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Nietzsche's Political Engagements: On the Relationship between Philosophy and Politics in The Wanderer and His Shadow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2016

Jeremy Fortier
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Abstract

In Nietzsche's early and late writings, he appears as an antimodern, antiliberal political revolutionary, championing the world-transformative characters of (first) Richard Wagner and (later) Zarathustra. By contrast, in the writings of his “middle period,” Nietzsche struck up a rapprochement with the modern world, and developed the ideal of a “free spirit.” Among those writings, The Wanderer and His Shadow sheds the most revealing light on the free spirit ideal. It shows that, even as Nietzsche sought to avoid some of the hazards associated with his more revolutionary writings, he continued to advocate a sharply critical engagement with political and cultural life. And it reveals what Nietzsche understood to be most challenging or problematic about the free spirit ideal—and, thereby, what later moved him away from it.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , Spring 2016 , pp. 201 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2016 

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References

1 See Fredrick Appel, Nietzsche contra Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 374–94; Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche's Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

2 Citations to Nietzsche's works are given parenthetically in the text, referring to aphorism numbers or section headings, and using the following abbreviations: AOM = Assorted Opinions and Maxims; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; BT = The Birth of Tragedy; EH = Ecce Homo; GM = On the Genealogy of Morality; GS = The Gay Science; HH = Human, All Too Human; KGW = Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke; RWB = Richard Wagner in Bayreuth; SE = Schopenhauer as Educator; TI = Twilight of the Idols; TSZ = Thus Spoke Zarathustra; WS = The Wanderer and His Shadow.

3 See Stephen E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 146–52, 217–26; Jacob Golomb and Ronald S. Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 109–48; Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

4 See Gillespie, Michael, “‘Slouching towards Bethlehem to Be Born’: On the Nature and Meaning of Nietzsche's Superman,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 30 (2005): 49–69Google Scholar; Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); also see Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 8.

5 Ruth W. Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Paul Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Garrard, Graeme, “Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment,” Review of Politics 70, no. 4 (2008): 595–608Google Scholar.

6 Cf. Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 222–27.

7 This designation is to be found on the back cover of the 1882 edition of GS. On the importance of this statement, see Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment, ix.

8 Cf. Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), 43–44.

9 For a more detailed account of Schopenhauer's crucial role in convincing Nietzsche that a truly revolutionary social transformation was possible only through culture, see Jeffrey Church, Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 179 and Church, Jeffrey, “Two Concepts of Culture in the Early Nietzsche,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 3 (2011): 336–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Regarding Wagner's ambitions for his Gesamtkunstwerk, see Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 46–51; Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 86–93; Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113–17.

11 For a compendium of Nietzsche's complaints about Bayreuth, see Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, 224–25. For a more detailed account, which gives especially helpful attention to Nietzsche's notebooks from this period, see Large, Duncan, “Nietzsche's Helmbrecht, Or: How to Philosophize with a Ploughshare,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 13 (1997): 3–22Google Scholar.

12 On this turn from myth to truth, see Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment, 2–11; Laurence Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 255–57; Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15.

13 Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment demonstrates that this “problem of culture” is the unifying thread of HH. This point is also highlighted by Lampert, Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, 257–59, who notes the newfound affinity for the Enlightenment entailed here. This latter point is elaborated by Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period, 87–88.

14 Cf. Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment, 50–51 and “Tocqueville and Nietzsche on the Problem of Human Greatness and Democracy,” Review of Politics 76, no. 3 (2014): 461–63Google Scholar; Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 148–51.

15 Cf. AOM 211 on “spiritual nomadism,” and Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship, 171: “For Nietzsche the only truly free thoughts are those which have not been corrupted by the prejudices and needs of the day, which have not lost their claim to honesty by having as their a priori enlistment in some cause.”

