Dialectics and Drama: Nietzsche as a Young Hegelian and Maître à Penser

ABSTRACT

In this article I argue that Nietzsche resorts to a typical, ambitious Young Hegelian dialectical grand narrative to dramatically frame Modernity, elevate his own critical theory to unmatchable heights and find for himself a superior, unique position as Critic and Destiny, having as his main enemy the philistines (common human beings), and that which politically corresponds to them: civil society and democracy. Nietzsche’s epochal narrative exhibits a classical dialectical progression from Error/Negation, through Escalation, to Crisis, then Negation of Negation (Inversion), and promised New Age, all of which entails the unwelcome consequences of self-aggrandizing exaggerations, determinism, negativism, binarism, otherworldliness, transhuman idealizations, and racial-caste-hierarchism that compromise the otherwise interesting side of his critical suggestions, once deflated, on culture and morality.

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche
• Young Hegelians
• historical-dialectical narrative
• historical self-overcoming
• anti-Hegelianism

Abbreviations of Works by Nietzsche

AC	=	= The Anti-Christ
BGE	=	= Beyond Good and Evil
EH	=	= Ecce Homo
GM	=	= On the Genealogy of Morals
KSA	=	= Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe
WP	=	= The Will to Power

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. I take epochal to mean epoch-defining or epoch-dividing; epochality for the quality of being epochal; and epochalism for the belief in or promotion of a particular division of history as absolutely relevant for humankind’s destiny, and not as the adherence to the spirit of the age as used by Clifford Geertz.

^2. I will mostly use “man” and “him” because this is the usage of the philosophers I will be referring to, especially Nietzsche’s.

^3. In the case of Nietzsche, it is a nostalgia for ancient Greece, not as an empirical reality, but as one of the variants of the typical fantasy of romantic-German identification with “Greece,” compared to which Modernity evidently pales. Nietzsche obviously considered himself entirely Hellenic, while considering non-Greek (or even Egyptian) some notorious Greeks (e.g., Plato). In any case, the role of that poetical-philosophical nostalgia is absolutely central: to confront Modernity through contrast, casting over it the most severe judgment, full of weighty, normative consequences.

^4. Although I will be focusing on what we may call Nietzsche’s philosophy of history, I understand that his whole philosophy is this sort of historical philosophy through and through, even if I value much more some insightful—practical, cultural, epistemological, critical elements that he offers in spite of that historical frame, and actually to be freed from it. For Nietzsche, “philosophy, or that alone which I count it to be, [is] the most general form of History, [is] the attempt to somehow describe and abbreviate in marks the Heraclitean world of Becoming” (KSA 11[562]).

^5. We can see that another kind of critique, that of distancing or differentiation, would not imply the same measure of grandeur for Nietzsche’s philosophy, and that the negation or inversion of any other Object—for example, German Idealism, or even Christianity itself as something that was not “the” Great Corruption—would not confer on that philosophy the same magnitude. Nor would it make the followers of Nietzsche as Maître à penser feel that they were part of such a superior, privileged, epochal standpoint and destiny. However, treating otherness in such terms as contrariness or binarism, seems to me not to give much chance to diversity, pluralism, or democracy, for that matter, nor, in fact, to a consequent, deflated, non-dogmatic, non-relativist perspectivism.

^6. Such involvement is sufficiently well documented in Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor.

^7. It seems that Nietzsche seriously believed that his Genealogy of Morals was fully scientific (cf. EH Genealogy; also GM, note at the end of Essay 1), and that his notion of eternal recurrence too was “the most scientific of all possible hypotheses” (WP, 55, p.1062; KSA 12[213]), which for me is an example of a traditional confusion between Critique and Science, typical of the nineteenth century.

^8. A true quarante-huitard, Richard Wagner, admired by Nietzsche as a man of thought and action, was first a typical Hegelian-Feuerbachian, before turning to Schopenhauer, more or less in the same way of the young Karl Marx or even Moses Hess.

