What if…Nietzsche had not gone mad?:
The course of recent Western philosophy would have been profoundly changed - also possibly the very course of history itself?
In 1889, after a period of increasingly rapid, florid philosophical production, Nietzsche broke down in Turin, on seeing a horse being whipped viciously in the street. He threw his arms around the neck of the horse, crying; but then collapsed, was interred in an asylum, and never recovered. He was only 45 years old.
For a long time it was thought that Nietzsche’s madness was the result of syphillis. It is now thought much more likely to be the product of CADASIL, a dreadful brain-disease. So: what if he had not had CADASIL (or whatever it was that drove him mad in 1889)? What if he had gone down in history not just as an eternal enfant terrible, but rather had gone on to become the grand old man of Western Philosophy? What if, furthermore, his sister and her husband had as a result not been able to completely distort his message such that it became used as intellectual legitimation for the rise of anti-Semitism, and of the Nazis?
Read on…
It was the intellectual event of the twentieth century. But the live radio-debate between Friedrich Nietzsche, the ever-energetic grand old man of German letters, and his genius upstart ‘follower’, Martin Heidegger, on July 17th 1932, proved to be much more than that: it may also have been a turning-point in history.
The debate was widely perceived as resulting in a hands-down victory for the elder statesman of the occasion. Nietzsche ran philosophical rings around Heidegger by sketching how he, Nietzsche, had already anticipated Heidegger’s interpretation of him, in his lately-added Preface to Being and Time, as ‘the last metaphysician’. I.e. Far from this being an interpretation that ‘put Nietzsche in his place’ and left the floor open for Heidegger to succeed him, Nietzsche had already anticipated precisely this interpretation, embraced it, and then moved beyond it, himself.
This put Heidegger on the back foot, but it was merely the prelude for the more widely significant part of the debate: the confrontation between Nietzsche and Heidegger over anti-Semitism and Nazism. Heidegger seemed to speak in coded defence of the Nazi Party, at that time on the rise and potentially about to become the dominant party in the Reichstag, as promising a (to him) welcome repudiation of academic freedom, with students and Nazi-friendly academics instead joining “the march” toward the alleged “destiny” of “the German people”. Heidegger also seemed to invoke Nietzsche as himself an intellectual authority who had laid out this path. Nietzsche responded with a calm but devastating broadside, restating with greater clarity than ever what he had sought increasingly strongly to assert for the previous 50 years: that anti-semitism was an abomination, that nationalism was a substitute for real human greatness, that German nationalism in particular was little more than a joke, and that Heidegger was dangerously distorting both Nietzsche’s own thinking and the historical moment they were in.
Nietzsche’s witty and powerful critique of Heidegger appeared to leave the younger man disoriented. Long after the debate, near the end of his life, Nietzsche said he almost felt pity for Heidegger, and felt an impulse to throw his arms around the younger man’s neck, as he had done so famously to that horse in Turin 43 years earlier (sparking the early rise of pro-animal ‘post-humanism’ in philosophy that became an important trend in the twentieth-century). If only, he said, Heidegger had not had the misfortune to have been ‘contaminated’ with anti-semitism. But the immediate effects of their radio encounter were much starker: the debate became a sensation, a wake-up call, with newspaper headlines across Europe especially latching onto Nietzsche’s closing warning that “We must have anti-Semitism curbed politically, and now, or the anti-Semites will end up having many of us shot”, and his ironic prophecy that “If Hitler becomes Chancellor, then only a god will be able to save us”. The July 1932 election, which many had expected to see the Nazis move toward power on the back of (in the context of the Depression gripping the world at that time), instead saw big increases in support for the Social Democrats and the Centre Party, who appear to have been the main beneficiaries of the shock-waves from Nietzsche’s powerful denunciation of the Nazis.
But to understand fully what happened in 1932, we have to go back much earlier, to other key moments in Nietzsche’s philosophical and public life.
In 1897, partly to counter the bastardised versions of his thought that his own sister had been quietly promoting, which appeared to place Nietzsche as an advocate of German nationalism and of anti-Semitism, Nietzsche published his best-selling polemic, ‘The anti-anti-Semite”. Modelled loosely on his own earlier work, ‘The anti-Christ’, this popular polemic threw a powerful spanner into the then-rising credibility among various strata of European society of anti-Semitism.
It set the scene moreover for Nietzsche’s decisive intervention into the Dreyfus affair in the following year. Nietzsche’s incendiary Foreword to Emile Zola’s cause celebre work ‘J’accuse’ argued that the treatment of the Jewish military officer Dreyfus was a stain upon all Europe. Nietzsche ridiculed the allegations of pro-German espionage made against Dreyfus, and called upon Germany not to allow the ludicrous attack on Dreyfus to stand; and this appears, after a wider public outcry in support of Nietzsche’s stance, to have led the German Government, unprecedentedly, eventually to open some of its secret military intelligence files, to help show that the case against Dreyfus was indeed absurd. Dreyfus won a full pardon, and the attempts of anti-Semites in both France and Germany to rally around the anti-Dreyfusard cause came crashing to a halt.
