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Nietzsche and the Will to Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Ruth Abbey  and
Fredrick Appel
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Extract

This article moves on two fronts. It continues the challenge to the belief that politics is not central to the concerns of Friedrich Nietzsche but questions attempts to transvalue Nietzsche into a democrat. With their illiberal and inegalitarian political views, Nietzsche's writings best serve democratic political theory in an antidotal way. The article discusses Nietzsche's aesthetic approach to political action and architectonic conception of politics. It also explores some of the qualities he believes future rulers would need and the mechanisms they could use to exercise and legitimate their power. Just as Nietzsche thinks of political action in aesthetic terms, so his own art has a political purpose for he envisages the formation of a social, cultural and political élite and hopes, through his writings, to galvanize this élite.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , Winter 1998 , pp. 83 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1998

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References

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5 Berkowitz, , Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 2Google Scholar. Berkowitz does not conclude that Nietzsche has nothing to contribute to political philosophy. Because he “starts from an analysis of what human beings desire and what is desirable for a human being, [he] moves within the domain of moral and political philosophy” (p. 2). Berkowitz also claims that Nietzsche's very devaluation of political life is a proper and indispensable subject of political philosophy” (Ibid).

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10 Thiele, , “The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault's Thought,” American Political Science Review 84 (1990): 913CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. 919, 922. Michael Haar argues along these lines that the “future ‘Masters of the Earth’ will possess neither political power, nor wealth, nor any effective governing force. Those who actually govern and dominate will ⃛ be of the slave class” (“Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” p. 26) while Alphonso Lingis warns that “the power of the noble life should not be confused with social, political or military power” (“The Will to Power,” p. 52) in The New Nietzsche, ed. Allison, David B. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).Google Scholar

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13 Illusion is the salient term here, for Rorty concludes that Nietzsche goes awry when he ventures into the political. See “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” Political Theory 15 (1987): 579, fn 27.Google Scholar

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15 Love, , Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 2Google Scholar. As she later notes, “Nietzsche not only talks about politics, he also seems to think that his philosophy has implications for politics broadly construed” (p. 9).

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18 Lampert, , Nietzsche and Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 279Google Scholar. Compare Gerald Mara and Suzanne Dovi's claim that “if one construes the public as Kultur rather than as Staatswohle, then it appears that the transvaluative activities of the overman will be inevitably political” (“Mill, Nietzsche and the Identity of Postmodern Liberalism,” Journal of Politics 57 [1995]: 9; cf. p.10Google Scholar).

19 Cf. Strong, , “Nietzsche's Political Misappropriation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Magnus, Bernd and Higgins, Kathleen M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 128.Google Scholar

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21 Connolly, , Identity/Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 191.Google Scholar

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23 Honig, , Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

24 Owen, , Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (London: Sage, 1995), p. 169Google Scholar. Owen believes that like Rawls's liberalism, Nietzsche's “political agonism models an understanding of citizens as free and equal” (p. 163). He claims that “agonistic politics recognizes the equal right of persons to claim political authority⃛. All persons have an equal right of recognition which implies that all persons are valuable and, as such, deserving of respect, even it if does not imply that all persons are of the same value and deserving of equal respect” (p. 167).

25 “The only valid tribute to [Nietzsche's] thought⃛ is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest⃛ being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche ⃛ is of absolutely no interest” (Foucault, , Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 [New York: Pantheon Books, 1980], pp. 53–54).Google Scholar

26 Connolly, , Identity/Difference, p. 189Google Scholar, and Honig, , Political Theory and Displacement, p. 65Google Scholar, democratize Nietzsche by seeing the Overman as part of all selves rather than a particular élite.

27 Compare Detwiler's Nietzsche and Aristocratic Radicalism point that while there is some convergence between liberal values and Nietzsche's, for the most part the disjunctive is profound (p. 101).

28 As Lampert puts it, Nietzsche's politics broadens the political perspective instead of shrinking itself into some modern option” (Nietzsche and Modern Times, p. 431).

29 Strong, , “Nietzsche's Political Misappropriation,” p. 129.Google Scholar

30 Unless specified, references to Nietzsche's works appear with their abbreviated titles and section number. The Hollingdale translation in the Penguin edition has been used and emphases are original. The abbreviations are: HAH = Human, All Too Human, including the sections AOM = “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” and WS = “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; D = Daybreak, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; GS = The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, W. (New York: Random House, 1974)Google Scholar; Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra, including the chapters OBI = “Of the Blissful Islands”; OSO = “Of Self-Overcoming”; ONL = “Of Old and New Law-Tables”; OR = “Of the Rabble”; HO = “The Honey Offering”; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; GM = On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Goffling, Francis (New York: Anchor Books, 1956)Google Scholar; AC = The Anti-Christ; TI = Twilight of the Idols, including the sections MaA = “Maxims and Arrows”; RIP = “‘Reason’ in Philosophy”; MAN = “Morality as Anti-Nature”; TIM = “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind”; EUM = “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”; EH = Ecce Homo, including “Books” = “Why I write such good books”; “Clever” = “Why I am so clever”; “BT” = “The Birth of Tragedy”; “WC” = “The Wagner Case”; and “Z” = “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”; WP = The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann, W. and Hollingdale, R. J. (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar. German quotations come from KGW = Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgaube, ed. Colli, Giogio and Montinari, Mazzino, 30 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter).Google Scholar

31 One of John Stuart Mill's defenses of free speech is that when a view is silenced, even those who oppose it suffer because they lose “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error” (On Liberty, ed. Himmelfarb, Gertrude [Middlesex: Penguin, 1980], 2: 76)Google Scholar. This faith in the antidotal value of opposing ideas and forces can be added to the convergences between Nietzsche and Mill that Mara and Dovi identify (“Mill, Nietzsche and the Identity of Postmodern Liberalism”).

32 Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 204.

33 As Lampert explains, “Nietzsche reads nationalism as anti-Napoleonic and destined to come into conflict with the antinational pan-European spirit that is the true heir to Napoleon's aspiration for a unified Europe” (Nietzsche and Modern Times, p. 374).

34 Mill, , “Nietzsche and the Identity of Postmodern Liberalism,” p. 5Google Scholar. Detwiler, Compare, Nietzsche and Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 59Google Scholar, and Strong, , “Nietzsche's Political Misappropriation,” p. 133.Google Scholar

35 As he wrote to Franz Overbeck in April 1884, “What I call grand politics at least furnishes a good station and provides a bird's eye view of present-day events” (Nietzsche. Unpublished Letters, trans, and ed. Leidecker, Karl F. [London: Peter Owen, 1960], p. 107).Google Scholar

36 “Es ist das eigentliche Herrenrecht, Werte zu schaffen” (KGW VI [2], p. 223).Google Scholar

37 See Nehamas, , “Beyond Good and Evil,” in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Solomon, Robert C. and Higgins, Kathleen M. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 57.Google Scholar

38 Introductwn to Nietzsche, p. 95.

39 As Martha Nussbaum observes, Nietzsche's remarks about existence being justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon (e.g, BT 5,24, GS 107) are often “taken to imply some sort of moral aestheticizing of existence, a playful overturning of all moral and political categories in the name of detached aesthetic values” (“Transfigurations of Intoxication; Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Dionysus,” Arion 2 [1991]: 101Google Scholar).

40 Kaufmann, , Nietzsche, p. 204.Google Scholar

41 Nehamas, , Nietzsche: Life as Literature, pp. 136–37Google Scholar. He identifies this attitude with moral perspectivism.

42 Honig, , Political Theory and Displacement, p. 231.Google Scholar

43 Thiele, , “The Agony of Politics,” p. 913Google Scholar; cf. 923.

44 Compare Ansell-Pearson's argument that “the ‘art’ Nietzsche speaks of and esteems is public art, that is, art such as Greek tragic drama, which gathers together a people or community and discloses to them the ‘truth’ of their existence. One could say, therefore, that the experience afforded by art is political” (Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 5).

45 Nietzsche is citing Z II OBI.

46 As Julian Young writes, “Art, in short, is ⃛ action. Nietzsche's activist vocabulary for talking about artists—he refers to them as creators, makers, doers, violators and as rapists (TI ix, 8)—continually emphasizes this. And it is this perspective on the artist that provides the basis for inclusion of conquerors and builders of states and empires among the ranks of “artists” (Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 121Google Scholar). Compare Berkowitz's claim that “founders are artists because they form packs of wild human beings into political entities, they create something new and grand by bending and moulding recalcitrant material into an ordered whole” (Nietzsche: Ethics of an Immoralist, p. 88).

