Nietzsche’s Sorrentino Politics

1 The Aristocratic Anarcho-Utopian Socialist Milieu

I adore all these chosen souls around Malwida, in Natalie [Herzen] her father lives, and I was also him [he also lives in me].^[1]

[Ich verehre alle diese ausgesuchten Seelen um Malvida in Natalie lebt ihr Vater und der war ich auch] (letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, January 4, 1889, no. 1248, KSB 8.575).^[2]

How close did Nietzsche come to marrying Natalie Herzen, the eldest daughter of Alexander Herzen, the revolutionary hero and father of Russian socialism?^[3] Not very close, as it turned out, despite the match being pursued in 1877 by Elisabeth Nietzsche, among others. After speaking to Paul Rée, she writes to Nietzsche that Natalie Herzen has become her highest ideal (Hauptideal) of a partner for him, for a “wealth of reasons” which had countered her concern that Natalie’s extensive worldly experience (Erfahrungen) would mean a dislike of the mundane life of a professor’s wife in Basel. Elisabeth Nietzsche also exclaims: “I cannot help mentioning how delightful it would be to have Miss von Meysenbug as a kind of mother-in-law and the Monods [Olga Monod née Herzen and her husband Gabriel] as siblings!” (May 1, 1877, no. 892, KGB II 6/1.546).^[4] Along with Rée, von Meysenbug approved of the idea of the marriage, at least until later in 1877, when Nietzsche received advice from her that Natalie must be removed from the list of prospective partners: “Your card from Rosenl<auibad> reached me in F<lorence>. I would say: I hope you are doing better than I am. Ogareff has died; Nat<alie> was with him in England. She is well. – But we have to cross N<atalie> off the list once and for all; she happened to give me her firm view on the relationship the other day” (June 23, 1877, no. 920, KGB II 6/1.591).^[5] Natalie Herzen’s politics, like those of her father, were of the intellectual anarcho-socialist revolutionary milieu in which Nietzsche found himself at the time. Natalie Herzen’s inheritance – “in Natalie her father lives” – suggests the possession of something like his “spiritual qualities” or “genius” and as such could be counted among “all the names in history.”^[6]

Nietzsche was introduced to Malwida von Meysenbug in Bayreuth when, in the company of Natalie and Olga Herzen, as well as Olga’s partner Gabriel Monod, she was attending the laying of the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus.^[7] Nietzsche and von Meysenbug remained in almost continual correspondence from 1872 until late in 1888. Malwida von Meysenbug had met Alexander Herzen in London in 1853 and became educator to Olga and Natalie Herzen there until leaving for Italy with Olga in 1862. From her first meeting with Herzen in London, she found him to share the key elements of her idealism: a universal republic to replace nation states, unionization of labour, the end of the aristocracy, and a “party of action.”^[8] Von Meysenbug had become well known through her Memoirs of an Idealist (1869–76), especially among politicized young women seeking progressive solutions to social inequality. In her Memoirs and later in The Twilight Years of an Idealist (1898),^[9] von Meysenbug especially mentions Herzen in connection with the establishment of communes as a means for land distribution, as well as his straightforwardness concerning the ideals of economic equality and an end to state violence.^[10]

In 1872, having already read von Meysenbug’s account of her own revolutionary past,^[11] Nietzsche began reading Herzen’s own autobiography and enthusiastically recommending both books to his friends:^[12]

By the way, I strongly recommend that you read From the Memoirs of a Russian by Alexander Herzen. Highly instructive and grim! (letter to Carl von Gersdorff, August 2, 1872, no. 248, KSB 4.41)

I recommend that you read From the Memoirs of a Russian by Alexander Herzen (the father of Miss Olga H.) (letter to Erwin Rohde, August 2, 1872, no. 249, KSB 4.43).

In October, von Gersdorff replies: “The Mémoires d’une idéaliste has been ordered; I also read Alexander Herzen’s poignant memoirs which aroused my veneration and painful feelings. Yes, ‘instructive and grim,’ the expression with which you recommended the book to me is correct” (letter from Carl von Gersdorff, October 14, 1872, no. 366, KGB II 4.88). Nietzsche also writes to von Meysenbug that he is reading Herzen – fully aware of her longstanding relationship, but without realizing he was reading her translation of the book into German: “Greetings to Miss Olga and tell her that I am reading her father’s memoirs” (letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, August 2, 1872, no. 247, KSB 4.40). Von Meysenbug responds, saying that in reading Herzen, Nietzsche is also reading her.^[13]

If you are reading Herzen’s memoirs in German, think of me as well, because I translated them from the Russian I learned at the time. But if you are really interested in him (and he deserves your attention), you should also read his From the Other Shore, a very interesting and characteristic book, written in the searing pain of the reaction breaking out after <18>48, and in which scepticism and negativity ascend into poetry (August 11, 1872, no. 352, KGB II 4.64).^[14]

In a return letter to von Meysenbug in August 1872, Nietzsche praises her translation of Herzen’s Memoirs and its rendition of Herzen’s literary power. He also mentions that the reading made him rethink some of his negative attitudes to some basic elements of his own thought, presumably associated with Herzen’s philosophy and politics, especially socialism and anarchism:

That you are the translator of Herzen’s memoirs was quite new to me; I am sorry not to have expressed to you my feelings about the merits of this translation before I was aware of this. I was astonished at the aptness and vigour of expression, and, tending to assume that Herzen possessed every distinctive talent – I had tacitly supposed that he had translated his memoirs from Russian into German himself. I have drawn my friends’ attention to this work; from it I have learned to think about a number of negative tendencies much more sympathetically than I could until now – and I would not even call them negative. For such a noble, fiery and persistent soul could not nourish itself on negation and hatred alone (August 27, 1872, no. 253, KSB 4.490).^[15]

