizes his races on a pseudo-biological basis, but this is still very blurred in his case, and the important thing is only to work out the social and moral contrast between the noble and the plebeian, between masters and slaves. But, for example, a direct connection to the propaganda of German chauvinism is still missing here. The diversely educated and aesthetically sensitive Nietzsche was extremely critical of the German culture of his time, indeed of German culture in general, and was a great admirer of the formal clarity and sharpness of thought of French culture.
The critique of German culture is very important for Nietzsche’s impact. For many, dissatisfaction with Germany’s cultural development and disappointment with it were the bridge to Nietzschean philosophy in general. And this critique of the cultural symptoms of German development in Nietzsche is often extraordinarily astute and witty, insofar as it is a question of symptoms and not of their social-historical nature. So that even in the camp of conscious and militant anti-fascism there are not insignificant spirits who see in Nietzsche a downright progressive thinker, an anti-fascist force. This question must therefore be considered in a little more detail.
Nietzsche actually despises the German culture of his time, the culture of the new empire of Bismarckian observance. But if one looks at the basic line of his scathing and detailed witty criticism, one finds that he does not criticize the culture of Bismarckian Germany because the “Bonapartist monarchy” realized German unity in a reactionary, undemocratic form, but he is, on the contrary, an opponent of Bismarck, because he (Bismarck) is too democratic, because he made too many concessions to democracy.
This is closely connected with the general basic line of Nietzsche’s conception of history. For him, democracy, the democratization of society, is basically synonymous with decadence. Since he bases his conception of the higher development of humanity on the fundamental inequality of human beings, which is a natural, racial, unbridgeable inequality of all natural predispositions between the master race and the slave race, since it consequently follows for him that the two races, their living conditions accordingly, have opposing epistemologies, morals, arts, etc., any attempt to shake this basic fact of life necessarily appears to him as contrary to nature, as decadent.
Of course, Nietzsche does not criticize Bismarck exclusively from this point of view; he is much too educated and culturally superior to overlook Bismarck’s narrow-mindedness. In addition, his conception of the aristocratic higher education of mankind is closely connected with a premonition of the imperialistic age: he expects a period of “grand politics”, the struggle for world domination, and sees Bismarck as not the suitable leader for this period. Bismarck is not sufficiently imperialistic. But the basic motive for his rejection is that Bismarck got involved far too deeply with democracy, that in doing so he opened the floodgates to the decadent development of Germany. In Nietzsche’s often witty and fascinating critique of cultural degeneration, Germany’s lack of culture is therefore always subject to criticism from the right: for him, Bismarck’s politics are not sufficiently aristocratic, not sufficiently reactionary.
In the blinding critique of the lack of capitalist culture of his time, Nietzsche is a pupil of Romantic anti-capitalism. He sees extraordinarily clearly to what extent the capitalism of his time is devastating and destroying culture; in this respect he is not blinded by either its economic or its technical achievements. Contrasting the culture of his time with the great cultures of the past, he reveals its negative traits with great perspicacity and aptly in many details. (Here, too, is an important point where dissatisfied ones, oppositionists, even rebels found a connection to Nietzschean philosophy.) And he is even right about the symptoms when he compares the culture, in the thinking and in the work of his time to old cultures, a partly characterless, partly outtroden characteristic trait, sometimes outspoken, when he tries to belittle the culture of his time by calling it theatrical, crudely rhetorical, and vulgar. But even this witty criticism is always criticism from the right. For all these shortcomings of modern culture do not derive from capitalism, according to Nietzsche, but from democracy, from the political equality of people, from the right of the masses to participate in culture, at least as a receptive.
This Romantic anti-capitalism of Nietzsche’s is therefore of a complicated, iridescent, and vacillating character, and this ambiguity is again a motive for its broad and general impact. Because Nietzsche always criticizes capitalist culture from the right, but this right has a double character for him. On the one hand, contemporary capitalism is bad in his eyes because it is too capitalistic, because it lacks the simplicity and clarity of the sharp stratifications of estates and their aristocratic culture (17th-century France in particular is such a model age for Nietzsche). On the other hand, contemporary capitalism lacks culture because it is not yet capitalistic enough, because it is not yet imperialism. The democratic currents of his time appear to him as the evils of a transitional period from which only the victory of aristocratism, the emergence of a new, higher class of rulers, can show the way out. This turning of Romantic anti-capitalism into an apologetic from the standpoint of the “entrepreneur genius,” the new aristocracy, is not entirely new. It is already present in Carlyle. Nietzsche gives it a more contemporary and German form, attacking the crude, unaesthetic forms of the relationship between capitalists and workers that plays out between officers and soldiers. “Workers should learn to feel like soldiers.” And on the other hand: “Military service: so that on average every man of the higher ranks is an officer, otherwise he is what he is.” Nietzsche means, that is “the very last resort to take up or hold on to the great tradition with regard to the highest type of human being, the strong type”. And, he characteristically adds, “all concepts that perpetuate the enmity and rank distance of the states may then appear sanctioned (e.g. nationalism, protective tariff)”. Here again it is clearly visible how the “higher”, the “noble” form of reactionary ideology ultimately, only indirectly, leads towards the same goals as the vulgar glorification of militarism, the “disciplined” unconditional subordination of the worker to the orders of the capitalists that can be read in every dozen pamphlets of imperialist propaganda. But a Nietzsche is necessary for this, so that this conclusion, in connection with the fight against decadence, with the ideal of nobility, with the emergence of the strong type of human being, etc. etc., also becomes accessible to those circles who regard the above-mentioned treatises with contempt and would throw them away unread.
In this way, the depiction and criticism of decadence forms the central part of Nietzschean philosophy, which is at the same time the most interesting in its inner contradictions. In spite of the reactionary starting point and the reactionary justification of his presentation and criticism, it contains a great deal that is intellectual and sometimes correct in individual cases. As we know, his starting point is the attack on democracy as the social basis and cause of decadence. But in execution this criticism broadens, encompassing most of its cultural and psychological symptoms. When treated individually, however, the original intention often fades into the background, sometimes even being completely forgotten. Nietzsche then criticizes decadence as a witty continuator of Romantic anti-capitalism: The symptoms of decadence appear in the context of a Romantic critique of capitalist culture in general; the prosaicization, desolation and coarsening of life, of culture in capitalism are contrasted with the height and refinement of old cultures.
However, this is still not the most important shift in viewpoint. As we have seen, Nietzsche is not a consistent Romantic anti-capitalist. For him, his age (especially contemporary Germany) is both too much and too little capitalistic: he is at the same time a “prophet” of the imperialist cultural epoch. If he now criticizes capitalist culture from the outside, from the point of view of past cultures, then he is in the latter respect in solidarity with the symptoms of decadence, with the decomposed, self-destructive refinements of the developed capitalist culture, in polemics with the crude, “healthy” philistinism of its backward forms, especially in Germany. He shows solidarity with these manifestations of decadence, especially with those of French literature and art, psychology and analysis of moral problems. And this is not a mere, spontaneous judgment of taste. As a “prophet” of imperialism, Nietzsche sees in certain decadent phenomena of his time symptoms of the necessary upward development in his sense, building blocks for the new aristocratic culture of which he dreams.
Thus his critique of decadence essentially becomes a self-criticism, a confession. Nietzsche no longer criticizes the decadent features of the culture of his time as an outside observer, but as a passionate participant who is fully aware that his emotional life and his thinking are determined through and through by decadent tendencies. And he is intellectually honest enough to admit it. This in turn creates a dazzling and vacillating picture of the age in Nietzsche’s philosophy, a dazzling and vacillating self-portrait of the philosopher himself. He sees himself as a decadent on the one hand, and as decadence’s greatest enemy and real conqueror on the other. These two sides, however, flow into each other in his reflections and bring witty, contradictory, paradoxical statements. (Think of the later Nietzsche’s passionate hatred of Richard Wagner and at the same time of the fact that he was never able to completely free himself from the fascination of Wagnerian art, in which he saw a prototype of decadence.)
In this way, Nietzschean philosophy becomes a hymn of consolation for all decadents. On the one hand they feel that the causes of their uneasiness in the world and their uneasiness in themselves have been revealed, and on the other hand their decadent traits, their decadent psychology and morality are affirmed and reinforced by this philosophy. From this philosophy they get a justification for their rejection of the society of their time, their rebellion against it, but the solution to their doubts links them – in a pseudo-oppositional way – even more closely to this society, makes them feel at home in the coming (reactionary) tendencies of development. The Nietzschean tendency to overcome decadence is objectively its strengthening and deepening; it gives bourgeois decadence a good conscience, a self-affirmation.
These are the essential factors that have determined the general success of this “lonely genius”. It is extremely characteristic both of the philosophy of Nietzsche and of the age in which it became effective that the first herald of his world fame was the known liberal literary historian Georg Brandes. And since then one can always state that, from a political point of view, left-leaning bourgeois thinkers, writers etc. were philosophically great admirers of Nietzsche. (One can draw such a line from Brandes via Simmel to Thomas Mann, who has only begun to take a more critical stance towards Nietzsche in the last few years as a result of the experiences of the anti-fascist struggle.)
It was not the extreme reaction itself, but the liberal bourgeois intelligentsia that helped establish Nietzsche’s world fame. For the reasons indicated above, this world fame, especially the broad and deep influence on German ideology, caught on surprisingly quickly. Despite its unsystematic, aphoristic form, it was accepted relatively quickly by the universities as a philosophical classic. It had a particularly broad and deep effect on literature and journalism, both in terms of content and form. This effect can already be observed formally in Germany, even in the daily papers, as a disintegration of the systematic construction of ideas, the implementation of ideas, as a domination of instincts over reason, also in style. In terms of content, the new form of aristocratism, the critique of capitalism and at the same time the “overcoming” of all socialist tendencies, the simultaneous self-criticism and self-affirmation of decadence, the aristocratic cult of genius, the morality of distinction as the essential characteristic of its effect. And although Nietzsche himself, as we have seen, took a very critical position towards narrow-minded forms of chauvinism, his admirers in Germany and on an international scale felt with the right instinct that he was actually inconsistent here, such succinct representatives of the chauvinism that flared up again in the imperialist period as Maurice Barres in France and Gabriele D’Annunzio in Italy build their extreme nationalist ideology on the basis of Nietzsche’s imperialist-decadent aristocratism, a tendency supported, in an adequate continuation of Nietzsche’s aspirations, by a conscious and polemical turning away from societal problems that are perceived as superficial, “shallow”, considered unworthy of a deep and noble man (Andre Gide, Stefan George and his school, Paul Ernst and neoclassicism).