Zoe Zhang
Political Thought and Intellectual History
Michaelmas Term, 2024
Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 5(2), pp. 56-69

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14289017

Introduction: The Conservative Revolution

As Jeffrey Herf rightly recognises, Friedrich Nietzsche served as a muse – perhaps the muse par excellence – for the Conservative Revolutionaries of the Weimar Republic (Herf, 1986). The Conservative Revolutionaries strove tirelessly against everything that Weimar Germany stood for: parliamentary democracy, market capitalism, social liberalism, and pacifism, choosing instead to affirm authoritarianism, economic corporatism, social conservatism, and militarism. Of crucial significance for the Conservative Revolutionaries was the manner in which Nietzsche had ‘turned against morality and invented a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life, purely artistic and anti-Christian’ (Harvey, 2022, p. 52). With this ‘amoral celebration of aesthetics’ (Herf, 1986, p. 29) in hand, the Conservative Revolutionaries were able to pull off the tremendous intellectual coup of articulating an opposition both to the Enlightenment and the twin spectres of capitalism and Marxism, which had arisen in its wake, whilst simultaneously rejecting the atavistic pastoralism of the völkisch ideologues. They were conservative in the sense that they were markedly illiberal and authoritarian nationalists who rejected all calls for liberty or equality from liberal and socialist camps in favour of the totalitarian unity of the nation. Yet, they were also revolutionaries in that they actively sought mass appeal, unlike traditional Prussian conservatives, and aimed not to restore Germany to her supposed pre-industrial health, but rather to accelerate her headlong into the twentieth century with the power of a strong state.

As such, Herf terms the Conservative Revolutionaries ‘reactionary modernists’, in that such men sought a cultural-political revolution that would undo the ruinous effects of 1789, not by repudiating the powers of modern industrial technology, but rather by freeing these potentialities from the mismanagement of the democratic-capitalist status quo. Despite their deep hostility to the Enlightenment ideals of autonomy and equality, and their sympathy for the hierarchical nature of the European ancien régime, they were undoubtedly ‘technological modernizers; that is, they wanted Germany to be more rather than less industrialised, to have more rather than fewer radios, trains, highways, cars, and planes’ (Herf, 1986, p. 12). For Karl-Heinz Bohler, the link between Nietzsche’s amoral aestheticism and reactionary modernism is straightforward. ‘By elevating the idea of beauty over normative standards’, Bohler writes:

linking this concept of beauty to an elitist notion of the will, and finally interpreting technology as the embodiment of will and beauty, Weimar’s right-wing intellectuals contributed to an irrationalist and nihilist embrace of technology (Bohler cited in Herf, 1986, pp. 29-30).

These intellectuals sought to unleash the potentialities of technology by instituting a hierarchical state capitalist or corporatist economic system under which the individual man would be aesthetically perfected in the guise of the worker: above all, they hoped to see the worker expend himself to fever-pitch under the pressure of wartime conditions, hence their convinced militarism.

Bohler’s identification of the Conservative Revolutionaries as irrationalists reveals another channel of Nietzschean influence upon reactionary modernism – namely, that of his vitalism. As Karl Löwith argues, Nietzsche fought against the linear conception of time, which postulated a rationally intelligible and definite end of history: for instance, the Christian (Löwith cited in Schloßberger, 2018, p. 547). In its place, Nietzsche introduced a cyclical conception of time with no salvific final cause of Creation anchoring the purposiveness of chronological passage; instead, Nietzsche introduced the ‘self-overcoming of nihilism in the face of eternal recurrence’ (Löwith cited in Schloßberger, 2018, p. 547). Armin Mohler identified the Conservative Revolutionaries with this precise sense of time’s cyclicity, writing that for the reactionary modernist, ‘every moment contains its full worth in itself and is not merely a station on the way to a separate final goal’ (Mohler cited in Schloßberger, 2018, p. 546). This cyclical conception of time is properly understood as both irrationalist and vitalist, in that it views the totality of life, along with any specific division thereof, as fully worthy and meaningful per se without the need for external justification.

As Christoph Schweer observes, Nietzsche’s blending of amoralism, aestheticism, irrationalism, and vitalism led quite naturally to a doctrine which rejected the necessity of making instrumental choices based on the vacuity of ethics, embracing instead the idea of intensity in all action. In this radical romanticism, Schweer argues, a new norm of ‘proclaimed intensity of Lebensgefühl [sense of life]’ was declared in the absence of contentual fixity (Schweer, 2018, p. 85). As Ernst Jünger, perhaps the most famous of the Conservative Revolutionaries, argued, ‘there is no alternative, no sideways and backwards; one can only increase the force and speed of the processes in which we are implicated’ (Schweer, 2018, p. 85). In this essay, Jünger and his thoughts will be considered representative of the broader Conservative Revolution due to his prominent role in the movement. Indeed, as the novelist Erich Müller put it, ‘Ernst Jünger is the paramount representative of this heroic nihilism’ expressed in the convictions of those ‘ready to blow Germany to pieces, lest she become absorbed into the West’ and its Enlightenment ideals of the equality of all men considered as rational, autonomous beings (Müller cited in Schloßberger, 2018, p. 564).

Thus, it is no surprise that the Conservative Revolutionaries identified themselves proudly with Nietzsche. ‘I am a disciple of Nietzsche, and take the greatest delight in a struggle for power wherever it occurs and whoever wins’, Jünger proclaimed in a 1926 interview with the English-language Evening Chronicle (Jünger cited in Schloßberger, 2018, p. 537). Similarly, Heinrich von Gleichen issued a gushing paean to ‘the conservative revolutionary Friedrich Nietzsche’ in his 1926 article ‘Jungkonservativ’, co-opting Nietzsche quite openly and readily into his political program (von Gleichen cited in Schloßberger, 2018, p. 541). Likewise, Gottfried Neeße was far from shy about declaring that ‘the father of the German Revolution is called Friedrich Nietzsche, and when the warriors of the new age speak of the fundamentals of their duty and their path, they speak with and think in the words and the thought of this man, who was himself a warrior’ (Neeße cited in Schloßberger, 2018, p. 543).

