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Don’t shoot the messenger: Friedrich Nietzsche, painted here by the German artist Curt Stoeving, diagnosed nihilism but did not endorse it
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 THE NS ESSAY

The return of
Bad Nietzsche
The great philosopher was read by Mussolini and appropriated by the Nazis.
Today, his writings are an inspiration to the alt-right. Is Friedrich Nietzsche
doomed to be abused and misunderstood?
By Hugo Drochon

A
sked who the most overrated
author was in a recent interview,
Steven Pinker, Harvard psyc-
hologist-at-large extraordinaire,
named Friedrich Nietzsche. He
explained, “It’s easy to see why his socio-
pathic ravings would have inspired so many
repugnant movements of the 20th and 21st
centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bol-
shevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of liber-
tarianism, and the American alt-right and
neo-Nazi movements today.”
For Pinker, the British analytical philoso-
pher Bertrand Russell got Nietzsche right
in his 1945 book A History of Western Phi-
losophy when he pointed out that he would
rather have lived in the Athens of Pericles or
the Florence of the Medici than today. That
he would rather live in the past than the
present – and in eras known respectively for
the birth of democracy and the Renaissance
no less – is, according to Pinker, suspect,
because on every measure human life has
today become longer, healthier, safer, hap-
pier, more peaceful, more stimulating and
more prosperous (he has made 75 graphs
to prove it). “If one wanted to single out a
thinker who represented the opposite of
humanism (indeed, of pretty much every
argument in this book), one couldn’t do bet-
Nietzsche,” Pinker writes at the end of En-
lightenment Now. “Drop the Nietzsche” is
his recommendation.
Another who blames the ills of the
world on the type of postmodernism Ni-
etzsche is often associated with is the Ca-
nadian academic psychologist Jordan Pe-
terson, who has become the darling of the
alt-right. Peterson presents himself as the
defender of “traditionalism” or “classical
liberalism”. Beyond his online lecture se-
ries, what brought Peterson to international
attention was his railing against a Cana-
dian law that would enforce gender-neutral
pronouns. His colleague at the University
of Toronto, Ronald Beiner, a professor of
political science, explicitly links Nietzsche
to the alt-right in his book Dangerous
Minds. Beiner argues that Nietzsche’s rejec-
tion of the Enlightenment has influenced
right-wing ideologues from Richard Spen-
cer to Steve Bannon.
From the nemesis of the Enlightenment
to the inspiration for the alt-right: why is
Nietzsche in the bad books again?
To understand why Nietzsche has been
so misunderstood, Russell’s A History
of Western Philosophy is a good place to
start. He wrote the book during the Sec-
ond World War while at Bryn Mawr Col-
was lauded for its literary style, and subse-
quently cited as having contributed to Rus-
sell winning the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1950, the account of the various philoso-
phers it discussed – including Nietzsche –
was dismissed by specialists.
A well-known pacifist who at first op-
posed the war – although he later accepted
it as the lesser of two evils when compared
to Hitler taking over Europe – much of Rus-
sell’s History was his personal response to
it. So part of what he was trying to do was
to understand the rise of Hitler, and to that
he found an answer: Nietzsche. The Sec-
ond World War, Russell declared, was “Ni-
etzsche’s War”. With Donald Trump in the
White House and the alt-right in the streets,
many commentators have started to ask
whether fascism has finally arrived in Amer-
ica. As such it is no surprise to see the 1930s
return as the historical moment to compare
to the present era. Mussolini claimed he was
influenced by Nietzsche, and Hitler pre-
sented himself as a Nietzschean superman
leading his Aryan master race to victory.
Nietzsche died in 1900 after suffering a
mental breakdown in 1889 – legend has it he
broke down in Turin after seeing a horse be-
ing flogged by its owner, wrapping his arms
around it to protect it. The great political
figures of his day were neither Hitler nor
t

ter than the German philologist Friedrich lege near Philadelphia. Although the book
31 AUGUST – 6 SEPTEMBER 2018 | NEW STATESMAN | 29

t
Mussolini but Bismarck, and its politics
was neither fascism nor National Socialism
but the “power politics” of German unifica-
tion and the European balance of power.
Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the small
town of Röcken in the German province of
Saxony. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died
at quite a young age, of a “softening of the
brain”, which Nietzsche himself might have
been afflicted by in later life. He was a pre-
cocious student, gaining a chair in philology
at the age of 24 at the University of Basel.
But he was plagued by ill-health for most of
his life and had to resign his position, after
which he became a wandering intellectual.
He met some of the most important peo-
We no longer have a shared morality
around which to organise our lives;
we are left instead with nihilism
ple of his time, including the composer
Richard Wagner, whom he would later fall
out with over the latter’s pan-Germanism,
anti-Semitism and rallying to Christian-
ity. He also knew the psychoanalyst and
later lover and muse of Sigmund Freud,
Lou Andreas-Salomé, whom he fell in love
with (like everyone else). Nietzsche pro-
posed to her at least twice, but instead she
ran off with his friend Paul Rée. He also vol-
unteered as a cavalry officer in the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870-71, the last of the wars
Bismarck waged to unify Germany into the
first German Reich with Prussia at its head.
I
t would be hard to overestimate the
influence Nietzsche had on the cul-
ture of the 20th century. His literary
style influenced Albert Camus, An-
dré Gide, DH Lawrence, Jack London,
Thomas Mann, Yukio Mishima, Eugene
O’Neill, William Butler Yeats, Wyndham
Lewis and George Bernard Shaw; his phi-
losophy Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sar-
tre, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault;
and he is often considered the forefather of
existentialism, critical theory, post-struc-
turalism, deconstruction and postmodern-
ism. His books range from a study of An-
cient Greek drama in The Birth of Tragedy
(1872) to the later poetic philosophy of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (1883) and his attack on
Christianity in his final book, The Antichrist
(1888). Today he is best remembered for his
1887 polemic On the Genealogy of Moral-
ity, in which he explored in three essays the
idea that all history was a struggle between
two moralities: a noble “master morality”
that values strength, beauty, courage and
30 | NEW STATESMAN | 31 AUGUST – 6 SEPTEMBER 2018
success, and a “slave” morality that values
kindness, empathy, sympathy. The latter he
strongly associated with Christianity.
But he didn’t leave it at that: he used his
theories and ideas to analyse the politics of
his time. Bismarck’s aim was to unify Ger-
many so that it might have a seat at the table
with the other great nations – France, Great
Britain and Russia – who were dividing the
world between them. But Nietzsche reject-
ed a politics based on nationalism, xeno-
phobia, philistinism and the fragmentation
of Europe: it was the political manifestation
of the slave morality he so brilliantly dis-
sected in the Genealogy. Instead, he posited
his own master morality “great politics”
that aimed at the unification of (continen-
tal) Europe to be led by a new, transnational
elite. Their aim would not solely be to lead
Europe into what Rudyard Kipling later
called the “great game” – namely the power
struggle between Britain and Russia over
Afghanistan and northern India (the “jewel
in the crown”) – but more importantly to
participate in the creation of a new, truly
European, high culture.
H
ow did Nietzsche become the
philosopher of the Third Re-
ich? It was Alfred Baeumler,
the Nazi court philosopher,
who transformed him into a
“Hitler prophecy”, as the German writer
Thomas Mann put it. Nietzsche was recast
as a philosopher of the German state and of
German racial purity. Baeumler was aided
and abetted by Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth,
“Yep, we sure shoulda heeded that sign”
who published a collection of his final note-
books as Will to Power.
Nietzsche was quite close to his sister,
two years his junior, when he was younger,
but their relationship soured when she tried
to intervene in his doomed courtship of Lou
Andreas-Salomé, whom she considered to
be “immoral”. But the definite break came
when she married Bernhard Förster, a rabid
anti-Semite who tried to found a “pure” Ar-
yan colony “Nueva Germania” in Paraguay.
In a letter to his sister, Nietzsche denounced
Förster as part of an “anti-Semitic canaille”,
and they never spoke again. For the rest of
his life Nietzsche considered himself to be
an “anti-anti-Semite”.
