Liberalism has never been without its critics. On the right, few have been as effective, influential, and popular as the illiberal intellectuals who influenced and participated in the German “Conservative Revolution.” At the summit of this canon are Nietzsche and Heidegger—two undeniably great philosophers who unapologetically called for slavery, aristocracy, and Nazism between them. Today, Nietzsche and Heidegger inspire reactionaries far beyond Europe, with many on the American illiberal right drinking deeply from their wells. Understanding why can give us a better sense of why so many continue to find liberalism unappealing. It is only through understanding these dynamics that liberals can more effectively craft their responses.
Nietzsche’s Critique of Liberalism
Nietzsche has had an unusual reception in the English-speaking world. In the early 20th century, many understood him as a German reactionary and an intellectual influence on the Nazis. Many would have agreed with Bertrand Russell that, ideologically, the Second World War was “Nietzsche’s War.” The latter misinterpretation was facilitated by Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Foster Nietzsche, who arranged her brother’s posthumous writings to play up their most fascist-sounding qualities. Elizabeth herself was a German nationalist and anti-Semite who feted Hitler shortly before her death. In the mid-20th century, things began to change. These changes were greatly inspired by Walter Kaufmann’s pioneering translations and his readings of Nietzsche as an existentialist psychologist, first and foremost in Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Anti-Christ. The result was a transformed Nietzsche, who could now be warmly received as a spiritual guide, and a largely apolitical one at that. However, not long after, Nietzsche was reconceived as a political thinker, but of a very different kind than before: he was now, of all things, radically “progressive.” As chronicled in Phillip Felsch’s How Nietzsche Came In From The Cold, a series of important French leftists like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault encountered new translations of Nietzsche and read him as a radical critic of conservative bourgeois morality. This post-modern Nietzsche took a hammer to Christian moralism and paved the way for counter-cultural resistance to power. Since then, the wheel has turned once again as far-right thinkers like Bronze Age Pervert and Richard Spencer reclaimed Nietzsche as an influence. This contributed a new wave of critics, such as Ronald Beiner, Daniel Tutt, and more, reemphasizing Nietzsche’s credentials as a man of the right. Even before the reverberating shockwaves of 2016, some on the left, such as Domenico Losurdo, had begun to make important contributions to Nietzschean studies that questioned the apologetic narratives of the French theorists.
From the beginning of his literary career, Nietzsche’s writings were saturated with politics. Keith Ansell-Pearson, in An Introduction to Nietzsche As Political Thinker, notes how “in the early 1860s Nietzsche’s political views were decidedly royalist. Combined with his classical liberal education, his royalism served to foster a respect for the heroes of history, for the nation, for great leaders, and for the classics.” Nietzsche volunteered to fight in the pan-German army invading France, and by most accounts he was appalled by the revolutionary Paris Commune. During his “middle period” Nietzsche is sometimes read as endorsing an aristocratic form of liberalism, expressing admiration for free thought and the contest of ideas. But as Ansell-Pearson notes, this shifted once more as the “Nietzsche of the 1880s is a very different figure from the youthful one of the 1860s and 1870s.” On my reading, the tipping point can be seen in the transitional work the Gay Science, where Nietzsche comes to emphatically articulate the anti-conservative, anti-liberal, radical-right political philosophy of his maturity:
We ‘conserve’ nothing, neither do we want to return to any past periods, we are not by any means ‘liberal’; we do not work for ‘progress’; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place singe of the future: their songs about ‘equal rights,’ ‘a free society,’ ‘no more masters and no more servants’ has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth… we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventure, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery-—for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.
By the time of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche insisted that only aristocratic societies have ever managed to elevate culture, and they are the only ones that ever will. The “pathos of distance” created by being a ruler and exercising command over others is the only way to obtain the nobility of souls which can produce high culture. Nietzsche insists that even forms of slavery are not off the table in the pursuit of this aristocratic society. But he remained deeply contemptuous of German conservatives for their failure to adequately contain the left and for elevating idolatrous forms of plebianism like nationalism. A new kind of aristocracy would be required. As recounted in William Banks’ The Great Debate: Nietzsche, Culture and the Scandinavian Welfare Society, the Danish admirer Georg Brandes wrote to Nietzsche describing his philosophy as a kind of “aristocratic radicalism.” Nietzsche apparently thought it was one of the cleverest things written about him.
