Timely Meditation I: Nietzsche, Dialectics and Drama
José Crisóstomo de Souza
Dept. of Philosophy, UFBA

Part of the most typical philosophy of 19th- (and even 20th-) century Europe is framed in ambitious, presumably universal, general narratives, which its authors use to frame/evaluate European Modernity and define its meaning. In order to agree with it and eventually make it advance, perhaps adjusting it; or to oppose it, deny it, overcome it. In the case of the Germans, oftentimes each philosopher explicitly defining, with the same stroke, the superior, absolutely new, epochal, sometimes even final, and in any case extraordinary reach of their own narrative philosophy and even of their own personal destiny in relation to other, previous expressions of thought-as negation or more refined overcoming of such expressions and of the entire past. In a way which often catapults the philosophers themselves to unheard-of and high-priestly heights, well beyond ordinary mortals, as supreme and unprecedented-prophetic-“maîtres-à-penser,” not only in relationship to people like you and I, but, in the upshot, to all of “Humanity.”
Such is the case, in varying degrees, of some versions of (anti-)Hegelianism or critiques of Modernity in dispute which make up the Left Hegelian or Young Hegelian movement-of David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, among others-, whose philosophies involve large “historic theories” which in fact only “Hegelize” according to different variations of Meaning-providing narratives. And this is the case even with philosophies characterized as anti-Hegelian and which pretend to reach radical conclusions, entirely different, opposite, from Hegel’s-or from all of philosophy up to now, from all metaphysics, from the entire classical philosophy, from two thousand five hundred years of civilization, etc., etc. I can even risk identifying a same enemy for most of them, despite all things, from the most to the least romantic: in different versions, “the philistine,” the philistinism of modernity, the faint-hearted subjectivity of the “common man,” or even the political equivalent-civil society or democracy.
Even Nietzsche’s “anti-Hegelian” and “anti-Platonic” position on Modernity and History, on his time, and on the epochal, decisive, and unique condition of his philosophy, despite its pretension to be something entirely different and uncommon-which is precisely the most typical and common-, seems to fit within the basic Hegelian/anti-Hegelian model. And it can also be read-which I do here-as integrating, even exponentially, the same family of atheist-historical, radically critical, historical-critical, dialectic, and “inverting” philosophers of 19th-century Germany. And that even if the most artful and self-conscious of them, precisely like Nietzsche and Marx, never stop trying to escape, bravely and ingeniously, a common framework that contests to their own. Even if they never stop trying to build and impose another one, especially crafted by them to consecrate their absolute difference and superiority-as maîtres-à-penser. (Has perhaps all philosophy always been that in one way or another?)
In the end, among these Germans, mutatis mutandis, it is essentially the same schema (taken to the extreme by Nietzsche), more or less dialectic/antithetical, of an Historic Progression negatively qualified as misdirected; of a deepening of the “Deformation” in question, of a denounced Crisis, of an entirely different New Era announced, opposite to that in which we live, yet whose conditions develop where “the Wrong” is most aggravated, and precisely because of that aggravation. In other words, once again a “philosophy of the future”-always with a greater or lesser nostalgia of the past-which provides the revealed meaning of History and Modernity as Crisis, to point to something well beyond and extraordinary. A new philosophy (or even a non-philosophy) which is presented as leaving everything else behind-including and especially its closest rivals, which would otherwise risk making it seem l like “more of the same.” Which is, by the way, the aspiration of dernier cri, a typically modern fixation.
This is all the more true in the case of the most radical and virulent-the most dialectic/dramatic-Hegelianism. In the hyperbolic case of hyperbolic Nietzsche (in that sense, a late-Young Hegelian), history is basically the progression of Nihilism (originally implicit) as the dialectic opposite of (Christian) Faith itself, of the Ascetic Ideal which denies the World and Life. An Evil (worthy of the uppercase) which finds in Modernity (therefore condemned) its protraction and explicitness, revealed behind the appearance of a rupture-e.g. with Christianity. A false rupture represented by its false opposite: modern science and rationalism, human morality, equalitarian politics, modern ideals. At the same time, this protraction disguised as a rupture also has the quality of an extreme aggravation of the “original Error,” of the “Great Calamity and Corruption”; of an aggravation that therefore paves the way, because of this quality as borderline expression (of Nihilism/Asceticism for Nietzsche), dialectically, “from within” (through “strong nihilism” or “perfect nihilism), for its-catastrophic-negation/inversion. In other words, in the case of Nietzsche, an aggravation that paves the way for the “recovery” of the possibility of entirely new values (for him, values that are opposite, the only ones which are finally non-ascetic, non-equalitarian, affirmative), aristocratic-proslavery values, as an inversion of the original, Judeo-Platonic-Christian inversion. This is basically, in a Nietzschean version, the “common sense” of 19th-century radical German ideology, the lingua franca of the insuperable, atheist and Hegelian, German philosophical radicalism-to which Nietzsche apparently belongs, in an exemplary and not at all extemporaneous manner. For that reason, because of this basic blood relationship, this shared structure, those who go from Marx to Nietzsche, for example, do it with relative ease and in good measure trade six for half a dozen. It is because of this that some prefer to simply mix-or at least approximate-the two, which has resulted in a reworked “leftist Nietzsche” or even, post-Marxistly, a poorly arranged anarchist philosopher of difference.
