What could a revolutionary thinker like Frantz Fanon possibly draw from the political philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed anti-egalitarian, anti-democrat, and anti-socialist?
Nietzsche clearly influenced Black Skin, White Masks, a book framed by references to Nietzsche in its introductory and penultimate chapters. Although the first reference is a misattributed quotation, the second is a lengthy passage endorsing Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome the reactional, negatively-grounded values he believed dominated European morality:
We said in our introduction that man was an affirmation. We shall never stop repeating it. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity….There is always resentment in reaction. Nietzsche said it in The Will to Power. To induce man to be actional…that is the task of utmost urgency (197).
In the same passage, Fanon also underlines his opposition to Nietzsche’s reactionary politics, directly tying the project of overcoming reactional values to overcoming human oppression:
But man is also a negation. No to man’s contempt. No to the indignity of man. To the exploitation of man. To the massacre of what is most human in man: freedom.
Although Fanon does not mention Nietzsche in The Wretched of the Earth, its account of colonialism is clearly indebted to On the Genealogy of Morality. This has been underappreciated in part because the Genealogy has mistakenly been reduced to a work of moral psychology and philosophy. As I argue elsewhere, it is better understood as a peculiar variant of historical materialist political philosophy. Fanon draws on precisely this overlooked aspect to reconstruct critically Nietzsche’s history of reactional psychology, tracing its origins to the ruling class rather than the oppressed, subversively redirecting it away from reactionary political aims toward revolutionary ones.
Nietzsche and Radical Aristocracy
Fanon can productively draw on Nietzsche’s political philosophy because it is fundamentally descriptive, its key claims logically independent of normative goals. Nietzsche believes every politics, intentionally or not, shapes material life-conditions in ways that create distinct criteria of flourishing and values. Those same conditions also cause individuals to internalize those values, leading to the development of distinct psychological types. In his later work, he notoriously refers to this process as züchten, a troubling word usually translated as “breeding,” sometimes as “cultivation” or “discipline” (Beyond Good and Evil 61-62, 203, 251; Twilight of the Idols VII.2-5; The Anti-Christ 3; Ecce Homo 4).
“Cultivation,” however, is the more accurate translation, for Nietzsche’s primary analogy is not animal-domestication, which he pejoratively compares to reactional forms of morality: “Clearly, we are not talking about taming animals anymore: even to conceive of a breeding scheme like this presupposes a type of person a type of person who is a hundred times gentler and more reasonable” (Twilight of the Idols VII, 3). Instead, his preferred analogy is horticultural. Politics is not an animal farm but, instead, “a hothouse for strange and exquisite plants” (Writings from the Late Notebooks 9 [154], Beyond Good and Evil 262, Twilight of the Idols IX.38). Its task is to determine “how the plant ‘man’ has so far grown most vigorously to a height” and create conditions for their preservation (Beyond Good and Evil 44). So, against both moralistic and biologistic readings of Nietzsche’s politics, humanity is shaped primarily by our material environment, rather than culture or heredity.
Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism is based in the misguided conviction that class societies produce material conditions that best cultivate higher human types. Traditional aristocracies create material conditions in which the ruling class and underclass lead profoundly unequal, rigidly separated lives, a form of social organization Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, aptly describes as “compartmentalized” (3). But the ruling class and the ruled also live side-by-side within a single, larger whole. This proximity forces constant comparison, a situation that cultivates two opposed psychologies (On the Genealogy of Morality, I.11).
The nobles are characterized by a “pathos of distance,” of pride in their difference from and superiority over others (I.2). Their primary moral concept of the good is a direct affirmation of their good fortune, while their concept of the bad is derived only secondarily. In contrast, the underclass lead lives dominated by feelings of envy and resentment, such that their morality is entirely reactional. They first define the nobles as evil, then indirectly derive their concept of the good as its negation. When internalized, these reactional values produce a so-called “slavish” psychology that can affirm its own self-worth only in contrast to a negatively conceived other:
This reversal of the evaluating glance—this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself—is a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world…its action is basically a reaction. (I.10)
Nietzsche concludes that traditional aristocracies inevitably fail because this “slave revolt in morality” eventually undermines aristocratic institutions (I.10, I.16). His proposed solution is a more radical form of aristocracy modeled on the Indian caste system. Unlike the traditional kind, a radical aristocracy starts from the admission that the ideology of natural hierarchy is a pious lie justified by a supposedly honorable end.
To overcome its acknowledged lack of natural foundation, radical aristocracy transforms artificial hierarchy into second nature, deepening class “types” [Typen] into what he calls “species” [Spezien] or “races” [Rassen] whose members are integrated into the social order, giving them the illusory appearance of natural kinds. In this way, as Jacqueline Scott has argued, Nietzsche anticipates contemporary non-eliminativist accounts of race, emphasizing its socially constructed nature while acknowledging its social reality and cultural significance. As I have suggested elsewhere, Nietzsche’s understanding of race is best understood as a variety of Michael O. Hardimon’s “deflationary biological realism,” which denies that race is a “robust biological kind” (158).
