José Pablo Feinmann on Nietzsche's continuing influence, Philosophy Here and Now (Temporada 1-13) (Spanish-language video)

This is Chapter 13 and the final installment of the first season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T1 CAP 13: Derivaciones de Nietzsche” Encuentro n/d Filosofía y Praxis YouTube 02/05/2013:

In this installment, Feinmann further discusses the continuing influence of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Including Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Freud, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, in particular that of Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973).

José Pablo Feinmann on Nietzsche and the death of God, Philosophy Here and Now (Temporada 1-12) (Spanish-language video)

This is Chapter 12 of the first season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T1 CAP 12: Nietzsche: 'Dios ha muerto'” Encuentro n/d Filosofía y Praxis YouTube 02/05/2013:

In this installment, Feinmann further discusses the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), particularly his famous concept of the death of God.

Feinmann explains that he takes the concept of the will to power being the "central concept" of Nietzsche's philosophy. As he explains it, Nietzsche's notion of life is that life seeks to conserve itself by expanding its own life force. Because if it merely conserves its life energy, it will die.

He expresses his agreement with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on this point about the centrality of the will to power in Nietzsche's thought. He goes on to say that he views Nietzsche as a proto-National Socialist philosopher, and Heidegger as a straight-up Nazi philosopher.

But the genius of both philosophers makes this question very difficult, as he says. Because they are both extremely important in the recent history of philosophy, however they may have contributed to Nazi ideology.

I wouldn't express it the way Feinmann does. I don't think it's meaningful to describe Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi philosopher. The explicit anti-Semitic boosters of the so-called "Aryan race" were around in Nietzsche's time. And he was a bitter critic of them. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner broke up primarily over Wagner's outspoken anti-Semitism.

There is plenty in Nietzsche's work that could be easily taken out of context and used as support of aspects of Nazi propaganda: his analyses of both Judaism and Christianity; his oblique references to the "blond beast"; his praise for notions of strength and war; his polemics against democracy and socialism. There's no question that in politics, Nietzsche ideas were reactionary. But there is little to argue that Nietzsche's actual philosophy contributed in a meaningful way to what passed for Nazi philosophy. Which, in any case, mostly amounted to ideas promoting the "Aryan race" by promoting hatred against Jews.

Heidegger's allegiance to National Socialism and membership in the Nazi Party until the end of the war is well-documented. Jürgen Habermas, Karl Löwith and Herbert Marcuse all believed that there were aspects of Heidegger's philosophy that contributed to his support for the Nazis. Feinmann himself has written a philosophical novel about Heidegger that deals in a substantive way with these issues, La sombra de Heidegger (2005).

Feinmann also explains the "death of God" idea. Very oversimplified, it has to do with Nietzsche's idea that Christianity and other contemporary religions have been historically superceded. But Nietzsche did have a sort of religious idea that a superior spiritual value could be found in ancient Greek thought. Nietzsche's famous Zarathustra persona appears to have been modeled in significant part on the 6th-century BCE pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

This affection for the pre-Socratics is one point of commonality between Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Feinmann also brings Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Hegel (1770–1831) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) into the discussion in this episode.

Georg Picht on the history of the concept of Nature (2 of 2)

German philosopher Georg Picht (1913-1982) in his book, Der Begriff der Natur und seine Geschichte (1989) based on lectures he gave in the early 1970s refers several times to the following quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, taken from "Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne" (Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873, III 2, 369; hg. von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967-1977.)

In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden. Es war die hochmüthigste und verlogenste Minute der ٬Weltgeschichte': aber doch nur eine Minute. Nach wenigen Athemzügen der Natur erstarrte das Gestirn, und die klugen Thiere mussten sterben. - So könnte Jemand eine Fabel erfinden und würde doch nicht genügend illustrirt haben, wie kläglich, wie schattenhaft und flüchtig, wie zwecklos und beliebig sich der menschliche Intellekt innerhalb der Natur ausnimmt; es gab Ewigkeiten, in denen er nicht war; wenn es wieder mit ihm vorbei ist, wird sich nichts begeben haben.

[In some castaway corner of one of the countless shimmering solar systems spilled out across the universe, there was once a heavenly body on which clever animals invented knowledge. It was the proudest and most mendacious minute of "world history": but only just a minute. After a few breaths of air, nature froze the heavenly body, and the clever animals had to die. - So someone could invent a fable but never be able to have enough illustrations of how pitiful, how shadow-like and fleeting, how pointless and arbitrary was the effect of the human intellect within nature; there were eternities in which it didn't exist; if its time again passes, nothing will have come of it.]

Nietzsche (1844-1900)

No doubt many readers would take this as evidence of Nietzsche's "nihilism." Probably not without reasons.

But it also reflects the change in scientific and philosophical perspective that developments in biology, geology and physics had forced on the scientific world and more and more on the general public.

But like much of Nietzsche's writing, that passage suggests more than a simplistic reading. Picht finds in it an important recognition that the improving and increasing knowledge of nature in Nietzsche's time was forcing people to develop "a new concept of 'world history'." One that recognized more accurately humanity's role in an external nature that also had a history. He argues that those lines from Nietzsche "depict the deepest ground of the crisis of metaphysics." (p. 25; emphasis in original)

And if there is less cosmic grandiosity in humanity's position in the universe than people previously assumed, there is also a kind of Icarian heroism in Nietzsche's depiction of the general insignificance of the "clever animals" of Earth.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962)

William Faulkner's famous conclusion to his Nobel Prize address in 1950 is more explicit in his spiritual optimism than the quote of Nietzsche's above. But there is also a great kinship between the two:

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Tags: begriff der natur und seine geschichte, georg picht, faulkner, nietzsche

Leo Strauss on Karl Löwith’s "Von Hegel zu Nietzsche"

Leo Strauss, the intellectual guru of American neoconservatives, reviewed Karl Löwith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, which I recently discussed here, in the 8:1/4 (1941) issue of Social Research, the journal of the New School of Social Research where Strauss taught and where the Troskyist trend that became neoconservatism had its genesis.

Strauss frames Löwith's book as a description of "the emergence of European, and in particular of German, nihilism." This is, at best, an imaginative way to construe Von Hegel zu Nietzsche.

Its subject, he writes, "may be said to be the transformation of European humanism, as exemplified by Goethe and Hegel, into German nihilism, as exemplified by Ernst Jünger." Actually, Löwith says very little about 20th century philosophy or the historical trends leading to Jünger's rightwing militarist sentiments and his nihilistic literary work.

Tags: karl löwith, leo strauss, nietzsche, von hegel zu nietzsche

Karl Löwith’s "Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (2 of 2)

Karl Löwith (1897-1973)

This is the second of two parts of a discussion of Karl Löwith's 1941 book, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Marx und Kierkegaard (I'm working here from the second edition of 1949).

Hegel's historical scheme of development implied that history had reached a kind of culmination point. His successors and contemporaries were very much influenced by the religiously founded but secularly oriented end-times mood of Hegel's philosophical system. Including Marx and Kierkegaard. Löwith writes of their respective works, The Communist Manifesto (1847, in Löwith's dating) and the Literary Applications (1846):

Dieser Gegansatz bedeutet aber geschichtlich betrachtet nur zwei Seiten einer gemeinsamen Destruktion der bürgerlich-christlichen Welt. Zur Revolution der bürgerlich-kapitalistischen Welt hat sich Marx auf die Masse des Proletariats gestützt, während Kierkegaard in seinem Kampf gegen die bürgerlich-christliche Welt alles auf den Enzelnen setzt. Dem entspricht, daß für Marx die bürgerliche Gesellschaft eine Gesellschaft von "vereinzelten Einzelnen" ist, in welcher der Mensch seinem "Gattungswesen" entfremdet ist, und für Kierkegaard die Christenheit ein massenhaft verbreitetes Christentum, in dem niemand ein Nachfolger Christi ist.

