Around Nietzsche’s Values, the World Revolves, Trivially
Nietzsche is, without question, the most influential philosopher in today’s world, and his influence has grown steadily for more than a century. While it is probably true that more people read Nietzsche’s words these days than those of any other major philosopher, book sales are certainly not the way a philosopher achieves profound influence. Rather, the great philosophers influence the world to the extent that their ideas filter down from the realm of theoretical men and higher education into the everyday world of common opinions and underlying assumptions. That is to say, you know a philosopher has become highly influential, for better or worse, when you can see traces and indications of his original ideas (which were once the radical fare of a probing few) in the ordinary, general attitudes and platitudes of society. In Nietzsche’s case, those traces and indications have become almost ubiquitous throughout the entire civilized world, which is why it is reasonable to assert that he is the most important philosopher of this era. In other words, a philosopher is truly changing the world when his ideas become the everyday opinions or unquestioned presuppositions of popular majorities who have never read any of his writings, nor perhaps even heard of his name.
Nietzsche himself defines this kind of profound influence most eloquently in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Around the creators of new values the world revolves, revolves silently.” For “silently,” understand “secretly” or “unaware,” i.e., without the many even recognizing that their lives are now swirling about this creator’s new ideas, their world spinning on a new axis.
With Nietzsche, one radical idea that has affected the world most undeniably is his apparent relativism — granting that academic terms such as “relativism” are products of a modern scholarly approach to intellectual categorization that Nietzsche himself abhorred. Of course, what we call relativism has existed in various forms for as long as humans have talked about what knowledge means. It is one of the ways of explaining our relation to truth and opinion, reality and perception, and so on. But it had always been a minority opinion, a sophisticated alternative of skepticism or cynicism, which in previous ages did not quite filter down to the point of common acceptance in any society. Nietzsche gave relativism, or perhaps subjectivism (another one of those scholarly terms with which we have become trapped), its most powerful, challenging, and exciting presentation. The sheer force of his language and argument, combined with certain historical factors that helped to prepare the world for a more doubtful view of the power of human reason, sent much wider shockwaves through the intellectual and artistic world than any previous form of relativism had achieved. The effects of his argument were widely apparent by the early nineteen hundreds; in fact, the effects became so pervasive that within a couple of generations of Nietzsche’s death, anyone who claimed to be searching for “the capital T truth,” in any context other than applied science, was treated by most “educated people” as antiquated or simplistic in his thinking. And since the ruling ideas of the intellectual and artistic class in any society will gradually become the normal attitudes of the general population, we may now hear Nietzsche everywhere, if we know what to listen for.
The problem, however, or at least the most immediate problem, with Nietzsche’s influence, is that all great philosophical ideas are by definition far beyond the intellectual capacity of ordinary people, which means that those ideas will filter down to popular opinion in a greatly reduced, simplified, and ultimately falsified form. The question then becomes, can that false form have a beneficial effect on the world in spite of being an inaccurate, or even totally distorted, version of the original thinker’s real theory? Or will the false form cause great harm to the world, due to the nature of the distortion, or rather the nature of the ideas themselves as they are inevitably processed by the social machinery of vested interests, myopic rationalizations, and moral convenience?
In Nietzsche’s case, I believe the effects of his theory in its popular, filtered-down version, have been catastrophic. The most obvious and extreme example of this is the adoption of Nietzsche’s concept of the “superman” or “overman” by Hitler and the Nazi Party. In fact, for decades before Hitler’s rise, intellectuals and political theorists in Germany (and beyond) were already using Nietzsche’s idea in a twisted and trivialized form to justify their racial theories, their pursuit of eugenics, and their wish to blame Germany’s cultural and economic problems on a conveniently identifiable Other, the Jews.
