Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace: Politics and International Relations in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche 9780228006015

Citation preview

beyond tragedy and eternal peace

mcgill-queen’s studies in the history of ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis

10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan

2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press

11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768-1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn

3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste 4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain 5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt 6 Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn 7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel 8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding 9 The Jena System, 1804-5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W.F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris

12 Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe 16 Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, 1300-1650 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come

20 Durkheim, Morals and Modernity W. Watts Miller 21 The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller's Aesthetics David Pugh

31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early Eighteenth Century Scotland Anne Skoczylas 32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman

23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon S. Shrimpton

33 Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie Dominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski

24 Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come

34 Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard

25 An Enlightenment Tory in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie

35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard

26 The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paola Mayer 28 Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop 29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde 30 The Distant Relation: Time and Identity in Spanish American Fiction Eoin S. Thomson

36 Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815-1848 Martin S. Staum 37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland 38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond, Second Edition Stephen J.A. Ward 39 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz 40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics: Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard

41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastl 42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan 43 The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1521 (Luther) to 1762 (Rousseau) Arthur P. Monahan 44 The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament Janet Ajzenstat 45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women Sara MacDonald 46 When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814-1848 J.A.W. Gunn 47 Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism Michael John DiSanto 48 Media, Memory, and the First World War David Williams 49 An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing Louis Groarke

52 Between the Queen and the Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Women John R. Cole 53 Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859-1914 and Beyond Martin S. Staum 54 Public Passion: Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice Rebecca Kingston 55 Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi 56 Materialist Ethics and Life-Value Jeff Noonan 57 Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles Ardis B. Collins 58 The Social History of Ideas in Quebec, 1760–1896 Yvan Lamonde Translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott 59 Ideas, Concepts, and Reality John W. Burbidge 60 The Enigma of Perception D.L.C. Maclachlan 61 Nietzsche’s Justice: Naturalism in Search of an Ethics Peter R. Sedgwick

50 Social and Political Bonds: A Mosaic of Contrast and Convergence F.M. Barnard

62 The Idea of Liberty in Canada during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 1776–1838 Michel Ducharme Translated by Peter Feldstein

51 Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology David Galston

63 From White to Yellow: The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300–1735 Rotem Kowner

64 The Crisis of Modernity Augusto Del Noce Edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti

74 The Age of Secularization Augusto Del Noce Edited and Translated by Carlo Lancellotti

65 Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America Michael Eamon

75 Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought Elaine Stavro

66 The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship John von Heyking

76 Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity Nicolás Fernández-Medina

67 War as Paradox: Clausewitz and Hegel on Fighting Doctrines and Ethics Youri Cormier 68 Network Democracy: Conservative Politics and the Violence of the Liberal Age Jared Giesbrecht 69 A Singular Case: Debating China’s Political Economy in the European Enlightenment Ashley Eva Millar 70 Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger Brian Harding 71 Before Copernicus: The Cultures and Contexts of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century Edited by Rivka Feldhay and F. Jamil Ragep 72 The Culturalist Challenge to Liberal Republicanism Michael Lusztig 73 God and Government: Martin Luther’s Political Thought Jarrett A. Carty

77 The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism Paola Mayer 78 Objectively Engaged Journalism: An Ethic Stephen J.A. Ward 79 Progress, Pluralism, and Politics: Liberalism and Colonialism, Past and Present David Williams 80 Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace Politics and International Relations in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche Jean-François Drolet

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace Politics and International Relations in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche

jean-françois drolet

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isb n isb n isb n isb n

978-0-2280-0559-9 978-0-2280-056-05 978-0-2280-0601-5 978-0-2280-0602-2

(cloth) (paper) (ep df) (ep ub)

Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Beyond tragedy and eternal peace : politics and international relations in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche / Jean-François Drolet. Names: Drolet, Jean-François. author. Series: McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas ; 80. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas ; 80 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200337688 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200337742 | isb n 9780228005599 (cloth) | is bn 9780228005605 (paper) | i sb n 9780228006015 (eP DF ) | is bn 9780228006022 (eP U B ) Subjects: l cs h: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. | l c sh: World politics—19th century. | l cs h: International relations—History— 19th century. Classification: lcc jc233.n52 d76 2020 | ddc 320.101—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Acknowledgments | xi Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works | xiii Introduction | 3 1 Culture Wars: Kant, Schopenhauer, and the “Fearful, Destructive Havoc of So-Called World History” | 18 2 Forces of Nature: Art and Politics in the Tragic Age of the Greeks | 46 3 Nihilism: Terror in the Alleyways of European Culture | 72 4 Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power | 97 5 Into the Abyss: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Modern European Statehood | 120 6 Grosse Politik: “The Time Is Coming When the Struggle for the Domination of the Earth Will Be Fought in the Name of Fundamental Philosophical Principles” | 139 Conclusion | 164 Notes | 175 Index | 231

Acknowledgments

Much inspiration during the process of writing this book came from my friends and colleagues at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London, especially Alexander Blanchard, Peter Brett, James Dunkerley, Adam Fagan, Kimberly Hutchings, Jef Huysmans, Ray Kiely, Karin Narita, Rick Saull, Lasse Thomassen, Oliwia Wasik, and David Williams. I am also grateful to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Babette Babich, Tom Bailey, David Owen, and Tracy B. Strong for the heart-warming encouragement at various points during the development of the manuscript. Very special thanks also to Michael C. Williams, Rita Abrahamsen, Srdjan Vucetic, Alexandra Gheciu, Vibeke Schou Tjalve, and Manni Crone for the invaluable intellectual stimulation, friendship, and hospitality during research visits in Ottawa and Copenhagen. At mqup , Richard Baggaley and Joanne Richardson provided invaluable support and helpful editorial comments. Thanks also to Kathleen Fraser for production assistance and to the two anonymous referees who offered thoughtful comments on the manuscript. Sections of chapters 2, 4, and 5 draw loosely on earlier iterations of material published in “Nietzsche, Kant, the Democratic State and War,” Review of International Studies 39, 1 (2012): 25–47; and “Ennobling Humanity: Nietzsche and the Politics of Tragedy,” Journal of International Political Theory 10, 3 (2014): 1–30. I am grateful for the permission to draw on this material here. Last but not least, my deepest appreciation goes to my wife Stina and our three beautiful children Oscar, Matilda, and Jakob, without whose love, energy, and unconditional support this work would never have come to fruition. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works

Anti-Christ, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1895] 2005). Written in 1888. ae , Anti-Education, trans. Damion Searls (London: Penguin Random House, 2015). Lecture series given in 1872. amo : Assorted Maxims and Opinions. Originally published in 1879 and subsequently included as part one of the second volume of Human, All Too Human, trans. Reginald John Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). bge : Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1886] 2002). bt : The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1872] 1999). d : Daybreak, trans. Reginald John Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1881] 1997). eh : Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1908] 2005). Written in 1888. ekgwb : Digital Critical Edition of the Complete Works and Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, based on the critical text by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, ed. Pablo D’Iorio (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter 1967–). Nietzsche Source: http://doc.nietzschesource.org/en/ eKGWB. gm : On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1887] 1997). gs : The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1882] 2001). a , The

xiv gs t: “The

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works

Greek State,” reprinted in On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1887] 1997). Unpublished essay written in 1871–72. hah : Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Reginal John Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1878] 1996). hc : “Homer’s Contest,” reprinted in On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1887] 1997). Unpublished essay written in 1871–72. hkg : Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Hans Joachim Mette (Munich: Beck, 1933). kgw : Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (24 vols + 4 cd s), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967–2004). ksa : Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, New York, and Munich: Walter de Gruyter and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1967–77 and 1988). pp : The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. G Whitlock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Lecture series 1872–76. pt : Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. Daniel Breazeale (New York: Humanity Books, 1999). ptag : Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, dc : Regnery Publishing, 1996). Unpublished manuscript written around 1873. sl : Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1969/1996). ti : Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1889] 2005). tsz : Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1883–85] 2006). um : Untimely Meditations, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1873–76] 1997). uw : Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 1995). wp : The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, [1901] 1968). ws : The Wanderer and His Shadow. Published in 1880 and subsequently

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works

xv

included as part two of the second volume of Human, All Too Human, trans. Reginald John Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I have relied on translations of the Nachlass (Nietzsche’s unpublished texts, fragments, notebooks, and letters) whenever available. The sources of these translations are indicated in the endnotes. Other translations are my own. Nietzsche’s letters are cited by addressee and date from the Digital Critical Edition of the Complete Works and Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (ekgwb ). Most references to Nietzsche’s notebooks are from the ksa . However, the ksa does not include Nietzsche’s writings before he took up a professorship at Basel in 1869. I use the kgw on those rare occasions where I refer to those early writings. The references for the ksa and the kgw provide the volume number (and part for kgw ) followed by the relevant fragment number and any relevant aphorism, and then page numbers. All italicized words and sentences in all citations are in the original.

beyond tragedy and eternal peace

Introduction

This study examines Nietzsche’s reflections on modern politics and international relations. More specifically, it offers an interpretative synthesis of Nietzsche’s engagement with questions concerning conflict and political violence as they presented themselves to him in the context of the late nineteenth century. This includes the rise of nationalism and colonial imperialism; the proliferation of racialist and social Darwinist doctrines; and the advent of new forms of transnational revolutionary agencies seeking to destroy the capitalist state system as a whole. In the German-speaking world, these developments were also central to the emergence of what would come to be known as Geopolitik (geopolitics) – a distinct set of intellectual and political initiatives that began to take shape on the back of Otto von Bismarck’s wars of unification but that only really picked up in earnest during the 1890s owing to growing anxieties over the more permanent aspects of German political geography and the destabilizing consequences of techno-scientific innovations for world order. Nietzsche was in one way or another deeply critical of all these phenomena, often articulating his positions through piercing analyses of the successes and failures of Bismarck’s policies. But the question of war and peace in his philosophy goes far beyond the melodrama of modern statecraft and balance of power diplomacy. Like Marx, Nietzsche saw interstate warfare as only the most extreme manifestation of deeper societal conflicts that transcend national boundaries and lay somewhat suppressed by what is generally referred to as “peace.” For Nietzsche, however, the sources of these conflicts lay not in the ways in which societies organize their productive capacity but in what he saw as the deeper-lying cultural and psychological

4

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

processes through which individuals and groups nurture or stifle their capacity for agency. According to Nietzsche’s controversial “will to power” hypothesis, the world is a chaotic and incessant process of creation and destruction, of resistance and conquest, in which “to live” is not merely to preserve ourselves but to continuously seek to expand our strength, our creativity, and our control over ourselves and over others. In this account, the “economy of force” (Clausewitz)1 underpinning our very being is beyond true and false and good and evil precisely because these categories are themselves the product of the relations of strength that make us who we are: “Life is a consequence of war, society itself, a means for war.”2 By prohibiting the positing of a pre-conflictual realm in this manner, Nietzsche’s philosophy effectively extends the political into the domain of ontological convictions and certainties that normally ground it – the consequence of which is to problematize all claims to legitimacy, justice, authority, and other such traditional categories of political practices and analyses. One should therefore not look for anything that might resemble a serious template for a particular type of political regime or for elements of a theory of international relations in Nietzsche’s books. His pronouncements on contemporary politics often lack specific details and cannot form the basis of a more “systematic” political philosophy that would bring together a set of ideals and abstract rules that should govern the distribution of power and rights within and between nations. This way of thinking about the political is precisely what he wants us to reconsider in his influential account of European nihilism, an all-consuming crisis of meaning triggered by the dissolution of the structuring ideals that had connected the exercise of power with purpose and determined questions of human co-existence under Christianity.3 Nietzsche saw that this crisis was nested deep in the cultural fabric of Western civilization. Christianity had taught that there are objective and knowable truths about the world, and that these truths provide validity to our moral aspirations and justify our belief that human existence has an intrinsic meaning or purpose. Like many other observers at the time, Nietzsche recognized that the erosion of this religious worldview since the Renaissance was closely linked to the intensification and diversification of scientific activity. What he perceived better than any of his contemporaries, however, is that secularization was a more specific consequence of science’s strong commitments to truthfulness and other moral ideals, such as honesty,

Introduction

5

sincerity and integrity, which Christianity had itself cultivated and enforced for centuries. Looking back from the vantage point of the 1880s, Nietzsche understood that “the end of Christianity at the hands of its own morality” had not only discredited beliefs in a redemptive afterlife.4 More fundamentally, secularization had undermined the status of morality and truth as such, stirring up profound anxieties concerning a wide variety of cultural constructs for which a residual God concept had remained the implicit guarantee under conditions of modernity: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”5 With abilities in foresight unmatched by any of his contemporaries, Nietzsche posited an intimate relationship between those disorienting cultural developments and the advent of new, totalizing forms of political violence. He anticipated that this violence would be transnational and global in scope, and enacted in the name of largescale ideological programs for planetary domination. Convinced that this destruction was inevitable, Nietzsche sought to accelerate the collapse of the old European order by exacerbating the contradictions of modern thought. His hope was that a new elite would eventually emerge out of these convulsions and pursue a “life-affirming” rethinking of the meaning of Europe and occidental humanity within the context of a largely secular culture. As he declares in a characteristic assessment of his own significance as a philosophical and historical event: I contradict as nobody has ever contradicted before, and yet in spite of this I am the opposite of a nay-saying spirit. I am a bearer of glad tidings as no one ever was before; I am acquainted with incredibly elevated tasks, where even the concept of these tasks has been lacking so far; all hope had disappeared until I came along. And yet I am necessarily a man of disaster as well. Because when truth comes into conflict with the lies of millennia there will be tremors, a ripple of earthquakes, an upheaval of mountains and valleys such as no one has ever imagined. The concept of politics will have then merged entirely into a war of spirits, all power structures from the old society will have exploded – they are all based on lies: there will be wars such as the earth has never seen. Starting with me, the earth will know great politics.6

6

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

It is the thought process motivating this comprehensive challenge to modern political and international political thought that this study seeks to illuminate in a more sustained fashion. What is it about Nietzsche’s philosophy that compels him to formulate his analyses in such radical – and often violent – terms? I suggest the answer lies at the intersection of his critique of Western metaphysics and his short and often disjointed analyses of the institutions, norms, and ideologies that shaped his views and expectations concerning the future of Europe and world politics during the 1870s and 1880s: if Nietzsche wants us to undertake such a far-reaching critique of modern culture as a whole it is because it has become so fragmented within itself that it is no longer capable of recognizing its own violence. Contrary to what interpretations of Nietzsche as an “anti-political” or “non-political” thinker often suggest,7 I do not think that Nietzsche had no appreciation for the value of politics as an identity-conferring activity through which men seek to determine their future together.8 But what his diagnostic of the modern age had demonstrated for him is that this ethically significant understanding of the political increasingly lacked institutional possibilities. Against an ideological landscape fixated on the redemptive conditions of peace and prosperity, Nietzsche’s is an effort to emphasize that the formulation of the question concerning the becoming of humanity into a static question of security and self-maintenance is itself already a will to self-destruction. While condemning aggression and abuse as especially base expressions of the will to power (as opposed to artistic creation, for example), Nietzsche understands that our best efforts to eradicate conflict and exploitation by institutionalizing conditions of universal justice and stability inevitably lead to the subordination of man and all his cultural activities to the necessity of a “petty” politics of control, deterrence, and retribution. In his eyes, the assumption that the “monstrous power of the negative” (Hegel)9 can be instrumentalized as the enforcement mechanism that will actualize a more harmonious whole is a debilitating delusion symptomatic of the crisis that needs overcoming. As various commentators have pointed out in different contexts, Nietzsche’s diagnostic of the crisis of modernity as a crisis of nihilism had an important subterranean influence on the development of international political thought during the course of the twentieth century and beyond.10 Realists, poststructuralists, conservatives, and critical theorists of all stripes have drawn selectively on his works

Introduction

7

to advance different aspects of their own competing research and political agendas. More often than not, however, this Nietzschean influence is sifted through the intellectual framework of other key thinkers of the twentieth century – Freud, Weber, Heidegger, Strauss, Arendt, Fanon, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida – who developed and articulated their own position on the back of a much customized reading of Nietzsche’s works. In reality, first-hand engagements with Nietzsche as a political thinker in his own right within the broad and eclectic discipline of international relations have remained far and few.11 This situation stands in sharp contrast with the growing interest in the “political Nietzsche” in philosophy and the more specialized subfield of “Nietzsche Studies” over the past two decades or so.12 Thanks to the trail-blazing work of scholars such as Tracy Strong, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Ofelia Schutte, Daniel Conway, David Owen, Tasmin Shaw, and others, questions concerning Nietzsche’s potential contribution to political thought have become central to anglophone Nietzsche scholarship. Yet, here as well, it is fair to say that the main debates structuring this expanding literature have evolved primarily around issues concerning the political constitution of the late-modern self and the extent to which Nietzsche’s aristocratic critique of modern democracy could or should be used to enrich contemporary democratic theory. The nature and implications of Nietzsche’s pronouncements on the intricacies of community and interstate relations have, until very recently at least, remained somewhat peripheral to the main concerns of this body of scholarship.13 The present volume is an effort to contribute to filling and bridging those gaps in the existing literature. In doing this, I do not claim to be providing a completely new interpretation of Nietzsche’s oeuvre or to have discovered new material that has never been discussed before. Rather, what I want to show is that Nietzsche’s political thought contains a powerful and still underappreciated account of the changing institutional forms and cultural and socio-political processes that culminated in the momentous collapse of the European society of states at the end of the “long nineteenth century” (1789–1914).14 Through his account of the moral-security imperatives underlying the formation, interaction, and transformation of political communities, Nietzsche also provides timely insights concerning the limits and contradictions of liberal democratic politics and international relations. In doing so, he lays out the basis of a voluntaristic mode of

8

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

political realism, in which the willingness to accept the ineliminable presence of force, cruelty, and exploitation in human affairs becomes a necessary preamble to the consideration of ways out. It goes without saying that Nietzsche’s reflections on these matters abound with tensions, paradoxes, shortcomings, and disturbing ambiguities. They have been the source of much intellectual confusion and political embarrassment, and remain to this day mired in controversy.15 I am referring here, of course, to the nationalist misappropriations of Nietzsche’s legacy made possible by the editorial forgeries of his sister, Elisabeth, after his mental breakdown in Turin in January 1889.16 Elisabeth was two years younger than Friedrich. Although the two of them were very close during their childhood and early adult life, they grew apart in 1885 when Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a former high school educator who had become a fervent nationalist and anti-Semitic activist by the 1880s. In 1887, the couple travelled to South America along with twelve other families to found a colony of pure Aryans in Paraguay.17 But the colony, Nueva Germania, was poorly managed and organized, leading to mounting debts and widespread anger among the settlers. Bernhard committed suicide in 1889 and Elisabeth returned to Germany in 1893. She then proceeded to found the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, assuming the roles of curator and editor of her brother’s manuscripts. Elisabeth meticulously expunged from Nietzsche’s texts any political statements against Bismarck, patriotism, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and the monarchy. She also made every effort to conceal her brother’s admiration for French and other cultures. By far the most famous and controversial product of Elisabeth’s forgeries was The Will to Power, a compilation of Nietzsche’s unpublished notes that she organized thematically and out of chronological order to support to her own racist and nationalist interpretation of her brother’s oeuvre. The volume was first published in 1901 and then expanded in a second 1906 edition. Elisabeth’s mendacious presentation of the book as Nietzsche’s unfinished magnum opus facilitated the alignment of Nietzscheanism with the forces of German nationalism during and in the aftermath of the First World War.18 It also became central to the appropriation of Nietzsche’s oeuvre by influential Nazi ideologues such as Alfred Baeumler, Heinrich Härtle, and Alfred Rosenberg in the 1930s.19 Elisabeth, who received financial support from the Nazi regime for the Nietzsche Archive after Hitler took power in 1933, helped

Introduction

9

to propagate this fascistic distortion of her brother’s political and philosophical messages. She hosted Hitler in a much-publicized visit to the Archive in 1934, and when she died in 1935 Hitler attended her funeral along with many other high-ranking Nazi officials. All of this was duly picked up and exploited by the propaganda machines of the Allies.20 Fortunately, Nietzsche’s more perceptive postwar interpreters have long dispelled this distorted view of his legacy.21 Most intellectual historians today no longer read his analysis of European nihilism as an instigating rationalization of the genocidal wars of the twentieth century but, rather, as an attempt to prepare his audience to confront a spiritual crisis that appeared to him to be already inescapable. Likewise, the perception of Nietzsche’s relationship to the Enlightenment has undergone significant revision in the past decades.22 Georg Simmel had already noted important parallels between Nietzsche and Kant at the beginning of the twentieth century.23 But it was Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze who, in the early 1960s, first drew more substantive attention to the Kantian “roots” of Nietzsche’s philosophy.24 As Deleuze wrote at the time, there is in Nietzsche not only a Kantian line of descent but also a half acknowledged and half concealed “rivalry.” Unlike Arthur Schopenhauer and other influential neo-Kantian contemporaries who sought to free Kantianism from its methodological shortcomings so as to reassert its contemporary significance, Nietzsche worked towards a “radical transformation of the critique that Kant compromised and betrayed at the same time as he was conceiving it. He wanted a reprise of the critical project, but on a new basis and with new concepts.”25 Since then, a number of dedicated studies have explored different manifestations of this lineage between the two thinkers over questions of epistemology, morality, and aesthetics.26 In the chapters that follow, I trace and emphasize the ways in which the motives and implications of Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant extend from those philosophical domains into the realm of politics and international relations.27 The aim of this reconstructive exegesis is not to provide a detailed and narrowly historical exposition of Nietzsche’s “radicalized Kantianism” but, rather, to facilitate a better appreciation of the close relationship between the development of his philosophical critique of metaphysics and the evolution of his political thought. It is above all a reading strategy designed

10

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

to highlight important features in Nietzsche’s intellectual trajectory from the early 1870s to the late 1880s.

o u t l in e I begin in chapter 1 with a general exposition of the political, intellectual, and cultural context in which Nietzsche makes his first formal statement on the complex linkages between questions of metaphysics and political violence in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and other texts from the same period. Nietzsche’s interest in tragedy goes back to his early formative years at Schulpforta, the prestigious humanities boarding school he attended between 1858 and 1864, where Greek tragedy was a key component of the curriculum. By then, the question of tragedy, taken not as a mere literary or theatrical genre but as a philosophical-political problem concerned with deep existential questions concerning the nature of the human condition, had taken deep roots in nineteenth-century German thought. German preoccupations with tragedy were driven by a set of concerns that would have been alien to the ethical universe of ancient Greece. These stemmed from a wider effort to come to terms with the sense of crisis and new beginning prompted by the French Revolution and the perceived erosion of Christian metaphysics among the educated classes. Still under the strong influences of the composer and theatre director Richard Wagner and the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s contribution to the German theory of tragedy unfolds as an oblique statement on the relationship between politics and culture, and the philosophical significance of the “back to Kant” movement that began in the 1860s as a reaction to the materialist controversy in German thought in the 1850s. Whereas Kant thought that his critical philosophy had succeeded in providing a systematic and holistic account of reason and its unfolding in human history, Nietzsche attributes the importance of Kant’s legacy to the fact it had demonstrated that such a systematic account is beyond our grasp and that genuine universality of knowledge – be it in the realm of science, metaphysics, morality, or aesthetics – is unattainable. In the young Nietzsche’s eyes, this had problematized the traditional relationship between science, arts, and politics in ways that raised the possibility of a partial recovery of the lessons of ancient Greek civilization to inform public debates over what the new Kaiserreich forged out of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) should become.