Herzen had joined a mass of émigrés, including von Meysenbug, moving around France, Italy and Switzerland after 1848, with many settling in England, from where they worked to overturn the authoritarian power of the monarchic-religious-industrialist rulers at home. Herzen first lived in Paris between 1847 and 1849, then London and Geneva: propagandizing, writing and publishing; financing others, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Giuseppe Mazzini. Their work for the future had the political and ethical goal of enhancing social justice through the creation of a state devoted to the power of the “aesthetic ideal.” Many adherents were wealthy, sometimes titled, well-educated patrons of the arts – some artists and intellectuals in their own right – whose salons, for example, the Wagners’ at Tribschen and von Meysenbug’s near the Colosseum in Rome, were attended by people such as Nietzsche, Lou von Salomé and Rée.^[16] Herzen’s writing is full of political analysis concerning the role of the intelligentsia in revolutionary Europe. He developed a “philosophical anarchism” that rejected all influence by the monarchy, the Church and the industrialist state.^[17] His emphasis was on the individual personality expressing its affirmation of a future without reliance on transcendent good or evil metaphysics, or the temporality of objective history.^[18]

The utopian-socialist position was widespread after 1848 throughout southern Europe, France and Britain, though strongly criticized by other more revolutionary elements of the left, especially Marx and, later, Lenin, as occupied with the “bourgeois and petit-bourgeois socialism of the period.”^[19] As Lenin describes it:

Herzen had left Russia, and observed this revolution [Paris, 1848] at close range. He was at that time a democrat, a revolutionary, a socialist. But his “socialism” was one of the countless forms and varieties of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism of the period of 1848, which were dealt their death-blow in the June days of that year. In point of fact, it was not socialism at all, but so many sentimental phrases, benevolent visions, which were the expression at that time of the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats, as well as of the proletariat, which had not yet freed itself from the influence of those democrats. […] When in the sixties he came to see the revolutionary people, he sided fearlessly with the revolutionary democracy against liberalism. He fought for a victory of the people over tsarism, not for a deal between the liberal bourgeoisie and the landlords’ tsar. He raised aloft the banner of revolution.^[20]

Viewed affirmatively, these aristocratic dissidents could be said to invoke perpetual evolutionist revolt against oppression but also the belief in a teleology of revolution – supporting an anarcho-utopian socialism derived from Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and others, including Robert Owen.^[21]

It can be suggested that this anarcho-utopian socialist milieu is a key source for Nietzsche’s aristocratic, spiritual values and that these socio-political views were developed over the course of the early 1870s in a direct response to his engagement with the various elements of this politicized group which could loosely be called the “48ers.”^[22] However, while Nietzsche shared a number of values with the émigrés considered as a group, he differs from each. Generally speaking, those in Nietzsche’s circles were opposed to concepts such as “objective progress” and “objective history” as well as belief in a future redemptive state of perfect equality. They also opposed the centralized power of a socialist state, as advocated by Marx and Engels and others, and the violent revolution advocated by anarchists such as Bakunin.^[23] As we will see, Nietzsche directly opposes the power structures of the modern state, especially those of capitalism, monarchism and the Church. He also opposes revolution, and we can consider him to express the germ of what might be considered an evolutionist but non-teleological anarcho-utopian socialism. The society of these activists formed an important social backdrop to Nietzsche’s political thinking at this time – both presenting points of criticism, as evidenced in many of their negative responses to Human, All Too Human (1878–80) as anti-idealist, and points of support where his affirmative philosophy of life was equated with their ideals. Their utopia was the perpetual betterment of social conditions but also aimed at bettering culture through promoting the aesthetic as an ideal.

As well as his meetings with the Wagners from 1869, Nietzsche reports an early personal encounter with this anarchist-socialist milieu when he met Guiseppe Mazzini while travelling with Elisabeth to Lugano in early 1871.^[24] Stuck in Flüelen on Lake Lucerne while attempting to cross a snowbound Gotthard Pass by coach, Mazzini shared with Elisabeth Nietzsche his motto for life which was adopted by Nietzsche as his own motto for the pursuit of life, perhaps expressing the essence of his later “Great politics,” which became known as the “Goethe-Mazzinischen Sinne” or the “Mazziniverse” – an expressed belief in resolute action for the good.^[25] The famous quote from Goethe was later sent to Lou von Salomé: “Turn away from half measures, and be resolute in living wholly, fairly beautifully [Ganzen Guten Schönen]” (May 28, 1882, no. 234, KSB 6.197).^[26]

Nietzsche began to use the Goethe-Mazziniverse almost immediately after their meeting. In the early, unused Preface to Richard Wagner, he describes his dislike of the notion of “seeking a purpose for humanity in the future of humanity” as such (Nachlass 1871, 11[1], KSA 7.351–7). He also remarks on Wagner’s shared dislike of “anti-cultural,” “feeble, comforting doctrines of liberal optimism [liberalen Optimismus],” and supporting instead work that prepared the way for the “future hero of tragic knowledge”: a German youth with a “fearless gaze” striving to “live resolutely” in “wholeness and fullness [Ganzen und Vollen].”^[27] A little later, Cosima Wagner exclaims: “How happy we were to find you looking as you did once again, dearest friend! You really fulfill the Goethe the Mazzini maxim and are so ‘resolute’ and healthy that it is a joy” (December 4, 1872, no. 388, KGB II 4.144). Also, Olga Herzen writes to Nietzsche: “I want to live resolutely and, if I ever need it, I want to remember what you wrote to Malwida – that I can always count on your friendship” (March 5, 1873, no. 418, KGB II 4.222).

