Is Nietzsche The Answer?

This is an excellent video.

Nietzsche is not the answer to our problems. I don’t say this as a Christian or as someone who dislikes Nietzsche. When I was in college, I read Nietzsche and was deeply influenced by him. I’m still a Nietzschean in the sense that I have always been interested in how morality evolves over time.

I’m currently engaged in a deeply Nietzschean project of exploring the genealogy of modern liberalism. It is my historical research that led me to the conclusion that Modernism greatly influenced liberalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernism merged with liberalism to produce cultural liberalism which is an aesthetic form of liberalism that values expressive individualism and cultural egalitarianism. Cultural liberalism has been a solvent that has dissolved Anglo-American ethnicity. Nietzsche had an enormous intellectual impact on the development of Modernism.

Nietzsche was hardly the only influence on Modernism. Darwinism is the indispensable background to both Niezscheanism and Modernism. Naturalism eliminated the sacred and transcendent and undermined the faith of the European intelligentsia in Christianity. The roots of Modernism trace back to Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Édouard Manet, Henri Murger, Théophile Gautier, Émile Zola and a host of other figures – artists, poets, novelists – who got the avant-garde rolling in late 19th century France. In late 19th century Britain, the aesthetic movement was represented by Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde. In late 19th century Scandinavia, it produced the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg who was personal friend of Nietzsche. Modernism developed into a Europe-wide movement that emphasized the autonomy of aesthetics from morality. Modern art became about the self-expression of the artist. It became detached from God and Nature. It became detached from the public. Ultimately, it became detached from representing reality itself.

Nietzsche was an enemy of both Christianity and traditional morality. He was a champion of the self-expression and self-realization of the “higher men” as opposed to the masses who were herd animals and slaves. Essentially, his message was for the creative geniuses he wanted to liberate from the slave morality of the masses whose work he saw as being the bridge to the Übermensch. The message of Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and others who shared this mindset in the late 19th and early 20th century is that aesthetics was superior to religion and ethics. Evil can be beautiful and we shouldn’t be held back from exploring and pursuing it because of traditional religious and ethical considerations.

The reason that Nietzsche isn’t the solution to our problems is because his philosophy is part of the problem which is the legacy of the 20th century. In our times, the problem is that the elites are cosmopolitans who do not identify with the masses. They despise the masses and want to tear down their culture and replace them with foreigners. Meanwhile, both the elites and the public have repudiated their own ethnic, cultural and religious identities in order to pursue their own lifestyles as self-absorbed expressive individualists. Everyone has become detached from everyone else. The world stops at their own doorsteps. We are no longer a part of a larger people with a common past, present and future. The present is the dystopian point in history where H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine converges with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 and Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints.

Nietzsche wanted to knock down religion and morality. Christianity was knocked down in the 20th century. Traditional morality was also knocked down. There was a transvalution of values. Just not the one he imagined. He wasn’t concerned with our problem which in the 21st century is a world in which all forms of solidarity between the elites and the masses whether it be racial, ethnic, cultural or religious has broken down. Whether it is the absence of the sacred, degenerate art, relativism in epistemology or ethics as being a mask that hides power relations, Nietzsche isn’t much of a guide of out this mess.

None of this is to say you shouldn’t read Nietzsche. I read Nietzsche and learned a lot from him. It is just that other people read Nietzsche in the 20th century and they created our present world.