An epoch approaching extinction while something new is straining to evolve
Towards the end of Stefan Zweig’s 1925 book Nietzsche he reflects on the late warnings of an “atmospheric, whose nerves read in the closeness of the air the oncoming storm”. As Nietzsche wrote: “the ice beneath us is already too thin: we all sense the warm and dangerous breeze heralding the thaw”. For Zweig it seems that “No one felt so keenly that an epoch was approaching extinction and that in the midst of this deadly crisis something new was straining to evolve” (pg 88). He reads Nietzsche as a prophet of impending catastrophe, coupling breathtaking lucidity with incipient madness, as a man “whose nerves were shot but still gave rise to the most courageous thoughts” (pg 85). It’s easy to imagine how potent these warnings would seem to Zweig, writing in the interregnum, surveying the devastation of the first world war in the years before he would be forced to flee Germany.
I was surprised to realise this bleak quote was actually from The Gay Science which I’d always understood as the closest thing Nietzsche produced to a theory of flourishing. Particularly so given I’d just reread it a new translation and had no memory of this evocative warning, which I found so potent when presented as a singular sentence. This is the full passage in David Petault’s translation:
We children of the future, how could we possibly feel at home in this present? We are estranged from all ideals that might allow someone to feel at home even in this fragile, broken transitional period; as for their “realities,” we do not believe they have any permanence. The ice that still supports us today has become very thin: the thawing winds are blowing, and we ourselves, we the homeless, are something that breaks the ice and other too-thin “realities”… We “conserve” nothing; we do not wish to return to any past; we are not “liberal” at all; we do not work for “progress”; we do not need to block our ears against the sirens of the future that the market sings—those who call for “equal rights,” “free society,” “no more masters and no more servants” do not entice us!
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: A New Translation (p. 272). (Function). Kindle Edition.
I was unsettled reading this to realise how readily I often gloss over passages of Nietzsche which are uncomfortable, difficult to understand or fail to resonate with me. This after all is Daniel Tutt’s claim about Nietzsche in How To Read Like A Parasite: left-Nietzscheans (which I would consider myself to be, even though it’s not a particularly salient intellectual identity for me) selectively read him in a manner which is particularly dangerous given his deeply strategic sense of how readers might relate to him. He was fundamentally a reactionary thinker, argues Tutt, committed to producing political technologies which could hold back the tide of socialism.
What makes it particularly uncomfortable, beyond belatedly seeing Tutt’s point in my own reading, comes from how much parts of this passage resonate with me. When I read it closely there’s so much here which echoes my own experience of losing any sense of political hope from December 2019 onwards, through to a political horizon receding entirely as I was overwhelmed by a rearguard action to prop up my life as it fell apart during the pandemic, through to experiencing a fragile regrowth of a belief in recent months that things can be better. Yet how could we possibly feel at home in this present? Indeed I find it astonishing that anyone could feel at home in this present but what’s more salient is, as Nietzsche puts it, the state of being “estranged from all ideals that might allow someone to feel at home even in this fragile, broken transitional period”.
We are in a fragile, broken transitional period again. The possibility Nietzsche is alluding to, indeed Tutt argues is proactively seeking to foreclose, arises that shared ideals might allow someone to feel at home in this present. That there might be ways of living and working with others that seek to address the fragility and act reparatively towards this broken world. That ideals can bring people together, making hope normal again in the face of endemic despair. That the horizon of possibility is made rather than given. That it can be remade. While I still think Tutt overstates large swathes of his critique I do now think he’s correct that Nietzsche’s lonely heroic subject can be understood in terms of foreclosing what we might think of as a collective aspiration in the face of nihilism. I was mystified by Tutt’s claim that Nietzsche can be understood as the first (right) accelerationist but I can now see what he means, particularly in this passage. The intention is to be the breaker of the ice rather than to conserve the past or work towards a better future.