In another early remark concerning the anarcho-utopian socialist milieu, Nietzsche criticizes David Strauß’ poor treatment of a “powerful statement by Proudhon” (Nachlass 1873, 27[2], KSA 7.588). Also, there is a later incident at Tribschen that was excitedly related to Carl von Gersdorff: “On Saturday we were with Mr Cook [apparently A. E. Cook], Proudhon’s friend; it was great. By the way, he is the son of a noble Austrian and a Spaniard from the Balearic Islands. Lots of secrets” (April 17, 1875, no. 439, KSB 5.42).^[28] Von Meysenbug reports that, in a conversation with Nietzsche, he stated that “of all lives, he most envied Mazzini,” considered as “an incessant act of the noblest individuality.”^[29] Ten years later, Nietzsche claims that friend and foe alike attributed three predicates to Mazzini: “good,” “noble” and “great” (Nachlass 1882, 20[3], KSA 9.680).^[30]

Von Meysenbug had felt particularly close to Mazzini during her time in London.^[31] She describes him as being opposed to sectarianism on the left and as striving for a practical socialism; as favouring the unity and solidarity of the left in action, but also advocating each person’s independence of thought.^[32] Von Meysenbug had written at length about her own politics and her role in the revolutionary times in her Memoirs and other writings. An important account she gives in her own work is of her “obstinate socialism,” her “socialistic ideal” and her enthusiastic support of communalist ideas:^[33] “those socialistic tendencies which hovered before all our eyes as an ideal of the future, for whose fulfilment we had fought and for whose downfall we were now mourning.”^[34]

In this context, von Meysenbug also gives an account of her philosophical thoughts during her time in London: to positivist science she opposes a metaphysical purpose, something sensed by some and translated into words by those who can harness such winged thoughts.^[35] For von Meysenbug, cultivating these aesthetic creations in the individual and humanity in general is the best service one could do for this unknown higher power, which, for Mazzini and von Meysenbug, was a form of Christianity.^[36]

The notions of purpose and a higher power are key to the differences that Nietzsche will insist upon between himself, von Meysenbug, the Wagners and Mazzini.^[37] While they all hold fast to the notion of individual action to encourage the political adaptation of the ideal, Nietzsche’s rejection of the role of a metaphysical ideal and especially the influence of Christianity in politics separates him from all of the others. At a less general level, his rejection of central government and nationalism separates him from Mazzini and, perhaps, the Wagners, but not von Meysenbug or Herzen. However, von Meysenbug’s attraction to Schopenhauer’s notion of the will to live, stilled by aesthetic experience, also distances Nietzsche from her and this was perhaps most decisive.^[38]

My greatest wish […] was to become acquainted with Schopenhauer’s philosophy […]. “The negation of the will to live” – this sentence which had once struck me as being so wonderful when I first heard it spoken by Wagner in London – now became clear to me. I understood that I had long been governed by this theory even in my youth, when I wanted to practice the Christian doctrines seriously. It was at last revealed to me that this struggle between the will to live and its negation had been the struggle of my whole life.^[39]

Nietzsche’s rejection of a “passive” nihilistic response to the loss of the ideal pushes him into an alternative evolutionist anarcho-utopian socialism that is more like the position held by Herzen concerning the need to remain continually working in the present.^[40] A particular similarity between Herzen and Nietzsche is their criticism of what Nietzsche calls Schopenhauer’s “pessimism of resignation,” also referred to as a “philosophy of death.”^[41] In a series of fictionalized letters to Ivan Turgenev, Herzen conducts a direct criticism of Schopenhauerian pessimism. This critique especially focuses on the idea that redemption from the violence of the will to live was only possibly through transcendence, a central element of Nietzsche’s On Schopenhauer notes from 1867–68 (Nachlass 1867/68, 57[51], KGW I 4.418). Both are critical of a nihilism of passivity and “resignationism [Resignationismus]” (BT, Attempt 6), especially derived from Schopenhauer, to whose “nihilism” they each oppose something like a “pessimism of strength” that would bring the “greatest blessings” to Europe (BT, Attempt 1, 4).

Herzen condemns those who “preach death as a holy message of impending redemption.”^[42] For Nietzsche, this resigned condemnation of life is also taught by Pauline Christian philosophy as a form of European Buddhism.^[43] Herzen associates this form of Buddhism with the Eleatic belief in being: “eternal, mute infinity, a dead calm at sea, lethargic sleep and finally – death, non-existence.”^[44] Herzen attempts to situate humanity and history within the broader concepts of nature and community, operating on the basis of notions of chance and concrete existence that go beyond any atemporal truths attributed to morality and science.^[45] Herzen claims that he finds no new principles in nihilism, only an exposing of error.^[46] He advocates a liberation from oppression that can only come through personal liberation from precisely this kind of overarching principle and goal, and through actions based on the critical capacities learnt through the personal liberation associated with Greek wisdom:

I do not believe that people who prefer destruction and brute violence to evolution and to amicable agreements are really serious […]. To preach to one’s enemy is an act of love […]. The Greeks expressed themselves more explicitly than we: “The wise man has no need of a law; his mind is the law.” Well, then, let us begin by “making ourselves and others wise. […] An outburst of unbridled savagery […] will spare nothing […]. Wiped out along with the capital amassed by the usurer will be that which has been amassed from generation to generation […] which bears the imprint of the personality and creativeness of different ages.^[47]

In an important debate with Bakunin following the January Uprising of 1863/64 in Poland, Herzen uses the format of letter writing to address the question of revolution or “evolution” considered not as a necessary approach to a goal but as working perpetually for a better future:

