‘Fritz’, as Nietzsche was known to his family, was the son of a Lutheran pastor who was descended from several generations of Protestant clergymen. His mother was the daughter of a minister as well, and Nietzsche was born close to the birthplace of Martin Luther, whose legacy still dominated the religious culture of the region. (Nietzsche and Luther were born 70 kilometres apart, in what is now Saxony-Anhalt.) This background did not prevent Nietzsche from coming to see Christianity as the source and symbol of everything he most despised; indeed, it probably played a decisive part in his eventual rejection of Christianity, against which he waged a personal campaign in the pages of his books, one of which is titled The Anti-Christ. He rebelled against the whole social, political, moral and religious order of Europe in which his parents raised him. It was Christianity, he believed, that had spread a slave revolt in morals initiated by the downcast ancient Jews, who were motivated by resentment and envy against their powerful oppressors. Unable to defeat them by force, Nietzsche argued, Jews and later Christians won a non-violent moral victory over their masters by inventing the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to legitimize the values and interests of slaves. That is the ‘genealogy’ of the moral system that has dominated the West ever since, which Nietzsche believed was inimical to all greatness. He viewed Christian anti-Semitism as just a ruse designed to hide the deep alliance of these co-conspirators against the strong and healthy. He also described Christianity as a Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world on behalf of the sick and the weak, who should naturally be controlled by the healthy and the strong.
For Nietzsche, morality is a human invention with a beginning and an end, and we have now reached that end in the Christian West. Just as the pre-Christian, aristocratic warrior societies of antiquity existed before good and evil, Nietzsche prophesied that the post-Christian world of the future would exist beyond good and evil (the title of another of his books). He was convinced that the Christian God had become unbelievable in the modern West, and everything that rested on that faith, ‘the whole of our European morality’, must collapse with it. In the void left by the loss of belief in Christianity and its moral system Nietzsche saw a unique opportunity to establish new, aristocratic, non-moral values suitable for masters rather than slaves.
Nietzsche was sketchy about what, precisely, he had in mind for this new, post-Christian world, partly because it would be the future creation of the ‘higher form of species’ that would dominate it, the so-called ‘supermen’. The point is that such ‘free spirits’ would conform to no existing or established rules or restrictions that might interfere with their overflowing creativity and natural dominance. Impelled by a restless ‘will-to-power’, these Olympian individuals would create great things on a blank and boundless canvas, pitilessly using ‘lesser’ people as ‘clay’ with which to mould new works. For Nietzsche, man is just an ‘ugly stone’ that needs a sculptor in the form of the superman. That is why he wrote approvingly of ‘the sacrifice of countless people who have to be pushed down and shrunk into incomplete human beings, into slaves, into tools, all for the sake of the aristocracy’. All of this first requires smashing the shackles of Christian morality and repudiating the ‘slave’ values of pity, sympathy and compassion that it represents. The ancient Greeks that Nietzsche admired were subject to no such decadent sentiments, which is why they were able to reach the summit of human artistic achievement and why modern civilization languishes in the creative depths.
Past ‘sculptors’ whose consciences never troubled them when sacrificing the lives and wellbeing of large numbers of ordinary men and women in order to impose their will on the world include Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia and Napoleon. Nietzsche admired all of these ruthless, strong-willed ‘artist-tyrants’. But the modern man whom he most revered and who was his exemplar of greatness was a pure artist, rather than an artist-tyrant: the modern German poet and writer Goethe.
The main goal and purpose of the supermen is to create culture and values to fill the void left by Christian morality, and politics would be subordinated to that goal. But, in a world beyond good and evil, anything is possible, so the occasional artist-tyrant such as Napoleon is bound to arise to impose his preferred form ruthlessly on human affairs according to his overflowing will-to-power. That is why Nietzsche admired Napoleon as an ‘artist of government’.