The colony in Paraguay was a failure:
Förster committed suicide and Elisabeth
returned to Germany in the early 1890s
heavily in debt. But she saw an opportunity
in the new-found celebrity of her brother
(who had since had his mental breakdown).
The great Danish literary critic Georg
Brandes, who was Jewish, had started lec-
turing on Nietzsche in Copenhagen. Elisa-
beth set herself up as the guardian of her
brother’s literary estate. From this came
a collection of his last notes, which Elisa-
beth edited and presented as the “magnum
opus” he had intended to complete, even
though Nietzsche claimed to have “fin-
ished” his final book with The Antichrist.
The Nazis claimed Nietzsche as their own
philosopher and in 1934 Hitler visited the
Nietzsche archive set up by Elisabeth in
Weimar, and she offered him her brother’s
walking stick.
Although from this period we only re-
member the so-called Nazi-Nietzsche,
Baeumler’s was not the only voice. For in-
stance the psychologist and existentialist
philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote what many
consider to be the first serious scholarly
study of Nietzsche in 1936, and he explained
that he “intended to marshal against the
National Socialists the world of thought
of the man whom they had proclaimed as
their own philosopher”.
This struggle between the good and the
bad Nietzsche has gone on ever since. Af-
ter the Second World War, Nietzsche was
made safe again by the German émigré phi-
losopher and translator Walter Kaufmann,
who, in his classic 1950 study, showed how
the Will to Power was a fraud.
The Nietzsche that came out of that strand
of interpretation was a sunny, happier (and
more literary) Nietzsche, one linked with
individual self-fashioning as explored in
film (think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind), literature and poetry. But the bad Ni-
etzsche was never far away. He reappeared
PHIL WITTE
in the 1980s “culture wars” in America, no-
tably as a consequence of the conservative

Respectable: both the Nazis and Mussolini tried to use Nietzsche to legitimise their world-view
philosopher Allan Bloom’s attack on the
moral relativism, or “nihilism”, that had
supposedly taken over American universi-
ties. Bloom had read Nietzsche, and praised
his cultural elitism, but he decried how his
thought had come to serve the cause of the
liberal identity politics Bloom abhorred.
Ironically, the term “culture war” is de-
rived from Bismarck’s Kulturkampf – his
“cultural struggle” against German Catho-
lics he was concerned would not be loyal
to the new Protestant Reich. Nietzsche
despised Bismarck’s policies, and secretly
hoped that the Catholic church and the
German state would “mutually devour
one another”. For him, the “struggle” was a
squabble within Christianity itself: the true
world-historical struggle is between master
and slave morality, whereas the struggle be-
tween Catholics and Protestants was only a
struggle within slave morality itself.
Ultimately whether we have the good or
the bad, Nietzsche tells us more about our-
selves and our times than it does about Ni-
etzsche: when things are good we have the
Nietzsche of individual self-creation, when
things are bad we have Nietzsche the god-
father of fascism.
But something more profound is going
on. And that has to do with Nietzsche’s no-
torious claim that “God is dead”.
What Nietzsche meant is that modern so-
cieties no longer have a common moral ref-
DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY
erence point to guide their actions: the role
Christianity used to play. This has come
about because of the Enlightenment Steven
Pinker defends, which undercuts not solely
the belief in a Christian God but in all types
of belief structures.
The Enlightenment has brought about
the triumph of scientific rationality over sa-
cred revelation. We no longer have a shared
morality around which to organise our
lives, and we are left instead with moral rel-
ativism, or nihilism: the belief that life has
no value; that there is no objective morality.
Nihilism holds that “nothing is true, every-
thing is permitted”, as Nietzsche, perhaps
drawing from one of his favourite novelists,
Dostoevsky, whom he considered one of
the greatest psychologists of his time, put it.
Nietzsche is often considered one of the
great psychologist-philosophers, having
diagnosed the ills that befall our age: Freud
lauded him as having the most “penetrat-
ing knowledge of himself than any man
who ever lived or was likely to live”. And
this nihilism – a feeling of being unmoored
in the modern world – captures something
profound about the spirit of our age, which
has seen events – the election of Trump
and Brexit to name but two – many of us
find difficult to apprehend. Having lost
our intellectual anchor, we set sail looking
for a new mooring, but the open sea still
separates us.