Should we exert external pressures on the natural course of events in order to hasten the internal process that is in evidence? [Bakunin argues] that the exclusive rule of capital and the absolute right of property have come to its end […] with the economic revolution [that] began with the realization of social injustice towards the workers [However,] [t]hey are not to be conquered by violence. Even if the whole bourgeois world were blown to bits, some sort of bourgeois world would arise after the smoke […] Prejudices yield only to slow treatment.^[48]

In his second letter, Herzen describes the processes enacted by the International Congress of Workers as a form of “gradual progress.”^[49] He sums up their respective positions:

You tear along, as before, filled with a passion for destruction which you take for a creative passion … breaking down obstacles and respecting only the history of the future. I do not believe in the former revolutionary paths and try to understand the march of humankind in the past and in the present in order to find out how to fall in step with it [for the future].^[50]

Herzen opposes the nihilism that attempts to overthrow “all laws, human and divine, and to destroy the foundations of society.”^[51] But even more so, he also opposes the passivity that turns “facts and thoughts into nothing,” producing the “barren scepticism” of “folding one’s arms” and “despair leading to inaction.”^[52] Both Nietzsche and Herzen can be said to have argued for a counterbalancing view that humanity fundamentally expresses a compulsion to an ethics derived through a community of affirmative power exchanges. The values that Nietzsche adheres to and which can be associated with “all the names of history” are based in the belief that the aim of society should be to produce the new principles of a highest culture: for Nietzsche, the Dionysian principles for an affirmation that could match the creative power of the “twenty generations” that, for Herzen, it took to produce a Goethe.^[53]

2 Nietzsche’s Affirmative Politics

By all means revolution: but whether it will produce barbarism or something else depends on the intelligence and humanity of the following generations: the lack of ethical philosophy among the educated classes has, of course, penetrated in more obvious forms into the uneducated classes […], in them everything is doomed […], [they only believe] that at some time everything will begin anew (Nachlass 1873, 29[207], KSA 7.713).

As is well known, Nietzsche stayed with Malwida von Meysenbug in the “monastery of freer spirits [Kloster für freiere Geister]” (letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz, September 24, 1876, no. 554, KSB 5.188) in Sorrento for about six months between December 1876 and May 1877, along with Paul Rée and Albert Brenner until 10 April: “four people who […] now lead a life together in perfect harmony, in untroubled freedom.”^[54] Von Meysenbug reports on a change in Nietzsche’s thinking that she saw developing over the Sorrentino winter; one which she thought was clouding “his true spiritual self.”^[55] She observed a “move towards positivism” and away from the “aesthetic ideal” that she thought they had shared. This was considered by herself and others as a move toward Rée’s scepticism and pessimism, or even nihilism, something that von Meysenbug deplored in Nietzsche, despite her affection for Rée. In the light of the previous section, we can argue that the position toward which Nietzsche was moving was much more complex, as he later also suggests (GM, Preface 4) – an affirmative alternative to modern pessimism, especially that of Schopenhauer concerning the will to live, as had been taken up after Turgenev by the nihilists of the day.

The charge of “positivism,” associated with Rée and Enlightenment moralists, fails to address Nietzsche’s rejection of attempts to prove a foundation for philosophy in a scientific conception of nature, especially one associated with a concept of absolute purpose (Zweckmäßigkeit, e. g. Nachlass 1881, 11[42], KSA 9.456, and 11[43], KSA 9.457). Nietzsche agrees with the rejection of metaphysics and theism, but argues for a creative flux for thinking, requiring continual creative revolt and rejecting scientific and other rationalizing explanations for the development of morality.^[56] Despite this change – which was in fact just the public revelation of his long developing private philosophical thinking – von Meysenbug remained in contact, though the increasingly mocking tone of Nietzsche’s attacks on Wagner, who he saw for the last time in Sorrento, was not appreciated. Von Meysenbug maintained strong support for Wagner, including Parsifal, while Nietzsche’s criticism, culminating in 1888, became extreme, especially of Wagner having betrayed the revolution and fallen to his knees before the Cross (NW, Freed 1).^[57]

Nietzsche’s target remains consistent: the belief in the ideal of the future as the attainment of an ultimate finality of purpose that transcends the suffering of life. Nietzsche’s political remarks are mainly concerned with establishing the best culture for Germany and Europe based on an international openness such as that he finds in the Greeks. As the quote above suggests, he argues that the revolution requires “ethical philosophy” to be taken up by the “educated classes” and disseminated (Nachlass 1873, 29[207], KSA 7.713), and later suggests this could come through a form of socialism (Nachlass 1877, 25[1], KSA 8.481–3). In 1874, his notes become increasingly critical of the German state in a way that can be related to the later published statements. He calls for a need for “responsibility” that uses power for the “benefit” of the culture (Nachlass 1874, 32[71], KSA 7.779–80).^[58] He also mentions the “evil” of the state, and addresses concerns with the exploitation of labour and excessive private ownership of property (Nachlass 1874, 35[14], KSA 7.819–22), especially in cooperation with the Church. These criticisms will become increasingly “revolutionary” and focused on the Church throughout his works toward The Antichrist (1888). Nietzsche considers that to remove the excessive power of the Church and state is vital for an affirmative culture, and he finds that philosophically there is a need to assist in the creative translation of the affirmative ethos into political customs.