This political production of race as second nature or artificial species is supposedly achieved through laws that regulate daily habits like diet, health, and hygiene, incorporating the law as unconscious instinct: “To prepare a book of law in the style of Manu means to give a people the right to become master one day, to become perfect, to aspire to the highest art of life. To this end, it must be made unconscious: this is the goal of every holy lie” (The Anti-Christ 57). If successful, every caste would completely identify with its social function as its essential nature, experiencing its social status as a source of meaning rather than resentment, thus resolving the dilemma of aristocracy’s self-undermining side-effect of reactional morality.
Many mistakenly conclude that Nietzsche endorses the Indian caste system. However, while it remains his general blueprint for radical aristocracy, he stresses in Twilight of the Idols that it fails in practice, creating reactional psychology in the “unbred” Chandala outcaste (2–3) and forcing the ruling classes to resort to a “morality of domestication” rather than a true politics of “breeding”: “the only way it was able to render these people harmless, to make them weak, was to make them sick.” Nietzsche admits this is the very same reactive form of morality practiced by the Christian priest, so we should read without any irony his claim that “perhaps nothing is more opposed to our sensibility than these protective measures of Indian morality.”
Fanon on Colonizer and Colonized
How does Fanon’s description of colonial society compare to Nietzsche’s account of aristocracy? As in traditional aristocracy, the colony is a “world divided in two, inhabited by different species,” a compartmentalized society whose material conditions cultivate distinct psychological types (5). However, his description of colonist and colonized as species also suggests parallels with Nietzsche’s conception of radical aristocracy. Fanon introduces the word “species” (espèce, “type” or “species”) in scare quotes. As in Nietzsche’s description of castes as “species” and “races,” he is intentionally drawing an analogy between social-political and biological registers, suggesting that colonialism, like radical aristocracy, is a politics of cultivation that attempts to deepen classes into castes in order to better secure the pious lie of natural hierarchy.
Unlike Nietzsche, Fanon emphasizes the falsity rather than piety of cultivating these species, which “owe their singularity [originalité] to the kind of reification [substantification] secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation” (2). Fanon uses the species-analogy critically, undermining Nietzsche’s aristocratic aims by emphasizing the dehumanizing consequences of transforming human beings into specialized functions of a larger whole. This is further underlined by the fact that he uses the term almost exclusively in Wretched’s first chapter, “On Violence,” abandoning it after describing how the process of independence destroys the illusion that colonist and colonized have essentially different natures: “the species is splitting up before their very eyes” (94). If colonialism is a radical aristocracy, it is a fundamentally flawed one, regenerating the problem of reactional psychology that the caste system was supposed to resolve.
As in Nietzsche’s account of traditional aristocracy, envy plays a foundational role in the colonial order. However, Fanon completely reverses Nietzsche’s narrative. Envy first appears as the colonists’ fear and projection of imagined envy onto the colonized. To be sure, he initially tells us that “the gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist’s sector is a look of lust, a look of envy,” but by introducing the envy of the colonized as an object of awareness, he is causally prioritizing the colonists’ point of view: “The colonist is aware of this as he catches the furtive glance, and constantly on his guard, realizes bitterly that ‘They want to take our place’” (5). The question is not whether the colonized experience envy, but how it becomes the defining feature of their psychology. Against Nietzsche’s assumption that the oppressed inevitably develop a reactional psychology, Fanon stresses the active role the colonists play in aggravating its conditions: “It is the colonist who fabricated [a fait] and continues to fabricate the colonized subject” (2).
In short, the colonists’ material privilege provokes a deep insecurity, rooted in the realization that they don’t merit their good fortune. In this way, their psychology is grounded in a reactional need for external validation: “the colonist derives his validity [vérité], i.e., his wealth [ses biens], from the colonial system” (5). The colonists’ original drive for material goods transforms into a need for the psychological good of validation or truth. They crave proof that they’re essentially, not just accidentally, superior, that they truly deserve their privileges.
So, supposedly “slavish” psychology originates not among the oppressed but among a colonial ruling class whose morality mirrors Nietzsche’s description of reactional morality: its concept of the good is the negation of a more primary evil. The colonists secure their own self-worth by imagining the colonized not just as inferior but as the very “negation of values,” as “absolute evil” (6). That is why racism plays such a foundational role. While Nietzsche’s self-affirming nobles are content with material superiority, the colonists’ Manichean need for absolute superiority requires the deeper illusion of physiological verification: “It is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to” (3). Colonialism’s innovation is its explicitly racialized caste-system, fusing race and class into a single, supposedly biological identity.
Colonialism is, consequently, a false radical aristocracy. The goal isn’t to integrate the colonized as a true caste with a meaningful social function, but to reduce them to an outcaste whose social function is entirely negative: to satisfy the colonists’ reactional need for psychological validation. Fanon’s insight against Nietzsche is that every reduction of human to species—whether master or servant, colonizer or colonized—is a form of dehumanization: “I see in this white gaze that it’s the arrival not of a new man, but a new type [type] of man, a new species [genre]” (Black Skin, White Masks, 89). True humanity will be realized only beyond types, beyond species, in a political and material order that no longer reduces groups to functions of a larger social whole.
