Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought

6. Nietzsche’s Proto-Phenomenological Approach to theTheoretical Problem of Race

Our Europe of today, being the arena of an absurdly sudden attempt at a radical mixture of classes, and hence races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths. —Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 208 Nietzsche was not the first philosopher to cultivate a nomadic existence. Nor was he the first to credit his itinerancy with the development of a powerful, new critical perspective. But he was certainly among the first of the philosophers-errant to allow his travels to fund his reflections on race.Although presented to his readers as a solitary wanderer, he usually sojourned in the company—if not always the companionship—of other travelers, some of whom regaled him with tales of their previous journeys.1 He typically frequented destinations, moreover, that were popular with other travelers: Sils-Maria, Zürich, Nice,Venice, Genoa,Turin, and so on.2 Like many of these fellow travelers , Nietzsche restlessly sought climates, locales, and meteorological conditions that would be ever more conducive to the restoration and/or amplification of health.3 While his journeys did not admit of an impressive degree of adventure ,4 they did afford him the opportunity to observe a wide range and diversity of human types, at a time when Europeans enjoyed an unprecedented mobility. Whether sitting quietly in a railroad car, dining in 6 Nietzsche’s Proto-Phenomenological Approach to the Theoretical Problem of Race DANIEL W. CONWAY 125 126 Daniel W. Conway the common room of a pension, or strolling alongside other sunseekers, he witnessed firsthand the effects of the “racial mixing” that characterized Europe, or so he believed, in the late nineteenth century. (He did so, moreover, under the conditions he most preferred in an observational setting: relative anonymity and a safe, clinical distance from his unsuspecting research subjects.)As a direct result of these observations, in fact, he was able to supplement his deeply personal psychological conjectures with evidence of a more recognizably sociological nature. It is safe to say, in fact, that Nietzsche’s travels directly and indirectly influenced his reflections on race. He succeeded, for example, in discerning a broad range of differences between and among supposedly fixed racial designations.5 The attunement he displayed in general toward subtle shadings, fine gradations, and unnoticed variations similarly informed his appreciation for the wide diversity of human types. He was thus able to infuse the nascent science of race with a welcome measure of scholarly objectivity. This is not to say, of course, that his reflections on race were innocent of ideology and idiosyncrasy, for they were not.6 But he was more willing than most to accommodate the growing body of empirical evidence and, on that basis, to question the most popular (and rigid) racial theories of his day. He consequently accepted as a non-negotiable fact of his own descent the “racial mixing” that rival theorists feared as an imminent threat to racial purity (GS 377). He was no doubt encouraged in his acceptance of this putative fact by the testimony of his fellow travelers, whose persistent pursuit of “health” may have confirmed his suspicions of a pandemic degeneration of European culture.7 The influence of Nietzsche’s travels on his reflections on race is especially striking in light of the skeptical, iconoclastic bent of his thinking. As we see in the epigraph to this chapter, he viewed the recent trend toward skepticism—including, presumably, his own—as a result of the “racial mixing” that had plunged European culture into disarray. Indeed, if any philosopher of the nineteenth century would have been inclined to conclude that race is simply an illusion, or that racial designations are reducible without remainder to ideological proclamations , Nietzsche should have been that philosopher. His current standing as the patron saint of postmodern philosophy is by no means undeserved. He was generally suspicious of the pet categories and dichotomies employed by philosophers,and he delighted in exposing the prejudices at work behind the scenes of most philosophical explanations. He also was an unabashed champion of science, at least as he imagined its ideal practice, and he regularly urged philosophers, historians, and psychologists to conform more strictly to the stringent methods and strict naturalism of the emerging scientific paradigm. He was deeply Nietzsche’s Proto-Phenomenological Approach 127 skeptical, therefore, of the most influential theories of race in circulation at the time,especially those that linked racial identity to the unbroken continuity of...