Introduction

11

Chapter 2 explores Nietzsche’s account of Attic tragedy and Greek tragic culture in this setting. What the young Nietzsche claims to have found in pre-Socratic Greece is a wholesome organic society in which the phenomenon of culture was understood to be linked to politics to a far greater extent than it is under conditions of modernity. As we will see, Nietzsche’s discourse on the Greeks is rife with philosophical difficulties and discomforting political tendencies. Yet for all its shortcomings and perplexing ambiguities, it remains to this day one of the most original and challenging attempts at drawing on this distant aesthetic tradition to understand how human propensities towards violence and destruction could be channelled and redirected towards more creative goals and outcomes. By the mid-1870s, however, Nietzsche begins to see his earlier preoccupations with the ancient Greek polis as the symptom of a misplaced nostalgia for what is long gone. His writings following the turbulent reception of The Birth of Tragedy are marked by his self-induced excommunication from formal academic life, his break with Wagner, and his distancing from Schopenhauerian pessimism. Increasingly anxious over the intensification of nationalist feelings and violent revolutionary activism across Europe, Nietzsche now seeks to make sense of modernity in its own terms. While dismissing the universalistic pretensions of reason and modernity as a political project, Nietzsche values its commitments to the individual and appreciates that these commitments require new, secular ways of thinking about politics. From the early 1880 onwards, this increasing engagement with more familiar themes of modern political theory becomes part of a shift in the modalities of Nietzsche’s Kulturkritik, by which his concerns over the cultivation of tragic thinking get rearticulated into a broader set of reflections over the nature and overcoming of the problem of nihilism. Kant will again become an important resource for Nietzsche in this undertaking. Chapter 3 exposes Nietzsche’s account of the crisis of European nihilism as it pertains to the question of agency and political violence in the late nineteenth century. The term “nihilism” originates from the Latin root nihil, meaning “not anything, nothing; that which does not exist.” It also shares the same root with the verb “annihilate” – to bring to nothing, to destroy completely.28 As a distinctive concept of philosophy, nihilism emerged in the late eighteenth century in the context of debates over the perceived fallacies and dangers of Kant’s critical philosophy and its subsequent assimilation into German

12

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

idealism. The concept then developed throughout the nineteenth century and became something of a tool of cultural criticism centred around four main interrelated propositions: (1) life is without any objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic worth (existential nihilism); (2) absolute knowledge of the world is impossible (epistemological nihilism); (3) morality is an intersubjective phenomenon that does not exist independently of relations of power and coercion (moral nihilism); and (4) the alleged rational necessity of existing social and political institutions is therefore to be rejected (political nihilism). The originality and lasting significance of Nietzsche’s contribution to the philosophy of nihilism has to do with the ways in which he rearticulates these different aspects of the concept onto the newly discovered terrain of “values.” Nowadays, of course, we speak of values uncritically everywhere and at all times to designate preferences that are either culturally relative or deemed to be grounded in the natural order of things. Democratic values, universal values, Asian values, religious values, conservative values, gendered values, values under threat – most of us have become so used to hearing our politicians insist on the importance of values that we rarely ever pause to ask about their status and origins. But this unproblematic familiarity is deceptive. For before a community can share values, its members must share the belief that values do exist and have “validity.” This, in turn, presupposes that values can be found somewhere hanging in some sort of ontological interregnum between the “is” and the “ought,” as if values existed before the adhesion that they command, before the act of evaluation. It also presupposes that this adhesion to values is voluntary – as if one could freely and arbitrarily opt for this or that value, and change values at will – and that this choice is subject to collective moral evaluation. It is the violence latent in these assumptions concerning the psychological and socio-cultural processes by which values are posited, revered, and discarded that Nietzsche problematizes in his critical reflections on the Western metaphysical tradition. According to Nietzsche, the failure to acknowledge and confront the illusions of subjectivity invested in Western metaphysics over the centuries has facilitated the accumulation of a wide range of pathological ideas, desires, and emotions within the normative structures of European societies. Nietzsche associates the unfolding of this process with the development of specifically modern forms of alienated social relationship produced by the decline of Christianity, the rise of

Introduction

13

industrial capitalism, and the emergence of procedurally egalitarian and competitive societies with expanding self-reflective aptitudes. Whereas premodern civilization is traditional and characterized by a deficiency in rationality and the exhaustion of forces and anger through immediate action and heroic sacrifice, modernization is about the accretion of energies and the repression of anger and frustration through a process of internalization and transference. This process lays claim to an ultimate rationality installed at the heart of everydayness by turning into mere means not just nature and objectivity as such but also man himself. Writing from the vantage point of the 1880s, Nietzsche foresees that the rapid erosion of the ascetic order of values that had for so long sustained this false overcoming of human bestiality would have tremendous implications for the conduct of politics and international relations in the next two hundred years or so. Nietzsche asks his readers to seize the rare transformative opportunity underlying this otherwise terrifying predicament. For although nihilism can be reactive and radically destructive, born out of disappointment and spite, Nietzsche believes that nihilism could also be a transitional stage towards the cultivation of exceptionally creative agency and positive transformations. In his eyes, however, the potential success of this transition hinges on the articulation of a violent critique of the political idealism that he holds partly responsible for this crisis in the first place. Chapter 4 analyzes Nietzsche’s mature engagement with Kant’s transformative philosophical and political vision in this context, exploring the contours of the will to power narrative that Nietzsche seeks to develop during the 1880s as an alternative to the moral view of the world that the Enlightenment recuperated from Christianity. As a close observer of the French Revolution, Kant believed that it was an immediate duty of mankind to “solve” the problem of political violence by adhering to an ideal of humanity understood as a universal community of all peoples governed by the rule of law. He envisaged this project as a European-wide program of rational education that would eventually lead to the emergence of a transnational public sphere, in which people would be able to regard themselves and others as free and equal citizens of the world. Kant saw this as some sort of cosmopolitan substitute for a world government that would unify the human community at the global level and supersede the potentially conflicting standards of local laws without unduly

14

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

preying on cultural diversity. A century later, Nietzsche would come to the conclusion that secularization and the advances of scientific rationalism had forever undermined the possibility of an uncoerced consensus on a set of normative principles that could ground such a transformation. In his eyes, Kant’s influential attempt at reconciling the moral interdiction of immoral means with the political indispensability of violence through the philosophy of history had contributed unwittingly to transmuting the epistemological nihilism of Enlightenment philosophy into the political nihilism of the new democratic nation-state. Chapter 5 reconstructs Nietzsche’s prophetic analysis of the political processes that he associates with these transformations in European practices of statecraft. Already by the mid-1870s, Nietzsche can see the signs of a coming bloodbath in the anxieties of the age over balance of power diplomacy as derived from the idea that national policies could and should be reconciled with a stable European order based on the legitimating discourse of raison d’état (reason of state). To be sure, European political leaders in previous decades and centuries had always been mindful of international rivalry. But this struggle for power had always been mediated by a belief that states ultimately existed for the purpose of achieving national ends without destroying the unity of Western civilization. What Nietzsche perceives with astonishing prescience at the close of the nineteenth century is that the changes in forms of statehood brought by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had destroyed the ideological conditions allowing for the reproduction of this sense of European unity. Nietzsche welcomed the Enlightenment for having exposed the bankruptcy of the Christian worldview and opened up the possibility of a new beginning with an unprecedented degree of individual freedom; however, he saw that the worship of universal equality and security underpinning progressive ideologies of mass rule had fostered an unprecedented expansion of state power by democratizing the cultural sphere and allowing the state to administer it according to its own political imperatives and foreign policy ambitions. Meanwhile, the transmutation of the principle of popular sovereignty into a set of amalgamating questions concerning nationalities and the territorial integrity of multi-ethnic states and empires was putting serious strains on relations between great powers. The mastery of Western technology and large-scale industrialization had

Introduction

15

also allowed Russia and Japan to compete against European trade. Nationalist awakenings in Asia were intensifying this competition, fuelling popular anxieties over the prospect of a “clash of civilization” between East and West and a redivision of the world into regional power blocs dominated by the strongest races and surviving nations. All of these concerns were already manifest at the 1878 Congress of Berlin and the subsequent Berlin Conference of 1884– 85, which effectively formalized the colonial “Scramble for Africa.” Nietzsche saw that this was a crisis of meaning that far exceeded the capabilities of the modern nation-state. For the first time in human history, the ensuing war would be fought over the entire surface of the earth, projecting Europeans onto a planetary space without any shared horizon of meanings and expectations. Chapter 6 examines the alternative vision of Europe that Nietzsche sketches out of his diagnostic of this new geopolitics in the making. For, not unlike Marx, Nietzsche believed that the alienating political culture produced by the nation-state was in contradiction with a whole range of technologically induced processes of trans-nationalization and cultural and racial hybridization. His hope was that these processes could be exploited by a new, ruthless type of “legislating philosophers” who would steer Europe towards a new unity much more diverse in composition than Kant could ever have imagined. In Nietzsche’s eyes, such a new beginning was indeed a new order insofar as it required the complete destruction of the old. Finally, the conclusion reflects on the implications, opportunities, and limitations of Nietzsche’s transformative vision. Needless to say, the interpretation I offer in this study is selective and very much opened to contestation. Each of Nietzsche’s texts moves in very many directions, and a quick survey of the fascinating debates animating the expanding literature on Nietzsche as a political thinker reveals that its contributors remain deeply divided over the significance of his often disquietingly brutal response to the dilemmas of modernity.29 For there is no sense in pretending that the cringing passages that Elisabeth emphasized and reorganized into her own proto-fascist manifesto are not to be found in Nietzsche’s corpus. Nietzsche’s dislike for democracy was profound, and his antiegalitarianism expressed itself in – and was argumentatively closely connected to – almost all of his other characteristic beliefs. Nietzsche never intended his work to be used by mass political movements. But it lends itself easily to such misappropriations, precisely because

16

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

he deliberately wrote in an experimental and polemical style that sought to rule out any authoritative interpretation and to provoke the passionate interest of his readers in contemporary problems.30 This is not to say that Nietzsche’s texts put no limits on plausible interpretations. However, how one chooses to approach his oeuvre as a whole is as much a function of contemporary cultural and socio-political concerns as it is of the texts themselves. Since the 1890s, in addition to fascism and National Socialism, Nietzsche has provided inspiration for practically any political movement, thinker, and school of thought across the entire political spectrum who has cared to claim his legacy.31 As Eric Voegelin argues in an important 1944 essay, this should not be “an incentive either to whitewash or to condemn Nietzsche, but rather to explore the structure of thought which produced this situation.”32 It has become conventional in the specialized literature to approach Nietzsche’s intellectual trajectory in terms of three distinctive phases. The early writings correspond to the period of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the four Untimely Mediations (1873–76); the middle writings correspond to Human, All Too Human (1878– 80), Daybreak (1881), and the Gay Science (1882); and the later writings correspond to the third, more polemical phase initiated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) and pursued in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), The Anti-Christ (1888), Twilight of the Idols (1888), and Ecce Homo (1888).33 I do not necessarily want to challenge those divisions here. However, I believe they are often over-accentuated at the expense of the overall consistency of concerns in Nietzsche’s texts, despite significant differences in styles and emphases. As both Paolo D’Iorio and Keith Ansell-Pearson argue in recent studies on Nietzsche’s middle period, the only genuinely distinct phase in the evolution of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the “Schopenhauerian-Wagnerian” period of the early to mid-1870s.34 This is reflected in the selection and organization of the material presented in this book. While I follow a broadly chronological approach to Nietzsche’s intellectual development, my analysis emphasizes associations, convergences, and revisions between statements and observations. This inevitably comes at the cost of emphasizing certain texts over others and fragmenting the artistic and stylistic unity of each individual work, but it provides a more comprehensive and nuanced account of his views and positions than I think a sequential analysis of individual texts can offer. Insofar as I

Introduction

17

also make use of statements from the Nachlass (Nietzsche’s unpublished fragments, notes, and manuscripts), I only do so as a means to clarify or interrogate positions expressed in the published texts, or when they support and elucidate positions that are clearly implicit in the published works – as is the case with Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism and, more ambiguously, the will to power.35 As mentioned earlier, I benefitted tremendously from a rich and expanding specialized literature on Nietzsche when preparing this study. Readers will find details of this literature in the endnotes wherever relevant, but I do not engage with it substantively in the main text except where my interpretations significantly differ from dominant ones. I concentrate instead on Nietzsche’s texts, which I often quote at length to highlight the tone and nuances of some of his most contested positions, and to retain an element of the expressionistic style that forms such an important part of what makes our experience of reading Nietzsche so exhilarating.

1

Culture Wars Kant, Schopenhauer, and the “Fearful, Destructive Havoc of So-Called World History”

Nietzsche began his intellectual career as a scholar of antiquity.1 He studied philology with the renowned classicist Friedrich Ritschl at the University of Bonn and the University of Leipzig during the midto late 1860s, after having lost his faith and abandoned his studies in theology.2 Ritschl was deeply impressed with the young Nietzsche’s graduate work. So much so that when a professorship in classical philology fell vacant at the University of Basel in 1869, he recommended that Nietzsche be swiftly awarded an honorary doctorate so that he could be considered for the appointment.3 Nietzsche took up the position at the remarkably young age of twenty-four. After his move to Basel, Nietzsche became a close friend of Richard Wagner, often visiting him and his wife, Cosima Liszt Wagner, at their residence at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne. Nietzsche had first met the great composer while he was still a student in Leipzig in the fall of 1868. His professor’s wife, the actress Sophie Ritschl, was a friend of Wagner’s sister, Ottilie Brockhaus, and facilitated the introduction. The friendship lasted into the mid-1870s and had a decisive impact on Nietzsche’s intellectual development during that early period, not least on the formulation of his theses in The Birth of Tragedy and the Spirit of Music (1872).4 As M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern argue in their seminal study of Nietzsche’s controversial first book: “The argument of The Birth of Tragedy is large, complicated, allusive and often elusive as well.”5 It brings together Kant, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the Greeks in an avant-garde mixture of classical philology and literary aesthetics

Culture Wars

19

to draw out the philosophical motives and consequences of Attic tragedy, and then it affirms the tragic culture of the pre-Socratics as an imperative for understanding our contemporary condition of modernity. We will grapple with the substance of this multifaceted argument and explore the politics Nietzsche weaves into it in the next chapter. But we cannot do this without first gaining a general understanding of the socio-political context and main philosophical influences that motivated and informed its development in the foundational moment of national unification in 1871.

t he f r a n c o - p ru s s ia n war, the k a i s e r r e i c h , an d g e r m a n y ’ s fas c in at i on wi th anti qui ty As the young Nietzsche was finally sitting down in the autumn of 1870 to write up what would become The Birth of Tragedy, the combined forces of Prussia and its south German allies had just defeated the French troops of Napoleon III at the battle of Sedan after a series of swift military victories in Alsace. The Franco-Prussian War had broken out on 19 July of the same year over concerns about the possible accession of a Hohenzollern candidate to the Spanish throne, which had been left vacant since the revolution of September 1868. The extent to which Bismarck had intentionally sought to provoke the narcissistic Louis Napoleon into declaring war on Prussia remains a matter of historical controversy. However, historians agree that Bismarck had deliberately played on French fears of growing Prussian powers to stir anti-French sentiment in south German states and to undercut revanchist aspirations in Austria. The aim was to give political momentum to his project of German unification, sending a clear message that the European balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was now a thing of the past.6 The defeat and capture of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew and his troops at Sedan on 1 September did just that. Three days later, however, the French resistance declared the Third Republic and continued fighting under the leadership of Adolphe Thiers as head of the provisional government. German forces responded by laying siege to Paris from 19 September until it fell on 28 January 1871. The campaign culminated with the proclamation of King Wilhelm I as the emperor of the new Kaiserreich in the Great Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 4 May 1871. The Treaty of Frankfurt was signed four days later amidst a civil war in France.

20

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

The French civil war was a direct consequence of the conflict with Prussia and the punishing terms of its diplomatic settlement. Along with the imposition of harsh reparations terms, which deprived France of two of its provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, the preliminary peace treaty of February 1871 forced the French government to repay a war indemnity of 5 billion gold francs in five years. The indemnity was proportioned, according to population, to be the exact equivalent to the indemnity imposed by Napoleon on Prussia in 1807.7 Outraged by the terms of the treaty, and primed by over two decades of discontent and broken promises, the Parisian working class seized control of the capital on 18 March and led the “Paris Commune.” Thiers’s government eventually suppressed the uprising and regained possession of Paris two months later with the tacit support of Germany. The operation culminated in the semaine sanglante (bloody week) of 21–28 May, in which tens of thousands of workers and revolutionaries were summarily executed. The war and its aftermath had a decisive impact on the ways in which Nietzsche would come to apprehend the complex linkages between the phenomena of culture, political violence, and human agency in his early writings. The young Nietzsche had been a proud Prussian observer of the previous military campaigns against Denmark and Austria. He was particularly impressed with the skilful strategies of statecraft that Bismarck had deployed during these conflicts.8 But the Franco-Prussian War took Nietzsche by surprise. In a letter that he was in the middle of writing to his friend Erwin Rohde when he first heard the news, Nietzsche expressed deep regrets that Europe’s “threadbare culture” had been unable to prevent this “fearful thunderclap.”9 Like many other observers, Nietzsche worried that this conflict between Europe’s two mightiest military powers might drag on for years and annihilate whatever was left of European civilization. As a German who had renounced his Prussian citizenship to be entitled to teach in Switzerland, Nietzsche at first refrained from getting personally involved in the war. But his patriotic attachments to Prussia soon got the best of him.10 Nietzsche had served in the army in 1868, but he was discharged early for medical reasons. He now felt ashamed of having to remain inactive when the time for putting his military training into practice had finally arrived.11 And so, after three weeks of hesitation, Nietzsche requested leave from the university on 8 August in order to fulfill his patriotic duty.12 He

Culture Wars

21

was granted leave of absence but, because of Swiss neutrality, could only serve as a medical orderly. He arrived in Bavaria on 13 August to receive his training and headed to the front ten days later. In many ways, what Nietzsche experienced at the rear turned out to be just as gruesome and traumatic as what many soldiers experienced on the battlefield. Like so many young men of his age, Nietzsche had gone to war with a sense of excitement nurtured by an aristocratic vision of war as a somewhat ennobling human activity. But the cruel, dehumanizing realities of modern warfare hit home as soon as he reached the zone of conflict. In a letter to his mother dated 29 August, Nietzsche wrote of “the fearfully devastated battlefield [of Wörth] covered everywhere with indescribably sad human body parts and stinking corpses.”13 Four days later, he and his war companion, the Frankfurt painter Adolf Mosengel, would embark on a makeshift hospital train to accompany the wounded from Arssur Moselle to Karlsruhe. The journey lasted three days and three nights. As Nietzsche explains in a letter to Wagner, the fact that the doors had to be kept shut because of the bad weather made an already atrocious situation even worse: “I had a miserable cattle-truck in which there were six bad cases; I tended them, bandaged them, nursed them during the whole journey alone. – all with shattered bones, several with four wounds – moreover – I diagnosed in two cases gangrene. That I survived in those pestilential vapors, and could even sleep and eat, now seems a marvel.”14 When the train finally reached its destination, Nietzsche had to be hospitalized and treated for severe dysentery and diphtheria. He was unable to return to work until the end of October. As he explains in the 1886 preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, when he did finally go back to his academic outpost in Switzerland upon his recovery, his brief but traumatic war experience had had a critical influence on his philology: While the thunder of the Battle of Wörth rolled across Europe, the brooder and lover of riddles who fathered the book was sitting in some corner of the Alps, utterly preoccupied with his ponderings and riddles and consequently very troubled and untroubled at one and the same time, writing down his thoughts about the Greeks ... A few weeks later he was himself beneath the walls of Metz and still obsessed with the question marks he had placed over the alleged “cheerfulness” of the Greeks; until

22

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

finally, in that extremely tense month when peace was being discussed at Versailles, he too made peace with himself and, whilst recovering slowly from an illness which he had brought back from the field, reached a settled and definitive view in his own mind of the “Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.”15 But the Franco-Prussian War did more than put the question of human suffering at the forefront of Nietzsche’s philosophical agenda: it initiated a transformation of his naïve patriotic support for Bismarck’s statesmanship into a set of deep anxieties over Germany’s future under the leadership of this ruthless new imperial chancellor.16 The war established Germany’s status as a major power in Continental Europe – a power that boasted one of the most powerful and professional armies in the world. Great Britain remained the dominant great power on the world stage, but, owing to its preoccupation with the maintenance of its colonial empire, its involvement in European politics and international relations during the late nineteenth century was relatively limited. This allowed the new Kaiserreich to envisage a much more significant role for itself in the management of European affairs. Nietzsche foresaw that these developments would incur a high cost on German culture and state-society relations.17 Particularly concerning for him at the time was the sense of self-satisfaction that swept the German population following the military victory against France. For what Nietzsche had come to realize by then was that the Franco-Prussian War and its settlement was not a mere cultural “contest” with France but, rather, a senseless war of territorial conquest designed to exact national revenge with excessive brutality.18 When, in the following months, the peace negotiations between the two nations began to morph into a civil war between classes, Nietzsche also became wary of those nationalist ideologues among Bismarck’s supporters who saw the military victory as an opportunity to use the coercive and bureaucratic mechanisms of the state to forge German unity around the new imperial ideal. This would destroy the freedom and spontaneous creativity necessary for the maintenance of a vibrant cultural sphere, which, in Nietzsche’s understanding, depended heavily on the public appreciation of art as the most fundamental metaphysical activity of man.19 The Birth of Tragedy was Nietzsche’s first formal statement on these complex linkages between the phenomena of culture, the

Culture Wars

23

use of force, and human agency in late nineteenth-century Europe. Nietzsche’s choice of aesthetic categories to convey his message reflected an aristocratic tendency in the intellectual circles of the time to erect an aesthetic barricade against the emergence of mass culture and against what he saw as the action-inhibiting incursion of instrumental rationalism into the domains of cultural production.20 As he explains in the foreword, in this very important respect, the book is a contribution to the conflict between formal academic investigation and political engagement. Those who read the study attentively will realize, to their astonishment, that the matter with which we are concerned is a grave problem for Germany, a problem which we now place, as a vortex and turning-point, into the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps, however, these people will take offence at such serious consideration being given to any aesthetic problem at all, particularly if they are incapable of thinking of art as anything more than an amusing sideshow, a readily dispensable jingling of fool’s bell in the face of the “gravity of existence.”21 When Nietzsche made this statement amidst the political tumult of the early 1870s, tragedy as a way of identifying the ills of modernity and asking profound existential questions about the nature of the human condition had become a prominent theme of nineteenth-century German thought.22 Preoccupations with tragedy in Germany at the time were bound with a more general fascination for antiquity and Hellenic Greece that had no parallel in any other language. The prime instigator of this neo-humanist German Hellenism was the art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). Through a peculiar combination of historical scholarship and literary aesthetics, Winckelmann seduced the educated classes across the German-speaking world with an attractive but static ideal of Greece characterized by calmness, grandeur, and the existential importance that it attributed to visual beauty. Winckelmann’s suggestion that the recovery of ancient Greece could serve as the basis for a reconstruction of modern German culture and institutions had a decisive influence on the Weimar classicism of Goethe and Schiller, on Humboldt’s neo-humanist conception of Bildung,23 and on the work of practically all major German philosophers up until the end of the nineteenth century.24 This fascination with the Greeks was therefore not without socio-political implications. Nineteenth-century Germany was

24

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

a collection of feudal-absolutist states characterized by a weak common culture and an elaborate set of bureaucratic structures. Underneath those autocratic assemblages, the aspirations of an ineffective bourgeoisie isolated from the masses and a dejected peasantry remained firmly subordinated to the economic, political, and military ambitions of the landed nobility – the Junkers. The professional literary caste that emerged out of the educated middle classes exerted significant cultural influence beyond the control of this self-regarding aristocracy. However, this bourgeois enlightenment remained largely cut off from economic and political power, and was characteristically deferent in its attitude towards the prevailing absolutist order. In this context, the aesthetic conversation about the character and origins of ancient Greek culture in Germany soon became an intellectual exchange about the prospects and implications of cultural and political self-determination. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, the liberal revolutions of 1848, and the wars of unification of the 1860s, Winckelmann’s Greece provided a compelling alternative narrative to the parochialism of the German states, which also worked as some sort of cultural surrogate for the middle class’s humiliating exclusion from the political realm.25 Like many other cultural developments in Germany at the time, this aesthetic conversation conjoining ancient Greek civilization with the socio-political future of Germany intersected in important ways with debates on the nature and significance of Kant’s philosophical legacy. As Lucian Goldmann argues in a seminal 1971 study: “Kant’s world-view constituted even in his lifetime the philosophical system most representative of the German bourgeoisie, and, with the single exception of the Hegelian period, remains so to this day.”26 Nietzsche himself came of age intellectually just after the “Hegelian period” in the midst of a surge of new interest for Kant’s critical philosophy in universities across the German-speaking world. This so-called “back to Kant” movement was an attempt to establish a bulwark against the incursion of natural scientific methods into the sphere of the humanities and social sciences following the steep decline of Hegelianism during the 1850s. Inspired by Schopenhauer’s engagement with Kant in his famous work The World as Will and Representation (1818),27 it produced a series of studies in the 1860s that sought to move past the idealism-materialism debate of the previous decade by going back before the perceived errors of Absolute Idealism and revisiting Kant’s critical philosophy.28

Culture Wars

25

Nietzsche first developed an interest in Kant through his reading of Schopenhauer’s oeuvre during the mid-1860s and the neo-Kantian literature he avidly consumed immediately thereafter. One of the most important works Nietzsche read in this context was Friedrich Albert Lange’s The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Importance (1866).29 Lange’s book made a strong impression and provided Nietzsche with a good overall understanding of Kant’s oeuvre.30 Nietzsche very soon after read the two volumes on Kant in Kuno Fischer’s series Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (History of Modern Philosophy, 6 vols. [1854–77])31 as well as Friedrich Überweg’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie von Thales bis auf die Gegenwart (Sketch of the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, 1866), which contained extensive discussions of Kant.32 Other authors whose works would have also exposed Nietzsche to important aspects of Kantian philosophy during the 1870s and 1880s include Afrikan Spir (1837–1890), Hermann Helmholtz (1821– 1894), Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), and Eugen Dühring (1833–1921).33 There is uncertainty in the specialized scholarship concerning the extent to which Nietzsche read Kant’s major philosophical works directly or only through the close commentaries of contemporary interpreters. Nietzsche is generally thought to have read The Critique of Judgment during the end of 1867 and beginning of 1868, as he was contemplating writing a doctoral dissertation on “the concept of the organic since Kant.”34 At various points thereafter (especially during the late 1860s and early 1870s, and again throughout the 1880s), Nietzsche also appears to be demonstrating a close first-hand acquaintance with The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and other texts.35 The difficulty is that Nietzsche’s library does not contain any of Kant’s books and that no reliable evidence in his notebooks, letters, or anywhere else has yet been discovered to suggest that he ever owned any work by Kant or borrowed any from the library. As Nietzsche’s intellectual biographers have argued, what this means is not that a direct reading never took place but that we can neither prove the existence of such a reading nor rule out its possibility.36 The fact of the matter is that Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant is substantive, detailed, and central to his general interpretation of modern philosophy. The Tunisian philosopher Olivier Reboul pointed out in the mid-1970s that Kant is the most mentioned philosopher

26

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

in Nietzsche’s publications, notebooks, and private letters after Plato and Schopenhauer.37 Kevin Hill, in a more recent study, counts 381 “instances of the expressions ‘Kant’ and related terms (e.g. ‘Kantian’) in the Colli-Montinari edition” of Nietzsche’s complete works, “with most of these references to Kant clustered around two distinct periods: from mid- to late 1860s to the early 1870s, and from the mid-1880s onward.”38 Despite the disparaging tone of many of Nietzsche’s remarks (especially in his later writings), Kant is an intellectual adversary whom Nietzsche takes seriously and against whom he continually feels the need to define, clarify, and redefine the aims and aspirations of his own philosophical reflections. Although the young Nietzsche never followed through with his doctoral dissertation project, his extensive reading of Kant and neo-Kantian literature during the mid-1860s to the early 1870s had a decisive impact on the formulation of his theses on the Greeks and the state of modern culture in The Birth of Tragedy, The Untimely Meditations, and other unpublished studies from this early period, including Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks39 and the projected Philosopher’s Book.40 Obviously, I cannot provide a systematic exposition of Kant’s mature philosophy in the limited space that I have available. It is nevertheless important to take the time to familiarize ourselves with some of its key features if we are to make sense of Nietzsche’s own evolving understanding of what was at stake philosophically and politically in those culture wars throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The reader who is already well acquainted with Kant may want to jump straight to the next section, which deals with Nietzsche’s mobilization of the Kant-Schopenhauer lineage to make the case for an experimental recovery of the Greek tragic consciousness in the charged political atmosphere of the early 1870s.

