Europe: A Nietzschen Perspective

Europe

What does it mean to be European? Should a common European identity be forged in the twenty-first century? In this innovative volume, Stefan Elbe addresses these important questions through his exploration of the ‘good Europeans’, an idea outlined by one of the most enigmatic and stimulating thinkers of the modern age – Friedrich Nietzsche. Despite the growing attention that Nietzsche has received in scholarly circles over the past decade, his thinking about modern nationalism and the idea of Europe remains remarkably unexplored. Elbe, however, shows how Nietzsche explicitly cast the question of Europe within the larger cultural context of secularisation and the death of God. Elbe is thus able to demonstrate the continued relevance of Nietzsche’s investigation of European nihilism for the debate on the European idea. The book concludes by exploring Nietzsche’s own idea of what it would mean to be a ‘good European’ within the context of a modern and secular culture. This book is the first systematic study of Nietzsche’s European thought, and provides a rare philosophical approach to the idea of ‘Europe’. Stefan Elbe lectures in International Relations at the University of Warwick. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Political Ideologies, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and International Security.

Routledge Advances in European Politics

1

Russian Messianism Third Rome, revolution, Communism and after Peter J.S. Duncan

2

European Integration and the Postmodern Condition Governance, democracy, identity Peter van Ham

3

Nationalism in Italian Politics The stories of the North League, 1980–2000 Damian Tambini

4

International Intervention in the Balkans A critical evaluation Edited by Peter Siani-Davies and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers

5

Widening the European Union The politics of institutional change and reform Edited by Bernard Steunenberg

6

Institutional Challenges in the European Union Edited by Madeleine Hosli, Adrian van Deemen and Mika Widgrén

7

Europe Unbound Enlarging and reshaping the boundaries of the European Union Edited by Jan Zielonka

8

Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans Nationalism and the destruction of tradition Cathie Carmichael

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Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe The democratisation of the general public in fifteen Central and Eastern European countries, 1991–1998 Christian W. Haerpfer

10 Private Sector Involvement in the Euro The power of ideas Stefan Collignon and Daniela Schwarzer 11 Europe A Nietzschean perspective Stefan Elbe 12 Europe, Globalisation and Sustainable Development Edited by Brian Baxter, John Barry and Richard Dunphy 13 European Union Council Presidencies A comparative analysis Edited by Ole Elgström 14 European Governance and Supranational Institutions Making states comply Jonas Tallberg 15 European Union, NATO and Russia Martin Smith and Graham Timmins

Europe A Nietzschean perspective

Stefan Elbe

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2003 Stefan Elbe All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by an electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Elbe, Stefan, 1975– Europe: a Nietzschean perspective/Stefan Elbe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. European Union. 2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900 – Views on Europe. I. Title. JN30 .E358 2003 306´.094–dc21 2002155516 ISBN 0-203-42655-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-43902-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–36975–4 (hardcover)

To my family – old and new

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

xi xiii

1

Europe

1

2

God or nothingness?

17

3

Labyrinths of the future

41

4

Europe wants to become one

65

5

We good Europeans

89

6

Free thoughts

109

Notes Select bibliography Index

123 147 163

x

David Corkill

Chapter Title

xi

Preface

This book is based on my doctoral research carried out in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It benefited immensely from the latter’s intellectual environment and yet undoubtedly contains some of the imperfections that invariably accompany a student’s undertaking of his first book-length research project. In my case this problem was confounded because of my initial preference for a difficult, interdisciplinary, and overly ‘grand’ research project. These are clearly first steps, in other words, but steps that have proved deeply rewarding, at least on a personal level. Nor was it easy settling on the final title for this book. The term Europe, for example, should be read in the broader sense of the term because it is not primarily the European Union that is at issue in the following pages, although the text will certainly touch upon its institutions. Rather, the main subject of this study is the idea of Europe and, more specifically still, the contemporary incomprehension that surrounds this notion. Given this broader focus on the European imagination, the book might also be of interest to those people currently living outside the countries which are already members of the European Union, or which are joining the club in the near future; it might equally engage the imagination of those with an interest in the wider themes of modern civilization and the ‘West’. ‘A Nietzschean Perspective’ – this part of the title is significant too. Hopefully it communicates to the reader that the following study only advances one possible treatment of the issues confronting scholars and policy-makers when employing the term ‘Europe’. Other accounts are clearly possible, although no one to my knowledge has previously teased out Nietzsche’s stimulating and original views on nationalism and the European idea in a sustained fashion. Yet Nietzsche himself would also have been amongst the first to insist on the necessity of having a plurality of perspectives, famously arguing in On the Genealogy of Morals that an individual can only see or know from a particular perspective, and so the more eyes, different eyes, we allow to reflect on an issue, the more complete our objectivity will be. The following book is written very much in this spirit, endeavouring to advance an additional and intriguing perspective that might liven up the contemporary debate.

xii

Preface

The phrasing ‘A Nietzschean Perspective’ is important, secondly, in that the primary purpose of the following volume is not to engage with the detailed disputes that have emerged amongst Nietzsche scholars over the past decades. Nor does it provide an extensive exegesis of his more philosophical ideas of the will-to-power, the eternal return, and the overman. These tasks have already been undertaken by a plethora of other Nietzsche scholars and philosophers. The following study remains informed by these debates, to be sure, but its foremost and more modest emphasis is on putting Nietzsche’s thought to contemporary use, i.e. to show how his thought can still fruitfully inform our thinking about an important contemporary issue. To name but one example, I have drawn liberally on Nietzsche’s posthumously published notes – something that seems unavoidable to me anyway when reflecting on the theme of European nihilism. Nietzsche was clearly very careful about his published writings and he may well have ultimately rejected some of the thoughts he penned in his notebooks – just as he later rejected some of the thoughts he had published in his own lifetime. Deep spirits who are prevented from changing their opinions, he noted in Daybreak (§573), cease to be spirits. His aphoristic style, his animated language, and his subtle tone all provide his texts with a degree of indeterminacy that renders his work enigmatic despite one hundred years of intervening scholarship. It is thus unlikely that it will ever be possible to establish a ‘true’ reading of Nietzsche’s texts – a fact that I seek to accommodate in the final reading of the ‘good European’ provided towards the end of this book. So the following pages offer just one perspective on ‘Europe’, and just one possible reading of ‘Nietzsche’. In the end, therefore, it is an altogether much more modest undertaking than the title might initially suggest. S.E. Nicosia, August 2002

Chapter Title

xiii

Acknowledgements

Many people were of immense help in writing this book and have my deep gratitude. In particular I would like to thank Christopher Coker for providing me with the requisite intellectual freedom for pursuing this research, and for intervening with good guidance at the crucial moments; Louiza Odysseos for her caring love and companionship, her unending support, and all our lengthy debates that served to improve greatly the quality of the final manuscript; my family for their encouragement throughout the years, not to mention their stoic and selfless financing of those exceedingly expensive London years. I have also had the benefit of receiving detailed and engaging feedback from Erica Benner and Mark Hoffman, who were on my annual research panels at the London School of Economics, and from Chris Brown and Nicholas Martin, who kindly agreed to examine the thesis. I am also grateful for the many opportunities to present aspects of this work to my fellow students and staff at the International Relations Theory workshop. Finally, I would like to thank the three external reviewers whose detailed comments similarly led to an improved final manuscript. All remaining errors and inaccuracies are, of course, entirely my own. Parts of this book draw upon material that has already been published in different forms elsewhere. Discussions of the book’s general themes have appeared in ‘ “We Good Europeans . . .”: Genealogical Reflections on the Idea of Europe’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2001, pp. 269–283; and in ‘Eurosomnia: Europe’s “Spiritual Vitality” and the Debate on the European Idea’ in Peter Mandaville and Andrew Williams (eds), Meaning and International Relations, London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 65–85. A version of Chapter 3 has also appeared as ‘“Labyrinths of the Future”: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of European Nationalism’ in the Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2002, pp. 77–96, http://www. tandf.co.uk. I would like to acknowledge permission from the respective publishers for using parts of these publications in the following book.

xiv

David Corkill

The search for the European ‘soul’ increasingly appears to be the main issue affecting the future of our continent . . . yet no one has any idea how to recreate the soul of Europe. This is indeed a sign of weakness. Romano Prodi (2000)1 In a word – and it should be our word of honour! – we are good Europeans, Europe’s heirs, the rich, superabundant, but also abundantly obligated heirs of two millennia of the European spirit . . . Friedrich Nietzsche (1887)2

RECTO RUNNING HEAD

1

Europe

Plato once suggested that one could not imagine a city where the idea of a city was completely lost and no longer recognizable at all. Over two thousand years later one of the pressing questions confronting European policy-makers is whether a peaceful, united, and prosperous European Union can be brought about without the articulation of an underlying idea of Europe. Many committed Europeanists remain deeply sceptical as to whether the political project of Europe can ultimately flourish in the absence of such a unifying vision. They have consequently sought to stimulate considerable public and academic debate about the meaning of ‘Europe’ over the past decade. ‘At no time in history’, one scholar finds, ‘have people talked more about “Europe” than today.’1 Another concurs, noting that ‘[n]ot since the end of the last “World” War has the notion of Europe in its totality been so incessantly interrogated’.2 Yet a third observes how ‘“Europe” has become a powerful and contested issue in political debate’.3 The European debate is thus no longer confined to the institutional, legal, and economic aspects of integration that traditionally tended to dominate the domain; it has also entered the cultural realm by opening up the debate about the deeper meaning of the European idea itself.4 This growing engagement with the idea of Europe is one of the most notable developments in contemporary European affairs.5 It reflects a greater openness toward ethical considerations regarding the politics of Europe, and marks a partial return to the boundary between the political and the intellectual realms from which the European debate initially embarked.6 It is also this emerging dimension of the European debate – this recent desire by Europeanists to deploy a more meaningful idea of Europe – that the following book would like to address in a more sustained fashion. By way of introduction it is worth considering in greater detail the multiple motivations animating this debate, as well as delineating the reasons for why an analysis of Nietzsche’s European thought is of considerable relevance within this context.

2

Europe

The legitimacy of the European Union One important reason for the growing interest in the meaning of the European idea is undoubtedly the pragmatic consideration by European policy-makers that a more compelling vision of Europe is needed in order to ensure the continued public legitimacy of the European Union. As early as 1989 François Mitterrand had argued that ‘[t]he Europe of the Community will not work, in the short-term, if it doesn’t have a vision, a perspective’.7 The institutions of the European Union need to articulate a compelling and visionary idea of Europe if the project of integration is ultimately to prevail over those who, in his words, ‘grumble, put the brakes on, and pull up in front of any obstacle, however, small’ because they oppose political union.8 The wager underlying this account is that the articulation of a more visionary idea of Europe will endow the European institutions with a greater sense of purpose, and will thus enhance their public legitimacy and political influence. In this political strategy it is hoped that long-term vision will ensure short-term policy success. The 1990s did much to bear out Mitterand’s intuition. The debates surrounding the Maastricht Treaty, for example, clearly exposed the underlying fragility of the European political project, and drew attention to grave fears of technocratic domination and the democratic deficit inherent in the hitherto chosen approach to integration. Although Europeanists were quite willing to inform their respective constituents about the detailed aspects of the treaty, they faced great difficulties in convincing their constituents of the benefits of the European Union on the basis of these technical points alone.9 How, one scholar understandably wondered at the time, can one possibly ‘ask millions of citizens to think in European terms, to give up the usual national state framework and to adopt a new entity with a symbolic value reduced to rules, regulations and quotas?’10 In retrospect the Maastricht Treaty has consequently been reproached for its inability to properly engage the European imagination.11 It is frequently also seen as having finally exposed the limits of a solely institutional approach to integration. Although the functional approach may have constituted a solid strategy for embarking upon the European project, it is increasingly seen as insufficient for completing this project. Joseph Weiler, for example, suggested at the time that the disillusionment about the European project extends much deeper than the mere content of the treaty. ‘The Europe of Maastricht suffers from a crisis of ideals’, he found, ‘[a]nd “Europe,” once avant-garde, has, it seems, become . . . politics as usual’.12 Michael Brenner concurred, observing that ‘Maastricht, the ultimate embodiment of benign technocratic management, is in one sense the endpoint of a logic that places material gain at the apex of social values. However, it may be a dead end as far as political union is concerned.’13 The growing interest in the meaning of the European idea is thus

Europe

3

closely tied to the conviction held by many Europeanists that the functional and institutional wager on European integration has reached its limits, and that something more is needed to propel the European project forward in the twenty-first century.14 Ultimately, the European project as a whole may even stand or fall depending on its ability to succeed in this area. ‘[W]ithout something resembling a “European identity”’, Peter van Ham argues, ‘the process of Europeanization will inevitably grind to a halt or even rupture.’15 Europeanists plausibly responded to Maastricht with a plethora of calls to provide their fellow Europeans with a more compelling vision of Europe.16 The President of the Trans-European Policy Studies Association, Jacques Vandamme, exhibited this response when he argued that ‘[a] political entity such as the European Union is inconceivable without the existence of a collective identity for its citizens’.17 His position was backed throughout the 1990s by Jacques Delors, whose influential support culminated in the financing of a variety of research programmes, spawning several academic studies from political scientists and historians, through to sociologists and intellectuals.18 ‘Europeans’, Delors famously predicted, ‘will not fall in love with a Common Market.’19 Yet the success of these attempts has been modest at best. The problem of articulating a more meaningful vision of the European project is proving remarkably intractable even a decade after Maastricht. ‘The Irish “no”, just as the Danish “no” of last year’, the Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt observed as recently as 2001, ‘is the consequence of the identity crisis, which the European Union is going through. There is a gap between the European Union and its citizens, a gap which since Maastricht has not decreased.’20 We currently have no idea, Romano Prodi echoes his predecessor as President of the European Commission, about how to delineate the ‘soul’ of Europe.21 If anything, Prodi’s concern is becoming more acute as the European Union contemplates not only deeper integration but also eastward expansion, raising yet more questions about what it means to be European and what the European enterprise ultimately stands for.

Europe’s cultural heritage This planned eastward expansion of the European Union has also generated a second reason necessitating more sustained reflection on the European idea. To many eastern European intellectuals ‘Europe’ represents far more than an expedient political arrangement; it forms a deeply held value. As the European Union expands into central and eastern Europe it must, in their view, begin to reflect more plainly the depth of Europe’s cultural heritage. In 1984 Milan Kundera had already been able to provoke intense debate on the European idea by voicing his concerns about the state of the

4

Europe

European imagination in his widely read article ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’. At a time when Europe was still divided by the Cold War, Kundera openly lamented that ‘western’ Europeans no longer cherished a common European idea. Kundera illustrated his argument by recalling the plight of the director of the Hungarian News Agency who, in November of 1956, had dispatched a telex to the world alerting it of the Russian attack on Budapest. The dispatch ended with the following words: ‘We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe’.22 In order to make this latter claim intelligible, of simultaneously belonging to Hungary and to Europe, Kundera emphasized that to a Hungarian, a Czech, or a Pole the word ‘Europe’ is not a geographical expression but a ‘spiritual notion synonymous with the word “West”’.23 Ironically, the plight of the director of the Hungarian News Agency had thus revealed that the: real tragedy for Central Europe . . . is not Russia but Europe: this Europe that represented a value so great that the director of the Hungarian News Agency was ready to die for it, and for which he did indeed die. Behind the iron curtain, he did not suspect, that the times had changed and that in Europe itself Europe was no longer experienced as a value. He did not suspect that the sentence he was sending by telex beyond the borders of his flat country would seem outmoded and would not be understood.24 The speed with which the borders of ‘Europe’ became redefined after the Second World War exposed all too clearly the extent to which the underlying cultural unity of Europe had evaporated in light of the new geopolitical realities. Kundera’s desperate plea, of course, was to not forget ‘central’ Europe, which undoubtedly belonged to Europe, whereas Russia did not. In his view the political frontier had been disastrously misplaced following the Second World War – a fact that could not be obscured with the passage of time.25 When, in the late autumn of 1989, the Germans collectively razed the Berlin Wall to the ground, effectively abolishing this geo-political frontier, the unexpected prospect of expanding the European Union eastwards provided an expedient historical and political context for Vaclav Havel to continue the line of argument opened up earlier by Kundera. In a speech delivered to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1996 Havel maintained that the European Union found itself at a difficult crossroads, conducting important negotiations about its future, while simultaneously facing growing doubts about the whole integrationist cause. His appeal was that: Europeans should give deeper thought to the historical significance of their magnificent unification effort, that they should look for the true and innermost reason behind it and for its broader mission, that they

Europe

5

should reflect upon their relationship to the world as a whole, to this future, to nature, and to the grave dangers looming over humankind today.26 Havel thus remains such an exemplary figure in the current debate not just because he believes in the importance of an overarching idea of Europe, but because he also wants the political project of Europe to reflect the spiritual depth of Europe’s cultural heritage. As Europe goes ahead with its unification ‘it has to rediscover, consciously embrace, and in some way articulate its soul or its spirit, its underlying idea, its purpose, and its inner ethos’.27 In this account the legitimacy of the European Union resides not merely in its ability to generate widespread attachment of the European publics, but more importantly in its ability to reflect this longer cultural heritage in the twenty-first century. In contrast to the more pragmatic argument that a meaningful vision of Europe would advance the political agenda of the European Union, he finds on the contrary that there is a deeper European heritage to which the political arrangements of the European Union must remain true, and must actively cultivate in the European consciousness in the years ahead.

A European community Yet a third reason animating the growing interest in the idea of Europe is the particular understanding of community that informs a significant body of literature on European integration. This conception of community emphasizes the importance of shared values and identities for bringing about a genuine European community – a European Gemeinschaft rather than just a Gesellschaft, to draw upon Ferdinand Toennies’s broad distinction. Diversity is greatly valued by Europeanists, to be sure, but it is also widely felt that underlying this diversity there has to be some common sense of unity if a genuine European community is to emerge in the twenty-first century. This conception of community as shared basic values and identities has accompanied the European endeavour from the outset. The Treaty of Rome already pronounced very boldly that European integration is about ‘[a]n ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’.28 For Jean Monnet the greater point behind the project of European integration was similarly to unite men, rather than just to bring states together.29 Yet in the end it was Robert Schuman who was the most explicit in this regard: The unity of Europe will not be achieved solely or principally by European institutions; their establishment will be an intellectual journey . . . Europe cannot and must not remain an economic and technocratic undertaking. It must have a soul, awareness of its historical affinities

6

Europe and its present and future responsibilities and political determination in the service of a single human ideal.30

Indeed, according to Schuman ‘true community requires at least some specific affinities. Countries do not combine when they do not feel among themselves something common.’31 From the very inception of the political project of Europe, the quest to peacefully unite the various peoples of Europe seemed to entail the ability to make relevant in the minds of these Europeans a common idea of Europe that would transcend national identities, or, at a minimum, complement them. For many supporters of the European cause, both past and present, the traditional wager on economic and institutional strategies for European unification is only a prelude to bringing about such a deeper union amongst the European peoples in the future. Several decades after embarking upon this project, however, Europeanists wishing to go beyond an intergovernmentalist conception of Europe note with some concern that this larger task still remains to be achieved.32 There is, Timothy Garton Ash observes, no European demos, only a European telos.33 Oliver Schmidtke has also argued that the contemporary European Union is no different from other institutional orders that depend on collective identities in order to delineate the criteria for membership and loyalty; he doubts whether the European Union can flourish either on the basis of mutual instrumental interests alone or on the basis of the strategic interests of business and political elites. He finds that what is at stake in the contemporary debate on Europe, ‘beyond the functional integration of economic, political, and legal processes, is the substantiated notion of a European citizenry which may possibly create bonds between individuals and institutions of the EU’.34 Having achieved a considerable degree of political influence, the quest to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe is no longer tangential to the project of European integration; for a growing number of Europeanists it stands at the very centre of the formation of a genuine European community.35 If, moreover, the notion of community informing the political project is one consisting of a group of people with shared values and identities, then bringing about such a European community would also seem to necessarily entail the articulation of an overarching idea of Europe that embodies or exemplifies such values.36

The spectre of violence Finally, the recent revival of interest in the meaning of the European idea is also partially grounded in the widespread view that many of the bellicose encounters periodically witnessed on European soil in the twentieth century were testament to the dangers inherent in not sharing a common idea of Europe. ‘A united Europe was not achieved’, the Schuman Declaration

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infamously proclaimed, ‘and we had war’.37 Since the inception of the political project of Europe this theme has been continuously repeated in the speeches of European officials and statesmen. As late as 1997 German Chancellor Helmut Kohl still portrayed the question of European Monetary Union as essentially being a ‘question of war and peace’.38 Over fifty years after the end of the Second World War, the violent nature of European history continues to resonate in the European consciousness.39 Throughout the past decade European states have been confronted with this bellicose history once again. The collapse of the former Yugoslavia heralded horrific conflicts that had not been seen in Europe since the 1940s. The view perpetuated by many commentators that there was somehow a Balkan Sonderweg to history, that those involved in the violent outbursts were not part of Europe,40 could not obscure the underlying fact that Sarajevo had also been a cosmopolitan city which was home to members of four different religions.41 To many commentators, irrespective of whether it was openly admitted or not, the inability to avert the extent of the Balkan crisis symbolized all too readily just how divided Europe remained, and how a pronounced and cultivated European responsibility was still utterly lacking.42 The events in the former Yugoslavia were thus widely perceived as testament to the challenges that Europe still faces, and to the continuing risks that the absence of a commonly held European identity entails. Nor have Europeanists overlooked that such nationalist and racist violence is not confined to the former Yugoslavia; it can be found in the very countries that sought to differentiate themselves so decisively from these events. The signs of racist and nationalist violence come not just from the former Yugoslavia, but from everywhere in Europe.43 There has been ample evidence of these well-known European pathologies resurfacing within many of the countries participating in the project of European unification.44 Although these movements often portray themselves publicly as resisting the political project of Europe, Europeanists tend to take the opposite view. Amongst the latter the rising tide of nationalist and racist sentiment is commonly seen as further evidence for the need to encourage a common European identity. We need a European identity, Gerard Delanty insists, ‘in order to protect us from the secularized remnants of Christendom: the dark and atavistic forces of nationalism and racism which threaten to engulf us’.45 A clearer expression of the perceived link between the violent nature of twentieth-century European history and the need for a broad European identity shared by the citizens of Europe can hardly be hoped for. Rather than being driven by a single set of interests, then, the current debate about the idea of ‘Europe’ actually emerges from the historical convergence of a complex set of diverse convictions. These convictions range from the necessity of having long-term vision for the expedient

8

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implementation of political strategy, to the perceived need to possess commonly shared values and identities in order to bring about a genuine and peaceful community, through to the need for political arrangements to reflect wider historical and cultural affinities. Each of these motivations is presently pushing the European debate further into the cultural realm, and is demanding greater awareness of a deeper and underlying idea of Europe. Many Europeanists are finally beginning to understand what Jean Monnet was hinting at when he famously argued that ‘if we were beginning the European community all over again, we should begin with culture’.46 Over the past decade this growing realization has prompted many Europeanists to turn towards the academy in search of guidance on how to articulate a more meaningful vision of Europe that is commensurate with the Zeitgeist of the twenty-first century, and that is sensitive to the depth of Europe’s cultural heritage. This renders the question of ‘Europe’ not only practical, but also academic.

Europe’s ‘spiritual vitality’ in crisis? The hope that scholars will be able to readily provide European policymakers with a vision of Europe meeting these complex demands may well prove premature. Scholars, too, have found it profoundly difficult over the past decade to outline a more meaningful idea of Europe. In his early and insightful study of the European idea the Swiss writer and dedicated Europeanist Denis de Rougement had concluded that ‘[t]o seek Europe is to make her!’47 This insight notwithstanding, and despite over a decade of searching, a more compelling vision of Europe is today still widely deemed to be lacking in the academy. In retrospect it seems that the past decade has given rise to many more scholars lamenting the absence of a more meaningful idea of Europe than it has to novel proposals for thinking about such an idea at the outset of the twenty-first century.48 In 1994 this dire state of affairs compelled Stanley Hoffmann to ‘revisit’ an essay he had published thirty years earlier and in which he had concluded that ‘Europe today has no clear profile other than that which a process of industrialization and a process of economic integration have given it. Europe today has no sense of direction and purpose.’49 In 1964 Hoffmann had concluded that a meaningful idea of Europe informing the European project was lacking. Thirty years later his discouraging conclusion is that this judgement remains essentially valid. The word ‘Europe’ continues to pass through the lips of countless commentators and scholars on a daily basis, and yet there is also a growing awareness amongst scholars and observers of European affairs that the European idea remains largely vacuous in the post-Cold War era and on the verge of the twenty-first century.50 Having been born in Vienna and grown up in France, Hoffmann is clearly disappointed by the inability of Europe to articulate a more

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compelling vision of itself, and thus concludes his article on a very sombre note. ‘In 1964’, he reminds his readers, ‘I wondered about Western Europe’s spiritual vitality. I still do.’51 In arriving at this pessimistic assessment Hoffmann is drawing on a very popular and widespread conception of ‘spiritual vitality’. Unfortunately he does not explicitly define and theorize what would constitute a more ‘meaningful’ idea of Europe in his article – a shortcoming that incidentally afflicts many contemporary reflections on the European idea.52 Yet it emerges quite clearly from his article that what he variously finds lacking in the European project is a clear ‘purpose’, a ‘sense of direction’, a ‘clear identity’, a ‘higher purpose’, and a ‘common enterprise’.53 In his account the absence of these attributes signals an absence of ‘spiritual vitality’.54 His pessimism consequently results as much from the absence of a more inspiring idea of Europe than he currently perceives, as it does from his sincere belief that the European project must possess such an idea if it is to flourish in the future. In searching for these particular attributes, Hoffmann is laying bare in an exemplary fashion the conception of ‘spiritual vitality’ that implicitly informs so many writings on the European idea. After all, Hoffmann is far from alone in arriving at such a pessimistic assessment. According to Agnes Heller, who was born in Budapest and who has been teaching both in Hungary and the United States over the past years, Europe has similarly been engaged in ‘a crash course in relativising its own culture, so much so that it arrived at a stage of advanced cultural masochism’.55 At times her imagery of the state of European culture is even glummer than Hoffmann’s. The stark image she associates with contemporary European culture is that of ‘a corpse whose hair and nails, wealth, and cumulative knowledge are still growing, but the rest is dead’.56 Europe lacks any future-oriented social fantasy apart from its technological forms of governance, having become a theatre without performers, a place where ‘[g]rand narratives of another, better future in politics, social questions, or anything else, are no longer forged’, and where ‘[r]edemption is deemed undesirable, and sociopolitical progress [is] ridiculed’.57 Heller does not wish to deny that Europe still retains a prominent position in the realm of philosophy, and that Europe still produces interesting philosophy and artworks, but she also finds that most of the attractive contributions increasingly tend to originate in the European periphery. Symptomatic of this fact, her argument continues, is the immense focus on preserving the past and on cultivating past traditions evident in contemporary Europe. Given that the present is incapable of yielding a more meaningful representation of its future direction, the search has to centre solely on European history, because it is only there that a more meaningful way of life can be discerned. ‘Old cities are rebuilt, ancient castles are refurbished, old artefacts are exhibited, old books are republished –

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Europeans tiptoe in their cities as in museums because their cities are museums.’58 Accordingly she views the growing emphasis on Europe’s past not as a gateway to discovering a more meaningful idea of Europe commensurate with the times, but as an admission of defeat. Europe has lost, either temporarily or for good, its trend to orient itself towards a more meaningful future. ‘European culture’, Heller concludes, ‘can legitimately be considered the cadaver of its own self-image.’59 The influential French scholar Zaki Laïdi has similarly given this theme of disappearing ‘meaning’ a book-length treatment. In fact Laïdi goes one step further and presents this absence of ‘meaning’ as the defining characteristic of post-Cold War international relations in general. Commendably he also specifies what he actually means by ‘meaning’, arguing that if we understand ‘meaning’ to consist of three interrelated notions – a foundation, a sense of unity and a final goal – then international relations in general, and European relations in particular, can properly be described as ‘meaningless’ in the post-Cold War era.60 With specific reference to contemporary European affairs he insists that: the need to project ourselves into the future has never been so strong, while we have never been so poorly armed on the conceptual front to conceive this future, which leaves a wide gap between the historic rupture that confronts us and our difficulty in interpreting it.61 In Laïdi’s view the political actions of Europe no longer derive their legitimacy from working towards a specific and inspiring vision of the future, but from pragmatically managing the ordinary demands of the present.62 In his account Europe clearly ‘has trouble metaphorising its own destiny, dramatising it’,63 and the only solution to this predicament is to realize that there is ‘no task more urgent than the reconstitution of a symbolic separation between the sphere of daily experience and the tracing of a new horizon of expectation’.64 In this account, too, Europe’s spiritual vitality is deemed to be in peril because of its inability to generate a more inspiring vision of Europe for the future. Finally, this theme of disappearing meaning has been observed from across the north Atlantic by the philosopher Robert Pippin. Like Heller and Laïdi, Pippin emphasizes the contemporary and pervasive dissatisfaction of European high culture with itself and its ideas.65 He observes that in the 1990s ‘[a] culture of melancholy, profound skepticism and intense self-criticism had become official high culture and the dominant academic one in the European West’.66 Yet Pippin also adds an important dimension to this debate by insisting that the contemporary experience of ‘crisis’ regarding the European idea is largely a repetitive phenomenon, having resurfaced frequently between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Pippin is thus able to place the contemporary European experience of ‘crisis’

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within its larger historical and cultural context, rendering it part of ‘a great, persistent dissatisfaction within European high culture with its own ideals and results’ that dates back much earlier than the end of the Cold War.67 Despite this wider historical awareness, however, Pippin essentially shares the broadly pessimistic assessment of contemporary European culture outlined by the previous three authors. Their considerable differences notwithstanding, these four influential scholars converge on the common assessment that there is an absence of meaning evident in contemporary European affairs, and that the European imagination currently appears too impoverished to give birth to a new and compelling vision of Europe for the twenty-first century. ‘[W]e no longer know very well’, Jacques Derrida writes, ‘what or who goes by this name [of Europe]. Indeed, to what concept, to what real individual, to what singular entity would this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?’68 The alleged ‘crisis’ of ‘Europe’ clearly extends into academic circles as well, rendering premature the aspiration that the latter will be able to quickly resolve the current impasse for European policy-makers. Neither the policy-makers employed by the European Union, nor members of the academy studying European affairs, seem genuinely optimistic about the prospects of articulating a more meaningful idea of Europe for the twenty-first century, despite the evident demand for such an idea. The resulting impasse generates an intriguing puzzle that this book would like to address in greater detail, namely why is it actually proving so difficult to articulate a more meaningful vision of Europe as we embark upon the twenty-first century, and how might this difficulty be addressed? What compelling vision could the idea of ‘Europe’ still possibly come to represent in the twenty-first century?

Nietzsche’s European thought Clearly these are grand questions, and questions too encompassing to be tackled exhaustively within the confines of a single book. Yet it is possible to attempt at least one answer, which is what the remainder of this book would like to accomplish by teasing out the hitherto unexplored ideas on Europe penned by one of its most notorious thinkers – Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). The explicitly European dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking consists of (i) his detailed analysis of the advent of nihilism, or meaninglessness, in European culture following the ‘death of God’; (ii) his critique of a nationalist response to this experience; and (iii) his own idea of the ‘good Europeans’ as a more appropriate way of responding to the challenges posed by secularization. There are many reasons why Nietzsche’s thinking on ‘Europe’, despite having been penned towards the end of the nineteenth century, still constitutes one of the most appropriate frameworks within which to explore further the current debate on the European idea.

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First, Nietzsche was amongst the earliest thinkers to problematize the collapse of an overarching and teleological idea of Europe within the secular configuration of European modernity. He anticipated that one of the greatest dangers likely to confront Europeans in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be the loss of their European voice – that Europeans would increasingly lack the means with which to cultivate a European spirit.69 This crucial insight explains why, long before he was thought of primarily as a ‘postmodern’ thinker, Nietzsche was internationally recognized for his profound insight into the cultural pathology of Europe and the onset of the ‘afterglow of European civilisation’.70 Nietzsche was amongst the early thinkers to contemplate in a sustained fashion the longer-term implications of the collapse of an overarching idea of Europe. Second, and in light of this realization, Nietzsche accorded the question of ‘Europe’ a prominent position in much of his thinking, showing a persistent interest in the deeper meaning of Europe’s cultural heritage and its future prospects. On the most basic of levels, this European dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking is revealed by the sheer frequency with which he comments on the European idea. According to the index compiled by Jörg Salaquarda to the standard German edition of Nietzsche’s writings, Nietzsche used the word ‘Europe’ over four hundred times.71 Beyond this more pedantic observation, Nietzsche was also a thinker who consciously cultivated a profound interest in the European idea and who accorded the notion of ‘Europe’ a central role in his thought.72 Not least he styled himself as ‘a thinker who has the future of Europe on his conscience’,73 and who once wrote of himself that, ‘even if I should be a bad German, I am definitely a very good European’.74 Occasionally he even referred to his ‘European mission’75 and one of his most important works, The Gay Science, was dedicated to the future Europeans that he envisaged. In a manner that might unexpectedly please central and eastern European intellectuals, Nietzsche’s conception of Europe even extended geographically into central and eastern Europe, in part because he was immensely proud of his Polish ancestors. Nietzsche can thus be seen as one of those formative philosophers and poets who, as Heinrich Mann once observed, have made such a pivotal contribution to the invention, cultivation, and maintenance of the European imagination over the past centuries.76 According to Heinrich’s better-known brother Thomas, Nietzsche was even a personality that summed up all that is essentially European.77 The third reason why Nietzsche suggests himself so naturally to a contemporary reflection on the European idea is that he deliberately cast the question of Europe in terms of ‘meaning’, referring not only to nihilism in general, but specifically to European nihilism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche already sensed that the modern European had begun to reveal an ‘unspeakable poverty and exhaustion’ in whose inner

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self ‘grey impotence, gnawing dissatisfaction, busiest boredom, and dishonest misery’ prevailed.78 In Europe, the overall aim was lacking and the question ‘Why?’ no longer found an answer.79 This widespread condition of not being able to experience a meaningful existence Nietzsche termed European nihilism and thought of it as ‘the really tragic problem of our modern world’.80 One could, of course, draw on a whole host of writers to explore this pessimistic experience of modernity, from Hölderlin to Heidegger, and yet it is Nietzsche’s discussion of this problem, especially in his passage 125 of The Gay Science, that is often considered to be the locus classicus for the expression of these themes.81 What is more, Nietzsche not only sought to document the emergence of these sentiments but also tried to understand the processes through which they had come about. Indeed, he theorised the method through which European existence had traditionally been endowed with a greater sense of meaning, and how, within the context of European modernity, this very method had become intellectually unconvincing, thereby giving rise to the European experience of meaninglessness. Nietzsche is such an appropriate choice for pursuing the contemporary impasse in the European debate, therefore, because he deliberately cast part of his discussion in terms of ‘meaning’ – his thought constantly traversing along this abyss of meaninglessness. Fourth, Nietzsche’s writings also continue to straddle those academic debates that bear so decisively on the contemporary reception of Europe’s longer cultural heritage. Ernst Behler has observed how Nietzsche can often still be drawn into current academic debates as if he were a contemporary.82 Another scholar concurs, noting how Nietzsche’s ‘philosophical system is now over a century old yet he still sounds contemporary. He needs no translation into the present. His problems are still our problems, his predicament our own.’83 In particular, Nietzsche is largely associated (although perhaps erroneously) with the ‘postmodern turn’ in the European and American academy.84 This means that Nietzsche also stands at the centre of precisely those academic debates that affect the contemporary reception of Europe’s intellectual heritage. ‘[E]veryone who thinks today’, Martin Heidegger once mused, ‘does so in Nietzsche’s light and shadow, whether they are “for” him or “against” him.’85 Finally, Nietzsche represents such a stimulating choice because, as a literary and philosophical figure, his writings continue to embody many of those very attributes that Europeanists are seeking to cultivate for the institutions of the European Union. Nietzsche has a growing and dedicated following within and outside the academy, many great contemporary intellects amongst them, and his thought has found nourishing roots in virtually every European country.86 His literary spirit evinces great vitality, passion, and profundity. Even his intellectual foes have to wrestle with the seductive quality of his writings that has not diminished significantly over the past century. While Nietzsche is certainly not universally admired and

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Europe

acclaimed, no one to date has criticized him of being unengaging, lacking in spiritual vitality, or being overly removed and detached – those qualities which are variously, if perhaps undeservedly, attributed to the institutions of the European Union. Irrespective of whether this is met with approval or dismay, Nietzsche is still capable of inspiring today in a way that the institutions of the European Union currently do not. All of this makes it all the more astounding that, despite the evergrowing amount of literature being generated on Nietzsche, the explicitly European dimension of his thinking has not yet received a thematic treatment.87 As early as 1935 J. P. Mayer had noted in his introduction to an anthology on Nietzsche’s writings that it might be necessary to explore Nietzsche’s pan-European perspective that transcends nationalist and völkisch divisions.88 Yet to this day the European dimension of Nietzsche’s thought usually receives only cursory attention at best.89 The following study would thus like to take up Mayer’s challenge, if rather belatedly. This is not an easy task; it requires making at least three brief methodological points at the outset. First, the following reading of Nietzsche is clearly not intended as a commentary on his work as whole. Although Nietzsche’s thinking undoubtedly spans a multitude of dimensions, the following study is intentionally selective in that it focuses on those themes that pertain most directly to thinking about the European idea – even though Nietzsche himself would probably have objected to such an endeavour. In so doing, the following study will also draw liberally on his posthumously published notes, many of which touch upon modern nationalism and the European idea. Some have argued that Nietzsche’s notes should not be used at all, or should only be used very cautiously, because they are not as polished and fully formed as his published thoughts. Others have suggested the opposite, pointing out that these notes might actually be a more honest representation of his thoughts given that he knew that they would not be published and thus did not have to hide behind literary masks. It is not possible to resolve this disagreement here without going into deeper methodological debates that would detract from the overall enterprise – debates, moreover, that are further complicated by the fact that many of the competing textual approaches employed to read Nietzsche are themselves informed by particular readings of Nietzsche. The best that can be said here is that it has now become customary to draw on these notes when referring to the theme of European nihilism, that this is in fact a useful thing to do, and that, regarding his thinking on ‘Europe’, these notes do not directly contradict his published writings on European nihilism. A second and closely related methodological point is that the following reading of Nietzsche will focus primarily on his middle and late periods, as these are the periods when he most explicitly thematized the problem of nihilism. This was also the period of Nietzsche’s life when he turned decisively against nationalism, and when he consciously began to extol his

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idea of the ‘good Europeans’. In outlining these ideas it will at times also be necessary to deliberately juxtapose passages from his middle and late periods for organizational and presentational purposes. Regarding the themes of nihilism, nationalism, and the ‘good European’, however, there is no essential contradiction between his middle and late periods. To this extent such occasional juxtaposition is also justifiable. This is not to deny, however, that a clear maturation and refinement of his thought undoubtedly took place between these periods, and that this schematic division of his corpus into early, middle, and late periods still remains useful for many other purposes. Finally, in exploring Nietzsche’s European thought the following study refrains from making specific criticisms of Nietzsche’s arguments in passing. It proceeds instead by letting Nietzsche’s European thought unfold, sometimes patiently and sometimes less patiently, and by initially giving him the benefit of the doubt. Towards the end of the book it will then be possible to judge as a whole the contribution that his European thought can make towards the contemporary debate on the idea of Europe. Proceeding in this way reveals Nietzsche to be not only a sophisticated thinker, but also one who was intimately concerned with the question of how to conceive of a meaningful idea of Europe in a secular age, who deliberately styled himself as a ‘good European’, and who can even warn us about some of the potential labyrinths with which this debate is already pregnant. It may well turn out that this much contested, detested and derided figure can actually still help us today in thinking about the meaning of the European idea.

