Hope Despite All Doubts

Hope Despite All Doubts

July 17, 2022

Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise.

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

As an anti-German German intellectual sandwiched between the Industrial Revolution and the catastrophic twentieth century, as a Romantic critic of Romanticism and a philosophical critic of philosophy, Nietzsche is an ambiguous figure who can be read “in relation to'' numerous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. His relation to his own time remains contested. Was Nietzsche an apologist for German imperialism, an enemy of the working class and quixotic champion of a dying nobility, as Lukács contends in his late works? Or an irrationalist who valorized the unconscious and prioritized perspectivalism over naive realism, as some post-structuralist readings contend? Or is Nietzsche a staunch individualist—a faithful reader of Emerson advocating self-reflection and self-reliance in the face of an increasingly false and rationalized society? Nietzsche tasks his readers with the question of how to read him. Though they are not entirely uncritical of him, the theorists of the Frankfurt School, particularly Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer, grasp Nietzsche immanently and, in so doing, read him first and foremost as a dialectical critic of the dialectic of bourgeois society after the Industrial Revolution, in other words, as a late philosopher of freedom.

In a fragment of commentary on a 1942 paper by Ludwig Marcuse on Nietzsche’s critique of German culture, Theodor W. Adorno observes, not without provoking some contention among his fellow discussants, the following regarding Nietzsche’s dialectical critique of bourgeois culture and society: “In certain critical respects, Nietzsche progressed further than Marx, insofar as he had a greater aversion vis-à-vis the bourgeois. . . Nietzsche’s critique is directed not only against democracy, but also against individualist society.”[1]

Adorno’s understanding here runs contrary to at least one popular interpretation of Nietzsche, one that views his philosophy as upholding an irreverent, elitist, and aristocratic individualism against liberal democratic egalitarianism. Adorno’s characterization of Nietzsche as a critic of the crisis expressed by the antinomy of individual and society recognizes his critical relation to the Enlightenment post-Industrial Revolution. Why did Adorno, in the accusatory words of L. Marcuse, attempt to “save Nietzsche by shaping him on a Marxian lathe?”[2] In other words, why employ Marx to interpret Nietzsche?

Adorno’s friendship with Walter Benjamin, formed when Adorno was still a student, initiated him into a radically unfamiliar approach to the great nineteenth-century thinker. Though Benjamin’s oeuvre lacks an extended analysis of Nietzsche, his influence suffuses Benjamin’s essays and aphorisms — via direct and indirect references, citations, and associations. Nietzsche’s influence is decidedly felt in his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and in sections of The Arcades Project, where Benjamin associates him with both Charles Baudelaire, the seminal theorist of 19th-century modernism and the radical socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui, two figures representative of culture and politics, respectively, in Second Empire France. While such a triangulation may at first glance feel idiosyncratic, Benjamin binds the three as figures contending with the dialectic of stasis and dynamism in post-1848 European society, in which all that is solid melting into air results in only more of the same. This is most evident to Benjamin in Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, which “transforms the historical event itself into a mass-produced article.” The figure of endless repetition draws its strength precisely from its opposite: In capitalism runaway progress makes it impossible “to expect a recurrence of conditions across any interval of time.”[3] For Benjamin, capitalism is a crisis of experience. The image of perpetual change as simultaneously an eternity of repetition represents Nietzsche’s counterpart to Marx’s category of capital.

Likewise, a decade earlier, in his 1929 essay on Surrealism, Benjamin’s acerbic condemnation of the protestant moralism of the bourgeois European intelligentsia possesses a Nietzschean texture, as does his critique of the coupling on the part of the “so-called well-meaning left-wing bourgeois intelligentsia” of idealistic morality and political practice.[4] Here Benjamin situates Nietzsche as a precursor to the radical concept of freedom and “profane illumination” of the surrealists who he describes as “the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom.”[5] For Benjamin, Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois morality embodied by the liberal democratic state as a force of domination and homogeneity is transposed in the 20th century onto a critique of conditions of unfreedom in capital. According to his biographer Walter Kaufmann, “Nietzsche objects to the State because it appears to him as the power that intimidates man into conformity.”[6] In his 1940 Theses, Benjamin offers a reconsidered source of conformity in the threat posed to history by the force of domination in capital,

Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over them both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.[7]

In this vision of rescue for “tradition,” Benjamin is expressing no nostalgic wish to return to an idealized past, but rather thinking through the past as it weighs on the present. In other words, Benjamin thinks through Nietzsche to critique present conditions via their mutilation of the past, their failure to live up to what was promised. In turn, historical understanding shapes or degrades conditions of possibility for the future. Benjamin’s Nietzsche seeks a self-overcoming of history via the “supra-historical” critical approach elaborated in his essay on “The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.” Nietzsche did not explicitly align himself with the working class, it is true. But this does not preclude Benjamin from understanding him as a master of the negative dialectic, especially in his theorization of history in the service of life, as opposed to one mired in a past as mere facticity. For Nietzsche, as for Benjamin, history in the modern world points beyond itself, toward its self-overcoming.

Much like Nietzsche, Adorno is a modern thinker misrecognized as Romantic, even reactionary, when viewed through certain distortions of the present. Quite recently, the Frankfurt School’s anti-Stalinism has been characterized as evidence of nefarious complicity with the deep state machinations of the CIA (at the same time as their being impotent liberal academics).[8] This amounts to an extension of the accusation that Adorno’s failure to cheerfully back the student protests in West Germany in the late 1960s evidences fidelity to the reactionary authoritarianism he spent his life critiquing. Similarly, characterizations of Nietzsche as an ideological precursor to German fascism grant far too much credit to fascism and not enough to Nietzsche’s critique of German ideology: “To think German, to feel German—I can do anything, but not that.”[9]

Nietzsche’s conception of a “higher,” more valuable type of human rubs contemporary egalitarianism the wrong way. Though his concept of aristocratic honor has roots in pagan values of antiquity (not pearls and monocles, nota bene), Nietzsche well recognized these values as already and irrevocably surpassed. There is no “return” to a pre-modern social order, and any attempt at such a regression would amount to a violation of human life, of individual potential and vitality, rather than its restoration. Nietzsche knew this, even if his reactionary contemporary adherents do not. Hence his “transvaluation of all values” represents a dialectical coming into being of a hitherto unforeseen human potential in contradistinction to a return to ancient values, or to a premodern static hierarchical great chain of being. Throughout his work Nietzsche is fundamentally and consistently against life-denying forces. All of this renders critiques of Nietzsche as a German nationalist and an advocate of Bismarckian imperialism implausible at best, sadly anachronistic or starkly disingenuous at worst.

Similarly, Nietzsche’s repeated reference to power as an achievement might today conjure visions of tear gas, machine guns, or of caged children imprisoned by border enforcement officials, but Nietzsche uses power in a different sense. Power for Nietzsche is a necessary force of life, the absence of which necessitates a descent into base herd existence,

I call an animal, a species, or an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is disadvantageous for it. A history of “lofty sentiments,” of the “ideals of mankind”—and it is possible that I shall have to write it—would almost explain too why man is so corrupt. Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking there is decline.[10]

Here Nietzsche could be understood as a proponent of unconscious instinct over and above conscious reason as an impetus for man’s self-overcoming. But, while Nietzsche does value animal impulse as a life force common to human and animal alike, he sees humans as tasked with setting themselves apart through a movement away from the objective spirit represented in the state toward absolute spirit exemplified in art, religion, and philosophy.[11] The turning of the life instinct against itself in slave morality and the will to truth is how, for Nietzsche, life must be advanced. The will to power is a category of life living against and beyond life, a category of history, of historical freedom.

The ubiquity of contemporary misreadings of Nietzsche is attributable to historical regression in the sense of a constraint on, and degradation of, conditions of possibility for freedom, for modern society’s self-overcoming, for the realization of the task history set for itself. History today is marked by a tendency to read personal experience backward through time. For all the contemporary emphasis on difference, historical particularity evaporates in an insistence on the ever same, transposed onto the past. This is why even the most serious historians today are constantly apologizing and proclaiming their ignorance. Reticent to offer anything like an informed and well-reasoned judgment, contemporary historians can make room only for the empirically verifiable. Any talk of goals or reasoned judgment is cast aside as irrelevant utopianism. Or history simply affirms contemporary prejudices. Contrary to Nietzsche’s critical approach to history in the service of life, an approach that tasks history with overcoming itself, history today is rendered impotent in its seemingly inevitable culmination in the present. Where history is indistinguishable in any meaningful way from the present, no possibility for a different future be registered. What is appears as what is natural, and is taken for granted as such, even by those who should know better. In an effort to disavow so-called metaphysics—the historical critique of the antithesis of subject and object—what is avowed, unwittingly or not, is a metaphysics of death in the collapse of both sides of the dialectic into the unthinkable, and hence, unknowability. Not infrequently in the university today, Benjamin, Adorno, and Nietzsche are forced to authorize the total abandonment of their own concerns.

While Marx and Nietzsche share the polemic as form, Marx, as a political revolutionary, wrote in order to be understood by his contemporaries. The aim of Marx’s philosophy of history was the practical achievement of socialism as the self-overcoming of bourgeois society in capitalism. This didn’t make for easy reading, but Marx’s writings sought maximum clarity for a socialist intellectual audience. Nietzsche was not a political revolutionary but a bohemian intellectual who had little to no responsibility to anyone. He spent a significant portion of his life in solitude. As a philosopher, Nietzsche is not entirely coherent. He affords himself enigmatic formulations. His thought can provoke unbounded, if chaotic, reflection. And yet there is nothing vague about Nietzsche. He certainly is not a hopelessly indeterminate relativist, and explicitly implores his reader to understand him. He demands commitment from the reader and offers in return invaluable critical orientation.

When the question of whether and how to read Nietzsche in relation to Marx was taken up by the Frankfurt School, they took Nietzsche to be a critical theorist of the dialectic of enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer write that Nietzsche “perceived in enlightenment both the universal movement of sovereign mind, whose supreme exponent he believed himself to be, and a ‘nihilistic,’ life-denying power.” The latter aspect of Nietzsche’s perception would be taken up and perverted by Nietzsche’s pre-fascist followers.[12] But even the former aspect, the possibility of cultivating a “movement of sovereign mind,” became interpreted as in itself reactionary. Adorno and Horkheimer, reading Nietzsche immanently as a symptom of bourgeois society, decry such interpretations as inadequate to Nietzsche’s dialectical critique of bourgeois morality in their chapter on “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,”

It is because they did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from the rooftops, that Sade and Nietzsche are still vilified, above all by progressive thinkers. In a different way to logical positivism, they both took science at its word. … In proclaiming the identity of power and reason, their pitiless doctrines are more compassionate than those of the moral lackeys of the bourgeoise.[13]

Contrary to positivism, individual experience, or what may be called subjectivity, need not be reduced to untruth.

Nearly contemporaneous with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Lukács, in his Destruction of Reason, read Nietzsche as a virulent anti-Marxist, a German nationalist, and an apologist for imperialism. He says of Nietzsche’s work, “the fight against democracy and socialism, the imperialist myth, and the summons to barbarous action 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 a demagogically effective pseudo-revolution.” Lukács reads Nietzsche’s sovereign mind exclusively as a force of domination, as opposed to a necessary part of Nietzsche’s critique and recognition of bourgeois culture as a process of humanity coming into itself, self-realization as a dialectical process. The capitalist dialectic is a movement toward becoming/overcoming held back by the force of stasis manifested in the constant recurrence of social, political, and economic crisis. On the level of the individual, the idea of the “true self” as a dialectical coming into being is shared with Marx, and evidenced in the subtitle of Ecce Homo: “wie man wird was man ist,” or, how one becomes what one is.