1: The Search For A Political Nietzsche

However, this is not to say that Nietzsche himself was a reactionary modernist. Indeed, Jünger readily admitted that ‘Nietzsche’s renaissance landscape had no place for the machine’ in his 1925 article ‘Die Maschine’. (Jünger cited in Herf, 1986, p. 29). Nietzsche criticised the industrial machine on account of mobilising ‘almost only the lower mechanical energies’ of the factory worker and failing to communicate the impulse ‘to climb higher, to become better, to become an artist’ (Nietzsche, 1880, XX), despite recognising the machine as ‘a product of the highest intellectual powers’ (Nietzsche, 1880, CCXX). Moreover, as Schweer argues, Nietzsche adopted a markedly different attitude towards existence overall, rejecting the rigoristic ‘pathos of heroic realism’ so beloved by the Conservative Revolutionaries in order to embrace ‘cheerfulness’ (Schweer, 2018, p. 95). In fact, Nietzsche’s works have proved singularly resistant to political interpretation across generations of scholarship and commentary due to various factors, including his general disinterest in political theory proper, instances of self-contradiction, and his own avowed perspectivism, best encapsulated by his declaration in Twilight of the Idols that ‘I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity’ (Nietzsche, 1889, ‘Sprüche und Pfeile’). Evidently, it is singularly challenging to pin Nietzsche down as belonging to any particular political camp, let alone the reactionary modernist one.

Yet Nietzsche did articulate explicit opposition to many of his chosen political bogeymen. Chief amongst their ranks was democratic egalitarianism. ‘Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority, where as its exception, he may forget the rule “man”’, Nietzsche crowed in Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche, 1973 [1886], p. 56). On this point, at least, Nietzsche and the reactionary modernists were closely aligned. ‘The mass’, Jünger wrote in Struggle as Inner Experience (1922), ‘is a beast of a thousand heads, it obstructs all movement, crushes anything it cannot swallow or engulf; it is envious, parvenu, common’ (Jünger, 1922, p. 30). Accordingly, Berel Lang views Nietzsche as an ‘aristocratic radical’ with a marked antipathy to mass-based politics of any kind, whether liberal-democratic or Marxist-socialist in nature, but also with no evident sympathy for any form of reactionary traditionalism, whether monarchic, feudal, or ultra-montane (Lang, 2003, p. 59). As for evidence for Nietzsche’s ‘radicalism’, Lang points her readers to Thus Spake Zarathustra, a text in which Nietzsche demonstrates an anarchic predilection for the destruction of the state. Nietzsche warns that ‘[o]nly where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable manner’ (Nietzsche, 1883, ‘Vom neuen Götzen’).

In Martin Ruehl’s (2003) view, it was precisely Nietzsche’s political leanings which caused his infamous break with his erstwhile mentor, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche’s first major work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), contained gushing paeans to the genius of Wagner as the total artist, the simultaneous composer and librettist, but his final major work, Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888), constituted a blistering criticism of a man he had come to recognise as a spineless Christian responsible for producing ‘narcotic’ music of the lowest kind (Ruehl, 2003, p. 65). Ruehl rejects the traditional understanding of the break as having been precipitated by Nietzsche’s disillusionment at Bayreuth during the 1876 rehearsals for the Ring cycle, as well as his horror at Wagner’s ‘genuflection before the Cross’ in Parsifal in favour of an explicitly political conflict which saw Nietzsche’s elitism rub up uncomfortably against his mentor’s taste for direct democracy, that is, rule by the masses for the masses (Ruehl, 2003, p. 65). The critical juncture, in Ruehl’s narrative, is represented by The Greek State, an unpublished introduction to The Birth of Tragedy dated to 1871. Ruehl hypothesises that Wagner forbade, or at least strongly pressured, his young protégé to refrain from publishing The Greek State due to his dislike for the ideas presented therein, leading to a permanent breakdown in relations between the two men (Ruehl, 2003). For Wagner, Periclean Athens was politically exemplary on account of its direct democracy, having been marred by the single flaw of the institution of slavery; Nietzsche’s The Greek State, on the other hand, preferred the Sparta of Lycurgus and sang the praises of slavery. As Nietzsche’s own close friend, Heinrich Köselitz (alias Peter Gast), observed, it was precisely Nietzsche’s ‘anti-revolutionary, anti-democratic taste [which] forever separated him from Wagner’s cause’ (Köselitz cited in Ruehl, 2003, p. 71).

However, as noted by Ryan Harvey (2022), Nietzsche remained a kind of Wagnerian to the very end, in the sense that he spent the rest of his life, at least until he succumbed to insanity, attempting to become more Wagnerian than Wagner. According to Harvey, Nietzsche had never abandoned his adherence to the Wagnerian doctrine of vitalism, ‘understood as a philosophical orientation that gives the category of life ontological priority over the categories of mind or intellect’ (Harvey, 2022, p. 15). In The Artwork of the Future (1849), Wagner declared that man would be incapable of reaching his true potential ‘until his Life is a true mirror of nature’ and went on to argue that ‘Science takes over the arbitrary concepts of the human brain, in their totality; while, by her side, Life follows in its totality the instinctive evolution of Necessity’ (Wagner, 1895 [1849], I.2). However, Nietzsche would later contend in An Attempt at Self-Criticism (1886), which served as the introduction to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, that Wagner’s music had been corrupted by the taint of moralism– that is, the reprehensible attempts of the intellect to fetter life to its groundless standards. Parsifal, Nietzsche noted bitterly, had failed spectacularly to affirm life as such, including ‘everything terrible, evil, cryptic, destructive and deadly underlying existence’, and had meekly resorted to ‘the moral interpretation and significance of existence’ as the weak, life-negating man incapable of bearing the brunt of existence would do (Nietzsche cited in Harvey, 2022, p. 194). As Nietzsche would go on to argue in The Case of Wagner (1888), the protégé had superseded the mentor in producing a work which issued a genuine, unconditional Yes to life: Thus Spake Zarathustra (Harvey, 2022, p. 228).

