Racist Aristocracy of Nietzschean Ethics by William A. Preston

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#24, JUNE-AUG/2017

Why should not a black existentialist who is also a leftist turn to Nietzsche? After all, Nietzsche’s name – along with Hiedegger’s – emblazons the banners held high by those who march in the literature and philosophy regiments of postmodernism. And postmodernism boldly advertises the hope of a rupture with modernity and all its ills, with bad things such as hypocritical bourgeois declarations about “equality,” “human rights,” and “progress.” A black existentialist philosophy would of course examine black suffering, and Nietzsche did examine suffering. Nietzsche’s philosophy is renowned for its genealogy of morals, its analyses of ressentiment, guilt, bad conscience, and the like. It is commonly assumed that Nietzsche diagnosed the spiritual ailments of modernity with a subtlety and nuance in psychologicis totally absent from the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. Marxism is, I submit, the most advanced form of bourgeois consciousness. Precisely because of its bourgeois, thoroughly modern character, though, Marxism is popularly seen by the well educated to be doltishly oblivious to the dimensions of human suffering plumbed by Nietzsche. The raging mysterious abysses in the depths of the human soul are matters about which Marxism must not have the slightest idea.

Given this presumed blindness of Marxism, it is hardly surprising that, after the end of socialism – that dying breath of Christian faith – men and women of the Left feel strongly tempted to turn to Nietzsche. Can Nietzsche in fact save not only the radical-Right and apolitical thinkers but also those who crave a new Left dispensation? Can Nietzsche help black existentialists find answers to their own questions? Nietzsche’s advocates on the Left might well wish to think so.

To be sure, Nietzsche is no hypocrite in the sense that Marxists and liberals so often are – but he is no hypocrite, it must be noted, because his theory aims to be as evil as his practice. Nietzsche strove to be as inegalitarian, illiberal, and anti-progressive as possible. Nietzsche addressed black suffering – of that there should be no doubt – but his intent, it appears from his writings, was to make blacks suffer more.

Given the fact that Nietzsche has so displaced Marx among contemporary academic leftists, one could almost be forgiven for regarding the famous critique of the subject as some sort of “grammatological” revolt of the masses against the dominion of reason. A rebellion against reason it very much is. But a rebellion against dominion of man over man? I think not. The subject of grammar, morally accountable for decisions to harm or not to harm, must, Nietzsche argues, be overcome in favor of the morally unaccountable ego of the aggressor. The “critique of the subject” as Nietzsche enacts it in the Genealogy of Morals aims to demolish moralities that would try to restrict the license of successful aggressors to lord it over the weak. Nietzsche’s critique of the subject would find its consummation in the formation of a new aristocracy from the ranks of the bourgeoisie. It is typical of the “Nietzscheans” of the Left to miss the essential connection between the critique of the subject and the anti-socialist urge to create a new ruling caste. But then, to be a left Nietzschean is, in the first place, to a contradictio in adiecto. What those who subscribe to this particular contradiction in terms thereby evade are the global power-stakes involved in Nietzsche’s critique of the subject and his assault on the idea of moral accountability.

The problem is as follows. The concept of the subject especially plagues the “Indo-Germanic” peoples, among whom Nietzsche numbers the Aryans of the Orient and the Occident, the Nordics as well as the Brahmanic caste, plus the ancient Greeks (BGE #20: 217-8).[1] This “concept of the subject,” originating on Nietzsche’s account in the grammar of the Aryan hordes who once roamed Eurasia, is now with democracy and even more so with socialism being exploited to postulate the moral worth and political accountability of every person on earth. The descendants of the Aryan originators of the subject (i.e., the spiritually higher men) are expected to be politically accountable to the conquered race in the West (i.e., the European workers) and to the nonphilosophic peoples of the South (i.e., the Africans).

Nietzsche’s writings, unlike, say John Rawls’, do not address themselves to an anonymous aggregate about whom practically nothing is presumed. Nietzsche excludes many people, and this exclusion is at the core of his philosophy. It is not a mistake or a mere “bias” somehow separable from that which is of enduring value in his writings.[2] It cannot be historicized away as inessential to Nietzsche’s serious philosophy, as if Nietzsche’s racism is the unfortunate intrusion into his philosophy of an alien element. Nietzsche’s writings address themselves only to people from certain cultures: Brahman India, Aryan Persia, Jewry, Semitic Islam, Russia, Scandinavia, and Europe with England as its westernmost outpost. What Nietzsche calls the “poles of philosophical endowment” run from India to England (GM: 106). Japan he admires for its noble men of prey, China he despises for the allegedly proto-socialist essence of its culture (GM:41; GS:99, 338; EH:330). America has its exceptions, like the Yankee Emerson, but remains on the whole peripheral to the creation of new values. Africa, philosophically speaking, is not even on the map. Black people, he affirms in a casual aside, are not even fully human:[3]

