Man or Dynamite?

 “If someone does not have a good father, he should acquire one,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote.[1] His own father died when Nietzsche was just five years old, and in accordance with his own axiom, he would have several mentors who became father figures to him, including Jacob Burckhardt, one of the leading historians of the age. When Nietzsche finished The Gay Science, he sent it to Burckhardt, with the note:

“…I am sending you…Die frohliche Wissenschaft (it is so personal, and everything personal is indeed comic.) Apart from this, I have reached a point at which I live as I think, and perhaps I have meanwhile learned really to express what I think.”[2]

Thoughts must be lived first, to achieve a kind of existential materiality, in order to be expressed in a tone that will make them truly resound in the world—the perfect synthesis of substance and style, achieved at last. Nietzsche sought to become a translator of himself—he translated his thoughts into lived life, and his life into his thoughts. As he put it in Human, All Too Human, a book written a few years before The Gay Science: “The thinker—and similarly the artist—who has put the best of himself into his work, experiences an almost malicious joy as he watches the erosion of his body and spirit by time. It is as if he were in a corner watching a thief at his safe, while knowing it is empty, his treasure being elsewhere.”[3] Translation is an indispensable component of revolution, as Walter Benjamin would theorize in his essays several decades after Nietzsche’s death, picking up on and expanding his ideas, but from a more Marxist revolutionary perspective than Nietzsche, as we will see.

The Gay Science is the book when Nietzsche first expressed the revolutionary ideas that would come to define his philosophy, for the layperson as well as the theorist—the overman, the eternal recurrence, the death of God, and more. The book has all the philosophical weight of his later books, but a much brighter style and tone, consistent with its title. He merges his heaviest ideas with a kind of lightness of spirit that makes them a catalyst for imagining new horizons, rather than abysses we lose ourselves in, or anchors to weigh us down.

Referring to how the new philosophers and free spirits who follow him feel about the death of the old gods, Nietzsche says:

“At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea.’”[4]

His open sea is both dangerous and freeing—we can crash and drown in it, because there has never been a sea so open and uncharted as this before, but this is not cause for caution or timidity—rather it should invigorate us. This is the stylistic spirit of The Gay Science, the perfect revolutionary style—facing up to the darkest problems, yet finding potential even in the darkness. It is explosiveness with a light touch—dynamite with a human face. Negativity and potentiality, in perfect harmony.

But what is the essence of this revolutionary style? The little-known Polish philosopher Alfred Seidel (1895-1924) pursued with as much intensity as anyone has. Seidel’s mind was constantly ablaze—he burned others up, and himself, too, with the force of his thoughts. Christian Voller has written one of the best summaries of Seidel’s life and ideas, describing the man as “an exhausting conversation partner: tireless, erratic, and driven by radical pessimism, depressing negativity, and a propensity for pedantry.”[5] And his ideas themselves were also just like this—he lived as he thought, and thought as he lived. He was a living synthesis. Seidel’s existence was simultaneously totally negative and totally focused on potential.

This contradictory nature was not untroubled. Seidel attained Nietzsche’s own famous rendition of himself: “I am no man, I am dynamite!” and his own fuse exploded when he was 29 when he hanged himself.

Living one’s life almost entirely as an embodied thought couldn’t have been easy. Seidel lived to think, he wanted to translate life itself into a thought, and thought into life, which is the essence of revolution—he could never turn this off and just pass a pleasant evening. He was a constant translator, everything he encountered had to be translated into its opposite—thought into life, life into thought, past into future. Translation is a negative activity—finding what words don’t mean, more than what they do mean; shielding words from becoming what they aren’t, rather than positively turning them into what they are. Creative negativity—that’s translation, and also the essence of revolution. The translator is the revolutionary subject.

One night Seidel had dinner with a young Theodor Adorno and his mother at their home. He was such an overwhelming and negative dinner guest that he felt the need to later ask their forgiveness for the “catastrophic condition” he was in that night. Adorno, though a Marxist, was never quite so gung-ho for revolution, and that dinner must have been quite the uncomfortable affair. Adorno’s commitment to revolution came out largely through his aesthetic theory—in sharp contrast to his catastrophic dinner guest, he abhorred any kind of revolutionary vitality in the moment.

His existence was not inherently revolutionary, as those of Seidel (and Benjamin, and Nietzsche) were—but his aesthetic theory, his analysis of the possibilities of form itself, gave perfect philosophical expression to the often half-formed, impulsive, scattered revolutionary tendencies of Seidel, Benjamin, and Nietzsche. Revolution is the materialization of an idea, an idea that must become life. Seidel’s whole existence was revolutionary—yet also profoundly pessimistic and relentlessly negative. In Seidel we can see that the true essence of revolution is not in hope, but rather in decisive negation. Dynamite is hopeful in the negative—one hopes it does as much damage as possible to the current situation. If one is unrelentingly negative, the dynamite can be buried ever deeper—and do as much damage as possible.

