"American Idol: On Nietzsche in America"...book review

"American Idol: On Nietzsche in America"

by

Ross Posnock

November 1st, 2011

The Nation

“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.” Ralph Waldo Emerson published these words of warning in 1841, and they can be read as both self-description and prophecy. Self-description because they occur in the essay “Circles,” one of the most dazzling bursts of American prose ever written, a hymn to a fact exhilarating and terrifying—that “nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.” The risk of conflagration erupts in the rhythm of Emerson’s thought and the pulse of his writing, evoking a world of “sliding” surfaces, of “whims” and “experiment,” of “surprises” and “abandonment,” where “permanence is but a word of degrees,” the essay slowing down just long enough to make a culminating statement that offers no anchorage: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Emerson had already tailored his actions to his words, having resigned from the ministry a few years earlier and chosen a life of unsettlement as a freelance lecturer and writer.

His warning to beware when “God lets loose a thinker” was borne out thirty-three years later, when a 30-year-old German academic quoted it in his autobiographical essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” to inspire his own act of liberation from settled routine. Friedrich Nietzsche would soon leave his Basel professorship in philology for the wanderings of a free spirit, making philosophy a way of life, as it had been for the ancients and the sage of Concord. Nietzsche had been reading and revering Emerson (in translation) since 1862, finding his words so intimate and penetrating that he couldn’t praise them: they are “too close to me,” he confessed. Born from this union—one of the most significant acts of transatlantic cross-fertilization in Western intellectual history—was “the enfant terrible of modernism,” the “epitome” of its unsettling spirit, to borrow the words of an early commentator. There was no turning back: “Where once the moral life was couched in terms of foundations, now, ‘after Nietzsche,’ thinkers and writers imagined it as life on the open sea.” “Beware,” Emerson had warned.

American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s lively history of the reception of Nietzsche’s ideas in the United States, from which I have drawn the preceding quotation about the moral life, wisely devotes its prologue to Emerson’s impact on the philosopher: “Nietzsche used Emerson not to get closer to him but to get closer to himself. For Nietzsche, Emerson provided an image of the philosopher willing to go it alone without inherited faith, without institutional affiliation, without rock or refuge for his truth claims.” These themes, encompassing Nietzsche’s persona and ideas, figure prominently in American Nietzsche. The facts of the philosopher’s lonely nomadic life—his books largely ignored upon publication, his genius burdened by ceaseless physical pain and eventually insanity—were, for most readers, inseparable from the scandalous self-described “immoralist” with his emphatically modern “philosophy of the future,” as he called his thinking. And this fusion of life and work made him, especially in the eyes of Greenwich Village radicals in the twentieth century’s opening decades, a prophet and martyr embodying what Ratner-Rosenhagen calls a “cautionary tale about the perilous course of the intellectual in the democratic era.”

Nietzsche paid a heavy price for daring to strip away the comforting props of Victorian piety, bringing readers face to face with the imperative “to become what you are.” He launched his own version of Emerson’s project, which begins with the recognition that man is but “a half-man,” a “dwarf of himself.” The time was ripe: how thrilling it must have been for Americans long shackled to the “agonized conscience” of Puritan rectitude, the “yoke” of the genteel, in George Santayana’s phrasing. Cease hiding behind conformity and habit and laziness, Emerson and Nietzsche implore; the former invites “every man to expand to the full circle of the universe,” while the latter will eventually call for the overcoming of the human, summoning what he will name the “overman.” Better known as the notorious Übermensch, this figure would be appropriated and distorted to help sponsor German imperialist aggression during World War I and then the Nazis’ genocidal onslaught. How Nietzsche’s reputation managed to survive both disasters is among the stories Ratner-Rosenhagen tells. In the postwar era, it was above all the labors of Walter Kaufmann, as translator and interpreter, who rescued Nietzsche from the taint of totalitarianism, locating him in the ambit of the Enlightenment tradition and turning him into a rugged individualist with immediate appeal to an American readership already swooning over French existentialism. Ratner-Rosenhagen makes a persuasive case for Kaufmann’s pivotal importance.

* * *

Nietzsche-mania erupted in Europe a decade before the philosopher’s death in 1900, spreading throughout the continent and on to Russia, and reaching the United States in the new century’s first decade. A question raised almost at once (and periodically revived) was why Nietzsche was proving so popular here: “What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?” Ratner-Rosenhagen wonders. Nietzsche became the exemplar for those seeking, in Emerson’s words, “not instruction, but provocation”; not intellectual doctrine but the visceral sense of liberation in hearing the inadmissible given voice. Radical leftists—anarchists, socialists and feminists—were early enthusiasts, including Emma Goldman, Randolph Bourne and the Harlem socialist Hubert Harrison, who found in Nietzsche’s contempt for religion and democracy a way to rouse the masses from obedience to Christian ideals of submission and democratic fictions of a free market. But interest was hardly limited to a bohemian coterie of freethinkers. One of the most distinctive aspects of the Nietzsche rage, and one of the striking findings of American Nietzsche, is the diversity of the philosopher’s readership, perhaps reflecting “the sheer range of Nietzschean liberation,” which attacked bourgeois pieties incubated in the home, the university, the church and the public square. Ratner-Rosenhagen writes that “over the course of the century, Progressives and anarchists, Christians and atheists, provincials and cosmopolitans, hawks and doves, academic scholars and armchair philosophers discovered in Nietzsche a thinker to think with.” The variety produces some amusing, if inadvertent, juxtapositions, as Lionel Trilling and Huey Newton are discussed alongside Hugh Hefner (who advised the postwar urban sophisticate to supply a dash of Nietzsche, along with Picasso and jazz, as a conversation starter) and Hitler (who bestowed upon Mussolini a specially bound complete edition of Nietzsche’s work for his sixtieth birthday).

Who got Nietzsche right? What were legitimate and illegitimate uses of his ideas? On one level, the encouragement to be bold that’s central to his appeal can be taken as justification for an impudent self-sovereignty that’s impossible to tame. By celebrating the attractions of becoming an untrammeled “free spirit,” Nietzsche played to a danger already inherent in romantic individualist societies such as our own. Recall Leopold and Loeb, two rich young self-styled Übermenschen of 1920s Chicago who kidnapped and murdered a boy. Their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, described them as victims of Nietzsche’s ideas! Beneath his cynical opportunism, Darrow had a point, if not an exculpatory argument. On another level, the uses made of Nietzsche by German nationalists, Nazis and Italian Fascists were distortions, his ideas and words ripped from their contexts and cobbled together to rationalize murderous ideology. In fact, Nietzsche was a fierce foe of anti-Semitism and nationalism.

As a historian of reception whose aim is to “listen to” rather than “adjudicate” claims about Nietzsche, Ratner-Rosenhagen implicitly finds the question of the legitimacy of someone’s grasp of Nietzsche’s ideas to be beside the point. Of the Übermensch she asks rhetorically, Was it “an ally or an antagonist in the campaign to overcome atomistic individualism in American public life?” It depended on whom you asked. The answer was “ally” to the socialists Jack London and Max Eastman, and to George Bernard Shaw (whose examination of the Übermensch, Man and Superman, played in New York in 1905). Yet to H.L. Mencken, the Übermensch was a “Dionysian aristocrat” of, in his words, “absolute and utter individualism.” Perhaps the most interesting answer was from the “most thoroughgoing Nietzschean theologian” of the early twentieth century, the remarkable George Burman Foster, a Baptist minister and University of Chicago professor, whom Ratner-Rosenhagen usefully recovers. She notes that for Foster, Nietzsche “had shown that modern man should not try to deny his messianic urges, but instead become an Ubermensch worthy of them.” Foster argued that despite the philosopher’s hatred of Christianity, Jesus and Nietzsche would have been friends, for Jesus too was a “revaluator of values” and “lived dangerously.” In Foster’s “functionalist” view, Nietzsche had helped him realize that Christianity had to be reinvented for the new century, its absoluteness and otherworldliness irreconcilable in a world “where the fixed had yielded to flux.” Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that for Foster, Nietzsche is “a saviour who teaches man to find the saviour in himself.” And “like so many other early twentieth-century liberal Protestants,” Foster “enlisted Nietzsche to come to terms with what his own Christianity meant to him.”

While Mencken, Bourne, Goldman and London are well-known early Nietzsche enthusiasts, each of whom Ratner-Rosenhagen carefully discusses, many unsung ordinary Americans also expressed devotion to the philosopher. Their passions are embodied in a trove of some seventy letters sent to the Nietzsche Archive in Germany, founded by the philosopher’s Nazi-sympathizing sister, Elisabeth, and which Ratner-Rosenhagen uses to great effect. In these letters from immigrants and the native born, “all the brows are represented” and all political persuasions. The letters are mainly worshipful, intimate confessions of the philosopher’s profound influence on his readers, and they frequently include requests for a relic of their saintly sufferer. Perhaps the most poignant letter is from Helene Bachmuller of Dayton, Ohio, who explained that Nietzsche inspired her to look beyond the immediate dreariness of her “trivial,” “ugly” and “commonplace” world; and she vowed to “hold on to” her “hunger”: “If I never manage to have a soul, at any rate I will remain, by hook or crook, aware of it and I will desire one all my life, I will not accept substitutes.”

* * *

With vigor and intelligence American Nietzsche covers a great deal of ground—more than a century of response to the philosopher, from music critic James Huneker and philosopher Josiah Royce to feminist writers Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. The book concludes with a consideration of how three influential thinkers—Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell—relied on Nietzsche as a way to recover “expressions of antifoundationalism on American native grounds.” Reading Nietzsche brought Bloom and Cavell back to Emerson, and helped Rorty reclaim the pragmatists William James and John Dewey. In each case, Nietzsche was the indispensable lens through which differences were clarified and understanding sharpened. Two terms are basic to Ratner-Rosenhagen’s discussion here. One is foundationalism, which means that for beliefs to be certain they must be underwritten by what Descartes called a “divine guarantee” independent of strictly human perception. The other term, antifoundationalism, means that all beliefs are in principle revisable, that none can have the absolute certainty required by Descartes. “Emersonian antifoundationalism,” Ratner-Rosenhagen writes, “is not a theory, it is a way of thinking and living in a world without foundations.” And she describes “thinking about thinking without foundations” as the principal activity of Emerson and Nietzsche, and of Cavell in his imagining of their dialogues. In the final two pages of the concluding chapter, each term appears no fewer than ten times.

At this point the limits of reception history become hard to ignore. They might be traced to Ratner-Rosenhagen’s distinction between listening and adjudicating. She is a superb listener, but a consequence of her withholding judgment is that Nietzsche’s ideas—and Emerson’s, for that matter—tend to be rendered in broad, formulaic strokes, the principal one being the antithesis of foundationalism and antifoundationalism. But there is a larger problem. From the outset of the book antifoundationalism is ubiquitous but only hurriedly defined—“the denial of universal truth”—and never reflected upon critically. This is especially unfortunate given that the book’s protagonists reflect upon it incessantly. American Nietzsche also seems to misunderstand the nature of the antifoundationalist claim, which, as the literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish rightly noted years ago, is a “thesis about how foundations emerge” and refutes the metaphysical assumption that “foundations do not emerge but simply are, anchoring the universe and thought from a point above history and culture.” In seeming to literalize the metaphorical, Ratner-Rosenhagen would have us believe that we can function in a world of constant flux, without foundations. But there is a basic logical problem here that Emerson identifies in “Circles”: “Yet this incessant movement and progression, which all things partake, could never become sensible to us, but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. While the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.”

Logically, we need a foundational principle to grasp the reality of “incessant movement.” Experientially, we always live with foundations, with truths and certainties, as Nietzsche but also Emerson and William James teach us. What counts is how we regard them. These thinkers regard them not as metaphysical but as agreed upon and revisable; above all, they are indispensable to the conduct of ordinary life. “Our experience meanwhile is all shot through with regularities,” James remarks in Pragmatism, where he describes our “tramp and vagrant world, adrift in space.” And he shows that “we let our notions pass for true without attempting to verify. ” In the opening of “Circles” Emerson looks at technological progress as a parade of invented foundations, all of them temporary. Just as there is “no end in nature, but every end is a beginning,” we observe in human history that “new arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gun powder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam by electricity.” We can update his list. So there are foundations aplenty; the mistake is to revere them as God-given and here to stay. “Permanence is a word of degrees.”

Nietzsche, as a number of philosophers have argued, retreated from the radical attack on truth in his early essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” (“truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions”), which was a key text for postmodern Nietzscheans like Paul de Man. As Bernard Williams noted, “Repeatedly Nietzsche—the ‘old philologist,’ as he called himself—reminds us that, quite apart from any question about philosophical interpretations, including his own, there are facts to be respected.” And truths to be pursued: Emerson and Nietzsche, ultimately, share Plato’s vision that philosophic inquiry is a heroic enterprise: the bold seeker is on a quest for truths undetectable by slaves to conformity, truths they know will be superseded. “How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare,” Nietzsche tells us, is the ultimate “measure of value.”

American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

ISBN-10: 0226705811
ISBN-13: 978-0226705811

"Jared Lee Loughner's Nietzsche: Why the philosopher is misunderstood by angry young men"

by

Matt Feeney

January 14th, 2011

Slate

If we never discovered that Jared Lee Loughner honed his murderous outlook while sitting alone in his bedroom, reading Nietzsche and thinking about nihilism, that would have been real news. Instead of real news, though, we've gotten a dreary iteration of a cultural cliché. The New York Times and other media are saying the addled and alienated young man arrested for trying to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords, and for the murders of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green and five other people, took himself to be a Nietzschean.

Of course he did.

I suppose we could start plucking out incendiary quotations from Nietzsche's works and assess how much blame to lay on his head for Loughner's alleged crimes and the crimes of other young men with similar philosophical interests, but such a project would tend toward philistinism or obscurity. Better, I think, to leave aside the indictment and treat the nexus of Nietzsche and troubled young manhood as Nietzsche himself would have—that is, anthropologically.

The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men is obvious, but it isn't exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces. Nietzsche mocks convention and propriety (and mocks difficult writers you'd prefer not to bother with anyway). He's funny and (deceptively) easy to read, especially compared to his antecedents in German philosophy, who are also his flabby and lumbering targets: Schopenhauer, Hegel, and, especially, Kant. If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if you're a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic.