Lukács’ denunciation condemns Nietzsche for failing to align himself with working class struggles, “[H]ow can we maintain of Nietzsche that his whole life’s work was a continuous polemic against Marxism and socialism, when it is perfectly clear that he never read a single line of Marx and Engels? We believe that the claim is still feasible, for the reason that every philosophy’s content and method are determined by the class struggles of its age.”[14] While this is a valid and pressing question, it might be answered differently than with the conclusions Lukács draws. Why was it the case that for the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche’s bohemian intellectual lifestyle and failure to align himself with proletarian politics did not confine him to the dustbin of history as a bourgeois reactionary? Indeed, Adorno sharply denounces Lukács’ undialectical misreading of Nietzsche,

It was doubtless his book The Destruction of Reason which revealed most clearly the destruction of Lukács’ own. In a highly undialectical manner, the officially licensed dialectician sweeps all the irrationalist strands of modern philosophy into the camp of reaction and fascism. He blithely ignores the fact that, unlike academic idealism, these schools were struggling against the very same reification in both thought and life of which Lukács too was a dedicated opponent. Nietzsche and Freud are simply labeled fascists, and he could even bring himself to refer to Nietzsche, in the condescending tones of a provincial Wilhelminian school inspector, as a man of “above average abilities.”[15]

Lukács fails to grasp Nietzsche immanently and instead evaluates his saliency on the basis of seemingly objective (Stalinist) political-historical categories and oppositions. In his condemnation of Nietzsche as an apologist for bourgeois society and not also its critic, which he sees determined by a post-revolutionary Romanticism, Lukács obscures Nietzsche’s dialectical critique of bourgeois society as a life-denying force, a dominating homogeneity that brutally stamps out the individual whose liberty it claims to uphold. Already by the time of Nietzsche’s writing, the bourgeois revolutionary optimism of Rousseau had been rendered naive, not least because it was left ultimately unrealized. The recognition of Nietzsche’s bourgeois critique of bourgeois society in its decadence (as pointing beyond itself) hinges on the necessity of immanent dialectical criticism, critique from within. Society can’t be critiqued, let alone transformed, objectively. Rather, society must be critiqued in and through the consciousness it itself creates. Among others, but most notably, the critical theories of Hegel, Marx, and Adorno are constructed around the revolutionary implications of the dialectic. The problem of the immanent dialectical critique of society becomes particularly pressing in the failure of the Enlightenment to fulfill its promise.

To what extent can Nietzsche be understood as partaking in this project of immanent dialectical critique of society? As Benjamin remarks, Nietzsche, like Blanqui, commands an “extreme hallucinatory power” that figures the dialectic of enlightenment as “anything but triumphant. . . [leaving instead] a feeling of oppression.” Nietzsche’s project is no barren search for an outside, but a dialectical critique of the dialectic of enlightenment, one that “traces an image of progress (immemorial antiquity parading as up-to-date novelty) that turns out to be the phantasmagoria of history itself.”[16] Adorno develops this insight. For him, Nietzsche had an unrivaled capacity to feel out the antinomies in bourgeois society,

The transition to such a critique [of instrumental reason] was in fact accomplished by Nietzsche. Nietzsche is uniquely important because he denounced the presence of the bad in the good and thereby also criticized the way in which the bad has assumed concrete form within the positive institutions of society and, above all, in the different ideologies. That in my view far transcends the way in which every possible obscurantist and reactionary trend has based itself on certain propositions of his. And the critique he has provided has been far more subtle and specific than, for example, Marxist theory, which has condemned ideologies en bloc, but has never succeeded in entering into their inner workings, their lies, as deeply as Nietzsche.[17]

In the same breath, Adorno critiques the limits of Nietzsche’s thinking, “At all events, I would criticize Nietzsche for having failed to go beyond the abstract negation of bourgeois morality, or, to put it differently, of a morality that had degenerated into ideology, into a mask which concealed a dirty business.”[18] Though they use Marx to interpret Nietzsche, The Frankfurt School thinkers do not mistake him for a political revolutionary, like Marx was, nor do they fail to critique his shortcomings. Rather, they take him up in the fullness of his contradictions. But to what end? What did it mean for Frankfurt School thinkers to take from Nietzsche an invitation to “hope despite all doubts”?[19]

In the 1942 discussion, Adorno is clear about the way in which Nietzsche weighs on the present,

[A]lready in Nietzsche’s day the whole nexus of concepts like praxis, organization, and so forth, showed a side whose implications are becoming only apparent today. Nietzsche withdrew from the demands of the day for the sake of advancing a number of the categories in question. He understood that, in and of itself, the concept of praxis is inadequate to differentiate between a barbarian and a nonbarbarian world. Precisely the point where he refused to provide his philosophy with prescriptive instructions is its moment of truth.[20]

Here Nietzsche’s withdrawal from politics, along with his refusal to offer his philosophy up to instrumentalization is the source of its power in the present. Praxis itself is inadequate to recognize barbarism let alone to transform it into something else. Here Nietzsche stands as a prescient image of what negative dialectical critique in the service of freedom might look like when the possibility of proletarian politics is absent.

Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois enlightenment morality is predicated on its status as an extension of Judeo-Christian virtue, privileging an afterlife as a reward beyond life on earth and so, consequently, a disparagement of life in favor of the self-delusions that have thus far been required to live. Nietzsche’s famous maxim that “God is dead'' can be taken as a nihilistic assertion that human existence is no longer subject to any force beyond itself and so scuttles forward through time devoid of, and freed from, any coherent teleological, moral, or rational principles. However, for Nietzsche, the problem is that in secular society the telos of Christianity persists in unrecognized forms (as democracy, science, and socialism) without completing its own self-transformation. Secular morality then reproduces the old as a force of conformity, complicit with the motives of the bourgeois state which represents the domination of individuality and the stamping out of both the possibility of becoming, and the individual as an end in herself. By extension, Nietzsche’s critique of Rousseau lies in the aspect of Rousseau that is manifest in such homogenizing forces, i.e., what became of modern democracy in Nietzsche’s time. Despite his critique of Rousseau as a harbinger of the bonapartist democratic state, Nietzsche shared with him an attentiveness to the historicity of man. While Nietzsche critiques the modern philosophical revolution Rousseau commenced, he understood freedom as a task to be fulfilled through self-directed activity. Nietzsche’s targets are always his deepest influences.

Human existence as a task raises the question of the extent to which Nietzsche can be considered Hegelian. Lukacs’s critique of Nietzsche as an anti-Marxist complicit with the forces of imperialism runs counter to Nietzsche’s disdain for nationalism, for the complacency of the “last man,” and for social domination of individual potentiality. And, as a plain matter of fact, does not Nietzsche’s embrace of his “good European” self and his unceasing excoriation of German philistinism give the lie to his supposed celebration of Bismarckian imperialism?

Oh, these Germans, what they have cost us already! In vain—that has always been the doing of the Germans. The Reformation, Leibnitz, Kant and so-called German philosophy, the Wars of “Liberation," the Reich—each time an in vain for something that had already been attained, for something irrevocable… They are my enemies, I confess, these Germans.[21]

Nietzsche did not merely valorize unconscious irrational forces, as some would have it, but advocated conscious self-overcoming and individual agency as forces that drive humanity to create itself in history. Nietzsche sees in democracy and socialism, as do Marx and Engels, symptoms of a crisis of transition. Nowhere does Nietzsche reject the will to knowledge as a “false god,” but rather recognizes in it the fate of his time and argues for its self-overcoming. The false dichotomy between triumphant unity and irrevocably divided subjectivity ignores the Hegelian aspect of Nietzsche’s sovereign individual as marked by self-contradiction that necessitates self-overcoming. Indeed, the Hegel scholar Robert Pippin recognizes this element in Nietzsche’s writings, “[Some] of the references translated as ‘self-overcoming’ are actually to the famously Hegelian term of art ‘Selbstaufbehung’ and its cognates, as in On the Genealogy of Morals when Nietzsche claims that ‘every good thing on earth’ eventually overcomes [‘sublates’] itself…”[22]

