Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

You’d think this sea of blood would be enough to discredit Nietzsche’s ideas among intellectuals and artists. But he is, incredibly, widely admired. “Nietzsche is pietzsche,” says a popular campus graffito and T-shirt. It’s not because the man’s doctrines are particularly cogent. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in A History of Western Philosophy, they “might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: ‘I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici.’” The ideas fail the first test of moral coherence, namely generalizability beyond the person offering them. If I could go back in time, I might confront him as follows: “I am a superman: hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience. As you recommend, I will achieve heroic glory by exterminating some chattering dwarves. Starting with you, Shorty. And I might do a few things to that Nazi sister of yours, too. Unless, that is, you can think of a reason why I should not.”

So if Nietzsche’s ideas are repellent and incoherent, why do they have so many fans? Perhaps it is not surprising that an ethic in which the artist (together with the warrior) is uniquely worthy of living should appeal to so many artists. A sample: W. H. Auden, Albert Camus, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Yukio Mishima, Eugene O’Neill, William Butler Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and (with reservations) George Bernard Shaw, author of Man and Superman. (P. G. Wodehouse, in contrast, has Jeeves, a Spinoza fan, say to Bertie Wooster, “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) Nietzschean values also appeal to many Second Culture literary intellectuals (recall Leavis sneering at Snow’s concern with global poverty and disease because “great literature” is “what men live by”) and to social critics who like to snigger at the “booboisie” (as H. L. Mencken, “the American Nietzsche,” called the common folk). Though she later tried to conceal it, Ayn Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them.¹¹³

As Mussolini made clear, Nietzsche was an inspiration to relativists everywhere. Disdaining the commitment to truth-seeking among scientists and Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche asserted that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” and that “truth is a kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.”¹¹⁴ (Of course, this left him unable to explain why we should believe that those statements are true.) For that and other reasons, he was a key influence on Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and a godfather to all the intellectual movements of the 20th century that were hostile to science and objectivity, including Existentialism, Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism.

Nietzsche, to give him credit, was a lively stylist, and one might excuse the fandom of artists and intellectuals if it consisted of an appreciation of his literary panache and an ironic reading of his portrayal of a mindset that they themselves rejected. Unfortunately, the mindset has sat all too well with all too many of them. A surprising number of 20th-century intellectuals and artists have gushed over totalitarian dictators, a syndrome that the intellectual historian Mark Lilla calls tyrannophilia.¹¹⁵ Some tyrannophiles were Marxists, working on the time-honored principle “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.” But many were Nietzschean. The most notorious were Martin Heidegger and the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who were gung-ho Nazis and Hitler acolytes. Indeed, no autocrat of the 20th century lacked champions among the clerisy, including Mussolini (Ezra Pound, Shaw, Yeats, Lewis), Lenin (Shaw, H. G. Wells), Stalin (Shaw, Sartre, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Brecht, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pablo Picasso, Lillian Hellman), Mao (Sartre, Foucault, Du Bois, Louis Althusser, Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin), the Ayatollah Khomeini (Foucault), and Castro (Sartre, Graham Greene, Günter Grass, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, and, as we saw in chapter 21, Susan Sontag). At various times Western intellectuals have also sung the praises of Ho Chi Minh, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il-sung, Pol Pot, Julius Nyerere, Omar Torrijos, Slobodan Milošević, and Hugo Chávez.