Review of "How To Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st Century Left"
YouTuber Jonas Čeika’s new book turns Nietzsche into a liberal in order to make him compatible with Marx. But there is an alternative!
Jonas Čeika, creator of a popular YouTube philosophy channel, has published a new book called How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. It is a fresh attempt to bring together modernity’s two foremost critics, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, to find a new revolutionary humanist materialism lurking within their ideas. The book gets some things very right: a focus on Nietzsche’s most revolutionary and anti-capitalist book, Daybreak, his best but least studied book; a nice analysis of how both Nietzsche and Marx critique moralistic versions of socialism connected to charity and pity; and even a timely, spot-on critique of emergent right-wing populism as a form of hypocritical moralism that decried the property destruction of the 2020 summer protests/riots, but ideologically ushered in the police violence that sparked it.
Ultimately, the book tends to lead its audience into misguided, idealistic directions. Čeika essentially neuters Nietzsche from his more reactionary tendencies, sanding off his rough edges, or pretending that those rough edges either aren’t there or are simply metaphors. He distorts him into a pacifist, claiming that Nietzsche “in fact hated militarism.”1 (This is far from true, as I will discuss). He also claims that antisemitism was Nietzsche’s “strongest, most persistent hatred.”2 Let’s leave aside, for now, the complex question of whether Nietzsche (or his philosophy) was anti-Semitic; calling anything other than the rabble (and the revolution and social upheaval the rabble always brings) his strongest, most persistent hatred, is to have your eyes closed. Čeika’s non-dialectical idealism consists in seeing Nietzsche as something he is not; treating him as a kind of aloof floating idol, rather than the deeply aware, engaged political philosopher he was.
Theorizing a new left use for Nietzsche should not take this idealist route, turning him into a kind of liberal—Nietzsche’s rough edges must rather be connected with the hard-edges of revolutionary materialist theory, especially Maoist theory and practice. But Čeika’s aversion to big structural embodiments of communist revolutionary thinking, Stalinism (which Čeika would probably lump together with Maoism, though he never mentions the doctrine) , the state and “regimes” in general, forecloses the possibility of using Nietzsche in this direction, which it seems to me is the more honest fit, and also where he can be most interestingly and usefully applied.
The book, in true Nietzschean fashion, takes a definite perspective, and makes no pretensions to objectivity. This is as it should be. He says the book is only an interpretation, and necessarily selective—that he leaves certain parts of Nietzsche and Marx out: “otherwise an interpretation without selection, one which leaves nothing out, could be nothing but a pure reproduction of the text which one intends to interpret.”3 In this case, leaving out Nietzsche’s potency, his wickedness, his advocacy of contempt and evil, is to mistake him entirely for what he is not. Nietzsche’s famous warning in his autobiography Ecce Homo, “Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!” is usually taken to mean “don’t make me out to be a right-wing lunatic!” This dictum can equally well be taken to mean “don’t turn me into a liberal!” This, to me, seems to be a much worse fate to consign our dear Friedrich to—and it is what Čeika has done.
Čeika takes pains to say that his book is not a work of synthesis or a combination of the ideas of the two great philosophers: “It is not, as has been done before, primarily a matter of supplementing what is lacking in Marx with Nietzsche or supplementing what is lacking in Nietzsche with Marx.”4 Čeika's book is not dialectical, and this is evident throughout his argumentation with its neglect of key material realities related to the idealistic and, ultimately, nihilistic perspective it generates towards Nietzsche's intellectual legacy. Rather than a revolutionary dialectical synthesis, the book seeks to show how the ideas of each thinker can already be found, in however scattered and obscure a form, within the other. The goal is to get the reader to see a kind of anti-Enlightenment Marx, and a pro-Enlightenment Nietzsche, to show both kind of meeting each other halfway. Čeika overlooks so much of the history of revolutionary materialist theory.
When pairing the intellectual concerns of the book's central figures—blending both Nietzsche's tendency to analyze the philosophy of culture and Marx's revolutionary political theory, Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would seem like an important event to analyze for this project. Despite these logical considerations, Mao is not mentioned once in Čeika's book, and neither is Louis Althusser--one of the most influential Marxist theorists of the last few decades, whose project was largely a Maoist intervention within Western Marxism. One of Althusser’s main targets was Stalinism, with its cult of personality and stifling bureaucracy. Stalinism was not revolutionary enough and needed to be invested with the kind of revolutionary dialectical materialism that Mao brought to the worldwide communist project. This is precisely what Čeika is seeking to do, yet he doesn’t engage with Mao or Althusser at all, because they are perhaps too closely tied to what Čeika views as the baggage of Marxism, or to “regime” thinking, which for Čeika is just a dead-end of structuralism, authoritarianism, and failure.
Čeika is heavily influenced by Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism. Fisher's thesis relies on the notion that views capitalism's history as fully victorious, when compared to the alleged 'failures' of communism, and all we can do is trudge along at the end of history while capitalism continues to win. But this is not true! Communism won some great victories and pretending that they were all failures is to engage in the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche would have hated. Čeika paints the great communist revolutionary regimes of the 20th century as dismal failures, and instead fetishizes losing causes as beacons of hope: the Paris Commune (about which he draws the wrong lessons, as I will discuss below) and the May 1968 student protests in Paris (which led to the ascendance of empty French theory and posturing and not much else).
An analysis of Marx and Nietzsche should start from their shared status as the two leading 19th century materialist philosophers, and to his credit, Čeika’s first chapter does just that. Čeika’s analysis of their materialism stays firmly within the individual body—indeed, the title of this chapter is simply “The Body.” Čeika describes Nietzsche’s brand of materialism as “a materialism that was felt before it was theorized.”5 This is the kind of humanistic materialism that Čeika wants to amplify within Marxism—that revolution is felt within the individual body and radiates outward from there into the socio-political body. Although, in doing this, Čeika risks trapping Marxism within the body, making the revolutionary theory par excellence small and claustrophobic—exactly what he accuses the structuralist approach of doing, by sapping Marx of its revolutionary power by trapping him within statism and bureaucracy. And insofar as the individual body is expansive and vast, then it is also a labyrinth, an abyss, a bottomless pit, ultimately terminating in nihilism and solipsism. Čeika is motivated to create this philosophy to fight what he views as the constricting nature of bureaucratic-statist and regime-centric Marxism that was predominant in the 20th century. Yet by trapping revolutionary theory within the body, Čeika is making it much smaller than any regime could hope to do.
The two philosophers are so close together in some ways through their materialism, atheism, and fearlessness, despite being separated by a seemingly unbridgeable sociopolitical gap. Čeika tries to salvage a revolutionary theory from within Nietzsche, while completely ignoring his clear affinity for the aristocratic society, and his clear contempt for collective politics. There is a contradiction at the core of Čeika’s project—that in focusing on the so-called Enlightenment phase of Nietzsche, his middle period, Nietzsche can be brought closer to Marx; but Nietzsche’s Enlightenment phase was disingenuous, a tactical incursion into enemy territory, done to bolster his own Counter-Enlightenment project (as I will discuss below). Moreover, Čeika wants to argue that Marx’s project was somehow not part of the mainstream Enlightenment—that Marxism was an attempt to distance emancipatory thinking from the socialist or even democratic currents of the time. So Čeika seems to want to have it both ways: to say that Nietzsche is an Enlightenment thinker, and that Marx isn’t, and that this shows how close the two thinkers are.
The truth is, however, that Nietzsche was Counter-Enlightenment, from first to last, and Marx was an Enlightenment thinker. Although, when considering the dynamics of his position, Marx was hostile to the utopian, sentimental, Christian-infused aspects of socialism that came from the Enlightenment. On this point, there is some interesting overlap with Nietzsche, and Čeika brings this out nicely. For Ceika, Marx also wasn’t that much of a supporter of universalism or rights—but only because he thought it got in the way of the goal of smashing the capitalist state and overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Hence Marx’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat—this dictatorship did not support rights or universalism, because it needed to be strong and warlike enough to mercilessly smash the bourgeois state, and make sure it did not regroup and slaughter the communists (as happened in the Paris Commune, as Marx knew well). Nietzsche opposed universalism and the concept of rights (a la bourgeois thought) because he believed that most people were subhuman (Untermensch) and should only be used as scaffolding for a few great men (Ubermensch) to raise themselves up to higher levels of cultural achievement. Čeika seems to want to draw some connection between Nietzsche and Marx here—but there can be no doubt that Marx wanted to ultimately fulfill the Enlightenment promise of human emancipation for the mass of people, while Nietzsche wanted to crush this down. There is no real common ground.
Čeika wants to develop a revolutionary materialism divorced from structure and a humanist materialism, that is concerned with the body and the ego. Politics is an afterthought for such materialism. In trying to separate Marxism from its political manifestations (because those manifestations were too big and statist for Čeika), Ceika risks losing the revolutionary core of Marxism that he wishes to retain in the first place. Marxism, after all, is a philosophy for changing the world—and changing the world requires politics and, ultimately, state power. The power of the bourgeoisie must be met with the power of the dictatorship of the proletariat, organized like a state—lacking this, communism will be crushed, as it was in the Paris Commune. For Čeika, however, the Paris Commune represents revolutionary possibility because it was an “anti-state.”6 Insofar as this is true of the Paris Commune, it is not something we should want to emulate—because it proved to be too weak and inchoate, to fight off the bourgeois forces that retook the city.
