How to Read Like a Parasite, Part III
Debunking myths about Nietzsche and the Paris Commune
On August 28, 1870, five days after finishing his medical training at Erlangen and departing for the front of the Franco-Prussian War at Wörth, Nietzsche described his first and only experience with war in a letter to his mother, Franziska:
“We’ve been traveling from Erlangen for five days: it’s going more slowly than you could possibly imagine…Yesterday we completed our assignments in Gersdorf, Langensulzbach, and the battlefield at Wörth. With this letter comes a memory of the fearfully devastated battlefield covered everywhere with indescribably sad human body parts and stinking corpses.”
A few days later, Nietzsche would recount in a letter to Wagner how he and his fellow medical orderlies “reached the uttermost limits of their exertions” in tending to the wounded, with Nietzsche finding himself solely responsible for the care of “six severely wounded men…All of them had broken bones, many had four wounds, and in addition I observed that two had hospital gangrene.” Nietzsche emerged from the battle with severe dysentery and diphtheria, but the effects of the war on his worldview would prove even more devastating. The Franco-Prussian War, and the founding of the German Reich under Bismarck the following year, would have lasting impacts on Nietzsche’s political views about nationalism, war, and the modern state.
Despite its enduring influence on Nietzsche’s politics, the Franco-Prussian War is mentioned only once in Chapter 3 of Daniel Tutt’s How to Read Like a Parasite, “The Political Context of Perspectivism,” and this only to note that Nietzsche eagerly enlisted. This illustrates a puzzling pattern in this chapter, namely that Tutt ignores major political events that Nietzsche himself emphasized in his writings and focuses instead on historical moments that are central to the narrative of class struggle Tutt wishes to tell, but only marginal in Nietzsche’s life and work. The most prominent example is Tutt’s repeated claim that the Paris Commune played a decisive role in inspiring Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy. Tutt’s central thesis is that Nietzsche scholars have deemphasized the historical and political context of his work therefore serves to conceal the fact that he has given readers a highly selective picture of that context that distorts more than it reveals. To explain why, this entry will outline Tutt’s argument in this chapter and examining the individual claims he uses to support it. A fuller portrait of the real historical and political context of Nietzsche’s work—including the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck’s Realpolitik, and the question of German nationalism—is beyond the scope of this entry, but we’ll add it to the growing list of future topics that Methods of Madness will plan to cover whenever its mercurial author gets around to it.
Tutt proposes to offer an explicitly political reading of Nietzsche’s main epistemological doctrine, known as perspectivism. Perspectivism, which Tutt defines as “a theory that posits the importance of subjective interpretation over objective reality as the criterion or basis of truth,” should be understood as “a form of political epistemology” that was developed “in reaction to the egalitarian demands that emerged out of the French Revolution and which were accelerating in Nietzsche’s time, from the worker uprisings of 1848 to the Paris Commune of 1871.” Setting aside Tutt’s definition of perspectivism, this passage clearly establishes the specific historical context he has in mind: a history of class struggle between 1848 and 1871. Though this focus is understandable for a Marxist interpretation of Nietzsche, it is important to recognize from the outset that Tutt seems to have bracketed another political context with immediate relevance for Nietzsche’s life and work, namely the problem of German unification and the founding of the German Empire, or Second Reich, by Bismarck in 1871. Throughout the chapter, Tutt leaves the major upheavals in German politics of the era to one side and focuses on a much broader narrative about liberal nominalism and Bonapartism. Tutt is undoubtedly correct to say that “Nietzsche developed perspectivism in the maelstrom of these political upheavals, and these events shaped its direction.” But which events, and how?
The first major historical event in Tutt’s narrative, which is indeed a central issue in Nietzsche’s thought, is the French Revolution and the promise of universal rights it unleashed. As Tutt correctly notes, “[a]t the heart of perspectivism is a rejection of the Enlightenment subject as an agent eligible for universal rights,” a political stance that Nietzsche consistently maintains throughout his work (83).[i] It would be natural to conclude on this basis that, like Marx, Nietzsche was a critic of the bourgeois morality that originally undergirded Enlightenment universalism. As Adorno and Horkheimer observe, “[l]ike few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment” and “formulated the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power” manifest in the calculative, instrumental reason so essential to capitalism and bourgeois culture.[ii] Instead, Tutt’s paradoxical claim is that Nietzsche should be read as a defender of liberal nominalism, or the restriction of equal rights to the political sphere. Nietzsche “radicalizes” the anti-universalist stance that is implicit in liberal nominalism when it opposes socialism’s extension of equal rights from the political to the economic sphere (89).
