THE PHENOMENON THAT WAS NIETZSCHE
Toward the end of March 1883, Friedrich Nietzsche, then aged thirty-nine and staying in Genoa, was far from well. He had recently returned from Switzerland to his old lodgings on the Salita delle Battistine but this brought no immediate relief from his migraines, stomach troubles and insomnia. Already upset (but also relieved) by the death the previous month of his erstwhile great friend the composer Richard Wagner, with whom he had fallen out, he came down with a severe attack of influenza for which the Genoese doctor prescribed daily doses of quinine. Unusually, a heavy snowfall had blanketed the city, accompanied by “incongruous thunderclaps and flashes of lightning,” and this too seems to have affected his mood and hindered his recovery. Unable to take the stimulating walks that were part of his routine and helped his thinking, by the 22nd of the month, he was still listless and bedridden.26
What added to his “black melancholy,” as he put it, was that it was four weeks since he had sent his latest manuscript to his publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, in Chemnitz, who seemed in no hurry to bring out this new book, entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra. He sent Schmeitzner a furious letter of reproach, which brought an apologetic reply, but a month later Nietzsche learned the real reason for the delay. As he said in a letter: “The Leipzig printer, Teubner, has shoved the Zarathustra manuscript aside in order to meet a rush order for 500,000 hymnals, which had to be delivered in time for Easter.” This rich irony was not lost on Nietzsche, of course. “The realization that his fearless Zarathustra, the ‘madman’ who had the nerve to proclaim to the somnambulists around him that ‘God is dead!’ should have been momentarily smothered beneath the collective weight of 500,000 Christian hymnbooks struck Nietzsche as downright ‘comic.’”27
The response of the first readers of the work was mixed. Heinrich Köselitz, Nietzsche’s friend, who by long tradition was sent the proofs to read and correct, was rapturous, and he expressed the hope that “this extraordinary book” would one day be as widely distributed as the Bible. Very different was the reaction of the typesetters in Leipzig, who were so frightened by what they read that they considered refusing to produce the book.
The world has never forgotten—and some have never forgiven—Nietzsche for saying “God is dead,” and then going on to add that “we have killed him.” He had actually said that before, in The Gay Science published the previous year, but the pithy style of Zarathustra attracted much more attention.
What is it with Nietzsche? Why is it his phrase above all others that has been remembered and has stuck? After all, belief in God had been declining for some time. For some, perhaps even many, belief in God—or gods, supernatural entities of any kind—had never seemed right. In most histories of unbelief, or doubt, the account begins in the eighteenth century with Edward Gibbon and David Hume, moving through Voltaire and the French Revolution, taking in Kant, Hegel and the Romantics, German biblical criticism, Auguste Comte and the “positivist breakthrough.” In the mid–nineteenth century came Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the ravages of geological and biological science brought about by Charles Lyell, Robert Owen, Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer and, above all, Charles Darwin.
These accounts, as often as not, add for good measure stories of celebrated individuals who lost their faith—George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Edmund Gosse. And those who didn’t, but who heard the signals, among them Matthew Arnold, who, in the decade following Darwin’s Origin, lamented in his poem “Dover Beach” “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith. Other accounts stress the sheer antiquity of unbelief, and here the cast includes Epicurus and Lucretius, Socrates and Cicero, Al-Rawandi and Rabelais. Here is not the place to rehearse these narratives. Our concern will be with the timing and the circumstances which culminated in Nietzsche’s notably bold proclamation (albeit, we should always remember, one made by a madman).
THE WHIFF OF DANGER AND THE CARGO OF LIFE
One of those circumstances was Nietzsche himself. He was a thoroughly unusual man—quixotic, contradictory, a young meteor who shone with an incandescent writing style but who burned out quickly and went mad at the age of forty-five. His aphoristic style lent itself to easy assimilation, by the public as well as by other philosophers, and was designed to be provocative and incendiary, succeeding only too well, as the reservations of those typesetters in Leipzig show. His madness, too, added a colorful salting to his biography, and to the biography of his ideas after his death in 1900. Were his extreme views “the uninterrupted consequence of his reason,” or were they flavored (distorted?) by his illness, an affliction that has grown more—not less—notorious since his death, as it has become clear that he was suffering from syphilis?
The uses to which his ideas have been put, or are said to have been put, since his death, are also a source of continuing notoriety. Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism caught the imagination of the world, one of its consequences being that he is the only person whose ideas, as Steven Aschheim points out, have been blamed for two world wars. This is a burdensome—and enduring—legacy.
