Sympathy for the Devil: A Defense of Wasting Time with Nietzsche

Posted by JC Sanders | 6 comments

My last post on this site was my take on why not to read Nietzsche. I received a few comments which partially agreed with me but questioned whether is was a little presumptuous to say that there is nothing of value in Nietzsche–perhaps even a little cynical (ironic, no?). I probably should have mentioned that the last post was part of a sort of “internal debate” and that it would be followed by a second part, which would be in defense of wasting time on Nietzsche [1]. This is that brief defense.

Before I get too carried away, I would like to make a few preliminary notes. First, there will necessarily be some contradictions between this post and the last. It is, after all, a sort of debate, albeit an interior one. Second, there are some assumptions made explicit in my last post and the comments therein which still apply here. Namely, that Nietzsche shouldn’t be read at the expense of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas (at the very least), and that what he has to say is for the most part not true and not good (that is, the central tenets of his philosophy are neither good nor true) [2]. Third, I am here addressing Nietzsche but I think a lot of what I say here could pertain to other “great books” as well (I am thinking of Marx, Rousseau, Hegel, Kant…). Finally, I am writing for the young Catholic everyman who wants to be well-rounded, not necessarily for the professional philosopher.

With that in mind, there are some reasons to read Nietzsche. A number of them are already mentioned in the comments to my last post, so I will not rehash all of these–so this is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list–but rather will focus on a few reasons which come to my mind.

• Read him to see the really logical consequences of rejecting God and where that leads–and also to see that the New Atheists for the most part are quite vapid by contrast.
• Read him to get a historical perspective of philosophy and also for our culture. The world may be better off without his philosophy, but unfortunately the world is not without his philosophy, so why pretend that it does not exist?
• Read him because of his cultural criticism, in particular the observation that “Christ was the last Christian.”
• Read him to better refute him.
• Finally, read Nietzsche as a means of strengthening your faith by contrast.

Nietzsche shows where being Godless ultimately leads: to hell on earth. We can spend our time trying to convince ourselves that this isn’t so. He alone among the atheists philosophers really grasped what it means for God to not exist. We can develop a system of morality which is alternative to the traditional Judeo-Christian morality, be it consequentialism or virtue ethics or what have you. We can even attempt to live according to that morality, to be “good” or “virtuous” people, and to succeed at these things. Nietzsche gets to the point by asking, essentially, ‘why bother?’ If there is no absolute truth and no such thing as good and evil, then might really does make right. We might try to convince ourselves that the strong have some sort of obligation to the weak, but really they have an obligation to themselves, to their will to power or life or the superman (or the race of overmen).

This sets a historical stage for the a world leader who took Nietzsche very seriously, enough so as to model his Reich at least in part on Nietzsche philosophy [4]. He would build his race of supermen, his master race; and the world would be shaken by his war. Of course, like Nietzsche, Hitler ended his days in despair and perhaps in madness.

Hell is unleashed on earth, and also in the mind. Concerning Nietzsche, Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy that

“The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have a softening of the heart must at least have softening of the brain.”

Unfortunately, Nitzscheism did not die with Nietzsche, nor with Hitler. Nihilism is still certainly an undercurrent in our culture now–if not exactly in the form that Nietzsche himself developed [3]–and is perhaps most evident in the so-called “hipster” culture. Thus, from our vantage point in history it is not a mere philosophical aberration, a a fad which arose for a decade or three and then died off with the generation which spawned it. Perhaps it will linger for centuries, and or perhaps it will work more violence as it dies, sucking the civilized world into a pit of darkness and despair as it suffers its own death pangs. Who can tell?

I somehow doubt that Nietzsche will be relegated to being a mere historical footnote a millennium hence, and he certainly isn’t now [5]. Thus, we might read some of his works to gain a better understanding of a philosophy which, though wrong, though even evil, is nonetheless widespread and influential. It is a philosophy with which even the everyman must grapple, and in particular the every Catholic, if he be faithful to his baptismal call to be a prophetic witness and an evangelist. He must certainly be familiar with Nietzsche–and with why Nietzsche is wrong–to survive college intact; yet ironically enough, the high school and college years are the most dangerous time during which to read Nietzsche, as Fr Schall (among others) will attest [6].

This brings me to the last two reasons for reading Nietzsche. We can read him to be better able to refute him. Of course, it gets tricky here again. We can refute him from a theoretical/academic perspective, as a professional philosopher might (and should). But we rarely encounter anyone whose philosophy is identical to Nietzsche’s. Yes, it may draw, borrow, or derive from Nietzsche, but odds are that it will also be something different. This is where Padre Pio’s example is again worth looking at: tell me what this Nietzsche said, and then I will tell you where he went wrong. We can and should do justice to Nietzsche even when disagreeing with him–which means reading him or at the very least reading some excellent commentaries [7]. On the other hand, many people who are influenced by Nietzsche may or may not actually adhere to his philosophy: and so we need not have actually read Nietzsche to refute or (better) evangelize them.

And of course, in the process of reading Nietzsche and grappling with him, we may find our own faith strengthened by contrast. That is, I think, the one truly good reason to waste time with his writings directly.

—-Footnotes—-

[1] Two notes here. The first is that I have edited my original second post a bit in part because of feedback received. The second is that “wasting” time is not always a bad thing. What else do we do with our time, especially if all of our “tasks” are done? What do we do when all of the “important” things are done, and for that matter, what counts as “important”? I’d recommend another of Fr Schall’s books here, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs.

[2] Given that he himself seems to have believed that there is absolutely no such thing as absolute truth (a self-contradictory belief) and that there is no such thing as objective good, either, I suspect that he himself would not disagree with me in this assessment.

[3] Full disclosure: I’ve read some of his works, but not most let alone all. I’m therefore basing this assessment on what fragments I have read, and on the assessments found in a number of commentaries.

[4] Whether that was Nietzsche’s ultimate intention or not, I won’t say. Maybe the Nazis only expropriated his writings for their own purposes. On the other hand, a man who can say that his philosophy will lead to “wars such as there have never been on earth before. Only from my time on will there be on earth politics on a grand scale” (W, II, p. 1153) can hardly be called innocent when those wars come to pass.

[5] On the other hand, since this is a Catholic site, I think that there is another question which ought to be asked: will any of his works survive in the afterlife? I suspect yes–they will be read daily in Hell, as they have certainly led more than a few souls there. I’m not so sure if they will be much contemplated elsewhere.

[6] Indeed, he writes about his experiences with Nietzsche as a teenager in The Life of the Mind. He also notes elsewhere in that book that there is a certain age at which it is best to encountered certain ideas, that there is a danger in exposing a young mind to a new idea, even a great idea, too soon. The danger is usually that the mind will not appreciate the idea if exposed to it too early; I think that with Nietzsche, the opposite is the problem, that an especially angsty teen or young twenty-something will appreciate Nietzsche too much and for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, a bitter forty-something may get the same experience. Let us not forget that Nietzsche is ultimately a poison, so I would never recommend reading him without having an antidote on-hand.

[7] I would recommend Henri Cardinal de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheist Humanism and Fr Vincent Micelli’s The Gods of Atheism. And, to round of my list of Jesuits at three, I’ve been reading from Fr Frederick Coppleston’s A History of Philosophy, which gives a broad overview of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks until now. On the other hand, Prof Mortimer Adler writes in his How to Read a Book that in order to really do justice to a thinker, you must interact with his thought directly (or as nearly directly as possible). Commentaries are good for getting breadth and even sometimes depth; but they cannot ultimately replace reading the real thing. Of course, the Catholic everyman may or may not have time to read “the real thing,” so a good commentary/summary is often the best he can do.