Nietzsche’s Superman: the Perfect Villain or Anti-Hero

There’s one thing no one does enough of these days. Read philosophy. As I’ve been going through this first semester of my Masters of Divinity, my Western Philosophy class has been a real gem. I’ve long wanted to wade into the waters of philosophy, but I kept putting it off. Now that I have no alternative, I’m finding my reading to be a constant source of contemplation about the state of culture and life in our times.

This week was Nietzsche. I approached him with a bit of trepidation (obviously). And although I can hardly agree with even a sentence of what he writes, it’s bracing stuff, very vivid and interesting. So interesting, that I came up with an entire story in the world of the Raven Son novels that’s based on his ideas of the “blond Teutonic beast.” This story I’m writing as part of a workshop on short stories that I’ve started, so you won’t see it for a while, but once I have permission to share it, I will.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some thoughts I had as I was reading his essay “Good and Bad, Good and Evil.” The images are all paintings by Konstantin Vasiliev, whose vision of Russian epic heroes is a bit frighteningly Nietzschean. (I still like them, though).

Grappling with the Blond Teutonic Beast

Every anti-Christian intellectual and pseudo-intellectual is at heart a Nietzschean. This may seem hyperbole, especially considering the same people’s frequent and pathological hatred of Nazism (real or perceived), and Nietzsche’s own clear racism, which endeared him so much to the Third Reich. Nevertheless, I insist that they are still Nietzscheans. I’ll make this clear a bit later.

Nietzsche’s arguments are compelling not because of their internal consistency or because of his facility with history or philology. He is a bad philologist and possibly an even worse historian. But the force of his language and the power of his imagery is monumental, beginning with his famous good/bad vs. good/evil dichotomy. He begins by suggesting, contrary to popular philosophy, that there is no actual link between altruism and goodness.

Instead, using an argument from etymology, he tries to demonstrate that the idea of “the good” comes from the idea of “the noble”. He claims, though the claim is not well supported, that in almost all languages, the word for “good” is connected to the word for “noble”. His examples equate the idea of the noble also with the existence of a noble and superior master-race of warrior aristocrats.

Conversely, he tries to demonstrate that the idea of “bad” is not based on anything other than an equation with the plebeian or common. One of his examples is the Latin word “malus” (bad), which he claims comes from the black-haired pre-Aryan settlers of Italy, who were also (apparently) black-skinned. This isn’t the most interesting or powerful part of his argument. It’s mostly parroting a silly, late-19th-century version of eugenics, based on the false sciences of physiognomy and phrenology.

The Warrior vs The Priest

The true force of his argument comes later, when he seems to abandon his semi-scientific method for bold invective. He begins by painting a picture of the current state of affairs of Europe in the late 19^th, early 20^thcentury. This was a period memorable for its passivity, neurasthenia, even flaccidity. In some ways, it reflects a similarity with our own emasculated 21^stcentury, a point noted by the authors of the Art of Manliness blog in their wonderful “Call for a New Strenuous Age.”  Nietzsche, disgusted by this spectacle, effectively invents a new mythology that explains how we got to this point.

Taking as a maxim his idea that political (or social) supremacy gives rise to notions of spiritual supremacy, he traces the history of the world as the formation of two dichotomies—the good/bad dichotomy and the good/evil dichotomy. The former is a natural result of a noble warrior society, where everything that is noble becomes good, while everything that is common becomes “bad.” This dichotomy (which Nietzsche prefers) was historically replaced by a far more insidious one—the good/evil dichotomy.

This came about as a result of what he calls a priestly aristocracy, which took the external values of purity of the body (which were nothing more than practical rules of hygiene and a preventative measure against racial mixing) and internalized them. This led to the execrable (in his opinion) phenomena of desert monasticism, fasting as a spiritual discipline, and abstinence from sensuality. These phenomena are execrable precisely because they have made the priestly aristocracy hateful, repressed, lacking in spiritual freedom, and angry at everyone else.

Becoming a kind of incarnation of the cunning Odysseus, the priestly aristocracy went to war against the noble warrior race, symbolized by Achilles or even Hercules. Their impotence, ironically, became a source of strength for their hatred. This inner festering effectively ensured their victory over the aristocratic warrior and his value system.

