Counter-Currents
2,218 words
Translated by Greg Johnson
Czech translation here
Translator’s Note:
The following interview of Guillaume Faye is from the Nietzsche Académie blog.
How important is Nietzsche for you?
Reading Nietzsche has been the departure point for all values and ideas I developed later. In 1967, when I was a pupil of the Jesuits in Paris, something incredible happened in philosophy class. In that citadel of Catholicism, the philosophy teacher decided to do a year-long course on Nietzsche! Exeunt Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others. The good fathers did not dare say anything, despite the upheaval in the program.
It marked me, believe me. Nietzsche, or the hermeneutics of suspicion. . . . Thus, very young, I distanced myself from the Christian, or rather “Christianomorphic,” view of the world. And of course, at the same time, from egalitarianism and humanism. All the analyses that I developed later were inspired by the insights of Nietzsche. But it was also in my nature.
Later, much later, just recently, I understood the need to complete the principles of Nietzsche with those of Aristotle, the good old Apollonian Greek, a pupil of Plato, whom he respected as well as criticized. There is for me an obvious philosophical affinity between Aristotle and Nietzsche: the refusal of metaphysics and idealism, and, crucially, the challenge to the idea of divinity. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is the counterpoint to Aristotle’s motionless and unconscious god, which is akin to a mathematical principle governing the universe.
Only Aristotle and Nietzsche, separated by many centuries, denied the presence of a self-conscious god without rejecting the sacred, but the latter is akin to a purely human exaltation based on politics or art.
Nevertheless, Christian theologians have never been bothered by Aristotle, but were very much so by Nietzsche. Why? Because Aristotle was pre-Christian and could not know Revelation. While Nietzsche, by attacking Christianity, knew exactly what he was doing.
Nevertheless, the Christian response to this atheism is irrefutable and deserves a good philosophical debate: faith is a different domain than the reflections of philosophers and remains a mystery. I remember, when I was with the Jesuits, passionate debates between my Nietzschean atheist philosophy teacher and the good fathers (his employers) sly and tolerant, sure of themselves.
What book by Nietzsche would you recommend?
The first one I read was The Gay Science. It was a shock. Then Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche overturns the Manichean moral rules that come from Socrates and Christianity. The Antichrist, it must be said, inspired the whole anti-Christian discourse of the neo-pagan Right, in which I was obviously heavily involved.
But it should be noted that Nietzsche, who was raised Lutheran, had rebelled against Christian morality in its purest form represented by German Protestantism, but he never really understood the religiosity and the faith of traditional Catholics and Orthodox Christians, which is quite unconnected to secularized Christian morality.
Oddly, I was never excited by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For me, it is a rather confused work, in which Nietzsche tried to be a prophet and a poet but failed. A bit like Voltaire, who believed himself clever in imitating the tragedies of Corneille. Voltaire, an author who, moreover, has spawned ideas quite contrary to this “philosophy of the Enlightenment” that Nietzsche (alone) had pulverized.
Being Nietzschean, what does this mean?
Nietzsche would not have liked this kind of question, for he did not want disciples, though . . . (his character, very complex, was not devoid of vanity and frustration, just like you and me). Ask instead: What does it mean to follow Nietzschean principles?
This means breaking with Socratic, Stoic, and Christian principles and modern human egalitarianism, anthropocentrism, universal compassion, and universalist utopian harmony. It means accepting the possible reversal of all values (Umwertung) to the detriment of humanistic ethics. The whole philosophy of Nietzsche is based on the logic of life: selection of the fittest, recognition of vital power (conservation of bloodlines at all costs) as the supreme value, abolition of dogmatic standards, the quest for historical grandeur, thinking of politics as aesthetics, radical inegalitarianism, etc.