Given all this, it is difficult to speak of a Nietzschean politics. He prescribed no positive political system or goals, let alone a theory. He saw himself as the prophet of a coming post-Christian, post-moral world that would be wholly dominated by artists who would be free to shape it according to their own super-abundant will-to-power. For Nietzsche, art is ‘the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life’. Nietzschean politics serves artistic ends. The greatest art (including the art of politics) is achieved by the ideal balancing of what Nietzsche called the ‘Dionysian’ principle of unbounded, intoxicating passion and pure will (named after Dionysus, the son of Zeus and the Greek god of wine and dance) and the ‘Apollonian’ principle of order, harmony and good form (named after Apollo, another son of Zeus and the Greek god of the sun). The result is ‘passion controlled’ in the form of great works of beauty and power that balance opposites in an original and aesthetically pleasing way.
According to Nietzsche, the superman must first subdue himself before imposing his will on the external world. He must be a warrior on the internal battlefield of the soul and engage in a process of ‘self-overcoming’, shaping himself (psychologically) before he is in a position to shape the external world. Nietzsche favoured the controlled and self-disciplined expression of natural impulses in order to create beauty and establish values, which are never the result of blind, uncontrolled urges. Much as he admired the healthy, brutish, conscience-free urge to dominate in Vikings and samurai warriors, particularly compared to the life-denying sheepishness and mediocrity of Christians and democrats, his ultimate ideal was of a higher order. The natural will-to-power must be expressed through and disciplined by the creative imagination, as it was, par excellence, in the tragic plays of ancient Greece. This means organizing one’s own inner chaos of emotions and drives by creating a unified self in which one drive dominates all of the others and, thereby, defines you and becomes your personal ‘style’. The creation of the self is therefore the necessary first creation of the artist.
It is not difficult to see why Nietzsche’s views proved popular with the Nazis and why he came to be regarded by many as a fascist philosopher. His writings are full of references to ‘blond beasts’ and the ‘will-to-power’, and he saw himself as the prophet of a brutal, amoral warrior ethic for a new race of naturally superior ‘supermen’ who will reduce the inferior masses of ordinary people to slavery. The irony of this association is that Nietzsche was a passionate opponent of German nationalism (he called the Germans a ‘servile race’) and often criticized anti-Semitism. He was openly disdainful of his sister Elizabeth’s anti-Semitic views and chose to live and work outside Germany for most of his adult life. Nietzsche was also an elitist and an individualist with an instinctive contempt for the ‘herd’ and a profound distaste for the kind of populist demagoguery that Hitler and the Nazis represented. It is very likely that, had he lived long enough, he would have found the Nazis to epitomize what he most despised about mass society and mainstream politics.
Unfortunately for Nietzsche’s posthumous reputation, Adolf Hitler paid a much-publicized visit to the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar at the invitation of its founder and director, the philosopher’s sister Elizabeth, who was an ardent Nazi. Hitler had come with his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, who took a picture of the Führer contemplating a large bust of Nietzsche in the archive’s main reception room. The photograph was widely published in the German press and featured in Hoffmann’s popular biography, Hitler as Nobody Knows Him, with the following caption: ‘The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized two great popula
r movements: the National Socialist of Germany and the Fascist of Italy’. Hoffmann’s unfortunate photograph cemented the popular association between Nietzsche and the Nazis for several generations, and all but destroyed Nietzsche’s credibility in post-war Europe for decades to come.
Nietzsche’s reputation has not only recovered from this unfair association with Nazism but is now higher than ever before. He is now among the most widely read and quoted writers in the history of ideas, to a degree that would surely have surprised and even appalled a thinker who was openly contemptuous of popular opinion. ‘Books for everybody are always malodorous books’, he wrote, with a strong hint of sour grapes when his own books did not sell well. ‘The smell of petty people clings to them.’ It is Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the crisis of Western civilization that continues to resonate in our time rather than his proposal for curing it, which was much worse than the illness. Fortunately, only a small, if noisy, fringe now take Nietzsche’s prescription seriously. But his analysis of and attacks on the basic assumptions that underlie modern liberal democratic societies today are not so easily dismissed as the products of a diseased mind. For example, many secular liberals have long argued that modern liberalism, egalitarianism and human rights stem from the rejection of Christianity during the French Enlightenment. But Nietzsche insisted that these modern principles were actually the direct products of Christian morality, with its concern for the poorest and weakest human beings. Historians of Western moral sentiments are now coming to agree with Nietzsche’s genealogy, if not with his dim assessment of it. This has not only challenged the self-image of the modern age but has tied the fate of many of its core values to the loss of religious belief, raising the spectre of moral nihilism that Nietzsche warned was the central crisis of modernity.