While Nietzsche’s self-undermining self-overcoming is not identical to the Marxist immanent dialectical critique of socialism, it is similarly predicated on a model of dialectical overcoming of self-contradiction. To put it in more concrete terms, Nietzsche wanted to make something of human suffering, including his own. Transposed onto man’s historical becoming, Nietzsche’s project is to make millennia of human misery through subjection to dumb nature and its disguised continuance in bourgeois society to have been worth something. There are echoes of this project in Benjamin’s concept of critique from the standpoint of redemption, as elaborated in his “Theses.” The search for the possibility of becoming in nearly unlivable life is contained in Nietzsche’s question as to whether, in a civilization in decline, is it possible to speak of a neurosis of health?[23] Nietzsche’s late addendum to his early work The Birth of Tragedy, “An Attempt at Self Criticism” exemplifies his characteristic tone of ironic triumphalism coupled with humility. Here Nietzsche puts forth art, as opposed to morality, as the genuine metaphysical activity of man. Nietzsche shares with Adorno an aesthetic philosophy that takes art as valuable only insofar as it points beyond itself toward what could be other than what is—an imitative anti-nature in that it exposes that which is as that which is unnatural. For both Nietzsche and Adorno, art and philosophy will be achieved when they render themselves no longer necessary.

While in Nietzsche there certainly can be found a critique of the domination of nature, his critique of the bourgeois dialectic as a force of domination is still more prescient as a source for Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason. In his short posthumously published reflection on the tenuousness of truth in bourgeois modernity, Nietzsche’s reflections on the concept prefigure Adorno’s, “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent.”[24] Nietzsche’s formulation is remarkably similar to Adorno’s later critique of the concept as a force of domination in thought, which requires conformity, or identity, on the part of the particular, and which always leaves an unthought remainder. Wielding conceptualization as a force of instrumental reason is a necessary tool for cunning, the essential attribute of bourgeois subjectivity, which is elaborated in Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the myth of Odysseus, in which Odysseus is read as the prototype of the bourgeois individual. This too, Nietzsche anticipates,

The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: it was here that one person first encountered another person, that one person first measured himself against another. … Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain extent they constitute thinking as such. … [M]an designated himself as the creature that measures values, evaluates and measures, as the “valuating animal as such.”[25]

After the Industrial Revolution, the radical bourgeois enlightenment discovery of man as the measure of all things revealed itself as both an as-yet-unrealized possibility and as a force of unfreedom. Herein lies Nietzsche’s dialectical critique of the antinomies of bourgeois society, to which Marx adds unfreedom specifically manifested in the domination of capital. For Nietzsche, the repressed instinct for freedom—neurotically born out in self-sacrifice and self-denial—is bad conscience. Such repression is an illness, “like pregnancy is an illness.”[26] Such an illness can only be cured by doctors and nurses who are themselves sick and “must be forgotten if one is to enjoy the child.”[27] To “enjoy the child,” to realize oneself, implies the necessity of immanent self-overcoming, as painful and as gratifying as childbirth, both as a task for the individual, as far as Nietzsche was concerned, and, for the Frankfurt School interpreting Nietzsche through Marx, as a necessary process to be directed and endured. Nietzsche is a philosopher of freedom.

Thanks to Spencer A. Leonard and Robert Weitzer for their valuable insights into this essay.

[1] Theodor W. Adorno et al, “Discussion of a Paper by Ludwig Marcuse on the Relationship of Need and Culture in Nietzsche (July 14, 1942),” Constellations, 8:1 (2001), 134.

[2] Ibid., 133.

[3] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 340.

[4] Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 186.

[5] Ibid., 189.

[6] Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 164.

[7] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255.

[8] Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA and the Frankfurt School’s Anti-communism” The Philosophical Salon (June 27, 2022), available online at https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/

[9] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc. Vintage Books Edition, 1989), 263.

[10] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 572.

[11] Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 176.

[12] Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Continuum, 1982), 36.

[13] Ibid., 93.

[14] Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason [1852], Chapter 3 “Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period,” available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.htm.

[15] Theodor W. Adorno et al, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 166.

[16] Benjamin, Arcades Project, 25.

[17] Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schröder, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 200), 172.

[18] Ibid., 172.

[19] Adorno et al, “Discussion of a Paper by Ludwig Marcuse,” 131.

[20] Ibid., 135.

[21] Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 654.

[22] Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 114.

[23] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss, and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8.

[24] Friedrich W. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Portable Nietzsche, 45.

[25] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 70.

[26] Ibid., 88.

[27] Ibid., 101.