Nihilism is a philosophy for late-stage capitalism, imperialism, and fascism.

The New Irrationalism

Nietzsche died in 1900. The date was significant, since in Lukács’s view, Nietzsche was the “founder of irrationalism in the imperialist period,” which was then only commencing. The imperialist or monopoly stage of capitalism in Marxist theory began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but, in terms of Nietzsche’s life and work, only “the first shoots and buds of what was to come” in that respect were visible. Nietzsche’s genius was instinctively to capture a sense of what was to come and to develop the method of irrationalism for the new age of empire as a “mythicizing form” of analysis, made more obscure by the frequent use of aphorisms. It is this that accounts for the mesmerizing nature of Nietzsche’s literary style, which was at the same time a means of perfecting indirect apologetics. Everything in Nietzsche is presented in a haze so that, while the whole political-social thrust of his philosophy is not in doubt, it also gives rise to endless discussions arising from its mythic character, inviting imitators, and establishing the dominant form in which philosophical irrationalism is pursued to this day.

In Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” “noble” spirits and the master race would again experience the triumph of the will in the cyclical swings of history. Yet, eternal recurrence, meant a lack of overall progress, so that the cumulative result was “Nothingness (the ‘meaninglessness’) for ever more!” Although Nietzsche wished to supersede nihilism through the Overman as the personification of the will-to-power, it was to nihilism that everything always eternally returned, as genuine forward progress was foreclosed.

Heidegger frequently lauded Mussolini and Hitler, presenting Nietzsche as a forerunner of both fascist leaders. In Heidegger’s book on Friedrich Schelling, a long sentence from the original lecture was omitted in the 1971 edition but was later reinserted at Heidegger’s own request. It said: “As is well known, both of the two men in Europe who have, in the political-national fashioning of their respective Volks, inaugurated countermovements [Gegenbewegungen] to nihilism, namely Mussolini and Hitler, were in turn, each in their own way, essentially determined by Nietzsche; still this was so without Nietzsche’s authentic metaphysical domain having come into its own.” Nietzsche, Heidegger explained in his lectures, had shown that “democracy” led to a “degenerate form of nihilism” and thus demanded a more authentic Volk movement. In a course on logic in 1934, Heidegger declared that “Negroes are men but they have no history.… Nature has no history.… When an airplane’s propeller turns, then nothing actually ‘occurs.’ Conversely, when the same airplane takes Hitler to Mussolini, then history occurs.” “The sham culture” of Western civilization, he explained, will be superseded only by the “spiritual world” of the Volk based on “the deepest preservation of the forces of the soil and blood.”