One of the most unique and remarkable features of Nietzsche’s critique of liberal modernity is how he links it to a rejection of Christianity. Since Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, a kind of traditionalist Christianity stressing submission to the hierarchical “Great Chain of Being” was seen as a bulwark against revolution. Conservative novelists like Dostoevsky (who Nietzsche read and admired) went further and saw in liberalism, socialism, and reason a nihilistic creed that made man the center of the universe and defamed all values. Nietzsche was startling in making the far more radical claim that it was in fact Christianity that was at the root of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. Christian “slave morality” was predicated on the ressentiment of the herd for their aristocratic betters. Over time, the herd was able to prevail by inverting the old master morality and replacing it with a slave morality, stressing equality and care for the humble and meek.
Nietzsche makes the radical claim that it was in fact Christianity that was at the root of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. Christian “slave morality” was predicated on the ressentiment of the herd for their aristocratic betters.
However, all great things contain the roots of their own self-overcoming. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche insists that Christianity’s God died at the hands of his believers, who were sincerely following his call to search for the truth. This moralistic injunction to pursue truth eventually led Christianity to its most startling inference—the “inference against itself.” What if it turns out that following through on Christianity’s demand to seek truth leads us to the conclusion that Christianity is untrue? This helped bring about modern secularism and the end of the Christian metaphysical worldview. But while the “death of God” had destroyed its metaphysical foundation, Christianity’s egalitarian morality did not die. It continued in secular form as liberalism, socialism, and democracy. In this respect, the nihilism brought about by the death of God was a final punishment wrought by Christianity on the world. Christian morality destroyed the very God it had created, and all its secular variants found themselves unable to spiritually fill the divine hole left behind. As Nietzsche put it in Twilight of the Idols:
The poison of the doctrine “equal rights for all”—has been dispensed with the greatest thoroughness by Christianity: Christianity, prompted by the most secret recesses of bad instincts, has waged a deadly war upon all feeling of reverence and distance between man and man—that is to say, the prerequisite of all elevation, of every growth in culture; out of the resentment of the masses it wrought its principal weapons against us, against everything noble, joyful, exalted on earth, against our happiness on earth…. To grant “immortality” to every St Peter and St Paul, was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity that has ever been perpetrated.—And do not let us underestimate the fatal influence which, springing from Christianity, has insinuated itself even into politics! Nowadays no one has the courage of special rights, of rights of dominion, of a feeling of self-respect and of respect for his equals,—of pathos of distance. Our politics are diseased with this lack of courage!—The aristocratic attitude of mind has been most thoroughly undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if the belief in the “privilege of the greatest number” creates and will continue to create revolutions.
Nietzsche hoped that through breeding and cultivating a new class of aristocrats, this decadent, nihilistic herd morality could be overcome. But in Ecce Homo, he makes no bones about predicting this will come at a cost. Nietzsche’s new “great politics” would be foreshadowed by wars of the sort the earth had never seen. His new Caesar with the soul of Christ would not inaugurate an era of pity and compassion, but fear and trembling.
Nietzsche hoped that through breeding and cultivating a new class of aristocrats, this decadent, nihilistic herd morality could be overcome.
Heidegger’s Critique of Liberalism
Nietzsche’s sneering anti-nationalism, wariness of Christianity, and lampooning of anti-Semitism made him a complex figure for the 19th century right to incorporate. More importantly, it was unclear how such a rarefied kind of aristocratic politics could ever successfully find a mass base, which would of course mean inspiring the very herd Nietzsche held in contempt. Fascist leaders like Mussolini, who was inspired by Nietzsche, attempted to square this circle by projecting aristocratic qualities onto the Italian people as a whole (though they were still expected to obey their leaders unquestioningly). But it was a dissatisfying solution.
