Nietzsche and the Now: An Interview with Glenn Wallis
by John Kendall Hawkins
Glenn Wallis is an independent scholar and founder of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. He has taught at several universities, including Brown University and the University of Georgia. His most recent books include A Critique of Western Buddhism and How to Fix Education . Wallis blogs at Speculative Non-Buddhism . He holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from Harvard University. Wallis has been a guitarist in a punk band as well.
He has also recently published Nietzsche NOW! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time. (Warbler, 2024). His book includes a fresh translation of the German philosopher's work. Here in this interview, Wallis describes how Nietzsche's thoughts and observations can usefully inform contemporary rumininators of the myriad cultural crises at hand. Willis's book is especially effective at addressing problems of democracy, identity politics and metaphysics, Wokeness, and living a critical and thoughtful life, while embracing amor fati. Readers can join discussion sessions on Buddhism and Nietzsche online at his Incite home.
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JOHN HAWKINS: Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist the Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time. Wow. Let's unpack that title. Why Nietzsche now? What's so special? Immoralist is a loaded term whose import depends on the point of view of the user. What do you mean? And just what are some of the "vital issues" of our time? Wow.
GLENN WALLIS: H.L. Mencken, who in 1908 (Nietzsche died in 1900) wrote the first study of Nietzsche to appear in the US, said something to the effect that all complicated issues have answers that are clear, concise, and wrong. A very Nietzschean comment! He says that he hears all around him people bellowing lazy half-baked opinions, politicians screeching illogical ideologically infused polemics, and assorted platitude-prone "improvers of mankind" yammering on about facile "solutions" to our most vexing problems. Sound familiar? How can Nietzsche-- and how can we-- not conclude that our fellow citizens have a "hatred against reason." If there were a Nietzschean sin, it would be "to stand in the midst of the discordant harmony of things and the whole wonderful uncertainty and ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the longing and rapture of questioning." So, the short answer is: Nietzsche shows us how to question. And I believe that in doing so, he shows us a way forward in our grimly divided world.
How does he do so? Most generally, however, he recommends that we "learn to survey and grasp a single matter from all sides." I should hastily add two points. The first is that Nietzsche is not advocating the cynical "two-sides" approach of our contemporary rightwing politicians. Indeed, such an approach is far too simplistic for Nietzsche. For him, any given issue has, quite literally, a para-infinite number of sides. The more variously we can consider a matter, the more we are exercising our intellectual conscience and deriving considered reasons for our position. When he says that the eyes must learn to "come-into-its-own," he means that we must learn to see and think in a way that resists the gravitational pull of "herd" ideology.
The second point is that becoming an acolyte of Nietzschean "perspectivism-- "of carefully considering a matter from multiple angles-- does not entail infinite deferment of a position. The entire purpose of the exercise is to move, step by step, person by person, toward a future worth living. Ultimately, Nietzsche wants to help create the conditions for new values-- values radically different from those that inform what he saw as the West's dominant forces: capitalism, democracy, the state and Christianity, transcendental idealism, and morality.
This is why Nietzsche calls himself an "Immoralist." For Nietzsche, there are two massive problems staring us in the face regarding our morality. The first is that we have created a world that "steams with the stench of slaughtered spirit." In the world we have created, the human being is a diminished little thing, animals are subjected to infernal torture, and the natural environment is desecrated. How can this be "good"? The second is that morality is not the infallible universal gauge of good and evil that it pretends to be. Rather, it is the prescription, or indeed dogma, for what the dominant group in a society deems "good and evil." In short, whatever preserves the community status quo is good; whatever threatens it is bad.
Nietzsche believed that by thinking outside of the very framework of "morality" per se, the immoralist can view more clearly the workings of the human heart and mind, and far beyond. What makes this possible is that the immoralist-- indeed, like amoral nature itself-- no longer takes into consideration the "utility of the herd."
The vital issues of our time that the book deals with are big ones like democracy, identity, consciousness, truth, embodiment, virtue, and overcoming. Many other specific issues of our day are woven in as well, such as "wokeness," pronouns, LGBTQ++, liberalism and conservatism, and more.
JH: You write of Nietzsche, "His most cherished values were intellectual curiosity and existential courage." What does that mean? It seems like a long time since Dylan sang about "flesh colored christs that glow in the dark" and not having to look too far to see "that not much is really sacred." That was like, uh, 1965. Where do we find genuine intellectual curiosity today? Existential courage? What with the climate catastrophe alone, where do we see such courage? How would Nietzsche, the philosopher who came too soon, be helpful to us now that it seems so late?
GW: I agree that neither intellectual curiosity nor existential courage are on abundant display these days. Maybe that paucity is yet another reason to read (and to write) a book like Nietzsche NOW!
It is interesting that you cite a lyric from 1965 because that era might have been the last time that something like collective existential courage was on display in a consequential way in the United States. Until now, that is. As we sit here, encamped students at Columbia University and other college campuses are protesting the Israelis excessive response to Hamas's monstrous attacks on October 7. By doing so, these students face brutal aggression by the police and suspension or expulsion by the university administration. Certainly, whatever your politics, that must count as an example of "existential courage." While the example might be considered an exception to the rule (of passivity), it might just as well be seen as a harbinger of the courage to come from the younger generation.
But what of "existential courage" in everyday life, the kind that is available to every one of us? Nietzsche asks us to consider two areas where such courage is of dire necessity. The first is in our thinking process itself. So, the first task of existential courage is to resist the "mythical," the fantastic, and the otherworldly in our very thinking.
JH: Some folks believe that Nietzsche was not necessarily a friend to Democracy, given his herd mentality snarking. But you write:
When people form into community-- whether a family, a friend group, workplace, or a nation-- is a diversity of viewpoint avoidable? Is it even desirable? After all, what is the alternative-- groupthink? Nietzsche does not believe that factionalism and friction necessarily entail discord. Or, expressed in more Nietzschean terms, what sounds discordant to our present ears may be transfigured into a future music.
Say more about this situation and the reference to "future music." BTW, what did you mean by your earlier crack: "It is essential to read him carefully and thoroughly, like a cow chews her cud, as our guide puts it."
Say what?
GW: About the cow: Nietzsche believes that he is not "readable" to us because we have forgotten a crucial "skill." The skill is one that a cow possesses. A cow chews her cud slowly, deliberately, repeatedly, thoroughly. Applied to reading and thinking, this skill requires that we cultivate rumination, that we learn to chew, and then chew again; to go over, and then go over again; to harp on, dwell on, tarry in; to contemplate, deliberate, excogitate; to reflect on-- again and again and again. Can we regain this skill? It is, after all, a skill that requires us to repudiate our very inclination to be a "modern person-- "to be hasty, shallow, screen-obsessed, bedazzled by the spectacle-- and to become "practically a cow." Who today is willing to make that tradeoff?!
You are right, Nietzsche is no friend of democracy. The reason is precisely because it is, he believes, in cahoots with capitalism, the state, and Christianity to create the kind of "modern person" that I just mentioned. He sees the modern citizen of democracy as a person disinclined to do the hard work of thinking and acting for change. The democracy that he saw emerging in Germany in his day clearly led to a "diminution and leveling" of the individual. "We see nothing today," he lamented, "that wants to become greater; we suspect that everything will go further down, down into what is thinner, more good-natured, more clever, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent."
In her book Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, Natasha Lennard talks about how large scale institutionalized fascism doesn't just sprout overnight. Its ground is prepared over time by millions of barely discernible actions carried out by well-meaning people in numerous liberal, democratic societies. Nietzsche asks us to consider what the long-term ramifications might be of actions such as habitually acquiescing to authority, turning away from oppression done before your eyes to other people, accepting injustice, and so on. In a private conversation, the anarchist theorist John Clark referred to this phenomenon as "fasciogenic." Nietzsche has a similar notion, namely, that "democracy" is first and foremost a micro psychological disposition to flatten out differences in the name of macro outcomes (liberty, equality, equity, justice) that somehow never comes to pass. As a thinker of the future, it is clear to Nietzsche that "democracy," whatever that may even mean in real terms, must be replaced with another system of governance.