Yet I still find the Gay Science a beautiful strange little book. I imagine Nietzsche less like a fascist philosopher and more like a Rust Cole. A broken yet strangely noble man who forces himself to look closely at matters which he feels, with some justification, those around him studiously avoid. Indeed he elevates this position into a passion, even a religion. We can learn from what he’s drawn to, as well as the questions it provokes in him, without accepting his answers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8x73UW8Hjk
Zupančič argues that Nietzsche can be read as a theorist of the Real. In her biography Lesley Chamberlain describes the “beautiful problem” he was preoccupied by. From Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin pg 121:
The paradox was that the realization of limitation was liberating. The Upper Engadine’s 5,500 feet above sea level stood for the msot desirable capacity in human beings to see far and over the heads of individual nations and people and creeds, the ability to survive by rising above the fray, and the need to go beyond the familiar world in order to see arbitrariness of its values. In Twilight, Nietzsche wrote of this extreme standpoint:
“One would have to be situated outside life, and on the other hand to know it as thoroughly as any, as many, as all who have experienced it, to be permitted to touch on the problem of the value of life at all”
It is a beautiful problem, the moment human beings realize they belong to no other realm but the present and have no God to whom they can pray.
A beautiful problem in a “fragile, broken transitional period” might not seem so beautiful. Particularly if you live an isolated peripatetic existence plagued by ailments which disfigure your capacity for the things in your life which bring you joy. But it remains a beautiful problem which, contra Tutt, I don’t think can be overlooked on the way to collective action. There’s no way round it, only through. The point is not to get stuck where Nietzsche got stuck. Nor to get drawn in by his self-valorising calls to remain there with him. It’s something to pass through, not to end with.
This is why for all his portentousness I find Zweig’s formulation so evocative. In this bleak time we see an epoch approaching extinction while many things are straining to evolve. The duplicity at the heart of Nietzsche is the indifference he preaches in the face of what could be. The point Tutt makes which I now entirely buy is that Nietzsche is a deeply political thinker. There is a political project for him defined by the foreclosure of other political projects, those predicated on what he sees as ressentiment. The books also document that political project as an existential response to Chamberlain’s ‘beautiful problem’. That’s what we need to focus on in left readings of Nietzsche I would argue: the moral psychology of how we respond to nihilism in a broken and fragile world. It’s ok to have ideals but, as he puts it in Ecce Homo, we should “put on gloves before them”. They should be ones we really have arrived at rather than inherited. Chosen rather than assumed.
This is an orientation of care as much as distance, recognising the worth of what we have alongside the possibility for damage. It means that collective projects confront the lack of guarantees, such that people are equipped to leap in spite of them. This was for many people I suspect, certainly myself, what was missing in 2019 and why the defeat of Corbynism was so utterly crushing. It’s the collective corollary of what Daniel Gaztimbide describes here in a more individualised mode:
I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would you want to do? Not, what do you have to do to survive, or appease the Other, but what would you just want? … It’s wrestling with that precipice of death, where all you’re left with is your own desire. And oftentimes that desire is oriented to something. I want. I want to be with loved ones. I want a tomorrow, regardless of whether that tomorrow will come.
Can this ever ultimately be separated? Even for Nietzsche they couldn’t, with his works filled with the effort to repress a collective dimension which Tutt convincingly argues saturates his work. For the rest of us they certainly can’t be. In his less bleak moments I wonder if Nietzsche doubted this as well:
It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come…
The Gay Science
Writing this prompted me to finally finish Tutt’s book. I realise that he’s advocating something similar in the sense of working through Nietzsche rather than simply dismissing him. But he conceives of this in explicitly political terms which overlooks the point I’m trying to make here. As Jacob Burckhardt put it, quoted by Zweig, Nietzsche’s books “Increased independence in the world… independence in the world, not independence of the world”. In this we can find, in Zweig’s terms, “an atmosphere, a clear atmosphere of higher lucidity permeated by passion, of a demonic nature, which discharges itself only in storms and destruction”. There’s something of this conveyed in Tutt’s description of sweating out the parasite but I think the contribution it makes to our wellbeing is lost in that metaphor. Can we linger for a bit in this atmosphere? Can we persist through the storms and destruction? If so can we come to our ideals afterwards in a freer, more knowing and more independent way? I suspect we can and therein for me lies the continued existential appeal of Nietzsche in spite of the terrible politics which, persuaded by Tutt, I now concede cannot simply be passed over in any adequate reading of him.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T.S. Eliot - East Coker
#Nietzscheans #accelerationism #Activism #DanielGaztimbide #DanielTutt #DavidPetault #EcceHomo #hope #LesleyChamberlain #Nietzsche #RustCole #StefanZweig #TheGayScience #Zupančič
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