Yet the “equal rights” that Nietzsche opposes were equally indispensable for establishing the regime of private property that enables bourgeois domination. Tutt’s argument seems to be that in radicalizing the anti-universalist tendency in nominalism and making it overt, Nietzsche nonetheless aims to preserve the bourgeois status quo. But how exactly is this supposed to work? Tutt’s answer lies in the concept of Bonapartism, “a theory of how reactionary elements persist even in an ostensibly progressive or liberal political regime” (92). Bonapartism is a Marxist theory of the Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi-style demagogue, “a political figure of pure decadence and irrationalism” who exploits the hypocrisy of liberal nominalism to establish cross-class alliances designed to defuse proletarian class struggles. “Liberal democracy is a paradoxical system,” Tutt explains, “it produces the Bonapartist figure, who is often reviled by large swaths of the bourgeois ruling class, but at the material level of capitalist social relations, the Bonapartist is quietly welcomed because they stabilize the capitalist system.” Thus the brazen anti-universalism of a figure like Trump serves as a shield for the nominal universalism of the capitalist system by enabling the anti-democratic measures required to “ensure the persistence of unjust and exploitative wage labor and bourgeois class domination” (95).
This is an attractive theory of how liberalism maintains exploitation and domination despite the lip service it pays to universalism, but how does it relate to Nietzsche? “Now we arrive at the heart of our argument. With the concept of perspectivism, Nietzsche aimed to radicalize liberal nominalism by forging a radical subjective nominalism (that is, perspectivism) that was meant to retain a social structure based on rank order” (112). And again, to close the chapter: “As a concept, perspectivism was a way to assert the inescapability of perspective, and by extension injustice, social misery, and rank ordering, in Nietzsche’s praxis. It was developed as a concept meant for the preservation of the brutal background social conditions of bourgeois social life” (114). I take this last statement to articulate Tutt’s distinctive claim in this debate pretty well: the goal of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not simply to enforce an aristocratic society based on rank order, but specifically the rank order intrinsic to bourgeois, capitalist social relationships.
Hence it’s important pause at the conclusion of this summary to notice that Tutt is advancing two separate claims here, with the general theory of Bonapartism serving as the thin reed upon which their connection rests. In each of the two cases quoted above, Tutt begins with the plausible claim that the concept of perspectivism is directly related to Nietzsche’s political effort to establish a caste society, then moves to a highly implausible claim that ruling class he has in mind is the bourgeoisie. As Nietzsche’s most explicit discussions of aristocratic radicalism in Beyond Good and Evil make abundantly clear, his goal is hardly to “retain” any existing social class structure but to create a radically new one, which will demand an epochal rupture with two millennia of Christian moral ascendency. Similarly, there is no doubt that perspectivism is deeply concerned with “the inescapability of perspective, and by extension injustice,” but in no way does it follow that Nietzsche wished to preserve “the brutal background social conditions of bourgeois social life.” The real heart of the chapter’s argument is a slight of hand that passes off a defense of the former claim as a justification for the latter.
To see why, let’s examine the evidence Tutt marshals to support the reading of Nietzsche as a champion of the bourgeoisie, starting with the pivotal claim, borrowed from Losurdo, that The Birth of Tragedy was a response to the Paris Commune.
At the end of Chapter 2, Tutt chastises Derrida for excluding the political context of Nietzsche’s lectures On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, which “were given immediately following the Paris Commune of 1871, an event that…fundamentally shaped Nietzsche’s political and philosophical outlook” (75). This claim is absolutely central to Tutt’s argument, and to dispel any doubt about how heavily he relies upon it to make plausible the view that Nietzsche was directly responding to working class struggles, consider the following excerpts from Chapter 3:
“Perspectivism was developed as a political epistemology in reaction to the egalitarian demands that emerged out of the French Revolution and which were accelerating in Nietzsche’s time, from the worker uprisings of 1848 to the Paris Commune of 1871” (85).
“Both Lukács and Losurdo have shown how the Paris Commune of 1871 stands as the fundamental political upheaval that shaped Nietzsche’s early thought” (90, emphasis added).
