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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2019
I argue that Nietzsche offers an account of how strong political states develop and how the highest forms of individuality emerge when the political will of these strong states weakens. Communities develop strength in proportion to the hostility of their environment. In order to flourish in a hostile environment, they must cultivate powerful and ambitious citizens by intensifying their most powerful drives, such as a lust for power. To control these citizens they must ruthlessly suppress individuality and allow these drives to be discharged in ways that do not threaten the community. This is achieved through an inflexible value system. When the political will of the state declines and this moral code weakens, the highest forms of individuality emerge. This account clarifies why Nietzsche tends to praise aristocratic states and brings into focus the obstacles to achieving the highest forms of human flourishing within a democratic state.
Thanks to Robert Lamb for comments on an early draft, and to Ruth Abbey and three anonymous reviewers for invaluable suggestions.
1 See, for instance, Detwiler, Bruce, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 7–8Google Scholar; Conway, Daniel, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), 7Google Scholar; and Leiter, Brian, Nietzsche on Morality, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 114Google Scholar.
2 Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism; Abbey, Ruth and Appel, Fredrick, “Nietzsche and the Will to Politics,” Review of Politics 60, no. 1 (1998): 83–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appel, Fredrick, Nietzsche contra Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Dombowsky, Don, Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 For the most part these scholars do not attempt to conceal the aristocratic tendencies of Nietzsche's thought, but focus on other aspects of his thought, with various justifications. Mark Warren, for example, argues that Nietzsche's political statements rely on some of his weakest arguments and rest on discredited assumptions, whereas Lawrence Hatab argues that Nietzsche was more antiegalitarian than he was antidemocratic, and that his antiegalitarianism is compatible with agonistic forms of democracy. See Warren, Mark, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Hatab, Lawrence, Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995)Google Scholar. Some scholars, however, have been criticized for selectively reading Nietzsche to try to make him appear more sympathetic to democracy than he was. See, for example, Mark Redhead's critique of Connolly, William, “Debate: Nietzsche and Liberal Democracy: A Relationship of Antagonistic Indebtedness?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 5, no. 2 (1997): 183–93Google Scholar, and see also Connolly, William, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
4 I will construct my account of Nietzsche's mature political philosophy from his post-1882 writings, beginning with The Gay Science. I will argue that in this period we can find no trace of his early allegiance to the Hobbesian state of nature, and plenty of evidence that he constructs a rival account which contradicts this earlier one. In particular, I will emphasize the continuity between his broad overviews of the rise and fall of political communities—and how this connects to higher individuals—in The Gay Science, § 23, On the Genealogy of Morality, II 16–17, and Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 201, 257, 262, as well as how his criticisms of liberalism and democracy in Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 202–3 and Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes 38–39, reflect the details of this account.
5 It is likely that strong communities will need to organize themselves hierarchically to overcome a constant threat of extermination. Regardless, strong communities will tend to overthrow and subjugate other communities—often becoming slave-owning states—so they will certainly become aristocratic, even if they are not already organized in this way.
6 There might be other mechanisms for flourishing. But for Nietzsche, the mechanism I describe here has hitherto been the only mechanism that has systematically engendered higher types. I argue that any attempt to promote Nietzschean flourishing should engage seriously with this account, and that any Nietzschean democrat should consider to what extent the process might be reproduced or modified within a democratic context.
7 Drochon, Nietzsche's Great Politics, 54.
8 Ibid., 54.
9 Ibid., 56–58.
10 I cite Nietzsche's texts using the standard English-language acronyms and section numbers and/or names where appropriate:
HC equals “Homer's Contest” and GSt equals “The Greek State,” both in On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
GS equals The Gay Science, trans. Nauckhoff, Josefine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar;
Z equals Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Del Caro, Adrian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar;
BGE equals Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Norman, Judith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar;
GM equals On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Diethe, Carol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar;
TI equals Twilight of the Idols, trans. Norman, Judith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar;
A equals The Antichrist, trans. Norman, Judith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar;
WP equals The Will to Power, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. and Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Random House, 1967)Google Scholar.
11 Drochon, Nietzsche's Great Politics, 58–59.
12 Moore, Gregory, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Warren does offer a brief explanation of how the individual emerges from the collective, which he draws from The Gay Science and an unpublished note: “Nietzsche locates the possibility for individuation in those cultures that attribute freedom, responsibility, or selfhood to those individuals in ways fostering their self-images as centers of activity” (Nietzsche and Political Thought, 59–60). As will become clear, this account has little in common with the one I am endorsing, which relies primarily on Beyond Good and Evil.