In fact, Nietzsche himself said many critical things about Jews and Judaism, but no more than he did about Christians and Christianity. More importantly, his criticisms were theoretical and historical, rather than personal and racial. In practical political terms, Nietzsche absolutely despised anti-Semitism and argued against this ugliest German tendency often – including rejecting his own horrible sister when she chose to marry a well-known anti-Semite. Furthermore, one of his own closest friends was a Jew, and he pointedly showed his scorn for the worst moral corruptions of his country by writing that an influx of the Jewish way of thinking was urgently needed in order to make German intellectual life “cleaner,” which was a brutal rhetorical stab against a society that routinely viewed Jews as dirty and corrupt. Unfortunately, after his mental collapse, his sister herself exploited his name and his books to promote her own anti-Semitic and authoritarian attitudes, which is part of how his reputation became distorted and his theories misrepresented, beginning even while he was still alive.
Beyond the extreme and violent case of Nazism, however, Nietzsche’s influence on the world at large has been more subtle, but equally extreme. Without taking the very long journey through all the details of this influence, we may isolate one striking example that directly relates to the problem, noted above, of the popularization or domestication of profoundly challenging and often ambiguous ideas.
It is true that Nietzsche defended a kind of relativism, or what in his case is often called “perspectivism.” And yes, this means one of his fundamental ideas is the rejection of the whole notion of absolute truth, or ultimate knowledge. However, it is essential to understanding his philosophy to consider how he presents the implications of this conclusion.
First, for Nietzsche himself the fact that there is no ultimate reality was not simply a liberating or pleasant thought, but rather a deeply disturbing one, because human life requires meaning and purpose, and therefore both individual and social life are inevitably doomed without such meaning and purpose.
Second, the collapse of all previous notions of truth, and the ultimate conclusion that all those competing notions are really just interpretations of the world, none of them truer than the others, is catastrophic for the human race, which depends for its civilized survival on a clear sense of shared meaning. For humans in general need some kind of established belief to order their lives and find a way to live that is not self-destructive and empty. But once a population begins to feel that no belief is truer than any other, they will become desperately lost, lacking any direction. This is the essence of nihilism, the fate that Nietzsche predicted would come and would cause terrible destruction in the twentieth century and beyond (which it certainly has).
Third, although seeing the destructive effects of nihilism as unavoidable in the immediate future (his future, meaning our age), Nietzsche also believed that eventually humanity would have to regain some kind of order or unifying purpose, lest we destroy ourselves in the abyss of nihilism.
Fourth, the return to order – the recovery of a sense of meaning and purpose – would require the greatest intellectual efforts of the greatest minds. These would be the “creators of new values,” the individuals who would provide the world with new pictures of “good and evil” that would have as much influence and power as Plato’s philosophy did, but without the (supposedly) dogmatic view of truth that (he says) has made Platonism impossible to accept anymore, due to the development of material science, the collapse of religious faith as a socially unifying force, and other causes.
Fifth, in order for value creation to be a true solution to the destruction caused by nihilism, the newly created values must be coherent, comprehensive, and powerful enough to become a guiding light – a meaning of life – for whole populations, whole societies. In other words, only the greatest “philosophers of the future” (Nietzsche’s own term), meaning the minds with the strength of will to persuade whole societies, from the intellectuals to the general population, could ever hope to restore a sense of purpose and order to any future civilization, after the nihilistic collapse of all belief in absolute reality or truth, which had already begun in Nietzsche’s time.
Thus, value creation, although it is necessarily subjective or relativistic, is most certainly not a matter of “doing whatever one pleases,” or “choosing your own lifestyle.” That trivialization, on the contrary, is precisely the outcome that Nietzsche predicts under the name “the last man.” For since most men lack the intellectual depth, emotional power, and psychological independence to “create new values,” the result of any easygoing notion of universal value-creation is obvious: Everyone will end up living randomly, but in basically the same ways. All differences will become superficial and meaningless, while in truth mindless conformity to the mob, for the sake of stability and personal comfort, will be the general attitude: “Whatever feels nice and comfortable for you at this very moment is good; whatever feels uncomfortable or unpleasant for you at this very moment is evil.” In other words, whole societies will be reduced to lazy, short-sighted collective leviathans of self-indulgence, empty pleasure, trivial comfort, “peace at all costs,” and the senseless relativism that refuses to judge anything or anyone, except for hating anyone who refuses to be completely non-judgmental and relativistic, i.e., to accept and praise whatever we are choosing or thinking now. They will sink into this abyss while telling themselves that they are all living freely according to “their own values.” The last man, who, as Nietzsche asserts, has lost both the ability and the will to “become a dancing star.”
