I explore here the conceptions held by the two German thinkers of the nineteenth century who most have influenced the course of events of the twentieth Century: F.W. Nietzsche and G.W. F. Hegel by exhorting a twofold undertaking: on the one hand as found animation in Nietzsche’s own words about interpretation of texts, which in this case his own ones are concerned. Nietzsche states ’How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this: whether existence without interpretation without ‘sense, does not become, ’nonsense’; whatever as the other hand, all existence (Dasein) is not essentially an interpreting existence (Auslegender) Dasein (...) I should think that today we are at least far from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner, rather has the world become ‘ infinite’ for all over again inasmuch as we cannot reject the personality that it may include infinite interpretation’ ¹

Furthermore, there are ‘...no eternal horizons or perspectives ² the way should be opened to our interpretations to reflect our individual differences’, and ‘This affirmative affirmation of differences is made possible through experimenting with a variety of perspectives and actively creating new interpretations that avoid the overtly hasty and unjust circumscription of the text’s (world’s) rich ambiguity and pluridimentionality’ ³

On the other, that Nietzsche never gave a direct reply to the Hegelian Philosophy as it was the costume in the past - particularly in the German tradition of system builders- at least up till Hegel. Nor even regarding to particular and specific topics we find any direct response from him to the latter. The only way to hurdle this difficulty is to survey most of Nietzsche’s key conceptions and which I will attempt to do here. Hence, it remains solely my advocating to the right to locate myself in that Nietzschean ‘infinite interpretation’s’ stance to which I would like to add further what himself recalls, as how Beethoven might have responded to a masterful interpretation of one of his compositions: ‘Well, Well ! That is neither I nor no-I (sic), but some third thing. It seems to me, too, something right, if not just the right thing. But you must know yourselves what to do, as in any case it is you who have listened’ ⁴

This approach can also be permissibly viewed by contrasting the two main belligerent features which structure Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s respective philosophical systems, namely: Sublation (Aufhebung) vis-à-vis Sublimation; the Dialectics against the Dionysiac; Verstand in contrast to Vernuft

Throughout his work ( I refer to the edition of 1913, London, in eighteen volumes, edited by Oscar Levy) Nietzsche alludes to Hegel thirty two times. These are between quotations and simply allusions and references found in other writers, which not all of them are relevant for a accurate understanding of Nietzsche’s knowledge of his fellow German, or, so at one would affirm that Nietzsche is rebutting Hegel directly and in a substantial sense. Nietzsche did not study Hegel in depth and relied mainly on secondary sources for the interpretation of the latter’s thought, chiefly in Shopenhauer, who bequeathed too his vehement hostility- in his main structure- to Hegel, to Nietzsche.

We are told that the hostility of Shopenhauer towards Hegel was fuelled by bitter personal disappointments eventuated in Berlin in 1820 as the former abortively attempted to draw away students from Hegel’s lectures by arranging his own ones at exactly the same time as those of the latter. And his failure in 1840 to win a prize from the Royal Danish Society for his essay on the foundations of morality because, he apparently neglected Hegel’s contributions to the study of ethics.

Even in criticising the main philosophers who in all evidence Nietzsche never read in depth, he too resorted to secondary sources. But it is as well evident that the only philosophers whom he best studied in detail were the Ancient Greek ones.

The only explicit reference Nietzsche makes of having read Hegel, comes in a letter to Herman Mushake on the 20^th of September 1865⁵. Although the tone in which he consign on that experience suggests that he was not too serious in the mood to study gravely his fellow German: ‘with coffee I eat a little Hegelian philosophy which spoils my appetite, so I take some Straussian pills such as The Wholes and the Halves’. ⁶

Many of Nietzsche’s quotations on Hegel are alluded to the latter’s style and it may suggest that Nietzsche read sections of Hegel’s original texts, but it is not a reliable prove either that he had studied him in depth. Although, there is no prove neither that he did the opposite, namely that he indeed studied Hegel in detail, but he reserved it for himself without acknowledging it for reasons we could just infer from an assiduous study of his entire work, which I acknowledge I have not done. But what I do have done is revised a variety of bibliographical sources, whose outcome I revise here.

There are two relevant evidences to our interest. One which shows that in his youth Nietzsche was overwhelmed by Shopenhauer’s philosophy and that he became one of his best pupils thereafter. The other, there are records on Nietzsches’s attendance to the lectures given by Jacob Burckhard, his friend and colleague at Basle. These lectures dealt with Hegels view on History and it is assumed it made a profound impression on him.

Friedrich Albert Lange’s book The history of Materialism -we are told- was enthusiastically red by Nietzsche. Other possible sources of his understanding of Hegel may be attributed to Uberweg’ History of Philosophy, Eugene Düring’s Course of Philosophy, and E. von Hartmans’s Philosophy of the Unconscious.

It is recorded too, that Nietzsche in his early writings appears to suggest that he is drawing parallels between his own attempt to bring out truths hidden in the literary tradition by being sceptical of the assumptions of that tradition, and Hegel’s dialectical method. But in this case as in almost all others, Nietzsche seems deliberately to keep away from Hegel’s terminology as the following quotation may suggest: ‘So a Hegelian would perhaps say that we were trying to ascertain the truth through the negation of the negation ’⁷.

Only in one occasion Nietzsche praised both Hegel and Shopenhauer for their opposition to the English-mechanistic stultification of the world: ‘Hegel and Shopenhauer ( along with Göethe) were on one accord; the two hostile brother-geniuses in philosophy, who pushed in different direction towards the opposite poles of German thought and thereby wronged each other as only brothers will do’ ⁸.

There are other few occasions in which Nietzsche prizes Hegel as a German of European range: in the preface to Daybreak, written in 1886, Nietzsche stresses the point on the contradictory nature of things: ‘We Germans of today, late Germans in ever respect, still sense something of truth, of the possibility behind the celebrated dialectical principle with which in his day he assisted the German spirit to conquer Europe-’contradiction moves the world, all things contradict themselves’-: for we are even in the realm of logic, pessimists ’⁹.

By the mid-1880 Nietzsche appears arrive to the point in considering Hegel’s philosophy as a danger or the seeds of a critical pessimism ‘ I believe there has no dangerous turning- point in the progress of German culture in this century that has not been made more dangerous by the enormous and still living influence of this Hegelian philosophy’¹⁰. But this suggests to be sooner a prize to Hegel than anything else, for Nietzsche adds elsewhere: ‘the German are dangerous people: they are experts in inventing intoxicants, Gothic rococo (according to Semper ), the historical sense and exoticism Hegel; Richard Wagner, Leibnitz too...’ ¹¹

At other points Nietzsche suggests that the Hegelian philosophy inheres a religious and concervatistic thought and along with some pantheism, it appears to him that Hegel is reluctant to accept the death of God: ’Hegel in particular was delayer par excellence, with his grandiose attempt to persuade us of the divinity of existence, appealing as a last resort to our sixth sense, "the historical sense".’ ¹²

For all this ‘historical man’ bequeathed by Hegel’s philosophy Nietzsche sees the hypostatisation of moral values and origin which lead the latter to associate the former with pantheism as virtually defending the existence of God by enthralling evil, error and suffering into divinity itself. In this sense Hegel cannot be a genuine philosopher who challenge the old values and creates new ones, but will always remain a philosophical ‘labourer’ whose task reduces to take some great fact of evaluation and identify and reduce them to formulas, whether in the realm of logic, politics , morals or of art. Hence, Hegel is blamed for being one who betrayed his wit and insight for the sake of his faith in morality, justice and reason; he was a German philosopher in pursuit of some sort of mystical depth and thoroughness and thereby lacking the intellectual purity and honesty of self-understanding which Nietzsche prized so highly in himself. On the other hand Nietzsche interprets Hegel’s ‘Idea ‘ which Nietzsche calls for ‘the pre-existent Idea’ as the entity which is actually leading man in history and not man himself. But this is best understood under the contrast between the Dialectic(Hegel) and the Dyonisiac (Nietzsche) and Verstand versus Vernuft to which now I turn.

Nietzsche does not display sufficient awareness of the social context of individual action which Hegel ( albeit in an idealist form) recognises. Furthermore Nietzsche lacks any explicit awareness of the ‘dialectical’ character of power which Hegel uncovers, awareness that is, of the inherent dependence of the powerful upon the impoverished. For Nietzsche the powerful and the weak are always antagonically opposed to one another.