Although referenced to a figure that is not exactly the classical subject (conscious, rational, universal), even the topical one, recurrent in Young Hegelianism, of alienation/hypostatization of a “mere” creation of men (in this case, values), and its successive re-appropriation (the recovery, with absolutely revolutionary consequences, of its true authorship), finds in Nietzsche one of its versions. As is the case with other young Hegelians, the existence of men up to now, before the philosopher’s providential and extraordinary “Announcement,” “Good News,” “Revelation,” has universally been complete “alienation”-from themselves, their consciousness, their corporality, their naturalness, their worldliness, their individuality, their distinction, their difference, or quite simply “Life” (whatever that might be). For the more dramatic and pyrotechnic (anti-)Hegelians (e.g. Bauer and Nietzsche), the announcement of the Good News is also-theologically and apocalyptically-the announcement of a tremendous Catastrophe, of an unparalleled Crisis, of a veritable Last Judgment, which appears as the prelude to the New Times, to an entirely new Future announced by the grand-priest philosopher. It is easy to see that the grandeur, terribleness, and dramatic quality of the negation/inversion purported by Nietzsche grow in the same measure as the grandeur and terribleness he confers to the Object he claims to deny/invert. Likewise, if his “Critique” implied a different relationship to the object that was not that of negation/inversion, it would not have the same grandiose effect either.
Because of all this, it is not surprising that Nietzsche’s affirmative philosophy of an unrestricted Yes to Life has nonetheless, and even more emphatically, the same pathos-of negation, of absolute negativity-as its more recognizably dialectic, Hegelian, critical relatives. Which is, by the way, the same dramatic pathos of apocalyptic, millenarian/messianic Christianity, which I suspect left an indelible mark in the German political/religious imaginary since the so-called Peasants’ Wars (e.g. Thomas Müntzer), and understandably found its triumphant return in the context of post-French Revolution Germany. The conclusions vary, but in the end the structure is basically the same; in many ways, Nietzsche overall seems to be an even more exemplary, more disproportionate and boastful (a buffoon, as he-almost-says of himself) Young Hegelian than others who are thus named. He thus appears as a radical late-Hegelian, who rescues the spirit of Young Hegelianism (abandoned in the second half of the 19th century) in a more openly romantic and dramatic version, now with its traits and manias even more hyperbolically concentrated and amplified, at the service of his most absolute and epochal personal singularization.
Putting aside then, in this brief, provocative essay, his claims of “extemporaneity,” let us catch our “perfect nihilist,” our earnest candidate to maître-à-penser, by the typically Young Hegelian, historic-dialectic framework with which he precisely “Authorizes himself”. He could also be “caught” completely, by the way, by his speculative biology, typical of the German 19th century, entirely involved in the romantic-German reception/refutation of a pseudo-Darwin, influenced by people like Wilhelm Roux, Michael Foster, and William Rolf-but we will not occupy ourselves with that here. In any case, Nietzsche’s clumsy efforts to seek “scientific” (according to a certain natural science of his time) corroboration-and even foundation-for his criticism of Modernity’s asceticism, an obsession typical of the 19th century, leaves him in the vulnerable position of a sort of “Friedrich Engels” of himself (understanding Engels here as a “scientific-naturalist degradation” of the historic critique undertaken by Marx), an Engels that resorts to a “romantic-heroic”, vitalistic, proslavery natural science, instead of “modern,” positivist-utilitarian, liberal, English-like, or materialist-dialectic, communist, à la the true, original Engels.
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In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche himself admits that he began his work Hegelianizing, with a text that has at its core, even “shockingly,” the clear mark of Hegelianism. The Birth of Tragedy, he says, basically presents “an ‘Idea,’ the opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, transposed to the metaphysical”; he characterizes “History itself as the development of this ‘Idea,’” and, finally, presents “in Tragedy, that [Dionysian-Apollonian] opposition elevated to its Unity.” Here one can undoubtedly detect something Hegelian and a Hegelian philosophy of History, and one can see that Nietzsche knows what he is talking about. As long as one also understands as Hegelian (as one should) a narrative that, contrary to what is usually understood as Hegel, fundaments a horizon still to be reached, and that is different, opposed to, Modernity up to now-especially, one we should add, to that German halfway Modernity, with a taint of Ancien Régime, (critically) validated by Hegel and mostly unchanged even in Nietzsche’s time.
I would not recommend, however, looking for Nietzsche’s Hegelianism only or even mainly where he himself points it out as a beginner’s oversight, quickly left behind; as he points it out at a moment when he also attempts to retroactively counterbalance the most obvious influences of Wagner and Schopenhauer as his real masters in his youth. I would not do it particularly in the case of such an affected author-in the most “plebeian” and “modern” way, I would say-in proclaiming (and constructing) at any cost his own absolute originality and novelty. And this even if we could say more about his “hint” at self-criticism; after all, the pair of opposites (Dionysian-Apollonian) “dialecticized” in The Birth of Tragedy is in all ways comparable to the dominant dialectic pair in the original Young Hegelian movement: substance and self-consciousness. For the moment, I would limit myself here to saying that Nietzsche’s efforts to de-Hegelianize himself should prevent him from representing himself as accomplishing, not only in The Birth of Tragedy but also elsewhere, grandiloquently, “universal-historic tasks.” And to repeatedly claim later, in his full maturity, for himself and for his works, even in Ecce Homo, that reach and that dimension, proclaiming a horizon that Hegel himself was generally content in defining more modestly as “world-historic.”
The presumably complete and indisputable distance between Nietzsche and Hegel and all things Hegelian alleged by apologetic commentators would be mainly constructed-and vaunted-by Nietzsche right after The Birth of Tragedy, in the second of his Untimely Meditations, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.” Our author focuses there on denouncing a representation of history that sets the present (and the Prussian state) as its pinnacle; a perspective that sees humankind as having finally arrived, as Nietzsche says, at its mature “later type” and at the knowledge of itself; a perspective that sees the “universal process” as having reached its goal, the “Day of Judgment” (Nietzsche’s expressions). In the second Untimely Meditation, this type of “historicism” characterizes a “sad and paralyzing,” and even “terrible and destructive” belief, which “accustomed Germans to justify their own time as the necessary result of this process”; it characterizes a science that “dethroned,” for its own benefit, “art and religion” (§ 8). Thus conceived, observes Nietzsche (critically and ironically), “the universal historic process”-as the trajectory and development of the Absolute Spirit, or simply God, or even just Humankind-“became intelligible and comprehensible inside Hegelian brain cases,” “so that its summit coincided with his own existence in Berlin” (UM, § 8). That, Nietzsche would definitely not tolerate-from Hegel.
