FUCK THEORY

Adventures in Pedagogy - Nietzsche In America

At that moment, if I could have strangled the person who taught him the book the first time around, I probably would have.  Though his initial protest against the argument of the passage was very collected, when I suggested that the passage might mean differently when put alongside the essay’s broader argument he got genuinely upset.  “I’ve already read it in a freshman intro course.  I guess Nietzsche would say I don’t understand it because I must not be the Superman, which I think is an extremely presumptuous assumption.” 

I can sympathize with my student’s anger.
His original complaint was that he didn’t see how the technology of pain Nietzsche describes can slowly and imperceptibly be internalized into the system of reactionary emotions we call “guilt” and “shame,” that there seemed to him to be a missing link in the chain.  After he recovered from his outburst I explained to him that this actually doesn’t contradict the argument, because it’s precisely the purpose of religion to mask its own origin in the technology of pain, to make itself seem like an ahistorical divine revelation; to that extent, Nietzsche would say that his argument is hard to process because religion is so effective at doing its job. 

But there’s something bigger going on here than the specific argument of the passage we were looking at in class.  My student’s response is indicative of a profound resistance American students have to any idea that isn’t explicitly egalitarian, or any concept that suggests people might not be inherently equal; as a teacher, ideas of this kind have to be presented very circumspectly to avoid an immediate knee-jerk reaction.  It goes without saying that there’s a profound irony to this resistance, given the economic inequality that organizes all of American society.  That, however, is a different blog post.

This post is about the fact that this resistance to meritocratic arguments on the part of American students is, I’ve found, one of the most frequent sources of hostility to Nietzsche’s ideas.  Except the thing is, this is a misdirected hostility, since it originates in a century-old proto-fascist reading of Nietzsche which is, to be frank, extremely stupid and superficial.  This is Hitler’s interpretation, in which Nietzsche’s philosophy is a call for the creation of a human elite, a distinction between people on the basis of their active capacities. 

From the perspective of this misreading, my student is very right to say that Nietzsche is “extremely presumptuous.”  This is the misreading which understands Nietzsche to be suggesting that some people are “overmen” and some are not.  Now, admittedly, Nietzsche does suggest more than once that his philosophy is impenetrable because its future reader has not yet arrived, and it’s not much of a stretch to associate this future reader with the coming of the Übermensch.  I can see how that connection might be made, especially by an undergraduate reader encountering Nietzsche for the first time.

But the crucial thing to remember when reading Nietzsche is that he is very explicit about the fact that the overman has not yet arrived.  Zarathustra is the herald of the overman, who announces his coming; but the overman himself is not to be found among contemporary humanity.  The Übermensch is an idea.  Nietzsche is not suggesting that some people are “supermen” and some are not (incidentally, David Bowie didn’t quite understand this, either, when he recorded The Man Who Sold the World).  

It boils down to this:  for Nietzsche, the superman is the man who is entirely active; he only acts, and is never reactive; he is never at the mercy of passive emotions.  But this is a concept, not an actual possibility, because no individual entity is stronger than the collective relations of force that make up the universe.  More bluntly, there’s always something bigger, stronger, more active than you; mortality is precisely the condition of inevitable passivity.  This is the essence of the axiom in the 4th part of Spinoza’s Ethics:  “There is in nature no individual thing that is not surpassed in strength and power by some other thing.  Whatsoever thing there is, there is another more powerful by which the said thing can be destroyed.”  

Nietzsche’s “superman” belongs in the same conceptual category as Derrida’s a venir and Irigaray’s sexual ethics:  an impossible necessity; a horizon beyond the limit of contemporary reality that we must struggle towards even though we know we’ll never live to see it.  Nietzsche is certainly not an egalitarian or a humanist, and he would have no problem saying that some people are more active or less reactive than others.  But nobody, no matter how active, is Nietzsche’s superman.  Because the superman has yet to arrive; he will never arrive so long as we’re waiting for him, because to wait is itself a reactive process. 

There are many reasons to be critical of Nietzsche, and there are many places where Nietzsche’s arguments fly sharply and deliberately in the face of egalitarian humanism.  But the idea of the superman is not necessarily one of them, and it’s time to let this century-old misunderstanding die out.