Believing that Marxism’s 20th century association with state power in Russia, China, and elsewhere has somehow stained it, Čeika wants to imagine some new Marxism—therefore he seeks to develop a Nietzschean-Marxist perspective, because he views Nietzscheanism as a theoretical vehicle for creating new values, new futures, and new horizons. Čeika is a neophile and sees this as the core of Nietzsche. This is a misconception—Nietzsche wanted a transvaluation, meaning a transformation in our perspective towards old values, not the creation of totally new ones. But Nietzsche also didn’t want us to simply return to the past and behave as the men of the past did—that is naïve, stupid, and impossible. Rather, he wants modern men, with our fully developed complex consciousness, to nevertheless take the same moral perspective on social questions (supporting slavery and mass death), in order to develop cultural greatness.
As Nietzsche says in an aphorism called “We Homeless Ones” in The Gay Science: “…we count ourselves among the conquerors; we ponder over the need of a new order of things, even of a new slavery - for every strengthening and elevation of the type ‘man’ also involves a new form of slavery.” So insofar as he is calling for something new, it is a new form of the oldest thing in the world—slavery! This is Nietzschean newness—making old things new again by changing our perspective on them.
In Nietzsche’s theory of the world and of humanity, perspectives are the only thing that can change. Slavery, war, and mass death was not just a metaphor or a figure of speech; Nietzsche really did support slavery in the modern world, because it was needed for great cultural achievements—and culture is all that he ever cared about. For Nietzsche, politics was a means to securing the conditions for culture. It may be true that Nietzsche personally did not have much taste for politics, but he was above all else a pragmatist, and he knew that, throughout history, great culture could only be achieved through a strong state which crushed down the rabble.
Nietzsche believed that you cannot have cultural greatness without the rabble being tightly controlled, lest they poison things7 with their baseness and carelessness—so politics and the state were important to Nietzsche, as the best available mechanisms for controlling the rabble. The title of that aphorism I just cited also seems significant to me—“We Homeless Ones.” From Nietzsche’s perspective, these aristocratic rebels were homeless. This notion is directly tied to Nietzsche’s view of the modern world, with its Enlightenment values of democracy and universal rights, made those who believed in the eternal truths of bourgeois intellectual culture conflate their epistemology into a squalor of ethics, rendering them politically homeless through the acceptance of destructive social practices such as slavery, imperialism, etc. Nietzsche wants a new home in the modern world for those who have the oldest views—that is the newness he is seeking, not the creation of any new values.
Nothing could be more contrary to Nietzsche than to believe that entirely new things are possible. The meaning of Nietzsche’s famous concept of the eternal return, after all, is that nothing new can happen, but that we should affirm life nevertheless—not despite all its suffering and cruelty, but because of it. Čeika interprets the eternal return to mean that socialist revolutionaries should “…prefer to live out your present in a tragic battle, struggling no matter how dim the light of hope is, and know that, even if you failed in the end, you are certain that you did all you could….”8 In opposition to Nietzsche, Čeika's fetishization of failure is more ideologically akin to the Fisherite ideology of conceptual tenacity to capitalist realism as a heuristic for understanding contemporary world history—capitalism and neoliberalism have won permanent victories, communism failed entirely, and its 20th century achievements should be shunned, so all we can do is affirm tragic hopeless losses forever.
For Nietzsche, what must be affirmed is the cruelty that goes into social apartheid, the necessity of sacrificing millions of the malformed (spiritually and physiologically), and the social utility of war and militarism; all that must be affirmed, said Yes to, with a carefree, mocking, laughing style, not one of hesitancy and moralistic guilt, or pity for the suffering of others. For Nietzsche, the cruelty of life serves as a means to the grandeur of culture. This is the meaning of that mysterious pronouncement in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy: “…for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” Life is infinitely ugly and endlessly cruel—but even so, it can be justified on aesthetic and cultural grounds. Nietzsche famously describes himself as a Yes-saying spirit, and Čeika understands this—but what Nietzsche wants us to say yes to is not failure or hopeless struggle—that is nihilistic, and Nietzsche is no nihilist; no, Nietzsche wants us to say yes to cruelty, to inflicting suffering on lower men, because that is the cost of culture and beauty (in his view).
Čeika ignores Mao and Althusser also because they are perhaps too closely related to the specter of structuralism that Čeika sees as haunting Marxism and weighing it down. As Čeika says when he’s running through the history of leftist failures: “But the German revolution failed, and the Soviet Republic ended up weak, isolated, and desperate. The bureaucracy, which was a growing threat to the proletariat from the beginning, along with militarization, increasingly moved the Soviet Republic away from socialism.”9 Bureaucracy, which is necessary for a socialist state to function, is instead viewed as “moving away from socialism.” This notion that socialism can somehow function without bureaucracies, committees, and administration is idealism.
Attempting to differentiate Marxist philosophy from its major revolutionary theoretical and material manifestations, like the Soviet Union, Čeika is engaging in a kind of idealism, the likes of which Marx and Nietzsche, the materialists par excellence, would not approve. This is not a bold new synthesis—it’s a dead-end idealism; Čeika searches for a kind of Marxist humanism, so he focuses on the early Marx, with his preoccupation with alienation; that is to say, he focuses on Marx’s most Hegelian stage, before he had exorcised the idealism from his dialectic—before the process of discovering dialectical materialism had come into its own. It’s no surprise that the heart of Čeika’s book is a long chapter on the very Hegelian, very idealist concept of Aufhebung—his Marxism is almost entirely early Marx, humanist Marx, idealist Marx, Hegelian Marx. He is also idealistic in his treatment of Nietzsche—pretending that Nietzsche has no political content, and that he was not very obviously in favor of crushing down the masses, rather than liberating them.
Čeika’s Nietzschean-Marxism is too Hegelian and idealistic, as well as too humanistic in a limited and counter-revolutionary way. This is not the revolutionary materialism Althusser searched for and formulated in his concept of theoretical anti-humanism. Revolutionary materialism cannot be anthropocentric. Ceika’s conception of materialism, via his inconsistent synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche, leads us to the dead-end of idealist bourgeois concepts that result in alienation, egoism, and ultimately nihilism. Trying to create a revolutionary theory out of humanist materialism is ultimately nihilistic. As Bertolt Brecht, and his friend Walter Benjamin, knew, revolutionary materialism must have a distancing effect—the characters in a work of art should not be ones that we immediately identify with; that is shallow humanism, and just reinforces the status quo. Distance, a theoretically anti-humanistic approach, is what real revolutionary materialism is about. This is precisely the way out of the labyrinth of alienation—by going away from humanism and discovering it in an authentic form on the other end, rather than diving headfirst into humanism as a cure for alienation. That just leads to more alienation.
Now, the core of Čeika’s project is the claim that “statist manifestations of Marx”10 have deadened Marxism’s revolutionary potency, and the revolutionary core of Marxism has to be blasted away from bureaucracy, statism, and other stodgy political phenomena—that Marx needs a “hammer to smash through all the historical rubble weighing him down.” That historical rubble is the entire history of revolutionary communist success in states and under regimes—Stalin and Mao were both total failures, in Čeika’s view. In place of the actual history of Stalinism and Maoism as movements in revolutionary communist theory and practice, Čeika offers fawning thumbnail portraits of four Bolshevik subversives, whom he calls proto Nietzschean-Marxists: Bogdanov, Volski, Lunacharsky, and Bazarov. We are meant to identify with these weird subversives, who were marginalized by the communist state for various reasons and take their failures as inspiration somehow. This seems to me like a bad trade for leftists—throwing out the world-historical successes of Sovietism and Maoism and taking empowering narratives about a few weird subversives as solace instead. Instead of powerful regimes that raised the global proletariat out of its subjugation, we get empowering stories and narratives, that we can emulate on an individual level—what could be more liberal and narcissistic than this?
Bits and pieces like that are all that Čeika thinks is salvageable from the great revolutionary struggles against global capitalism in the 20th century. The rest is just baggage! Structures, states, regimes—all of these just get in the way and should be forgotten, for Čeika. But he goes even further and compares the Soviet Union’s treatment of Marx to the Nazi’s treatment of Nietzsche—that both “regimes” are comparable in terms of how badly they “vulgarized” both thinkers; that the Nazified Nietzsche is as incorrect as the Sovietized Marx. This is a devious maneuver, utterly untrue, and frankly dangerous to any revolutionary future—it is totally buying into the bourgeois propaganda about the evilness of the Soviets. Čeika never mentions Maoism, but it’s likely he would say that Mao’s use of Marx is as incorrect as the Nazi’s use of Nietzsche.