Still in his second Untimely Meditation, he insists that this representation and this appraisal of history as “Power” (“objective,” “in itself,” that is, as Substance) stimulate a conformist and paralyzing “admiration of success,” a “worship of the factual.” They introduce a “tyranny of reality” before which-as formerly with religion-the “historic man” (“un-artistic,” a mere “objective mirror”), “on his knees,” prostrates and denies himself, and “understands-justifies everything” (“understand-justify” is also Marx’s expression for what “right-wing” Hegelianism would do). Nietzsche calls this vision, quite appropriately, “religion of historical power,” and sees there a submission “in the Chinese fashion” (UM, § 8)-i.e., precisely, in Hegelian language, to “Substance.” While it is possible to understand (with good will) what Nietzsche is trying to say in this essay, it is nonetheless funny to see Hegel, a philosopher generally accused of being a speculative idealist (especially for his philosophy of history), a philosopher traditionally criticized for violating and disdaining concrete, particular, finite reality, i.e., historical facts, being denounced now by Nietzsche, as it appears to be the case, for proposing or being responsible for an excessively “positivist,” “scientificist,” “very German” (!?) preoccupation, for excessively “considering [historical] facts.”
In any case, the first thing that can be said about this Nietzschean image of Hegel is that it essentially portrays/criticizes the quietist, conservative Hegel of right-wing Hegelianism. And by doing so it only belatedly reiterates, with a stronger romantic accent, the classical Young Hegelian criticism of the Great Master, according to which he, in a conciliatory manner, artificially ties the (inexorable) historic-dialectic coming into being to the present, now transfigured/justified by him. Now, if that image was all that was “Hegel” and “Hegelian,” Nietzsche himself would have no right to apply the term to his correspondent and admirer, the (by that time old) Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, proponent of the most radical Young Hegelian “Pure Criticism” or “Critical Criticism,” which, sovereign, does not stop before any “positivity” or “substantial objectivity.” Neither would Nietzsche have the right to call Hegelian the supposedly dialectic vice of his own The Birth of Tragedy, a text that is openly critical of his bourgeois/philistine time. However, Hegel was never only one; he has many “veils” and “masks” (as was said about him in his time, well before it was said by Nietzsche), in addition to those of “conciliator” and “substantialist.” The first Young Hegelians or leftist Hegelians, during the movement’s early days, were careful to unveil as true a crypto-radical Hegel, an ill-disguised Jacobin (sic) of philosophy-at the limit, literally “atheist and anti-Christ.” It was afterwards that they opted, each their own way and against the others, to develop as their own the radical, dialectic potential of Hegelianism against Hegel, as anti-Hegelianism-perhaps in order to take Hegel’s place, rather than definitively vacating it.
All radical Young Hegelians, and not just Nietzsche, are in the end and by definition young anti-Hegelians, who, like Nietzsche, dispute the trophy of ultra-radicalism, the crown of “The Truest Critic,” “The Most Complete Atheist,” “The Most Accomplished Destroyer of Christianity.” Generically speaking, all of them attempt to “leave” Hegelianism (as a philosophy that is presumably conciliatory with the status quo, the state, and religion) for a radical “philosophy of the future,” reorienting the fulfillment of dialectic, Hegelian promises of overcoming and culmination, reworked from the present to the future-for the benefit of some radical-heretic (anti-)Ideal of their own. In the end, all of them maintain the Hegelian belief that they live in an extraordinary and dramatic era or transition, perhaps the eve or day before the eve of a Grand Turn, of which the French Revolution, the modern-bourgeois modes of thinking, etc., can be understood both as coarse rehearsals and disguised pilfering. In this regard, the radical, post-Hegelian philosophical landscape becomes in fact monotonous, despite the fact that it is Nietzsche who derives from all of this the most spectacular and most dramatic effects, taking dialectics even further.
We could certainly say here other kinder things about those radical (anti)Hegelians as a whole, including Nietzsche, with regards to what they represent. Such as, mainly, that they attempt to keep away from the metaphysical and theological reach of Hegel’s speculative history on more “earthly” grounds, away from the Absolute Spirit as well as the abstract and atemporal character of previous philosophy, in the direction of the simply human, concrete, practical-mundane, contingent historical. But they were still-some more than others-too impregnated with romantic exaltation and inflated German speculation to do it in a satisfactory manner for our time-that is, in a “non-theological” way. What I suggest, then, is that these Destroyers of Windmills are thinkers of transition (for us today, I mean); as well as often unremitting adversaries of democratic Modernity.
Going back to Nietzsche’s work, the second thing that can be said of the Nietzschean critique of Hegel in “On the Use and Abuse of History” is that in its development, in the most specific, anti-Straussian tones it assumes (e.g. the denunciation of the “objective Power” of History in favor of “Personality”), it approaches-despite its renewed romantic grounding, its Schopenhauerian/Wagnerian element-the most characteristic positions of one of the branches of the original Young Hegelian movement. Not by accident was Bruno Bauer, a most distinguished representative of “Critical Criticism,” in his time the “Arch Enemy of Substance” (of “Objective Power”) and also, as Nietzsche would have it, arch enemy of the “Mass” (as well as philistine bourgeoisie); Bruno Bauer who, like Nietzsche, and well before him, entered the post-Hegelian philosophical scene (at first as a right-wing Hegelian) precisely as a critic of David Strauss, who is also an object of Nietzsche’s critique in the first of his Untimely Meditations; Bruno Bauer who crowned his Hegelian radicalization with a well-crafted “unmasking” of Hegel as “atheist and Antichrist,” in The Trumpet of the Last Judgment. We will not develop here, however, these “erudite” historic/biographical elements in order to argue in favor of a parentage between Nietzsche and Bauer, for example, and between both of them and other Young Hegelians, now in terms not only of their more or less common dialectic strategy, but of their comparable theses. Instead, what we will do now, albeit briefly, is to present some of the characteristic traits of Nietzsche’s Hegelianly anti-Hegelian historic-dialectic narrative, which attempts to seduce and vividly impress the reader as only its author can.