As such, it is no surprise that The Greek State, too, was a deeply Wagnerian work, despite its obvious and self-conscious opposition to everything Wagner stood for politically. It is a prime example of Nietzsche’s lifelong mission to become more Wagnerian than Wagner, in using a staunchly Wagnerian conceptual framework to produce a distinctly anti-Wagnerian conclusion. In this way, it might be argued that reactionary modernism also constituted a kind of Wagnerian politics, although Wagner himself would have abhorred the association. In being deeply influenced by both Nietzsche’s amoral aestheticism and his irrationalist vitalism – which were really a single phenomenon which decried morality as anti-vital – reactionary modernism would have been unthinkable without the initial existence of Wagnerian vitalism.

2: The Wagnerian Basis Of The Birth Of Tragedy

In order to understand the argument of The Greek State (henceforth to be referred to as GS), it is necessary to first turn to the work for which GS was intended as an introduction, The Birth of Tragedy (henceforth to be referred to as BT), a self-consciously Wagnerian work. The central claim made in BT is that ‘the existence of the self and that of the world are only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (Nietzsche, 1872, I). Consequently, Nietzsche states, ‘art is the highest task and the essential metaphysical capability of this life’. In BT, Nietzsche takes art ‘in the sense of that man to whom I here, as to my sublime pioneer on this path, wish this writing to be dedicated’ – Richard Wagner (Nietzsche, 1872, ‘Preface to Richard Wagner’). In BT, it is Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, which is held up as the exemplar of all artistic activity. For Nietzsche, the successful artwork is a hybrid art-form in which ‘[t]he myth protects us from the music, while it, by contrast, immediately gives the music its highest freedom’ (Nietzsche, 1872, XXI). As such, Tristan und Isolde’s ideality lies, in the first instance, in the very fact of it being an opera synthesising both textual myth and melodic music, rather than a poem or a purely instrumental work.

This veneration of the total artwork, or the Gesamtkunstwerk, was a Wagnerian idea, although, as we shall see, Wagner conceived of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a synthesis of dramatic action and vocal music, rather than a combination of text and melody. Wagner himself had already lamented the modern gulf between ‘the plastic arts of architecture, sculpture and painting’ and ‘the humanistic arts of dance, poetry and music’, seeing in ‘the fragmented nature of the art forms now in existence’ a reflection of ‘humanity’s own fragmented psyche in its separation from nature’ (Wagner cited in Harvey, 2022, p. 20). The visual arts, Wagner noted, addressed themselves to the ‘outer man’ and his experience of individuation, whilst the auditory and kinaesthetic arts addressed themselves to the ‘inner man’ and his experiences of unity and sameness. Only by creating and contemplating a total artwork, simultaneously encapsulating the twin truths of both individuation and oneness without lapsing into narrow-minded focus on one facet of existence or the other, could the human being achieve his true potential, in keeping with his vitalist stress upon the ontological priority of life as such, undivided and unmediated.

For Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk was the hybrid Musikdrama, defined by Theodor Mundt as a special form of formally unified opera without discernible arias or duets, which was uniquely capable of facilitating full, uninterrupted dialogue between individual man and the totality of Nature. ‘The dramatic Action […] is withal the moment in the entire artwork which ensures its widest understanding. Directly borrowed from Life, past or present, it forms the intelligible bond that links this work therewith’ (Wagner, 1895, V), he argued in ‘The Artwork of the Future’. In this way, Wagner understood drama to be the highest of the arts of the ‘outer’ man, deriving all its material from concrete particularities and in doing so strongly affirming human individuality. Vocal music, in turn, was the highest of the arts of the ‘inner’ man, in being uniquely capable of communicating with the deepest, most hidden recesses of human existence. The inner man, Wagner claimed, could ‘only find direct communication through the ear, and that by means of his voice’s Tone. Tone is the immediate utterance of feeling and has its physical seat within the heart, whence start and whither flow the waves of life-blood’ (Wagner, 1895, V).

Thus, by writing and composing Musikdramen, Wagner hoped to re-establish the primordial unity of the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’ man and restore the sickly moderns to full health, which the ancient Greeks had enjoyed most authentically. ‘Before what phenomenon do we stand with more humiliating sense of the impotence of our frivolous culture, than before the art of the Hellenes?’ Wagner marvelled (1895, I.6). Uniquely amongst all historical peoples, the ancient Greeks had not only united the three humanistic arts ‘to a trinitarian utterance of human Art […] the Lyric’ (Wagner, 1895, II.2) but had then extended the scope of their artistic activity from the inner to the outer world, that is, ‘to expand it to the exposition of Nature’ (Wagner, 1895, III.1), all without divorcing the plastic from the humanistic. ‘Let the modern Art of Building bring forth the gracefullest [sic] and most imposing edifice she can, she still can never keep from sight her shameful want of independence’ Wagner criticised (1895, III.1). In the ancient Greek world, on the other hand, architecture stood in proper relation to her humanistic sisters – the plastic and the humanistic had nourished and nurtured one another, having been viewed as integral facets of one unified corpus of artistic practice; ‘[U]nder the fair-ceiled roof, and amid the symmetry of marble columns of the God’s temple, the art-glad Lyrist led the mazes of his dance, to strains of sounding hymns’ (Wagner, 1895, III.1).