Nietzsche believed that our path forward must necessarily entail what he termed agon. This is a Greek word that means "contest," "opposition," "struggle," "competition" and can be seen in our word antagonist, "one who contends with another." You might ask: is that not what we do on myriad online platforms without pause? Where has this cacophonous bellowing led us? Nietzsche asks us to consider that the situation is like that of a "great city" in front of whose gates his protagonist (there is that word again), Zarathustra, finds himself one day. He is accosted there by a "foaming fool" who warns Zarathustra not to enter the city. "Oh, Zarathustra, here you have nothing to find and everything to lose. Why do you want to wade through this sludge? Here great thoughts are boiled alive and cooked until they are small." It is a place that "steams with the stench of slaughtered spirit." It is the City of Public Opinion, where souls are hung out to dry "like limp, dirty rags." And yet, somehow, although it is a place where "all desires and vices are at home," we may nonetheless still find "virtuous people" to interact with there. How can we discern the difference between worthy and unworthy, between edifying and disheartening? Only through agon. It is, furthermore, through agon that we recognize and develop our own capabilities. As unpleasant as it may be, Nietzsche holds, agon is an unavoidable component of a desirable world.
JH: You write:
We, we moderns, have emptied the universe of the certainties and securities of the past. In so doing, we have initiated an unprecedented cosmic-cultural-existential-psychological crisis that is equal parts liberating and terrifying. Nietzsche offers many high-octane passages about this crisis, and even a few about its resolution.
Tease us with a Nietzsche flourishment or two that addresses our crises.
GW: Haha. Well, the book is full of fraught examples of how Nietzsche might get us thinking about issues like "wokeness," identity politics, argumentation as well as cherished ideas like equality, equity, democracy, and truth. How about I offer a comment that expresses Nietzsche's general attitude toward this task? And, reader, please note that, in that first bit at least, Nietzsche is describing, not prescribing!
We must thoroughly think through the reasons for [our current situation] and resist all sentimental frailty: Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering strangers and weaker people, oppression, severity forcing one's own ways on others, annexation, and at the very least, at the very mildest, exploitation...That sounds harsh"But why stroke the pampered ears of our modern softies? Why should we yield a single step to their foolishness of words? For us psychologists, it would be a foolishness of deed to do so: quite apart from the fact that doing so would make us nauseous. For, if a psychologist today has any good taste (some would say "honesty"), it lies in his resistance to the shamefully moralized manner of speaking with which virtually all modern judgments about people and things are besmeared.
JH: You write:
We were prepared to give whatever we had to follow Zarathustra's advice for going under , crossing over , and rising up .
Is this the same "we" who were following Dr. Leary's advice to "Turn on, tune in, drop out"? How are they different? Why are they necessary?
GW: We were a tad too young for Dr. Leary's Human Be-In, but your point still stands. Yes, we understood Zarathustra to be beckoning us away from the ways of "the herd" and toward what we considered the wild torrent of "the Dionysian." (We even wrote a song about it.) What this involved, we were not completely sure. But we believed, assumed, we had-- faith?-- that, as you note, it would entail our "going under , crossing over , and rising up." I think that anyone who looks carefully at how we have lived our lives will find some merit to my claim that we were correct in our assumption.
JH: Given what Nietzsche famously felt about "the herd mentality", what would he feel about the hivemind we call the Internet? Would he even have an email address? And what would it be: ubermenschen@gmail.com? Oh, wait, I think that one might be taken.
GW: Concerning the internet, Nietzsche would have trumpeted "public opinions, private laziness!" The internet is just the latest version of the City of Public Opinion, through which "sludge," emitting steam "with the stench of slaughtered spirit," oozes. The role that the internet and other organs of public opinion are of such interest to Nietzsche is because he recognizes the role that such sites play in the formation of individual values and, by extension, of culture and society. Nietzsche anticipated the concept of the "meme." That is, he recognized that certain mentalities have a way of spreading throughout the social field. Some readers might recall the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, in which evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" to describe the way idea-transmission occurs. Like genes, which "propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs," memes "propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." For Nietzsche, any venue of public opinion-- a newspaper, a marketplace, a place of worship, a school, the internet-- is a meme-replicating machine. It is a mechanism through which ideas get passed from mind to mind via non-genetic means, such as language and speech, ritualized practices, symbols, imagery, advertisement representations, conspiracy theories, and so on. For Nietzsche, acquiescence to the memes of the moment is the way of the lowly "last mortal." The "higher type," the capacious Übermensch, for whom Nietzsche is writing, is constituted to no small degree in resistance to the seemingly natural and inevitable stream of memes that buffet them: "One must be a sea to absorb a dirty stream without becoming unclean," he says.
JH: And what would he make of the AI phenomenon and ChatGPT and Taylor Swift and the meaning of her pulling in a billion dollars for touring while so many people are still starving in Africa?