Nietzsche’s notion of strength takes the fact of weakness so seriously that cannot conceive of strength without reference to the weak which reveals an unconsciously use of ‘dialectics’ (Aufhebung). Nietzsche thus holds a strict dichotomy between the strong and the weak which erects artificially as fiction in order to preserve the powerful, heroic individual from any sense that his strength might need and depend of weakness in order to flourish. For Nietzsche the master is transformed in a new master, whereas the Hegelian view the one overcomes the other in a new individual. In Nietzsche the ‘dialectical’ negation and re-creation of the master is only one side of the Hegelian process. Nietzsche individualises, petrifies the master in a Master race which is renewed in an ‘eternal recurrence’; a superman whose dependence of the weak, the infrahuman, the mob simultaneously petrifies history in the sense that nothing has changed and nothing has to be changed either, except that the master race has to strength his position then and on at expenses of the weakening of his subordinated; the master becomes stronger as the bondsman becomes weaker. Thus a sort of balance is maintained as polarisation takes place.

As for Sublimation regards, Hegel maintains that the former involves the employment of impulses by reason, which is not affin with Nietzsche’s transformation of impulses into reason.

Sublimation in the Mind of Hegel involves the subordination of impulses in their original specification, to rational goods in contrast with Nietzsche’s who assumes that sublimation can be defined as self-overcoming, the domination and control of instinctual self by the rational self.

Sublimation for Nietzsche is a function of the individualistic will to power: it is a process in which the individual’s will to power is fulfilled by being turned against itself, macerated by itself, by being converted from power over others to power over self. But for that very reason the fundamental orientation of the individual’s will towards dominance is not altered- will to power remains will to power. In other words, in overcoming or sublimating itself it is both that which overcomes( e.g., reason) and that which is overcome (e.g., impulse). Quite contrary in Hegel we have reason, subjectivity is not a force that overcomes and dominates its ‘other’, i,e. substance, subjectivity in this sense, is rather the inner rationality or self-contradictory character of substance- the mediation of substance’s independence by what is insubstantial.

Under the generic term of Sublation, or Aufhebung, by contrast, Hegel’s understanding of the impulses, do not merely take the form of the control of one instinctual mode of will to power by another rational mode, a process which leaves the individualistic, self-assertive essence of the will to power untouched, and which, indeed actually fulfils that essence in the very exercise of control. The aufhebung of the impulses is the dialectical working out of the self -contradiction at the heart of the will to power itself, that is, the working-out of the self-contradiction involved in the inherent dependence of the will’s masterful freedom on what it seeks to dominate.

The result of Hegels Sublation -Aufhebung- of the will is therefore not merely individual self-control, but the explicit socialisation of man’s interest. In the explicit recognition by the will that satisfaction of individuals needs lies in social interdependence and interaction, which for Nietzsche, the former is exploitation, slavery, and the latter domination; for Hegel these are the community and the power emanated from it. Hence for Hegel the will is geared primarily to individual self-assertion into one that finds individual self-fulfilment and power in a community, whereas for Nietzsche this self-fulfilment and power is snatched from the community and turned against it in form of pillage, exploitation by one part of that same community, that is to say by the Masters.

The individualistic will to power, then, remains the fundamental character of man’s genuine common interest , therefore, it is illusory, and is merely a function produced by a weak ‘democratic’ form of will to power, the latter held by weak men in the sense of not being able to perpetrating a strong hand against the mob.

As regarding the opposition between Verstand -understanding- and Vernuft -reason. Nietzsche clearly opposes the idea of any identity in life, because he understands the identity of elements as an abstraction from or reduction of their specific individuality, which it witness of his confusion between Verstand and Vernuft. That is, his failure resides in the fact that he equates consciousness and the understanding which Hegel sees the understanding only as a moment or subordinate form of consciousness as a whole. It is therefore a grave error to equate understanding with the human mind.

Radical differences between Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s views, relevant to our analysis, can be revealed in their theory of tragedy. Nietzsche’s view is coupled here too with his protracted rejection of what he sees as traditional metaphysical morality: in one hand, for him tragedy is meant to idealise and glorify guilt and sin as virtues, thus he does not condemn the hero as evil; and in the other, tragedy deprives the hero of moral responsibility as he ultimately is to be deprecated by elemental natural forces, so the justified downfall of immoral man is rendered from the tragedy. The hero is meant to embody the utmost individuality before the hostile world, and the imminence of his downfall, and brandishing the latter as condition of victorious heroic nobility.; Prometheus is the best example for him of the hero who faces a hostile world.

By contrast, Hegel’s insists that tragedy enacts a critique of the hero as well as affirming his stature and pathos through, in one hand affirming the nobility of the deed of his tragedy; and in the other the hero by seeking appreciation of the worth, or passion which leads him to his suffering, that is, his greatness and nobility springing from, both the process or the sittlich justification of his deed and his personal beschafenheit, which is not melery that the Good defeats the Evil the constitutive rejection of a moralistc view of tragedy.

In Hegel’s view the hero is not demounted by the hostile world but by the self-contradiction of the hero which is the fulcrum in around upon which his own heroism gyrates; the fact that his character’s heroic self-assertion and persistence is at odds with his own best interests.

Hegel sees an eternal justice in the eternal immanent dialectic of human action which is absent in Nietzsche. Furthermore this immanence translates as the intrinsic self-destruction within man’s self-oriented actions, hence, it is not the merely Apolline veneer over the Dionysiac reality but the core of tragedy itself. In other words, that it does not anything coming from the outside but is the man’s own creation, his own self-imposed faith. Although that is not to say that the tragic characters are completely responsible of what happens to them but that they are ultimately responsible. And in consonance with the aforesaid Hegel adds that the conflict and contradiction is not necessarily eternal but that reconciliation is viable. This view of the heroic man gives way to a consciousness which, like that of the Eumenides, has become truly conciliatory, or, like that of Othello or Lear, has become fully self-aware.

Contrarily to that, Nietzsche’s hero and his heroic mood, the magisterial will to power, remains individualistic and heroic, and in eternal clash. The suffering that the hero is enduring does not arises from his action but it is external to him, and therefore his responsibility before it vanishes, and its place is then filled with his own heroic affirmation, as hindrance over which man may test his individuality. That self-consciousness that in Hegel is the responsible for man’s own abandonment of his own suffering becomes in Nietzsche only the vehicle to demonstrate man’s own ‘manhood’. Therefore for him, distance is of course essential to all nobility, as much as the absence of reconciliation, since the self is essentially natural, instinctual and individual rather than social. For Nietzsche therefore tragedy celebrates the heroism of eternal human confrontations.

Nietzsche remains caught up in an inner world of psychological and physiological ‘perspectives’, and it appears to me that Nietzsche lacks a clear sense of how the self is objectified in concrete social situations since concrete social situations are invariably dissolved back into states of subjectivity. Moreover it seems to me that his man’s display of heroicity in his theory of tragedy applies solely to the mind and not to the dramatic situation, and he seems to have not clear understanding (or perhaps he consciously reject having any understanding) of the objective dialectic of heroic individuality which Hegel sees enacted in tragedy. In any case both indefectible bring to the fore the consequence of their own philosophical systems, which in the case of Hegel, tragedy reveals in an aesthetic mood the dialectical truth of man and nature. For Niezsche the situation is quite different: man’s creativity stems from his assertive and instinctual individuality.

For Nietzsche heroism lies at the heart of his critic of metaphysics for he criticises what he sees as the fiction of the discrete metaphysical subject by confronting it with ‘heroic’ physiological strength and life. But his critic of that subject is not radical enough, for since his heroism itself remains individualistic, it retains a formal similarity with the very metaphysical self which is the object of his criticism. He does not allow his individualistic selfhood to be transformed by tragedy. Individual natural life remains the foundation of selfhood and the ‘inauthentic’ forms of community and social identity, such as language, shared belief and rational institutions, can never do more than merely mediate that natural life. Contrarily for Hegel the dialectic of tragic hubris is all-important; tragedy enacts in an aesthetic medium the immanent redefinition of the individual subject which his own philosophy fulfils. Is in this way that tragedy presents a critical challenge to the metaphysical subject; but equally presents a critical challenge to the Nietzschean misconception of man.

Individuality and instinctual natural life do not constitute the foundation of human freedom for Hegel, but only the beginning of freedom, for freedom finds its fulfilment in the conscious unity and community of social existence. Nietzsche with his vision of the ‘sublimated’ refined individual strength and energy, and as he fails to equate freedom with social harmony becomes the philosopher who has missed the lesson of tragedy. Or perhaps that there has not been yet enough ‘tragedies’ to constitute a lesson.

I turn now to the historical setting of both philosophies. It is well known the impact Hegels philosophy caused in the course of the following years of his death in 1931. As with other philosophical systems of significant interest, in the past, the new generations divided themselves in those for and those against. One of these against him was Shelling who even received an express commission from Frederick William IV, ‘ to destroy the dragon seed of Hegelianism’; those who on the contrary side for example Herzen who stated that Hegelianism ‘contains the principles of revolution ’¹³.