If you're a thoughtful and unhappy young man, in other words, why wouldn't you want to read someone who seems to reflect both your alienation and your uncontainable desire back to you as masculine bravery and strength? Indeed, there's something in every book you're likely to pick up—some enticement of form or content or both—that addresses your horniness/alienation and flatters you in the pretense that, though you have no formal training and are actually kind of a crappy and distracted reader, you are doing philosophy.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first work, it's the celebration of anarchic and sexually with-it Dionysus over boring Apollo, who's like the Greek god of algebra or something. In Zarathustra, it's the beckoning first-person narration, a crazy novel or memoir kind of thing, a heroic story of Zarathustra "going under," gathering spiritual strength in hermetic solitude that reminds you of your own bedroom, and then "rising" to "shine" upon a people who don't even understand or deserve him. In The Genealogy of Morals it's Nietzsche examining the real history of that Bible stuff your lame pastor barks at you in church (which you understand as saying two main things: no sex, no touching yourself) and proving that morality originates not in God but in the will to power—ancient priests seizing power over ancient masters by guilt-tripping them about the suffering of slaves. (Christianity is just "slave morality." So much for that dilemma.) In Ecce Homo it's those excellent chapter headings ("Why I Am So Clever," "Why I Write Such Good Books"). And in Beyond Good and Evil it is, well, the awesome title of the book itself, and that hilarious opening line ("Supposing truth is a woman—what then?"), and that first chapter where he mocks all those philosophers you don't have to read anymore, now that Nietzsche has told you how lame they are.

And, also in Beyond Good and Evil, it's the aphorisms—a section entitled "Epigrams and Interludes" comprising over a hundred one- and two-sentence masterworks of moral paradox and counterintuition, calculated outrage and elegant eye-poking. Nietzsche is aphoristic even when he's being systematic, and when he's being aphoristic, his writing is simply unmatched in its beauty and mayhem, its uncanny mix of compression and infinite suggestion. And for a young guy who's intellectually hungry but doesn't much enjoy reading, finding this section of philosophy-bits in the middle of this famous book is like a homecoming. You don't even have to know what these epigrams mean to enjoy them. You just feel manly and brave in entertaining them at all, not flinching but laughing when Nietzsche says: "One is best punished for ones virtues." (You even get to work out some of your girl-troubles by lingering over Nietzsche's several jabs at women.)

Of course, Nietzsche scholars will tell you not to run too far with these little wisecracks. You need to understand them in the context of his larger body of work, in which he often circles back to themes, again and again, revising and even contradicting his earlier writings. You have to understand the aphorisms as part of a vast poetic project of self-creation or becoming in which nothing is truly settled. Nietzsche himself predicted he would be misread, acquire misguided disciples, and so he has.

Loughner's favorite book, according to news reports, fits with these troubled-guy tendencies and their associated pitfalls. It's not Beyond Good and Evil, but rather the notorious compilation of Nietzsche's working notes (which Nietzsche's sister peddled, wrongly, as his great systematic work). The observations are longer-form in The Will to Power, but, like the "Epigrams and Interludes," they are too-easily separated from Nietzsche's other work. They have a tidy thematic organization that is largely his sister's. This scheme is helpful to the scholar who knows his other books. It's also helpful to the troubled young man obsessed with one thing in particular. In Loughner's case, this one thing was apparently nihilism, which happens to be the first topic in The Will to Power.

That Loughner was reading Nietzsche on nihilism fits so perfectly into a template for such tragedies that it's easy to miss the gaping confusion in news stories about the shooting. These stories echo claims by some acquaintances that Loughner was a nihilist, and by others that he was "obsessed with nihilism," as if these are the same thing. But Loughner didn't see himself as a nihilist. He saw himself as fighting nihilism. This is evident in his fixation in his YouTube videos on the idea that words have no meaning, or have somehow lost their meaning in a process of nihilistic decline—a fixation that seems to lie at the basis of his tragic grudge against Gabrielle Giffords.

Nietzsche, oddly, has suffered a similar fate. Because of his assault on religion and rationalist metaphysics, and because of the hints of anarchy in his assorted visions of the future (e.g., "the transvaluation of all values"), he's taken as the West's über-nihilist. But he saw himself as the scourge of European nihilism, and possibly also its remedy. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a disease, which grows from, in Alexander Nehamas' words, "the assumption that if some single standard is not good for everyone and all time, then no standard is good for anyone at any time." It presents itself as mindless hedonism and flaccid spirit, but also as fanaticism.

So does that make Nietzsche and Jared Lee Loughner philosophical brethren after all, joined in the same fanatical fight against nihilism? In a word, no, and Loughner's pathological fixation on the meaning of words is the giveaway. One way of looking at Nietzsche's project is that he set out to teach himself and his readers to love the world in its imperfection and multiplicity, for itself. This is behind his assaults on religion, liberal idealism, and utilitarian systems of social organization. He saw these as different ways of effacing or annihilating the world as it is. It is behind his infamous doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence—in which he embraces the "most abysmal thought," that the given world, and not the idealizing stories we tell of it, is all there is, and he will affirm this reality even if it recurs eternally.

Jared Loughner's despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for its failure to resemble the words we apply to it. Faced with a choice between real people and some stupid abstraction about words, themselves mere abstractions, Loughner killed the people to defend the abstraction. This, then, really is a kind of nihilism, only not the kind that people think Nietzsche was guilty of. It's the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to warn us about, and help us overcome.

A rebuttal...

"Nietzsche on Eggshells"

A new book on the philosopher’s American reception soft-pedals his dark influence.

by

Fred Siegel

January 20th, 2012

City Journal

American Nietzsche: a History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Chicago, 464 pp., $30)

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche is a 464-page footnote to Allan Bloom’s comment in The Closing of the American Mind that American readings of the German philosopher have produced “nihilism with a happy ending.” Her sense of Nietzsche is based heavily on the writings of the German-born Princeton scholar Walter Kaufmann, famed for softening the philospher of the übermensch’s writings. Like the apologists for jihad who portray it as an internal quest for purification, advocates for Nietzsche acrobatically rope off his praise for war and cruelty as matters of spiritual struggle.

Ratner-Rosenhagen begins with an examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s enormous influence. Emerson’s assertion that “permanence is but a word of degrees” becomes in Nietzsche’s writing what later thinkers would call perspectivism, the view that no firm footing exists for asserting the truth or falsity of any particular claim. Or, in Nietzsche’s words, “truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions.” Presenting herself as an historian of the reception of ideas, Ratner-Rosenhagen traces the adoption of perspectivism in twentieth-century America. Perspectivism, she rightly notes—first as turn-of-the-century pragmatism and today in the form of postmodernism—has been central to the liberal critique of American ideals.

Ratner-Rosenhagen’s principles of selection seem askew. She discusses the plays of George Bernard Shaw, including Man and Superman, only in passing. But Shaw’s plays were one of the primary means through which Americans came to know of Nietzsche’s ideas. Instead, she devotes an entire chapter to letters from obscure Americans to Nietzsche and to his sister Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who became the keeper of the Nietzschean flame after her brother’s death in 1900.

