Nietzsche. You barely have to utter his name to get a reaction — either nodding approval from conservatives or cringing disdain from their liberal opponents. The long-dead German has transformed into a culture war figurehead, his clubs banned from universities and his quotes stripped from offices, even as Right-wing admirers wallow in the “Nietzschean aesthetics” of hierarchy and will.
If you know much about the philosopher, such visceral reactions are unsurprising, not least given his electrifying style — to say nothing of his appropriation by some of the darkest forces of the 20th century. Yet, if the Right are welcome to Nietzsche’s more reactionary positions, I’m instead keen to speak to my Leftist comrades and to explain why and where it is still valuable to read Nietzsche productively: as long as we recognise that, in learning from Nietzsche, we are using the master’s tools to fight against his far less thoughtful heirs.
Friedrich Nietzsche began his academic career a prodigy. Winning an academic chair at the tender age of 24, he soon dazzled his contemporaries. But disappointed by the conservative German academy, he came to live as a reclusive wanderer, living off a small pension and increasingly sick and lonely, with madness soon following. Had he remained lucid a while longer, he’d have likely been astonished by his influence, becoming a canonical figure for everyone from Michel Foucault to Julius Evola. Unfortunately, this also included the Nazis, who aped Nietzschean language of will, power, and violence to provide their movement with intellectual glamour. This profoundly chilled the initial reception of Nietzsche in the Anglo-American world. Plenty agreed with Bertrand Russell’s characterisation of the Second World War as “his” war, with many Leftists characterising Nietzsche as a proto-fascist thinker.
Things began to change by mid-century, when Nietzsche’s reputation enjoyed a phoenix-like rebirth. As post-war philosophies like existentialism grew in prestige, Nietzsche was read to be an important predecessor. That was clear enough in Sixties France, when a generation of French intellectuals was tiring of Marx and looking for new sources of philosophical inspiration. Among them was Gilles Deleuze, a men of the Left and a giant of radical thinking. He’d read Nietzsche as the great critic of bourgeois moralism and power, heralding liberation from discipline and control in the name of difference and self-creation.
The problem with such an approach was it was hard to square with Nietzsche’s own insistence that — of all the “rabble” — he most despised “socialists” who undermined the instincts of the lower orders for submission. For Nietzsche, progressive movements from liberalism to democracy were equal expressions of cultural decline. Their roots lay in Christian slave morality: which had the positive effect of deepening the soul of man, but which also meant a collapse into egalitarianism. Socialism itself was, as Nietzsche put it in The Will to Power, “the residue of Christianity and Rousseau in a de-Christianised world”. As for his own political preferences, Nietzsche was often critical of conservatives, but not for being too extreme. Rather, they weren’t active enough to counteract the spreading nihilism now so ensconced in Western culture.
Given these instincts for hierarchy and elitism, it should come as no surprise that Nietzsche has once more become a darling of today’s illiberal Right. But his impact on the contemporary Left is rather more complicated. To be sure, many liberals and Leftists continue to resent him. That’s clear enough from the reception of Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. Written by the Marxist scholar Domenico Losurdo, the book foregrounds Nietzsche’s hatred of egalitarianism, to say nothing of his endorsement of aristocratic radicalism and slavery. As Ronald Beiner, a retired professor at the University of Toronto has put it, there is no whitewashing Nietzsche’s frequent misanthropy against most of the human species.
To be clear, none of these thinkers hold that the Left should simply bid adieu to Nietzsche — as if one could. But they do caution against thoughtlessly failing to recognise his own starkly anti-egalitarian views, let alone painting him as some kind of proto-Judith Butler. As far as it goes, this is good advice. At the same time, though, I think there is still much that liberals and Leftists can learn from Nietzsche.
For one thing, he offers important insights into the religious roots of modernity and its politics. These remain under-appreciated by progressive thinkers, many of whom treat religion either as one worldview to be tolerated like any other, or else as a ruling ideology to be ruthlessly crushed. Certainly, the Right isn’t particularly engaging here. At their most facile, many conservatives see Nietzsche’s militant hatred of Christianity and paint him as an unbridled atheist. Somewhat better, but still crude, are those like Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray who note Nietzsche’s stress on the cultural nihilism that emerges with the death of God. And yet they see few problems in trying to oil and water Nietzsche by drawing on his insights to defend a kind of “cultural Christianity” — while ignoring his claims that it is the woke activists who are the most obvious standard bearers of the Christianity’s herd morality today.