S
teven Pinker and Jordan Peter-
son are both psychologists, so it
is no surprise that Nietzsche the
psychologist-philosopher, diag-
nostician of the nihilism of the
modern world, should play such a central
role in their thinking. Both agree that what
is wrong with the world is nihilism, and
both want to restore order to it. The sub-
title to Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life is
An Antidote to Chaos. Pinker thinks the
31 AUGUST – 6 SEPTEMBER 2018 | NEW STATESMAN | 31
answer is to return to the values and meth-
ods of the Enlightenment, grounded in
modern science, thereby skipping back over
Nietzsche as if he had never existed. Peterson
believes the world is divided between order
and chaos, and that for masculine order to
dominate the feminine chaos, then certain
rules – the 12 he proposes – must prevail.
Nietzsche’s notion of the “death of God”
is introduced by a madman rushing into a
marketplace in daylight with a lit lamp, ask-
ing where God is. He is met with much ridi-
cule by the those gathered around, them-
selves non-believers.
The madman declares: “Where is God?
I’ll tell you. God is dead, and we have killed
him, you and I.”
This is met by shocked silence, and the
man, frustrated, finally smashes his lamp
to the ground and says to himself: “I come
too early, my time hasn’t come yet. This tre-
mendous event is still on its way, still trav-
elling – it has not yet reached human ears.
Lightning and thunder need time, deeds
need time after they have been done before
they can be seen and heard.”
The point of this famous passage from The
Gay Science (1882) is that although “God is
dead” – in that the non-believers no longer
believe in him – they continue to live as if
he were still alive. This is what Nietzsche
calls living in the “shadows of God”. The
challenge that Nietzsche, through the par-
able of the madman on the market square,
addresses to non-believers is neither to
pretend that God isn’t dead nor to fall into
nihilism, but instead to have the courage
to create their own values. If we have killed
God, then “must we ourselves not become
gods simply to appear worthy of it?” the
madman asks.
From a Nietzschean point of view, what
both Pinker and Peterson propose is to re-
main within the shadows of God. Pinker
wants to erect a new God of the Enlight-
enment, with its values and methods. In
elaborating his rules for life, Peterson draws
freely from the great myths and religions
of the past, which he describes as being es-
sentially moral stories. But it is not just the
Christian God that has died but “All Gods
are Dead”, as Nietzsche’s infamous alter-
ego, Zarathustra, will make clear: it is not
just Christian morality that can no longer
be grounded but all types of morality.
Peterson comes closest to advocating
what Nietzsche is advocating – he has a long
engagement with his notion of the death of
God in 12 Rules – but he steps back from the
abyss. Perhaps he didn’t like what he saw
there. (“You stare into the abyss and the
abyss stares back into you,” as Nietzsche
put it.) Peterson agrees we are living in an
t
age of nihilism, but rejects Nietzsche’s

t
view that what is left for us is to create
our own values: “We cannot invent our
own values, because we cannot merely im-
pose what we believe on our souls.” We
have a nature that must be discovered, and
we need rules for our life so chaos doesn’t
overwhelm order.
Nietzsche would have nothing to say
against constraints, nor does he believe that
it will be open to everyone to create their
own values: he is quite happy for the major-
ity of people to go on living as if God were
still alive. But that didn’t mean he thought
creating new values, as we saw from the
madman passage, would be open to no one.
It would be open to non-believers who have
the courage to create their own values.
In his book Dangerous Minds, Beiner
is thus quite right to point out that: “Ni-
etzsche wanted creativity and open hori-
zons for the heroic philosopher and want-
ed brutally closed and confined horizons
for everyone else,” except that Nietzsche
thought the closed and confined horizons
were self-imposed (ie imposed on the
slave-morality herd by itself). Such a politi-
cal vision does not immediately make Ni-
etzsche a Nazi. In fact, there is an element
of pluralism in Nietzsche’s thinking: he
32 | NEW STATESMAN | 31 AUGUST – 6 SEPTEMBER 2018
gladly accepts that most civilisations are a
mixture of master and slave moralities and
that most people should continue to live as
if God still existed, while those who do not
should be given the opportunity to explore
new modes of existence.