16

David Corkill

Chapter Title

2

17

God or nothingness?

Nietzsche’s thought contains a multitude of entrances and exits. Many of the prominent disagreements about the meaning of his corpus actually hinge on the different places that his readers decide to enter and leave it. When exploring his thinking about Europe, however, the best starting point is undoubtedly his detailed discussion of the emergence of nihilism, or meaninglessness, in European culture following the ‘death of God’. This discussion of European nihilism retains immense pertinence for the contemporary debate on ‘Europe’ by virtue of three of its facets. First, it was in the context of this insightful and original discussion that Nietzsche illustrated what the European idea meant in the past, why this past idea of ‘Europe’ is no longer credible on a widespread basis, and why it remains so difficult to articulate a new and compelling vision of Europe within the cultural configuration of European modernity. Second, by casting the question of Europe within the wider context of secularization, Nietzsche’s discussion of European nihilism also renders intelligible many aspects of the current debate noted in the introduction, including why many Europeans continue to demand the articulation of a more meaningful idea of Europe, and why the inability to formulate such an idea frequently culminates in deep pessimism about Europe’s spiritual vitality. In these two ways Nietzsche’s analysis of European nihilism allows for a much more subtle understanding of why it continues to prove so difficult to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe today. Finally, Nietzsche’s analysis of European nihilism remains crucial for the contemporary debate on the European idea because an intimate engagement with the deeper dimension of this experience of meaninglessness also formed the constitutive moment for Nietzsche’s own vision of what it would mean to be a ‘good European’.1 It is only possible to fully grasp Nietzsche’s way of thinking about the European idea if the deeper implications of his analysis of European nihilism are first understood.

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God or nothingness?

Nietzsche and European secularization Nietzsche’s intellect matured at a time when many of his contemporaries were still passing through the second wave of European atheism. The first phase of atheism had been inaugurated by the scientific advances of Galileo and his followers, and had culminated in a largely naturalistic and mechanistic understanding of the universe. Although this conception of existence clearly diminished the role played by God, it had not denied this role altogether. Philosophers and scientists such as Descartes, Boyle and Newton no longer conceived of God as immanent in the world, but neither did they exclude the possibility that God existed externally to it.2 As Leszek Kolakowski notes, this crucial ambiguity enabled many people to ‘live without realising that they were denizens of two incompatible worlds and, by a thin shell, protect the comfort of faith while trusting progress, scientific truth and modern technology’.3 It was a fragile balance, indeed, but one facilitated by the fact that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was still a considerable gap between the conduct of scientific research and the noticeable impact of such knowledge on the daily lives of Europeans.4 For several generations it remained possible to deny the explicit conflict between the theistic and scientific worldviews. Nietzsche’s era was unique in that attempts by thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer to bridge this gap were being met with decreasing satisfaction.5 Darwin’s evolutionary theory was gaining in prominence, and, coupled with advances in applied technology, was making important inroads into the popular and intellectual reception of Christianity. As the great temporal distance between the advances of modern science and their application to the improvement of everyday life began to narrow in the course of the nineteenth century,6 so too a widespread sense of scientific and progressive optimism unfolded in European culture.7 Nietzsche matured intellectually within the context of this second wave of atheism, which had by then transformed itself from the initial and weaker version into a much deeper and more suspicious form that sought to radicalize the denial of God.8 In this latter form atheists arrived at the conclusion that the concept of a God was merely a psychological illusion created by human beings, with the result that many thinkers of Nietzsche’s generation could no longer believe unquestioningly in the existence of the divine world postulated by Christianity. Much in this vein the generation prior to Nietzsche had still rebelled, in its own view often heroically, against the excessive religiousness evident in European societies.9 Often the question preoccupying this generation was no longer whether or not God existed, as this question increasingly seemed settled to them. They were much more interested in understanding why Europeans had postulated the existence of God in the first place. It is this important cultural shift, this deeper atheism, which Nietzsche saw as being

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so characteristic of the European intellectual climate towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Formerly’, he observed in a work from his middle period: one sought to prove that there is no God – nowadays one indicates how the belief that there is a God could arise and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous. When in former times one had refuted the ‘proofs of the existence of God’ put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.10 This profound intellectual and cultural transition subsequently contributed to the collapse of clerical authority in 1848, and to the rapid de-Christianization amongst European Protestants.11 Nietzsche’s generation, in turn, was left with the difficult task of considering the ramifications of this decisive cultural adjustment. The defining aspect that set Nietzsche’s generation apart from the previous one, then, was that it could no longer portray this struggle against Christianity exclusively in heroic and liberating terms. The novel and additional task confronting Nietzsche’s generation was to come to terms with the potentially profound implications of European secularization.12 This entailed above all the need to render existence meaningful and intelligible in a world where God no longer credibly existed in their imagination, in an intellectual universe where God was deemed to be ‘dead’. One biographer rightly observes about Nietzsche’s generation that ‘[s]ecularisation threatened to leave them displaced and rootless, yet enticed them forward with the alternative of a post-religious identity as the first of the “new men”’.13 Perhaps it was also Nietzsche’s firmly Protestant upbringing that spurred him on so decisively to explore the cultural implications of secularization. In either case, it is his pivotal position at the end of this second wave of European atheism that makes him such a crucial figure to engage with in the quest to trace the origins of the modern inability to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe. Nietzsche effectively approached his intellectual maturity in an age when the traditional meaning of the European idea, that of the Christian continent, was rapidly losing widespread credibility.14 ‘God’, he had both Zarathustra and the madman in the market place famously proclaim, ‘is dead’.15

The ‘death of God’ Given this prevailing intellectual climate, Nietzsche framed the question of Europe within the wider context of secularization, incessantly probing how

20

God or nothingness?

the ‘death of God’ would affect European existence in the long run. If henceforth the meaning of ‘Europe’ could no longer be assumed to be that of the Christian continent, then it was necessary to inquire what might take Christianity’s place as the overarching cultural referent for European societies. Here Nietzsche detected a revealing and uncomfortable silence amongst the majority of his contemporaries, allowing him to anticipate that Europeans might soon confront the spectre of a meaningless existence. In the long run, Nietzsche thought, this decisive cultural shift towards widespread secularity entailed the possibility of a vast disenchantment of European culture, and the emergence of a pervasive inability to identify a deeper meaning underlying European existence. His prognosis for secular European culture was thus far more ambivalent than those advanced by the scientific optimists of his day. His axiom, penned in one of his notebooks, was that ‘[n]ihilism stands at the door’. But ‘[w]hat does nihilism mean?’ Nietzsche asked, famously providing the following answer: ‘[t]hat the highest values devalue themselves’. It means that in Europe the overall ‘aim is lacking’ and the question ‘Why?’ no longer finds an answer.’16 Nietzsche used the word nihilism to denote that state in which it is no longer possible for a society or a culture to experience existence as meaningful because its ‘highest values’ have become incredible. In the case of Europe, it signified that stage of its historical development towards the end of the nineteenth century during which the theistic universe of Christianity was finally starting to lose its grip on the European imagination, and with it, its claim to be the embodiment of European idea. Nietzsche’s detailed analysis of the longer-term effects of European nihilism is complex and conceptually sophisticated. ‘To attempt to sort out what Nietzsche meant by nihilism’, one scholar warns quite rightly, ‘is to confront a tangle of issues that must be teased out with great delicacy.’17 A widely recognized starting point in this quest can be found in Section 125 of The Gay Science, which is a work that Nietzsche had published during his lifetime. In the passage Nietzsche presents his readers with his famous tale of the ‘Madman’ – a passage that for many scholars still represents one of the most eloquent descriptions of the experience of meaninglessness characteristic of modern existence.18 The passage anticipates, in a poetic and metaphorical fashion, the existential discomfort and lack of orientation that might ensue for Europe’s deeper spirits upon their eventual realization of the full implications of secularization for European culture. Due to the central importance of the passage for the remainder of the book, and for the intellectual history of the twentieth century in general, it is worth quoting it at some length. The passage begins by having the ‘madman’ draw attention to the ‘death of God’: Have you not heard of the madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: ‘I seek

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God! I seek God’ – As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? – thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I.’19 The ‘madman’ announcing the ‘death of God’ is mad in the sense that he has understood, unlike his contemporaries, the far-reaching implications of this development for European culture. The atheists standing around the marketplace no longer believe in God and view religion as an obsolete superstition in a Europe that has discovered the power of science. They do not yet understand that they are only immersed in the quiet before the storm. As one scholar has astutely pointed out, their very laughter at the madman ‘reveals unwittingly the truth of his proclamation’.20 Throughout this passage Nietzsche was not primarily concerned with traditional arguments about the existence of God, such as the cosmological, the ontological, and the one from design, but with the cultural ramifications of secularization.21 Strictly speaking Nietzsche did not even maintain that God does not exist. Rather, God existed in the European imagination in the past, but no longer does so; and it is this development, this experience of withdrawal, that would have profound consequences for the viability of much of European culture in future.22 Whether there ever truly had been a God or not is, in fact, largely irrelevant to Nietzsche’s account, given that the actual experience of loss and disillusionment brought about by secularization was certainly real enough.23 When Nietzsche had the madman proclaim that ‘God is dead’ he was essentially insisting that the common cultural identity and fabric of Europe had collapsed.24 Nietzsche continued the passage much in this vein: All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we plunging continuously? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continuously closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God remains dead. And we have killed him.25

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God or nothingness?

The apocalyptic language invoked here by Nietzsche anticipates the great discomfort and disorientation that would be likely to befall European culture as Europeans increasingly grew aware of the deeper ramifications of the ‘death of God’. Christianity could no longer provide European existence with a deeper meaning, severing it, so to speak, from its sun and pushing it towards its ‘great noon’. In his notebooks Nietzsche even considered the emerging conviction that ‘nothing has any meaning’ to be the ‘[t]he danger of all dangers’ for European culture.26 It is a sentiment he later expressed again in his autobiography, where, with characteristic Eurocentrism, he referred to the advent of European nihilism as ‘a crisis without equal on earth’.27 Why would the ‘death of God’ lead to the widespread experience of meaninglessness in European culture? The reason was simply because so much of European culture had previously been based on, and revolved around, the Christian faith. Traditionally it was the belief in God that had endowed much of European existence with a greater meaning and value, and had made life, including its suffering and disappointments, intelligible. Despite his prominent criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche was all too aware of its historical ability to avert the experience of meaninglessness in Europe. ‘What were the advantages of the Christian moral hypothesis?’, he inquired in one of his notebooks.28 First ‘[i]t granted man an absolute value, as opposed to his smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away’. Even if fallen, man was deemed to be God’s most important creature, bestowing upon man an important dignity and value in a world otherwise characterized by flux and instability. Second, Christianity ‘conceded to the world, in spite of suffering and evil, the character of perfection – including “freedom”: evil appeared full of meaning’. By positing a perfect deity that shines through all suffering and evil, Christianity was able to endow even such instances with meaning and value; it was all part of a divine plan. Third, Christianity ‘posited that man had a knowledge of absolute values and thus adequate knowledge precisely regarding what is most important’, preventing ‘man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life’. Christianity was, in effect, a ‘means of preservation’ and ‘the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism’ in that it ‘protected life against despair and the leap into nothing’.29 With the ‘death of God’, however, this cultural resource for addressing human suffering and rendering it meaningful would henceforth be unavailable to Europeans on a widespread basis. European existence would increasingly appear meaningless. The disorienting impact of the ‘death of God’ on European culture would be further exacerbated because the Christian faith had been incorporated and translated into virtually all aspects of European existence: into architecture and sculpture, literature and painting, music and philosophy, as well as ethics and law. The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin reminds his readers

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of this underlying unity that characterized much of medieval culture, observing that the latter was effectively ‘a whole whose parts articulated the same supreme principle of true reality and value: an infinite, supersensory and super-rational God, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, absolutely just, good and beautiful, creator of the world and of man’.30 This is not to imply Novalis’s romantic vision that medieval culture was a monolith, nor is it to deny that there was a wide array of interpretations of Christianity. Yet it is to insist that it was possible to unify complex and disparate events and phenomena under the will of God.31 To illustrate the point Nietzsche himself recalled in The Gay Science that in an earlier time ‘experiences shone differently because a god shone through them. . . . “Truth” was experienced differently, for the insane could be accepted formerly as its mouthpiece – which makes us shudder or laugh.’32 In earlier times even madmen could be subsumed under the umbrella of this common Christian horizon because God shone through the insane as well. Christian morality would be one of the first casualties of secularization. In Nietzsche’s view, ‘Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces’.33 In The Twilight of the Idols he reiterated with specific reference to Christian morality that ‘its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth – it stands or falls with faith in God’.34 Much like Dostoyevsky, some of whose works he had read in French translation, Nietzsche argued that in a godless world, everything might ultimately be permitted.35 ‘[H]ow much must collapse’, he pondered, ‘now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example the whole of our European morality.’36 Nietzsche appeared astonished, at times even frustrated, that the majority of his contemporaries were as yet unwilling to recognize and confront these deeper ramifications honestly and directly.37 Indeed, the famous passage from The Gay Science concludes with the ‘madman’ recognizing that his message was still very much premature: Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I have come too early’, he said then; ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves’. It has been related that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out

24

God or nothingness? and called into account, he is said to have replied nothing but: ‘What after all are these churches now if they are not tombs and sepulchers of God?’38

Whereas Nietzsche’s madman understood very well that the ‘death of God’ might render European existence increasingly meaningless, the atheists standing around the marketplace could not yet envision the impending catastrophe for European culture. What is more, just as the madman had come too early, so too Nietzsche thought he was only going to be born ‘posthumously’, i.e. that the importance of his writings would only become recognized long after his death and after the implications of the ‘death of God’ had finally begun to spill out of the salons and into the streets of European culture.39 Once it did, the crucial question on the minds of many Europeans would be what, if anything, could still endow European existence with a greater sense of meaning. The most immediate meaning of Nietzsche’s declaration that ‘God is dead’, therefore, is ‘that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable’,40 and the recognition that this might entail the eventual collapse of both the moral framework and worldview which was built around it.

The ‘meaninglessness’ of modern science Nietzsche thought the crisis of nihilism would be particularly severe for European culture because modern science was unlikely to provide a viable new ground for a common and meaningful vision of Europe. Although the naturalistic-evolutionary perspective was rapidly gaining in credibility and influence, and was successfully dethroning the primacy of the Christian account of existence in the European imagination, it could not endow the lives of Europeans with a deeper sense of meaning; it was unable to determine a new goal for European existence. Although Nietzsche placed great emphasis on the strengths and achievements of modern science in his middle phase, by the time of his final writing period he had become increasingly sceptical about the prospects of modern science forming the basis of a new post-Christian idea of Europe. In his notebooks he found that scientific and mechanistic accounts of existence give ‘the impression of meaninglessness’41 and referred to the ‘[n]ihilistic tendency in the natural sciences. (“Meaninglessness”) Causality, Mechanism. The “law-like regularity.”’42 Modern science lacked an easily recognizable goal and thus could not fulfil the human desire cultivated by nearly two millennia of Christian thinking. For this reason Nietzsche also drew attention to the ‘nihilistic consequences of contemporary science. . . . Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the centre toward X’.43 Prior to Copernicus Europeans had perceived themselves to be centred in the universe spiritually; they occupied

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centre stage in the cosmic drama of revelation and redemption. Europeans also thought themselves to be centred in the universe physically, with the heavenly bodies rotating in perfect circles around their privileged position. As modern science advanced, it increasingly called into question this status, and perpetuated a displacement from this unique and privileged position towards a yet unknown ‘X’.44 This process seemed to be continually perpetuating itself. ‘Since Copernicus’, Nietzsche observed in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane – now he is slipping faster and faster away from the centre into – what? into nothingness? into a “penetrating sense of his nothingness”?’45 Science could certainly specify the means, but not illuminate the ends. In some ways the scientific worldview even diminished and disenchanted the previous cosmic status and dignity of Europeans. The growing influence of the ‘Darwinian’ thinking implied that modern Europeans now stood in much closer relation to the animal kingdom than they did to the kingdom of God. The rise of modern science effectively relegated Europeans from the privileged position of being God’s most important creature to that of being nothing more than a sophisticated animal, which is why Nietzsche noted in one of his published works that ‘[a]las, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past – he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God (“child of God”, “Godman”)’.46 This complaint pertained not only to the sub-fields of physics and astronomy, but to science more generally: All science (and by no means only astronomy, on the humiliating and degrading effect of which Kant made the noteworthy confession: ‘it destroys my importance’ . . .), all science . . . has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been nothing but a piece of bizarre conceit.47 Nietzsche’s anticipation of these longer-term ramifications of secularization compelled him to stipulate that ‘the most universal sign of the modern age’ is that ‘man has lost dignity in his own eyes to an incredible extent’.48 Modern science could not easily provide the metaphysical comfort and privileged status demanded by a European culture which had been accustomed to the balm of faith; it ‘never creates values’ itself.49 Although science was a powerful intellectual pursuit, it lacked the characteristics crucial to achieving widespread human felicity; it ultimately could not answer the ‘Why?’ question. To the extent that modern European culture embraced, even put a primacy on, the principles of modern science and a naturalistic account of existence, it would also encounter great difficulties in answering the question of meaning in general, and the question of Europe’s meaning in particular.

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When viewed in combination, these two interrelated processes – the challenge of Christianity through the rise of naturalist accounts of existence, and the subsequently perceived meaninglessness of a European culture grounded solely on the underlying principles of modern science – represent the first phase of Nietzsche’s discussion of European nihilism. During his middle period Nietzsche took this joint ‘decline of the faith in the Christian god, [and] the triumph of scientific atheism’ to be the most decisive ‘European event’ of modern times.50 It is an understanding of the dilemma of ‘Europe’ that still resonates amongst contemporary scholars and policy-makers. Not too long ago Anthony Smith characterized Europe’s true and unavoidable dilemma as ‘a choice between unacceptable, historical myths and memories on the one hand, on the other a patchwork, memoryless scientific “culture” held together solely by the political will and economic interest that are so often subject to change’.51 As will emerge in greater detail below, the wider problems inherent in the cultural configuration of European modernity already outlined by Nietzsche towards the end of the nineteenth century continue to resonate throughout the contemporary debate on the European idea.

The groundlessness of modern science Yet there is also a second, more profound, and more interesting dimension to Nietzsche’s discussion of European nihilism that should not be overlooked. In his later period Nietzsche came to realize that the problem of European nihilism actually ran much deeper than even he had initially thought. Where in his middle period he still cast the question of nihilism largely within the widespread experience of meaninglessness accompanying the demise of Christianity and the rise of modern science, in his later period Nietzsche’s engagement with modern science progressed towards further exploring the very ground upon which the scientific endeavour first emerged and subsequently flourished. In this later period Nietzsche began to realize that ultimately the entire endeavour of modern science itself could no longer be properly grounded in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. Consequently not even modern science could function as an imperfect surrogate for Christianity, leading to an even deeper experience of meaninglessness. Specifically, Nietzsche sought to expose that modern science, despite claiming to be neutral and objective, was a normative project embodying a clear moral hierarchy; it privileged the pursuit of truth over all other values. What is more, Nietzsche thought that this primacy it placed on the pursuit of truth had historically derived from the prior Christian equation of truth with the divine. Modern science had unconsciously retained its overriding desire to determine the truth of existence from its Christian predecessor, and thus also remained continuous with its Christian pre-

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cursor in terms of the highest value it embodied and pursued. The crucial dilemma that modern science consequently confronted following the collapse of Christianity was how to ground its absolute priority of truth without recourse to the prior Christian framework out of which it had historically emerged, and yet which it was also rapidly displacing. Nietzsche did not think that science could actually achieve this task, which is why he thought the victory of science over Christianity was merely a hollow one. Not even modern science could serve as an intellectually persuasive foundation for a reinvigorated, post-Christian idea of Europe. It is worth re-tracing the steps through which Nietzsche arrived at this conclusion one step at a time. Contrary to the popular view that modern science is an objective and non-metaphysical enterprise, Nietzsche still found it to rest on an overriding value and on a heavily biased disposition to the world. In his published writings Nietzsche repeatedly argued that there was actually ‘no such thing as science “without any presuppositions”’52 and that modern science ‘requires in every respect an ideal of value, a value-creating power, in the service of which it could believe in itself’.53 In his view the overriding value implicitly motivating the entire endeavour of modern science was that of truth; scientists stood in a relation to the world that was defined overwhelmingly by their desire to determine the truth of existence. In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche argued how: That which constrains these men [the modern scientists] . . . this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative – don’t be deceived about that – it is the faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute value of truth, sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone (it stands or falls with this ideal).54 Why, though, did scientists place such an overriding importance on determining the truth of existence? Nietzsche argued that unbeknownst to many scientists, this overriding value they placed on truth was ironically still derived from the much older ideas of Christianity that had coloured so much of European culture for the past two millennia. ‘[W]e men of knowledge of today’, he insisted, ‘we godless men and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith . . . that God is truth, that truth is divine.’55 Christianity had cultivated in European culture a powerful obligation to seek the truth of existence, and had educated Europeans to believe that truth was holy. One way of recognizing the important role of being truthful in the Christian faith is by considering the crucial role played by confession. Nietzsche referred to this powerful European impulse to determine the overall truth of existence, and to posit the existence of a ‘true’ world residing behind or beyond the flux of daily existence, as the ‘will to truth’.

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Like Christianity, modern science still seeks to determine the overall truth of existence, and believes in the existence of a ‘true’ world. It merely searches for this ‘true world’ in a different realm, focusing on earthly existence rather than on a divine world. Yet Nietzsche’s argument about the tenuous foundations of modern science was even subtler still. The ultimate point he was trying to establish is not only that modern science’s emphasis on the importance of truth remained continuous with the much older Christian impulse to determine the truth of existence, but also that historically the modern scientific conscience actually grew out of the moral framework of Christianity. In assuming that knowledge of truth is also knowledge of the divine, Christianity had unwittingly encouraged the ever more rigorous pursuit of truth that eventually gave birth to the modern scientific conscience.56 Nietzsche thus wished to draw attention to the immensely ironic circumstance that it was precisely Christianity’s uncompromising insistence on the absolute primacy of truth that, over time, became translated into the modern scientific mindset. This scientific conscience, in turn, subsequently generated naturalistic accounts of existence that did not rely on the existence of God, and that compelled Europeans give up their faith in Christianity. It was thus the intense Christian commitment to truth that eventually exposed the concept of God as an elaborate lie:57 You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian god: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood ever more rigorously, the father’s confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and governance of a god; interpreting history in honour of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; interpreting one’s own experiences as pious people have long enough interpreted theirs . . .58 In this account the ‘death of God’ is not simply the result of Europeans having voluntarily turned their back on Christianity for underlying personal or sociological reasons. Rather, and this is often seen to be one of the very strength’s of Nietzsche’s argument, the European experience of nihilism results from the sincere and consistent application of Christian values.59 It is the unconditional pursuit of truth cultivated by Christianity that eventually exposes Christianity to be a lie in the European imagination. ‘We outgrew Christianity’, Nietzsche maintained, ‘not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close, even more because we grew out of it. It is our strict and over-indulged piety itself that today forbids us still to be Christians.’60 It was the constant application of Christianity’s own values that led to its demise. This also explains why Nietzsche detected a

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kind of logic behind the advent of modern nihilism, why he asserted that nihilism is the necessary consequence of our valuations so far, and why he claimed that the highest values devalue themselves. Such an understanding of the rise of modern science casts the latter in a very different light. First and foremost, the view that modern science still remains continuous with, and indeed historically arose from within, the Christian command to determine the ultimate truth of existence, necessitates a fundamental reassessment of the radical break that science purports to constitute in relation to Christianity. While modern science parts with Christianity’s religious doctrines and its belief in a divine world, its underlying moral hierarchy, and its teleological perspective oriented towards determining the truth of existence, remains very much continuous with that of its Christian predecessor. ‘It is’, Nietzsche argued in this regard, ‘still a metaphysical faith [in truth] that underlies our faith in science.’61 Modern science and Christianity are not that different when it comes to their highest values – both operate in the service of truth. Indeed, modern science is only the most recent manifestation of this much older will to truth; it is nothing but a refined version of the will to truth exemplified in its purest, secular form, and applied so consistently that it subsequently undermined the Christian worldview in the popular European imagination. ‘Unconditional honest atheism is [thus] not the antithesis of that ideal [the will to truth], as it appears to be; it is rather only one of the latest phases of its evolution, one of its terminal forms and inner consequences – it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.’ 62 Despite its break with religious doctrine and its naturalistic outlook, modern science still bows at the same altar of truth, and its disposition towards the world is still very much based on the same attempt to determine the underlying truth of existence. It merely looks for this truth in a different realm. Second, and more importantly, the recognition that modern science remains in crucial respects a Christian enterprise also has implications for the persuasiveness of modern science as a possible new grounding for the European idea following the ‘death of God’. For, if Nietzsche was correct in asserting that the value of truth pursued by scientists ultimately still derived from Christianity’s moral framework, then the crucial question that had to follow was how modern scientists would justify their activity (and their underlying worldview) without recourse to the prior Christian framework which they had subsequently displaced in the European imagination? How does modern science propose to ground this incessant desire to fix the truth of existence once it had surpassed Christianity as the most widespread account of existence? The unconditional orientation towards determining the truth of existence is certainly intelligible within a Christian framework that posits a supreme God who shines through all

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aspects of human existence – even the insane – and who thus guarantees the existence of truth, indeed is equated with the truth. If God is truth, and God shines through all earthly phenomena, then the compulsion to pursue the truth unconditionally makes sense as an act of faith and as an obligation to God. Yet this unconditional privileging of truth over other social values becomes much more difficult to sustain intellectually once the belief in the existence of God collapses. Can the pursuit of truth be grounded as the highest European value without a God who commands this devotion to truth unconditionally? If there is no God, why should European existence continue to revolve around this torturous pursuit of truth rather than any other possible value? This question is not at all easy to answer. In fact Nietzsche remained quite sceptical as to whether modern science could persuasively ground its unconditional prioritising of the value of truth over any other possible values following the ‘death of God’; he did not think that modern science could actually accomplish this task. As David Owen notes, ‘science as the will to truth cannot itself articulate a ground on which to assert the value of truth’.63 Modern science thus portrays itself as impartial and free of metaphysical baggage, whereas it implicitly strives towards determining the truth of existence, without explicitly theorising how this overriding value is grounded. Because modern science is inept at answering ‘Why? questions, and at determining the ends of mankind, modern science cannot persuasively assert why the pursuit of truth should have priority over other competing values. In the end, therefore, modern science is just as profoundly affected by the ‘death of God’ as Christianity. With the ‘death of God’ the crucial entity that traditionally commanded the unconditional pursuit of truth as the highest possible human obligation is effectively removed from the equation, leaving the scientists in the awkward situation of not being able to answer the question as to why truth should be the highest European value. Why truth rather than untruth? This is not a radical denial of the existence of truth, but a normative question about the place of truth in the European hierarchy of values. Nietzsche thought that this deeper conceptual problem surrounding the enterprise of modern science essentially left its advocates with two very different options. On the one hand scientists could refuse to problematize the unconscious faith they still put in the pursuit of truth, and could simply continue with the scientific enterprise as they had done in the past. The problem with this response is that it is not very scientific, if by ‘scientific’ one understands the open and critical evaluation and examination of all of one’s assumptions. This option, in other words, is neither intellectually rigorous nor consistent with the principles of science itself. Max Weber would later draw attention to this very problem in his famous lecture entitled ‘Science as a Vocation’ when he observed that ‘[s]cience . . . presupposes that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense

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that it is “worth being known”. In this obviously are contained all our problems. For this presupposition cannot be proved by scientific means.’64 Modern science is hard pushed to ground its continuing pursuit of the truth of existence, and even the recourse to the social and cultural benefits that the pursuit of truth could accrue is rendered problematic by the immense dissatisfaction that human beings display in relation to naturalistic accounts of existence that are solely based on the principles of rationality. Worse still, the unwillingness to scrutinize the prioritising of the value of truth over all other values could even be said to constitute a breach of the scientific intellectual conscience. Continuing with the quest of modern science in the absence of properly grounding this overriding value of truth would, quite literally, amount to an act of faith – the very antithesis of scientific endeavour. Nevertheless, Nietzsche anticipated that many scientists would habitually opt, either consciously or subconsciously, for this strategy; it was the easiest and the most convenient option as it did not require a shift in underlying values and attitudes. In this case, however, modern science’s inability to ground the values to which it subscribes leads to the paradoxical situation whereby the scientists having ‘got rid of the Christian God . . . now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality’ 65 – truth at any price and essentially as an act of faith. In Nietzsche’s view a better strategy for modern scientists, and one that would remain true to, as well as consistent with, the principles of the scientific spirit, would be to engage in an open debate about this unconditional disposition towards determining the truth of existence, and to subject Europe’s will to truth to critical intellectual scrutiny. If scientists really want to get to the bottom of things, they must ask where this whole European desire for truth came from, and what the value of putting a primacy on truth over all values actually is. They must begin to reflect on this crucial blind spot in European culture of simply taking the pursuit of truth for granted, which is evident both in Christianity and in modern science. Although unconventional and controversial, Nietzsche certainly thought that his was the path of intellectual integrity and of consistently applying the will to truth, insisting that: Truth has to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, has had to be sacrificed to it . . . For what does it mean to be honest in intellectual things? That one is stern towards one’s heart, that one despises “fine feelings”, that one makes every Yes and No a question of conscience! – Belief makes blessed, consequently it lies.66 The path of intellectual conscience and rigour, as well as of scientific openmindedness, required that the will to truth not be simply accepted unquestioningly.

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In Nietzsche’s view a clean intellectual conscience demanded instead that the will to truth, too, be subjected to critical scrutiny following the ‘death of God’. It is a strategy he began to explore in On the Genealogy of Morals: At this point it is necessary to pause and take careful stock. Science itself henceforth requires justification (which is not to say that there is any such justification). Consider on this question both the earliest and most recent philosophers: they are all oblivious of how much the will to truth itself first requires justification; here the ascetic ideal has hitherto dominated all philosophy, because truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest court of appeal – because truth was not permitted to be a problem at all. Is this ‘permitted’ understood? – From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied a new problem arises: that of the value of truth.67 By pursuing this strategy the whole European habit of trying to fix the truth of existence gradually becomes conscious of itself not as something innate, but as something potentially problematic. The consistent and unconditional desire to fix the truth of existence is revealed to be a profound and deep bias in European thought rather than something that is essential to its existence. Henceforth, Nietzsche insisted that, Europe’s ‘will to truth requires a critique – let us define our own task – the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question’.68 While intellectually more conscientious, pursuing this strategy of experimentally questioning the will to truth is not without its own risks. The problem with following this more rigorous strategy is that while it arguably does remain true to the scientific spirit, it paradoxically also opens the floodgates to the undermining of the ground of the scientific endeavour itself, at least in its modern rendition. Once one begins to question the will to truth, the latter effectively begins to prey on itself. Nietzsche described this aporia in the following manner: Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality . . . After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth?’ And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet I know of no friend): what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem.69 Here, according to Nietzsche, we simultaneously encounter both the most consistent application and the abandonment of the will to truth, the latter

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applied so consistently that it literally begins to expose its own limits and to open up a deep abyss. By pushing Europe’s will to truth into ever greater extremes, Nietzsche was able to show the questionable ground not only of the Christian account of existence, but of the incessant desire to fix the truth of European existence which had been retained by modern scientists. This is not to say that the pursuit of truth cannot be useful and socially beneficial in certain contexts. Nor is this to say that the quest for truth has to be abandoned altogether, but it is to insist that the consistent and conscientious quest for truth also needs to reflect on the value and meaning of this quest itself. Science can accrue great social benefits, to be sure, but without God it cannot account for why the pursuit of truth should represent the highest European value. Nor, for the purposes of this study, is it clear why it should be equated with the European idea following the retreat of Christianity as some have suggested. For the later Nietzsche, then, the ‘death of God’ actually implied much more than just the gradual demise of Christianity and rise of modern science. It also implied that modern science, as a modern continuation of this much older Christian will to truth, could no longer be properly grounded following the ‘death of God’ and thus could not persuasively replace its Christian predecessor as the new cultural referent for European societies as he had still hoped during his middle period. The scientific victory of Christianity was merely superficial because in displacing Christianity it also imploded its privileged status: among the forces cultivated by [Christian] morality was truthfulness: this eventually turned against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective – and now the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant. Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation – needs that now appear to us as needs for untruth; on the other hand, the value for which we endure life seems to hinge upon these needs.70 Like its Christian predecessor, modern science still placed an absolute primacy on the pursuit of truth, yet without God to demand this devotion to truth unconditionally, modern science could no longer ground the absolute priority that it believed this practice should enjoy in European culture. If it simply proceeded nevertheless, it had to do so essentially as an act of faith. As such it would not have any greater claim than Christianity to be the manifestation or embodiment of the European idea. From a Nietzschean perspective, its victory of Christianity was not the moment of a great triumph, as many of his contemporaries believed, but the decisive moment of its unravelling, rendering the experience of nihilism even deeper and more disorienting. Other avenues would henceforth have to be explored for articulating a more meaningful idea of Europe.

