TLDR: a short essay on Camus' "Man in Revolt", a total banger of a book about the history of rebellion, in philosophy, art, and history. The section on Niezsche in particular showed me something I hadn't quite understood about where Nietzsche came up short.
Nihilism Wants Empire: Camus on Nietzsche
In his epic survey of rebellion through the ages, "Man in Revolt" ("L'Homme Revolte", often translated as "The Rebel"), Camus saw into Nietzsche's brilliance and imprecisions with keen eyes, but he also saw something in the man's thought that is of paramount relevance to today: that nihilism wants empire, and achieves it by integrating Nietzsche's will to power. It has succeeded to a large degree, and Camus explains how Nietzsche's vision failed to stop the Last Man from taking over, and why.
The Problem: God is Dead
Nietzsche was the first to understand that nihilism was to be the dominating force and central adversary from his time onwards. His "God is dead and we have killed him" was just that: the first conscious awareness that, with God being dead in his time, the vacuum left behind would make room for the degrading force of the Last Man, the nihilist.
"Revolt, for him, starts from a "God is dead" which it considers a hard fact; it then orients itself against anything that aims to falsely replace the lost divinity and dishonors a world no doubt without direction, but which remains the only crucible of the gods."
The Solution: the Overman
Nietzsche's proposed solution to this conundrum was the Overman ("Ubermensch") who would lead the second renaissance, where new values would have to be created to replace the ones lost in the death of God.
"The death of God achieves nothing and cannot be lived except on the condition of preparing a resurrection. 'When we don't find the greatness of God, we find it nowhere; one must deny it or create it.' To deny it was the task of the world he saw around him. To create it was the superhuman task he wanted to die for." And also, "Nietzsche only ever thought in terms of a coming apocalypse, not to exalt it, since he guessed the sordid and calculating face this apocalypse would take, but to avoid it and turn it into a renaissance."
Misunderstanding the Overman
This is where most people get lost, from young college nihilists to proto-fascists: the Overman is not about physical strength, or domination of others. It is about being strong enough to create new values and to live by them. The prodigious strength required for such an endeavour is psychological, not physical or even mental. It's not about competition or war. It is the hardest work of filling the vacuum left by the death of God by building a foundation for new values and embodying them without going insane.
Nihilism secularizes the Overman
Nietzsche wanted the overman's renaissance of values to exalt the human spirit and rekindle divinity on and of the earth: humanity would kneel only to the Cosmos, creation itself. But the Marxists saw an opportunity, caring little for the grandeur of the human spirit, and admiring the freedom available to their cause with a revaluation of all values.
"Philosophy secularizes the ideal. But then come the tyrants and soon they secularize the philosophies which give them a right to it."
Nietzsche was going up the chain, from philosophy to the sacred, urging man towards his ideal of the Overman that-is-yet-to-come, perhaps "a Caesar with the soul of Christ". The opposite direction down towards the secularization of every living thing gives us Marx's historical materialism.
"For Marx, nature is that which we subjugate in order to obey history, for Nietzsche, it is that which we obey in order to subjugate history. It's the difference between Christian and Greek."
"He himself had nonetheless imagined a system where crime could not serve as an argument against anything and where the only value resided in the divinity of the human being." He just didn't imagine that this idea would be used to force man to kneel before history instead of creation.
The Nihilist Empire
"The nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who refuses to believe in what is."
The other mistake Camus identifies is that Nietzsche placed his Overman as a "yet-to-be", something that would come in the future, thus betraying both his pre-Socratic influences and Jesus's teachings, which brought the "later" to the "here and now". Marxism just had to say that the revolution was now, in active becoming. Anything that is, could be erased by how we write the history books. And if power is what you want, now is always better than later.
"Marxism-Leninism has in reality taken over Nietzsche's will, give or take a few Nietzschean virtues they ignored. The great rebel creates then from his own hands, and to lock himself in, creates the implacable reign of fate. Having escaped from the prison of God, his first concern was to build the prison of history and reason, concluding thus the camouflage and consecration of the nihilism Nietzsche pretended to vanquish."
I could think of no better explanation for the almost overwhelming force of the nihilists of today: they have integrated Nietzsche's will to power more than anybody else. One perfect example was Gov. Newsom's explanation for how San Francisco got cleaned up before a state visit by President Xi of China (link). In seeing the years of illness, decay, and violence that beset SF swept under the rug with a quip, one realizes that the "sordid and calculating face" of the nihilist endgame has arrived.
Nietzsche was prophetic in this respect, and Camus, writing after World War II, believed those prophecies had come true in the 20th century. Yet he would not live to see the 21st century, where nihilist thought and action would come to dominate in spectacular ways.
Quoting Nietzsche once more, Camus wrote, " 'The time is coming when we will have to struggle for the domination of the earth, and this struggle will be led in the name of philosophical principles.' He announced the 20th century. But if he announced it, it is because he was privy to the interior logic of nihilism and knew one of its ends was empire."
Time will tell whether we are still capable of founding new values and escaping subjugation to historical materialism. Here and there, whispers of new beginnings float on the wind, and who knows? Perhaps the Overman is yet to come...
Translations my own.
English text pdf