The structuralism of Althusser is precisely the target of Čeika’s analysis—he approvingly quotes a slogan of the Paris student protests of May 1968: “Structures don’t take to the streets!”11 and fondly reflects on this period of revolt, as an overcoming of the structuralist theory that dominated intellectual life at the time. He admits that this revolt failed—but this is precisely what he seems to fetishize about it. Just as he fetishizes the failure of the Paris Commune, and learns its wrong lessons, he fetishizes the spirit of 1968, a Boomer perspective if ever there was one, consistent with the brand of egoistic, personal narrative-based “Marxism” he is pushing. When it migrated to the US, says Čeika, the revolutionary spirit of May 1968 came to be labeled simply “French theory,” and was confined to academic circles and weird subsections of the art/culture world. This, he suggests, was a betrayal of the promise of the May 1968 poststructuralist revolt in Paris—so for Čeika, just as statism and bureaucracy was a betrayal of Marxist revolutionary theory, academia and weird art/culture appropriation was a betrayal of French theory. (He makes extensive use of the French poststructuralist theorist Jean Baudrillard, unsurprisingly—leftists who hate regime communism, and hate winning, love Baudrillard, as his theory of the simulacrum is a useful rationalization and justification for their nihilism). But in both cases, Čeikahe is wrong—Marxism is inseparable from statism, since it is an applied political philosophy, and politics requires state actors; and poststructuralism is divorced from structures, and so will always migrate towards feckless academic and weird subsections of the art/culture worlds.
Čeika’s book is mostly an engagement with Marx and Nietzsche as primary sources, to its credit. The secondary theorists Čeika uses most are Baudrillard, who is the theorist of The Matrix, not exactly a new idea anymore, and then Leon Trotsky. Trotsky is not exactly a bold new theoretical direction for the 21st century—and Trots have a long ugly history (which Čeika ignores) of becoming neocons.
Čeika states that “The subject of this book can be reduced to five components: Nietzsche, Marx, philosophy, modernity, and human emancipation.”12 But Nietzsche’s relation to emancipation is far more complex and fraught than Čeika wants to admit. If Nietzsche’s philosophy has anything to do with emancipation, it is emancipation for great men from the pity they may feel towards those beneath them. Nietzsche wants to emancipate great men from the feelings of moral guilt that millennia of Judeo-Christian tradition have shackled them with. The revolutionary hammer that Čeika is looking to find within Nietzsche and gives to Marxism is a hammer that shatters any kind of mass solidarity.
Čeika is seeking to find revolutionary dynamite, and a hammer, for Marxism within Nietzsche, which is reasonable, since no philosopher has ideas and language more suited to explosiveness and hammering than Nietzsche—but the weapons to be found within Nietzsche are not neutral or objective; they come fully loaded and specially calibrated for top-down class war. Nietzsche places great emphasis on weapons—but we can’t use them well if we don’t fully know what they are. As he writes in a wonderful little aphorism in Morgenröte called “Why so proud?”: “A noble character is distinguished from a vulgar one by the fact that the latter has not at ready command a certain number of habits and points of view like the former: fate willed that they should not be his either by inheritance or education.”13 Everything is a weapon—even habits and points of view—and they must be at ready command, always available to be used, in any situation. You must know yourself, your habits and viewpoints, extremely well, so you can wield them at a moment’s notice. There can be no confusion, no mystery—everything must be clear, sharp, precise, ready to cut and do damage. There can be no doubt that Nietzsche wanted his philosophy to be used as a weapon—and if we are to use it well, we must know what kind of weapon it is!
The late historian and philosopher Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, a thousand-page historical materialist critique of Nietzsche, makes the case that Nietzsche’s politics are fundamentally opposed to any kind of real political or social revolution, and inseparable from his larger philosophical project—that Nietzsche is the ultimate opponent of any kind of truly emancipatory proletarian project. Nietzsche’s philosophy is emancipatory—but for aristocrats, not for proletarians. It is an effort to get aristocrats to rebel against bourgeois emptiness and conservative stuffiness—to become an aristocracy that justifies itself by producing great works of culture, and to which the rabble will willingly submit. Čeika totally ignores Losurdo’s work (which was published in Italian twenty years ago and translated into English in 2019). Čeika even says that “Our challenge is to inject into Nietzscheanism a political content…”14 As if there is no political content in Nietzsche! Yet another idealistic fantasy.
Losurdo has shown that Nietzsche was a close follower of the power politics of his time—the Franco-Prussian War and the Second Reich—and that he was disappointed with Prussia's steady liberalization, after its victory over France. The Second Reich was too liberal for Nietzsche—that was his clear political stance, and one of the main motivating factors in his entire work as an author, which began in earnest around 1870-1, the time of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Wilhelms I and II, the first German Emperors or Kaisers, paid their respects to labor, which Nietzsche took as a betrayal of the properly aristocratic spirit, and an example of the leveling effect of the Enlightenment, of the “international hydra head” (a phrase he used to describe the spectre of communism) getting its tendrils into the highest places. For Nietzsche, the masses should not be catered to or flattered in this way—this is a lie both to the aristocracy, who hate the masses, and to the masses themselves, who deep down know they are inferior; as Losurdo quotes Niezsche saying: “For the masses are basically prepared to submit to any kind of slavery provided that the superiors constantly legitimize themselves as higher, as born to command – through refined [vornehme] demeanour.”15
Nietzsche called Kaiser Wilhelm II a “brown idiot,” because he “…calls it his ‘Christian duty’ to free the slaves in Africa.”16 In the later 1880s, when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the man of blood and iron (a thoroughly Nietzschean idea!), was being ousted by Wilhelm II, Nietzsche even “spoke of his intention to contribute to ‘creating a party of life’ or a ‘new faction in favour of life.’”17 Nietzsche had clear politics, and his politics were embedded within his philosophy, even inseparable from it. It’s fair to say that his politics track closely, though not perfectly, with Bismarck. Nietzsche was to the right of Wilhelm II (though not conservative—Nietzsche wanted a rebellious aristocrat, and Wilhelm II was a subservient one, not the kind who would command respect).
Bismarck had vision, he had cruelty, he had will—but he was just the first step, and Nietzsche’s imagination was bigger than Bismarck. However, it is not fair to say that Nietzsche’s politics track at all with Hitler. Nietzsche was frustrated with the liberalism of the Second Reich, but he would not have approved of the utter insanity of the Third Reich. Now, this is not to say that Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic; but his anti-Semitism was not like Hitler’s: Nietzsche did not think that exterminating Jewishness from the world was either possible or desirable. He was smart enough to know that the qualities of Jewishness that have been mixed into humanity for thousands of years cannot be unmixed from humanity—and also that Jewishness has many positive sides to it, that it would weaken humanity to remove them.
The connection between Nietzsche and Bismarck is well-illustrated by their shared perspective towards the Jews and is worth quoting from the introduction to Losurdo’s book at some length: “Besides their hostility to socialism and the young Wilhelm II, another thing Bismarck and Nietzsche shared was a utopian project of mixing the Jewish and Prussian races. As Bismarck put it in 1871, it would be a good policy to cross ‘Jewish mares with Prussian stallions.’ Nietzsche took a nearly identical position and fantasized about how the new European elite he envisioned should appropriate the genius of the Jewish race for its own ends. But what Nietzsche considered as Jewish weakness, superficiality, and ill-manners had to be purged: ‘Their [the Jews’] eye does not convince, their tongue easily runs too quickly and becomes entangled, their anger does not achieve the deep and honourable leonine roar, their stomach cannot deal with carousals, their head with strong wines – their arms and legs do not permit them proud passions (in their hands there often twitch I know not what memories); and even the way a Jew mounts a horse […] is not without its difficulties, and shows that Jews have never been a knightly race.”’18 It is not a coincidence that Nietzsche’s political and social positions were basically identical to Bismarck, who was, after all, born a Prussian Junker; the closest thing to an aristocracy in the modern Western world, other than the plantation owners in the American South (which Nietzsche also approved of, as Losurdo documents).
Not only was Nietzsche a close follower of the politics of his time—and endlessly embittered by the excessive liberalism of the Second Reich—Nietzsche’s philosophy can be seen as perhaps even more political than Marx’s. As Losurdo says: “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.”19 Nietzsche enthusiastically supported the Franco-Prussian War, served in it, and was injured; but was disappointed that the great victory of 1871 did not lead to the use of militarism needed to produce a cultural rebirth. Germany had power, but, in Nietzsche’s view, squandered it. From Nietzsche’s perspective, Germany failed to produce cultural achievements on a world-historical scale. Power was not wielded in the correct way, by a state, and an aristocratic class, that was properly attuned to spirit, beauty, and truth. The German aristocracy that came out of the Unification of 1871 was too heavy, earthbound, and moralistic. Not carefree and mocking enough in their violence.