That’s why all the thinkers and philosophers — self-appointed, and handsomely maintained by the system — who proclaim themselves more or less Nietzschean, are impostors. This was well understood by the writer Pierre Chassard who on good authority denounced the “scavengers of Nietzsche.” Indeed, it is very fashionable to be “Nietzschean.” Very curious on the part of publicists whose ideology — political correctness and right-thinking — is absolutely contrary to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
In fact, the pseudo-Nietzscheans have committed a grave philosophical confusion: they held that Nietzsche was a protest against the established order, but they pretended not to understand that it was their own order: egalitarianism based on a secularized interpretation of Christianity. “Christianomorphic” on the inside and outside. But they believed (or pretended to believe) that Nietzsche was a sort of anarchist, while advocating a ruthless new order. Nietzsche was not, like his scavengers, a rebel in slippers, a phony rebel, but a revolutionary visionary.
Is Nietzsche on the Right or Left?
Fools and shallow thinkers (especially on the Right) have always claimed that the notions of Left and Right made no sense. What a sinister error. Although the practical positions of the Left and Right may vary, the values of Right and Left do exist. Nietzscheanism is obviously on the Right. The socialist mentality, the morality of the herd, made Nietzsche vomit. But that does not mean that the people of the extreme Right are Nietzscheans, far from it. For example, they are generally anti-Jewish, a position that Nietzsche castigated and considered stupid in many of his writings, and in his correspondence he singled out anti-Semitic admirers who completely misunderstood him.
Nietzscheanism, obviously, is on the Right, and the Left, always in a position of intellectual prostitution, attempted to neutralize Nietzsche because it could not censor him. To be brief, I would say that an honest interpretation of Nietzsche places him on the side of the revolutionary Right in Europe, using the concept of the Right for lack of anything better (like any word, it describes things imperfectly).
Nietzsche, like Aristotle (and, indeed, like Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, of course — but not at all Spinoza) deeply integrated politics in his thinking. For example, by a fantastic premonition, he was for a union of European nations, like Kant, but from a very different perspective. Kant the pacifist, universalist, and incorrigible utopian moralist, wanted the European Union as it exists today: a great flabby body without a sovereign head with the Rights of Man as its highest principle. Nietzsche, on the contrary, spoke of Great Politics, a grand design for a united Europe. For the moment, it is the Kantian view that has unfortunately been imposed.
On the other hand, the least we can say is that Nietzsche was not a Pan-German, a German nationalist, but rather a nationalistic — and patriotic — European. This was remarkable for a man who lived in his time, the second part of the 19th century (“This stupid 19th century,” said Léon Daudet), which exacerbated as a fatal poison the shabby petty intra-European nationalism that would result in the terrible fratricidal tragedy of 1914 to 1918, when young Europeans from 18 to 25 years, massacred one another without knowing exactly why. Nietzsche the European wanted anything but such a scenario.
That is why those who instrumentalized Nietzsche (in the 1930s) as an ideologue of Germanism are as wrong as those who, today, present him as a proto-Leftist. Nietzsche was a European patriot, and he put the genius of the German soul in the service of European power whose decline, as a visionary, he already sensed.
What authors do you see as Nietzschean?
Not necessarily those who claim Nietzsche. In reality, there are no actual “Nietzschean” authors. Simply, Nietzsche and others are part of a highly fluid and complex current that could be described as a “rebellion against the accepted principles.” On this point, I agree with the view of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Locchi, who was one of my teachers: Nietzsche inaugurated “superhumanism,” that is to say the surpassing of humanism. I’ll stop there, because I will not repeat what I have developed in some of my books, including Why We Fight and Sex and Perversion. One could say that a large number of authors and filmmakers are “Nietzschean,” but this kind of talk is very superficial.
On the other hand, I believe there is a strong link between the philosophy of Nietzsche and Aristotle, despite the centuries that separate them. To say that Aristotle is Nietzschean is obviously an anachronistic absurdity. But to say that Nietzsche’s philosophy continues Aristotle, the errant student of Plato, is a claim I will hazard. This is why I am both Aristotelian and Nietzschean: Because these two philosophers defend the fundamental idea that the supernatural deity must be examined in substance. Nietzsche looks at divinity with a critical perspective like Aristotle’s.