^9. The opposition between Objectivity or Potency in itself (Substance, determinism), and Personality (Self-Consciousness, Subjectivity, Spontaneity), which Nietzsche develops in his second Untimely Meditation, can be read as a continuation of the previous Young Hegelian central contention. Hegel’s philosophy was considered by many Young Hegelians to represent a false, unstable synthesis of Substance and Self-Consciousness, that is, of Spinoza and Fichte (and sometimes Leibniz), which should be decided one way or the other. Regarding the variations of the Substance/Self-Consciousness dialectics in the Young Hegelian Movement, see Part II of my Ascensão e Queda do Sujeito no Movimento Jovem Hegeliano. Regarding the positions of Marx, Stirner, and Feuerbach, see my A Questão da Individualidade: A Crítica do Humano e do Social na Polêmica Stirner-Marx [The question of individuality, the critique of the human and the social in the Stirner-Marx polemics].

^10. See, for example, Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, The Birth of Tragedy (§4), Untimely Meditations (§3), and Human, All Too Human (§6).

^11. Another curious, symptomatic, questionable “distancing” worth mentioning is that of Romanticism, in spite of Nietzsche’s obvious affinity with it as in Friedrich Schlegel, for instance. By use of his extraordinary rhetorical and conceptualizing powers, Nietzsche does as he wishes with the notion of Romanticism, always convincingly I reckon. Epicurus and Jesus Christ are among his “romantics.”

^12. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 308.

^13. I quote well known English translations of Nietzsche since they all seemed correct to me, even if slightly improvable from a philosophical and stylistic point of view. I want to thank Prof. Dr. André Itaparica for confirming this. I allowed myself to use a few capitalized nouns, however, from the German original (KSA), whenever I understood they had been used by Nietzsche in an arguably universal, hypostatized, or grandiloquent sense—as the reader may judge.

^14. See note 10. In the face of such opposition, Nietzsche, of course, as a late, more romantic Young Hegelian, would not decide in favor of the more classical, rationalist notion of Subject, as consciousness and reason (but neither would another typical Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, who studied with Schleiermacher and decided for a pulsive, voluntarist, corporeal, unique self, der Einzige). Accordingly, Substance, on the other hand, will not be conceived by Nietzsche in a clear rationalist way either, as something to be rationally and consciously appropriated (by a Subject), but instead, again, in a more romantic way. Among the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Stirner were probably the most influenced by Romanticism, though Stirner was an anti-hierarchical philosopher of the common men, with a much more deflated, de-transcendentalized philosophy.

^15. The proto Young Hegelian Heinrich Heine had already “unmasked” the peaceful Kant, with whom everything began, as a veritable philosophical Robespierre. Yet remissions to Heine as a common “ancestor” for different Young Hegelianisms, who not for nothing was a hero for both Nietzsche (reticently) and Marx, will not be explored here.

^16. For more on this, see my Ascensão e Queda do Sujeito. In order to characterize Nietzsche as Hegelian, it would always be advisable to first give a good answer to the question “what is Hegel?”—beyond what Nietzsche or some Nietzscheans can say of him. A shortcut to unveiling the radical Hegel that Nietzsche does not acknowledge, beyond Bruno Bauer, whom Nietzsche knew, would be to see him through the eyes of Marcuse (a late Young Hegelian) in Reason and Revolution, where he approaches Hegel in search of “the power of Negative,” for his radical, revolutionary critique of the Establishment and Capitalism, a critique which, to Marcuse, lost its edge in positivist Marxism and positivist social theory in general.

^17. Oftentimes we forget that Nietzsche’s broadest, lifelong intellectual project (as well as Marx’s, Bauer’s and others) was one of historical Critique, which at a certain point he conceived in four volumes: A Critique of Christianity, of Philosophy, of Morality, and finally of his own Philosophy of the Eternal Return (KSA 13 [589–90]). Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche et la Philosophie, in spite of trying to make Nietzsche the anti-Hegelian par excellence, curiously insists on claiming for him the title of True Critic, the one just about every Young Hegelian pretended to be.