By now, Nietzsche’s reputation was widespread across the European continent. When Nietzsche published his monumental magnum opus, ‘On the value of values’, in 1909, it therefore received a wider public reception than had ever been the case previously for a philosopher. Nietszche became a byword for intelligent and (increasingly) sober reflection on the crisis of European civilisation, and of how to find meaning in an increasingly secular world. Nietzsche’s next short polemic, ‘Nietzsche contra Frege’, outsold any of his previous books; this work, which over the next generation became widely assigned in university classrooms due to the clarity and accessibility of its exposition, challenged the emerging ‘Analytic’ philosophy to deepen Frege’s ‘Context Principle’ so as to take seriously context in its true, widest sense, including cultural context, and sought at the same time to root out the ‘disease’ of anti-Semitism from within European intellectual life. (It was these two books together that famously led the young Ludwig Wittgenstein to dedicate his great ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Logic, sin, and das uberwindung’ to Nietzsche. His later masterpiece, ‘Philosophico-cultural investigations’, was also of course highly influenced by the cultural-contextualist argument of ‘Nietzsche contra Frege’.)
The rise of European anti-Semitism in the early twentieth century was very patchy, in part perhaps because of the common cause between otherwise unlikely allies such as Zola and Nietzsche. Thus Nietzsche got a hearing when, in the ashes of Germany’s empire immediately after the First World War, he argued passionately for the victorious powers not to impose anything that could be spun as a national humiliation onto Germany. Another unlikely ally therefore was John Maynard Keynes; voices of reason such as his and Nietzsche’s helped make the Treaty of Versailles into a document not of Franco-British triumphalism but into the basis for something more like a community of nations. Thus those, such as Adolf Hitler, who sought to gain political power by claiming Germany to have been humiliated and ‘stabbed in the back’ in 1918, were never able to gain sufficient traction. Hitler bitterly commented in his pseudo-autobiography, ‘Mein Kampf’, that “…only the mighty can bear defeat. But Nietzsche has prevented us, to our great cost, from being able to understand why we were defeated.”
Nietzsche’s joint epistolary enterprise with Freud in the 20s, published as ‘The genealogy of the psyche’, sealed his wide and positive reputation. In 1933, Nietzsche published his final book, ‘A perspective for my work as an author’, which sought one last time to rebut misinterpretations of ‘Nietszcheanism’, and to show instead what it actually meant to embrace life, affirmatively. By this time, it made sense to his remarkably wide readership that what it was to be a thinking European was to be someone who, while unafraid to speak one’s mind and to reject dying or fashionable dogmas, had no truck with aggressive nationalism nor with any form of dehumanisation. 1933 too was of course the year in which the Popular Front, building on the decisive knock-back that the election of 1932 had delivered to the Nazis (in the wake of that extraordinary Nietzsche vs Heidegger radio-debate), swept to power in Germany, with a promise of a programme of public works to match that that Franklin Roosevelt was already carrying out in the USA, and a rejection of the divide and rule tactics and racist beliefs of the Nazis. Nietzsche finally died in 1935, and was given a full state funeral (except that Nietzsche himself had insisted that there would be no glorification of nation-states at the event, and asked instead for a reading to be given, at his funeral, from his relevant piece “The new idol”; his wishes were respected).
1939 saw the birth of the 'European Economic and Security Community’, which emerged from the growing good relations between the Popular Front Government in Paris and that in Berlin. The new EESC took as its anthem Beethoven’s ‘Ode to joy’. When a French journalist questioned the French Prime Minister as to why we had to have a German composer being the author of what was in effect the European super-national anthem, the French PM famously replied, “Beethoven was a truly great man, an ‘ubermensch’. So said the great Friedrich Nietzsche. And, you know; if Beethoven was good enough for Nietzsche, then he’s good enough for me”.
Some will find this re-writing of history, hingeing on the mental state of one philosopher, a little fanciful. But it is important to bear in mind the (important) role that Nietzsche was used for, posthumously, in ‘legitimating’ German nationalism and anti-semitism, when in actual life he opposed both. And it is important to bear in mind how narrowly the Nazis came to power; they never won an actual majority in an election, and if their vote had been significantly less in 1932, it seems highly likely that they could have been rolled back.
The ascendancy of the Nazis was not inevitable. Nietzsche might just have been the pivot on which European history turned. If he had lived, and not had CADASIL.