Most writers who call themselves admirers of Nietzsche are impostors. Paradoxically, I link Darwinism and Nietzsche. Those who actually interpret Nietzsche are accused by ideological manipulators of not being real “philosophers.” Even those who want Nietzsche to say the opposite of what he so inconveniently actually said. We must condemn this appropriation of philosophy by a caste of mandarins who proceed to distort the texts of the philosophers, or even censor them. Aristotle has also been a victim. One can read Nietzsche and other philosophers only through a scholarly grid, inaccessible to the common man. But no. Nietzsche is quite readable by any educated man. But our time can read only through the grid of censorship by omission.
Could you give a definition of the Superman?
Nietzsche intentionally gave a vague definition of the Superman. This is an open-ended yet clear concept. Obviously, the pseudo-Nietzschean intellectuals were quick to blur and empty this concept by making the Superman a sort of airy intellectual: detached, haughty, meditative, quasi-Buddhist—the conceited image they have of themselves. In short, the precise opposite of what Nietzsche intended. I am a partisan not of interpreting writers but of reading them, if possible, with the highest degree of respect.
Nietzsche obviously linked the Superman to the notion of Will to Power (which, too, has been manipulated and distorted). The Superman is the model of the man who fulfills the Will to Power, that is to say, who rises above herd morality (and Nietzsche thought socialism was a herd doctrine) to selflessly impose a new order, with two dimensions, warlike and sovereign, aiming at dominion, endowed with a power project. The interpretation of the Superman as a supreme “sage,” a non-violent, ethereal, proto-Gandhi of sorts is a deconstruction of Nietzsche’s thought in order to neutralize and blur it. The Parisian intelligentsia, whose hallmark is a spirit of falsehood, has a sophisticated but evil genius in distorting the thought of annoying but unavoidable great authors (including Aristotle and Voltaire) but also wrongly appropriating or truncating their thought.
There are two possible definitions of the Superman: the mental and the moral Superman (by evolution and education, surpassing his ancestors) and the biological superman. It’s very difficult to decide, since Nietzsche himself has used this expression as a sort of mytheme, a literary trope, without ever truly conceptualizing it. A sort of premonitory phrase, which was inspired by Darwinian evolutionism.
But your question is very interesting. The key is not having an answer “about Nietzsche,” but to know which path Nietzsche wanted to open over a hundred years ago. Because he was anti-Christian and anti-humanist, Nietzsche did not think that man was a fixed being, but that he is subject to evolution, even self-evolution (that is the sense of the metaphor of the “bridge between the beast and the Superman”).
For my part — but then I differ with Nietzsche, and my opinion does not possess immense value — I interpreted superhumanism as a challenge, for reasons partly biological, to the very notion of a human species. Briefly. This concept of the Superman is certainly much more than Will to Power, one of those mysterious traps Nietzsche set, one of the questions he posed to future humanity: Yes, what is the Superman? The very word makes us dreamy and delirious.
Nietzsche may have had the intuition that the human species, at least some of its higher components (not necessarily “humanity”), could accelerate and direct biological evolution. One thing is certain, that crushes the thoughts of monotheistic, anthropocentric “fixists”: man is not an essence that is beyond evolution. And then, to the concept of Übermensch, never forget to add that of Herrenvolk . . . prescient. Also, we should not forget Nietzsche’s reflections on the question of race and anthropological inequality.
The capture of Nietzsche’s work by pseudo-scientists and pseudo-philosophical schools (comparable to the capture of the works of Aristotle) is explained by the following simple fact: Nietzsche is too big a fish to be eliminated, but far too subversive not to be censored and distorted.
Your favorite quote from Nietzsche?
“We must now cease all forms of joking around.” This means, presciently, that the values on which Western civilization are based are no longer acceptable. And that survival depends on a reversal or restoration of vital values. And all this assumes the end of festivisme (as coined by Philippe Muray and developed by Robert Steuckers) and a return to serious matters.