Nietzsche begins to bring these various notions concerning politics to his overt discussion in the political notes made in Sorrento, 1876–77. The result would be the chapter “A Glance at the State” on politics in Human, All Too Human (HH I 438–82) that is followed by similar passages in Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and his Shadow. He stresses two basic ideas: the need for lessening the degree of economic inequality in Europe, and the need to achieve greater liberty from authoritarian monarchism. He advocates achieving these aims through perpetual revolt against the morality of custom, aiming for political reform rather than violent revolution.^[59] In this, he joins possibly the most significant continuing debate on the left: between revolutionary and evolutionary models of praxis – where evolution is perpetual revolution rather than a singular violent event that moves toward a finality. For Nietzsche, vigilant benevolence is required to address the retention of a dangerous seduction to nihilism – political or otherwise – remaining present in modern thinking as the “shadow” of the dead god: that nothingness is the only possible alternative to the belief in truth, purpose and redemption in death.

There are an increasing number of studies that accept that Nietzsche had an affirmative relationship with socialism and anarchism at some level.^[60] As suggested by Robert Miner and Paul Patton, Nietzsche’s comments on socialism and anarchism should not be regarded as blanket condemnations but more like the kind of criticisms that are commonplace on the left and which were strongly articulated in the mid-1800s, especially between, for example – the communism of Marx and Engels, the Christianized socialism of Eugen Dühring and the anarchism of Bakunin. Miner warns us against oversimplification of any discussion of left-wing politics, especially concerning the varieties of socialism.^[61] The suggestion that Nietzsche was aware of the divergencies leads Miner to look at Nietzsche’s comments on property, capital and labour with more care, assuming that it would be unlikely that Nietzsche was writing without reference to the debates of the day and the discussion with his friends.

Patton reminds us that Nietzsche’s primary analytical method is the analysis of power, particularly in relation to the non-contradiction between the desire for power and the means chosen to gain power. At best, there would be an enhancement of power across a culture. This could be the result of a “democracy to come,”^[62] but definitely not to be gained through the expansion of the notion of greed and personal immortality into economic domination through ownership of property and accumulation of capital for the sake of political self-justification: that of the “good and the just.” As Miner suggests, this is where we are at: in a mindless selfishness of consumption that destroys life to achieve what is believed to be the best life; and in failing, expands the despair at personal failure to universal destruction.^[63] Instead, we require an affirmation of life that must be repeated in each generation.

When Nietzsche is critical of socialism, it is of particular aspects – especially as advocated by thinkers as such Dühring, whose principle of equality did not take account of the necessary differences between each person that Nietzsche finds important (Nachlass 1875, 9[1], KSA 8.131–81).^[64] It could be argued that Nietzsche’s later concepts, such as “order of rank” and “pathos of distance” can be interpreted in the context of this debate; one that he extends in later works to the Christian notion of “personal immortality” as opposed to “common wellbeing [Gesammt-Wohl]” (A 43). In brief, the debate concerns whether equality, considered in terms of economic or political equality or equality under the law, is something actual but betrayed, as Dühring suggests, or even more fragile – the ever-present ethos in all interactions that is most pure but infinitely susceptible to corruption. This is an affirmative originality that must be constantly striven for through philosophical, revolutionary or other ways; as something that could never exist by decree.

A major problem Nietzsche has with “socialism,” as he sees it, is with the doctrine of a reduction of all to a lowest-common-denominator version of equality, especially in education, an opinion that seems largely a prejudice employed to argue against the opening up of selective higher education institutions (Gymnasium) to all (CV 2). He considers the enforcement of this to be a secular equivalent of the strategy used by the Church-State oligarchy, which employs Christian morality to exert political force (Nachlass 1876/77, 23[25], KSA 8.412). In the notion of establishing a given transcendent equality of human beings as a goal for politics, Nietzsche finds a “principle [that is] hostile to life,” effacing differences due to resentment and following a “secret path to nothingness” insofar as it overrides the critical awareness of one’s uniqueness that is necessary to thinking, and advocating self-asserted ignorance instead (GM II 11, GM III 14). For Nietzsche, a liberation is required from the morality of custom of the time, specifically from the doctrine of an equality of immortal souls. He is also critical of the teleology of a historical progression toward such a finality of equality, including the use of this to justify revolutionary violence. However, by far his greatest concern is the imposition of norms through the teaching of fearfulness concerning the future. This issue remains paramount today as the primary means of retaining the power of the morality of custom.

There is an emphasis on freely deciding about equality and its association with justice, which we can differentiate from the belief in the actuality of equality in any sense. The decision to confer equality and the association with justice connects with the agon and the palaestra, as well as the later idea of the higher virtue of relationships between equals, where this equality conferred by each upon the other is the basis of the notion of nobility (inter pares, see BGE 259, 260, 265; GM I 11; and Nachlass 1887, 11[127], KSA 13.60–1).^[65] We presume that such relationships require the decision to confer equality for the contest, and always presumes judgement; at the highest order of rank as the basis for joyful wisdom (GS, Preface 3, 4; BGE 260).

In relation to Nietzsche’s antipathy toward the democracy and socialism that he observed in his day, we might also ask whether he was focused on essential elements of these political forms or mainly considered them in relation to his general criticism of post-Christian European nihilism.^[66] For Nietzsche, the arguments for the equal rights in question presuppose a transcendent basis for human existence derived from Christianity’s notion of equality before God, based in a notion of the human soul equal in both its fallenness and capacity for redemption from this (A 43). This eschatological model is found to have been taken into the objective history of progression seen to be fundamental to various form of socialism and Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe. The distinctions that Nietzsche would have been aware of, broadly speaking, concern the view that a greater degree of equality will be achieved in the future through revolutionary violence or evolutionary propagandizing means, as discussed above. We suggest that, in general, Nietzsche’s political milieu favoured utopian socialism brought about by democratic means that benefit from the equalizing power of an education that pre-eminently values the ethos of eternalizing affirmation.