As for Nietzsche’s alleged pacifism, or aversion to militarism, this is simply untrue. As Losurdo points out: “At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the young professor of classical philology was among the volunteers; although he lived at the time in Basel, in neutral Switzerland, he was so borne along by national passion that he did not hesitate to abandon his professorial chair.”20 Does this sound like someone who, as Čeika’s claims, “hated” militarism? No, what Nietzsche hated was militarism with a bad conscience, that squandered its power.
Čeika claims that the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche, exemplified in the popular Nazi writer Alfred Baeumler, made a mistake by downplaying the Dionysian element in the philosopher’s outlook, because Dionysianism—orgiastic frenzied creation, a revolutionary aesthetic mode—was contrary to the Nazi Baeumler’s “monolithic statism.”21 The Nazi totalitarian state did constrain artistic and intellectual energy, and Nietzsche would not have approved of that. However, Dionysianism is not a complete concept in itself—the other half of that most important Nietzschean equation also needs to be there: the Apollonian element. The god Apollo represents the order and control of the state, as a check against the Dionysian frenzy. The Apollonian state is responsible for militarism, for the business of war, of enforcing the social apartheid that Nietzsche was convinced is the root of all great culture. Dionysianism is the revolutionary festival of aesthetic possibility and ecstatic frenzy, yes—but, as Nietzsche says, “without cruelty there is no festival”; and the Apollonian element is precisely the cruelty that makes the festival possible. By emphasizing the cold Apollonian element of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Baeumler and the Nazis were not entirely incorrect.
Losurdo makes this all quite obvious. Here he is, at some length, discussing the connection between culture and slavery in Nietzsche’s philosophy: “Not only Greek culture but culture as such could only be thought of beginning from the subjugation of this barbarian element. It was this act of force that made possible the ‘separation and division of the chaotic mass’ into castes. There thus emerged ‘military castes’ and ‘the organization of the intellectual castes.’ While the state, of which Apollo was the symbol, held in check the slaves and the ‘great masses’ with its ‘iron grip’, it promoted war; beside the education of the warriors, this also provided for the recruitment of the slaves themselves: ‘for the state war is a necessity, in the same way that slavery is a necessity for society.’”22 Here is Nietzsche again quoted in Losurdo, making his pro-slavery views explicit: “Slavery must not be abolished, it is necessary. We merely want to ensure that such people emerge again and again for whom others work…”23 The creation of great men, heroes of culture, logically implies men who are almost subhuman in relation to them. There need to be slaves in order to have masters—and worthy slaves will want worthy masters, so Nietzsche views it as not necessarily cruel to the Untermensch, because they want to be subordinate to worthy aristocrats who richly and abundantly deserve their privilege. And for good measure, here is one more Nietzsche quote along these lines in Losurdo: “‘…slavery belongs to the essence of a culture.’”24
As Losurdo notes, for Nietzsche it is “of paramount importance that ‘the healthy should remain separated from the sick, should even be spared the sight of the sick so that they do not confuse themselves with the sick’. And, most importantly, ‘the sick should not make the healthy sick.’” Losurdo notes Nietzsche’s view that “‘The nobleman must in all cases keep his distance from the rabble [a plebis commercio]’. This theme was now repeated with greater force than ever: ‘Every choice [auserlesener] human being strives instinctively for a citadel and secrecy where he is rescued [erlöst] from the crowds, the many, the vast majority; where, as the exception, he can forget the human norm.’ ‘A person of higher taste’ was to avoid ‘bad company’ and ‘all company is bad company except with your equals’. Or, more succinctly still: ‘One must be very superficial, so that one never returns home full of remorse after having been with the common people’. It was a matter of hygiene: ‘Because solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people (“society”) inevitably makes things unclean.’”25 These are not just figures of speech, and they are not isolated outbursts—they are meant literally and are a constant feature of Nietzsche’s entire authorship.
In an early lecture called Socrates and Tragedy, Nietzsche makes his pro-slavery position crystal clear once again (italics mine): “Out of the emasculation of modern man has been born the enormous social distress of the present time, not out of the true and deep commiseration for that misery; and if it should be true that the Greeks perished through their slavedom then another fact is much more certain, that we shall perish through the lack of slavery. Slavedom did not appear in any way objectionable, much less abominable, either to early Christianity or to the Germanic race.” This lecture is also significant in that he makes his most explicit statement of anti-Semitism, saying that the Socratism at work in society today is the “Jewish press.”26 Socrates is the enemy in Nietzsche’s whole system, and here he explicitly connects it to contemporary Jewish media.
Richard Wagner’s wife Cosima, who had a special connection to Nietzsche, and was one of the few people he ever really loved and listened to, read the lecture, and wrote this to him in a letter: “Do not name the Jews, especially not en passant. Later, if you want to engage in this terrible struggle, in God’s name, but not at the start, so that not everything on your path turns into confusion and entanglement. I hope you do not misunderstand me. You will know how much I agree, from the depths of my soul, with your statements, but not now, and not in that way.”27 This is advice that Nietzsche took to heart—to not explicitly name the Jews but have that be in the background. It should go without saying, it shouldn’t be made front and center—but only for tactical reasons, not moral ones. Not engaging in anti-semitism was thus a matter of intellectual conscience, not moral conscience. It was about buying the dynamite deep, so that it does more damage—surface strikes just aren’t lethal enough. Nietzsche did not despise anti-Semitism; what he despised was crude and vulgar anti-Semitism. One could dismiss this early lecture, since it was early—as if it isn’t a true representation of his views; and that it was never published; but Čeika makes full use of the early Marx, and views that as a valid expression of his ideas; and Nietzsche did fold the ideas in Socrates and Tragedy into The Birth of Tragedy, but in a more obscure way, in accordance with Cosima Wagner’s advice.
Čeika makes much of Nietzsche’s mid-period Enlightenment turn. This constitutes roughly the years 1878-1883, spanning the books Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science. Of all these, I think Daybreak is the best, and indeed his best book overall in many ways. This phase in Nietzsche’s career has always been kind of odd—was it a real Enlightenment turn? What was the purpose of it? And why did his later work become even more hostile to Enlightenment ideals than he was at the outset of his authorship? I will get to these questions. But one of the best things about Čeika’s book is how it brings Daybreak (in German Morgenröte, morning-redness, almost like red dawn) into the central role in Nietzsche studies that it deserves but has never gotten. (All the translations of the title—Daybreak, The Dawn, The Dawn of Day, are so inferior, it’s better to just call it Morgenröte). The book is the absolute high point of Nietzsche’s so-called Enlightenment phase. One aphorism called “The Impossible Class” contains a critique of wage slavery under capitalism that could well have been written by Marx himself. But even in this aphorism he extols social apartheid as the solution to the wage slavery dragging down the souls of European men (importing Chinese slave labor into Europe because they are “industrious ants.”)
Morgenröte is his most Enlightenment book, but also his book that has as its theme loving and knowing your enemy—there can be little doubt that Nietzsche delved into Enlightenment thinking the better to destroy it. This is Losurdo’s view. What else could have been the case? That he, randomly in the middle of his philosophical career, became an Enlightenment thinker, and then went back to Counter-Enlightenment thinking in his later works? That his much-discussed “syphilis” rotted his brain, or that his years of loneliness made him abandon his Enlightenment ideals? No. Not at all. Čeika dismisses Baeumler, the leading Nazi popularizer of Nietzsche’s thought, as a vulgar and crude interpretation, in part because Baeumler discounts the middle period of Nietzsche’s corpus, his Enlightenment “turn.” But Baeumler was correct to discount this middle section of Nietzsche’s corpus, because for Nazi purposes, it was irrelevant—they did not need this tactical detour, they were already at the end.
Baeumler and the Nazis were both right and wrong to discount this middle period of Nietzsche’s work—correct because it had nothing to do with their Nazi project of destroying Enlightenment ideals, but wrong because in overlooking it, they miss Nietzsche’s subtlest, most intimate incursion against the enemy, into the enemy’s very heart. But the Nazis were of course too brutish and unsubtle to grasp this kind of tactical maneuver. It is true that Nietzsche would have detested Hitler and the Third Reich—but largely for this reason, that they were stupid, not because he disagreed with their overarching policies (except for exterminating world Jewry; Nietzsche, like Bismarck, believed that Jews should be used for breeding purposes, to help create a master race—not exterminated!) So Čeika is correct that Baeumler and the Nazis were too vulgar for Nietzsche, but only because they didn’t understand the subtlety of his total war attack on Enlightenment ideals. Nazi cruelty was not sophisticated enough—their commitment to total war was not imaginative enough.
As Losurdo points out: “Not even the ‘Enlightenment’ period was an exception: even Human, All Too Human reflected an interest in investigating the conditions of the formation and consolidation of a ‘spiritual bodily aristocracy.’”28 Another aphorism in Human, All Too Human, called “Pangs of conscience after dinner parties,” makes his contempt for humanity crystal clear: “Why do we feel pangs of conscience after ordinary parties? Because we have taken important matters lightly; because we have discussed people with less than complete loyalty, or because we were silent when we should have spoken; because we did not on occasion jump up and run away; in short, because we behaved at the party as if we belonged to it.” He takes it for granted as a starting point that “ordinary dinner parties” produce negative feelings, because everything ordinary is bad, and the people at those parties are beneath him, and his readers—that’s what he means with his use of the royal we in this aphorism (and throughout his work). So even in this Enlightenment book of his, distance from humanity, a kind of festering permanent contempt, is his baseline for engaging with the world around him and the people in it.