GW: As someone who suffered chronic insomnia due to recurring migraines, persistent digestion problems, deteriorating eyesight, and looming insanity, Nietzsche, I think, would have applauded AI's ability to scour the medical literature and produce etiologies and diagnoses that surpass human ability. In terms of popular, scholarly, political, and corporate uses, I think it is fairly obvious that he would have found AI and ChatGPT to be just more "last mortal" idiocy. He was, after all, a lifelong proponent of lento, lento, of going slowly, as we talked about in relation to the cow earlier. I think he would see ChatGPT as a technology that leads us "further down the path to sand," to homogenized uniformity and massified conformity. Like the interlocked forms of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity, AI and ChatGPT are instruments of human "sandification-- "same-making, difference-destroying, diminishing, mediocritizing, equalizing.
JH: You spend quite a few pages discussing how Nietzsche's thought might be a tonic for an aging Democracy. You write:
The new tyranny is being erected on the venerable mantle of democracy itself. The reader may ask, how can this be? But this state of affairs would not surprise Nietzsche at all. In his later view, the two, tyranny and democracy, are never far apart. A crucial reason why this is so, says Nietzsche, is that democracy breeds mediocrity at best, stultification at worst. Most alarmingly, it breeds herd mentality.
This sounds ambivalent about democracy. Can you clarify his thought on this?
GW: If you read around in Nietzsche's vast body of work, you will come away thinking that he is indeed often ambivalent about some given issue. If you read him chronologically, you might gain some insight into how his thinking changed over time. But given the importance that perspectivism plays in his thought, I tend to take his ambivalence as a lesson in how to think like the Immoralist. That is not to say that I want to copy his thoughts or to arrive at his conclusions. Rather, it means that I want to develop my own ambivalences, my own varying perspectives. Of course, I want to do this not as an end in itself but on my way to a firmer stance on some issue.
So, Nietzsche sees both the value and the danger of democracy. The value is that it helps to abolish monarchy and strongman authoritarian tyranny. It also helps to raise up oppressed classes from serfdom. The danger is that it leads to the "sandification" of the person that we discussed earlier. Nietzsche offers a succinct definition of democracy. It is, he says, the disbelief in human greatness. In his view, democracy also leads to another kind of tyranny, that of the interminably moralizing "herd." (As pejorative as this term sounds, Nietzsche is even ambivalent about the "herd." It confines and coerces but it also warms and protects.)
JH: Can you say how Nietzsche might have felt about anarchism, given his Dionysian/Apollonian creds?
GW: As the author of a book titled An Anarchist's Manifesto, the question of Nietzsche's attitude toward anarchism has occupied my mind for a long time! Talking about Nietzsche's tendency toward ambivalence, we should pause to consider the following. The Nazis' embrace of Nietzsche is well-known. Less known is that the Nazis' archenemies embraced him with perhaps even more vigor. And who were they? As Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it in her book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, they were "left-leaning liberationist, progressive circles, including anarchists, socialists, feminists-- both hard-boiled Marxist materialists and more aesthetically inclined romantic radicals." Nietzsche was admired by both Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader, and Huey Newton, the American Black Panther leader. Take a moment to let that sink in!
No less a formidable figure than "Red Queen" Emma Goldman (1869-1940) insisted, loudly, that "Nietzsche was an anarchist!" Does she have a point? Consider that Nietzsche and the anarchists shared a nauseating hatred of: the state and its capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, antisemitism, and racism; the vapid, obedience-oriented education system; the spectacle-prone hivemind of "the herd;" the cruelty and inhumanity of labor; the cheapness and mindlessness of mass consumerism. Likewise, they shared a desire for the Übermensch, the human being who sloughs off Christian morality, dissolves the inner slave, disobeys the inner police, becomes a master, and lives beyond good and evil.
JH: You write that Nietzsche never got his doctoral and was soundly abused by the established eggheads of his day. This struck me as funny. How would Nietzsche fare today faced with academia's needs for rigorous self-seriousness? Would he finish his thesis? And how did what amounts to a teaching assistant finagle a pension out of the university? It is amazing when I read today of grad students in America going hungry for want of funds or for want of hooking up with sugar mummies, like Dylan did in NYC, to nurture their nascent genius.
