Ronald Beiner - Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right

Eleven pass, and then

Athene takes Achilles by the hair,

Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,

Because the heros crescent is the twelfth.

Y. B. Yeats, The Phases of the Moon

In the fateful fall of 2016, a far-right ideologue named Richard B. Spencer stirred up some fame for himself by exclaiming to a conference room packed with his followers not far from the White House: Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory! On the face of it, this mad proclamation would appear to have nothing in common with the glorious tradition of Western philosophy. Yet consider a few other provocative remarks ventilated by Spencer: American society today is so just fundamentally bourgeois. Its just so, pardon my French... its so fucking middle class in its values. There is no value higher than having a pension and dying in bed. I find that profoundly pathetic. So, yeah, I think we might need a little more There is no question about the Nietzschean lineage of these sentiments. Spencer knows that theyre Nietzschean, and any honest reader of Nietzsche knows that theyre Nietzschean.

Or consider Spencers ideological kinsman, Russias far-right political thinker Aleksandr Dugin. In April 2014, Dugin participated in an hour-long interview with Russian television host Vladimir Posner. Near the end of the show, Posner asked Dugin, Is there a philosophical quote that is especially dear to you? Dugin responded, Yes: man is something that should be overcome.

Inhabiting the same murky swamp is Julius Evola, the monocled baron, Italian exponent of ber-fascism, and an explicit disciple of Nietzsche. Charles Clover, in an illuminating recent book on Dugin and his ideological forebears, gives a helpful glimpse into Evolas vision of caste-based Nietzschean neoaristocracy: He believed that war was a form of therapy, leading mankind into a higher form of spiritual existence. Such views capture quite well why the thinkers expressing these views are committed, in a faithfully Nietzschean spirit, to the root-and-branch rejection of the way of life embodied in liberal, bourgeois, egalitarian societies.

Doug Saunders, a thoughtful Canadian journalist, wrote the following in the February 11, 2017, issue of The Globe and Mail: Europes far-right parties have been ushered into prominence... by a flood of bestsellers with titles such as Germany Abolishes Itself; The Last Days of Europe; After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent; Reflections on the Revolution in Europe; Decline and Fall: Europes Slow-Motion Suicide; and Submission. All argue that a weakened, feminized, coddled, birth-controlled Western culture has become too soft and impassive to resist invasion and dominance by supposedly more muscular, more fertile, and more

One of the truly great mysteries of twentieth- (and now twenty-first-) century intellectual life is how a thinker as forthrightly and bluntly antiegalitarian and antiliberal as Friedrich Nietzsche could have become pretty much the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century (a phenomenon then replicated by a philosophical successor no less antiegalitarian and antiliberalnamely, Martin Heidegger). The intellectual influence of Nietzsche is of staggering breadthnot least within the precincts of the intellectual and cultural left. The solution of this puzzle will probably be left to sociologists of knowledge fifty or a hundred years from now. In the meantime, however, we must do our best to weigh the intellectual power of Nietzsche while at the same time fully appreciating the dangerousness or possible perils of that intellectual power. The same goes for Heidegger.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote the following: The great majority of men have no right to life, and serve only to disconcert the elect among our race; I do not yet grant the unfit that right. There are even unfit peoples. Martin Heidegger once wrote the following:

An enemy is each and every person who poses an essential threat to the Dasein [existence] of the people and its individual members. The enemy does not have to be external, and the external enemy is not even always the more dangerous one. And it can seem as if there were no enemy. Then it is a fundamental requirement to find the enemy, to expose the enemy to the

These are both incitements to genocide. The point of quoting these statements is not to impugn Nietzsche and Heidegger as important thinkers. Nietzsche was a great philosopher. Heidegger was a great philosopher. Nothing in this book is meant to challenge their intellectual stature. Theres no intention here to expel them from the history of philosophy (as there is in Emmanuel Fayes severely critical work on Heidegger). But they are not innocent. Great thinkers can be dangerous thinkers. And to the extent that their ideas contribute to bad ideological currents in the present, we have to be alert to their noninnocence and do our utmost not to become their apologists. We need to commence a serious engagement with Nietzsche and Heidegger because, in the end, these thinkers are not the resources for the left that we have so often been told that they are. In a longer-term view, they are more likely to be resources for the right and far right.

Richard Spencer and Aleksandr Dugin, scary as they are, are not unique cases. They are part of a new Fascist International that is becoming more and more assertive. As incredible as it may seem, the alt-right even managed to establish a beachhead in the Trump White House. Im not sure whether that sentence was ever fully true, but its certainly not true today.

Blooms most ambitious successor in the claim that the left has been hoodwinked by Nietzsche is himself a man of the leftnamely, Geoff Waite. But Waite goes beyond Bloom in further claiming that this was a deliberate project of Nietzsches: Nietzsche programmed his reception in unconscious, subliminal ways. then a very profound engagement with Nietzsche is required. And as Waite again fully understands, the same level of engagement needs to be applied to Heidegger as well.

) Nietzschean notions, mediated by supposedly emancipatory appropriations of Nietzsche, seem to have left us vulnerable to harsh new ideologies that appear to regard respect for truth as a snare for the strong set by the weak (as Nietzsche largely presents it).

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Lets sketch the essential historical/philosophical background. The French Revolution represented the key moment of fundamental sea change in European consciousness and politics. To put it very crudely and simply, prior to 1789, one had a political world oriented fundamentally toward hierarchy; after 1789, one had a political If one subscribes to hard-line reactionary politics, as both Maistre and Nietzsche do in their very different ways, then the French Revolution will present itself as the moment when European civilization begins to slide into the abyss. Thats the decisive turning point. A view of society where all individuals are fundamentally equal or a view of society where people can live meaningful lives only under the banner of fundamental hierarchy: this is an either/or, not a moral-political choice that can be submitted to compromise or splitting the difference.