14 Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, 139.
15 Earlier he writes: “valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community” (GS 116), and, later, “A tremendous range of experiences teaches it which qualities are primarily responsible for the fact that, despite gods and men, it still exists, it keeps prevailing. It calls these qualities virtues, and these are the only virtues it fosters” (BGE 262).
16 See also The Gay Science § 19, where Nietzsche argues that the “most fruitful people and peoples” have grown up amid “misfortune and external resistance.” Once strong states have acquired a slave class, the possibility that the “oppressed” might rebel provides another form of resistance that the masters must struggle against (BGE 262).
17 See for instance Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, 45.
18 Drochon, Nietzsche's Great Politics, 93.
19 Another promising explanation for Nietzsche's claim that aristocratic societies produce the highest individuals is that aristocratic societies produce a “pathos of distance” and the highest individuals emerge when they internalize this feeling. This compelling explanation has been developed elsewhere; see Mark Alfano's argument that aristocracies produce contempt in the nobles for the slaves, and that they come to also feel this contempt for the slavish aspects of themselves (Alfano, Mark, “A Schooling in Contempt: Emotions and the Pathos of Distance,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Katsafanas, Paul [London: Routledge, 2018]Google Scholar).
20 Riccardi, Mattia, “Virtuous Homunculi: Nietzsche on the Order of Drives,” Inquiry 61, no. 1 (2018): 21–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
See also Paul Katsafanas, who defines drives as “non-conscious dispositions that generate affective orientations” (The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Riccardi, Mattia, “Inner Opacity: Nietzsche on Introspection and Agency,” Inquiry 58, no. 3 (2015): 226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Lust for mastery (Herrschsucht) crops up again, along with greed, when Nietzsche identifies them as examples of “actual active emotions,” which are of “much greater biological value than those of reaction” (GM II 11). However, hatred and envy make the counterlist of reactive emotions, rooted in ressentiment, and so the distinction between active and reactive emotions is of limited use in trying to make sense of Nietzsche's lists of the drives that imperiled communities cultivate.
23 There has been a general lack of attention paid to how a drive such as greed can enhance humankind. It is true that much has been written on power, but this has focussed on the broader concept of the will to power, rather than the lust for power, which Nietzsche explicitly identifies in these passages as a drive. For a rare example of work on the value of one of these specific drives, see Siemens, Herman W., “Nietzsche's Philosophy of Hatred,” Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 77, no. 4 (2015): 747–84Google Scholar.
24 In this same passage Nietzsche likens this accumulation to putting “a threatening tension into the bow,” repeating the same idea in notes when he writes, “The significance of protracted despotic moralities: they tense the bow, if they do not break it” (WP 961 / KSA 11:34[178]).
25 Nietzsche's emphasis on the vigor and vitality of the highest individuals and the ages in which they tend to appear has generally been overlooked by his commentators. The best account is offered by Daniel Conway, who argues that the strong ages are those “overflowing with vital energy” and draws the connection between “genius” and vitality: “The order of rank among individuals and types is thus determined by a measure of the relative capacity of excess affect that one can afford to reserve and expand” (Nietzsche and the Political, 23, 48). However, Conway offers little explanation for how these qualities are cultivated, which is what I am focusing on here.
26 On the idea that greatness is correlated with degree of force, see also WP 863: “The concept ‘stronger and weaker man’ reduces itself to the idea that in the first case a great deal of force is inherited—he is a summation—in the second, as yet little— (inadequate inheritance, splintering of that which is inherited … the starting point is where great force is, where force is to be discharged)” (WP 863 / KSA 13:15[78–79]). On the lack of a single higher type, see Alfano, Mark, “An Enchanting Abundance of Types: Nietzsche's Modest Unity of Virtue Thesis,” Journal of Value Inquiry 49, no. 3 (2015): 417–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Nietzsche indicates that the highest philosophers are likely to flourish in such periods too. The philosopher must be a “strong, independent spirit,” a quality which is more likely to originate in those who possess “harshness and cunning” than in the “gentle, fine, yielding good nature” that we associate with scholars (BGE 39). Furthermore, the strength and vitality needed to be an individual is also linked to the capacity to face reality without needing to take comfort in transcendence and illusion. In The Gay Science, for example, Nietzsche argues that “he who is richest in fullness of life” can allow himself “the sight of what is terrible and questionable” (GS 370), and elsewhere he makes it clear that this capacity is crucial to the highest forms of philosophy: the “measure of value” in philosophy is how much truth a spirit can “tolerate” and “withstand” (EH Preface 3 and BGE 39). Aside from the vigor which is required to face reality, there is another reason to expect that these conditions would be fertile for producing philosophers. Nietzsche claims that “every great philosophy so far has been … a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir,” because a philosopher's morals reflect how his drives stand “with respect to one another” (BGE 6). It follows, therefore, that the cultivation of drives that are usually ostracized will provide an advantage in discovering “certain aspects of the truth” which are usually ignored (BGE 39).