Yet even the ancient Greeks had not accomplished the creation of the true Gesamtkunstwerk. To be sure, Wagner was adamant that ‘the outlines for the Artwork of the Future’ – at the time of the writing of ‘The Artwork of the Future’, Wagner had yet to write any of his Musikdramen, having only completed romantic operas – would only arise out of a proper understanding of the fundaments of Hellenic art (Wagner, 1895, I.6). However, it would fall to the moderns to actually realise the ‘highest conjoint work of art [which] is the Drama’ (Wagner, 1895, IV). Greek lyric had indeed constituted a unification of the three humanistic arts, but Wagner’s qualification of this unity as a ‘primal, earliest manifested’ one (1895, II.2) was very deliberate. It was drama, instead, which constituted the ‘loftiest completion’ of the unification of the humanistic arts, and drama which would form the Gesamtkunstwerk once supplemented by ‘the stage, prepared by architect and painter’ (Wagner, 1895, IV). ‘Not one rich faculty of the separate arts will remain unused in the United Artwork of the Future; in it will each attain its first complete appraisement’ (Wagner, 1895, IV), Wagner enthused. ‘While Architecture and […] scenic Landscape-painting have power to set the executant dramatic Artist in the surroundings of physical Nature, and to dower him from the exhaustless stores of natural phenomena with an ample and significant background, so in the Orchestra, that pulsing body of many-coloured harmony, the personating individual Man is given, for his support, a stanchless elemental spring, at once artistic, natural, and human’, he continued – and thus, Bayreuth was born (Wagner, 1895, IV).

According to Nietzsche, however, the pre-Socratic Archaic Greeks had completed the total artwork with triumph. Thus, the salvation of modern art, and that of existence itself, lay in recovering the lost wisdom of the archaic Greek world, specifically the miraculous resolution of the principles of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the form of Attic tragedy. The Apollonian, according to Nietzsche, was to be identified with ‘the principium individuationis’—the principle of individuation and objectivization—responsible for the rational differentiation of discrete parts of reality from one another. The Dionysian, on the other hand, was that in which ‘the subjective succumbs to total forgetfulness of self’ (Nietzsche, 1872, II). There is a striking parallelism here between the Wagnerian conception of the plastic arts of the ‘outer’ man with the Apollonian, which Nietzsche identified with sculpture, and the humanistic arts of the ‘inner’ man with the Dionysian, which Nietzsche identified with music. Likewise, for Nietzsche, the Apollonian and Dionysian were not opposed principles, in the same way that for Wagner, the plastic and the humanistic arts were to be rightfully united in the Gesamtkunstwerk. Instead, they belonged to the fundamental nature of reality and acted in eternal tandem. He constructed a metaphysics in which ‘the really existing, the Ur-Eine, that is, the primordial One […] likewise requires the enchanting vision [of the Apollonian] for its continuous redemption’. As such, ‘our empirical existence, like that of the world at large’, was to be understood ‘as a conception of the primordial One produced anew in every moment’ (Nietzsche, 1872, IV). Thus, it was neither the case that the Apollonian forms stood as transcendental truth above the chaos of Dionysian amorphousness, as definite concepts giving a higher reality to the ground of being, nor the case that Apollonian appearance ultimately dissolved into Dionysian formlessness, as fleeting and ephemeral visions fated to return to the undifferentiated ground of being. In fact, Dionysian inchoateness necessarily produced Apollonian differentiations.

Nietzsche warned starkly against the disastrous consequences of privileging one principle over the other. Socrates, Nietzsche observed, had committed the grave error of uncritically embracing the Apollonian. In doing so, he had led humanity into its present, miserable state, characterised by an erroneous belief ‘in a correction of the world through knowledge’ (Nietzsche, 1872, XVIII). ‘The whole modern world is trapped in the net of Alexandrian culture and has as its ideal the offspring of Socrates, the theoretical man, who is equipped with the highest powers of cognition and works in the service of science’, Nietzsche lamented (1872, XVIII). The Socratic obsession with knowledge, namely with the rational division of the undifferentiated primordial One, could not ultimately redeem human existence, in assuming without real justification the identity of its regulative principle, namely that of efficacy, with that of existence itself. The influence of Wagnerian vitalism is strong here, with its abhorrence of privileging the categories of mind or intellect over the category of life.

It could, Nietzsche admitted, certainly determine the means by which the base material preconditions of man’s existence might be more efficiently upheld, but never the final cause of this said existence. Ultimately, the pursuit of the ‘earthly consonance’ of ‘the machines and the crucible’ would only serve to institute material satisfaction as the end of human existence without actually addressing the fundamental lack experienced by all created beings in relation to the fullness of the primordial One. Thus, the inescapable truth of the wisdom of Silenus delivered to King Midas would persist: ‘It would be best of all […] to not have been born, to not be, to be nothing. But the next best thing is […] to die soon’ (Nietzsche, 1872, III). On the other hand, the purely Dionysian man, otherwise called the tragic, was fully consumed by ‘the desire to be borne into nothingness’ (Nietzsche, 1872, XII). Having long ago realised that ‘eternal life flows on undisturbed behind the turmoil of appearances’, he would spurn his own individual existence itself as a mocking illusion (Nietzsche, 1872, XVIII). As such, Nietzsche suggested, one’s own individual existence could only be justified following the middle path which combined both the Apollonian and the Dionysian–that is, the Wagnerian, vitalist path of embracing life as a totality, without attempting to rationally or intellectually distinguish its worthy facets from its unworthy ones.