The book is stronger when it deals with Nietzsche’s influence on major figures such as H.L. Mencken and Randolph Bourne, both of whom devoted themselves to freeing the country from the strictures of Victorian morality and denouncing the American effort in World War I. “No author,” writes Ratner-Rosenhagen, “did more to establish the persona of Frederick Nietzsche in America than H.L. Mencken.” Indeed, Mencken was Nietzsche’s first American popularizer. The sage of Baltimore followed his 1908 book, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, written when he was only 28, with The Gist of Nietzsche, a collection of the German’s aphorisms, in 1910, and a translation of The Anti-Christ, published in the aftermath of World War I. Mencken, Ratner-Rosenhagen notes, told a friend that his denunciations of American life and culture “were plainly based on Nietzsche; without him, I’d never have come to them.”

Ratner-Rosenhagen complains that in the postwar period, the Nietzsche once celebrated by radicals such as Max Eastman and Margaret Sanger as a “crusader for truth, a debunker of superstition, and an iconoclast who placed conscience above convention” was now seen as “the martial ideal of imperial Germany.” But in her own version of Kaufmann’s softening, she insists—ignoring or failing to read Mencken’s writings on Nietzsche and World War I—that “there is not a straight trajectory from. . . Mencken’s aristocratic. . . Übermensch to the image of the Übermensch as a menace to democracy during the war.” She’s wrong.

Writing for The Atlantic in “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,” Mencken celebrated Nietzsche as the inspiration for the new Germany, which was “contemptuous of weakness.” Mencken wrote that Germany was a “hard” nation with no patience for politics, because it was governed by the superior men of its “superbly efficient ruling caste.” “Germany,” he concluded, “becomes Nietzsche; Nietzsche becomes Germany.” Mencken approvingly quotes Nietzsche to the effect that “the weak and the botched must perish. . . . I tell you that a good war hallows every cause.”

Surely, in writing a book on Nietzsche’s reception in America, Ratner-Rosenhagen is duty-bound to respond to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s well-regarded 1970 New York Review of Books essay, “The Gentle Nietzscheans.” Yet she ignores this, too. O’Brien tellingly quotes from Nietzsche’s posthumously published The Will to Power on the “annihilation of decaying races.” “The great majority of men,” Nietzsche wrote, “have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men. . . . There are also peoples that are failures.” This was an argument that appealed to supporters of eugenics as well as to the Nazis. Walter Kaufmann explained it away by noting that Nietzsche hadn’t mentioned the Jews and Poles directly.

Moving into the contemporary era, Ratner-Rosenhagen cites, apparently without irony, the postmodernist literary critic Paul de Man and the Black Panther Huey Newton as examples of people who put Nietzsche to good use in liberating, respectively, literature and African-Americans from outdated prejudices. She declines to mention de Man’s collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. As for Newton, who thought of himself as a superman of sorts, the question is: did he murder three innocents? Or was it four, or five?

The book closes with a sympathetic discussion of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s attempt to reconcile pragmatism’s emphasis on political practicality with Nietzsche’s concern with states of being rather than outcomes. Rorty embraces the Nietzschean absence of truth as socially liberating—but advertisers and politicians find the absence of truth liberating, too. Trapped in his own perspectivist logic, Rorty invokes the sense of empathy, “the inspirational value” derived from reading great novels, as the basis for his intellectual and political viewpoints.

In Ratner-Rosenhagen’s sunny reading, Americans have managed to rope off Nietzsche’s anti-democratic, aristocratic radicalism while embracing his perspectivism, all without doing damage to the body politic. But as we’ve unfortunately become a far more hierarchical and unequal society, it’s difficult to see how that judgment can hold. The absence of commonly held truths is all too compatible with a less democratic society dominated by an aristocracy of the successful and politically connected. They’re only too happy to manufacture their own truths.

[Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.]

Friedrich Nietzsche [Wikipedia]

Nietzsche Chronicle



Count Harry Graf Kessler...extraordinary observer of history

Hugo Chavez...as many do, misconstrues "uberman"

“God remains dead. And we have killed him.”...things change

Thanks to POSP stringer Tim.

Hugo Chavez...as many do, misconstrues "uberman"

"Coping with cancer, Chavez contemplates Nietzsche"

by

Ian James

July 23rd, 2011

Associated Press

While he undergoes cancer treatment, Hugo Chavez has been finding inspiration rereading a 19th century philosophy book by Friedrich Nietzsche about a prophet who shows courage while trying to spread a nonconformist message.

The Venezuelan president has been so fascinated with the German philosopher's treatise "Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None" that he has been reciting passages in televised speeches and referring to it in postings on his Twitter account.

"Zarathustra struck me once again in Havana," Chavez said in a speech earlier this month in Caracas. He said the book popped into his mind when he was receiving treatment, and he sent for a copy.

"I asked for it and I just said: Only now you've appeared once again, Zarathustra," Chavez said. "Now you've struck me deeply, only this time you came from the hand of Fidel Castro."

The book tells a story of a prophet who after 10 years living alone in the wilderness descends from a mountain seeking to share his wisdom with humanity. He urges people not to be complacent and says he will teach them about "the overman." That term that has been translated and interpreted in various ways, but scholars generally agree it is Nietzsche's call for each individual to aspire to transcend comfortable, conformist society and become a nobler person.

"Nietzsche says the most beautiful thing about man is that he isn't an end, but a bridge between the animal and the 'super man,' the 'ultra man,'" Chavez said. He added that he sees parallels with the teachings of Jesus, the philosophy of Karl Marx and the socialist ideal of a "new man" espoused by Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

"I'm quoting Nietzsche and also expressing my agreement with those maxims of philosophy and life: to transform the world," Chavez said.

Chavez, however, appears to be bending Nietzsche's concepts to suit his own socialist ideology, expanding on Nietzsche's "overman" idea with his own call to create "the socialist man, the socialist woman, the socialist society."

"It's a kind of bizarre turn of events that he would be so interested in a thinker who is so virulently anti-socialist and anti-egalitarian," said Robert B. Pippin, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.

"What Nietzsche is just saying is that we need to aspire to a condition of humanity that is beyond the kind of conformist, bourgeois, self-satisfied, smug, boring, prosaic character of late modern life," Pippin said in a telephone interview. "It really just is an aspiration to go beyond that, to create a form of society in which independence of thought and a kind of concern with self-perfection ... would be the order of the day."

Pippin said he isn't sure why Chavez is so attracted to the book but that some clues may lie in the main character.

The fictional prophet is misunderstood and mocked, and although he cultivates a small circle of disciples does not succeed in having any mass effect, Pippin said. Instead, he said, Zarathustra has to persevere while "not having the great kind of impact on the transformation of society that he wanted to have."

Zarathustra is portrayed as someone who has to suffer for his ideas and who has "the courage to persevere no matter what the obstacles are," Pippin said. "So I would imagine something like that might appeal to Chavez. ... Maybe he's just attracted to the idea of struggle or perseverance."

Such ideas have been a common thread for Chavez, both in his calls for socialism and his own personal struggle to beat cancer. He has been in Cuba during the past week undergoing chemotherapy, which he says aims to prevent any recurrence of cancer after a tumor was extracted from his pelvic region in a June 20 surgery.

A message on Chavez's Twitter account earlier this month suggested some passages in Nietzsche's book resonate with him as battles cancer.

"I find myself before my highest mountain and my longest walk," one message read, quoting a passage. "That's how Zarathustra spoke!"

Friedrich Nietzsche [Wikipedia]

Nietzsche Chronicle

Nietzsche and the Nazis, A Personal View by Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Nietzsche--physics?

Some blogging thoughts on Friedrich Nietzsche and physics by physicist Kip Thorne.