28 In 1888 Nietzsche begins to describe the loss of instinctive certainty as decadence. For a detailed account of Nietzsche's use of the term “decadence,” see Conway, Daniel, “The Politics of Decadence,” in “Nietzsche and Politics,” supplement, Southern Journal of Philosophy 37, no. S1 (1999): 19–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to the account I have sketched, some decadence is the precondition for cultural and artistic growth. But the more decadent a society becomes, the more people “instinctively prefer things that disintegrate, that accelerate the end” (TI 39); in Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes complete decadents as those who “always choose the means that hurt themselves” (EH Wise 2). But the presence of great vitality acts as a kind of protective against the negative effects of decadence because it enables people to impose order upon their drives and to give themselves purpose. It is only once this vitality diminishes that decadence becomes an obstacle to future flourishing.
29 Nietzsche describes one variant of this period of political decline in his account of Socrates in Twilight of the Idols. Socrates exemplifies the “fanaticism with which all of Greek thought threw itself on rationality” because their “instincts were in anarchy.” Socrates sensed that the “degeneration” was spreading and the ability to master and order the drives was being lost, and so he developed a “counter-tyrant” out of reason (TI 4–10). This is one example of a “morality of timidity.”
30 Conway also recognizes this point: Nietzsche values aristocracies because they express the highest degree of “strength and vitality.” Since political regimes will “accurately reflect the vitality of the peoples and ages they serve … (an aristocracy) is not a better regime for those epochs that can afford only democracy” (Nietzsche and the Political, 41).
31 Hatab, for instance, argues that “Nietzsche's primary political target is egalitarianism… . The promotion of political equality is unmasked as the weak majority grabbing power to incapacitate the strong few” (A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, 28). Pursuing a different line of argument, Maudemarie Clark argues that Nietzsche is not concerned that democratic institutions will produce actual equality, but is troubled by a democratic culture that claims that people are of equal worth and thus denies the existence of “more spiritual human beings” (Clark, Maudemarie, Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 183Google Scholar).
32 See also Z On Old and New Tablets: “For the best should rule, my brothers, and the best also want to rule! And wherever the teaching says differently, there—the best are missing.”
33 Some forms of agonistic democracy are less explicitly Nietzschean. Chantal Mouffe's account, for example, owes more to Carl Schmitt's theorizing of the friend/enemy distinction than it does to Nietzsche. Mouffe's form of agonistic democracy is less concerned with human flourishing, too (although there is some emphasis on it): agonistic democracies are primarily desirable because they offer a way to transform antagonistic conflict, characterized by hatred and violence, into agonal conflict, which is civil and peaceful. It thus focuses more on protecting societies from violence, rather than enhancing the species. See, for example, Mouffe, Chantal, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar.
34 Hatab discusses this essay in A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, 62, and Owen in Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason (London: Sage, 1995), 139Google Scholar.
35 Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, 76.
36 Ibid., 133.
37 Ibid., 138.
38 Owen, David, “Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on Nietzsche's Agonal Perfectionism,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 24 (2002): 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Owen, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity, 160.
40 Ibid., 146.
41 Owen, “Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect,” 126.
42 While some have construed Nietzsche's higher types exclusively in cultural terms (see Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality), others have argued persuasively that at least some of the highest individuals will be drawn inexorably to the political realm. See Abbey and Appel, Nietzsche on the Will to Politics, 101–2.
43 While Hatab, for example, does compile a list of passages that seem to support an “aristocratic, authoritarian political arrangement” (Nietzsche's Defense of Democracy, 39–42), he does not discuss the process by which the highest individuals have hitherto arisen, which is what I have focused on here. Neither does Owen in Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity, where his account of Nietzschean flourishing is predominantly drawn from “Homer's Contest”and the account of the sovereign individual in On the Genealogy of Morality.