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To be fair, I begin by recording a synthetic presentation of the “Nietzschean view of history” by someone who I would call an “apologetic commentator,” one who considers the thinker a maître-à-penser, who basically takes what Nietzsche says he does as entirely in accordance with what he “truly” does. Someone who, as background, takes seriously all of his most ambitious allegations about himself and his points of view-their unparalleled originality, extemporaneity, epochality, superiority, radicalism, and whatever else. I apologize for the length of the citation with which, despite some minor cuts, I attempt to respect the commentary’s wording:
“The history of man is not a totality, but a plurality of processes of simultaneous ascension and decline, which therefore do not obey any succession, any order, plan, reason, or end. (...) How could there be a universal reason and meaning of history, if people have different cultures (...)? How could there be universal ends of history, if human ideals have always been contradictory? In reality, for Nietzsche, the world, as well as history, is determined by a blind power (...). If there is necessity in history, it is the necessity of chance (...). History cannot prove the existence of ends; on the contrary, what it proves is that the results obtained contradicted and were incompatible with what was previously desired [which is practically a maxim of Hegel (JCS)]. All attempts made at establishing an end for humanity presupposed a concept of man. However, says Nietzsche, the terms man and humanity are abstractions, generalizations, simplifications, since only concrete and real individuals actually exist [I believe that Nietzsche can be anything but a consequent nominalist in this respect (JCS)]. When the priority is placed on the fate of humanity as a whole, obstacles are created for the expression of exceptional individuals who could point to a new direction for men. In other words: there is no universal history and neither is there a universal end, or at least it is impossible to know it (...). No abstract idea can promote history or lead it to its end. (...) All ends were destroyed.”
It is good to know all of this since, as far as I understand, it is what our anti-Hegelian philosopher of the “transmutation of all values” most needed to hear himself. We should ask ourselves: is that really Nietzsche’s conception of “history”? To me, almost on the contrary, it seems that most of the time he sees in “history” a general, basically unique trajectory for “man.” He offers his own and ambitious Grand German Narrative in order, among other things, to obtain the same, traditional effect of producing and separating, typically, the usual two only sides, the two parties in struggle “forever,” “Good” and “Evil,” “Right” and “Wrong,” “True” and “False” (in uppercase, of course). And in fact, in practically his entire work, he brandishes right and left the notions of “man” and “humanity” in a not at all nominalist sense, but rather as great “abstractions” or “generalizations”; just as he repeatedly brandishes the very category of “universality” (as well as “essence” and “concept”). Finally, it seems like Nietzsche-like any traditional “Christian ascetic”-considers his world, the existing world, as essentially (metaphysically, epochally) wrong. And, more than that, in the most typical theological/apocalyptic manner, as a simply inverted world, an upside-down world, a world turned on its head. That is his Revelation.
After this, in bad terms with becoming, in a way “worse” than Hegel, our junker philosopher “closes,” in his Historical Super-Narrative, not only the past and the present (as, presumably, Hegel), but also the Future, the next centuries and even millennia, anticipating it as the past. And he does so with more authority than the Absolute Spirit, the Holy Spirit, or any other hypertrophied, delirious, metaphysical or theological figure of Subject, of grand Subject, would. Nietzsche apparently does with the future what he accuses Hegel of doing with the past; even more than other philosophies that present themselves only as philosophies for the future (e.g. Feuerbach), he pretends this future to be something already definable and narratable-in his philosophy-as the past. And as necessarily leading, through an unparalleled Catastrophe, to something heroic, unequal, grandiose-and, of course, ruthless. It surprises me that there are scholars who accompany him in all of that.
Of course Nietzsche, as if it was necessary to say so, is not just that, and we will continue to read him for the richness of his suggestive insights of “psychology” and “morality,” suggestive for the critique of culture and for personal self-creation. It must be acknowledged, however, that they are mixed with all of that historic/dialectic “authorization” of a radical speculative interpretation of “history,” narrated in the splendid tonalities of Strurm und Drang, full of sound and fury (in more than one sense). For I believe that it is that worn-down Young Hegelian historical framework, which he does not resist (re)constructing and dramatizing, which, to him, authorizes his most hyperbolic pretensions as ‘maître-à-penser’(and unsurpassable, apocalyptic, anti-modern “bad boy” of European philosophy), pretentions which unfortunately some still naively accept as biblical truths. We must say in his favor, however, that eventually Nietzsche candidly admits to his readers: “Perhaps I am a buffoon.” To which I propose we respond now: Yes, in fact, Nietzsche, on one hand we can agree with you, for the apocalyptic/epochal tone with which you, like other 19th-century German radicals, try to taint your poetic/philosophical positions, as well as for your assertions of “scientificity” and your pretentions of constituting yourself as “Destiny.”