16 See William Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 58–59.

17 Cf. Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, 273–78.

18 In his autobiographical work Ecce Homo Nietzsche wrote a series of chapters commenting on each of his books, including a chapter “Human, All Too Human, with Two Continuations.” Nietzsche also referred to AOM and WS as “continuations,” “appendices,” and “supplements” to HH in a variety of published and unpublished remarks (for a complete list, see Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment, 233n8). These statements must be weighed against two facts. First, within the text of Ecce Homo Nietzsche discusses WS independently, as a work that represents a distinct moment in his life and career, on par with its successor, Daybreak (see EH Wise 1 and HH 4); by contrast, AOM is never singled out for discussion. Moreover, if one looks at the title pages to the first editions of AOM and WS one can see plainly that, from the outset, Nietzsche highlighted the status of the former writing as a mere “continuation,” and gave the latter a more independent status. To wit: the top half of the title page for AOM has Human, All Too Human written in a large typeface, dominating the page, with A Book for Free Spirits on the next line in smaller type, followed by Nietzsche's own name near the center of the page. Below all of this one reads, in a smaller typeface, “Appendix: Assorted Opinions and Maxims.” By contrast, on its successor volume we find an uncluttered title page, dominated by the words “The Wanderer and His Shadow” in large print. Connections to the predecessor volumes can be found within the work (see n19, below), and to that extent it is a “continuation” of them. But the title pages alone make clear that WS stands on its own in a way that AOM does not.

19 As Werner Dannhauser, Nietzsche's View of Socrates (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 164– 66 and Franco, Nietzsche's Enlightenment, 15 both point out, although only the first installment of Human, All Too Human divides its aphorisms into a series of chapters, the aphorisms of the second two installments clearly parallel the organization of the first. Thus, HH, Chapter 1 corresponds to WS 1–17.

20 Adrian del Caro, Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 220; cf. Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period, 99–101; Keith Ansell-Pearson, “True to the Earth: Nietzsche's Epicurean Care of Self and World,” in Nietzsche's Therapeutic Teaching, ed. Horst Hutter and Eli Friedland (London: Bloomsbury 2013), 104–6.

21 The concern for “the closest things” in WS is distinct from the commendation of “little unpretentious truths” in HH because in the latter case Nietzsche is referring to discoveries made with the aid of modern scientific method (including historical philosophy), but which might seem unimpressive when placed next to the grander claims advanced by traditional religion and metaphysics (cf. Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period, 117; Dannhauser, Nietzsche's View of Socrates, 160). Thus, in HH the primary contrast is between science and metaphysics, where in WS the key contrast is between individual and civic concerns (“metaphysics” acting as a tool of the latter). The latter conflict is the more essential one, as is indicated by the fact that in WS Nietzsche focuses on Socrates and Epicurus as models for philosophy: they were not concerned with modern science, but they were concerned with “the closest things,” and so their respective responses to the perennial conflict between philosophy and the city remains relevant.

22 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche notes that The Wanderer and His Shadow was produced during the year of his life when he lived first “like a shadow in St. Moritz,” and then “as a shadow in Naumburg,” before adding that “I was an expert in shadows in those days” (EH Wise 1). As the dialogue between the wanderer and his shadow in WS demonstrates, that expertise concerns the significance of the “closest things” above all.

23 See sections 2–4 of the preface to the first volume of HH. The quotation is from section 4.

24 In TI, the first few sections of the chapter “The Problem of Socrates” describe Socrates as, variously, “ugly,” “stunted,” “rabble,” a “decadent,” a “monster,” a “criminal,” a “buffoon,” who contained “all the bad vices and desires,” and continues in this vein.

25 Nietzsche is citing Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 2.2. On Socrates's pivotal role in turning philosophy away from cosmology and towards “the human things” (or, in Nietzsche's terms, away from “first and last things” and towards “the closest things”), see also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.10–11; Plato, Phaedo 96a–99d; Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1.11–16.

