Marx and Hegel posited a new meaning and purpose to life. The failure of 1848, however, caused as much damage to the quasi-theological German idea of development as the discoveries of natural sciences had inflicted on faith in God. The quick collapse of working-class uprisings in 1848, and the triumphs of the bourgeoisie, made historical development seem neither rational nor progressive. Reason did not rule the world; the real was plainly not the rational.
With neither God nor the spirit of history able to explain disastrous events, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, first aired and ignored during the springtime of secular modernity, made a triumphant return. It impressed many with its conviction that the world was directed by a demonic will that determined all human action. In Schopenhauer’s view, individual freedom is an illusion. At best, human beings can deny a malicious will to life by ceasing to strive and act, and dwell in a state of resignation, or non-striving (what Schopenhauer mistakenly thought was Buddhistic Nirvana).
Baudelaire was among those whose God died young in 1848 (if largely because his stepfather, a general whom he loathed, managed to survive the revolution in Paris). He started to see Satan, symbolizing the human capacity for self-destruction, as the only real supernatural presence. Herzen came to sneer at the ‘naive people and revolutionary doctrinaires, the unappreciated artists, unsuccessful literary men, students who did not complete their studies, briefless lawyers, actors without talent, persons of great vanity but small capability, with huge pretensions but no perseverance or powers of work’, who had tried to make a revolution. Flaubert immortalized these losers and no-hopers in his greatest novel, Sentimental Education (1869).
But it was Nietzsche who sensed, with especial acuteness, the debilitating post-1848 mood – what he called ‘nihilism’ – while also recoiling from what he saw as counterfeit attempts to deny it. ‘What will not be built,’ he argued, ‘any more henceforth, and cannot be built any more, is – a society in the old sense of that word; to build that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society; this is a truth for which the time has come.’ As he saw it, Europeans were far from facing up squarely to the death of God, and its radical consequences; they had sought to resurrect Christianity in the modern ideals and ideologies of democracy, socialism, nationalism, utilitarianism and materialism. Stressing humanitarianism and pity, they had embraced the ‘slave morality’ of the first Christians in Rome.
Nietzsche denounced these weaklings, the banal last men of history, who pursue their pathetic invention: a bovine happiness. ‘The earth has become small,’ he wrote, ‘and on it hops the last human being, who makes everything small.’ In this shrunken world, mediocrity is the rule: ‘Each wants the same, each is the same.’ What Nietzsche hoped for was the emergence of noble and strong spirits, a new caste of aristocrats: supermen, such as Napoleon, the true anti-Christ whose will to power is uncontaminated by ressentiment and its pseudo-religions, who creatively use their freedom from false gods and deceptive ideals, and who transcend their fate of passive nihilism to become active nihilists.
Nihilism, then, was both a dismal fate, and a necessary condition for a ‘new race of “free spirits”’, as Marinetti called them, who, ‘endowed with a kind of sublime perversity … will liberate us from the love of our neighbour’. It is hard to imagine what Nietzsche would have made of the free-spirited neighbour-haters that did emerge in every corner of the world: fin de siècle revolutionary ideologues, who, as we have seen, were fired with a Promethean zeal, committed to creating a New Man on the ruins of the old, and restarting stalled history with superhuman effort and a kind of perpetuum mobile. In his own time, Nietzsche witnessed only some ‘active’ and ‘complete’ nihilists from a backward country who appeared to be destroying the old order and its feeble-minded morality rather than preserving it. Although Nietzsche largely knew them only from the novels of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, he was much attracted by the Russians who proved his belief that the incorrigible human will would rather will nothingness and destruction than not will at all.
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The Russians experienced with particular intensity the general shattering of faith in a purposive universe. As we saw briefly in the pages on the Iranian Revolution, members of an uprooted Russian intelligentsia injected a messianic fervour into their desire for freedom and progress. This was largely because there was little modernization going on in Russia for much of the nineteenth century. The Russian economy stagnated while even the Italians started to industrialize. Political oppression often increased. All through the post-1789 European-wide challenges to the Old Regime and the universal outcry for reason, fraternity, liberty and equality, Russia, under its despotic rulers, remained mute. Russian intellectuals were excruciatingly aware of belonging to a country derided as the ‘gendarme of Europe’ for its repressiveness.
Their anguish at being left behind, or at experiencing modernity in abortive forms, anticipated the political and spiritual struggles of many African, Asian and Latin American peoples. One trait their educated representatives all seemed to share is brisk movement from one intellectual passion to another, each more radical than the previous one, in a quest for truly transformative modes of action.
Bakunin, along with Belinsky, had been desperate enough to glorify, much to the dismay of their friend Herzen, the Tsarist autocracy, interpreting the Hegelian formula – the ‘real is the rational and the rational is the real’ – to mean acceptance of the status quo. It brought him in ideological proximity to the conservative Slavophiles with whom he violently disagreed on many issues. Moving on from this tawdry reconciliation with reality (i.e. the establishment), Bakunin (and Herzen) then invested throughout the 1840s their deepest hopes in a revolution in the West that would in turn emancipate Russia, and indeed all of humanity. Their disappointment over the defeat of the working classes and the consolidation of bourgeois power in 1848 was therefore extreme.
Herzen declared that the pitiless science of economics had triumphed over the universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Western bourgeois, Herzen wrote, ‘is selfishly craven and is capable of rising to heroism only in defence of property, growth and profit’. Western civilization itself was a ‘civilization of a minority … made possible only by the existence of a majority of proletarians’, breeding a cult of power on one side and servility on the other.