In a number of passages, Nietzsche also addresses the issue of the excessive power that has been gained through the accumulation of capital and property. The question is how to achieve a more equitable distribution of power, where this is equated to justice. In this context, we suggest that he is referring to a practical justice “with seeing eyes” (Z I, Adder, Nachlass 1880, 3[1], KSA 9.47) that occurs through critical ethical engagement with others and finds a “free life” on “Earth” (Z I, Idol).

Property and justice. – When the socialists show that the division of property among present-day mankind is the outcome of countless acts of injustice and violence, and in summa repudiate any obligation towards something having so unjust a foundation, they are seeing only one aspect of the matter. The entire past of the old culture was erected upon force, slavery, deception, error; but we, the heirs and inheritors of all these past things, cannot decree our own abolition and may not wish away a single part of them. The disposition to injustice inhabits the souls of the non-possessors too, they are no better than the possessors and have no moral prerogative over them, for their own ancestors were at some time or other possessors. What is needed is not a forcible redistribution but a gradual transformation of mind: the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone, the instinct for violence weaker (HH I 452).^[67]

Elsewhere, Nietzsche suggests that a “socialist mode of thought resting on justice is possible” if the wealthy practice a justice that incorporates “sacrifices and self-denial” (HH I 431), so that equal rights can be granted freely and received; while demanding them cannot be just. Nietzsche is in clear conflict with those who maintain that those possessing land are, by virtue of their possession, acting unjustly. The argument for an evolutionary equalization based in a concurrent rise of a sense of justice and decreasing drive to violence would require the voluntary gift of economic power occurring in a perpetual revolt of the possessors against the violence of excessive possession.

Nietzsche’s criticisms of socialism are also presented in a longer passage in eight points written shortly after leaving Sorrento. In summary, he argues against projecting one’s own notion of suffering onto others or universally, and questions whether lessening suffering is better for culture; he asks whether disorder is not better to produce the great human; he finds that some people have to do the menial work, and again, somewhat lamely, suggests importing labour from “barbarian” foreign states; he claims that power decides and socialists want power not equality, also that justice emerges through negotiation, and that human rights do not exist; he claims that nobody deserves riches or poverty; that transforming institutions will not increase happiness, and that socialists are bad tempered and diminish happiness; also that socialists destroy tradition and thus contentment; however, socialism can bring philosophical discourse to the people for the good (Nachlass 1877, 25[1], KSA 8.481–3).

In the subsequent works of the 1870s, Nietzsche criticizes the notion of the socialization of property, suggesting that people will work harder for what they own (HH II, WS 285; cf. HH II, VS 304, 305, 316, 317). He also maintains, in passages entitled, “Can Property be Reconciled with Justice?” and “The Value of Work”, that the accumulation of excessive wealth and the exploitation of labour have placed European culture in a “state of war” (HH II, WS 285, 286). Addressing this requires enhancing the affirmative will to power of the community at large by strengthening the sense of self-value through ostracising the values of the overly powerful, especially those who accumulate excessive wealth (Nachlass 1871, 9[69], KSA 7.299, and CV 5).^[68] He considers other similarities in the promises made by Christianity and socialism: of an objective history of a necessary redemptive future after the violent deposing of the oppressor; that is, with a logic that essentially provides consolation and justification. This is unmasked by Nietzsche as a doctrine of replacing one dominating power with another – that of the socialist state – the “new idol” created from the resentment of the old.^[69] Nietzsche is suggesting that certain socialists of the day advocate a power-gaining but life-denying worldview.

Nonetheless, two notes from 1877 suggest that Nietzsche at times associates socialism with another form of justice:

Socialism is based upon the decision [Entschluss] to posit humans as being equal and to be just towards each one: it is the highest morality (Nachlass 1876/77, 21[43], KSA 8.373).

We reproach socialism with overlooking the actual inequality of humans; but that is no reproach, instead a characterization, because socialism decides to overlook that inequality and to treat humans as equal i. e., to allow the relationship of justice to go into effect among all of them (Nachlass 1876/77, 23[25], KSA 8.412).

As well as other seemingly socialist concerns, Nietzsche is opposed to the exploitation of workers. He considers that their disgruntlement, as a result of exploitation, is not only understandable but a necessary result of the “anonymous and impersonal slavery” that is the life of the worker (HH II, WS 286, 288).^[70] Moreover,

once they [socialists] have got the power of taxation into their hands through great parliamentary majorities they will assail the capitalists, the merchants and the princes of the stock exchange with a progressive tax and slowly create a middle class which will be in a position to forget socialism like an illness it has recovered from. – The practical outcome of this spreading democratization will first be a European league of nations [europäischer Völkerbund] within which each individual nation, delimited according to geographical fitness, will possess the right of a canton [Stellung eines Cantons] (HH II, WS 292).

Is this a criticism of socialism? That providing an effective degree of economic equality would destroy socialism? Nietzsche suggests that “the purpose of politics is to make life endurable for as many as possible” (HH I 438). In general, he finds that the means to do so is to employ justice and to understand the role of the desire for power: the especially unconstrained desire to acquire excessive wealth that necessarily requires dominatory power over some and the complicity of others, whether each one is fully conscious of this or not. Nietzsche is strongly critical of bourgeois liberalism (HH I 304). He considers its devotion to acquiring possessions, capital, land and property not only worthless greed and destructive of the potential of culture, but also the breeding ground for the resentment that he finds to be an impetus behind the socialism of which he is critical. In HH II, WS 285, the suggestion is to “keep open all the paths to the accumulation of moderate wealth” attainable through work, while preventing “the sudden or unearned accumulation of riches,” with a key issue being the abolition of the very rich and the very poor. He suggests that:

we must remove from the hands of private individuals and companies all those branches of trade and transportation favourable to the accumulation of great wealth, thus especially the trade in money – and regard those who possess too much as being as great a danger to society as those who possess nothing (HH II, WS 285).

