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.Noise is simply the most primitive, crude and ultimately destructivemeans of accomplishing such deliverance.But making a racket is farmore than just an intellectual anaesthetic; it is also symptomatic of thefrenzied egoism of Western civilisation, its will to power.The heatedrhetoric of demagogues, the clamour of the masses, the empty chatterof cultural life all these are nothing more than expressions of the stilluntamed struggle for life in society, a means by which one individualseeks to impose his tyrannical will upon another, to make himself heardamidst the cacophony of screaming voices and throbbing machines.TheWest s boisterous self-regard is a sign of cultural immaturity, an imper-fect internalisation and spiritualisation of the libidinal drives.For Lessingsees culture as an evolution towards silence towards the contemplation,tranquillity and communality valued by the late, biologically old civilisa-tion of the Orient and achieved through a peaceful self-discipline whichimbues life with dignity.40 Ultimately, Lessing sees the regeneration ofEuropean culture taking place not through a programme of social hy-giene, but through a wholesale moral renewal through a transvaluationof values.Nietzsche, then, is not the only philosopher of the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries to articulate his ideas within the discur-sive framework of evolution and degeneration.But no other thinker, itseems to me, has such an ambivalent, complex relationship to the themesof race and disease, progress and decline.Health and sickness may well38Lessing, Der Lärm, p.30.See Lawrence Baron, Noise and Degeneration: TheodorLessing s Crusade for Quiet , Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982), 165 78.39Lessing, Der Lärm, p.8.40Ibid., p.19. Conclusion 211be the central normative antithesis in the writings of men such as Scheler,Spengler, Simmel, Lessing and Klages, but their work lacks the almostobsessive proliferation of medical metaphors that we find in Nietzsche, hissheer rhetorical exuberance.Nietzsche s biologism is more wide-ranging,more total than that of his immediate successors.Their work also lacksthe fundamental contradictoriness of Nietzsche s position a nineteenth-century faith in the institutional authority of the biological sciences whichco-exists uneasily with a belief that these same disciplines are infected withfalse values; the characteristic hovering between literalness and metaphor,sincerity and irony.We might say that, though Nietzsche shares a com-mon language both with his contemporaries and his intellectual heirs, hespeaks it with a different accent.More importantly, perhaps, a consid-eration of Nietzsche s disciples also underscores the degree to which therhetoric of health and sickness even within Lebensphilosophie has beenmade to serve diverse ideological ends, from anti-Semitism to Zionism,from conservatism to socialism.To appreciate this, to recognise that biol-ogism is a significant thread running through the fabric of much post-Nietzschean German thought, prevents us from making the rash andunhistorical attempt to trace a direct line of descent from Nietzsche s phi-losophy to National Socialism simply on the basis that both are couchedin the same language of evolution and degeneration.Steven Aschheim,for example, has argued that the Nazi bio-political understanding of, andsolution to, degeneration was in multilayered ways explicitly Nietzsche-inspired.41 That such a claim is misguided is, I hope, clear from theargument of this book.The doctrines of National Socialism and thecrimes prepetrated in their name represent the logical conclusion ofthe academic debates about evolution and degeneration in Europe inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, something that oneof Hitler s officers at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg wasclearly aware of when he proclaimed: The German form of life is def-initely determined for the next thousand years.The Age of Nerves ofthe nineteenth century has found its close with us. 42 Nietzsche s voice,then, as I have repeatedly argued throughout this book, must be seenas only one among many in a larger chorus, and, for the fanatical posi-tivists of the Third Reich, rather less authoritative than that of Fritz Lenzand other respected scientists at the forefront of the eugenics movement [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.Noise is simply the most primitive, crude and ultimately destructivemeans of accomplishing such deliverance.But making a racket is farmore than just an intellectual anaesthetic; it is also symptomatic of thefrenzied egoism of Western civilisation, its will to power.The heatedrhetoric of demagogues, the clamour of the masses, the empty chatterof cultural life all these are nothing more than expressions of the stilluntamed struggle for life in society, a means by which one individualseeks to impose his tyrannical will upon another, to make himself heardamidst the cacophony of screaming voices and throbbing machines.TheWest s boisterous self-regard is a sign of cultural immaturity, an imper-fect internalisation and spiritualisation of the libidinal drives.For Lessingsees culture as an evolution towards silence towards the contemplation,tranquillity and communality valued by the late, biologically old civilisa-tion of the Orient and achieved through a peaceful self-discipline whichimbues life with dignity.40 Ultimately, Lessing sees the regeneration ofEuropean culture taking place not through a programme of social hy-giene, but through a wholesale moral renewal through a transvaluationof values.Nietzsche, then, is not the only philosopher of the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries to articulate his ideas within the discur-sive framework of evolution and degeneration.But no other thinker, itseems to me, has such an ambivalent, complex relationship to the themesof race and disease, progress and decline.Health and sickness may well38Lessing, Der Lärm, p.30.See Lawrence Baron, Noise and Degeneration: TheodorLessing s Crusade for Quiet , Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982), 165 78.39Lessing, Der Lärm, p.8.40Ibid., p.19. Conclusion 211be the central normative antithesis in the writings of men such as Scheler,Spengler, Simmel, Lessing and Klages, but their work lacks the almostobsessive proliferation of medical metaphors that we find in Nietzsche, hissheer rhetorical exuberance.Nietzsche s biologism is more wide-ranging,more total than that of his immediate successors.Their work also lacksthe fundamental contradictoriness of Nietzsche s position a nineteenth-century faith in the institutional authority of the biological sciences whichco-exists uneasily with a belief that these same disciplines are infected withfalse values; the characteristic hovering between literalness and metaphor,sincerity and irony.We might say that, though Nietzsche shares a com-mon language both with his contemporaries and his intellectual heirs, hespeaks it with a different accent.More importantly, perhaps, a consid-eration of Nietzsche s disciples also underscores the degree to which therhetoric of health and sickness even within Lebensphilosophie has beenmade to serve diverse ideological ends, from anti-Semitism to Zionism,from conservatism to socialism.To appreciate this, to recognise that biol-ogism is a significant thread running through the fabric of much post-Nietzschean German thought, prevents us from making the rash andunhistorical attempt to trace a direct line of descent from Nietzsche s phi-losophy to National Socialism simply on the basis that both are couchedin the same language of evolution and degeneration.Steven Aschheim,for example, has argued that the Nazi bio-political understanding of, andsolution to, degeneration was in multilayered ways explicitly Nietzsche-inspired.41 That such a claim is misguided is, I hope, clear from theargument of this book.The doctrines of National Socialism and thecrimes prepetrated in their name represent the logical conclusion ofthe academic debates about evolution and degeneration in Europe inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, something that oneof Hitler s officers at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg wasclearly aware of when he proclaimed: The German form of life is def-initely determined for the next thousand years.The Age of Nerves ofthe nineteenth century has found its close with us. 42 Nietzsche s voice,then, as I have repeatedly argued throughout this book, must be seenas only one among many in a larger chorus, and, for the fanatical posi-tivists of the Third Reich, rather less authoritative than that of Fritz Lenzand other respected scientists at the forefront of the eugenics movement [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]