Felix Nussbaum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Nietzsche and Cognitive Dissonance

Interest in the writings and thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche is at a high ebb. When these moments occur, we have to ask which Nietzsche is receiving the attention, if not accolades. Nietzsche spoke of the “profound” as wearing “masks.” And indeed, Nietzsche’s various opinions appear to wear different philosophical personae. Let us not only consider his thoughts but also whether any of them add meaning and purpose to our livesor are just a stylishly written collection of literary quips that mask an ideology of cruelty.

Nietzsche as a reactionary thinker?

The Marxist revolutionary and polemicist Leon Trotsky wrote an essay upon the occasion of Nietzsche’s death, in which Trotsky observed that Nietzsche’s writings can be understood in multiple ways:

 [T]he writings [are] rich in paradoxes… whose aphorisms are often contradictory and, in general, allow for dozens of interpretations…

Instead of parsing these multiple aphoristic masks, Trotsky preferred a one-dimensional sociological-historical approach. The “natural road,” Trotsky writes, “towards a correct clarification of Nietzschean philosophy is the analysis of the social base that gave birth to this complex product.” Trotsky has no patience for Nietzsche’s poetic-literary-philosophical stance, which Trotsky judges as ideologically defective. It is important, he observes, to disabuse ourselves of any “subjective reactions of sympathy or antipathy for the moral and other theses of Nietzsche” because they “result…in nothing good.”

Disputing any claim that Nietzsche’s Will to Power thesis was novel, Trotsky asserts that Nietzsche’s division of Master Morality versus Slave Morality, and the companion doctrine of a fresh creation (or “transvaluation”) of values, had already been realized in feudalistic Russia.  The higher Russian caste of the “masters,” the “creators of values”, Trotsky argues, had already been erected during the time of Russian serfdom by landlords, who knew that “there exist people who have blue blood and others who don’t and that what is necessary for one group is reprehensible in the others.”

However, lest one think that Trotsky is confusing Nietzsche with a member of the economic exploiting class, an “adventurer of finance or a vulture of the stock market,” Trotsky hastens to add that the class—the parasitenproletariatthat is parasitic on the lower classes is actually much broader than the masters of capitalism.  And Nietzsche, for Trotsky, is the ideologue of this higher-level exploitative class, an aristocratic elite that finds commercialism vulgar and crass. The “pernicious dregs of bourgeois society,” Trotsky writes, “were bound to find Nietzsche’s ideas about a life full of adventures more appropriate” than that of a philistinism preached, for example, by Bentham, the father of British Utilitarianism.

Nietzsche as a self-help guru?

Whereas Trotsky sees in Nietzsche an apologist for the high-end bourgeois status quo—advocating an adventurous life as an exciting perk for a more cultivated aristocracy—others find in Nietzsche a road to personal liberation, though not of the Marxist-Leftist stripe.

This existential interpretation posits Nietzsche’s famous Eternal Return thesis as the outcome of a thought experiment in which we imagine a rerun of our lives complete with all of the choices we have made, along with the consequences of those acts. Could we, hypothetically, live this same life again and again without sinking into hopelessness, complacency, and anguish? This forces an evaluation of the projected visions of how we should really live our lives, encompassing

[the] ultimate embrace of responsibility that comes from accepting the consequences, good or bad, of one’s willful action. Embedded in it is an urgent exhortation to calibrate our actions in such a way as to make their consequences bearable, livable with, in a hypothetical perpetuity.

This vision of Nietzsche as a valuable self-help guru, who liberates us from despair by giving us innovative tools for emotionally coping with our lives, is the exact opposite of Trotsky’s dismissal of any “subjective reaction” to Nietzsche’s views. To have a positive emotional reaction to Nietzsche’s doctrine as a path toward existential freedom is exactly the result intended, putting to rest Trotsky’s claim that Nietzsche’s thought can have no good results.

Wassily Kandinsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Nietzsche and Cognitive Dissonance

A study of the best philosophical minds requires coming to grips with philosophy’s version of cognitive dissonance: the mental discomfort felt when a philosopher holds—or seems to hold—two or more conflicting views, that is, presents different philosophical personae.

Trotsky, driven by his one-dimensional, left-wing, revolutionary dogmatism, succumbs to this cognitive dissonance. Refusing to parse Nietzsche’s multiple—and multi-layered—theses, he instead takes refuge in a single-minded, hardline ideological interpretation: as a reactionary defender of the parasitic aristocratic class, Nietzsche’s views contribute nothing worthwhile.

By contrast, the existential interpretation of Nietzsche as a high-level self-help guru, whose Doctrine of Eternal Return is a ‘thought-experiment’ that helps us emotionally adjust to the difficulties of living with our choices, is more attuned to the complexities of Nietzsche’s thought, as well as highlights Nietzsche’s contribution to the human quest for meaning.

An inconvenient Nietzsche?

Yet, was Trotsky entirely wrong about Nietzsche? Criticizing the social and political aspects of Nietzsche detracts nothing from the separate contribution that Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Eternal Return offers toward helping us psychologically adjust to the difficulties of living. It cannot be denied, however, that Nietzsche wore, among his many masks, a reactionary, morally callous persona.

Nietzsche scholar Brian Leiter describes being shocked at realizing 

what Nietzsche believes, that the illiberal attitudes and the elitism [are] really central to the way he looked at things. The suffering of humanity at large was not a significant ethical concern in his view; it was largely a matter of indifference.

Like most important thinkers, Nietzsche needs to be carefully parsed and scrutinized for his specific contributions, not dismissed in toto. Here lies the reward of overcoming philosophical cognitive dissonance: understanding that the flaws and blind spots of great minds do not detract from their valuable contributions to the human search for meaning.

Thomas White is a Wiley Journal contributing author, and a previous contributor to Undercurrent Philosophy, Aeon, The Philosopher’s Eye, and other journals. He is also a poet and speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in print and online in Australia, Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. The Encyclopedia Britannica selected one of his previously published philosophical essays on Hannah Arendt, Adolph Eichmann, and the “Banality of Evil” for reprinting on its website, Britannica.com. 

 

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