
By Patrick Bixby
As we swiftly approach the centenary of the foundation of the Irish Free State on the 6th of December 2022, we might pause to consider the role that Friedrich Nietzsche, of all unlikely figures, played in helping to imagine the future of an independent Ireland.
On the 8th of December 1922, just two days after the establishment of the new government in Dublin, the first President of the Executive Council, W.T. Cosgrave, was bringing debate in the Dáil Éireann to a close when the Leader of the Opposition, Thomas Johnson, interrupted to end the proceedings on his own terms: ‘I have never made any protestations of my religion’, he claimed, ‘but this is a question of Christianity or Nietzscheism’. The occasion for Johnson’s assertion – and for the debate that had occupied the entire parliamentary session – was the execution that morning of four anti-Treaty Republican Leaders in reprisal for the assassination of the pro-Treaty Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (Member of Parliament) Sean Hales and attempted assassination of Deputy Speaker Pádraic Ó Máille the previous day. The actions represented a disturbing escalation of violence in the newly founded state, which was struggling to establish law and order in the early days of its existence.
Previously in the Dáil debate, Sean Milroy, a Sinn Féin TD and veteran of the Easter Rising, had sought to justify the executions by arguing that the assassinations and the anarchy they represented had gripped the ‘the Irish nation … by the throat’ and ‘challenged the right of this nation to say what its decisions will be and what its future will be’. Noting that only forty-eight hours had elapsed since the formal proclamation of the Irish Free State, Johnson protested bitterly that ‘almost the first act is to utterly destroy in the public mind that association of Government with the idea of law. I am almost forced to say you have killed the new State at its birth’. His Labour Party had declared neutrality in the dispute over the Anglo-Irish Treaty and again when the hostilities led to civil war, but now he condemned the brutal measures taken by the state to put down the activities of the anti-Treaty Irregulars. Drawing on the binary opposition made familiar by Irish poet and parliamentarian, Thomas Kettle, along with the propagandists of the First World War, his concluding remark addresses the issues at stake for the national conscience: would the coming years be characterised by civilisation or barbarism, the assumed spiritual force and gentle values of the gospels or the supposed brutality and depravity of Nietzschean doctrine? It was a question that, in a number of variations, would play a role in defining the prospects for both Europe and Ireland.
Nietzsche himself had foreseen that the twentieth century would be a time of escalating warfare between ideological forces that were emerging in this own time and that would eventually represent an existential threat to civilisation. He had also predicted that Western culture would have to wait until the twenty-first century to finally come to terms with the crisis of nihilism, which had long been part of its history. The propagandists of the Great War had helped to cement the association between Nietzsche and nihilism by claiming over and over again that his philosophy provided inspiration for murder and mayhem on an immense scale by preaching an absolute indifference to human life: ‘nothing is true’, they had him say, ‘everything is permitted to the strong’. But more attentive readers of Nietzsche knew that his writings provide an exhaustive diagnosis of nihilism as a chronic ‘disease of the will’ that had entered a new phase when ‘the Death of God’ opened the way for a whole array of secular faiths. According to Nietzsche, his contemporaries sought cures in anarchism, socialism, communism, nationalism, and other mass movements that were only so many means to avoid recognizing the full consequences of the disease.
But Nietzsche could be looked to not just as a scapegoat or diagnostician, but also as what he called a ‘physician of culture’. His philosophy, that is, refuses to accept the present conditions that define a culture and instead, through imaginative leaps and visionary intuitions, seeks to transcend prevailing historical processes and to realise new possibilities (even a new politics) for life. His infamous Übermensch (or overman) is just such a ‘mythos of the future’. Nietzsche had urged his contemporaries, and the generations to come, to meet the peril of nihilism head on by overcoming the legacy of Western culture and becoming the creators of new life affirming values, even as he suggested that the ascendancy of nihilism remained incomplete and that its complete overcoming would have to wait for a future epoch.
It is little wonder, given the tumultuous intensity of the war years and the urgent questions they raised about the fate of both Ireland and Europe, that writers such as W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, and even James Joyce had turned their attention toward prophetic modes of discourse: increasingly, they composed in ways that both passed judgment on the current state of Irish culture and Western civilisation more broadly, intimated a range of reasons for their judgment, and, most importantly, offered a revelation of events to come. Writing during this period of historical tumult – beginning during the First World War and continuing through the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War – Yeats sought in A Vision (1925) to offer a systematic, if highly idiosyncratic, account of the patterns of human history that might also reveal something about how those patterns would project into the future. In other words, like another admirer of Nietzsche, Arthur Spengler, he set out to write a new kind of totalizing history that not only announced the doom of Western Civilisation, but that could also predict world-historical events to come.
Meanwhile, in his preface to Back to Methuselah (1921), Shaw wondered whether ‘the human animal, as he exists at present, is capable of solving the social problems raised by his own aggregation, or, as he calls it, his civilisation’.The five-part play that follows attempts to translate the tenets of his vitalist Lamarckian philosophy of Creative Evolution into the legends of a new religion that rewrite the story of the Garden of Eden, comment directly on the political failings of the present, and project a posthuman future some 30,000 years hence. Like Yeats, then, he took on the role of modernist as heroic seer (not to mention, artistic celebrity) capable of transvaluing the values of his own time. Insofar as their prophecies owe something to Nietzsche they worked toward a wilful demolition of existing moral and ethical standards in order to open the way for new ideals that might transcend the rising tide of nihilism in the postwar years. At the same time, like many of their contemporaries after the war, Yeats and Shaw also became increasingly enamoured with the biopolitical potential of eugenics to overcome the counter-selective effects of the recent war and to breed the human race into fitter or more effective political animal.
Joyce, for his part, demonstrates considerable scepticism about such eugenicist efforts and the utopian dreams they cultivated, but he is nonetheless preoccupied with human breeding and the question of futurity in the later chapters of Ulysses (1922). Among many competing discourses, Nietzsche’s philosophy serves a key role in the consideration of these issues, especially in episode fourteen of Ulysses, the so-called ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter. And, again, the effects of the recent conflict on the Continent, along with the increasing nationalist agitation and political violence in Ireland, form crucial contexts for appreciating the urgency of these concerns. Nietzsche’s thought had heralded the final collapse of a shared mythos that had provided Western civilisation with a sturdy bulwark against the tumultuous forces of history; but it had also helped to usher in a new myth-making project that was based on the unrestrained freedom of artistic creation.
By appropriating his language, Yeats, Shaw, and Joyce each explored the potentiality of an Irish modernism that can also be said to imagine worlds at a critical distance from historical realities in order to breach a dimension that would otherwise remain out of sight, a dimension that raises persistent questions about what should be considered possible, necessary, or desirable. Or, to put this another way, these Irish modernists respond to Nietzschean provocations with their own array of provocative images, metaphors, and myths, which repeatedly traverse the borderlands between art and society, aesthetics and politics.
Nietzsche and Irish modernism
By Patrick Bixby
Nietzsche and Irish Modernism demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. With its wealth of detail, the book greatly enriches our understanding of modernist culture as a site of convergence between art and politics, indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives.