When Nietzsche’s Name Becomes More Useful Than His Thought
A reflection on selective borrowing, political authority, and the danger that follows when the destruction of old values is separated from the whole of a philosopher’s thought.
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra asks what human beings can rely upon after Christianity and traditional morality have lost their authority. His call to revalue inherited values and create new ones can therefore sound attractive to movements that wish to dismantle an established moral order and shape a new kind of human being.
This creates a particular temptation for radical politics. A movement may invoke Nietzsche’s prestigious name and borrow his language of liberation, transvaluation, and the overcoming of old morality without accepting the rest of his thought. I do not believe that every radical leftist will necessarily resist that temptation.
Nietzsche himself, however, was hostile to egalitarianism, socialism, mass democracy, and collective conformity. His value-creating individual was not meant to become a disciplined follower of a party, institution, or ideological movement. When an organization uses his language to produce obedient adherents, it borrows Nietzsche’s authority while contradicting his radical individualism.
The deeper question is what enters the space after inherited values and transcendent standards have been removed. A world of freely creative individuals does not necessarily follow. The state, the university, the media, an activist organization, or a charismatic leader may instead claim the authority to define the new values for everyone else.
At that point, education can cease to be the formation of judgment and become the manufacture of a new conformity. Nietzsche disliked the obedience of the crowd, yet language borrowed from him can paradoxically be used to create another crowd with another orthodoxy.
It would therefore be inaccurate to call Nietzsche simply the intellectual father of the radical left. A more careful conclusion is that any movement seeking to dismantle traditional morality and design a new human type may find his reputation useful, while quietly discarding his anti-egalitarianism and hostility to collective conformity.
The final issue is larger than Nietzsche or any one political faction: when a famous thinker’s name becomes more useful than his actual thought, philosophy has stopped functioning as a discipline of truth and has become an instrument of power.
“When a famous thinker’s name becomes more useful than his actual thought, philosophy has stopped functioning as a discipline of truth and has become an instrument of power.”