As Nietzsche writes in a striking aphorism in Morgenröte called “To what extent the thinker loves his enemy:” “Never keep back or bury in silence that which can be thought against your thoughts! Give it praise! It is among the foremost requirements of honesty of thought. Every day you must conduct your campaign also against yourself. A victory and a conquered fortress are no longer your concern, your concern is truth but your defeat is no longer your concern, either!” The military language here is certainly no mistake—Nietzsche viewed everything as a war, and not only in metaphorical terms. I think it’s obvious that this aphorism is an encapsulation of his entire “Enlightenment turn.” It was a sneak attack on his enemy—a clever tactic to do maximum damage to the Enlightenment, and everything it stood for.
Nietzsche even toyed with the cultural signification of bourgeois Enlightenment when naming this period of his intellectual engagement: The New Enlightenment. We might even call it a Dark Enlightenment, or Counter-Enlightenment. Now, this was not New in the sense of creating totally new values, beyond the Enlightenment. No, this was a matter of seeing traditional cruelty social apartheid, and aristocracy, for what it is, in all its cruelty, and nevertheless affirming it, as modern men, with our fully developed consciousnesses, and with all the baggage of the millennia of moral indoctrination. Breaking free of that—that is the new Enlightenment that Nietzsche was conjuring. There can be little doubt that his alleged Enlightenment turn was an attempt to plumb the depths of his enemy, to be able to construct a perfect weapon against it: his New Enlightenment. As Losurdo tells us: “On several occasions, fragments from the mid-1880s announced a book with a very significant title: The New Enlightenment [Die neue Aufklärung]. However, this was a very different Enlightenment from the ‘old’ one, which functioned ‘in the sense of the democratic herd, the levelling [Gleichmachung] of all’. The ‘new’ one, on the other hand, which subjected morality to the demystifying scrutiny of enlightenment, ‘wants to show the way to the ruling natures, in the sense that they are allowed to do what the herd-being is not.’”29
Čeika claims that Nietzsche is not a reactionary because he does not wish to return to some previous age when things were better: “Nietzsche is decidedly not a reactionary, at least if we understand a reactionary as being someone who wants society to return to a previously existing condition. A common misconception about Nietzsche is that he wants to return to Homeric Greece, more generally to the previously existing, ancient, master morality, against the currently existing slave morality, so that the new transvaluation of values is a mere reversal — a return to the way things were prior to the slave revolt. This is completely false, and not just because such a return would be plainly impossible. As the negation of the negation implies, Nietzsche no more wants to return to the ancient form of master morality than Marx wants to return to primitive communism. In Beyond Good and Evil, he charts three stages in the development of morality, entirely in line with the notion of Aufhebung: the pre-moral stage, the moral stage, and the extra-moral stage. This categorization alone makes clear that the final, extra-moral stage, the abolition of Morality, is not a mere return to the pre-moral, but an entirely new development.”30
Now, there is no such tendency towards an “entirely new development” in Nietzsche—this is the real misconception. Nietzsche does want a return to the carefree, mocking violent attitude to slavery that produced the beauty of ancient culture—but he wants it from a contemporary perspective. He knows we can’t simply go back, “return” to how things were, and reproduce history again. That is idiotic, and our dear Friedrich was no idiot. He wants us today, modern men, with our complex consciousnesses and millennia of moral indoctrination within us, to choose, to affirm, what the ancients did so spontaneously and effortlessly.
For more proof of this, let’s turn once again to Losurdo, at some length: “The aristocratism Nietzsche professed did not have as its task the resuscitation of an agrarian society or one exclusively dominated by large landowners. It was meaningless to dream of turning the clock back to the time before industry and big industry. The task was rather to ensure industry was no longer led by a mercantile and vulgar class incapable of winning the respect of the mass of workers, but by an elite, an aristocracy, capable of investing its rule with greater legitimacy. Far from appealing to a community or similarity with the ruled, in accordance with Wilhelm I’s slogan (‘We are all workers’), the rulers now emphasised the insuperability and naturalness of the gap that separated them from the ruled – as if they wanted to form a new ‘nobility of blood’. The central problem was precisely the constitution of this estate. Moreover, the historical cycle of the slave revolt was in no way irreversible. There were plenty of encouraging symptoms of an inversion of this tendency: ‘A layer of slaves is forming – we must make that an aristocracy also takes shape.’ But ‘how to organize the new nobility [Adel], as the estate that has power?’ To this question, a fragment from the spring–autumn of 1881 attempted an answer: “Slavery is visible everywhere, although it does not want to admit this to itself; we must aspire to be everywhere, to know all its relations, to defend as well as possible all its opinions; only thus can we master and use it.”31
So it’s not that Nietzsche isn’t a reactionary because he doesn’t want to return. He knows you can’t simply go back to how it was then. But we can access the innocence of their becoming, their unique contact with evil, if we affirm life, serve life—and that especially means the cruelty that always follows life. Indeed, what is more common in life, more casual, than cruelty? From first to last, Nietzsche had one very clear theme: that Socratism, the tendencies associated with Socrates, like optimistic faith in science, reason, progress, dialectics, and so on, were a betrayal of the tragic, heroic period of Greek cultural history, and represented revolution and decay. Socratism is the first great revolutionary force in the West, for Nietzsche—and Socratism is also the greatest source of decay in the West. In this way, revolution and decay are always linked in Nietzsche’s view. There can be no question that he preferred the cultural history before Socratism, and he wished us to return to it in the modern world—but that required abandoning Enlightenment ideals that stand in the way of the possibility conditions of great culture.
Let us turn now to the complex question of Nietzsche’s anti-semitism. In a telling aphorism in Morgenröte called “The Desire for Perfect Opponents,” Nietzsche praises France as the most Christian nation, in a way that Germany never was able to be. Christianity is his enemy here, as always—but he praises France for producing Christians in their fullest, purest type, which better enables Nietzsche, in his merciless campaign against Christianity as an ontotheological world-historical force, to understand, and thus to destroy, his enemy. In rapturous language, Nietzsche praises Pascal, Fénelon, Madame de Guyon, and others. He singles out the Huguenots for special praise; their “…union of worldliness and industriousness, of more refined customs and Christian severity, has hitherto never been more beautifully represented.” All of these noble qualities of the French character make possible a Christianity free of that “Jewish obtrusiveness that Paul showed towards God.” So Christianity was his enemy here, and Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for it—but he praises the French for being the purest examples of Christianity, purified from the bad Jewish influences that have watered Christianity down. Even though Christianity is his enemy, Jewishness is still lower even than Christianity, and the French are the highest and best Christians, because they are the freest of Jewish obtrusiveness and importunity.
In aphorism 205 of Morgenröte, called “Of the people of Israel,” Nietzsche offers extended, effusive praise of the Jewish people—but even here it is deeply entwined with antisemitism, just as it was in the aphorism about perfect opponents. In this aphorism, Nietzsche essentially describes the Jewish people as the strongest race in Europe: “Every Jew possesses…the subtlest outwitting and exploitation of chance and misfortune; their courage beneath the cloak of miserable submission, their heroism…surpasses the virtues of all the saints….They themselves have never ceased to believe themselves called to the highest things, and the virtues which pertain to all who suffer have likewise never ceased to adorn them. The way in which they honour their fathers and their children, the rationality of their marriages and marriage customs, distinguish them among all Europeans.” But even among all this praise, which is quite rare for Nietzsche to give to any person or people, he says that “…one has to say in extenuation even of their usury that without this occasional pleasant and useful torturing of those who despised them it would have been difficult for them to have preserved their own self-respect for so long. For our respect for ourselves is tied to our being able to practise requital, in good things and bad. At the same time, however, their revenge does not easily go too far: for they all possess the liberality, including liberality of soul, to which frequent changes of residence, of climate, of the customs of one's neighbours and oppressors educates men.” So even when he is saying all these positive things about the Jews, he still takes it for granted that they are especially usurious; but that they had no choice and that it was a survival mechanism and also that they’re entitled to it because of their special circumstance. If he was actually against anti-Semitism then he wouldn’t take it for granted that Jews practice usury, which is perhaps the most common form of anti-Semitism that exists. But here again this is consistent with his entire project, because he is honestly facing up to a negative thing and looking for ways to embrace it and see it as a positive. And in this way, we can see how with Nietzsche antisemitism and philosemitism are two sides of the same coin.
