Nietschze: The Anti-American Philosophy?

[astorian]

Actually, one could make a strong case (and Allan Bloom DID make a strong case, in The Closing of the American Mind) that Nietzsche’s ideas have WON in the United States, just as they have elsewhere. That a kind of nihilism is pretty much par for the course in America, as it is elsewhere.

The difference is, Americans embraced a wimpy, watered down version of what Nietzsche said.

When Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” he MEANT it to be a terrifying proposition. After all, if your whole society, your whole culture, your whole sense of morality were built on Christianity, then the collapse of belief in God SHOULD mean chaos and panic and a complete redefinition of everything you ever believed.

In America, though, that didn’t happen. If anything, people took the “news” of God’s demise rather nonchalantly. The result was not chaos or even a serious re-evaluation of our society. Rather, the result was a casual relativism. “Oh, God doesn’t exist? Well, that’s okay. All that means is, I do my thing, you do your thing, and I’m Okay, You’re Okay, and who’s to say what’s right and wrong? Lah dee dah!”

Thing is, even if the USA is, on paper, the most religious Western society, you’ll find that most self-proclaimed American Christians are namby-pamby relativists, too. They’ve pretty much bought into the notion that… well, not that God is dead, but that He doesn’t really matter very much, that He doesn’t really care what we believe or how we live, and that, if there’s a Heaven, almost everyone will get into it. (Sort of “God isn’t dead, but he’s not at all well… and while we’ll miss him a bit, we won’t let it get us down if He’s gone. Because, really, isn’t it more important to be nice than to be good?"”)

Faith in America is a mile wide, but an inch deep. Right about where Europe was when Nietzsche first started writing.

[BrainGlutton]

@astorian

Actually, one could make a strong case (and Allan Bloom DID make a strong case, in The Closing of the American Mind) that Nietzsche’s ideas have WON in the United States, just as they have elsewhere. That a kind of nihilism is pretty much par for the course in America, as it is elsewhere.

Whatever is the actual meaning of Nietzsche’s message, it is most definitely not nihilism.

[astorian]

@BrainGlutton

Whatever is the actual meaning of Nietzsche’s message, it is most definitely not nihilism.

Sure it is- it just so happens that his nihilism is not what most people think it is.

[BrainGlutton]

@astorian

Sure it is- it just so happens that his nihilism is not what most people think it is.

No, with regard to nihilism, Nietzsche was not proclaiming it, he was diagnosing it, as something pervasive (but overlooked) in contemporary European culture. By “transvaluation of values,” he meant we should change our values, not that we should have none at all. At least, that’s how I read this:

Nietzsche’s relation to the problem of nihilism is a complex one. He approaches the problem of nihilism as a deeply personal one, stating that this problem of the modern world is a problem that has “become conscious” in him.[32] Furthermore, he emphasises both the danger of nihilism and the possibilities it offers, as seen in his statement that “I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism’s] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!”[33] According to Nietzsche, it is only once nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.[18]

He states that there is at least the possibility of another type of nihilist in the wake of Christianity’s self-dissolution, one that does not stop after the destruction of all value and meaning and succumbs to the following nothingness. This alternate, ‘active’ nihilism on the other hand destroys to level the field for constructing something new. This form of nihilism is characterised by Nietzsche as “a sign of strength,”[34] a willful destruction of the old values to wipe the slate clean and lay down ones own beliefs and interpretations, contrary to the passive nihilism that resigns itself with the decomposition of the old values. This willful destruction of values and the overcoming of the condition nihilism by the constructing of new meaning, this active nihilism could be related to what Nietzsche elsewhere calls a ‘free spirit’[35] or the Übermensch from Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Antichrist, the model of the strong individual who posits his own values and lives his life as if it were a work of art.

Is this correct, wintertime and olivesmarch4th? You two seem to be our resident experts on Nietzsche.

[wintertime]

@astorian

Sure it is- it just so happens that his nihilism is not what most people think it is.

Interesting. Please, explain.