For Nietzsche, history up to now has been not the history of class struggle (unless inverted) as for Marx, nor only of the denaturalization of man through Christianity, as for Feuerbach, nor simply of the diminution and subjection of man in religion, in dogmatic philosophy, and in particularist politics, as for Bauer; rather, it has been the history of Nihilism and its escalade. Or perhaps, more precisely, the history of the Ascetic Ideal, of its rise and fall, of Nihilism as the “logic of Decadence,” of Nihilism as the veiled opposite of Belief (i.e., of the Ascetic Ideal), which, with the “Death of God,” finally reveals itself unabashedly and increasingly openly scourges our time. It is a “History” that points to something like “two millennia of anti-nature and violation of man,” as Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo (EH, I, § 1); or the “great inner Corruption” and the “immortal Disgrace of Humanity,” as in Antichrist (§ 62). It is in either case a Narrative according to which “man,” “humanity,” traverses a long detour of, shall we say, “alienation,” “estrangement,” as if of itself and its natural character. For, although “alienation/estrangement” is not the term used by Nietzsche (or by Marx in his later years), that does not mean that it is not something similar. “Humanity does not follow the straight path on its own,” he says; “it was the instinct of décadence which governed it” up to now (EH, VII, § 79). It is therefore the history of an “Error,” of a universally “mistaken” existence, subjected to a veritable “inversion.” In contrast with which Nietzsche, as we will see below, establishes himself as “the straight Path and the Measure of Truth” for Humanity-to which he explicitly addresses himself and which he pretends, as an educator, to improve. Only that, but with such a tremendous poetic, dramatic, and theatrical quality!
The Ascetic Ideal is contempt and denial of life and the body, nature, and the world, of the sensible for the intelligible, of the present for the future Beyond, etc., etc. It is an expression of decadence, of emasculation, of the prevalence of the week, the reactive, the deniers of the world’s becoming; it is what Jews, Christianity, and Platonism imposed on us-or, rather, what priests and the weakest and most infirm, the most numerous, imposed on us. In this regards, what Nietzsche’s discourse brings to the forefront is his speculative history of Europe and the West, with an interpretation full of anti-modern, normative content-and drama. But although he frequently speaks of Europe and the West, his combat and his remedy do not give up a pretention of trans-European universality (otherwise he could not speak so much of “man” and “humanity”). Nietzsche recognized in his time “two great nihilist movements,” “universal,” not only Christianity, but Buddhism too (WP, § 220), both ascetic, which equally lead to explicit nihilism (§§ 19, 23). With the exception of his additional meditations on Judaic and Islamic monotheisms, whatever is not Christianity or Buddhism does not exist nor does it interest him; not even that which could be considered “pagan” in our times (part of Africa, for example), since to him only “Greek” paganism and polytheism matter. According to Nietzsche, “the two universal religions, Buddhism and Christianity,” are both expressions of an “infirmity of the will,” of a negative will, of the “desire of a you-must” (GS, § 347). But he goes further: despite the so-called “different cultures,” he allows himself to proclaim that “the whole Earth” is perhaps “the ascetic star par excellence,” “a place of unhappy creatures who never free themselves of a profound displeasure with themselves, the earth, all of life.” Also, the figure of the “ascetic priest,” “that species hostile to life,” precisely the devoted creator, promoter, and beneficiary of the Ascetic Ideal, “flourishes everywhere, with regularity and universality” (GM, III, §11), his Ideal being defined by Nietzsche as the only one offered to men up to now. That, despite the fact that Christianity is a special and privileged case of asceticism, more acute and privileged, though also the most unrefined; which guarantees, however, a “growing tension” apparently capable of leading to a more radical and complete overcoming of its evil.
Let us further examine the Nietzschean notion the Ascetic Ideal in The Genealogy of Morals, which offers, in Nietzsche’s words, “the only Meaning” (general, supreme-I suppose) for man up to no: a “finality for his existence on Earth,” “a meaning for his Suffering”-which prevailed due to a lack of competition, since “any Meaning is better than none.” Nevertheless, with the Ascetic Ideal “the door closed to all suicidal nihilism,” and the decadent man could then “want something”: “A will for nothing is better than no will.” At the same time, however, that Ideal, even though it came from the comfort of a meaning for existence, “brought with it new suffering, deeper and more harmful to life,” because it is driven by a “hatred of that which is human, animal, material,” by a “horror of the senses,” by a “fear of happiness and beauty,” and, finally, by a “desire to stay away from appearance, change, death, becoming, desire, urge” (GM, III, § 28)-to stay away, in the final analysis, from anything that might be “Life.” For Nietzsche, “the lie of the Ideal has been up to now the Curse upon Reality” (which, however, he did not come to bless either). “Through it, humanity became a liar and false, to the point of adoring values that are opposite to the only ones [emphasis is mine, JCS], which guarantee the flourishing, the future, the lofty right to the future” (EH, pról., § 2). It is not something to which one can remain indifferent.
Through the (Platonic/Christian) Ideal, Nietzsche complains, the real and existing world, as it appears, was disdained for the benefit of the “Other World,” the “Beyond,” the “Ideal,” which became, at least among metaphysical philosophers and Christians, the “World of Truth” or the “True World”, while our truly-existing-world was declared mistaken, false, inverted. Our real life is, for Christianity, a false and degraded existence (WP, § 224); of which Nietzsche can say, as supreme maître-à-penser: “Before me, all was upside down”; “I am the first to hold in my hands the measure of Truth,” “no one before me knew the straight Path” (EH, XII, §§ 1 e 2). Apparently, then-it should be noted-, Nietzsche seems ready to decree the essential “uselessness” and the “error” of the world, but of the “modern world, not the world of existence” (WP, § 34)-whatever that might be (!). In any case, the fact is that, based on his dramatic diagnosis, Nietzsche unloads on our poor heads an on our fragile, finite being, heavy “tasks” for Tomorrow, veritable German Aufgaben, “epochal,” “historical universal,” uncomfortable tasks, which distance us from ourselves and from others, oriented by a tremendous “Ideal” (his), such as “being a rope stretched out for the Superman.” It seems to me that the future is always an entirely different “beyond,” always being-for-beyond (or being-for-the-Beyond), always a traditional “Jenseitigkeit” characteristic of theological thought and of religious attitudes taken too seriously: the world as it is, the one that is here, is also worthless to Nietzsche. The same “Grand Refusal” is also exercised by other “Hegelians” (and non-Hegelians), even in the 20th century. Is that perhaps the only way that life, or at least philosophy, can be interesting-as a struggle, “at odds” with the world?