Source: http://nietzscheacademie.over-blog.com/article-nietzsche-vu-par-guillaume-faye-106329446.html
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13 comments
“This means breaking with Socratic, Stoic, and Christian principles and modern human egalitarianism, anthropocentrism, universal compassion, and universalist utopian harmony. It means accepting the possible reversal of all values (Umwertung) to the detriment of humanistic ethics. The whole philosophy of Nietzsche is based on the logic of life: selection of the fittest, recognition of vital power (conservation of bloodlines at all costs) as the supreme value, abolition of dogmatic standards, the quest for historical grandeur, thinking of politics as aesthetics, radical inegalitarianism, etc.”
The central problem I see with this line of thought is that there is a tendency in Nietzsche to value the form more than the essence, so to speak. That is, in reaction to the order in which he (and we) lived, he lionizes selection of the fittest for its own sake, inegalitarianism for its own sake, etc. But there is no principle informing these views (yes, you can all see the Evolian influence. Well it holds).
The link between Aristotle and Nietzsche is much appreciated, and something to ponder. But the note Faye makes that both rejected metaphysics and “idealism” may be part of the problem, in this sense. The God whose death Nietzsche proclaimed was in effect a meme used by man to symbolize, personalize, and try to come to a realization of the Supreme Reality. The efficacy of this and the effects of the Christian religion on Europeans and the West is something else to be debated entirely, but Nietzsche falls into a trap here, in my opinion, in allowing his philosophy to be influenced too much by his revolt against this order. The criticism that Evola and others make here is that this makes his critique as subjective as the order itself. To use a phrase, “those who fight the Empire become the Empire.” If the order passes away, then Nietzsche would have had nothing to criticize. Rather, criticism must be informed by comparing the current order to principles which hold whether or not the current order exists. This not only allows for a frame of reference for criticism, but also protects one from falling into the reverse-extremes commonly found in reactionaries of all stripes. In the world of Tradition, inegalitarianism is a fact, but so is noblisse oblige and the rights of the merchants’ and workers’ guilds. Selection of the fittest and violent action, but also cooperation, mercy and benevolence, and love. Conservation of bloodlines, but not to the extent where it becomes decrepit and inbred, leading to a degeneration of the race of the body and the loss of the race of the spirit (to use Spengler’s phrase, “a healthy race, not a pure one”). Traditionalism is, in my opinion, not to be studied because it has handy justifications against liberalism, but because it is true whether or not the liberal order exists. They are as true in the Golden Age as in the Kali yuga.
Traditionalists themselves are a different matter and Faye has made some very important criticisms of them in another essay. Particularly disheartening is the denial of many, perhaps even most prominent Traditionalists of evolution by natural selection, and a highly anti-scientific attitude which leads them to dismiss anything to do with modernity with an ease that is frankly embarrassing when one compares it to their usually so apt and well-thought out arguments on other issues. But this is something that must be worked on and can, I think, be resolved.
On another topic completely, I find Faye’s comments on Voltaire interesting. Is there something in this man of use to New Right and Traditionalist circles? Perhaps an essay in the works?
I admittedly don’t know much about Voltaire, but he seems to have expressed racialist as well as eugenicist ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised if contemporary editions of such works as his Essai sur les moeurs are either expurgated or include politically correct glosses or both. He was clearly anti-Jewish, concluding the entry on the Jews in his Dictionnaire philosophique with the remark: “In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.” He was hardly a democrat or an egalitarian. (Incidentally, Gustave Le Bon noted that virtually none of the philosophes advocated democracy.)
I vaguely recall reading something — perhaps in Marc Crapez’s La gauche réactionnaire — to the effect that Voltaire didn’t believe that mankind had a single ancestor, and effectively regarded the races of mankind as separate species. A precursor of Carleton S. Coon, perhaps?