k a n t : r e in v e n t in g humani ty Kant’s mature philosophy was an ambitious effort to reorientate mankind in a world in which we can no longer assume a theological basis for what we can know and achieve. Kant understood this enterprise as an effort to justify and limit the attitudes and achievements of the Enlightenment. In his short essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), Kant defines the Enlightenment as that moment in European history when the individual emerges from his own “self-induced immaturity” by ceasing to act according to

Culture Wars

27

an external source of guidance, such as religion and traditions, and instead makes use of his own spontaneous rational self-legislation in deciding what is an appropriate course of action.41 According to Kant, this historical condition of intellectual and political tutelage that enlightenment seeks to overcome stems from the fact that men are generally lazy, cowardly, and subservient. They find it easier and less demanding to simply obey others; they fear that thinking for themselves might reveal truths and new ideas that could have burdensome implications. This, in turn, facilitates the concentration of knowledge into the hands of self-serving political, intellectual, and religious elites who benefit from this state of affairs and therefore seek to maintain the low level of curiosity and education among the general public.42 If humanity is to overcome this condition of heteronomy (the state of being conditioned by a force outside of the individual), men must learn to make use of their own reason without the support of another authority: “‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.”43 For Kant, however, it is not only the authority of religion, myth, customs, and traditions that lies at the origins of human errors and ill-designed social institutions: it is also the faculty of reason itself. Kant uses the term “critique” in this context to refer to the “total” and “immanent” aspirations of his philosophical enterprise: total because it purports to scrutinize all claims to truth and knowledge in all domains of human activity; immanent because it disallows postulates that have their sources in experience, feelings, instincts, and any other phenomenon external to reason. It seeks to unveil errors and illusions stemming from the inner functioning of reason as such rather than from empirical experience of the physical world.44 Critique thus takes the form of a legislative enterprise in which reason interrogates its own value and defines its own boundaries as it seeks to determine the theoretical limits governing knowledge (The Critique of Pure Reason [1881]), the essence of the moral law governing human freedom (The Critique of Practical Reason [1888]), and the purpose governing human existence (The Critique of Judgment [1790]).45 Kant’s aspiration to critical totality and immanence rests on two important epistemological claims that he articulates against a twofold opposition between dogmatic metaphysics, on the one hand, and scepticism, on the other. The first claim is that knowledge is only possible by means of empirical experience of spatio-temporal

28

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

objects: whatever it is that we know about the world, we know it through sense perception by means of observation, inference, and scientific laws ultimately connected to the possibility of experience. According to Kant, reason transgresses its legitimate domain of operation and becomes dogmatic when it tries to extend knowledge beyond the limits of empirical experience. The second, more controversial, claim is that, even so, a form of knowledge prior to experience and unmediated by experience in any way whatsoever (other than mathematics) is available to the human mind. For, according to Kant, causality, space, time, and the laws that we discern in nature are constructions of the mind that we use for the task of understanding nature: they cannot be made to inhere in the occurrences of the empirical world as such. All experience is only made possible by what we a priori require of experience for it to be possible at all – that is, by “subjective conditions” that he calls the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories (concepts such as substance or causality). In other words, Kant argues that there are characteristics of how the human mind processes empirical data that are necessary if we are to experience that data at all. He calls those conditions of experience “transcendental” because they are both necessary and universal to human experience. Kant compared the importance of his discoveries to Copernicus’s heliocentric revolution in astronomy. Since the time of Aristotle in the fifth century bc , Western learning taught that heavenly bodies (planets, stars, moons, etc.) revolved around the earth, which was at the centre of the universe. In On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543), Copernicus formulated an alternative model that placed the sun at the centre of the universe by explaining the motions of the heavenly bodies as resulting not just from their own motion but from the motion of the observers on earth. Kant believed that he was doing something similar insofar as he located the laws governing the realm of experience not in the objects themselves but in us: “in a priori cognition nothing can be ascribed to the objects except what the thinking subject takes out of itself.”46 With this move, Kant gave birth to a wholly new conception of humanity. For what it implies is that, unlike the rest of nature and the animal world, human beings know themselves not only through the senses but also through the faculties of reason and understanding. We know ourselves both as determined “phenomenal” objects constituted by our sensitive experience in the chains of cause and effect

Culture Wars

29

that characterize the natural world and as free intelligible subjects constituted by a rational will capable of initiating causal sequences within nature – and therefore capable of transforming nature. This is why Kant’s critical epistemology is so important for his moral philosophy. According to Kant, nature and the phenomenal world of things in space and time in which we live (and about which natural science has produced so much knowledge) is the world as it appears to us as mediated by the human mind. This is the realm of “pure” theoretical reason about which science can formulate laws. “Behind” this world of appearance is a world of things-in-themselves, which is absolutely unknowable to science and the human mind simply because it is impossible for us to tear down the cognitive veil that structures and mediates our relations to the world. This is the “noumenal” realm of “practical reason,” in which the freedom of the moral life is guaranteed by its independence and disengagement from the situated contexts, emotions, feelings, and material interests of its agents. Practical reason, in other words, is the exercise of reason not with the aim of understanding the empirical world but with the aim of acting in the world that we share with others to promote and protect freedom – mine and that of others.47 Kant’s account of practical reason in terms of moral autonomy seeks to provide a conception of reason whose scope and manifestation in the everyday goes beyond Hume’s account of reason as some sort of “slave” to the passions. For Kant, it is neither pertinent nor appropriate that I am moved to moral action by pleasure, happiness, instincts, charity, or self-interest. Morality is insulated from all these things. It consists in treating all persons with the respect arising from their status as rational agents who subscribe to an order that can be universalized. That is the basis of the “categorical imperative,” which prescribes the form but not the substance of morality. Because men cannot know the essence of things-in-themselves, they must remain free to determine the content of the imperative for themselves in accordance with their mutual treatment as rational moral beings: “Act according to maxims of a universally legislating member of a merely possible kingdom of ends.”48 Politics and international relations in this framework thus become a question of establishing normative criteria by which men can manage and settle public conflicts of interests according to the principle of universality. As Sean Molloy emphasizes: “Kant’s level of analysis is the human species, which he develops in relation to his philosophy

30

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

of history, with the effect that Kant provides both an unflinching assessment of power politics as they existed (and at least in part, continue to exist) and a solution to the war problem, as well as attempting to develop a more positive conception of peace as more than the mere absence of war.” He does this by relying on the distinction outlined above “between human beings as they appear to be to each other and humanity as it ought to be according to the insights or rational morality derived by Kant from the principles of the three critiques and his moral theory.” This move “allows him to both confront the realities of global politics and to promote a reformation of global politics in the image of his philosophical project.”49 Although reason cannot provide us with verifiable knowledge when it comes to questions of political ordering, it can provide a conditional regulative idea of reason to reveal the ideal terms and conditions of political association. According to Kant, those ideal terms are those associated with republicanism – namely, the rule of law, representative government, and a free citizenry. He invokes the notion of the social contract in this context not as a demonstrable empirical proposition but as a regulative ideal conveying the legitimacy of a political association demanding recognition and obedience on the ground of its rationality rather than of instrumental reason.50 A rational attitude towards international relations similarly demands that states renounce war as a legal policy instrument in order to establish peace and maximize the freedom of citizens across borders. Kant considers the idea of a world state impractical and undesirable given the overwhelming concentration of power it would entail; he therefore settles for a federation of similar republican states to serve as an institutional anchor for this ambitious transformation of the political.51 Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice: God, Teleology, and Aesthetics Now, one of the main questions preoccupying Kant in The Critique of Judgment and other writings on politics and history is how to sustain and stimulate the progressive agency necessary to carry out this enlightenment vision. After having drawn a rigid distinction between the determinism of the natural world and the world of human freedom in the first two critiques, Kant perceived the need to find ways of building bridges between the two. Kant was evidently wary of

Culture Wars

31

the divided account of the self that resulted from his delimitation of reason’s legitimate field of operation: as objects in nature, we had to see ourselves as things among others, law-bound and mechanical. As inquirers and moral agents, we had to think of ourselves as standing outside of nature. What troubled Kant is the fact that we do not have the abilities within ourselves as a species to explain and guarantee the possibility that our best moral efforts can actually lead to the realization of a new world order. If our moral actions cannot be demonstrated to be causally effective in the world of experience, Kant quite rightly saw that men are likely to feel that their best efforts are in vain. This would lead them to despair and undermine the very motives for enlightenment.52 Kant makes two bold moves to try closing that gap between theory and practice. First, he argues that if the possibility of grounding an ameliorative transformation of European civilization lies neither in nature nor in reason alone, it is justifiable to postulate God as an original transcendent force that guarantees the affinity between reason and nature, and opens up the possibility for causally effective moral action. In this framework, God no longer exists as a lawgiver but strictly as a figure whose indemonstrable “noumenal” presence provides encouragement that mankind will fulfill its ultimate moral duty.53 As Kant insists, we make these assumptions not as expression of knowledge but as matters of faith and as practical hypotheses legitimated by the limits of theoretical reason and the need to validate and support the moral experience of mankind: We cannot prove the concept of this good, as to whether it has any objective reality, in any experience that is possible for us, and hence adequately for the theoretical use of reason. But since pure practical reason commands us to use this concept in order to achieve that purpose [the highest good in the world] as best we can, we must assume it as possible. This commanded effect, together with the sole conditions conceivable by us under which [achieving] that effect is possible, namely, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, are matters of faith (res fidei), and they are moreover the only objects which can be called matters of faith.54 Kant’s other move is more complex and needs a more substantive exposition as it would come to play an important role in Nietzsche’s thought. It concerns his advancement of “judgment” as that faculty

32

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

that guarantees the unity of reason by mediating between sensuality and cognition, on the one hand, and between sensuality and moral action, on the other.55 Kant starts by introducing a distinction between what he calls “determinative” and “reflective” judgments. In determinative judgments (those of the first two Critiques) we subsume a given particular (say, Copenhagen) under a universal that is already known (the concept of being a city). Reflective judgments work in the other direction. They seek to find unknown universals for given particulars, and in ways that involve introspective awareness of one’s own cognitive process.56 So, for example, to say that Copenhagen has a population of X inhabitants is a determinative judgment because I subsume a particular to a universal conceptual principle of population known through empirical experience; it possesses objective validity for transcendental subjects. By contrast, to say that Copenhagen is a terrific city is a reflective judgment insofar as the properties of the concept of being terrific are not “in the world” but posited from the perspective of my own subjectivity, and universality must be sought for it through intersubjective agreement. The Critique of Judgment focuses on two main species of reflective judgments: teleological and aesthetic. “Teleology” refers to the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes. Kant introduces the notion of a teleological judgment in the third Critique to deal with difficulties concerning the empirical heterogeneity of natural phenomena. The problem is to do with the fact that all sorts of aspects of nature both obey particular laws and yet cannot be explained as just the result of the blind interaction of these laws. Kant writes about the biological as being teleological in this context, arguing that there are things such as living beings whose parts seem to exist for the sake of their whole and their whole for the sake of their parts, and which therefore appear to show nature as functioning in terms of a purpose.57 For example, if we think of the liver in terms of an organ that detoxifies various metabolites, synthesizes proteins, and produces biochemicals necessary for digestion, we do so through a priori concepts of intentionality that apprehend the said organ in terms of what digestion is for. And since one cannot say what something is for without a prior assumption concerning what we expect that something to do, Kant sees that our biological accounts of nature are intrinsically normative. Kant argues that teleological judgments do not transgress the limits of reason insofar as they are not claims about an object

Culture Wars

33

directly but about what I, as a reflective subject whose cognition is mediated by universal a priori conditions of experience, think about the object in question.58 Kant’s interpretation of aesthetic judgment rests on the same a priori principle that nature is systematically organized in a way that conforms to our cognitive faculties, seeking to salvage an intersubjective validity to claims of taste despite the absence of objective aesthetic properties.59 According to Kant, judgments of taste do not refer to any qualities of the work of art or of a beautiful object of nature but merely to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure within the subject. And yet, Kant insists, aesthetic judgments are not randomly subjective: to say that something is “beautiful” is not the same as to say that something simply pleases me, that it is “agreeable.” Whereas the pleasure derived from what is “agreeable” is tied up with the personal like, dislike, or sensuous appetites and material interests of the subject in its existence, the “beautiful” pleases without satisfying any concrete antecedent desire of the subject. That is why I can legitimately expect everyone else to agree with my aesthetic judgment. Although we cannot compel others to believe that a given object is beautiful, we can reasonably expect them to share our judgment simply because all human beings are endowed with the same faculties and are therefore likely to experience the same stimulation of these faculties.60 Thus, even if beauty is not something in the world as such, the aesthetic experience always contains an element of the universal truth that is neither subject nor consequent to argument. The binding force of this aesthetic “ought” is captured in the idea of a sensus communis (community of taste) that Kant presents in this context: We must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else’s way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones ... Now we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that [may] happen to attach to our own judging.61

34

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

This is where Kant locates the possibility of an aesthetic reconciliation between humanity and nature, for whoever experiences the beautiful will refer to it as if beauty were a property of the object and the judgment were logical. This implies that the beautiful object will be experienced as if it was of the natural world, as some sort of illusion constitutive of the experience. Although it is a fabricated artefact, the work of art is not experienced as such since it does not have an end extrinsic to itself; beauty is experienced as if it exists for the pleasure of the viewer, and yet it is not the purpose or aim of any beautiful object to do so.62 Kant’s thesis on the power of aesthetics culminates in his discussion of the sublime. This discussion would come to play a crucial role in German theories of the tragic during the nineteenth century – not least Nietzsche’s.63 As in the case of beauty, Kant explains that the sublime is not a quality of the object but a completely subjective feeling or sensation: “For what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible forms but concerns only ideas of reason.”64 The difference is that, unlike in the experience of beauty where our imagination and understanding identifies an object as beautiful, the sublime has to do with our cognitive ability to fathom something that defies our faculty of imagination – that is, our ability to arrive at a conceptual understanding of things through sensory experience. The sublime is “what is large beyond all comparisons.”65 Kant makes his case by drawing a distinction between what he calls the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime refers primarily to infinity. Although we cannot possibly arrive at a conceptual understanding of what infinity is like by means of sensory experience, we nevertheless have the supra-sensible power to grasp the notion of the infinite. According to Kant, the pleasure of the mathematical sublime derives from this moment of becoming aware of this ability to think independently of our senses, despite the fact that we can never experience anything independently of our senses. The dynamical sublime refers to a similar phenomenon, except here the process is associated with those encounters with nature that have the power to stir up a feeling of fear and anxiety within us but that, in fact, arouse a sense of pleasure when experienced from a sufficiently remote and secure distance or standpoint. This is the case, for example, when we are confronted with a vast and boundless ocean, or with terrible scenes of natural devastation like a tsunami, an earthquake, or a tornado. Presented

Culture Wars

35

with such overwhelming spectacles, our senses can be brought into an alarming state of horror that should provoke a feeling of intense displeasure. Yet the opposite happens, and we are overcome by an unexpected feeling of “negative pleasure.” This negative pleasure derives from the ability afforded by reason to judge ourselves independent from nature, thus conceiving of human freedom as being immune to the natural destruction and violence of the sensory realm. Kant describes this thought process as one by which the individual subject discovers its capacity to assume a perspective that moves beyond the anxieties and concerns of the everyday: The irresistibility of nature’s might makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us. This keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded, even though a human being would have to succumb to that dominance [of nature]. Hence if in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength (which does not belong to nature [within us]), to regard as small the [objects] of our [natural] concerns: property, health, and life, and because of this we regard nature’s might (to which we are indeed subjected in these [natural] concerns) as yet not having such dominance over us, as persons, that we should have to bow to it if our highest principles were at stake and we had to choose between upholding or abandoning them.66 Kant goes out of his way to restrict the relevance of this account of human freedom to the aesthetic realm, insisting on its negatively derived character to warn against the danger of “fanaticism” – that is, the temptation to give our aspiration to transcendence a concrete shape in the empirical world of appearances: “For the idea of freedom is inscrutable and thereby precludes all positive exhibition whatever; but the moral law in itself can sufficiently and originally determine us, so that it does not even permit us to cast about for some additional determining basis.”67 And yet, Kant argues that our experience of the beautiful and the sublime hints at an enigmatic harmony of the phenomenal and the

36

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

noumenal nested in the spontaneous play of the human faculties, inviting us to conceive of existence from a universal perspective where the wisdom of a Creator shows itself as a promise of unity. He sees the aesthetic and teleological standpoints in this context as encouraging resources for the exercise of moral agency in a world that can otherwise seem stubbornly unresponsive to our highest moral aspirations. His suggestion is that, given what we know about the cognitive process through which the mind processes data, it is legitimate for us to apprehend the world as if all other forms of nature existed directly or indirectly for the purpose of their relation to man, who stands alone outside of this process because of his faculty of reason. Quasi-aesthetic judgments underpin the ways in which organisms are judged to act holistically and similarly in how history is conceived. Just as the beautiful is an indeterminate yet universal form of judgment, so organisms can be envisaged as developing holistically and history as exhibiting an overall purpose showing progress towards the gradual elimination of war, oppression, and injustice in human affairs.68

p e s s im is m : a n c ie n t and modern Kant’s reassessment of the relationship between aesthetics and rational inquiry had a huge impact on the development of German philosophy during the nineteenth century. For both critics and supporters, the importance of Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judgment lay in the fact that it accorded a disclosing power to aesthetics that is more than fiction, more than a postulate of morality, and more than a regulative principle of reason. What was less clear, and what would become the basis of many intricate debates in philosophical aesthetics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is the precise nature of this “surplus.”69 Whereas Kant had looked to aesthetics to bridge the gap between the theoretical and the practical, and morality and politics, the young Nietzsche would mobilize the Greeks and Kantian aesthetics to transcend the distinction between the two. In ways that are often surprisingly analogous to Marx’s writings on arts, Nietzsche’s engagement with Greek tragedy is a radical critique of the bourgeois sentimentalities underpinning the Hegelian account of tragedy that still dominated the literature at the time.70 Nietzsche’s critique rests on a fundamentally new, agonistic, and “orientalized” conception of the Greeks, which Nietzsche in many

Culture Wars

37

ways shared with two of his friends and intellectual interlocutors in Basel, the philologist Johann Jacob Bachofen and the art and cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt.71 Against the contemporary orthodoxy, Nietzsche argues that the harmonious image of antiquity was the disingenuous fabrication of a progressive age too frightened by the existential truths that it was in the process of discovering to confront the implications of these truths sincerely. Rather than being a site of calm contemplation, order, and logical systematicity, ancient Greece was riven with internal conflicts and driven by irrational forces of desire, violence, and fear.72 Thus, far from being organic reflections of the serene and harmonious character of their civilization, the art and deities of the ancients were defence mechanisms born out of a need for self-preservation in the face of despair over the “fearful, destructive havoc of so-called world history.”73 At a deeper philosophical level, Nietzsche’s discourse on art and Greek tragic culture is driven by a pressing concern with providing a post-Christian theodicy. Theodicy under Christianity was an attempt to answer the question of why a good and omnipotent God permits the manifestation of evil such as wars, earthquakes, and other terrible aspects of the social and natural worlds. In the Critique of Judgment and in “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” (1791), Kant had argued that all such attempts at justifying the ways of a moral God to men were doomed to failure since reflections concerning the possible existence and nature of the divine extend principles observed in nature to a reality that is beyond the experienceable material world. He then proceeded to develop the first secular theory of evil, giving an evaluative definition of evil based on its cause as having a will that is not completely good.74 Eighty years later, Nietzsche goes much further and seeks to articulate the question concerning the value and meaning of human existence beyond the moral categories of good and evil and into the secular realm of aesthetics, which is concerned with depicting existence in its totality from the point of view of the uninvolved spectator of human history, and where the criterion of justification is whether life is being creatively affirmed or ascetically negated: The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence … In order to be able to live, the Greeks were obliged, by the most profound compulsion, to create these gods ... How else could that people have borne existence given their extreme sensitivity, their

38

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

stormy desires, their unique gift for suffering, if that same existence had not been shown to them in their gods, suffused with a higher glory? The same drive which calls art into being to complete and perfect existence and thus to seduce us into continuing to live, also gave rise to the world of the Olympians in which the Hellenic “Will” held up a transfiguring mirror to itself. Thus gods justify the life of men by living it themselves – the only satisfactory theodicy! 75 Nietzsche’s contribution to philosophical theodicy was obviously influenced by his traumatizing experience of the Franco-Prussian War. However, the deeper philosophical motivations lay in his life-changing encounter with the world-denying pessimism of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.76 What he ran into here was a worldview he had never considered before, one that was heavily influenced by Kant and yet thoroughly atheistic and averse to the rationalist optimism of the Western philosophical tradition. In a note from 1867, Nietzsche recalls that day in the fall of 1885 when he picked up a copy of the work in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig, not long after having abandoned his religious beliefs: I do not know what daemon whispered to me: “Take this book home with you” … At home I threw myself into the sofa corner with the treasure I had acquired, and started to allow that energetic, sombre genius to work upon me. Here, every line screamed of renunciation, denial, resignation, here I saw a mirror in which I caught sight of the world, of life, and of my own mind in terrifying grandeur. Here the full, disinterested, sun-like eye of art looked upon me, here, I saw sickness and healing, exile and sanctuary, heaven and hell.77 Without going into the complex details of this fascinating but often perplexing work, The World as Will and Representation argues by a priori and empirical methods that all nature, including human beings, is the expression of an insatiable “will to life” that accounts for all the suffering of our species. Schopenhauer’s judgment follows from three core claims sustaining his interpretation of the world as being polarized between the phenomenal and the noumenal dimensions of human existence.78 As we have just seen, Kant believed that space, time, causation, and other similar phenomena belonged to the form imposed on

Culture Wars

39

the world by the human mind in order to create the representation and that these factors were absent from the thing-in-itself. In other words, the Kantian thing-in-itself is a strictly negative concept insofar as it designates whatever is left of a thing if we take away everything that we can know about it through our sensations. By contrast, Schopenhauer maintains that anything outside of time and space could not be differentiated and that the thing-in-itself must therefore be one: all things that exist, including humans, must be part of this fundamental unity. Schopenhauer argues accordingly that if one looks deeply enough into oneself, one does get an intuitive understanding not only of one’s inner being but also of the basic energies of the universe flowing through oneself as they flow through everything else. Hence the title to the book: all knowledge gained of objects in the phenomenal world of appearance is a self-referential representation conveyed to us by “the Will,” an all-encompassing metaphysical entity objectified in our body through the unending play between pleasure, pain, and emotional states constitutive of our individual will. From this, Schopenhauer goes on to argue that the Will as the essential condition of the world has no purpose, teleology, or motivations. It is present in every single human desire and guides every single one of us into achieving forms of satisfaction that either do harm to the desires of others or that ultimately end in frustration. Schopenhauer considers willing to be a sufficient source of suffering simply because all willing arises necessarily from a want or a sense of deficiency, and to experience such a want or deficiency is to suffer. If my will is not satisfied I suffer from lack; if my will is satisfied its object quickly loses its initial appeal and I suffer from boredom (Schopenhauer gives the example of sexual desires). This means that the very nature of the world precludes the possibility of continuous happiness. Existence continuously oscillates between the yearning for meaning or fulfilment and the realization that this yearning can never be satisfied.79 But it gets worse. Schopenhauer argues that, because all men always desire more than what they have, they live in constant fear of being deprived by others of whatever it is that they already possess, however unsatisfying these possessions might be. This volatile mixture of insatiable egoistic ambition and endemic suspicion means that political violence and war are not the product of subjective errors, or of a lack of moral education or discipline, but are incorrigibly endemic

40

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

to the human condition. As individuals sharing the world with a plurality of others, we are therefore not only condemned to constant dissatisfaction but also to universal disharmony, violence and pain. Schopenhauer’s grim diagnosis culminates in the nihilistic judgment that “it would be better for us not to exist.”80 But suicide is not an option for, like all animals, human beings are driven by an inescapable will to live. Except for a few “biologically dysfunctional” individuals, all of us will choose life over death irrespective of our different circumstances. As Schopenhauer sees it, there is really no escape from this meaningless war of all against all. The young Nietzsche does more than draw openly on Schopenhauer’s pessimism to develop and philosophically ground his own philological studies of ancient Greece. What he is telling us in The Birth of Tragedy and other writings of the same period is that the Greeks were some sort of Schopenhauerians avant la lettre. This, he claims, can be gleaned from the pessimistic character of their myths and from the pessimistic wisdom of their pre-Platonic thinkers.81 Nietzsche often refers to the pre-Platonics as the “philosophers of the tragic age” not because they lived in the era of tragic drama but because he sees Attic tragedy as the artistic expression of an early Greek worldview that was more attuned to the finite conditions of life than subsequent developments in philosophy represented by Plato’s Socrates.82 He finds the most sublime expression of this worldview in the philosophy of “flux and fire” of one of his favourite pre-Socratic thinkers, Heraclitus of Ephesus (C. 535 – C. 475 bc ): As Heraclitus sees time, so does Schopenhauer. He repeatedly said of it that every moment in it exists only insofar as it has just consumed the preceding one, its father, and is then immediately consumed likewise. And that past and future are perishable as any dream, but that the present is but the dimensionless and durationless borderline between the two. And that space is just like time, and that everything which co-exists in space and time has but a relative existence, that each thing exists through and for another like it, which is to say through and for an equally relative one. – This is a truth of the greatest immediate self-evidence for everyone, and one which for this very reason is extremely difficult to reach by way of concept or reason. But whoever finds himself directly looking at it must at once move on to the Heraclitan conclusion and say that the whole nature of reality