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The deeper dimension of European nihilism Nietzsche’s intimate engagement with the ground of modern science allowed him to recognize that both Christianity and modern science stood on shaky ground in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. Both were examples of the will to truth, and the ‘death of God’ ultimately entailed calling this will to truth experimentally into question. Yet even in arriving at this deeper insight, Nietzsche had still not unravelled for his reader what he thought the ultimate implications of the advent of European nihilism were, and what he was really referring to when he jotted in his notebooks ‘[t]hat the highest values devalue themselves’, that in Europe the overall aim is lacking, and that the question ‘Why?’ no longer finds an answer.71 The larger point Nietzsche was trying to make was that the advent of European nihilism entailed not merely the collapse of the particular Christian or scientific meanings accorded to the European idea in the past, but the calling into question of the entire underlying will to truth through which European existence had been rendered meaningful for nearly two millennia. The entire European practice of deriving meaning from determining the truth of existence was fundamentally subverted by the ‘death of God’. To those who understood the deeper implications of the ‘death of God’ it would henceforth no longer be persuasive to find meaning in this manner, which is why Nietzsche had Zarathustra proclaim not only that ‘God is dead’, but that effectively ‘[a]ll gods are dead’.72 Not only Christianity and modern science had lost their persuasiveness as ways of understanding the meaning of European existence, but all attempts to determine the truth of existence – not because Nietzsche did not believe in truth, but because the unconditional value that Europeans traditionally placed in truth was no longer self-evident in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. The earth had become unchained from all of its possible suns, and there was literally no firm ground upon which to stand, or towards which to orient one’s existence. This is the deeper dimension of European nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to communicate through his analysis of the ‘death of God’. Despite his forceful criticisms of Christianity, Nietzsche did not think that the historical origins of this incessant European habit of determining the truth of existence were to be found in Christianity itself. Nietzsche bestowed this (dis)honour upon Plato. Nietzsche argued that in Plato’s case the ‘true’ world already consisted of the non-empirical and eternal Forms, containing all those properties such as truth, identity, unity, stability, that earthly existence did not possess.73 This ‘true’ world, Nietzsche noted, was ‘attainable to the wise, the pious, [and] the virtuous man’.74 Plato thus stood at the beginning of a European tradition that tended to denigrate the sensuous world in favour of some higher and truer world. By dividing the world into two – into the ‘true’ and the ‘apparent’ world – Plato’s is the

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nihilistic gesture par excellence in that it invents a non-existence world on the basis of which the value of earthly existence is depreciated.75 Plato’s was the ‘[o]ldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing’.76 Nietzsche thought that Christianity had simply retained Plato’s habit of positing a ‘true’ world beyond the realm of daily existence. Like Platonism, Christianity posited the existence of a timeless and true world that is separate from earthly existence and that is synonymous with the true meaning of existence.77 This crucial similarity allowed Nietzsche to claim that Christianity was essentially a form of ‘Platonism for “the people”’.78 Modern science retained this excessive belief in the value of truth, merely redirecting its gaze from heaven to earth. With the ‘death of God’, however, Nietzsche thought that all of these Christian-Platonic attempts to posit a ‘true’ world beyond the realm of daily existence had become untenable. As Martin Heidegger pointed out, with the ‘death of God’ the ‘suprasensory world is without effective power. It bestows no life. Metaphysics, i.e., for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end.’79 In Nietzsche’s view, therefore, the greatest challenge posed by the ‘death of God’ was that ‘meaning’ could no longer be derived from positing the ultimate truth of existence. After more than two thousand years of seeking to invoke a ‘true’ world in order to give European existence a deeper sense of meaning, this traditional disposition towards existence had begun to call itself into question, giving rise to a pervasive and frightening experience of meaninglessness in European culture. ‘What has happened at bottom?’, Nietzsche asked: The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realisation that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of ‘aim’, the concept of ‘unity’, or the concept of ‘truth’. Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not ‘true’, is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world.80 With the ‘death of God’, the ‘Europe’ built around the will to truth was at an end. It would henceforth be futile to continue trying to find meaning by incessantly seeking to determine the truth of existence, and yet there was no clear idea of what could possibly replace the will to truth as Europe’s grounding cultural referent, or as a mechanism for rendering European existence meaningful in a different manner. The implications of this transition from an existence based on the will to truth, to one in which this will to truth is no longer accepted blindly and unconditionally, are certainly profound; they also far exceed the mere ramifications of the demise of Christianity and the rise of modern science. This transition entailed not just the calling into question of Christianity

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and modern science, but of all possible ‘true’ worlds, as well as the norms, ideals, and values traditionally derived from these ‘true’ worlds.81 As Simon Critchley points out, the advent of European nihilism entailed the complete ‘breakdown of the order of meaning, where all that was posited as a transcendent source of value becomes null and void, where there are no skyhooks upon which to hang a meaning for life’.82 Such is the immensely destructive power of Nietzsche’s ‘dynamite’, and the abyssal depths opened up by the ‘death of God’. Yet Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would only be able to emerge in future if they first grasped this much profounder dimension of the advent of European nihilism. This deeper dimension of European nihilism also has important ramifications for the contemporary debate on the Europe idea, and for understanding why, even today, it is proving so difficult to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe. First and foremost, this discussion of the ‘death of God’ can be read as an enlightening perspective on what the idea of ‘Europe’ meant in the past (will to truth), why this past ‘Europe’ is no longer credible (will to truth puts itself into question), and why it remains so difficult to actually come up with a new convincing answer for the twenty-first century (all attempts to reactivate a new ‘true world’ seem unconvincing following the ‘death of God’). In this discussion of European nihilism Nietzsche effectively exposed how post-Platonic, European culture had initially emerged and flourished by basing itself on the overriding pursuit of truth. In contrast to those thinkers who do not engage directly with the question of what the meaning of ‘meaningful’ actually is, Nietzsche can also be read in this passage as implicitly offering his readers an account of what Europeans traditionally meant by the term ‘meaningful’. In his reflections on Plato Nietzsche effectively outlined the beginning of the process by which European existence had traditionally been endowed with a greater sense of meaning. This process entailed invoking a metaphysical distinction between a meaningful world, where the more eternal and ‘true’ meaning of existence resided, and a less valuable realm of earthly existence characterized by flux and uncertainty. Meaning was thus understood and produced through the gesture of distinguishing between a ‘true’ and a merely ‘apparent’ world. Nietzsche subsequently demonstrated how in modern times the consistent application of will to truth had culminated in a scientific conscience which increasingly began to call the Christian account of existence into question, and which eventually even called into question the will to truth itself – with perplexing and disorienting consequences. After having posited a series of ‘true’ worlds, modern Europeans were thus likely to lose faith in the existence of such ‘true’ worlds and to suspect that becoming really ‘aims at nothing and achieves nothing’.83 This, in fact, was the great ‘question mark’ of modern European nihilism:

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Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition – an opposition between the world in which we are at home up to now with our reverences that perhaps made it possible for us to endure life, and another world that consists of us – an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with a terrifying Either/Or; ‘Either abolish your reverences or – yourselves!’ The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be – nihilism? – This is our question mark.84 Once the will to truth begins to put itself into question Europeans would no longer be able to convince themselves that there was a greater or ‘true’ meaning underlying human existence, although they may still crave such a meaning. In modern Europe one ‘forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities – but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it’.85 Nietzsche referred to this condition of not being able to experience a meaningful existence as European nihilism and understood it as ‘the really tragic problem of our modern world’.86 In this way Nietzsche still shows his contemporary readers what the European idea meant in the past, and why this idea of Europe is no longer credible on a widespread basis. By virtue of casting the modern experience of meaningless within the wider context of secularization, moreover, Nietzsche’s discussion of nihilism also has the second advantage of rendering intelligible many of the convictions exemplified by the literature on the European idea outlined in the introduction to this book; this includes why many Europeans continue to demand the articulation of a more meaningful idea of Europe, and why the inability to articulate such an idea frequently culminates in deep pessimism about European culture and its spiritual vitality. In Nietzsche’s account the demand for a more meaningful idea of Europe would persist not only because of the pragmatic necessities of European policy-makers, but also because Europeans have traditionally been accustomed to having the balm of metaphysics and ‘true’ worlds to fall back upon in their quest to find the deeper meaning of existence. Consequently, Europeans would be prone to miss this past ‘Europe’, and to perceive the absence of a more meaningful idea of Europe built upon the will to truth, as a profound loss of spiritual vitality. Being accustomed to finding a deeper meaning beyond the flux of daily existence, it would take a long time before Europeans would be capable of renouncing this craving for a deeper meaning and for ‘true’ worlds. Nietzsche was even able to anticipate how the impact of the advent of European nihilism would frequently be experienced as uncomfortable and disorienting. In a passage from one of his earlier works, he hypothesized that Europeans might ‘bleed to death’ from this realization. ‘The tragic thing’, he noted:

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God or nothingness? is that we can longer believe those dogmas of religion and metaphysics, once we have the rigorous method of truth in our hearts and heads, and yet on the other hand, the development of mankind has made us so delicate, sensitive and ailing that we need the most potent kinds of cures and comforts – hence arises the need that man might bleed to death from the truth he has recognised.87

Nietzsche thus defined a nihilist in his notebooks as ‘a man who judges, of the world as it is, that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist’. On the one hand, modern Europeans would feel uncomfortable in a world in which there were no more ‘true’ worlds to worship and that appeared to be meaningless. ‘[T]he pathos of the “in vain”’, Nietzsche noted, ‘is the nihilist’s pathos.’88 On the other hand Europeans could no longer easily convince themselves of any greater meaning to existence once the will to truth began to put itself into question. It is this ‘antagonism – not to esteem what we know, not to be allowed any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves – [that] results in a process of dissolution’.89 The pessimism that continues to surround the inability to articulate a more meaningful vision of Europe is thus very much compatible with Nietzsche’s earlier account of European nihilism, indeed would even be expected on the basis of his analysis. In this case, however, the contemporary debate on the meaninglessness of the European idea also emerges as part of a much longer and deeper problem that already arrived in European culture towards the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier.

Conclusion In many ways, then, Nietzsche is still to the contemporary debate on the European idea what the madman was to the marketplace.90 It should now be evident that Nietzsche’s reference to the ‘death of God’ and the advent of European nihilism is much more than just a historical observation about the demise of Christianity and rise of modern science as an overriding cultural framework; it is the diagnosis of a deeper and profounder malaise that arose in modern Europe, and with which scholars are still engaging today. In terms of the contemporary debate on the meaning of the European idea, this account of European nihilism is enlightening and discouraging at the same time. It remains enlightening because it renders many aspects of this debate intelligible within the larger context of European secularization. It is also discouraging because this ‘enlightenment’ comes at the considerable price of acknowledging that it is not only the particular Christian or scientific worldview that loses its ground following the ‘death of God’, but an entire 2,000-year-old practice of endowing existence with a greater

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sense of meaning by determining the overall truth of existence. How does one possibly proceed to find a more meaningful idea of Europe in this context? In this way Nietzsche’s account also further complicates the contemporary debate, showing that the task of articulating a more meaningful idea of Europe in the contemporary context might actually be much more difficult than many current policy-makers anticipate. What is at stake in this debate is not merely the identification of a new specific meaning that the European idea might embody in the twenty-first century; rather, the contemporary impasse requires in all likelihood a whole new way of generating ‘meaning’. As early as 1799 the German philosopher Friedrich Jacobi had already begun to use the term nihilism, insisting in a letter to Johann Fichte that human beings have only a single choice alluded to in the title of this chapter: ‘Nothingness or a God. . . . There is no third.’91 In Nietzsche’s view, the challenge confronting Europeans in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be to investigate whether Jacobi would not only have the first word on nihilism, but also the last, or whether it would be possible to articulate a meaningful idea of Europe without recourse to the traditional metaphysical hypotheses that no longer appear credible following the ‘death of God’. Nietzsche set himself precisely this formidable task. Contrary to popular misconceptions, he was not merely preoccupied with proclaiming the arrival of nihilism in European culture; Nietzsche was just as concerned with finding a possible response to it. He once characterized much of his philosophical project along these lines: He that speaks here, conversely, has done nothing so far but reflect: a philosopher and solitary by instinct, who has found his advantage in standing aside and outside, in patience, in procrastination, in staying behind; as a spirit of daring and experiment that has already lost its way once in every labyrinth of the future; as a soothsayer-bird spirit who looks back when relating what will come; as the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself.92 Nietzsche tried very hard to think through this crisis of nihilism and to free European life from its moribund remnants. His bold and self-appointed task consisted of turning his own life into a prolonged experiment with different possibilities for responding to the deeper implications of European nihilism, thinking many of these possibilities through to their end, and exposing some of them as mere labyrinths for future generations to become lost in.93 This same strategy eventually also allowed Nietzsche to outline what he thought would probably be the most appropriate response for rendering European existence meaningful in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. Nietzsche gave this vision the name of the ‘good Europeans’.94

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Beyond allowing for a stimulating reading of the contemporary debate on ‘Europe’, Nietzsche’s European thought remains intriguing because he also explored his own vision of what it would mean to be a ‘good European’ within the context of a modern and largely secular culture. Although this idea was devised in a different age, there are at least three notable attractions in revisiting it within the context of the present debate. First, there is an important analogy between the current inability to find a more meaningful idea of Europe on the one hand, and Nietzsche’s earlier discussion of European nihilism on the other. Much like Nietzsche found himself caught in the intellectual climate of an age in which Christianity as the unifying cultural construct had passed its zenith, leaving the question of Europe’s meaning unresolved, so too contemporary Europeanists confront the question of how to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe following the end of the Cold War. What is more, many of the wider parameters of this current impasse still remain the same ones that Nietzsche already confronted towards the end of the nineteenth century. If the deeper meaning of European existence is no longer seen to reside in the progressive unfolding of world history, as the Cold War ideologies had promised, then Europeans are confronted once again with Nietzsche’s question of how to render their collective existence meaningful within the cultural context of widespread secularization. In re-raising the question of ‘Europe’, Europeans have partially returned to the very same problem that already preoccupied Nietzsche – a problem that has not really been addressed in a viable, convincing, and lasting way since that time. Looking at Nietzsche’s own idea of the ‘good Europeans’ in greater detail might thus still provide important clues as to how one might think about the European idea in the present context. Third, it is worth revisiting this idea of the ‘good Europeans’ because Nietzsche himself had also directed it not so much at his contemporaries, but at future generations of readers who would be better situated to understand this deeper dimension of European nihilism. Nietzsche felt perennially untimely amongst his contemporaries and this compelled him

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to deliberately devise his idea of the ‘good European’ for a readership that was decades, if not centuries, his junior. ‘What I relate’, he wrote in one of his notebooks with characteristic hubris, ‘is the history of the next two centuries.’1 Nietzsche thought it would take some time before Europeans would be able to recognize not only the superficial dimension of the ‘death of God’, but also its profounder ramifications revolving around the selfquestioning of the will to truth; and yet it was only once this deeper dimension had been properly understood on a more widespread basis that his idea of the ‘good Europeans’ could take root and flourish. For this reason Nietzsche decided to bide his time and to direct his idea of the ‘good Europeans’ at future generations. As a result, exploring Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘good European’ in the present context is far from anathema to his own intentions; it is very much in accordance with the spirit of his writings. It is also in the spirit of the contemporary debate on ‘Europe’, given that recent attempts to articulate such a vision have largely proved unsatisfactory.

The good Europeans and incomplete nihilism What were the main characteristics of the ‘good Europeans’ whom Nietzsche thought would be able to find European existence meaningful within the cultural configuration of European modernity, and who would represent a sensible response to the advent of nihilism in European culture? The answer to this question, like Nietzsche’s analysis of European nihilism itself, is highly complex and will take the remainder of the book to unfold.2 Each of the following chapters is devoted to outlining one of their three central characteristics. The first of these, to be explored in this chapter, can already be deduced from Nietzsche’s foregoing discussion of European nihilism. In the first instance these ‘good Europeans’ would no longer be persuaded by attempts to render European existence meaningful by trying to determine the overall truth of existence. For Nietzsche the deeper implications of European nihilism entailed that the will to truth of Europe’s Christian-Platonic cultural heritage had become conscious of itself as a problem, and this means that even secular attempts to posit a new truth underlying European existence would no longer be persuasive. In his notebooks Nietzsche even coined a new term – incomplete nihilism – to refer to those modern responses which did not comprehend the profounder dimension of the ‘death of God’, and which simply sought to maintain this traditional habit of determining the truth of existence within the cultural context of secularization. In Nietzsche’s view ‘incomplete’ nihilism consisted of any ‘attempt to escape nihilism without reevaluating our values so far’.3 This formulation captures the fact that incomplete nihilism is a response to the experience of meaninglessness in European culture following the ‘death of God’, but it is

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one that merely seeks to replace the worship of the old God with the worship of more secular idols and ideologies; it still tries to determine the truth of existence. Consequently it is also a response to the advent of European nihilism in which the will to truth of Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage remains operational. Europe’s incessant desire to determine the truth of existence is merely redirected from the otherworldly realm to the earthly one. Incomplete nihilism is thus nothing but the pursuit of the will to truth within the horizon of earthly existence. Michel Haar made this point very eloquently when he wrote that ‘[i]ncomplete nihilism is but the decomposition of the “true world”, the recurrent attempt to find replacement values to substitute for the Platonic and Christian ideals (Christianity only having “popularised” the concept of a “true world” with its idea of a “world beyond”)’.4 Examples of incomplete nihilism are different from Christianity only in so far as the ‘true’ meaning of existence is no longer located in a divine or celestial world, but is rather seen as residing closer to home. In a sense it is also the most comfortable and easiest response to the ‘death of God’ because it requires no adjustment of underlying attitudes. In his interpretative essay on Nietzsche’s discussion of the ‘death of God’, Heidegger explained how in Nietzsche’s view modern Europeans would demand such forms of incomplete nihilism for some time to come; how they would demand that the empty space left behind by the ‘death of God’ be: occupied anew and to have the god now vanished from it replaced by something else. New ideals are set up. That happens according to Nietzsche’s conception . . . through doctrines regarding world happiness, through socialism, and equally through Wagnerian music, i.e. everywhere where ‘dogmatic Christendom’ has ‘become bankrupt’. Thus does ‘incomplete nihilism’ come to prevail.5 The likely response that Nietzsche anticipated for the twentieth century, and possibly the twenty-first, was the erection of new ideals that would fill the void left behind by the ‘death of God’. He expected Europeans to find such strategies of incomplete nihilism deeply attractive, and that the latter could achieve considerable popular success. For although Christianity was widely deemed to be dead, the adoption of incomplete forms of nihilism served to retain some of the metaphysical ‘balm’ that Europeans would still desire in light of the formative impact of Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage on modern European culture. Superficially, such strategies would also appear plausible given that they did not resort to the extra-terrestrial mythology of Christianity and thus could appear far more credible in a secular culture. ‘God is dead’, Nietzsche maintained, ‘but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.’6

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Despite being able to understand their appeal very well, Nietzsche wished the ‘good Europeans’ of the future to resist such strategies of incomplete nihilism because they were responses to the ‘death of God’ that failed to acknowledge and understand the deeper implications of this event. Responses of incomplete nihilism are ‘incomplete’ rather than ‘complete’ in that they still rely on the underlying will to truth. They shed the belief in otherworldly spaces, but not the underlying desire to determine the truth of existence. Their disposition to the world remains the same as their ChristianPlatonic predecessors. They are also ‘nihilistic’ in that, like Christianity itself, they still affirm a non-existent world; they still worship a world abstracted from the diversity and plurality of human existence. Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would thus be characterized, firstly, by their deep scepticism regarding such secular strategies of incomplete nihilism that remained based on the will to truth, and would steer away from advocating and adopting such strategies. This scepticism, in turn, would place the ‘good Europeans’ in direct opposition to one of the most influential responses to the advent of European nihilism that modern European culture has given birth to – nationalism.

Nietzsche, nihilism and nationalism Like any possible vision of Europe for the twenty-first century, Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘good Europeans’ would have either to contest the prevalence of nationalist identities or at least to reconcile itself with them.7 For many Europeanists the challenge of nationalist loyalties has been one of the principal moral motives and goals informing the process of European integration since 1945. Judging on the basis of the European debate in the 1990s, however, this benchmark is still far from being achieved. After much optimism and enthusiasm for a federal Europe leading up to Maastricht, there has been a progressive return to the more modest consensus that for the foreseeable future the European order should remain based on national identities, and that nations should continue to provide the locus of meaning for European societies.8 Contrary to much premature writing on the obsolescence of nations and nationalism, and despite several attempts to articulate the basis for a common European identity, these forces remain potent in contemporary European politics. As Isaiah Berlin once observed, nationalism is not so much new or resurgent; it has never died.9 Yet because of their aforementioned scepticism regarding strategies of incomplete nihilism, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would oppose viewing nationalism as a persuasive way of endowing European existence with a deeper sense of meaning following the ‘death of God’. This emerges very clearly from Nietzsche’s consistently acerbic comments about the nature of modern nationalism. Although these passages have not hitherto received widespread attention, they contain, in embryonic form, a compelling account

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of why Europeans should refuse to accept a nationalist response to the arrival of nihilism in European culture.10 A cursory consideration of these passages reveals that Nietzsche saw nationalism not only as lacking in intellectual rigour, and as benefiting those segments of society with little or no interest in a genuine engagement with European nihilism, but also as addressing the problem of nihilism on too small a scale. When viewed collectively, moreover, these three criticisms also point to a more thoughtprovoking axiom, namely that the advocacy and appropriation of nationalist identities amounts to a re-activation of the will to truth under a secular guise: nationalism is an exemplary manifestation of exactly the kind of incomplete nihilism that Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would no longer find persuasive in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’.11 In the contemporary debate on Europe they would consequently situate themselves in critical distance to those actors advocating national identities. Approaching the rise of modern nationalism in Europe in this way would, perhaps, be deemed unconventional by contemporary standards. Yet it is important to bear in mind that Nietzsche was writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, and therefore prior to the two devastating world wars and widespread decolonization, all of which played such an important role in the emergence of nationalism as an independent area of research. Unlike many contemporary theorists of nationalism Nietzsche did not engage nationalism on the basis of these historical experiences. Unlike many contemporary nationalism scholars, Nietzsche also did not engage in the debate about the definition of nationalism, famously noting once how ‘only that which has no history is definable’.12 Neither did he provide his readers with a detailed theory of nationalism, nor even with a set of case studies of the rise of modern nationalism in Europe or elsewhere.13 Nietzsche was certainly not a nationalism scholar in the contemporary sense. Rather, and in light of the evident and widespread success of nationalism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche broadly approached the phenomenon against the background of the cultural crisis of European nihilism. His primary interest lay in probing whether this avenue constituted a credible and desirable response to the ‘death of God’ and a viable new way of rendering European existence more meaningful.14 The originality of Nietzsche’s treatment of modern nationalism thus lies precisely in this attempt to understand its rise against the backdrop of the wider cultural crisis of secularization. ‘What is the meaning of our nationalism?’, he asked, and replied, ‘the metamorphosis of the cross’.15 Nietzsche urged his readers to understand the growing nationalist movements in Europe as a modern response to the European experience of meaninglessness.16 Nietzsche would thus have sided with scholars insisting on the essentially modern nature of European nationalism, arguing that ‘[t]he love of fatherlands in Europe is something young and stands on weak legs: it

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falls over easily! One must not let oneself be fooled by the noise they make: small children scream the loudest.’17 By viewing the success of modern European nationalism against the background of this secular experience of meaninglessness, Nietzsche was also able to gain original insights into the nature of modern nationalism, many of which have found an echo in the twentieth-century scholarship on nationalism. Nietzsche’s linking of the ‘death of God’ with the rise of modern European nationalism was not fortuitous, but was partially based on his own personal experience as a youth. Nietzsche had come of age during Bismarck’s rise to power and, like many other young men of his era, he had affirmed the German nation-state as a student.18 The young Nietzsche cultivated respect for established ‘historical heroes’, for the classics, for his nation, and for great leadership.19 Judging by the nationalist sentiments he often expressed in his letters from the 1860s, it is clear that the young Nietzsche, while certainly not uncritical of Germany, can be said to have been a German patriot.20 Further evidence of this tendency can also be found in his reaction to the outbreak of war against Austria in 1866. Initially Nietzsche thought it ‘an audacity on Bismark’s [sic] part to create a united Germany in this manner’,21 and several of his friends participated in anti-war demonstrations. Yet once the war proceeded Nietzsche towed the official line, endorsing the Prussian deployments.22 By the time he took up his professorship at Basel, at the young age of 24, Nietzsche’s patriotism had not yet receded, as his voluntary service as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 indicates. Even in this early phase, however, Nietzsche was not an unconditional supporter of Prussian and German nationalism; his nationalism stopped short of preaching an aggressive self-assertion, and it did include an important component of selfcriticism.23 By the middle period of his writing career, and for reasons that will be elaborated in greater detail below, Nietzsche would come to abandon his nationalist sentiments and emerged as the fierce critic of nationalism that he undoubtedly remained until the end of his life.24 It was nevertheless these early years of Nietzsche’s career, during which he hoped that nationalist ideals might effect a cultural regeneration of Europe and would lead to the overcoming of the experience of European nihilism, that allowed him to understand the profound appeal that nationalist ideas and sentiments could exert in an age otherwise characterized by the absence of a deeper meaning or purpose. Bearing in mind Nietzsche’s attempt to experiment with European history within himself, he even took his early flirtation with nationalism as a worrying indicator that in future much larger sections of European society would pursue a similar course. It might well take many decades, he feared, before people would recognize that the nationalist alternative to nihilism was metaphorically speaking only a ‘labyrinth of future’ – an initially appealing but ultimately non-viable antidote to the

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experience of nihilism. One of the distinctive characteristics that he consequently entrusted to his ‘good Europeans’ of the future was that they were to arrive at this realization much quicker than most of their contemporaries. As Nietzsche explained, partially in critical reflection on his own brief pondering of nationalist sentiments stimulated by having just listened to Wagner’s music: We ‘good Europeans’ – we, too, know hours when we permit ourselves some heartly fatherlandishness, a plop and relapse into old loves and narrowness – I have just given a sample of that – hours of national agitations, patriotic palpitations, and various other sorts of archaizing sentimental inundations. More ponderous spirits than we are, [however,] may require more time to get over what with us takes only hours and in a few hours has run its course: some require half a year, others half a life, depending on the speed and power of their digestion and metabolism. Indeed, I could imagine dull and sluggish races who would require half a century even in our rapidly moving Europe to overcome such atavistic attacks of fatherlandishness and soil addiction and to return to reason, meaning ‘good Europeanism’.25 Nietzsche felt that the attraction of nationalist sentiments in a secular age would be so powerful that even the intellectuals would be unable to resist their appeal. From his middle period onwards, however, Nietzsche clearly sought to distance himself unambiguously from viewing nationalism as a genuine solution to the experience of meaninglessness. Already as early as Human, All Too Human had argued that those who propagate nationalist ideas are perpetuating the ‘sickness of the century’ and were ‘an enemy of the good Europeans, an enemy of the free spirits’.26 Is there any historical evidence to support Nietzsche’s understanding of nationalism as an antidote to the experience of European nihilism, as a metamorphosis of the cross? The thesis that nationalism functions as a kind of surrogate religion is a view shared by a host of prominent nationalism scholars dating from the early formation of the field through to the present day. ‘Is it not a demonstrable fact’, Carlton Hayes asked as one of the pioneering scholars of the field, ‘that nationalism has become to a vast number of persons a veritable religion, capable of arousing that deep and compelling emotion which is essentially religious?’27 Another early scholar of nationalism, Hans Kohn, similarly observed that nationalism replaced the divine right of kings with the divine right of nations. ‘Messianic dreams with the nation at their centre’, he noted, ‘put the nation into immediate and independent relations with the Absolute.’28 Kohn thus wrote of nationalism in the post-Revolutionary era as ‘taking the place of religion’.29 Arnold Toynbee similarly could not resist viewing modern nationalism as a modern substitute for the worship of God,

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noting that ‘the spiritual vacuum left in Western souls by the recession of Christianity has been filled by the resurgence of the older, and always latent, worship of the collective power of human communities’.30 In his view it was even possible to trace the dynamic whereby, in post-Christian societies, the religious zeal was transferred from religious doctrine to nationalist worship: In our post-Christian age, the worship of collective human power has been keyed up to a higher pitch by the infusion of ex-Christian fanaticism into it. The post-Christian worship of collective human power is the evil religion whose name is ‘nationalism’. It is un-Christian, except in the point of being Christianly fanatical. Unhappily, fanatical nationalism is today about 90 per cent of the real religion of about 90 per cent of the human race.31 While Toynbee saw nationalism as something profoundly un-Christian, this did not bar him from identifying its strong religious quality, and from recognising that its rise was often correlated with the retreat of Christianity in European societies. In terms of their analysis of the relationship between the decline of religion and the rise of nationalism, these early studies seem to have largely withstood the test of time. Three more contemporary scholars of modern European nationalism have re-emphasized the close relationship between the decline in the role of Christian faith in European societies and the rise of nationalist sentiments. The title of Joseph Llobera’s study of the rise of modern nationalism in western Europe, The God of Modernity, evokes this relationship quite clearly.32 Llobera argues that modern national identity appeared in western Europe at the same time as all the intermediary bonds of society were collapsing, and religion itself was losing its grip on the peoples. Religion was a ready-made model for nationalism and in many cases it was also a powerful ally, reinforcing emerging nationalism.33 This allows him to argue that ‘nationalism has become the functional equivalent of religion; or, expressed in a more pungent way, nationalism has become a religion – a secular religion where god is the nation’.34 ‘In its essence’, Llobera concludes, ‘the nation is the secularised god of our times.’35 Mark Juergensmeyer also finds it no accident that nationalism was becoming increasingly religious in character at the same time as religious sentiments were declining in the West. In his view the structural similarities between religion and nationalism show themselves with particular clarity in their ability to draw allegiance and loyalty to the extent of sanctioning even martyrdom and violent conflict.36 He finds these similarities striking enough to merit the coinage of a new term, ‘ideologies of order’, that encompasses both of these phenomena. Such ideologies of order:

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conceive of the world in coherent, manageable ways; they both suggest that there are levels of meaning beneath the day-to-day world that give coherence to things unseen; and they both provide the authority that gives the social and political order its reason for being.’37 Secular nationalism, as an ideology of order, locates an individual within the universe and ties him to a larger collective associated with a particular place and a particular history. In this way both organized religion and nationalism ‘serve the ethical function of providing an overarching framework of moral order, a framework that commands ultimate loyalty from those who subscribe to it’.38 Such a view is clearly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s earlier analysis of the role previously played by Christianity in European culture. Finally, Nietzsche’s thesis also implicitly resonates throughout the work of one of the most influential contemporary writers on nationalism, Benedict Anderson. Dissatisfied with traditional Marxist and liberal accounts of nationalism, Anderson attempted a reorientation of perspective in ‘a Copernican spirit’ by viewing nations and nationalism as cultural artefacts of a particular kind which need to be understood in the terms in which they have come into historical being, in what ways their meaning changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy.39 Against the background of Nietzsche’s aforementioned discussion of European nihilism it is intriguing that Anderson should commence his exposition of nationalism as a cultural artefact with a consideration of religion’s important role in endowing existence with a deeper meaning, including its suffering and death.40 Anderson begins his account with these observations because for him it is crucial to understand that the dawn of nationalism in Western Europe during the eighteenth century was intimately linked with the dusk of religious modes of thought. In this regard his account is also reminiscent of Nietzsche’s earlier discussion of the important role played by Christianity in European societies and its ability to give meaning even to suffering and death. The problem entailed by the diminishing role of religious modes of existence, Anderson argues further, was that their decline was not necessarily accompanied by a decline in suffering itself. While Christianity increasingly disappeared from European existence, the suffering that it had previously mediated did not. If anything, the experience of suffering may actually have even been exacerbated by the striking absence of a redeeming afterlife. Nietzsche had similarly once noted that ‘[w]hat really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering’, and it is this senselessness of suffering which the Christians were spared.41 Correspondingly, in Anderson’s account, the waning appeal of religious modes of existence pointed to the need for ‘a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning’, and in

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Anderson’s view ‘few things were [are] better suited to this end than an idea of nation’.42 Anderson thus explicitly recognizes the relationship between nationalism and religion as cultural systems grappling with the problems of suffering and death. For Anderson and Nietzsche alike, modern nationalism can broadly be seen as fulfilling a desire formerly addressed by Christianity and left otherwise unfulfilled in modernity.43 Despite their important differences, then, these three contemporary studies – Llobera, Juergensmeyer, and Anderson – lend strong historical and empirical support to corroborate Nietzsche’s earlier insight about the relationship between the ‘death of God’ and the success of nationalism in modern Europe. What still remains to be seen, however, is how this relationship unfolds in detail, especially with reference to the appeal of nationalism on behalf of those who accept and internalize national identities, and in relation to the interests of those segments of society who actively advocate and propagate nationalist sentiments. Such an analysis is interesting not only in its own right, but also constitutes the background against which Nietzsche’s vehement critique of modern nationalism emerged in his middle and late periods, and against which his advocacy of the ‘good Europeans’ should ultimately be understood.

Nihilism and the appeal of nationalism Nietzsche’s analysis of European nihilism generates an insightful perspective on the immense appeal these nationalist sentiments could exert in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. An understanding of the nature of this appeal should be central to any account of nationalism and is something which structural accounts in general, and Marxist accounts in particular, occasionally struggle to explain. Anderson, for example, has argued with specific reference to Tom Nairn’s theory of nationalism that while structural and Marxist accounts of nationalism can certainly explain why nationalist ideas were advocated by certain segments of society, they encounter greater difficulties in explaining the attraction of these nationalist sentiments to those who accept them. Up to a point, he concedes, Nairn’s argument that the ‘new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and [that] the invitation-card had to be written in a language they understood’ is correct. Yet for Anderson this rightly still leaves the important question of why this invitation was welcomed by the people at large.44 Structural and Marxist accounts can certainly explain the selfinterest of certain segments of society in advocating nationalist sentiments, but, despite the complexities of their positions, the weakest aspect of their argument is often their treatment of why people actually believed and appropriated nationalist ideas on such a widespread basis. This weakness raises the suspicion that many of these structural accounts implicitly rely on an underlying theory of meaning in human life without

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making such assumptions explicit. In his influential theory of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, to name but one prominent example, points out quite candidly that by emphasizing the contrived and artificial nature of nationalism he had by no means intended to ‘deny that some measure of such patriotism is indeed a perennial part of human life’.45 Yet, as Alan Finlayson has pointed out, this concession is actually quite crucial and significant in that there is effectively ‘an untheorised, asserted claim about the innate features of human social need and an unexplained “loyalty”’ at the basis of Gellner’s influential theory of nationalism.46 This claim about an innate social need occupies a crucial place in Gellner’s account and yet remains largely unexplored by the latter. This is not to imply that resorting to psychological accounts of nationalism would be an adequate remedy for this deficiency. Psychological accounts of the rise of modern European nationalism can run into the opposite problem; while they might be able to better explain the widespread appeal of nationalism, by and large they face greater difficulties in accounting for why certain groups systematically propagated and deployed nationalist ideas, and why they did so particularly effectively in modern Europe. From a Nietzschean perspective, one of the problems with psychological accounts of nationalism, and with functional accounts of nationalism in general, is that they also need to account for the particularly modern aspects of the rise of nationalism.47 In order to do so, such explanations invariably need to complement their account by taking into consideration some specifically modern development, such as religious decline or the emergence of industrial economies. In so doing, however, they also tend to move beyond the limits of functional explanation alone. In short, and at the risk of greatly oversimplifying matters, one of the problems in accounting for the rise of modern nationalism in Europe is that structural accounts of nationalism face difficulties in explaining the appeal of nationalism, while the resort to psychological theories of nationalism faces difficulties in accounting for the historical specificity of the rise of nationalism in modern Europe. Against the background of these difficulties, Nietzsche’s own reflections on the appeal of modern nationalism take on renewed relevance. Based on his own experience as a youth, Nietzsche could understand from firsthand experience the appeal that nationalist ideas could command in societies undergoing the process of secularization. Following the ‘death of God’, Europeans would be looking for a new purpose in their lives and this spiritual vacuum provided a nourishing context in which nationalism could prosper. Nietzsche argued that ‘[t]he nihilistic question “for what?” is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside – by some superhuman authority’. The response to the ‘death of God’ that he found most likely in modern Europe was that ‘[h]aving unlearned faith in that, one still follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and

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tasks’.48 As the ‘God’ hypothesis lost its grip on the European imagination and ceased to represent the unconditional goal, the nation could gradually step in to fulfil its place. In the aftermath of the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche penned in one of his notebooks, Europeans would be seeking a ‘temporary redemption from pessimism’, and in this quest would turn to ‘nationalism’ amongst other things.49 This also explains why he considered modern European nationalism to be ‘the metamorphosis of the cross’,50 and why he linked the rise of modern European nationalism with a particularly modern development – secularization. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the rising tide of nationalism was itself already a sign of the ‘nihilistic catastrophe’ that had befallen Europe.51 Where Nietzsche’s account crucially differs from both the early and the contemporary literature studying the continuities between religion and nationalism, then, is not that it points towards a human need for meaning. Rather, the way in which Nietzsche’s account still marks a crucial advancement on many of these theories is that he actually sought to historicize and problematize this ‘need’ for meaning. Unlike psychological theories of nationalism, or, for that matter, structuralist accounts like that of Gellner, Nietzsche did not take this need to determine the deeper meaning of existence along the lines of the will to truth to be an innate feature of human existence. In Nietzsche’s view human beings certainly sought and needed a deeper meaning or greater purpose in order to prosper and flourish. ‘Gradually’, he noted, ‘man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfil one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists’.52 In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche again emphasized how man, originally nothing more than a sophisticated animal, had evolved into a creature which endowed, and needed to endow, his existence with a greater sense of meaning. ‘That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man’, he argued, ‘is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal – and it will rather will nothingness than not will’.53 Yet by the end of his writing career Nietzsche was no longer convinced that this meaning had to be found along the same lines of the will to truth that characterized so much of Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage. In Nietzsche’s view it was the centuries of Christian-Platonic thinking that had sensitized Europeans into ‘needing’ to find their meaning by determining the truth of existence at the expense of exploring other strategies. Nationalism, in this sense, was a problem not of too little transcendence, but of insufficient immanence.54 Nietzsche’s move to view the phenomenon of nationalism against the backdrop of the larger cultural crisis of nihilism triggered by the ‘death of God’ thus also goes some way towards avoiding the difficulties inherent in both functional and structural accounts of modern European nationalism. Contrary to structuralist accounts of modern nationalism, Nietzsche’s approach can broadly account for the widespread appeal

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of modern nationalism in Europe. Yet by historicizing the particular form that this ‘meaning’ must take, he also avoids some of the difficulties usually encountered by functional accounts of nationalism. The appeal of modern nationalism, in this view, is linked to an evolved, rather than innate, way of rendering existence meaningful by determining its truth. This artificial need could no longer be satisfied by Christianity following the ‘death of God’, thus providing the space for nationalism and other forms of incomplete nihilism to fill this vacuum in an increasingly secular context. Nietzsche’s view that the appeal of modern nationalism hinges on some kind of perceived ‘identity need’ also led to his first criticism of it. If, as Nietzsche thought, the advent of European nihilism ultimately entailed putting the will to truth of Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage into question, then the reactivation of the will to truth under the guise of nationalist ideals was not intellectually persuasive, although such strategies might nevertheless achieve considerable popular success. ‘What is called a “nation” in Europe today’, Nietzsche noted in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘is really rather a res facta than res nata (and occasionally can hardly be told from a res ficta et picta).’55 This view accorded with a conviction he had expressed earlier in Human, All Too Human, where he noted that ‘this artificial nationalism is in any case as perilous as artificial Catholicism used to be, for it is in its essence a forcibly imposed state of siege and selfdefence inflicted on the many by the few and requires cunning, force and falsehood to maintain a front of respectability’.56 For Nietzsche the nation is simply the most recent in a long line of ascetic ideals generated by Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage. From a broadly Nietzschean perspective, Henry Staten has recently argued in relation to the widespread appeal enjoyed by one particularly virulent of form of nationalism that ‘[w]hat motivates the immanentizing of transcendence could thus well be not a transhistorical or transcendent need for transcendence but a pre-existent ideology of transcendence or a need generated by such an ideology’.57 Rather than questioning the will to truth, advocates of nationalist ideas and identities actually encourage and prosper on the basis of its reactivation and maintenance. This insight is of considerable import for those contemporary theories of nationalism that either implicitly or explicitly draw upon this problematic assumption of an ‘identity need’, perpetuating it further rather than subjecting it to critical scrutiny. In a crucial passage from The Gay Science Nietzsche argued that: The demand that one wants by all means that something should be firm (while on account of the ardor of this demand one is easier and more negligent about the demonstration of this certainty) – this, too, is still the demand for a support, a prop, in short, that instinct of weakness which, to be sure, does not create religious, metaphysical

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When combined with Nietzsche’s insights into the deeper dimension of European nihilism from his late period, these observations from the middle period also yield a powerful critique of the appeal of nationalist ideas. At the root of modern nationalism is the desire not to question the will to truth, but rather to escape the uncomfortable experience of meaninglessness by replicating the comforting balm of transcendental ideals within an earthly horizon. Modern nationalism, in his view, was the quintessential example of the kind of incomplete nihilism that his ‘good Europeans’ would no longer find persuasive following the ‘death of God’. Such strategies of incomplete nihilism remained grounded in the will to truth, and perpetuated the need for a ‘true’ world rather than undermining it and experimentally calling it into question. In the case of nationalism this incessant desire to fix the truth of existence is no longer directed at a world elevated above earthly existence as it was with Christianity, but is directed at a human collective sharing specified attributes and demanding unbridled devotion. Nationalism is thus a response to European nihilism fuelled by secularization, yet which does not understand the deeper implications of the ‘death of God’ delineated by Nietzsche. When it comes to nationalism, Nietzsche once noted provocatively, ‘people want to work as little as possible . . . with their heads’.59

Nihilism and the advocates of nationalism Nietzsche’s grasping of modern nationalism as a form of incomplete nihilism is also evident in his critical reflections on the actors who perpetuated nationalist sentiments in modern Europe. Indeed, Nietzsche’s ability to render the appeal of nationalist ideas intelligible within the broader framework of secularization did not bar him from recognizing, as many structuralist theories of nationalism rightly point out, that it has historically also been in the self-interest of certain segments of a society to propagate such national ideas. There are several passages in Nietzsche’s corpus indicating that it was his very awareness of these interests, rather than his ignorance of them, which triggered his suspicion that nationalism did not amount to a desirable and honest confrontation with the spiritual vacuum left behind after the ‘death of God’: It is not the interests of the many (the peoples), as is no doubt claimed, but above all the interests of certain princely dynasties and of certain

