Nietzsche Rolling in His Grave: Philosophy as Fashion

Introduction 🔗

Researching for future ideas, I had a great experience reading the chapter Soul Image and Life Feeling of Spengler’s Decline of the West.¹

With benefit of hindsight, he lines up the early moderns—Schopenhauer, Darwin, Engels, Marx, Ibsen, Wagner, Strindberg, Nietzsche and ending with Shaw—and shows their interlacing influence. He demonstrates intimate familiarity with them, and ended his analysis by diagnosing the totality of their thought as a symptom of a declining civilization, rather than a birth.²

I am less interested in history and sociology than I am in the internal, spiritual experience and the very physical side of nature. Reading Schopenhauer’s synthesis of the Upaniṣads with Kantian theory was fascinating. Darwin from principal education, and because he popularized the term of evolution as we know it. Nietzsche? Mostly from popular culture.

As Spengler examined them, I revalued what I knew. I assumed many followers would be defensive if their ideas were discussed in ways the authors themselves might not have endorsed. Of course they are all innocent against posthumous critique. Their ideas are not.

Why defend Nietzsche, anyway? Spengler was far from as harsh as Nietzsche himself. If anything, the observation felt karmic and ironic. I must say that there is something strange about having allegiance to a figure from the distant past.

Discussion 🔗

Philosophy as Aesthetic 🔗

For all the great thoughts they produced, they often exist in my mind as amusing caricatures—and there are worse portrayals. I am more than humble before them because I know what it is like to grapple with ideas.

But there is an aesthetic that forms when admiring thinkers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: mostly about the idea and the style. Nietzsche, the supreme hater. Schopenhauer, the grumpiest complainer. Both being edgy and harsh critics of modern ideas, they appeal to contrarians. And we find Nietzsche ironically having become a symbol of the modern, spiritually right-wing intellectual herd.

Idolizing the philosopher and apologizing for them comes at the expense of the ideas and the spirit of philosophy itself. Others have had similar ideas and would be just as proper to cite, but it is the popular and recognizable who get preferential treatment.

Buddhism,³ Stoicism,⁴ Paganism⁵ function similarly, especially in terms of aesthetics.⁶ These are not the first, and will not be the last. In comparison, later thoughts such as Spengler, Evola or Nishitani are far more refined, nor are they immune to the phenomena.

Winter Civilization and Hyper-Awareness 🔗

This glazing is philosophical slop. The demand called, the supply answered (delivered by algorithms).

We live in a historic period void of (philosophical) invention and creativity, which functions through critique, revaluation, and analysis. One result is that we discover truths long taken for granted.

If I apply those same methods to this situation we can remark the following: if calling philosophy “fashion” becomes its own fashion, and rejecting fashion becomes contrarian fashion, it becomes stuck in second-order awareness. In Spenglerian terms: hyper-self-awareness symptomatic of a late-stage “winter” civilization.

1. Adopt a philosophy.
2. Realize it is aesthetic.
3. Reject it as fashion.
4. Realize rejection is fashion.
5. Grow cynical.
6. Realize cynicism is fashion.
7. Eventually adopt a new philosophy.

This is not an iron law, and one could break it but stubbornly sticking to one’s philosophy. Schopenhauer was famous for this⁷ and Camus called it philosophical suicide.⁸ But this is not the full reality: certain amalgamations of philosophies are very practical to navigating the world and supporting the goals of the will.

Conclusion 🔗

What is the outcome? Philosophical thought as methods and tools? While I might reject Hegel’s verbosity, I approve of his particular dialectic. A Camusian acceptance of absurdity? To some extent. Philosophies should not become identities.

Thinking entirely from first principles is impossible. Likewise, none could arrive at these conundrums from scratch. Even thoughts free of conscious influence would operate in a collective unconscious.

At the of the day references will carry aesthetics and connotations. They help show the path ideas took to arrive at the point they did, and provide the inquisitive reader with wider context. As I continue to cite Nietzsche in my writing, I recognize that there is a rhetoric element to doing so. Not an appeal to authority, but to the aesthetic thereof. This goes against his spirit and is ironically one of the things he has become. I am fine with this.