Let me declare expressly that in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now that pessimists exist. . . . Perhaps in those days – the delicate may be comforted by this thought – pain did not hurt as much as it does now; at least that is the conclusion a doctor may arrive at who has treated Negroes (taken as representatives of prehistoric man) for severe internal inflammations that would drive even the best constituted European to distraction – in the case of Negroes they do not do so. (The curve of human susceptibility to pain seems in fact to take an extraordinary and almost sudden drop as soon as one has passed the upper ten thousand or ten million of the top stratum of culture; and for my own part, I have no doubt that the combined suffering of all the animals ever subjected to the knife for scientific ends is utterly negligible compared with one painful night of a single hysterical bluestocking.) (GM:67-68)

Nietzsche is a cruel racist. This should be directly acknowledged, and his cruelty and racism in no played down. Upon what basis would Nietzsche consign even “prehistoric men” to the category of laboratory animals? And how really does Nietzsche know that “pain does not hurt as much” to the Negro and to the prehistoric man and to the animal and to all those others who do not have the good fortune to share the top stratum with the hysterical bluestocking? Something other than a logical argument is at work here.

If blacks, as On the Genealogy of Morals quite clearly suggests, are more akin to animals fit for laboratory experimentation than to people of “the top stratum of culture,” then what is to be gained by feeling superior to them? Nietzsche, to be sure, does not mention blacks that much. When he does, of course, they are described as inferior.[4] All in all, blacks simply do not figure that much in Nietzsche’s writings, and with good reason: the feeling of distinction derived from a sense of superiority towards blacks is not worth much. A man of distinction, on Nietzsche’s account, could not feel ecstasy in his pathos of distance from blacks. In Nietzsche’s scheme of things, the value to life of black people is so negligible it is absurd to try and acquire a rise by oppressing them. Heightened, and infinitely more refined, feelings of power, though, are obtainable through cruelty towards people who are more racially equal, for instance, European working-class people. Oppressing lower-class whites is so much more enjoyable and fulfilling precisely because upper-class whites recognize in the rage of the white proles the envy of a relatively racially superior being. That such a being envies them makes them even more superior.

The new world, according to Nietzsche, is an antiblack world. So was the old world. But it was not antiblack enough. In the old world, European imperialisms dispatched missionaries to conquer the Africans for Christ. That would now be passe, but not because it is imperialist. Rather, such proselytizing among black people would be passe because Christianity affirms – however much it honors in the breach – that the souls of black people are equally precious to God. All that changes when God dies. Black equality, on Christian grounds, is argued for in terms of the equality of all souls before God. Democracy only secularizes this religious claim in the normative order of the state. Socialism, that most dreadful regime, would put the poor, including the poor blacks, in charge of the world. But if God is dead, then there is no longer a watchful spirit in whose eyes the poor and the black are the equals of the rich and the white. And a whole new world, wondrously abundant with possibilities for a novel kind of domination, opens up. There is disclosure, after the debris left by Christians and democrats has been lit up in the clearing, of authentic possibilities for a world rather shocking. In the future as Nietzsche would, cruelly but actually, envision it, black people would exist only – and explicitly – to be dominated, experimented on, or just simply killed.[5]

In the most profound sense, Nietzsche’s whole philosophy – and not just his view of blacks – is racist. Blacks to Nietzsche are at a lower stage of evolution than whites, and as such are generally of marginal consideration. But the European bourgeoisie is racially inferior, too. The crucial difference, though, is that Nietzsche cherishes hopes for the European bourgeoisie he does not in the slightest feel for blacks. The centrality of race to Nietzsche’s deepest concerns becomes apparent in his discussion of bourgeois racial inferiority. Equating class with race, Nietzsche attacks the individual members of the bourgeoisie for failing to embody the nobility of blood they must somehow incorporate if they are ever to purge themselves of their slave instincts. Nietzsche’s wish to ennoble the bourgeoisie is also a wish to elevate the bourgeoisie racially. A higher race-quality must be incorporated there. Two kinds of racist commitment are manifest in Nietzsche’s thought: one, affirming the need to heighten the race-quality of the European bourgeoisie, the other, denying the full humanity of black people. The democratic movement Nietzsche detests would realize black political equality and sap the will to power of the European bourgeoisie, thereby affecting a blood poisoning of its instincts by way of a dissemination of lies about equality in general. Nietzsche’s racist commitment aims to counter these different but ultimately related forms fo the egalitarian peril.