[But this opposition {between the viewpoints of Marx and Kierkegaard} merely represents two sides of a common destruction of the bourgeois-Christian world. Marx counted on the masses of the proletariat {working class} for a revolution of the bourgeois-capitalist world, while Kierkegaard in his fight against the bourgeois-Christian world staked everything on the single individual. This corresponds to the fact that for Marx, bourgeois society is a society of "isolated individuals" in which the person is alienated from his "genus essence," and for Kierkegaard Christianity is a widely disseminated institutional Christianity in which no one is a follower of Christ.]

Löwith brings a range of 19th century philosophers into the discussion of the longer-range implications and development of Hegel's thinking in addition to Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, especially Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), Max Stirner (1806-1856) and David Friedrich Strauß (1808-1874). Those five were among the Left Heglelians, as were Marx and Friedrich Engels also. The Left Hegelians developed the implications for social theory and radical politics. Bauer, Feuerbach and Strauß were also important in developing the historical-critical school of Biblical studies, which American fundamentalist would later deride as "Higher Criticism."

The Old Hegelians Löwith discusses only briefly, in the persons four of the most important: Rudolf Haym (1821-1901), Johann Eduard Erdmann (1805-1892), and Kuno Fischer (1824-1907) and Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879). Of Rosenkranz, Löwith approvingly cites Arnold Ruge's comment that he was "by far the freest Old Hegelian." He notes that originally, Old Hegelian referred to Hegel's direct students who propagated his ideas during Hegel's lifetime. But, he writes, “For the historical movement of the 19th century, they are without significance.” And he provides a short discussion of New Hegelians like Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Julius Ebbinghaus (1885-1981), Richard Kroner (1884-1974), Georg Lasson (1862-1932), Johann Max Emanuel Plenge (1874-1963), Heinrich Scholz (1884-1956) and Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915).

Löwith has a fascinating section comparing the perspectives of Hegel and Goethe on history. He uses the comparison to raise several issue about the grand theories of history from both Hegel himself and his followers, which also had great influence on those who were not admirers or followers of Hegel. Löwith argues that Hegel's concept of world history, by which the World Spirit develops in ever greater stages of freedom, is essentially Christian teleology dressed up in more scientific trappings. It contains within it the danger of arrogance in having people assuming they understand the nature of history and the direction it is going and needs to go. Hegel's concept of the world-historical individual carries with it the risk over over-estimating the significance as well as the virtues of the showy and the powerful.

Löwith also sees an element of Hegel's view of history that celebrates the successful in the form of the dominant and powerful, a variant of which can look a lot like Social Darwinism. Or, as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher put it, "God intended the great to be great and the little to be little.” As a caution against such a view, Löwith quotes Nietzsche, "Der Erfolg war immer der größte Lügner" ("Success has always been the biggest liar.")

And Löwith raises an important point about Hegel's theory that neither his more traditional-minded nor his more radical followers in the 19th century were inclined to challenge: Hegel's philosophy assumed a sharp distinction between humanity and Nature, between the person as Subject and Nature as object. This sharp distinction has long since become highly problematic. Löwith makes the point well through a contrast of Hegel's view of history to Goethe's:

Hegel hat seine Vorlesung über die "Philosophie der Geschichte" in den Jahren 1822/3-1830/1 vorgetragen. Die Einleitung dazu erklärt das Prinzip seiner Betrachtung, welches die stufenweise Entfaltung des Geistes und mithin der Freiheit ist. Der Geist, welcher als Weltgeist die Weltgeschichte beherrscht, ist gegenüber der Natur negative, d. h. der Fortschritt in der Entwicklung des Geistes zur Freiheit ist ein solcher in der Befreiung von der Gebundenheit an die Natur. Die Natur als solche hat daher in Hegels Philosophie der Geschichte keine selbständige und positive Bedeutung. Sie ist nicht der Grund der Geschichte der Welt, sondern nur ihr geographischer Boden. Das naturgegebene Verhältnis von Land und Meer, die Gestaltung der Küsten, der Hochländer und Ebenen, der Lauf der Flüsse und die Form der Berge, Regen und Trockenheit, das heiße, kalte und gemäßigte Klima – das alles ist zwar immer von Einfluß auf das geschichtliche Leben der Menschen, aber es nie schlechtweg bestimmend. Dem "Naturtypus" einer bestimmten "Lokalität" entspricht Typus und Charakter des darin lebenden Volkes, weil sich der Geist überhaupt in Zeit und Raum auseinanderlegt. Diese Entsprechungen zwischen der natürlichen und der geistigen Welt hat Hegel oft bis ins Eizelne ausgeführt. Im Prinzip galt ihm die Natur aber doch nur als der natürliche "Schauplatz" des geistigen Geschehens der Welt. Für Goethe ist die Natur der Schlüssel für dessen Verständnis.

[Hegel delivered his lectures on the "Philosophy of History" in the years 1822/3-1830/1. The Introduction to them declares the principle of his treatment, which is the stage-by-stage unfolding of the Spirit and with it freedom. Nature as such has here no self-standing and positive meaning in Hegel's philosophy of history. It is not the basis of the history of the world, but rather only its geographical grounds. The naturally established relationship of land and sea, the formations of the coasts, the highlands and the plains, the course of the rivers and the form of the mountains, rain and dryness, the hot, cold and mild climate – all of that is certainly always an influence on the historical life of humanity, but never absolutely determines it. The "natural type" of a particular "locality" corresponds to the type and character of the people living there, because the Spirit lays itself out in time and space in any case. Hegel often explained these influences between the natural and the spiritual world in detail. But in principle, he held Nature to be only the natural "showplace" of the spiritual occurrences of the world. For Goethe, Nature is the key to its understanding.]

Nietzsche

Löwith has written extensively on Nietzsche's philosophy in other works as well as this one. Nietzsche, even more so than Hegel, suffered from association with National Socialism in both Anglo-Saxon and orthodox Marxism-Leninism traditions. In a reflection of the latter, Wolfgang Harich (1923-1995), who was persecuted as a dissident Marxist in Communist East Germany, wrote even in the late 1980s about Nietzsche as a hidebound reactionary in "Revision des marxistischen Nietzschebilds?" Sinn und Form 5/1987 (Sept/Okt). Writers from Leon Uris to Walter Kaufmann have written at length about the problems with such an interpretation. In the philosophical tradition in which Löwith and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School were working, Nietzsche’s thought was seen as a source of valuable insights, though scarcely accepted uncritically. (Is it possible to accept Nietzsche's thinking uncritically?) Psychoanalysis also has generally had a high regard for Nietzsche’s psychological insights.

Löwith in this book gives a succinct definition of what he sees as Nietzsche’s philosophical system:

Nietzsches eigentlicher Gedanke ist ein Gedanken-System, an dessen Anfang der Tod Gottes, in dessen Mitte der aus ihm hervorgegangene Nihilismus und an dessent Ende die Selbstüberwindung des Nihilismus zur ewigen Wiederkehr steht.