I consider plausible to remind the reader that the statements quoted above are best understood under the light of a brief account on the historical context wherein they were uttered. Those statements foster the imprint of the events during the year 1844-48 when Europe, in particular Germany endured proletarian revolutions whose nurturing come from interpretations of Hegel’s Philosophy, first on the hands of Ludwing Feuerbach, D. F., Strauss among the most influential; and later by both Marx and Engels.

When the Hegelian system collapsed, so did the whole endeavour to co-ordinate and so to comprehend, the world’s totality and its principle of growth from idealist sources, i.e., from elements of the human consciousness. The demise of the system in bourgeois thought prompted the outbreak of a bottomless relativism and agnosticism, as though the now obligatory renunciation of ideals systematising were at the same time to mean renouncing the objectivity of knowledge, a real coherence of the actual world, and the possibility of knowing this. But equally we know that the burial once and for all of the idealist system coincided with the discovery of the real framework of objective reality, namely dialectical materialism. Engels polemizing against one of Nietzsche’s contemporary Eugen Düring, formulated the new philosophical position, thus: ‘the real unity of the world lies in its materiality,..... this unity the individual branches of learning seek (with ever greater accuracy) both to reflect and to embrace conceptually; the principles and laws of this cognitive process are summed up by philosophy. So the systematic frame work has disappeared. It no longer appears, however, in the form of idealist ‘essences’, but always as an approximating reflection of that unity, that coherence, that set of laws which objectively- or independently of own consciousness present and captive in reality itself ’¹⁵.

So Nietzsche’s rejection of system arouse from the relativistic, agnosticizing tendencies of his time. The point that he was the first and most influential thinker with whom this agnosticism turned into the sphere of myth. To this outlook his aphoristic mode of expression is not doubt intimately related. But he also had another motive beyond this. It is a general phenomenon in ideological history that thinkers who can observe a social development only in embryo, but who - specially in the moral area- are striving for an intellectual grasp of it, prefer the essayist aphoristic forms. The reason is that these forms garantee the expression most fitted to a mixture of mere scenting of future developments onto one hand, and an acute observation and evaluation of their symptoms on the other. We see this in Montaigne and Mandeville, and in the French moralist from the Rochefoucault to Vauvenargues and Chamfort. Stylistically, Nietzsche had a great liking for most of these authors. But a contrast in the basis tenor of the content accompanied this formal preference. The important moralists had already criticised- the majority in a progressive way- the morality of capitalism from within an absolutist, feudal society. Nietzsche’s anticipation of the future was, on the contrary, approvingly oriented to an encumbering reactionary movement, qualitatively heightened, that is to say imperialist reaction. It was solely the abstract fact of the anticipation which determined the formal affinity. Thus, the sources of his mythic-aphoristic style owes to the immediate interests of the bourgeoisie and the ideologies endeavours, could be arranged and interpreted in the most diverse, often diametrically opposed ways. This form was the increasingly dominant mode of philosophical expression in the imperialist age.

But there is a continuity of thought mirroring the continuity of the basic problems of imperialism which are the submission of the ‘slaves’, ‘the mob’ the labourers all over the planet and the echoing of the interpretations of the permanent needs of the parasitical bourgeois intelligentsia. In Nietzsche the fight against socialism, the imperialist myth and the summons to barbarous action which pervade all over his work are intended to appear as an unprecedented reversal, a ‘transvaluation of all values’, a ‘twilight of the false gods’, and the indirect apologetics of imperialism as demagogically effective pseudo-revolution.

Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking seemed to be opposed Democracy and Socialism from the beginning as we can see in his notes for the lectures ‘On the Future of our Cultural Institutions (1871-3): ‘ The most widespread culture, i.e., barbarity is just what communism presumes... universal culture turns into a hate of genuine culture ....To have no wants Lassalle one said, is peoples greatest misfortune. Hence the worker’s cultural associations, whose aim has been often described to me as that creating wants.....the drive, therefore, to disseminate culture as widely as possible is reduced to a means of gain and of earthly happiness in the vulgar sense ’¹⁶.

For Nietzsche slavery was necessary for any real civilisation as we can read in Beyond Good and Evil: ...’The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is however... that it accepts with good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments ’¹⁷, and ‘Exploitation does not pertain to a concept of imperfect of primitive society; it pertains to the essence of living things as a fundamental organic function it is a consequence of the situation will to power which is precisely the will of life- Granted this is a novelty as theory- as reality it is the primordial fact of all history; let us be at least that honest with ourselves ’¹⁸. Moreover ‘and while it may be true that the Greeks perished because of their slave-holding, it for more certain that we shall perish because of the absence of slavery ’¹⁹.

On the other hand we have that Philosophy felt an eagerly need of renovating itself. The abhorrence with which the philosophical world alluded to the awakening of ‘the mob’ first appeared in Shopenhauer’s philosophy. He who during the Paris Commune offered the counter-revolutionaries his opera-glasses to help them shoot at those fighting on the barricades, and who bequeathed part of his wealth to the counter-revolutionaries disabled.

Now when we consider Nietzsche’s period of activity it can be clearly discerned the Paris Commune, the evolution of the socialist parties of the masses, in particular in Germany of his time, as also the manner and success of the bourgeois struggle against them, impressed him most profoundly. For his and for other philosophers of the age Socialism as movement and world-view had become the chief opponent and that only this change in the social front and its philosophical consequences enable me to portray his outlook in its true context.

Nietzsche witnessed the founding of the German Reich, the hopes that where pinned to it and their disappointment, the fall of Bismarck and the inauguration by Whilhelm II of an overtly aggressive imperialism. And at the same time he witnessed the Paris Commune, the origins of the great party of the proletarian masses, the ‘mob’ in Nietzsche’s words; the outlawing of socialists, and the worker’s heroic struggle against it.

He was able to satisfy and brilliantly illuminate the pressing question with clever aphorisms, and to satisfy the frustrated, indeed sometimes rebellious instincts of the parasitical classes of intellectuals with gestures that appeared fascinating and hyper- revolutionary. Nietzsche associated a coarsely humdrum anti-socialism with refined ingenious, sometimes even accurate critique of culture and art was what made him subject-matter and modes of exposition so seductive for the intelligentsia.

On the other hand we have that Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind was the result of several attempts in pursuing to endow the former’s thinking with a system. His first attempt of a system glimpsed through his lectures at the University of Jena from 1802 to 1806 and published under the generic name of The Jenenser Realphilosophie.

Hegel devised his Phenomenology of Mind as an introduction to his philosophical system of which freedom, subject, mind, notion are derived from the idea of reason. The latter is conceived as the result of thinking and thought ought to govern reality. The work intends to guide human understanding from the dimension of every-day experience to that of concrete and real philosophical knowledge, to absolute truth, i.e., to knowledge of the world as mind. To be sure the Phenomenology of Mind impersonate the immanent history of human experience whose common sense experience is certainly questioned to the point that it do not possess the whole truth but that it is the grown from which the real knowledge emerges.

Hegel advocate that reason is the totality of objective concepts and principles of thought as opposed to feelings. Although reason can only exist through its realisation, and that reason’s right to shape reality depend upon man’s ability to hold generally valid truths, Hegel insists that the changing relation between consciousness and its objects is a process of knowledge which becomes too the process of history, thus Hegel couples the epistemological process of self-consciousness ( from sense-certainty to reason) with the historical process of mankind from bondage to freedom, i.e., the modes of shapes of consciousness emerge simultaneously as objective historical realities, states of the world wherein at certain point in history man’s self-conscience must prove itself and so doing it effects a split into two conflicting domains, the one in which man is bound to his labour so that it determines his whole existence, and the other in which man pillages and possess another man’s labour and becomes master by the very fact of this appropriation and possession. Hegel terms the latter as the lord or Master, and the former as the bondsman or Slave as it is expounded by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Mind whose dialectic now I turn to.

If we are to believe Hegel that the first experience in this duality is the experience of the first estrangement manifested by disunion of the pure self-consciousness and consciousness in the shape of thinghood, this relationship though necessary configures as dependent to each other, or existence—for-another; the one is the Master and the other is the Slave.

In Nietzsche too we find this duality and which according to him it is enacted by a struggle between each other which he terms ‘slave morality’ and ‘master morality’, and the ‘...symbol of this struggle, inscribed in letters legible across all human history, is "Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome": -there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction ’²⁰.