I think even with Nietzsche’s relationship to Socrates we can see the dialectic of antisemitism and philosemitism playing out. His critique of Socrates is extremely vicious and personal and cruel in a way that isn’t all that different from the kind of propaganda you would see the Nazis do against the Jews, demonizing him because of his physical appearance, his excessive sexual appetite, and because of dialectics, which is of course a Jewish tendency; but at the same time Nietzsche famously says that Socrates is so close to him that he can never get away from him, and indeed that he kind of loves him. And so, Nietzsche would never have approved of Hitler’s policy of exterminating the Jews—on the contrary, he wanted them preserved as much as possible; but because he viewed them as kind of resources to be used to eugenically. So, Nietzsche thought that Jews had eugenic potential, while Hitler of course thought they had only dysgenic potential. But both views are anti-semitic in a basic way—regarding the Jews as having essential qualities tied to their ethno-religious background. Nietzsche viewed those qualities as good, while Hitler viewed them as bad.
So, it is still anti-semitic in a certain way, though not anti-semitism of the Hitlerite style. And I think here we can see an irony—that Nietzsche’s political ideal, in terms of eugenics, cruelty, and cultural preservation at all costs, has perhaps best been achieved by Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people. Who else has so mercilessly savaged a population that they view as subhuman (the Palestinians), in order to preserve racial and cultural purity? But at the same time, Israel’s cultural emptiness speaks to the ultimate wrongheadedness of Nietzche’s political ideal—for all its cruelty, Israel has no culture to speak of. It is known for creating shitty neoliberal technology apps and having all the cultural and social charm of a massive New Jersey strip mall. All their cruelty and eugenics produced the cultural majesty of an enormous TGI Fridays.
Now that we have dealt with his complex relationship to anti-semitism, let’s turn again at some length to Losurdo, for insight into Nietzsche’s relationship to war and mass slaughter. Losurdo writes of Nietzsche’s political and philosophical programme that it “…was of a radicalism without precedent in Galton or, obviously, in Plato. A fragment from the spring of 1884 gives the ‘great men’ that wanted to ‘imprint their shape onto great communities’ an important piece of advice: ‘Acquire that enormous energy of greatness in order, on the one hand by breeding and on the other by annihilating millions of those that have turned out badly, to shape the future human being and not to perish because of the pain that one creates and that is of a like one has never seen before.’ ‘Millions of the deformed’! Nietzsche stretched the category of sickness frighteningly wide: ‘To understand the mutual connection of all forms of corruption; and, in so doing, not to forget Christian corruption’ and ‘socialist-communist corruption (a consequence of the Christian)’, and to draw the necessary conclusions: ‘Here there can be no covenants: here we must destroy, annihilate, make war.’ And one was not to forget that a physiological defect underlay Christian and socialist ‘counter-nature.’ But there were ‘malformed peoples’ as well as malformed individuals, or, as we have seen, ‘degenerating and dying races’. In this case, too, Nietzsche was not for half measures: ‘Annihilation of the decadent races.’”32
Pretending like militarism was something that Nietzsche hated, and he just used military metaphors because he felt like it, is so wrong. There can be no doubt that from first to last his constant use of military rhetoric was because he loved war, in a literal and metaphorical sense, in every possible sense, indeed it was probably the only thing he ever really loved. What was closer to Nietzsche’s heart than war? Probably the single most well-known quote from this most quotable of philosophers is “that which does not kill me makes me stronger”; and the title of that aphorism is “From the military school of life.” Indeed, once he went insane, he was paraded in a classroom for medical students to examine, because his affliction was rare. The professor wanted him to walk back and forth so his students could better observe him, but the insane Nietzsche wasn’t cooperating, so the professor said, “An old military man like you should know how to march, now snap to it!” This reference to Nietzsche’s brief service in the Franco-Prussian War triggered something deep within the philosopher’s shattered mind, and he did pull himself together and march back and forth in front of the classroom with perfect discipline. There can be no doubt that his military identity was a very central part of how he viewed himself—even when he lost his mind, he could look to that as a kind of solid ground. I don’t want to make too much of what happened once our dear Friedrich went insane, but it’s also worth at least nothing that when he was in the mental asylum, he would often call the warden “Prince Bismarck” and insisted on being called “Kaiser.”33 Politics and war was on his mind, indeed deeply embedded within it, as it was in his philosophy, from start to finish.
Lest there be any doubt that Nietzsche had a positive view of war, and thought it was central to politics, and was obsessed with it, consider this once again from Losurdo: “The late Nietzsche insisted obsessively on the need to amputate the sick parts of the social organism. To resist the essential hygienic measures seemed to him ultimately criminal. Those that still had moral qualms should bear in mind this truth: ‘To bring a child into the world in which one has no right to be is worse than taking a life’. It is necessary to dwell for a moment on this passage: killing is not necessarily the most reprehensible act; the malformed, the subject of these remarks, do not have the right to procreate, and cannot even claim for themselves the right to life. Nietzsche is explicit: ‘I do not even give the malformed the right’ to live. And again: ‘Annihilation of those that have turned out badly – for that, one must emancipate oneself from morality up to now’.
For Nietzsche, one must not allow oneself to be paralysed by meaningless scruples: ‘The weak and the failures [Missrathnen] should perish. […] And they should be helped to do this’; the necessary and beneficial ‘attempts to assassinate two thousand years of anti-nature and desecration of humanity’ led to ‘the ruthless extermination of everything degenerate and parasitical.’ Nietzsche repeatedly used the word ‘extermination [Vernichtung]’. Precisely because life was at stake and it was a matter of conquering ‘counternature’ and ‘vice’ in its basest form, the war on the horizon and indeed already underway was a total war: ‘Merciless hardness’ was essential. The ‘great politics […] inexorably puts an end to all that is degenerate and parasitical.’”34 The language here is interesting—Nietzsche is absolutely obsessed with amputating what is parasitical, which in his view is the rabble, that drags everything great down to its level, ruining the potential of great culture. I think a Marxist perspective on this would invert the rage against parasites—towards the actual parasites, who certainly aren’t the working class! A Maoist perspective is all about this, but from a proletarian perspective—that the bourgeoisie is the parasitic class, getting superprofits for doing nothing. And Mao certainly had no qualms about amputating parasitically elements! For Mao, bourgeois consciousness is parasitical on proletarian consciousness, which is the precise opposite of Nietzsche’s view. If Nietzsche’s political philosophy is about the aristocratic rebel—Mao’s is about proletariat rebelliousness. Bourgeois consciousness is the enemy. In order to achieve true culture at last—proletarian culture—millions must be sacrificed. Nietzsche would’ve approved.
Čeika makes much of the Paris Commune, as a source of revolutionary clarity and hope. In March 1871, the working class of Paris rose up and drove the capitalist class and its bourgeois national army out of the city. They established a new form of government, called the Commune. Workers seized and ran the factories. The whole world took notice—human emancipation was being taken to unimaginable levels, in the most important city in the world. But only two months later, the bourgeois forces, with their military, crushed the Communards. This event, along with the Franco-Prussian War of the same year, clearly shaped Nietzsche’s entire work as an author. He wanted a nobler ruling class (Wilhelm was not a proper aristocrat, in Nietzsche’s eyes).
The reaction that Marx and Nietzsche had towards this great pioneering attempt at revolution tells you everything you need to know about them: Marx enthusiastically supported the Communards and devoted much of his effort after it failed to explaining why it failed—the Communards failed because they never established a dictatorship of the proletariat via the instrumentalist nexus of a communist state. Indeed, Čeika’s entire interpretation of the Paris Commune seems off. He views it as an example of an anti-state, leaderless movement—which it was! But this is also precisely why it failed—it was easy to crush. Marx developed the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat precisely in response to the failure of the Communards—that they needed to establish a working-class state, to build and protect power, so that they would not be smashed so easily. The Communards were not a working-class dictatorship—they needed to be; they should have been. Čeika instead sees the Commune as an example of the success of the anti-state socialism he prefers; but the Paris Commune, despite its incredible historical significance, was a failure, and should be thought of that way—and it failed because it was not a strong enough, centralized state structure, which could fight off the vengeful bourgeois forces.
It's worth taking a look at how Nietzsche felt about the Paris Commune. There can be no doubt that he despised it with all his heart—his contempt for it, and for the spirit of revolution it so vividly represented, was truly bottomless. After the Paris Commune was mercilessly crushed, Nietzsche wrote in a letter: “Hope is possible again!...I’m in better spirits than ever…that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come.”35 After the brutally violent end of the Commune, when tens of thousands of communist revolutionaries were slaughtered, Nietzsche felt hopeful and happier than ever—and compared the Commune to the “international hydra head” AKA the spectre of communism haunting Europe; and since the Commune was crushed, perhaps the rising tide of communism could also be crushed in time. This is Nietzsche’s obvious position on this.
Losurdo captures Nietzsche’s reaction to the events of the Paris Commune: “After the news of the fire at the Louvre by the insurgents – as he writes in a letter to Gersdorff of 21 June 1871 – ‘I was for some days completely destroyed and drenched in tears and doubts: all scholarly and philosophical aesthetic existence seemed to me an absurdity, if a single day could wipe out the most noble works of art, or whole periods of art…. feeling the autumn-time of culture. Never a deeper pain.’”36 Nietzsche’s worst nightmare almost came true—the most precious collection of culture in the world, or one of them at least, was nearly destroyed by rioting rabble! Never a deeper pain! A worse event even a genius like him could not imagine.