[Nietzsche's real though is a thought system, in whose beginning stands the death of God, in whose middle stands the nihilism that proceeds from it and at whose end stands the self-unwinding of nihilism in the eternal return.]

Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return had to do with the idea that a person would live his life again and again in exactly the same way. Löwith takes that concept as a sign of how indebted Nietzsche's thinking always remained to Christianity:

Sie ist ein ausgesprochener Religionsersatz und nicht weniger als Kierkegaards christliches Paradox ein Ausweg aus der Verzweiflung: ein Versuch aus dem "Nichts" in "Etwas" zu kommen.

[It is an outspoken substitute for religion and not less than Kierkegaard’s Christian paradox a way out of despair: an attempt to get to "something" out of the "nothing."]

Löwith also spends some time on aspects of the work of Jakob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853), Paul Anton de Lagarde (1827-1891), Nietzsche’s close friend Franz Camille Overbeck (1837-1905) and Georges Sorel (1847-1922).

Löwith in the final section of his book focuses on "The Problem of Christianity." Löwith's discussion of Kierkegaard uses three different German words that all translate into "Christianity" in English: Christlichkeit, Christenheit, Christentum. Christlichkeit in the chapter title isn’t much of a problem. But Kierkegaard used terms that translate into German as Christenheit, by which he meant the present state of the Christian institutional churches, and Christentum, which he regarded as the true, original core of Christianity.

Both the real nature of Christianity and the state of institutional Christianity are problems with which the thinkers of this time were concerned, not only Kierkegaard. Löwith here calls attention to the heavily Protestant cast of 19th century German philosophy from Kant to Hegel to Strauß, calling again on Nietzsche, who wrote, "Der protestantische Pfarrer is Großvater der deutschen Philosophie, der Protestantismus selbst ihr peccatum originale." ("The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy, Protestantism itself its peccatum originale [Original Sin].")

Tags: goethe, hegel, karl löwith, nietzsche, von hegel zu nietzsche

Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophy

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Pretty much the opposite of Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor", scheduled on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the same place, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, takes place tomorrow. Part of Beck's schtick with this rally is place himself and his fellow segregationists in the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ben Dimiero in Martin Luther King would have been on Glenn Beck's chalkboard Media Matters 08/25/2010 explains why the comparison is historically, politically and morally absurd.

He references a 1958 article in which King talked broadly about his philosophical views, including Communism, of which his opponent accused him of being an adherent: My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence Fellowship 09/01/1958, an excerpt from his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958). That's main what I talk about in this post. (Warning: this post is LONG and WONKY)

But I also wanted to mention that Beck's trying to claim he's following in the legacy of King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s is the kind of double-reverse historical revisionism that has always been a standard part of segregationist ideology and propaganda. We aren't prejudiced against the Negroes, the segregationists said (polite version using "Negroes"), it's the Negroes who are prejudiced against us white folks. Segregation isn't to make an advantage for whites at the expense of Negroes, it's to help the Negroes; no one will be hurt worse than them by ending it. It's not us good Christian white folks promoting racial hate against the Negroes, it's the Negro Commonist civil rights fanatics promoting hate against us. And so on.

The same individuals and groups could also argue in straight up racial terms that whites were just inherently superior to blacks. As we've seen with Bush idolaters during the previous administration and in the last year with Republican and Tea Party fanatics, authoritarian-minded people can hold the most screaming contradictions in their opinions, without either their belief system or their emotional commitment to it being notably damaged.

What we seeing now with Beck, Limbaugh, Laura Schlesinger and the Tea Party zealots is pretty 1950s-style Southern segregationism, superficially adapted to the 2000s.

Now, on to the thoughts of King, who was in active opposition to those segregationists in 1958. He relates his perspective on racism and economic conditions as having developed early:

I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice. Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort,I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me. During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father’s wishes - he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions - in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. [my emphasis]

The wording is important. King didn't describe racism as only a function or side-effect of inequality and economic injustice. But he describes his view as being that "the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice."

He writes that the Social Gospel writer Walter Rauschenbusch made a big impression on him, particularly in regard to the notion that Christian Gospel had to be concerned with the broader social conditions of people in their physical lives, not just for their individual souls. But he criticized Rauschenbusch on this point: "he came perilously close to identifying the Kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system - a tendency which should never befall the Church."

I especially noticed King's attention to German philosophers of the 19th century. He describes a course with one of the professors that particularly influenced him, Edgar Brightman, this way:

Although the course was mainly a study of Hegel's monumental work,
Phenomenology of Mind, I spent my spare time reading his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. There were points in Hegel's philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His contention that "truth is the whole" led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.

This is notable in several ways. One, having read two of those three books, I can say for sure they aren't light reading. He took philosophy pretty seriously if he was reading Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right on the side. Plus, it suggests he had a seriously geeky side. (On the day Glenn Beck reads Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, the oceans will evaporate. Or, at least what's left of Beck's sanity will do so.)

Having more than little of such a side myself, I'm willing to unpack this sentence a bit: "His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle." Hegel did understand the world in general as behaving according to a dialectical process which required dialectical thinking to understand. He also had a dialectical method, and orthodox Marxists would later say that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took Hegel's formal logic and his dialectical method. The influence of Hegel on Marx's thought actually become a serious issue in Soviet and Eastern European science and philosophy in the postwar period. I'm guessing that King wasn't particularly aware of that at the time but it's an interesting question. I posted about Hegel's philosophy on 12/30/2009 in Review of Klassische deutsche Philosophie (10): Hegel.

King's critical but open-minded attitude toward Hegel is interesting in another regard. After the Second World War, Anglo-American evaluations of Germany often fell into what is known as the "From Luther to Hitler" line of thinking, which essentially viewed all major philosophical and social trends in Germany since the 16th century onward as somehow precursors to Hitler's National Socialism (Nazism). Hegel figures in that view as a "totalitarian" thinker. In the textbook of my otherwise excellent undergraduate political theory course, an excerpt of Hegel's work was paired with one by Mussolini.

This attitude toward Hegel's work actually began before the Second World War. The first one had inclined the Anglo-American world to take a rather dim view of all things German, and the rise of Hitler to power encouraged it. But that attitude toward Hegel's philosophy was always cracked. And King recognized this in the 1950s, in spite of the prevailing academic atmosphere against Hegel. His comment also suggests that he found much to admire in Hegel's view of historical development as the long-term realization of freedom.

Nietzsche is a philosopher whose reputation in the Anglo-Saxon world suffered excessively from the "From Luther to Hitler" school of thought. In Nietzsche's case, it's a little easier to understand. Because he wrote in a way that was easy to quote out of context to give his words a distorted meaning. But Nietzsche was definitely no proto-Nazi. His bitterest polemics were directed against the anti-Semites of his time, the real proto-Nazis. But King's reason for criticizing what he understood of Nietzsche's philosophy is interesting in itself:

During this period I had about despaired of the power of love in solving social problems. Perhaps my faith in love was temporarily shaken by the philosophy of Nietzsche. I had been reading parts of The Genealogy of Morals and the whole of The Will to Power. Nietzsche's glorification of power-in his theory all life expressed the will to power - was an outgrowth of his contempt for ordinary morals. He attacked the whole of the Hebraic-Christian morality - with its virtues of piety and humility, its other worldliness and its attitude toward suffering - as the glorification of weakness, as making virtues out of necessity and impotence. He looked to the development of a superman who would surpass man as man surpassed the ape.