Whatever is the actual meaning of Nietzsche’s message, it is most definitely not nihilism. – BrainGlutton

In support of this – and for astorian:

(…)
But at some time or other, in a more powerful time than this mouldy, self-doubting present, he must nonetheless come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit, constantly pushed again and again away from every sideline or from the beyond by his own driving power, whose isolation is misunderstood by people as if it were a flight from reality—whereas it is only his immersion, burial, and absorption in reality, so that once he comes out of it into the light again, he brings home the redemption of this reality, its redemption from the curse which the previous ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will release us from that earlier ideal just as much as from what had to grow from it, from the great loathing, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism—that stroke of noon and of the great decision which makes the will free once again, who gives back to the earth its purpose and to the human being his hope, this anti-Christ and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness—at some point he must come . . .
On the Genealogy of Morals - A Polemical Tract: 24

The original (Die Genealogie der Moral), for verification:

Aber irgendwann, in einer stärkeren Zeit, als diese morsche, selbstzweiflerische Gegenwart ist, muss er uns doch kommen, der erlösende Mensch der grossen Liebe und Verachtung, der schöpferische Geist, den seine drängende Kraft aus allem Abseits und Jenseits immer wieder wegtreibt, dessen Einsamkeit vom Volke missverstanden wird, wie als ob sie eine Flucht vor der Wirklichkeit sei –: während sie nur seine Versenkung, Vergrabung, Vertiefung in die Wirklichkeit ist, damit er einst aus ihr, wenn er wieder an’s Licht kommt, die Erlösung dieser Wirklichkeit heimbringe: ihre Erlösung von dem Fluche, den das bisherige Ideal auf sie gelegt hat. Dieser Mensch der Zukunft, der uns ebenso vom bisherigen Ideal erlösen wird, als von dem, was aus ihm wachsen musste, vom grossen Ekel, vom Willen zum Nichts, vom Nihilismus, dieser Glockenschlag des Mittags und der grossen Entscheidung, der den Willen wieder frei macht, der der Erde ihr Ziel und dem Menschen seine Hoffnung zurückgiebt, dieser Antichrist und Antinihilist, dieser Besieger Gottes und des Nichts – er muss einst kommen…

Is this correct, wintertime and olivesmarch4th? You two seem to be our resident experts on Nietzsche. – BrainGlutton

Definitely not an expert, but your cite sounds about right.

[wintertime]

BrainGlutton, here is an English translation of the quote from Ecce Homo from a previous post.

The word ‘overman’ as a designation for the type that has turned out best, by contrast with ‘modern’ men, ‘good’ men, Christians and other nihilists — a word which, in the mouth of a Zarathustra, the destroyer of morality, becomes a very thought-provoking word — has been understood almost everywhere, in all innocence, in the sense of those values whose opposite was made manifest in the figure of Zarathustra, in other words as the ‘idealistic’ type of a higher kind of man, half ‘saint’, half ‘genius’…

It has led some scholarly blockheads to suspect me of Darwinism; people have recognized in it even the ‘hero cult’ of that great unknowing and reluctant counterfeiter, Carlyle, which I have been so malicious as to reject. If I whispered in someone’s ear that they should look around for a Cesare Borgia rather than a Parsifal, they didn’t believe their ears.

Ecce Homo, chapter 3, Why I Write Such Good Books: 37, translated by Duncan Large

[BrainGlutton]

@wintertime

BrainGlutton, here is an English translation of the quote from Ecce Homo from a previous post.

That statement actually still leaves it rather ambiguous, as to whether what Nietzsche really means by the “Overman” is nearer to Parsifal or to Borgia. (Is it any clearer if you speak German, I wonder? Probably not.)

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@astorian

When Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” he MEANT it to be a terrifying proposition. After all, if your whole society, your whole culture, your whole sense of morality were built on Christianity, then the collapse of belief in God SHOULD mean chaos and panic and a complete redefinition of everything you ever believed.

In America, though, that didn’t happen. If anything, people took the “news” of God’s demise rather nonchalantly. The result was not chaos or even a serious re-evaluation of our society. Rather, the result was a casual relativism. “Oh, God doesn’t exist? Well, that’s okay. All that means is, I do my thing, you do your thing, and I’m Okay, You’re Okay, and who’s to say what’s right and wrong? Lah dee dah!”

Thing is, even if the USA is, on paper, the most religious Western society, you’ll find that most self-proclaimed American Christians are namby-pamby relativists, too. They’ve pretty much bought into the notion that… well, not that God is dead, but that He doesn’t really matter very much, that He doesn’t really care what we believe or how we live

I don’t think you’re taking it back far enough.

Yes, “if your whole society, your whole culture, your whole sense of morality were built on Christianity, then the collapse of belief in God SHOULD mean chaos and panic and a complete redefinition of everything you ever believed.” But I don’t think it was. We knew all along that our society in general and personal morals in particular weren’t built on giving away one’s worldly goods and turning the other cheek when attacked; armed revolution by enthusiastic property owners led to a government said to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed, sure as “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” and “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”.

We were ***always *** in a position to say that our assorted justifications stand regardless of any religious underpinning; even back in the 1700s, it did Thomas Jefferson no injury for a neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God, since he already knew it neither picks his pocket nor breaks his leg. (Of course, he was ready to break your leg if you tried to pick his pocket; like the rest of the Founding Fathers, he liked being rich and had no problem with hitting folks.)

We never really cared back then. Why the heck would America start caring circa Bloom?

[wintertime]

@BrainGlutton

That statement actually still leaves it rather ambiguous, as to whether what Nietzsche really means by the “Overman” is nearer to Parsifal or to Borgia. (Is it any clearer if you speak German, I wonder? Probably not.)

When he wrote the Zarathustra, we can be absolutely sure (for once) that he didn’t intent his Übermensch to have any similarity with Parsifal at all – at least not the Parsifal he was referring to: the hero of Wagner’s last music drama.

Wagner had introduced the young student Nietzsche to the idea of the Dionysian (damn, I misspelled this word continuously in previous posts) and professor Nietzsche’s book The Birth of Tragedy endorsed not just the composer’s romantic and irrational ideas but interpreted the ecstatic quality of (his) music as the heart of the Dionysian spirit.

The academia of his time dismissed such an idea as confused romanticism and Nietzsche’s career might have derailed even sooner than it did if the influential Wagner hadn’t supported him publicly.

Nietzsche, however, distanced himself from Wagner after he had seen him in his circle of passionate admirers during the first “Bayreuther Festspiele” and sought refuge in the Bavarian Forest to start writing Human, All to Human that already shows a provocatively anti-Wagnerian attitude and introduces the well-known redefinition of the Dionysian that deals with the positive affirmation of life through the acceptance of death and pain.

Nietzsche claimed that Wagner had started with a revolution in his mind but betrayed his, well, their ideals when he sided with the Wilhelmine Empire and tainted the public discourse with his antisemitism, catholicism and romantic hero worship.

And though Nietzsche changed his mind on many occasions, he couldn’t overcome his disappointment with the hero of his youth and kept the distance for the rest of his life.

The consequences were quite harsh for Nietzsche: his early Wagnerian attitude had isolated him from the academia, his enmity towards the composer estranged him from the influential Wagnerians. Any chance of academic or public influence he might have gained otherwise during his productive years was pretty much gone. OTOH, many of his readers consider his position between the influential forces of his time the main reason for his unique approach and his ability to look beyond the present.

Anyway, that he mentioned Cesare Borgia in connection with the Übermensch fits, imo, insofar as he was the role model for Niccolò Machiavelli’s Principe, a manual for anyone who seeks to gain power in the world by using “any means necessary” without a qualm to realize his will.

[BrainGlutton]

@astorian

Actually, one could make a strong case (and Allan Bloom DID make a strong case, in The Closing of the American Mind) that Nietzsche’s ideas have WON in the United States, just as they have elsewhere. That a kind of nihilism is pretty much par for the course in America, as it is elsewhere.

The difference is, Americans embraced a wimpy, watered down version of what Nietzsche said.

When Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” he MEANT it to be a terrifying proposition. After all, if your whole society, your whole culture, your whole sense of morality were built on Christianity, then the collapse of belief in God SHOULD mean chaos and panic and a complete redefinition of everything you ever believed.

In America, though, that didn’t happen. If anything, people took the “news” of God’s demise rather nonchalantly. The result was not chaos or even a serious re-evaluation of our society. Rather, the result was a casual relativism. “Oh, God doesn’t exist? Well, that’s okay. All that means is, I do my thing, you do your thing, and I’m Okay, You’re Okay, and who’s to say what’s right and wrong? Lah dee dah!”

Thing is, even if the USA is, on paper, the most religious Western society, you’ll find that most self-proclaimed American Christians are namby-pamby relativists, too. They’ve pretty much bought into the notion that… well, not that God is dead, but that He doesn’t really matter very much, that He doesn’t really care what we believe or how we live, and that, if there’s a Heaven, almost everyone will get into it. (Sort of “God isn’t dead, but he’s not at all well… and while we’ll miss him a bit, we won’t let it get us down if He’s gone. Because, really, isn’t it more important to be nice than to be good?"”)

Faith in America is a mile wide, but an inch deep. Right about where Europe was when Nietzsche first started writing.

I’m curious: Why does Bloom use the name The Closing of the American Mind for a process which, even if it happened exactly as he describes it, was actually an opening of the American mind?

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@astorian

Actually, one could make a strong case (and Allan Bloom DID make a strong case, in The Closing of the American Mind) that Nietzsche’s ideas have WON in the United States, just as they have elsewhere. That a kind of nihilism is pretty much par for the course in America, as it is elsewhere.

The difference is, Americans embraced a wimpy, watered down version of what Nietzsche said.

When Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead,” he MEANT it to be a terrifying proposition. After all, if your whole society, your whole culture, your whole sense of morality were built on Christianity, then the collapse of belief in God SHOULD mean chaos and panic and a complete redefinition of everything you ever believed.

In America, though, that didn’t happen. If anything, people took the “news” of God’s demise rather nonchalantly. The result was not chaos or even a serious re-evaluation of our society. Rather, the result was a casual relativism. “Oh, God doesn’t exist? Well, that’s okay. All that means is, I do my thing, you do your thing, and I’m Okay, You’re Okay, and who’s to say what’s right and wrong? Lah dee dah!”

Thing is, even if the USA is, on paper, the most religious Western society, you’ll find that most self-proclaimed American Christians are namby-pamby relativists, too. They’ve pretty much bought into the notion that… well, not that God is dead, but that He doesn’t really matter very much, that He doesn’t really care what we believe or how we live, and that, if there’s a Heaven, almost everyone will get into it. (Sort of “God isn’t dead, but he’s not at all well… and while we’ll miss him a bit, we won’t let it get us down if He’s gone. Because, really, isn’t it more important to be nice than to be good?"”)

Faith in America is a mile wide, but an inch deep. Right about where Europe was when Nietzsche first started writing.

I must agree that’s a very unfortunate development-the rise of ecumenicalism and universalism has become a virus that has infected even the Evangelical denominations.

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

I’m curious: Why does Bloom use the name The Closing of the American Mind for a process which, even if it happened exactly as he describes it, was actually an opening of the American mind?

Because (sorry, I don’t know much about Nietzsche, but do about Bloom), Bloom’s argument in the book is that the universities abandoned the search for objective truth for a kind of shallow relativism. The mind of higher education is closed because it’s no longer willing to ask and consider the fundamental questions that have made up western philosophy from the beginning (i.e. What is truth? What is beauty? What is the nature of the divine? How does one lead a “good” life? What does “good” mean?", etc.) In fact it says these questions are fundamentally unanswerable, and what matters now is not what people think about things, but how they feel about things. As he put it in the book’s introduction:

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one’s own and the good. Culture, hence, closedness, reigns supreme.

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@Captain_Amazing

Because (sorry, I don’t know much about Nietzsche, but do about Bloom), Bloom’s argument in the book is that the universities abandoned the search for objective truth for a kind of shallow relativism. The mind of higher education is closed because it’s no longer willing to ask and consider the fundamental questions that have made up western philosophy from the beginning (i.e. What is truth? What is beauty? What is the nature of the divine? How does one lead a “good” life? What does “good” mean?", etc.) In fact it says these questions are fundamentally unanswerable, and what matters now is not what people think about things, but how they feel about things.

But AFAICT, that’s pretty much exactly what Nietzsche recommends; if such questions are fundamentally unanswerable, then a search for objective truth is missing the point – since, after (negatively) tearing apart any “thou shalt” justification like a lion, the next (positive) step comes not from looking for some answer out there but from providing your own:

Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? “Thou shalt” is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, “I will.” “Thou shalt” lies in his way, sparkling like gold, an animal covered with scales; and on every scale shines a golden “thou shalt” … the lion is needed for such prey. But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will…

It’s, y’know, existentialism.