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classes of business and society, that impel to this nationalism; once one has recognised this fact one should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply a good European and actively to work for the amalgamation of nations.60 Already towards the end of the nineteenth century, and prior to the advent of much of the prominent nationalism scholarship, Nietzsche urged his readers quite explicitly to detect the self-interest behind the perpetuation of nationalism by politicians and businessmen. Nietzsche argued that the primary promoter of modern nationalism in Europe was the modern state. In order to justify its evolving existence, and to legitimate the growing demands it made of the citizenry, the state frequently mobilized and fuelled nationalist ideas.61 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche consequently labelled the modern, nationalistic state as the ‘new idol’ and the ‘coldest of all cold monsters’.62 In one of his earlier works he had already criticized how: Today almost everything on earth is determined by the most common and evil forces, by the egoism of acquisitors and military despots. In the hands of the latter, the state attempts, as does the egoism of the acquisitors, to organise everything anew from out of itself and to be the bond and the pressure for all those hostile forces; that is to say, the state wants human beings to idolise it in the same way that they previously idolised the Church. With what success? We will have to witness this.63 The modern state sought to profit from the process of secularization by portraying itself as the new source of meaning in people’s lives. ‘The monster’, as Nietzsche later referred to it metaphorically in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘divines you too, you conquerors of the old god’,64 warning his readers that ‘[y]our weariness serves the new idol’.65 Their unwillingness to call the will to truth into question played directly into the hands of the modern state which promised them new ‘true worlds’. Through its use of nationalist ideas the modern state was able to thrive on the basis of those unwilling to welcome the experience of meaninglessness as harbouring the possibility of a cultural rejuvenation of Europe and who prefer instead a secular substitute for the ‘old Idol’ of Christianity. Nietzsche found this objectionable because he thought the modern state was not at all interested in, nor capable of, a critical engagement with the advent of European nihilism. Instead, political elites were content with advocating a new and fairly artificial form of meaning. ‘Coldly’, Nietzsche insisted, ‘it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people”. It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.’66

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Yet Nietzsche’s objection to the modern state also ran deeper than this. Not only did the modern state seek to prosper by portraying itself as the new idol to be worshipped following the ‘death of God’, but the state also helped to create the very conditions under which the desire for redemption and salvation was first born amongst European publics. Nietzsche maintained that it is the destroyers of peoples ‘who set snares for many and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them’.67 Nietzsche stipulated that historically it was the state, broadly conceived, which facilitated the emergence of slave morality and that generated the need for transcendence amongst its subjects. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he broadly traced the emergence of the state back to ‘a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its claws upon a populace perhaps superior in numbers but still formless and nomad’.68 By hanging this sword over its subjects, and by denying the people’s instincts a natural outlet, the state thus encouraged the very appetite for metaphysical meaning that would culminate in a way of interpreting existence that devalued existence in favour of a higher purpose. In this way the modern state also helped to generate the very appetites that it claimed to be addressing. Not surprisingly Nietzsche found the doctrine that ‘the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state’ to be ‘a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity’.69 In his view it was a ludicrous state of affairs. In addition to serving the members of state bureaucracies, Nietzsche also found the advocacy of nationalist ideas to benefit those who stand outside of politics and in the service of international capital.70 Here Nietzsche, like many scholars after him, attacked those ‘“truly international homeless hermits” who, due to their lack of state instinct, abuse politics as an apparatus for their own enrichment’.71 In an unpublished essay he even designated ‘as the most dangerous characteristic of contemporary politics, the application of revolutionary thought to the service of a self-serving, stateless money-aristocracy’.72 Nietzsche objected to those men whose loyalty was primarily to money and material wealth, and who would manipulate nationalist sentiments to this end. In his view European statesmen and businessmen were lamentably united in their unwillingness and inability to confront honestly the experience of meaninglessness and their desire to generate or appropriate new forms of meaning that would ensure their respective power and wealth. Already in Human, All Too Human Nietzsche had insisted that national ideas require ‘cunning, lies, and force to remain respectable’.73 There are copious passages, then, which indicate that Nietzsche was clearly aware of the material dimension to the rise of nationalism in Europe. Contrary to many other materialists, however, Nietzsche’s critique of the advocates of nationalist ideas did not revolve exclusively around this

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material dimension. What Nietzsche really wished to criticize about these advocates of nationalism was not primarily their material self-interest, but their inability to understand the deeper implications of the ‘death of God’. The primacy that advocates of nationalism put on power and wealth effectively barred them from cultivating the spiritual depth required for a more honest confrontation with the advent of European nihilism. The material dimension is thus clearly important to Nietzsche’s critique, but only in a secondary function; Nietzsche’s primary concern was not with economic inequalities as such, but with the cultural effects of excessive materialism. In his view those individuals likely to pursue material goals are the ones that are also unlikely, perhaps even unable, to engage honestly and directly with the advent of nihilism in European culture. ‘What matters most’, Nietzsche insisted, ‘always remains culture.’74 Neither politicians nor businessmen understood enough about these matters to respond properly to the advent of European nihilism. In one of his earlier works Nietzsche had maintained that ‘[e]very philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke’.75 In Twilight of the Idols, he extended this critique beyond politics into business and economics, noting that: If one spends oneself on power, grand politics, economic affairs, world commerce, parliamentary institutions, military interests – if one expends in this direction the quantum of reason, seriousness, will, self-overcoming that one is, then there will be a shortage in the other direction. Culture and state – one should not deceived oneself over this – are antagonists. . . . The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. 76 Throughout his life Nietzsche remained deeply sceptical about whether the aspiration for political power and economic gain marked an appropriate response to the advent of nihilism in European culture, and about whether these activities really represented the highest possible goods. Statesmen and businessmen lacked the requisite depth to address such issues and thus chose to promote national ideas amounting only to a fairly basic and unsophisticated form of meaning which serve to keep modern politics at a very low level.77 In a fragment entitled ‘Critique of the worship of fatherlands’ Nietzsche argued that: Whoever feels above himself values which he takes a hundred times higher than the well-being of the ‘fatherland’, of society, of blood and race relatives, – values that are beyond fatherlands and races, i.e. international values – he would be a hypocrite to play the ‘patriot’. It is a lowering of man and spirit, which tolerates within itself national hate, or even admires and deifies it: the dynastic families exploit this

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‘It is a bad symptom’, he added in another of his fragments, ‘that one pays so much tribute to the love of the fatherland and politics. It seems that there is nothing higher which one can praise.’79 Nietzsche objected to modern nationalism, then, not only because it still rested on a way of rendering existence meaningful that he no longer found intellectually persuasive following the ‘death of God’, but also because it was perpetuated by those actors who were unlikely to appreciate the deeper ramifications of European nihilism, and who benefited politically and materially by portraying themselves as the new meaning in people’s lives. These actors would not be able to supply European culture with a whole new way of generating meaning, which the ‘death of God’ ultimately required in Nietzsche’s view. A third and final criticism that can be extrapolated from Nietzsche’s diverse passages on the nature of modern nationalism, and that is again linked with his understanding of nationalism as a form of incomplete nihilism, is that it simply addressed the problem of European nihilism on too small a scale. In light of the European dimensions of the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche thought that a European response, rather than merely a national one, was required. The ‘death of God’, he noted in The Gay Science, was ‘already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe’80 – not just over individual nations. Consequently he repeatedly referred to nationalism as being ‘petty’ and small, and saw it in no way as being fit to address the magnitude of the problem of European nihilism, whose nature he found to be more profound and sophisticated. In his autobiography Nietzsche again complained that: Nationalism, this névrose nationale with which Europe is sick, this perpetuation of European particularism (Kleinstaaterei), of petty politics [has] deprived Europe itself of its meaning, of its reason – [has] driven it into a dead-end street. – Does anyone besides me know the way out of this dead-end street? – A task that is great enough to unite nations again?81 Ultimately Nietzsche thus understood the rise of nationalism in modern Europe to be a regrettable symbiosis between European publics yearning for a greater sense of meaning following the ‘death of God’ and selfinterested segments of society wishing to profit from the production of national meanings and identities. Nietzsche saw both modern European statesmen and businessmen as working in opposition to the quest to achieve a rejuvenation of European culture. Their willingness to propagate national sentiments in order to serve their own interests stood in stark

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opposition to Nietzsche’s own search for a more honest response to the onset of European nihilism. As Graham Parkes notes, if one were, in response to the advent of European nihilism, to ‘find meaning of one’s existence in being a certain nationality, this would for Nietzsche be a sign that the abysmal depths of the self opened up by nihilism had not been properly plumbed’.82 Rather than confronting the advent of European nihilism, political and business leaders kept the will to truth alive, even if this meant, in the end, pitting Europeans against one another. This pervasive critique of modern nationalism as a form of incomplete nihilism also forms the backdrop against which one should understand Nietzsche’s litany of caustic remarks about the self-intoxication of European nations,83 as well as his ardent pleas to overcome the petty nationalism of European nation-states. In one of his notes, for example, he pointed out that ‘to be national, in the way and degree in which it is now demanded by public opinion, would . . . pose not only a case of bad taste among us more intellectual people, but also a deliberate numbing of our better knowledge and conscience’.84 In a later note he again pleaded to ‘[l]et some fresh air in! This absurd state of affairs must not go on any longer in Europe! What sense is there in this bone-headed nationalism? Now that everything points to larger common interests, what is the purpose of encouraging this scurvy egoism?’85 In his autobiography Nietzsche even concluded that modern nationalism was intellectually suffocating and was stifling human creativity, referring to it as the anti-cultural sickness par excellence.86 In the end, modern nationalism was clearly not a persuasive response to the advent of European nihilism. In the view of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ it was still symptomatic of the crisis of nihilism, not its resolution.

Nationalism, Germany and Wagner All three of Nietzsche’s above criticisms were collectively unleashed in his attack on German nationalism in particular. Nietzsche tended to look upon the German character with ‘sorrowful despair’,87 obliging the historian Golo Mann to conclude that ‘there has never been a shrewder critic at any time anywhere’.88 Nietzsche was critical enough of German nationalism to suggest once that ‘to be a good German means to de-Germanicise oneself’.89 He even accused the Germans of denying Europe its last cultural harvest.90 By the time of the 1880s Nietzsche was clearly no longer a friend of the German state, now openly loathing the philistinism of Bismarck’s Reich with its emphasis on racist, statist, nationalist and power politics.91 In the first of his Untimely Meditations Nietzsche had already drawn a crucial distinction between the German Geist and the German Reich because in his view German public opinion had profoundly misunderstood the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War.92 It was not, as so many believed, German culture that had been victorious in the war with France. The

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things that led to the German victory, such as superior generals and discipline, should not, he insisted, be confused with culture.93 Nietzsche openly lamented that ‘there no longer exists any clear conception of what culture is’ in Germany,94 and continued this line of criticism in Twilight of the Idols where he again expressed the view that the cry ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ had signalled the end of any serious thinking in German.95 In his autobiography of 1888 Nietzsche even fired a welcome salvo at Treitschke, noting that ‘[t]here is now a historiography that is reichsdeutsch; there is even, I fear, an antisemitic one – there is a court historiography and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed’.96 Nietzsche wished to leave no doubt regarding his own position, insisting that ‘[t]he nationality-insanity . . . is without magic for me. “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” rings painfully in my ears.’97 Nietzsche even blamed the Germans for spreading modern nationalist sentiments in Europe, and for turning their romanticism into an unreasonable political programme. In Beyond Good and Evil he portrayed the Germans as a constraining force in Europe: It must be taken into the bargain if all sorts of clouds and disturbances – in brief, little attacks of hebetation – pass over the spirit of a people that is suffering, and wants to suffer, of nationalistic nerve fever and political ambition. Examples among the Germans today include now the anti-French stupidity, now the anti-Jewish, now the anti-Polish, now the Christian-romantic, now the Wagnerian, now the Teutonic, now the Prussian (just look at the wretched historians, these Sybels and Treitschkes, and their thickly bandaged heads!) and whatever other names these little mystifications of the German spirit and conscience may have. Forgive me, for during a brief daring sojourn in very infected territory, I, too, did not altogether escape this disease and began like everyone else to develop notions about matters that are none of my business: the first sign of the political infection.98 By the middle phase of his writing career Nietzsche had come to the conviction that German nationalism in particular, and modern nationalism in general, was neither a viable nor a desirable way of confronting the advent of European nihilism.99 Nietzsche’s development from being an early, yet qualified supporter of the German nation through to the ardent critic of nationalism that he became is also mirrored in his famous break with Wagner, a relationship which preoccupied Nietzsche until the very end of his sane life. Through this intimate relationship with Wagner, Nietzsche had ultimately come to realize that the role of artists and intellectuals in a secular age should not be to encourage strategies of incomplete nihilism, and that it was not their role to go to Syracuse, as Plato had done, in order to supply political leaders with

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new ascetic ideals to fuel their political ambitions. ‘What did I never forgive Wagner?’, Nietzsche asked, and replied ‘that he became reichsdeutsch’.100 Nietzsche had obviously become very uneasy about the transformation of Bayreuth into the new ‘cultural’ centre of the ‘German Reich’, the Holy City of anti-Semitic ‘Christian’ chauvinism.101 In light of the fascinating history of their relationship, Nietzsche liked to portray himself as having grown sick of what he perceived as Wagner’s romanticism and egomania, as well as the latter’s anti-Semitism:102 ‘Thus I attacked Wagner – more precisely, the falseness, the half-couth instincts of our “culture” which mistakes the subtle for the rich, and the late for the great’.103 In his own view, at least, Nietzsche would subsequently become the very antipode of Wagner,104 of the man who’s Parsifal proved that he ultimately still ‘knelt at the cross’.105 It was also after his initial break with Wagner that Nietzsche began to refer increasingly to his vision of the ‘good Europeans’.106 The factor, then, that perhaps differentiates Nietzsche from Wagner most decisively is not that Nietzsche did not also have a decadent side himself. After all, Nietzsche admitted quite candidly that he was ‘no less than Wagner, a child of his age, that is a decadent’, but Nietzsche insisted, ‘I comprehended this, I resisted it’.107 In contrast to Wagner, Nietzsche chose to vehemently fight his age, whereas Wagner made his peace with his contemporaries and had become the high priest of modern decadence. Reflecting once more on his early infatuation with Wagner’s music, Nietzsche concluded in retrospect that ‘[a]ll things considered, I could not have endured my youth without Wagner’s music. For I was condemned to Germans.’ Indeed, he explained further, ‘[i]f one wants to rid oneself of an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish. Well then, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the antitoxin against everything German par excellence – a toxin, a poison, that I don’t deny.’108 What Nietzsche had still seen in his youth as an antidote to ‘everything’ German had subsequently turned into a very different kind of intoxication, one that had made its peace with the Reich. By this time Nietzsche had realized that his earlier quest to bring about the re-emergence of tragic culture was itself indicative of the very crisis he had diagnosed.109 The most important task in such an age, he now concluded, was ‘[n]ot to remain stuck to a person – not even the most loved – every person is a prison, also a nook. Not to remain stuck to a fatherland – not even if it suffers most and needs help most – it is less difficult to sever one’s heart from a victorious fatherland.’110

Conclusion Nietzsche’s notes on modern nationalism, then, certainly do not amount to a theory of nationalism in the contemporary sense, but they might still shed important light on the important continuities between Christianity and modern nationalism in Europe. While this relationship has been

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explored in greater detail both in early and recent nationalism scholarship, Nietzsche’s assessment also remains distinct from these accounts in that it additionally seeks to problematize and theorize this ‘need’ to posit a deeper meaning underlying European existence, which nationalism is seen to fulfil after the decline of Christianity. From a Nietzschean perspective, early and contemporary theories of nationalism emphasizing the link between Christianity and religion are correct in pointing to the close relationship between them as overarching social and cultural structures, but they do not go far enough in terms of scrutinizing the origins of this ‘need’ for meaning and identity. Tracing the rise of modern nationalism back to Christianity only places the phenomenon in its proper historical context, without engaging with the core issue. Nietzsche’s account, by contrast, wishes to directly engage the question of an identity ‘need’ and, in so doing, still retains great value for contemporary theorists of nationalism. Although Nietzsche clearly conceded that man had evolved an important need for meaning, he did not think that this ‘meaning’ had to be generated in the way Christian-Platonic culture had traditionally done. By drawing attention to these structural similarities between Christianity and nationalism, moreover, Nietzsche’s approach can also account for why, despite the clear shift from religious to national identities in Europe in the longue durée, the two might co-exist in certain regions and over certain periods of history, why in some instances the rise of nationalism may have preceded the widespread secularization of the publics, and why some people might be simultaneously both Christian and nationalistic – both phenomena address the same evolved ‘need’ to determine the truth of existence and, despite the different location of this utopia, adopt the same strategy of the will to truth in response to the experience of meaninglessness. Nietzsche’s passages on nationalism also demonstrate that he was not blind to the fact that nationalist ideas were often promoted in order to protect and serve the interests of certain segments of society. Nietzsche objected to the spread of nationalist ideas not only because he did not find their reliance on the will to truth intellectually persuasive in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’, but also because they marked a response to the advent of European nihilism that was not commensurate with the European scale of the phenomenon, and that served statesmen and businessmen politically and materially by hindering a more honest and direct exploration of the implications of the ‘death of God’. Both the advocates of nationalist ideas, and those who appropriated and internalized these ideals, had not yet properly understood the deeper dimension of European nihilism and the problematic nature of the will to truth following the ‘death of God’. In the end, therefore, Nietzsche had no choice but to object vehemently to the ‘dangerous carnival of nationality-insanity’111 and to expose the ‘national lies’112 as ‘humbug’.113

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In terms of the contemporary debate on the European idea, Nietzsche’s critique of modern nationalism as a form of incomplete nihilism would thus have to lead to a considerable distancing from any attempt to confront the advent of European nihilism in this way. From a Nietzschean perspective the current resolution of the crisis of European nihilism achieved by locating the deeper meaning of existence in national identities would have to be actively contested. ‘This provocation to self-idolisation of the nations’, Nietzsche wrote towards the end of 1888, ‘has to be put to an end – and I am strong enough for this.’114 Indeed, he added elsewhere, ‘I have taken the spirit of Europe inside myself, now I will make my counterstrike!’115 As a form of incomplete nihilism, nationalism failed to appreciate the deeper dimension of the ‘death of God’, and thus also did not experimentally call the will to truth into question. Moreover, it did not understand that ultimately the advent of European nihilism required a European response. This first attribute of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’, by contrast, is that they understood this deeper dimension of European nihilism and consequently found strategies of incomplete nihilism, including modern nationalism, to be unpersuasive responses to the ‘death of God’.

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Europe wants to become one

Convinced that the problem of nihilism could only be adequately addressed at the European level, Nietzsche deliberately characterised his ‘good Europeans’ of the future as ‘laughing about the nations.’1 This conscious cultivation of a ‘supra-national’ and European perspective marks their second characteristic and will be further explored throughout this chapter.2 Nietzsche, it will be shown, even reflected on the broad political structure that a Europe consisting of these ‘good Europeans’ might adopt in future, pointing beyond a ‘Europe’ conceived of solely in functional, intergovernmental, or economic terms. In conjunction with his critique of modern nationalism, this would seem to place the ‘good Europeans’ firmly within the Europeanist camp – albeit with one crucial qualification. Because their European outlook is directly derived from Nietzsche’s foregoing critique of nationalism as a form of incomplete nihilism, they would only endorse such a political project of Europe if it were qualitatively different from its nationalist predecessor; it could not simply replicate the particular logic of nationalism, or the general logic of incomplete nihilism, on a European-wide scale. Certain aspects of the European Union currently reflect this very logic, however, generating considerable differences between the kind of Europe for which Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would strive, and the idea of Europe currently pursued by many Europeanists. Although the ‘good Europeans’ would undoubtedly view the political project of Europe as a crucial and welcome advance over nationalist political projects, especially in terms of achieving a more credible engagement with the advent of European nihilism, these European institutions would only be able to perform a secondary function in Nietzsche’s greater quest to eventually leave the modern experience of meaninglessness behind. Despite their broad support for such a political project, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would ultimately seek to make their contribution in a very different manner.

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Nietzsche’s European perspective Nietzsche considered it to be of paramount importance that his readers henceforth adopt a European rather than a national outlook. ‘And here I stand now’, he confessed in a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘as [a] European. I cannot do otherwise . . .!’3 This European perspective was closely linked with his foregoing critique of nationalism, as is evident from the deliberate contrasting and interweaving of these two ideas in many of his passages. In a letter to his mother, for example, Nietzsche adamantly proclaimed that ‘even if I should be a bad German, I am definitely a very good European’.4 Such deliberate juxtapositions indicate that his idea of the ‘good Europeans’ was also partially conceived as an antidote to the particular style he associated with many of his German contemporaries: we are too openminded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well informed, too ‘travelled’: we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, ‘untimely’, in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics: to keep its own creation from immediately falling apart again, is it not finding it necessary to plant it between two deadly hatreds? Must it not desire the eternalisation of the European system of a lot of petty states?5 Nietzsche even accused the Germans of having prevented the political and economic union of Europe.6 This does not mean, though, that his idea of the ‘good Europeans’ was aimed exclusively at the Germans, as his more general passages on the widespread rise of nationalism in many European states reveal. Nietzsche equally opposed the ‘national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine’.7 Personally, Nietzsche preferred to peer ‘beyond all the national wars and the new “Reiche”, and all else that currently stares us in the face. As far as I am concerned I see the gradual preparation of the one Europe.’8 This European outlook was also motivated by Nietzsche’s personal distaste for ideas of racial superiority. The ‘good Europeans’ of the future would have to recognize the benefits of racial diversity over purity. ‘We who are homeless’, he insisted in The Gay Science: are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being ‘modern men’, and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the ‘historical sense’.9

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After having passed into the initial stages of madness, Nietzsche’s patience in this matter grew substantially thinner. Illustrative of this period is his famous proclamation that ‘I am having all anti-Semites shot’,10 and his letter to Georg Brandes from early December 1888 in which Nietzsche again promised with characteristic intrepidness that ‘[i]f we are victorious, we will have the governance of the earth in our hands – including world peace. . . . We have abolished the absurd divisions of race, nation, and class.’11 In Nietzsche’s view a European perspective was clearly required as a counterweight to the modern forces of nationalism and racism. Nietzsche’s overriding belief in the necessity of a European response to the ‘death of God’ noticeably coloured many of his predictions about the immanent emergence of a united Europe, several of which seem highly optimistic and premature in retrospect. In a note from Human, All Too Human intended for the politicians and businessmen of his day, for example, Nietzsche argued that: Commerce and industry, traffic in books and letters, the commonality of all higher culture, quick changes of locality and landscape, the presentday nomadic life of all nonlandowners – these conditions necessarily bring about a weakening and ultimately a destruction of nations, or at least the European nations; so that a mixed race, that of the European man, has to originate out of all of them, as the result of continual crossbreeding.12 In light of the two world wars, and the continuing influence of nationalist sentiments in European politics, such optimism now seems largely misplaced. Of course Nietzsche had also conceded that ‘[t]he isolation of nations due to engendered national hostilities now work[ed] against this goal, consciously or unconsciously’, but he expected that ‘the mixing process goes on slowly, nevertheless, despite those intermittent countercurrents’.13 Again and again he pressed upon his readers that ‘[t]he national stupidities should not blind us to the fact in the higher regions there already exists a significant amount of interdependence’.14 Although Nietzsche quietly feared that his thinking too would become obsolete one day, he expected his influence to outlast at least those thinkers who failed to adjust their thinking beyond the nation. ‘Everything’, he sensed, ‘is striving for a synthesis of European history into the highest cultural and spiritual types – a kind of centre which denies the sickness of the nations.’15 Regardless of the plethora of evidence that his contemporaries were moving in the opposite direction, Nietzsche remained committed to a European response to the ‘death of God’ until the end of his literary life. At times Nietzsche even realized that he was being overly sanguine in his predictions about the emergence of a united Europe, and that the currents of nationalism actually ran very deep amongst his fellow Europeans. In

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Beyond Good and Evil, for example, he lamented with a sense of impending catastrophe that: Owing to the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has induced, and still induces, among the peoples of Europe; owing also to the shortsighted and quick-handed politicians who are at the top today with the help of this insanity, without any inkling that their separatist policies can of necessity only be entr’acte policies; owing to all this and much else that today simply cannot be said, the most unequivocal portents are now being overlooked or arbitrarily and mendaciously reinterpreted – that Europe wants to become one.16 If his contemporaries were not yet willing to embrace this higher European spirit, Nietzsche had to retrench and to place his aspirations in the untimely ‘good Europeans’ of the future who might have sufficient critical distance and hindsight to resist this dynamic of nationalism. In either case, throughout the overwhelming majority of these passages Nietzsche’s advocacy of the ‘good Europeans’ is consistently reinforced by, and mutually constitutive of, his aforementioned critique of nationalism. According to several scholars, this deliberate choice of extolling the benefits of being a ‘good European’ also marks a notable instance of how Nietzsche’s themes can still be drawn into contemporary debates with relative ease. Two such scholars recently pointed out that Nietzsche ‘seems to have been astonishingly prescient about the new Europe and its old predicaments. His overriding concern was that the “nations and fatherlands” of old Europe not obstruct forever the historic process of European unification.’17 Nietzsche’s biographer Lesley Chamberlain fervently concurs, underscoring that ‘[n]ot least, Nietzsche aimed to be European, not German, in spirit’,18 and that this ‘absence of national narrowness we can delight in these days, and delight in with a timeless relish too, because a European style was part of Nietzsche’s campaign’.19 More specifically, Nietzsche’s decidedly European outlook allows his writings to be brought into closer dialogue with the political project of Europe pursued by the European Union. The fact that Nietzsche himself had broadly envisaged the emergence of such a political project renders this dialogue even more stimulating. During his middle and late periods Nietzsche thought that the basis for a politically united Europe might be found in the common European culture exemplified by such key nineteenth-century spirits as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer and even Wagner. ‘[I]t is’, he maintained, ‘Europe, the one Europe, whose soul surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and impetuous art.’20 During this period Nietzsche also occasionally grappled with the question of how to unite this cultural ‘Europe’ politically, thus succumbing to the temptation to conflate European politics and culture. Nietzsche thought

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that the first attempt to unite Europe politically had already been undertaken by Napoleon, which may also go some way towards explaining the controversially affirmative view of the latter Nietzsche periodically exhibited in his writings.21 With Napoleon defeated, however, Nietzsche moved on to cultivating a vision of Europe more akin to a European league of states.22 He showed particularly keen interest in the Swiss model of cantons, stressing that the latter were quite distinct from the petty nations and states that needed to be transcended in his view (keine Kleinstaaten).23 In a subsequent note he reiterated that a temporary ‘Switzerlandization’ of Europe would be a very welcome mechanism for transcending the petty politics of Germany.24 Nietzsche thus looked towards the future formation of ‘a European league of nations, within which each individual nation, delimited according to geographical fitness, will possess the status and right of a canton’.25 Clearly his insistence that the borders of these political units be determined on the basis of ‘fitness’, rather than on the basis of prevailing national identities, would not be politically viable in the contemporary context. Nevertheless, it is possible to deduce from this insistence that Nietzsche’s aspiration for the ‘one Europe’ went significantly beyond an intergovernmental one. Nietzsche was not a Eurosceptic in the contemporary sense of desiring a Europe in which strong nation-states formed the focus of European political life. Nor would Nietzsche have supported a ‘Europe’ conceived primarily of a common economic market. His institutional vision most closely approximated a federal Europe.26 Beyond this rather vague vision, Nietzsche did not, in his later writings, explore a specific political blueprint or strategy for bringing about the political unification of Europe. As Martha Nussbaum points out, ‘if Nietzsche did have a plan for world government, or even European unity, he has not revealed it’.27 Many have followed Nussbaum in dismissing Nietzsche’s credentials as a political philosopher on the grounds of this striking absence. Yet there may also be good reasons for Nietzsche’s choice not to explore this avenue further in his later writings. The most plausible explanation, in fact, lies in Nietzsche’s inherent scepticism about whether a modern political project would ever suffice on its own in terms of addressing the deeper problems raised by the advent of European nihilism. Here the intimate link between Nietzsche’s foregoing critique of nationalism and his advocacy of a European perspective acquires great importance, as it implies that any political project undertaken in the name of ‘Europe’ would only enjoy the endorsement of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ if it were qualitatively different from the modern nationalism of his day, and if it incorporated a viable and credible strategy for responding to the advent of European nihilism. From the perspective of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’, the crucial question regarding the European Union is whether it qualifies in these two respects, and whether the political strategies pursued by modern politicians are capable of experimentally calling the will to truth into question.

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Clearly the political project of Europe is immune to one of the three principal criticisms that Nietzsche had levied against modern nationalism, namely that it addressed the problem of European nihilism on too small a scale. Here a European perspective would have clear advantages over any national response, and would be viewed by the ‘good Europeans’ as an immense improvement on the nationalist political projects that flourished in Nietzsche’s own lifetime. This particular strength of the political project of Europe will be further amplified in the years ahead by the eastward expansion of the membership of the European Union. Yet upon closer inspection the European Union does seem vulnerable to Nietzsche’s two other criticisms of modern nationalism. The European Union’s wider appeal, too, can still be seen to rest historically on the same will to truth that underpinned the rise of nationalism in modern Europe, and that Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ no longer found intellectually persuasive following the ‘death of God’. What is more, like the nationalist strategy, the institutions of the European Union can also be seen as serving too closely those political and economic actors who have little or no interest in encouraging a genuine engagement with the advent of nihilism in European culture. In short, it is possible to project two central aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of modern nationalism on to the way in which some advocates of the European Union are currently seeking to deploy a more meaningful idea of Europe in the twenty-first century. In this case, however, the initial advantage of scale would turn into more of a liability. Such a projection of these criticisms does not lead to an outright rejection of the political project of Europe, but it does critically distance the ‘good Europeans’ from the way in which the European Union is currently participating in the contemporary politics and production of ‘meaning’. The ‘good Europeans’ would wish to point out that although the European Union represents an immense improvement on its nationalist predecessors, it simultaneously harbours the great danger of simply replicating the specific logic of nationalism, and the general logic of incomplete nihilism, albeit on a much larger scale. If this critique is accepted as valid, then Nietzsche’s initial suspicion that a European political project alone may be insufficient in terms of responding to the deeper implications of European nihilism would also be partially borne out by contemporary experience. It is thus worth probing in greater detail to what extent Nietzsche’s aforementioned criticisms of nationalism pertain to the wider appeal that the political project of Europe enjoys, and to the actors who are driving this project forward.

The appeal of the European union Only half a century after his death, and by the time of the Second World War, Nietzsche would no longer have had to go to such rhetorical lengths

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to make his advocacy of a European perspective heard. The devastating experience of two world wars had by then given rise to a widespread desire to transcend national boundaries.28 Even though these sentiments were broadly compatible with Nietzsche’s insistence on adopting a European outlook, he most certainly would have taken issue with the Christian overtones that resonated throughout the European project from its outset. While Nietzsche regretted about his own times that ‘a European politics has become untenable’, he also insisted that a solution along ‘Christian perspectives is a malheur’.29 In his view Christians could not credibly refuse the problem of the ‘death of God’, nor could the experience of nihilism be easily circumvented by a pre-modern leap of faith. Hence, Nietzsche insisted very explicitly in The Gay Science that it was precisely in this opposition to Christianity that ‘we are good Europeans and heirs of Europe’s longest and most courageous self-overcoming’.30 This unwavering stance towards Christianity places Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ in stark opposition to a long lineage of modern attempts to reconstitute the European idea along Christian lines. This ancestry can be traced at least as far back as Novalis’ influential essay Christianity or Europe, in which he had argued that ‘[o]nly religion can re-establish Europe’.31 Following Germany’s defeat in the Great War, Max Scheler felt compelled to excavate such arguments, suggesting that the cultural reconstruction of Europe must be based on the Christian tradition as the decisive, common possession of the various European peoples.32 In the aftermath of the Second World War such sentiments were understandably reiterated.33 The Christian interpretation of the European idea resonated particularly forcefully amongst the founding fathers of the institutional project of Europe; Schuman, Adenauer, and de Gasperi were all men with sincere Catholic beliefs and simultaneously prominent members of Christian Democratic parties.34 They all also shared a Christian conception of Europe.35 In addition to the religious convictions of Europe’s ‘founding fathers’, the entire project of European integration was itself also very much a Christian one, centring on a call for forgiveness and a quest to overcome the mutual hatred of the nations of Europe. Joseph Weiler argues very insightfully that the European project as a whole admittedly resonates with ‘the distinct discourse, imagery and values of Christian Love, of Grace’.36 In either case, there can be little doubt that some of the most instrumental protagonists of an institutionally united Europe had similar hopes and aspirations about the role Christianity might have in the Europe to come. While it is easy to empathize with this aspiration, given that Christianity could be seen as offering a non-nationalist, pan-European form of allegiance, in light of his earlier discussion of European nihilism and the ‘death of God’ it is clear that this vision could not and would not be the strategy pursued by Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’.