47 Kaufmann, , Nietzsche, p. 248, cf. 325.Google Scholar

48 Strong, , Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 13; cf. 91.Google Scholar

49 Nehamas, , Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 203.Google Scholar

50 Berkowitz, , Nietzsche: Ethics of an Immoralist, p. 252; cf. 255.Google Scholar

51 Ansell-Pearson, , Introduction to Nietzsche, p. 44.Google Scholar

52 The idea that Nietzsche is interested only in motivations may stem from passages like BGE 287.

53 Cf. Detwiler, , Nietzsche and Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 55Google Scholar. Nietzsche sees the “symbol” of the long-standing struggle between master and slave moralities as “inscribed” in the following “letters legible across all human history.” “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome” (GM I. vi). Rome, even more than Periclean Athens or Sparta, is identified as the champion of master morality. This passage should give pause to those who, following Kaufmann, argue that Nietzsche's view of the Jews is unambiguously positive.

54 Nietzsche echoes the criticism of Christian quietism advanced by Machiavelli in The Discourses, II. 2, and Rousseau in The Social Contract, chap. 8.

55 “Einer neuen über Europa regierenden Kaste” (BGE 251)—the quotation that begins this article. See BGE 208; WP 960 (master race [Herren-Rasse]); and WP 976 (ruling caste).

56 The emphasis on future-oriented responsibility threatens Kaufmann's idea (above) that for Nietzsche, “those who achieve self-perfection ⃛ have no thought of the morrow” (Nietzsche, p. 322).

57 Nietzsche resurrects the spirit of ancient moral philosophy in this regard, for as Williams notes “it has been in every society a recognizable ethical thought ⃛ that one can be under a (moral) requirement ⃛ simply because of who one is and of one's social situation” (Shame and Necessity, p. 7). Williams argues that ancient moral philosophy could account for this better than most modern ethical thought can.

58 This accent on the responsibility of future aristocrat contrasts with Nietzsche's discussion of the founders of the polity who, “being natural organizers ⃛ know nothing of guilt, responsibility, consideration” (GM II xvii).

59 Contrast this reading with Honig's discussion of responsibility which renders it an entirely personal quality (Political Theory and Displacement, pp. 52, 60–61, 64). Our interpretation is also at odds with Robert Solomon's that Nietzsche's philosophy “does not talk about ‘responsibility’ or ‘authenticity.’” See his introduction to Reading Nietzsche (p. 10). Again our position is much closer to Lampert's, who argues that BGE “is a book that assigns the greatest responsibility to the philosopher as one who knows what religions are good for, who knows how to order the politics of fatherlands, who commands and legislates how the world ought to be, and who has the whole future of mankind on his conscience” (Nietzsche's Teaching [New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986], p. 247Google Scholar).

60 Detwiler, Compare, Nietzsche and Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 44.Google Scholar

61 Cf. Ansell-Pearson, , Introduction to Nietzsche, pp. 7, 11, 63Google Scholar; Detwiler, , Nietzsche and Aristocratic Radicalism, pp. 101, 189.Google Scholar

62 Politics, trans. Sinclair, T. A. (London: Penguin. 1981), II, ii, 1261a22, III, iv.Google Scholar

63 Compare the claim that “he who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures” (ZII OSO).

64 Lingis, , “The Will to Power,” in Allison, , The New Nietsche, p. 52.Google Scholar

65 Nehamas, , “Beyond Good and Evil,” in Solomon, and Higgins, , Reading Nietzsche, p. 65.Google Scholar

66 Compare Love's argument that “Marx and Nietzsche agree that the means to overcome alienation and ascetic ideals [respectively] exist in modern society” (Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity, p. 65).

67 Cf. Bergmann, Peter, Nietzsche, “The Last Antipolitical German” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 122–23.Google Scholar

68 Introduction to Nietzsche, fn 12, p. 214. WS 283 and 288 support Ansell-Pearson's conclusion, but these seem more opposed to industrialization than to capitalism. In contrast to Ansell-Pearson, Love claims that Nietzsche perpetuates capitalist economics with his emphasis on individuality, play and the freedom of a leisured élite from the necessity of labor {Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity, pp. 18, 189). She concludes that “Nietzsche's overman portrays a bourgeois ideal— skeptical, individualistic, playful men—as human nature” (Ibid, p. 200). However, capitalism is not the first mode of production to purchase the leisure of an élite at the cost of the forced labor of the majority. Given Nietzsche's criticisms of capitalists (D 203, GS 40) and the rule of money (D 203, 204), it is more likely that his model is the ancient slave economy.

69 Compare Will to Power's reference to the internationalization of the economy, that “common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable” (866).