Hegel maintains that a second moment in this peculiar relationship is provided by the fact that The Master relates, (apart from his own existence) to himself through another consciousness that is, that of the Slave’s. Now to the object of desire which is the product of the Slave’s labour as thinghood which simultaneously synthesised as such in this double-dealing, and which the former becomes a third element as soon himself establishes by mediation to each of these moments through the first moment, that is: for the Master the essential thing is existence-for-self; whereas for the Slave the essential thing is its life, or existence-for-another. This state of affairs is to be interpreted as that of the Slave is a type of consciousness that is willing to barter freedom and independence to assure existence and avoid risking life.

By contrast, in the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche gives us a brief revision of the different stages that the mutual recognition of personality -whose abhorrence Nietzsche fails to hide- which first introduced by Christianity been taken across the ages: from Christianity through the German Reformation, and ending with the French Revolution. Common to all these epochs, Nietzsche indicates, a ‘slave revolt in morality’ has taken place, and the characteristical futures of this revolt are best expressed with the terms ‘resentment’ and ‘imaginary revenge. Nietzsche put it in this mode: ‘To be sure, in the midst of it there occurred the most tremendous, the most unexpected thing: the ideal of antiquity itself stepped incarnate and in unheard- of splendour before the eyes and conscience of mankind.... the supreme rights of the majority, in opposition to the will to the lowering, the abasement, the levelling and the decline and twilight of mankind, there sounded stronger, simpler and more insistently than ever the terrible and rapturous counterslogan’ supreme rights of the few !’²¹

The Slave, Hegel argues, in its dealing with things as products of his labour relates to it negatively in the manner that the latter appears as anxiety, fear for the death ‘the absolute master’, which is the absolute negativity and in so doing the Slave ‘supersedes its adherence to natural existence-here-and now and work it off ’²². That is to say, by transforming natural existence through work, one attains freedom from natural existence. Thus the subordinated comes to self-consciousness through the dealing with the producing of things to keep his live going and to that of the Master. The former arriving at self consciousness through work reports on his situation as subordinate being inasmuch as the independent existence of things has been the chain that had held the servile consciousness captive, and in so doing it supersedes its contingency, which is at first the servile consciousness or objective negativity that now destroyed situates itself as the negation in the element of permanence ‘by this means it becomes an existence-for-self, for-itself. That is the negation of the first negation or state of alienation caused by the chain or independent existence of things given by the scarcely confrontation with the latter. And so the strong ties to the Master is negated once more through the Slave’s work who ceases to tremble, as his own existence-for-self comes to the fore.

The Master, contrarily as passive consumer of the products of the subordinate’s labour and deprived of the independence of things which chained both himself and the Labourer, that is, the independence of the thing is relegated by the Master to the Slave who works on it. The master has the power over the Slave, the Slave has the power over the thing, his work, which is not self evident at first but becomes as such in a progressive relationship. As soon as the slave acquires self-consciousness, that is to say, as soon as he abandons the domain of alienation , within which recognition only goes one way, namely that the Master does to himself what he is doing to the other, and the Slave does the other what he is doing to himself which, which in other terms it is depicted by the inversion of the Golden Rule, ’Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, which spells a one sided and unequal recognition, about which Nietzsche seems to be very happy, for what he would to impose to the slave it is the same which the former impinges upon self, that is self-restrainement, self-repression, ‘the ascetic life’ which ‘... even when he wound himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction-the very wound itself ‘, - assumingly- ‘... the very wound itself afterward compels him to live ’²³.

However as life goes, the mediated thing, labour, is retired from the mediation and the Masters self- certitude collapses. And ‘Slavery as consciousness-forced-back-on-self, will come to itself and convert itself into true independence ’.²⁴ For the latter exerts his power over the ‘thing’ through the Salve. Now, the consciousness for-the-Master, that is the Slave-consciousness, through which the Master attains fulfilment is a dependent consciousness, he lacks certitude as his existence- for-self as the truth, is the inessential consciousness and its inessential action, whereas the Slave is pure essential action. In other words, Masters looking for objective reflections of their freedom from their slaves, are doomed to disappointment; for the only reflection they will get is abject, cowering dependence. The only way masters could recognise a reflection of their own freedom in their slaves would be to permit full freedom to the slaves which for Nietzsche would be the worst of the atrocities. Seemingly, for Nietzsche, notwithstanding the aforesaid ’... finally has arrived ‘..with its vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals over all nobler ideals ‘²⁵. And, ‘Let us stick to the facts: the people have won or ‘the slaves’ or ‘the mob’ or ‘the herd’ or whatever you like to call them...’²⁶... ‘ bad air, bad air ’²⁷.

If we have to believe Nietzsche, the Master race in order to cope with the imminent growing status of the Slave recurs to the preservation of his own life by indulging in self-deprecation, asceticism, otherwise succumbing before ‘a degenerating life’, that is that, ‘degenerated’ Slave’s self-consciousness which renders the former’s consciousness inessential.

To be sure, whereas for the Master the outcome is to do away with desire, or ‘passion’, and insofar as ‘ working is an ignominy ...wretched the seducers who have deprived the slave of his innocence by means of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, ’²⁸ to indulge in a ascetic life, to practice self-repression, has the same to be ordain upon the bondsman.

At this juncture, I would like to remind the reader that Max Weber has closely observed the connection that the ascetic life maintains with Capitalism; and whose Puritanism had been commonly associated with asceticism. He argues that as soon as capitalism established, that religious element which had helped to produce it was eradicated and the transition to secularity conveyed the task of the announcement of ‘the dead of God’. Weber remarks: ‘its significance (of asceticism) for the development of capitalism is obvious’ ²⁹.

On this order of things, asceticism had to provide a ‘iron cage’ adequate to the endeavours of the capitalist, that man has to exist in an increasingly bureaucratic order from which the spontaneous enjoyment of life is ruthlessly expunged-the Puritan in his self-restrainement aspires at most to remain the master over the workers and the products of their work.

Hegel perseveres in that the Slave on the other hand as servile-consciousness remains in fear for the Master -"the fear for the Lord is the beginning of wisdom"(Proverbs 9:10)- which is not yet existence -for-self, but through work it comes to itself. In the Master’s consciousness work appears as inhibited desire appropriated for itself and vested in self-feeling since the objective dealing with the thing, work is missing, that is, the objective aspect, or its subsistence. The Master thus appropriates the pure negative aspect of the thing , and validated as inhibited desire ’ascetic ideal’ hypostaseated in the products of slave labour. But, the negating activity which is its production, belongs to the labourer which externalises himself through this, through the enacting and asserting of his desires via working, and in so doing paves the way to the stability of his self; thus, to the labourer’s own self, his existence becomes an existence for-self, for-itself thereby he/she acquires its liberation - which, if we have to believe in Hegel it represents universal liberation. Thus, recognition remains one sided, what at the end of the dialectical process according to Hegel will assuredly happen is that the liberation of the slave entails the effacement of the duality, Master-Slave into another negated negation unity of higher value, wherein the ethic is not that the liberated slave is to become the master over his work and not over his fellow men, but so, as mediated thing between him and Nature it establishes solely a relationship which unites both the ethical and the aesthetical in one dimension: the absolute reconciliation of the senses and mind conflated in the absolute truth: the absence of exploitation, which for Nietzsche would be unacceptable as I have remarked above (p.5)

So, viewed through this prism, work itself as negative objectivity negates itself as the Master is expelled from the unequal moment of the recognition, and work looses its character of toil and becomes play, in other words Art. What is more, the universal condition of this liberation is to do away with masterdom, to which Nietzsche opposes rabiately.

I consider significant to abound a bit more in the historical setting of Nietzsche’s opinions, in order to understand the sources and echoes of them. A second period of Nietzsche’s cultural crusade had to do with the cultural conflict of his time, namely the anti-socialist laws in Germany. Firstly we have the young Nietzsche affected by the war of 1870-71 where he as Bern professor enlisted as volunteer nurse, and hopes of a general cultural regeneration in the eftermarch of victory.

After acquiring more experience and knowledge on the political -social situation of his time, his next cultural move was centred upon the idea of rebutting and disarming the socialist threat, his chief adversary now as before, with the aid of democracy. Nietzsche thus became a ‘democrat’, ‘liberal’ and evolutionist precisely because he found in this most effective counter-poise to socialism. Then he declared ‘adapt oneself to the new circumstances as one adapts when as earthquake dislocates the earth’s old borders and contours ’³⁰. It was not fortuitous that Human All-too Human appeared roughly half a year before the promulgation of the socialist ban. But maintained and did it all of his life that ‘ A higher civilisation can only come about when there are two distinct social castes: that of the working people and that of the leisured, those capable of true leisure; or to put it more strongly, the caste of forced labour and the caste of free labour ’ ³¹ .

His democratic devotion of this period entranced the ‘Democracy’ of Bismarck the ‘democracy’ of the antisocialist laws and processed social politics, the ‘democracy’ of carrot and stick.