Contemporaries
23
Mohandas Gandhi: The Warrior
Too often Gandhi is portrayed as a gentle and saintly holy man. He was, above all, a fighter for justice – all too ready, perhaps, to sacrifice his own life and the lives of his followers. What Gandhi admired most was fearlessness, and he unflinchingly faced deadly attacks throughout his life. In the campaign he waged against Defence Minister Jan Smuts on behalf of Indians working in South Africa, Gandhi perfected his strategy of non-violent boycotts, marches and strikes – pressuring the government to rescind its racist laws. During these battles, Gandhi endured nearly 20 years of beatings, attempted lynchings and appalling prison conditions. In January 1914 the European railway workers in South Africa went on a general strike for economic reasons, threatening the survival of the white minority government. Immediately, Gandhi called off his own previously announced protest march on the grounds that it would be wrong to take advantage of his adversary’s weakness. Gandhi’s surprise concession caught Smuts off guard. One of Smuts’s secretaries described his quandary to Gandhi:
I do not like your people, and do not care to assist them at all. But what am I to do? You help us in our days of need. How can we lay hands on you? I often wish you took to violence like the English strikers, and then we would know at once how to dispose of you. But you will not injure even the enemy. You desire victory by self-suffering alone and will never transgress your self-imposed limits of courtesy and chivalry. And that is what reduces us to sheer helplessness.
By June 1914, Gandhi and Smuts had negotiated a new Indian Relief Bill, restoring basic rights to the South African Indian community. The next month, Gandhi set sail for India with the mission of freeing his homeland from centuries of unjust British rule while preserving friendship between India and Britain. Gandhi’s Indian campaign was ultimately successful but at a horrific cost to himself and others – a cost culminating in Gandhi’s own assassination by a fellow Hindu in 1948. His enemies, whether in South Africa or India, confronted his highly unorthodox tactics in five stages: indifference, ridicule, abuse, repression and finally, respect. Indeed, Jan Smuts became a lifelong friend and admirer of his once despised Indian opponent.
Gandhi was a brilliant strategist of human conflict, the Napoleon of non-violence. What makes him unique among the great warriors in history is that he achieved victories against much more powerful opponents by combining a courageous willingness to suffer and even to die with an equally resolute determination not to injure or kill. Gandhi believed that violence was the weapon of the weak, who kill out of a fear of dying. Gandhi hated above all the timorous submission to oppression: better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. He was not surprised that the most warlike of the Indians (the Pathans) were also the greatest practitioners of non-violent resistance. You cannot teach non-violence, he often said, to a coward. Gandhi himself was decorated by the British government for his courageous service in combat as an ambulance driver during the Boer War (1899–1902).
Gandhi was the product of the highest ideals of the Christian West and the Indian East. Born in India, he travelled to London as a young man to become a lawyer. He developed a great respect for British law and liberties; his whole life could be described as an attempt to get the British rulers of South Africa and India to live up to their own ideals of legal justice. While in London, this future Indian monk wore a top hat and tails, learned ballroom dancing, studied Latin and French and took up the violin. More importantly, Gandhi met in London a motley crew of devout Christian and ex-Christian pacifists, vegetarians, feminists and socialists. Ironically, Gandhi’s exploration of Christian ideals in London ultimately led him back to his Hindu roots. The first of his experimental communes (later known as Ashrams) was named Tolstoy Farm, after the great Russian novelist and Christian pacifist. Gandhi was the least sectarian of religious sages in history: his fellow Hindus sometimes complained that he seemed too Christian. He insisted upon equal respect for all of the world’s major religions. Whatever religion you inherit, he would say, you should try to become the best exemplar of that religion.
