If the Last Man reads Nietzsche, what then?

Sartre’s Nausea answers this question, and it’s not a pretty picture. The novel’s anti-hero, Roquentin, undertakes a distinctively modern enterprise, a diary, in order “to see clearly” and to “classify” the “small happening” of his life, which changes imperceptibly. (Hence his desk-clerking: observer of endless comings and goings.) He lacks “self-knowledge,” puzzling over the Cartesian question, Have I changed, or have objects changed? He is a man of ressentiment, for whom small, unconscious sentiments build up, resulting in angry seemingly sudden decisions—rather as a political revolution builds up under an accumulation of remembered injuries. This is the way the novel itself proceeds: through foreshadowings of the resolution in the last pages.

This burned-out Cartesian lives alone, speaks to no one. “I receive nothing, I give nothing.” “When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.” The classical-philosophic exit is closed; eros doesn’t move him, only sex without passion. He gave up his lover because he and she lacked “the strength to bear the burden” of “implacable, torrid love.” The religious exit is also closed: “I’m neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.” His proposed exit, historiography, is turning out to be another dead end: “Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigor of the order I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.” Having invented the fact, modern man knows not what to do with it. His self-examination yields only “self-contempt.” The longer he looks at his ugly face in the mirror, the more he sees that “nothing human is left.” Self-examination leads not to self-knowledge but to a feeling: “It seems that I see my own [face] as I feel my body, through a dumb, organic sense.”

Society is no exit, either. People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.” Humanity is sociality, but society too is empty, as seen in the card game he watches. Our time—after the Great War—is a “viscous puddle,” nauseating. (Recall Nietzsche: nausea over man is a great danger. But Roquentin is no Zarathustra.) Politics is a realm of hatred and blood, as seen in the torn campaign posters he passes. The jazz song he hears relieves the nausea for awhile, but leaves him within it; for the moment, art is no exit, either. Only the coldness and unloving purity—the opposite of viscosity—of the Boulevard Noir appeals to him: “To be nothing but coldness.” But in the end “I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.”

So Roquentin begins to define himself against. He is not Gustave Impetraz, the school inspector immortalized in stone, whose “Christian ideals” have themselves become statuesque, unloving dead authority fof the “narrow, small ideas” of the bourgeoisie. The slave-morality Nietzsche excoriated has become an enslaving morality of, by, and for the mediocre. Roquentin is not the Self-Taught Man, who represents something like the exhaustion not of Christianity but of Hegelianism, proceeding dutifully and arbitrarily through the contents of the library, starting at ‘A’ and heading toward ‘Z’—at which point, what then? The prophetic power of the religious and also the Hegelian tradtion end in Roquentin watching an old woman and seeing the future. “What advantage will accrue from its realization?”

Adventure, another attempt to make the bourgeoisie more spirited, has of course been a modern theme from the beginning. It is no exit. Adventure means that your life is a story, with beginning, middle, and end. But your life cannot be a story for you, if you are honest. Everydayness is no adventure, as Heidegger and Lukacs were also saying around this time; everydayness is banal, compromised, altogether bourgeois. It is another form of the Cartesian problem of subject and object: “a man is always a teller of tales,” “but you have to choose: live or tell.” In the grips of the Cartesian problem, Roquentin lacks the strength (or the self-deception?) to seize the Machiavellian/Cartesian solution: resoluteness, spiritedness. “When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes. I knew I was inflating myself with heroism, but I let myself go, it pleased me. After that, the next morning I felt as sick as if I had awakened in a bed full of vomit.”

The Last Man is sick with himself. So he gives Maurice Barrès a spanking. Barrès seduced bourgeois, turn-of-the-century French youth with faux-Nietzschean patriotism and sent them into battle in the Great War, anticipated as a great adventure, there to suffer unheroic deaths. Fighting in the Great War was a practical substitute for reading Nietzsche, a substitute accessible to everyone. The Last Man is a democrat.

The Rights of Man? They are fossilized in the portraits in the Bouville Museum, portraits of haute bourgeois rulers of the town from 1875 to 1910—that is, from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (particularly the reaction against the Paris Commune) to the futility of the modern ambition: “They had enslaved Nature: without themselves”—with their sanitation projects, their improved roads and civic betterment—”and within themselves”—the deathbed farewell to the wife, “I do not thank you, Thérèse; you have only done your duty.” They are only five-foot-tall men made to look like eminences by artists who sold themselves out. “Farewell, beautiful lilies, elegant in your painted little sanctuaries, goodbye, lovely lilies, our pride and reason for existing, good-bye you bastards.” This is the critique of the ruling bourgeoisie not by Zarathustra but by the Last Man: no spirited overcoming, only resentment.