26 An especially vivid conflation of these two sets of interests can be found in Pericles's famous funeral oration, which locates the site of individuals' distinction precisely in the sacrifice of what is closest to them (their own bodies) for the sake of the greater whole of which they are a part (the Athenian city): “Beholding every day the power of the city in action, and becoming erotic lovers of it, and when to you it seems great, reflecting that men of daring who knew what had to be done and who possessed a sense of awe in their actions, acquired these things; and when they failed in any attempt, did not think they ought therefore to deprive the city of their virtue, but offered it the noblest contribution. For by giving in common their bodies, they took individually the praise which is ageless—and the most distinguished tomb: not that in which they lie, but that in which their fame is left forever remembered on every opportune occasion in speech and in deed” (Thucydides 2.43.1–2; cf. 1.70.5–6, where the Corinthian ambassadors admiringly remark that the Athenians “use their bodies as if they were least their own, for the sake of the city”). This example highlights how it is possible to become confused about, and cease to properly care for, one's individual good: not by forgetting it altogether, but by believing that it could only be fully satisfied through a sort of temporary, transactional sacrifice to a community which will then bestow back on us (“individually”) a greater good than we could acquire on our own (in this case, promising individual soldiers the quasi immortality of fame in exchange for sacrificing their mortal—corporeal—being to the good of the community).

27 Corresponding to chapter 3 of HH (“The Religious Life”) (cf. n19 above).

28 As Villa observes, in WS Socrates and Nietzsche are aligned as “enemies of the ideal of their respective times and places,” and as “paradigms of the independent, nondogmatic life” (Socratic Citizenship, 163; cf. Dannhauser, Nietzsche's View of Socrates, 163).

29 Nietzsche never wavered in judging this “agonistic” aspect of Socrates as indispensable to his appeal (see TI “Problem” 8), even if in later works he emphasized its corrupting effect on Athenian youths. In this as in other respects, Nietzsche's “normative” assessment of Socrates changed, even though his assessment of the facts of Socrates's character remains consistent with points that he first established in WS.

30 Nietzsche says that he detects “a touch of Attic irony and love of jesting” in Socrates's claim to be a “divine missionary.” In a similar vein, aphorism 86 commends Socrates's “gay seriousness and wisdom full of pranks” (cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.3.8, 4.1.1 and Symposium 4.29, on how Socrates “mixed the playful with the serious”). This is another point on which Nietzsche's assessment of Socrates remained consistent for the rest of his career: see BGE 191 on Socrates as a “great, secret-rich ironic” and TI “Problem” 9 on Socrates as a “great ironist.”

31 Nietzsche is not alone in concluding that Socrates's skeptical response to the Delphic oracle is a testament to his heterodoxy, and even disbelief, rather than proof of his piety: see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 81–83; David Leibowitz, The Ironic Defense of Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 60–102.

32 Nietzsche had already referred to Socrates as a free spirit in HH 433, 437. In the first of these aphorisms, Nietzsche seems to be referring to Socrates's relationship with Xanthippe as depicted by Xenophon (Memorabilia 2.2.7–14; Symposium 2.10).

33 Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 131.

34 It is worth noting that Nietzsche makes Socrates's name into the title for this aphorism (WS 86), i.e., as if this is his authoritative statement on Socrates—for which Xenophon would then be serving as his authoritative reference-point.

35 Dannhauser, Nietzsche's View of Socrates, 97.

36 For what follows, see KGW IV.1: 170–71, IV.2: 423; IV.3: 363, 442; letter to Carl von Gersdorff of May 26, 1876.

37 See KGW IV.1: 170–171 with Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.6

38 See Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2.1–6, 1.5, 1.6; cf. Apology 16, Oeconomcius 2.7–8.

39 See, e.g., Memorabilia, 1.2.23: “All things that are both noble and good are matters of training… . For the pleasures growing in the same body together with the soul persuade the soul not to be moderate but instead to gratify themselves and the body as quickly as possible” (i.e., persuasion/mind, pleasure/body, and soul compete for control, rather than organizing themselves into a harmonious hierarchy; cf. 1.3.9–13). Thus, in the Memorabilia Socrates makes self-control (enkrateia) the very “foundation of virtue” (1.5.4; cf. 2.1, 4.5).