"Nietzsche: Long Live Physics!"

by

Kip Thorne

February

Discover

Henri Poincaré proved his "recurrence theorem" in 1890: in a mechanical system with bound orbits (particles can't just run off to infinity), any state through which the system passes will be approached (to arbitrary accuracy) an infinite number of times in the future. That was eight years after Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, asked us to imagine exactly such a scenario, in his notion of eternal return:

What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!"

This is the kind of thing you come across when you're writing a book about time. Nietzsche wanted to suggest that a well-lived life was one you wouldn't mind knowing would recur throughout eternity, while the prospect would cause gnashing of teeth for most of us. Poincaré's concerns were somewhat different.

While looking up this passage, I stumbled across one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes, just a few aphorisms prior:

Yes, my friends, regarding all the moral chatter of some about others it is time to feel nauseous! Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste! Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present,—which is to say the many, the great majority! We, however, want to become who we are,—the new, unique, incomparable ones, who give themselves their own laws, who create themselves! And to that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense,—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics,—our honesty!

A quote which engenders, as you might imagine, swift elaborations on the part of Nietzsche scholars that he certainly wasn't talking about what we ordinarily mean by "physics." But I’m not so sure. The substance of physics (experimental results, theoretical understandings) is of no help whatsoever in leading a moral life. But the method of physics — open-minded hypothesis testing and scrupulous honesty in confronting what Nature has to tell us — is a pretty good model for other aspects of our lives.

Not that physicists are, as a matter of empirical fact, any better at being good human beings on average than anyone else. Even we physicists could learn to be better physicists.

Bacon's bum rap?

Francis Bacon

Remember Friedrich Nietzsche's "Übermensch" meaning "overman"? And that Adolph Hitler took that word and construed it as "superman" and applied it to his Aryan race doctrine. Bum rap for Nietzsche. And Fancis Bacon? Similar situation? Lambast Bacon if you like for modern delimas of the environment and the relationship between science and technology but read: "...Works are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts or life...." This is not unusual for people to remove statements from context and historical perspective and use them to champion some political cause or agenda.

"Is Bacon to blame for the evils of our polluted age?"

by

Nieves H. De Madariaga Mathews

When considering at what point we took a wrong turning, destructive to the earth and all that dwell upon it, those who are working for a new concept of science often invoke, as the villain of our disastrous piece, Francis Bacon, the 'father of experimental science', whose prophetic New Atlantis was published soon after his death in 1626. Bacon is reproached (along with Descartes) for spearheading a scientific revolution which promoted a mechanistic view of nature, and abdicated all responsibility for the results of its discoveries. Some have seen in a 'Messianic' Bacon the very model of the biotechnology at work today in the global markets - a 'cult camouflaged as science', 'a mindset that views science as a way of bringing man closer to God', and claims to improve our lives while actually degrading them.

In the film Mindwalk, based on the ideas of Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point (1982), Liv Ullman, as 'the physicist', indignantly decries our modern science, of which Francis Bacon is made the epitome. According to Bacon, the physicist declares, 'nature had to be hounded and made a slave to the new mechanicized devices; science had to torture nature's secrets out of her'.

And 'hasn't modern science', she concludes, 'done exactly what Francis Bacon preached - hasn't it tortured our planet?'

Did Bacon really preach these things? Many have believed he did, since, half-way through our century, two illustrious thinkers at the opposite extremes of the political scale concurred in laying at his door not only our polluted air, sea and soil, but the polluted lives of our alienated consumer society. In 1942 Herbert Marcuse, the patron saint of a generation of leftist extremists, described Bacon as the 'evil animus' of modern science, while Martin Heidegger, who was still celebrating in 1953 what he called 'the inner truth and greatness of Nazism', denounced in Bacon the symbol of a nefarious identification of science with technology. During those same decades Bacon's reputation as a scientist was also at its lowest ebb. At the hands of Karl Popper and others, the 'Great Secretary of Nature' had been demoted to sham thinker - a mere fact-collecting inductionist - and altogether excluded from the present scientific scene. Struck by the paradox, an eminent Baconian scholar, Paolo Rossi, pointed out that those who exalted science allowed Bacon no part in it, while those who looked on it as thoroughly evil, saw him as 'its very essence'.

When we turn to what Bacon actually said, however, these various dismissals prove groundless. Absorbed in their respective ideologies, their authors had failed to read Bacon in the original - and to read him in context - thus making a gross travesty of his model of science, and reducing his philosophy to a handful of slogans. This was the conclusion of various Baconian scholars who, in the 1980s, closely studied the meaning of his texts, reconstructing the situation in which he worked. Bacon's induction, based on the generation of laws from observation and experiment, by means of an intuitive 'analogical leap' from the observed to the unobservable, was shown to be a highly original contribution to philosophical thought, and he was rehabilitated as a founder of the new science, alongside Galileo and Descartes. His apparently one-sided exaltation of technology was similarly shown to have sprung from a misinterpretation - where not an actual misreading - of his words, in particular from the neglect of his basic tenet, that 'works are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts or life'. We owe these misunderstandings in part to the tendency of some commentators to project the experience of a later time onto past ages (thus making Bacon, among others, a nineteenth century utilitarian, a positivist and even a Marxist). But we have also to understand why Bacon alone among English Renaissance thinkers, has been singled out in our time for consistent vilification. This anomaly has a good deal to do with the distorted image or his life which most of us have been brought up on, ever since, in 1837, the historian Macaulay published his brilliant but thoroughly untrustworthy essay, depicting a contemptible Bacon, soon to be loaded by subsequent biographers with every conceivable vice. This negative image of the man, which could not but influence that of the thinker, is still present in many people's minds, and it has made them only too ready to see him as a scapegoat for the harmful effects of the science he had heralded with so much acclaim. Bearing these points in mind we can now look at the principal complaints made of Bacon by the friends of Gaia.

Bacon's scientific revolution launched a mechanistic view of nature, in which living organisms are seen - and treated - as machines. The partition of the universe into live human mind and passive, mechanical nature was Descartes's gift to modern science, not that of Bacon, who stopped well short of 'the pitfall of classical mechanization', as it has been called.

Already in the eighteenth century the Italian philosopher, Vico, had congratulated his predecessor on having wisely avoided 'the rocks of mechanistic thought', while a contemporary recalled that, as a youth, he was given the works of Bacon to read so that he could be on his guard against 'the aberrations of Descartes'. For Coleridge 'the impulse towards a true natural philosophy, based on legitimate experience', had been betrayed by Descartes's science of mechanics. Like Shelley, Coleridge regarded Bacon as the man 'by whom Science was married to Poetry', while early in our century Alfred North Whitehead appreciated Bacon above all as a Renaissance vitalist.