“There is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing,” Roquentin tells the Self-Taught Man, who yatters about socialist humanism. The Self-Taught Man claims that “All men are my friends,” has no friends, and lusts after adolescent boys. He is not even the Enlightenment figure of the misplaced abstraction Burke criticized, the philosophe who loves humanity and hates people; the Self-Taught Man lacks the strength to hate. In Carlyle’s terms, he can’t even get to the ‘Everlasting No.’ Roquentin can get to the ‘No.’ There is no reason for existing. Self-preservation, the bourgeois principle par excellence, is therefore meaningless. It too is an abstraction from reality, a mere symbol for that which exist. The humanist’s “tender, abstract soul will never let itself be touched by sense of a face”; it fends off nausea with illusions.

La nausée, c’est moi. The viscous, the “soft, monstrous masses all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness (imagery perhaps taken from Malraux’s La Voix royale, its title an ironic use of a Cartesian trope) is what really exists beneath the “veneer” of life. “The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence”; things or facts have a “passive resistance to explanation and even to sense perception.” Only by feeling this, in “horrible ecstasy” or emptying-out, can Roquentin understand and possess ‘the nausea.’ Only the resolute admission of radical contingency, not the high-modern attempt to dominate it by politics and technology, can a man exit the Cartesian trap. Cartesian resoluteness remains, but redirected to a different branch of technē: writing of songs and stories, realms of purifying imagination. “Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you….” This is prophetic and apocalyptic language, whereby ‘existence’ replaces the Christian Holy Spirit and the Hegelian Absolute Spirit; it also replaces the Nietzschean will to power, which makes beings seem too spirited, too youthful and resolute. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” This is Nietzsche for the middle-aged and disillusioned, for the Last Man. he can now meet with his old lover and come to terms with her in his own mind; he can now feel sympathy for the real person that is the Self-Taught Man, and not for his abstract ‘Humanity.” He can now wish to be transformed, not into a statue but into music, a jazz tune, and decides to write a novel—a non-ossifying art-form. In his autobiography, The Words, Sartre criticizes this final move in the novel. “I palmed off on the writer the sacred powers of the hero.” “Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.”

Sartre himself never overcame ressentiment. One of his funniest scenes is Roquentin’s imagining of the great Doctor Rémy Parottin, surrounded by acolytes, taking a special interest in the headstrong, rebellious youth, saving the lad’s soul, enlightening him by bringing him to understand “the admirable role of the elite.” Parottin’s cure for rebellion consists of an appeal to vanity. In the last decades of his life, Sartre did nothing to discourage acolytes, and one can easily imagine him taking special interest in the most headstrong, saving/enlightening their souls with pep talks on Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, an elite of a different sort.

“In Emerson we have lost a philosopher,” Nietzsche writes, lamenting that “such a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit” never had “gone through some strict discipline, a really scientific education.” By contrast,, “Schopenhauer as Educator” might also have been titled “Schopenhauer as Philosopher.” To consider Emerson and Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer together is to consider the difference between a philosopher and an intellectual.

Emerson is the first American intellectual. By ‘intellectual’ I don’t mean a clerk, a Hegelian ‘knowledge-worker’-cum-bureaucrat, the sort of professor Nietzsche despises. I mean a secular preacher, a professor in the literal sense, one who makes a living using knowledge to persuade. Earlier Americans had had of course engaged in intellectual pursuits, but they had day jobs: Jonathan Edwards a clergyman; Franklin a printer and politician; Jefferson a politician and so-so farmer; Adams an attorney and politician, and so on. Emerson is the one who goes on the lecture circuit.

Typically, an American intellectual might also be described as an American mind stocked with German ideas. Emerson was that, too, and again a pioneering one, serving much the same function in America as his friendly acquaintance Carlyle served in England: an introducer of German philosophic themes and preoccupations to a decidedly untranscendental public. If the Germans may be said to have continued and transformed Rousseauian spiritnednes or thumos in modern philosophic thought, such cultural middlemen as Emerson and Carlyle brought that spiritedness out of the Continent, roiling bourgeois waters, for better or worse, ever since.

