Understanding Nietzsche

Michael Sanfey

Issue 378, vol.95, Summer 2006

But Nietzsche pressed on : The end of the once hegemonic ‘Christian-moral’ interpretation of the world results in an experience of dislocation and disorientation in which human beings are no longer certain of the ‘place’ they inhabit as beings in the world and are unsure of the direction in which their existence is moving. This represents ‘nihilism’ (though he allows for an epoch in the future when new values will begin to be created).

Nietzsche reduces the basic impulse for all our actions to ‘the will to power’. He does, however, posit the eventual advent of a future when the will-to-power will be ‘creative and innocent’. First, two stages will have to be reached : (1) The Experience Of Eternal Return : In this, we no longer experience time in terms of straightforward seriality of past, present and future, but experience the dimensions of time as fundamentally interconnected, and in terms of the dramatic happening of the ‘moment’. Then, out of this Experience Of Eternal Return, will come (2) the emergence of the Superman…And only now finally, is that ‘creative and innocent’ will-to-power going to be a reality – embodied in the Superman : he will be able to live without the comfort of religion, sustained by belief in himself alone.

It may have been elements of emotional chaos in Nietzsche’s personal life – loneliness; heartbreak after rejection – which led him to universalize his denial of rationality to religious belief. But he is also responsible for a concept of the human person as being no longer capable of knowing good from bad, right from wrong. Fascism can easily follow from this moral relativism – which also helped create the crisis of modernity. Nietzsche has been called “a tragic prophet of the spiritual vacuum that gave birth to the spiritual abysses of the twentieth century”.

Indeed, ideas like the Superman and the will-to-power, as championed by Nietzsche, were ripe for takeover by the fascist-minded. And the Nazis had little scruple about possibly misunderstanding a thinker who also happened to champion : pan-Europeanism; opposition to nationalism; vigilance against the danger to creativity and individuality posed by socialism and by the modern bureaucratic state; the primacy of culture over politics. Indeed, Hitler was positively invited to misinterpret the philosopher through the malign influence of his sister, Elisabeth, who had complete control over his literary estate and who held anti-Semitic views – in contrast to Nietzsche himself, who consistently offered an extremely positive valuation of the role that Jewish minorities could play in the construction of a Europe with wider cultural horizons.

Michael Sanfey is an Irish diplomat and a PhD candidate in politics at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon