19th Century Context: Society, Culture, and Philosophy
Nietzsche: Historical Context
Although the nineteenth century had no great wars, it was remarkably turbulent and profound. It is the century of the “bourgeois revolution,” causing “reactions” that sometimes resulted in autocratic regimes. Gradually, however, the liberal ideals of the rising bourgeoisie prevailed. Great capital appeared, benefiting from spectacular industrial and technological development. This resulted in the emergence of colonialism, given the need for new markets to meet overproduction and obtain raw materials. Europe experienced unprecedented population growth, doubling its population through improved sanitation and medical progress. The result was a saturated job market, with companies taking advantage by paying poverty wages for grueling hours. This led to the labor movement, which demanded decent working conditions. In 1864, the First International appeared, and in 1889, workers and Marx’s followers founded the Second International. In 1870, as a popular reaction to the humiliating defeat by Germany, the Paris Commune was established. Private ownership and exploitation were abolished, while proclaiming socialist ideology. The repression was brutal: 20,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands were imprisoned. Meanwhile, Prussia, after its victory over France, unified the different German states, founding the Second Reich. Under the leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Prussia became Germany and began an era of tremendous development in all fields, becoming one of the two great world powers. Nationalism is the great innovation of the nineteenth century and one of its most important legacies to the twentieth. Its adoption by the dominant elites occurred only when they understood it could serve as a brake on the progress of the labor movement and socialism. It also provided a sense of community to the common people uprooted by migration from the countryside to the city and the process of increasing secularization. Nationalism fostered anti-Semitism. The persecution of Jews in Germany and Russia encouraged their emigration to America, especially the U.S.
Cultural Context
Romanticism dominated the first half of the century. It implied an aesthetic reaction against the cold weight of modern reason and classical taste. Its more idiosyncratic features include a vision of the dark side of the soul, the irrational, emotional, popular taste for exotic lands, the idealization of rural life, and the myth of ancient times, such as the Middle Ages. However, it shifted in the second half to realism and positivism. The successes of science and technology expanded and consolidated the hegemony of the capitalist social bourgeoisie, resulting in the sweeping triumph of materialist, bourgeois life scientists. Science was applied to large industries, including the military. The new century’s political ideologies – liberalism, nationalism, socialism – had in common a disregard for old religious doctrines. They were not necessary for technology or industry and were therefore relegated to the private sphere. Liberal reforms were made at the expense of the dominant role of the Church and its traditional heritage of land and real estate. The Papal State was reduced to the small enclave of the Vatican. However, in moral, educational, and customary matters, the church retained a strong influence on the population. It is important to mention the evolutionary theories of Darwin and the extraordinary impact they had in fin de siècle Europe. It was also the time of Pasteur, with the first vaccines and success against infectious diseases. In the last decades of the century, there was the climax and crisis of Newtonian science and the beginning of the scientific and technological revolution that would have extraordinary consequences for the twentieth century. Impressionism in painting introduced a radical cut with the pictorial tradition since the Renaissance. Any event was now worthy of being painted. Light, time, and motion became key elements. Impressionists wanted to paint reality as it looks (changing, ephemeral) and not as it is thought to look, aiming to be faithful to Nature, paralleling Nietzsche’s intention in his philosophy to be faithful to life. The novel became a mass phenomenon, with many published in brochures of the daily press. Authors like Stendhal or Dostoevsky left a deep impression on Nietzsche. A decadent and nihilistic attitude often appeared in poets, who sought challenges and new experiences with alcohol or drugs. They despised the bourgeois and the establishment, seeking pure art and fleeing to private, subjective worlds, avoiding conceptual thinking and expressing reality in an immediate and symbolic sense. Finally, there was Wagner. His music seduced the young Nietzsche entirely as a prototype for the creation of a free spirit, but Nietzsche broke with him when he believed the old master had finished by giving the farce of Christianity.
Philosophical Context
The nineteenth century marked the end of the philosophical mainframe and the emergence of a plurality of philosophical movements with very different designs, rejecting the systematic and speculative philosophy conceived by German idealism. Positivism triumphed, with Comte as its most prominent representative. This was a radical empiricism that made science the only valid form of knowledge, with a particularly critical attitude toward metaphysics. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a backlash against positivism occurred. The causes were many: the crisis of positive science itself, the awareness that individual and social problems were not solvable by scientific research, the ideological use of scientific propositions that were only superficially so, etc. Currents involved in this reaction included neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, but new critical movements also emerged, including:
- Marxism
- Spiritualism: Denying matter as such and reducing it to a consequent subordination of the spirit of the cause, a providential order dominated by the end.