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How did the great and millenary “Error” discovered by Nietzsche begin? “It was the Jews who accomplished that miracle of the inversion of values,” he denounces; which was also “the beginning of the slave rebellion in morality” (GE, § 195). That was the beginning of all the wrong which then followed its course with Platonism and Christianity; the beginning of everything that found its “mundaneness” in Modernity, whose consequences will reach their apocalyptic pinnacle in centuries to come. Christianity and Plato, says Nietzsche, are the faithful heirs and continuators of that Jewish “megalomania” (WP, § 202), that Great Inversion to be now Inverted, that Great Denial to be now Denied. According to our surprising poet-philosopher, Plato is “the instinctive Semite and anti-Helene” (WP, § 195), “the great vehicle of corruption,” “already marked by a Judaic fanaticism (in Egypt?)” (WP, § 202). “Christianity”-which, as we know, is Platonism for the people-“only resumes the [Judeo-Platonic] combat against the classical and noble Ideal,” only resumes “anti-paganism” (WP, § 196), in order to promote the same Ascetic Ideal. To go along with Nietzsche, however, let us not remain only in Christianity, nor in a single point of the remote Past, of Antiquity. “Dividing the world” in two, “a ‘true’ and an ‘apparent’ one, whether it is in the way of Christianity [or Platonism] or in the way of Kant, is only a suggestion of décadence, a symptom of declining life” (TI, III, § 6). In other words, all later philosophy, including modern philosophy, suffers from the same vice, which follows then a progression, a threatening and well ordered escalade.
In a few lines, Nietzsche presents, with seven-league boots, his masterly condensation of the history of that philosophy (and of the “Spirit”), a brilliant and plausible Narrative of the development of the Great Error, which is also the history of its Dissolution. Recapitulating the noteworthy excerpt from the Twilight of the Idols: The “true [other] world” begins by being “accessible to the wise, the devoted, the virtuous”-with the proposition “I, Plato, am truth.” It then becomes “promised” for after death in Christianity, and later it is only Kantianly “postulated” as hypothetic and “indemonstrable.” Later it becomes “non-mandatory,” binding us to nothing (as, presumably, in positivism). Lastly, it is declared “useless,” “superfluous,” and simply “discarded.” Finally free of it, we-“free spirits”-can once again embrace our earthly, “apparent” world, as the only one. For free spirits, that is “the end of the longest of errors,” “the high point of Humanity,” a radiant “Noonday” (TI, IV, §§ 1-6), although, unfortunately for others, for the immense majority, it is possibly the beginning of a dark, cold night under the shadow of nihilism, dejection, emptiness, despair. Nietzsche believes that, with the end of the true-world and the death of God, we are destined not to a happy mundaneness or to a more interesting, non-ascetic culture, but, above all, to the “complete nihilism” that awaits us as the “necessary consequence of the ideals held to this point.” Meanwhile, we provisionally “live in the midst of an incomplete nihilism” (WP, § 28)-a melancholy purgatory on the way to something else.
The death of God, “the greatest recent event,” “the fact that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God was discredited,” “begins to cast its first shadows upon Europe,” Nietzsche proposes, setting the stage for his usual intensification and drama. “Everything will crumble now that this belief was undermined, because everything was built upon it.” “This long sequence of rupture, decline, destruction, cataclysm, which is now imminent,” will be “a solar eclipse as there has probably never been another on Earth” (GS, § 343 passim). Yet now, in the midst of Modernity, not only are we far from overcoming the Ascetic Ideal (which I do not doubt), but in a way we are worse off, we are worsening; for, in effect, neither modern science nor atheism are a true negation/overcoming/liberation. Science is not “the natural antagonist of the Ascetic Ideal, it does not express the opposite Ideal [my emphasis, JCS].” “Both Science and Ascetic Ideal are on the same ground, on the same overestimation of Truth.” “Science steps on the same ground as the Ascetic Ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is assumed in both cases” (GM, III, § 25). Instead, it is “Art [which] more radically opposes (than Science) the Ascetic Ideal: that was perceived by Plato’s instinct, that great enemy of Art”-and in this we can agree with Nietzsche. “Plato against Homer: that is the true, entire antagonism” (GM, III, § 25), the dramatized Nietzschean “class struggle” of the last two thousand and some years.
Nietzsche highlights here (in On the Genealogy of Morals) a triple implication. In Modernity, a) we do not leave the dominion of the Ascetic Ideal, b) it is now more insidious and veiled, and c) it is in fact stronger and worse. Nonetheless-it should be said-that means that it is now near its end, that Modernity is in fact the end of the road. “‘Modern Science’ is at this moment the best ally of the Ascetic Ideal,” believes our romantic hero, “because it is the most involuntary, unconscious, secret, subterraneous. (...); in it the Ascetic Ideal was not in any way defeated, rather, it became stronger” (GM, III § 25). Likewise, the most typical modern atheism, as the other side of the supposed negation/overcoming of dogmatic Christianity, in Modernity “does away with God, does away with the Ascetic Ideal in its traditional form, but not its will to truth-which is, however, the same Ideal in its more narrow formulation.” It is clear that the will to truth is not so much the “rest” as it is the “core” of the Ascetic Ideal; where atheism, even “unconditional and straight” atheism, “is not opposed to the Ascetic Ideal, as it seems at first sight” (GM, III, § 27)-in fact, it is not even close.