And so we will find him. In his own Theory of Heaven he categorically denied the void he had earlier envisaged, and conjured up instead a starry heaven of 'fluctuating waves and reciprocations', an earth on which 'all objects emit rays'. He conceived the dynamic processes of nature - organic and inorganic - as a constant flow and ebb of 'vital spirits', struggling against the 'spirits' of inanimate matter to preserve youth and beauty, and to develop higher organic forms. It was by the synthesis of this universe in perpetual fluctuation with the quantitative aspects of his new science - a unique feat, as has been noted - that he sought to interpret all natural phenomena, 'from planet to planet, from spirit to star'. Indeed, with hisvital spirits, 'impressed by God upon the primary particles of matter', it looks as if Bacon had by-passed Newton's clockwork universe to rejoin the quantum scientist, Heisenberg, just as he had by-passed Aristotle to rejoin the pre-Socratic Heraclitus - that 'tracker-down of truth', as Bacon called him - whose complementary opposites he liked to recall, and with whose fire, 'both matter and moving force', Heisenberg identified his own 'particles of energy'. Anyone inclined to attribute a cold, mechanistic view of nature to Bacon should read his notes for a History of Generations and Pretergenerations, with its cascades or 'perturbations', 'vivifications' and 'gestations', its limitless 'potentialities', all leading to an order based on the 'generative and vivifying power in things' - a power which bears within it, 'like a second chaos', that air 'in which the seeds of so many things act, wander, endeavour and experiment'.

Bacon advocated 'the torture or nature'. 'The art of enquiry into nature itself, and or putting it on the rack', was never Bacon's, and these words, so often quoted against him, will not be found in any of his works. As recalled by Peter Pesic (from whose thorough studies of this subject, in Isis 1999 and elsewhere, I have taken most of the material for this section), they were written in 1696, by his great admirer, Leibniz, in praise or 'the art of experimentation which Lord Bacon began so ably'. Influenced, perhaps, by the fact that torture was still used in his day as a touchstone of certainty, Leibniz failed to distinguish, as Bacon emphatically did, between the concept or racking, or torture - terms which Bacon invariably connected with a brutal abuse - and that of 'the trials and vexation of art', indicating the agitation or provocation of nature in the course of an experiment aimed at verifying the evidence of the senses. Bacon depicted this 'vexing' or 'crossing' of nature with vivid images related to discovery or pursuit - never to torture. Many of them - such as 'espials', examination, trial, interrogation, deciphering - are taken from legal practice. Others are grouped around his concept of 'the Hunt or Pan, or Learned Experience' - a hunt 'in the woods or experience' for nature's laws - all of nature being 'nothing else than a hunt', while man himself 'hunts after his works'. If you 'follow and as it were, hound nature in her wanderings, you can drive her afterwards to the same place again': this is Bacon's description of controlled experiments aimed at making results replicable.

Turning to mythology, he described experimentation as a wrestling-match with that indestructible 'thrice-great prophet, Proteus, or Matter' - a matter permeated with spirit - who has to be gently but firmly held in place with the 'handcuffs' of mechanical aids, as he wriggles from one shape to another - or disappears for a time, as a gas; until, having rung all his changes, he finally discloses some of nature's secrets, thus assisting her to 'achieve her ends'. The experimenter is also tested in this process (being much in need of purification, since the mind of man is ever prone 'to distort the nature of things by mingling his own nature with it'). In the end, however, his part is a small one, for, Bacon insisted, 'all that man can do is to put together and put asunder natural bodies. The rest is done by nature within.' On the role played by man in vexing nature, within these limits, Bacon is quite clear. He gives examples from the age-old crafts - baking, brewing, pruning - by which nature is 'forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded', and he cites experiments such as confining the spirits of wine in a sealed vessel, or making a rainbow in a spray of water.

We are far from the 'racking of nature' imagined by Leibniz. None the less, a few others were to follow him in confusing Bacon's charged images, and more recently various feminist writers - including Carolyn Merchant (1980), from whom, alas, Capra took his notion of Bacon's views - have contributed their own brand of confusion. Bacon is now denounced for launching 'a science infused with sexual and misogynistic metaphors' - in particular with images of rape and torture - aimed at encouraging middle-class male entrepreneurs 'to exploit nature, as a female to be tortured through mechanical inventions'. As Alan Soble has demonstrated (Oxford, 1998), none of the passages adduced by these writers remotely supports their claims. By omitting key words and sentences, and introducing metaphors of rape and of 'the torture chamber' where there are none, they completely transform his meaning. Thus Bacon's remark that 'a useful light' might be gained by the scientist from an inquiry into the arts of witchcraft, to Merchant 'strongly suggests the interrogations of the witch trials and the rnechanical devices used to torture witches' - and in Mindwalk he will be made out presiding over the witch trials of King James, though these were held in Scotland, many years before Bacon became Attorney General. Merchant saw caverns like that of the Sybil as 'sexual holes', and, she complained, Bacon 'frequently described matter in female imagery, as a "a common harlot"'. In fact he referred (twice) to an 'untenable opinion' of Plato's 'that matter is like a common harlot, always seeking after new forms'.

Nature cannot literally be tortured, but some of her creatures can, and often are today, in our service. At a time when vagabonds were regularly flogged, thieves hanged alive in chains, and felons gradually crushed to death under rocks, people were not much preoccupied with the suffering of animals. Descartes defended vivisection, and compared animals to creaking machines. Even Spinoza, half a century later, declamed in his Ethica that we could treat them 'in any way which best suits us'. Bacon was in two minds.

He believed that vivisection had rightly been condemned, but, in exceptional cases 'of great usefulness', it could have been a mistake to 'relinquish it altogether'. We may doubt that he ever came across such a case, for this 'tender-hearted' judge, as he was known to his contemporaries, who looked on offenders 'with the eye of compassion' - and who searched for ways of mitigating pain - repudiated torture, not only for its cruelty, but because he believed it was more liable to evoke 'strange fallacies' than to discover the truth. When 'vexing' even inorganic matter (which to him was alive) Bacon compared the care to be taken in regulating and varying the heat used in experiments to the gentle action of the womb. As for living tissue, eggs might be studied, but cutting out the foetus from the womb (as advocated by his contemporary William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood) 'would be too inhuman'.

The womb is very present in Bacon's writings. He saw his own thought 'rooted in the lap and womb' of a nature more subtle 'many times over' than the mind of man, while the Scholastics 'touched nature only with the tips of their fingers, without mingling themselves into her being'. Had they 'remained attached to the womb of nature and continued to draw nourishment from her', he said, there would be no need for a new science. Far from preaching the rape of nature, the closer union Bacon sought with her was as the bride in 'a chaste and lawful marriage', from which 'many helps to man' might spring. (And should anyone object to the patriarchal view or her as a 'fruitful spouse', let us recall that nature appears as the dominant partner in another patriarchal image, with the arts subject to her 'as the wife is subject to the husband'). Bacon obviously preferred a 'happy match' to a grappling, however gentle. It is only men 'too intent upon their ends', he said, who 'rather struggle with Nature than woo her embraces with due observance and attention'.

Bacon offered mankind the boundless expansion of human power which has given science its daemonic and Faustian character. The power Bacon offered was never boundless. 'All knowledge is to be limited by religion', he said, 'and referred to use and action'. And keen as he was for man to 'open and dilate the powers of his understanding' and reach out to the spacious new worlds of discovery that lay beyond the pillars of Hercules, he never once lost sight of those essential restraints. The arrogant claim of unlimited power for man is precisely what he most strongly deprecated in the magicians of his day -those self-seeking and vainglorious 'braggarts', as he called them, who looked on themselves as gods, and in their 'blind greed' attempted 'to domineer over nature', merely to boost their own personal influence. It was not long since Marlowe's Dr Faustus, 'lord and commander or the elements', had boasted on the stage that his dominion 'stretched as far as doth the mind of man'. Bacon too, in The Advancement or Learning (1623), sought 'to extend the bounds of human empire' - but read on: 'as far as God Almighty in his goodness may permit.' (This limiting condition does not appear in the New Atlantis, where the sentence ends 'to the effecting of all things possible'. But the words are spoken there in the same religious context, 'for the love of God and man'.

