ROBERT S. WISTRICH
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Camus, who presciently suggested in
1951
that the German philosopher
was more a herald and a prophet of the crisis of values out of which
totalitarianism had emerged, than a godfather of fascism per se. Niet–
zsche had announced the twentieth century, so Camus maintained, pre–
cisely because he represented "the sharpest consciousness of nihilism."
This was a far cry from the kind of demonization of Nietzsche on the
postwar Marxist Left epitomized in the writings of Georg Lukacs. In the
1930S,
during his exile in Moscow, this Hungarian Stalinist and leading
literary critic had already denounced Nietzsche as a central figure in the
"destruction of reason" that led directly to Hitler. For Lukacs, Niet–
zsche was not only a pure irrationalist but the ideological spokesman of
a rapacious capitalist imperialism that had asserted itself in Germany
after
1870,
expressing to perfection the illiberal, anti-socialist and anti–
democratic mindset of the ruling classes. He saw in Nietzsche the fore–
runner of fascist aesthetics, whose glorification of intuition, myth, and
a new barbarism based on the instincts had anticipated in theory the
true course of development of the Hitler regime as well as the imperial–
ism of the emerging "American age." Lukacs was especially infuriated
by Nietzsche's denial of the existence of an "objective" external world
and of the idea of progressive historical development as it had been
elaborated by Marx.
Some of the more critical, independent Western Marxists, notably
those of the Frankfurt School, did not share this reductionist view. Ernst
Bloch, for example, saw in Nietzsche's advocacy of Dionysian, life–
affirming impulses, the dawn of a subversive countermovement against
the repressive character of Western culture-one which embodied a
utopian promise. Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the neo-Marxist Left in
America in the
1950S
and
'60S,
also embraced Nietzsche as a critic of
the "technical rationality of modern civilization, " as a great transvaluer
of values who had exposed the fallacies on which most of Western phi–
losophy and morality were built. In postwar West Germany, Adorno
and Horkheimer similarly praised Nietzsche's "negative dialectics," see–
ing a parallel with their own radical critique of the leveling nature of
modern mass culture and its dehumanizing tendencies. Nietzsche's aes–
thetic orientation, his individualism and contempt for the "mass man"
was congenial enough for a critical Marxist theory that had virtually
abandoned the proletariat as its revolutionary subject and turned itself
into a
"Kulturkritik."
Indeed, rather than being regarded as a forerun–
ner of fascism, Nietzsche was seen by Adorno as an important demysti–
fier of the "dialectic of Enlightenment" and its all-embracing
"instrumental rationality" which had helped to produce totalitarianism.
