Europe Discovers Nietzsche 321popular that the first parodies, satires, and lampoons appeared as eady
as the 1890s. Max Nordau, for example, spoke on behalf of the obdu-
rate sector of the bourgeoisie when he called Nietzscheanism a "practi-
cal emancipation from traditional discipline" and warned about "the
unchaining of the beast in man" (Aschheim 28). To these critics,
Nietzsche was a philosopher who made consciousness degenerate into
intoxication and blind instincts. Quite a few Nietzscheane also under-
stood his philosophy as such and believed that their indulgence in wine,
women, and song was their direct path to Dionysus.
Adherents of this sort debased Nietzsche's philosophy. It is important
to bear in mind that Nietzsche had equated "life" with creative potential
and called it the "will to power" on those terms. Life aspires to itself and
strives to configure itself but consciousness maintains an ambivalent
relationship with this principle of the self-configuration of living things.
It can act as an inhibiting or an enhancing force. It can elicit anxieties,
moral scruples, and resignation, and can cause the élan vital to snap, but
consciousness can also place itself in the service of life by pronouncing
valuations that encourage life to engage in free activity, refinement, and
sublimation. However consciousness functions, it remains an organ of
life, and hence its effects, whether auspicious or disastrous, shape the
destinies that life makes for itself. At times, life is enhanced by con-
sciousness; at other times, it is destroyed—again, by consciousness. It is
not, however, an unconscious process of life that decides whether con-
sciousness goes in one direction or the other; it is the conscious will, the
element of freedom in one's life, that determines this.
Nietzsche's Lebensphilosophie liberated "life" from the deterministic
straitjacket of the late nineteenth century and restored its characteristic
freedom, namely the freedom of artistic creation. Nietzsche had
declared that he wanted to be the poet of his life, and we have already
seen the consequences of this oudook for the concept of truth. There
is no truth in an objective sense. Nietzsche's pragmatism held that truth
is the kind of illusion that proves useful for life. Unlike its Anglo-Saxon
counterpart, his pragmatism drew on a Dionysian vision of life. In