Nietzsche having witnessed with despair how the German working class had advanced first the founding of the communist International in 1864, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the belligerency showed in the 1880’s he became more and more sceptical about the chances of putting down the workers by time honoured methods, strongly feared- at least for the time being- a workers victory. Thus he wrote in the Genealogy of Morals (1887) ‘Let us face the facts: the people have triumphed- or the slaves, the mob, the heard or whatever you like to call them....Masters have been abolished; the morals of the common man have triumphed.. mankind’s ‘redemption’ (namely for its masters) is well under way; every thing is becoming visibly judified or Christified or mobified (what do words matter) to arrest this poison’s progress throughout the body of mankind seems impossible...’³²

On the other hand he was criticising Bismarck for not solving the workers problem and accusing of failing to understand was to be the era of great wars by way of reactionary aggression. For Nietzsche maintained that ‘ upholding of the military state is the ultimate means to the highest type of person, the type that is strong ’³³. That time, Nietzsche held was the time of the great politics ‘the time of moral politics is over: the very next century will bring a struggle for dominion over earth, the obligation for great politics’ ³⁴

In Ecce Hommo Nietzsche expressed himself thus on the subject: ‘there will be wars the like of which have never been on earth before Great politics on earth are only beginning with me’ ³⁵.

Most of his statements on ethics became a dreadful reality under the Hitler regime, and they also retain a validity as an account of ethics in the present North American age: let us just quote from The Will to Power ‘ In our civilised world would no are almost solely acquainted with the stunted criminal, weighed down by society’s curse and contempt, mistrusting himself, often belittling and calumniating his own dead, a failed criminal type; we find it repugnant to think that all great men were criminals ( but in the grand manner, not miserably) and that crime belongs to greatness ’³⁶. And further, ’... the putrid ruling classes have corrupted the image of the ruler. For the State to exercise jurisdiction in cowardice, because it lacks the great man who can serve as a criterion. There is no much uncertainty in the end that men will kow-tow to any old will-to power that issues the orders ’³⁷.

All this Nietzsche wrote as a sincere thinker no hypocrite or sneak, he wrote with a downright cynical candour. And we have not pass away that the Nietzsche interpreters of our time are eager to water down all his tendencies towards revival of barbarity, glorification of the white terror, racism , Neo-Nazism and the moral sanction of cruelty and bestiality inflicted upon humans, eager indeed to eliminate them from his works by dividing the young Nietzsche from the old one and depriving him of authorship of his works published by his sister. One wonders why is so popular that of ‘man is a brute and super-brute, the higher man is the monster and superman; thus the two go together whenever man adds to his greatness and stature he also increases in lowness and fearsomeness. The one thoroughly you want the one, the more thoroughly you will achieve the other ’ ³⁸.

Hegel may be epitomised as follows: he has held, with the discussion of work, that the mere fact of work indicates that man has exchanged the immediacy of nature for a mode of existence. As he investigates the determinations he uncovers a dialectic in which technology and society interact to the benefit of both: the subordinated and the subordinator. On one hand, Hegel shows how tools arise out of the dialectics of labour. Starting with the man, who by using tools, exploits the laws of nature operative in work, he passes through various transitions until he reaches the nodal point where the concept of the machine emerges. On the other hand, thought inseparably from the first process, Hegel shows the universal, i.,e. the socially determined aspects of work lead to the increasing specialisation of particular types of labour, to a widening gulf between the labour of the individual and the satisfaction of the needs of the individual. These two processes are intimately connected. At this stage we should remind the reader that Hegel was well acquainted with the work of Adam Smith, and that his contribution was to raise the dialectic immanent in economic process to conscious philosophical level. Thus he perfectly knew that a high degree of technical competence presupposes a highly advanced division of labour. By the same token he is no less aware that the perfection of tools and the development of machinery itself contributes to the extension of the division of labour. On the latter we can find a quotation from one of his lectures of 1805-6: ‘The existence and scope of natural wants is, in the context of existence as a whole, vast in number; the things that serve to satisfy them are processed, their universal inner possibility is posited as something external, as form . This processing is itself manifold; it is consciousness transforming itself into things. But since it is universal it becomes abstract labour. The wants are many; to absorb this quantity into self, to work, involves the abstraction of the universal images, but it is also a self-propelling formative process. The self that exists for self is abstract; it does indeed labour, but its labour is too abstract. Needs are broken down into their various aspects; what is abstract in them is their self- existence, activity, labour. Because labour is only performed for an abstract self-existence need the work performed is also abstract. This is the concept the truth of the desire we have here. And the work matches the concept. There is no satisfaction of all the desires of the individual as he becomes an object for himself in the life he has brought forth. Universal labour, then, is division of labour, saving labour. Ten men can make as many pines as a hundred. Each individual, because he is an individual labours for one need. The content of his labour goes beyond his own need; he labours for the need of many, and so does everyone. Each person, then satisfies the need of many and the satisfaction of his many particular needs is the labour of many others ’³⁹.

Hegel’s philosophical system is the consciousness of consciousness, or the unity of the Mind that speaks within its mutual inconsistent thoughts. Nietzsche on the contrary denies any primacy of self -consciousness. The essence of man, in his view is what is unconscious, the will to power. Self-conscious is not the discovery of the unity in disemption, but merely a mistaken interpretation of our unconscious nature. Nietzsche ostensibly opposed to all forms of the ‘beyond’, in fact alienates it as self-conscious from nature, as unconscious becoming. As a result of rejecting the unity of self- consciousness as a function, Nietzsche cannot find freedom from nihilistic self-division as such, but rather attributes the overcoming of decadent nihilism to the non-self-conscious creativity of noble nihilism, which is to make nihilistic self-division the permanent ‘sense’ of human experience. Nietzsche’s solution thus deprives man of his consciousness, of his unified, universal sense of ‘I’ and confines him to a truth which is particular and personal, that is, if philosophical truth is mine, then there is no truth, but only opinion. Contrarily with Hegel we learn that if truth is to be found it is the unity, direction and purpose of man’s universal self-consciousness as found in himself and in relation to the collectively.

It is just that Nietzsche lacks a sense of the unity of consciousness; it is rather that Nietzsche fails to understand -or refuses to do so- the moment of mutual recognition and social mediation which in Hegel’s account all true selfhood requires. Furthermore, Hegel’s account throughout the Phenomenology, of the self-negating consciousness is a phenomenological analysis of consciousness in terms immanent to the mental realm as such. This analysis is rooted in the fact that consciousness is only certain of itself as consciousness insofar as it is conscious of other objects. That is, consciousness of in being for self in its otherness.

Desire is involved as initial move of the agent, which is the first mode of self-consciousness and which seeks to verify its certainty of self in its other by consumption of the object and independent natural life. In this way desire transforms what is merely other into an object for consciousness, an object which reflects consciousness back into its own sense of self. However precisely since it consumes the object, desire destroys the element which is to reflect its power as conscious desire. The truth of desire thus turns onto to be rather that self-consciousness can attain its being-for-self only in another self-consciousness. Nietzsche on the contrary the self-attainment or self awareness of the other’s self, endures a negative character which is not again ‘negated’ but that remains only self -aware in its sole self. Therefore Nietzsches’s morality is understood in terms of a logic of self-consciousness invested in a philosophical force within which the negation of desire is thus not motivated by the need of self-consciousness to enter into a relationship of mutual recognition and social identity with another, rather it is motivated by the will within the weak mode of force to preserve itself against the other.

Nietzsche was undertaking not a practical deduction of individual morals from concrete social conditions, but an intuitive, irrational association of highly personal psychological and moral problems with a society and a history transferred to mythical terms. But just this philosophical approach- deliberately witty in form, in content serving the permanent interests of the most important reasons for Nietzsche’s lasting influence in the imperialist period.

The union of an ingeniously decadent individualism with an imperialist commonality decided the duration of Nietzsche’s influence in the imperialist age and caused it to survive particularities. The moral disintegration of bourgeois economics and petty bourgeois, which become increasingly marked as imperialist economics and politics gained ground, confirmed the ‘prophetic’ foresight of Nietzsche’s ethics. And his lasting influence had not little to do with the fact that he went a long way towheads catering the needs of decadent wing. He brought up questions from within its sphere of interests, amused them in its own spirit. Above all he commended and encouraged its decadent instincts professing that this was just the way to conquer decadence. Hence Nietzsche’s ‘dialectics’, I found in this respect, lay in a simultaneously acceptance and rejection of the decadent movement, whereby he could enable the militant reactionaries to reap the benefits. For his own part, Nietzsche gave his blessing to these dialectics: in Ecce Hommo he said: ‘For granted that I am a decadent, I am also the antithesis ’⁴⁰. This antithesis is represented as I know in his ethics of barbarism. And Nietzsche turned the whole problem of decadence firmly on its head when he defined as its most important sign the view that ‘we are fed up of egotism’ ⁴¹ For patently the predominance of individualist-egotistic propensities over social ones was among the movement’s most significance features. But it was possible for Nietzsche to ‘salve’ the decadents, i.e., to induce in them absolute self-confidence and give them a clear conscience without fundamental altering their psychological moral structure. He did so precisely in egoticism, and that they must- with a good conscience become more egotistic still.