This passage thus seems to advocate a form of socialism, or the common ownership or nationalization of major aspects of the means of production. He discusses the division of land called for by socialism but rejects an equal division as being unsustainable over time. He also rejects community ownership of land as being bound to destroy the land (HH II, WS 285). Elsewhere Nietzsche offers the wealthy a chance to live moderately and assist the state’s heavy taxation requirements. “And if only this wealth and comfort were true wellbeing [Wohlbefinden]! It would be less external and less of an incitement to envy, it would be shared more, be more benevolent, more minded of demands of equity, more willing to lend a helping hand” (HH II, VS 304).

That the rich should not flaunt their wealth but should pay their taxes honestly and be community spirited is advice that stands in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s judgement of the general mediocrity of human intentions in liberal-Christian modernity. Such generosity hardly seems likely, even in the face of the direst circumstances in which others find themselves – let alone payment of reparations to those from countries that were the source of the wealth through labour and materials – and yet this would be required to act in the present, on the past, for the future and thereby redeem the past. Nietzsche seems to admit as much elsewhere in arguing for the enforced higher taxation of the wealthy; though it could be suggested that all of these measures are addressing the issue of how to limit the power of socialism and the rule of the people, rather than proselytizing for justice.

There is also an issue concerning how governments would be formed, given Nietzsche’s criticism of democratic processes. However, he does seem to accept that democracy is the only possible form of legitimate government, but in the context of an end to nation states, especially in Europe, as we will see (HH II, WS 293), something he argues for as strongly as he opposes revolutionary socialism.^[71] He also considers that socialist revolution could easily lead to another form of tyranny (HH I 261).

Democracy wants to create and guarantee independence [Unabhängigkeit] for as many people as possible, independence of opinions, of lifestyle and of livelihood. For this, it needs to deny political voting rights not only to those who are without property, but also to those who are genuinely rich: as two prohibited classes of people, towards whose elimination/abolition [Beseitigung] it must steadily be working, because they will continually call its task into question. It must likewise obstruct everything that seems to be directed towards the organization of parties [Organisation von Parteien]. For the three great enemies of independence in that threefold sense are the impoverished, the rich and the political parties [die Habenichtse, die Reichen und die Parteien]. – I am speaking of democracy as of something yet to come [Demokratie als von etwas Kommendem]. What is now called democracy differs from older forms of government solely in driving with new horses: the streets are still the same, and the wheels are likewise. – Is the danger really diminished because this vehicle now carries the welfare of nations? (HH II, WS 293)^[72]

While it seems that he favours rule by a form of spiritual aristocracy, it is hard to determine what this is or how it would rule. However, we suggest that such a Dionysian form of democracy could – essentially – employ the means advocated in Aeschylus’ Eumenides: bringing the violent justice of revenge, possibly derived from a fear of the future, into the polis and transforming it to work for an affirmative human-future. The “democracy of the future” seems to advocate that those in the middle ground of power in a society assume control in an effort to aid those with lower levels of power, and decrease excessive power – a kind of Greek measure – which would suggest that Nietzsche has a positive programme for politics in mind that involves democracy in some form coupled with nobility, in his sense.

Another issue – given that Nietzsche is criticizing the same abuses of power in both left and right-wing state systems and does not support a return, for example, to monarchical rule – is the model of the election of higher types to legislate, as those best suited to make laws, by those less suited by their own judgement. While there is a need for many qualifications, the election of the most suited is fundamental to democracy across cultures. It can be assumed that election by a community of individuals is considered to allow such a choice, as opposed to self-selection of a tyrant or selection by an oligarchy. It seems clear that widespread pessimism and revenge felt against the past are not regarded as being conducive to a viable affirmative democracy, but it also seems possible that such a democracy could occur, in which a government of the people would be able to act consistently to control capital and support labour as its most fundamental ideology.

Nietzsche considers the role of parties to be impediments to a democracy of the future and suggests that political power should not be divided in this way, presumably because of its increased openness to corruption. However, elsewhere he mentions a “party of life” (Nachlass 1888/89, 25[1], KSA 13.638).^[73] Does Nietzsche regard a political party that is “for life” to be necessary for a properly functioning democracy? Or as a ruling power that is not democratically elected?

The criticism of socialism and anarchism continues along the same lines in Dawn (1881). Nietzsche again associates the interpretation of Christian pity with a devaluing of life and the subsequent requirement for a justification of life and living in a projected beyond of life:

There is today perhaps no more firmly credited prejudice than this: that one knows what really constitutes the moral. Today it seems to do everyone good when they hear that society is on the way to adapting the individual to general requirements, and that the happiness and at the same time the sacrifice of the individual lies in feeling themselves to be a useful member and instrument of the whole: except that one is at present very uncertain as to where this whole is to be sought, whether in an existing state or one still to be created, or in the nation, or in a brotherhood of peoples, or in new little economic communities (D 132).