What exactly do these religious limits to knowledge imply? While in sympathy with 'the heathen' (the fathers of whose church, he said, were the poets), Bacon lived his spirituality within the newly reformed Church of his time, as a practising Christian - witness his inspired religious writings, and his evident interest in 'the true temper of a man who has religion deeply seated in his heart'. He conceived his New Instauration as the fulfilment of a Biblical prophecy and a rediscovery of 'the seal of God on things'. Which did not mean that he could ever see in the practice of a technology 'a first step to becoming one with God' - as proclaimed of child-cloning by one of its famous promoters. On the contrary, Bacon repeatedly warned his readers against the 'unwholesome' mixture of things human and divine, and admonished them never to 'presume by the contemplation of nature to attain to the mysteries of God'. The meaning of that crucial condition, 'as far as the Almighty may permit', is simple. Bacon solemnly disavowed both 'power and knowledge such as is not dedicated to goodness or love'. The words are used with precision. 'Goodness' means the search of truth for its own sake - since 'the very beholding of light is itself a more excellent thing than all the uses of it'. 'Love', or 'goodness applied', means doing everything possible to relieve 'the immeasurable helplessness of the human race'.

This aim was the leitmotiv of Bacon's life, and his whole new concept of science was geared to it. He had seen the effects of hunger at first hand as a young legal counsel, when examining a band of rebel yeomen. Shocked by what he found, he had set out to study their condition, and had defended, in Parliament after Parliament - with a heat that surprised fellow Members - a Statute for the Relief of the Poor that was to last for centuries, and his two bills against the enclosure of common lands - which, he rightly insisted, 'destroyed the bread of the poor'. Bacon believed that poverty could best be eliminated by achieving abundance for all, and it was to remedy 'the pinched and narrow state of human fortunes' that he wanted to multiply the discoveries of science, made so far by accident, like that of silk, glass or the magnet. This claim, now used by some multinationals to justify their depredations, was a new one at that time, although he had inherited his strong sense of the service owed to mankind from an ancient Platonic and Christian tradition known as the vita activa, of which his friend, Sir Philip Sidney, was the living example. Bacon was however the first scientific thinker to have appropriated the vita activa to science, and made 'the weal of man' his goal.

It is in this light, and recalling his precept that 'the true ends of knowledge' are neither profit, fame nor power, that we should interpret his concept of dominion over nature - a dominion evoking the benevolent authority of the first King of Atlantis, with his 'large heart, inscrutable for good'. For Bacon, power meant 'the power to do good'. There is no place in the New Atlantis for a world dominion, which he described as 'the evil dream of a prosperous brigand'. In the heyday of colonization he stressed that 'people are not to be planted' so as to displace others, and he lamented the miserable fate of 'the poor Indies, brought from freedom to be slaves'. Neither did he look on nature as man's slave. The only case in which he appears to couple slavery with nature - when offering an imaginary pupil 'to bind nature to your service and make her your slave' - has been found to be a mistranslation of the Latin original for 'slave', 'mancipaturus', which actually means 'to be assigned to an office'. It implies a bond - in Bacon's case a mutual one - but without the indignity of slavery. Himself, as he believed, 'born for the service of mankind', Bacon took every opportunity to emphasize that man is but the servant of that nature which he was now joyfully placing at the service of his 'dear, dear son'; that beyond following and observing her order, he 'knows nothing and can do nothing'; and above all that 'the least part of knowledge' is passed to him 'by a Charter from God', and 'must be subject to that use for which God hath granted it'. Failing which 'all manner of knowledge becometh malign and serpentine.'

In the New Atlantis Bacon set up a model for the manipulation of nature which, carried to extremes, has led to the widespread genetic modification of plants by our multinational corporations. Bacon extended his inexhaustible capacity for wonder to 'the border regions of knowledge', as he put it. There was nothing he did not propose to study, from the transmutation of metals, and 'those minute particles that do so great effect ', to a drink he had heard of 'called coffa, as black as soot and of a sharp scent, which comforteth the brain and heart'. He wished an inquiry to be carried out 'with all sobriety and severity', into 'the transmission of spirits at a distance', precognition, hypnosis and telepathic dreams. And he was interested in every aspect of plant life, from their 'enlarging and dwarfing', and 'transplanting one species into another', to the effects of 'the force of imagination' on 'their sudden fading or lively coming up', their closing and opening, their 'bending one way or another'.

But, whatever our opinion of his programme, we cannot reproach Bacon for holding the man-centred - and in his case still earth-centred - view of the universe, which has been an essential part of our Western tradition since Genesis. Or for advocating a manipulation of nature that has been with us ever since Cain ploughed the first field and a Persian gardener bred the first rose. That our species should thrive at the expense of the rest of creation, appears to us now increasingly 'malign and serpentine'. Many of us are more in sympathy - at least as a counsel of perfection - with Eastern attitudes that deprecate stepping on an insect, or those of native Americans, when they ask a plant's permission to harvest it. But where exactly does each of us stand? Do we accept the human kidney transplant but not the heart of a pig? Can we take as a gift from Bacon's prescience hearing aids and spectacles, microscopes and air-conditioners - submarines even, but not those dangerously polluting aeroplanes? Do we accept 'the multiplication of light at a distance', and Bacon's binary scale, on which our computers are based, but not the medical panaceas - or at least not the cosmetics - we owe to the suffering of mice and dogs? Some of us now think we should not destroy life 'without sufficient reason'. But how much is sufficient? Ought we to eat miserable factory-farmed animals, when a less sentient vegetable could feed us? Bacon's position was clear. He would 'try all things and hold that which is good.' We are trying all things, but we no longer know what is good. And we stop at nothing. In each case it is possible to identifiy the point at which we disregarded the limits Bacon laid down, and, failing to obey nature, brought - and are still bringing - upon ourselves every kind of disaster. ('Force maketh Nature more violent in the return.')

We will find Bacon in radical disagreement with the promoters of present day biotechnology on at least four fundamental counts. The first relates to their respective priorities. For Bacon, profit was excluded. Research was a matter of public funds - a task, he said, 'for Kings and Popes', and he stringently admonished scientists who 'turn aside after profit or commodity' : they do so, he warned, 'to the infinite loss of mankind'. There can be no comparison between a philosopher whose 'only earthly wish', from youth to old age, was to promote inventions that could relieve the poverty of man, and a corporation professing to 'do the right thing (namely, to feed mankind) while doing business', and publicizing this worthy aim out of the huge profits they had made with ventures such as Agent Orange and the defoliation of Vietnam; or planning the sinister Terminator Seed 'to protect their investments'. The second difference is one of scale. The ever moderate, middle-of-the-way Bacon, who noted that 'the personal fruition of man cannot attain to feel great riches', knew that more is not better. ('It is the empty things that are vast, things solid are most contracted, and lie in little room.') Bacon could not have conceived the escalating size, the global greed of corporations coolly planning to take over a large portion of the earth's water resources or feverishly decoding some three billion DNA sequences, in a bid to patent the entire human genome. The third radical difference between corporation practice and the thinker who would not reap the green corn, and who reminded us that it is not the tempest but 'the soaking rain that relieves the ground', is one of timeliness. Bacon would have deplored, as the worst 'levity and rashness in new experiments', the immoderate haste with which giant multinationals are now combing the virgin forests for plants that have yielded their healing properties over the millennia, in a headlong rush to extract, code, genetically modify and patent substances which would require generations of testing before they can be fed to adults - rnuch less to babies. The fourth, and perhaps most striking difference, is the contrast between the corporations' stealthy moves to impose their untested wares on us, as a part of their silent progress towards world supremacy - with Bacon's declared goals of open communication and exchange of knowledge, placed at the service of mankind.