Seidel poured himself into his book, Consciousness as Doom, synthesizing Marx with Freud and Nietzsche in a way that sought to finally answer the question—why do revolutions fail? Why have all our best energies not been successful at turning the thought of revolution into living actuality? Why do real conditions of life remain stubbornly untouched by the idea of revolution? Why can we have a universal vision, but never quite achieve it? Why does it always seem to slip further away, despite the feeling of progress? History moves forward, but humanity seems to either stay in place, or even move backwards. As rationality and technological mastery increases, the potential for social fulfillment seems to decrease. Is there any way out of this dead-end? This was Seidel’s question, and it is still our question today.

Seidel was an active member of the socialist student union in Heidelberg, Germany. In 1920, however, he wrote a friend that his “scientific socialism” was “collapsing.”[6] There was just something missing in the socialist movement of the time for him, as there is today. On the one hand, socialism can seem too economistic and dry, too focused on the labor relation and productive forces. On the other, it can sometimes seem too unfocused, too emotional, too concerned with righting all forms of social injustice. It is both too closed and too open, and so ends up nowhere. Scientific socialism is how Marx and Engels distinguished their capitalist critique from other forms of socialism that preceded them in the 19th century, most of which were utopian, romantic, and sentimental with no theory, no mechanism, and no explanatory power.

Seidel’s frustration with scientific socialism led him to develop a critique of the practical value of scientific knowledge, and how, despite its precision and clarity, it can obscure the meaning of history and revolution. Marxism sees all of history as the history of class struggle—that is historical materialism. But what is class struggle, really? Despite being the basis of historical materialism, it is an idea, and the idea is the abolition of class society. That is what the actualization of the idea of Marxism would look like—that would be the thought of Marxism becoming life. But Seidel noticed that Marxism conceived of classless society becoming a historical necessity—the development of the proletariat leading in a causal way to the end of capitalism. This is mechanical, rather than dialectical and historical, materialism. But history is not mechanical, and revolution is certainly not mechanical, not a clean, neat, linear developmental process.[7]

Marxism overcame the humanistic abyss of 19th century socialism by prioritizing objective analysis of the forces of production—but this has definite drawbacks, as Seidel expressed it, with his “scientific socialism” going into “collapse.” What are the “metaphysics of production,” as Adorno would later describe this problem, when discussing Seidel in a lecture in 1965? Revolution is not mechanical, it is explosive—and too often, Marxist theory takes a mechanistic, rather than truly dialectical, approach, in the belief that mechanically developing the forces of production will destroy capitalism. This is materialism, but it isn’t dialectical materialism. Marxism is the philosophy for changing the world—but revolution aims for a better world, and so is also a metaphysical phenomenon, that familiar and explosive goal of turning a thought into life, not just a simple matter of seizing control of productive forces.

If class struggle is the inevitable, mechanical result of historical development, then the idea of class struggle will be treated as an afterthought, an automatic function of history. If it is automatic, it doesn’t have to be imagined, and so will remain an empty signifier. The paradox of historical materialism is that it requires a non-historical, and non-material, dimension, in order to move from thought into life. So even Marxism, the philosophy of revolution which aims to eliminate the suffering and exploitation of the mass of people in their working day, can all too easily leave us alienated. 

Marxism does this not by ignoring material conditions—but by focusing on them exclusively. As Walter Benjamin writes in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History:”

“Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement.”[8]

Benjamin is saying here that the development of productive forces themselves will not carry people along to the promised land—completing the revolutionary promise of historical materialism requires precisely breaking with such simplistic materialism. Historical materialism requires a force that stands outside of history and materiality in order to fulfill its objective—historical materialism is not a self-moving system, and revolutionaries should not see themselves as simply being part of it, along for the ride.[9] Additionally, revolutionaries should be careful in their relationship to the proletariat, neither adopting a kind of humanism that seeks to right all moral injustices, nor painting the lower classes as bastions of moral purity, which they are not. Historical materialism can also take the form of a kind economistic, mechanical determinism—the idea that the proletariat itself is an objective engine of history that will move conditions along of its own accord. Both conceptions of the proletariat—humanistic and mechanistic—are incorrect.