Or, as Sartre would put it a couple of generations later, if the human condition is a case where existence precedes essence, then it’s folly to go looking for such an essence in the realm of objective truth; the whole point is that no such answer is out there, because it’s up to you: “I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values. That does not mean that he wills it in the abstract: it simply means that the actions of men of good faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself as such … if I have excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are. And moreover, to say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this; that there is no sense in life a priori. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”)

[Captain_Amazing]

And Bloom talks a lot about Nietzsche…he spends about two chapters on him…“Values”, and “The Nietschzeanization of the Left and Vice Versa”. Bloom has a problem with those implications of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and even more so by what he sees as the “hijacking of Nietzsche by the Left”, and what he sees as the existentialists and the critical theorists squeezing Nietzsche into a Marxist mold. As he puts it:

When one talks to Marxists these days, and asks them to explain philosophers and artists in terms of objective economic conditions, they smile contemptuously and respond, “That is vulgar Marxism,” as if to ask, “Where have you been for the last seventy-five years?” No one likes to be considered vulgar, so people tend to fall back into embarrassed silence. Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heideger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drink at their trough-such as Lukacz, Kojeve, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre- and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism. The game is surely up when Marxists start talking about “the sacred”.

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@Captain_Amazing

And Bloom talks a lot about Nietzsche…he spends about two chapters on him…“Values”, and “The Nietschzeanization of the Left and Vice Versa”. Bloom has a problem with those implications of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and even more so by what he sees as the “hijacking of Nietzsche by the Left”, and what he sees as the existentialists and the critical theorists squeezing Nietzsche into a Marxist mold. As he puts it:

When one talks to Marxists these days, and asks them to explain philosophers and artists in terms of objective economic conditions, they smile contemptuously and respond, “That is vulgar Marxism,” as if to ask, “Where have you been for the last seventy-five years?” No one likes to be considered vulgar, so people tend to fall back into embarrassed silence. Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heideger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drink at their trough-such as Lukacz, Kojeve, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre- and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism. The game is surely up when Marxists start talking about “the sacred”.

That sounds more like he’s got a problem with jettisoning Marxist stuff to avoid conflict with existentialist thought in general and Nietzsche’s philosophy in particular. AFAICT, he’s not on about them squeezing Nietzsche into a Marxist mold; he’s saying the mold yielded when philosophers didn’t fit it, pointing out that dropping economic determinism as vulgar Marxism (which, as he puts it, is Marxism) would be hopelessly problematic even before adding in talk of “the sacred” – at which point, he says, the game is surely up.

[BrainGlutton]

@Captain_Amazing

Because (sorry, I don’t know much about Nietzsche, but do about Bloom), Bloom’s argument in the book is that the universities abandoned the search for objective truth for a kind of shallow relativism. The mind of higher education is closed because it’s no longer willing to ask and consider the fundamental questions that have made up western philosophy from the beginning (i.e. What is truth? What is beauty? What is the nature of the divine? How does one lead a “good” life? What does “good” mean?", etc.) In fact it says these questions are fundamentally unanswerable, and what matters now is not what people think about things, but how they feel about things. As he put it in the book’s introduction:

Bloom is a fool or a liar, then, if he says such questions are no longer asked in academia. The present state of affairs is more open-minded than an age when the teachers only pretended to pose those questions because they already had all the “answers” ready to present and defend.

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

Bloom is a fool or a liar, then, if he says such questions are no longer asked in academia. The present state of affairs is more open-minded than an age when the teachers only pretended to pose those questions because they already had all the “answers” ready to present and defend.

He was neither. But he was a classicist, and he was a man who lived in a time that that the western canon and the idea of the liberal arts were being challenged. And he’s right that classics and philosophy departments aren’t really in high standing, and the critical theorists have taken over the universities. Interestingly enough, I was just listening to an interview with Victor Davis Hanson, where he was pretty much making the same complaint. You really need to read Bloom’s book, though, rather than my brief summary of it.

[BrainGlutton]

@Captain_Amazing

He was neither. But he was a classicist, and he was a man who lived in a time that that the western canon and the idea of the liberal arts were being challenged. And he’s right that classics and philosophy departments aren’t really in high standing, and the critical theorists have taken over the universities.

That may be so, but it is neither (1) a “Closing of the American Mind” nor (2) an instance of “nihilism.” Quite the reverse, on both counts.

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

That may be so, but it is neither (1) a “Closing of the American Mind” nor (2) an instance of “nihilism.” Quite the reverse, on both counts.

There are certainly people who would agree with you, most notably, Lawrence Levine, who wrote a response to the book in praise of multiculturalism and the expansion of the canon. But I still recommend reading Bloom’s book so that you can see his argument for itself, rather than relying on my futile attempts to explain it.