German Thought in America

Video version of the essay below.

What the Right needs to thrive is increasingly a matter of discussion. Art, literature, money, power, leadership — there can’t be a future for the movement without them. But what about philosophy? Its “effects” are not immediate, and even wanting it to be effectual seems counter to its nature: Heidegger called philosophy “useless, though sovereign, knowledge.” True, philosophy teaches us something about ethics and therefore about the practical art of living. It orders our soul and provides us with the specific benefits that accompany intelligent order. And if we call “philosophers” those we educate us about desire, conflict, and competition - well, what can be more practical than that? Desire is the root of action, after all. But what about metaphysics and ontology? Who could care about that dimension of philosophical activity? What hinges on whether we have or lack truth about the whole? Isn’t that kind of philosophizing merely a distraction from the political tasks proper?

The political relevance of philosophical ontology is an old affair. We have the figure of the Philosopher King in Plato’s Republic and Plato’s own attempts at philosophical kingship in Syracuse, not to mention dialogues on philosophy and tyranny, philosophy and law, philosophy and the madness of crowds. Popper condemned Plato as an enemy of the open society, reminding us that philosophers are implicated in the realm of the political, with its friend-enemy distinction, even when they are primarily concerned with metaphysics: a good liberal today should be suspicious of metaphysicians (imagine a Washington Post Op-Ed: “Parents, are your children showing an interest in metaphysics? Why that might mean they’re being radicalized). We see a kinship between politics and philosophy on the radical left, too: they are partly inspired — whether directly or not doesn’t matter — by the theoretical writings of French Nietzscheans and Heideggerians about topics like “the metaphysics of presence” and other related jargon. They reject political Platonism: “Plato's ideas” for them are ineradicable reminders of an ever-present fascist threat to freedom and democracy. Plato institutes rank, order, hierarchy, exclusion, and supremacy. No movement committed to equality, diversity, inclusion, and envy can tolerate that. Anti-fascism is anti-Platonism.

So politics is somehow implicated in ontology and metaphysics, not only in ethics and morality, at least in the sense that egalitarian ethics often implies war on inegalitarian metaphysics. If it’s clear enough how that looks on the Left, what will be the place of philosophy on the Right? Take the simplest case: the defence of eternity, first principles, fundamental values, and the pillars of the Western tradition imply at least the task of honouring the best known figures from the canon: Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, enough to bring both Athens and Jerusalem into view. Thus, for example, in his book The Great Awakening vs. The Great Reset, Dugin, referring to the case of American anti-globalists, writes that, “We need to liberate the West. We need to liberate Plato, Aristotle, Graeco-Roman antiquity. We need to restore the dignity of the Christian pre-modern societies - political thought, cultural values, philosophies, metaphysics.” Today’s West, he argues, has been colonized by political modernity, which wages war against the true West in the name of cancel culture and global liberalism (the Great Reset). The great awakening must liberate the traditional canon from cancel culture. 

But beyond the liberation of the great philosophers from the civilization-destroying project of the great reset, fundamental questions remain. Who are we to take as our guide when philosophers disagree about basic issues? And how are we to interpret our past in the first place? There is no “view from nowhere” on the philosophical tradition, and our desire to let it live shouldn’t devolve into treating it as cultural decoration. We need somewhere to stand; who will be our ground? Once we have opened the door to fundamental disputes, who will be our fighter? What is the Right philosophy? 

In the last few years, there has been something like a resurgence of interest in Nietzsche on the right, probably most closely associated with online circles that champion life, vitalism, strength, power, Roman virtue, and master morality, borrowing rousing images from Nietzsche to stir the youth to excellence, heroism, and daring. This tendency has, however, been criticized by orthodox or classical American liberal conservatives, who believe that “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” are “two-bit imposters” unschooled in the high-minded political wisdom of America’s founders.  In his attempt to “revivify the self-evident truths of 1776 as living principles for 21st-century America,” C. Bradley Thompson thus defends America’s founding principles as “objectively, absolutely, permanently, and universally true,” presenting the “metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political principles employed by America’s revolutionary founders when they created the United States.” We again see that not only the Right’s war on the Left but even the classical liberal’s war on the Right requires that “metaphysical” principles are discussed. 

If Thompson is correct, a Nietzscheanized Right will be done with the natural right principles of the American founding. This was the concern that Leo Strauss addressed when at the start of Natural Right and History he asked whether the American nation still “[cherishes] the faith in which it was conceived and raised.” America defeated Germany on the battlefield and “as it were, annihilated [it] as a political being,” and yet German thought “deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on [the Americans] the yoke of its own thought.” To paraphrase, America loses its “revolutionary mind” when it lets “German thoughts” into its head, as it does when it turns to Nietzsche. The risk is real. Previously, German thought had predominated on the American left. Now it has come to the American right.

An old adage says that “the world is won by those who let it go.” Must America let go of its revolutionary mind in order to win back the American world? Are “German thoughts” the key to the American future? It’s an uncomfortable and complex problem to consider, but there’s no avoiding it. And we can’t do much better than to take three “German thinkers” as our guides through the question: Strauss, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. 

If Strauss, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all agreed that “Americanism” had been defeated on the intellectual plane by “German thoughts,” then Thompson’s strategy of recourse to “metaphysical” principles is a fool’s errands: the metaphysical war has been won, and not in America’s favour. But there is another strategy, more characteristic of anti-metaphysical American pragmatism (also inspired partly by Nietzsche), which can also have its place on the Right. Here, what matters is what works. If “metaphysical truths” culminate in an undesirable political order, to hell with them: it does not follow that society must become an egalitarian, social justice smorgasbord of grievance airings and rectifications. We tend to think of deconstruction as a leftist phenomenon. But there can be a deconstructive Right. It wouldn’t care about natures, essences, and truths in themselves so much as it would care about the practical effect of thinking and talking in terms of natures, essences, and truths. America can be defended as the land of free-to-interpret-themselves-effectively, unburdened by either German or American metaphysics, and with a healthy disgust for degenerate self-interpretation.

Still, it is worth at least considering the philosophical issues on their own terms. These three thinkers are the ones to help us do it. Strauss said that between the ages of 22-30 he “believed literally every word I understood” of Nietzsche. Heidegger saw in Nietzsche the culmination of the entire history of Western philosophy as it stood at the threshold of another beginning. Strauss aimed to effect a return to “Platonic political philosophy” and used his unprepossessing, unparalleled talents as an expositor of moderation to remind us of Socratic wisdom. Nietzsche thought he was overcoming Platonism and Christian Platonism for the people, and although he saw in Socrates “the turning-point, the vortex of world history,” he faulted him for destroying the Dionysian spirit of tragedy. Heidegger argued that Nietzsche was still dependent on Plato in merely inverting or reversing him — against Christ, the anti-Christ —  but without ever getting outside the Platonic metaphysics that has characterized philosophy until now; Nietzsche, for Heidegger, still characterizes being (life, will to power, eternal return) in terms of beings, whereas Heidegger invited all of us to “leap” into question of being directly, not as a way to answer the question “what are beings”? And yet, there is a Dionysianism common to both Nietzsche (as Lampert has pointed out) and Heidegger (as Dugin has shown): Heidegger speaks of the drunk god. 

It gets more complicated. There’s a Straussian interpretation of Nietzsche that brings him closer to Plato than you’d expect. And there are speeches in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that bring him closer to Heidegger than you’d imagine. It’s a dizzying, disorienting affair: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Socrates…around and around we must go until we find our footing. Clearly, something is at stake. Straussian politics, Nietzschean politics, and Heideggerian politics are distinct. Straussianism places a greater emphasis on moderation than the others. I don’t think you will find a more beautiful defence, or example, of wise moderation than in Strauss’s writings. Nietzschean politics, by contrast, go off with a bang; whoever is not frightened by the heat and light is attracted by it. We have barely begun to consider what Heideggerian politics might be. Heidegger’s Nazism kept that door closed. Dugin’s Heideggerianism opened an adjacent one — that many would prefer stayed shut. 

Will Americans learn to speak with Heidegger of being, beings, beyng, sheltering, concealing, and Da-Sein? Don’t hold your breath. A Nietzschean feast of vitality and power is more digestible for a the American appetite. Maybe it’s no surprise. Nietzsche considered diet’s effect on character and temperament often, writing, for instance, that the rice-eating habits of vegetarians “impels to the use of opium and narcotics.” "Bad cooks,” he said, “- and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen - have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.” If we can learn to stomach Nietzsche, perhaps it is because he taught us how to stomach well at all. But “man shall not live by bread alone” and Heidegger is a better guide to the Word and the problem of Speaking Being than Nietzsche, however much Nietzsche also understood. We shouldn’t decide too hastily the question which German to follow. 

Let’s table a proposal. 

The Right has this task. First, to recognize that philosophy matters, not as a cultural ornament but as the pulse that kills when it stops. Second, to unearth a coherent account of the philosophical tradition from the rubbish heap piled upon it by civilization-destroyers, tarantulas of vengeance, “specialists without spirit and voluptuaries without heart,” not merely to pick and choose à la carte whatever flatters an existing inclination. Third, to find their footing somewhere in or in relation to the newly recovered philosophical landscape. Fourth, to take seriously the claims of other worthwhile philosophical alternatives, assessing their charms and dangers, like spies in the land of milk and honey. Fifth, to do creative, inspired work generating ideas, elaborating visions, and shaping the future on the basis of intelligent engagement with the most profound thinkers, never forgetting the muse. Sixth, not isolating themselves from other workers and warriors: no flight from the earth. Seventh, to again make possible a way of being-in-the-world that preserves the dignity, decency, and diligence of a human life lived well, using all that we know and have available to us. To these ends, the Philosophical Right must whirl like a dervish around “Strauss, Nietzsche, and Heidegger” until we find our centre.