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Nor is this comfortable co-existence between Christianity and the political project of Europe confined to the dustbin of history. According to the Pope, Europe remains a Christian continent, and he views Christianity as having ‘moulded the civilisation and founded the common identity on the European people’.37 In fact, the European idea has proved to be strategically expedient for the Vatican over the past decade, as it has sought to push the notion of an enlarged ‘Christian Europe’ following the end of the Cold War.38 This strategy is based on the Vatican’s belief that all secular, non-religious visions of a European order have failed, and that only Christian spirituality can serve as a central and regenerating force in today’s world.39 Countering such a conception of Europe is the obvious objection that religion has contributed as much to Europe’s division and violent conflicts as it has done to conserve European unity. Besides this historical objection, though, there is also a more ‘Nietzschean’ one, given that Nietzsche saw Christianity as having devalued earthly existence in favour of the promise of otherworldly gratification. In the end, however, this Christian support enjoyed by the European Union need not constitute an insurmountable problem from the perspective of the ‘good Europeans’. Although the Christian idea remains influential in certain European circles, Hugh Seton-Watson was correct when he argued that ‘[i]n today’s world, allegiance to Christendom, the land of the true faith, can have no meaning’.40 In contemporary European societies the influence of Christianity as a politically mobilizing force, though not insubstantial, is insufficient to endow the institutional project of Europe with a greater sense of meaning that would be accepted on a widespread and pervasive basis amongst the European publics.41 Moreover, if the Christian reading of the European project is no longer as prominent as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, then it would also seem that the initial Christian overtones of the institutional project of Europe need not, in the contemporary context, be an impairment for endorsing the institutional project of Europe from the Nietzschean perspective. What does decisively render the political project of Europe incompatible with Nietzsche’s vision of the ‘good Europeans’, however, is that even without explicitly Christian content the idea of ‘Europe’ has begun to act as a new ascetic ideal in contemporary European politics. The convergence between Christianity and the political project of Europe, in other words, is not primarily problematic because many Christians support the project, but because this convergence serves as an important caution that the European Union might not be sufficiently critical of the incessant will to truth of Europe’s Christian-Platonic cultural heritage which, in Nietzsche’s view, had ultimately been called into question by the ‘death of God’. If the political project of Europe is readily compatible with Christian visions of Europe, then it might not possess sufficient critical distance to call the will to truth experimentally into question, and to bring about the revaluation

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of traditional values that Nietzsche thought would henceforth be necessary. Indeed, upon closer inspection it appears that the majority of support historically achieved by the political project of Europe was based on a strategy of incomplete nihilism, on projecting a particular, fixed, and benign idea of Europe – the European Union as the culmination of Europe’s common cultural heritage, and as a protracted zone of peace and unity. In the public domain the European Union benefits substantially from the perception that it represents both the institutional culmination of European history and the embodiment of the latter’s rich cultural heritage. From a Nietzschean perspective, this vision of Europe is problematic because the deeper implications of the advent of European nihilism had called into question the intellectual credibility of much of this cultural heritage, especially the incessant will to truth that permeates so much of it. Nietzsche certainly saw himself as being greatly indebted to this culture, but also thought that the ‘death of God’ necessitated a critical reappraisal of some of its key precepts. A vision of Europe couched solely as a safeguard, guarantor, and preserver of this Christian-Platonic heritage would thus be anathema to Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘good Europeans’. In order for this project to be endorsed by the latter, it would also have to encompass an awareness of the limitations, shortcomings, and subtle prejudices of this culture. The attempt to equate the meaning of the European idea with Europe’s Christian-Platonic cultural heritage is thus a serious source of divergence between the imagery deployed by some supporters of the European Union and Nietzsche’s own idea about what it meant to be a ‘good European’ in a modern, secular culture. The ‘good Europeans’ would also resist the attempts to portray the European Union as the pathway to a peaceful and united European order. Despite their stated ‘crisis’ and inability to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe for the twenty-first century, the institutions of the European Union deliberately and continuously appeal to the greater ideals of peace and unity in order to achieve at least that degree of public appeal that they currently enjoy. The European Union has been repeatedly portrayed, and portrayed itself, as the harbinger of a European peace for all European peoples, and as the institutional structure that will redeem the violent nature of twentieth-century European history. According to surveys published in Eurobarometer it is also this vision of Europe that has been most readily and widely appropriated by European publics who envision the European Union as an organization dedicated to peace, friendship, and economic cooperation.42 This underlying logic, that the institutions of the European Union will redeem the suffering that Europe experienced in the course of the twentieth century, has helped to give the institutional project of Europe much of its momentum and has allowed it to achieve its current level of public appeal. This is a seductive vision of Europe that few would want to oppose publicly. Yet, irrespective of the benign nature of this vision, Nietzsche’s

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‘good Europeans’ would undoubtedly find that this vision of Europe, too, still represents a form of incomplete nihilism based on the will to truth. From the Nietzschean perspective, what is objectionable about this vision of Europe is not necessarily its benign content as such, but rather the underlying disposition to the world that it still reflects. In this imagery of Europe there is again an attempt to determine the truth of European existence as one of striving towards peace and unity, and an attempt to equate the meaning of the European idea with a particular goal or aim. The will to truth remains in operation through claiming that the deeper telos of peace and unity is unfolding through the course of European history. Again this imagery also preys on the secular aspiration to avert the experience of meaninglessness by serving a greater ideal, and to articulate a ‘true’ world within the horizon of earthly existence. Such imagery would not only have struck Nietzsche as offensively Hegelian, but with the ‘death of God’ and the advent of European nihilism, he also found that there is no longer any ground on which to establish this alleged momentum or trajectory of European history. The latter, after all, is just as replete with disunity and conflict. Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ might even come to suspect that the significant success of this European imagery is grounded in the same psychological principles as its Christian and nationalist predecessors; that it forms yet another prop and support, another post-Christian attempt to ‘command goals and tasks’ and to articulate a ‘true world’.43 The emergence of this vision of Europe as peace and unity is even uncannily similar to Nietzsche’s own description of how ascetic ideals are frequently born out of the creative ressentiment exhibited by suffering and enslaved peoples. In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche had argued that once stronger men began to enslave weaker ones, the weaker men no longer possessed an outlet for their natural instincts and physical drives. They consequently became increasingly repressed and evolved an inner life, or soul, within which to process the aggression and cruelty they suffered at the hands of the ‘masters’.44 In order to come to terms with their suffering, these ‘slaves’ began to deny earthly existence, marred as it was for them by suffering, in favour of another, ‘truer’ world where the moral hierarchy is precisely the opposite of the one they are experiencing.45 Unable to resist the masters physically, the slaves resist spiritually. ‘True worlds’, in Nietzsche’s account, were thus mostly born amongst enslaved men, and in a historical situation of impotence and suffering.46 By inventing a ‘true’ world, he noted in Twilight of the Idols, ‘we revenge ourselves on life by means of the phantasmagoria of “another”, a “better” life’.47 By way of analogy, the vision of Europe as ‘peace and unity’ was similarly born out of a violent and impotent situation, and one enmeshed in historical experiences of immense collective human suffering and pain. Much like Christianity, the growing appeal to the European Union as the redeemer of Europe’s past suffering could thus be grasped as a contem-

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porary form of ‘slave’ morality. Nietzsche himself had already observed about his own times that ‘[e]very philosophy that ranks peace above war . . . that knows some finale, some final state of some sort . . . permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher’.48 To this extent the idea of Europe as ‘peace’ embodied in the institutional project also remains anathema to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘good Europeans’ – not because Nietzsche desired war, but rather because such an idea constitutes yet another in the series of unhealthy ascetic ideals which European culture has generated in reaction to the experience of suffering and which mark a resentful, rather than life-affirming, attitude both towards existence and towards the experience of nihilism. Despite Nietzsche’s own clear preference for a political project of Europe to overcome the national divisions of Europe, then, there is scope for a critical distancing from certain aspects of the European Union. This disagreement, however, is not with the political project as such, which Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would probably have welcomed, but with the way in which this project has sought to legitimize itself publicly. There is an important analogy here in terms of Nietzsche’s earlier engagement with the claim of modern science to be a neutral and objective intellectual endeavour when in fact it is not. Despite the claims of the Europeanists that the political project of Europe lacks a more meaningful representation of itself, this project, too, is always already infused with a deeper teleology and sense of purpose. Just as modern science claimed to be objective while still serving the greater value of truth, so too do the institutions of the European Union claim to be experiencing an identity crisis, while still seeking to serve the greater values of peace and unity. Yet how is this privileging of peace and unity grounded in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’? If there are no longer any firm skyhooks to which to attach these values, then it remains unclear why European society should, for example, strive towards peace, rather than towards a conception of co-existence that is non-violent, but nevertheless agonistic; or why it should strive towards unity rather than towards a mutual respect for difference. Nor is it clear how the privileging of peace and unity over any other values, such as justice or freedom, is to be achieved. Nor is it even evident why this particular understanding of peace as the absence of war, which the European Union invokes, should be elevated over other conceptions of peace. In Daybreak, Nietzsche had insisted quite plainly that: we men of conscience who do not want to return to that which is outlived and decayed, to anything ‘unworthy of belief’, be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; we do not permit ourselves any bridges-of-lies to ancient ideals; we are hostile to every kind of faith and Christianness existing today; hostile to all romanticism and fatherland-worship.49

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All these values remain indicative of the Christian-Platonic ‘slave morality’ that has been called into question by the ‘death of God’. The European Union, however, largely continues to operate in the name of these values, thus forcing the ‘good Europeans’ to call for a more critical assessment not only of nationalism, but also of the popular vision of Europe advocated by Europeanists. Indeed, the first criticism that a Nietzschean perspective would generate in relation to the idea of Europe embodied in the European Union is that, however vacuous the ideational basis for the former may appear to be, it still constitutes a remarkably under-criticized ideal. While there exists a plethora of critical studies on nationalism, racism, and fascism, the idea of Europe as a unifying or universal ideal has not been subjected to such studies, despite the fact that the idea of ‘Europe’ has become an increasingly important aspect of contemporary political life.50 The idea of Europe as a mobilising metaphor and as a central ideal in contemporary political discourse might well have to be subjected to greater critical scrutiny given that its appeal may still be a continuation of the same will to truth that characterizes so much of European culture, and which Nietzsche’s thought had become intellectually incredible following the ‘death of God’. To the extent that it encourages and participates in the deployment of a new ascetic ideal, the institutional project of Europe may still be complicit in ‘the tremendous amount of forgery in ideals’ that were traded in modern Europe.51 Much like nationalism in his own day, the implicit idea of Europe upon which advocates of the European Union draw, seems to rest on ‘the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and tasks’.52 It is yet another of God’s shadows trying to recreate the balm of metaphysics. The growing discourse on the ‘meaninglessness’ and ‘crisis’ of Europe only serve to mask the very extent to which the European project is always already endowed with a greater sense of meaning and this is something that Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ were likely to have found objectionable, despite Nietzsche’s broad support for the political unification of Europe.

The advocates of the European Union Nietzsche’s second criticism of modern nationalism can also be projected on to the European Union in light of the powerful state and business interests that are driving the political project of Europe forward. Part of the reason why Nietzsche objected to the rise of modern nationalism and called for a European perspective was that the former was being advocated by statesmen and businessmen who had little interest in confronting the experience of European nihilism honestly and critically, and who instead benefited materially from providing Europeans with new idols and ideals. In surveying the history of the European integration effort over the past

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decades, it appears that the same forces that had done so much to encourage nationalist ideas in the course of the nineteenth century, have today appropriated key elements of the European project. With some prominent exceptions, states and businesses have largely been able to reconcile their interests with the institutions of the European Union, raising the suspicion that, like its nationalist predecessor, the former might similarly come to be seen as a regrettable symbiosis between a European population still demanding a greater sense of meaning, and political and business elites wishing to fill this vacuum with an institutional project of Europe that will serve their respective interests. Much of the initial progress achieved in the quest for European integration occurred during the 1950s and 1960s when the nation-state was still struggling to rebuild its legitimacy following the Second World War, and when European idealism for a new political order still ran quite high. This idealism presented a significant challenge to the traditional status of national governments, but it was not able to persist.53 Eventually it proved possible for national governments and bureaucracies to halt further integration and to realign the European project in such a way that it better served their respective needs. Ironically, it may have been the material wealth derived from the economic fruits of integration that allowed many states to regain credibility in the eyes of the public, and thus to halt, or at least significantly slow down, the pace of European integration.54 Historians of the political project of Europe are today much more sceptical as to whether the political process leading up to European integration ever conformed to the idealist view in the first place.55 To this end Alan Milward has provided a very influential revision of the early idealist historiography of European integration in favour of one centred on economic integration. The long-term effect of the process of European integration, Milward suggests, has been not so much the erosion of the modern nationstate as its ‘rescue’, and this by virtue of the fact that economic cooperation provided sufficient material prosperity for the re-emergence of popular support for the nation-state. Milward goes on to note that this is part of a larger shift in the historians’ assessment of the unfolding of the political project of Europe, whereby this process is increasingly seen as driven primarily by the interests of great powers, and not as an inevitable trend.56 ‘From the beginnings of detailed historical research into the origins of the European community’, Milward contends, ‘it became clear that nation-states had played the dominant role in its formation and retained firm control of their new creation.’57 Milward’s thesis has received substantial support from scholars of European integration over the course of the past decade. Even William Wallace, who differs in crucial respects from Milward’s thesis, concedes that, at least up until the end of the 1960s, there was ‘a positive sum relationship between the security and economic frameworks which the

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institutions of European integration . . . had built, and the maintenance – or re-establishment – of national legitimacy and autonomy’.58 According to Philip Allott this convergence of interests between individual member states and the European Union has been so extensive over past decades that he now views European integration as ‘a cynical perversion of a wonderful idea’ – a perversion which has turned the redemptive dream of Europe into a ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracy of the public realms’.59 In this view the current direction in which the European project is heading is marked by neither intellectual creativity nor insight into the profoundly problematic nature of articulating a more meaningful Europe; rather, it is allowing for the institutional project of Europe to serve the interests of national and European bureaucracies and governments. This development further complicates an easy reconciliation between Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ and the European Union. Many large businesses have likewise been able to reconcile their interests quite positively with key aspects of the project of the European Union. Although this is not true for all big businesses, the economic pressures have undoubtedly been very important in driving forward the process of European unification.60 The desire to expand markets, to increase the social and geographical mobility of labour, to reduce transaction costs, and to increase investment potential, have all been important driving forces behind the political project of Europe.61 Much like the nationalist projects of the nineteenth century, the project of European integration is often not driven by an overriding and greater cause, but by much narrower, material interests.62 Nietzsche would not even have been terribly surprised by this development. ‘The money alone’, he had predicted in one of his notebooks, ‘forces Europe eventually to unite itself’,63 which is why he also thought that the economic unification of Europe would follow at some point in the future.64 In many ways this aspect of the development of the European Union echoes Gellner’s earlier theory of modern nationalism in which he argued that nationalism emerged as a necessary adjunct to the process of industrialization and the needs of nineteenth century capitalism.65 By way of analogy, a considerable component of the impetus behind the process of European integration lies in the interests of large corporations.66 This perception has triggered some particularly harsh assessments of the European Union by the Left in recent years, members of which have found that the idea of Europe is increasingly being used as a driving force for neo-liberal projects in macro-economic and political engineering.67 From the Nietzschean perspective, however, the problem with a European project conceived in such a way is twofold. First, the ‘hard economic choices’ might well contribute to social conditions that are themselves conducive to the emergence of new ascetic ideals. Nietzsche, after all, had detected a close link between the experience of suffering and hardship on the one

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hand, and the emergence of ‘slave morality’ on the other. Second, Nietzsche remained unconvinced that an economic Europe alone would be publicly perceived as an inherently meaningful one. Although material gains are often cited as a justification for the political project of Europe, from the perspective of the ‘good Europeans’ its ultimate success should not be judged on these grounds alone. These gains may be important, but they are insufficient on their own. Nietzsche maintained unmistakably that ‘what I combat is economic optimism: as if increasing the expenditure of everybody must necessarily involve the increased welfare of everybody’.68 Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would thus view the growing convergence of such state and business interests with considerable suspicion, because these actors were unlikely, in his view, to move the debate on the European idea beyond visions grounded on the will to truth, and would thus not be able to increase significantly the welfare of Europeans in terms of finding a way of rendering European existence meaningful in the wider context of secularization. In its current form, then, the European Union only modestly reflects the grander aspirations of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’. Much like states and international businessmen had in Nietzsche’s own lifetime sought to encourage nationalist identities that served their interests, it now seems that they often also choose to endorse the European Union. As a result, the political project has become transformed from a vanguard movement to the staple diet of daily politics. To some extent, of course, this is inevitable, as it remains difficult to see how an institutional project of Europe could ever flourish in stark opposition to larger economic and political interests. Yet there is an important degree of judgement involved regarding this aspect, and from the Nietzschean perspective it might well seem that much like Massimo d’Azeglio famously proclaimed following the Italian unification that ‘[w]e have made Italy, now we have to make Italians’,69 the European Union is now trying to invent those elusive ‘Europeans’.70 ‘It is difficult to know how to engineer affection for a new European patria’, Jan Zielonka notes, ‘the Union cannot just hope and pray that the identity and democracy problems will somehow go away.’71 In Nietzsche’s view, however, the majority of states and businesses only had a modest interest in encouraging a more honest engagement with the deeper dimensions of European nihilism; indeed they benefited materially from preventing such an engagement. Their popular support and material base even depended on their ability to produce new idols and ideals, and on their ability to maintain the will to truth under secular conditions. Perhaps this is the price ultimately paid for making the European project compatible with state and business interests, rather than initially opting for a more revolutionary approach; perhaps it is also the reason why Nietzsche thought that even though the solution to the advent of European nihilism required a European perspective, a political project alone would not achieve an adequate response. This suspicion is further intensified when considering the strate-

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gies currently available for policy-makers in terms of articulating a more meaningful idea of Europe.

European nihilism and the European Union Is there any way for the European Union to escape this conundrum of replicating the specific logic of nationalism, and the general logic of the will to truth, on a much larger scale? In seeking to avoid the logic of the will to truth Europeanists could be tempted simply to continue with the broadly functionalist strategy pursued in the past. After all, the founding fathers of the European project had deliberately avoided an overtly revolutionary process of European federalism, opting instead for a strategy that would achieve unification of Europe more gradually. By focusing on piecemeal and sectoral integration it was hoped that cooperation between states was more likely to ensue in the long run, and that such cooperation could, in turn, breed a habit of further cooperation which would induce ever greater steps towards integration. Eventually loyalties would begin to shift from nation-states to supranational institutions. In this way the functionalist mode of integration might over time culminate in a federal Europe. The founding fathers had thus adopted a policy that did not cast the European question in spiritual or philosophical terms, deliberately refusing to deploy new ascetic ideals. Instead it placed economics before politics, making the latter a function of the former, and relied on the logic of the market to drive forward the political project of Europe.72 Ernst Haas famously insisted that it is ‘the economic technician, the planner, the innovating industrialist, and trade unionist [that] advanced the [European] movement, not the politician, the scholar, the poet, the writer’.73 Mitrany, too, laid his cards openly on the table, conceding that ‘[t]he functional way may seem a spiritless solution – and so it is, in the sense that it detaches from the spirit the things which are of the body’. For, he maintained, ‘[n]o advantage has accrued to anyone when economic and other social activities are wedded to fascist or communist or other political ideologies; their progeny has always been confusion and conflict’.74 Mitrany clearly did not ignore questions of meaning and vision in his account of integration. Rather, in his opinion these notions had to be deliberately avoided by any attempt to unite Europe if it wished to stand a chance of succeeding in the long run. The ‘spiritless’ approach would eventually be redeemed by the later emergence of a united Europe. This explicit deferment of the question of ‘meaning’ in favour of technical solutions was even exemplified by Jean Monnet, who wrote that ‘I have never been in doubt that this process would one day lead us to a United States of Europe, but I do not even try to imagine what the political framework will be. There is probably no precedent for what we are preparing.’75 Determining the precise vision of

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‘Europe’ is thus the deferred task of later generations. First the institutional framework must be established. Initially this functional approach appeared to be a politically cunning and astute strategy, and one that resisted the need to devise and posit new acetic ideals that clashed with the expectations of a post-metaphysical age. According to Stanley Hoffmann it was a classic example of: the old Saint-Simonian dream of depoliticised progress, accompanied by one idea that, at first sight, seemed quite political: the idea that the gradual dispossession of the nation-state and the transfer of allegiance to the new Community would be hastened by the establishment of a central quasi-federal political system.76 This deliberate refusal to rehabilitate a more metaphysical idea of Europe might even appear compatible with Nietzsche’s plea not to fall back on Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage in order to legitimise the political project of Europe. Nevertheless, continuing with this broadly functional approach in the present context would not be an option for the ‘good Europeans’, who would deem it to be deficient in at least four regards. First, the functional approach has not yet generated the kind of widespread attachment to a common European ethos that Nietzsche was seeking to evoke amongst his readers and the ‘good Europeans’ of the future. Even though Nietzsche did not want to articulate new ascetic ideals in the name of ‘Europe’, he did want to provoke a common European sentiment or disposition. In the functional account the best way of institutionalising a more compelling vision of Europe paradoxically resided in avoiding overt reflection on the meaning of the European idea. While such a strategy achieved considerable success in terms of bringing about many of the institutions of the European Union, the price it paid for such a strategy was that the evolution of this institutional framework was not accompanied by a commensurate shift in public attitudes that could see far beyond the European Union’s bureaucratic structures. After several decades of European integration scholars are understandably beginning to wonder whether affective associations will ever result from processes of functional integration alone. Hoffmann has noted quite rightly that there still remains today a vast difference between Europe ‘as a zone of economic integration (this has been achieved) and Europe as a common enterprise’.77 Despite nearly half a century of institutional cooperation and functional integration, and despite the widely accepted arguments in favour of market integration, Europe still finds it difficult to evoke a sense of meaning socially shared by all the nations and peoples of Europe.78 Many scholars remain doubtful about whether the functional approach will ever bring about such a shared sense of ‘Europeanness’ amongst the European publics. The latter are likely to see the European Union, even if erroneously from the

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functionalist perspective, as a technocratic and bureaucratic enterprise, rather than as a profoundly visionary process. In the public view, functionalism could outline the mechanisms through which European integration might be achieved, but it could not engage the public imagination. This inability to provoke a common sense of Europeanness would be deemed an important shortcoming by Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’. Second, and because of this choice, a functional approach to the political project of Europe is virtually guaranteed to be in a perpetual state of public ‘crisis’, necessitating constant attempts to delineate its deeper meaning in the quest for greater public legitimacy. Because of the public dissatisfaction with a functional approach, the later is inevitably accompanied by periodic calls for outlining a more meaningful idea of Europe, and thus also for implicitly reactivating the will to truth. The 1990s has provided a plethora of examples of how the very insistence on a functionalist approach by Europeanists paradoxically stimulated a demand amongst the European publics for a more meaningful representation of the European institutions. It is the very exclusion of more meaningful representations of the political project of Europe that ironically triggers the demand for a more compelling vision of Europe amongst the publics and the intellectuals. Despite its intentions to the contrary, the narrow focus of the functional approach thus produces immense pressures to reactivate the will to truth by constantly needing to resort to more meaningful representations of Europe in order to ensure its continued public legitimacy. By restricting the legitimate sphere of activity to the bureaucratic and the rational, it paradoxically provokes a backlash of the creative and aesthetic. Yet if the functional approach can only succeed in the long run by inadvertently encouraging a parallel reactivation of the will to truth, then for this reason, too, it remains an unpersuasive response from the Nietzschean perspective. Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would also take issue with the functional approach for a third reason. Much like modern science, functionalism only appears to be meaningless and lacking a deeper spirit, when in fact it is not. The functional approach is very much endowed with its own rich sense of meaning. This is something that has been very clear to functionalists from the very beginning, in that this quiet and technocratic approach was aimed at bringing about a more unified Europe in the long run, and in its stronger formulation even sought to encourage the widespread transcendence of state structures. From the functionalist perspective, its publicly perceived ‘spiritlessness’ is only superficial. The ultimate goal of some functionalists – the political transcendence of the modern nation-state – is even an aspiration that Nietzsche frequently expressed himself. Where Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would further depart from the functional approach, however, is in its reliance on deep myths about the emancipatory power of modern rationalization processes. Lene Hansen and Michael C. Williams have argued that:

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Functional or rational categories are not ‘objective’ . . . Their separation from ‘political’ (or mythic) categories is a political achievement – it represents the successful operation of a mythic structure: the delineation of a field of activity as not touching upon the mythic . . . the very rationalist, liberal, functionalist vision . . . is itself mythic.79 Much like Nietzsche sought to unmask the false neutrality and objectivity that modern science proclaimed for itself, Hansen and Williams wish to expose the deeper vision and mythology animating the functional approach to European integration. The question regarding functionalism in their view is thus rightly not a choice between elaborating a myth of Europe and not advocating a myth of ‘Europe’, but one between different and competing mythologies evident in the political project of Europe. Functionalism simply replaced an overtly metaphysical representation of the European project with a subtler one based on the redeeming power of modern rationalization processes. Nietzsche, however, wanted the ‘good Europeans’ of the future to resist the redeployment of such mythologies in general, and this rationalist vision in particular. In one of his notes he remarked ironically that ‘[o]nce we possess that common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of the economy – as a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever smaller, every more subtly “adapted” gears’.80 In the end, the functionalist mythology remains deeply anathema to the creative spirit of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’. Leaving ‘Europe’ to the functionalist would be the political equivalent of leaving life to the scientists. Finally, the ‘good Europeans’ would also criticize the functionalist approach for its lack of historical success in terms of challenging the spread of nationalism and national identities in Europe. Because nationalism amounted to a strategy of incomplete nihilism, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would deem it to be very much in need of critique. If, despite its aspirations, the functionalist approach cannot successfully challenge the primacy of national identities, then it also amounts to an insufficient strategy for the ‘good Europeans’. Just how unsuccessful this approach has been in challenging national identities is evident from the periodic Eurobarometer surveys, which indicate that a large part of the European public clearly opposes a Europe that comes at the price of national identities.81 Although there is considerable support amongst European publics for the European Union, much of this support is only given to the political project of Europe on the condition that it does not begin to infringe upon valued national identities. In sum, then, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would be discontent with a functional approach to European integration because its technocratic appearance means it is unable to generate a sufficiently European sentiment

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and perspective amongst the European publics, because its ‘meaningless’ image constantly provokes renewed attempts to reactivate the will to truth, because it has not been able to sufficiently challenge the primacy of national identities, and because it simply replaces the Christian and nationalist mythology with its own deep mythology about the power of rationalization processes. A political project of Europe structured around a functional approach is not one that Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would have found persuasive and would not be one that would allow the European Union to escape this conundrum of replicating the will to truth on a much larger scale than its nationalist predecessor. Other avenues would have to be explored. The most prominent response to some of these perceived weaknesses of functionalism has been the call by Europeanists for the articulation of a more overtly meaningful idea of Europe that could serve as the basis for a common European identity. Zaki Laïdi has argued with exemplary clarity that ‘[u]ntil this force [of nationalism] is matched with a project of meaning, it is very unlikely to die down or come to a halt’.82 As was noted in the introduction, a unified Europe is increasingly seen to additionally require a common idea of Europe, as the task formerly deferred by an earlier generation of Europeanists has returned to confront contemporary scholars much more directly. Bearing in mind, however, the discussion of Nietzsche’s European thought carried out in the previous chapters, it should now become evident why this preferred strategy, like the functionalist one to which it responds, is likely to remain deeply problematic from the perspective of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’. First, it is proving very difficult to actually articulate an idea of Europe that is compelling to Europeans at large. Not only is there a lack of requisite symbolic heritage for Europeanists to draw upon, but the latter would also have to contend with the sceptical attitude of European intellectuals in general.83 When the will to truth puts itself into question, the deployment of new idols remains profoundly difficult, as any attempt to articulate the true meaning of earthly existence is likely to remain intellectually unconvincing. Nietzsche himself had already noted that one of the most difficult lessons to learn in modern times is that: What will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built anymore, is – a society (Gesellschaft) in the old sense of that word; to build that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society; this is a truth for which the time has come.84 By way of analogy, the public mood in the post-Cold War era may simply be too sceptical to allow for the adhesion to an overarching idea of Europe and for the rebuilding of a community based around shared ideals. The

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Eurovision Song Contest, the new currency, the European City of Culture, the European flag and the European anthem taken from the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony have not only failed to provide a genuine European identity, but in the eyes of many they also look very much like crude attempts at social engineering, reminiscent, to some, of earlier forms of state-sponsored propaganda.85 The deeper problem affecting any such move to delineate a more meaningful idea of Europe is that it runs the risk of further simulating the specific logic of nationalism, and the general logic of incomplete nihilism, but on a much larger scale. It is revealing that in seeking to achieve a more meaningful attachment to the European project, policy-makers have resorted to the very same tools of nationalism, such as the flag, the passport, and the anthem.86 Hence it remains difficult to see how the successful articulation and deployment of a more meaningful idea of Europe in response to the perceived inadequacies of functionalism would or could avoid replicating this logic of incomplete nihilism and reactivating the will to truth. The political project of Europe, set up to transcend European nationalism, constantly runs the risk of returning to the very strategies upon which its nationalist and Christian predecessors relied.87 Much as the nationalists eventually challenged the Christian superstition with their own myths, so might the institutional project of Europe be seen as seeking to challenge the nationalist superstition with a European myth. In this case, however, the logic of nationalism and the will to truth would not so much be transcended, as it would simply be replicated on a much larger scale. Any further step in this direction would only serve to exacerbate this tension. In the quest to encourage these ‘Europeans’, some of the institutional actors have already also begun to apply the same techniques used for the purposes of nation-building in the nineteenth century. In order to ascertain how best to bring about loyalties and affective attitudes to the European Union and the European cause, scholars have not so much sought to develop new models, as they have repeatedly turned to the literature on nationalism for guidance. Perhaps it is not even a coincidence that the pioneers of regional integration theory such as Ernst Haas and Karl W. Deutsch were also pioneers of the literature on nation-building and nationalism. Haas actually defined regional political integration as a process of collective identity formation, as ‘the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new centre, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing nation states’.88 This same logic is also reflected in Monnet’s ‘A Ferment of Change’, in which he had argued that: To establish this new method of common action, we adapted to our situation the methods which have allowed individuals to live together

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Europe wants to become one in society: common rules which each member is committed to respect, and common institutions to watch over the application of these rules. Nations have applied this method within their frontiers for centuries, but they have never yet been applied between them. [emphasis added]89

From the very beginning of the process there was a desire amongst enthusiastic Europeanists to work towards a European identity similar to that traditionally associated with nations.90 This logic has not been buried in the early literature of European integration. Two anthropologists note that there are revealing parallels between the attempt to bring about a European citizenry and earlier attempts to bring such a citizenry about at the national level. The view that older nation-building projects provide insightful parallels, or even models, of how to encourage deeper European integration is still a widely held belief today.91 Throughout the history of the European integration the debate on the idea of Europe has thus remained very firmly grounded within traditional conceptions of state organization; the project of European integration has not so much transcended national ideals as it has displaced them to a higher, European level.92 Consequently there is also a danger that the institutions of the European Union will not so much transcend its predecessor as they will replicate its logic on an even larger dimension.93 To the extent that it seeks to deploy a more meaningful idea of Europe along Hoffmann’s lines, the European Union would just be approximating another form of incomplete nihilism that the ‘good Europeans’ would find unpersuasive following the ‘death of God’. Not without irony Nietzsche had noted in one of his fragments that ‘they call the unification of German governments into a single state a “great idea”.’ It is the same type of person who will one day be enthusiastic about the united states of Europe: it is the even “greater idea’’’.94 Neither the functionalist approach, nor the attempt to deploy a more meaningful idea of Europe, seems capable of escaping the conundrum of further replicating the logic of incomplete nihilism on a much larger scale.

Conclusion Many contemporary advocates of the political project of Europe are clearly not the ‘good Europeans’ that Nietzsche hoped would emerge at some time in the future. Although Nietzsche was critical of a nationalist response to the advent of European nihilism, and although he advocated a European perspective, this call was not unqualified. Today it seems that the idea of Europe currently pursued by some Europeanists does not differ that significantly from the nationalist ideas that Nietzsche already encountered towards the end of the nineteenth century. Much like nationalist political

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projects before it, the European Union’s recent attempt to articulate and propagate a more meaningful idea of Europe that would provide the basis for a European identity, and that would also enhance the legitimacy of the European Union, might equally be seen as a form of incomplete nihilism – as a way of simply substituting one ‘true world’ with another without genuinely and honestly confronting the deeper dimension of the ‘death of God’. From the perspective of the ‘good Europeans’ such a reactivation of the will to truth in the name of ‘Europe’ would have to be firmly resisted. The broad parameters of the contemporary debate on Europe consequently also do not promise to address adequately the problem of European nihilism. In the contemporary debate Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would situate themselves at a critical distance from the ‘nationalizers’ who overlook, or deliberately obscure, the fact that the very nature of modern nationalism, as a strategy of incomplete nihilism, is to avoid a genuine and critical confrontation with the experience of European nihilism. It is an overly modest and artificial process of producing meaning that regrettably remains convincing for many. On a Nietzschean reading Europeanists are therefore correct to adjust their thinking to the European level, and there was indeed a broad convergence between Nietzsche’s European aspirations and those who sought to work towards a united Europe in the post-war era. Yet the functionalist wager on European integration has culminated in a European Union that can no longer be seen as the embodiment of ‘good Europeanism’ in the way Nietzsche had understood it. Instead these institutions have become substantially assimilated by the very forces that Nietzsche lamented in his discussion of modern nationalism at the end of the previous century, and which he hoped would be displaced by a European perspective. ‘[N]ihilistic values’, Nietzsche once noted, ‘hold sway under the holiest of names.’95 Both the nationalist response, as well as the counter-response by Europeanists to articulate an overarching idea of Europe, represent strategies of incomplete nihilism resting on the old way of finding meaning through the will to truth. Both still seek the comfort of metaphysics and both still play the game of modern politics within the matrix of the will to truth. The ‘good Europeans’ whom he hoped might emerge in future would be unlikely to pursue either of these strategies. Despite this critique, however, Nietzsche did not want to stand in the way of the political unification of Europe. From a Nietzschean perspective the brunt of this criticism would pertain to the way in which the European Union seeks to engage in the production of meaning, not to the effort of European integration itself. If forced to choose between a nationalist and a European position, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would undoubtedly situate themselves much closer to the political project of Europe, because such a project would mark a clear advancement over national political projects, and because it would do more than nationalist projects to encourage the emergence of these ‘good Europeans’ in future. ‘The very

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same conditions’, Nietzsche noted in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘that will on the average lead to the levelling and mediocritisation of man – to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal – are likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality.’96 In the same book he added that ‘[i]n accordance with the slowly arising democratic order of things (and its cause, the intermarriage of masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare urge to ascribe value to oneself and on one’s own and to “think well” of oneself will actually be encouraged’.97 Despite its shortcomings, Nietzsche suggested that a political project of Europe ‘will probably lead to results which would seem to be least expected by those who naively promote and praise it, the apostles of “modern ideas’’’.98 A political project of Europe was thus an important precondition for his ‘good Europeans’ of the future to emerge on a wider scale, and their second defining characteristic would have to be that they adopted a supra-national perspective and broadly supported a political project of Europe. The role of this political project, however, would always remain a secondary one in their view, especially when compared to the much more urgent task of encouraging a response to the advent of European nihilism that was not premised on reactivating the will to truth. As the next chapter illustrates, Nietzsche directed his best efforts to this much more difficult task.

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In the end Nietzsche placed his hopes for responding to the deeper ramifications of secularization in encouraging the emergence of the ‘good Europeans’ of the future. As their name implies, these ‘good Europeans’ would realize that a European response was required in light of the wide reach of this decisive cultural transition. Yet because the ‘death of God’ also entailed calling Europe’s will to truth experimentally into question, they would be wary of any European response that remained grounded in the will to truth. Even the European Union, which has achieved the formidable task of establishing a common institutional framework for Europe, still harbours the risk of replicating the will to truth on a European-wide scale in its efforts to gain increased public legitimacy. In the contemporary debate on the European idea these ‘good Europeans’ would thus resist articulating an overarching idea of Europe with fixed attributes along the lines that Hoffmann and others have called for. The difficult task confronting these ‘good Europeans’ instead would be to explore alternative avenues, and to find a whole new way of rendering European existence meaningful beyond the will to truth. Contemplating an existence not grounded in the will to truth would initially appear to be a disconcerting and disorienting task. Given their comprehension of the deeper dimension of European nihilism, however, these ‘good Europeans’ would have no choice but to embark upon this troublesome avenue of experimentally calling the will to truth into question, and of exploring where this alternative path might lead them. Through pursuing this path, Nietzsche hoped, they would eventually evolve a new disposition towards existence, and would begin to affirm a very different way of being than had been encouraged in the name of ‘Europe’ in the past. Increasingly, European culture would no longer appear meaningful to the ‘good Europeans’ because of its ability to determine the overall truth of existence. ‘Europe’ would now become meaningful to these ‘good Europeans’ because it afforded them the possibility of freeing themselves from such attempts. The highest European value, for them, would gradually shift

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from being truth, to being freedom; for what would an existence no longer grounded in the will to truth be but an existence that seeks to be free. The third and final characteristic of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ is thus that their experimental calling into question of the will to truth would allow them to undergo an important inner transformation following which the ‘death of God’ is no longer viewed as the catastrophic moment marking the collapse of Europe’s spiritual vitality, but as a meaningful and celebratory event allowing European culture to explore a new trajectory based on encouraging a deep and creative experience of autonomy.1 Being a ‘good European’ would henceforth have to consist of constantly trying to free European existence from all attempts to determine its overall truth.

Nietzsche’s complete nihilism Nietzsche deliberately refused to articulate a new idea of Europe in the way Hoffmann and others have recently called for. Instead his strategy revolved around encouraging the emergence of those ‘good Europeans’ who could flourish without recourse to such ascetic ideals. This emphasis on persons rather than on abstract ideals is a deliberate and important feature of his thinking. Because the advent of European nihilism ultimately entailed calling Europe’s entire will to truth into question, and with it all attempts to determine the truth of European existence, Nietzsche’s response to the modern experience of meaninglessness had to focus on communicating to his readers a particular sensibility or disposition towards existence that could find meaning without devoting itself to a new ‘true’ world. The whole point of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ was thus to resist the temptation of drawing up an ideal or identity that Europeans would then be persuaded to internalize. The ‘good Europeans’ would be ‘good’ precisely in that they would understand the deeper dimension of European nihilism, and would not seek to erect new idols to replace the old God that has died. Such a reading of the ‘good Europeans’ would also render premature the argument recently advanced by two scholars that Nietzsche’s European thought remains ‘too culture-bound, too excessively European’ for thinking about the idea of Europe.2 If Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘good European’ is understood as a person who responds to the experience of meaninglessness in European culture by pursuing a strategy of complete rather than incomplete nihilism, then this idea might still be instructive in the context of the contemporary debate on the European idea. The crucial difference between ‘incomplete’ nihilism and ‘complete’ nihilism is that in the latter the deeper implications of the advent of European nihilism are accepted, and there is subsequently no eager attempt to escape these implications.3 ‘One could conceive’, Nietzsche noted in this vein, ‘of such pleasure and power of selfdetermination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practised in maintaining

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himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.’4 Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’, or ‘free spirits’ as he sometimes also referred to them, would creatively explore the possibility of living without these ‘true’ worlds.5 Throughout his middle and later periods Nietzsche repeatedly described his ‘good Europeans’ in precisely these terms, constantly trying to encourage those readers who did not require overarching ideals to experience European existence as meaningful. ‘What alone can be our doctrine?’, Nietzsche asked rhetorically in Twilight of the Idols, replying: That no one gives man his qualities – neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. . . . No one is responsible for man’s being there at all, for his being such and such . . . Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, an end.6 For the ‘good Europeans’ the demand for certainty regarding the truth of existence would consequently not be ‘the innermost craving and the deepest need’. In its place Nietzsche recommended ‘the magic of the opposite way of thinking, not to be denied the stimulation of the enigmatic’.7 Their starting point would have to be a ‘[d]eep aversion towards resting once and for all in any total interpretation of the world’. 8 It was, Nietzsche maintained in The Gay Science, precisely the ‘attainment of good conscience when one feels hostile to what is accustomed, traditional, and hallowed’ that ‘constitutes what is really great, new, and amazing in our culture; this is the step of steps of the liberated spirit’.9 These passages suggest that Nietzsche wanted the ‘good Europeans’ to follow him in experimenting with an existence not grounded exclusively in the truth. Along the way, they would hopefully discover a new possibility for orienting their existence and rendering it meaningful. Yet this choice of deliberately advocating a strategy of complete nihilism that refuses to articulate new European ideals also raises the crucial question of whether such an outlook on life is not inherently nihilistic? After all, if Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ are not able to offer contemporary readers a positive vision in the traditional sense, then the value of this idea for the contemporary debate on the idea of Europe may only be very limited indeed. Nietzsche anticipated this question, already lamenting in an early essay from 1862 that ‘I have tried to deny everything. Oh, tearing down is easy, but constructing!’ Yet he did not proceed to address it before pointing out to his readers that ‘even tearing down seems easier than it is: we are so determined down to the heart’s core by the impressions of our childhood, the influence of our parents, and our upbringing, that those deeply rooted prejudices are not so readily eradicated by rational arguments or mere force of will’.10 The Christian-Platonic assumption, for example, that ‘true’ worlds are utterly necessary for human felicity was so

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ingrained in European culture that a pervasive critique of such values was in itself no small achievement. In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche again envisaged being asked: ‘What are you really doing, erecting an ideal or knocking one down?’ This time he gave the following response: But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost? How much reality had to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified every time? If an ideal is to be erected an ideal must be destroyed: that is the law! – let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!11 Nietzsche did not think that those who erected and propagated ascetic ideals following the ‘death of God’ had attained the moral high ground in relation to the ‘good Europeans’. In his view the very quest to erect new ascetic ideals – be they national, European, or otherwise – reduced the diversity of existence in favour of fictitious and empty ideals. In this sense the erection of ascetic ideals destroys an existence that in Nietzsche’s view resists being wholly captured by such ascetic ideals. Irrespective of whether Nietzsche presents a generally acceptable alternative in the contemporary debate on the European idea, his critique of prevailing patterns of thinking remained, at least in his own estimation, a formidable intellectual achievement that should not be dismissed too lightly. With this caveat in mind, the question of whether Nietzsche’s vision was nihilistic can be considered directly. It is certainly true that Nietzsche is frequently perceived to have been such a nihilist. In 1965, for example, Arthur Danto argued unambiguously that ‘Nietzsche’s is a philosophy of Nihilism’.12 If Danto was correct then there is little hope that Nietzsche can assist the contemporary scholar in successfully addressing the problem of European nihilism. If Nietzsche’s work does mark such ‘a deep and total Nihilism’13 that it ‘is not an ideology but a metaphysics’,14 then his corpus might have to be abandoned in the attempt to come to terms with the ‘death of God’. Yet, as Richard Schacht has pointed out, there is substantial textual evidence in Nietzsche’s writings to suggest that, contrary to the argument of Danto and others, Nietzsche considered neither himself, nor his vision of the ‘good Europeans’, to be nihilistic.15 The comprehensive review of Nietzsche’s references to nihilism undertaken by Schacht does reveal a few passages that, upon a cursory reading, might convey the impression that Nietzsche considered himself to be a nihilist. In his posthumously published notes, for example, Nietzsche wrote that: it is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character [of things], the necessity of lies. To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking.16

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In other notes Nietzsche similarly argued that nihilism can be a form of strength given that ‘the spirit may have grown so strong that previous goals . . . have become incommensurate’.17 Indeed, ‘[i]t could be a sign of a crucial and most essential growth . . . [that] genuine nihilism, would come into the world’.18 Referring directly to himself, Nietzsche even once observed ‘[t]hat I have hitherto been a thorough-going nihilist, I have admitted to myself only recently’,19 and in the preface to a planned but abandoned book Nietzsche intended to refer to himself quite explicitly as ‘the first perfect nihilist of Europe’.20 All of these passages could be read as clear evidence that Nietzsche considered himself to be a nihilist. In the end, however, the copious textual evidence suggesting that Nietzsche did not consider his position to be nihilistic outweighs these pronouncements. Of the many remarks that Nietzsche did make on the subject of nihilism, these are the only ones that can be used in support of the view that Nietzsche considered himself to be a nihilist.21 What is more, in the preface to The Will to Power where many of these notes appear, Nietzsche also remarked that ‘one should make no mistake about the meaning of the title that this gospel of the future wants to bear, “The Will to Power: An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values” – in this formulation a countermovement finds expression, regarding both principle and task: a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism’.22 The wider goal of Nietzsche’s intellectual endeavour was thus to move beyond the experience of European nihilism. Whenever Nietzsche did refer to himself as a nihilist, he always did so in the past tense, or pointed out that he had subsequently moved beyond being one. For example, when Nietzsche referred to himself as ‘the first perfect nihilist of Europe’, the passage continues to point out that he is a thinker ‘who, however, has even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself’.23 Similarly, when Nietzsche claimed that he had hitherto been a nihilist, he meant precisely that: he once saw himself as a nihilist but no longer did so. Nietzsche also made a number of critical comments about nihilism and nihilists which cast further doubt on the argument that he understood himself, and his ‘good Europeans’, to be nihilistic. ‘Nihilism’, Nietzsche maintained, ‘represents a pathological transitional stage (what is pathological is the tremendous generalisation, the inference that there is no meaning at all)’.24 In his notebooks Nietzsche even penned that ‘[t]he nihilistic movement is merely the expression of physiological decadence’.25 This critical attitude towards nihilism is underscored further by the fact that Nietzsche also located its origins in the Christian-moral interpretation of existence, for which he had notoriously exhibited enormous distaste: ‘It is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted’,26 adding that the belief in the ‘aim and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary effect once the belief in God and an essentially

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moral order becomes untenable. Nihilism appears at that point. . . . One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation, it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence . . .’.27 This ‘as if’ is of crucial importance.28 As Schacht points out, many of Nietzsche’s published writings further corroborate this scepticism about viewing him as a nihilist. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche was moved to remark that ‘there may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer even a certain nothing to an uncertain something to lie down on – and die. But this is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul.’29 In the Antichrist he made another dismissive comment on nihilism, declaring that ‘[s]ome have dared to call pity a virtue. . . . To be sure – and one should always keep this in mind – this was done by a philosophy that was nihilistic and had inscribed negation of life upon its shield.’30 In light of these disapproving passages it is necessary to reinterpret the initial remarks that Nietzsche made and which have led some commentators to conclude that Nietzsche was in fact a nihilist.31 Rather, Nietzsche is probably seeking to convey in such passages that nihilism has arrived in European culture and that its arrival is, based on his analysis of Christian-Platonic culture and the will to truth, to some extent necessary and inevitable. Yet whenever Nietzsche affirmed nihilism he did so not for its own sake, but only as a necessary first step in revaluing traditional European culture. Finally, the conclusion that Nietzsche did not consider his position to be nihilistic is also supported by his critical stance towards the ‘last man’. In Nietzsche’s account the ‘last man’, who had emerged in such large numbers in modern Europe, effectively forfeited the quest for meaning in exchange for material gratification. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche famously described how: Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir. . . . Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. ‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and he blinks. . . . ‘We have invented happiness’, say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbour and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. . . . One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into a madhouse.32

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A society largely composed of these ‘last men’ is content to aim primarily at its self-preservation.33 It is an existence in which the experience of nihilism has shifted from the ‘anxious inequiétude’ of the ‘madman’ to the much more complacent quietude of the ‘last man’.34 Nietzsche disapproved of the ‘last man’ for giving up the quest for meaning and for not exploring the entire array of human experience presented to him by Europe’s cultural heritage. Although Nietzsche was clearly critical of the highest values that have traditionally animated European culture, he did not wish to abandon the inner space and distance that this tradition had instilled upon Europeans. Despite his criticism of Christianity as slave morality, Nietzsche granted quite openly that historically it constituted the soil upon which ‘man first became an interesting animal, . . . only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil’.35 The attempt simply to refuse the question of meaning in favour of material gain, as the ‘last man’ did, would be just as nihilistic as the postulating of ascetic ideals resentful of earthly existence. In the end, the combination of textual evidence from both his published and unpublished writings, in conjunction with his critique of the ‘last man’, suggest overwhelmingly that Nietzsche did not consider his vision of the ‘good Europeans’ to be nihilistic. How could Nietzsche square this castigation of the ‘last man’ with his simultaneous refusal to articulate new ascetic ideals, and with his advocacy of a strategy of complete nihilism? Was it not precisely Nietzsche’s unwillingness to erect new ‘true’ worlds and ideals that left Europeans with no choice but to live the life of the ‘last man’? Nietzsche seemed to think that it was possible for the ‘good Europeans’ to resist the logic of life-denying ascetic ideals without falling back onto the position of the ‘last man’. In a passage from the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, which is worth quoting at some length, he argued that the ‘good Europeans’ would clearly possess a great deal of spiritual depth: But the fight against Plato or, to speak more clearly and for ‘the people’, the fight against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia – for Christianity is Platonism for ‘the people’ – has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals. To be sure, European man experiences this tension as need and distress; twice already attempts have been made in the grand style to unbend the bow – once by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of the democratic enlightenment which, with the aid of freedom of the press and newspaper-reading, might indeed bring it about that the spirit would no longer experience itself so easily as a ‘need’. . . . But we who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits – we still feel it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow. And perhaps also the arrow, the task, and – who knows? – the goal –36

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In contradistinction to the ‘last man’, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would clearly cultivate the inner depth of Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage and would experience the ‘tension of the bow’, not least because of their intimate engagement with the ‘death of God’. While Nietzsche’s intellectual efforts sought to dispel all those idols that Europeans had elevated above existence and which served to devalue earthly existence in his view, he did not think that in attacking these idols he had left modern Europeans in the position of the ‘last man’ who forfeited a reflective depth about European existence. Nietzsche could reconcile these seemingly opposing stances by applying his strategy of complete nihilism so thoroughly and consistently that it reached the point where it exposed the underlying telos residing even in modern science, showing how the will to truth remains operational within the scientific worldview internalized by the ‘last man’. ‘No doubt’, Nietzsche argued in The Gay Science, ‘those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world” – look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?’37 Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would refuse to fall back on a scientific account of existence appropriated by the ‘last man’ because this naturalistic worldview still remains grounded in the will to truth. In Section 373 of The Gay Science Nietzsche eloquently asked his readers whether: we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this – reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste. . . . That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work hard and do research scientifically, in your sense (you really mean, mechanically?) – an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more – that is a crudity and naiveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. . . . A ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning . . .38 Such passages suggest that Nietzsche’s strategy of complete nihilism clearly extended into the realm of modern science as well. Scientists and atheists ‘are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth’,39 and his ‘good Europeans’ and ‘free spirits’ would have to ‘take liberties even with science’.40 Consequently Nietzsche’s strategy of complete nihilism also does

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not leave the ‘good Europeans’ with the same scientific atheism of the ‘last man’, as it undermined the naturalistic framework that discouraged the quest for meaning amongst the ‘last men’. In this way Nietzsche’s strategy of complete nihilism neither leads to a problematic reactivation of the will to truth by deploying new ascetic ideals, nor culminates in the kind of existence exemplified by the ‘last man’, whose existence remains grounded in the will to truth because of his or her unproblematic acceptance of scientific accounts of existence grounded in the will to truth. What still remains unclear, however, is how the ‘good Europeans’ can both accept and thoroughly apply such a strategy of complete nihilism, one which was pervasive enough to undermine the ground of modern science, and yet still consider this response to be an affirmative one escaping the pitfalls of a debilitating nihilism. Is the price for Nietzsche’s victory over the naturalistic worldview of the ‘last man’ not a hollow one that merely entangles his ‘good Europeans’ in an even more pervasive and paralysing experience of meaninglessness? This, after all, seems to be the larger problem to which scholars such as Hoffmann, Heller, Laïdi, and Pippin are drawing attention regarding contemporary European culture and its insufficient spiritual vitality for generating a more meaningful idea of Europe for the twenty-first century. In order to demonstrate why this is not so, and why Nietzsche’s vision is ultimately an affirmative one, Nietzsche introduced one final distinction in his analysis of complete nihilism.

Europe’s passive nihilism Nietzsche anticipated that many readers would find his advocacy of complete nihilism both bewildering and frustrating. Europeans, he thought, would be prone to exhibit one of two responses to his insights into the deeper dimension of the ‘death of God’ – passive nihilism or active nihilism. In Nietzsche’s taxonomy both passive and active nihilism were forms of complete nihilism.41 Both readily accepted the deeper implications of the ‘death of God’, yet only one of them would lead to an affirmative response to the ‘death of God’ in European culture. Passive nihilism, which Nietzsche associated particularly with the pessimism of Schopenhauer,42 was the nihilism that despairs upon recognising the deeper dimension of the ‘death of God’. It is the form of complete nihilism most likely to prevail in Europe following the ‘death of God’, and yet it is also the one that is unlikely to lead to an affirmative response. Alan Schrift has accurately described Nietzsche’s concept of passive nihilism as: the expression of a weary, exhausted will which has searched in vain to locate the highest values: aim, unity, Being. Having grown dissatisfied

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To the passive nihilist, the absence of metaphysical standards by which to judge existence leads to spiritual pessimism and weariness, to a taking sides against the world that has deserted his or her ideals.44 ‘The strength of the spirit’, Nietzsche noted in this vein, ‘may be worn out, exhausted so that the previous goals and values have become incommensurate and no longer are believed.’45 Passive nihilism thus refers to the nihilism of a spirit or culture too exhausted to do more than passively succumb to the emptiness that threatens to engulf it.46 Nietzsche wished to single out and criticize this passive form of complete nihilism, as it would not be the form of nihilism pursued by his ‘good Europeans’. ‘The nihilist’s eye’, he maintained, ‘idealises in the direction of ugliness.’47 Nietzsche considered this kind of nihilism to be dangerous for Europe given its reminiscence of the ‘nihilistic catastrophe that finished Indian culture’.48 In Beyond Good and Evil he even predicted that the ‘death of God’ in Europe might lead to ‘the worship of the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the Nothing. . . . All of us already know something of this.’49 Ironically, much of the current debate on the European idea mimics this response to the inability to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe. Many contemporary scholars of European affairs have set out on the quest to distil an ‘aim’ or ‘unity’ to the European idea and, in their inability to identify a ‘higher purpose’, a ‘clear identity’, or a ‘common enterprise’, to use Hoffmann’s criteria, have subsequently arrived at largely frustrated and pessimistic accounts of contemporary European culture and its lack of ‘spiritual vitality’. Yet Nietzsche thought that the conclusion reached by passive nihilists was still premature. He certainly understood that Europeans were prone to understand the absence of ascetic ideals following the ‘death of God’ in a discouraging and problematic way because Europe’s ChristianPlatonic heritage had accustomed European culture to posit a deeper meaning underlying all events. If one continued to apply ChristianPlatonic standards to a modern, secular culture, then one would invariably end up with disappointing results. ‘For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary?’, Nietzsche asked, and incisively replied: ‘[b]ecause the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals – because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had’.50 The experience of nihilism appeared as a ‘crisis’ primarily because Europeans continued to (mis)apply the evaluative criteria of Christianity and Platonism to modern, secular conditions. The advent of passive nihilism was thus the

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price that Europeans had to pay for having been Christians for over two thousand years. This insight also led Nietzsche to doubt whether the origins of the European experience of meaninglessness were to be found exclusively in the organization of society, or in the economic and political structures that govern it. He suspected that to no small measure this experience was equally bound up with Europe’s own historical self-understanding. In his view it was ‘an error to consider “social distress” or “physiological degeneration,” or worse, corruption as the cause of nihilism’. This would be to mistake the symptoms of nihilism for its causes. Rather, he declared, ‘it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted’.51 The cause of the experience of nihilism is the result of a particular interpretation of the world and existence that has governed the cultural horizon of Europe for virtually two thousand years: the ChristianPlatonic interpretation of the world. Once this heritage had become increasingly untenable in the European imagination, modern Europeans would habitually yearn for the lost form of meaning previously posited by Christianity, but would no longer be able to readily partake in it. Yet if the desire to identify a deeper meaning underlying European existence largely still derives from Europe’s older Christian-Platonic heritage, then the predominantly pessimistic conclusion drawn by the passive nihilists was still rushed. ‘The philosophical nihilist’, Nietzsche cunningly observed, ‘is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain; and that there ought not to be anything meaningless and in vain.’ ‘But’, he intervened ‘whence this: there ought not to be? From where does one get this “meaning”, this “standard”?’52 The passive nihilist is disappointed with modern European culture because of his unquestioning and continuing belief in the necessity of ascetic ideals for achieving human felicity. Unable to articulate such ideals, the passive nihilist becomes discouraged and withdrawn within the cultural configuration of European modernity. He is unable to find meaning without such ideals. While this attitude towards nihilism has predominated in the course of the twentieth century, and arguably still constitutes the most frequent response to the inability to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe, it is neither the only response that is possible, nor the preferable one. Nietzsche disagreed with this passive reaction to the ‘death of God’. In his famous ‘madman’ passage in The Gay Science Nietzsche was not, as is widely believed, trying to proclaim this mood of passive nihilism; he was only attempting to capture it. The passage is still very much symptomatic and diagnostic rather than prescriptive.53 It is not the response that he himself later adopted, nor that he prescribed to his ‘good Europeans’.54 Nietzsche’s message was much more optimistic than many commentators have hitherto credited him with. In retrospect this famous ‘madman passage’ in The Gay Science can thus be read as containing, in symbolic

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form, both of the primary responses to the ‘crisis of meaning’ currently evident in the European debate, neither of which were indicative of Nietzsche’s own response. On the one hand, it describes the people in the marketplace who laugh at the madman, i.e. those ‘last men’ who have given up the quest for meaning, settling instead for a scientific and atheistic account of existence which aims mostly at material gratification and discards the ‘why’ question as being largely irrelevant, meaningless, or unanswerable. It is this attitude that broadly corresponds to those who are happy to have the political project of Europe eschew overt questions of meaning and to focus on piecemeal, functional cooperation. On the other hand, this famous passage also anticipates the current response in the European debate, i.e. the expression of pessimism and melancholy at the inability to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe that will enhance the legitimacy of the European institutions and provide the basis for a European identity capable of countering the rise of nationalist and racist violence. This view corresponds to the passive nihilism of the ‘madman’ recounted by Nietzsche in the passage. Initially this response may seem closer to Nietzsche’s; for, unlike the ‘last man’, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ did understand the profound implications of the ‘death of God’ and wished to salvage the spiritual depth afforded by Europe’s ChristianPlatonic tradition. Despite this proximity, however, this response is also not that of the ‘good Europeans’. For, unlike the passive nihilism of the ‘madman’, and the contemporary scholars and policy-makers cited in the introduction to this book, the recognition of the profound implications of the ‘death of God’ does not trigger amongst the ‘good Europeans’ the experience of melancholy and the corresponding desire for redemption from this event; it provokes instead a much more appreciative and generous response which manifests itself in the second and more active form of complete nihilism.

The active ‘nihilism’ of the ‘good Europeans’ In contrast to this pessimistic reaction, Nietzsche insisted that the modern experience of nihilism is essentially ‘ambiguous’.55 The advent of European nihilism could be taken as a sign of a weakened spirit, especially when judged by the standards of the past; but in the hands of the ‘good Europeans’ it could just as well be the sign of a strengthened spirit.56 Nietzsche wished to emphasize this latter form of nihilism, outlining a more active form of complete nihilism that did not simply succumb to passive resignation. The aim of this more active form of complete nihilism pursued by the ‘good Europeans’ was not simply to replace the Christian meaning of existence with new secular ideals, as so many have subsequently tried, but rather to explore a different conception of meaning and value altogether. As David Toole argues, the point of complete nihilism is not to culminate in passive

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resignation but ‘to clear the way so that one can replace those values with new ones, not in the way that incomplete nihilism proposes, but with a vigor that in fact leads not only to new values but to a whole new conception of value itself’.57 Rather than succumbing to the deep pessimism of their European contemporaries, these ‘good Europeans’ would begin to explore a different conception of meaning altogether. Modern European existence would henceforth be meaningful to them, not because they could identify with an overarching ascetic ideal based the will to truth, but because it provided them with the historic opportunity to experiment with an existence liberated from the constraints of such past ideals. Their goal would not be to articulate a new overarching idea of Europe, but to expose all those areas of European culture where the will to truth remained operational, including the current debate on the European idea. The central insight animating this active response adopted by the ‘good Europeans’ is that following the ‘death of God’ the Christian-Platonic standards of the past can no longer form the basis for evaluating modern, European culture. Given that the ‘death of God’ had called into question much of the Christian-Platonic tradition centred on the will to truth, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would no longer find these standards to be applicable within the cultural space of secular European modernity. Once the deeper dimensions of European nihilism are comprehended, there would no longer be any prima facie reason for the ‘good Europeans’ as to why the meaning of existence would have to be generated by means of the will to truth. Similarly there would also no longer be an a priori reason as to why the inability to articulate an idea of Europe in this manner should necessarily lead to a pessimistic account of European culture. There is, concomitantly, no reason why the inability to articulate an idea of Europe that delineates a ‘higher purpose’, a ‘clear identity’, or a ‘common enterprise’ – to use Hoffmann’s (Christian-Platonic) criteria – should be a cause for concern and pessimism. Intuitively the absence of such a vision is experienced as distressing in light of the formative influence of Europe’s ChristianPlatonic cultural heritage, but with the ‘death of God’ there is, strictly speaking, no more ground on which to devalue an existence that did not conform to such a vision. For Nietzsche the relapse into pessimism only made sense if one continues to judge modern European culture by the criteria of the past, and yet these very criteria have themselves come under critical scrutiny in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’.58 To the ‘good Europeans’ simply applying these evaluative standards to the contemporary debate on the European idea would thus be ignorant of the deeper dimension of European nihilism, and would amount simply to begging the question posed by the ‘death of God’. This recognition of the questionable status of the Europe’s ChristianPlatonic heritage not only allowed Nietzsche to undermine the pessimistic assessment of modern European culture, it also enabled him to suggest, on

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the contrary, that the pursuit of an active nihilism might actually be indicative of a strengthened spiritual vitality, which would also explain why he occasionally made positive references to nihilism.59 For, if the standards of the past can no longer be applied unproblematically to the present, who was to bar the ‘good Europeans’ from actually celebrating an existence that called the will to truth into question, and which refused to be captured by the series of ascetic ideals that Christian-Platonic culture had generated over past centuries. ‘It could’, Nietzsche maintained in this vein, ‘be the sign of a crucial and most essential growth, of the transition to new conditions of existence, that the most extreme form of pessimism, genuine nihilism, would come into the world.’60 Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would thus not only seek to expose the untenability of divine and secular metaphysical systems, but would courageously affirm the demise of this aspect of Europe’s cultural heritage and would try to muster the spiritual strength necessary to live without such ideals. The ‘good Europeans’ would seek actively and continuously to free themselves from the constraints of these past values, and would embark upon a crucial revaluation, which is successfully reached when this pessimism surrounding the experience of meaninglessness transforms itself into a moment of creative affirmation. Nietzsche described how this initial pessimism frequently experienced after the ‘death of God’ might transform itself into a more joyful affirmation; how ‘from such abysses [of nihilism], from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn . . . with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before’.61 Rather than immersing themselves in passive nihilism, Nietzsche ‘good Europeans’ of the future would go one step further by recognizing the problematic nature of Christian-Platonic culture, and would pursue this more active strategy of complete nihilism. They would experimentally call the will to truth into question wherever they found it still to be operational, and would see the collapse of the ascetic ideals of the past as a new source of renewed strength for the ‘European spirit’. In the hands of the strongest, Nietzsche insisted in this vein, nihilism ‘is only an additional hammer and tool with which to create a new set of wings’,62 and ‘[t]he belief that there is no truth, the nihilist belief, is a great stretching of the limbs for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, incessantly lies in battle with hateful truths’.63 Paradoxically, then, it is only by first accepting and passing through the deeper experience of nihilism that the feeling of meaninglessness may eventually cease to be experienced as distressing, and that one may find existence meaningful in a different way and without recourse to the will to truth. One first had to affirm what, from the Christian-Platonic perspective, would appear to be nihilistic existence, namely a way of living not devoted to ascetic ideals. Yet this way of living would not remain nihilistic

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for long, because in progressively leaving behind the Christian-Platonic standards of the past one could gradually evolve a new disposition towards existence that recognized the empty and life-denying aspects of the prior Christian-Platonic standards. Eventually, one would begin to see the value of living an existence not reduced to these ascetic ideals and would no longer allow these standard to devalue modern existence. In this way an existence that initially appears to be ‘nihilistic’ from the Christian-Platonic perspective gradually transvalues itself into one that is experienced instead as deeply meaningful. Indeed, from the perspective of the ‘good Europeans’ who had undergone this transformation, the advent of European nihilism would not even seem like a terrible disaster. In their view the advent of European nihilism would mark a moment of ‘the greatest courage’,64 and would simultaneously be ‘the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles’.65 Ultimately, Nietzsche even concluded, ‘I praise, I do not reproach, its arrival’,66 and in the form of his ‘good Europeans’ he deliberately encouraged a counter-movement which ‘will in some future or other slough off that consummate nihilism; and yet which presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and can actually only come to that nihilism and out of it’.67 One of Nietzsche’s most important insights about the nature of European nihilism, then, was his insight that despite being initially distressing, it also entailed a vastly creative and liberating potential, both intellectually and spiritually. The advent of European nihilism, although frequently experienced as disorienting, actually marked a great liberation of the self from the Christian-Platonic standards of the past. It represented the victory of freedom over truth in modern European culture. Once this liberating potential was recognized, Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage could be increasingly left behind, enabling new opportunities to open themselves up for European culture.68 This was Nietzsche’s more positive vision for the ‘good Europeans’. It was not a positive vision in the sense of determining a new truth underlying European existence, either in the form of an underlying identity or unity; rather it was an attempt to communicate to his readers an experience of a deep creative freedom and autonomy. Although Nietzsche may not adhere to the traditional truth games of the Christian-Platonic persuasion, this does not make him a nihilist. His ‘active nihilism’ appears nihilistic when judged on the basis of Christian-Platonic standards, to be sure, but according to Nietzsche these standards had themselves been called into question by the ‘death of God’. This response of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ to the onset of European nihilism also stands in marked contrast to the attitude displayed by many of the contemporary scholars cited at the outset of this book. It is not formulated in the pessimistic and melancholic tone frequently encountered in the debate on the idea of Europe today. Nietzsche repeatedly pointed out that his response to the experience of nihilism is ‘not at all sad and gloomy,

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but rather like a new, difficult to describe kind of light, happiness, relief, amusement, encouragement, dawn’, and that ‘we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead”, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonition, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again.’69 In a word, Nietzsche’s own response to the ‘death of God’ was one of ‘cheerfulness’.70 This cheerfulness enabled Nietzsche to find renewed pride in his idea of the ‘good European’, announcing that ‘[w]e are, in one word – and let this be our word of honour – good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit’.71 They would be the heirs of the old Europe not only in that they would understand the meaning of Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage, but also in that their sense of autonomy can only be built on an awareness and appreciation of the meaning and shortfalls of this past tradition. They would seek to retain its spiritual depth and vitality, albeit by exemplifying it in new and unconventional ways. These ‘good Europeans’, Nietzsche hoped, might even: redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness – he must come one day.72 In addition to having understood the implications of the ‘death of God’, then, and in addition to refusing the articulation of new national or European idols to replace the old God, the final characteristic of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ is that they understand the liberating and creative potential which is afforded to European culture by the advent of European nihilism, and that they actively cultivate a disposition towards existence that finds its meaning not in determining the truth of this existence, but in continuously freeing itself from such attempts. In this way they also do not embody a preconceived European identity, but a whole new way of rendering European existence meaningful. European existence would appear meaningful for them, not because it conformed to a shared ideal or ‘true’ world, but because it had provided them with a deep, inner experience of freedom. In the end this also made the experience of nihilism a gift rather than a burden. At long last, Nietzsche gratefully noted, ‘our ships may finally venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea”’.73 By experimentally

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calling the will to truth into question, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ and ‘free spirits’ undergo a ‘great separation’ from previous constraints that have directed European thinking for over two thousand years.74 This experience of freedom was the ‘decisive event’ for the ‘free spirit’ as well as the ‘good European’, and is marked by a ‘dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world [which] flames up and flickers in all the senses’.75 It is also this ethos of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’, of pursuing a thinking that is more free than it is ‘true’, which can be said to constitute a vibrant alternative to the predominantly pessimistic assessments of contemporary European culture which predominate today. In this case, however, the current inability to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe would not so much be a sign of a weakened ‘spiritual vitality’ as it would be the sign of a strengthened spirit. Indeed, it might even be the sign of a ‘good European’.

Conclusion Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘good Europeans’ may, then, offer contemporary Europeanists a difficult way out of the contemporary ‘crisis’ of Europe. This difficult path entails comprehending that the advent of European nihilism, and the self-overcoming of past values, is not necessarily a negative and pessimistic development for European culture, but a welcome development that affords it with new possibilities previously unrealized by it. The key to understanding Nietzsche’s resolution of the ‘crisis of meaning’ in modern European culture is to recognize that the entire framing of this ‘crisis’ is itself still very much bound up with Europe’s ChristianPlatonic heritage. It was the incessant will to truth that drove Europeans to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe within the context of Christianity, and which subsequently gave rise to naturalistic accounts of existence that then bar the articulation of a more meaningful idea of Europe along these lines. Without the incessant will to truth cultivated by Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage, there would neither be the need to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe along Christian-Platonic lines, nor would there even be a ‘crisis’ of European nihilism in the absence of such an idea. Concomitantly, the appropriate way to engage the ‘European crisis of meaning’ is not the articulation of new ideas of Europe that will challenge the ‘meaningless, scientific’ understanding of existence and which will reactivate Europe’s will to truth; these ideas are unlikely to be persuasive in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’ and are also likely to make the experience of meaninglessness more acute. Rather, the way out of this ‘crisis’ is a more creative and experimental calling into question of Europe’s incessant will to truth. ‘You ought’, Nietzsche insisted, ‘to learn the art of this-worldly comfort first; you ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are hell-bent on remaining pessimists. Then, perhaps, as

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laughers, you may some day dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil – metaphysics in front.’76 By way of analogy, Europe’s ‘identity crisis’ and ‘crisis of meaning’ can be bemoaned and lamented, as is so often done; but it could also be seen as an invitation to critically rethink the kind of ‘Europe’ the European Union would like to encourage at the outset of the twenty-first century. The European idea can either perish in light of the self-destruction of Christianity and its quasi-Christian surrogates, or Europeans could use the opportunity presented by the ‘death of God’ to recognize the emptiness of Christian-Platonic ideals, thus paving the way for more affirmative and healthier visions of its future development.77 In so doing Nietzsche also puts to the contemporary scholar a perspective on Europe that cannot be easily ignored in our attempts to delineate a more meaningful idea of Europe for the twenty-first century. In this account the way of finding a more meaningful idea of Europe consists of attempting to say ‘yes to all that has previously been denied and rejected’,78 which also explains why Nietzsche insisted once that ‘I have a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any other human being before me; I am teacher par excellence of this – I know both, I am both . . . I turned my will to health, to life, into philosophy’.79 Realising the radical nature of his thinking, and anticipating the resistance it was likely to encounter, Nietzsche wrote to Brandes explaining that ‘[m]y task is quite singular this time: I’ve asked myself what mankind has always hated, feared, and despised the most – and precisely out of this I’ve made my gold’.80 Nietzsche mined for his gold where many of his contemporaries never bothered to look. More importantly, Nietzsche also placed his wager for addressing the advent of European nihilism not on abstract ideas but on persons; the crucial transvaluation of values that he envisaged could only take place within the minds of people. ‘Let us not undervalue this’, Nietzsche insisted, ‘we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a “revaluation of all values”, an incarnate declaration of war and victory over all ancient conceptions of “true” and “untrue”.’81 Nietzsche was even optimistic about realising this prospect in the long term, noting in Human, All Too Human: That there could someday be such free spirits, that our Europe will have such lively, daring fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, real and palpable and not merely, as in my case, phantoms and a hermit’s shadow play: I am the last person to want to doubt that. I already see them coming, slowly, slowly; and perhaps I am doing something to hasten their coming when I describe before the fact the fateful conditions that I see giving rise to them, the paths on which I see them coming?82 If Nietzsche’s challenge is met successfully it might not even be necessary to possess a more meaningful idea along the lines contemporary Europeanists

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are looking for in order to demonstrate one’s spiritual vitality as a ‘good European’. One could demonstrate such spiritual vitality precisely by refusing to articulate such an overarching idea of Europe and by experimenting with a new disposition towards existence. Having explored the broad outlines of these ‘good Europeans’ over the past chapters, then, their general ethos can finally be summarized as consisting of the following three attributes: (i) their comprehension that the deeper dimension of European nihilism necessarily entails calling the Christian-Platonic will to truth experimentally into question; (ii) their realization that a European rather than a national response is required to this decisive and wide-ranging cultural transformation; and (iii) their ability to experience an existence partially freed from the will to truth not as paralysing and distressing, but as a meaningful given that it represents an important moment of liberation from the past constraints of European culture. The challenge of these ‘good Europeans’ may initially seem unconventional, but then Europe would not be Europe if it were not able to find a new way out of an old dilemma.83

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This book set out to explore the puzzle of why it is proving so difficult to articulate a more meaningful vision of Europe for the twenty-first century, and how Europeans might respond to this impasse? Having explored Nietzsche’s European thought in greater detail, at least one answer can now be advanced in relation to this question. From a Nietzschean perspective many of the difficulties encountered in the current debate on the European idea derive not merely from the concerns of day-to-day politics and the prevailing economic conditions, but from the longer and deeper ramifications of secularization. From this perspective the current inability to determine the ‘soul’ of Europe is only the most recent manifestation of a much longer and more fundamental problem, the origins of which can be traced back at least to the end of the previous century. Consequently it remains possible to deduce important lessons about how to respond to this current impasse from Nietzsche’s earlier critique of incomplete nihilism, and from his own positive vision of the ‘good Europeans.’ These ‘good Europeans’ would be able to render European existence meaningful within the context of a largely modern and secular culture.

Secularization and the meaning of ‘Europe’ One of the lasting contributions that Nietzsche’s European thought can still make to the debate on the European idea is that it expands our understanding of the current impasse. Particularly useful in this regard is Nietzsche’s insightful illustration of how Europeans traditionally rendered their existence meaningful by means of the will to truth, i.e. by invoking the existence of a ‘true’ or ‘real’ world in which the deeper meaning of existence was located. Meaning derived from the ability to determine the truth of existence. This could take the shape of the ideal world of forms, as it did with Plato, or the promise of a redeeming afterlife, as it did with Christianity. In either case, meaning was produced by invoking a metaphysical distinction between a ‘true’ world with fixed attributes, and a merely ‘apparent’ world characterized by flux and uncertainty. By identifying

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this subtle but powerful bias in the history of European thought and culture, Nietzsche still provides his contemporary readers with an enduring, stimulating, and rich vision of what the European idea meant in the past and how this ‘Europe’ traditionally rendered its existence meaningful. Nietzsche’s detailed analysis of the ‘death of God’ also advanced a compelling account of why this past ‘Europe’ has become problematic within the cultural configuration of European modernity, and why it is no longer credible on a widespread basis. Nietzsche was able to trace the decisive steps through which these metaphysical distinctions became untenable in modern times; how, over time, the Christian-Platonic emphasis on truth gave rise to a scientific conscience which subsequently revealed the existence of God to be an elaborate ‘lie’, thereby provoking a widespread experience of meaninglessness. The ‘Europe’ of the past – the Europe of the will to truth – emerged as too problematic and unconvincing for it to continue its grip on the European imagination. A new way of rendering European existence meaningful would have to be found. Reading the contemporary debate on Europe against the background of Nietzsche’s earlier discussion of European nihilism thus also places the former in its larger historical context, and locates it within the wider problem of finding a more meaningful conception of European existence within a largely secular culture. This renders additional aspects of the contemporary European debate intelligible. Many of the pessimistic responses that currently predominate, for example, are clearly consistent with Nietzsche’s argument that the formative influence of Christian-Platonic thinking on European culture would generate a widespread and pessimistic experience of meaninglessness following the ‘death of God’, and that this pessimistic response to secularization would be capable of lasting for a long time. A culture historically based on a categorical devotion to determining the truth of existence, and accustomed to addressing its suffering by inventing true worlds, would perceive the inability to articulate a common idea of Europe as a loss and as a cultural shortcoming, perhaps even as a profound culture failure. This habit of positing a ‘true’ world is so deeply engrained in European culture that the resulting pessimism would be capable of lasting for decades, perhaps even a century or two. Finally, by drawing attention to the true depth and magnitude of the problem of European nihilism, and by tracing the full implications of secularization, Nietzsche’s European thought also provides an important insight into why, to this day, it remains so difficult to find a quick and easy solution to this modern impasse. The shift in European culture from a theistic to a more scientific understanding of existence meant that metaphysical attempts to articulate a greater meaning underlying European existence would be deemed incredible virtually a priori – metaphysics would henceforth become the forbidden fruit of European intellectual and public life. Secular European existence emerged as ‘a hiatus between two

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nothingnesses’1 – an existence caught between myths that now seem unacceptable on the one hand, and a pervasive feeling of meaninglessness on the other. As this ‘crisis’ ultimately necessitates calling the will to truth experimentally into question, it runs very deep indeed and is not easily remedied. It requires, in all likelihood, a very different form of thinking and being. In retrospect it even seems that much of the historical evolution of the debate on ‘Europe’ broadly followed Nietzsche’s earlier outline of the unfolding of European nihilism. The question of Europe’s meaning began to emerge historically with the gradual ‘death of God’, as ‘Europe’ ceased to be the Christian continent. The resultant inability to identify an underlying meaning for European existence following the ‘death of God’ signalled an extensive European crisis, encompassing severe nationalist divisions and two world wars during which the idea of Europe as the Christian continent could no longer be readily discerned. Amid the devastation left behind by two world wars, the ‘founding fathers’ of the European project opted for a functional idea of Europe that was closer to the altered configuration of the European imagination in which science had increasingly begun to replace Christianity as the formative cultural structure. Yet nearly half a century later, as the straitjacket of Cold War politics was removed, it emerged that a ‘spiritless’ and ‘institutional’ Europe was not sufficient for evoking a meaningful response to the European project amongst the public. In this vein Europeanists have sought, over the past decade, to retrieve the cultural space they abandoned earlier, and to recover a more meaningful understanding of the European idea. Yet another decade later many of these same Europeanists have been disappointed in their quest, seeing only the remnants of a Europe whose ‘spiritual vitality’ remains too badly bruised to give birth to a new horizon. The first lasting contribution that Nietzsche’s European thought can still make towards the contemporary debate on the European idea, therefore, is that it renders a great number of the phenomena observed within this debate intelligible within the wider context of secularization; it provides an insightful account of how Europeans traditionally rendered their existence more meaningful, why this traditional mechanism of the will to truth lost its persuasiveness in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’, and why many Europeans nevertheless continue to search for a more meaningful idea of Europe along these lines. What is more, it can also account for why it remains so difficult to articulate such an idea within the context of a largely secular culture, and why the inability to find such an idea frequently culminates in pessimism about the spiritual vitality of European culture. In this way Nietzsche allows for a more sophisticated understanding of the magnitude of the problem currently confronting dedicated Europeanists, and of why it is proving so difficult to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe for the twenty-first century.