This middle path Nietzsche found reflected in the tragic artistic culture of pre-Socratic Greece, above all in the composition of ‘lyric poems, which, at the high point of their maturity, were termed tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs’ (Nietzsche, 1872, V). Lyric poetry constituted the synthesis of ‘the art of the sculptor, the Apollonian, and the non-pictorial art of the musician, the Dionysian’ (Nietzsche, 1872, I). While ‘the sculptor […] is submerged in the pure apperception of the image’, the Dionysian musician, lacking all pictorial reference, can only be in himself ‘the primordial pain and reverberation of the image’ (Nietzsche, 1872, V). In lyric poetry, however, ‘the word, the image, and the concept seek an expression analogous to music and take upon themselves the violence of music’ (Nietzsche, 1872, V). In this way, Nietzsche suggests, the lyric poet ‘merges […] with the original creator of the world’ and becomes ‘simultaneously subject and object’, achieving a revelatory understanding of the perpetual reciprocity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian by way of personal participation (Nietzsche, 1872, V). In writing melody, the archaic Greek lyric poet dissolved himself wholly into the Dionysian formlessness of the primordial One, but in writing lyrics, he simultaneously delivered the primordial One from its elementary muteness and solitude by bringing it to miraculous awareness of itself through the production of Apollonian externalities thus infinitely redeemed despite their intrinsic transience. Crucially, through justifying the existence of the world in this way, the lyric poet could justify his own existence.

It is as a modern-day Greek tragedy that Tristan und Isolde was lavished with praise by Nietzsche. As a purely instrumental work, it would have failed. No one, Nietzsche argues, would be capable of ‘perceiving the third act of Tristan and Isolde purely as an immense symphonic movement, getting no help from words and images’. Upon ‘hearing in the suffering glass case of his human individuality the echo of countless cries of desire and woe from the ‘wide space of the world’s night’ […] would such a man not fall apart on the spot?’, Nietzsche asks (Nietzsche, 1872, XXI). Luckily, however, ‘where we breathlessly imagined we were dying in a convulsive inner paroxysm of all our feelings with only a little linking us to this existence, now we hear and see only the hero mortally wounded and yet not dying, with his cry full of despair’, and here, Nietzsche remarks, ‘the Apollonian power breaks through, preparing for the reintegration of the almost shattered individuality with the healing balm of a blissful illusion’ (1872, XXI). In the end, however, ‘that Apollonian deception is broken up and destroyed […] In the total effect of tragedy the Dionysian regains its superiority once more. Tragedy ends with a tone which never could resound from the realm of Apollonian art’ (Nietzsche, 1872, XXI). In this way, Tristan und Isolde reconciles the audience to the metaphysical truth of things like no other artwork past or present. The deep inspiration gained from Wagner by Nietzsche is glaringly apparent here.

Leaving aside Tristan und Isolde, however, Nietzsche’s conception of the dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian and the existentially redemptive necessity of their unification in the total artwork of the lyric poem, especially the tragic dithyramb, appears itself to have been prefigured not only by Wagner’s concept of the plastic and the humanistic arts, but also the latter’s conceptions of Science and Life. In ‘The Artwork of the Future’, the dichotomy of Science and Life is presented as such: ‘Science takes over the arbitrary concepts of the human brain, in their totality; while, by her side, Life follows in its totality the instinctive evolution of Necessity’ (Wagner, 1895, I.2). Thus, Science can be read as having prefigured the Apollonian, as the principle of differentiation and particularity, whilst Life related to the Dionysian as the principle of the undifferentiated and the unified. Similarly, the reconciliation of Science with Life was uniquely capable of redeeming the existence of the world, just as the unification of the Apollonian with the Dionysian by the lyric poet was. ‘Science thus bears the burden of the sins of Life, and expiates them by her own self-abrogation […] The end of Science is the justifying of the Unconscious, the giving of self-consciousness to Life’, Wagner wrote, anticipating Nietzsche’s declaration that ‘art is the highest task and the essential metaphysical capability of this life’ (Wagner, 1895, I.2; Nietzsche, 1872, I).

There are evident differences between the Nietzschean and Wagnerian schemas. For instance, the Apollonian and the Dionysian were, for Nietzsche, ‘artistic powers […] which erupt from nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist’ – that is, fundamental principles of existence – while Wagner opposed the human artifice of rational Science to the natural spontaneity and fundamentality of Life (Nietzsche, 1872, II). However, Nietzsche’s conception of the metaphysical opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian and the existentially redemptive necessity of their reconciliation can essentially be understood in terms of a synthesis of the Wagnerian notions of Science and Life and the existentially redemptive necessity of their reunification with his conceptions of the humanistic and the plastic arts and the indispensability of their being united in the Gesamtkunstwerk for the flourishing of mankind. Yet, it is obvious from the way in which this was accomplished that, while Wagner understood the unleashing of human potentiality as an end in itself, Nietzsche considered human existence justified by its ability to redeem the existence of the world at large through tragic culture-creation. This constitutes the crucial difference underlying the vastly divergent political theories of both men.

3: The Greek State Between Vitalism And Aestheticism

Read in the context of BT, GS appears to stand in relation to BT in the exact manner in which politics has traditionally been understood, in the Western tradition, to stand in relation to ethics – that is, as the application of ethics on the societal level. GS outlines Nietzsche’s conception of a state in which man will function as artwork, personally participating in the perpetual interplay of the Apollonian and the Dionysian so as to justify the existence of the world, in keeping with his insistence in BT that ‘we are, for the true creator […] [beings] who attain the highest dignity in our capacity as works of art’ (Nietzsche, 1872, V). As it turns out, Nietzsche took this sentiment of man being a ‘work of art’ rather than a Wagnerian ‘artist’ to its logical extreme so as to declare that man possessed no inherent dignity or worth whatsoever, enabling him to project explicitly totalitarian political leanings. In doing so, he made a decisive political break with Wagner.

