Domenico Losurdo's Nietzsche

The Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo's massive critique of Nietzsche reveals one of modern philosophy’s most well-known, but least understood, figures

The late Italian Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel, translated into English last year, is more readable than you would think a 1000+ page tome on history and philosophy would be. The book is like a grand opera, a masterful and seamless harmonizing of an astonishing range of complex themes scoured from the most obscure parts of literary, cultural and political history—but always at the same time filled with undeniable, unnerving relevance. Losurdo has the kind of effortlessly knowing writing style that makes you feel totally at home while also constantly pushing you—he knows as much as any historian, and can explain complex philosophical concepts with clarity and succinctness, but without sacrificing any context or depth. He compares in some ways to Edward Said, in terms of his range, commitment, and grand ambition in tracing out the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, but I find Losurdo far more readable than Said.

If we aren’t accustomed to thinking of Nietzsche mainly as a political and social philosopher, Losurdo’s book will change that. It is a full-scale historical materialist deconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the likes of which we have never seen before. It truly is a groundbreaking work. To read this book is to encounter a brand new Nietzsche—but also the one that was always there, hiding in plain sight. The book makes a convincing case that not only is Nietzsche a conservative thinker, which has somehow been in question for the last several decades with the rise of the so-called Left Nietzscheans, he is the modern conservative thinker who Marxists must reckon with above all others. He will always be standing there laughing in the face of communists as they try to create a classless society and liberate humanity. This is, for Losurdo, Nietzsche’s real face. In order to have a chance at moving socialism forward in a real way, we need to see Nietzsche’s real face, and fully appreciate his profound challenge to socialist thinking.

Nietzsche’s challenge may well be unanswerable, and his diagnosis of the human condition and his account of the human good may be more convincing and attractive than any alternatives we can imagine or express, but we will certainly have no chance at all if we continue to avert our eyes from his real message. Losurdo wants us to finally see Nietzsche’s real face, so that we can fully appreciate him as a truly great thinker, meaning one with a coherent, systematic worldview. This goes against the grain of most Nietzsche interpretations, but Losurdo makes a fairly unbeatable case that Nietzsche is a philosopher totos politicus, as Losurdo puts it—that Nietzsche’s central aim, from beginning to end, was to diagnose the “long cycle of revolution” from Socrates to the French Revolution to the Paris Commune, as a symptom of degeneration and decadence, and to portray the counterrevolutionary tendency of his time in the best possible light.

Nietzsche wanted to persuade us—or rather, to convert us into believing—that throughout all of history the revolutionaries have always been sick, and those defending themselves against revolt, have always been strong and healthy and good—he wants to restore what he thinks is a self-evident truth to its good conscience. Slaves should be in their place, and masters should be in theirs, and that’s clearly the way the world should be, so we should just admit this to ourselves—this is Losurdo’s characterization of Nietzsche’s thought, and the documentation he provides to back up this view is beyond damning. Yet this basic truth has remained largely obscured, until now. Why? As Nietzsche said, “The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.” This truth is only abstract because we are so out of touch with our good sense and with the proper way of the world, which the slave revolt in morals caused.

To make this basic truth non-abstract and clear once again requires seducing our senses—getting us in touch with a new kind of common sense—but it’s really the oldest ancient common sense, that being strong is good and being weak is bad. This was inverted so that being weak was good and being strong was bad—Jesus was meek and mild, but these were now viewed as strengths, not weaknesses. This is what Nietzsche means by the slave revolt in morals. Socrates the intellectual overtaking the strong Greek figures of their heroic age. And there can be little doubt that he was better at seducing the senses of his readers than anyone who ever lived, which is why his simple message has been so confused. But this doesn’t mean that his message wasn’t received—it was received all too well. It is received almost in our bodies, going around our defenses, worming its way into us. As he boasts, correctly, in his intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo, “I have some notion of my privileges as a writer—I have even been told that I disturb nightly rest.” This is, of course, how he wanted it. For his message to really work, it had to be absorbed in this way, far more deeply and more all-encompassingly than any message that Kant or Hegel wanted to deliver. He wanted us to receive his message but also not be too sure what it was—because if we were too sure, we wouldn’t accept it, or be able to grasp it, perhaps because we would otherwise see that it was too terrible.

One of the penultimate aphorisms of The Gay Science, “On the question of being understandable” makes the case for not being understood into something of a moral stand. “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood…All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same time erects barriers against ‘the others.’ All the more subtle laws of style have their origin at this point.” Few things were more important to Nietzsche than style—in another important aphorism in The Gay Science titled “One thing is needful,” he says, “To give style to one’s character—a great and rare art!” He calls this the one needful thing—we can throw out all other moral and ethical codes, and live by this one rule, presumably. And style works by means of exclusion, selection, a sense of distance, hierarchy, strict, snap judgments, and so on. Style is about closed-mindedness—if you’re too open, you won’t know yourself and your own unique internal rhythms fluidly enough to produce an interesting, worthwhile style. And if style is fundamentally exclusionary and closed in this way, and giving style to our character is the one needful thing, then closedness is itself elevated to a fundamental moral principle. So this great immoralist has some virtues after all—style, and style does not have its true origin in anything that can be called traditionally virtuous or moral. This, for Nietzsche, only makes it more important and more central to the aristocratic radicalism he is creating.

Skirting around the edges and getting lost in a haze of interpretations and the cottage industry of luxuriating in the mystifications of Nietzsche, as so many authors have, pimping Nietzsche’s name because it will sell, will not help us come to terms with his real doctrine, and it won’t help us understand the almost unparalleled appeal he continues to have among philosophers. Nietzsche is so popular because he is the most evil of the great philosophers—he was able to teach evil to speak in a beautiful, intuitive language that fills us with hope and that reveals profound, inspiring heights as well as depths. Anyone who wishes to defeat Nietzsche must offer something equal and opposite—making goodness and solidarity feel as inspiring and real as Nietzsche made evil. But the question is—can that be done? Or is goodness, solidarity, and whatever other positive value words that socialists talk about too much of a lie to ever be made to resound with the grandeur and authority that Nietzsche has bestowed upon evil and wickedness?

Nietzsche often wrote about masks—it was one of his favorite themes. As he said, “Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing.” Has anyone ever gotten so lost in masks he created for himself as Nietzsche did? What reason would a man have to create and hide behind so many masks? Someone with something terrible to hide, perhaps? Losurdo brings us closer to Nietzsche’s true face than we’ve gotten before—or at least an unflinching gaze at another one of his faces, his hidden face, his darkest face. And for that, perhaps his truest face—as he himself knew, what is darkest is often what is truest. As he says at the very end of Beyond Good and Evil, “Alas! what are you, after all, my written and painted thoughts!…some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths…” Why would he be afraid that his thoughts were truths? The effect of reading Nietzsche is to be familiarized to the most fearsome truths—but without knowing that this is what is happening. This line from Nietzsche is very telling. He isn’t even sure that his thoughts had become truths, they may or may not have at some point, and that is what is most fearsome–but this is how our darkest thoughts, which are also our truest thoughts, actualize themselves; bit by bit, without us knowing. The moral choice is not all at once, all or nothing, like for Kantian moral philosophy, and it’s not a rational calculation like for the utilitarian moral philosophers. Rather, the moral task for Nietzsche is to “Become who you are” as he often says. This is a process of surrendering a bit every day to who you really are, but what you have not permitted yourself to actualize—what is most true and deep within us, and for Nietzsche this means what is most wicked.

We can’t become wicked all at once, just like we can’t question everything in the world all at once. To become as wicked as we possibly can, which is basically what Nietzsche means when he says “Become who you are,” we have to agree to become wicked bit by bit every day. You can’t become a demon all at once. Just like Spartan soldiers would be fed a bit of poison every day to inoculate themselves, Nietzsche’s moral philosophy of the ubermensch calls for a steady inoculation against morality—which for Nietzsche essentially means Christianity, socialism, feminism, and democracy. We can’t free ourselves from these things all at once–we have to chip away at it every day. It’s almost like the anti-liberal counterpart to the liberal slogan of “Doing The Work,” which refers to the “work” of raising your consciousness and awareness about various social justice issues that are easy to overlook but which must be acknowledged to Be A Good Liberal and so on. In contrast, Nietzsche offers a kind of Undoing The Work. The crucial idea here is that modern liberal bourgeois values must be explicitly rejected—not half-accepted or taken for granted, but fully rejected and replaced with immoralism, but an immoralism with a good conscience, because it has looked wickedness in the face, and said Yes!

His famous aphorism “The Madman” (also in The Gay Science) where he proclaims the death of God is perhaps most important as a critique of pale, feckless modern people, the people in the marketplace who laugh at the madman who preaches about the death of God, who do not believe in God but also do not care that God is dead, or even that mankind has killed Him. Nietzsche wants people to admit what they know deep down—that there is no God, he thinks that not even the most devout modern Christian in his heart of hearts really believes in God, because modern consciousness has become too sophisticated for such a primitive hypothesis to have much purchase. But just acknowledging that there is no God is not enough for Nietzsche—that’s just a half-measure. The full-measure is internalizing the truth that God is dead because we killed him. Looking ourselves in the face is to see that we are god killers, we have committed the worst crime imaginable, deicide. But rather than scaring us or causing us to repent, this should fill us with power and energy. There is a kind of logic to this—if God is dead, and we have killed him, that makes us gods, and so we should be ecstatic. This, for Nietzsche, is a kind of happiness and goodness that is worthy of real men.

Along these lines, we can perhaps begin to understand part of the meaning of Nietzsche’s theory of “the eternal return of the same.” Every day we are faced with the same thing, returning endlessly, and that presents us with a choice–what do we say about this return of the same that characterizes the everyday? Every choice, at the end of the day is a Yes or No. Nietzsche often talks about how the ubermensch should be a Yes-Saying spirit. But what are we saying Yes too? To this daily acceptance of our wickedness, saying yes to becoming who we are, which is just becoming as wicked as we can be. Every day we say yes to becoming who we are—but who we are, who we really are, is not who we would allow ourselves to ever be. This is why Nietzsche is always careful to emphasize becoming over being. We have to become who we are in brief little bursts, because who we are is too terrible to ever really be, so all we can ever do is become it–but we have to become it in a constant struggle. Say yes to lying to your moral conscience, but not all at once, bit by bit. This is a challenge, a constant struggle, but it is worth it, because within our wickedness we can find new distinctions and meanings.

Nietzsche writes in aphorism 379 of The Gay Science, with such love as he rarely manages about anything, about the virtues of contempt. Contempt is a fine virtue, much better than hatred. Hatred is democratic and common–but contempt is refined. Contempt is the virtue of hate, it might be said. Anyone can hate, but only a great man can have contempt—that is what a great man does with hate, he turns it into contempt. As Zarathustra, the prophet of the ubermensch, asks us, “Do you know the word ‘contempt’ yet, my brother?” It is a defining virtue of the ubermensch. Contempt is the source of some of the richest joys, in Nietzsche’s eyes. “And how much fine joy, how much patience, how much graciousness even do we owe precisely to our contempt! Moreover…refined contempt is our taste and privilege, our art, our virtue perhaps…” What he wants his followers to be are “virtuosos of contempt” for whom “every association with human beings makes us shudder slightly…” For Nietzsche the immoralist, there is one clear virtue for modern men–contempt.

The relation to Aristotle’s moral philosophy here is significant. Aristotle’s moral aim is on the production of what he called the great-souled-man, who had achieved a condition of eudaimonia, a Greek word that means great-souled-ness. In the focus on this practical side of morality, of the production of men with specific characteristics, Aristotle is very close to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s (im)moral system is also practical, in its focus on the creation of men as its aim, but it is the ubermensch, rather than the great-souled-man. It is an immoral system, so it would call for the creation of an immoral man. And so the virtues of this immoral system will be inverted—contempt is now a virtue, not a vice.

Nietzsche, it should be remembered, was first and foremost an immoralist–that’s how he described himself, and how he referred to his followers and readers: “we immoralists.” But as Losurdo notes, Nietzsche didn’t just want readers, or followers, or even students—he wanted converts. This is how Lou Salomé, the woman who perhaps knew him best and who was probably the love of Nietzsche’s life, described him, as wanting to convert rather than teach. A big part of the conversion process that Nietzsche wanted to facilitate was self-overcoming. He often said that man is something that must be overcome. But what is it that must be overcome exactly? Losurdo makes clear that there is no doubt—pity, softness of heart, and related things. In a word, what must be overcome is the moral conscience. Moral conscience was the enemy to be defeated that stood in the way of the self-overcoming and becoming who you are of the ubermensch. But Nietzsche does not want to dispense with conscience entirely—he emphasizes the importance of conscience, just not moral conscience. What we should trust more was what Nietzsche called the intellectual conscience. He writes with the most profoundly sharp understanding about everything, of course–that’s why he’s Nietzsche. But his description of the intellectual conscience in The Gay Science stands out. This is the real moral center of his immoral moral system:

“The great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience…I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.” This is what those he wishes to convert to immoralism should hold as their morality–conscience stripped of the all-too-compromised moral dimension, and replaced with sheer intellectual tightness. For the intellectual conscience to find something to be good, it has to have no trace whatsoever of slackness–it must be tight, like its ready to be used as a weapon in war. The moral conscience too easily becomes bleeding heart liberalism and the kind of open-mindedness that causes your brains to leak out of your ears. The intellectual conscience, meanwhile, is defined by its closedness, not its openness–something counts as good and true when precision is reached, when a judgment is cast. The intellectual conscience is not in a state of constant open-mindedness–only a feckless liberal thinks like that. Anyone who aspires to be the ubermensch will have a mind like a weapon, hardened by an absence of slackness, refined and sharpened to perfection.

Losurdo’s book was published in Italian all the way back in 2002, but was only translated into English in November 2019. There have been countless efforts to look at the philosopher from a purely moral, metaphysical or literary perspective, but what this book does is strip away the endless philosophical complexity and focus on the major political and social events that were going on in Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the United States) in the 1870s and 1880s, when the philosopher was most active. As Harrison Fluss says in his introduction, this is a more “terrestrial” Nietzsche than we’ve ever seen before. A fully grounded and situated Nietzsche may seem inappropriate at first, given how lofty his ideas were, but as the book goes on, it becomes clear that this is as valid a way to understand him as any—and just because Nietzsche wanted to be seen as being far beyond the petty social and political events of his day, it doesn’t mean we have to see him that way, or even that that is the right way to see him.

Nietzsche is usually viewed as floating above all petty human affairs, but Losurdo shows how he actually was deeply informed about contemporary politics, and directed much of his energy to addressing them. Rather than making the picture more complicated, this clarifies things, and makes Nietzsche’s otherwise bizarre and perplexing doctrines crystal clear. Even those who have been ensconced in everything Nietzsche for years will feel like they are encountering him for the first time. Losurdo says that the phenomenon of modern revolution, beginning in 1789 in France, continuing in 1848 with revolutions all over Europe, and the Paris Commune (which Nietzsche had a special hatred for) a few years later, split all of human history into “just two epochs, the one the champions of the revolution sought to close and the one they sought to open.” Karl Marx, of course, is the foremost philosopher of the epoch seeking to be opened—of the liberation of humanity from degrading hierarchies, exploitation, and alienation, and the book makes the case that Nietzsche is the foremost philosopher for the unequal epoch that they tried to close. We might say that this epoch that the champions of the revolution sought to open, of egalitarianism, was the “abyss” that Nietzsche dreaded so much.

What might his famous saying about the abyss—that we should be careful when looking into it, lest it looks also into us—really mean? If the abyss is this rising tide of modern revolution, it represents the freedom, humanity and liberation of millions of people, and Nietzsche is perhaps saying that if we look at them, and see them as equals, then “they” will drag “us” down to “their” level, the era of aristocracy will be over, humanity and culture will become leveled and massified, nothing great will ever happen again, and so existence will become worthless. If the masses are the abyss, we cannot look at them, without them spreading their commonness, and so their nothingness, their lack of particularity and quality, into “us,” his reader-converts.

If, as socialists often say, the modern world offers us a choice between socialism or barbarism, what then? Socialism is the epoch on the verge of being opened, and barbarism is the epoch on the verge of being closed. What Marx and Nietzsche both share is a conviction that this moment of the modern crisis of liberal bourgeois freedom requires us to face who we are, to fully be who we are, socialist or barbarian, one or the other, without the half measure of liberal democracy, which satisfies nobody except the bourgeoisie—and it doesn’t even really satisfy them. Marx despised the bourgeoisie for obvious reasons—their exploitation of the proletariat. Nietzsche also despised the bourgeoisie, but not because they exploited the lower class—rather because they weren’t worthy of their elevated social position, they had none of the grandeur of the aristocracy of old.

Nietzsche’s strategy for defending the epoch of inequality against the socialists who sought to close it was twofold. He wants to undermine the good conscience of socialist revolution by linking it with ressentiment. And he wants to minimize the bad conscience of barbarism, by proposing a moral vision beyond Christian/socialist (for Nietzsche they are scarcely distinguishable) conceptions of good and evil, so that a modern aristocracy can arise that views hierarchy and domination as natural and good. After all, Nietzsche’s main beef with Christianity is that it gave humanity a bad conscience—and the problem with a bad conscience is that it makes you feel bad when you do bad things. Nietzsche’s new aristocrats would be proper aristocrats—they wouldn’t feel pity for the unfortunate lower people, they would be glad in their privilege. Rather than checking their privilege, they would revel in it. “Carefree, mocking, violent,” in Nietzsche’s words, is, supposing that truth is a woman and thus loves only a warrior, how truth itself wants us to be.

So Nietzsche does not simply want to defend the epoch the revolutionaries are seeking to close. He agrees with the revolutionaries that that epoch was inadequate—but it was inadequate not because it suppressed the freedom of the mass of people, but rather because the aristocracy of that epoch were bourgeois imposters, who needed to be replaced by a new class of aristocrats, ones worthy of their status. Nietzsche has as much contempt for the lower class of people, who he delights in calling rough, ugly, and stupid, as he does for the liberal bourgeois fools pretending that they deserve their higher status. Nietzsche wants to initiate an epoch in which the ruling class is actually worthy of ruling, not like the liberal, as well as conservative, bourgeoisie of the time.

This is the point of the ubermensch—an aristocratic figure who feels himself worthy of ruling, and who the lower people also feel is deserving of ruling, and so they won’t have as much ressentiment towards them. The ubermensch, indeed, is the cure for ressentiment—the ubermensch is a way of being which is ressentiment-proof. The ubermensch feels no ressentiment, and so nobody will feel ressentiment towards him. Nietzsche and Marx both see bourgeois liberal freedom as a pathetic lie—and that is what fuels ressentiment. Marx wants communism, which would eliminate social classes, and thus the main cause of ressentiment, and Nietzsche wants a kind of civilized barbarism—or, what he would prefer, an aristocratic rebelliousness, which would neutralize ressentiment. An aristocrat who rebels against aristocracy, outflanking rebelliousness from the lower class, rebelling before they do, and with more style and power, so that they don’t even have to bother. Why bother rebelling, when the rulers do it even better than you possibly could?

Nietzsche seeks to provide a philosophical scaffolding for the psychology of an aristocratic rebel in a variety of ways, but mainly with two key ideas—the ubermensch and the eternal return of the same. If the theory of the ubermensch is true, then there is as much of a difference between higher and lower types of men as there are between homo sapiens and lower mammals. If that’s the case, then the higher men should feel no bad conscience in opposing the rising tide of socialism, since it is just fueled by millions of qualitatively lesser, but quantitatively greater, creatures. And the theory of the eternal return of the same can act to reassure the higher class of men that the socialist revolution is an imaginary delusion, since nothing fundamentally ever changes, and the hierarchy of capitalism is just another mode of the older hierarchies of slavery and feudalism, and any revolution seeking for a non-hierarchical social relation is misguided, and so should be opposed without hesitation. Marx said that the point of philosophy is to change the world, and Nietzsche is saying that the point of philosophy is to realize that the world cannot be changed.

Marx’s strategy was to systematically analyze and critique capitalism as a social, metaphysical, and epistemological totality. He seems to have believed that once this was done, the mass of people exploited and alienated by capitalist relations would be able to engage with genuine reality, achieve true consciousness, and collectively move through history together as self-actualized subjects. Marx wanted to get us to realize the ways in which capitalism enchained us, and trusted that this would suffice to get the workers of the world to throw off their chains—and once that happened, their dormant humanity would flower.

So his message was essentially critical and negative—the deconstruction of capitalism—with the belief that once the chains of capital were laid bare, the mass of people would shake off the chains and move forward together in a positive way. Marx was, essentially, a critic of capitalism. He performed a “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” as he himself put it. He totally negated reality as he found it. For Nietzsche, this negation of what exists is a fundamentally religious impulse—fleeing from reality as it is, in favor of some utopian alternative. He condemned socialism for many of the same reasons he condemned Christianity. He saw them both as springing from the same sources of ressentiment, which was the basis of nihilism, the slave revolt in morals, and the rule of the Last Man.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, called for the total affirmation of life, and called himself a “yes-saying spirit,” who refused nihilism or pessimism. But what exactly was Nietzsche saying yes to? He was saying yes to inequality, hierarchy and aristocracy, and tried to give it a good conscience, freeing us from the guilt and pity that Christian and socialist moralism had infected us with. His philosophy was positive, seeking to affirm what exists, by freeing us of the baggage that prevents us from doing that. Marx’s vision was more negative, but in service of a positive vision—the liberation of humanity from alienation and exploitation. Nietzsche’s vision was positive, but in service to a negative vision of an aristocracy supported by an exploited mass of lower people. This is perhaps why, though Nietzsche’s philosophy is positive and affirmative, it has been so confusing and interpreted so differently by so many. As Losurdo demonstrates, Nietzsche was always careful to not quite say exactly what he meant, or what he wanted us to affirm, and to use metaphor and an astonishing range of literary tricks.

Marx, of course, wanted a revolution. That’s the entire point of Marxism—it is a philosophy for changing the world. Nietzsche did not want a revolution—what he wanted was a “transvaluation.” A revolution sweeps away everything existing and builds something new. A transvaluation keeps the existing order, but gets us to think about it differently. A transvaluation seeks to get us to look “beyond good and evil,” to see how what has been considered evil is actually good, and what has been considered good, is actually evil. Nietzsche wants his readers to view wickedness with a good conscience, to have the courage to be evil. In his words, “to live dangerously!”

Nietzsche, who liked to say he was descended by Polish aristocrats (and toyed with the idea of changing his name to the more Polish ‘Nietzky’) often compared himself to the Polish astronomer Copernicus, and referred to his philosophical project as a Copernican revolution, which was a reference both to Copernicus himself, and to Kant, who described his Critique of Pure Reason as a Copernican Revolution in epistemology. But that was not enough for Nietzsche, who dismissed Kant as a mere scientific philosophical laborer, not a visionary like Schopenhauer and himself. What Nietzsche wanted was a Copernican revolution in values, just like Kant’s epistemological revolution was a way of changing perspectives on subject and object in the creation of knowledge and understanding, Nietzsche’s was a way of changing perspective on what is considered good and evil, and to model a way of being in the future that incorporated this new perspective.

To begin, Losurdo situates Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in the political climate of the time, especially the Franco-Prussian War, and what that conflict represented to the young Nietzsche. That book has a strange place within the rest of his philosophy, because the main ideas in it, the distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian categories, remain central themes for his entire life. But that book was a complete failure at the time, and even those who like it find much in it that is perplexing. One never knows just quite what to make of that first book of Nietzsche’s. Thinking about it in terms of a direct connection with the Franco-Prussian War, as Losurdo does, is perhaps the key to understanding it.

As is well known, Nietzsche distinguishes between the forces of Apollo and Dionysos in the book. For Losurdo, Apollo represents Bonapartist France (the new Rome) and Dionysus represents Germany. Apollo represents the kind of spread of civilization that Bonapartist France embodied, but it was lacking culture, it was homogenized. Dionysus represents the deeper, more profound German culture, closer to ancient Greece than ancient Rome. This is a key distinction for Nietzsche, between civilization on the one hand and culture on the other, and he always advocated for the primacy of culture over civilization. Civilization was a low, common thing, while culture was high and rare. Nietzsche praises the tragic view of life that the ancient Greeks had, in comparison to the ancient Romans, yes, but also in comparison to the Enlightenment outlook of the modern world.

He’s always unclear about just what this terrible tragic truth is, and it has always been interpreted vaguely as just the inextricable dissatisfaction of human existence. He doesn’t say what this tragic terrible truth is, but he is clear that it needs to be affirmed, and the fact that the ancient Greeks did affirm it is what made them superior to all other people, past or present, especially in the areas of art, culture, philosophy and science. But Losurdo submits that the “terrible truth” that Nietzsche talks about needing to affirm is either slavery (the basis of ancient Greek culture) or at least the rejection of egalitarianism—that culture requires hierarchy and rank ordering in order to reach its most profound heights, which is really all that Nietzsche cared about.

Modern Germany was Dionysus (embracing terrible truths, producing genuine culture, creation through destruction, etc). Bonapartist France was Apollo—order, law, neo-Latin, civilizational spread, homogenizing. The Birth of Tragedy can be viewed as a piece of nationalistic propaganda for the German spirit to embrace its anti-modern, counter-enlightenment essence—first and foremost by affirming the terrible truth of the necessity of human slavery, the plantations of the German Junkers being one major example. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck himself was a Junker, from a noble landed family in Prussia who owned serfs with few rights—and as Losurdo shows, Nietzsche was deeply disappointed with Chancellor Bismarck, and with Kaiser Wilhelm I, and the Second Reich as a whole, for being all too ready to accommodate the rising tide of worker’s rights.

The Second Reich, for Nietzsche, was simply too liberal. Bismarck and Wilhelm were not rulers worthy of their ancestors or of power itself, in Nietzsche’s view. Hierarchy and noble aristocracy were a necessity for the creation of culture, for Nietzsche, and nobody obsessed over culture, from poetry to music to philosophy to science, quite like the neoclassical Germans of the 18th and 19th centuries. In a fragment from one of his early notebooks from this period, he says that “life is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon,” and also that in order to exist at all “we need art at every moment.” If life only has meaning and value as an aesthetic or cultural phenomenon, as he always believed, then any social injustice whatsoever is acceptable in order to produce a a powerful aesthetic phenomenon.

When he was writing The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche viewed Bonapartist France as the agent of Apollo and democracy, of the flattening out of civilization, of spreading wretched modern comforts, sinking culture into the abyss of egalitarianism, rather than building it up hierarchically, and bringing degeneracy and so on. He viewed Germany as the modern Athens, which was the hotbed of culture, of poetry and music, that could spark a renewal of the human spirit. But as time went on, and the influence of social democracy in Germany after the war became more widespread, he abandoned Germany as the hope for a rebirth of the noble aspects of the human spirit in the modern world.

It is well known that Nietzsche spent much of the 1880s living abroad in Italy and Switzerland, rather than home in Germany. The picture becomes clear that he opposed the social democratic measures in Germany at that time and wanted no part of it and chose to live abroad because of that.