^18. As to Marx, I believe that, freed from his transhistorical pretensions, and thus made more “empirical,” he offers a practical-poietic, material perspective that can play a relevant role in practical-critical philosophical developments, beyond the dominant contemporary philosophical linguocentrism.

^19. It is interesting to note that, while David Strauss The Confessor and the Writer (first Untimely Meditation) is not his first published work, Nietzsche refers to it in Ecce Homo as his “entrance to Society,” a carefully studied entrance against “the first German free thinker”—the first of the Young Hegelians, he should have said. Strauss in regard to whom not just Nietzsche but other members of that movement start defining and developing their positions. “The process of decomposition of the Hegelian system began with Strauss” Marx writes in the first paragraph of The German Ideology. Might that process of Hegelian decomposition (hegelianly historicized radical-atheism-humanism, and in the case of Stirner, anti-humanism), and not something so much larger and extraordinary, of over 2000 years, have ended with Nietzsche? Or is it still ongoing among the competing Nietzschean-Heideggerian French deconstructionisms of our days?

^20. ‘Atheist’ and ‘Antichrist’ complete the title of Bruno Bauer’s anonymously published 1841 pamphlet, The Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: An Ultimatum (Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum), where Hegel is mockingly “denounced” (as if by an alarmed Christian) as a philosophical Jacobin, responsible for God’s death for Philosophy, thus revealed by Bauer before Nietzsche was even born.

^21. See my A Questão da Individualidade where here and there I discuss Nietzsche’s relation to Stirner.

^22. Noéli Sobrinho, “Apresentação e Comentário,” 38–39 (my translation). The idea that History “proves that the results obtained contradicted and were incompatible with what was previously intended” is very much something that Hegel himself would say. As to “man and humanity” being for Nietzsche abstractions, “for only concrete and real individuals actually exist,” I believe that our philosopher is anything but a consequent nominalist in that respect. Anyway, I am not engaging here in a debate with this particular commentary, of which I present an excerpt for illustrative purposes only. In a similar vein, that is, of showing examples of reading Nietzsche as the supreme un-dialectical, un-Hegelian thinker and historian, I could have also quoted from Kuehne, “Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Dialectics,” or from Deleuze’s entire Nietzsche and Philosophy. See note 36, too, for Jensen’s surprising claim to full anti-Hegelianism of Nietzsche’s understanding of history, which supposedly rejected “frameworks” and “teleology.”

^23. In other words, Nietzsche, like other philosophers critical of Modernity tacitly or explicitly offers us a philosophy of history full of normative implications, sometimes in the most foundationalist, exaggerated sense of sustaining a clear-cut binary distinction and historical struggle between Truth and Error, Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, as a real Zarathustrean after all.

^24. I believe that a consequent nominalist position would impose great limitations to the grandiloquent effect that Nietzsche wants to give to his position. Nominalists are not usually very impressive candidates as maîtres à penser, nor do they make great Critics in the grandiloquent German sense of the word.

^25. The classic dialectical reduction of the relation between two opposing perspectives to that of a succession through inversion and negation (of one by the other), has every trait of a binarist strategy contrary to difference and otherness, one that does not seem to allow for an irreducible multiplicity and diversity of perspectives. In Nietzsche’s case, that binarist dialectic strategy wants to leave us with only two options: the Party of Life versus the Party against Life, which means Everything Else. Thanks to it, Nietzsche can say of Christian values that they are “values opposed to the only ones favorable to Life” (EH Pref., §2; KSA 6[258], my emphasis). Well, it is certainly not a bad idea to enlist on the party of Life itself—life which nonetheless may end up losing with the operation, and we too, an operation that seems to leave us with only one set of values—Nietzsche’s (I, Nietzsche, am the Truth, not Plato), i.e., inverted Platonism, which in his case entails the embarrassing partie honteuse that we don’t want of his philosophy.