Not a New Left but a New Right is the genuine political expression of Nietzsche’s philosophy. By “Right,” I mean any party opposed to progressive legacies of both the French and the Russian revolutions. By “New” I mean a Right that is really worthy, unlike twentieth-century European pretenders, of being called new.

The common confusion that Nietzsche is neither Right nor Left was expressed through George Bataille (1897-1962), perhaps because, rather than in spite of the fact that Bataille was the foremost Nietzschean anti-Nazi of his generation. Nietzsche was neither Right nor Left because, Bataille informs us, the subordination of thinking to a political cause appalled Nietzsche (Bataille: xxii). Bataille is correct about what appalls Nietzsche. But Bataille also misconstrues what it means to be a man of the Right. He projects his own left-wing concept of the political cause onto the rightist thinker, as if Right and Left thinkers can be easily equated in terms of their respective relations to “a cause.” Bataille ignores that what makes Nietzsche a rightist is not only his hatred of leftist goals but also his violent objection, as a superior human being, to the voluntary discipline and dutiful commitment that characterize Left commitment. Joseph de Maistre phrased it rather well when he indicated, in regard to his own royalist intentions, that wise monarchists did not want a counterrevolution but rather the opposite of revolution (de Maistre:105). Nietzsche is no restorationist. But like Maistre before him he would rather not join a cause, even an antirevolutionary cause. He would rather there had not been a revolution in the first place. As revolution exists, though, Nietzsche must oppose it – but without mimicking its militant conformism.

Nietzsche is a man of the Right. But his philosophy charts a course toward a Right remade as atheist, forward-looking, and trans-European. Nietzsche counsels conservatives to lose their hopes for a return to the feudal-miedieval epoch, and he despises their nationalistic thoughtlessness. An authentically New Right would found a New Order beyond – and above – “modern ideas,” a new Order that would legalize arson against individual freedom and social justice to which the wretched of the earth feel entitled as a result of Western reason, religion, and politics. Prometheus, Marx’s favorite god, is to be replaced by man-become-god who gives new meaning to the sacrilegious calling: “bring the fire to the people.” Even the fascists, presuming as they do the national superiority of one people over another, could never be right-wing enough for this politics. For their politics are still of “the people.”

[1] References to Nietzsche are lettered as follows: Daybreak (D); The Gay Science (GS), Beyond Good and Evil (BGE); On the Genealogy of Morals (GM); Ecce Homo (EH).

[2] In Nietzsche and Political Thought (1988), Mark Warren blatantly disregards Nietzsche’s politics after this fashion, conceding, for example, that “Nietzsche’s view of biological determination . . . underwrites his politics” but concluding that “reconstructing his metaphysics of domination according to what his politics demands is a waste of time; the result would be of little interest for questions of postmodern transitions.” Whatever his “postmodern transitions” ultimately portend, Warren clearly believes that their theorization is compatible with “the integrity of [Nietzsche’s] philosophy as a whole”(241, 228).

[3] In an otherwise commendable article, Yirmiyahu Yovel states that Nietzsche “rejects racism as a normative doctrine and ideology” (1994: 226). Richard Schacht likewise avers that it is unfair to call Nietzsche a racist (1983: 335). But on the issue of the humanity of black people there is no equivocation in Neitzsche.

[4] See also aphorism #241 of Daybreak, where Nietzsche suggests, scientifically, that black skin color might be “the ultimate effect of frequent attacks of rage” among the less “intelligent races.” He furthermore draws the conclusion that the ape-like ancestors of both blacks and whites might very well have been of a “brownish grey” color. The implication is that in the case of blacks there has actually been a regressive evolution, in contrast to the evolutionary progress towards whiteness (D: 141).

[5] Historically, the antiblack dimension of Nietzsche’s reception has been less visible than the antiproletarian. That was understandable given the needs of the antidemocratic struggle in Europe until well after the Second World War. Nevertheless, note should be made of one book, published in 1935, and authored by an anti-Nazi exile name Alfred Rosenthal, Nietzsche’s “European Race-Problem”: “The Struggle for World Domination,” which interpreted Nietzsche’s call for race breeding in terms of the need to forge a new ruling caste whose overarching purpose would be to intensify the oppression of Europe’s non-white colonial populations. See also Aschheim: 284-5, where Aschheim cites and briefly discusses Rosenthal’s book.

originally published as “Nietzsche on Blacks”, included in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, edited by Lewis R. Gordon, (Routledge, 1997) pp.167-172. Dedicated to the memory of Ruth Weiss Ulansey. “Nietzsche on Blacks” is excerpted from a larger manuscript, Nietzsche as Anti-Socialist: Prophet of Bourgeois Ennoblement.