King didn't select his Nietzsche books as well as he did the Hegel ones. The Genealogy of Morals is an expansion and explanation of Beyond Good and Evil. The Will to Power was published posthumously and is only a Nietzsche book in a limited sense. Nietzsche's executor was his sister, who was a proto-Nazi. And she put together The Will to Power by cutting and pasting material from Nietzsche, selected to emphasize authoritarian schemes.

But King rejected what he understood poorly from Nietzsche on the grounds, "He attacked the whole of the Hebraic-Christian morality - with its virtues of piety and humility, its other worldliness and its attitude toward suffering - as the glorification of weakness, as making virtues out of necessity and impotence." In other words, he saw Nietzsche as rejecting Christian virtues wholesale, virtues which King defended. And he also rejected what he understood as a racialist theme in Nietzsche's concept of the "superman."

I've posted a couple of reviews of books on Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity in two parts, on 10/25/2009 and 10/29/2009. He actually had a sophisticated view of the development of Jewish and Christian moral concepts. And understood more sympathetically, I would even argue that King made very good use of the "slave morality" aspects of Christianity, the idea that Christian morality fundamentally represented the viewpoint of slaves in opposition to their masters. The notion that Christianity has what Latin American Catholics would later call a "preferential option for the poor" fit well with King's understanding of Christianity. The two had more in common in their views of the Christian religion than King realized.

In that article, King also discusses the influence of the pacifists A.J. Muste and Mohatmas Gandhi. What I find more interesting, continuing with the German philosophy theme, were his comments on Karl Marx. He says he read Marx's Capital (he names it by the German title Das Kapital) and The Communist Manifesto. How much King knew about the political situation in Germany and other parts of Europe leading up to the democratic Revolutions of 1848, the year the Manifesto was published, I don't know. But his discussion in that article isn't focused on whether Marx in developing his theory of surplus value correctly used the work of English political economist David Ricardo.

King was already nationally known in 1958, and he was very well aware that he had to be careful in addressing anything to do with Communism. On the other hand, since he was being accused of it - the segregationists always said the civil rights movement was a Communist plot - he also couldn't avoid addressing it. He leads with what he rejects. Although he refers to "the thinking of Marx and Lenin" in general, this is more addressed to his current understanding of Soviet Communism in the Cold War context:

First[,] I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality - a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.

In this, King showed more affinity with Hegel than with Marx. The theory of dialectical materialism, i.e., Marxism (Engels invented the term after Marx's death), as interpreted by orthodox Communism, was a materialist philosophy that rejected the notion of God. And while the practice of religion was banned in the Soviet bloc in 1958, believers and church members were discriminated against in serious ways.

Second, I strongly disagreed with communism's ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything - force, violence, murder, lying - is a justifiable means to the "millennial" end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the mean.

This was a conventional Christian critique of Communism, based on the idea that without the notion of God, there was no firm foundation for a moral order for humanity.

Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxist would argue that the state is an "interim" reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that end. And if any man's so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.

While this may also sound like a conventional criticism, it would have been made the hair on many a conservative anti-Communists head stand up. Because in his description, he is criticizing the restriction of individual freedom of conscience and the intellect - not the public ownership of the means of production which Marx advocated and the Soviets practiced. This doesn't mean that King advocated nationalization of all industry and banking, he didn't and never did. But here he states a priority that would set an Ayn Rand fan to sputtering and gagging, now as in 1958.

Not incidentally, this criticism of the restriction of personal freedoms and meaningful political expression in the former Communist countries is almost universally accepted today, at least in theory, even by the "postcommunist" left parties in Europe.

But he did have this to say about Marxism in relation to "social justice", something Glenn Beck explicitly denounces:

Yet, in spite of the fact that my response to communism was and is negative, and I considered it basically evil, there were points at which I found it challenging. The late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, referred to communism as a Christian heresy. By this he meant that communism had laid hold of certain truths which are essential parts of the Christian view of things, but that it had bound up with them concepts and practices which no Christian could ever accept or profess. Communism challenged the late Archbishop and it should challenge every Christian - as it challenged me - to a growing concern about social justice.

With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice. The Christian ought always to be challenged by any protest against unfair treatment of the poor, for Christianity is itself such a protest, nowhere expressed more eloquently than in Jesus's words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor: he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."[my emphasis]

This was a statement of a Christian worldview that rejected what he understood at the basic Communist worldview. But it was also the statement of a man who wasn't going to be deterred from demanding just and necessary reforms by people labeling him a Communist.

And the following was obviously carefully worded. But it also indicated a willingness to entertain a radical criticism of capitalism as practiced in 1958, which in the United States was arguably a more sensibly regulated system than it is today:

In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers-from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial “yes” and a partial “no.” In so far as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous “no”; but in so far as he pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness in the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian churches, I responded with a definite “yes.”

My reading of Marx also convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise, and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.

That thesis-synthesis-antithesis triad is a crummy way to try to conceive Hegel's or Marx's dialectics. But it was and still is a conventional and familiar way to do so, so his readers would have recognized the reference.

Finally, his view of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology is notable:

In spite of the fact that I found many things to be desired in Niebuhr’s philosophy, there were several points at which he constructively influenced my thinking. Niebuhr’s great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth, or the semi-fundamentalism of other dialectical theologians. Moreover, Niebuhr has extraordinary insight into human nature, especially the behavior of nations and social groups. He is keenly aware of the complexity of human motives and of the relation between morality and power. His theology is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. These elements in Niebuhr’s thinking helped me to recognize the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism. While I still believed in man’s potential for good, Niebuhr made me realize his potential for evil as well. Moreover, Niebuhr helped me to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil. [my emphasis]

Tags: hegel, martin luther king jr., karl marx, marxism, niebuhr, nietzsche

Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and "vulgar Nietzscheanism"

In the previous post, I discussed a couple of articles on libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand (born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), including Michael Prescott, Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman (2005) and Corey Robin, Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It? 06/07/2010. His sketch is interesting for the biographical background he provides.

I wanted to follow up on Robin's discussion of the brand of "vulgar Nietzscheanism that has stalked the radical right ... since the early part of the twentieth century" is decent, focusing as he does on the aspects of this type of Nietzscheanism on Rand herself. But his discussion of Nietzsche doesn't distinguish well between the actual Nietzsche and "vulgar Nietzscheanism."

Despite these reservations, those two articles together give a worthwhile sketch of the dark side of Rand "libertarian" ideology.

Nietzsche himself didn't make a "journey back to antiquity, where he hoped to find a master-class morality untainted by the egalitarian values of the lower orders." He was a philologist by training, a specialist in Greek and Latin. He built his concept of "slave morality" on the ancient Greek usage, as in Homer, in which the aristocratic characters spoke of "good" not in terms of morality but in terms of what aristocrats did. What the common people did was "bad", not because it was morally evil but because it wasn't aristocratic.

Nietzsche argued that Judaism turned that notion on its head but also redefined them, so that they regarded what was aristocratic as not just "bad" but evil, morally damnable. He saw Judaism and, to an even greater extent, Christianity, as a product of the anti-aristocratic "slave morality." But, despite his extravagant language, he wasn't condemning that development, he was describing it - and with a great deal of perception. Robin seems to see Nietzsche as the prophet of conservative anti-religious sentiment. While Nietzsche rejected Christianity, though, he respected religion as a human force.