His core insight—and the most dangerous—was that there does not exist any perspective external to or higher than life itself. There cannot exist any privileged viewpoint, any abstraction or force outside the world as we know it; there is nothing beyond reality, beyond life itself, nothing “above”; there is no transcendence, nothing metaphysical. As a result, we can make no judgment on existence that is universally valid or “objective”: “the value of life cannot be assessed.” As Nietzsche famously insisted, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”28
From this, certain things follow. We are solely the product of historical forces. Contrary to what the scientists say, the world is a chaos of multiple forces and drives “whose infinite and chaotic multiplicity cannot be reduced to unity.”29 We must learn to situate ourselves in this multiplicity and chaos and the way we do so is via the “will to power,” by which we seek to gain control over inanimate nature. Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a “hidden prejudice” in favor of the “beyond” at the expense of the “here and now,” and this must be changed. This very likely means that much of our activity will be in refuting what has gone before, a task made no easier by the competing forces within us, a jostling, which is our natural state and requires us to be spirited in making sense out of this jostling.30
Importantly, Nietzsche tells us that this struggle to achieve mastery over the chaos that is both outside and inside us—the “cargo of life”—leads to a more intense form of existence, and it is the only aim we can have in life, in this life here and now. Our ethical stance should be to achieve this intensity at whatever cost: our only duty is to ourselves.31
The role of reason in our lives is to enable us to realize that many of our urges are irrational, and no less powerful or valuable for that: we must harness them, and unlock them intelligently, so that they do not continue to thwart one another. This rationalization of the passions in our life he defines as the spiritual quality of existence. We should seek harmony, but we should recognize that some passions are not what the traditional religions have approved of. For example, enmity is one of the passions; it should be accepted and lived with as much as any of the others.32
All this naturally affected Nietzsche’s idea of salvation. Salvation, he holds, cannot apply to some ideal “beyond” the here and now. “God becomes the formula for every slander upon the ‘here and now,’ and for every lie about the ‘hereafter.’” And he goes so far as to propose putting what he called the “doctrine of eternal recurrence” in the place of “metaphysics” and “religion.” This was his idea that salvation cannot be other than resolutely earthly, “sewn into the tissue of forces that are the fabric of life.” The doctrine of eternal recurrence reads that you must live your life in such a way that you would wish to live it again. “All joy wants et
ernity,” he says, and is the criterion for deciding which moments in a life are worth living and which are not. “The good life is that which succeeds in existing for the moment, without reference to past or future, without condemnation or selection, in a state of absolute lightness, and in the finished conviction that there is no difference therefore between the instant and eternity.”
We must make a “Dionysiac affirmation,” “stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence,” “select to live only those instants that we would be willing to live with over and over again, in infinite recession.” In this way we will be saved—saved from fear.
In Nietzsche’s new world, without a beyond or a hereafter, life has no purpose other than to live in the grand style, using the will to power to achieve an intensity of experience such that we would like those intense moments to go on and on and on.
All this was as heady as it was dangerous, and a lot is lost in translation, for Nietzsche was a superb stylist of the German language. That language, that style, go some way toward explaining why the world of 1883 picked up on his aphorism—that God is dead—so quickly and so wholeheartedly, even enthusiastically. But it was not the whole picture.
DOUBT’S BID FOR A BETTER WORLD
A. N. Wilson calls doubt “the Victorian disease” and Jennifer Michael Hecht, in her history of doubt, says the period 1800–1900 was “easily the best-documented moment of widespread doubt in human history.” It was, she says, the century of “doubt’s bid for a better world.” “The best-educated doubters felt that the time for doubting religion was over: it was time to start building something in which one could truly believe, a happy new world. They guessed that it would be a better world because the money and energy once given to religion would be devoted to generating food, clothing, medicine, and ideas. They also thought that they might see farther than ever before, now that their vision was mended.”33
Owen Chadwick, who was regius professor of modern history at Cambridge and onetime president of the British Academy, proposed in his Gifford Lectures and subsequently in The Secularization of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1975) that doubt’s bid for a better world involved two parallel processes—a social process and an intellectual one. There were, as he put it, two kinds of “unsettlement” occurring throughout the nineteenth century, “unsettlement in society, mainly due to new machines, growth of big cities, the massive transfer of populations; and unsettlement in minds, rising out of a heap of new knowledge in science and history, and out of the consequent argument.” And perhaps more important, the two unsettlements merged easily. The crucial twenty years when this “merger” took place, he pointed out, were 1860–80, exactly the time leading up to Nietzsche’s publication of Zarathustra.
THE UNFITNESS OF FAITH AND SCIENCE
It is important to conclude this introduction with four qualifications. First, that if we look around, and read our histories of the long twentieth century, we find that by no means everyone has or has had this apocalyptic fear of the death of God, as epitomized by, say, Dostoevsky. In 1980, James Thrower published an account of what he called “the alternative tradition,” the rejection of religious explanations in the ancient world. The German sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey said that everyone has a “metaphysical impulse,” in that we all have within us a theory, however inchoate or incoherent, about the world and our place in it, and about what metaphysical forces may or may not exist. But it would be wrong to say that everyone is troubled by the problems that vexed Dostoevsky and Nietzsche so much. Many people are troubled by these issues, and troubled deeply, but by no means everyone.34
Second, Callum Brown has recently given us a new narrative of secularization. In The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000 (2001) he introduces the notion of “discursive Christianity,” a form of religious identity not captured by the usual sociological categories. Discursive Christianity shapes an individual’s personal identity, the private—even secret—self, which influences morality, personal behavior (such as saying grace before meals), speech and dress, expectations, the sort of subtle behavior captured in oral histories. Brown argues that Britain remained a Christian nation until the 1960s, when it collapsed spectacularly, to become thoroughly irreligious. People did not turn to other forms of belief; rather, they stopped regarding themselves as religious.