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Nietzsche’s critique of the will to truth Nietzsche’s European thought also remains instructive, secondly, by virtue of his insights into how not to respond to the modern inability to render European existence more meaningful. A Nietzschean perspective generates profound scepticism as to whether the most appropriate response to the current impasse really is to try to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe along Christian-Platonic lines. Based on his probing analysis of the deeper dimension of European nihilism, Nietzsche remained highly sceptical as to whether such an approach would ever prove persuasive following the ‘death of God’. While perhaps appropriate to an earlier time, such ‘true’ visions of Europe were deeply anachronistic in a secular age. From the perspective of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’, the attempt by Hoffmann and others to encourage the articulation of an overarching idea of Europe would constitute yet another example of incomplete nihilism, a modern day manifestation of the will to truth. Would not any attempt to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe simply return to the language and logic perpetuated by Europe’s Christian-Platonic heritage? In the view of the ‘good Europeans’ any such idea is likely to be reminiscent of the will to truth that had been called into question by the ‘death of God’. While such an idea might please old habits, it can hardly be the appropriate response to a crisis whose implications entail precisely the calling into question of this very will to truth. What is worse, such attempts to find an overarching idea of Europe could also have the more adverse effect of further perpetuating the logic of incomplete nihilism and the will to truth within contemporary European culture. Attempts to articulate a more animating conception of Europe along traditional lines, as well as the copious references to the ‘crisis of meaning’ witnessed in the post-Cold War era, only preserve this traditional language of ascetic ideals, and draw much of the debate onto this terrain. Implicitly, the contemporary literature on the European ‘crisis of meaning’ thus functions as a powerful incitement to reactivate the will to truth, and to postulate some greater meaning underlying European existence.2 Worse still, the call by European policy-makers to articulate a more compelling vision of Europe is potentially self-fulfilling in the sense that the constant invocation of the need for greater meanings and overarching ideas might provoke Europeans into thinking that they really do have to find meaning along such lines. Nietzsche had pointed out regarding the role of the Christian church in the Middle Ages that ‘the universal institution of the Church was reflecting artificial needs, based on fictions, which, if they were not yet present, it first had to produce (need for redemption)’.3 In seeking to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe, and by constantly invoking a ‘European crisis’, European policy-makers and scholars may similarly be encouraging and sustaining practices which, in light of Nietzsche’s analysis

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of European nihilism, remain deeply problematic. Perhaps it is for this reason that Nietzsche once noted that ‘[a]ttempts to escape nihilism without revaluing our values so far, they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute’.4 In the end the fight against nihilism only strengthens it and further entangles Europeans in its web.5 In order to remain consistent with Nietzsche’s imperative of experimentally putting the will to truth into question, the ‘good Europeans’ would thus have to adamantly refuse to articulate a new idea of Europe along the lines Hoffmann and others have demanded. Instead these ‘good Europeans’ would have to explore new ways of rendering existence meaningful without devoting themselves to such ‘true’ worlds. This reading of the ‘good Europeans’ is corroborated by Nietzsche’s own writings, especially when he noted that ‘[n]o new idols are erected by me; let the old ones learn what feet of clay mean’.6 Indeed, Nietzsche added in his autobiography, ‘[o]verthrowing idols (my word for “ideals”) – that comes closer to being part of my craft’.7 As Walter Kaufmann has long pointed out, Nietzsche’s revaluation of values thus does not consist of ‘a table of new virtues, nor an attempt to give us such a table’,8 but rather of ‘a courageous becomingconscious’,9 especially of the problematic nature of Europe’s historical asceticism. In Nietzsche’s view the ‘death of God’ required Europeans henceforth to cultivate an ethos or disposition that would allow them to flourish without the kind of Christian-Platonic ideals of the past. The ‘good Europeans’ and ‘free spirits’ would represent such a crucial revaluation of the ChristianPlatonic culture in that they would seek to experiment with an existence not grounded exclusively on the will to truth. ‘Let us not undervalue this’, Nietzsche argued in Twilight of the Idols, ‘we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a “revaluation of all values”, an incarnate declaration of war and victory over all ancient conceptions of “true” and “untrue” ’.10 His ‘good Europeans’ would thus be persons who have understood that with the ‘death of God’ all gods are dead, and that the resultant experience of nihilism requires a European rather than a national response, as well as a response that would find its meaning along a path very different from the will to truth. It was an integral part of the nature of the ‘free spirit’ and the ‘good Europeans’ that ‘he has released himself from tradition’.11 Indeed, in order to be such a ‘good European’ one must ‘have liberated oneself from many things that oppress, inhibit, hold down, and make heavy precisely us Europeans today’.12 Having undergone this transvaluation of values, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would begin to view the absence of a more meaningful idea of Europe not as a reason for despair, but rather as the moment of an immense re-enchantment of European existence. In The Gay Science Nietzsche put this point very persuasively:

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Where others sought to reduce the ambiguity and diversity of existence into a single ideal, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would find their meaning in the diverse and enigmatic aspects of existence; where others would seek to reduce the diversity of European existences into a single European ideal, Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would refuse such a reductive gesture. Although upon first impression these ‘good Europeans’ may appear excessively critical and negative, they are actually deeply affirmative. They only appear negative and resentful on the basis of the Christian-Platonic criteria that were themselves called into question by the ‘death of God’. Indeed, in their own estimation these ‘good Europeans’ would be supremely affirmative beings. Following their crucial transvaluation of values it is not they who appear nihilistic and dejected, but rather those who refuse to affirm the ambiguity of existence.14 This is why Nietzsche repeatedly reminded his readers that ‘negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes’.15 With specific reference to himself, Nietzsche even noted how ‘I contradict as has never been contradicted before and am nevertheless the opposite of a No-saying spirit’.16 It is a character trait with which he also endowed his literary character Zarathustra: The psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he that says No and does No to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a Nosaying spirit; how the spirit who bears the heaviest fate, a fatality of a task, can nevertheless be the lightest and most transcendent – Zarathustra is a dancer – how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has though the ‘most abysmal ideal’, nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence – but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, ‘the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen’. – ‘Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying Yes’.17 Although Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would similarly say ‘No’ to current attempts to articulate an overarching idea of Europe, they would say a resounding ‘Yes’ to a European existence freed from such ideals. ‘A freed

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spirit’, Nietzsche maintained in a more affirmative stance, ‘stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed – he no longer denies.’ This joyous affirmation would also compel Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ to distance themselves from the prevailing pessimistic response in the debate on the European idea. They would find this European pessimism misplaced, resulting from a failure to understand the deeper dimension of European nihilism, and failure to explore this new way of finding meaning opened up by the ‘death of God’. Indeed, these ‘good Europeans’ would consider the modern ‘inference that there is no meaning at all’ to be a ‘tremendous generalisation’ that is ‘pathological’ in being so extreme.18 If anything, modern pessimism is ‘an expression of the uselessness of the modern world – not of the world and of existence’.19 It was a symbol of modern man’s lack of humility that led him to deny the meaning of existence simply because he could not see it.20 Nietzsche, by contrast, showed his readers that it might not at all be necessary to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe along the traditional lines in order to demonstrate one’s ‘spiritual vitality’ as a ‘good European’. Precisely in refusing to articulate such an overarching idea of Europe, Nietzsche could refer to them as ‘[y]ou victorious ones, you overcomers of time, you healthiest and strongest, you good Europeans! ’21 Pointing to some of the pitfalls inherent in the predominantly pessimistic response to the current impasse thus marks Nietzsche’s second lasting contribution to the current debate.

The experience of freedom Nietzsche’s final and most valuable contribution, however, undoubtedly remains his own positive vision of what it would mean to be a ‘good European’ within a modern and largely secular culture. This idea provides Nietzsche’s readers with a very different way of rendering European existence meaningful, and of thinking about Europe’s spiritual vitality. This vision is not positive and affirmative in the traditional Christian-Platonic sense, as Nietzsche clearly did not wish to offer his readers an ideal of the ‘good European’ with a fixed and finite set of attributes. The deeper dimension of European nihilism could never be adequately addressed in such a manner. In Nietzsche’s view the better way to overcome the experience of nihilism was to call the will to truth experimentally into question and find meaning where previously one found none.22 Nietzsche could make this suggestion to his ‘good Europeans’ by equating the experience of the deeper dimension of European nihilism with the experience of a profound and creative existential freedom. With sufficient thought and critical distance, Nietzsche had come to realize that the experimental calling into

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question of the will to truth was not a frightful and disastrous moment for European culture, but rather the birth of a deep and creative experience of autonomy that only a secular culture could afford. Nietzsche effectively turned what many saw as one of the principal vices of modernity into one of its greatest strengths. What is meaningful about modern European culture, in this account, is its ability to partially free itself from its own self-imposed constraints, especially the Christian-Platonic will to truth that previously dominated so much of European culture. In his engagement with the will to truth Nietzsche had discovered that the deep experience of freedom that European culture was able to generate was something much more valuable than this relentless pursuit of truth. In his view Europe’s highest cultural good was no longer the ability to determine the truth of existence, but this experience of an existential freedom. In his view, being a ‘good European’ would concomitantly have to consist of recognizing, internalising, and expanding this experience of freedom afforded to modern Europeans by the ‘death of God’, the latter being not the death knell of European culture but one of the latter’s most important moments marking the victory of freedom over truth. For Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ man remains the ‘as yet undetermined animal’.23 Such a response to the ‘death of God’ also requires a novel conception of ‘spiritual vitality’ that differs considerably from the one implicitly informing much of the contemporary literature on European culture. In Nietzsche’s view, continuing with the traditional conception of spiritual vitality exemplified by Hoffmann and others in a secular context would only culminate in a severe ‘decline and recession of the power of the spirit’ marked by Hamlet-like inaction.24 Hence Nietzsche suggested to his readers that they should explore viewing the deliberate refusal to articulate a more meaningful idea of Europe along Christian-Platonic lines as the sign of a strengthened spiritual vitality. In his view the very attempt to fix a more meaningful idea of Europe by reactivating the will to truth beckoned a declining and reactionary spirit, resentful of existence. ‘One has deprived reality’, Nietzsche noted in this vein, ‘of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world.’25 Inventors of ‘ideal’ worlds are usually those incapable or unwilling to accept the ambiguous and diverse aspects of existence and whose ascetic ideals substitute the meaningfulness of earthly existence in favour of fictitious, ascetic ideals. It is the positing of higher idols and ideals that devalues life and can thus be said to be indicative of a weakened spiritual vitality; 26 it is those who call for the articulation of new ideals, and who offer pessimistic accounts of European culture in the absence of such ideals, who are indicative of weakened ‘spiritual vitality’. Great spiritual vitality, in this account, would be demonstrated instead by those people who can achieve the novel and harder task of leading an experimental life

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without determining the overall truth of existence, and who can accommodate this ‘nihilism’ rather than desperately seeking to escape it. For this reason he sought to encourage a ‘[p]rofound aversion to responding once and for all in any one total view of the world’ and a ‘refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic’.27 If Europeanization is ultimately understood as encouraging such an inner experience of autonomy, and as cultivating this novel conception of spiritual vitality, then how can this process be driven forward in the present? One of the greatest difficulties with such a deep and committed sense of freedom is undoubtedly that it cannot be easily institutionalized, nor easily taught. This, too, is a question that Nietzsche struggled with. Nietzsche realized that he could not deploy a fixed ideal of a ‘good European’ without contradicting his own analysis, which is why he did not even want himself to be considered as a new idol, noting in his autobiography that ‘I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy . . . I do not want to be a holy man; sooner even a buffoon. – Perhaps I am a buffoon.’28 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he subsequently counselled his readers to be suspicious of that ‘best European’ Zarathustra:29 Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you . . . One repays a teacher badly if one always wants to remain nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? . . . You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers – but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves: and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to little.30 Nietzsche’s point was clearly not that everyone should simply follow his lead and become a Nietzschean.31 Rather than trying to provide his reader with a list of attributes that they should strive to embody, he tried to communicate to them a very different disposition towards existence with which they could set about living their lives in a healthier and more affirmative fashion, and which would allow them to uniquely appropriate their existence from their own particular location. These ‘good Europeans’, in short, would not share a common set of attributes but a common experience of autonomy. Perhaps the best that Nietzsche could do in terms of furthering the emergence of such ‘good Europeans’ was to do what he did so well, namely to exemplify his commitment to such a radical experience of autonomy in the hope that his own quest for autonomy would prove contagious, and would spurn others to explore this path in their own way and from their own perspective. One does not have to agree with Nietzsche’s dictum that mankind is redeemed only by its greatest exemplars, to grant that the exemplification of such a deep intellectual freedom greatly furthers its

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continuation. Nietzsche did not and could not compel his readers to be free,32 and so perhaps he built his strategy around exemplifying a deep intellectual freedom so that he might find not believers that are just like him, but fellow autonomous spirits that might share this experience of freedom granted by the developments in modern, European culture. Nietzsche touches his readers by taking them this far – far enough to be able to taste this freedom – but no further. Undoubtedly Nietzsche was also a masterful exemplar of the fruits that the pursuit of such a deep intellectual freedom could yield, and it is also this soaring freedom that best captures his spirit, as well as the many contradictions of his views. Nietzsche can still make his greatest contribution to our contemporary reflection on the European idea by exemplifying this commitment to a deep experience of freedom. At a time when people are losing sight of the meaning of the European idea, Nietzsche’s unearthing of this deep secular autonomy, in conjunction with his own sensuous descriptions of this experience, serve as a useful and refreshing reminder of what ‘Europe’ might come to stand for in the twenty-first century. If finding ‘meaning’ used to reside in the ability to determine the ultimate truth of existence, then Nietzsche’s European thought suggests, on the contrary, that today ‘meaning’ can only consist of leaving the ultimate truth of existence undetermined. ‘I intend to find out’, Nietzsche wrote in a letter from 1874, ‘to what degree our friends, who are so proud of their freedom of thought, can actually tolerate free thoughts.’33 In light of this more positive vision, Nietzsche could also suggest that even though ‘the world is not worth what we believed [in the past] . . . the world could be worth much more than we believed’.34 In at least two key respects this commitment to a profound and existential experience of freedom also remains continuous with central aspects of the Enlightenment project. It not only continues the Enlightenment quest for a post-Christian conception of Europe, but it also retains a critical ethos that seeks to provoke amongst his readers a deep and creative experience of partial autonomy. More importantly still, it is a vision that focuses on persons rather than on abstract ideals, which also makes it a profoundly humane vision in the end. It is even an idea of what it means to be a ‘good European’ that has tactical advantages for Europeanists in the contemporary debate on ‘Europe’. Going down Nietzsche’s path means that the inability to find a more meaningful idea of Europe along the line suggested by those cited at the outset of this book does not have to lead to pessimism about the European project, but can open up a much more positive reconciliation with the present. If Europeanization is ultimately understood in the sense of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’, i.e. as provoking a profound experience of freedom amongst fellow human beings without seeking to fix in advance the precise nature of their identity, then the inability to find a more meaningful representation of Europe along the

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lines suggested by Hoffmann and others need also not amount to an obstacle for the European project. To those who are able to understand the deeper implications of European nihilism as a creative experience of freedom, this would also be a vision of Europe that is deeply meaningful and not excessively technocratic. It would be an idea that could contribute to a peaceful European community not because Europeans would share an identical and homogenous conception of what it means to be European, but rather because they would share a deep and valued experience of autonomy. Nietzsche’s, in short, is a vision of what it means to be a ‘good European’ that is intellectually more persuasive in a secular context because it allows for an experimental questioning of the will to truth; that is supremely affirmative of an understanding of existence that does not try to vest all of its creative efforts in ascetic ideals; that demonstrates immense spiritual vitality and courage in undertaking this experiment; and that is also more optimistic than the pessimistic reaction found in much of the literature on the crisis of the European idea. His European thought overwhelmingly suggests that rather than trying to articulate an overarching idea of ‘Europe’, the European Union should try to encourage a Europeanization from below by contributing to the material and educational conditions within which such ‘good Europeans’ could emerge in the years ahead. In this account the field of European studies also need not restrict itself to studying the institutions of the European Union and the various political processes in which these institutions participate; it could also try to create the space for exploring this new ethos, thus itself further contributing to this process of Europeanization.

Conclusion The crucial question that remains, then, is whether Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘good Europeans’ does not simply take us back to a metaphysics of a different kind, a metaphysics of immanence? It may very well do so. The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka once noted that ‘[t]he constant shaking of the naïve sense of meaningfulness is itself a new mode of meaning, a discovery of its continuity with the mysteriousness of being and what-is as a whole’.35 Although Nietzsche does not offer his readers a new ‘meaning’ of the European idea along traditional lines, he does provide them with a vision of the ‘good Europeans’ that generates its meaning by experimentally putting the will to truth into question. Yet this must not necessarily be a debilitating factor in the case of Nietzsche. For if Nietzsche’s vision of the ‘good Europeans’ does return towards a metaphysics of immanence, it is a metaphysics that has sought to shed itself of some of the reactive, negative and life-denying aspects of the Christian-Platonic metaphysics of the past.36 If Nietzsche does remain a metaphysician in one form or another,

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his metaphysics is one of a more reflexive kind.37 Clearly the kind of autonomy that Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would seek to provoke could never be complete and could never free itself entirely from its cultural moorings, which is why Nietzsche conceded quite openly that even the ‘good Europeans’ remain the heirs of two thousand years of European culture. Even though they experiment with the will to truth, they only embark upon this experiment after first having applied this will to truth so consistently and so rigorously that it finally began to call itself into question. It is also this insight which best explains why, in the end, the truthfulness of Nietzsche’s account of European nihilism is only of secondary importance. There is little point in trying to establish the veracity or falseness of all of his aphorisms and insights. Nietzsche’s European thought as a whole represents an extensive experiment with the will to truth, and a great gamble as to whether human beings really need such ‘true worlds’ in order to reconcile themselves positively with their existence. In Nietzsche’s view such radical questioning and thinking was required in light of the deeper implications of the ‘death of God’. Yet if the advent of European nihilism entailed calling the will to truth into question, then the truthfulness of his account can no longer be the sole criteria for evaluating his analysis. Indeed, Nietzsche himself openly admitted that many of his written interventions were of a polemical nature. Nietzsche’s thought must thus be judged instead on what it tried to achieve, i.e. exemplifying the constant struggle between freedom and truth, usually placing its wager on freedom. Irrespective of whether one agrees with the specifics of his analysis, what arguably remains impressive about his European thought is that he uses his analysis to provoke a deep experience of freedom amongst his readers. He played the will to truth out against itself, returning to European existence a wonderfully enigmatic and enchanting character, even if the ultimate viability of his approach to rendering modern European existence meaningful may in the end be as much based on an act of faith as the Christian response with which he wrestled so incessantly throughout his life. In either case, the kind of ‘Europe’ that Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would probably cultivate in the end is the one he had Zarathustra once describe in the following terms: ‘Not riddle enough to scare human love from it, not solution enough to put to sleep human wisdom – a humanly good thing was the world to me today, of which such bad things are said’.38 Similarly, his vision of the ‘good Europeans’ gives his readers a certain amount of direction as to how to structure their thinking about the meaning of the European idea, while leaving it sufficiently open for people to appropriate this ethos for themselves and from their own perspective. Such a ‘Europe’ partially consisting of Nietzsche’s ‘good Europeans’ would be one that (i) avoids nationalist and racist interpretations of existence;

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(ii) that refuses to fix the deeper meaning of the European idea and thus also remains open to those who currently remain outside the borders of the European Union; (iii) that would not seek to impose its freedom on others, but would equally not shy away from exemplifying this commitment to a deep experience of freedom; and (iv) that seeks to address the problem of the increasing globalization of the ‘last man’ through combating the refusal to cultivate, within existence, an important reflective depth. In this account Europeanization would manifest itself not primarily in a political or institutional project, but in the emergence of those ‘good Europeans’ who ‘can actually tolerate free thoughts’,39 and who can share in an experience of freedom that has long been lost in the political project of Europe.40 To continually recover this experience of freedom is the challenge of Nietzsche’s European thought, about which such equally bad things have been said. It remains a timely challenge, as it would be a great shame indeed if we were to find ourselves in the paradoxical situation whereby one of the greatest gifts that could be offered under the heading of ‘Europe’ would become increasingly threatened under the banner of that very name.

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Notes

Epigraphs 1 Romano Prodi, Europe As I See It, trans. Allan Cameron, Cambridge: Polity, 2000, p. 5. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974, §377, p. 340.

1 Europe 1 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality, London: Macmillan, 1995, p. 145. 2 J. Peter Burgess, ‘On the Necessity and the Impossibility of a European Cultural Identity’, in J. Peter Burgess (ed.), Cultural Politics and Political Culture in Postmodern Europe, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, p. 19. 3 Brigid Laffan, ‘The Politics of Identity and Political Order in Europe’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 1996, p. 82. 4 See, for example, Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson (eds), The Question of Europe, London: Verso, 1997, p. ix; and Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 5 Victoria A. Goddard, Joseph R. Llobera and Cris Shore, ‘Introduction: The Anthropology of Europe’, in Victoria A. Goddard, Joseph R. Llobera and Cris Shore (eds), The Anthropology of Europe: Identity and Boundaries in Conflict, Oxford: Berg, 1994, p. 26. 6 See Chris Brown (ed.), Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 1994; and Ian Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2002, pp. 235–258. 7 See Alan Clark, ‘Francois Mitterand and the Idea of Europe’, in Brian Nelson, David Roberts and Walter Veit (eds), The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity, Oxford: Berg, 1992, p. 156. 8 Ibid. 9 Zaki Laïdi, A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics, trans. June Burnham and Jenny Coulon, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 76.

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10 Ariane Chebel D’Appollonia, ‘National and European Identities between Myths and Realities’, in Ulf Hedetoft (ed.), Political Symbols, Symbolic Politics, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, p. 65. 11 Laïdi, A World Without Meaning, p. 76. 12 Joseph Weiler, ‘Europe After Maastricht – Do the New Clothes have an Emperor?’, Harvard Jean Monnet Working Papers, no. 12, 1995. 13 Michael Brenner, ‘EC: Confidence Lost’, Foreign Policy, no. 91, Summer 1993, pp. 26–27. See also Ralf Dahrendorf, Whose Europe? Competing Visions for 1992, London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1989, p. 8; and William Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe, London: Pinter, 1990, p. 55. 14 Laffan, ‘The Politics of Identity’, p. 81. 15 Peter van Ham, ‘Europe’s Postmodern Identity: A Critical Appraisal’, International Politics, vol. 38, 2001, p. 229. 16 Jo Shaw, ‘Citizenship of the Union: Towards Post-National Membership?’, Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law, 1995, vol. 6, no. 1, The Hague: Kluver Law International 1997/1998, p. 251. 17 Cited in Celine Belot and Andy Smith, ‘Europe and Identity: A Challenge for the Social Sciences’, in Hedetoft (ed.), Political Symbols, p. 83. 18 Ibid., pp. 84–85. They refer, for example, to the research programme on the history of European identity and consciousness. 19 Cited van Ham, ‘Europe’s Postmodern Identity’, p. 242. 20 Guy Verhofstadt, ‘What Kind of Future for What Kind of Europe?’, speech at the 7th European Forum, Wachau in Göttweig, 24 June 2001. 21 Soledad Garcia, ‘Europe’s Fragmented Identities and the Frontiers of Citizenship’, in Soledad Garcia (ed.), European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy, London: Pinter, 1993, p. 2. 22 Milan Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, New York Review, 26 April 1984, p. 33. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 38. 25 Ole Waever, ‘Europe since 1945: Crisis to Renewal’, in Kevin Wilson and Jan van der Dussen (eds), The History of the Idea of Europe, London: Routledge 1995, pp. 179–180. 26 Vaclav Havel, The Art of the Impossible: Politics and Morality in Practice: Speeches and Writings 1990–1996, trans. Paul Wilson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, p. 248. 27 Ibid., p. 247. 28 Preamble of the Treaty of Rome, reprinted in Brent F. Nelson and Alexander Stubb (eds), The European Union: Readings on the Theory and Practice of European Integration, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998, p. 17. 29 See D’Appollonia, ‘National and European Identities’, p. 65. 30 Robert Schuman, Pour l’Europe, Paris: Les Editions Nagel, 1963, pp. 48, 78. 31 Cited in van Ham, ‘Europe’s Postmodern Identity’, p. 241. 32 Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe, p. 55. See also Sven Papcke, ‘Who Needs a European Identity’, in Nelson, Roberts and Veit (eds), The Idea of Europe, p. 73; Oliver Schmidtke, ‘Obstacles and Prospects for a European Collective Identity’, in Hedetoft (ed.), Political Symbols, p. 45; and Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 1.

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33 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Europe’s Endangered Liberal Order’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 77, no. 2, 1998, p. 59. 34 Schmidtke, ‘Obstacles and Prospects for a European Collective Identity’, p. 45. 35 For a challenge of this assumption, see Paul Howe, ‘A Community of Europeans: The Requisite Underpinnings’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 1995, pp. 27–46. 36 This is the view of community espoused, for example, by William Wallace. See The Transformation of Western Europe, p. 55. 37 Robert Schuman, ‘The Schuman Declaration’, reprinted in Nelson and Stubb. (eds), The European Union, p. 14. 38 Anthony Pagden, ‘Introduction’, in Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe, p. 7. 39 Ibid. 40 See R. Ali and L. Lifschulz (eds), Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War, Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1993, cited in Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 158. 41 Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 158. 42 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis Revisited’, Daedalus, vol. 123, no. 2, Spring 1994, p. 2. See also Brenner, ‘EC: Confidence Lost’, p. 24; Burgess, ‘On the Necessity and Impossibility’, p. 20; and Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. viii. 43 J. Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Micheal B. Naas, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 6. 44 See, for example, Jacques Julliard, Ce Fascisme qui vient . . . Paris: Seuil, 1994. 45 Gerard Delanty, ‘Redefining Political Culture in Europe Today: From Ideology to the Politics of Identity and Beyond’, in Hedetoft (ed.), Political Symbols, p. 33. 46 van Ham, ‘Europe’s Postmodern Identity’, p. 245. 47 Denis de Rougement, The Meaning of Europe, trans. Alan Braley, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965, p. 19. 48 Jürgen Habermas has advanced a compelling vision of Europe based on adherence to common constitutional principles. But his vision, too, is widely seen to be deficient in terms of its ability to inspire and motivate genuine attachment to the political project of Europe. See his ‘Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe’, Praxis International, vol. 12, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–19. 49 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis’, p. 1244, cited in Hoffmann, ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis Revisited’, p. 1. 50 Indeed, the necessity to use the cumbersome term ‘post-Cold War era’ over a decade after the collapse of the Berlin Wall is itself testament to this vacuity. 51 Hoffmann, ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis Revisited’, p. 22. 52 As the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka observed, ‘[w]e often speak of the meaning of particular human events, of the meaning of life, of history, of various institutions, of democracy, without either defining or attempting to define the concept of meaning – evidently because, on the one hand, we sense we need such a concept but, on the other hand, it seems somehow selfevident. . . . it is undoubtedly its difficulty and at the same time its inescapability which leads us frequently to resort to a time-honored way of

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53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

72 73

Notes sparing ourselves closer analysis, which is to assume the self-evidence of such inescapable conceptual tools.’ See his essay ‘Does History Have Meaning?’, in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák, Chicago: Open Court, 1996, p. 53. Hoffmann, ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis Revisited’, pp. 1, 15, 18. For empirical research confirming the lack of a European identity see Sophie Duchesne and Andre-Paul Frognier, ‘Is there a European Identity?’, in Oskar Niedermayer and Richard Sinnott (eds), Public Opinion and Internationalized Governance, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 223. For a more recent survey with a similar conclusion see Stefania Panebianco, ‘European Citizenship and European Identity: From the Treaty of Maastricht to Public Opinion Attitudes’, Jean Monnet Working Papers in Comparative and International Politics, no. 3, 1996. See also Anthony D. Smith, ‘National Identity and the Idea of European Unity’, in Gowan and Anderson (eds), Question of Europe, p. 319. Agnes Heller, ‘Europe – An Epilogue?’, in The Postmodern Political Condition, Cambridge: Polity, 1988, p. 154. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 155. Ibid. Laïdi, A World Without Meaning, p. 1. Laïdi further defines his terms in the following manner: ‘foundation’ is meant as the basic principle on which a collective project depends, unity is meant that ‘world images’ are collected into a coherent plan of the whole; end or final goal is meant to denote a projection towards an elsewhere that is deemed better. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p.76. Ibid., p. 178. Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfaction of European High Culture, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. xii. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. xii. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 5. Josef Nolte, Wir guten Europäer: Historisch-politische Versuche über uns selbst, Tübingen: Narr, 1991, p. 207. Robert B. Pippin, ‘Nietzsche’s Alleged Farewell: The Premodern, Modern and Postmodern Nietzsche’, in Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 255. In addition, Nietzsche uses the noun ‘European’ around 280 times and the adjective ‘European’ 320 times. When he does use the terms he also tends to use them with strong emphasis. See Nolte, Wir guten Europäer, p. 199. Ibid., pp. 198, 203, 206. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966, §251, p. 188.

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74 Written by Friedrich Nietzsche to his mother from Sils-Maria on 17 August 1886. Cited in David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. v. 75 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vols 7–13 of the Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montimari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, vol. 11, 29[4], p. 337. My translation, passim. 76 Paul Michael Lützeler, ‘Writers on European Identity’, in Paul Michael Lützeler (ed.), Europe after Maastricht: American and European Perspectives, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994, p. 296. 77 Thomas Mann, Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Light of Contemporary Events, Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1947, p. 3. 78 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, §5, cited in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 240. 79 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968, I, §2, p. 9. This study only draws upon The Will to Power as a source for English translations of some of Nietzsche’s notes. 80 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 7[8], p. 291. 81 Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, p. 144. 82 Ernst Behler, Confrontations: Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. viii. 83 Nimrod Aloni, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Healing and Edifying Philosophy, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991, p. 195. 84 For a discussion of this issue see Clayton Koelb (ed.), Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, New York: State University of New York Press, 1990. 85 Cited in Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 1. 86 Two Italian scholars, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, compiled the standard edition of Nietzsche’s works. 87 Nolte, Wir guten Europäer, p. 195. 88 J. P. Mayer, Kritik und Zukunft der Kultur, Aus Friedrich Nietzsches Werken für die Gegenwart ausgewählt, Leipzig: Rascher, 1935. Cited in Nolte, Wir guten Europäer, p. 196. 89 There are brief references to Nietzsche in Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe, 2002, pp. 32, 206. For short treatments of his European thought in English see Nicholas Martin, ‘“We Good Europeans”: Nietzsche’s New Europe in Beyond Good and Evil’, History of European Ideas, vol. 20, nos 1–3, 1995, pp. 141–144; and Graham Parkes, ‘Wanderers in the Shadow of Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Good Europeans’, History of European Ideas, vol. 16, nos 4–6, 1993, pp. 585–590. For brief German studies see Nolte, Wir guten Europäer, pp. 195–210; Paul Michael Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: Piper, 1992, pp. 190–201; and Elisabeth Kuhn, ‘Nietzsche’s “gute Europäer” und gutes Europa’, in Endre

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Notes Kiss (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche und die Globalen Probleme unserer Zeit, Cuxhaven: Traude Junghans Verlag, 1997, pp. 215–228.

2 God or nothingness? 1 Graham Parkes, ‘Wanderers in the Shadow of Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Good Europeans’, History of European Ideas, vol. 16, nos 4–6, 1993, p. 586. 2 David Ray Griffin, ‘The Reenchantment of Science’, in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 666. 3 Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 8. 4 Ibid., p. 99. 5 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 96. 6 Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, p. 99. 7 Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 96. 8 Keiji Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 71. 9 Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 24. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, §95, p. 93. 11 Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 24. 12 Ibid. 13 P. Bergmann, Nietzsche: The Last Anti-Political German, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 29. 14 For the Christian origins of the European idea, see D. Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957. 15 Nietzsche’s famous proclamation occurs first in Book 3 of The Gay Science, §108, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974. It can also be found at the end of §2 of the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1961. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968, I, §2, p. 9. 17 Karen L. Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth Century Responses to Meaninglessness, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, p. 26. 18 Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfaction of European High Culture, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. 144. 19 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §125. 20 William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, p. 9. 21 Ibid., p. 7. 22 Thomas L. Pangle, ‘The Roots of Contemporary Nihilism and Its Political Consequences According to Nietzsche’, Review of Politics, vol. 45, no. 1, 1983, p. 46. 23 Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, p. 150. 24 Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, p. 9.

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25 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §125, p. 181. 26 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vols 7–13 of the Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, vol. 12, 2[100], p. 110. 27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, ‘Why I am Destiny’, §1, p. 326. See also Nietzsche, Gay Science, §343, p. 279; and The Will to Power, Preface, §2, p. 3. 28 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, I, §4, pp. 9–10. 29 Ibid., §55, p. 36. 30 Pitirim Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age, Oxford: Oneworld, 1992, p. 18. 31 Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, pp. 7–8. 32 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §152, pp. 196–197. 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’, §5, pp. 80–81. 34 Ibid., p. 81. 35 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1967, III, §24, p. 150. 36 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §343, p. 279. 37 Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 71. 38 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §125, p. 182. Zarathustra comes to much the same conclusion in §5 of the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 39 See, for example, the Preface to the Antichrist, trans. R.J. Hollindale, London Penguin, 1990, p. 125 and Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §1. 40 Ibid. 41 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 7[54], pp. 312–313. 42 Ibid., 2[131], p. 130. 43 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, I, p. 8. 44 Glen T. Martin, From Nietzsche to Wittgenstein: The Problem of Truth and Nihilism in the Modern World, New York: Peter Lang, 1989, p. 12. 45 Ibid. 46 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, 25, p. 155. 47 Ibid., pp. 155–156. 48 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §18, p. 16. 49 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §25, p. 153. 50 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §357, p. 306. 51 Anthony D. Smith, ‘National Identity and the Idea of European Unity’, in Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson (eds), The Question of Europe, London: Verso, 1997, p. 338. 52 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §24, p. 151. 53 Ibid., §25, p. 153. 54 Ibid., §24, p. 151. 55 Ibid., §24, p. 152. 56 Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 74. 57 Carr, Banalization of Nihilism, p. 39. 58 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §357, p. 307. See also The Will to Power where Nietzsche remarks that ‘[m]orality itself, in the form of honesty, compels us to deny morality’, V, §404, p. 219.

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59 Carr, Banalization of Nihilism, p. 39. 60 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, p. 165, trans. Carr, Banalization of Nihilism, p. 40. 61 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §24, p. 152. 62 Ibid., §27, p. 160. 63 David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Ambivalence of Reason, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 59. 64 Cited in ibid., p. 89. 65 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’, §5, p. 80. This reference is made by Nietzsche in relation to George Eliot and the English, but it can also be seen as applying to modern scientists more generally. 66 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, §50, p. 179. 67 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §24, pp. 152–153. 68 Ibid., p. 153. In an unpublished note written after Nietzsche had completed Part 3 of Zarathustra, he had the latter claim that ‘We are conducting an experience with the truth!’ Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. II, 25[305], p. 88. 69 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §27, p. 161. 70 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §5, p. 10. 71 Ibid., §2, p. 9. 72 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, Part I, ‘Of the Bestowing Virtue’, §3, p. 104. 73 David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, p. 32. 74 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘How the “Real World” at last Became a Myth’, p. 50. 75 Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Michael Gendre, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 12. 76 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘How the “Real World” at last Became a Myth’, p. 50. 77 Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 74. 78 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966, Preface, p. 2. 79 Martin Heidegger, ‘Nietzsche’s Word God is Dead’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper and Row, 1977, p. 61. 80 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §12 A, p. 13. 81 Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 2. 82 Ibid., p. 7. 83 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §12 A, p. 12. 84 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §346, p. 287. 85 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §12 A, p. 13. 86 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 7[8], p. 291. 87 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, London: Penguin, 1984, §109, p. 78. 88 Nietzsche, Will to Power, III, §585 A, p. 318. 89 Ibid., I, §5, p. 10.

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90 Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, p. 12. 91 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, ‘Brief an Fichte’, Appelation an das Publikum, Dokumente zum Atheismusstreit Jena 1798/99, Leipzig: Reclam, 1987, p. 168. Quoted in Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, p. 4. 92 Nietzsche, Will to Power, Preface, §3, p. 3. 93 Nishitani, Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, p. 30. 94 R. C. Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds, New York: Harper and Row, 1970, p. 112.

3 Labyrinths of the future 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968, Preface, §2, p. 3. 2 See Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987, p. 342. 3 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §28, p. 19. 4 Michel Haar, ‘Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language’, in David Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche, London: MIT Press, 1997, p. 14. 5 Martin Heidegger, ‘Nietzsche’s Word God is Dead’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt: New York: Harper and Row, 1977, p. 69. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974, §108, p. 167. 7 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ‘In Search of Brussels: Creolization, Insularity and Identity Dilemmas in Post-National Europe’, in J. Peter Burgess (ed.), Cultural Politics and Political Culture in Postmodern Europe, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, pp. 254–255. 8 Paul Taylor, The European Union in the 1990s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 148–149. 9 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Nationalism’, New York Review of Books, 21 November 1991. Cited in Tony Judt, ‘The New Old Nationalism’, New York Review of Books, 26 May 1994, pp. 44–51. 10 Karl Jaspers once argued in relation to Nietzsche that scholars drawing on his work should not rest content until they have also found the exact opposite of what he is claiming elsewhere in the corpus. In relation to the question of nationalism, however, this principle does not seem to hold. 11 Elisabeth Kuhn, Friedrich Nietzsches Philosophie des europäischen Nihilismus, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992, p. 244. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, II, §13, p. 80. 13 Nietzsche’s observations were frequently, but not exclusively, directed at his German contemporaries living during the last third of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche did travel widely across Europe, however, and thus also referred more generally to the rise of nationalism in Europe. 14 Throughout this chapter, the term modern nationalism refers to what Otto Dann has classified as organised nationalism, i.e. that form of nationalism that arose in the last third of the nineteenth century that combined both

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Notes nationalist sentiment with political action. See Otto Dann, ‘Modernity and the Project of the Modern Nation’, in Johannes Müller and Bo Stråth (eds), Nationalism and Modernity, EUI Working Paper HEC 99/1, San Domenico, Florence: 1999, pp. 24–25. See Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vols 7–13 of the Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, vol. 12, 7[26], p. 305. See also 2 [127], p. 127. See Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §1, p. 8 and Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 9[82], p. 377. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 3[6], p. 172. Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche, The Last Anti-Political German, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 30. Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 24. Tarmo Kunnas, Die Politik als Prostitution des Geistes: Eine Studie über das Politische bei Nietzsche, Munich: Frido Flado, 1982, p. 130. Bergmann, Nietzsche, p. 46. Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 25. See also Bergman, Nietzsche, Chapter 3, and Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987, p. 15. Kunnas, Die Politik als Prostitution des Geistes, p. 130. See also AnsellPearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 24. See, for example, Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche, p. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966, §241, p. 174. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, KSA 2, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, ‘Der Wanderer und sein Schatten’, §87, p. 593. Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays in Nationalism, New York: Macmillan, 1926, p. 95. Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples: Studies in Nineteenth Century Nationalism, New York: Macmillan, 1946, p. 8. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, New York: Macmillan, 1948, p. 574. Cited in William Hutchison, ‘The Long Goodbye: Revision of Traditional Identities in the “Christian West’’’, in Kokusai Koryu Kikin and Nichi-Bei Senta (eds), The End of the Century: The Future in the Past, London: Kodansha International, 1995, p. 250. Arnold Toynbee, ‘Death in War’, in Toynbee et al., Man’s Concern with Death, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1968, p. 147. Ibid., pp. 147–148. Joseph Llobera, The God of Modernity, Oxford: Berg, 1994. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 221. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 15. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 15.

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39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991, p. 13. 40 Ibid., p. 19. 41 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II, §7, p. 68. 42 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 18. 43 See Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, pp. 158–159. 44 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 77. 45 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983, p. 138. 46 A. Finlayson, ‘Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Theories of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998, p. 146. 47 John Breuilly, ‘Approaches to Nationalism’, in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, London: Verso, 1996, p. 155. To what extent nationalism is a truly modern phenomenon is, of course, a matter of debate amongst scholars of nationalism. Yet the two sides are not as far apart as is sometimes suggested. In a recent article, for example, John Armstrong notes that ‘to a considerable extent . . . one may agree with . . . [Hobsbawm and Anderson] . . . that, like other human identities, national identity has been an invention. The principal remaining disagreement is over the antiquity of some inventions and the repertory of pre-existing group characteristics that inventors were able to draw upon.’ ‘Towards a Theory of Nationalism: Consensus and Dissensus’, in Sukumar Periwal (ed.), Notions of Nationalism, Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995, p. 36. 48 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §20, p. 17. 49 See Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 9 [126], p. 410. 50 Ibid., 7[26],p. 305. 51 Ibid., 9[82], p. 377. 52 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §1, p. 75. 53 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §1, p. 97. 54 See Henry Staten ‘ ‘‘Radical Evil” Revived: Hitler, Kant, Luther, NeoLacanianism’, Radical Philosophy, no. 98, 1999, p. 14. 55 Something made; something born; something fictitious and unreal. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §251, p. 188. 56 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, London: Penguin, 1984, §475, p. 228. 57 Staten, ‘‘Radical Evil” Revived’, p. 14. 58 Nietzsche, Gay Science, §347, pp. 288–289. 59 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §480, p. 232 60 Ibid., §475, p. 228. 61 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, §6, pp. 165–166. 62 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1961, ‘Of the New Idol’, p. 75. 63 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, §4, p. 150. 64 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, ‘Of the New Idol’, p. 76. 65 Ibid.