Bacon promoted a science in which the experimenter abdicates all responsibility for the results of his discoveries. In fact Bacon was the only thinker of his day to unite scientific knowledge with ethical ideals, as he was the first to evolve a concept of fraternity in 'learning and illumination' among scientists of all countries, 'joining forces for the common good'. Bacon presents his new scientist - neither 'Schoolman' nor magus, but a 'pioner' (or digger) in the mine of truth - with 'tears of tenderness' for his fellow beings in his eyes. And it is because he envisaged a succession of such scientists, handing down the torch of a continuous tradition, at his symbolic 'Promethean Games', that Loren Eiseley described Bacon as 'the first great statesman of science'. But as a statesman Bacon was also aware of the dangers of scientific knowledge, and, on setting forth his plan of work for the Great Instauration, he confessedto 'inward hesitations and scruples'. The new learning, he feared, 'might open a fountain', and who could tell where its waters would fall? Alone among the forerunners of modern science Bacon foresaw the possibility of that 'Rape of Minerva (wise nature), by Vulcan (the mechanical arts)', which we have since perpetrated. His myth of 'Daedalus, or the Mechanic' - famous for his 'pernicious genius', 'unlawful inventions' and 'depraved applications' - sounds a dire warning against the 'imperfect births and lame works' which 'chemical productions and mechanical subtleties' could lead to, if mechanical art should attempt 'to force Nature to its will. And well we know how far in cruelty and destructiveness they exceed the Minotaur himself.'

Bacon hoped, as many have after him, that the mechanical arts might 'serve as well for the cure as for the hurt'. And since people are not to be trusted with dangerous discoveries, the brotherhood of Salomon took an oath of secrecy for 'the concealing of all inventions they thought fit to keep secret', even, if necessary, from the state - a solution not open to our democracies, although some scientists have resorted to it, and one great poet has appealed for it to be practised in our time. (In any case the salutary independence of scientists from Bacon's Utopian state compares favourably with the tacit understanding between powerful corporations and some of our governments.) The only reliable safeguard, however, in Bacon's view, was the age-old remedy of prayer, and in New Atlantis daily services were held 'of laud and thanks to God for his marvellous works', and of prayers (similar to those Bacon affixed to his own works) 'imploring God's aid and blessing for the illuminatiori of our labours, and the turning of them to good and holy uses'. For Bacon the efficacy of prayer was not in doubt. He saw the orations of the monastic orders as 'true works that cast their beams upon society for the benefit of man'. In our less believing age we may look on the prayers offered daily at Salomon's House as a declaration of intent, and a decision to maintain that intent by concentrating the mind upon it.

It is for the firmness of his own purpose and the stress he laid on turning our labours to good uses that I think ecologists can look on Bacon as an ally in the struggle ahead. The needs of humanity are changing, but never has it been more imperative for us to 'join forces for the common good' - that of our whole planet, this time. Bacon's was a cyclical view of history, in which 'the sciences have their ebbs and flows'. Four centuries ago he proclaimed a science that was to go on 'fructifying and begetting', as long as there was room for its wastes. But now that the tide has begun to turn, might not the forward-looking Bacon, had he lived today, be urging us to redirect our inborn thirst for knowledge away from the dead-ends of uncontrolled genetic engineering and the nuclear nightmare? Towards - new variants of earth-healing culture, perhaps? Undiscovered forms of renewable energy, a 'revivifying' concept of growth, or some other form of resurgence we haven't yet thought of?

Be that as it may, he appears to be in unison with the ecological vision in one respect. There is a remarkable affinity between Bacon's dynamic concept of the origins of life, and the cosmologies now emerging in centres like Schumacher College at Dartington, and the Santa Fe Institute of New Mexico - an affinity perceptible even in the vocabulary of these seekers. The 'fluctuating patterns' now found 'running deep in nature' (as cited by Brian Goodwin, in How the Leopard Changed his Spots, 1994), bring to mind those 'fluctuating reciprocations' noticed above in Bacon, the 'resemblances and conjugations' which, he believed, 'reveal the unity of nature' and 'the fabric of the universe'. And when we read today of 'the dynamic fluidity' with which elements 'move from chaos to order and back again', interacting rather than competing, in 'a creative play of forms', or 'a sacred dance', we are very close to that world which, in Bacon, 'enjoys itself and in itself all things that are', while 'the souls of the living leap about and dance with infinite variety'; a world in which 'Pan, or Nature' is ever inclined to 'fall back into ancient chaos' - but that Cupid foils him in the contest; in which God himself 'delights in hiding his works', so as to give man the pleasure of finding them.

We must not forget that if Bacon took the dominion of Adam over his fellow-creatures for granted, he himself extended his 'feeling of communion with men also to beasts', had thoughts of 'nourishing and comforting the trees', and dearly loved birds. He believed that nature was 'corrupted by too much cultivation' - after all the first scientists were 'the brute beasts, quadrupeds, fishes and serpents'. And when it rained, we are told, he would go out in his open coach 'to receive the Nitre in the air and the Universal Spirit of the World'. Let us hear him in his History of the Winds, a late work, urging us to 'make a stay with nature' and 'meditate upon her':

'Wherefore if there be any humility towards the Creator; if there be any praise and reverence towards his works; if there be any charity towards men and zeal to lessen human want and sufferings; if there be any love of truth in natural things ... men are to be entreated again and again ... that they should humbly and with reverence draw near to the book of Creation, and becoming again as little children, deign to take its alphabet into their hands.'

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For further information and references for most of the above, see chapter 33 of Francis Bacon, The History of a Character Assassination, by Nieves Mathews (Yale U.P. 1996), and for Bacon's attitude towards judicial torture, chapter 24.

On the 'torture of nature' see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (1980); Alan Soble in A House Built on Sand, ed. Noretta Koertge (Oxford, OUP, 1998); Peter Pesic, "Nature on the Rack, Leibniz's Attitude towards Judicial Torture and the 'Torture' of Nature", Studia Leibnitiana, Band XXXIX/2, (1997), and "Wrestling with Proteus, Francis Bacon and the 'Torture' of Nature", Isis (1999).

On the rehabilitation of Bacon's science after the criticism of Karl Popper, Alexandre Koyré, Peter Medawar and others, see Thomas Kuhn (1977) Peter Urbach (1987), Antonio Perez Ramos (1988), Brian Vickers, "Bacon's so-called 'Utilitarianism'", and Paolo Rossi "Ants, Spiders and Epistemologists", both in Francis Bacon, Seminario Internazionale, ed. Marta Fattori, Rome, 1984.

Also Rossi, "Bacon's Idea of Science", in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (CUP 1996); On Bacon's cosmology, Graham Rees, (1984).


Fancis Bacon's Works