How to Read Nietzsche Badly - By Seeing Him as an Existentialist

 

In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs describes an "on-screen" couple in a this way: "Clothes and hairdo suggest existentialist bars of all the world's cities."  Existentialism indeed became, briefly, a style of clothes, even a "hairdo".  Sartre himself noted this, with some disdain.  

Can we fit Nietzsche into these clothes?  Into this hairdo? 

Perhaps the most common definition of existentialism is the one given by Sartre- the idea that, as he puts it, “existence precedes essence” or, in other words, that there is no given meaning for experience, and therefore you have a responsibility to create meaning for your own experience. There is a long tradition that this comes from - most notably Kierkegaard - or you could go further back and look at Schelling’s call for a “philosophy of existence”.  Arguably one can find similar sentiments expressed throughout history.

 

Briefly, I don’t think this definition fits Nietzsche very well. In fact I think he would have seen some unexamined Kantian vestiges in Sartre’s definition. Sartre was an avowed humanist, and Nietzsche was contemptuous of humanism. He thought that the death of God also implied the end of humanism. And I think Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are as different as night and day. Nietzsche, philosopher of the day-after-tomorrow, had thought his way to the crisis that is called Existentialism - and thought his way beyond it.

Sartre famously opined that we are all "doomed to be free" - that, once man "is thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."  But I don't think that's how Nietzsche saw things- rather than thinking that we are all condemned to freedom, Nietzsche thought that there were many people who were ruled and quite content to be ruled.  If he had lived to read Sartre, he probably would have dismissed Sartre's insistence that we are all condemned to be free as a product of an egalitarian impulse for which Nietzsche had nothing but contempt.  Nietzsche would regard the doctrine everyone is free as mere wishful thinking.

If anything, rather than seeing Nietzsche as an existentialist, I'd see him as an essentialist, of sorts - but for him, the essence of humanity, or perhaps of life itself, is the will-to-power.  Come to think of it, his doctrine of "eternal recurrence" also has essentialist overtones as well.  He'd probably reject the notion that existence precedes essence as compromise with empiricism - one of the "British ideas" that he so despised.  And had a Sartrean existentialist, or someone of a similar bent, accused him of essentialism, Nietzsche would, in my mind, have likely replied, Yes?  And what of it?  Nietzsche proudly declared that humanity's essence was to be a rope stretched from the animal to the übermensch - a rope over an abyss - "A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."

Nietzsche believed that humanity has a goal, not that humanity is a goal.  For Nietzsche, humanity has a purpose, and that purpose is the übermensch.  It is towards this purpose that the entire being of the human is oriented.  This teleology also implied a standard by which one can measure a specific person's value, their "greatness": namely, to what extent they were able to attain or approach this goal.  Nietzsche alludes obliquely to bridgemen - admired aspirants who show signs of moving towards the goal of the übermensch, or who perhaps show some glimmer of awareness of the possibility of this goal, even if they utterly fail to move toward it.

Sartre, on the other hand, thought that humanity is a goal - each individual human is an end-in-itself (more evidence of the Kantian influence on Sartre).  Indeed, it is precisely the fact that there is no given purpose to human existence that makes radical autonomy - the existential decision - possible.  But Nietzsche would have seen Sartre's refusal to acknowledge an external purpose to human existence as nothing but weakness and self-deception.  In Nietzsche's metaphor of the rope over the abyss, the abyss of course represents nihilism.  Nietzsche would have seen Sartre as one who fell into nihilism, motivated by egalitarian relativism and an unwillingness or inability to realize and recognize his purpose.

If Nietzsche had lived to see what existentialism became, he would have laughed at it.  He would have said, "These young men are far too concerned with existence - their own, and everyone else's."  As I have written before, the will-to-power is not derived from any existence, any "is," any fact.  The will-to-power wills power whether power exists or not.  At most, existence is an obstacle for the will-to-power. 

Nietzsche would have seen existentialism as a hold-over from Romanticism: people taking themselves all too seriously.  Nietzsche complained, in his own time, of the Romantics - that they made everything too heavy, that they had not yet learned the art of lightness.  To be a Romantic, in imitation of Rousseau is to be a person with such intense delusions of grandeur that they paradoxically achieved a kind of genuine grandeur all their own.  Rousseau was unrepeatable - but that didn't stop generations from attempting to repeat him.

It never ceases to surprise me that people will compare Nietzsche with Kierkegaard - "Thinking along the same lines" - no, no, and again, no.  Never were two philosophies more absolutely opposed than those of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.  Kierkegaard bemoans alienation and fragmentation - he is James Dean screaming "You're tearing me apart!"

Nietzsche, by contrast, is closer to Andy Warhol in spirit.  He represents that development of the progression of spirit for whom existentialism has already become a joke - and a bit of an old joke.  Kierkegaard may have insisted that purity of heart is to will one thing, but Nietzsche felt comfortable willing many things.  He felt the contradiction, but felt no need that the contradiction should be resolved. 

So, no.  Nietzsche was not an existentialist.

This attempt, which comes up again and again, to read Nietzsche as an existentialist - I like it, it's "nice".  It's a warm, inclusive gesture, if perhaps a somewhat curious one, and there's something paradoxical about it.  Nietzsche himself would doubtless have utterly rejected it, and that's paradoxical, too.  Nietzsche presented a radical challenge to conventional morality, one that is much more radical than anything existentialism has to offer, and so the attempt to misconstrue him as an existentialist is, quite frankly, an attempt to domesticate him, to humanize his work and make it palatable, acceptable, pleasing - to remove or brush under the rug everything in Nietzsche that is frightful and incompatible with polite society.  But be careful in casting out demons, lest you cast out what is best within a person.  By refusing to confront Nietzsche at his most radical, these readers risk rendering Nietzsche's work into something that is not worth reading.  In this impulse towards benign inclusiveness, this liberal impulse to bring everything into acceptability by absorbing everything, assimilating everything and quietly eliminating those qualities that cannot be assimilated, Nietzsche would have seen clearly seen the fingerprints of what he called "The Last Men" - an attitude which can be summed up as "I accept everyone's opinion - so long as they agree with me." 

I noted that Nietzsche would have rejected the warm embrace of the existentialist, and that this is paradoxical, too.  What I mean by that gets to one of the central paradoxes of Nietzsche.  That is: why should Nietzsche reject the embrace of existentialism?  Yes, it is not true that Nietzsche was an existentialist - but why should that matter?  Why should truth matter?  This is the paradox: for someone who claimed to have transcended the will to truth, Nietzsche sure was a stickler, and a person with an instinctive courage to be loud about his disagreements, even when this didn't win him any friends.  If the will to power is really what drove him, why not pretend to get along, just for the sake of having some friends?  Why not, for social acceptability's sake, pretend to be an existentialist?  

But this Nietzsche could not do.  And that is very revealing.  He had to show us his ugliest sides.  This was his - confession.

All of this, however, does not stop you from being an existentialist, if you would like to be. Go right ahead.  No one is stopping you.

But I have to ask: if you're an aspiring existentialist, why do you find it necessary to distort the memory of Nietzsche, to lie to yourself about him, and tell yourself that he was, so to speak, on your side?  Is it because you desire to have some revered, ancient wiseman to authorize and give meaning to your adventure, to add the weight of history and legacy to your philosophical tradition?  But doesn't that very desire go against the principles of existentialism?  (And what are the principles of existentialism, anyway?)

Simply understand that Nietzsche is your enemy - and defeat him.