The Inversion Ethic

Taking it from the realm of the theoretical to the practical, Nietzsche then identifies the Jews as the finest example of the priestly aristocracy and its good/evil dichotomy. Their primary evil was that they inverted the original meaning of the good based on the aristocratic, noble, and warrior-like to a new system of good based on the poor, downtrodden, sick, and ugly. Christianity made this even worse, becoming a fulfillment of Judaism, not in the way their own theology teaches, but because it ennobled the Jewish inversion of the good through Christ’s teaching on love.

In a particularly strange episode, Nietzsche goes so far as to say that the crucifixion of Christ was a brilliant political move on the part of the Jews to better perpetuate their “inversion ethic” on the world stage. According to Nietzsche, this ethic is the ethic of the mob and the slave, seeking “redemption from the lords.”

Warrior Morality, according to Nietzsche

All true noble morality, as he sees it, comes out of triumphant self-affirmation. The true noble is active, and through his activity he finds happiness. Nobility holds in itself no trace of resentment, because the noble man absorbs all such resentment immediately, not allowing it to fester. The noble man creates the idea of the good from himself, then, and in contrast to this, he creates the idea of the bad. The vermin slave “man,” however, does the opposite. He imagines the ultimate Evil One, and from that manufactures the idea of the Ultimate Good One—himself.

It is also true that the true noble is a savage from time to time. He is like an unfettered animal given to natural predatory cruelty. However, the culture of Christianity, which historically tamed the blond Teutonic beast, is far worse than the ravages of the untrammeled noble warrior. It is better, Nietzsche insists, for the vermin “men” to live in fear, yet admiration, of the Viking marauder, than to be an effete and sickly vermin “man,” such as were present everywhere in the Europe of his time.

Judgment Day

The true revelation of the hatefulness of the vermin man is the idea of Judgment Day, when the noble warrior will be struck down. To support his position, Nietzsche takes a long quote from Christian writer Tertullian, which out of context does sound like Christian triumphalism of a rather nasty variety. This sort of reduction of Christianity to the opposite of its ideal is one of the most defining aspects of the modern pseudo-intellectual, by the way. That’s what makes him or her essentially Nietzschean.

In his conclusion, Nietzsche imagines an eternal war between Rome (all that is good) and Jerusalem (all that is evil). He laments the fall of Napoleon, because he was the ideal of Rome incarnate in a world infected with Judaic femininity. Finally, he calls for the formation of a new morality based on the good/bad dichotomy, not the good/evil dichotomy, in which the warrior race would rise up again to dominate the world for its own benefit.

Of course, when this did happen in Germany, the results were different than the ones Nietzsche imagined for himself.

Nietzsche in Popular Culture

The basically innocent, essentially heartless, but occasionally brutal warrior–he continues to fascinate in popular culture. Game of Thrones and basically all of grimdark fantasy is filled with such characters. We love to watch them in the TV shows Vikings and The Last Kingdom. James Bond is in many ways a modern reflection of him. But what’s most interesting to me is this: In vicariously enjoying his exploits, are we basically just embodying the role of the vermin “man”?

Also, modern, facile attacks on religion are often little more than repetitions of Nietzschean rhetoric. Seriously. Read Nietzsche, those of you who like to deride Christians as weak or conniving or repressed or hateful. Are you sure you want to be associated with the ideas of Nietzsche?I’m suggesting, in fact, that a lot of pop culture is mired in caricature of a very Nietzschean kind.

And yes, there is a certain kind of man in our time who, though a vermin “man” through and through, would love to become a superman. He’s not a Christian, though. He’s more likely an internet troll of a particular nasty variety.

The Perfect Villain or Anti-Hero?

Remember that story in The Heart of the World about the Priest-King’s brother who finds the fountain of youth, then loses it? Well, he’s effectively trying to become a Nietzschean superman. He believes in his “will to power”, and he wants to shrug off all control over his fate on the part of divine forces. Guess what? Things don’t turn out too well for him…

I’m writing that story right now.

I’ll let you know when you can read it.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like my essay “A Passport to Russian Fairy Land,” in which I guide you through the opening lines of Russian Fairy Tales, help you interpret cryptic fairy tale phrases, and introduce you to the infamous Baba Yaga herself! Enter your email and I’ll send your passport!