His vision for Germany as the modern Athens, with Dionysus as its spirit, and otium et bellum (leisure and war) as his ideals, was quickly betrayed by the reality of life after winning the war. There was no otium, there was instead an effort to appease workers. Wilhelm I paid his respects to labor, calling himself “the first worker” of Germany, which Nietzsche denounced as shocking “indecency.” Work should be totally foreign to a culturally ascendant society—leisure and war should be all that anyone who is worth anything bothers with, and work should be done by one large lower class only, so the higher class could pursue nobler things, like the creation of culture and art that could bring about a spiritual renewal.

Nietzsche began to see Napoleon himself as the figure most connected with the best aspects of ancient Greece, rather than the hopeless German leaders. Napoleon would never refer to himself as the “first worker,” for he knew that he was a god. If there could not be leisure, then maybe war was what was needed. In the last period of his career, after he had abandoned hope in Germany, he began to make his infamous pronouncements about great wars of the future on the horizon. Nietzsche valued Napoleon in terms of knowing that human culture required hierarchy and subjugation in order to reach its most profound heights. He viewed Napoleon as a figure out of time, plucked from the ancient world and dropped into the modern world. And being “untimely” in this way was one of the highest compliments Nietzsche could give.

He thought in order to rescue the best elements of the past, and prepare for a worthwhile human future, we had to be out of step with the modern present condition of things, because they were degenerate and made us small. Napoleon was thus a grand figure in the ancient style, who sought to bring back ancient noble tendencies, like massive war and slavery, into the modern world. Napoleon, far from ending slavery, sought to maintain it in the French colonies. He also swept away the egalitarian social justice mania of the French revolution. He ended the French Revolution, which was one of the greatest calamities in history for Nietzsche, so of course Napoleon would be his hero. Napoleon, for Nietzsche, came to represent the last hope for nobility, and a respectable inequality, to exist in the modern world—not in spite of the fact that he started wars that killed millions of people, but because of it.

Losurdo notes that Napoleon also began the spread of punitive institutions across Europe for the poor and sick, meant to “free the public” from the “disgusting image of infirmities and misery,” a goal that Nietzsche wholeheartedly agreed with. As we will see, a big part of Nietzsche’s energy was devoted to the problematic effect that the infirm and miserable, what he called those “whose lives turned out badly,” had on the strong, powerful, and happy.

Nietzsche’s hostility to dialectics is well-known. He equates dialectics with the figure of Socrates, whose existence itself Nietzsche viewed as a problem, an error, a kind of world-historical ugliness and foolishness quite unlike anything before or since. In the first chapter of Twilight of the Idols called “The Problem of Socrates” he demonstrates his mastery of one of his favorite virtues—contempt!—in writing about his greatest enemy. “I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as agents of the dissolution of Greece, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek.” He goes on: “Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble. One knows, one sees for oneself, how ugly he was.” With these views of Socrates established, Nietzsche then offers a big picture view, which is so good that it must be quoted in full: “With Socrates Greek taste undergoes a change in favor of dialectics: what is really happening when that happens? It is above all the defeat of a nobler taste; with dialectics the rabble gets on top. Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners, one was compromised by it. Young people were warned against it. And all such presentation of one’s reasons was regarded with mistrust. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one’s goods. What has first to have itself proved is of little value.”

Socrates himself was ugly and decadent, and he defined the shift on the world-historical stage from the age of heroes to an age where dialectics played a central role. So dialectics is a symptom of the kind of decadence that Socrates exemplified–as a way of life, as a cultural tendency, it is decadent. But as a tool, as a scalpel, it can be the greatest weapon to use against your enemies. Nietzsche’s enemies were, after all, the revolutionaries and socialists of history, and they have always been dialecticians, from Socrates to Marx to Hegel. Losurdo says of Nietzsche’s method that “the study of such different historical periods and contexts did not lead to a loss of focus, for Nietzsche constantly sought to place individual peculiarities and details in a framework that made sense as a whole.” This is the very essence of dialectics–achieving a constant synthesis of part and whole, individual peculiarity and sensible whole. There is even a dialectical aspect to Nietzsche’s immoralism– which is about re-evaluating the “affects of hatred, envy, greed, and power-lust, as the conditioning affects of life, as elements that fundamentally and essentially need to be present in the total economy of life.” All those individual affects are to be evaluated not according to this or that unpleasant instance of them, but as they relate to the totality. This, again, is the essence of dialectical thinking.

In this way, Nietzsche wielded dialectics in on a world-historical scale, to shape it to his liking, like a dialectical Napoleon. Nietzsche, at the end of the 19th century, wanted to solidify tendencies of reaction to the Enlightenment from below at the end of the previous century, the populist Enlightenment, which brought common sense reason up to the heights of power. This is the essence of equality and democracy, averageness elevated to supreme heights. Against this, he synthesized all the reactionary tendencies of the 19th century into the dialectical opposite–an Enlightenment from above, that he set against the previous Enlightenment from below. Losurdo describes the Enlightenment from below as having “aimed to delegitimize and challenge the power of the ruling classes.” Against this, Nietzsche set his Enlightenment from above, which synthesized all the elements and tendencies of reaction to this earlier Enlightenment. Losurdo describes Nietzsche’s Enlightenment from above as having “scrutinized and mercilessly exposed the fanaticism, the credulity, all the weak elements of plebeian movements of revolt.” This was the essence of Nietzsche’s attack on democracy and socialism, and he used dialectics, which he despised, but respected as a scalpel, to do it.

In all of this, we can see Nietzsche’s unwavering commitment to defending inequality and attacking equality at all times. One of the main ways that Nietzsche justified his commitment to inequality was his belief that the members of the vast lower classes were less sensitive to pain of all kinds. This meant they could be made to suffer more, without necessarily being more unhappy for it. The lower man wouldn’t really know how much he was suffering and being exploited anyway, and his labor was benefiting the higher type of man so much as to give him the leisure to create art and culture. Hierarchy and subjection, for Nietzsche, were thus natural, necessary, and almost zero sum—everybody wins.

The thesis of The Birth of Tragedy, his first book, was one that he never abandoned—that life is only redeemed as an aesthetic phenomenon. The aesthetic sense reaches its peak only in rare aristocratic artists, whose existence is made possible by the suffering of a vast mass of lower men, which isn’t really even aware of its own suffering—this is the logic underlying Nietzsche’s political philosophy of the aristocratic rebel. Plato’s ideal political system was an intellectual aristocracy, and Nietzsche’s is something of an aristocracy of sufferers, whose genius lies in their suffering, because only through their suffering, and the art it produces, is nature itself redeemed. The main qualification that Plato’s rulers needed was being able to pass a lot of tests, the main qualification that Nietzsche’s leaders needed was to experience the kind of suffering that created art, but to do it with a joyful nature that would produce affirmative, inspiring art that could renew the spirit.

