Brown study.(The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism)(Book Review)

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, by Richard Wolin (Princeton, 404 pp., $29.95)

THIS is a valuable but ungainly book. Richard Wolin, a professor of history and literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is formidably erudite about French and German 19th-century thought, and he gives the reader useful expositions of the major Romantic thinkers.

He sandwiches this history of 19th-century ideas in between discussions of the postmodernism of such figures as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, all of whom attempted to show the comprehensive failure of representation, including language, and therefore the impossibility not only of literature but even of all rational communication. Though these contemporary figures considered themselves leftists hostile to existing institutions, Wolin sees in them affinities with neo-fascist leaders today on the Continent, including Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jorg Haider in Austria. These European neofascists are, in actuality, mainly opponents of immigration; not every Austrian whose last name begins with H and ends with R is the Fuhrer's second coming.

Wolin's title mentions Nietzsche, but his narrative starts much earlier, with Maistre, Burke, and the opponents of the French Revolution. Right there a problem becomes evident. If there is a "temptation of unreason," there is certainly a temptation of reason as well: Many, even most, of the revolutionary philosophes were rationalists, the Goddess of Reason was worshipped during the Revolution, and--as Burke said--at the end of that road lies the gallows. Not only unreason, but reason too, can serve the human appetite for power.

Another mistake Wolin makes is to understand Nietzsche as an intellectual source for political fascism. During World War I, philosopher partisans of the Allies propagandized by blaming Nietzsche for Bismarck, the Kaiser, and German militarism; later, he came to be blamed for National Socialism. But Nietzsche would have loathed Nazism; he hated anti-Semitism and other vulgarities, and often said harsh things about Germans. (Another supposed protofascist here, Oswald Spengler, is said to have been asked by Hitler, "Am I Julius Caesar?" "No," Spengler sneered, "Tiberius." If Hitler had understood him, Spengler would have had a visit from the Gestapo.)

Nietzsche's actual goal was not the powerful state, or the mighty Volk, but the heroic individual. In his journey toward this individual, he "philosophized with a hammer," expressing and admiring philosophies from Socrates and Plato through the Enlightenment and the 19th century, then smashing them and rejecting them as idols. He considered Socrates "holy," then rejected him as a corrupter; the same with Wagner, and Jesus. He called his own autobiography Ecce Homo. In the end Nietzsche reached his goal, utterly alone, stripped of illusion, on the mountain peak as Zarathustra, a poet of uncomfortable truths. Entire "aloneness" was the condition of freedom, which allowed for self-creation, not necessarily a terrifying thing, but even potentially joyful.

The case of Martin Heidegger, however, was genuinely tragic: He was too big for National Socialism, but fell into their fetid ditch and behaved like a rotter. No mere ideologue could have achieved Heidegger's explications of a few verses of Parmenides, going on ...