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There... the dialectic game is on, and Nietzsche can conclude: “[other people’s, JCS] atheism is one of the last phases of the development of the Ascetic Ideal, one of its final forms and internal consequences” (GM, III, § 27). We are now, with Nietzsche, at the top of the top. As promised above, we have here, un-nuanced, the typically Young Hegelian model of the escalade, the intensification, and the denounced false overcoming, in Modernity, of the “Error” which the world incurred. The dissolution/mundaneness/escalade/realization of the Ascetic Ideal is understood by our “untimely,” in its various aspects, in the usual, dialectic way of Young Hegelians (some more than others), in whose hands dialectics are apocalyptically radicalized in “antithetics.” Nietzsche’s philosophy of history as trajectory/process does not lack the specifically dialectical dimensions of “logical necessity” and “(self-)overcoming” and, more than that, in his case, of explicit radical and theatrical dramatics. For he understands that, “like all great things,” Christianity, the Ascetic Ideal, and also Nihilism itself, “perish on their own, through an act of self-overcoming.” “Such is the will,” according to him, nothing less than “the Law of Life” (which I suppose aspires at being better than a “Law of History” à la Marx): “the necessary self-overcoming is in the very essence of Life” (GM, III, § 27). And here Nietzsche introduces (and apparently “biologizes”) the most Hegelian of notions, expressed in that deified little German word, Aufhebung, specified even more Hegelianly as Selbstaufhebung, (dialectic) self-overcoming, self-suppression.
This way, according to our narrator of History, Christianity perished as dogma: by its own doing, “through the work of its own Morality.” It still remains-or at least remained in Nietzsche’s time-for Christianity to perish “as Morality.” And it is “at the threshold of such occurrence” that its time-place resided (that junker Germany)-which, like Dostoyevsky’s feudal-tsarist Russia, perhaps has little to do with ours. “After Christian truthfulness has come to a series of conclusions, it will draw its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself, when it poses the question: what is the meaning of all will to truth?” (GM, III, § 27). It is interesting to note, then, how Nietzsche attempts to portray the historic movement as a logical (as well as dramatic) Movement, with a narrative that even includes the Hegelian final Consciousness, characteristic of philosophies of the historic subject and (self-)consciousness, here involved in flagrant and explicit hypostatization: “The will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem.” In that succession of “conclusions,” and in that “gradual consciousness of itself, morality will perish”-according to our dramatist, in “the most terrible of all spectacles,” in a “spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe” (GM, III, § 27).
It is the well-known dialectic movement, immanent and necessary: “It is necessity itself at work here,” reveals Nietzsche in The Will to Power (WP, pref. §2). It is in fact a logical and inexorable necessity: the advent of Nihilism is “necessary,” for it is the “ultimate consequence of our values up to now”: “Nihilism is the logical ultimate conclusion of our great values and ideals” (WP, pref. § 4). And, quite dialectically, the most complete negation necessarily presupposes that which is negated: Nietzsche’s “gospel of the future” (the term is his), the promised “transvaluation of all values” (which in the future “will take the place of perfect nihilism”), “presupposes, logically and psychologically, this perfect nihilism, and certainly can come only after and out of it” (WP, pref. § 4): after Christianity, the “Great Calamity,” “the Transmutation of All Values” (Antichrist, § 62). That is why our philosopher-prophet can say: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries”-in other words, it is the future already defined as the past, it is the precocious narrative of what is still to happen, taken as truth. This sort of prophecy may seem odd, but its dramatic effects are insuperable.
Not even Hegel imposed on becoming, to that degree, his “(Omni)Potency of History,” nor did he take that far the ambition of the thoughts of a small brain and of a finite human existence, even if German, whether Berlinian or not. “Our European culture is moving for some time now toward a Catastrophe”; “I describe what can no longer come differently: the advent of Nihilism”; “this history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here” (WP, pref. § 2). And what will come, according to Nietzsche, after the intensification of Nihilism and the collapse of everything else, is the Transvaluation of All Values, which will come as a Catastrophe, as a Great War of the End of the World, as the “evocation of the Day of Decision” (EH, X, § 1)-of a Final Judgment, we should understand. “A Crisis never seen on Earth before,” “the profoundest collision of conscience, a decision evoked” (EH, XIX, § 1). On the other hand, Hegel, for better or for worse, never thought that philosophers could treat the future as the past, much less a future of centuries or millennia, fusing in such a narrow, providential, and ultra-Young-Hegelian manner, prescription and foresight. Nor did he attempt to scare us with such ominous tonalities of Awe.
In the end, in Nietzsche’s narrative, through “self-consciousness” men will be able to make History deliberately (not as a mass, by the way), to finally take control of History. Enlightened by his thought, evidently: “My life-task is to prepare for Humanity a moment of supreme self-Consciousness” (EH, VII, § 2). The “Transvaluation of all values” is, in the final analysis, “an act of supreme Self-Gnosis of Humanity,” “which in me became genius and flesh” (EH, XIV, § 1). Thus, also in the case of Nietzsche, History and Humanity become transparent to themselves in his thought, in his time, and, through him, the latter-men-can take deliberate and conscious control of the former. “I will have to confront Humanity with the most difficult demand it has ever faced” (EH, prol. § 1). Or: “I want to teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare great ventures and overall attempts of discipline and cultivation, by way of putting an end to that gruesome dominion of nonsense and accident that has so far been called History” (GE, § 203). To put an end to the dominion of accident in History is no small task; he begins by conceiving it as a Thing, as Substance (worthy of the uppercase), a characteristic vice of the 19th century, understood as a future endowed with Logic and Meaning-with a “Providence,” we should understand. Two thousand years after the Lord Jesus (the role that seems to capture Nietzsche’s and other Young Hegelians’ imaginations, not to mention some later philosophers), and a few decades after Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, our philosophical poet is ready to rule the world. As he literally says himself in a passage not included in the final version of Ecce Homo: “Since the old God was abolished, I am ready to rule the world.” His faithful friend Peter Gast refers to Nietzsche, in a letter to him, as a “Spirit ruler of the world.” Engels, despite all things, would never call Marx such a thing; and Hegel, “in his particular Berlinian existence,” never aspired to that much.