Seidel also critiques historical materialism and scientific socialism as being “almost devoid of any psychology.”[10] Like Nietzsche, he wondered how revolution, the most spirited of things, could be possible in the modern nihilistic world. The modern world is characterized both by revolution—from the French Revolution in 1789, to the revolutions across Europe in 1848—but also by a distinctive, and growing, nihilism, the belief that nothing matters, and nothing is possible. Paradox abounds—the most revolutionary time was also the most nihilistic time. What was to be done about revolution in a nihilistic time? Seidel’s answer is that revolutionary theorists must be radically dialectical: “In his activity, based on his essential nature and from inner necessity, this type must be negative, but against negativity, nihilistic against nihilism.”[11] Negativity must be used as a revolutionary weapon.

Seidel is one of the few thinkers to fully grasp the revolutionary potential of negativity in this way. Why do revolutions fail? Because they are too positive. Historical materialism, scientific socialism, was too positive in the sense that it posited class itself, in an objective sense, as the mechanical motor of history—that the proletariat expanding its productive powers would provide the content needed to spark a successful revolution. In positing this, there is no room for the human subject—and no room for the idea underlying Marxism, which is the abolition of class society. So even Marxism, the science of history, is both abstract and negative—because the goal is to identify class as the material motor of history, but only to eventually destroy it.

Class is not the meaning of history—the meaning of history is to abolish class, not enshrine it. So how do we leave necessary room for the subjective consciousness of the collective proletariat to materialize—but without verging into the kind of sentimentality and empty clichés that doom radical liberalism and social democracy? Through negativity—negativity opens space, while positivity closes things down. Negativity is an opening; positivity is a closing. But it can’t be just any negativity—it has to be revolutionary negativity, negativity with a future. Revolutionary negativity is one that has been negated, or, in Seidel’s terminology, nihilized.

 The trick is to merge this with historical materialism, which, as the science of history, works positively, by positing theses. In essence, Revolutionary theory requires a positivity that has passed through negativity—a positivity which isn’t strictly scientific. Such a dialectical positivity calls to mind Benjamin’s conception of the task of the translator, which is not merely to reproduce the original text: “…a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife.”[12] Translation is thus a revolutionary act, but one defined by its negative quality—finding life in afterlife. Revolution is about a kind of translation—the translation of thought into life. This translation does not come from pure positive life as it is, but from negation, from the afterlife contained within history. The guiding force of revolution is the idea of abolishing class society—it is a negative idea, not a positive one.

The present is empty—we are waiting for revolution, waiting for the Messianic moment in which the future can begin at last. The past is the only thing that can fill the present, but only the negative content of the past—death itself, sacrifice, enslavement, can fill the void, or activate the void of the present. Once the present is activated by being filled in with the negative content of the past, the future explodes out of it. The problem with revolutionary theory, with scientific socialism and historical materialism, is that it has not understood the positive potential of negativity—the explosiveness of negation. And for revolution to become real, it has to be explosive.

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Bison Books, 1996), 195.

[2] Nietzsche to Jakob Burckhardt, Naumburg, August, 1882, in Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996), 190.

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, page 888.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 280.

[5] Christian Voller, “Alfred Seidel and the Nihilisation of Nihilism: A Contribution to the Prehistory of the Frankfurt School,” trans. Jacob Blumenfeld, in The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. by Beverly Best, Werner Bonefeld and Chris O'Kane (SAGE Publishing, 2018), 255.

[6] Ibid., 255.

[7] The method of Marxist analysis is historical materialism, which Louis Althusser describes simply as the “science of history.”  This is a revolutionary approach to history, because it banishes humanism, idealism, and spirit from the understanding of history, so that its material mechanisms—class dynamics and the politics of productive forces—can be discovered and taken hold of. This is what makes historical materialism revolutionary, and makes it dynamite—its lack of humanism and idealism. Humanism isn’t dynamite—only a ruthless critique of everything that exists, as Marx described his theory, can be dynamite. But the lack of humanistic content, the focus on objectivity and economics, remains a problem that Marxists grapple with—keeping the idea of scientific socialism from collapsing in real practice, due to its downplaying of the humanistic, cultural, even spiritual dimensions of revolution. Marxism, like all revolutionary philosophies and movements, has humanism as its final goal, and its motivation—the point of changing the world is to make life better for human beings, the vast majority of whom are suffering under the daily grind of global capitalism, while a small number prosper. But in order to achieve this overall humanistic goal, a certain negation or void must be operative, the humanism must be withheld. The goal of revolution is humanistic, or subjective—but must be approached in an anti-humanistic, or objective, way.

[8] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), 202.

[9] This perhaps brings us close to the idealist philosophy of Hegel, that individual great men are the vectors through which the spirit of history expresses itself and moves things along. Historical materialism does require a kind of similar concept, but not one that fetishizes this or that great man—rather, the proletariat itself fills this role. But, and this is the crucial point, without also fetishizing the proletariat.

[10] Voller, 259.

[11] Ibid., 261.

[12] Benjamin, Illuminations, 13.

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