On the above context the unity of Nietzsche’s philosophy implied an active rejection of the chief enemy, namely the working class ( ‘the mob’, ‘the herd’) and socialism. And as a class struggle intensified and one illusion crumbled after another, it expanded into an intellectual anticipation of the imperialist phase in capitalist evolution. Only in an imperialist bourgeois state of a decidedly aggressive reactionary tint could Nietzsche find a sufficiently strong defence against the socialist danger, only the emergence of such a power inspired in him the hope of succeeding in neutralising the working class once and for all. His bitterness about Germany of his time stemmed from its failure to adopt this measure and its continued hesitancy in doing so. There tendencies are best seen in Nietzsche’s ethics, that is because he, in view of his class situation, his ignorance of economics and the fact that his activity pre-dated imperialism, was naturally in no position to foreshadow imperialism in economic and social terms. In his work, he portrayed the bourgeoisie’s consistent imperialist morality all the more clearly for that. Indeed he here anticipated in theory the true course of development. Most of his statements on ethics became a dreadful reality under the Nazi-regime, and they also retain a validity in the current politics of the Western Countries against the third world.

Nietzsche was not only as in his ‘ethics’ a prophet of the imperialist barbarity, but was moreover looking for those new types of forms of dominion which could thwart the rise of the working class.

Nietzsche was highly sceptical about those methods of apprehension practised in his own times ( he had witnessed the failure of the anti-socialist laws). He did not believe that the contemporary capitalists, politically conservative, as they were, were capable of carrying out such a policy. That calling awaited none else than ‘The lords of the earth’ whose deliberate training was the principal idea behind Nietzsche’s ethics. here we see that he anticipated in his thinking not only imperialism, but also fascism to boot. Of course it was impossible for this to happen in an even relatively concrete form; it was only possible on a mythical, universal level.

To his intellectual attainment I have to add his view of history, the reactionary content, the apologetics defence of capitalist society as the unsurpassable peak and final end of human evolution had to bring about the repeal of history, evolution and progress. This stimulated keeping in step with needs of the times, along with a mythicizing of history in nature and society leading not only to the emergence of other reactionary evolutionist contents and aims, but also to the self annulment of evolution in the mythical presentation.

Now I will turn to broadly abound in the elucidation of the general epistemological structure which underlies Nietzshe’s conceptions regarding the pair of opposites Master-Bodsman.

Along the past paragraphs I have hinted that the Nietzsche’s time was characterised by the rise of irrationalistic trends in philosophy as contrast with the post-Hegelian ‘rationalists’. I would like to add that during that time epistemological questions played a decisive role in philosophy. Crucial collisions occurred between idealist dialectics and irrationalism over the ‘intellectual intuition’, the positive philosophy of Shelling. And their outcome determined philosophically the concrete question of history. With Nietzsche the issue is reversed: a wholly unknown adversary even in the realm of philosophical theory being the scientific method of socialism, eventhough Nietzsche had not an inkling of the philosophical problems of dialectical and historical materialism.. He confronted them wherever he though he could do it in the flesh: socially, historically, morally. Therefore the concrete contents of these areas are crucial to his system. For him, epistemology was only a tool whose character and disposition were dictated by the purpose it served. But Nietzsche only bequeathed what it was notorious of all bourgeois philosophy of the period, philosophy in the age of decline. Contrarily to the period of its rise which was characterised by the struggle against feudal ideology, accordingly evinces a great variety of epistemological trends; idealism, and materialism, subjective and objective idealism, metaphysics and dialectics contend one another for predominance. Objective idealism whose bourgeois perversion was considerably fostered the ‘heroic illusions’ of the democratic revolution, died out with increasing speed as this period come to an end.. After the French revolution, mechanical materialism lost its earlier university; Feurerbach’s purview was already much narrower than that of his seventeenth and eighteenth-century predecessors. But after a brief period of supremacy in natural philosophy, mechanical materialism bereaved its leading stance in this province also. Although, as Lenin noted, every ‘genuine scientist’s praxis remained spontaneously materialistic, philosophical idealism falsified and deformed the great scientific discoveries. Thus epistemology sank very low precisely as a result of the near-total hegemony which subjective idealism exercised in the bourgeois philosophy of this period. It was as philosophy did not reflected more than this perfunctory use of the content and method of philosophising. But in contrast to that an academic scholasticism was growing up, and trivial profession squabbles over insignificant nuances were replacing the great philosophical conflicts. The social ground for subjective idealism’s total control over bourgeois philosophy is clearly visible in this pre-imperialist period which energetically paved the way for this decline. Idealism along with agnosticism enabled the bourgeois ideologist to take from the progress of science, firstly from the natural sciences, all that served capitalist interests, while at the same time avoiding taking position with regard to the altered world-picture. Engels very rightly calls this period’s agnosticism a ‘shame-faced materialism’ ⁴².

Even in the period previous to the imperialist period, that is, before the 1870’s Europe, the ideological needs of the bourgeoisie underwent a change. Question of viewpoint did not sufficed and philosophy was obliged to make an stand primarily against materialism: more and more clearly the positivist agnostic’s ’shame-faced materialism’ was acquiring an anti-materialist makeup. Thus we see the outburst of Machism, Neo-Kantism who were their chief orientations as they completed this shift, and which was concurrent with Nietzsche’s activities ⁴³

In contrast with Berkeley’s open war on materialism in the eighteenth-century, bourgeois thinking of the middle of the nineteenth-century, in order to defend idealism against materialism, was forced to resort to a ‘third road.’, that is, to behave as if it were reproving and repudiating both idealism and materialism from a ‘higher perspective’, it bespeaks that, on the world-historical scale, it had been forced into a defensive posture. Its propositions, method and so forth were more in the nature of protective measures than means of analysing and interpreting objective reality in a manner of its own. But this time described by Engels soon fluctuated towards a qualitative distinct from those of the bourgeois’s hey day. Thus the bourgeois world-view had its basis in an agnostic epistemology, in a denial that what was objectively real was perceptible. For that reason it could be only a myth, something subjectively contrived with pretensions to an epistemologically unarguable objectivity, an objectivity resting solely on an extremely subjectivist ground, on intuition and the like, and so never more than a feigned objectivity. This need of mounting and increasingly uncritical need of myth witnesses of the decline of bourgeois thinking contrasting with its hey day when its philosophical systems sought to oppose the feudal legends precisely by appealing to real evolutionary trends in nature and history.

Now, the relevance of Nietzsche’s thinking in this period is determined by the fact that along with other thinkers ⁴⁴ of the period he introduced the new agnosticist method in epistemology. But Nietzsche went much further than his contemporaries did, for with his anticipation of agnosticism into the sphere of myth, he showed a careless daring that general bourgeois development only came close to matching at the end of the first imperialist world war, as in the work of Spengler ⁴⁵.. He did strike a special note in his determination to think reactionary bourgeois tendencies via the most extreme consequences and openly to state their conclusions in a crude and paradoxical form. This is connected with an attitude in which I see the restraining centre of Nietzsche’s philosophical system: with his everlasting and passionate open warfare against the peril of socialism.