70 Detwiler, Compare, Nietzsche and Aristocratic Radicalism, pp. 174–75Google Scholar, and Karl Löwith's remark that “the democratic levelling of the masses, resulting in a degradation of man, and also the breeding of a master cast, which leads to an exaltation of individual men—these belong together like the two faces of a coin” (From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. Green, David E [London: Constable, 1965], p. 261).Google Scholar

71 Ansell-Pearson, , Introduction to Nietzsche, pp. 42–43, 51,153–58.Google Scholar

72 Ibid, p. 155.

73 Löwith, , From Hegel to Nietzsche, p. 262.Google Scholar

74 The broader position is exemplified in Nehamas's claim that “the view that Christianity and its morality have outlived their usefulness runs through the whole of Nietzsche's later work” (“Beyond Good and Evil,” in Solomon, and Higgins, , Reading Nietzsche, p. 60Google Scholar). Compare Jörg Salaquarda's position, “Nietzsche and the Judeo-Christian tradition, “in Magnus, and Higgins, , Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, p. 90.Google Scholar

75 Although Nietzsche uses Brahmins to illustrate his general claims about the political uses of religion, Christianity can be included here. This is suggested by the passage's anticipation of a transition from the present, dominated by Christianity, to the future, where Christianity can be used by rulers as a way of securing compliance from the mass and is confirmed by the later specification of “Christianity and Buddhism” (BGE 61).

76 Compare Berkowitz's point that in The Anti-Christ, good politics requires élite “wise religious leaders [who] conjure illusions and contrive convictions for the discipline of the party men or common believers” (Nietzsche: Ethics of an Immoralist, pp. 116–17).

77 Ronald Beiner argues that “Nietzsche is entirely faithful to the modern tradition of civil religion as set forth by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau” (“George Grant, Nietzsche and the Problem of a Post-Christian Theism,” in George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity, ed. Davis, Arthur [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996], p. 126).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

78 The claim about Christianity's obsolescence also overlooks Nietzsche's suggestion that it has a place in a transvalued future as something for higher values to struggle against (WP 216,401)—a suggestion compatible with his claims about the antidotal value of ideas.

79 While liberal philosophers such as John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexis de Tocqueville grounded their arguments for secular equality in such Christian ideas, not all adherents of Christianity have inferred an imperative to secular equality. St. Augustine and Sir Robert Filmer are two notable examples of Christian thinkers who married their faith with an acceptance of social hierarchy.

80 See Augustine's, City of God, 19: 12, 15Google Scholar, and Luther's, “On Secular Authority” in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. and trans. Hoepfl, Harro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

81 Williams, , Shame and Necessity, pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

82 Lampert underestimates Nietzsche's fears that agents who can take advantage of the structural conditions afforded by late modernity for a new politics might not emerge when he writes that “Nietzsche stood at the head of an army not yet mustered and outfitted, an army formed for public battles still a long way off and won in the mind of their instigator” (Nietzsche and Modern Times, p. 389).

83 Compare Lampert's claim that Nietzsche's writing “is meant to appeal to a particular kind of reader and in that appeal to form and mold, to educate, make Nietzschean” (Ibid, p. 11). Schacht's claim that Thus Spoke Zarathustra “was no mere work of literature, scholarship or philosophy, but rather a unique educational device capable of making a real and great difference in human life” (Nietzsche, pp. 230, cf. 231) runs parallel to these arguments. See his “Zarathustra/Zarafftwsfra as Educator” in Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, ed. Sedgwick, Peter R. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar. However, as a commentator who denies the importance of the political in Nietzsche's thought, Schacht focuses on this as education for personal greatness.

84 Mara, and Dovi, , “Mill, Nietzsche and the Identity of Postmodern Liberalism,” (1995), p. 5Google Scholar. Cf. Detwiler, , Nietzsche and Aristocratic Radicalism, p. 192.Google Scholar

85 Warren, , Nietzsche and Political Thought, p. 211; cf. pp. 4, 67, 208.Google Scholar

86 Owen concedes that “this political theory is [not] the only one which could be drawn from Nietzsche's work; it is simply the position which I think offers most of interest in terms of Nietzsche's ongoing relevance to contemporary debates” (Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity, p. 171). Connolly likewise declares that “the Nietzschean conception of a few who overcome resentment above politics while the rest remain stuck in the muck of resentment in politics is not viable today⃛. Today circumstances require that many give the sign of the overman a presence in themselves and in the ethicopolitical orientations they project onto the life of the whole” (Identity/Difference, p. 187, cf. 190).

87 For just one example, consider Sen's, AmartyaInequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar where the belief in equality isa given in debates about justice. The issues arise when we ask what sort of equality? equality of what? how is this to be achieved?

88 We are grateful to Jeremy Moon and the anonymous reviewers for comments on a draft of this article and to Barry Hindess for his encouragement.