And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
— Friederich Nietzsche
Like many teenagers, Nietzsche was my philosophical gateway drug. As a burgeoning political agent about to graduate high school, I felt a profound sense of anger towards the conservative religious forces in America, whose confident ignorance was, to me, a slap in the face to everything democratic and right in the world — an ethical worldview ironically influenced by Christian thought. So, it should make sense that his radical discomfort with organized religion resonated with me.
In that sense, I was raised as a sort of ‘cultural Christian’. I hear that term used a lot by people like Richard Dawkins, who seek to maintain a Christian culture and society without the metaphysical baggage that comes with it. From a utilitarian perspective, Christian ethics are exceptional for keeping society together, ensuring orderly function, thus, a more comfortable society. With it, surplus good. And Kantian thought is essentially Christian ethics turned rational. In either case, we’ve got a pretty solid moral base.
However, Nietzsche saw this, thought about it, and realized something: Christians, who preach altruism and purity, whose worldview is contingent on faith as a weapon against selfishness and nihilism, are selfish themselves. Religion doesn’t actually make you selfless. You don’t give a damn about your neighbor, you give a damn about being seen as good, upstanding, and the validation that comes with it. You want to gain approval, and thus feel recognized and validated. Inadvertently, it’s basic Hegelian recognition: we only interact with others to validate ourselves.
Through this, he ripped into Christian morality. It contradicts itself: Assuming he exists, how can we find goodness through God if God himself endowed us with a selfish nature? If we mirror God, then he himself must be selfish, meaning he lacks the so-called “ultimate goodness” ascribed to him. If he doesn’t, then ethics remains a social construct: meaningless in itself, as it’s imposed upon us, reliant on illusions of cosmic punishment and coercion to negate a selfish nature.
It didn’t help that a good number of Christian ideas rely on a suppression of desire. It’s a limit to ourselves, our desires, and, by extension, a limit to the ways we can express ourselves. And we can’t genuinely be ourselves, achieve our goals, and truly bring about great change in society if we can’t express ourselves in the first place.
This means, in a way, many Christians are forced to lie to the world while prohibiting themselves from achieving great things. To Nietzsche, this sounded like a perfect storm for nihilism.
The Industrial Revolution & the Death of God
Fundamentally, one now feels at the sight of work — one always means by work that hard industriousness from early till late — that such work is the best policeman, that it keeps everyone in bounds and can mightily hinder the development of reason, covetousness, desire for independence.
— Friederich Nietzsche
After this, he would dedicate a good portion of his work to combating nihilism and a gradual increase thereof. Around the enlightenment, he saw a rise in meaninglessness, which he attributed to a loss of religious faith, in part brought by empiricism and rationalism. In Beyond Good And Evil, in a passage attacking rationalism, he writes,
For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives…
He outright denied the concept of true and false, preferring to live in a nebulous third space: true and false as something constructed to cope with an incomprehensible world. All we have is approximations of value. Thus, without a metaphysical basis to true and false, even the sciences turn a tad nihilistic.
In essence, with the death of God, everything looks pitifully small and nothing has any genuine value.
Nietzsche mourned this. The world had lost its color, its character and soul. Both literally and figuratively: our lives and the planet giving them a home aren’t some cosmically endowed expression of a divine creator, but a pathetic accident, a coincidence; self replicating molecules lying to themselves for fear of negative neural chemicals. Obviously, this isn’t a fun thought, and it wasn’t for the people of Nietzsche’s time (mid to late 19th century Germans).
I’m sure you know what was happening around then. Not only was Germany experiencing a collective decline in religiosity, but the world around him was cloaked in a thick smog. Factories produced commodity after commodity, as wealthy industrialists (whom Nietzsche regarded highly) led laborious armies toiling away for pitiful wages.
Just a century prior, Germany was downright feudal. Its rapid industrialization was crowning, it hadn’t even reached infancy. But by Germany’s unification in 1871, it’d accelerated rapidly. And by the roughly ten years in which Nietzsche wrote most of his body of work, Germany was a serious industrial power, their economic force crystallized into what would some day devolve into the first world war. Monoliths of capital would rise from the ground; peasants were imported from the country to the cities; and a new aristocracy turned against the old, squabbling over territory once dominated by an inbred nobility.
Nietzsche looked on with awe, watching as a new species of elite dominated the unchanging. His love for the powerful and grand had a new batch of idols. Some, like Karl Marx, watched with horror as the propertyless lived in widespread austerity. His hatred for the powerful and dominant had a new batch of enemies.
In either case, class dominated their view. That includes their understanding of morality.
Where does morality come from?
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?
— Karl Marx
Morality was a solely selfish endeavor for Nietzsche. To him, historically, morality grew as a symptom of class. The poor, often the slaves of the ancient world, watched as their masters lived in luxury, eating what and when they wished, living in homes that didn’t fall with each gust of wind. Then, they looked at their own conditions: starving, decrepit, dingy. So, by vilifying wealth, as Jesus did, they can glorify their own poverty while painting the wealthy as evil. If they make altruism good and selfishness bad, they can manipulate the elite into wealth distribution, thereby getting a taste of opulence. It was, basically, a sort of ‘class jealousy’: if I can’t have it, you can’t have it.
It’s not impossible to see this attitude nowadays. Socialists look up at billionaires and see a class of selfish balls of greed, struggling to gift to the worker even the slimmest morsel of capital. More moralistic working class movements like socialism glorify working class conditions while vilifying the elite — Nietzschean morality embodied.
On the opposite end, modern day hustle culture reveals a working class desperate for wealth, deifying the powerful in the hopes of reaching such a point themselves. This doesn’t do much to vilify the wealthy. In fact, it doesn’t at all. If anything, it vilifies the working poor, revealing a culture symptomatic of elite manipulation: the worker internalizes the beliefs of their ruler, thus glorifying them. This is pure Marxian historical materialism, the mirror image of Nietzsche’s thought. To ossify power, the ruling class, wielding control over cultural, religious, and intellectual institutions, systematically distorts culture to legitimize their position. Workers, peasants, and so on — they internalize it, regurgitating it.
For example, the peasants of the Middle Ages, unable to read or write, understood the Bible only through authority; with it, the Bible was understood to be a mechanism legitimizing Church and monarchical power. Nobles were endowed by God with special privileges, the monarch was an extension of God’s hand, and the Church was pure in every sense of the word. It’s easy to see elsewhere, especially with the aforementioned hustle culture, organizations like the Depression-era Spiritual Mobilization, modern day prosperity gospel, or Donald Trump.
In either case, polar opposite thinkers, an elitist and an egalitarian, apply nearly identical yet somehow antithetical theories of morality, culture, and society. However, Nietzsche’s theory never fully follows through. According to Marxist theory, socialism, a principally Marxist approach, emerges the moment the working class realizes how dreadful its conditions are. Their wages are stolen, their quality of life is driven into the ground, and inequalities expand as imperialist forces recolor the globe. It would be surprising if the exploited didn’t turn resentful.
Morality is a social construct; Nietzsche understood this. Yet his theory looked, not at those who control the social element — i.e., the class operating religion, education, propaganda, art, defining what can and can’t be done, and so on — but the class helpless to influence it.
This elitist, pitiless view of the poor, whose psychology was to him resentful, self-indulgent, and dependent on the strong to survive, inspires his solutions to existential despair. God is a father figure, a parent to wantonly save his flock from the forces of evil. Nietzsche thought this was the problem. How can we face our world, and thus live a life fully steeped in it, if we throw our goalpost far beyond it? Marx thought this way, too, feeling that the working class used religion as a distraction from austerity.
We needed to, not only live fully grounded in reality, but dominate it. We must turn ourselves into a force to be reckoned with, whether economically, politically, or creatively: the Übermensch. The world ought to bend to our will. At that point we’ve transcended transcendence, needing only ourselves to tolerate an otherwise nihilistic life.
To him, elitism was the antidote to nihilism.
In a sense, he was right. We cannot live passively, interacting with the world only insofar as it interacts with us. By seeing ourselves mirrored in outside reality, the world grows, not only a little bit more human, but a little bit more like us. And if this mirror is social, like in the case of charity work or political activism, it’s self-validating, self-recognizing. It reinforces our identity by echoing it. This, in turn, gifts us purpose in life.
This isn’t economic or political elitism. Mainly, it’s humanistic. It’s the arts, humanities, and so on, economic domination being only the accumulation of capital, a goalpost that constantly shifts, constantly distances itself from you. In a way, it spurs desire, making us happy. But, in a way, it’s just another way to cope. It’s steeping oneself in an ideology — that of capital — ignoring reality itself. In other words, it’s shallow, meaningless.
Yet, Nietzsche justified warlords and dictators like Napoleon. He called himself an aristocratic elitist, and he despised the utopian socialists of the time. He briefly criticized capitalism, as labor conditions at the time meant workers wrestled with nihilism each time they travelled to work. Yet, his industrialist obsession prevented him from seeing the real problem: labor itself was miserable, alienated, and arbitrary. It wasn’t just material conditions — people get used to filth, as much as we don’t like it. It was their labor, a defining feature of social identity, which caused nihilism, and, by extension, the widespread psychological repression of millions.
From Karl Marx’s Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
The object which labour produces — labour’s product — confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. Under the conditions of political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the worker; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
Labor, because its fruits are beyond the worker and made abstract by profit, turns repetitive and estranged. Yes, nihilism comes with a collective abandonment of faith. Yes, nihilism comes with an inactive population of atheists. However, nihilism comes most of all from an estrangement of identity, one accompanying an estrangement of labor.
In essence, alienation spawns nihilism: Nietzsche saw a population alienated from the universe they lived in, void of a deeper connection to it than that of an infantile observer. Marx saw a population alienated from their labor, void of a deeper connection to their occupations and communities than that of a stranger. They were both correct.
Aidan Vanhoof 
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