Demanding the Impossible. Peter Marshall
to the borders of anarchism, Humboldt ultimately remained in the liberal camp. This cannot be said of his compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche who came to anarchist conclusions quite independently.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Despite his erroneous reputation as the inventor of fascism, Nietzsche may be counted amongst the great libertarians for his attack on the State, his rejection of systems, his transvaluation of values, and his impassioned celebration of personal freedom and individuality. His libertarian views formed only part of his revolutionary attempt to reorientate totally European thought and sensibility. As a result, his influence was far-reaching and complex.
At the turn of the century, Nietzsche’s form of individualism won many converts in bohemian and artistic circles throughout Europe – much to Kropotkin’s dismay as he considered it too epicurean and egoistic.14 Amongst anarchist thinkers, Emma Goldman also welcomed him into the family and admired his ‘giant mind’ and vision of the free individual.15 Rudolf Rocker admired his analysis of political power and culture.16 Herbert Read acknowledged that he was the first to make people conscious of the importance of the individual in evolution.17 But his influence was not only restricted to anarchist intellectuals – Salvador Segui, the Catalan syndicalist who helped found the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, was also deeply impressed by his message.
Nietzsche did not call himself an anarchist. He claimed that the anarchist of his day was, like the Christian, a decadent, ‘the mouthpiece of a declining strata of society’ because his complaints about others and society came from weakness and a narrow spirit of revenge.18 Clearly this is true of some anarchists as well as some socialists. When the resentful anarchist demands with righteous indignation that his rights be respected he fails to see that his real suffering lies in his failure to create a new life for himself. At the same time, Nietzsche admired those anarchists who asserted their rights: many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled because ‘a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it’.19
With considerable psychological acumen, Nietzsche argued that anarchists of his day demonstrated that
The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of overfull, future-pregnant strength (my term for this, as one knows, is the word ‘Dionysian’); but it can also be the hatred of the misdeveloped, needy, underprivileged who destroys, who must destroy, because the existing, and even all existence, all being, outrages and provokes him.20
Nietzsche was probably thinking of Bakunin here, whom his friend Richard Wagner knew. Those followers of Bakunin and the terrorists who destroy and maim in the name of freedom and justice are clearly motivated by hatred. Most anarchist thinkers, however, especially Godwin, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, were motivated by a sense of the overflowing richness and vitality of life in their wish to overthrow existing values and institutions.
Nietzsche thought that literary decadence sets in when instead of a work of art forming a whole, there is ‘an anarchy of atoms’.21 As a child of his age, he too recognized that he was a decadent but he tried to resist it. His work does not form a coherent whole, indeed he deliberately rejected system-making as a distortion of the truth. The will to construct a system shows a lack of integrity, and, moreover, ineradicable convictions are prisons.
Nietzsche’s method is therefore experimental; he approaches his subjects tangentially. His style is aphoristic, rhapsodic and ironic. Engulfed in iconoclastic fervour, he is deliberately paradoxical. He wanted to soak his thoughts in blood, to show that knowledge has to be lived to be understood. It is not surprising that Nietzsche should often have been misinterpreted.
The most serious accusation against him is that he was a forerunner of Nazism. This accusation was made possible by the work of his sister, who selectively edited his works when he became mad towards the end of his life, and by Nazi ideologues who took certain of his phrases and redeployed them completely out of their context. It is only by radically distorting his message that Nietzsche can be seen as an anti-Semite, a racist, or a German nationalist.22 He despised and detested German culture, was utterly opposed to German nationalism, and thought the State the poison of the people. One of the main reasons why he broke with Wagner was because of the composer’s anti-Semitism. Nietzsche’s metaphor of the ‘blond beast’ became a model for the elevation of the Aryan German, but he was no racist, and even recommended racial mixing. Certainly he celebrated war, but like Blake he was thinking of intellectual not physical strife; he was well aware that ‘blood is the worst witness of truth’.23
Nietzsche’s atrocious views on women however cannot be explained away. ‘In woman,’ he wrote in Thus Spoke Zaruthustra, ‘a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not capable of friendship: she knows only love.’ A woman should be trained ‘for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly’. In the same work, Nietzsche ironically makes an old woman say ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!’24
Like Proudhon’s and Tolstoy’s, Nietzsche’s attitude to women is lamentable. But his rehearsals of traditional misogyny can at least be better understood when we remember that his childhood was dominated by his mother, sister, grandmother and two aunts; his life as a lonely bachelor visiting European spas was full of frivolous women; and his relationship with the only love of his life, Lou Salomé, ended in failure. His complex relationship with women was aggravated by the fact that he became infected with syphilis from prostitutes as a young man. The disease eventually made him mad in the last ten years of his life and finally killed him. Ironically, the great philosophical misogynist was once photographed pulling a cart with Lou Salomé holding a whip in her hand! Nonetheless, all his antics did not prevent Emma Goldman from admiring his libertarian insights.
The most important premiss of Nietzsche’s philosophy is his uncompromising atheism. Kropotkin acknowledged that next to Fourier, Nietzsche was unequalled in undermining Christianity.25 He not only popularized the slogan ‘God is Dead’ but joked that there was only one Christian and he died on the cross. Like Bakunin, Nietzsche believed that traditional Christianity is a form of slave morality, with its stress on humility, pity and piety. Above all, it was decadent because it tried to extirpate the passions.
Unlike Bakunin, however, Nietzsche did not believe that law or morality could be derived from nature. Nature is entirely arbitrary and contingent: Lord Chance rules. Indeed, Nature is so disordered that given infinite time, finite space and constant energy in the world, Nietzsche argued, everything is likely to recur eternally. In this scheme of things man appears as a ‘thoughtless accident’, standing on a rope stretched over an abyss. His mind and body are two aspects of one being. The will, not reason, is paramount and determines both his thought and action. In Nietzsche’s view of history there is no rational pattern or moral purpose to be discovered.
The problem for Nietzsche was to find meaning in a godless and arbitrary world based on chance and eternal recurrence. But he did not give into nihilistic despair. In our own lives, we are free to decide whether we want to be sickened or exhilarated by the journey, whether we want to follow the herd and act out inherited beliefs or to create our own life and values. Coming from nowhere, and going nowhere, we can nevertheless create ourselves and shape the world around us.
As in nature so in art: out of chaos human beings can create order. At first Nietzsche called the emotional element in life and art ‘Dionysus’, and its antithesis