Brown’s statistics are impressive but a number of comments may be made. First, something similar was observed in the United States in the Pew survey report mentioned earlier: there, current religious faith was described as “mushier” than in the past. Either way, these results flatly contradict the claims of those who argue “God is back.” No less important from our point of view, they do not affect this book’s argument. Whatever the exact trajectory of secularization, of the collapse of belief in God, the individuals discussed within these pages clearly felt—and feel—that God is indeed dead.35
Third, Brown’s view overlaps to an extent with the theory of the French analyst Olivier Roy, who in Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (2010) argues that a parallel process has been recently taking place alongside secularization. Thanks to globalization, religions have become divorced from their cultural homelands—“deterritorialized.” Christianity is no longer exclusive to Europe and the Middle East, Hinduism to India, or Islam to the desert heartlands, but all are now more or less worldwide.
Consequently, the cultural attributes that once formed an integral part of religious identity and practices have less and less place. Arabs will refer to “Muslim culture,” for example, by which they mean family-related attitudes and practices, segregation of the sexes, modesty, food habits and so on, whereas by “Islamic culture” is meant art, architecture, the practices of urban life. In order to circulate in a global context, a religious entity must appear universal; for the message to be fully grasped, it must be disconnected from a specific culture as traditionally understood. “Religion therefore circulates outside knowledge. Salvation does not require people to know, but to believe.” As a result, as they have become “de-ethnicized,” religions have become “purer,” more ideological and, therefore, at the same time, more fundamental. They are, in a very real sense, based more on ignorance than knowledge, Roy says, and, to that extent, and in reply to what Charles Taylor says about secular lives, these religions are thinner.36
These various strands come together to show why Nietzsche was the phenomenon he was, why his remarks about the death of God ricocheted around Europe in particular so resoundingly, and why what he said is still so potent today. Although there had always been some people who didn’t believe in God, and although Doubt with a capital D had been growing since the middle of the eighteenth century, it was only in the 1880s that, again as Owen Chadwick put it, the “great historical revolution in the human intelligence” became clear to all who took an interest in these matters, and that the act of faith was no longer seen “to fit the experience of men.” Since then, whatever the adherents of the God-is-back thesis may say, people have continued to lose faith, and religion is evolving in ways that increasingly suggest a rearguard action.
This leaves us with one issue, the fourth qualification, which is no less important. It is that science, for all its great reputation as the institution that has the capability to acquire all kinds of truth, and despite its undoubted successes, has nonetheless left behind a widespread “sadness that [it] is not fitted to offer truths about the moral being and that therefore . . . perhaps truths about the moral being are not to be obtained.”37
However many people have faced up to the fact that we are now living in a world without God, and are troubled by it, just as many have found (until very recently) science wanting as a source of life’s meaning. The intertwined nature of these two elements has been in general overlooked, but the link is inescapable, as we shall see, time and again, and has been critical in determining how we have tried to live our lives since Nietzsche wrote what he wrote.
I. Recalling G. K. Chesterton’s observation that “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything.”
PART ONE
The Avant-Guerre: When Art Mattered
1
The Nietzsche Generation: Ecstasy, Eros, Excess
T
he greatest irony of Nietzsche’s life—far greater than Zarathustra being held up at the printer by 500,000 hymnals—was surely the fact that he exploded onto the intellectual and cultural scene when he was already insane, catatonic and knew nothing about what was occurring. It was only in the 1890s that he came to the attention of significantly large audiences.1 Until that point, he had not been without influence—Steven Aschheim tells us that both Gustav Mahler and Viktor Adler were inspired by Nietzsche, perhaps as early as 1875–78. But this influence was piecemeal and it was not until the 1890s that some sort of “confrontation” with Nietzsche became virtually obligatory.
His fame spread internationally very quickly, but of course the concern with his ideas was more intense in Germany than elsewhere. Every would-be academic or intellectual was expected to have a “position” on Nietzsche, or the “Nietzsche problem” as it was referred to, and among the middle classes in Germany, Nietzsche evenings became commonplace—social gatherings accompanied by music and spoken texts.2
As mentioned in the introduction, part of Nietzsche’s appeal lay in the lyrical power of his language, but it wasn’t only that. The Germans, many of them, were proud of Nietzsche: he had German roots and was addressing what many people thought were specifically German problems. His opponents stressed his “Slavic” way of thinking and played down his Deutschtum, his Germanness.
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 4