Nietzschean Noobs: On "Unpublished Fragments from the Period of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'" by Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche | Unpublished Fragments from the Period of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Summer 1882-Winter 1883/84) | Stanford University Press | July 2019 | 862 Pages | Translated from the German by Paul Loeb and David Tinsley
Silicon Valley adores Nietzsche. Signal’s web site grants Nietzsche prominence at the top of its web site, as if he were a VIP user of the encrypted messaging software. A more recent startup called Superhuman happily advertises its hierarchical view of the world. There are those with superpowers and those without. The superpowerful must pay $30 U.S. a month for e-mail software available by invitation only. According to The New York Times, 100,000 people are waiting to become Übermenschen.
As Nietzsche says in this batch of notebooks: “The love for superhumans is the antidote to compassion for humans.”
Rank order is a Nietzschean staple, one Silicon Valley’s techies welcome. To hell with egalitarianism in this new world where the Superhumans should be admired and serviced. Tech workers in San Francisco, now a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, are frustrated that their six-figure salaries do not result in a lifestyle sans homeless people but with affordable homes of “Big Little Lies” bespokeness.
We are at the opposite end of a Zeitgeist that resulted in the appearance of Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corps/e (1996) and Why We Are Not Nietzscheans in 1997. Amazon’s “The Boys” might be the closet thing we have to a cultural antidote to the cult of the Superhero/Superheroine. Superherx?
Nietzsche was clear about this in his unpublished notebooks: “Do not forget this about me! I told humans to create superhumans. My brothers, I know of no greater consolation for a woman than to tell her: ‘you too can give birth to superhumans.’” The “my brothers” phrase deserves attention, given that Emily Chang named Silicon Valley a Brotopia. The translators might as well have gone with “Dude” in the previous quotation instead of “my brothers.”
Nietzsche’s misogyny is only exceeded by his will to power. “To want the emancipation of women achieves only the emasculation of men,” he writes in the notebooks under review. Still, feminists turn to Nietzsche as if he will help their cause.
As Ben Waite and Geoff Waite explain in “Laibach is Laibach. Sanitized Zarathrusta,” “There are two main approaches to Nietzsche and his Zarathustra. One is to become Nietzsche. The other is to be his lover.” The Superhuman herd in Silicon Valley has chosen the lover angle.
André Comte-Sponville captures the rhetorical skills Nietzsche uses to sucker people into worshipping him. “[Nietzsche] is a philosopher for all tastes and distastes.” Nietzsche’s duplicity “renders any attempt at serious discussion very difficult.” Comte-Sponville understands that Nietzsche is “the bomb,” but not in a positive sense. Comte-Sponville wants to defuse Nietzsche, while, for example, Sue Prideaux in her I Am Dynamite! (2018) views Nietzsche not as a suicide bomber, but as “the man who blasted a tunnel through his own age’s heavy indifference to the consequences of the death of God, opening the way for audacious Argonauts of the spirit to reach new worlds.” Prideaux simply ignores the passage she quotes on the previous page that indicates clearly that Nietzsche’s bombing mission wasn’t intended for “his own age” but for the future, for us, and the “new world” the blast would clear for Superhumans and slaves, not for “Argonauts of the spirit,” the noobs who become dynamite’s collateral damage.
The contemporary interpretations of Nietzsche, like Prideaux’s, frame him as a helper, a guru, an admirable badass. In John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche (2018), the “little pastor,” as the other kids at school called Nietzsche, is the Sherpa leading us to our adult, better selves. Kaag is blind to the hierarchical problematic of Übermenschen. Kaag can’t resist the chum Nietzsche has thrown into the water. Kaag writes, “The Übermensch stands as a challenge to imagine ourselves otherwise, above the societal conventions and self-imposed constraints that quietly govern modern life. Above the fear and self-doubt that keep our freedom in check.”
Martin Ruehl can help Kaag, Prideaux, and others by reminding them that apolitical readings of Nietzsche don’t hold up with Nietzsche’s Nachlass, the unpublished notebooks, few of which had been available in English prior to Stanford’s translations. Ruehl: “In an entry from 1884, he condemns the emancipatory movements that were transforming Western societies in the 19th century. Nietzsche lists their objects with palpable disdain: women, slaves, workers, the sick.” Nietzsche doesn’t advocate freedom, as Kaag proposes. Ruehl corrects the record. “Nietzsche blames the modern demand for democratisation on the rhetoric of the Enlightenment and especially on the ‘seductive’ concept of universal human goodness propounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In the notebooks, Nietzsche drives home the point of how far from democracy he wants to be: “Only great criminals have any significance in world history.”