In the notes written at the time of Dawn, Nietzsche is working out how an ethical community could arise. Ultimately, he finds the need for a “revision of all valuations” (Nachlass 1880, 3[158], KSA 9.98).^[74] This is to achieve an overcoming of the pessimism that denies the value of life and instead condemns life as evil or meaningless as such. Nietzsche envisages the possibility of a community that could produce the “utmost fairness [Billigkeit] of utmost intelligence [Intelligenz]” to produce a culture based in “happiness” within life (Nachlass 1880, 3[161], KSA 9.98–100) and opposed to the preachers of death through “fanaticism [Fanatismus]” and the morality of custom (Nachlass 1880, 3[158], KSA 9.98).^[75]

3 Conclusion

“I love the great despisers [Verachtenden], because they are the great adorers [Verehrenden], and arrows of longing for the other shore [Pfeile der Sehnsucht nach dem andern Ufer]” (Z I, Prologue 4).^[76] The use of the famous phrase, “the other shore,” might not be accidental, but it does not constitute influence.^[77] However, if, along with Natalie Herzen, Nietzsche “also was” Alexander Herzen, what could this amount to?^[78] As one of Nietzsche’s “names of history” from 1889, Alexander Herzen would be one of the peaks in European culture, standing at this height; one of the lucky accidents that express the combination of the immediacy of the “ahistorical” and the expansive force of the “suprahistorical” that together exemplify the “will to justice” (UM II, HL 6) – as a “cultural physician” in the production of culture as a “transfigured physis” (UM II, HL 10, UM III, SE 3).^[79]

It is possible that Nietzsche considers Herzen as one of the “great despisers” of the political, religious and philosophical worldviews of the day – including Schopenhauer’s pessimism. However, most importantly, the human of the modern era needs to clear a path that allows the capacity for the affirmation of life to predominate. The general notion is that creating for life, for-the-future, must be a philosophical undertaking and overcoming. This invokes Nietzsche’s somewhat complicated view of history, which is not an objective progression or unfolding, and cannot be erased and restarted, as a clean slate, and in this way no longer be fallen. Nietzsche’s alternative political model, that of a practical politics, is one of individual engagement based in the notion of the philosopher who can employ the “resoluteness” that Nietzsche connects with Mazzini in working for a culture that affirms the future of humanity in its art and life.

We can suggest that it is as a forerunner of modern pessimism that Herzen can be regarded as a cultural physician, as opposed to Wagner. Along with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, he opposes the “teleological optimism” of Hegel and its development in Marxist socialism, and considered that an anarcho-socialist politics of revolt would best serve the development of individual, society and culture.^[80] The key element to his utopian anarchist-socialism is his pessimistic rejection of the belief in universal or objective history or progress, or any notion of a historically necessary sequential unfolding of meaning or purpose in any events of the world. For many, overcoming the belief in progress is a very difficult liberation, and feels like a condemnation of the possibility of affirming the future. Thus, Nietzsche’s call for a move beyond the “active nihilism” – that we might attribute to Herzen – to the Dionysian affirmation gained through a “pessimism of strength” (BT, Attempt 1).

While Nietzsche recognizes an active form of nihilism that is more about clearing a path for action than despairing, he doubts that nihilism, in any of its formulations, can be creative of values. There is no doubt that the devaluation of the highest values of the time – principally through their self-contradictory denial of the value of life – undertaken in “active” nihilism is required, but only as an affirmative first step in modern society in a most extreme form of pessimism: “real nihilism [eigentliche Nihilism]” or “radical nihilism [radikale Nihilismus]” (Nachlass 1887, 10[22], KSA 12.468, and 10[192], KSA 12.571). The aim of this nihilism is to make clear the meaninglessness of the concept of purpose (Nachlass 1887/88, 11[99], KSA 13.46–9) in relation both to science and religion and, as such, to translate the longing for justice in the future into practical politics working in the present. At issue is an attempt to recognize, expose, and not reactivate “Christian themes,” but to retain the key meaning of the sense of sovereign will that is constantly interpreting the future in terms of a movement between ethical sensibility and justice.^[81] Even the active nihilism that goes beyond the folding of arms cannot reach the “global insight [Gesammt-Einsicht]” (Nachlass 1887, 10[22], KSA 12.469, and 10[23], KSA 12.468) that is required to recognize the originality of ethos considered as a personal dynamic affirmation of temporality that is always an orientation to the future bound to the present. With this affirmation, Nietzsche is attempting to instate ethos and its translation into justice into an affirmative philosophy of cultural Europe.

Nietzsche has a vision of the higher human beings, nihilists and destroyers of the virtues of the “good and the just” (Z I, Prologue 8). In the first instance, this is to support the affirmative ethos as primary for humanity: prior to the screams of Ares, the oracular voice spoken for the future in the “horizon of the future” (GS 124); expressing inexhaustible riches and a golden future (GS 337). Herzen is waiting for this world to become expressible and, we could assume, for “new people” who advocate such a world. Nietzsche will later advocate the most expanded sense of redemptive affirmation, despite the nihilism of cultural Europe in modernity.^[82]

The utopian sense of the future of humanity is referred to using the metaphor of the necessity of future-creating in all thinking – considered as for-the-others that will comprise the future. This temporality of fecundity metamorphizes the self into a bridge to the “new people” and the “children’s land” (Z III, Tablets 25: “neue Völker”; Z II, Culture; and Z III, Tablets 12, 28).^[83] We can find in Herzen and Nietzsche the character of an adorer of something like the future considered as a “children’s land” – a perpetual striving in each person to satisfy the longing for a higher culture supported by a politics that is affirmative of life. The notion of such a land is encompassed in the imagery of Ariadne’s great longing for a future in which the purest fragile gift of ethical sensibility is taken and returned as a catharsis.^[84] However, it can be suggested that becoming capable of “learning to laugh” (Z IV, Nightwanderers) in relation to the political remains problematical.

This sign I give to you: every people speaks its language of good and evil: this its neighbour understands not. Its language has it devised for itself in laws and customs. But the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies; and whatever it has it has stolen. False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it bites, the biting one. Even its bowels are false. Confusion of language of good and evil; this sign I give to you as the sign of the state. Truly, the will to death, indicates this sign! Truly, it beckons to the preachers of death! (Z I, Idol)