Culture Wars

41

[Wirklichkeit] lies simply in its acts [Wirken] and that for it there exists no other sort of being.83 With this simple theory of spatio-temporal relativity, Heraclitus demonstrated that our reality is one that constantly “comes-to-be but never is,” and in which there cannot be any certainty other than the certainty that everything must come to pass. For how could one claim to have unconditional knowledge of a world of constant becoming in which no two moments are ever the same?84 Much of what Nietzsche has to say about Greek tragedy as it pertains to contemporary politics and culture in his early writings revolves around three bold, interrelated claims that he deploys against the backdrop of this perplexing lineage posited between the tragic wisdom of the ancients and nineteenth-century pessimism. Let me outline those claims briefly to conclude this contextualization and set the stage for the next chapter. The first has to do with a crucial difference that Nietzsche identifies between Schopenhauer and the Greeks in the ways in which each assimilated pessimistic knowledge concerning the illusions of subjectivity and human agency. For Schopenhauer, our discovery of the cruel, restrictive reality of “the Will” is a cause for deep, action-paralyzing scepticism. The best we can hope for is a temporary relief from this state of eternal frustration through aesthetic experience, which by virtue of its disinterested nature can briefly remove us from the cycle of desire and gratification and offer a momentary escape from the endless flux of willing. By contrast, the Greeks, in full awareness of the “horrors of existence,” fought epic battles, created Western civilization, and elevated the latter to a level of greatness that has never been matched by any other societies afterwards.85 Echoing Kant’s interpretation of the sublime, Nietzsche argues that what accounts for those extraordinary achievements is the fact that ancient Greek culture was oriented by art and the tragic view of the world, which relieved the individual from the pain of existence by allowing him to transcend his own individualized perspective on the depravity of the human condition: “The greatest causes of suffering there are for the individual – that men do not share all knowledge in common, that ultimate insight can never be certain, that abilities are divided unequally – all this puts him in need of art ... How could we endure to live in the feeling of this threefold incapacity if we were unable to recognize in our struggles, striving and failures

42

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

something sublime and significant and did not learn from tragedy to take delight in the rhythm of grand passion and in its victim?”86 Second, Nietzsche claims that this “ennobling sense for the tragic” was lost as a consequence of the degenerative cultural process by which the Greeks abandoned their pessimistic attitude towards knowledge, eventually losing touch with the artistic sensibility underlying their greatest civilizational achievements. Nietzsche refers to this paradigm shift as the “Socratic enlightenment.” He associates its theoretical optimism with Plato’s effort to overcome the epistemological pessimism of the pre-Socratics by pursing a line of rational thought that argues that “real” – that is, eternal – knowledge can only be had of abstract “ideas” whose properties remain the same across change and that this knowledge can only be attained through the activity of the mind working independently from whatever the senses may tell us about the material world (as with mathematics). According to Nietzsche, this strong emphasis on permanence through abstraction in Platonic philosophy necessarily led to a dismissive attitude towards aesthetic experience to the profit of the scientific quest for Truth. In Book X of the Republic, Plato argues that art imitates objects that the artist finds in his surrounding environment but that these objects are in fact already approximations to ideas, mere copies of the truly valuable original. Plato considered ideas to be more valuable simply because they are conditions of possibility for the existence of their empirical manifestations. A chair, for example, is an object that can only be produced by a carpenter because of his knowledge about the idea of the chair. Yet even the most skilful carpenter will never produce a chair as perfect as the idea after which that chair is modelled. Plato argues that a drawn or painted representation of a chair had even less value since one cannot even sit on it or learn anything relevant about the idea of a chair.87 This dismissive attitude towards the arts, either on the ground that sensory experience is easily confused or that art is not amenable to conceptual analysis, continued more or less unchallenged until at least the mid- to late nineteenth century, with the philosophical aesthetics of Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762), Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and, most decisively, Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790).88 And third, according to Nietzsche, the significance of Kant’s critical philosophy for the nineteenth century lies in the fact that it has exposed the impasse in which the theoretical optimism of the Socratic enlightenment must necessarily end up, providing a long-awaited

Culture Wars

43

opportunity for a rediscovery of the tragic wisdom of the ancients.89 Nietzsche’s bewildering claim rests on his assessment of the achievements and limits of Kant’s Copernican revolution as they appear to him in the context of his engagement with the Critique of Judgment and Schopenhauer’s pessimism. As mentioned earlier, Nietzsche turned his attention to the Critique of Judgment for the first time in 1867–68 as he was reading Kuno Fischer’s two-volume study on Kant. In a close analysis of Nietzsche’s notebooks, Kevin Hill demonstrates that, in all likelihood, Nietzsche goes “back to Kant” at this specific moment in time to work through tensions he perceived between Schopenhauerian teleology and Darwinism, which he encountered for the first time when reading Lange’s History of Materialism in 1866.90 After having read Lange’s account of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Nietzsche had become aware of what he now saw as Schopenhauer’s dogmatic – and ultimately superfluous – metaphysical ruminations concerning the Kantian thing-in-itself in his explanation of life.91 Yet Nietzsche could not completely accept the Darwinian rejection of teleology. This was mainly because of his commitment to Kant’s thesis that all theories seeking to explain patterns of nature “mechanistically” (i.e., out of effective causes) are in fact always caught up in mind-dependent representations and, therefore, can only have the intersubjective validity of a reflective judgment. But whereas Kant sought to restrict the relevance of his thesis to biology and insisted on the permanent and universal objectivity of the claims of physics, Nietzsche had by then adopted the view that all natural sciences – including physics – rely on representational concepts: One can only comprehend the mathematical completely … In all else human beings stand before the unknown. In order to overcome this [they] invent concepts, which only gather together a sum of appearing characteristics, which, however, do not get a hold of the thing. Therein belong force, matter, individual, law, organism, atom, final cause. These are not constitutive [i.e., determinative] but only reflective (reflektirende) judgements.92 The details of Nietzsche’s positions in those early notebooks are inconclusive. The important point for us is that by the early 1870s Nietzsche had concluded that the overall implications and consequences of Kant’s philosophical achievements were a lot more radical

44

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

and profound than Kant himself was ever willing to acknowledge. By shifting the focus of philosophy from an appeal to the structure of the world to an appeal to the structure of our minds, Kant had shown that it was utterly useless to seek an external Guarantor, even if Christianity had taught mankind to expect it. Kant himself saw the importance of his achievement in the fact that he had effected this important shift in ways that had simultaneously brought relief from the unknowability of the world by securing a space for the continued relevance of Christian metaphysics without compromising the scientific integrity of his systematic account of reason and its development in human history. Nietzsche, by contrast, saw the importance of Kant’s legacy precisely in the fact that it had demonstrated the limits of reason in ways that had put a decisive end to the plausibility of philosophy as metaphysics, while simultaneously undercutting the normative standing of science in modern European culture to the profit of arts. As he declares in a fragment from the projected Philosopher’s Book: “To be completely truthful – glorious, heroic joy of man, in a mendacious nature! But possible only in a very relative sense! That is tragic. That is the tragic problem of Kant! Now art acquires an entirely new dignity. The sciences, on the other hand, are degraded by one degree.”93 As Keith Ansell-Pearson points out, Nietzsche’s opposition of art and knowledge at first glance may appear to simply be reproducing Kant’s dualistic formula of faith versus knowledge: whereas Kant wanted to limit the claims of science to make room for faith, Nietzsche wants to limit the delusional claims of scientism to make room for the edifying illusions of arts. But Nietzsche’s position is more nuanced.94 In another fragment from the Philosopher’s Book, Nietzsche emphasizes that the agnosticism concerning the essence of reality in Kant’s dualistic philosophy is itself an expression of the debilitating divorce of life and knowledge that needs overcoming. In Nietzsche’s eyes, the question of knowledge as it presents itself at the end of the nineteenth century must be addressed in the context of a wider discussion about the phenomenon of culture – a discussion in which the scientific quest for knowledge is not abandoned but mediated by art and normative concerns over the conditions under which human life is most likely to prosper: Kant says (2nd preface to his Critique [of Pure Reason]: “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room

Culture Wars

45

for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics without a critique of pure reason, is the true source of all that unbelief which opposes morality and is always very dogmatic.” Very important! He was driven by a cultural need! Strange opposition, “Knowledge and faith”! What would the Greeks have thought of it? Kant knew no other opposites! But we do! Kant is driven by a cultural need: he wants to save an area from knowledge: that is where he places the roots of all the highest and deepest things, art and ethics – Schopenhauer.95 Nietzsche uses the term “culture” differently and to different effects, depending on the context, throughout his productive life. At the most general level, however, he sees culture as a process and activity by which affects and bodily drives are being sublimated in ways that can either foster strong and autonomous individuals or inhibit individuality to such an extent that culpability, sickness, and decadence ensue.96 Modern culture is of the latter type: homogenizing, repressive of the body, and inimical to creative agency. It rests upon an all-pervasive dichotomy between reason and emotions that fosters introspective and sceptical modes of subjectivity, incentivizes over-specialization, and promotes a view of human reality that leads to all sorts of pathological obsessions with the pursuit of power. Nietzsche’s typical example of modern man is the German poet Heinrich von Kleist who was stricken by existential melancholy upon reading Kant and eventually committed suicide in 1831.97 This is what is at stake for him in this rearticulation of the querelle des ancients et des modernes. In pre-Socratic Greece, Nietzsche claims to have found a more dignified synthesis of reason and aesthetic sensibility in which culture was not understood as a free human activity by which we seek to discipline nature but, rather, as an anthropocentric metaphor designating the human struggle to close the gap that exists within man himself between nature as formless necessity and nature as reflexive desire and aspirations: “the conception of culture as a new improved physis [the Greek word for nature], with no inner and outer, no dissemblance and convention, the concept of culture as the unanimity of living, thinking, seeming and willing.”98 Nietzsche designates this gap as “tragic” because it invokes two seemingly conflicting necessities and because this irresolvable tension is constitutive of what it is to be human.99

2

Forces of Nature Art and Politics in the Tragic Age of the Greeks The thrill of intoxication, of trickery, of vengeance, of envy, of abuse, insult and obscenity – all of this was acknowledged by the Greeks as being human and was accordingly integrated to the development of social orders and communal ways of life ... Nature, as it manifested itself, was not disowned but channelled and limited to a number of cults and specific celebrations. This is the root of the liberalism of antiquity ... The Greek state was not erected upon abstract individual determination, but upon the natural properties of men ... A release of the forces of nature was sought, not their destruction and denial. Nietzsche, Nachlass 1875

Nietzsche’s interest in antiquity follows from his concern over the limitations and perils of modern life as they appear to him in the context of the unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation-state. Nietzsche was under no illusion that the cultural practices of ancient Greece could be recreated in the industrialized setting of nineteenth-century Europe. However, he believed that the intellectual reconstruction of the Greek historical experience could be a valuable resource to help in identifying the challenges facing any attempt at building and maintaining a vibrant and self-conscious cultural community, despite our post-Kantian “knowledge of the absolute illogicality of the world order.”1 Tracy B. Strong rightly points out that what distinguishes The Birth of Tragedy from later publications in this regard is that Nietzsche not only mobilizes the Greeks to help him understand the nature of the challenges of culture but also contends, much

Forces of Nature

47

more controversially, that what the Greeks actually did to confront those challenges could provide guidance to address the decadence of modern life at this crucial juncture in German history.2 Nietzsche’s thesis unfolds along two distinct but closely linked lines of argumentation. The first revolves around a philological account of the origin and decline of Greek tragic drama, which is staged as a critical encounter with Socratic theoretical optimism. The second is an impassioned call for a regeneration of contemporary German culture inspired by Greek tragedy and Wagnerian opera. Nietzsche’s contention is that ancient Greek culture is the highest form of culture ever known to man. It was superior to modern culture because it was grounded in artistic production rather than in theoretical science and formally systematized morality. According to Nietzsche, art provided the Greek citizen with a wholesome sense of identity and ethical guidance, and the most flawless expression of that artistic culture is fifth-century Attic tragedy. This is because Attic tragedy was a public performance born out of music, dance, and poetry. And, like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche believed that the uniquely non-representational character of music allowed it to convey aspects of human existence that cannot be rendered through conceptual, representational forms of expression. The problem was that knowledge of the ancient Greek tradition of music and dance had been lost during the forty or so lifetimes that separated Nietzsche’s generation from archaic Greece. Thus, for the young Nietzsche, the best hope for a renewal of German culture lay in a recovery of the spirit of Attic tragedy channelled through Wagnerian music drama, which, at the time, he considered to be the highest form of contemporary culture.3 Nietzsche’s identification of Attic tragedy with Wagnerian opera is naïve and sometimes bordering on the absurd (he would repudiate it later). Likewise, his historical theses on the origins and death of Greek tragic drama are disputable on various grounds and have been heavily contested ever since their publications in January 1872. But those twin narratives are ultimately peripheral to the main concerns and achievements of Nietzsche’s enterprise. For what Nietzsche is really trying to do through his aesthetic discussion of Greek tragedy is to determine the essence of the tragic as such and to formulate on that basis a hypothesis on the nature of our socio-political reality as whole. In doing so, he is articulating one of the core themes of his philosophy for the first time and presenting his readers with his

48

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

vision of what he believes could be a more meaningful basis for human agency under the conditions of late modernity. This chapter examines the main features of Nietzsche’s enterprise. It begins with a brief exposition of his aesthetic theory of tragedy and then moves on to consider the politics that he weaves into this multi-layered reconstruction of pre-Socratic Greek civilization. As we will see, the question of violence is integral to the troubled relationship between politics and culture that Nietzsche affirms in those early texts, and it is largely determined by two interrelated sets of commitments. The first revolves around Nietzsche’s desire to assert the importance of affective experience and struggle in the construction of political institutions; the second stems from his determination to transcend contemporary efforts to construct history as a stage dominated by political greatness as the primary engine of human achievement. For the young Nietzsche, art and art alone can reveal the true potential of human agency and elevate the “German spirit” above the crass neo-Hegelian ideals of statehood professed by the philistines of the new Kaiserreich.

ap o l l o, d io n ys u s , a n d the ennobli ng p ow e rs o f g r e e k t r agi c drama The narrative of Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory of tragedy rests on an ambiguous adaptation of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic worldview in terms of the “will” and the “representation” of human beings. The ambiguity stems from the fact that Nietzsche does not use the formula to draw an ontological distinction between two domains of reality (as Schopenhauer did) but, rather, as a means to describe a “dynamic and creative process” of interaction between what he calls the Dionysian and the Apollinian.4 The Dionysian and Apollinian refer to the two ancient Greek deities Dionysus (god of intoxication and rapture) and Apollo (god of light, dream, and prophecy). Nietzsche uses the appellations as heuristic devices to designate two “ideal-typical” sets of aesthetic, psychological, and metaphysical “drives,” or mode of consciousness, that he takes to be constitutive of the human condition. The Apollinian represents the drive towards individuality, distinction, order, justice, beauty, and comprehensive knowledge. It is a subjective condition characterized by consciousness of oneself as a distinctive individual living amidst a plurality of other individuals.5 Nietzsche

Forces of Nature

49

borrows Schopenhauer’s neo-Kantian concept of the principium individuationis to refer to this subjective mode of consciousness.6 The principium individuationis holds that all beings exist collectively in space and time only and precisely because they are differentiated from each other: wherever one being ends, the other begins. Individual identities in this interpretation are therefore the primary form of existence. They exist prior to combinations or relationships among entities and are thereby inherently linked to the applicability of what Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) called the “principle of sufficient reason.” For individuation is a prerequisite of relations of causation and other such general laws that constitute science as a human activity and that allow us to explain the logic governing the necessity of events in such a way that no event is without a reason. Following Schopenhauer’s neo-Kantian formula, Nietzsche maintains that this interpretation of “Being” as a multiplicity of separated “beings” is an illusion transmitted to us by the subjective forms of space and time. In reality, the world as “the thing-in-itself” is an undifferentiated flux of life that never aims for a stable condition or finished state.7 Again, Nietzsche does not use the concept of “the thing-in-itself” to suggest that there exists a noumenal domain of reality from which we are excluded but, rather, to distinguish between two different modes of consciousness within the same account of reality as becoming. He quotes Schopenhauer’s analogy of the boatman trapped in the “veil of Maya” to illustrate this Apollinian condition of false security: “Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis.”8 The “veil of Maya” refers to Schopenhauer’s claim that, although we are aware that this condition of separate and definite form is an illusion, this fact is somewhat veiled from us. Nietzsche likens the situation to a dream in which we know that we are dreaming. For, like dreams, Apollinian forms appear in the midst of a primordial flow of becoming to give comfort for a time to individuals who must eventually awaken to the intimidating reality of life’s perpetual cycle of emergence and destruction.9 Aesthetically, the Apollinian is rendered through representational arts like painting, sculpture, architecture, and epic poetry – especially Homer. What impresses Nietzsche deeply about Homer’s Olympian

50

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

epics is that they operated beyond the moral categories of good and evil and, thus, made no attempt at concealing the contradictions of the social world.10 Homeric epics were replete with horrific acts of war, violence, vengeance, and destruction that bear witness to the abysmal character of being. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and practically all other Greek mythopoetic works of the period expressed a pluralistic, agonistic, and fatalistic religious outlook that sacralized the conditions of concrete life. Quite unlike Christianity, these were polytheist narratives saturated with tensions between opposing forces that made no attempt to transcend the finitude of earthly existence in a bid for eternal salvation from suffering.11 Nietzsche presses the point in Homer’s Contest: Why did the Greek sculptor repeatedly have to represent war and battles with endless repetition, human bodies stretched out, their veins taut with hatred or the arrogance of triumph, the wounded doubled up, the dying in agony? Why did the whole Greek world rejoice over the pictures of battle in the Iliad? I fear we have not understood these in a sufficiently “Greek” way, and even that we would shudder if we ever did understand them in a Greek way.12 As Julian Young emphasizes, Apollinian art for Nietzsche is a question of “focus” or “perspective” rather than “falsification.”13 The Greek artist knew about the horrors of war, and he did not shy away from illustrating its goriest and most repelling details. But what his work really sought to capture – what it focused on – was the hypnotizing grandiosity and aesthetic magnificence of the battlefield as a whole. Apollinian art is therefore not a flight from the empirical world but simply the veil of beauty cast over the cruelty of the world. According to Nietzsche, this act of creating beautiful imagery out of a horrifying truth has a soothing dimension: “the power of the epic-Apolline is so extraordinary that, thanks to the delight in semblance and release through semblance which it imparts, it casts a spell over even the most terrifying things before our very eyes.”14 The Dionysian, by contrast, is the drive towards excess and the transgression of boundaries. It names an experience of rapture and ecstasy that “causes subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-forgetting.”15 As hinted above, Nietzsche generally uses the term in this context to refer to the aimless cycle of emergence and

Forces of Nature

51

destruction in which separate individual identities are being dissolved and human beings find themselves reunited with the elemental forces and energies of nature. But he sometimes also uses it to designate the more sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of “human nature,” which he associates with the barbarism of “pre-civilized” violence and the overindulgence of strong sexual urges.16 His main source of inspiration for these overlapping usages is the chaotic and orgiastic ritual worship of Dionysus, during which dichotomies such as male and female, subject and object, are collapsed and the principium individuationis momentarily breaks apart. Nietzsche saw the spirit of this ritual preserved in the German medieval festivals of St Vitus and St John as well as in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Because the Dionysian experience exceeds the limitations of language and conceptual representation, Nietzsche argues that it is best expressed aesthetically through the non-representational art of music: If one were to transform Beethoven’s jubilant “Hymn to Joy” into a painting and place no constraints on one’s imagination as the millions sink into the dust, shivering in awe, then one could begin to approach the Dionysiac. Now the slave is a freeman, now all the rigid, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or “impudent fashion” have established between human beings, break asunder. Now, hearing this gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled or merged with his neighbour, but quite literally one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been torn apart, so that mere shreds of it flutter before the mysterious primordial unity (das Ur-Eine [the primordial One]).17 Despite what his Schopenhauerian adaptation sometimes seems to suggest, what accounts for the success of Attic tragedy in Nietzsche’s interpretation is not its Dionysian character as such but, rather, the fact that it managed to accommodate the tensions between the vitalism of the Dionysian and the more reflexive character of the Apollinian. Nietzsche identifies this play between those two fundamental modes of consciousness in the temporal structure of tragic drama. According to him, Greek tragedies begin with the Dionysian singing of a chorus and a more restrained and ordered dialogue between individual players staged before it. As the drama unfolds,

52

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

the confident and all-knowing hero becomes conscious of the illusive character of his distinctive identity, eventually allowing himself to be drawn back into the Dionysian nature he had sought to escape. This structure is mirrored in the attitude of the audience throughout the play. Although the spectators empathize with the hero in his inexorable march to destruction, as a congregation of worshippers they primarily identify with the chorus and are moved into a Dionysian state by its singing: “This is the first effect of Dionysiac tragedy: state and society, indeed all divisions between one human being and another, give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity which leads men back to the heart of nature.” This means that the death of the protagonists is not an event to be mourned but one that comforts us with the feeling that “life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable.”18 Like Schiller, Schlegel, and Hegel before him, Nietzsche’s consideration of the “tragic effect” is heavily influenced by Kant’s aesthetic discussion of the “sublime.”19 According to Nietzsche, we enjoy tragic drama because we understand that in watching these acted rituals of self-destruction we gain existentially pertinent insights into the nature of the human condition. Although these insights are terrifying, we nevertheless derive some kind of masochistic pleasure from the shear fact of knowing these truths. At a deeper metaphysical level, tragedy also provides pleasure in that the loss of individuality conveyed by the Dionysian chorus is experienced as a return to our original and most fundamental state of being, following a tormenting sojourn into the world of appearance. And again here, it is not only the experience of individual dissolution that is horrible and pleasurable at one and the same time but also the knowledge that individuation is illusive and bound to dissolution that provides some kind of painful satisfaction: For brief moments we are truly the primordial being itself and we feel its unbounded greed and lust for being; the struggle, the agony, the destruction of appearances, all this now seems to us to be necessary, given the uncountable excess of forms of existence thrusting and pushing themselves into life, given the exuberant fertility of the world-Will; we are pierced by the furious sting of these pains at the very moment when, as it were, we become one with the immeasurable, primordial delight in existence and receive an intimation, in Dionysiac ecstasy, that this delight is indestructible and eternal. Despite fear and pity, we are happily

Forces of Nature

53

alive, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative lust we have become one.20 Yet precisely because this tragic effect is one of intoxication and relief, the return from the Dionysian state is experienced as a painful existential “comedown.” The pain here arises not only from the dismemberment of the individual from the unity of the whole but also from the realization that no belief or action can alter or interfere with the course of this perpetual cycle of coming and going into existence. Nietzsche illustrates this process with an insightful interpretation of Hamlet: The Hellene, by nature profound and uniquely capable of the most exquisite and most severe suffering, comforts himself with this chorus, for he has gazed with keen eye into the midst of the fearful, destructive havoc of so-called world history, and has seen the cruelty of nature, and is in danger of longing to deny the will as the Buddhist does. Art saves him, and through art life saves him – for itself. The reason for this is that the ecstasy of the Dionysiac state, in which the usual barriers and limits of existence are destroyed, contains, for as long as it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences from the past are submerged. This gulf of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday life and Dionysiac experience. But as soon as daily reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such with a sense of revulsion; the fruit of those states is an ascetic, will-negating mood. In this sense Dionysiac man is similar to Hamlet: both have gazed into the true essence of things, they have acquired knowledge and they find action repulsive, for their actions can do nothing to change the eternal essence of things; they regard it as laughable or shameful that they should be expected to set to rights a world so out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion – this is the lesson of Hamlet.21 This is where the Apollinian element of tragedy comes in. By creating a realm of what Nietzsche calls Schein (semblance), the dialogues, ethical doctrines, costumes, and stage actions attenuate the paralyzing impact of the pessimistic truths transmitted by the Dionysian chorus. They do this by cloaking Dionysian knowledge in

54

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

a mantle of representative fiction that establishes a distance between the protagonists and the audience by creating the impression that what is happening on stage concerns the fate of a particular individual and not myself as a spectator.22 Thanks to this “noble deception,” we are relieved of “the pressing, excessive burden of the Dionysiac” and seduced into living again: “At which point the supreme goal of tragedy, and indeed of all art, is attained.”23 This is the meaning of The Birth of Tragedy’s fundamental claim – namely, that art is the only truly life-affirming and life-enhancing activity of man. For Nietzsche, Apollinian and Dionysian moments of artistic transfiguration in which life shows itself from “outside human individuality” – either as a majestic Olympian spectacle or as an eternally creative and eternally destructive reality – are the only perspectives from which existence can be redeemed: “for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified – although, of course, our awareness of our significance in this respect hardly differs from the awareness which painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas.”24

t h e p o l it ic s o f tragedy So where does that leave us in terms politics? The first thing that ought to be said here is that Nietzsche is explicit that tragedy (or art more generally) cannot provide us with any meaningful guidance on how to act in any given political situation. This is because the life struggles and problematic situations that art represents are nothing but overly simplified “abbreviations of the endlessly complex calculus of human action and desire.” Yet the more we experience life and become knowledgeable about its incomprehensible complexity, the more we hanker after these simplified representations. For the more knowledgeable we become about the world, “the greater grows the tension between general knowledge of things and the individual’s spiritual-moral capacities. Art exists so that the bow shall not break.”25 For the young Nietzsche then, the main socio-political significance of tragedy is to do with the conciliating function of the Dionysian chorus. Nietzsche’s Dionysian chorus is “a chorus of natural beings whose life goes on ineradicably behind and beyond all civilization, as it were, and who remain eternally the same despite all the changes of generations and in the history of nations.”26 It is “a chorus of transformed beings who have completely forgotten their civic past