Nietzsche dismisses Carlyle as garrulous, confused, preeminently a man of indigestion—that is, a man who mixes nihilism and Christian nostalgia, a man who needs a faith, an Everlasting No followed by an Everlasting Yea, a man who lacks the strength to make himself his own end. Emerson does not lack that strength. Finding even Unitarianism insufficiently latitudinarian, he writes that Jesus “saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of the world” (“An Address”). The Church distorted this teaching with its claim that Jesus was God, come to earth unique in his divinity. Thus “men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” (Nietzsche will say, famously, He is dead, meaning something like what Emerson means.) Make yourself “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost” (thus far, Hegel); “all men have sublime thoughts” (Hegel democratized).

Emerson calls his countrymen to thumos. Not ‘Know thyself’ so much as ‘Trust thyself’ is his motto: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” and if your innermost promptings be Satanic, then say with Milton’s spirited Satan, “Evil be thou my Good.” Nietzsche read “Self-Reliance” as a youth, and found a rhetorical strategy to last a lifetime: “The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines,” an instance of thesis-antithesis dialectic borrowed from the Germans. Reject the “miscellaneous popular charities” of the compassion industry; that portion of the Rousseauian project has outlived its usefulness. “Power is, by nature, the essential measure of right” because self-sufficiency, not dependence upon God or men, frees us to receive the “immense intelligence” of the over-soul, a being bearing no small resemblance to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. “God will not make himself manifest to cowards,” and “the reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.” Genius is not imitative but “intellect constructive” (Hegel, again); Nietzsche will call this “the plastic power.” Nature only seems stable. “The universe is fluid and volatile, a rapid efflux of goodness [there, the Rousseauian core of ‘Germanism’] executing and organizing itself”; this “eternal generator” is the one thing lasting, and needful.”

Unlike Hegel, Emerson’s immanentism is not discursive; it issues in silence, not speech. (Well, in principle, at any rate. The peripatetic lecturer deserved as much as anyone the wisecrack aimed at Carlyle, that he preached the doctrine of silence in twenty volumes.) Nor is this immanentism logical; Nietzsche was right to find Emerson unscientific, and it is inconceivable that he would write a Logic. His experimentalism (the “endless seeker with no Pack on my back”) evokes Rousseau’s solitary walker, not Hegel’s end-of-history sage. Emerson wants the home libre to be footloose. The eternal generator is “superior to knowledge and thought,” forever “creat[ing] a life and a thought as large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that which is made instructs how to make a better” in eternal progress. This raises the question of whether the eternal generator is conscious or not. If not, can it be said to be superior to all its creations? Nietzsche was right to find Emerson not quite a philosopher.

“Away, pachyderms, away!” Nietzsche shoos ponderous Hegelians, who image that “the race is at its zenith.” Look around you, fools: Does this look like the apex of anything? What is needed first of all is not the knowledge culture but the knowledge of life, of instinct reawakened. Nietzsche is in this sense the Rousseau of the Hegelian Enlightenment.

Schopenhauer as educator means Schopenhauer as philosopher because a potential philosopher can only be educated by another philosopher. From Emerson Nietzsche borrows the advice of finding oneself by looking at what “you have truly loved up to now,” the piece of fatum that is above you, not within you, and of living courageously (later, “dangerously”) according to it. The spiritlessness of the late demi-Christianity is the enemy, as it is for Emerson. Nietzsche pushes beyond Emerson, however, in saying that philosophy is not an ascent from the cave but a descent into it, into the cave of solitude. In most times a philosopher finds himself alone—assuredly not on the lecture circuit—with “not a single companion truly of his own kind to console him.” The philosopher retreats from the tyrannies of public opinion to “the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart,” where lurks his greatest danger, the dragon of ressentiment, whereby bitterness against conformism enlarges into a melancholy metaphysic of ‘being’ and anti-appearance. (In The Gay Science Nietzsche says that the philosopher who rails against the mediocre, those stolid metronomes of the slow in spirit, has no right to philosophize—although it must be admitted that Nietzsche did his share of railing against the mediocre.) The real philosopher unresentfully “acquire[s] power so as to aid the evolution of the physis and to be for a while the corrector of its follies and ineptitudes,” to be a lawgiver and not a bureaucratic State-server, a Hegelian philosopher. (Schopenhauer, in the thumotic line of German philosophers, denounces Hegel as “a clumsy charlatan” who has spawned scholars “incapable of thinking, coarse and stupefied.)

Although many of the modern philosophers are philosophers of thumos, Nietzsche is preeminently so. “It is necessary for us to get really angry for once in order that things get better”; heroism not value-free social science, self-forgetting not (animal-like) self-preservation, will overcome the untenable tightrope-walker, Man. The intellectuals’ role is, first, to get out of the philosopher’s way by resisting the impulse to sink their sharp little teeth into everything great (recall Hegel: “Free man is not envious….”). Schopenhauer makes a fine object-lesson, here, writing in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, that the professors “are qualified for philosophy by the ministry, whereas I am simply by nature.” Second, they should try to cultivate a culture that will produce philosophers, artists, saints, rather than mere professors of philosophy, art, and religion. Intellectuals, don’t be a bunch of greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number, utilitarian-commercial-political-prettifying-scientistic, unerotic, unthumotic drones—a gaggle of polite Englishmen.

Reason may be cunning, but reason doesn’t rule nature, and nature is a blunderer, forever misfiring its precious philosophic arrows into the great swamp of the world. Under such conditions, a philosopher needs “an inflexible and rugged manliness.” He will be not merely a great thinker but a real human being. His freedom will be wonderful–in the Greek-philosophic sense—and perilous, to himself and others. His freedom from convention is also a debt, obligating him to do something with it. “Love of truth is something fearsome and mighty”: Does this not retain a sort of political ambition, indeed a supreme political ambition, that came to grief in those twentieth-century men who heeded Nietzsche’s call? It is true that Nietzsche might not have minded their coming to grief, but to come to grief without anything to show for it (did 1996 differ much from 1896?) might drive even Nietzsche to the melancholy of the labyrinth of solitude.

One last thing: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, despite their sharp differences, all express interest in Eastern (especially Hindu) thought—Nietzsche, for example, cites The Laws of Manu). Immanentism is their answer to ‘semitic’ creationism. Even this has been vulgarized, as ‘New Age’ drivel proliferates.

In the introduction to The Philosophy of History Hegel takes up the Aristotelian distinction between philosophy and history. Aristotle ranks history below philosophy (and below poetry) because history lacks generality. Hegel replies that the events of history reveal a rational process, that reason is not only prescriptive but productive. To speak theologically, Hegel resolves Aristotle’s history-philosophy distinction, and vindicates history, by claiming that god is not an unmoved mover but a self-moving mover. Hegel’s God is neither Anaxagorean nous nor the Biblical disposer of Providence. ‘God’ or the Absolute Spirit is immanent, moving not only over the waters but within the waters; the waters themselves are congealed or self-alienated, concretized, Absolute Spirit. In Platonic terms, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit amounts to a synthesis of logos and thumos, reason and spiritedness, emerging from the apparently material desires. It is this melding of reason and spiritedness that gives Hegel’s thought its characteristically ‘modern’ (Machiavellian-Cartesian-Baconian) air, that telltale whiff of grapeshot. The mastery of fortune and the conquest of nature remain, redefined as aspects of the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit as it moves toward the end, the purpose of ‘History.’

The Absolute Spirit is free (the Rousseauian theme) because self-determined; unlike matter, it is not determined by gravity or anything else. History consists of the working-out of Absolute Spirit. With no false modesty, Hegel claims that the Germans discovered that man as such is free—in contrast with the Greeks, who supposed that only some men are, and in even sharper contrast with the Asians, Africans, and native Americans, who have yet to ascend to even that small degree of self-conscious spiritedness. (For example, the native Americans are said not merely to lack reason but to lack spiritedness, to be merely passive, a mere quantitative mass, like nature itself—and unhistorical therefore.)

Seeing is not the same as achieving, Hegel sees. Real history, even in Germany, has been a slaughter-bench. Passionate self-seeking coexists in a matrix with eruptions of Absolute Spirit; sometimes, as seen in great men or world-historical individuals, the passion and the eruption coincide. Lesser men follow great men, feeling “the irresistible power of their own Spirit thus embodied”; the life-force philosophy of Nietzsche is here, but still in rationalist form. (Nietzsche is the Rousseau of the Hegelian Enlightenment.) Apparently chaotic historical concatenations are all part of “the cunning [which literally means ‘knowing’] of history,” as the passions of men are gratified but simultaneously and often unwittingly build up the edifice of rationality: the State. Right comes out of this concordia discors of selfish wills, superintended by the Absolute Spirit, which struggles out of matter in the manner of never-finished Michelangelos.