“The Paris Commune of 1871 sparked a profound melancholy in the young Nietzsche, heightening his need to develop a political alternative to the rise of socialist and radical egalitarian movements” (99).
“As we have indicated, this highly influential text (Note: it’s unclear whether Tutt is referring to The Birth of Tragedy or On the Genealogy of Morals here) must be understood as a response to the event of the Paris Commune, which was the first seizure of state power by the proletariat in the nineteenth century.” (112, emphasis added).
No matter how common this narrative has become among Marxist scholars of Nietzsche, it has one major problem: there is virtually no evidence to support it. To begin with, the narrative makes little sense from the standpoint of basic chronology; Losurdo’s admission that “[i]t is indeed true that the gestation of Birth of Tragedy started before the Paris Commune” is hilarious understatement.[iii] In truth, Nietzsche had written an early draft of The Birth as a birthday gift for Cosima Wagner in December of 1870, and he began work on the book in earnest the next month. As fragments in the Nachlass clearly show, with extensive notes on tragedy in the notebooks from 1869 and significant drafts of The Birth such as “The Dionysian World View” already completed in 1870. This of course does not rule out the possibility that the Paris Commune—along with the rest of the dramatic historical events surrounding the Franco-Prussian War and the founding of the German Empire—played an important role in the text Nietzsche eventually published in 1872. But the textual evidence clearly refutes the claim that the Paris Commune directly inspired The Birth’s main theses.
Upon closer examination, Losurdo and Tutt both rely upon the same two excerpts from Nietzsche’s correspondence and unpublished fragments as the entire textual basis for the Paris Commune narrative. The first is from a June 1871 letter to Gersdorff, which clarifies the decisive context for Nietzsche’s reaction to the Paris Commune: “I was for some days completely destroyed and drenched in tears and doubts: all scholarly and philosophical-aesthetic existence seemed to me an absurdity, if a single day could wipe out the most noble works of art, or whole periods of art.” Note that this passage contains no reference whatsoever to the political substance of the Paris Commune, socialism, the working class, or even egalitarianism in general. Rather, Nietzsche is specifically reacting to the apocryphal rumor that the communards had burned the Louvre and much of the world’s greatest art along with it. It was this specific news and the terrible despair it produced in Nietzsche that he would later recall in the second passage Losurdo cites. Neither passage appears to discuss the Paris Commune specifically, and Tutt is keen to downplay the real source of Nietzsche’s reaction: the destruction of great art and culture. And in case you’re wondering whether anyone else has succeeded in providing a more compelling textual basis, here’s The New Left Review citing the exact same two fragments.
Interestingly, none of these critiques include the parts of Nietzsche’s letter that relate most directly to their thesis. In an enlightening discussion that offers an alternative reading of Nietzsche’s reaction to the Paris Commune, Pierre Klossowski provides an expanded version in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle:
“If we could discuss this together, we would agree that precisely in that phenomenon does our modern life, actually the whole of old Christian Europe and its state, but, above all, the ‘Romantic’ civilization which is now everywhere predominant, show the enormous degree to which our world has been damaged, and that, with all our past behind us, we all bear the guilt that such a terror could come to light, so that we must make sure we do not ascribe to those unfortunates alone the crime of a combat against culture. I know what that means: the combat against culture. When I heard of the fires in Paris, I felt for several days annihilated and was overwhelmed by fears and doubts; the entire scholarly, scientific, philosophical, and artistic existence seemed an absurdity, if a single day could wipe out the most glorious works of art, even whole periods of art; I clung with earnest conviction to the metaphysical value of art, which cannot exist for the sake of impoverished people, but which has higher missions to fulfil. But even when the pain was at its worst, I could not cast a stone against those blasphemers, who were to me only carriers of the general guilt, which gives much food for thought.” (emphasis added)
Indeed, Klossowski’s interpretation of the passage centers on a line that Nietzsche’s Marxist critics tend conveniently to leave out: “But even when the pain was at its worst, I could not cast a stone against those blasphemers, who were to me only carriers of the general guilt.” Nietzsche’s reaction to the events of the Paris Commune is no doubt related to his class position, but in an ambivalent way, where the actions of the working class serve to reveal the general cultural decadence of the European bourgeoisie.