The lower man isn’t aware of his own suffering, because he lacks even the sensitivity for this, and neither is the higher man aware of the suffering of the lower man, and if he is, Nietzsche is quick to remind his reader-converts (which I am of course one of!) that their first duty is to guard against compassion, because it will throw them off their pursuit of cultural creativity, by distracting them with the unpleasant, but necessary, social realities making art possible. All that the higher man needs to know is that the labor of the lower man has enabled his own leisure, which has produced culture. To look more closely than that is to look into the abyss, and to invite chaos and uncertainty.

Nietzsche often extols the virtues of a kind of childlike innocence as an important quality of the ubermensch, and this is probably the point of it, to ignore unpleasant social questions, to treat it as necessary background to more important things, like artistic creativity. This is perhaps the meaning of his remark about the tragic age of the Greeks, that they were, compared to the more plebeian Socrates, superficial, but they were superficial because of their deepness. Some superficiality is due to being blind, but some is due to being able to see all too well. His critique of Socrates is largely that he tries to see too deeply behind everything, and this reveals the terrible truth which the Greeks before Socrates, who represents the birth of the kind of extreme Enlightenment rationality that Nietzsche always opposed, knew better than to examine too deeply. This is why Socrates is the villain of The Birth of Tragedy—he marks the end of the tragic wisdom of the Pre-Socratic Greek art and philosophy, with his rationalistic optimism, the belief that the world can be understood, and improved. Nietzsche would counter this with the tragic knowledge, the terrible truth, that all there is to understand of the world is that egalitarianism is a myth, and culturally generative leisure made possible by a subhuman lower class is the only meaning of human life.

But, again, this terrible truth did not even have to be so bad, Nietzsche thought, since lower men were hardly sensitive enough to know they were suffering anyway. The higher men, meanwhile, were more like Nietzsche himself. He suffered profoundly all his life, from his Father dying when he was only six, to a lifetime of dealing with severe headaches that left him in bed for days on end, horrible problems with his eyesight and growing blindness, a famously weak stomach, among many other maladies. He certainly must have seen himself as the pinnacle of the higher man, and for good reason—has anyone ever been more sensitive, physically and mentally, than him? That’s what the “master race” he envisioned was—a class of people so sensitive that they could barely get out of bed. He envisioned a race of people like him who were so sensitive that they could hardly exist, and yet were able to produce the most profound works of culture that the world has ever seen. Such people would be very few in number, but their existence required the toil and labor of thousands or millions of lower men, who not only didn’t realize what they were missing, in terms of lack of access to the higher life, but because they were a lower type, had less sensitivity to the pain they were suffering.

Nietzsche’s career is usually divided into three parts: the early part, which is focused on The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations; the middle part, in books like The Dawn and Human, All Too Human, which is more in keeping with Enlightenment values and the modern world; and his final phase, where his mature, complete, dark philosophy is developed, in books like Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols, and which is very much a rejection of modern liberalism in all forms. For Losurdo, the middle enlightenment period is more of a detour or an experiment than a really new phase. It was a testing ground and a way for his convictions, which never really changed, to become even stronger because they were challenged. An aphorism from The Dawn titled “To What Extent the Thinker Loves His Enemy,” expresses this well: “Make it a rule never to withhold or conceal from yourself anything that may be thought against your own thoughts. Vow it! This is the essential requirement of honest thinking. You must undertake such a campaign against yourself every day. A victory and a conquered position are no longer your concern, but that of truth, and your defeat also is no longer your concern!”

But really what he was doing during this time was figuring out how to change from supporting Germany to rejecting Germany because of its increasing socialism, and seeing Napoleon instead as the true path for modern nobility.

The Nietzsche of the middle period, which The Gay Science is a road out of, leads back into himself. “How one becomes who one is,” and “becoming what you are” is a central theme of all of his work, and Losurdo shows this process in terms of the philosopher’s first period of an artist’s metaphysics, which was more nationalistic and really not too far away from being military propaganda, through the critical and self-critical period that entertained notions of socialism and egalitarianism and a critique of capitalism, into the mature, final phase that proposed a full philosophy of neo-aristocracy.

As much as Nietzsche despised the church, he held the modern state in even lower regard. The church at least is based on a spiritual hierarchy, the state is based on perfunctory competence, luck, whatever other low things. Losurdo shows how Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity can perhaps best be attributed to his view that the religion opened up space for socialism in the modern world, because of its blind emphasis on compassion and empathy and so on. In order to maintain the hardness of soul and heart necessary to pursue colonialism and aristocracy and maybe even slavery in the modern world, compassion needed to be minimized, and Christianity encourages us to blindly love the whole world, which can be compatible in a way with forms of socialism.

Marx, of course, also critiqued Christianity, but for the opposite reason. While Nietzsche’s problem was that it encouraged soft-hearted socialist tendencies, Marx’s was that it got people to accept inequality on earth, because of the promise of equality and happiness in heaven.

Christianity and socialism both, for Nietzsche, had the common problem of using blame to explain problems—others or yourself, and being motivated by ressentiment in both cases. Socialists take revenge against the capitalists, Christians take revenge against themselves, against their own sinfulness.

Marx had no use whatsoever for religion, viewing it, again, as a way of duping the lower classes into accepting temporary inequality on earth for the promise of equality in heaven. But this is precisely where Nietzsche does find some use for religion, as Losurdo points out. Nietzsche thinks that it will be useful for the aristocratic order he is advocating to use religion as a tool to keep the lower classes docile, to put them to sleep so they could do the necessary toil for helping higher men produce culture, without asking too many questions. For Nietzsche, atheism was a mark of distinction only for the higher men, while for Marx, atheism was a universal necessity.

Nietzsche also despised the tendency of slavery and freedom to become mixed in this new form of bourgeois freedom provided by the modern liberal state. He did not like socialism because of its emphasis on labor—labor was a thoroughly modern idea in this sense, the result of not quite slavery, but not quite freedom. All work was slavery, that was the aristocratic view Nietzsche held.

All labor was really just slavery—it was both a socialist delusion to think it could be made good if done without the heavy hand of capitalist exploitation, and a bourgeois delusion to think you could have a middle class job as a wage slave and find anything other than a miserable abyss. His view was that labor is inseparable from slavery, but slavery made possible the kind of high leisure or otium of the ancient Greeks that allowed them to produce such profound culture, so it was justified. For Nietzsche, all work should be done by a vast lower class, and a small aristocracy benefits from this, and use their leisure to create culture. Work had no value in itself, and if not confined to a tightly controlled lower class, would actively impedes culture, the only thing of real value, from being created.

In a key aphorism in The Dawn, in my opinion his best book, though one that is not discussed very often, called “The Impossible Class,” Nietzsche makes his view of wage slavery, and really all labor, clear. He thinks it is a delusion that work could ever be anything other than dehumanizing. “To the devil,” he says, “with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of the machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations—the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible?” All aspects of bourgeois capitalism are condemned here—the wage slaves themselves getting exploited, and the exploiters themselves for caring only about getting as rich as possible. Nietzsche saw that capitalism was alienating on both ends—for the working class and also for the bourgeois class. Trying to make this work was an illusion—just as was a socialist world of egalitarian justice.