True freedom is therefore collective, within the State, not ‘bourgeois-individual.’ All individual worth is possessed through the State, as shaped by great men, in the conflictual-thumotic and rational self-development of the national spirits or Volkgeists, themselves particular expressions of the Absolute Spirit. Rousseauian perfectibility comes not according to nature but in contradiction to it, even as nature itself exists only via the Absolute Spirit’s self-alienation. The ascent from the Cave of mere opinion—the most noteworthy achievement of Plato’s philosopher—has been illusory, inasmuch as religion, art, and even philosophy and science are subsumed under the larger category of ‘culture.’ The ‘Idea’ or final manifestation of Absolute Spirit is no mere ‘ideal,’ never to be actualized, but something to be struggled for, achieved conceptually in the thought of G. W. F. Hegel (again, no false modesty), and achieved in politics by the realization of a stable constitutional monarchy buttressed by a bureaucracy whose members will have been culled from the very bourgeoisie that is now merely commercial-selfish. Thus shall logos and thumos triumph together (as they could only do in speech, hitherto) in what might be called an attempted synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem, theory and practice, rationality and providence. That is to say, if Absolute Spirit/ideas are productive, and find their consummation in discourse, then the dreams of sophists and rhetoricians shall be realized, and speech will complete reality; in theological language, words shall become flesh or, more precisely, flesh words.

The metaphysical connection between man’s freedom/conscious human will and Freedom/Absolute Spirit/historically inevitable dialectical progress may be seen in Hegel’s Logic, to which he refers more than once in his Introduction. To make a long story short, Hegelian logic attempts to account for change; it proceeds dialectically not analytically. Deeper than contradiction is thinking the thing contradicted. To think ‘X,’ and then to think ‘not-X,’ is not to annihilate ‘X’ but to retain both ‘X’ and ‘not-X’ in one’s mind; contradiction simultaneously is and is not ‘X’; we posit as we negate. Hegel avoids subjectivism by saying that this sagacious knowing, and not merely wisdom-loving or philosophic, thinking is the mind of a particular sage. One function of contradiction is to show the impossibility of apartness; everything is part of a Whole. This logic of Becoming contains both Being and Nothing; nothing, or negating, is what keeps Being from inertia. The Absolute Spirit is neither a thing (as is nature for some Greeks) nor a subject (as is the God of the Bible); it is the formation-process of subjects and objects; wisdom is the knowledge of the formation process. This obviates the problems associated with epistemological foundationalism. Hegel is a sage or so-phist, not a philo-sopher, because the whole is itself Proteus-like (and therefore Protagoras-like!), a changeling. Sagacity or wisdom sees the slaughter-bench of history with equanimity, knowing itself to be the final result of the slaughter, physical and intellectual/dialectical. Sagacity satisfies, because the sage embodies the unity of what humans want and need, the grand assimilation of every ‘X’ and ‘not-X.’

Politically, this means that ‘otherness’ is relational, not destructive, but one must be very cautious here. Hegel is no college administrator, playing a more sophisticated version of ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ by commending the love of ‘diversity.’ Hegel’s idea of a great man in political history is Napoleon, whose assimilations involved real spilt blood.

Having jettisoned the Biblical God and undermined its own conception of natural right by making nature unteleological (which founders on the ‘is-ought’ problem, as Hume sees), modern thinkers first tried to found morality on natural freedom (Rousseau), then on rationality divorced from nature (Kant). The latter scheme of reason-as-lawmaker runs afoul of the nihilist implications of the universalization principle of the categorical imperative, which, as Hegel remarks, could as well result in the command, ‘Thou shalt steal’ as ‘Thou shalt not….’ ‘History’ is the next way-station, wherein Absolute Spirit replaces the General Will and the Categorical Imperative. The historical ‘struggle for recognition’ replaces the Hobbesian state of nature, but now struggle itself is rationalized, albeit ‘cunningly’ or concealedly.

The plausibility of Hegel’s magnificent scheme depends on accepting the link between logic and phenomenology: Does Hegel’s point about the logic of contradiction ‘transplant’ to any correct observation about phenomena? It is clear that his process of Spirit alienating itself into matter (its apparent opposite) bears some resemblance to Einstein’s famous equation of matter and energy. But Einstein also accepted the inevitability of entropy, not ‘progress.’ Nor is it entirely clear that the Absolute Spirit is finally any less mysterious, less cloud-shrouded, than the Creator-God of the Bible. How does any thing come to be? If Einstein is right, this process does not need mind. On the level of logic: If the actual is brought into being by the discursive revelation that occurs only after the actual presents itself, how do you avoid linguistic constructivism, and the deconstructivisms that follow in its wake? On the level of theology: If the sage is a sort of mortal God, a mighty Leviathan of the intellect who settles the intellectual war of all against all, is not divinity something you need before you experience totality, not after? If the answer is, ‘We have met God, and he is us,’ this may be an intoxicating or a disappointing revelation, depending upon one’s estimate of men who claim to be gods. Politically, the parallel question is: How much like a (Hegelian) syllogism is political society ever likely to be?