^26. Nonetheless, I see Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, Stirner, and Young-Hegelianism in general as part of a modernist, practical-creative, poietic, poietic-pragmatic, non-reductively naturalist detranscendentalizing turn in philosophy, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, the United States and beyond, much more promising than the linguistic turn of our days both in its analytical and Continental versions. This detranscendentalizing turn hasn’t yet developed to its full potential, towards concrete, practical needs and “spiritual” demands of our more recent times. Nietzsche’s contribution, as a sort of utilitarian romantic, may be at the roots of several roughly pragmatic philosophical developments (e.g., Ferdinand Schiller), of pragmatism, in general, in French philosophies of action, besides American neo-pragmatism. About his role, in this respect, at the beginning of the twentieth century, see, e.g., Berthelot, Un Romantisme Utilitaire, vol. 1. I discuss a development for such a turn in “Towards a Practical-Poietic, Material Point of View” and in “A World of Our Own.”

^27. Regarding the “History” of such philosophers, the problem is not only the attribute added to the Subject (a history of this or that) but conceiving of it as the one and only Subject (or Substance on the way to becoming a Subject), whose name one should therefore always write in the singular and in uppercase, and whose notion would allow us to make claims of supreme breadth. Besides conceiving of it as a normative-foundational, immanently teleological, theological, meta-narrative, for sure.

^28. Nietzsche, as any good Young Hegelian (with the remarkable exception of Max Stirner), often takes “Man” and “Humanity” (and “History”) as a strong, value-laden reference, in a universal, generic, even substantialized sense, as Subject, something which in one way or another is typical of much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy. The fact that Nietzsche reserves execration and slavery for most men, the fact that he is only interested in “superior” or “maximum” types (to whose flourishing the organization of social life and all other men must serve as a means) does not make him any less of a philosopher of Humanity and of its superior Realization. Likewise, all that considered, Nietzsche, in spite of his critique of others for that sin, places himself as the true Educator who wants to effectively improve Humanity, obviously according to his Ideal, not in the “pious” sense that his Christians and his Moderns do.

^29. In “Nietzsche, Pensador da Modernidade,” Matteo, for instance, writes that for Nietzsche asceticism is “a pandemic spread throughout the Earth” (123).

^30. Nietzsche: “The fight against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure … has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit, the likes of which the Earth has never known: with such a tension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals” (BGE, Pref. 4).

^31. Nietzsche, too, in his particularly difficult existence, may want something now: a Negation of that Negation, which he has to offer to whomever wants to escape the Ascetic Ideal.

^32. Nietzsche makes himself the announcer of the Death of God, as the antechamber of a Great Hecatomb, in the dramatic, hyperbolic style that sustains his poetic pose of Prophet, painting it all with unparalleled tones of gravity and terribleness, thereby calling forth superhuman responsibilities. That is his dramatic art, those are his special effects, but here his feeling seems to have more to do with his own tortured personal experience and the weighty nineteenth-century German theological spirit he carries. Anyway, it seems that whoever imagines that the death of God will bring about immense and unheard-of evils seems not to remember what He did when alive. Over a century after Nietzsche, we can understand that, with that Death (not quite as definitive or complete as Nietzsche thought), more human beings, looking more around themselves and less above, seem more willing to find meanings and reasons to live, flourish, and sustain values—not quite as high-sounding as Nietzsche’s—in this very world. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that the fears of philosophers like Jürgen Habermas in good measure converge with Nietzsche’s alarmism, that “post-Platonist” transformations of culture could precipitate greater irrationality and violence, instead of leading us to a more secular, poetic, democratic culture.

^33. The same could be said, mutatis mutandis, of “Marxian History” with its version of the great Error: On the one hand, the scission of Society by private property (division of labor) and the domination of men by circumstances; and on the other hand, their false overcoming and actual deepening with the bourgeois Revolution and capitalist Modernity, and then the imminence of a “final Crisis” (of Capitalism), before the transit to a future which puts an end to the “Prehistory” of man.