This is also why colonialism seeks an ever-increasing degree of material inequality: the immiseration of the colonized is not an accident of the colonists’ indifference, but essential to the colony’s justification and preservation. As Fanon points out, the colony’s infrastructure—the very materials of its construction—betray the intention to dehumanize the colonized in order to incite their envy and hatred: “The ‘native’ sector is not complementary to the European sector…not in the service of a higher unity[…].The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel[…]. The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light” (The Wretched of the Earth, 4).
In other words, the colony is materially designed to force the colonized to conform to their projected image as the “quintessence of evil,” creating an illusory verification of the colonists’ moral superiority (6). As a result, the colony produces a secondary, equally Manichean psychology among the colonized. But against Nietzsche’s claim that this is an unfortunate side-effect, Fanon suggests it was the goal all along: to produce a secondary reactional psychology among the oppressed to justify the original reactional psychology of the oppressor: “On a logical plane, the Manichaeanism of the colonist produces a Manichaeanism of the colonized. The theory of the ‘absolute evil of the colonist’ is in response to the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the native’” (50).
Consequently, Nietzsche’s naïve hopes for radical aristocracy are groundless. No version of aristocracy will ever create a higher humanity, and every version of aristocracy will eventually bring about its own downfall.
Fanon, Nietzsche, Race, and Class
Fanon’s relation to Nietzsche can help us understand the relation of race and class more generally. Colonialism can serve as the model of an extreme toward which every advanced capitalist society tends: a false radical aristocracy in which an active drive for material superiority mutates into a reactive need for spiritual superiority, in turn artificially verified through the construction of an illusory biological outcaste—primarily identified with race, but also with gender and sexuality. Every hierarchical society shares some of these features, but colonialism exaggerates them to a degree that can help us recognize more subtle variations of the same structures in non-colonial class societies.
On a general level, Fanon accepts Marx’s materialist view that the economic causes the ideological: the colony’s material conditions produce a psychological incentive toward racism, then transform it into a second nature, creating the racist as species: a deep-seated identity whose self-worth depends upon the reactive feeling of essential superiority. In the process, racism becomes a psychological satisfaction independent of material incentives. This, in turn, creates a new, non-material incentive to increase material inequality, since the dehumanization of the colonized provides illusory validation of the colonists’ claim to essential superiority.
That is how we should understand Fanon’s claim that in colonialism “The economic infrastructure is also [également] a superstructure. The cause is effect [conséquence]: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich” (5). He claims “Marxist analyses should always be slightly stretched” not because such analyses are wrong, but because a priority of the economic is perfectly compatible with this independence of the ideological. Both are equally true because the original causal process has split into two mutually reinforcing processes: class inequality causes white supremacy, but white supremacy independently reinforces class inequality.
Consequently, Fanon provides us with a novel, sophisticated case against both class- and race-reductionism, regardless of whether we accept his Marxist premises. Even if inequality is racism’s primary cause, ending it won’t eliminate the existing racist qua “species.” It will not eliminate individuals’ deep-seated, current psychological incentive toward racism—on the contrary, it will likely aggravate it. And even if ideology is racism’s primary cause, ending it won’t eliminate the material incentive to regenerate racist ideology in order to justify inequality. Material superiority will continually create psychological insecurity, the need to prove one spiritually merits one’s advantages. So, class inequality cannot be ended without anti-racist politics, and racism cannot be ended without class-politics.
Fanon’s analysis also provides us with a reason to reject the false dichotomy of revolutionary or reformist politics. Because class societies cultivate Manichean psychology at all levels, revolutionary politics isn’t dialectical. Existing classes can’t be synthesized, only replaced by a new humanity: “After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise [disparation] of the colonized. This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism” (178). So, the task is not to synthesize or simply invert classes but rather to “endeavor to invent man in full[l’homme total]” (236). In the meantime, individuals driven by reactional psychology require the incentive of immediate reform—concrete improvement to their lives—to work for a future humanity whose interests aren’t identical to their own. Immediate egalitarian reform is the concrete foundation of revolutionary politics, not an alternative or obstacle.
For the same reason, we can reject the false dichotomy between deontological and consequentialist approaches to politics. Any deontological politics that absolutely refuses to override individual rights, under any circumstance, ignores that rights can only be fully realized in an entirely new humanity made possible only in a fundamentally reordered society.
However, any consequentialist politics that demands the sacrifice of individual rights on principle to a purely abstract, unrealized future will destroy its own psychological foundation. Given the dominance of reactional psychology, present individuals will sacrifice their self-interest to greater social utility only if it is incrementally-realized: they need short-term gains as evidence for the promised end of full dignity and equality. Fanon has, then, shown us that a new, higher humanity can be realized only through a humanist politics that recognizes the imperfect rights and dignity of our imperfect present humanity as the only concrete foundation for realizing the full rights and dignity of future humanity.