For Marx, work can have inherent value. Man is oppressed by labor because in capitalism “the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.” Labor thus is alienated from our will, and forced upon us, confronting us like an object. Marx thinks that this is not due to an inherent property of labor itself, but because of capitalist dynamics at work. This is why Marx says that “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Labor is not forced upon us, but is our free choice, so we do different things for a short time each day, rather than one repetitive thing all day. By doing this, we can all be happy.

Nietzsche meanwhile rejects all of this. This would just be allowing all of life to be infected by the low status activity of work, dragging all society down to one mediocre level. He believed that labor is no different from slavery, and thinking that the two belong to separate categories is a delusion of modern liberals, socialists, and communists. In order to not get infected by slavery/labor, men of value and sense needed to be kept totally separate, in a neoclassical world of otium.

Already in the 1880s, he was clear about the limitations of both liberalism and conservatism, as well of course of democratic socialism. He appealed to what he called “free spirits,” whom he took pains to distinguish from anarchists, who he calls “scribbling slaves of democratic taste and its modern ideas.” His followers would be free to reject both modern conservatism and liberalism, in favor of what he called a “Party of Life,” which would promote the type of the aristocratic rebel, who was neither liberal nor conservative, but a kind of synthesis of both, that transcends both.

Nietzsche viewed revolution as to some extent desirable, because it would sweep away a lot of social inertia and detritus and make way for new experiments with different ways of being. Liberalism and conservatism were obsolete in his view and not capable of meeting the challenges of the time. He was writing in the most revolutionary of times. The French Revolution still was casting a long shadow, but more so the revolutions of 1848 all around Europe, and the American Civil War were fresh in his mind. He knew that the revolt of the masses was the key question of social and political thinking. He viewed social democracy as an inevitable part of the modern world, and the ruling class alone having the power to stop it, but not in a direct, repressive way.

This is why he desired a new kind of aristocracy or ruling class, but the party of life for free spirits, who do not simply try to preserve the old order or to crash down the upsurge, but who also would not try to be moderate and appease the egalitarian sentiments of social democracy. This new power would not be based on mere brute repression of the upsurge of social democracy. Rather he thought that the disingenuousness of this upsurge must be realized and used to control it. Anything that seeks a great change like this does so because it is insecure in itself, and to some extent ashamed of itself, while anything that stays what it is does so because it knows what it is. Nietzsche wanted a new type of politics that would get the masses to accept their degraded position as natural, inevitable, and even preferable to some alternative.

So his formula for a new type of rulership to deal with the unique problems of the modern world was an elite that was worthy of its privilege. He thought that the main causes of revolution on the part of the mass of people was that they felt that their rulers were illegitimate. This is especially the case with capitalist rulers and the bourgeoisie as a class who had very little culture and sophistication and did not really even enjoy their wealth and power and did not seem to really deserve it because they had no cultivation or real nobility. He thinks that people desire to know their place and to serve, but if there is a system that promotes rulers who don’t really deserve to rule then the mass of people will realize that on some level and react against it.

So how can there be aristocrats who seem to and deserve their status and privilege? That is the key political and social question that he focused on for his whole career. And if you look at our current situation I think one of the reasons that there is this popular uprising against the ruling class is because of this reason. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to take just two of endless examples personify ruling class figureheads and power and privilege but they do not deserve it in anyway. Plenty of people view Hillary Clinton as uninspiring and having accomplished really nothing. And plenty of people view Donald Trump the same way as being a fraud basically who is handed everything. Yet Trump won and Hillary didn’t to some extent because he appeared to enjoy himself, and that creates a kind of legitimacy in itself—if the people see you feeling comfortable and confident with your power and enjoying your power they will on some level assume that you deserve that power and will be less likely to want to rise against you.

He thought that egalitarianism was a myth, and that human existence required some kind of differentiation, but he thought that meaningful differentiation was only vertical and not horizontal. Horizontal differentiation is no differentiation at all. So could there be a form of aristocracy which did not trigger the resentment of the masses and which was not based on resentment on the part of the aristocracy itself? Could this power of resentment in politics and society somehow be neutralized by a new form of aristocracy that was charismatic enough and noble enough to overcome that kind of mutual resentment. This is why he wanted to rehabilitate the notion of nobility for the modern world, he knew that it was absurd to our ears now because everything has become so democratized and leveled down and massified.

Yet nobility is also in inextricable part of human existence and culture and politics and society. Just like when he has the madman in the gay science pronounce the death of God, the point was not to celebrate the death of God but rather pose it as a problem, so to the lack of mobility in the modern world, and I’m thinking of the chapter and beyond Knievel called what is noble, was an attempt to salvage this ancient concept for the modern world. He did not like how these good things like God and nobility lost all their value to us in the modern world because of our increased knowledge of science in the enlightenment and so on. This new knowledge was good in the sense that it freed us from the bad elements of religion and so on, but this freedom was a gift and a curse because it could open up too much freedom the horizon would be wiped away and we would just be falling into infinite nothingness.

One of the main themes is the need for a horizon, pointing to the distance that we can look to and orient ourselves. The mass of people want and need a horizon, but today all we know how to do is wipe away horizons and constantly destroy and empty things out which leaves us in the condition of falling endlessly without knowing what direction we’re going in as a madman describes in to get science, and the attitudes of the people he talks to in the passage are absurd and ironic. So how can we have a knot absurd and not ironic Engagement with things like God and nobility in the modern world once we know so much and once all distinctions have been wiped away or thrown into doubt? Does knowledge always lead to absurdity?

So the people want an end to the irony and absurdity which they adopt because there is no Horizon and there is no direction, and the only thing that can end this irony and absurdity and that can bring about a new horizon is a hierarchy. In Nietzsche’s view aristocracy was the best kind, but one that was rebellious rather than merely intellectual. Plato‘s ideal republic of course was an intellectual aristocracy, but those people were anything but rebellious, they were completely controlled by state meritocracy and technocracy and not allowed to really rule until they were 50 and had gone through the most grueling training which really set them of their individuality and strengths. Perhaps the only way to have a form of aristocracy that can be considered legitimate in the modern world is to be rebellious. Because what is more absurd and ironic then an aristocratic rebel? Isn’t aristocracy precisely the opposite of rebelliousness? Perhaps the rebellious aristocrat is doing the work for the people in being ironic and absurd on their behalf for them so that they don’t have to do anything but accept and submit.

Nietzsche made the analysis of slave revolts central to his philosophy, but up to now that was never taken quite seriously in connection with the events of his historical time. Losurdo is rightly perplexed that we haven’t taken him at his word, that he was actually talking about real slavery in the modern world, and not just using metaphors and doing academic moral philosophy. Indeed his untimely meditations, which he never really turned his back on, where largely about the need to break away from out of touch scholarship and engage with the more meaningful profound questions of the present and the future. Nietzsche takes the arguments made by John C. Calhoun and other theorists of slavery seriously, in terms of how they viewed slavery as easier than modern capitalist labor, less strict hours and so on, and the idea that an employer just rents you and so has less incentive to treat you well, but an owner owns you and so has to keep you in better condition.