When Tutt tries to conjure additional evidence to support the narrative, he makes demonstrable exegetical mistakes. For example, on pp. 76-77 Tutt criticizes Derrida for ignoring Nietzsche’s political context and taking “the category of decadence…to refer to Nietzsche’s depression after he left his teaching post at the relatively young age of thirty-six.” But Derrida is absolutely correct here. As Nietzsche clearly says in Ecce Homo: “My life went downhill the same age as [my father’s]: at the age of thirty-six I hit the low point in my vitality…I resigned from my post as professor in Basel, survived the summer in St. Moritz like a shadow, and then survived the following winter in Naumburg…as a shadow. This was my low point: The Wanderer and his Shadow came out of this” (EH, “Why I am so Wise,” §1). Readers of this Substack will probably be familiar with these passages, where Nietzsche clearly credits his sickness with giving him experience with decadence and an eye for its symptoms. Indeed, in a passage I’ve quoted before on several occasions, Nietzsche explicitly states that his experience of sickness is the origin of his doctrine of perspectivism:
To be able to look out from the optic of sickness towards healthier concepts and values, and again the other way around, to look down from the fullness and self-assurance of the rich life into the secret work of the instinct of decadence—that was my longest training, my genuine experience, if I became the master of anything, it was this. I have a hand for switching perspectives: the first reason why a ‘revaluation of values’ is even possible, perhaps for me alone.
So Derrida appears to be vindicated after all. The issue here is less the careless lack of attention to well-known aspects of Nietzsche’s biography than its implications for Tutt’s broader strategy of interpretation. Though Tutt, like Losurdo, protests against a “hermeneutics of innocence” that ignores Nietzsche’s historical and political context, he offers an equally one-sided reading that completely leaves out Nietzsche’s personal life. Tutt may be correct to castigate Derrida for leaving out Nietzsche’s politics, but he commits the same mistake in the opposite direction, sketching the broad sweep of a historical narrative without connecting it to Nietzsche’s biography in any meaningful way. Yet this does not prevent Tutt from making bold inferences about Nietzsche’s psychological motivations, such as when he describes his “profound melancholy” in response to the Paris Commune “heightening his need to develop a political alternative” to socialism. A synthesis of the historico-political and psychobiographical is evidently required, but Tutt does not provide it.
There is some irony to this, since Nietzsche himself lays out the historico-political context of The Birth in his 1886 Preface, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism.” The “profoundly personal” nature of The Birth “is attested by the times in which it was written, and in spite of which it was written, the turbulent period of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1” (BT, Preface, §1). Leaving out his own role in the Battle of Wörth, he describes himself at that time as “sitting in some corner of the Alps, utterly preoccupied with his ponderings and riddles and consequently very troubled and untroubled at one and the same time.” I call attention to this less to make any specific point about how this context should shape our interpretation of Nietzsche than to point out that The Birth’s historical and political context is hardly the great secret Tutt makes it out to be. It’s a serious flaw for a book that purports to highlight that context to leave out Nietzsche’s own comments on the subject.
This problem is not limited to the Paris Commune narrative. In fact, at several points where Tutt offers key quotations meant to substantiate his reading of Nietzsche as a defender of bourgeois class domination, the evidence evaporates upon closer examination:
Tutt argues that “[b]ourgeois Christianity is celebrated and lauded by Nietzsche on countless occasions in his writings, most notably in his support for the role of Christianity in the imperial Opium Wars in China” (91). But no such passage exists, and Tutt declines to offer any of the other “countless” passages in which Nietzsche allegedly defends bourgeois Christianity. In fact, the passage on the Opium Wars comes from Alexis de Tocqueville, as cited by Losurdo.[iv] This really serves as the perfect example of Tutt’s disingenuous interpretive strategy. We are treated to an astonishing claim about the “countless occasions” on which Nietzsche celebrates bourgeois Christianity, only to find that Tutt is unable to produce even a single one that isn’t fabricated.
On p. 97, Tutt seems to assume that Nietzsche’s admiration for Napoleon also extended to Louis Bonaparte III: “Nietzsche admired Napoleon Bonaparte’s effort to overturn the egalitarian development of the French Revolution, and he also admired his more mediocre and farcical relative, Louis Bonaparte III.” Tutt offers no citation for this, but one might charitably assume he has in mind “Napoleon III as President,” a piece Nietzsche penned at age 18 while still at Schulpforta. In Tutt’s defense, one can certainly read this as a Bonapartist text! On the other hand, to assume that Nietzsche’s mature views in the 1880s remained the same as those he held as a teenager seems tenuous at best.