40 Aristotle, Politics 1267a10–12; Nicomachean Ethics 1177a25–1177b; cf. Nietzsche, TI “Maxims” 3.

41 Nietzsche articulates this aim of freeing oneself from dependence on others most emphatically in WS 318: “To satisfy one's requirements as completely as possible oneself, even if imperfectly, is the road to freedom of spirit and person. To let others satisfy many of one's requirements, even superfluous ones, and as perfectly as possible—is a training in unfreedom.”

42 Nietzsche's remarks on Epicurus thereby help to clarify the nature of “the closest things” in the following way. When Nietzsche first introduces this notion, he lists “eating, housing, clothing, social intercourse” as examples of such things (WS 6). Later we see these examples brought to life in his description of “the pleasures of Epicurus”: “a little garden, figs, cheeses, and in addition three or four good friends” (WS 192). So Epicurus enjoyed “social intercourse,” but only in this limited sense of enjoying the private company of “three or four good friends,” rather than in the sense of seeking fame or influence (see WS 227). It is this limited notion of social intercourse which is compatible with the conception of freedom quoted in n41, above.

43 See Michael Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 213–14, 233–40.

44 In his second preface to the 1886 edition of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche describes in detail how he denied himself musical pleasures during the period in which he originally wrote the work, and issues the following maxim to all would-be free spirits: “Cave Musicam!” (beware of music). This sentiment also sheds some light on Nietzsche's evolving estimation of Socrates: in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche had criticized Socrates for being insensitive to the spirit of art and music, and therefore looked forward to the possible future emergence of a “Socrates who plays music” (BT 15). In his turn to the free spirit, Nietzsche was able to find a new sympathy for Socrates in part precisely because he had become skeptical of his own artistic and musical instincts (and it is therefore especially fitting that at this time he turned specifically to the Socrates represented, not by the poetic Plato, but by the more prosaic Xenophon).

45 A similar thought is suggested by a remark that Nietzsche made in a letter written shortly after his break with Wagner, just as he was beginning his work on HH. Characterizing himself to his correspondent as a “free spirit,” he explains that this means that he is “a person who desires nothing more than to lose some comforting belief every day, who seeks and finds his happiness in a liberation of the spirit that increases daily.” But then he adds: “It may be that I want to be more of a free spirit than I am able to be!” (letter to Louise Ott, September 22, 1876).

46 BGE was originally planned as a second edition of HH, and revisits most of its major concerns, especially by including an extensive discussion of the free spirits (the only one of Nietzsche's later books to do so). On the kinship between the two works, especially with regard to the free spirits, see Laurence Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 271; Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche's Task (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 5–6.

47 See Gillespie, “‘Slouching towards Bethlehem to Be Born,’” 51–56.

48 Thus Nietzsche has Zarathustra say to the crowd that has cheerfully accepted that it is heading down the road to becoming “last men” (a sort of “end of history” scenario): “I say to you: one must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos within you” (TSZ Preface 5; cf. BGE Preface: “With so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals”).

49 Nietzsche would later adapt imagery from this aphorism for a speech in Part Four of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also titled “At Noon” (which happens to follow a chapter where Zarathustra is addressed by his own shadow). By having the two works point forwards and back to each other in this way, Nietzsche makes WS and TSZ into landmarks within a single orbit. In light of this, I am inclined to agree with the conclusion of Franco (Nietzsche's Enlightenment, 223–24), which suggests that, in a complex way, the ideal of the free spirit ultimately calls for, and is in a way completed by, the writings that begin with Zarathustra.

50 See Newell, Waller R., “Zarathustra's Dancing Dialectic,” Interpretation 17, no. 3 (1990): 415–32Google Scholar; Pangle, Thomas L., “The ‘Warrior Spirit’ as an Inlet to the Political Philosophy of Nietzsche's Zarathustra,” Nietzsche-Studien, no. 15 (1986): 174Google Scholar.