For Wagner, tragedy constituted the highest form of ancient lyric precisely because of its democratic character. Tragedy, Wagner argued, ‘flourished for just so long as it was inspired by the spirit of the Volk [the people, the ethne]’, the entire Volk being viewed, in this way, as one great, communal artist (Wagner, 1895, II.5). As such, it was the form of lyric whose dramatic action most closely mirrored Life and ‘the Necessity of elemental forces’ (Wagner, 1895, I.4), with Wagner having understood ‘the Volk alone’ to ‘act […] according to Necessity’s behests, and therefore irresistibly, victoriously, and right as none besides’ (Wagner, 1895, I.3). For Wagner, the popular character of tragedy was inextricably linked with the institution of democracy in fifth-century Athens where tragedy reached the pinnacle of its development. ‘Tragedy was therefore the entry of the Artwork of the Volk upon the public arena of political life’, he observed (Wagner, 1895, II.5). In another essay of 1849, ‘Art and Revolution’, Wagner made an even more explicit association of the communal nature of tragedy with democracy, whilst taking shots at Christianity on account of the equivalent parallelism between solitary prayer with autocracy:

Where the Greeks, for their edification, gathered in the amphitheatre for the space of a few short hours full of the deepest meaning: the Christian shut himself away in the life-long imprisonment of a cloister. In the one case, the Popular Assembly was the judge: in the other, the Inquisition; here the State developed to an honourable Democracy: there, to a hypocritical Despotism (Wagner, 2002, p. 8).

For Wagner, Athenian democracy had just one fatal flaw: the institution of slavery. One can therefore read his insistence in ‘The Artwork of the Future’ that the moderns had to go beyond Greek lyric tragedy to create the higher, more perfect Gesamtkunstwerk in the form of the Musikdrama as being supplemented by a political aversion to Hellenism in ‘Art and Revolution’. For Wagner:

No, we do not wish to revert to Greekdom […] It is their very fall, whose cause we now perceive after years of misery and deepest universal suffering, that shows us clearly what we should become; it shows us that we must love all men before we can rightly love ourselves (Wagner, 2002, p. 14).

Continuing to say that ‘[T]he man who was not Greek […] was still a man, and his barbarianism and his slavery were not his nature but his fate: the sin of history against his nature’ (Wagner, 2002, p. 14). As such, Wagner can be understood as a democrat and an egalitarian, a man who adored the vitality of the masses and abhorred all notion of dividing the Volk into a better or a worse part, a superior or inferior part, a man who believed in the basic equality of all men, their common right to freedom, and the shared germ of artistry and creativity living in each individual (his infamous anti-Semitism notwithstanding). It is not difficult to imagine the horror he would have felt upon setting eyes upon the manuscript for Nietzsche’s GS, a text in which his protégé lustily justified slavery, crowed triumphantly about violence being the foundation of right, and praised the ancient Greek world for its chronic condition of interstate warfare. In GS, politics essentially consists of the exploitation of human beings so as to facilitate the maximum of tragic culture-creation, no matter the amount of suffering this might cause to the individuals involved. Here, the slender difference between Wagner’s veneration of tragedy as a means to the end of human flourishing and Nietzsche’s praise of tragedy as a means to the end of justifying the existence of the world at large, was revealed to produce a gaping political gulf with spectacular effect.

Since it is ‘an impossibility that the man struggling for his daily existence can become an artist’, it was evident for Nietzsche that ‘slavery belongs to the essence of culture’ (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 275). Furthermore, Nietzsche stressed that ‘[t]he misery of those who eke out a living must be further intensified to enable a small number of Olympian individuals to engage in the production of the world of art’ (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 277). Here, the thrust of Nietzsche’s argument is that the few blessed with the ability to create truly tragic-aesthetic culture should be enabled to devote themselves fully thereto by any means available, not because those possessing artistic genius are in themselves worthier, more valuable beings, but because every man is to be sacrificed on the altar of culture, in whichsoever way he is able to contribute. In a direct snub of Wagner, Nietzsche pointed out that ‘even if it were true that the Greeks foundered because of their institution of slavery, the flipside is far more certain – that we will founder because of our lack of slavery’ (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 278). Against the predictable humanitarian outrage at suggesting the legitimacy of slavery, Nietzsche declared that ‘violence makes right, and there is no right that is not in principle arrogation, usurpation, outrage’ (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 279). Indeed, in his view, ‘man in himself, the absolute man, possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties […] only as a fully determined creature, serving a purpose unbeknownst to him, can man excuse his existence’ (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 284). Here, the full force of Nietzsche’s description of human beings as ‘works of art’ rather than ‘artists’ in BT becomes clear. In GS, Nietzsche revealed how the state was to exhaust its reserves of human material to bring the primordial One, the ground of being, to self-consciousness through the nigh-on industrial production of tragic culture.

If Wagner considered himself an Athenian, then Nietzsche surely saw himself as a Spartan. ‘Whoever beholds war and its uniformed possibility, the military profession […] must come to the impression that a reflection or even the archetype of the State is presented before us [therein]’, Nietzsche ruminated. This truth had been recognised, above all, by ‘the Lycurgian constitution of Sparta’, which had instituted ‘the creation of military genius’ as the chief object of state activity (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 283). For Nietzsche, the importance of war was twofold. On one level, he understood interstate war as necessary for culture-creation, and, therefore, to justify the existence of the world. ‘Without the state, in the natural war of all against all, society is altogether unable to put down any roots’, Nietzsche argued in Hobbesian fashion. However, against Hobbes, Nietzsche suggested not that the state would overcome the war of all against all, but that it would actually ‘concentrate’ this ‘instinct, from time to time, into the most dreadful fog of war between nations’. This, he stressed, was not only a positive development, but a necessary one, since it would only be in the pax post bello, ‘under the inwardly concentrated effects of that war’, that the political community could witness the ‘luminous petals of genius spring forth’ (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 281).

