Peter Marshall - Demanding the Impossible

Rejecting unnecessary political regulations, Humboldt contemplates the possibility of an anarchist society:

If we imagine a community of enlightened men – fully instructed in their truest instances, and therefore mutually well-disposed and closely bound together – we can easily imagine how voluntary contracts with a view to their security, would be entered into among them … Agreements of this kind are infinitely to be preferred to any State arrangements. 11

Humboldt’s ideal society based on fellowship in which each individual is independent and yet part of society has something akin to libertarian socialism. It was precisely his aim to outline the kind of political organization which would allow ‘the most diverse individuality and the most original independence’ to coexist equally with ‘the most diverse and profound associations of human beings with each other – a problem which nothing but the most absolute liberty can ever help to solve’. 12 Nevertheless, Humboldt retains the need for the nightwatchman State to stand guard over its citizens. Its principal role is negative: to maintain security, against both the external attacks of foreign enemies and internal dissension. Like Thomas Paine, he sees that State is a necessary means; ‘and since it is always attended with restrictions of freedom, a necessary evil’. 13 The only justification for State interference is to prevent harm to others. Thus, while he came to the borders of anarchism, Humboldt ultimately remained in the liberal camp. This cannot be said of his compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche who came to anarchist conclusions quite independently.

Despite his erroneous reputation as the inventor of fascism, Nietzsche may be counted amongst the great libertarians for his attack on the State, his rejection of systems, his transvaluation of values, and his impassioned celebration of personal freedom and individuality. His libertarian views formed only part of his revolutionary attempt to reorientate totally European thought and sensibility. As a result, his influence was far-reaching and complex.

At the turn of the century, Nietzsche’s form of individualism won many converts in bohemian and artistic circles throughout Europe – much to Kropotkin’s dismay as he considered it too epicurean and egoistic. 14 Amongst anarchist thinkers, Emma Goldman also welcomed him into the family and admired his ‘giant mind’ and vision of the free individual. 15 Rudolf Rocker admired his analysis of political power and culture. 16 Herbert Read acknowledged that he was the first to make people conscious of the importance of the individual in evolution. 17 But his influence was not only restricted to anarchist intellectuals – Salvador Segui, the Catalan syndicalist who helped found the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, was also deeply impressed by his message.

Nietzsche did not call himself an anarchist. He claimed that the anarchist of his day was, like the Christian, a decadent, ‘the mouthpiece of a declining strata of society’ because his complaints about others and society came from weakness and a narrow spirit of revenge. 18 Clearly this is true of some anarchists as well as some socialists. When the resentful anarchist demands with righteous indignation that his rights be respected he fails to see that his real suffering lies in his failure to create a new life for himself. At the same time, Nietzsche admired those anarchists who asserted their rights: many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled because ‘a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it’. 19

With considerable psychological acumen, Nietzsche argued that anarchists of his day demonstrated that

The desire for destruction , change, and becoming can be an expression of overfull, future-pregnant strength (my term for this, as one knows, is the word ‘Dionysian’); but it can also be the hatred of the misdeveloped, needy, underprivileged who destroys, who must destroy, because the existing, and even all existence, all being, outrages and provokes him. 20

Nietzsche was probably thinking of Bakunin here, whom his friend Richard Wagner knew. Those followers of Bakunin and the terrorists who destroy and maim in the name of freedom and justice are clearly motivated by hatred. Most anarchist thinkers, however, especially Godwin, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, were motivated by a sense of the overflowing richness and vitality of life in their wish to overthrow existing values and institutions.

Nietzsche thought that literary decadence sets in when instead of a work of art forming a whole, there is ‘an anarchy of atoms’. 21 As a child of his age, he too recognized that he was a decadent but he tried to resist it. His work does not form a coherent whole, indeed he deliberately rejected system-making as a distortion of the truth. The will to construct a system shows a lack of integrity, and, moreover, ineradicable convictions are prisons.

Nietzsche’s method is therefore experimental; he approaches his subjects tangentially. His style is aphoristic, rhapsodic and ironic. Engulfed in iconoclastic fervour, he is deliberately paradoxical. He wanted to soak his thoughts in blood, to show that knowledge has to be lived to be understood. It is not surprising that Nietzsche should often have been misinterpreted.

The most serious accusation against him is that he was a forerunner of Nazism. This accusation was made possible by the work of his sister, who selectively edited his works when he became mad towards the end of his life, and by Nazi ideologues who took certain of his phrases and redeployed them completely out of their context. It is only by radically distorting his message that Nietzsche can be seen as an anti-Semite, a racist, or a German nationalist. 22 He despised and detested German culture, was utterly opposed to German nationalism, and thought the State the poison of the people. One of the main reasons why he broke with Wagner was because of the composer’s anti-Semitism. Nietzsche’s metaphor of the ‘blond beast’ became a model for the elevation of the Aryan German, but he was no racist, and even recommended racial mixing. Certainly he celebrated war, but like Blake he was thinking of intellectual not physical strife; he was well aware that ‘blood is the worst witness of truth’. 23

Nietzsche’s atrocious views on women however cannot be explained away. ‘In woman,’ he wrote in Thus Spoke Zaruthustra , ‘a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not capable of friendship: she knows only love.’ A woman should be trained ‘for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly’. In the same work, Nietzsche ironically makes an old woman say ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!’ 24

Like Proudhon’s and Tolstoy’s, Nietzsche’s attitude to women is lamentable. But his rehearsals of traditional misogyny can at least be better understood when we remember that his childhood was dominated by his mother, sister, grandmother and two aunts; his life as a lonely bachelor visiting European spas was full of frivolous women; and his relationship with the only love of his life, Lou Salomé, ended in failure. His complex relationship with women was aggravated by the fact that he became infected with syphilis from prostitutes as a young man. The disease eventually made him mad in the last ten years of his life and finally killed him. Ironically, the great philosophical misogynist was once photographed pulling a cart with Lou Salomé holding a whip in her hand! Nonetheless, all his antics did not prevent Emma Goldman from admiring his libertarian insights.

The most important premiss of Nietzsche’s philosophy is his uncompromising atheism. Kropotkin acknowledged that next to Fourier, Nietzsche was unequalled in undermining Christianity. 25 He not only popularized the slogan ‘God is Dead’ but joked that there was only one Christian and he died on the cross. Like Bakunin, Nietzsche believed that traditional Christianity is a form of slave morality, with its stress on humility, pity and piety. Above all, it was decadent because it tried to extirpate the passions.