One of Nietzsche’s closest lifelong friends, the classics scholar Erwin Rohde, “…describe[d] the Paris Commune as the final outcome of the delusion that ‘all abysses can be measured by the chain of logic’, of ‘purely ethical logic’, of theoretical and practical optimism.”37 This is a brilliantly succinct summary of the thesis of The Birth of Tragedy, perfectly applied to the Paris Commune. There can be no doubt that the thesis of Nietzsche’s first book—Socratism as a world-destroying cultural force of revolution and decay—found practical expression in the Paris Commune. It was truly Nietzsche’s worst theoretical fear come to life. Nietzsche despised revolution.
Losurdo discusses the long history of revolution destroying culture, the theme of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and connects it to other historical events: “The death of tragedy in Greece found its parallel in the development of the great English theatre: after having reached its highest moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century, ‘it dies violently in the middle of this century due to political revolution’, due, that is, to the first English revolution.”38 Revolution always destroys culture—this was Nietzsche’s conviction from first to last. Culture has a foundation in slavery, it thrives on slavery, and revolution destroys slavery, so it also destroys culture. The revolution of Socratism destroyed Greek culture; the first English revolution destroyed English theatre; according to early reports (that later turned out to be false), the Paris Commune burnt down the Louvre, which caused Nietzsche more despair than almost anything else in his life. Even after it was revealed to not be true that the Communards burnt down the Louvre, the thought that it could have happened, and that another group of Communards could do it for real next time, was enough to cement Nietzsche’s views. It was like his Cuban Missile Crisis—the doomsday scenario, and what his philosophy prophesied and warned against, from first to last; the deadly danger of Socratism and revolution to culture and nobility. Where Marx saw the Commune as the greatest hope for the future, Nietzsche saw it as the greatest danger to the future. On this most decisive event for the question of revolution and socialism, they could not be further apart.
Now, do not misunderstand me—in pointing all of this out, I do not mean to suggest that Nietzsche should be canceled or banished from left spaces or any such childish nonsense. In order to respect Nietzsche as the truly great thinker that he is, we have to see him for who he is. This does not mean that he should be ignored and cast aside—far from it! In order to be used, he must be understood, and idealism and illusions must be destroyed.
Nietzschean themes are inseparable from politics, philosophy, and culture—any tendency that wishes to totally remove his themes from those domains is utopian and idealistic. If we are to be real materialists, we need to accept that Nietzsche’s themes are permanent features of sociopolitical reality and try to harness them in a proletarian revolutionary direction (as Mao did), rather than an aristocratic counterrevolutionary direction, which is what he wanted.
Nietzsche’s unique approach to total war, and even cruelty, is precisely what the left needs to embrace—but from an inverted, proletarian perspective—if it is to win. But Čeika is not interested in this—he shuns so-called “regimes” that have embraced a truly Nietzschean approach. In his “new” Marxism, Stalin is demonized, and Mao is simply ignored. Far from being new, this is precisely what has been done for decades. Čeika calls Stalin’s book Dialectical and Historical Materialism a “monstrosity,” and critiques its “chillingly positivistic and mechanical” dialectics.39 This is a valid point—Stalin’s approach to dialectics was mechanical, his materialism was positivistic. But Mao is precisely the response to these Stalinist errors—his essay “On Contradiction” is a seminal statement against mechanical dialectical materialism, and it is ignored entirely.
Vladimir Lenin, the greatest revolutionary in history, is mentioned a few times, but less than Trotsky. This is strange, because (aside from Mao), I can hardly think of a more Nietzschean figure than Lenin—from his flamboyant, aggressive literary style to his theory of the vanguard. Nietzsche famously said that if truth is a woman, she loves only a warrior, and wants us to be carefree, mocking, and violent—and few men have written in a more carefree, mocking, violent style than Lenin. Other than one or two quotes, Lenin doesn’t figure into Čeika’s analysis. The quotes chosen are pretty good: There’s a quote about how statues are for pigeons to shit on, meaning we shouldn’t fawn over monumental historical figures; and also, a very beautiful quote about how revolution must be a totalizing force—but didn’t Mao do exactly this, with the Cultural Revolution and his total war commitment to the proletariat cause?
Ultimately, Čeika ignores the aristocratic nature that is present in Nietzsche's oeuvre; but he also ignores the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 in Communist China. It seems hard to imagine a more Nietzschean figure than Mao—he was an accomplished poet, he used culture as a political weapon, he was unswervingly cruel in pursuit of his ideals, he even made a superhuman 6000-mile trek across China. The ubermensch is real—and he was Chinese.
The irony here is thick, since Nietzsche was more racist against the Chinese than perhaps any other group of people, calling them “industrious ants” who should be imported to Europe to be used as slave labor, so that a new European aristocracy could use their free time to pursue the one thing that Nietzsche cared about—culture. “The Cultural Revolution,” Wang Meng recalled in his novel The Season of Carnival, “was a people’s carnival, Mao Zedong’s poetic rhapsody…It was a carnival of heroism, the thinking of the avant-garde. It was a carnival of will to power, of concept and language….Mao Zedong let the young people liberate themselves to the extreme, got rid of all ropes and rules. It was a little cruel. But is all that obedience and rigidity not cruel to life and to youth?” Cruelty in service of life—is it even possible to formulate a more Nietzschean idea than this? This is more Nietzsche than Nietzsche. This is the very core of Nietzsche’s worldview, but it is coming out of a fully committed communist perspective. What more could a Nietzschean-Marxist want than this? As Čeika says: “The festival, after all, is Dionysian: it consists in the collective and ecstatic destruction of bounds. In the festival, art refuses to be contained in museums and picture-frames, to be reduced to a passive object for disinterested observation.” Isn’t this precisely the Cultural Revolution? Čeika neglects the Cultural Revolution, even though it's precisely what he is looking for, likely because it is tainted by its association with regime communism. Sad!
In a letter to one of his lifelong best friends, Carl Gersdorff, Nietzsche said: “For the coming period of culture…fighters are necessary: we must maintain ourselves for these battles.”40 Nietzsche wanted a Cultural Revolution, but from the aristocratic perspective—an aristocracy that rebelled against the moribund bourgeois culture of the time; one that was not only strong enough to fight off the swelling tide of revolution, which threatened culture itself—but strong enough to earn the submission and respect of the rabble, to keep them willingly in their place of subservience, so that they could fulfill their rightful spot as platforms upon which the aristocrats of the future could construct a beautiful culture once more, as mankind used to have.
In one of the final aphorisms in The Gay Science, Nietzsche clearly states that culture and style have a fundamentally political character: “A distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers; by selecting them, it at the same time closes its barriers against "the others." It is there that all the more refined laws of style have their origin: they at the same time keep off, they create distance, they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have said,) - while they open the ears of those who are acoustically related to them.” Culture and style, for Nietzsche, are the best available tools for aristocrats to mark themselves off from the rabble. Mao’s Cultural Revolution is precisely an inversion of this—using culture as a tool to mark proletariat consciousness off against bourgeois consciousness.
But again, Čeika makes no mention of Mao or the Cultural Revolution—probably because of Čeika’s aversion to so-called “regimes.” For someone trying to develop a hard-edged, badass approach to Marxism—and isn’t that the whole point of bringing Nietzsche, the philosopher of war, coldness, and blood par excellence, into the mix? — Čeika seems like a bog-standard Fox News puritan when it comes to swallowing the capitalist propaganda about the horrors of the revolutions of the 20th century.
As part of his critique of structures, Čeika inveighs against academia and academic philosophy—and that is certainly valid! Nietzsche produced the all-time best critiques of the deadening effect of educational institutions on our spirits: the two main essays of his Untimely Meditations, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” and “Schopenhauer as Educator.” But Čeika doesn’t quote from those essays—instead he mentions that Mark Fisher was driven to become a blogger because academia stifled him. Big fucking shit! Indeed, Čeika calls Fisher one of the most interesting thinkers of the last decade—but what is interesting about a thinker whose big idea is that there is no alternative to capitalism? It is simply propaganda and lies to claim that there is no alternative to capitalism or no hope—this is to view the great revolutions in China and Russia as either failures or as too cruel. This, however, is not a very Nietzschean view—dismissing something because it is too cruel! In service of culture, all cruelty is permitted, indeed necessary—this was Nietzsche’s view. He advocated this, of course, from an aristocratic perspective, while Mao inverted it, from the proletarian perspective.
Indeed, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was like the Untimely Meditations brought to life. It was an assault on books, academia, total war on the bourgeois influences in society, politics, and culture. As Charu Sudan Kasturi writes in an article on the Cultural Revolution: “More than 1 million schools and China’s 43 universities at the time were made to stop classes in 1966. Schools reopened only in 1969, and colleges in 1970. A total of 107 million school students and 534,000 college students were impacted, according to Julia Kwong.” I can’t imagine a more Nietzschean move—exercising will to power over the decadent aspects of education! Nietzsche’s dream come true. Nietzsche wrote the theory, in his heartfelt lamentations about the deadening effect of German education; and Mao did the practice, purifying China’s schools of everything that was bourgeois.