Forces of Nature

55

and their social position; they have become timeless servants of their god, living outside every social sphere.”27 Philologically, Nietzsche’s interpretation is a repudiation of the democratic tendencies that many authors, such as W.A. Schlegel (1767–1845) and the British classicist George Grote (1794–1871), associated with Greek tragic drama at the time.28 Nietzsche is especially critical of explicitly political interpretations that read the chorus as a representation of the people “in contrast to the princely region on the stage.” As he explains, these formulations sound so lofty to the ears of some politicians, as if the immutable moral law of the democratic Athenians were represented in the popular chorus which was always proved right, beyond all the passionate excesses and indulgences of the kings. But no matter how strongly a remark by Aristotle seems to suggest this, this idea had no influence on the original formation of tragedy, since its purely religious origins preclude the entire opposition between prince and people, and indeed any kind of political-social sphere.29 Nietzsche’s critical attitude towards democratic readings of Greek tragedy is obviously not just a matter of philological accuracy. Nietzsche deplores political interpretations of the Dionysian because they encourage people to demand reforms of socio-political institutions that would bring the latter in line with the experience of wholeness and harmony that the Dionysian brings forth as the true, primordial ground of being. But in doing so, such political entrepreneurialism overlooks the “gulf of oblivion [separating] the worlds of everyday life and Dionysiac experience.”30 Nietzsche is evidently still under the shock of the Paris Commune, a new and catastrophic type of internationalized social war that had developed on the back of a conventional national conflict and exposed the barbaric attitude of the working class towards culture. In a letter dated 21 June 1871, he tells his friend Carl von Gersdorff of his despair upon hearing reports that the Communards had burned down the Louvre,31 emphasizing the importance of the event for his understanding of the violent injustice vested in the tragic relationship between politics and culture: Over and above the struggle between nations the object of our terror was that international hydra-head, suddenly and so

56

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

terrifyingly appearing as a sign of quite different struggles to come … When I heard of the fires in Paris, I felt annihilated for days and was overwhelmed by fears and doubts; the whole academic, philosophical artistic world seemed an absurdity, if a single day could wipe out the most glorious works of art; even whole periods of art; I clung with earnest conviction that the metaphysical value of art, which cannot exist for the sake of poor human beings but which has higher missions to fulfil. But even when the pain was at its worst, I could not cast a stone against those blasphemers, who were to me only carriers of the general guilt, which gives much food for thought.32 Nietzsche further develops his reflection on class conflict and the general culpability of art in section 18 of The Birth of Tragedy and in “The Greek State,” an unpublished essay that he originally conceived as a political extension to his reflections on Attic tragedy.33 There, Nietzsche argues that modern democratic ideologies rest on a series of dangerous conceptual self-delusions concerning the foundation of the political, giving rise to a combination of two contradictory tendencies in modern European societies: a tendency to value work and a tendency to value art. The contradiction stems from the fact that, whereas work is a struggle for mere physical existence at all cost, art is a struggle to live a meaningful ethical existence – a fight against the action-prohibiting nausea of pessimistic wisdom. Nietzsche holds that one cannot value work and art simultaneously since human existence as such has no intrinsic value, and a life devoted to labour necessarily prevents one from pursuing precisely the kind of creative activities that can endow life with meaning. This is the cruel reality haunting Europe’s “Alexandrian culture” – that is, a culture composed of a mixture of Socratic rationalism and Judeo-Christian theological morality.34 In the late 1840s, Wagner had famously argued that the artistic culture of ancient Greece deserved extinction given that it was founded on slavery. For him, a genuine “work of art of the future” could only be the product of a society that had abolished not only chattel-slavery but also the wage-slavery of modern capitalist societies.35 Wagner’s pronouncement was a retort to Schiller and the early Romantics, who had generally ignored the problem of slavery in their idealization of ancient Greece. Nietzsche brings up the issue again three decades later, only to disagree with the master. Although

Forces of Nature

57

it is both “terrible” and “shameful,” no society aspiring to high cultural achievements can dispense with a large labouring class: Here we find the source of that hatred that has been nourished by the Communists and Socialists as well as their paler descendants, the white race of “Liberals” of every age against the arts, but also against classical antiquity. If culture were really left to the discretion of a people, if inescapable powers, which are law and restraint to the individual, did not rule, then the glorification of spiritual poverty and the iconoclastic destruction of the claims of art would be more than the revolt of the oppressed masses against drone-like individuals: it would be the cry of compassion tearing down the walls of culture; the urge for justice, for equal sharing of the pain, would swamp all other ideas.36 Nietzsche’s strident rhetoric is addressed to a bourgeois audience hostile to art. Although he is not unappreciative of the tremendous degree of individual freedom that liberal modernization has made possible, Nietzsche is in agreement with Marx that industrial capitalism intensifies the egoistic impulses of the species way beyond the limits of what a liberal society can sustain. In his eyes, however, what is needed at the end of the nineteenth century is not a forcible redistribution of wealth but a cultural undoing of the sinister complicity between oppressor and oppressed through a gradual transformation of their shared obsession with material possessions. At a deeper philosophical level, Nietzsche’s tirades against democracy and its egalitarian ideology seek to problematize the question of what is to be achieved in a political community and in world politics more generally. In Nietzsche’s estimation, the Kantian demand that the conditions of political association are to be arranged fairly so that all citizens participate on equal terms is unsatisfactory insofar as it detracts from asking substantive questions about the nature of the good life, the community, and the individuals who participate in it. Kant drew our attention to our fundamental desire as human beings to share the world with others. But for Nietzsche this raises the question of what kind of world it is that we want to share, and with what kind of men. Although Nietzsche refuses to answer this question for us (we must do this for ourselves), it is clear for him that not all kinds of life are equally worth living and that a hierarchy between values and between men is a necessary condition

58

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

for the improvement of humanity – as evidenced by the trail-blazing accomplishments of its most exceptional catalyzers of culture: Goethe, Schiller, Voltaire, Beethoven, Kant, Napoleon, Copernicus, Thucydides, Homer, Caesar, Emerson, Michelangelo, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Bizet, and so on. Nietzsche’s argument is an ethical-political extension of the aesthetic concept of artistic “genius” that Kant sought to develop in the Critique of Judgment.37 Kant’s was an attempt to convey the movement from the subjectivism of the individual to the intersubjectivism of the collective that is necessary for something to have the quality of being a work of art. As Kant explains, genius is by definition spontaneous, original, and therefore “not a skill that can be learned by following some rule or other.” Yet, although the genius cannot produce a determinate rule for an artwork, the work of genius as a whole nevertheless provides the audience with “a standard or a rule by which to judge” other works without infringing on the aesthetic freedom of its members.38 Following Kant’s lead, Nietzsche argues that strong creative types provide model forms of human excellence that can serve as a basis for ethical judgment and intersubjective understanding, despite the unavailability of an a priori structure of rationality out of which determinate rules of conduct can be deduced. From this, Nietzsche goes on to argue that the main task of politics is neither to enable the reciprocal freedom of all nor to preserve the alleged birthright and privileges of the few but, rather, to allow society to prosper as a whole by fostering the conditions favourable to the emergence of strong creative individuals whose extraordinary deeds can inspire others and give direction to their community.39 As Daniel Conway puts it, through the pioneering achievements of its most creative representatives, who paradoxically hold no intentional stake in the lives of others, humankind perpetually reaches beyond itself. But it does so without telos or pre-established goals: “each successive transfiguration further limns the unknown depths and reaches of the human soul.”40 The conception of the political that Nietzsche derives from these reflections on art and culture is aristocratic in the original Greek sense of the term, meaning the “rule of the best.” Against its modern conflation with oligarchy (rule by the few) and plutocracy (rule by the wealthy), Nietzsche holds that what matters is not that creative and psychologically strong types should necessarily sit on top of the economic and political structure but, rather, that they should be able to feel and perceive their socio-cultural superiority in civil

Forces of Nature

59

society. This is what, in his mature writings, he calls the “pathos of distance.”41 It rests on his belief that cultural unity is unachievable without some form of mastery and obedience, which gives creative individuals the self-confidence to formulate the goals and principles that structure the multiplicity of conflicting drives constitutive of the social realm.42 Nietzsche insists that politics in this setting should not be directed towards the pursuit of cultural ideals but, rather, should only indirectly serve culture by providing a stable and secure environment for those who value culture and its development. As he explains in an insightful fragment from 1873: In the state the individual’s happiness is subordinated to the general welfare: what does this mean? Not that minorities are utilized for the welfare of the majorities, but rather that individuals are subordinated to the welfare of highest individuals, to the welfare of the highest specimens. The highest individuals are the creative persons, be they morally the best, or else useful in some larger sense. Thus they are the purest models and are the improvers of mankind. The goal of the commonwealth is not the existence of a state at any price, but rather its goal is for the highest specimens to be able to live and create within it. This is also the goal that underlies the foundation of states, except that they often had a false opinion concerning who the highest specimens were: often conquerors, dynasties, etc. If the state’s existence is no longer to be preserved in such a way that great individuals can live within it, what will then arise is the terrifying state filled with misery, the pirate state in which the strongest individuals take the place of the best. It is not the state’s task that the greatest possible number of people live well and ethically within it; numbers do not matter. Instead, the task of the state is to make it generally possible for one to live well and beautifully therein. Its task is to furnish the basis for a culture. In short, a nobler humanity is the goal of the state. Its goal lies outside of itself. The state is a means.43 Further insights into Nietzsche’s early account of the political and its relationship to arts and culture can be gleaned from “The Greek State” and the notebooks documenting its composition in 1871. Here, Nietzsche presents the state as a thought that has been forced upon human beings by the necessity of their collective existence. Yet the state is far from being a mere metaphysical abstraction. While

60

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

recognizing that it only exists through the individuals by which it is composed, Nietzsche insists that the concrete existence of each of these individuals is constituted through and through by the organization and structuration of relations between men within the collective. Although founded on a cruel act of violent subjectification, its higher destination is to engender culture and to ensure its continuity by displacing the struggle for life and death between individuals at the “higher” level of interstate relations: “The individual being, with all his egoism could never contribute to culture. That is why the political instinct must begin with appeasing egoism. Out of concern for his own security, he becomes the labourer on fatigue duty for the attainment of higher goals, of which he remains unconscious.”44 Not unlike Hobbes (and Hegel), Nietzsche describes this process of as an “objectivization of the social instincts” that gives a unifying and relatively predictable form to the otherwise diverse and conflicting elements of the multitude. It is the “iron clamp producing society by force: whereas without the state, in the natural bellum omnium contra omnes, society is completely unable to grow roots in any significant measure and beyond the family sphere.”45 For Nietzsche, however, the state is not a transcendence of the dangerous bestiality of human beings but a mobilization of this bestiality for its own self-preserving ends. The state, in other words, never emerges from the state of nature. It attains only a temporary and precarious stability since conflict, war, and natural inequality remain the very basis of the social structure: How did the slave, the blind mole of culture, come about? The Greeks have given us a hint with their instinct for the law of nations that, even at the height of their civilization and humanity, never ceased to shout from lips of iron such phrases as “the defeated belong to the victor, together with his wife and child, goods and blood. Power (Gewalt) gives the first right, and there is no right that is not fundamentally presumption, usurpation and violence.”46 He goes on a little further in the text:

Now, after states have been founded everywhere, that urge of bellum omnium contra omnes is concentrated, from time to time,

Forces of Nature

61

into dreadful clouds of war between nations and, as it were, discharges itself in less frequent but all the stronger bolts of thunder and flashes of lightning. But in the intervals, the concentrated effect of that bellum, turned inwards, gives society time to germinate and turn green everywhere, so that it can let the radiant blossoms of genius sprout forth as soon as warmer days come.47 Nietzsche’s mythical account of the Greek state taunts socialists concerning the eventual “withering away of the state.”48 No less clearly than Marx and Engels, Nietzsche understands that the ever-increasing number of arbitrating duties that the state takes on during the nineteenth century is intrinsically linked to the ambitions of a bourgeoisie that has “learnt to misuse politics as an instrument of the stock exchange, and state and society as an apparatus for their own enrichment.”49 Empowered by the deterritorializing imperatives of technological development, the aim of this emerging “money aristocracy” is to co-opt the forces of liberal nationalism in order to homogenize and transform the state system into a stable, flat, and hospitable terrain for economic transactions and vagrant capital accumulation: To this end, they first have to cut off and weaken the specifically political impulses as much as possible and, by establishing large state bodies of equal importance with mutual safeguards, make a successful attack on them, and therefore war in general, extremely unlikely: whilst on the other hand they try to wrest the decision over war and peace away from the individual rulers, so that they can then appeal to the egoism of the masses, or their representatives: to do which they must in turn slowly dissolve the monarchical instincts of the people. They carry out this intention through the widest dissemination of the liberal-optimistic world view, which has its roots in the teachings of the French Enlightenment and Revolution.50 Conscious of the wide popular appeal of this self-serving pacifism, the young Nietzsche sees only one desperate solution to the problem of safeguarding culture against this bourgeois atrophy of the state instinct: “war and war again.” For beyond the contingent historical circumstances and external events leading to its outbreak, war demonstrates with the utmost brutality that the state was never

62

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

founded “as a protective measure for egoistic individuals” but, rather, holds within itself “a much loftier designation.”51 As it endangers the life and belongings of each and every one of us, war forces the individual to come to terms with the fact that the existence and future of everything he holds dear depends on the future of the public world that he shares in common with others, reminding us that political conflict, exclusion, and subjugation are not external to the well-ordered ethical community but are its original condition of possibility: “This truth is the vulture which gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of culture.”52 By exposing the brutal reality of statehood in this manner, Nietzsche’s exasperating “paean for war” also seeks to emphasize the danger of glorifying the state for its own sake. For when the state instinct becomes excessively charged, it detaches itself from its foundational role as the originator of culture and becomes its most formidable enemy. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Nietzsche attacks the Bismarckian “cultural state” (Kultur-Staat) for precisely that reason. In a lecture series he gave in Basel in 1872 on the future of educational institutions in the German-speaking world, Nietzsche explains that the main feature of the cultural state is that it gets directly involved in the determination of the community’s culture by financing and deciding on the content of education and assessing its results.53 Echoing the political narrative of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that the ascent of the mass state, the mass economy, and mass democracy has given rise to “two dominant tendencies in our educational institutions, apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education.”54 With remarkable foresight, Nietzsche argues that education is no longer about developing students’ ability to think independently but about servicing the needs of industry and fulfilling students’ expectations of material success and social advancement. As the state’s need for well-trained and reliable administrators keeps on growing, so does its intolerance for critical thinking and whatever non-conformist behaviour a classical education might generate. The state strives “to promote as widespread an education as possible, in its own interest, since it feels strong enough to clamp back down on even the mightiest unleashing of education, and it has found

Forces of Nature

63

again and again that a well-educated civil service or military helps it compete against other states.”55 The outcome is a huge expansion of the education system matched by an abandonment of its role as the structuring originator of true authentic culture, which, although attainable by all, only a few will make the efforts and sacrifices necessary to achieve. Nietzsche links his critique explicitly to Germany’s newly acquired role in the changing European balance of power: Under such pressures, a state naturally turns to any ally it can, and when one of these allies goes so far as to offer its service with pompous phrases – when it describes the state, in Hegel’s words, as an “absolutely perfected ethical organism,” and holds up as the task of education the job of discovering where and how a person can best serve state interests – how surprising is it that the state then falls into the arms of such an ally, crying out with full conviction, in its deep, barbaric voice: “Yes! You are education! You are culture!”56 In ancient Greece, Nietzsche tells his audience, the real “ethical organism” was not the state as such but the community and its culture: “The state was not the culture’s border patrol and regulator, its watchman and warden, but the culture’s sturdy, muscular, battle-ready comrade and companion, escorting his admired, nobler, and so to speak transcendent friend through harsh reality and earning that friend’s gratitude in return.” In Nietzsche’s eyes, the modern cultural state that reduces the meaning of individual life and death to its own governmental imperatives is a dangerous contradiction in terms. Whereas culture seeks to preserve the diversity of life forms by fostering meaningful modes of sociability through the practice of individual self-responsibility, the state seeks to preserve the life, unity, and growth of the political community at the cost of the normalization of the individual. Nietzsche’s hostility to the modern cultural state will intensify continuously with the growth of Bismarck’s foreign policy ambitions throughout the 1870s and 1880s, but the message will remain the same: “Culture and the state … these are adversaries: ‘Kultur-Staat’ is just a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other.”57 In his Basel lectures and writings on Greek philosophy, Nietzsche develops his argument by drawing a parallel between Bismarck’s aggressive politics of German unification and the political decline

64

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

of Greek civilization following the Greco-Persian wars. The GrecoPersian wars were a series of intense armed conflicts fought by Greek states and Persia between 499 bc and 449 bc . Nietzsche argues that the wars led to political decline precisely because they rendered political and military preoccupations overly determinant in Greek life, stimulating appetites for political centralization that culminated in the conflict between Athens and Sparta on the Peloponnese between 431 bc and 404 bc : “the success was too great; all the bad drives broke loose. Individual men and cities were seized by the tyrannical will to rule all over Hellas.”58 In Nietzsche’s estimation, Sparta was an excessively brutal, aggressive, and war-mongering state, a mere “caricature of the polis, a corruption of Hellas.” Its victory over Athens was “the greatest failure of culture; for it has given rise to the atrocious theory that culture cannot be pursued unless one is at the same time armed to the teeth … Sparta was the ruin of Athens in so far as she compelled Athens to turn her entire attention to politics and to act as a combined federation.”59 According to Nietzsche, what was lost in this all-consuming process of political centralization was the healthy spirit of competition that existed between Greek states and that allowed for the culture of the polis to blossom during the early Archaic period – more specifically between 776 bc and 560 bc .60 This condition of pluralism reflected the agonistic political culture nurtured by those states within their own respective city and dependent territories. By nurturing an ethos that did not appeal to the individual equality of men but instead encouraged competition among them, the Greek state acted to promote the development of strong and accomplished individuals whose deeds inspired others to reach beyond themselves: “for the ancients, the aim of agonistic education was the well-being of the whole, of state society [der staatlichen Gesellschaft]. For example, every Athenian was to develop himself, through the contest, to the degree to which this self was of most use to Athens and would cause least damage.”61 As Herman W. Siemens points out, Nietzsche appreciates the agon because it tapped into the raw determination and “temptation to excess” of the participants, “with measured, creative conflict in the relations between them.” However, for him, the agon became effective as an institution not because it cultivated the sort of general attitude of self-restraint and respect for one’s adversary (as is often assumed in postmodern theories of agonistic democracy) but, rather,

Forces of Nature

65

precisely because ancient Greek societies could not rely on such reflexive norms of self-limitation.62 In this account, antagonistic social relations between individuals, groups, and city-states play a fundamental role in shaping the identity of agents involved in agonal action; “however, these relations also act as a medium of resistance that cuts subjective intentions off from resulting action or interaction, so that identity – the ‘who’ – disclosed in agonal action is not the result of a wilful purpose, but the product of relations of tension that are dynamic and unpredictable in nature.”63 Nietzsche saw Attic tragedy as an essential part of this agonistic culture. This was not only because the annual dramatic performances in Athens were organized as competitions among playwrights but also because the heroes of Greek tragedies were bold individuals whose deeds gave value and meaning to the suffering of the polis. In section 9 of The Birth of Tragedy, for example, Nietzsche explains how Oedipus revealed in his character the “glory of passivity” by marrying his mother and killing his father. Oedipus was inevitably punished and suffered greatly for challenging nature in this way. Yet in recognizing his deed and blinding himself, a deed that was in fact orchestrated by the gods, Oedipus took on the responsibility for and guilt of his action and thereby saved the community of Thebes from the plague. Similarly, Prometheus challenged nature and revealed in his character the “glory of activity” by stealing fire from the gods and helping humans to assume powers that do not belong to them. Prometheus is then punished for his act, but the act itself lives on and becomes a founding mythical example of human freedom and dignity against which other individuals in the future can pattern their own lives.64 Although it is rarely ever recognized as such, this is arguably the most fundamental political point of Nietzsche’s discourse on tragedy in his early writings. According to Nietzsche, the intense moments of collective subjectivity prompted by exposure to these tragic myths played a crucial role in channelling and moderating the strong political instincts of the Greek polity: “The people of the tragic Mysteries is the very same people which fought the Persian wars; conversely, the people which fought those wars needs tragedy, of necessity, as a restorative draught.” Nietzsche’s reflections here lack both clarity and development. But what he seems to be suggesting is that the sense of meaningfulness that the exposure to tragedy bestowed on the life of the Greek citizenry facilitated the

66

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

sublimation of its Dionysian energies into the well-organized, clearly delimited, and “state-founding” Apollinian forms characteristic of its successful military campaigns. Yet, at the same time, the spiritual, de-individualizing states of consciousness induced by the Dionysian element of tragic drama prevented this strong military posture from degenerating into an obsessive quest for military power and aggrandizement for the sake of survival: “After all, wherever there is a significant outbreak of Dionysiac fervour, the attendant liberation from the shackles of the individual always makes itself felt, first and foremost, in a dwindling of the political instincts, to the point of indifference even or indeed hostility.” According to Nietzsche, the metaphysical comfort impaired by exposure to tragedy allowed the Greeks to invent “a new, third form in classical purity,” one that threaded a path between the excessive, militaristic patriotism of the Romans and the dispirited political apathy of Indian Buddhism.65 But the sublime balance between the Apollinian and the Dionysian that Nietzsche identifies in Greek tragic drama always was a precarious one. Nietzsche regards the tragedies of Euripides (ca. 480 bc – ca. 406 bc ) as the end of the genre because, in them, conscious knowledge and critical reflection are given prominence at the expense of the Dionysian element. In Euripides’ plays, heroes defend their actions dialectically from the standpoint of their own subjectivity with arguments and counter-arguments that undermine tragic reverence in the face of the incomprehensible. According to Nietzsche, the dialectical quest for intelligibility in Euripidean plays was symptomatic of the Socratic enlightenment by which the Greeks eventually lost touch with the agonistic spirit that had sustained the dynamism of their civilization during the previous centuries. To be sure, Plato’s Socratic dialogues unfold through argumentative contestation and the questioning of received opinions. But, unlike older, open-ended agonistics, those exchanges are governed by strict rules of consistency and universality that tend to predetermine outcomes and consequently undermine their agonistic structure.66 Thus, even while proclaiming its own “zetetic” ignorance, Socratic inquiry dismisses the pessimistic notion that scientific inquiry is always at some point limited by the unfathomable and that art is consequently required “for protection and as medicine.”67 This is what accounts for the shift from a tragic to a moral worldview in Greek thought. Socrates disliked tragic drama because it lacks a clear sense of moral cause and effect. Tragedy declines because the existential problems

Forces of Nature

67

with which it confronts its audience are taught to be surmountable through rationalization and the application of scientific methods: For who could fail to notice the optimistic element in the essence of dialectics, which celebrates jubilant at each conclusion reached, and which can only breathe where there is cool clarity and consciousness? Having once penetrated tragedy, this optimistic element was bound to spread gradually across its Dionysiac regions and drive it, of necessity, to self-destruction by taking a death-leap into domestic tragedy. One only needs to consider the consequences of these Socratic statements: “Virtue is knowledge; sin is only committed out of ignorance; the virtuous man is a happy man”; in these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy.68 It is in this spirit that The Birth of Tragedy celebrates the “hardest-fought victory of all which was won by the enormous courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer.”69 By demonstrating the limits to the domain within which reason and science can operate without “seeing logic curl up around itself at these limits and bite its own tail,” Kant’s Copernican revolution heralded the beginning of the end of Socratism.70 For the young Nietzsche, this raised the possibility of a recovery of tragedy on the basis of our historical consciousness of the Socratic enlightenment, with the aim of achieving a more reflexive understanding of the tragic – that is, one which would elevate “wisdom” above science and affirm art as the foundation of culture and society.71 Although there can be no final redemption from the suffering of life and history, Nietzsche hoped that this “renovation and purification of the German spirit through the fire magic of music” (an allusion to Wagner’s The Valkyrie) could counter the “growing sterility and exhaustion of present-day culture” by creating the conditions for a heroic experience of the primordial pain and joys of existence.72

a f t e r m ath The Birth of Tragedy is an incredibly imaginative and thoughtprovoking statement on the shortcomings of modernity. But the originality of the work and the cultural revolution to which it aspired incurred a high cost to Nietzsche’s career at the time. Nietzsche’s

68

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

disregard for the traditional boundaries of the discipline of philology shocked his colleagues, and it embarrassed his former mentor who had facilitated his exceptionally rapid rise within the field. It also made him many enemies within the academic profession. Upon the book’s publication in 1872, the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf penned a merciless review in which he accused Nietzsche of having distorted a whole range of philological facts to support his radical theses on the origins and death of Greek tragic drama. Against Nietzsche’s unorthodox marriage of philology with philosophy and aesthetics, he insisted that the only appropriate path to the ancient world was through the painstaking study of history. Moellendorf’s dismissive polemic sparked a short but heated debate between Nietzsche’s detractors and his supporters. Among the latter was the philologist Erwin Rhode, who intervened to show how Moellendorf had unfairly misrepresented and misquoted his friend’s theses. Wagner, to whom the book was dedicated, also intervened. But his was a clumsy and patronizing defence that did not really engage with the substance of Moellendorf’s critique.73 This marked the beginning of a long process by which Nietzsche would slowly excommunicate himself from the philological profession, until his eventual resignation from his position at Basel in 1879 due to chronic health problems. By then, Nietzsche had long abandoned his hopes for a Greek-inspired renewal of the “German spirit.” In his second Untimely Meditation (1874), Nietzsche already expresses concerns about the affinities between the sort of aesthetic myth-making in which he engaged in his first book and the mindless glorification of the national past sustaining the Bismarckian cultural state. Although different in character and intent, both are ultimately forms of what he calls “monumental history” – a non-scientific mode of doing history that exalts past greatness selectively, “deceives by analogies,” and “with seductive similarities inspires the courageous to foolhardiness and the inspired to fanaticism.”74 Nietzsche’s association of aesthetic myth-making with fanaticism was probably not coincidental. Recall that it was precisely the danger of “a fanatical delusion of wanting to SEE something beyond all bounds of sensibility” that had led Kant, in his theory of the sublime, to warn against the temptation to give our aspiration to transcendence a concrete shape in the empirical world of appearances.75 The Birth of Tragedy never completely collapses the tension between the Apollinian and the Dionysian in this regard.76 But the interpretation