^34. About the discussion of Bauer’s antithetic dialectics, see, for instance, Moggach, Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer, 4ff. Bauer became so antithetical in his philosophical development that he even seemed to have stopped being historical.

^35. Hegel, too, in his early writings, began by calling Life what he would later call Spirit.

^36. Here, and just about anywhere else in this essay, we can recall the traditional opinions on Nietzsche and History in which I don’t see how the true Hegelian-dialectical contours could have been missed. One such example is Jesen’s statement in the opening paragraph of “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History”: “Against the Hegelians, Nietzsche rejects efforts to systematize history within rational frameworks as well as teleological schemes generally.” But does he?

^37. Nietzsche is justly known and appreciated for his criticism of the idea of self-consciousness in Cartesian and Kantian terms. In the citations above, he uses the term Selbstbesinnung, for self-examination or self-reflection, and he does not use Selbstbewusstsein. Nonetheless, in Leo Strauss on Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, writing about Thus Spoke Zarathustra, holds that for Nietzsche “Self-Consciousness is the ground of history,” and that “Self-Consciousness” of “human Creativity” is “final” in History (4). Like Young Hegelians in general and Bauer in particular, Nietzsche’s perspective resounds with Hegel’s historical-culturalist perspective in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

^38. How do post-metaphysical philosophers attempt to uphold transcendentality, to have superiority and authority in a world that changes without a theocentrically pre-established Meaning or Goal? Well, they try to provide the Law of that change, and the unveiled direction of that Becoming—as History. The fact that becoming may not be subordinated to a great Direction, that it may be just a passing that is not the realization (or collapse) of anything so great, is absolutely unbearable to individuals whom I would not disdainfully call, à la Nietzsche, the herd or the weak or the Modern, but perhaps simply less ingenious or artistic people and, for that reason, people in need of a traditional religious, theological relief or its secular substitute, in terms of Belief. Politically and culturally, however, a relative trivialization of becoming could perhaps bring about a more interesting sociability of people courageously and creatively, joyfully, reconciled with their—and others’—finitude and contingency. That does not seem to be the opinion of our hyper-romantic Philosopher, though.

^39. It is curious that in general it suffices to note that Nietzsche is not an ordinary anti-Semite (how could he be anything ordinary?) to get to the conclusion that his is not a racist or racialist thought. I would imagine that at least among Brazilian scholars there could be a more demanding sensitivity on that matter, an attitude we should not fear would make us less philosophical. In the Genealogy of Morals, the advent of democracy in Europe is understood as a sort of return of the “black-haired man,” previously vanquished by the “blond Arians” (GM, I, §5; KSA 5[263]). In the same work, in the same aphorism, referring to classes of men (according to his usual binarism), Nietzsche attempts to openly associate “dark” (mellus) with “bad” (mallus) and with “common” (as a contemptible mark). Even out of respect for him, I do not see why his categories that have a clear political reach should be procrusteanly shoved into a narrow, politically aseptic interpretation, as if that were the compliment we owed to the great genius he was, and as if it were absurd—and would mean losing what is valuable in his thought—to critically challenge him and call him by the names he deserves in that case.

^40. In order to satisfy one’s democratic inclinations, I would recommend an agonistic reading of democracy, and I would confront Nietzsche and Nietzschean epigones with its advantages: democracy as a regime of ineliminable difference and conflict, of free emulation and unfixed, non-bureaucratized hierarchies, as well as (despite Nietzsche), a certain measure of organized solidarity.

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José Crisóstomo de Souza

José Crisóstomo de Souza has recently retired as Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California (Berkeley), at the New School (New York), and at Humboldt University (Berlin). On the basis of his studies in Left-Hegelianism, Marx and Pragmatism, and other related contemporary philosophical discussions, he has developed his own practical-poietic alternative philosophy. He has published several books and articles on these topics, mostly in Portuguese.