“At their most facile, many conservatives see Nietzsche’s militant hatred of Christianity and paint him as an unbridled atheist.”
The philosopher’s most careful readers have always observed how Nietzsche argued that Christianity religious beliefs were not decaying because they encountered some external enemy, but because of forces internal to Christianity itself. As Nietzsche himself chronicled, Christianity’s universalistic morality — focused on defending itself as the “truth” — led Christian thinkers to develop increasingly sophisticated and proto-scientific approaches to the world. Finally, Christian morality’s idealisation of the truth led Christian thinkers to the most striking inference of all: that the Christian metaphysical worldview itself is false.
This is key to understanding Nietzsche’s seemingly bizarre claim that the modern Left represents a more sincere inheritor of Christian morality than the Right. After the Christian will to truth led to the secularisation of the metaphysics, the morality of Christianity continued in secularised form as liberalism, socialism, democracy, alongside many other progressive doctrines. It wasn’t Frantz Fanon who coined the phrase “the wretched of the earth” but the Gospel of Matthew, where the apostle wrote that the poor will know God is on their side. Understanding their religious roots, in short, can help many on the Left better grasp their own history — with Nietzsche an incisive if hostile guide.
Nor is that the only reason the Left should take Nietzsche seriously. After all, he offers vivid insights into the nature of resentment. Nietzsche often lampooned the conservatives and nationalists of his day as petty tyrants avenging themselves on the world. By and large, however, Nietzsche’s writings on resentment locate it in the psychologies of the lower orders, who disdain the aristocrat’s pride and seek to elevate themselves by presenting their suffering as divine. This concealed desire for revenge, dolled up in moralistic grandeur, is characteristic of Christianity and its contemporary Leftist offshoots.
There’s obviously some truth in this accusation — just consider Leftist efforts to indulge in what progressive philosopher Richard Rorty, in Achieving Our Country, called the “America sucks” mode of public discourse. All the same, many Nietzscheans underestimate or dismiss the extent to which resentment can equally motivate the Right. Their condemnation of victim rhetoric aside, many conservatives clearly love to present themselves as victims of Left-wing silencing. This continues a longstanding Rightist tendency of exempting themselves from condemnation for participating in cultural practices (think: cancellation and victim posturing) they otherwise criticise. Not that resentment is quite identical across the political spectrum. For progressives, it often emerges in those who lack power and status, and who use a moralistic screen to assail the elite. On the Right, though, resentment usually means punching down.
To explain what I mean, consider the example of race in America. As the civil rights movement got going, in the middle of the last century, many southern whites saw equality as an unbearable attack on their race-based aristocracy. Even now, the Right rejects plenty of social programmes, even ones with undeniable benefits like student debt forgiveness and universal public healthcare, by claiming that “if I didn’t get help, neither should they”. And, of course, an enormous amount of the racist rhetoric around being “replaced” by immigrants isn’t really about the idea that whites will disappear. Only the most paranoid fanatics suggest white Americans will literally be prevented from existing as before. Rather, it’s a classic example of Nietzschean resentment: that whites will no longer be an unambiguous majority, losing an abstract but strongly sentimentalised claim to call America “their” superior country at the expense of all others.
The examples can be multiplied, but I think the point is clear. Nietzsche’s account of resentment is indispensable to understanding swathes of Right-wing discourse, including the statements by some of the loudest and wealthiest men on earth. More to the point, this theoretical value echoes in the realm of practical politics. Consider religion. To be clear, there’s every reason for Leftists to be fiercely critical of reactionary and idolatrous forms of religious nationalism, especially the Baalesque version of Christianity popular in the White House these days. But when we follow Nietzsche in recognising the genealogical links between Christianity and the morality of modern Leftism, we can better acknowledge that more radical, progressive side to religious doctrine, clear enough during abolitionism or the civil rights era. Nietzsche’s disgust for humanity notwithstanding, that surely makes him useful.