Forces of Nature

69

of Dionysian freedom that Nietzsche associates with the tragic chorus and the regeneration of the “German spirit” comes disquietingly close to doing just that. As we have seen, the danger is that it depreciates the cares and material concerns of the everyday while simultaneously affirming the possibility of a deeper unity between the individual and the community in the experience of a more existential mode of consciousness from which the individual is normally estranged.77 Nietzsche’s formula would be a lot less worrying were it not for his complete lack of appreciation for the innovative democratic features of the Greek polis. Although he provides valuable insights concerning the tension between politics and culture, it is hard to imagine how culture can thrive under conditions of modernity without the development and maintenance of a relatively stable institutionalized public space within which collective actions with civic equals can take place.78 Unlike Marx, Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, and other influential sociologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nietzsche makes no substantive attempt at developing appropriate analytical categories to study the complex structures of modern societies organized as markets and increasingly complex bureaucracies and collective structures of power, preferring instead to draw on historically misleading comparisons with an ancient slave culture. This leads him to identify the alienation of modern man with a subjective loss of meaning in the cultural domain without being able to provide an account of the relationship between modern culture and changes in labour conditions and the commodity form as a structured and structuring social practice.79 What we are left with in the end is a version of what Herbert Marcuse called “affirmative culture”: “it plays off the spiritual world against the material world by holding up culture as the authentic values and self-contained ends in opposition to the world of social utility and means.”80 In the retrospective preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche concedes defiantly that the formulation of his message through philological theses about the Greeks was misguided. Like the nationalistic sentimentalities over the “German spirit” in which he had indulged in the last sections of the book, Nietzsche attributes his youthful cultural reveries to the romanticism he had naively contracted from Wagner. What he had come to understand clearly by then was that, rather than trying in vain to resuscitate ancient ideals, Europe needed to create new ones that would take modern structures of power more seriously into account.81

70

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

The 1886 preface also signals an important conceptual shift in Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy. At a general level, Nietzsche still embraces the book’s move towards an affirmative account of the tragic against Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism. But he now shifts the focus away from the loss of the self in the communal vision of the chorus to relocate the justificatory power of tragedy in its capacity to refuse any “metaphysical comfort,” leading him to reconsider the ways in which he had envisaged the ethical relationship between politics, suffering, and the search for meaning in his early writings. Although Nietzsche would never abandon his belief that art is the only truly life-affirming activity of man, he now maintains that his early emphasis on “art as metaphysical solace” was the product of an immature combination of Wagnerian aesthetics and distantly neo-Platonic metaphysics that he borrowed from Kant and Schopenhauer.82 According to Nietzsche, his early understanding of the problems associated with Schopenhauer’s pessimism was too simplistic. What he failed to see clearly back then is that it is not so much that the pre-Socratics responded differently than Schopenhauer to pessimistic knowledge but, rather, that their pessimism was significantly different from Schopenhauer’s. Whereas Schopenhauer teaches a “pessimism of weakness,” the Greeks lived by a “pessimism of strength.” The difference is to do with whether or not the philosophy in question – pessimism, optimism, or else – contributes to an affirmation of everyday existence in this world: Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts – as was the case amongst the Indians and appears to be the case amongst us “modern men” and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual preference for the hard, gruesome, malevolent and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence?83 By rejecting Schopenhauer’s conclusion in this manner, Nietzsche recognizes that the amount of suffering in the world does not actually tell us anything about the value of existence. For the pessimist to experience life as worthless because it is characterized by constant suffering, his beliefs about how life should be must first have been conditioned by a normative framework that prizes happiness and the

Forces of Nature

71

limitation of suffering above anything else that might have value for life, despite being the source of considerable pain and unhappiness. This is why Nietzsche begins to take his distance from Schopenhauer more decisively from the mid-1870s onwards.84 Schopenhauer had recognized the disorderly nature of the world, but he judged this world on the basis of an imaginary world of painless and timeless stability against which our transient world of becoming could be measured.85 The depreciation of life underpinning this flawed epistemological procedure is one of the main features of what Nietzsche calls “nihilism” in his mature writings. As he explains in The Gay Science, nihilism is a radicalization of pessimism.86 What pessimism and nihilism share with one another is the conclusion that our world is radically hostile to the realization of our highest normative aspirations. The difference between the pessimist and the nihilist is that the nihilist has abandoned all misplaced hopes and beliefs in another world in which those aspirations and ideals might one day be realized: “At this point nihilism is reached: all one has left are the values that pass judgment – nothing else. Here the problem of strength and weakness originates: 1. The weak perish of it; 2. those who are stronger destroy what does not perish; 3. those who are strongest overcome the values that pass judgment. In sum, this constitutes the tragic age.”87 What is at stake for Nietzsche in this modulated problematique is no longer “just” the status of art or the future of the newly unified Germany but the self-understanding and continued existence of occidental humanity as a whole.88

3

Nihilism Terror in the Alleyways of European Culture What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect. Nietzsche, Nachlass 1887–88

Despite being one of the most important themes of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, nihilism is mentioned only about a dozen times in the published writings. The bulk of Nietzsche’s account of European nihilism is to be found in his unpublished notebooks, where it often remains fragmentary and by no means free of ambiguities. The term begins to appear in those notebooks during the early 1880s in the context of a series of reflections that Nietzsche published as The Gay Science in 1882.1 This period also marks the beginning of a substantive re-engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy, which is no longer cast as an attempt to overcome pessimistic scepticism through the cultivation of tragic thinking but, rather, as an effort to understand and overcome the crisis of nihilism in European thought, politics, and culture.2 Nietzsche, of course, was by no means the first in the history of Western thought to associate the problem of nihilism with Kantian

Nihilism

73

philosophy. The first explicit formulations of nihilism as a distinct concept of philosophy began to emerge towards the end of the eighteenth century in the context of a series of attacks on German idealism by writers such as Jacob Hermann Obereit (1725–1798), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), Daniel Jenisch (1762–1804), and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829).3 According to these critics, Kant’s claim that human knowledge is strictly limited to phenomena arising out of interaction between the noumenal self and the noumenal world had driven a wedge between humanity and reality, opening up the possibility that absolutely nothing in this world can have any intrinsic meaning or solicit genuine commitment. Profoundly alarmed by the consequences for Christianity, they sought to debunk the Kantian critique by drawing a stark contrast between an unwavering faith in a God who exists beyond all human subjectivity and an unappeasable reason that reduces everything to the illusions of human subjectivity.4 During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the originally philosophical notion of nihilism was transmuted into a wider set of cultural tropes. This was facilitated by the rise of materialism and scientific positivism, and led to a much wider usage of the term to designate the sense of lost illusions, melancholia, and cultural pessimism afflicting European societies at the time. This account of nihilism as “fin de siècle fatigue” first came into its own in Russian literature during the 1860s and 1870s, most notably in the novels of Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky. By the mid1880s it was popping up everywhere in European literature and cultural criticism: Amiel, Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Hugo, Maupassant, Renan, Zola, and many others. In a widely read series of articles published in Le Parlement between 1881 and 1883, the French novelist Paul Bourget (1852–1935) identified this cultural trend as a deep and morbid psychological illness that was in the process of mining the unity and ambitions of European civilization: “a deadly tiredness of life, a dreary perception of the vanity of all efforts.”5 Nietzsche’s own distinctive contribution to the philosophy of nihilism rests on his ability to differentiate between the long-term intellectual origins of nihilism and its more immediate cultural and socio-political paroxysmal symptoms.6 In Nietzsche, nihilism is not just a spiritual malaise or a cultural event among others: it is a deep structural crisis of meaning and human agency, which is induced by

74

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

the fact that the moral-metaphysical framework that has governed social relations under Christianity is no longer worthy of belief. Nietzsche interprets this crisis in terms of a paralyzing disconnect between our empirical experience of the world and the constellations of ideals, concepts, and metaphors that we moderns have historically inherited to interpret and appraise this experience. Nietzsche does not believe that this condition is necessarily terminal for occidental humanity, insisting on the opportunity that it affords for a rethinking and revaluation of the basis and goals of human co-existence. But he anticipates that the road to this potential overcoming will be long and extraordinarily violent.7 For contrary to the position that is often attributed to him in popular culture, Nietzsche’s thesis is not that the Western metaphysical tradition has already “devalued” itself and lost its ability to order our societies but, rather, that the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries have not yet understood the radical implications of contemporary developments in thought and still cling to values and ideals that are no longer viably supported by belief structures. His is a prophetic account of what will necessarily happen extrapolated from his genealogical exploration of Western values and his analysis of contemporary conditions of cultural and political decay. This chapter outlines the broad contours of the complex relationship that Nietzsche posits between nihilism as a condition of metaphysical dissolution and the radicalization of political and ideological antagonisms that he anticipates as a consequence of these developments.

n ih il is m “ p e t e rs burg s tyle” Although The Birth of Tragedy already anticipates the theme of nihilism,8 Nietzsche’s first explicit references to the concept date from the summer of 1880. According to Elisabeth Kuhn’s widely cited study, those early references almost certainly derive from his reading of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1863) in a French translation by Prosper Mérimée, who also discusses the concept of nihilism in his introduction to the novel.9 We know that Nietzsche also read Bourget’s chronicles attentively in the winter of 1883–84, along with several other French literary critics during the winter of 1886–87.10 But it is his rather late discovery of Dostoevsky at the end of 1886 that probably had the most direct impact on his understanding of the existential politics of nihilism as it manifested itself at the end of

Nihilism

75

the nineteenth century. As Nietzsche writes in a letter to Overbeck in February 1887: “I did not even know the name of Dostoevsky just a few weeks ago ... An accidental reach of the arm in a bookstore brought to my attention L’esprit souterrain [Notes from the Underground], a work just translated into French. (It was a similar accident with Schopenhauer in my 21st year and with Stendhal in my 35th.) The instinct of kinship (or how should I name it?) spoke up immediately; my joy was extraordinary.”11 Among other things, what Nietzsche would have found in this literature is a series of important insights into the psychology of nihilism and its complex relationship to the emergence of a new form of revolutionary, transnational terrorism that was being encouraged and practised more and more frequently by anarcho-socialist movements across Europe since the mid-1870s. Facilitated by the Industrial Revolution, the invention of nitroglycerine, and changing social relations of power, this new terrorism chose its victims not on the basis of national identity but on the basis of social identity – specifically targeting members of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the clergy. Some nationalist movements across Europe after the defeated revolutions of 1848 had already begun to align murder with the pursuit of liberal and progressive ideals.12 But the use of violence advocated by these nationalist actors was more collective and traditionally insurrectional than terrorist: its aim was to foster national unity and to win national independence from multinational empires. By contrast, anarchist terrorism sought to spread fear and chaos with the aim of triggering a revolution that would destroy the capitalist state system as a whole.13 In all sorts of complex and mediated ways, anarcho-socialist terror found its intellectual justification in debates that had been animating the revolutionary left since the early 1860s, particularly the conflict opposing Marx and his followers to the collectivist anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin in the First International (1864–76).14 Whereas Marx saw the state as a derivative instrument of economic exploitation and accounted for historically changing state forms through development in economic class relations,15 Bakunin believed that the state has its own impersonal self-reproducing logic of oppression transcending class control, interests, and priorities.16 This led both men and their respective followers to advocate different and sometimes conflicting revolutionary tactics. Because Marx saw the state as a mere instrument of class power, he also believed that the state

76

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

could be seized and utilized for the revolutionary purposes of the working class. For him, the state was oppressive and dehumanizing because it was under the control of the bourgeoisie. Once the means of production were collectivized and class distinctions abolished, the state would lose its tyrannical character and eventually become superfluous. Bakunin, by contrast, argued that the state had to be destroyed completely as the first and primary act of all revolutionary activity and never to be relied upon as a strategic tool for emancipation. As he declares in God and the State (written in 1871 but published posthumously in 1882), the anarchist “obeys natural laws because he has  himself  recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual.”17 Nietzsche first became familiar with those debates through his conversations with Wagner, who had been inspired by Bakunin in the 1848 revolution.18 He also acquainted himself more substantively with different intellectual positions within the revolutionary left in 1876–77.19 This is reflected in the more nuanced appreciation of class politics and changing state practices that Nietzsche expresses in Human, All Too Human.20 Human, All Too Human was published in April 1878, just as the first major wave of anarchist terrorism was taking off across Europe with a series of attacks on prominent aristocrats, public servants, and heads of state (including the Kaiser on 11 May and 2 June 1878), culminating in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by members of Narodnaya Volya (New People) on 1 March 1881. Narodnaya Volya was one of the several underground organizations inspired by the Revolutionary Catechism (1869) of self-proclaimed “nihilist” Sergey Nechayev (1847–1882). The Catechism was part of a wider propaganda literature Nechayev co-produced with Bakunin in Geneva in 1869. It sought to outline the general rules of organization and conduct for anarcho-socialist militancy, urging all revolutionaries to abandon all values, beliefs, and affective attachments to others and subordinate their existence to the higher cause of the revolution through violence. It contained the famous statement: The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name ... The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them

Nihilism

77

for future generations … Tyrannical toward himself, he must be tyrannical toward others ... He enters the world of the State, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and total destruction … He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world. He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends, or lovers; he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.21 Like many other observers at the time, what Nietzsche found disturbing about this radical asceticism is that it was advocated in the name of humanist ideals.22 As emphasized in the resolution adopted by the International Workingmen’s Association (iwa ) at the end of the London Congress in July 1881, the anarchist move towards aggression and “propaganda by the deed” was not an incitement to random killing but a response to the overwhelming structural advantage of the enemy in the struggle for universal justice.23 Anarchists believed that violent action could disseminate revolutionary sentiments better than words ever could, precisely because violence is the means of communication with which the dominant classes were most familiar. The assumption was that elites would respond with state-sanctioned violence and that this would then drive more people into the arms of the revolution, simultaneously demonstrating the true repressive nature of government and its vulnerability to defeat.24 That Nietzsche’s philosophy could have inspired a softer, more individualistic strand of anarchism during the 1890s and subsequent decades is not completely incomprehensible given the tone and scope of its attacks on bourgeois culture and political institutions.25 But Nietzsche himself always makes it very clear that he has no affinities whatsoever with his anarchist contemporaries, condemning their vindictive conflation of justice with murder as the “undisguised snarling of the dogs that now wander the alleyways of European culture.”26 Although Nietzsche could agree with Bakunin that economic exploitation is predicted on a more fundamental political oppression, he dismisses the anarchist critique as a senseless romantic fantasy. This is because the critique is articulated from a moralizing natural law position that misconstrues itself as being extrinsic to networks of violence and exploitation that are in reality intrinsic to the historical emergence of the “reflexive” revolutionary subject.

78

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

Nietzsche had already identified the problem in the early 1870s.27 During the 1880s, he apprehends this unhistorical anarchistica28 through the distinction between the “noble” and “slave” ideal types of ethico-political agencies that he first introduces in Human, All Too Human and further develops in Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morality.29 In this account, anarchist revolutionary subjectivity is servile because it takes its bearing from the object of its hatred and, therefore, cannot possibly understand itself as worthwhile without the prior existence of the immoral and irrational structures of power and mastery that it so desperately wishes to destroy: “That is, the less someone knows how to command, the more urgently does he desire someone who commands, who commands severely – a god, prince, the social order, doctor, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience.”30 What Nietzsche is getting at here is that the ontological void underlying this servile mode of political subjectivity generates a condition in which the agent is continuously confronted with the groundlessness of its own existence and its consequent inability to shape the world in its own image. Nietzsche sees that this politics cannot but culminate in violence and self-destruction insofar as the reproduction, strength, and effectiveness of this quintessentially “nihilistic” type of agency is predicated on the continued presence of suffering and oppression in the life of the agent in question.31 This is what he calls slave morality in the first essay of the Genealogy of Morality. Whereas the “noble” type of man experiences himself as a creative individual who sets his own standards, spontaneously affirms himself as “good,” and only subsequently extends deprecating judgment to whatever he considers base and inferior to himself, the slave is parasitic on what it must first negate as evil in order to feel essential: “it says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside,’ ‘other,’ ‘nonself’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed.”32 Now, while Nietzsche learned a great deal from Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and various French literary critics about this “Petersburgstyle nihilism,”33 the relationship between interpretation, existential melancholia, and violence in this literature remained largely understood as the indicator of a transient psycho-cultural mood characteristic of European societies at the time. For reasons that we have just seen, Nietzsche did not believe that anarcho-socialist terror could ever achieve anything significant politically (other than providing an excuse for dynastic governments to declare “states

Nihilism

79

of exception” and extra-legal repressive measures to neutralize threatening changes in the balance of power and public opinions across Europe).34 Yet what he perceived by way of his reflections on metaphysics during the 1880s is that this fin-de-siècle escalation of revolutionary violence was expressive of a much more complex and all-encompassing “logic” of cultural and physiological “decadence.” This logic transcended the conventional politics of left and right and manifested itself most comprehensively in the representational problem of “values.”

va l u e s The concept of value is another elusive products of nineteenth-century philosophy.35 Up until the mid-eighteenth century, the notion of value was used primarily as a measure of material worth. In the political economic theories of William Petty (1623–1687), Adam Smith (1723– 90) and, later, David Ricardo (1772–1823) and Marx (1818–1883), value has a quantitative character that is not a feature of things in themselves but is given by its specific historical conditions – that is, by the amount of work necessary to produce something within economic processes, its use and its “exchange value.” Kant hinted at an ethical appropriation in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) by distinguishing between the “price,” which is the relative value of a thing, and its “intrinsic value or dignity, which belongs only to man and is an unconditional, incomparable worth, infinitely above all price.”36 However, it is the logician Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) who decisively imported the concept of value into philosophy from political economy in the early 1840s. He did so by introducing an ontological distinction between beings, referring to things that empirically exist, and values, which instead have “validity.” Although Lotze himself insisted that values have their own autonomous metaphysical status as “validities” existing beyond things and minds (his was a reinterpretation of Plato’s theory of ideas), his move sowed the seed of further discussions concerning the separation between statements of fact and “value judgments.”37 Like many other themes in German philosophy after Hegel, these discussions came to fruition in the context of a wider critical re-engagement with Kant’s famous distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason – each of which expresses different and epistemologically opposed critical methods of rational justification. As

80

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

we saw in chapter 1, whereas theoretical reason refers to the applied scientific methods through which we produce knowledge of our empirical world, practical reason concerns the general human capacity to reflect and decide on how to act on the basis of a commanding moral imperative. Although Kant always remained committed to scientific knowledge, he came to limit the latter to objects of possible experience and to consider ideas of metaphysics – including theology and morality – as matters of rational faith. For Kant, the importance of this delimitation of knowledge hinged on the fact that it affirmed his commitment to truthfulness while at the same time preserving a space for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”38 With this famous statement, Kant set the basis of a distinction between scientific explanation and normative evaluation that would feed retrospectively into the philosophy of value at precisely the moment when Hegelian and other historicizing accounts of the metaphysical unity of “the true” and “the good” began to lose their wider appeal. As Hans Joas puts it: “The concept of ‘value’ takes the place once occupied by the Platonic concept of the ‘good’ in the philosophical tradition. However, whereas the ‘good’ could, according to this tradition, be accorded a status ascertainable either by rational contemplation of the cosmos or through divine revelation, and thus had a ‘being’ – even a higher being than other existents – there is attached to the concept of ‘value’ an ineradicable reference to the valuing subject.”39 Nietzsche’s key contribution to the philosophy of value hinges on his reformulation of truth itself as a value. Nietzsche articulates this “breakthrough” in the context of a tension he identifies between Kant’s commitment to scientific intellectual integrity and his unwillingness to ask where this prior commitment to the ultimate value of truth comes from. In a tremendous show of courage and intellectual insight, Kant announced the end of traditional metaphysics and exposed for us the tragic limits of rational knowledge and understanding. But, “like a fox who strays back into his cage,” he sought to assuage popular fears over the weak epistemological bases of knowledge by inventing a new “noumenal” basis that would forever remain unquestioned since, by definition, we can never really know anything directly about it.40 Had he had the courage to question the moral “thou shall not lie” and ask about the origins of this “will to truth,” Kant would have been forced to recognize that truth

Nihilism

81

is ultimately nothing but an expression of our species’ desire for growth and self-preservation: All our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions of preservation and growth. Trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, therefore the valuation of logic, proves only their usefulness for life, proved by experience – not that something is true. That a great deal of belief must be present; that judgments may be ventured; that doubt concerning all essential values is lacking – that is the precondition of every living thing and its life. Therefore, what is needed is that something must be held to be true – not that something is true. “The real and the apparent world” – I have traced this antithesis back to value relations.41 As this statement indicates, Nietzsche follows Kant in his claim that we cannot, on the basis of experience, ascend to knowledge beyond the finite and conditioned character of the empirical world. He also adopts Kant’s view that we impose categories on the world in order to make our experience intelligible. But for him, as for Hume, the fact that we always experience nature under the guidance of unempirical conceptual categories means neither that nature is necessarily structured by these categories nor that there exists a domain of reality from which we are excluded.42 While acknowledging the necessity and desirability of such judgments, ideas, concepts, and perspectives for forms of life to exist and prosper, Nietzsche rejects the idea that any of them holds the epistemological status assumed by those who posit these perspectives as foundational truth claims: “We do not consider the falsity of a judgment as itself an objection to a judgment; this is perhaps where our new language will sound most foreign. The question is how far the judgment promotes and preserves life, how well it preserves, and perhaps even cultivates, the type.”43 By opening the possibility of other synthetic a priori truths in this manner, Nietzsche wants to raise more explicitly the issue of the relative value of alternative truths, transforming Kant’s critical project of legislation into a critical project of valuation: “we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined – and so we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which these values grew up, developed and changed.”44

82

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

We will return to examine Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s epistemology more substantively in the next chapter. For the moment, the important point is that the need for a revaluation of values that Nietzsche identifies during the 1880s stems from an overestimation of reason that science and enlightenment philosophy have revealed in the metaphysical and moral narratives through which we have fabricated our values, ideals, goals, and understandings of the world under Christianity. Nietzsche refers to those supra-sensible constructions as the “highest values” to emphasize the fundamental constitutive role that they have played in the history of Western civilization by regulating the individual’s relationship to the self, to others, and to the community. These highest values range from traditional moral prescriptions such as pity, charity, forgiveness, penitence, and compassion to more abstract and encompassing structuring concepts such as justice, freedom, progress, unity, purpose, universality, peace, and truth itself. What Nietzsche calls the crisis of European nihilism in this context designates the historical process by which we come to terms with this new, terrifying situation: Final conclusion: All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world – all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination – and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naivete of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things.45 Nietzsche’s account of European nihilism thus rests on three closely interrelated analytical claims that we must clearly understand if we are to grasp the political consequences that he associates with the phenomenon. First, as a socio-cultural condition of disorientation and despair, nihilism is induced by the fact that the ideals in the realization of which our life has hitherto found its meaning have lost their ability to inspire creative agency because of the realization that those ideals can never be fulfilled in this world: “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.”46 As Nietzsche emphasizes, nihilism is experienced at that point “not because the displeasure at

Nihilism

83

existence has become greater than before but because one has come to mistrust any ‘meaning’ in suffering, indeed in existence.”47 Thus, unlike in Heidegger, Sartre, and other influential twentieth-century interpretations, the nauseous anxiety that Nietzsche associates with the experience of nihilism is not intrinsic to the human encounter with the ontological nihil or a manifestation of some sort of phenomenological intuition of “Being-in-itself.”48 Rather, it is the cultural consequence of a frustrated idealism: “Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a ‘meaning’ in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the ‘in vain,’ insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure – being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long.”49 Second, nihilism is not only a socio-cultural condition but also a philosophical problem that carries its own radicalizing logic of terror. It unfolds in European history as the long agony of something that was moribund from the very beginning: “For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals – because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these ‘values’ really had.”50 Drawing on his earlier account of Socratic rationalism, Nietzsche traces the origins of the problem to the pact that Plato concluded with science and mathematics, for what Plato found truly awe-inspiring about mathematics is the fact it gives us access to eternal entities, which contrast with the apparently changing character and corruptible nature of all things in our surrounding environment. He therefore saw to it that philosophy should extend the timelessness of mathematical entities to everything that is with his theory of ideas (or ideal forms), depreciating everything that presents itself to our senses to the ontological status of a distorted version of the “true world” of immutable entities to which philosophy can provides access. This is the irrational and life-denying leap of faith that Nietzsche identifies at the heart of the entire edifice of Western metaphysics. It concerns the arbitrary inference of the existence of “unconditioned substances and identical things” from the conditioned character of an empirical world characterized by pluralism and change, which metaphysics simultaneously and illogically demotes to the status of an error:

84

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

This world is apparent: consequently there is a true world; – this world is conditional: consequently there is an unconditioned world; – this world is full of contradiction: consequently there is a world free of contradiction; – this world is a world of becoming: consequently there is a world of being: – all false conclusions (blind trust in reason: if A exists, then the opposite concept B must also exist). It is suffering that inspires these conclusions: fundamentally they are desires that such a world should exist; in the same way, to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer: the ressentiment of metaphysicians against actuality is here creative.51 According to Nietzsche, Christianity simply democratized access to the eternity and immortality of ideal forms, ruling mercilessly over Europe for two thousand years by transforming Plato’s “true world of ideas” into the eschatological notion of a “true world beyond.”52 With the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus and the analytic geometry of Descartes, however, the deceptive character of the original pact between philosophy and science came to light. The eternal forms of mathematics began to reveal themselves for the mere constructions of the human understanding that they really are. After being fostered by Christianity for centuries as the means whereby one acquires the appropriate relationship to God, the will to truth began to turn against the moral interpretation of the world that made it intelligible in the first place, exposing it as an indefensible error: “and now the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant. Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation – needs that now appear to us as needs for untruth; on the other hand, the value for which we endure life seems to hinge on these needs.”53 It is in this context that Nietzsche refers to Kant as the “delayer and mediator” par excellence.54 By placing God and metaphysics beyond the possibility of any further critical investigation, he managed to translate the “true world beyond” of Christianity back into philosophy, avoiding a decisive acknowledgement of the psychological needs lying at the origins of our religious beliefs and moral values. His was a hidden gift to theologians and transcendentalists of all sorts: “he showed them a secret path on which, from now on, they could, independently, and with the best scientific decorum,

Nihilism

85

pursue ‘their heart’s desires.’”55 But the will to truth was too strong. Darwin’s theory of evolution quickly dispensed with this need to provide a proof or refutation for the existence of a creator God, leaving man alone in a chaotic universe in which he no longer occupies a privileged position among all the other beasts: Has not man’s self-deprecation, his will to self-deprecation, been unstoppably on the increase since Copernicus? Gone, alas, is his faith in his dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceableness in the rankordering of beings, – he has become animal, literally, unqualifiedly and unreservedly an animal, man who in his earlier faiths was almost God (“child of God,” “man of God”) ... Since Copernicus, man seems to have been on a downward path, – now he seems to be rolling faster and faster away from the centre – where to? into nothingness? into the “piercing sensation of his nothingness”? 56 This takes us to the third main aspect of Nietzsche’s diagnosis. When Nietzsche argues that the highest values devalue themselves he does not mean that we are left without values; rather, his claim is that this process of dissolution driven by the sincere instantiation of Christian values leads to a proliferation of competing values, the relations between which become unsecured. This is what he calls the “death of God.” Nietzsche appropriates the expression from German religious thought and Hegelian philosophy to convey the notion that what has died is not only the theistic God of Christianity but also all metaphysical ideals giving meaning to the world.57 It designates both the moment of revelation that nihilism has been at the heart of Western civilization for two millennia and the fact that awareness of this process of dissolution has slowly begun to seep into the wider public sphere.58 Here, the triumphant, self-satisfied atheism that one finds in Marx and other nineteenth-century humanists turns into the anguished atheism of the worshipper deprived of its idols. For honesty compels all serious individuals, on examination of their conscience, to admit that the dissolution of the “true world” of Christianity necessarily leads to the problematization of an alleged end to human history and natural evolution.59 What also loses all plausibility is the notion that the totality of phenomena obeys a cosmic unity and finality of which we are only a tiny part, as if by deciphering the scientific laws of the totality of the system or of the organization we could

86

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

shed light on our destiny and our duties, which would allow us to live in harmony with the regulation of the whole: “‘Everything lacks meaning’ (the untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false).”60 Yet to say that all is “false” is to still assume that the unconditional certainty of Platonic-Judeo-Christian conceptions of “truth” is the only way of understanding the world and rendering it meaningful, but that this certainty is nowhere to be found. Caught between this persistent longing to believe and an intransigent refusal to indulge that longing, the scepticism of modern man thus radicalizes itself into a more dogmatic “belief in unbelief” that simply mirrors and (negatively) perpetuates the essence of a metaphysical tradition that has lost its justification in thought:61 “rebound from ‘God is truth’ to the fanatical faith ‘All is false.’”62 Ultimately, what modern man loses in this process is not only the old Christian tables of values but also his will and capacity to participate in any projects requiring deep, unwavering commitment. Everything becomes trivial: Modern man believes in experimental fashion now in this value, now in another – at the risk of abandoning them altogether: the sphere of obsolete and deposed values grows incessantly; the void and indigence in values is growing and becoming ever more perceptible: this movement is irresistible – despite the tremendous attempt to delay its effects – Modern man finally risks a generalised critique of values; he recognises their origins; he knows sufficiently to not believe in any values anymore: this is the pathos, the new shiver.63 Nietzsche thus foresees that nihilism will have disastrous significances for politics and international relations insofar as it marks the collapse of the main belief structures that had for so long provided individuals and groups with a relatively stable sense of security and social situatedness, despite the ubiquity of exploitation and violence in human affairs: “It was morality that protected life against despair and the leap into nothing, among men and classes who were violated and oppressed by men: for it is the experience of being powerless against men, not against nature, that generates the most desperate embitterment against existence.”64

Nihilism

87

Anticipating the psychological literature on neurosis (the tendency to reassure oneself with completely inadequate answers to existential questions),65 Nietzsche posits a strong relationship between the dissolution of dominant beliefs systems and the explosion in supply and demand of mass political ideologies during the second half of the nineteenth century. He elaborates vaguely on the temporality of this relationship in his notebooks by distinguishing between different ideal types of what he calls “incomplete nihilism.” This is to emphasize the yet-to-be-overcome nature of the crisis. As he explains, incomplete nihilism occurs when faith in traditional values has been lost but the desire for the absolutes that characterized such faith remains in place. It is the nihilism of those who are incapable of coping with the disintegration of Christian absolutes and who consequently transfer God’s redemptive functions to History, the Nation-State, Empire, Class, Science, Technology, the Party, the Revolution, Race, Capitalism, and other such substitutes, without realizing that it is the metaphysics animating those ideals that is the cause of their alienation in the first place: “Incomplete nihilism; its forms: we live in the midst of it. Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluating our values so far: they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute.”66 Incomplete nihilism can then express and radicalize itself passively or actively. Passive nihilism follows from the realization that the compensatory ideals of incomplete nihilism are just as illusory as the old ones. The inevitable conclusion is that things should not be as they are, but how things should be is an unattainable fantasy: “everything egoistic has come to disgust us (even though we realize the impossibility of the un-egoistic).”67 This leads to a nagging feeling of negativity and indifference, inducing those afflicted by the condition to seek to mitigate the painful feeling of powerlessness either through an obsessive but dispirited quest for material comfort and hedonistic enjoyment or through a withdrawal into the disenchanted retraction of a priestly ascetic existence: “so that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegration – and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic, etc.”68 By contrast, the active nihilist seeks to destroy all values because they are seen as wanting with regard to an overpowering creative

88

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

need. Whereas passive nihilism is a “decline and recession of the power of the spirit,” active nihilism is “a sign of increased power of the spirit” but remains incapable of creative deeds and is therefore relentlessly destructive.69 Active nihilism is premised on the conclusion that if the world is so hopelessly resistant to the realization of one’s most esteemed goals and ideals, then it might as well be destroyed. It is the terrorist, insurgent voluntarism of someone “who would like to stamp as a binding law and compulsion what is most personal, singular, narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, and who as it were takes revenge on all things by forcing, imprinting, branding his image on them, the image of his torture.”70 For despite being an individualized and deeply introspective experience, active nihilism is ultimately about demonstrating to others one’s commitments, allegiances, and convictions. It is precisely because no one can possibly know what my pain and disorientation feels like that I want everyone to acknowledge how I feel.71 The more one doubts and suffers, the more one escalates the radicalism of one’s actions. As in Nechayev’s Catechism, it is about demonstrating that one is willing to go all the way, that one is capable of the worst, but without ever assuming responsibility for one’s action: Nihilism does not only contemplate the “in vain!” nor is it merely the belief that everything deserves to perish: one helps to destroy. – This is, if you will, illogical; but the nihilist does not believe that one needs to be logical. – It is the condition of strong spirits and wills, and these do not find it possible to stop with the No of “judgment”: their nature demands the No of the deed. The reduction to nothing by judgment is seconded by the reduction to nothing by hand.72 ressentiment

a n d t h e psycho-poli ti cs o f n ih il ism

In reality, of course, the ideal types that Nietzsche sketches out in these disjointed statements overlap and feed into one another in all sorts of socio-political combinations and temporalities. The intimate relationship between metaphysical frustration, suffering, and violence that he identifies in the fabric of these intersecting temporalities of nihilism is given a more explicitly psycho-political slant in his account of what he calls ressentiment.73

Nihilism

89

In the English language, the word “resentment” describes a feeling of indignant anger at some act, statement, individual or group considered to be the cause of an injustice, injury or insult.74 Nietzsche uses the French word ressentiment to signify not just the bitter emotion of resentment as such but also the intricate set of beliefs, ideas, and institutions that foster it, along with the debilitating consequences of this vengeful emotional process for politics and international relations. Thus, whereas resentment is generally understood to denote a legitimate sense of anger prompted by the perception of a wrongful injury, ressentiment denotes a malicious and self-deceptive reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one’s own impotence onto an external actor. The aim is to achieve temporary psychic alleviation from one’s condition of anxiety and suffering by cultivating more violent emotions. For, unlike hate, rage or effective anger, which tend to consume immediately and rapidly, ressentiment is an internalized reaction – a postponed vengeance in which violence moves between different spiritual, physical, and symbolic forms.75 It grows out of an initial trauma associated with the denial of a particular sense of justice, and its charge accumulates out of a multiplicity of negative feelings such as spite, envy, shame, disappointment, vulnerability, and personal inadequacy. The whole process hinges on one’s willingness to self-harm in order to be able to harm others. As Nietzsche explains in The Genealogy of Morality: For every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit who is receptive to distress, – in short, for a living being upon whom he can release his emotions, actually or in effigy, on some pretext or other: because the release of emotions is the greatest attempt at relief, or should I say, at anaesthetizing on the part of the sufferer, his involuntarily longed for narcotic against pain of any kind ... The sufferers, one and all, are frighteningly willing and inventive in their pretexts for painful emotions … they rummage through the bowels of their past and present for obscure, questionable stories that will allow them to wallow in tortured suspicion, and intoxicate themselves with their own poisonous wickedness.76 Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment anticipates the Freudian “death drive” (Todestrieb).77 In both cases, the agent seeks to derive

90

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

pleasure out of pain by creating a condition of equality in displeasure, prohibition, and destruction. The particularity of this ascetic non-egoistical behaviour is that it has nothing to do with what is normally considered as the opposite of egoism – namely, altruism.78 On the contrary, ressentiment works as a destructive denaturation of the life organism as a whole and for the sake of which the man of ressentiment is willing to forgo all utilitarian social advantages insofar as this spiteful investment in the wound becomes essential to the construction of his subjectivity: For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here an unparalleled ressentiment rules, that of an unfulfilled instinct and power-will that wants to be master, not over something in life, but over life itself and its deepest, strongest, most profound conditions; here, an attempt is made to use power to block the sources of the power; here, the green eye of spite turns on physiological growth itself, in particular the manifestation of this in beauty and joy; while satisfaction is looked for and found in failure, decay, pain, misfortune, ugliness, voluntary deprivation, destruction of selfhood, self-flagellation and self-sacrifice.79 Nietzsche situates the aggressive psychology of ressentiment in the relationship between consciousness and memory. In Nietzsche, as in Freud, consciousness is by nature reactive and stands as the negative pole to memory in the sense that it reacts to stimuli without necessarily recording them. Despite its being a nuisance in many mundane life situations, Nietzsche argues that forgetfulness in this deeper psychological context plays an essential, positive, and active role in allowing for new excitements and in facilitating action. For without forgetfulness, we would be constantly confronted with the dizzying Heraclitean reality of permanent change and infinite meaningless data within all space and time: “a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being … would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming.” Without forgetfulness, we would also be paralyzed by constant reflections over the potential consequences of our actions, crushed under the weight of previous generational achievements and extraordinary deeds: “A man who wanted to feel historically through and through

Nihilism

91

would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic.” 80 In ressentiment, the reception of new stimuli is obstructed by a pathological expansion of memory over consciousness.81 As Deleuze puts it, when memory replaces new stimuli in this manner, “reaction ceases to be acted in order to become something felt (senti).”82 Max Scheler (who introduced Nietzsche’s concept into sociology in the 1910s) describes this process as a recurrent “re-living” of antagonistic sentiments that are repeatedly relegated to the margins of consciousness and transformed due to a felt inability to satisfy them: “The continual reliving of the emotion sinks it more deeply into the centre of the personality, but concomitantly removes it from the person’s zone of action and expression. It is not a mere intellectual recollection of the emotion and of the events to which it ‘responded’ – it is a reexperiencing of the emotion itself, a renewal of the original feeling.”83 The reflexive moment of abstention in this process is induced by the assessment that an instant reaction would most likely deepen one’s sense of injury and humiliation. Revenge thus becomes the affective fulcrum in a progression of reactive feelings and emotions. These can move from envy and rancour all the way to vindictiveness, spite, and a malicious impulse to demean and undermine others. Some of these feelings, such as hate and envy, have specific objects. But others, like rancour and the malicious urge to detract, are more generalized and are not necessarily attached to the particular and definite “causes” with which they arise and disappear.84 As Nietzsche explains, whatever the particularities of the specific case, the fundamental characteristic of this complex sensorial and cognitive matrix is that it always expresses a reactive position of weakness that will deplete the mental strength of its agent even further as time goes by: Since any sort of reaction wears you out too quickly, you do not react at all: this is the reasoning. And nothing burns you up more quickly than the affects of ressentiment. Annoyance, abnormal vulnerability, inability to take revenge, the desire, the thirst for revenge, every type of poisoning – these are definitely the most harmful ways for exhausted people to react: they inevitably lead to a rapid consumption of nervous energy and a pathological increase in harmful excretions, of bile into the stomach, for instance.85

92

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

Nietzsche hereby draws an important distinction between the repression of the affects constitutive of ressentiment and the reflective control and re-evaluative renunciation of those affects based on the acceptance of one’s inability to satisfy them. As Bernard Reginster argues: “repression, as Nietzsche appears to understand it, is the ultimate compromise of the person who values a desire, believes he is unable to satisfy it, but neither (reflectively) abandons its value nor resigns himself to his impotence.”86 This compromise then leads to a sophistic inversion of the hierarchy of values that the subject of ressentiment is unable to fulfill. What happens is that the impotence and servility of the agent are transmuted into signs of merit, while the instruments and achievements of those targeted are condemned because of their unfairly arrogated or arbitrary nature and are devalued from whatever morally transcendent point of view the subjects of ressentiment construct for themselves. To put it differently, ressentiment is not about substituting a genuine – that is, empirically lived – axiological point of view to a predominant order of values but, rather, about the vengeful formulation of values in contradistinction to the order of values that one enviously attributes to those who benefit most from the prevailing state of affairs. This inverted axiology expresses an alienated insurgency – both because its phenomenology is overdetermined by the looming presence of the original order of values that the man or ressentiment is unable to attain and because this mendacious jealousy hinges on a bitter acceptance of one’s own subjugation at the same time as it appears to be negating it.87 The first book of the Genealogy of Morality polemically traces the origins of the submissive revolt of ressentiment back to early Christianity, which replaced an expressive religion of rituals with a repressive, ascetic religion of pity and guilt that falsifies all genuine sensations and their realization through a compensatory valuation of heaven and hell.88 Nietzsche speculates that the event took hold historically in the context of a struggle for political superiority within the noble class between the priestly caste and the chivalric warrior caste. Priests, who are physically weak due to a notoriously unhealthy lifestyle based on the “avoidance of meat,” “fasting,” and “sexual abstinence,” were defeated by the “powerful physicality” and “blossoming, rich and effervescent good health” of the knights. As a consequence of this defeat, the priests developed a pervasive sense of powerlessness and moved on to reject the value of socio-political

Nihilism

93

supremacy altogether, condemning at the same time the whole range of attitudes and behaviour that helped gain and maintain it: the ascetic priest thereby prescribes, when he prescribes “love thy neighbour,” what is actually the arousal of the strongest, most life affirming impulse, albeit in the most cautious dose, – the will to power ... All the sick and sickly strive instinctively for a herd-organization, out of a longing to shake off dull lethargy and the feeling of weakness: the ascetic priest senses this instinct and promotes it; wherever there are herds, it is the instinct of weakness that has willed the herd and the cleverness of the priests that has organized it.89 What Nietzsche calls the “slave revolt in morality” in this context denotes the historical process through which the weak developed a new type of anger based on a deferred act of retribution designed to seduce the aristocratic masters into internalizing their dangerous affects and becoming slaves as well.90 As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Nietzsche places anarchist terrorism at the far-left end of the slave morality spectrum, an indication “that the tempo of this morality is still much too slow and lethargic for those who have less patience, those who are sick or addicted to the herd instinct.”91 But it is important to understand that, although the noble masters in this narrative do value socio-political supremacy and “feel themselves to be men of a higher rank,” their possessing or valuing of socio-political power is not fundamental to their possessing a noble character. For what is at stake in the distinction between master and slave moralities is “psychic, not physical strength, and nobility as an ideal type of character rather than an empirical socio-political situation.”92As Nietzsche emphasizes in Beyond Good and Evil: “in all higher and more mixed cultures, attempts to negotiate between these moralities also appear, although more frequently the two are confused and there are mutual misunderstandings. In fact, you sometimes find them sharply juxtaposed – inside the same person even, within a single soul.”93 The point is that ressentiment is by no means exclusive to the stigmatized minorities or those we may want to identify as the defeated or victims of the class struggle. It can also be a key motive for the organized hatred simmering within the majorities who fear that the minorities might “cheat them out” of their socio-economic and

94

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

cultural advantages. Nietzsche finds that this type of ressentiment is particularly strong among the anti-Semites, the nationalists, and the defenders of the ancient regime (see chapter 5). For one of the common claims of ressentiment is the right to persist in one’s current social position and not to have to make an effort when confronted with the possibility of losing one’s socio-economic privileges. Given that the distribution of entitlements within a polity normally reflects the distribution of power, “more privileged subjects will have a greater recourse to narratives of injury. The more access subjects have to public resources, the more access they may have to the capacity to mobilise narratives of injury within the public domain.”94 According to Nietzsche, the entire Christian era was an epoch in which an ethics of deferring indignation and spite was earnestly implemented under the guidance of the ascetic ideal. Whereas the heroes of Greek myths and literature expressed anger in immediate release and glorious sacrifice, Christianity proactively subjected anger and violence to a process of repression, internalization, and transference, prescribing the commandments, proscriptions, and prohibitions that collectively provided sufferers with a framework for salvation.95 For what is even more unacceptable than suffering from the slave point of view is the senselessness of this suffering: “pain always asks for the cause, while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself and not look back.”96 By disinvesting suffering of its absurd character and transmuting it into a “deserved” punishment, this imposition of a form of meaningful rationality on pain worked as an oblique strategy to increase the feeling of power of those who lack the strength to do it by confronting the world as it is in its totality: “suffering was interpreted; the enormous emptiness seemed filled.”97 But the death of God finally revealed the ascetic ideal for what it always was: an elaborate, cultural strategy of self-preservation that, unbeknownst to even its most dedicated protagonists, mobilized its adherents in a disguised program of prolonged self-destruction. As Nietzsche writes at the end of the Genealogy of Morality: It is absolutely impossible for us to conceal what was actually expressed by that whole willing that derives its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic, even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from appearance, transience, growth, death, wishing,

Nihilism

95

longing itself – all that means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life, but it is and remains a will! … man still prefers to will nothingness, than not will.98 The new age of political extremes that Nietzsche anticipates as he surveys the ideological landscape of the 1880s reflects the disencumbering of ressentiment from the cultural bulwarks that Christianity had devised to contain its most savage expressions.99 Whereas Christianity had sought to individualize and redirect ressentiment inwards through guilt, modern political ideologies facilitate its externalization into fanaticism and proactive vengeance by transmuting the “deserved” suffering of Christianity into a revolting injustice and instituting spite as the main “anaesthetizing” bonding experience. As Nietzsche explains: “fanaticism is the only ‘strength of the will’ that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, as a type of hypnosis of the entire sensual-intellectual system to the benefit of the excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling which is now dominant – the Christian calls it his faith.”100 Vengeance works in similar ways. Except in this case, the soothing effect does not follow mainly from the reactive discharge of the avenger’s uncontrolled affects but from the increased feeling of power that he enjoys at the perception of the suffering inflicted on the recipient of his vengeance. Through this exchange of suffering, those who enact this vengeance are capable of abandoning all human decency precisely because of their belief that it is necessary to even the score. Nietzsche thus anticipates that political conflicts will acquire a limitless character not only because of the redemptive nature of modern political ideologies but also because it is precisely the violation of moral limitations on the use of force associated with Christianity that will make this redemptive politics so attractive to the agent of ressentiment: “unbelief to the point of martyrdom.”101 Unlike Dostoevsky, who sought to confront nihilism through a reaffirmation of Christianity, Nietzsche welcomes the death of God as the greatest deed man has ever accomplished because it is a precondition for “a higher history than all history up to now!”102 But he expects that men will have to be brought to the abyss before they can become aware of their responsibility for their fate. Against the neurotic pessimism of the age, Nietzsche argues for a “pessimism of strength” that will harden occidental humanity and forever break

96

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

its addiction to a residual Christianity that maintains life at the lowest level.103 Like Zarathustra (the main character in Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Nietzsche wants us to make a clear choice between the hedonistic existence of the “last man” who rules through conformity and the commanding creativity of the Übermensch (overman) who is willing to risk it all for the enhancement of mankind.104 As he writes in a note from the early 1880s: “If we do not turn the death of God into a perpetual victory over ourselves, we will have to pay dearly for this loss.”105 It is in this affirmative spirit that Nietzsche announces himself in his notebooks as “the first perfect nihilist,” who by virtue of his solitary intellectual experimentation has found a vantage point from which to apprehend the problem of European nihilism in historical retrospect – “leaving it behind outside himself.”106 In line with the tragic vision that he sketched out in his early writings, Nietzsche’s perfect nihilism acknowledges the power of illusion and falsification and finds pleasure in incertitude. With uncompromising intellectual honesty, it denies that the world and anything in it has intrinsic meaning and intrinsic value, disclosing with delight that the only fundamental value for man is valuation as such: “It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meanings in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself.”107 As will become clearer in the next chapter, the opposition between incomplete nihilism (the disease) and perfect nihilism (the cure) is not necessarily one between different sets of values but, rather, has to do primarily with the process through which values are generated. Insofar as incomplete nihilism is a flight from the material world into the transcendence of a world beyond, Nietzsche pleads for the unity of reason, affects, and will, and demands that we make our peace with the immanent determinism pertaining to nature. What matters most here is not whether our values have “validity” but whether our values have value for life. In Nietzsche’s eyes, this hazardous process of revaluation must begin with a brutal and sincere exposition of the syllogisms of reason generative of the ressentiment at the origins of our most esteemed ideals.