Interesting. His way with words precedes him, but perhaps I’ll have to give the words themselves a look sometime soon.
I was writing from memory when I wrote the above regarding Voltaire. According to one article I’ve since read, Voltaire’s Essai sur les Mœurs et l’esprit des Nations “is not easy to find, except for expurgated versions, publishers rectifying the writings of an emblematic figure of French culture without scruple.” I’m not in a position to confirm this, as this would require comparing the various editions of this work, but if Voltaire’s works have been expurgated, it’s likely that Xavier Martin discusses this in his Voltaire méconnu. Another article notes that although the Essai sur les Mœurs is one of Voltaire’s major works, it was last published in 1993; this article also notes that the complete text of this work has around 1,800 pages, which indicates that abridged editions of this work have probably been published.
One of these days, I should get around to reading L’esprit du judaïsme by the Baron d’Holbach. It seems to have been frequently characterized as “anti-Semitic”; the excerpts from the conclusion that I have read indicate that it draws a sharp dichotomy between European civilization and Jewish barbarism.
I’ve often thought that a man’s disciples can be his worst enemies. Major thinkers often have their ideas vulgarized, expurgated, distorted, obscured, and trivialized by their “interpreters.” This can be largely attributed to superficiality, stupidity, indolence, cowardice, and conformism on the part of interpreters and their audience. These things are arguably more effective in sterilizing “subversive” ideas today than formal censorship or an evil-minded caste or cabal of mandarins such as Guillaume Faye refers to above.
I’ve struggled to wrap my head around Traditionalism for a few years now, but every now and then I stumble upon written words that help in the wrapping. Yours is one such set of words, Dominion. Excellent analysis!
Very interesting!
Just a my two cents as I’m by no means a scholar.
In my own minor efforts to try to understand Western philosophy, I have noticed this sort of parallel between Aristotle and Nietzsche (which is why I myself have respect for traditional Catholics even though I also loathe most forms of Christianity). I, likewise, have also been perplexed by the sort of moral-snootiness and outright rejection of Nietzsche that tends to come from not just Christian circles, but also Catholic ones, given that the BRIGHT SPOTS within the Christian (Catholic) intellectual tradition have all sorts of Nietzschean (pagan) strands. Of course, some neo-Aristotileans like Alasdair MacIntyre and Phillipa Foot have paid respect to Nietzsche (from an ambivalent standpoint of mostly disagreement) in their writings.
But I can only link much of the general tenor towards Nietzsche from such circles to a shallow, sentimental angst against Nietzsche’s “Parable of the Madman,” which to me, was and still is one of the most inspiring pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Reading it was perhaps my first real “eureka” moment where I began to see how religion and culture and race were not all vacuum topics like one is trained to think from years of public schooling. It certainly got me interested in philosophy and culture more than anything I had read hitherto.
The two examples I always bring up with respect to how Aristotle and Nietzsche relate deal with Aristotle’s causes when compared to Nietzschean concepts. To me, Aristotle’s “formal cause” seems to work within his realist philosophy a lot like Nietzsche’s “healthy instincts” does within his more skeptical view of the metaphysical project. And though I realize the two concepts are different in some ways, I’ve feel that Aristotle’s “final cause” works within his philosophy in much the way Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” does. As far as I can tell, Will to Power is a little more vague (less tied to a specific qualifying of a form) than the eudaimonian flourishing of Aristotle’s “external goods,” but it’s hard not to think of them as being the same thing when approaching the real world on the spot and making decisions and affirming values.
Perhaps it is true that Nietzsche did not understand traditional Catholic Reason and faith. But at the same time, Nietzsche’s writings do come across as much more agnostic and nominalist than Aristotle’s realism (even though it is a realism much more grounded and skeptical of abstraction when compared to Plato’s). So I think it would be a mistake to think that Nietzsche would have been more Aristotilean had he just not been born a Lutheran. Perhaps this feature (his more nominalist bent) is what thoughtful Catholics (like Father Fredrick Copleston) found/find so unpalatable about Nietzsche in contrast to the typical shallow reactions from the Christian herd to his prose about God being dead. Blasphemy!