Both types of lives, according to Ni-
etzsche, have their own value, and his de-
sire to find the right balance between the
two opens the door to what we would rec-
ognise today as political liberalism – that
is, a politics that tries to mediate between
competing spheres and demands, while
giving each its due.
Nietzsche is trying
to cure us from
resenting our past
L
inking nihilism to Nietzsche is
undoubtedly correct, but blam-
ing Nietzsche for nihilism is
like shooting the messenger:
Nietzsche diagnosed its arrival,
but he never endorsed it. His whole en-
terprise was about trying to find ways out
of it. Linking Nietzsche to fascism, as both
Pinker and Beiner do, is thus likely to back-
fire: the alt-right will seize on this as a way
of giving their movement the intellectual
heft it is missing, much like the Nazis and
Mussolini tried to appropriate Nietzsche to
legitimise themselves.
If Nietzsche is the diagnostician rather
than the herald of nihilism, then perhaps
the conceptual tools he forged for himself
to make sense of the world he lived in might
be the best way to use him today. Nietzsche,
after all, was the philosopher of ressenti-
ment, which seems to be driving much
populist politics today.
Indeed his notion of “slave morality”,
marked by nationalism, xenophobia and
fragmentation, seems like a good way to
characterise a lot of the current politics of
the far right. Bertrand Russell closed his
chapter on Nietzsche in A History of West-
ern Philosophy with the line: “His follow-
ers have had their innings, but we may
hope that it is coming rapidly to an end.”
This is unlikely – not least because we are
still grappling with the “death of God”.
The way out will not be through erecting
another “good” or “bad” Nietzsche, but
through confronting head-on what he was
trying to teach us.
What was he trying to impart? On his
own account Nietzsche’s greatest lesson
was the thought of the eternal return. In an-
other famous passage from The Gay Science
Nietzsche asks: “What, if some day or night
a demon were to steal after you into your
loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This
life as you now live it and have lived it, you
will have to live once more and innumerable
times more’… Would you not throw your-
self down and gnash your teeth and curse
the demon who spoke thus? Or have you
once experienced a tremendous moment
when you would have answered him: ‘You
are a god and never have I heard anything
more divine.’” The key word here is “if”:
Nietzsche does not claim that the eternal re-
turn is true – that you will relive every sin-
gle instance of your life an infinite amount
of times – but asks how you would react if
it were true. Would you “curse the demon”,
or would you say “never have I heard any-
thing more divine”?
Most people would probably opt for the
former – there are plenty of moments in
one’s life one would rather not have to re-
live, and indeed given the option most peo-
ple will want to return to the past to change
something they have done and regretted.
But what Nietzsche is trying to cure us from
is resentment towards our past: he wants us
to come to accept it. And one way to accept
it is to learn from the past to better confront
the future: if we hadn’t made mistakes in
the past how could we warn against making
the same mistakes in the future?
So the question we might ask ourselves
is: what future action would justify my past
mistakes; what in the future might help me
reconcile myself with a past action I regret?
This is why the eternal return not only has
a backward-looking but a forward dimen-
sion too: Nietzsche writes “that one wants
nothing to be different, not forward, not
backward, not in all eternity”. Overcom-
ing one’s resentment towards one’s past is
the only way to overcome nihilism, to give
one’s life meaning again.
Again, most people still might not pass
the test, but that is OK: Nietzsche was
quite content for lots of people – if not the
majority – to continue to live their lives as
they have always done. But for those will-
ing to give it a go, perhaps the thought of
the eternal return can offer the basis for a
new valuation, for a new ethics. As moral
philosopher Bernard Williams brilliantly
saw in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
(1985), what Nietzsche was trying to do was
to replace a top-down, institutional, dog-
matic and absolutist morality with a more
bottom-up, individualistic and self-creating
ethic. Will this succeed? Who knows, but it
might be worth a shot. If not we’ll be con-
demned to eternally play out the good ver-
sus the bad Nietzsche. l
Hugo Drochon is a political theorist at
Cambridge University and the author of
“Nietzsche’s Great Politics” (Princeton
University Press)
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