GW: It is funny, and then it's sad. I find it absurd, ridiculous, and infuriating that Nietzsche could not thrive in academia. Of course, I also find it unsurprising. The fact of his "failure" reflects the faults of academia, not of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was offered his professorship at the age of twenty-four, an unheard of accomplishment then and now. Consequently, he never got around to writing his dissertation. So, when his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was announced, the academic world braced itself for what would surely be Nietzsche's explosive debut. And explode it did! The book was universally panned. I explain the reasons for this reception in Nietzsche NOW! In short, the book's argument was trashed for being "sheer nonsense"achieved through intuition and presented partly in the style of the pulpit, partly through a journalistic reasoning" and for displaying "a truly childish ignorance and lack of the love for truth." It was, finally, "the exact opposite of the way to research that the heroes of our science [of philology] have tread."
One of the most frustrating aspects of this story, repeated all too often in the arts and philosophy, is the fact that later generations recognized the value of Nietzsche's first book. Two comments from eminent twentieth-century classics scholars bear this out. One called The Birth of Tragedy "a work of profound imaginative insight, which left the scholarship of a generation toiling in the rear;" and another, "a great book, by whatever standard one cares to measure it"It has cast a spell on almost everyone who has dealt with the subject since 1871." What is wrong with contemporary people of any given era that they so miserably fail to recognize brilliant innovation? It irritates me to no end.
How would Nietzsche fare in today's academia? Worse than in his day. He would not have gotten the position in the first place, and he would not have received the pension that enabled him to spend his life wandering and writing. The pension that he received was meager, barely enough for his itinerate life of cheap rooms, sparse meals, and worn out clothes.
JH: You bring the great HL Mencken into the conversation. I recall his famous quip: You'd never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. This is knee-slapping stuff. Nietzsche writes somewhere about the genius of Germans. He notes how Gutenberg changed the world with the invention of the printing press. But then f*ckers came along an invented the noisy newspaper for the masses. Achtung!
It's tough expecting much from the masses, leading their lives of not-so-quiet desperation isn't it? Both Mencken and Nietzsche seem to have loathed the homogenizing effects of journalism, ja?
GW: Yes, Nietzsche planned to include a diatribe against the press in Untimely Meditations. He never finished it, of course. But the role that journalism played in the development of, as you say, the "homogenizing effects" on the populace remained a lifelong concern for him. Newspapers were the major organs of the emerging modernist worldview that he found so problematic. In a notebook, he refers to "newspaper-slavery" to designate the coercive stranglehold that the press had on people. So, desiring, as he did, to offer a critical diagnosis of that enslavement, he kept a vigilant eye on the papers. He believed that doing so enabled him to keep an eye on the thinking, aspirations, and lifestyles of his contemporaries. What he saw was not pretty. Recall the earlier quote about the city of public opinion (such as a newspaper) that "steams with the stench of slaughtered spirit," a place where souls are hung out to dry "like limp, dirty rags." And recall, too, that it is out of these rags, says Nietzsche, that newspapers are made.
Regarding the Germans, Nietzsche offers typically varied views. For instance, the Germans "were called the people of thinkers," but, he rhetorically asks, "do they think at all today?" Surveying the history of German culture, it is obvious to Nietzsche that they once possessed an innovative, dynamic "spirit." In his day, however, they have swapped creative spirit for political power. That Germans no longer think is a consequence of their newfound dominance in Europe: "One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid"The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters. Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles-- I fear that was the end of German philosophy." Nietzsche says he gets asked abroad, "Are there any German philosophers? Are there German poets? Are there good German books?" "They ask me," he says, "and I blush."
JH: So, you were a guitarist in a punk band, Ruin. One critic said of the band that you were, "one of the most beloved bands in the history of Philly." Is there a Nietzsche tie-in? Maybe a musical version of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols? Punk at its best?
GW: Nietzschean themes are interwoven into several songs. I was a university student around the same time as Ruin. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Nietzsche's concept of the will to power. So his thinking was swirling around in my head at that time. It's funny, I vividly recall the very first time I heard the term "hardcore" to describe the super revved up thrash beat that was beginning to be heard in punk circles. I made the point that the term "pure strain" would be better. I had in mind Nietzsche's idea of the Dionysian as a dynamic transgressive force within life, or indeed music, itself. My thinking was that this new ecstatic hyper-rhythm of punk should be viewed as our own manifestation of a primordial drive.