He made depend all the principal contents of his thought to the needs of this battle; he always allowed these needs to decree the content. Thus his epistemology thought very close to his contemporaries, far exceeded them in its cynically frank conclusions. To be sure, Nietzsche was in complete agreement with the formers regarding the ‘immanence’ of philosophy, of the programmatic denial of all ‘transcendence’. By ‘immanence’ they meant the world of our intuitions and ideas, ’transcendence’ all that in reality goes beyond these, for instance, objective reality itself, existing independently of our consciousness. Another further agreement between the both parties, was that they seem to polemize against idealism’s purported claims to be able to perceive objective reality; here therefore, anti-idealist polemics mask the denial of materialism. Although Nietzsche went still farther along this road by coupling the campaign against ‘transcendence’ and the Beyond with his anti-Christian views. He was even capable of misleading those who happen to see the beyond is the synthesis of the Christian Heaven and the materialist view of objective reality. In connection with the aforesaid the school of Ernest Mach even criticised materialism as ‘metaphysical theory’. They even challenged the perceptibility of objective reality, indeed all objectivity of knowledge. They regarded causality, laws, etc., as categories of an idealism that has been conquered once and for all. They even did as Nietzsche did, opposed the materialist side of the Kantian Ding an sich.⁴⁶

Nietzsche’s ‘beyond’ was, apart from the ‘immanence’ of the Machists view, the sole scientific grounds for comprehending the world, including his nihilistic openness, and he formulated it in bold paradoxes. In The Twilight of the Idols his mocking polemics harangued against the conception of a ‘true world (of objective reality), and his deductions climax in the sentences proclaiming the ‘end of the longest error’ and the ‘peak of mankind’: ‘The true world we have abolished: what was left? the apparent world, perhaps?...But no! Along with the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!’ ⁴⁷

But Nietzsche was not content only with epistemological statements. His whole epistemology was for him just one weapon in the battle against socialism. Hence not only epistemologically but even socially he attempted to endorse a concrete definition of ‘immanence’, the world of ideas inseparable from the general philosophical level, that actual condition of society at any given time: in concrete terms capitalism. Therefore we see how Nietzsche reprended morally and philosophically those who represented ‘transcendence’, Christians and socialists, as being ‘immanent’ reactionaries. Nietzsche wrote: ’But even if the Christian condemns, slanders and vilifies the "world", he does so from the same instinct as the socialist worker who condemns slanders and vilifies society: the "Last Judgement" itself continues to offer sweet revenge- the same revolution that the socialist worker awaits, only carried somewhat further. The "Beyond" itself- what good might a Beyond have except as a means of vilifying this world?...’⁴⁸

In the last analysis all ‘immanence’ in imperialist bourgeois philosophy is aiming at the target of deducing from epistemology the ‘everlastigness’ of capitalist society. And Nietzsche did it very well and as he became the leading ideologist of the militant reactionaries.

A considerable complement for grasping Nietzsche’s epistemological findings put forward in form of the duality master-bondsman is to explore his way of treating the issue of Being and Becoming.

Nietzsche’s agnosticism and subjective idealism though certainly derived from Berkeley and Shopenhauer belongs to modern imperialism,⁴⁹ but admittedly, we can find antecedents as far as from Heraclitus. And in so doing his agnosticism becomes endorsed with a ‘philosophical’ character that exceeds the aridly scientific and helps him to transpose agnosticism into myth-making, at the point that the most recalcitrant fascist followers such as Baeumler who stresses so much this derivation as it is by this may that he soothingly be dislodged from the mainstream bourgeois philosophy and make him a ‘solitary’ forerunner of Hitler.

On the one hand, the fact that Heraclitus philosophy is more liable to support the dialectical world-view is it as well true that in reactionary hands yields to irrationalist myths. I his notes for Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks(1872-3) Nietzsche hints on a central thesis of Heraclitus’s dialectics, ‘Everything always contains its opposite’, and Aristotle’s polemics against this thesis. His commentary is significative: Heraclitus possesses the real gift of the highest power of intuitive thinking, while showing himself cool, insensitive and indeed hostile towards that other type of thinking which is accomplished in concepts and logical combinations, i.e., towards reason and seems to take pleasure in any chance to contradict it with a truth intuitively arrived as ’⁵⁰. So we see that for Nietzsche the critique of understanding (Verstand) is simply identical with the sovereign supremacy of intuition over reason and not as Heraclitus’s lore put it, as being through its own contrariety. In the same manner, what logically ensues, Nietzsche establishes a close couple betwixt Heraclitus dialectics and Shopenhauer’s as parallels too betwixt Berkeley and Mach. In the Birth of Tragedy (1870-1) he contextualizes the Heraclitean concept of becoming: ‘In Becoming is manifested the ideational nature of things: there is nothing. nothing exists, everything becomes, i.e., is idea ’⁵¹

It has been argued that this view belongs to Nietzsche’s youth and therefore not relevant but let us turn to the ‘mature’ Nietzsche of The Twilight of the Idols, where he again touches on Heraclitus and where he stresses the very same idea: ‘But Heraclitus will forever be right in that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the one and the only: "the true world" is only a mendacious gloss...’⁵²

Nietzsche’s lack of concern of historical facts are again patent when he makes Democritus as ‘inspirational source‘ to this purpose as it is testified in the preparatory writings for The Will to Power. And Protagoras, the patron saint of the Machists is too summoned to the same purpose as the latter ‘ united in himself both Heraclitus and Democritus’⁵³.

On the previous account we see that the concept of being employed therein is stranger to real Being that is, existing independently of consciousness; crosswise, it is voiced purely in order to lend myth a semblance of objectivity, inasmuch as myth can be apprehended solely intuitively, through ‘illumination’.

In his elucidation on becoming and in connection with Heraclitus, the former serves chiefly to severe all objectivity. In The Will to Power he warrants: ‘The character of the becoming world as defying formulation, as "false", as "self-contradictory". Knowledge and Becoming are mutually exclusive ’⁵⁴. The same advisement, logically settles the pure fictive quality of Being: the supposition that which is in being is necessary in order to be able to think and summarise: logic only deals in formulae for unchanging things. Hence this act of assuming could still furnish no proof of reality: "That which is in being" (Das Seiende) belongs to our optics ’⁵⁵. But if it is the case that Being is a mere fiction, then how can Being crop up in eternal recurrence which is higher than real becoming- real at least in our idea of it?

Nietzsche following the line of Berkeley, Shoppenhauer and Mach did away with any possible connecting links between the remnants of dialectics left by Shelling and Kierkegaard, to the extend that it is allowed to speak of a logico-philosophical order at all in his work. What he did have but one meaning: the more fictive a concept is and the more purely subjective its origins, the higher it stands and ‘truer’ it is in the mythical scale of values.

Being for Nietzche, then has to be jettisoned from all relationship of the independence of reality, it must be displaced by becoming. And because Being is displaced by Becoming, thereby pure fiction and the will to power, the former still abides a higher category than becoming which in last instance is an expression of the pseudo-objectivity of myth. The idea behind this move is to underpin a pseudo- historicity which is vital to the indirect apologetics and simultaneously dismissing it, confirming philosophically that historical Becoming can produce nothing that is new and outruns capitalism.

But this single instance, central as it is to his epistemology, yet the picture has to be completed with the fact that in contrast with the neo-Kantians and Positivism whose basic approach was specific objectivism, and admittedly only scientific abstention from any explicit attitude and relationship to praxis, Nietzsche vigorously shifted the connection between theory and practice to the centre of his whole epistemology. Here he was more intrepid and radical than his agnostic contemporaries for he proclaimed the usefulness of truth only in connection with the survival of the individual and the species, tenet which is befitting to the imperialist pragmatism: ‘We have always forgotten the main thing: why does the philosopher want to know? Why does he value "truth" more highly than appearance? This valuation is older than any cogito ergo sum: even presupposing the logical process , there is something inside us which affirms it and denies it opposite. Whence the preference? Every philosopher has neglected to explain why he values the true and the good, and none has sought to attempt the same for the opposite. Answer; the True is more useful (for preserving the organism)- but not in itself more acceptable. Enough; form the very beginning we find the organism speaking as a whole, with "purposes"- therefore making value judgements ’.⁵⁶ It is evident that this applies to the truths of morality: ‘All moralists join in drawing lines regarding good and evil, depending on their sympathetic and egoistic impulses. I regard as good that which serves some end: but the "good for what?" Good is merely a term for a means. The "good end" is a good means to an end ’⁵⁷, and in The Will to Power, Nietzsche summed up this doctrine in the suggestive words: truth is the type of error without which a particular type of living being could not exist. In the last resort the decisive value is the value of living ’.⁵⁸

Let us consider the aforesaid as preamble within the path to comprehend Nietzsche’s stance on the duality masters and slaves and add that, the object of his endeavours to trace back the usefulness of the truth to the life of the species and of the individual, takes us into the sphere of Becoming again, which in terms of the species and the individual it is firstly a historical process and secondly, as historical content, the uninterrupted conflict between two human types, two races, namely masters and slaves. In this context hence the ‘truth’ refered in the past paragraph becomes conceptualised in connection with the everlasting struggle between these two races, and the moral and philosophical consequences in this connection determining the degree of truth they possess. Put it differently, the usefulness of that truth becomes as such solely in connection with the survival and establishment of the master race. Consequently the establishing of the master race is made possible through first: a ‘clear conscience’ for the master’s most extreme egotism ‘Egotism and a kind of second innocence go hand in hand ’⁵⁹ ; second: every sort of cruelty and barbarity that has been fulfilled ( the innocence of becoming); then, and only then, this concept is finally instituted and set free in the mythical province of eternal recurrence. It goes without saying that it consigns exclusively to the ‘lords of the earth’, for it was for them that Nietzsche wanted to furnish a militant philosophy.