Thus, we can see what kind of distortions of Nietzsche’s challenging and difficult observations have filtered down to our everyday world.
Nietzsche, who invented our language of “values” and “value creation” — a deliberate overturning of the traditional, non-subjective language of virtues, which has since displaced its predecessor as the central moral concept of our age with almost no one even noticing the radical change — said that this endeavour was the enormous, painful, and life-defining activity of only the greatest and most powerful individuals in the world: those strong enough, serious enough, and self-overcoming enough to make themselves a kind of destiny for mankind, to become a new axis upon which a whole society could spin. Today, we imagine that every teenager “has the right to create his own values and choose his own lifestyle,” as if such a thing were possible – as if every kid in a high school classroom had the will, the resistance to suffering, and the independent spirit to be a value creator.
Nietzsche taught that the collapse of all our searches for truth into relativism would lead to nihilistic despair on a global scale, which it has. Today, however, people talk the language of relativism as though it were a gold card or free pass for doing whatever one likes. “What’s true for you may not be true for me, so I should be allowed to do whatever makes me happy!” Nothing could be farther from Nietzsche’s opinion about how people should live their lives, but, since most humans lack the intelligence or strength of will to understand the giant challenge of Nietzsche’s proposed solution to nihilism, they take the easy way out of imagining that relativism itself is the simple answer to all our problems of meaning: We all have our own meaning, and no meaning is better than any other, so what’s the difference what we choose? The difference, Nietzsche would say, is between a society that has a unifying purpose and a standard of greatness, and a society of mindless slaves who just wander around aimlessly doing their assigned jobs for the rulers and then comforting themselves with low pleasures and trivial amusements in their “free time.” The last man.
To express the divide between Nietzsche and his popularized influence in the most straightforwardly personal terms, we may look at Nietzsche himself: He gave up his job as a scholar while still in his twenties and lived on a very small pension for the rest of his life, in tiny rooms with almost no possessions. He wrote continually — all the while struggling against obscurity and a profound frustration at his inability to attract serious readers — producing many beautiful and profound books by the time he was forty-five, when he collapsed into madness, which was likely brought on, at least in part, by the exhaustion of endless hard work and the sheer isolating non-conformity of his ideas. He was half-blind and intermittently ill through his whole adult life, suffering terrible recurring headaches and nausea but continuing to think and write through it all. Although he rejected his pastor father’s faith, his country’s moral codes, and in a sense the entire history of philosophy that he loved, he seems to have lived a remarkably consistent adult life of self-discipline and purposeful effort, disdaining and eschewing the destructive self-indulgence of all mind- and energy-draining habits (alcohol, casual friendships, erotic adventurism, modern education) at least as much as he despised what he saw as the spirit-diminishing effects of late Christianity on modern man (utilitarianism, socialism, the aggrandizement of pity, and the glorification of a slavish “selflessness”).
This is the real Nietzsche. It is interesting to note that although his philosophic ideas are radical and set him apart from so many of the assumptions and conclusions of most of the previous major philosophers, his way of thinking about his own life and pursuits, as I have just outlined, shows him to have been psychologically similar to almost all the great thinkers in his personal preferences and approach to living. In other words, he had a true philosophic soul, and was in that way more akin to his predecessors than foreign to them, no matter how radical and ultimately dangerous his theories might have been.