And he hoped to see humanity turn to a higher form of religion that affirmed life and human passions in a way he believed existing Christianity did not. He envisioned that higher form of religion as a return to the Dionysian religion of old.

Tags: ayn rand, nietzsche, radical right

Nietzsche and Christianity (2 of 2)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

This is a continutation of yesterday's post on the two books Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums [Nietzsche's Ideas on the History of Christianity] (1938) by Ernst [Wilhelm] Benz (1907-1978) and Nietzsche und das Christentum [Nietzsche and Christianity] (1938) by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969).

Jaspers' book is more focused on some critical observations about Nietzsche's broad views on Christianity.

Jaspers makes the argument that some of Nitzsche's key philosophical ideas were essentially Christian. This particular contention doesn't hold up well. Christianity is scarcely the only religion or philosophy that places a high value on truth, for instance, one of the aspects of Nietzsche's thought that Jaspers sees as deriving from Christianity. And the fact that Christianity was a decisive influence on the scienfic outlook that developed in Europe does not mean that science is essentially Christian. For centuries it was the Muslim world that was producing the key scientific developments while Christian Europe was pretty much an underdeveloped backwater in comparison. The revolutionary advances in European science didn't begin until Europeans began to integrate the Aristotlean materialist philosophy and scientific thinking from the Muslim world, to which the Muslim portions of the Iberian Peninsula were a key contact point.

Nietzsche saw Jesus as a special being who practiced a unity of life and belief, someone very like Buddha. But it's hard to see what's specifically Christian about it. A respectful non-Christian view of Jesus would be a better description. Nietzsche rejected the Resurrection as both a physical and spiritual event. He rejected the teaching of Christianity from Jesus' earliest disciples on. He rejected the teachings of St. Paul, the first great Christian theologian. Nietzsche's image of Jesus may be one that fits well in the mystical tradition from which Nietzsche drew so much inspiration. But his Jesus is an ahistorical one. He apparently viewed Jesus as having been scarcely effected by, much less consciously accepting, his own Jewish religion and as being virtually independent of the Christian religion his followers created. Good or bad, brilliant or muddled, it's hard to see how we could call that essentially Christian.

Along with the European concept of science, more specifically the notion that the whole world of existence is a proper object for human study, Jaspers also points to Nietzsche's belief in a fundamental flaw in human beings and to a world-historical vision that explains the movement of history as being beliefs basically derived from Christian thought. The belief in a fundamental flaw in humanity would seem to be the most obvious candidate for Christian roots, in the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin. But Jaspers devotes only a few paragraphs to that belief of Nietzsche's, and does not specifically link it to Original Sin.

Although his claims for the particularly Christian nature of these parts of Nietzsche's thinking don't hold up very well, his discussions of those issues certainly sheds light on Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity. For example:

Aus dem christlichen Geschichtsgedanken ist durch eine Verwandlung die Geschichtsphilosophie all weltliches Totalwissen hervorgegangen. Herder, Kant, Hegel und Marx stehen in der Descendenz des christlichen Gedankens und mit ihnen auch Nietzsche. Immer ist eine Vision des Ganzen maßgebend, immer ein Bewußtsein des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters als eines bestimmten Ortes im Gesamtablauf, und zwar immer als Krise, als ein alles entscheidender Übergang; immer besteht die Neigung, irgendwo in der Vergangenheit den Höhepunkt, den Heilsursprung zu erblicken und diesen wieder als die Möglichkeit der eigenen Gegenwart zu sehen; immer wird als Grundform des Geschehens gedacht, daß wahre, gesunde Zustande durch ein Gift, durch ein den Menschen sich selbst entfremdendes Geschehen, durch eine Untat, ein Böses ruiniert, zersetzt und verkehrt worden seien und nun widerhergestellt werden müßten. Der Inhalt all dieser Kategorien wechselt, sie selber aber kehren ständig wieder.

[The philosophy of history [that assumes to be] a total science of everything secular came out of Christian thinking on history through a transformation. Herder, Kant, Hegel and Marx stand in the tradition of Christian thought and, with them, Nietzsche also. Always a vision of the whole is standard, always a consciousness of the present age as a particular place in the total order of even, and that always as crisis, as a trasition that will decide everything; there always exists the tendency to see in the past the high point, the holy origin to, and to see it again as the possibility of one's own present; always the basic form of events is conceived as that the true, healthy state has been ruined, corroded and turned upside down by a poison, by events that alienate people from themselves, by a crime, an evil, and now must be restored. The content of all these categories changes, but it itself returns again and again.]

I would note here that the notion of seeing a high point of history in the past would not apply to Karl Marx's view of history, which did not look to restore some ideal state from the past but rather to create a greater future beyond the capitalist stage of economic development.

Jaspers also makes a very perceptive point about understanding Nietzsche's thought. He argues that understanding Nietzsche means to join him in his distinctive critical process of thinking, of looking at ideas and historical processes in their dynamic development and at the many contradictory implications and meanings in them. As he puts it:

Jede Niederschrift, jeder Augenblickseinfall gehören bei Nietzsche zum Werk. Wenn Nietzsche selbst schon die Abgleitungen von seinen besten Gedanken vollzieht, wenn er abfällt in das Fanatische und in das Spielerische, wenn sich in seinen Sätzen ein dichtes Vordergrundsgestrüpp ausbreitet, wenn die Leidenschaft des Augenblicks ihn absichtlich ungerecht werden läßt, so ist alles das um so sichtbarer geworden, weil jede Notiz, auch alles von ihm nicht mehr kritisch Geprüfte, zu seinem Werk gehört, und es kein Mittel gibt, eine Trennnung zu vollziehen. Denn auch die wesentlichsten, ursprünglichsten Gedanken sind gerade in flüchtigen Notizen bewahrt. Man muß stets in dem Bewußtsein lesen, nicht ein Fertiges vor Augen zu haben, sondern in der Gedankenwerkstätte zugegen zu sein, wo das solide Werk und zahllose Splitter zugleich entstehen.

[Everything he wrote down, every brief vagary, belong with Nietzsche to his work. If Nietzsche himself already derives the derivatives from his best though, if he falls off into the fanatical and in the playful, if in his sentences a thick forground of brush spreads itself out, if the passion of the moment interntionally becomes unjust, so has all that become so visible because every note, even everything that was not critically proofread by him, belongs to his work, and there is no means by which one can draw a dividing line [between those and other parts of his work]. Because even the most essential, most original thoughts are evidenced precisely in fleeting notes. One must always read [Nietzsche] in the consciousness that one has not a finished work before one's eyes, but rather to be in the thought workshop where the solid work and innumerable splinters originate at the same time.]

Visiting Nietzsche's workshop and watching him go through the process is a great metaphor. You have to go along for the ride you realize all the places you've seen along the way.