Few such problems exist with Heidegger, who wrote in a very different time for a very different audience. When Nietzsche’s writings made their way into the world, the German Empire was near the height of its power and ambition. By the time Heidegger published Being and Time in the 1920s, he spoke for and to a defeated generation beset by alienation and pessimism. Unsurprisingly, and despite the notorious difficulties of Heidegger’s writing, he was a much more acclaimed figure during his lifetime. Though in some respects, this good fortune was a Pandoran gift for Heidegger’s legacy as his early fame rocketed him to power before crashing down into infamous sewage.
Being and Time is a magnificent work that reconceives what it means to be human. At its core is the question of the meaning of Being, though Heidegger realizes this cannot be thought through without first understanding humanity’s nature as that being for whom Being is a question. This leads him to a deep critique of Western rationalism. Heidegger stresses convincingly that it is not reason that is the “structural primordiality” of human life, but “care.” Before I begin to reason about the world, I have to care about it. This care is inherently related to time, as I am “ecstatically” drawing on memories while thinking about the present to better secure my future. Every human life is structured by this relationship to time; there is an anxious awareness that the time of my life is finite. Seen scientifically, for almost all of eternity, it has been the case not only that I didn’t yet exist: I was nothing. With death, I don’t even return to nothing, since there is no more me to return to anywhere. Nothingness followed by abject annihilation is the fate of all human existence. Life is nothing but a walking shadow. A brief candle before the darkness that is the true state of affairs.
According to Heidegger, a few of us choose to live authentically in an awareness of this coming annihilation, and so to pursue great projects that add a thickness of meaning to life. But most of us, especially those who live in big, urban cities, choose instead to live inauthentically. Retreating from anxiety about death, we hide in the world of das Man or the “They,” indulging in idle chatter and hedonistic libertinism. Early readers saw Being and Time as a call for a kind of radical individualism which might be compatible with a kind of romantic liberalism and socialism. But Heidegger rejected that interpretation for another by the time Hitler came to power.
For Heidegger, modern society views the world as nothing but “standing reserve” to be manipulated by human reason to gratify crass desires. Seen in this way, liberalism and socialism are “metaphysically the same.”
By the time of Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger casts his philosophy in far more historical and political terms. The inauthenticity and nihilism pervading modern society are laid at the feet of a forgetting or retreat of Being, and the consequent demotion of existential seriousness. The climax of this retreat is the ascendence of a technical metaphysical worldview, where the world is viewed as nothing but “standing reserve” to be manipulated by human reason to gratify crass desires. Seen in this way, liberalism and socialism are “metaphysically the same,” as he put it in Introduction to Metaphysics. Both are reduced to just dull technical “philosophies” debating how to build and distribute iPhones. The very seriousness with which the idle debate between all too similar liberals, capitalists, socialists, and communists was prosecuted itself indicated how spiritually dead the West had become. For Heidegger, only the especially spiritual German people, the country of the “center,” caught between America and Russia, could redeem the West.
Heidegger was dismissive of much of Nazism’s official ideology. Despite these reservations, he joined the Nazi party and remained a member till it ceased to exist.
Heidegger was dismissive of much of Nazism’s official ideology, insulting “what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity…” Despite these reservations, he joined the Nazi party and remained a member till it ceased to exist. In his infamous “Rectoral Address,” he called for German students to militantly support the regime and abandon their doubts. Once upon a time, this Nazi association was downplayed by Heidegger’s defenders as a foolish error that said little about his philosophy as a whole. They noted that Heidegger grew increasingly wary of Nazism and posited that he always rejected its racism and antisemitism.
Recent scholarship has shown otherwise. As Peter Trawney notes in Heidegger: A Critical Introduction, Heidegger’s preference for “spiritual National Socialism” rather than “vulgar National Socialism” led him to retreat from politics. But this “does not mean Heidegger gave up his interest in National Socialism. On the contrary: the motives for his retreat are ambivalent.” Heidegger remained confident that, even if vulgar National Socialism had disappointed him, a new world was still on the horizon. As late as his Der Spiegel interview, he expressed pessimism that democracy was the right political system and was confident that history would reveal that. Though, as Emmanuel Faye notes in Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, Heidegger tended to be, shall we say…selective in mystifying history to support his conclusions. When the German panzers rolled into Paris in 1940, he took that as a sign that the end of modernity was nigh. Five years later, when Nazi Germany was occupied and utterly defeated, Heidegger decided this proved nothing. He maintained that, in the long run, he’d be vindicated.