Of far more significance than this poorly explicated claim of war as laying the social foundation for culture-creation, is Nietzsche’s other justification of war: his direct aestheticist justification thereof. For Nietzsche, the Spartans’ recognition of the cultivation of military genius as the highest object of state activity was praiseworthy on account of its understanding of the proper station of man as culture-fodder to be utilised at will by the state, above all to the end of ‘his annihilation as a tool of the military artwork’ (Nietzsche, 1954, p. 284). Unfortunately, this embryonic claim, too, is mainly left unexplained, seemingly on account of GS having ultimately been rejected by Wagner, so that Nietzsche felt no need to seriously work on the arguments presented therein. Still, it is not particularly difficult to deduce exactly what Nietzsche meant by the idea of the ‘military artwork’ when one keeps the concept of ‘man as artwork’ presented in BT in mind.

Suppose that the concept of ‘man as artwork’ is used to denote the idea that the existence of individual human beings is justified by the expenditure of each individual by the state in order to facilitate the culture of existentially redemptive tragic culture. In that case, the ‘military artwork’ constitutes the grandest of artworks, in which human beings are led en masse to slaughter for the sake of the realisation of the tragic principle. In BT, Nietzsche explains that in the process of tragic culture-creation, the artist becomes ‘simultaneously subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator’ (Nietzsche, 1872, V). In GS, it becomes apparent that war itself is the highest consummation of tragedy, in which man truly becomes ‘simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator’, no longer in the symbolic sense of the sympathetic, sensitive artist transmuting his first-hand experience of reality into a communicative artwork, but in the genuine sense of the soldier as an agent of, participant in, and witness to military violence. That Janus-faced phenomenon in which the Dionysian negativity of the fragility of life leads not to resignation and ascetic renunciation but is instead combined to dizzying effect with the Apollonian positivity of the heroic to produce an orgiastic and deeply vitalistic celebration of the vigour of Creation even in the face of the ephemerality of all created things.

Nietzsche’s justification of militarism is aestheticist in the sense that it is concerned not with whether war is just to or beneficial for the individual human being in the moral sense, but rather with war’s ability to reflect the totality of life, in both its individuating Apollonian aspect and its diffluent Dionysian aspect, as an aesthetic phenomenon, beyond the moralistic categories of good and bad. Writing on the heroic nature of the Apollonian, Nietzsche declares that ‘here speaks only a prodigious, even triumphant existence to us, in which everything existent is apotheosised, whether or not it is good or bad’ (Nietzsche, 1872, III). The Dionysian, too, knows no distinction between good and evil, only primordial unity.

Martine Prange notes accordingly that ‘Daniel Came is certainly right when he states that the clash between moral and aesthetic value forms the axis of The Birth of Tragedy’ (Prange, 2013, p. 134). According to Nietzsche, Prange argues, ‘[t]he tragic Greek knows that life is good and that life is not good, precisely because he or she does not long for an appreciation of life as good ‘from our human perspective’ […] The only thing he or she longs for is the aesthetic view (transformation) of life’ (Prange, 2013, p. 137). In superseding the moral view of life with an aesthetic one, Nietzsche made another crucial break, perhaps the most crucial of all, with Wagner, who had argued in ‘Beethoven’ (1870) that the highest object of music was to express the belief in humanity’s original goodness (Prange, 2013). Yet, Nietzsche could not have accomplished this coup without being, at his core, a Wagnerian. Not only did his understanding of the tragic as the artistic unity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian initially arise from his engagement with the works of Wagner, but his aestheticist rejection of morality was also made possible, in the first place, by Wagnerian vitalism. Aestheticism, for Nietzsche, was the logical conclusion of vitalism. It discarded all pretension to moral judgements that would mark out certain facets of life as valuable and others as invaluable. All of life, Nietzsche declared, was henceforth to be affirmed as ripe for aesthetic affirmation. In Nietzsche’s own mind, he had only taken Wagnerianism to its logical conclusions. GS was intended by Nietzsche to show Wagner the true political implications of his vitalism and his conception of the existential redemption achieved by the reconciliation with Science with Life – that is to say, to demonstrate that taking such ideas seriously would culminate in aristocratic totalitarianism and not democratic egalitarianism.

4: Jünger As Nietzschean – And, By Extension, Wagnerian

Jünger likely never read GS; however, if he read BT (which he almost certainly did, considering the stature of the work within the Nietzschean corpus), then we can understand his reactionary modernism as having been underpinned by the same concerns as those underpinning the political framework of GS. In any case, many of the ideas in GS would reappear in later published works, of which Jünger would likely have at the very least been aware of. Nietzsche would go on to argue in Beyond Good and Evil:

The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy is that it […] accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings, who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments. Their fundamental faith has to be that society must not exist for society’s sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of human being is able to raise itself to its higher task (Nietzsche, 1973, p. 258).

Thus, we can establish a direct line of influence from Wagner to Jünger, the effects of which abound in Jünger’s political thought. According to David Ohana (2003, p. 268): ‘[s]eparating aesthetics from morality, which means raising creativity from a normative to a metaphysical level, was the central axis of the revolt against bourgeois norms in the late nineteenth century. The Nietzscheanism of the radical Right led, in the end, to the aestheticisation of philosophical thought and moral principles’.