What neither Benz nor Jaspers undertakes in these volumes is to evaluate to what extent Nietzsche's historical arguments about the history of the Christian Church make sense. Just as Nietzsche pointed out that the 19th-century biographers of Jesus substituted their own philosophical/theological notions for the historical Jesus, so Nietzsche envisions the historical Jesus as a kind of Near Eastern Buddha. It's not a fully implausible position. But Nietzsche also seems to picture the historical Jesus as virtually unrelated to the Jewish and Christian religions. And that is thoroughly implausible. Jesus understood himself as a Jewish teacher and his religious conceptions were derived from the Jewish understanding of God and the divine. And however much his later followers may have expressed their ideas of religion differently, the Christian religion was founded on the teachings of Jesus and his followers' belief in his Resurrection.

And key messages of the historical Jesus like the urgency of the coming Kingdom of God and the need for people to decide to change their lives and embrace that kingdom continued into early Christian theology. Certainly it evolved over time. But the idea of a radical break between Jesus and the theology of his earliest disciples or with that of St. Paul is historically more than a little doubtful.

Here Nietzsche's sources may have led him astray with their own perspectives derived from the Christian tradition. Christians of that time, and to a large extent in our own time, saw Jesus' teachings as a radical break from the Jewish religion. Even the more secular-minded practitioners of the historical-critical methodology were to some extent working within that assumption. The emerging Biblical criticism tended to judge the Hebrew Bible as representing a grimmer, more primitive view of God and to blame it for the violent aspects of the Bible. It takes some imagination to view the Book of Revelation as displaying God in a more merciful and kindly mode than the Book of Jonah. But Nietzsche did seem to extract Jesus out of his Jewish religious context.

This may also be reflected in the way Nietzsche viewed the break between Christianity and Jesus himself. He recognized that the Christian religion took over many of its concepts from Judaism. But because he imagined Jesus as virtually standing outside the Jewish religion, the Jewish aspects he saw in Christianity would have looked like a departure from Jesus. But when Jesus is seen as part of his Jewish tradition, that assumption becomes far more problematic. In that aspect of his view of Jesus, Nietzsche may well have been taking a "Christian" view, albeit one of the most problematic of Christian views.

Both books are strong reminders that however sweeping and careless Nietzsche's pronouncements may sometimes seem, his views of Christianity were based on a careful study of contemporary and earlier sources. He was familiar with much of the cutting-edge scholarly work of his time on the history of Christianity. Nietzsche was an intuitive thinker. But he wasn't receiving his intuitions on Christianity out of thin air or from some superficial "village atheist" thinking. Nietzsche pushes the reader to critical thinking. As Jaspers puts it, he constantly pushes us to think carefully, to look for contrary indications to our own conclusions:

Ständig kommt eine Zwei- und Mehrdeutigkeit in Nietzsches Denken. Er gewinnt nicht die Ruhe einer Wahrheit, nicht die Entspannung an einem erreichten Ziel. ...

Dabei schult uns Nietzsche in der Sensibilität eines intuitiven Wahrnehmens, dann im bewußten Auffassen der Zwei- und Vieldeutigkeiten, schließlich in der Beweglichkeit des Denkens ohne Fixierung eines Wissens! Es ist im Umgang mit Nietzsche wie ein Aufgelockertwerden. Möglichkeiten entstehen, aber nicht mehr.

Er zeigt uns nicht den Weg, lehrt uns nicht einen Glauben, stellt uns nicht auf einen Boden. Er läßt uns vielmehr keine Ruhe, quält uns unablässig, jagt uns auf aus jedem Winkel, verwehrt jede Verschleierung.

Er will uns, indem er uns ins Nichts stellt, gerade dadurch die Weite unseres Raumes schaffen; indem er uns der Bodenlosigkeit ansichtig macht, gerade dadurch die Möglichkeit schaffen, unseren echten Grund zu erfassen, aus dem wir kommen.

[A double and multiple interpretation comes regularly in Nietzsche's thought. He doesn't win the rest of a truth, nor the relaxation at a goal achieved. ...

Nietzsche thereby schools us in the sensibility of an intuitive perception, then in conscious comprehension of double and multiple interpretations, finally in the flexibility of though without the fixation of a science! Dealing with Nietzsche is like becoming limber. Possibilities develop, but not more.

He doesn't show us the way, doesn't teach us a faith, doesn't give us a grounding. It's more like he leaves us no rest, distresses us unremittingly, bolts out of every corner, refuses every deception.

He wants us, precisely by leading us into nothingness, to create the breadth of our space; precisely by putting us at variance with bottomlessness, to creat the possibility to acquire our true ground from which he come.]

Tags: christianity, karl jaspers,nietzsche

Nietzsche and Christianity (1 of 2)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums [Nietzsche's Ideas on the History of Christianity] (1938) by Ernst Benz (1907-1978) and Nietzsche und das Christentum [Nietzsche and Christianity] (1938) by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) are two books from the same time concerned with Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas on Christianity and its development. Jaspers' book appeared somewhat later than Benz' and Jaspers references Benz' book favorably. Benz focuses specifically on the intellectual environment and particular sources on which Nietzsche relied in his writing on Christianity, my main interest in reading both books. Jaspers is more focused on critiquing some of the philosophical implications of Nietzsche's work on the Christian religion.

I didn't see until after I had read Benz' book that he became a member of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1937. Jaspers, on the other hand, was married to a Jewish woman at the time and was banned from teaching because of that. Previously, he had been a professor of psychology and after the Second World War was able to return to teaching. Whatever his political convictions or affiliations were, Benz is recognized as an important scholor of mysticism. A prolific writer, he is particularly known for his work on the Eastern Church, Geist und Leben der Ostkirche (1957) and his Beschreibung des Christentums [Description of Christianity].

Benz relies heavily on quotations from The Will to Power, which was not prepared for publication by Nietzsche himself. He uses those quotes in the context of Nietzsche's other writing on Christianity, though.

Nietzsche viewed the Renaissance as a return to a vital classical understanding of human life. He saw Luther and the Reformation as having preserved Christianity in the Church sense because it reversed the trend represented by the Renaissance, both in the Protestant and Catholic Churches. He saw both the Renaissance and the Reformation as attempts of the human spirit to free itself from the dead, dogmatic religion he saw in the Church's Christianity, the Renaissance a vital and true attempt at such a liberation, the Reformation as a negative, reactionary one. Though both movements took the form of looking back in time to recover truth.

Jaspers describes Nietzsche's view of the Renaissance this way:

Fur Nietzsche liegt der Hohepunkt des Menschentums (in dem Glanze gesehen, wie der Christ durch die Evangelien die Fülle der Zeiten erblickt) im vorsokratischen Griechentum; die Möglichkeit unserer eigenen Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit liegt in der Wiederannäherung an dieses Griechentum des tragischen Zeitalters; — die Höhe der Antike ist durch Gifte zerstört, die — alle zusammengefaßt, summiert und überboten im Christentum ... — die Welt in den Ruin brachten, der nach zweitausend Jahren jetzt seinen tiefsten Punkt erreicht hat und endlich zur Umkehr auffordert.

[For Nietzsche, the high point of humanity (seen in the glimpse like the one in which the Christian catches sight of the fullness of time through the Evangelists) lay in pre-Socratic Greek culture; the possibility of our own truth and authenticity lies in again drawing near to this Greek culture of the tragic era; the height of antiquity was destroyed, which - altogether summed up and outdone in Christianity ... - brought the world to ruin, that after 2000 years has not reached its lowest point and finally invites a reversal.