Prideaux and Kaag are not exceptions to translating Nietzsche outside the context of esotericism. Prideaux and Kaag can be added to the list of those duped by Nietzsche, a list that includes Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Martin Heidegger. Nietzsche exploited rhetoric in ways that cause the usual interpretive strategies to fail. Nietzsche describes himself as “the most hidden of the hidden ones.” Following a philosophical tradition as old as Plato’s Seventh Letter, Nietzsche designed his prose one way for the exoteric audience, and another way for an esoteric one. In modern politics, the crude form of this is called “dog whistling.”
Nietzsche’s rhetorical superiority dupes even those who imagine themselves masters of rhetoric, like Babette Babich and Stanley Fish. Apparently, Fish feared a backlash against Nietzsche based on what happened during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Fish decided to mount a pre-emptive defense, to be the first to protect the beloved Nietzsche. Fish’s August 2016 article in Foreign Policy entitled “Don’t Blame Nietzsche for Donald Trump” is Fish’s love letter. Fish is enlightening because he is so wrong about Nietzsche, and so right about one important point. He’s right that the etiological quest requires a wider net that would ensnare Fish himself too, who sidesteps the political linkage between relativism and fascism. Fish claims that “different vocabularies deliver different worlds and different measures of true and false” while ignoring the history of the politicization of relativism by the far Right, perhaps most notably Benito Mussolini’s statement from “Relativismo e Fascismo” (first version published in 1921): “In truth, we are relativists par excellence, and the moment relativism linked up with Nietzsche, and with his Will to Power, was when Italian Fascism became, as it still is, the most magnificent creation of an individual and a national Will to Power.”
You need a different Stanley to grok Nietzsche, Stanley Rosen. In “Suspicion, Deception, and Concealment,” Rosen cites Nietzsche’s concern for how things “sound” to potential recruits. Rosen makes use of Nietzsche’s own description of the toxic atmosphere necessary for esotericism to function best. It’s “wherever one believes in rank-ordering and not in equality and equal rights.”
Let’s ratchet up the shock value of Rosen’s description of what you get with your worship of Nietzsche. The example appears in all innocence in Kaag’s book. The Nietzscheans want to see your broken bones. “I glanced across the terminal to the flickering screens of a generic sports bar. The Tour de France was in full swing, and the riders each of them powered by their own two legs, were in the Alps. Crashes, dehydration, torn tendons, broken bones: they were killing themselves on these mountains. And it was a thing of beauty.” Your “killing” yourself gives Nietzscheans a thrill.
On the other hand, Nietzsche never intended to die, and his acolytes continue Nietzsche’s persistent resurrection, even at the level of attempting to reproduce Nietzsche’s “sound,” his actual voice from DNA samples gathered at the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar. Necrophilia meets technophilia. The last sentence of the “input text,” a 4 January 1889 letter Nietzsche wrote to Georg Brandes, directs us to a core Nietzschean problem, “The problem now is how to lose me [Nietzsche].”
As any smitten Nietzschean can tell you, 3 January 1889 plays a key role in Nietzsche’s biography. It’s the date of “the break,” the beginning of the last eleven years Nietzsche “spent in incoherent madness, crouching in corners and drinking his own urine.” While some scientists have been devoting energies to allowing Nietzsche to speak from the grave, others have focused on what happened to Nietzsche in Turin, the catalyst for the 2011 film, The Turin Horse. The latter group of scientists confirmed that syphilitic spriochetes came to life within Nietzsche, “armies of revived sprochetes munched on his brain tissue.”
Thus, the Nietzschean voice that has been resurrected from DNA samples is a voice of madness. My brothers, now you know – if you listen to Nietzsche, “that way madness lies.”
This review is part of our Theory and Society Series. The Theory and Society Series is meant to bridge the gap between academic critical theory’s mode of social analysis and everyday social criticism, creating a totally new discourse in the process.