134 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Notes Ibid., p. 75. Ibid. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II, §17, p. 86. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, §4, p. 148. Ibid., §6, pp. 164–165. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Greek State’, in Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, p. 774. Ibid. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §475, p. 228. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin,1990, ‘What the Germans Lack’, §4, p. 74. This does not necessarily mean that he is a-political altogether, in the sense that Nietzsche can be seen as trying to rehabilitate an older form of politics, rather then endorsing the modern one. Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 44. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, §4, pp. 147– 148. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘What the Germans Lack’, §4, pp. 73–74. Trace Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, p. 208. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 7[47], pp. 310–11. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 305. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §343, p. 279. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, ‘The Case of Wagner’, §2, p. 321. Graham Parkes, ‘Wanderers in the Shadow of Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Good Europeans’, History of European Ideas, vols 16, no. 4–6, 1993, pp. 586–587. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990, Foreword, p. 125. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 2[199], pp. 164–65. See ibid., vol. 13, 11[235], p. 92. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘The Case of Wager’, §2, p. 321. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1967, §23, p. 136. Golo Mann, in The History of Germany since 1789, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985, p. 396. ‘Gut deutsch sein heisst sich entdeutschen’. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschlisches II, ‘Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche’, §321, p. 511. See also Nietzsche, Antichrist, §61, p. 196. Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ‘David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer’, §1, p. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘What the Germans Lack’, §1, p. 71. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘The Case of Wagner’, §2, p. 319. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 2[10], p. 70.

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98 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §251, pp. 186–187. 99 Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 9. 100 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Clever’, §5, p. 248. 101 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn, Princton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 38. 102 Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 27. ‘Die verfluchte Antisemiterei . . . hat R[ichard] W[agner] und mich verfeindet, sie ist die Ursache eines radikalen Bruchs zwischen mir und meiner Schwester.’ See Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche, p. 250. 103 Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 135. 104 Ibid., p. 66. 105 See A. J. Hoover, Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Thought, London: Praeger, 1994, p. 9. 106 Parkes, ‘Wanderers in the Shadow of Nihilism’, p. 586. 107 Cited in Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 73. 108 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Clever, §6, p. 249. 109 Daniel Conway, ‘The Politics of Decadence’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 37 (Supplement), 1999, p. 22. 110 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §41, p. 52. 111 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 2[3], p. 67. 112 Ibid., 2[121], p. 121. 113 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, §7, p. 179. 114 Nietzsche in a letter to Bonghi at the end of 1888. Cited in Josef Nolte, Wir guten Europäer: Historisch-politische Versuche über uns selbst, Tübingen: Narr, 1991, p. 197. 115 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 9, 8[77], p. 399.

4 Europe wants to become one 1 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vols 7–13 of the Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, vol. 11, 32[8], p. 404. As Nietzsche put it in a fragment, ‘against the national [das Nationale] – the good European’. See ibid., 25[523], p. 150. 2 See ibid., 26[297], p. 229. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1961, ‘Among the Daughters of the Desert’, p. 319. 4 Nietzsche, in a letter to his mother on August 17, 1886. Cited in David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, back of title page. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974, §377, pp. 339–340. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, ‘The Case of Wagner’, §2, p. 321.

136 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35

Notes Nietzsche, Gay Science, §377, p. 339. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. II, 37[9], p. 583. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §377, p. 340. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 46. Cited in Josef Nolte, Wir guten Europäer: Historisch-politische Versuche über uns selbst, Tübingen: Narr, 1991, p. 197. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, London: Penguin, 1984, §475, p. 228. Ibid. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 11, 25[112], p. 42. Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966, §256, p. 196. Krell and Bates, Good European, p.1. Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: The End of the Future, London: Quartet Books, 1997, p. 9. Ibid. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §256, p. 196. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §362, p. 318. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, ‘Der Wanderer und sein Schatten’, §292, p. 684. ‘Ihre Kantone waren keine Kleinstaaten’. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 8, p. 312. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 9, p. 536. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, ‘Der Wanderer und sein Schatten’, §293, p. 684. Gunars Ebels, ‘The Ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche About the European Integration and Nowadays’, in Endre Kiss (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche und die Globalen Probleme unserer Zeit, Cuxhaven: Traude Junghans Verlag, 1997. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Is Nietzsche a Political Thinker’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1997, p. 4. Derek Urwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration Since 1945, London: Longman, 1991, p. 8. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. II, 26[336], p. 239. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §357, p. 307. Cited in James Joll, ‘Europe – An Historian’s View’, History of European Ideas, vol. 1, 1980, p. 11. Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, trans. Gary Steiner, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 177. See, for example, Winston Churchill’s ‘Something That Will Astonish You’ Speech delivered in Zurich on 19 September 1946, in David Cannadine (ed.), Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Winston Churchill’s Famous Speeches, London: Cassell, 1989, pp. 309–314. Jude Bloomfield, ‘The New Europe: A New Agenda for Research?’, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), National Histories and European History, London: UCL Press, 1993, p. 264. Joll, ‘Europe – An Historian’s View’, p. 11.

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36 Joseph Weiler, ‘Europe After Maastricht – Do the New Clothes have an Emperor?’, Harvard Jean Monnet Working Papers, no. 12, 1995. 37 Max Gallo, ‘Europe without Nations’, in J. Peter Burgess (ed.), Cultural Politics and Political Culture in Postmodern Europe, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, p. 384. 38 See P. Chenaux, Une Europe Vaticane?, Brussels: Ciaco, 1990 and M. Kettle, ‘John Paul’s Grand Design for Europe’, The Guardians 27 April 1990. Cited in Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality, London: Macmillan, 1995, p. 145. 39 Ludo Abicht, ‘One Nation as God? A Critique of Metaphysical Nationalism’, Cultural Dynamics, vol. 7, no. 2. 1995, p. 262. 40 Hugh Seton-Watson, ‘What is Europe, Where is Europe: From Mystique to Politique’, Encounter, July-August 1985, p. 16. See also Anthony Smith, ‘National Identity and the Idea of European Unity’, International Affairs, vol. 68, no. 1, 1992, pp. 55–76. 41 Bloomfield, ‘The New Europe’, p. 264. For a more recent statement of this case, made in favour of a certain reappropriation of the Orthodox faith, see Julia Kristeva, The Crisis of the European Subject, trans. Susan Fairfield, New York: Other Press, 2000. 42 Commission of the European Communities, Eurobarometer, no. 38, December 1992, p. vii. See also Paul Taylor, The European Union in the 1990s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 154–155. 43 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968, I, §20, p. 17. 44 See Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the Genealogy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 8. 45 David Owen, Nietzsche, Politics, and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason, London: Sage Publications, 1995, p. 69. 46 David B. Allison, ‘Introduction’, in Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, New York: Dell, 1977, p. xii. 47 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990, ‘“Reason in Philosophy”’, §6, p. 48. 48 Nietzsche, Gay Science, Preface to the Second Edition, §2, p. 34. 49 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, Preface, §4, p. 4. 50 Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. vii. 51 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, III, §26, p. 159. 52 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §20, p. 17. 53 William Wallace, ‘Rescue of Retreat? The Nation State in Western Europe, 1945–1993’, in Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson (eds), The Question of Europe, London: Verso, 1997, p. 26. 54 For the figures of postwar European economic growth, see, for example, Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies 1945–2000, London: Sage, 1995, especially ch. 7. 55 Wallace, ‘Rescue of Retreat?’, pp. 25–26. 56 Alan S. Milward, ‘The Springs of Integration’, in Gowan and Anderson (eds),

138

57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75

76

Notes The Question of Europe, p. 6. Milward invokes Robert Keohane’s and Stanley Hoffmann’s piece ‘Conclusions: Community Politics and Institutional Change’, in W. Wallace (ed.), The Dynamics of European Integration, London: Pinter, 1990, as well as ‘Institutional Change in Europe in the 1980s’, in R.O. Keohane and S. Hoffmann (eds), The New European Community: Decision Making and Institutional Change, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991 as evidence for this trend. Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 12. Wallace, ‘Rescue of Retreat?’, p. 22. Philip Allott, ‘Kant or Won’t: Theory and Moral Responsibility’, Review of International Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 1997, p. 354. Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe and A. D. Smith, ‘Towards a Global Culture?’ Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 7, 1990, pp. 171–192. Both cited in Cris Shore and Annabel Black, ‘Citizens’ Europe and the Construction of European Identity’, in Victoria Goddard, Joseph Llobera and Cris Shore (eds), The Anthropology of Europe: Identity and Boundaries in Conflict, Oxford: Berg, 1994, p. 277. See G. Smith, Politics of Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1972, pp. 297–298. Furio Cerutti, ‘Can There Be a Supranational Identity?’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 18, no. 2, 1992, p. 153. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. II, 37[9], pp. 583–84. Ibid., 11[235], p. 93. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. See Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 8. Delanty is referring to Ernst Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Ibid. Ibid., p. 464. This phrase was addressed to the parliament of the newly united Italian kingdom. See E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 44. Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 8. Jan Zielonka, Explaining Euro-Paralysis: Why Europe is Unable to Act in International Politics, London: Palgrave, 1998, p. 224. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis Revisited’, Daedalus, vol. 123, no. 2, 1994, p. 16. E. B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces 1950–1957, 2nd edn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968, p. xix. David Mitrany, A Working Peace System, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966, reprinted in Brent F. Nelson and Alexander Stubb. (eds), The European Union: Readings on the Theory and Practice of European Integration, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998, p. 113. Jean Monnet, Mémoires, Paris: Fayard, 1976, pp. 615–616, trans. Zaki Laïdi, A World Without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics, trans. June Burnham and Jenny Coulon, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 192. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Reflections on the Nation-State in Western Europe Today’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 21, 1982, p. 29. Cited in

Notes

77 78 79

80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91

92

93 94 95 96 97 98

139

Wallace, ‘Rescue of Retreat?, p. 26. See also Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1996, p. 37. Hoffmann, ‘Europe’s Identity Crisis Revisited’, p. 18. Laïdi, A World Without Meaning, p. 67. Lene Hansen and Michael C. Williams, ‘The Myth of Europe: Legitimacy, Community and the “Crisis” of the EU’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 1999, p. 240. Nietzsche, Will to Power, IV, §866, p. 463. Commission of the European Communities, Eurobarometer, no. 38, December 1992, p. ix. Laïdi, A World Without Meaning, p. 4. Oliver Schmidtke, ‘Obstacles and Prospects for a European Collective Identity’, in Ulf Hedetoft (ed.), Political Symbols, Symbolic Politics, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, p. 45. Anthony Smith, moreover, notes that there is ‘no European analogue to Bastille or Armistice Day, no European ceremony for the fallen in battle, no European shrine of kings or saints. When it comes to the ritual and ceremony of collective identification there is no European equivalent of national or religious community’. ‘National Identity and the Idea of European Unity’, p. 73. See also Michael Heffernan, The Meaning of Europe: Geography and Geopolitics, London: Arnold, 1998, p. 2. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §356, p. 304. Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. 128 Ibid. This fact, moreover, makes Paul Michael Lützeler’s assessment that Nietzsche simply sought to transpose the ideology of nationalism to the European level with no qualitative difference unconvincing. Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: Piper, 1992, p. 200. Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political Social and Economical Forces 1950–1957, London: Stevens & Sons, 1958, p. 16. Jean Monnet, ‘A Ferment of Change’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, 1962, p. 206. Paul Taylor, The European Union in the 1990s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 143. Shore and Black, ‘Citizens’ Europe and the Construction of European Identity’, p. 277. See also Göran Therborn. ‘In talking about Europeanism and European identity, we are talking about something which might as well be called nationalism, nationality and-or ethnicity’. European Modernity and Beyond, p. 242. Thomas Diez, Neues Europa, altes Modell: Die Konstruktion von Staatlichkeit im politischen Diskurs der europäischen Gemeinschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Haag and Herchen, 1995, p. v. Ibid., p. 1. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 8, 19[74], pp. 357–348. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990, §6, pp. 129–130. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §242, p. 176. Ibid., §261, p. 209. Ibid., §242, p. 176.

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5 We good Europeans 1 The main passages where Nietzsche refers to the ‘good Europeans’ in his published writings can, in chronological order, be found in the two volumes of Human, All Too Human (§475 and §87 respectively), Beyond Good and Evil (Preface, §241, §243, §254), the Preface to the second volume of Human, All Too Human (§6), Book V of The Gay Science (§357), Book III of The Genealogy of Morals (§27). In the commentary to the German edition of his works by Colli and Montinari, there are also references to Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘good European’ in Kommentar zu den Bänden 1–13, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, pp. 117, 201, 328, 331, 337, 436, 472, 712. There are also some references to the ‘good Europeans’ in Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vols 7–13 of the Kritische Studienausgabe, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, vol. 11, pp. 234, 473, 511; and vol. 12, p. 172. See Elisabeth Kuhn, ‘Nietzsche’s “gute Europäer” und gutes Europa’, in Endre Kiss (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche und die Globalen Probleme unserer Zeit, Cuxhaven: Traude Junghans Verlag, 1997, pp. 215–228. 2 ‘After all’, they further point out, ‘he was a classicist, who specialised in Greek literature and philosophy, and an admirer of Rome; he did not open his eyes to Africa or the Orient; Venice is as close to China as he ever got, and German translations are as close as he came to Huckleberry Finn.’ David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 1. For similar assessments see Paul Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: Piper, 1992, p. 200 and Ofelia Schutte ‘Nietzsche’s Cultural Politics: A Critique’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 37 Supplement, 1999, pp. 65–71. It should not be overlooked, however, that Nietzsche was actually quite knowledgeable about Oriental as well as Indian philosophy. 3 See, for example, David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy and Apocalypse, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998, p. 37. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974, §347, p. 290. 5 Nietzsche often used the expression ‘good Europeans’ and ‘free spirits’ interchangeably. In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, for example, Nietzsche refers to ‘we good Europeans and free, very free spirits’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966, Preface, p. 3. See also Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987, p. 125; and Josef Nolte, Wir guten Europäer: Historisch-politische Versuche über uns selbst, Tübingen: Narr, 1991, p. 202. Nietzsche, moreover, continues to accord his notion of a ‘good European’ a central role until his collapse in 1889. See Nolte, Wir Guten Europäer, p. 203. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990, ‘The Four Great Errors’, §8, p. 65. 7 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 2[155], p. 142. What is more,

Notes

8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

141

he insisted, ‘[o]ne should not let oneself be misled: great intellects are sceptics’. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, §54, p. 184. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968, IV, §470, p. 262. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §297, p. 239. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jugendschriften, ed. Hans Joachim Metter et al., Berlin and Munich: Walter de Gruyter and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994, 2, pp. 55–56, cited in Krell and Bates, The Good European, pp. 31–32. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, II, §24, p. 95. Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, New York: Macmillan, 1965, p. 80. Danto uses the term ‘Nihilism’ in the upper case to emphasise the centrality of this notion to Nietzsche’s corpus. More recently, Keith Ansell-Pearson has also referred to Nietzsche as ‘the perfect nihilist’. An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 3. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, p. 31. Ibid., p. 30. Richard Schacht has gathered much of this textual evidence in his essay ‘Nietzsche and Nihilism: Nietzsche and Danto’s Nietzsche’, in Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995, p. 37. The subsequent account draws substantially on his essay. Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §15, p. 15. Ibid., §23, pp. 17–18. Ibid., §112, p. 69. Ibid., §25, p. 18. Ibid., Preface, §3, p. 3. Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche, p. 36. Nietzsche, Will to Power, Preface, §4, p. 3. Ibid., §3, p. 3. Ibid., I, §13, p. 14. Ibid., §38, p. 24. Ibid., §1, p. 7. Ibid., §55, p. 35. Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche, p. 37. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §10, p. 16. Nietzsche, Antichrist, §7, p. 130. Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche, p. 37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1961, I, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, §5, p. 46. Cited in Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche, pp. 105–106. Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Michael Gendre, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 11. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I, §6, p 33. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, pp. 2–3. Nietzsche also has passages where he is much more encouraging of democracy, arguing that it will lead in the future to an ‘impossibility that the orchards of culture will again be destroyed overnight by savage and senseless mountain torrents.

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37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63

Notes Stone dikes and bulwarks against barbarians, against plagues, against physical and spiritual enslavement!’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, ‘Der Wanderer und sein Schatten’, §275, pp. 671–672. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §344, pp. 282–283. Ibid., §373, p. 335. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §24, p. 150. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §180, p. 203. This is, however, not to say that they would abandon the scientific spirit altogether. In one of his letters, Nietzsche wrote that ‘Europe is necessary for me because it is the seat of science on the earth’, cited in Laurence Lampert, ‘‘‘Peoples and Fatherlands”: Nietzsche’s Philosophical Politics’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 37 (Supplement) 1999, p. 44. For a reading that considers passive nihilism to be a form of incomplete nihilism see Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 56. Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, p. 37. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, p. 56. William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, p. 15. Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §23, p. 18. Ibid., §22–23, pp. 17–18. Ibid., §21, p. 17. Ibid., §64, p. 43. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §55, p. 67. Nietzsche, Will to Power, Preface, §4, p. 4. Ibid., §1, p. 7. Ibid., I, §36, p. 23. Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfaction of European High Culture, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p. 151. Ibid., p. 148. Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §22, p. 17. Ibid., Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, p. 37. In this sense it is interesting that it was Francis Bacon himself who once pointed out in relation to his revolutionary ideas, ‘I cannot be fairly asked to abide by the decision of a tribunal which is itself on trial’. See the Preface of Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, in Francis Bacon, Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, 14 vols, 1847–1874, New York: Garret Press, 1968. Cited in Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 40. Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §23, pp. 17–18. Ibid., §112, p. 69. Nietzsche, Gay Science, Preface §4, p. 37. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 2[101], p. 111. Ibid., vol. 13, 11[108], p. 51. Note trans. Karen Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth-Century Responses to Meaninglessness, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, p. 44.

Notes 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

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Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 2[129] p. 128. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, §27, p. 161. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 13, 11[119], p. 56. Nietzsche, Will to Power, Preface, §4, pp. 3–4. As Nietzsche noted in the Gay Science. ‘A dangerous resolve. – The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad’, §130, p. 185. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §343, p. 280. In 1886 Nietzsche thus also added a fifth book to The Gay Science. The first aphorism of Section V (§343) is written under the heading ‘The Meaning of Our Cheerfulness’ and notes how ‘[t]he greatest recent event – that “God is dead”, that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable – is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe’. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §377, p. 340. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II, §24, p. 96. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §343, p. 280. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Preface, §3, p. 6. Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1967, Preface ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, §7, p. 26. Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism, pp. 48–49. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 13, 9[164], p. 432. Cited in Nimrod Aloni, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Healing and Edifying Philosophy, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991, p. vii. A. J. Hoover, Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Thought, London: Praeger, 1994, p. 21. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, §13, p. 135. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Preface, §2, pp. 5–6. Jacques Darras, Beyond the Tunnel of History, London: Macmillan, 1990, p. 60.

6 Free thoughts 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vols 7–13 of the Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinaria, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, vol. 12, 10[34], p. 473. 2 As J. Peter Burgess has argued in this vein, ‘[c]ultural identity cannot recall a time when it wasn’t a question of cultural identity, when cultural identity was not in question, when some form of disequilibrium, dispersion, rupture was not present, sounding the alarm and the call to redefining, re-establishing the identity presumed lost or threatened. There was never not crisis.’ J. Peter Burgess, ‘European Borders: History Of Space/Space Of History’, www. ctheory.com/a-european_borders.html. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, London: Penguin, 1984, §476, p. 230. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1968, I, §28, p. 19.

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5 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 5[57], p. 206. 6 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967, Preface, 2, pp. 217–218. 7 Ibid. 8 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 110–111. 9 Nietzsche, Will to Power, IV, §1007, p. 521. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990, §13, p. 135. 11 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §225, p. 140. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974, §380, p. 342. 13 Ibid., §2, pp. 76–77. 14 William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, pp. 167–168. 15 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §4, p. 328. 16 Ibid., p. 327. 17 Ibid., ‘Zarathustra’, §6, p. 306. 18 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §13, p. 14. 19 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, vol. 12, 1[194], p. 54. 20 Ibid., 2[109], p. 114. 21 ‘Ihr Siegreichen, ihr Zeit-Überwinder, ihr Gesündesten, ihr Stärksten, ihr guten Europäer!’ Cited in Josef Nolte, Wir guten Europäer: Historischpolitische Versuche über uns selbst, Tübingen: Narr, 1991, p. 199. See also David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, The Good European Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 7. 22 Randall Havas, Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge, Ithaca, MY: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. xiv. 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1966, §62, p. 74. 24 Ibid., §22, p. 17. 25 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Preface, §2, pp. 217–218. 26 ‘Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme [in German Nihilist und Christ]], and do not merely rhyme.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990, §58, p. 194. 27 Ibid., §470, p. 262. 28 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am a Destiny’, §1, p. 326. 29 See Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Kommentar zu den Bänden 1–13, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988, p. 331. 30 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Preface, §4, p. 220. 31 Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut (eds), Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, trans. Robert De Loaiza, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 32 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Preface, §2, pp. 217–218. 33 Nietzsche in a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug on 25 October 1874. Cited in A.J. Hoover. Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Thought, London: Praeger, 1994, p. 18. 34 Nietzsche, Will to Power, I, §32, p. 22.

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35 Jan Patocka, ‘Does History Have a Meaning?,’ in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohak, Chicago: Open Court, 1996, p. 61. 36 Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Michael Gendre, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, p. xiii. 37 Haar also argues through an analysis of Nietzsche’s key themes of the will to power, nihilism, genealogy, the overman, and the eternal return, that Nietzsche does not fall prey to Heidegger’s accusation of remaining trapped in the latter’s conception of metaphysics as the identification of beings in their totality. This is especially true given that the ‘will to power’ cannot be reduced to an ‘identity’. Heidegger is unable, or unwilling, to see the moments of Nietzsche’s thought that evade his conception of metaphysics. Haar is thus also correct to suggest that it is not convincing for Heidegger to argue that the ‘essence’ of metaphysics emerges unshaken by Nietzsche’s approach. See Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Derrida has similarly pointed out that ‘Heidegger regarding Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigour as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last “Platonist”. One could do the same for Heidegger himself. . . . And today no exercise is more widespread.’ Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 281–282. 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1961, III, ‘Of the Three Evil Things’, §1, trans. Bonnie Honig, ‘Nietzsche and the Recovery of Responsibility’, in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 42. 39 Nietzsche in a letter to Malwida von Meysenburg from October 1874, cited in Hoover, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 18. 40 John Rajchman has argued that ‘Nietzsche is the philosopher who separates the problem of freedom from the problem of acquiring the truth about ourselves, who would free us from the tyrannies of such truths through an analysis of their histories. He separates our freedom from the knowledge of our nature.’ Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 121.

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Index

163

Index

Adenauer, Konrad 71 Allott, Philip 78 Anderson, Benedict 49–50 anti-Semitism 61, 67 Armstrong, John 133n47 atheism 18–19, 24 authority, superhuman 51–2 autonomy: Europeanization 117; freedom 103; good Europeans 120 d’Azeglio, Massimo 79 Bacon, Francis 142n58 Bayreuth 61 Beethoven, Ludwig van 68 Behler, Ernst 13 Berlin, Isaiah 44 Berlin Wall 4 Bismarck, Prince Otto 46, 59 Boyle, Robert 18 Brandes, Georg 67 Brenner, Michael 2 Burgess, J. Peter 143n2 business: institutions 77; market expansion 78 Chamberlain, Lesley 68 cheerfulness: death of God 104; good Europeans 104; pessimism 105–6 Christian-Platonic tradition: death of God 101; Europe 73, 99; European culture 110; life-denying 95–6, 103, 119–20; meaning 52, 62; slave morality 76; truth 91–2; will to truth 101–2 Christian Democratic parties 71

Christianity: death of God 34, 53, 71; Europe 71, 72; European culture 22; good Europeans 71; Middle Ages 112; nationalism 85; passive nihilism 98–9; Platonic Forms 35; politics 72–3; Pope 72; science 27, 28–9; secularization 23; slave morality 95; suffering 49; truth 27, 28, 32, 33; will to truth 32–3, 35–6, 42, 43 citizenship 5, 6 classical studies 140n2 co-existence 75 Cold War 41, 84–5, 111 common enterprise 81–2, 98, 101 community 5–6, 84–5 conscience 75, 91 Copernicus, Nicolaus 24–5, 49 crisis: Europe 10–11, 100, 105, 112–13; European Union 82; of meaning 105 Critchley, Simon 36 crossbreeding 67 cultural heritage: Europe 3–5, 42, 43, 68; politics 68–9 cultural reconstruction 71 currency 85 Dann, Otto 131–2n14 Danto, Arthur 92, 141n12 Darwin, Charles 18 De Gasperi, Alcide 71 Delanty, Gerard 7 Delors, Jacques 3 democracy 141–2n36

164

Index

demos/telos 6 Derrida, Jacques 11, 145n37 Descartes, René 18 Deutsch, Karl W. 85 economic optimism 79 education 119 elites 55 Enlightenment project 38, 118 Eurobarometer 73, 83 Eurocentrism 22, 25 Europe 4; Christian-Platonic culture 73, 99; Christianity 71, 72; citizenship 5, 6; Cold War 41; crisis 10–11, 100, 105, 112–13; cultural heritage 3–5, 42, 43, 68; cultural reconstruction 71; death of God 67; demos 6; Germany 66; good Europeans 69, 120–1; idea of 1, 89, 112, 114–15, 119; idealism 77, 91; identity 5, 7, 8, 9–10, 21, 84, 86, 87, 126n54; league of nations 69; meaning 109–11, 116, 120; meaninglessness 20, 45–6, 90; modern state 55–6; modernity 110; nationalism 45, 66, 67–8; nihilism 17, 22, 28, 34–8, 62–3, 76–7, 79–80, 88, 90, 93, 103–4, 120; particularism 58; Pope 72; postChristian 118; religion 71; soul of xiv, 109; spiritual vitality 8–11, 17, 98, 107; telos 6, 96; unification 5–6, 7, 22–3, 80; violence 6–7; will to truth 89; see also good Europeans Europe, Eastern 3–5, 70 European anthem 85 European City of Culture 85 European Commission 3 European culture: atheism 24; Christian-Platonic tradition 110; Christianity 22; meaninglessness 35; nihilism 11, 12–13; pessimism 52, 116–17; post-Platonic 36; secularization 110–11; will to truth 101, 116 European flag 85 European Monetary Union 7

European Union 1, 2–3, 79; common enterprise 81–2, 98; crisis 82; currency 85; Eastern Europe 3–5, 70; expansion 70; founding fathers 71, 80–1; freedom 121; functional approach 81–2, 83, 87; good Europeans 70, 73, 79; idea of 98; incomplete nihilism 86; institutions 2, 77, 81; integration 3, 76–7, 78, 81, 83; loyalties 85; meaninglessness 76; nationalism 65; peace and unity 73, 75; as redemption 74–5; revaluation 73; slave morality 75; symbols 85; will to truth 69, 84 Europeanists: cultural space 111; good Europeans 118; integration 3; Maastricht Treaty 2, 3; nationalism 7, 44, 86–7; politics 75 Europeanization 118–19; autonomy 117; spiritual vitality 117 Eurovision Song Contest 85 evolutionary theory 18 Fichte, Johann 39 Finlayson, Alan 51 Forms, Platonic 34–5 founding fathers, European Union 71, 80–1 free spirits 91, 96, 105, 106, 140n5 freed spirit 114–15 freedom: autonomy 103; European Union 121; existential 115–16; good Europeans 90, 118–19; intellectual 117–18; truth 103, 145n40 freedom of will 90–1 functional approach: European Union 81–2, 83, 87; good Europeans 81, 82, 83–4 Galileo Galilei 18 Garton Ash, Timothy 6 Gellner, Ernest 51, 52, 78 Gemeinschaft (community) 5 geopolitics 4 Germany: anti-Semitism 61; Berlin Wall 4; Europe 66; Geist/Reich

Index 59–60, 61; nationalism 59–61; unification 4; Wagner 60–1 Gesellschaft (society) 5, 84 globalization 121 God, death of 19–24; cheerfulness 104; Christian-Platonic tradition 101; Christianity 34, 53, 71; Europe 67; good Europeans 70, 100, 113; incomplete nihilism 63; madman 20–1, 23–4, 99–100; meaninglessness 11, 22, 26, 110–11; modernity 110; nationalism 46; nihilism 93–4; peace and unity 75; pessimism 102; science 30, 34; superhuman authority 51–2; will to truth 33, 89, 90; see also secularization God/truth 30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 68 good Europeans concept 140n1; active nihilism 100–5; autonomy 120; cheerfulness 104; Christianity 71; as counter-movement 103; death of God 70, 100, 113; Europe 69, 120–1; European Union 70, 73, 79; Europeanists 118; free spirits 91, 96, 105, 106, 140n5; freedom 90, 118–19; functional approach 81, 82, 83–4; Hoffmann 113; incomplete nihilism 44, 74, 112; last men 96; meaning 115; meaninglessness 84; nationalism 14–15, 44, 83; nationalizers 87; Nietzsche xiv, 11, 15, 17, 39, 41–2; nihilism 42–4; politics 87–8; secularization 89; supra-national perspective 65; transvaluation of values 113–14; will to truth 87 Haar, Michel 43, 145n37 Haas, Ernst 80, 85 van Ham, Peter 3 Hansen, Lene 82–3 Havel, Vaclav 4–5 Hayes, Carlton 47 Hegel, G. W. F. 18 Heidegger, Martin 13, 35, 43 Heine, Heinrich 68

165

Heller, Agnes 9–10, 97 Hoffmann, Stanley: good Europeans 113; idea of Europe 89, 112; integration/common enterprise 81, 98, 101; meaning 8–9, 86, 119; spiritual vitality 9, 97, 116 Hungarian News Agency 4 ideal worlds 116 idealism 77, 91 ideals, shared 84–5 identity 3; collective 85; in crisis 106; cultural 143n2; European 5, 7, 8, 9–10, 21, 84, 86, 87, 126n54; nationalism 53, 83; post-religious 19 ideologies of order 48–9 immanence/transcendence 52, 53 incomplete nihilism: death of God 63; European Union 86; good Europeans 44, 74, 112; Heidegger 43; nationalism 54, 58, 65, 70, 83, 85; secularization 42–4 institutions: business 77; European Union 2, 77, 81 integration: European Union 3, 76–7, 78, 81, 83; Europeanists 3; regional 85 intellectuals: Eastern Europe 3–5; freedom 117–18 interdependence 67 international capital 56 Italy 79 Jacobi, Friedrich 39 Jaspers, Karl 131n10 Juergensmeyer, Mark 48–9, 50 Kaufmann, Walter 113 Kohl, Helmut 7 Kohn, Hans 47 Kolakowski, Leszek 18 Kundera, Milan 3–4 Laïdi, Zaki 10, 84, 97, 126n60 last men concept 94–5, 96 league of nations 69 life-denying aspects 95–6, 103, 119–20

166

Index

Llobera, Joseph 48, 50 loyalties 85 Lützeler, Paul Michael 139n87 Maastricht Treaty 2, 3 madman/death of God 20–1, 23–4, 99–100 Mann, Golo 59 Mann, Heinrich 12 Mann, Thomas 12 market expansion 78 martyrdom 48–9 Marxism 50 materialism 56–7 Mayer, J. P. 14 meaning: Christian-Platonic tradition 52, 62; crisis of 105; Europe 109–11, 116, 120; good Europeans 115; Hoffmann 8–9, 86, 119; Patocka 125–6n52; secularization 79, 109–11 meaninglessness: death of God 11, 22, 26, 110–11; Europe 20, 45–6, 90; European culture 35; European Union 76; good Europeans 84; nihilism 36; pessimism 38; science 24–6; secularization 37 men of conscience 75 metaphysics 119–20 Middle Ages 112 Milward, Alan 77 Mitrany, David 80 Mitterrand, François 2 modern state 55–6; see also nation state modernity 12, 13, 110 Monnet, Jean 5, 8; ‘A Ferment of Change’ 85–6 Nairn, Tom 50 Napoleon Bonaparte 68, 69 nationalism: Christianity 85; as cultural artefact 49; death of God 46; Europe 45, 66, 67–8; European Union 65; Europeanists 7, 44, 86–7; Germany 59–61; good Europeans 14–15, 44, 83; identity 53, 83; immanence 52, 53; incomplete nihilism 54, 58, 65, 70,

83, 85; international capital 56; Marxism 50; materialism 56–7; modern 53, 61, 131–2n14, 133n47; nihilism 15, 45, 50–9, 54–9; politics 57–8, 75; post-Revolutionary 47; psychological accounts 51; racism 67; religion 47–50; secularization 49, 51; self-criticism 46; self-interest 55, 62; structuralism 50–1, 52–3; theories of 61–2; violence 48–9; Wagner 47; will to truth 53 nationalizers 87 nation-building 85 nation-state 77, 82; see also modern state Newton, Sir Isaac 18 Nietzsche, Friedrich 67; Antichrist 94; autobiography 59, 60, 113; Beyond Good and Evil 53, 60, 68, 88, 94, 95, 98; ‘Critique of the worship of fatherlands’ 57–8; Daybreak 75; death of God 19–24; The Gay Science 12, 13, 20, 23, 53–4, 58, 66, 71, 91, 96, 99–100, 113–14; On the Genealogy of Morals 25, 27, 32, 52, 56, 74, 92; good Europeans xiv, 11, 15, 17, 39, 41–2; Human, All Too Human 47, 53, 56, 67, 106; nihilism 15, 20, 26, 38, 39, 92–3; notes 14; Thus Spoke Zarathustra 34, 55, 66, 94, 114, 117, 120; Twilight of the Idols 23, 57, 60, 74, 91, 113; Untimely Meditations 59–60; The Will to Power 93 nihilism: active 100–5; complete 90–7; Danto 141n12; death of God 93–4; Europe 17, 22, 28, 34–8, 62–3, 76–7, 79–80, 88, 90, 93, 103–4, 120; European culture 11, 12–13; gift/burden 104–5; good Europeans 42–4; Jacobi 39; labyrinth of future 46–7; meaninglessness 36; nationalism 15, 45, 50–9, 54–9; Nietzsche 15, 20, 26, 38, 39, 92–3; passive 97–100; philosophic 99; science 24–5; secularization 54; values 87; see also incomplete nihilism

Index non-violence 75 Novalis 23; Christianity or Europe 71 Nussbaum, Martha 69 optimism, economic 79 Owen, David 30 Parkes, Graham 59 particularism 58 Patocka, Jan 119, 125–6n52 patriotism 46 peace and unity 73, 74, 75 pessimism: cheerfulness 105–6; death of God 102; European culture 52, 116–17; meaninglessness 38; Schopenhauer 97 Pippin, Robert 10–11, 97 Plato: city 1; Forms 34–5; Syracuse 60–1; will to truth 42, 43 politics: Christianity 72–3; cultural heritage 68–9; elites 55; Europeanists 75; good Europeans 87–8; nationalism 57–8, 75 Pope 72 postmodernism 12, 13 Prodi, Romano xiv, 3 racism 66, 67 Rajchman, John 145n40 regional integration theory 85 Reich 59 religion 47–50, 71; see also Christianity ressentiment 74 revaluation 73, 113 Rome, Treaty of 5 de Rougement, Denis 8 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy 81 Salaquarda, Jörg 12 scepticism 112 Schacht, Richard 92, 94 Scheler, Max 71 Schelling, F. W. J. von 18 Schmidtke, Oliver 6 Schopenhauer, Arthur 18, 68, 97 Schrift, Alan 97–8

167

Schuman, Robert 5–6, 71 Schuman Declaration 6–7 science: Christianity 26–7, 28–9; death of God 30, 34; meaninglessness 24–6; nihilism 24–5; truth 26–7, 28, 29, 30–1; Weber 30–1; will to truth 36 secularization: atheism 18–19; Christianity 23; enlightenment 38; European culture 20, 21, 109, 110–11; good Europeans 89; incomplete nihilism 42–4; meaning 79, 109–11; meaninglessness 37; nationalism 49, 51; nihilism 54; spiritual vitality 116–17; will to truth 45 self-criticism 46 self-interest 55, 62 self-questioning 42 Seton-Watson, Hugh 72 slave morality: Christian-Platonic culture 76; Christianity 95; European Union 75; suffering 78–9 Smith, Anthony 26 society 84 Sorokin, Pitirim 22–3 spirit/freedom of will 90–1 spiritual vitality: Europe 8–11, 17, 98, 107; Europeanization 117; Hoffmann 9, 97, 116; secularization 116–17 Staten, Henry 53 Stendhal 68 structuralism 50–1, 52–3 suffering 49, 75, 78–9 superhuman authority 51–2 supra-national perspective 65 Swiss canons 69 telos 6, 96 Toennies, Ferdinand 5 Toole, David 100–1 Toynbee, Arnold 47–8 Trans-European Policy Studies Association 3 transcendence/immanence 52, 53 transvaluation of values 106, 113–14 Treitschke, Heinrich von 60

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truth: Christian-Platonic culture 91–2; Christianity 27, 28, 32, 33; freedom 103, 145n40; God 30; science 26–7, 28, 29, 30–1; see also will to truth unification: Europe 5–6, 7, 22–3, 80; Germany 4; Italy 79; see also peace and unity values 73, 87, 106, 113–14 Vandamme, Jacques 3 Verhofstadt, Guy 3 violence 6–7, 48–9 Wagner, Richard 47, 60–1, 68 Wallace, William 77–8 weakness 74; see also slave morality

Weber, Max 30–1 Weiler, Joseph 2, 71 will to truth 31–3; Christian-Platonic tradition 101–2; Christianity 32–3, 35–6, 42, 43; death of God 33, 89, 90; Europe 89; European culture 101, 116; European Union 69, 84; good Europeans 87; nationalism 53; peace and unity 74; Plato 42, 43; scepticism 112; science 36; secularization 45; self-questioning 42 Williams, Michael C. 82–3 world wars 7, 71, 77, 111 Yugoslavia, former 7 Zielonka, Jan 79