In Heidegger in Ruins, Richard Wolin shows that Heidegger was hardly immune to the vicious antisemitism common to the German right and, of course, Nazism. He tended to reject the crude, pseudo-scientific biological racism of “vulgar” Nazi ideology. But like his far-right Italian counterpart Julius Evola, Heidegger was quite content with a “spiritual” racism and antisemitism. For Heidegger, the Jews were a rootless, nomadic people who parasitically undermined the spiritual unity of the German volk. This could get even cruder. Wolin notes how Heidegger appropriated the “conservative revolutionary standpoint,” believing that Germany and the West were facing potentially terminal decline and decadence. At least one of the causes of these ills, exposed in his letters, was “Heidegger’s conviction that a cabal of powerful Jews was manipulating German politics from behind the scenes: a situation that was ultimately rectified by the Nazi seizure of power.”
In Heidegger and Politics, Alexander Duff rightly stresses that Heidegger’s philosophy is not “coextensive” with Nazism, and there is much to be learned from it. This includes in areas as seemingly far-flung as the philosophy of mind and debates around AI. In What Computers Can’t Do, Heidegger’s seminal American interpreter, Hubert Dreyfus, reconfigures Heidegger’s critique of rationalism and technical reason into an argument that the mind can’t be understood as just an information processor and communicator. But these uses shouldn’t come at the expense of acknowledging his toxic politics, and there is a reason contemporary hard right and fascist thinkers like Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin cite Heidegger as a core influence.
Toward a Liberalism of Hope
There are many objections one can make to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Political theorist Wendy Brown has noted that Nietzsche rarely extended his critique of resentment to aspiring aristocrats themselves. In her In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, Brown chides Nietzsche for failing to recognize that those who feel so entitled to rule perennially seek revenge against those who’d deny their vainglorious conceits. One can even go further and note the frequency of conservative evocations of ressentiment à la “if I didn’t get welfare, they shouldn’t either” or “if I had to pay my student debts, they should also.” In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas notes how Heidegger’s late work and much of his political and historical thinking are far less original than his own massive ego led him to recognize. In fact, by foregrounding the “history of metaphysics” as the real spine of Western history, Heidegger did more than indulge the vain philosopher’s old self-flattering conceit (that their discipline must be the most important of them all), he also retreated into a vulgar philosophical idealism wherein ideas make and are the world, even more so than real people who live and breathe and have material needs. This could take astronomically stupid forms, as when Heidegger downplayed the Holocaust by pointing out that it was “metaphysically” no different from industrial agriculture.
Nietzsche and Heidegger resonate by rejecting liberalism, socialism, and democracy as swinish philosophies that cannot answer our need for heroism, excitement, and meaning. Their resonance will not dim so long as new generations come to associate liberalism with vacillating compromises and a smug lack of ethical seriousness.
But the political appeal of these philosophers will not wane by pointing out this or that error or launching this or that critique. At their core, Nietzsche and Heidegger resonate by rejecting liberalism, socialism, and democracy as swinish philosophies that cannot answer our need for heroism, excitement, and meaning. Their resonance will not dim so long as new generations come to associate liberalism with vacillating compromises and a smug lack of ethical seriousness. Hillary and Bill Clinton lecturing voters yet again on why they need to get over themselves and stop asking for more of the Democratic party is not going to cut it. It never was going to.
To answer the illiberal right, we must abandon the easy and historically skewed understanding of liberalism as a cautious, small-c conservative philosophy. This has been a popular reading since the Cold War, and it has led liberals to disaster. Instead, we must stress that liberalism at its best is an ethically and aesthetically higher philosophy than its competitors—one that challenges us to create a society where all are truly free, equal, and can live lives of cooperative flourishing. This challenge has often been called utopian by those who insist on narrower aspirations; for instance, the many nationalists who experience intensely big feelings towards very small ideas like the nation. But rather than conceding the point by becoming similarly small, liberals must aspire to more. We need a liberalism of hope.
Matthew McManus is an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Spelman College. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.
Image made using “Martin Heidegger for WP,” by Herbert Wetterauer licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. All other images used are in the public domain.