In connection with all transcendence which I already hinted above,. transcendence is revoked by ‘eternal recurrence’. Nietzsche said: ‘It is the great disciplinary idea; those races which cannot endure it are condemned, those that find it of the greatest benefit are destined for mastery ’⁶⁰. Further, ‘Morality protects the defeated type from nihilism by attributing to each person of this type as infinite, metaphysical worth and by assigning each to an order which differs from worldly power and hierarchy: it taught submissivness, humility, etc. Supposing that faith in this morality perishes, the defeated would no longer have their consolation- and would perish ’⁶¹. It goes without saying that the lords of the earth are the decadent parasites of the Europeans imperialism.

Nietzsche’s conception of decadence as central figure in future developments and as startpoint for desired future condition distinguishes him from his contemporaries. Nietzsche wanted to save capitalist society as typified by the ‘normal’ man, i.e., the bourgeois and the petty-bourgeois who found themselves increasingly discontent in the course of time with the capitalist reality, with its increasingly total distortion of man. This distortion manifested itself as world-weariness, pessimism, nihilism, dissipation, lack of self-belief, lack of perspectives and so on. As Nietzsche proceeded resolutely from this basis recognising himself in them, regarded the former as brothers.

At first sight would seem that Nietzsche is combating nihilism and decadentism, but as I have noted above, he considered himself decadent and its opposite: it was precisely those decadent attributes which would provide the right material for the new lords of the earth; he wanted a change of direction, a turn-round, without affecting the status quo. All decadent attributes were to be converted into tools for a militant advocacy of capitalism, and the decadents themselves into activists supporting the - both inwardly and outwardly-aggressive and barbaric imperialist cause. Here again appears the mythical figure of Dionysos as the symbol of this turn among the ruling class.

Decadence is a universal problem to Nietzsche’s mind and Dionysos appears as a symbol of the haughtiness, meritorious type of decadence, decadence in strength, as opposed to paralysing, debilitating pessimism (Schopenhauer) or a liberation of the instincts with plebeian sonority (Wagner). Nietzsche said on this pessimism of strength: ‘Man now needs a "justification of the bad" no longer, it is precisely "justifying" that he abhors: he enjoys the bad in its raw purity and finds the meaningless bad the most interesting.....Under such conditions it is precisely the good which needs "justifying", i.e., it must have an evil and dangerous undercurrent or incorporate a great stupidity: then it will still find favour. Animality now no longer shocks; a lively and cheerful bravado in favour of the best in man is, in such times, the most victorious form of mental activity ’⁶². It is part and parcel of this he stated somewhat later, ‘to grasp the hitherto rejected sides of existence not only as necessary but also as desirable: and not only as desirable with regard to the hitherto approved sides (as, say, their complements or preconditions), but for their own sake as the mightier, more fruitful and truer sides of existence through which its will is distinctively voiced ’⁶³. The god of this decadence ‘redeemed’ for activity is Dionysos; his distinguishing marks are ‘sensuality and cruelty’⁶⁴. He is the new God: ‘God conceived as a state of liberation form morality, cramming into himself the whole abundance of life’s antithesis and redeeming, justifying them in divine torment:- God as the Beyond, superior to the pitiful workday morality of "good and evil"’⁶⁵.

Nietzsche’s methodological model of indirect apologetics of capitalism served to the whole imperialist period which even reaches us to-day showing just how a fascinating and colourful symbol-realm of imperialist myth could evolve from an extremely agnosticist epistemology, a theory of the most extreme nihilism.

Nietzsche undoubtedly held a consistent philosophical system but this consistency lies in its articulation with the social reality of his time. His brightly assorted, mutually irreconcilable myths will yield up their ideational unity, their objective coherence: they are imperialist bogeys myths serving to mobilise all imperialist forces against the chief adversary, socialism. The fact that the struggle of masters and herd, of nobles and slaves amounts to a mythical counterpart, in caricature form, not the class struggle is not too hard to discern. I noted more in detail in the precedent paragraphs on the Dionysiac versus the Dialectics how the challenge to Darwin was a myth arising from justified fear that the normal course of history must lead to socialism. That behind eternal recurrence there hides a self-consoling, mythical decree that evolution can produce nothing fundamentally new, and therefore no socialism. Furthermore his Superman came about in order to steer back on capitalist lines, etc., etc., the yearning spontaneously springing from the problems of capitalist life, its distortion and stunning of human beings. His ‘positive’ part of the myths is no more than a mobilisation of all the decadent and barbaric instincts in men corrupted by capitalism in order to save by force this parasitical paradise; here Nietzsche’s philosophy is the imperialist myth designed to counter socialist humanism.

True from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, men were projecting as model an image of the Greek polis that was full of illusions in order to manage its declining post, such illusions, its nucleus was nonetheless made up of real evolutionary currents, the real evolutionary trends of a rising bourgeois society; hence of elements of its own social life and outlooks, of its own concrete future. But with Nietzsche, all his contents stem from fear which sought refuge in myth, of the fall of his own class, and from inability genuinely to measure up to the adversary in intellectual terms. It is material from ‘enemy territory’, problems and questions imposed by the class enemy which ultimately determinated the content of Nietzsche’s philosophy. And the aggressive tone, the offensive approach in each individual instance barely distinguishes this underlying structure. The epistemological appeal to adopt the most extreme irrationalism, to deny completely all knowability of the world and all reason, linked to a moral appeal to all bestial and barbaric instincts, is an unconscious admission of this position. Nietzsche’s uncommon intelligence is patent in his ability to project, on the threshold of the imperialist period, a counter-myth that could exert such influence for decades. Therefore his aphoristic mode of expression appears to be the form utmost tailored to the socio-historical situation. Hence it becomes transparent that the inner rottenness, hollowness and mendacity of the whole system wrapped itself in his multicoloured and formally cleavaged ragbag of ideas.

Herewith I consider consummated the corroborating of the initial predication, namely that Nietzsche did not undeviatingly riposted Hegel but circuitously.

A final remark has to be done: this is not the place to demonstrate in detail how the Nazi regime incorporated to its need the philosophy of Nietzsche and other German philosophers and thinkers, it suffices with the allusions I have made throughout the text. Nazism as an ideology grounded in the German soil and soul had no other than incorporate all what it was ‘incorporeable’ to its success to which nor even Hegel escaped. It is well known that at the entrance of Auschwitz we could read ‘arbeit macht frei’ ⁶⁶ which tells a big deal on Hegel’s philosophy in the line I have here expounded, which moreover is the core of his philosophy. However, even in that extreme case, Hegel applies there inasmuch as Auschwitz was a concentration camp or a camp were slave labour was been conducted, ⁶⁷ and which as Hegel has strongly insisted, to them, to the slaves, freedom, in the historical sense, particularly belongs. And to all of them also belongs the Hegelian philosophy. Contrarily, modern German history has found Nietzsche’s philosophy coquetting with the master race.

Arturo Reyes Mata

40. Vol. XV, p.11.

41. Vol. XV, p.147.

42.- Engels, F., On Historical materialism, in Ludwing Feurerbach and the end of German Classical Philosophy, Berlin 1927, p.85.

43.- We know that Niezsche did not know anything about of Avenarius’s Critique of the Pure Experience, neither on Schuppe the leader of the ‘philosophy of immanence’; nor on Vaihinger’s ‘Philosophy for the common man’ even though the latter claimed his support. Here I am solely concerned with the epistemological orientations of Nietzsche’s time essentially similar to his.

44.- Mach, Avernarius, etc., see note 43.

45.- Spengler, Ostwald, The Decline of the West, London, 1926, pp. 132f

46.- On the Ding an sich see Kant, I., Critique of Judgement, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1989, pp. 175f

47.- Vol. III, p. 83.

48.- Ibid, p. 142.

49.- Since the 1980’s it is being euphemistically termed ‘Globalization’

50.- Vol. X, p. 32.

51.- Vol. IX, p. 197.

52.- Vol. VIII, p.77.

53.- Vol. XV, p. 456.

54.- Vol. XVI, p. 31.

55.- Ibid., pp 30f.

56.- Vol. XIV, pp.12f.

57.- Vol. XI, p.51

58.- Vol. XVI, p. 19.

59.- Ibid., p. 138.

60.- Vol. XVI, p.393.

61.- Vol. XV, p. 184.

62.- Vol. XV, p.371.

63.- Ibid., p.383.

64.- Ibid., p. 386.

65.- Ibid., p.379.

66.- Lengyel, Olga, Five Chimneys: the story of Auschwitz, Mayflower, 1972.

67.- Kogon, Eugen. The theory and practice of hell: the German concentration camps and the system behind them, New York, 1973

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