Jünger, in particular, took Nietzschean aestheticism to many of the same conclusions that Nietzsche himself came to in GS. In Struggle as Inner Experience, Jünger phrased his militarism in a manner highly reminiscent of GS in that it presented war as the arena in which man could become the greatest of tragedians – so long as he possessed the strength to affirm existence as such without being scared off by the danger of his own individual expiration. ‘To sink into their lofty goallessness as into an artwork or as into the starry sky, that is granted only to the few. But who experiences in this war only negation, only inherent suffering and not affirmation, the higher movement, he has experienced it as a slave’, Jünger argued (Jünger, 1922, p. 107).

Likewise, utilising the familiar Nietzschean theme of opposition to the Socratic, Jünger declared in the preface to his brother Fritz’s The March of Nationalism that modern nationalists did ‘not want the useful, the private, and the pleasurable, but what is necessary and what is required by destiny’ (Jünger, 1926, p. 11). Nietzsche had charged Socrates with an untenable moralistic optimism grounded in the notion that ‘virtue is knowledge; sin is only committed out of ignorance; and the virtuous man is a happy man’. Thus, the Socratic could stubbornly hold tight to the idea that the ‘comprehended individual life is the only justifiable one’ (Mulhall, 2014, p. 119). Nevertheless, as Nietzsche showed in BT:

[w]hereas this optimism once believed in our ability to grasp and solve […] all the puzzles of the universe, and treated space, time and causality as entirely unconditional laws of the most general validity, Kant showed that these things actually only served to raise mere appearance […] to the status of the sole and supreme reality (Nietzsche, 1872, XVIII).

At this juncture, at which Socratic logic ‘bites its own tail’ (Nietzsche, 1872, XV), modern man was forced to become cognizant of the ‘necessary disappointment to which all theoretical optimism is fated’, and, as can be seen, Jünger confidently embraced this sense of ‘tragic knowledge about knowledge’ (Mulhall, 2014, p. 121).

Similarly, following the Nietzschean denial of the inherent dignity of the worth of human beings, Jünger’s ‘On Pain’ (1934) declared that ‘meritorious man […] is the one who is full of contempt toward the world of bourgeois mediocrity […] The body is not regarded as having any value in itself, but is an object or tool for the attainment of higher values that are achieved through the technological impulse’(Jünger cited in Ohana, 2003, p. 275). This theme is also present in the essay ‘Die Tradition’, in which Jünger asserted that ‘the individual may perish, but his fate […] and his consummation is ruin in the name of a higher, further goal’ (Jünger in Storch, 2018, 447). This declaration, in particular, echoes Nietzsche’s veneration of individual annihilation as a tool of the military artwork, the process by which man is exalted as artwork in the most intense, vigorous manner possible, as he is made into the meeting point of a maximally forceful collision between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

These manifold Nietzschean tendencies flowered in their fullest development in Jünger’s most important political text, The Worker (1932). Here, Jünger declared that ‘[t]he individual develops his highest power, develops domination in general where he is in a position of service. […] The deepest happiness of man lies in the fact that he will be sacrificed, and the highest art of command consists in the capacity to present goals that are worthy of sacrifice’ (Jünger, 1981 [1932], p. 36). Even in peacetime, the spirit of tragedy, as the unity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, could retain its omnipotence. The worker, Jünger envisioned, would achieve ‘personal satisfaction not through pursuing any external goal but through manifesting energy in production, transportation, and management’, driving himself ceaselessly towards dissolution and disappearance into Dionysian formlessness with the heroic strength of the Apollonian hero. Jünger’s love of the machine, too, can be understood in essentially Nietzschean terms, even if Nietzsche himself was deeply suspicious of industrial technology. For Jünger, the functioning of the machine encapsulated ateleological action, movement for movement’s sake, and as such, offered the possibility of a modern, vitalist supplantation of the Socratic, which would justify life as an aesthetic phenomenon without the need for the postulation of final moral ends. In Fire and Blood (1925), Jünger marvelled at how modern Germany was beginning ‘to reconcile itself with the machine and to see in it not only the useful but the beautiful as well. This reconciliation is an important first step out of a grey, frightful world of utilitarianism, out of the Manchester landscape in which coal dust covers over all values’ (Jünger cited in Herf, 1986, p. 79).

Conclusion

It may be recalled that Nietzsche was also highly prone to decrying the tyranny of the state, as much as he entertained the idea of a hierarchical, enslaving aristocracy – Thus, Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil are diametrically opposed in this way. When one views the Nietzschean corpus in its entirety, Nietzsche’s political thought is a strange, rudimentary, fragmented thing indeed, with GS only representing one particular strand of Nietzschean politics: a political stance made possible by Nietzschean aestheticism. Yet this aestheticist strain would prove highly influential in the decades to come, as evidenced by the obvious influence of Nietzschean aestheticism upon the political thought of Jünger. Armin Mohler and Karlheinz Weißmann even go so far as to assert that even if ‘Nietzscheanism had political adherents in all camps, it had a natural affinity to the right’ – and ‘not the right in the traditional sense’, and certainly not the anti-Semitic or völkisch right, but the ‘new right’, that is, the Conservative Revolutionaries and their seemingly paradoxical blend of reaction and modernism (Kaufmann & Sommer, 2018, p. 6). Even if GS itself did not directly influence Jünger, the aesthetic anti-moralism underpinning the argument of BT evidently did. In this sense, we can also charge Jünger with an essential Wagnerianism, for it was Wagner and his vitalism which lay at the root of Nietzschean aestheticism. Jünger’s reactionary modernism was, at its core, a direct heir of Wagnerian vitalism.

Zoe Zhang

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