Guillaume Faye’s concluding remarks on contemporary frivolity makes me think of a billboard I saw last year bearing the message: “Destiny is calling — but beer is on the other line.” This is a crude but revealing expression of the mentality of the consumer society.
Nice essay but not without it’s faults. To link Nietzsche with Aristotle is like linking him with Judaic priests. Sure Aristotle destroyed values, but he destroyed precisely the values Nietzsche most admired and felt to be beneficial for the flourishing of human greatness. Likewise attempting to link Nietzsche with Darwin.
As always, there is no excuse to read what someone else said about Nietzsche instead of reading Nietzsche himself.
As for Dominion’s suggestion that Nietzsche had “no principle informing [his] views,” this can only be assumed if the entirety of Nietzsche’s great politics is ignored – something most American postmodern scholars are glad to do. The principle underlying everything Nietzsche wrote was the creation of a new human type that will rescue us from the degenerative effects of bourgeois modernity. And to say that Nietzsche “lionizes selection of the fittest” is simply not true. The fittest was never a concern of Nietzsche, for his ideal was to be too brave and bold to survive for long, even though as exemplars of the species their absence would leave it in the hands of the mediocre rabble. In fact, this is his very argument against Darwinism – it is the mediocre who survive and procreate, not the daring creators of new tables.
For that matter, if the “death of God” means anything philosophically (for it is a political doctrine) it is the death of the thing-in-itself (which, again, puts Nietzsche at an extraordinary remove from Aristotle), making the likelihood of his “lionizing … for its own sake” a conceptual impossibility.
Perhaps “had no principle to inform his views” was a bad way of putting it. I meant that Nietzsche’s values seemed to be influenced too much by his reaction against the current order rather than striving to be above it. A note on Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest” notion was a phrase used by Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s Bulldog) and his followers and which became very common in social Darwinist movements, but it is in fact not a wholly accurate way of explaining natural selection. After all, cockroaches are not exactly the strongest creatures individually, and yet they have survived extinctions. Fit or unfit does not matter for a group so long as the group can adapt and overcome environmental obstacles. Perhaps in this way, the Overman is more Darwinian than Nietzsche may have realized, as he overcomes the current order which inhibits him and brings a new one about in its place where his values thrive.
“As always, there is no excuse to read what someone else said about Nietzsche instead of reading Nietzsche himself.”
Amen. I began Birth of Tragedy a while back and there is nothing like hearing it from the man himself.
There is for me an obvious philosophical affinity between Aristotle and Nietzsche: the refusal of metaphysics and idealism, and, crucially, the challenge to the idea of divinity. Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is the counterpoint to Aristotle’s motionless and unconscious god, which is akin to a mathematical principle governing the universe.
This can only be a reference to Aristotle’s teleology, and then we must understand a further distinction between intrinsic teleology and contingent, or derived teleology. Certainly in the context of an interview we cannot expect detail, and always expect some looseness in speaking, but to presume Aristotle supported a “refusal” of metaphysics is a strange thing to say. And, as has been pointed out by later scholastic thinkers, an intrinsic teleology presupposes more than a “mathematical principle” governing the universe.
Indeed, intrinsic teleology (not derived teleology, as we find in artifacts) cannot be said to include an idea of governance, if by that we mean to imply a mechanistic or imposed arrangement “from the outside.” Aristotelian final cause is an internal movement, an unfolding of a thing’s inherent nature. In any case, the idea of a “motionless” or unmoved mover is a metaphysical point.
As far as Nietzsche goes, one must pick and choose with him, because often nothing is very organized in the usual sense of the word.