Nietzsche thought Jesus' original Apostles had misunderstood his message and departed from his true teachings immediately after his death on the Cross. Later, he came to blame Saint Paul in particular for that result. He wrote of Paul, "er hat principiell das ursprüngliche Christenthum annulliert ...". (He annulled the original Christianity as a matter of principle.) In line with his own social-psychological theories that Judaism and even more so Christianity were "slave religion" with a strong underlying theme of revenge, he also said, "Paulus war der größte aller Apostel der Rache." (Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge.)

Nietzsche saw this early falling-away from the teachings of Jesus himself as a continuation of a decadent trend in ancient culture which began with Plato and continued through the Stoics and the Hellenistic Mystery Religions, a trend which moved away from the life-affirming nature of the Greek religion. "Paulus wusste schwerlich, wie sehr Alles in ihm nach Plato riecht," (Paul hardly knew how much everything in him smells of Plato) according to Nietzsche. This vital nature of the Greek tradition was what Nietzsche saw as the true pagan religion, essentially the same as what Jesus and Buddha had found. Nietzsche called this trend that produced Christianity an "Anti-Heidenthum" (anti-heathenism) movement. He saw Epicurus as one of the classical philosophers who fought against that trend.

Nietzsche criticized Christianity and the Mystery Religions for, among other things, their emphasis on miracles: "gerade das Auszeichnende des Judenthums and des ältesten Christenthums sein Widerwille gegen das Wunder ist, seine relative Rationalität." (Precisely the distinguishing feature of Judaism and the oldest Christianity was their indisposition toward miracles, their relative rationality.) Nevertheless, he believed that Christianity preserved something of that vital essence of the ancient understanding, the "Universal-Heidnische" (universal-heathen), and that it was in fact the underlying reason for the success of Christianity as a world religion, despite all the ecclessiastical accretions and excesses that he so strongly criticized.

Nietzsche actually has a real point when he writes of St. Paul, "Dies ist der erste Christ, der Erfinder der Christlichkeit! Bis dahin gab es nur einige jüdische Sectierer!" (This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christ-likeness! Until then there were only some Jewish sectarians!) Paul was in fact the first great Christian theologian. As with much of Nietzsche's writing, his provocative and polemic style can obscure some perceptive and accurate observations. Paul's theology and remarkable mission activity did lay the groundwork through which Christianity became a world religion and not a brand of Judaism.

Nietzsche did name a number of figures like Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) as people who had managed to extract the essential, pagan/vital thread from Christianity, as distorted as he believed it had been by the Christian ecclesiastical traditon itself. He once described Pascal as "der einzige logische Christ" (the only logical Christian).

Nietzsche accepted the approach of the historical-critical school that had flourished in Germany in particular during the 19th century, which understood the Gospels as the product of the Christian communities that produced them. He interpreted the history of the Church as a continuing falsification and distortion of the original message of Jesus which began with Jesus' own immediate disciples. From his point of treasuring the "heathen" or "pagan" heritage of ancient Greece, Nietzsche declared, "Die Kirche ist die Barbarisierung des Christentums." (The Church is the barbarization of Christianity.)

Benz takes a look at the intellectual influences that seem to have been particularly important to Nietzsche in constructing his own original, provocative theories about these matters.

The Catholic historian Jannsen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes [History of the German People] influenced Nietzsche's polemic style in his discussions about Church history and about Luther, but Nietzsche's view of Luther was significantly different than that of Jannsen.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) and his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [Culture of the Renaissance in Italy] (1860)greatly influnced Nietzsche's evaluation of the Renaissance, Benz argues.

Nietzsche's particular view of Luther was supported by a trend within Protestant theology that saw Luther as embodying the medieval spirit of Catholicism. This was known as the "Tübinger" trend and was exemplified by writers like Heinrich Lang (1826-1876), the Protestant theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), and philologist Paul Anton de Lagarde (1827-1891).

Leo Tolstoy was often said to be an influence on Nietzsche. Benz, however, points out a number of ways in which Tolstoy's particular views on Jesus and on Church history differed notably from Nietzsche's. Tolstoy's view of the fall of the Church away from the true Gospel of Jesus was that it began with the Emperor Constantine's adoption of the faith, not with the first disciples of Jesus. Tolstoy shared Nietzsche's view of Paul as decisive for the development of the Christian Church, but Tolstoy had a far more favorable view of the functioning of Paul's theology and its relation to the original message of Jesus. Benz winds up questioning the significance of Tolstoy's rationalist theological views for Nietzsche's particular ideas on Christianity.

Dostojewski was clearly an important influence on Nietzsche's view of Christianity, as Benz explains. Benz argues that because Nietzsche praised Dostojewski most of all for his psychological insight and because in Beck's reading Nietzsche's view of Christianity was primarily a psychological one, that Dostojewski's insight were important to Nietzsche's views on Christianity in the last decade of his active scholarly work, the 1880s, which is when Nietzsche first discovered the Russian's work. But Beck argues that Dostojewski's influence was a negative one, in the sense that Nietzsche saw in Dostojewski the type of Christianity that Nietzsche denigrated, albeit expressed with great psychological insight. "Er [Nietzsche] liebt ihm [Dostowewski] als Enthüller des Gegentypus seines eigenen [Nietzsches] Menschenbildes." (He [Nietzsche] loved him as the revealer of the opposite type of his own [Nietzsche's] image of humanity.) Benz argues that the characters in Dostojewski's novels became for Nietzsche the basis of Nietzsche's psychological understanding of the early Christians, including the disciples, who failed to grasp the real meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus.

Nietzsche's mutual fan, the Left Hegelian Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), was a huge influence on Nietzsche's understanding of early Christianity. And, via Bauer, so was the early Enlightenment thinker and radical Pietist Johann Christian Edelmann (1698-1767). Including the idea of the earliest disciples having misunderstood and falsified the teachings of Jesus and the notion of Christianity being influenced by an historical movement of the kind that Nietzsche called "Anti-Heidnisch", a movement which represented the decadence of Hellenistic civilization. Both Bauer and Nietzsche rejected the central belief of the Christian religion, the Resurrection, and the interpretation of the Crucifixion as a sacrifice to reconcile sinner with God, as false and as "priestly" falsifications of the life and message of Jesus.

Bauer also argued for the intellectual continuity of Plato and the Stoics to Christianity. And he like Nietzsche put great weight on the popularity of Christianity in Rome first among the poor and the dispossessed, as did Ernest Renan in his biography of Paul. Benz makes a good case for the direct influence of Bauer on Nietzsche, as he also does for Nietzsche's friend the Protestant theologian Franz Camille Overbeck (1837-1905). Overbeck's influence seemed to have been more in his interchange of ideas, a "constant give-and-take" with Nietzsche more than Nietzsche adopting Overbeck's positions. Benz found that Overbeck was particularly helpful to Nietzsche in developing his ideas on the development of Christian morality, on the relation of Christianity to Hellenistic thought, on his understanding of Paul's and Luther's theologies, and on the theological assumptions of contemporary biographers of Jesus like David Strauß and Renan. Benz explains that Nietzsche departs significantly from the image of Jesus produced by the successors of Strauß and Bruno Bauer. His view of Church history and of Jesus himself was heavily influenced by the work of Strauss and Bauer in trying to distinguish the historical core of the life of Jesus. But Nietzsche also thought they had constructed their own Jesus in the image of their rationalistic theology, which Nietzsche rejected.