Čeika’s book is also disappointing in how it uses the most tired talking points in Nietzsche studies—blaming his sister Elisabeth for vulgarizing her brother’s work, and dismissing The Will To Power as totally irrelevant to his true ideas, indeed as a dastardly fabrication by Elisabeth. The blame all the bad stuff on the sister thing has been done to death, for as long as Nietzsche studies have existed. But the truth is that she was not that stupid, she was not uniquely anti-Semitic, and her misinterpretation of his philosophy is overemphasized. Elisabeth was not some total incompetent.
Dismissing the book The Will To Power is also very played out and tired—it does not deserve to be entirely neglected as a fabrication., The text serves as a valid source of Nietzsche’s ideas. The book’s index is incredible—the most comprehensive guide to Nietzsche’s views that exists. It should not be treated as the exclusive source of Nietzsche’s ideas, the way that the Nazi Nietzsche scholar Baeumler believed—but it should not be ignored entirely either. Čeika cites the Italian Nietzsche scholar Mazzino Montinari, who has been dead for thirty-five years, and wrote a book called The Will To Power Does Not Exist, as his basis for dismissing that book. There is some validity to questioning the centrality of The Will To Power book in Nietzsche studies, but the book certainly exists! And it’s a bit funny that he cites an Italian Nietzsche scholar from decades ago, and ignores Losurdo’s more current work, because one Italian confirms his perspective, and the other destroys it. For something that is supposed to be a fresh new interpretation of Nietzsche, the book is bogged down in all the most played-out angles.
The book opens with a reflection on how the American establishment embraced Martin Luther King, Jr. so fully, in order to remove his hard edges, making him a safe figure in order to neutralize how threatening his message was. The connection is then made to how the Soviet Union and other big socialist or communist states did the same to Marx—the implication is that MLK was a true revolutionary who was de-fanged, just like the Soviets de-fanged Marx. But this is wrong on both counts—the Soviets did not de-fang or corrupt Marx, they fulfilled him. And if you’re going for an authentic revolutionary, MLK is an odd choice—Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Kwame Ture were all far more radical figures than MLK ever was. Indeed, MLK was always the liberal establishment’s choice for how dissent and activism should be conducted, precisely because it wasn’t as much of a real threat as Malcolm, Hampton, or Ture’s methods.
So it's no surprise that Čeika’s praise of the Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests focuses on its most liberal, narcissistic, toothless aspects: “…when Black Lives Matter, a collective movement, calls on people to ‘say their names’ in reference to all the individual victims of police brutality, giving their individualities the kind of acknowledgement and social worth that the social relations in place had denied them.”41 The “say their names” part of BLM is the most individualistic, egoistic, liberal, and least radical part of the movement. Connecting it to the black radical tradition and its methods and principles—Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Kwame Ture, to name just a few—is far more important than saying the names of black people recently killed by cops. Socialist revolution is not about remembering or honoring this or that person who was killed by the bourgeois state—it is about the collective power of the proletariat to come together and smash the bourgeois state once and for all. Class war is a battle to the death—Martin Luther King’s nonviolent theories have nothing to do with this, and saying individual names has nothing to do with this.
Čeika disagrees with this entirely, as he says: “The point of a socialist revolution is not to punish anyone, but to transform social relations in such a way that it is no longer in anyone’s interests to exploit, to incarcerate, to wage war; to make punishment superfluous.”42 This is idealism and optimism of the worst kind—as if positive motives can smash the bourgeoisie and sustain revolution! Nietzsche did not want us to say yes to positivity or to life or to suffering—he wanted us to say yes to contempt, wickedness, evil, cruelty. As Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols: “One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul—in contempt.”
I have already described how Mao Zedong exemplifies this for a leftist perspective. The philosopher Walter Benjamin also makes a powerful statement in this regard, which historical materialists should take seriously. (Čeika mentions Benjamin once or twice, but only as a name-drop). Benjamin emphasizes how negativity and vengeance are essential components of socialist revolution in his “Theses on History,” especially the 12th thesis, which opens with a quote from Nietzsche, about how history must be used for living. For Benjamin, the problem with the left is that “the working class [has been] made to forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”43 This is precisely how to use Nietzsche from a leftist perspective—using history to serve living, as Nietzsche wanted, and using contempt. Hate must be used to fuel and sustain revolution—hate for class enemies, and the historical injustice they have perpetrated on the masses.
I imagine that Čeika would dismiss this as resentment. But contempt is not ressentiment; putting all negativity into that category is boring, incorrect, and untrue to Nietzsche’s doctrines. One of Nietzsche’s anti-communist tricks is to make ressentiment the villain in his philosophy, to equate it with bad conscience and decline—thus robbing the proletariat of its most useful weapon: the spirit of vengeance, the thirst for the blood of its class enemies. Nietzsche clearly thinks contempt is a virtue—but only for aristocrats to use against the rabble. A leftist inversion of this would be precisely what Benjamin is advocating in his philosophy of history—to embrace its hatred and use it as a weapon in the class war. That is how to philosophize with a hammer and sickle.
Jonas Čeika, How To Philosophize With A Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st Century (Repeater Books, 2021), 187.
Ibid., 194.
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 87.
Nietzsche was deeply troubled by the rabble’s capacity for poisoning good, clean things—they can poison even words! As he writes in the “On the Rabble” section of Thus Spake Zarathustra: “LIFE is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned. To everything cleanly am I well disposed; but I hate to see the grinning mouths and the thirst of the unclean. They cast their eye down into the fountain: and now glanceth up to me their odious smile out of the fountain. The holy water have they poisoned with their lustfulness; and when they called their filthy dreams delight, then poisoned they also the words.”
Ibid., 239.
Ibid., 183.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 16.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day trans. J.M. Kennedy (Dover, 2007), 250.
Čeika, 64.
Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet (Haymarket Books, 2021), 357.
Ibid., 531.
Ibid., 532.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 831.
Ibid., 616.
Čeika, 188.
Losurdo, 69.
Ibid., 358.
Ibid., 58.
Ibid., 359.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 113.
Ibid., 355.
Ibid., 845.
Čeika, 143.
Losurdo, 358.
Ibid., 598-9.
Examples in this paragraph come from Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Faber & Faber, 2018).
Losurdo, 598.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 91.
Ibid., 29.
Čeika, 164.
Losurdo, 76.
Čeika, 252.
Ibid., 131.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), 204.
Review of "How To Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st Century Left"
As a right-wing 'philosophy' blog would argue: Nietzsche isn't actually based - he never murdered anyone or womanized enough and, indeed, he makes far too many 'concessions'. In this fan-fictional image I suppose it makes sense to frame Nietzsche as indeed having this based political project if only to make the Youtuber look worse for it, placing the promise of true radicality in the hands of older configurations of philosophical education. The guilt-by-association strategy barely works with Nietzsche because of the cherry-picking necessary to 'uncover' the enemy - his library contained a work by an obscure French racist who translated the Book of Manu which Nietzsche uncritically followed as a good example for his plans to build a new slave empire as his sanity was slowly dispersing (oh whoops that's not really accurate, bordering on fraudulent). He is at once pathetic and weak and yet dangerous and exciting, the old flavour truly is 'transformed' into a new one by pretending as if 'receipt' checking philosophers like Tweet-detectives works as, ahem, total ownege. Booooo.
"This is precisely how to use Nietzsche from a leftist perspective—using history to serve living, as Nietzsche wanted, and using contempt. Hate must be used to fuel and sustain revolution—hate for class enemies, and the historical injustice they have perpetrated on the masses. "
Yes of course left-version of Nietzsche as the 'political theorist' who despised the 'untermensch' would 'want' the out-group and slave class to transform their hatred for injustice perpetrated on the herd into a destructive revolution! Contradiction lies at the heart of all things for Nietzsche, you see. Of course he seeks to spread his ideas of his ideal to others - as an improver of mankind, how Nietzschean!
The transformation and shift of perspective of old history which is necessary to form a deep resentment towards the Evildoers will hopefully lead to the destruction of the elites who are beneath us. What could be a better way to think of a left Nietzschean? After all his entire philosophical project -- is it anything more than an extended secret re-writing of Pericles' Funeral Oration to include more resentment and mobilized hatred?
"Rather, he wants modern men, with our fully developed complex consciousness, to nevertheless take the same moral perspective on social questions (supporting slavery and mass death), in order to develop cultural greatness. "
I don't know if this re-kindling of the erroneous alt-Right Nietzsche is worse than the more institutional defence of his writing as a 'modern scientifically valid' approach, perhaps it is not. That kind of lawyerly libidinal investment might actually convince people who are becoming more and more 'scientific' about their Neuro-Buddhism and statistical-reasoning.
Maybe I didn't get the joke?