The Misused Hammer

I. The Hammer That Listens

At large railway stations men once walked along the trains with long-handled hammers, tapping every wheel. A sound wheel rang clear. A cracked wheel sounded dull, and the carriage was taken out of service. The doctor taps the knee with his little hammer to see whether the nerves respond. And whoever mounts a grinding wheel taps it lightly first, because a cracked wheel sounds different from a sound one.

Nobody would think of smashing the wheel, the knee or the grinding wheel with this hammer. The hammer is a testing instrument. It asks a question, and the sound is the answer.

That is exactly how Friedrich Nietzsche meant his most famous book title. “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer” appeared in 1889, shortly before his collapse. In the preface he writes that he wants to touch the idols of his time with the hammer “as with a tuning fork” and hear whether they give that hollow sound which betrays that there is nothing inside. The hammer was meant to listen. His heirs struck with it.

II. The Sister

In early January 1889 Nietzsche collapsed in Turin. He lived another eleven years without ever thinking clearly again, finally in Weimar, nursed by his sister Elisabeth. She had been married to Bernhard Förster, a leading anti-Semite, with whom in 1887 she had founded the colony “Nueva Germania” in Paraguay, a settlement for Germans of pure blood. The colony failed; Förster took his own life in 1889. Elisabeth returned and found a new task: her increasingly famous brother.

She founded the Nietzsche Archive, controlled the literary estate and compiled from his notes a book she presented as his main work: “The Will to Power”. Nietzsche had abandoned the plan for this book. She arranged, cut and added as she saw fit, and forged letters to enlarge her own role. Only the critical edition by the Italians Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, from the 1960s on, showed what really came from him.

By then the damage was long done. Hitler visited the archive several times, and when Elisabeth died in 1935 he attended her funeral. In 1943 he gave Mussolini a complete edition of Nietzsche for his sixtieth birthday. The philosopher who had warned like no other against the herd man became the house philosopher of the largest herd Germany had ever seen.

This society is about the fact that one can put anything into the mouths of the dead. With Nietzsche his own family did it, while he was still alive and could no longer defend himself.

III. What He Really Thought

Nietzsche despised the anti-Semites. He considered his sister’s marriage to Förster a misfortune, and he had turned away years before from Richard Wagner, whose circle cultivated hatred of Jews. Of the new German Reich he wrote that “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” had, he feared, been the end of German philosophy. In one of his last letters, already sliding into madness, he wrote: “I am just having all anti-Semites shot.”

That does not make him harmless. Nietzsche wrote sentences one reads only with discomfort: about the strong and the weak, about pity as a sickness, about a morality of masters against a morality of slaves. Whoever wanted to misuse him found material. But he wrote in images, contradictions and masks; he tried out thoughts instead of laying down doctrines. His sister made a system out of the experiment and a programme out of the system.

IV. The Hammer in Every Hand

After 1945 one might have thought Nietzsche finished for good. The opposite happened. He became the philosopher everyone invokes, often at the same time.

The left. In France Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault discovered Nietzsche as a critic of all claims to power that pass themselves off as truth. From his notebooks comes the sentence: “Facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations.” It was meant as a warning against false certainty. Thought through to the end, a line runs from there to a politics in which every fact is just one story among many and lies are called “alternative facts”.

The right. Spokesmen of the American alt-right such as Richard Spencer have declared that Nietzsche shaped them. They read the overman as master race and the will to power as permission.

Silicon Valley. Max More, one of the founders of transhumanism, explicitly invoked Zarathustra. Man is something to be overcome, so why not with technology? Here the overman arrives with a chip and life extension.

Everyday life. “What does not kill me makes me stronger” comes from “Twilight of the Idols”. Today it appears on calendar pages, in resilience guides and in a pop song by Kelly Clarkson. Nietzsche, the philosopher of solitude, has become a motivational coach.

V. The Last Man

In the prologue to “Zarathustra” Nietzsche describes a figure he feared more than any tyrant: the last man. He wants nothing great any more, no risk, no longing, only comfort. “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink.

A hundred years later Francis Fukuyama titled his book “The End of History and the Last Man”. In “The Right Side of History” we described how he read Hegel. The last man he took from Nietzsche, and he himself suspected that this man would not stay content. He was right: the satisfied man did not become content but irritable. Which brings us to where Nietzsche is indispensable today.

VI. Where Nietzsche Is Right

God is dead. No sentence of Nietzsche’s is quoted more often or misunderstood more thoroughly. In “The Gay Science” a “madman” proclaims it in the market place, and he is not rejoicing, he is horrified. Who gave us the sponge, he asks, to wipe away the entire horizon? With God the ground on which all values stood disappears. The people laugh at him, and he says: “I have come too early.” He is the first of the callers we described in “Die ungehörten und vergessenen Rufer in der Wüste”. The void he foresaw has been filling ever since with substitute religions: nation, race, class, market, conspiracy.

Ressentiment. In “On the Genealogy of Morality” Nietzsche describes the grudge of the wounded that disguises itself as morality. Whoever feels too weak to defend himself declares the strong evil and himself good. The philosopher Max Scheler developed this further in 1912. For today’s politics there is hardly a sharper tool. Populists of every stripe live off the fact that grievance sells better than any programme. Hegel described how people fight for recognition. Nietzsche described what becomes of them when they believe they have lost the fight.

Perspective. That we always see the world from a standpoint is no licence to lie but a duty to be modest. Whoever knows he sees only a section tests his view against others. That is the opposite of what the preachers of “alternative facts” have made of it.

VII. Testing or Smashing

A testing hammer has one property that distinguishes it from a sledgehammer: it must not damage what it tests. The man at the station who smashes the wheel instead of tapping it has not understood his job.

Nietzsche’s heirs almost all struck. The National Socialists smashed morality to erect a worse one. The cynics smash truth in order to place their lie beside it as an equal. The transhumanists want to smash the human being in order to rebuild him. None of them listens.

The honest use would be different: tap one’s own idols, not those of others. Does the growth we all believe in sound hollow? The market, the nation, progress, security, efficiency? In the language of control engineering, tapping is a measurement. It delivers a signal one can correct oneself by. Smashing delivers no signal any more, only rubble.

VIII. Turin, January 1889

Legend has it that Nietzsche collapsed in Turin when he saw a coachman beating his horse. He is said to have thrown his arms around the animal’s neck and wept. Whether it is true, nobody knows. But it is the story people tell about him, and it does not fit the image his sister drew: the philosopher of hardness ends with pity for a tormented animal.

Perhaps that is the last lesson of the misused hammer. Whoever swings it should first listen to how he himself sounds.

Nietzsche wanted to hear whether the idols were hollow. His heirs struck, and failed to hear how hollow they themselves sounded.