On p. 98, Tutt situates Nietzsche in the context of The Communist Manifesto and the 1848 revolution and states that “Nietzsche diagnosed this egalitarian philosophy thus: ‘The pretension of terrestrial happiness for everyone, which more and more characterized the modern world, was thus revealed as madness.” Nietzsche never wrote this, and Tutt appears to have confused him with Losurdo here.[v]
On pp. 113-114, we have: “As Nietzsche wrote: ‘The categories of species and kind could be used to describe the mass but not the outstanding or even brilliant individual.’” Again, this is Losurdo, not Nietzsche.
When the glossy Marxist narrative of Nietzsche-as-class-enemy is stripped to its roots, we find that the entire interpretation was a house of cards. In this sense, “The Political Context of Perspectivism” functions as a red herring. It fails to inform us in any useful way about the historical and political context that most directly shaped Nietzsche’s writings, and it instead redirects our attention to historical events and political concerns with only peripheral significance for understanding the forces that shaped his thought. As a result, Tutt confuses Nietzsche’s aristocratic defense of caste society with a version of capitalist apologetics. Tutt is at his most transparent when he writes: “Does Nietzsche discuss the Paris Commune directly? From a Marxist perspective, we must read Nietzsche as developing a philosophy which took a stance on the class struggle in ways that are comprehensive and thorough” (91). No matter how compelling we might find this overall perspective, the burden of proof is squarely on Tutt to vindicate its direct relevance in Nietzsche’s case. If he cannot, his account of Nietzsche’s historical context amounts to an exercise in begging the question—Tutt finds only what he expected to find.
One of Tutt’s central contentions is that academic Nietzsche scholarship, whether in the Anglo-American, French, or any other tradition, has systematically ignored the real political significance of his thought. Tutt is not wrong that this is a necessary corrective to certain dominant readings of Nietzsche, mostly following Walter Kaufmann, that downplay the political themes in his philosophy. Where he seems to go astray, however, is his equal blindness towards the rigorous scholarship that has been completed on Nietzsche’s political philosophy, and the very different narrative it tells about his political and historical context than Tutt’s class-centric Paris Commune narrative. The truth is that recent scholarship on Nietzsche’s political thought has been rather extensive, and none of it has concluded that the philosopher who claimed to split human history in two was an apologist for the bourgeois status quo.
Nietzsche is a vicious critic of socialism, an aristocratic radical who dreamed of a future caste society in which the achievement of higher culture requires slavery. These aspects of Nietzsche’s political thought are widely acknowledged in major scholarship, from Keith Ansell-Pearson’s Nietzsche and Political Thought to Hugh Drochon’s Nietzsche’s Great Politics, Daniel Conway’s Nietzsche and the Political to Tamsin Shaw’s Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism. It’s hardly controversial to point out that Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism sits uncomfortably at best with normative commitments to democracy or socialism.
But Nietzsche is also a thinker whose experiences in the Franco-Prussian War led him to conclude, in the first of the Untimely Meditations on David Strauss, that the German military victory in no way amounted to a triumph over France in the realm of culture. By omitting any mention of the founding of the German Empire, among the most significant political events of Nietzsche’s time, Tutt avoids having to discuss Nietzsche’s vehement objection to “the defeat, if not the extirpation, of the German spirit for the benefit of the ‘German Reich’” (UT, I, §1). In the end, Tutt hasn’t even touched on the political context that really does provide crucial background for understanding Nietzsche’s thought: the rising problem of German nationalism, the “petty politics” of Bismarck’s Realpolitik, the question of European unification, and the clash between political power and the forces of culture. An examination of these themes in detail, however, is a topic for another entry.
[i] The aphorism that articulates Nietzsche’s mature position on this issue most clearly is BGE §257: “Every enhancement so far in the type ‘man’ has been the work of an aristocratic society—and that is how it will be, again and again, since this sort of society believes in a long ladder of rank order and value distinctions between men, and in some sense needs slavery. Without the pathos of distance as it grows out of the ingrained differences between stations, out of the way the ruling caste maintains an overview and keeps looking down on subservient types and tools…without this pathos, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown at all, that demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive, and in short, the enhancement of the type ‘man,’ the constant ‘self-overcoming of man’”.
[ii] Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 36
[iii] Losurdo, p. 29
[iv] See Losurdo, p. 684
[v] Ibid, pp. 28-29