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Because of all this we can say that Nietzsche is a thinker for many reasons more typically confined than any other to the horizons of 19th-century German thought (of the transition from the Ancien Régime to Modernity), which frames his aristocratic-heroic, cast-hierarchical, emphatically anti-Modern, anti-democratic romanticism within an exemplarily Hegelian-more specifically, Young Hegelian-historic-dialectic narrative at his service. We can say that he resorts to this narrative, together with his romantic-vitalist biologism, also typical of the 19th century, to authorize the superior, inflated, high-sounding, ultra-epochal character he wishes to attribute to his judgments. In order to effectively crown himself monarchically as “Maître-à-penser,” as the Antichrist lui-même, as the First Immoralist (for those who do not know Max Stirner), as unparalleled “Bad Boy” of Western philosophy-a characterization which, nonetheless, assiduous apologetic commentators want to inadvertently deprive him of. According to what we suggest, it is his theological-apocalyptic, intensely dramatized “historic Narrative” which sustains the dogmatic, normative, as well as enraged, tone of his racist-proslavery, racialist, anti-democratic philosophy; it is that Narrative which sustains and accentuates the impoverishing (yet absolutely striking) binary, Manichean distinctions that characterize his work as a whole. It is with the aid of this dramatic-dialectic narrative (and of a “scientificism” that in my opinion, at least today, is laughable) that our junker philosopher attempts to deform, metaphysically and theologically, the opportunity for renovation offered to European thought after the collapse of metaphysics and theology (and, soon thereafter, the Ancien Régime). An opportunity whose accomplishment was prefatorily outlined in less hyperbolic traces by authors like Rabelais, Voltaire, or La Rochefoucauld (to take literally his compliment to the French), as well as less exalted Germans.
That which Young-Hegelianly marks his “historic Narrative” and gives it its Foundationist function (and its “binarizing” tendency) is therefore essentially the idea of an initial, epochal “Error” (the Ascetic Ideal), characterized as a Great Inversion/Negation (of “Life”), confronted by his Absolute Critique, as an equally epochal Negation of the Negation, or Inversion of the Inversion. And it is also, before this Ausgang, the idea of the development of that “Great Evil” in a logical-dialectic, immanent, and necessary trajectory, taken as an escalade which leads to that which had always been “germinally” present in the original Belief itself: its apparent opposite, Nihilism, now made explicit. Nietzsche’s “authorized” Young-Hegelian trademark is finally in the idea of his own time (a peculiar 19th-century Center-European “Modernity”) as a time of deepening Asceticism and precipitation of Nihilism (deceptively disguised, as he points out, as their overcoming), in the direction of a Crisis/Calamity like no other on Earth, a dramatic Last Judgment as the eve of the “Kingdom” of aristocratic and ruthless transvalued values. As we suggested, though referenced to a figure that is not the classical subject, even the topical, common to all Young Hegelianism, that of a hypostatization of a creation of men (in this case, values and norms) and its re-appropriation, a return to its authorship, with hyper-revolutionary consequences, finds in Nietzsche one of-or rather, its-most dramatic and bombastic version.
His philosophy is therefore more a “philosophy of the future,” in his case anticipated as the past; it is a thought apparently in bad terms with coming into being, with finitude, with contingency. Which, in a still “theological” manner, places itself, and to that end also its time, as an absolute and extremely unique watershed of “History” and, because of that, sustains Nietzsche’s own finite and individual existence as “Destiny,” as a historic-universal, superhuman destiny, the neck of an hourglass through which the vast sands of time must necessarily pass. The inversion, the inversion of the inversion, the determining logic of the historic development to come, allow Nietzsche, more than Hegelianly, as weltregierender Geist, to foresee the future and narrate it as the past, dominated, it should be understood, by the dialectic movement of the Objective Power of History.
After this, I do not see how the Nietzschean idea of the “Eternal Return,” “the fundamental conception of Zaratustra,” could effectively modify this setting or rescue what is, shall we say, problematic about it. And that even if to Nietzsche his Eternal Return meant to represent the “cosmological framework” of that “authorized historical framework,” and not, mainly, as is the case most of the time, a challenging idea, the most challenging and heaviest, adequate to its fulfillment (of history up to now). It could not be otherwise for our hyperbolic, dramatic-heroic Nietzsche: “a horrific and paralyzing Idea,” “the heaviest thought”; concomitant with, on the other hand, the most complete “amor fati” and “yes to life”-for that reason, also “the most divine thing that could be heard for a demon.” It is the background idea (or better, the clef de voûte of its construction) about time, necessary to sustain the most complete and final transmutation of all values to the thoughts of Nietzsche’s admirable new world: the most refined end of all hesitation with regards to the most complete affirmation of Life (or of the “non-meaning” of Life). Where no trace of Christianity, of the Ascetic Ideal, or of its disguised modern vestiges would remain; an idea where nihilism and anti-nihilism were combined and overcome. To desire the Eternal Return would thus be the utmost affirmation of that life, of each person’s individual life; where that is a sort of spiritual exercise adequate to the struggle for self-creation (audacious and challenging, artistic) sought by some of us.
On the other hand, I do not see what this idea of the Eternal Return could have to gain from the “scientific grounding” that Nietzsche feels he needs to search for; I do see what it has to lose. It is an interesting idea that I prefer to measure with another, which has to do directly with our common finitude, and which goes along more with a shrug of the shoulders than with apocalyptic, historical-universal tasks. The idea that we all die, that our time does not need to be anything essential and epochally special, nor our role in any way that of a savior; that the world does not end (or that it ends all the time), that it is we who simply pass. I believe this idea does have the capacity to better favor the development of restless, interesting, and artistic individuals, here and now, even among Nietzsche’s readers. Along the path of a “deflation” of the philosopher we would lose, perhaps, some of the boldness and audacity of his heroic and ruthless romanticism, some of his more spectacular and dramatic tonalities. On the other hand, on that path we would be able to contemplate, recreated, the democratic inclinations that we may perchance hold dear. Without wasting any more time or being further ashamed with the partie honteuse and the exhaustingly presumptuous side of his thought.