What does the thesis of the Birth of Tragedy mean, that existence is an aesthetic phenomenon, really mean? It means that morality must be sacrificed to beauty, meaning slavery must be legitimized as the only way to produce conditions that can create the kind of high flowering of aesthetics and beauty and culture and so on that he never really abandoned his belief in as the absolute good.

Suffering was Nietzsche’s superpower, so that was the superpower of the ubermensch. We could use his own dictum here, that there are no philosophies, only philosophers, against him. He knew what suffering felt like and could describe it in a way that was far more advanced than anyone had ever done before in quite that way. As the following extract of a poem from The Gay Science shows, the author was basically anticipating the mass psychology of the incel in striking detail:

“Here I lie with intestinal blight,
Bedbugs advancing;
Over there, still noise and light;
I hear them dancing.

She promised—she is late—
She would be mine;
But like a dog I wait,
And there’s no sign.

She swore again and again:
Was it by rote?
Does she run after all men,
Just like a goat?”

He wrote about suffering with a poet’s style, a psychologist’s insight, and a philosopher’s imagination. What else could perhaps his most famous line, “that which does not kill me makes me stronger,” mean, but that he thought suffering was a superpower? He’s saying that suffering builds strength, so the more suffering you have, the stronger and more powerful you become. The noblest men are the ones who suffer most, and their suffering produces monumental cultural achievement, which he must have felt he was the supreme example of, and for good reason.

The problem with egoism, as Thomas Hobbes said, is that we always overvalue ourselves because we see our own self firsthand but others at a remove. We could say the same about suffering, that we overvalue our own, because we experience our own suffering first hand, and we only see traces and appearances of the suffering of others. But if the capacity to suffer is so rare, which is the basis of his whole ubermensch theory, that the higher men are higher precisely because they are more susceptible to suffering, which produces good culture, then how come he was able to write with such universal appeal about it, how come so many countless readers felt like he looked deep within their soul? Doesn’t the very popularity of his message of elitism show how common this is? Don’t we all suffer equally, after all? If he could write about suffering, and be so understood in expressing all its subtleties, doesn’t this produce a universality that negates his attack on democratic universals and rights and so on? Doesn’t the popularity and success of his elitist argument against the mindless masses prove that the masses aren’t so hopeless after all—that some of them, maybe many of them, were able to read him and find so much of themselves in him? Indeed, over 150,000 copies of Zarathustra were included along with basic supplies and rations for German soldiers in World War One.

A word about Schopenhauer’s relation to all this. One of the main points of disagreement between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer was about his pessimism. Losurdo helpfully contextualIzes Schopenhauer’s pessimism to show its role as an anti-revolutionary measure, that simply changing the social order wouldn’t change human misery, because it is an essential part of existence itself. Nietzsche likes the anti-revolutionary aspect of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, but thinks that we should embrace and say yes to life because of its wickedness rather than doing a massive cope like Schopenhauer. The fact that human misery, slavery, is part of life, is good, because it always has been, and everything endlessly recurs anyway, and amor fati is the correct view of that—and it is good because it enables great artists to produce great works and great men to do power politics. This should, for Nietzsche, all be actively incorporated into life in an all-encompassing, unapologetic, affirmative, joyful way. It should not be an occasion to retreat from the world and try to transcend the will of the world through music, as it was for Schopenhauer. Rather, music should be directly political, wielded as a political tool, to achieve the visionary ethical-political aim. For Schopenhauer, music was how we escaped the wretchedness of the world—for Nietzsche, it was how we celebrated it.

Music should be revolutionary! Nietzsche hated revolution, but he loved music—and he loved music because it was revolutionary. He hated Christian-democratic-socialist revolution because it had no music to it—only the roar of the masses, who Nietzsche despised, there’s no doubt about that. Reading Marx, you get the sense that he really cares about humanity, and the suffering and exploitation of the working day—you get none of that from Nietzsche. If anything, you get nothing but scorn, contempt, and ridicule for those people from Nietzsche. But what you do get from Nietzsche is the feeling that he is talking to you. He cares about you, not about this or that person in general, but you yourself. He shows he cares not by writing with understanding and compassion about the working day, as Marx does, but by writing with the kind of casual psychological insight that can make you feel like you’re really being seen for the first time—shining rays of light onto you yourself, in a way that nobody else has ever quite cared enough to bother doing.

Nietzsche’s mentor, the great historian Jakob Burckhardt, told Nietzsche after he read The Gay Science, that he wished he would throw his “shafts of light,” as only he could, on ancient history, who knows what he might find? But already in his early book Untimely Meditations, he saw that the historical sense needed to be put to better use than ancient, monumental, antiquarian history—his whole philosophy of history and education are laid out in those essays. His shafts of light were applied to history as it was unfolding, and for Nietzsche that was clearly about one thing—socialist revolution. So he used his shafts of light, that even the great Burckhardt marveled at, in a critical capacity on the historical force of socialist revolution as it was happening. To connect socialist revolution to the slave revolt in morals, of Jesus as well as the Jews, and of Socratism—one long continuum, all one psychological sickness.

It’s now time to ask: what’s the difference between Nietzsche and Marx? Who has the advantage in this final showdown between Right and Left? Losurdo notes how with Nietzsche, there are no neutral territories—nothing is ever set apart from the war, nothing is out of bounds or off limits. Losurdo writes, “in his will and ability to interpret class conflict, however understood, even in morality, religion, and science, in the Socratic ‘syllogism,’ Nietzsche was, in a sense, even more radical and immediately political than Marx, who, though with oscillations and contradictions, seemed to place science in a sphere that at least partially transcended the conflict.” For Marx, science, as well as art, could be neutral territories, categories that transcend power politics. Not so for Nietzsche—he sees his enemy in everything and pursues him everywhere. This is what the Right does today, and what always gives it an edge, despite never really having the mass of people on its side.

Losurdo emphasizes Nietzsche’s attack on “the Socratic syllogism,” the very way of thinking of the revolutionary tendency. This is how ruthlessly Nietzsche pursued his enemy; even into their minds—especially into their minds. Here we can see that Nietzsche was perhaps even more ruthless—and tactical, like all good military men—than Marx, who famously defined his method as “ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Nietzsche’s book Twilight of the Idols means what it says—art, science, and logic, like all idols, are not universal, objective, liberatory forces—they are bound up in subjectivity, power, and ultimately politics, like absolutely everything for Nietzsche. This is still ultimately what rightists today understand more than leftists—that absolutely everything is political, that culture is political, and that power is all that matters, because power is all that really exists. Never give an inch, and don’t worry about what’s right or even what makes sense—worry about power only. We see this all the time on the Right, and it is very much in the spirit of Nietzsche. A Left response to this would need to be able to match their total war approach—but in doing this, wouldn’t Leftists be pulled into the abyss along with them?