Nietzsche on the jews:
You will have already guessed how easily the priestly [i.e. Jewish] way of evaluating can split from the knightly-aristocratic, and then continue to develop into its opposite. … The knightly-aristocratic judgments of value have as their basic assumption a powerful physicality, a blooming, rich, even overflowing health, together with those things required to maintain these qualities—war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and, in general, everything which involves strong, free, happy action. The priestly method of evaluating has, as we saw, other preconditions… As is well known, priests are the most evil of enemies—but why? Because they are the most powerless. From their powerlessness, their hate grows among them into something huge and terrifying, to the most spiritual and most poisonous manifestations. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests…
Let us briefly consider the greatest example. Everything on earth which has been done against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers” is not worth mentioning in comparison with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people, who knew how to get final satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical transformation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge. This was appropriate only to a priestly people with the most deeply repressed priestly desire for revenge. In opposition to the aristocratic value equations (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = loved by god), the Jews, with an awe-inspiring consistency, dared to reverse things and to hang on to that with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of the powerless), that is, to “only those who suffer are good; the poor, the powerless, the low are the only good people; the suffering, those in need, the sick, the ugly are also the only pious people; only they are blessed by God; for them alone there is salvation.—By contrast, you privileged and powerful people, you are for all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lecherous, the insatiable, the godless; you will also be the unblessed, the cursed, and the damned for all eternity!”
In connection with that huge and immeasurably disastrous initiative which the Jews launched with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the sentence I wrote at another time—namely, that with the Jews the slave revolt in morality begins… (I, sec. 7)
Let’s bring this to a conclusion. The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have fought a fearful battle on earth for thousands of years. … The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome.” To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, this contradiction between deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jew was like something contrary to nature itself, its monstrous polar opposite, as it were. In Rome the Jew was considered “guilty of hatred against the entire human race.” And that view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.
By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat ourselves again to the Apocalypse of St. John, that wildest of all written outbursts which vengeance has on its conscience…
The Romans were indeed strong and noble men, stronger and nobler than any people who had lived on earth up until then or even than any people who had ever been dreamed up. Everything they left as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can guess what is doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par excellence that priestly people of ressentiment, who possessed an unparalleled genius for popular morality…
Which of them has proved victorious for the time being, Rome or Judea? Surely there’s not the slightest doubt. Just think of who it is that people bow down to today in Rome itself, as the personification of all the highest values—and not only in Rome, but in almost half the earth, all the places where people have become merely tame or want to become tame—in front of three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (in front of Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the carpet maker Paul, and the mother of the first-mentioned Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable: without doubt Rome has been conquered. (I, 16)
“The fittest was never a concern of Nietzsche, for his ideal was to be too brave and bold to survive for long, even though as exemplars of the species their absence would leave it in the hands of the mediocre rabble. In fact, this is his very argument against Darwinism – it is the mediocre who survive and procreate, not the daring creators of new tables”
I have the same take on Nietzsche’s Over-man. It’s not about “propagating the species,” or even what’s “good” for your race, nation, or some typical Darwinian sense. No, it’s the “man” (singular, notice he doesn’t say over-men) who is sovereign (above herd morals and controls) who breaks the chains of conformity, comfort, safety, for the life “that plays dice for death,” who can see the abyss and is undaunted.
Yea you’re not going to last too long with such an unrestrained approach to life. But this is one of the greatest European thinkers who just so happen to proclaim to his philosophical progeny – “So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared! I spare you not, I love you from my very heart, my brethren in war!— Thus spake Zarathustra.
I would say the Over-man is about depth rather than longevity of life, not survival but experiencing* the heights despite survival – of course, embrace Fate!
* “He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.”
Mr. Johnson,
I just wanted to heartily thank you for engaging in so much translation over the past few months, a significant portion of which has been of Alain De Benoist’s teachings, a writer whom I greatly respect and my admiration of him continues to increase as he becomes more accessible to us through your work. I used to think that Faye was boilerplate but it is clear to me now that he knows the stakes and is closer to the truth of Nietzsche than any of the Parisian Illuminati. It is a shame that there has been a schism between he and De Benoist.
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