The seeds of Gandhi’s ideal of non-violent resistance are found in his encounter with the Jesus of the Gospels. Gandhi always referred to Jesus as the greatest practitioner of non-violent resistance. Jesus says to the Jews living under Roman oppression: ‘If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile’. By Roman law a soldier was permitted to require a civilian to carry his pack for one mile. So, Jesus says, when a Roman soldier unjustly demands that you carry his pack for one mile, offer to carry it two miles. Why answer Roman evil with goodness? By punishing yourself, you throw the crime of the oppressor back into his face. If your oppressor has any conscience, he will feel the sting of your rebuke. Gandhi’s Jesus is a champion of active non-violent resistance against the Roman empire, not a meek advocate of passive non-resistance to evil.
Gandhi’s quest for holiness was both personal and political. Even as a young man, he became increasingly troubled by his own sexual and other appetites. He yearned for inner serenity and a philosophical detachment from his own bodily urges. At the same time, as a young lawyer working in South Africa, he also became increasingly disturbed by the lust for domination among the whites and the craven submission of the non-white races he witnessed. As soon as he arrived in South Africa, Gandhi himself was ejected from a first-class train carriage simply because of his colour. His vocation was to see a relationship between personal psychology and social oppression. Like the American naturalist and radical Henry David Thoreau, like John Ruskin and like Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi became convinced that modern capitalism, by fanning the flames of desire for more and more commodities, by stimulating envy and social competition, was creating the psychological basis for class and race oppression. Following the example of his hero, Socrates, Gandhi always insisted that peace and justice in the world depended upon peace and harmony within each human soul. Hence, his campaigns for social justice were always rooted in the self-discipline of his ascetic communes, devoted to voluntary poverty.
Gandhi’s
asceticism was a worldly one, in service to peace and justice. All soldiers must be rigorously disciplined so that they can ignore their bodily appetites and learn to accept suffering and even death. The same applies to monks, whose ascetic practices are precisely such a training: by learning to sacrifice smaller desires and appetites, they ultimately become capable of sacrificing their own lives. The courage required for non-violent resistance rests upon years of ascetic training in self-control, self-purification and suffering. Gandhi’s followers took formal vows of chastity, poverty and service; they were required to fast, exercise, work and pray. These practices of self-perfection were both an end in themselves and a means to cultivate courageous warriors for social justice. Individual self-perfection lays the necessary foundation for healing the world. Gandhi famously insisted that a person must first become the change he seeks to see in the world.
Gandhi coined a new word to describe his worldly asceticism, satyagraha, based on the Hindu word satya, meaning ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. Satyagraha means ‘firmness in pursuit of the truth’; Gandhi once explained it as ‘the conquest of one’s adversary by suffering in one’s own person’. The fruit of satyagraha is the courage of non-violent resistance, or ahimsa. If we are willing to die, then there is no need for violence to protect our lives. Ascetic discipline is traditionally reserved for elite spiritual athletes. No religious tradition has expected it of everyone. But Gandhi was convinced that virtually anyone was capable of this rigorous discipline: he aimed to democratize the ascetic ideal. His strict vegan diet nearly killed his wife, his children and himself, and his relations with his family were strained, to put it mildly, by other disciplines. Gandhi-ism was not possible even for all the Gandhis. As for his mass followers, many resorted to shocking violence during his various campaigns, especially in India. He spent the final 30 years of his life working for Hindu–Muslim friendship in a unified India, only to see at the end widespread pogroms, brutal inter-communal violence and the first Indo-Pakistani war. Although India and Pakistan did achieve independence without ever fighting Britain, Gandhi considered his life’s work a total failure.
How to Think Politically Page 16