Paul de Lagarde, whose given name was Paul Bötticher, was and philospher and thosophist who became a leading Orientalist. His ideas on Christianity borrowed heavily from the German mystical tradition and Benz documents that Nietzsche was familiar with Lagarde's work on Christianity.

Lagarde was also a noted anti-Semite, representing the mystical/theosophist trend of anti-Semitic thought, which was generally less influential in the 19th century than the pseudoscientific brand of racism. Benz doesn't deal with the issue of anti-Semitism in this 1938 book. Nazi writers very selectively quoted Nietzsche critical comments on Judaism to promote their own anti-Semitism. But 19th-century anti-Semitism was not a trend that had much of any influence on Nietzsche's thinking in any other way but his emphatic condemnation of it. His book Nietzsche contra Wagner provided a lot of disapproving commentary on Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism, the main reason for the break of his earlier friendship with and admiration for the composer. That part of Legarde's thinking did not match up with Nietzsche's. Benz alludes to this when he writes, "Mit den positiven Zielen einer Erneuerung der Kirche, wie sie Lagarde verkündet, hat freilich Nietzsche nichts zu tun ..." (Clearly Nietzsche had no use for the positive goals of a renewal of the Church such as Lagarde had promulgated.) Lagarde notion for "renewal" of the Church had to do with the creation of a "German Church" based in part on anti-Semitic racism and nationalism.

Lagarde shared with Nietzsche the notion that Jesus' own disciples were the first to create a false version of Jesus' true teaching. Like Nietzsche and German mystical/Pietist tradition, he saw the Church itself as chronically hostile to the real message of Jesus. Lagarde shared Nietzsche's harshly critical judgments against St. Paul, and some of their ideas about Martin Luther were similar.

In the case of other thinkers Benz discusses, the direct influence on Nietzsche is less clear. But he draws some interesting analogies, which could indicate direct influence. Or it could be a reflection of the intectual environment in which Nietzsche lived and worked, the things that were "in the air".

For instance, Adolf von Harnack's (1851-1930) work on the Hellenization of Christianity was influential in the 19th century. Nietzsche and Harnack both took seriously the variety of historical and intellectual influences at work in early Christianity, but they drew very different conclusions from that understanding.

The French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was another who was generally influential at the time and whose influence at least was an important force in shaping Nietzsche's intellectual environment, though Nietzsche rejected Renan's disignation of Jesus as a genius and a hero.

Benz argues that Nietzsche's view of Jesus was very much "in dem alten Sinn des deutschen Spiritualismus eines Sebastian Franck [1499-1542] und Valentin Weigel [1533-1588]" (in the old sense of the German mysticism of a Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel). He saw Jesus as a figure who was in touch with the real inner life and who led a model outward life, a figure very akin to Buddha. Referring to the influence of Edelmann on Nietzsche via Bruno Bauer, Benz discusses several ways in which Nietzsche's thought was in line with the German mystical/Pietist tradition: their concept of the Church as a decadent institution; the notion that the Christian traditions had relatively early fallen aware from the true teachings of Jesus (Edelmann even dated the falling away to the earliest disciples as Nietzsche did); and, the emphasis on unity of life and belief as they understood Jesus had exemplified.

Benz mentions the historian Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) only in passing, as someone whose image of Paul of having been the first to really understand the message of Jesus was accepted by Overbeck but rejected diametrically by Nietzsche. Andrés Sánchez Pascual names Wellhausen as a significant influence on Nietzsche in Revista de Occidente Agosto-Septiembre 1973.

Jaspers' book is more focused on some critical observations about Nietzsche's broad views on Christianity. I will discuss it in a separate post tomorrow.

Tags: christianity, karl jaspers, nietzsche

Bob Nietzsche Somerby on reporters exposing "lies"

Bob Somerby's Daily Howler column often reminds me of reading Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Anyone that has spent some time wrestling with Nietzsche's work has encountered passages that seemed at first glance to be wild polemics that, on closer inspection and in the context of the larger work, are actually well-thought-out analysis. His concept of Judaism and Christianity as being based on "slave morality" comes to mind.

Somerby is in full Nietzschian mode in his post of 06/25/09 as he undertakes rhetorical jihads against Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson for a frivolous obsession with stories of sex and adultery ("We're all Ken Starr now") and at Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen for failing to take into full account the state of our national press corps during the 1990s.

And he makes some great points in the process, though someone not really familiar with his work might be taken aback by his polemics against such well-known liberals and, in the case of Glenn and Jay, outspoken critics of the Establishment press.

Anyone who has read a few consecutive posts of mine knows that I quote Glenn Greenwald every other day or so, normally with approval. He's been great on the torture accountability and NSA spying issues, for instance.

But Nietzsche-Somerby in that column touches on one of the weaknesses of Glenn's approach in criticizing the national press is that he often frames it in lawyerly abstractions about the press catering to power. What Glenn sometimes misses or at least understates is the way that the dysfunctions of the national press more often than not benefit the Republican positions on issues of the day. Or, as the Howler puts it in full-throated Nietzsche mode:

What makes Glenn’s work so mushy? He walks away from some profoundly basic distinctions — distinctions which have been universally observed for millennia. As Froomkin tends to do, he draws no distinction between "false statements" and "lies." Everyone in the western world has observed this (important) distinction, for several millennia. But we progressives have become so ardent that we now tend throw this distinction away. In the process, we seek a world where "objective establishment journalists" should be empowered to tell us who’s lying.

But guess what, dumb-asses? Establishment journalists have felt quite free to make such judgments in recent decades. ...

Can we talk? Establishment journalists have felt quite free to identify "LIARS" in recent decades. The problem is this: To the extent that they’ve had this freedom, they have kept calling Democrats LIARS. Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were endlessly described as the world’s biggest LIARS. And uh-oh! In the future, this is likely the way the mainstream press corps will work - to the extent that they’re given this power.

In fairness, Professor Rosen knows nothing of this, being newly arrived from Pluto. He think the press corps’ problems began under Bush - and only because these elite professionals lacked imagination to deal with his outlier ways. (They were doing their best.) But if we continue to have an establishment press corps, it will be very unwise for liberals or progressives to task them with telling us who are the LIARS. Their track record on this point is clear. The establishment press is a tool of power. They will tend to call Big Pols of the more liberal party LIARS. They’ve done this for the past twenty years. Once financial regularity returns, they will likely resume this practice as the looting starts up again. [my emphasis in bold]

It can be very misleading to try to interpret the national press dysfunction as partisan or ideological; a lot of it is just plain weird. Their deference to power is primarily a deference to economic and corporate power which often does not translate into deference to the Democratic President and Congressional delegation, even when they are at a high tide of popularity as of the current moment.

Three defining features of today's national press corps are their deference to corporate power; their general practice of their profession as infotainment rather than as anything that deserves to be called journalism; and, a locker-room-style groupthink that strains at a gnat and swallows a fly (to borrow a famous King James Biblical phrase). Mix that all together, and you get Maureen Dowd writing about how Obama's cigarette smoking is like Silvio Berlusconi's sex life, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann trashing Hillary Clinton so hard a year ago that both would up apologizing on-air for their excesses, and leading celebrity press figures stewing in outrage because Obama called on a writer for the Huffington Post in his press conference this week. (Bush's people hiring a male prostitute to act as a ringer at dozens of his press conferences? Not so much.)

Tags: bob somerby, glenn greenwald, nietzsche