4

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power Those wars, those religions, those extreme moralities, those fanatical arts, that partisan hatred – this is the great comedy of powerlessness indulging in an illusory feeling of power and wants at last to be synonymous with strength – always followed by a relapse into pessimism and laments! You lack power over yourselves! Nietzsche, Nachlass 1880

The Birth of Tragedy sought to show how the misplaced scientific optimism driving the Socratic-Kantian philosophical enterprise had historically turned on itself and laid the foundation for a rehabilitation of myth and tragic culture. In similar yet different ways, Nietzsche goes back to Kant during the 1880s motivated by the realization that the scientific “will to truth” contributes to the demythologizing of the highest values, paving the way for a revaluation that will induce Europeans to think differently about culture and politics. Kant’s philosophy is important for Nietzsche in this context both because it presages and helps him understand the convergence of epistemological and political nihilism that he observes in the history of the nineteenth century and because this understanding informs the experimental interpretation of “the world as will to power” that he contemplates as a counterweight to European nihilism during the same period. Nietzsche’s much-reviled phrase “will to power” first appears in a fragment from 1877.1 It is first articulated as a concept in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) as a redevelopment of the notions of the “desire for power” (Machtgelüste), the “feeling of power,” and the “belief in power,” which Nietzsche introduces in The Wanderer and His Shadow,2 Daybreak,3 and The Gay Science,4 respectively. The phrase appears in Part I in “On a Thousand and One Goals” and

98

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

then in Part II in “On Self-Overcoming” and “On Redemption,” where Zarathustra announces that the will to power is the desire for greater strength, increase, and growth – the evaluative drive and dominant feature of all living things.5 The will to power then becomes central to one of the many interrelated phases in the development of a magnum opus that Nietzsche begins to work on in 18856 until he eventually abandons the project in August 1888.7 Nietzsche mentions this Hauptwerk in progress to his readers in the Genealogy of Morality (1887), announcing that it will be a history of nihilism entitled The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values.8 In this formulation, Nietzsche claims to have found “the principle and task of a counter-movement that in some future will take the place of perfect nihilism – but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it.”9 Nietzsche also uses the phrase frequently in other published works and unpublished notebooks from the mid- to late 1880s without ever systematically defining it conceptually, leaving much open to debate and interpretation.10 Historically, a great deal of misunderstanding concerning Nietzsche’s account of life as the will to power in the domains of politics and international relations stems from a common tendency to interpret the will to power as a short-hand for the universal struggle for domination between individuals and groups of all kinds, reducing this highly complex and multidimensional thought experiment to its most superficial elements. Oswald Spengler’s influential appropriation of Nietzsche’s concept in interwar Germany is a particularly good case in point.11 Consider his reply to a poll on the possibility of world peace undertaken by the American magazine Cosmopolitan in January 1936: Life is a struggle involving plants, animals, and humans. It is a struggle between individuals, social classes, peoples, and nations, and it can take the form of economic, social, political, and military competition. It is a struggle for the power to make one’s will prevail, to exploit one’s advantage, or to advance one’s opinion of what is just or expedient. When other means fail, recourse will be taken time and again to the ultimate means: violence. An individual who uses violence can be branded a criminal, a class can be called revolutionary or traitorous, a people bloodthirsty. But that does not alter the facts. Modern world-communism calls

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

99

its wars “uprisings,” imperialist nations describe theirs as “pacification of foreign peoples.” And if the world existed as a unified state, wars would likewise be referred to as “uprisings.” The distinctions here are purely verbal.12 Spengler’s was one of many nationalist and National Socialist “adaptations” circulating in right-wing intellectual circles at the time.13 On the left, Leon Trotsky,14 Georg Lukács,15 and many others relied on similar anthropological readings of Nietzsche’s theses on power and human agency to construct his philosophy as a counter-insurgency manual for the forces of German imperialism. Hans Morgenthau’s influential conflation of the will to power with what he calls the “lust for power” and the animus dominandi in Scientific Man and Power Politics (1947) also comes to mind in this context.16 As discussed in the introduction, all of these interpretations were in one way or another made possible and given credibility by the editorial forgeries of Nietzsche’s sister.17 Yet, even after the “de-Nazification” of Nietzsche’s legacy, anthropological readings of the will to power as some sort of bestial will to domination have remained a decisive obstacle to the understanding of both his account of nihilism and his contribution to political thought.18 This chapter examines Nietzsche’s mature engagement with Kant in this context. More specifically, it explores and extrapolates Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s vision of a modernity without wars from his polemics against the perceived shortcomings of Kant’s critical philosophy. The aim is to further illuminate the nature and character of Nietzsche’s attack on the idealism of modern political thought and to get a better sense of the will to power hypothesis that he sketches out as he lays out the structure of an epoch-making schism between ethical reflection and the production of rational knowledge pertaining to the nature of the political.

kan t a n d t h e p o l it ic al transformati on o f t h e e u ro p e an order Before turning to Nietzsche’s critique, a brief clarification of the basic conceptual premises linking Kant’s critical philosophy to his political thought will be useful. Kant himself expounded those important connections in various sections and passages of his three critiques as well as in series of essays written and published between

100

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

1784 and 1798. This includes “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” (1786), “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason” (1793), “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), and “The Metaphysics of Morals” (1797). In these texts, Kant tells his readers of the “depravity” of a European order in which “each state sees its own majesty … precisely in not having to submit to any external legal constraint,” and in which “the glory of its rulers consists of his power to order thousands of people to immolate themselves for a cause which does not truly concern them, while he need not himself incur any danger whatsoever.”19 Considering war and lawlessness to be the most significant threats to republican freedom and the rights of man, he proposed to address this “Westphalian predicament” by means of three normative-institutional developments with which international relations scholars today have become very familiar: (1) the universalization of the rights of man through the voluntary adoption of the republican state form by eventually all political communities; (2) the strengthening and development of international law, along with the establishment of a federation of states that would facilitate the regulation of conflicts and eventually eliminate wars between states; and (3) the institutionalization of basic cosmopolitan rights that would ensure protection to all foreigners and form the basis of a universal civil society that would complement the development of international law. Crucially, the cosmopolitan point of view from which Kant articulated his scheme for what he hoped would be the future of world politics rested on an exposition and intimation of what he believed human freedom can achieve, even in the dangerous and volatile domain of international politics. So much he had made clear when insisting on the distinction between theoretical and practical reason in his earlier Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The transformation of the international order, Kant wrote: requires that we should abstract at the outset from the present hindrances, which perhaps do not arise inevitably out of human nature, but are rather occasioned by neglect of genuine ideas in the process of legislation. For there is nothing more harmful, or more unworthy of a philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to an allegedly contrary experience …. For no-one can or ought to decide what the highest degree may be at which mankind may have to stop

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

101

progressing, and hence how wide a gap may still of necessity remain between the idea and its execution. For this will depend on freedom, which can transcend any limit we care to impose.20 In this framework, the task of theoretical reason is to show that the impossibility of progress towards perpetual peace cannot be demonstrated by appealing to experience. Although Kant does not maintain that men have a moral duty to believe in the eventual realization of this moral “kingdom of ends,” he asserts that men have a duty to will those ends and therefore to act consistently with this will – as long as the unattainability of perpetual peace cannot be decisively demonstrated. This is where practical reason comes into action. Once practical reason has established its categorical proscription on war, the issue of whether or not perpetual peace is possible is no longer relevant. What matters from then on is that men have a duty to act as if perpetual peace is achievable and, thus, proceed to set up the republican institutions that are required to this end. For Kant, this is simply the liberation of the moral categorical imperative from the dogmatism of theoretical reason: “Seek ye first the kingdom of pure Practical Reason and its righteousness, and your object (the blessing of Perpetual Peace) will be added unto you.”21 As we have seen, Kant envisaged the aesthetic and teleological standpoints in this context as reassuring resources for the encouragement of moral agency in a world that can otherwise seem brutally unresponsive to our highest human aspirations. Although anxious about the politics of his time, he saw sufficient evidence in the age of enlightenment to allow himself to hope that man’s freedom could be brought into conformity “with some definite plan of nature.”22 His suggestion was that, given what we know about the cognitive process through which the mind processes data, we could legitimately apprehend the world as if all other forms of nature existed directly or indirectly for the purpose of their relation to man, who stood alone outside of this process because of his faculty of reason. Since the mechanisms of the natural world show that there is purposiveness in parts of the universe, argued Kant, it is by no means irrational to assume that there is purpose and meaning concealed in the blind contingency of history. And because reason can neither legitimately prove nor disprove that such a purpose exists, we can allow ourselves to have “rational faith” that nature contributes in facilitating our own actions in accordance with the moral law.

102

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

In this account, the end of nature – that is, the meaning that nature gives to history – consists in the development of all the abilities and dispositions of the human species. As Kant explains in section 83 of The Critique of Judgment, it is precisely the selfish inclinations in human nature that nature exploits to foster the general aptitude of man as intelligent being to make use of nature as a means and, thus, to choose freely for himself ends that will culminate in a progressive transformation of politics and international relations.23 Selfishness and malicious appetites beget violence, inequality, and acquisitiveness; but they simultaneously help to develop new technical skills and a sense of appreciation for material comfort, social stability, and arts, leading to counter-measures to tame greed and to eradicate gross inequalities and brutish aggression. In similar ways, this “culture of discipline” pushes men to form ever stronger political units and to seek the acquisition of new territories to fulfill their desire for security, material wealth, and prestige, leading to the proliferation of armed conflicts over the distribution and control of social products. Yet, as the organizational and technological ability of modern states to wage war continuously improves and the ensuing destruction is ever more absolute, men feel compelled to impose legal restrictions on the war-making powers of national executives, slowly moving towards constitutionalizing international relations into a “cosmopolitan whole.” Through this dialectical process, the interdiction and indispensability of immoral means are reconciled historically as the public good emerges out of private vice, social justice out of inequality, and peace out of war: “Though war is an unintentional human endeavor (incited by our unbridled passions), yet it is also a deeply hidden and perhaps intentional endeavor of the supreme wisdom, if not to establish, then at least to prepare the way for lawfulness along with the freedom of states, and thereby for a unified system of them with a moral basis.”24

s u bv e rt in g t h e m o r a l it y-s ecuri ty nexus That Nietzsche hardly ever engages directly and explicitly with Kant on the question of war and peace is surprising but by no means incomprehensible. From his Dionysian perspective, the ideal of an eternal peace established on abstract principles of reason would have appeared as a palliative fiction expressive of the worst desperate attempt to neutralize the unruly pluralism of becoming. As

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

103

he writes in the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science (1887): “Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher.”25 In saying this, Nietzsche is obviously not making a case for war but trying to subvert the binary account of war and peace that he associates with the metaphysical ressentiment underpinning Kant’s enlightenment philosophy. The methodological sleight of hand relaying this ressentiment in Kant’s political vision is well conceived. But Nietzsche would have had no difficulty in tracking it down insofar as it reflects the main shortcomings that he identifies with the Kantian critique more generally. As we have just seen, Kant interprets war as a conceptual and institutional problem located in the present inability of human beings to adequately conceive the means and principles by which perpetual peace could be established. In this account, war is read negatively as mere chaos and privation from the teleological standpoint of a fully realized history of reason where the transformative dimensions of war are no longer needed. Although Nietzsche’s engagement with teleology in his formative years is inconclusive, by the time of his first Untimely Meditations (1873) he had already come to the decisive conclusion that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the law-like processes and instances of purposiveness that science observes in nature are coterminous with human interests and cultural developments: “an honest natural scientist believes that the world conforms unconditionally to laws, without however asserting anything as to the ethical or intellectual value of these laws: he would regard any such assertions as the extreme anthropomorphism of a reason that has overstepped the bounds of the permitted.”26 The main issue from Nietzsche’s perspective is therefore not only that war in Kant seems to have no ontological status whatsoever; it is also that Kant failed to make good on his pledge to immanently ground the hypothetical theory of peace from which he then retrospectively interprets war as a negative moment of historical privation. Kant deduced the possibility of perpetual peace a priori from the characteristics of moral beings who enact and obey the moral law. He sought to show the dependence of peace on law, and of law

104

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

on a practical reason that has been freed from the dogmatism of uncritical assertions derived from the phenomenal realm of experience, in favour of a scrupulous adherence to what reason could know a priori because it constitutes its own reality. For Nietzsche, the problem is that reason in Kant’s procedure lacked an empirical method that would have allowed it to explain its own limits and capacity “from within” without granting reason the prerogative of judging itself.27 Unlike Darwin, Kant did not approach reason as a naturalistic phenomenon that can be studied scientifically. Instead, and consequently, he imposed limitations on the realm of theoretical reason posited, in an illogically circular manner, on the basis of a noumenal world of practical reason itself derived from the conditioned character of the empirical world of appearances: “was it not somewhat peculiar to demand of an instrument that it should criticise its own usefulness and suitability? that the intellect itself should ‘know’ its own value, its own capacity, its own limitations was it not even a little absurd?”28 In Nietzsche’s eyes, Kant’s unconditional moral commitment to the “universal kingdom of ends” was yet another expression of his very German way of pursuing ontological security in an existential manner: To create room for his “moral realm” Kant saw himself obliged to posit an undemonstrable world, a logical “Beyond” – it was precisely for that that he had need of his critique of pure reason! In other words: he would not have had need of it if one thing had not been more vital to him than anything else: to render the “moral realm” unassailable, even better incomprehensible to reason – for he felt that a moral order of things was only assailable by reason! In the face of nature and history, Kant was, like every good German of the old stamp, a pessimist; he believed in morality, not because it is demonstrated in nature and history, but in spite of the fact that nature and history continually contradict it.29 Beyond those epistemological issues, what really troubles Nietzsche about Kantian philosophy is the naïve, apolitical interpretation of the social world that follows from the dualism of mind and body that it appropriated from Christian metaphysics. Kant conceived of society in abstract terms as an amalgamation of free and equal “subjects-in-themselves” separated analytically from their naturally conditioned empirical manifestation in thoughts, actions,

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

105

and emotions, and related to each other strictly as proprietors of their own souls and personhoods. This, in turn, led him to envisage autonomy in terms of a self-legislative obedience to certain moral values to be discerned through rational deliberation, free of all psychological cravings and with little regard for the particular societal context within which willing takes place. Nietzsche dismisses Kant’s procedure as a “misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason.”30 In this account, the reflexive “I” that Kant takes to be the source of moral action is not a unitary entity but a multitude of different states, antagonistic drives, feelings, and affects formed through the internalization of social norms and developed out of the combined judgments of others: “The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd.”31 Kant had argued that freedom “can transcend any limit we care to impose,”32 and that “each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law.”33 For Nietzsche, the problem with this abstract conception of freedom is not only that it eclipses the necessity of an order of rank among values but also that it wrongly assumes that the ends that we choose to strive for and that constitute our identity exist prior to or independently of our interaction and conflicts with others: “You call yourself free? Your dominating thought I want to hear, and not that you escaped from a yoke … Free from what?”34 Nietzsche’s point here is that freedom depends on our capacity for agency, and this agency is inevitably shaped and motivated by the thoughts and actions of others. These exert pressure on the pursuit of our goals and desires, and thereby give unity to the plurality of antagonistic inner drives and feelings that we are as individuals. They act as stimulants to creativity and deeds and compel individuals to come up with the “dominating thoughts” needed for the exercise of their freedom, just as they impose limitations on those deeds and cultivate a sense of self-control in front of the levelling “thrill of the infinite and unmeasured” animating liberal narratives of freedom.35 By insisting on the disaggregated and relational character of the self in this manner, Nietzsche seeks to overcome the deep metaphysical

106

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

distinction between the autonomous sphere of reason and the heteronomous sphere of natural necessity that underpins Kant’s reductive opposition between morality and politics. According to Nietzsche, Kant’s disembodying of rational moral agency from our conscious and unconscious physical experience sought universality “masochistically” at the expense of the natural and inherently political condition of life. This is why he says that Kant’s progressive account of enlightenment philosophy in fact “smells of cruelty.”36 The rigid distinction between moral duty and lived experience in Kant’s framework ensures that a reconciliation of the two can never be achieved in this world: “life must constantly and inevitably be proved wrong because life is essentially something amoral.”37 It is important to emphasize here that Nietzsche’s self-conscious reduction of morality to coercion and human interests is not a debunking of morality in the purely cynical and destructive sense of the term. This is because power and coercion in his interpretation of the human condition are common elements to all social processes.38 As he explains in Daybreak, the Genealogy of Morality, The AntiChrist, and other texts, his invitation to “revaluate our values” is not a question of positioning oneself above all moral restraints but, rather, of becoming conscious of the problematic history of Europe’s ascetic moral values so that we can then extricate those values from the ressentiment from which they have grown.39 The aim is to transfigure traditional moral values such as responsibility, generosity, and honesty from reactive expressions of weakness and insecurity into expressions of dignity and abundance of power: “It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently – in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.”40 The Genealogy of Morality provides a speculative account of the long and violent historical process by which we came to take this ascetic morality for granted.41 Not unlike Kant’s “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,” Nietzsche’s narrative tells a story about the past in order to stimulate agency in the present. But whereas Kant sought to reassure his readers that their acting according to the moral law would eventually contribute to a reconciliation of mankind, Nietzsche’s genealogical account seeks to subvert the

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

107

oppositions, unities, and identities that have sustained this moral view of the world: “All these false opposites! War and “peace”! Reason and passion! Subject and object! There is no such thing!”42 According to Nietzsche, the history of ascetic morality corresponds to the historical development of individual consciousness and responsibility as an ability “to make promises.” As Babette Babich points out, Nietzsche borrows the metaphor from Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) to convey the notion that only he who has the determination to “hold himself to his own word,”43 despite the daily contingencies of the empirical world, has a right to make promises.44 For Nietzsche, as for Kant, this “right” to make promises does not follow from the normative substance of the promises that this kind of strong-willed individual makes but, rather, strictly from the fact he is the only kind of man who is able and can be expected to keep his promises. But whereas Kant derived his account from the rationality of a moral law that he took for granted, Nietzsche associates the cultivation of sovereign individuality with the torture of the flesh and the mnemonics of pain.45 As we have seen in the previous chapter, memory is at work, according to Nietzsche, when it overcomes our formidable capacity to forget the vast majority of sensory data that comes within the scope of our awareness. Forgetting enables us to screen out many of our experiences and, thereby, to attain a certain degree of psychological stability despite the pain and difficulties that life throws at us on a daily basis. The ability to make promises is a product of a slow, cumulative process of overcoming our predominant tendency to forget.46 This is not merely a question of remembering a pledge or a commitment. It involves a complex thought process and set of practices that have since long ago been taken for granted, including knowing the meaning of making a promise and anticipating possible difficulties in making good on a particular promise: “man must first have learnt to distinguish between what happens by accident and what by design, to think causally, to view the future as the present and anticipate it, to grasp with certainty what is end and what is means.” And before he can gauge, calculate, and compute in this way, “man himself will really have to become reliable, regular, necessary, even in his own self-image.” 47 Nietzsche refers to the long-forgotten learning process through which man’s ability to make and keep promises was cultivated as the “morality of custom.”48 This is a historical period during which

108

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

the capacity for remembering had to be “burned in,”49 and in which judgment over the righteousness or wickedness of an action had little to do with the intentions of the individual agent but depended strictly on the consequences for the group: “how the tradition has arisen is here a matter of indifference, and has, in any event, nothing to do with good and evil or with any kind of imminent categorical imperative; it is above all directed at the preservation of the community, a people.”50 Nietzsche asks us to consider “the dreadful methods” that were employed historically for Germans to forgo a wide range of instincts, impulsive desires, and possible experiences in order to remain aligned with dominant moral codes and, eventually, become an intellectual people: Think of old German punishments such as stoning (– even the legend drops the millstone on the guilty person’s head), breaking on the wheel (a unique invention and speciality of German genius in the field of punishment!), impaling, ripping apart and trampling to death by horses (“quartering”), boiling of the criminal in oil or wine (still in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the popular flaying (“cutting strips”), cutting out flesh from the breast; and, of course, coating the wrong-doer with honey and leaving him to the flies in the scorching sun. With the aid of such images and procedures, man was eventually able to retain five or six “I-don’t-want-to’s” in his memory, in connection with which a promise had been given, in order to enjoy the advantages of society – and there you are! With the aid of this sort of memory, people finally came to “reason”! – Ah, reason, solemnity, mastering of emotions, this really dismal thing called reflection, all these privileges and splendours man has.51 In Nietzsche’s eyes, the historical importance and value of this long-drawn historical process of moral education lies in the fact that it has historically nurtured and controlled the sense of power and consciousness the individual has over himself.52 The problem is that the overwhelming majority of us have remained trapped in this transitional stage of an internalized ascetic social code, which encourages continual self-monitoring and condemns the strong passions and desires essential to initiatory social action. Against Kant’s noumenal account of moral legislation, Nietzsche maintains that people suppress a sense of alienation by becoming “tranquilized”

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

109

by the comforting, ready-made schemes of beliefs and values prevailing in their societies. In deliberating and interpreting their environment from the perspective of their affects, individuals construct (consciously and unconsciously) their own relationship to it in ways that will facilitate their desire for self-conservation and selfempowerment: “One wants the moral imperative to be categorical: an absolute master must be created by the wills of the many who are afraid of themselves and of each other: it must exercise a moral dictatorship. For if one did not have this fear, one would not need such a master.”53 Because genuine “sovereign individuality” requires us to disengage ourselves from the ways of the herd, Nietzsche sees that the remedy for self-estrangement is inherently liable to bring us into conflict with each other: One more word against Kant as a moralist. A virtue needs to be our own invention, our own most personal need and self-defence: in any other sense, a virtue is just dangerous. Whatever is not a condition for life harms it: a virtue that comes exclusively from a feeling of respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is harmful ... The most basic laws of preservation and growth require the opposite: that everyone should invent his own virtues, his own categorical imperatives. A people is destroyed when it confuses its own duty with the concept of duty in general. Nothing ruins us more profoundly or inwardly than “impersonal” duty, or any sacrifice in front of the Moloch of abstraction. – To think that people did not sense the mortal danger posed by Kant’s categorical imperative!54

w il l to p ower We are now in a better position to try getting a general understanding of the significance and implications of the complex notion of the will to power that Nietzsche was trying to develop during the 1880s as an alternative response to the Kantian critique and the Western metaphysical tradition more generally.55 The first thing that must be said here is that the will to power is not a “doctrine” or a “theory” of power as such but, rather, a strategy of interpretation. Like the Kantian critique, the will to power is not an account of the world in itself but of its “intelligible character” presented from within our structures of understanding and action.56 Unlike Kant, however,

110

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

Nietzsche cannot ground the authority of his critique on a metaphysical claim to complete the history of reason; Nietzsche’s critique must acknowledge its own specificity as a response to a crisis of meaning, order, and agency situated within the history of reason.57 As a principle of immanent critique, the will to power seeks to capture the dynamics of the process through which we impose being upon the chaotic and complete particularity of becoming, while simultaneously highlighting the linguistic difficulties hindering such an enterprise. By means of hypothesis, it offers a reading of the world as a multitude of interpretative processes of becoming that have no ties to any form of being and that can only be roughly apprehended with a modicum of methodological legitimacy on the basis of the plurality of instincts and desires that we designate as “the body.”58 As an alternative metaphysics of world order, the will to power builds on Nietzsche’s Heraclitean-Schopenhauerian interpretation of the reality of occurrences, events, and experiences in terms of a relational merging “in-one-another” of moments of forces without substances rather than in terms of a sequential “after-one-another” of causes and effects conceived as enduring substances, things, bodies, or communities: “All that happens, all movement, all becoming as a determining of relations of degree and force, as a struggle…”59 In a seminal 1971 study, the German philosopher Wolfgang Müller-Lauter made a compelling case that the will to power is best understood not in the singular but, rather, as a plurality of creative and reactive “wills to power” competing and exhausting one another in a continuous process of becoming.60 Nietzsche’s account of this process rests on the observation that the only property of a force is activity and that this activity can only take place in relation to one or many other forces.61 His main hypothesis is that life is nothing other than this tension towards a constant accretion of power; there is no “remainder” in life that could make a choice of not tending towards this affirmation and expansion of oneself. Whether it is physical, vital, material, or psychological, it is in the nature of a force to seek to occupy as much space as it possibly can, to dominate as much as it possibly can, and to subjugate everything that it can possibly subjugate. These relations of resistance and overpowering can be said to form a whole to the extent that they constitute an open-ended interconnection of activities, shaped through processes of subordination and integration. But this whole is not unitary in the usual, metaphysical sense of the term: “All unity is only unity as organisation and

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

111

connected activity: no different from the way a human community is a unity: thus, the opposite of atomistic anarchy; and thus a formation of rule which means ‘one’ but is not one.”62 That Nietzsche’s account of the will to power generally tends towards the coercive and violent aspects of human relations is undeniable. For reasons that we have just seen, the will to power excludes the principle of universality and reciprocity upon which Kant’s account of morality and politics is based. At various occasions in his published and unpublished writings, Nietzsche does indeed formulate his account of life as an antagonistic process that always seeks more pain, inequality, and tyranny in ways that exhibit strong similarities with more familiar “Hobbesian” narratives of power and the “pre-political” state of nature as a “war of all against all.” Section 259 of Beyond Good and Evil is often quoted in this context: Life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least exploiting ... Even a body within which (as we presupposed earlier) particular individuals treat each other as equal (which happens in every healthy aristocracy): if this body is living and not dying, it will have to treat other bodies in just those ways that the individuals it contains refrain from treating each other. It will have to be the embodiment of will to power, it will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance, – not out of any morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life is precisely will to power.63 Read in an anthropological register, the will to power would simply designate a desire for power, a social world in which each individual seeks to dominate, control, and subjugate others individuals and material things. This would presuppose the traditional metaphysical interpretation of the “will” as a substance or faculty that “causes” our actions as reflexive unitary subjects, and that Nietzsche so emphatically rejects.64 This is why these bold statements on the nature of the world and the animus dominandi inhabiting it must be read in the discursive context of his polemics against idealism.65 Section 22 of Beyond Good and Evil is quite clear on this point. After having mocked idealist attempts at deducting democratic principles of universal justice out of the alleged laws of nature, Nietzsche suggests that

112

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

somebody with an opposite intention and mode of interpretation could come along and be able to read from the same nature, and with reference to the same set of appearances, a tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims. This sort of interpreter would show the unequivocal and unconditional nature of all “will to power” so vividly and graphically that almost every word, and even the word “tyranny,” would ultimately seem useless or like weakening and mollifying metaphors – and too humanizing. Yet this interpreter might nevertheless end up claiming the same thing about this world as you, namely that it follows a “necessary” and “calculable” course, although not because laws are dominant in it, but rather because laws are totally absent, and every power draws its final consequences at every moment. Granted, this is only an interpretation too – and you will be eager enough to make this objection? – well then, so much the better.66 Nietzsche’s perplexing claim to have exposed a “primal fact of all history” and to have discovered “the essence of being alive” is therefore not a description of reality “in-itself” but, rather, an exercise designed to make the reader realize how we misconstrue the world and how we are the prisoner of such misconstructions. There is obviously something very Kantian in this enterprise. However, what is at stake here is not the effective independence of the world from the subjectivity of the interpreter but the possibility of finding a way of conveying the nature of this world whose “essence” is interpretation: “In short: the essence of a thing is only an opinion about the ‘thing.’ Or rather: ‘it is considered’ is the real ‘it is,’ the sole ‘this is.’ One may not ask: ‘who then interprets?’ for the interpretation itself is a form of the will to power, exists (but not as a ‘being’ but as a process, a becoming) as an affect.”67 Thus when Nietzsche occasionally appropriates the rhetoric of “realism” to denounce the idealist delusions of the Western tradition,68 he is not merely reversing the Kantian priority of the noumenal over the phenomenal but also trying to subvert dualistic interpretations of the “real” without positing an alternative foundational account. This is the oft-cited “History of an error” in Twilight of the Idol: “The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? … But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!”69 By affirming the complete equivalence of reality and the

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

113

phenomenal world in this manner, Nietzsche disinvests the notion of appearance from all “deceptive” connotations while, at the same time, emphasizing that the world of phenomena is already the result of a cultural process of interpretation: The term “appearance” signifies a reality that is inaccessible to the operations and distinctions of logic, an “appearance,” therefore, in relation to “logical truth,” which – it must be added – is only possible in an imaginary world. I am not claiming that appearance is opposed to “reality,” on the contrary, I maintain that appearance is reality, that it is opposed to whatever transforms the actual into an imaginary “real world.” If one were to give a precise name to this reality, it could be called “will to power.” Such a designation, then, would be in accordance with its internal reality and not with its proteiform, ungraspable, and fluid nature.70 Nietzsche’s claim that “‘reason’ makes us falsify the testimony of the senses” is therefore not some sort of crude empiricism suggesting that the senses provide access to knowledge about the “essence” of things.71 The priority that he wants us to grant to the body over the conscious intellect is strictly methodological, a response to the inconsistencies of idealist attempts to establish the sovereignty of reason over the body.72 Nietzsche warns accordingly against treating notions like “instinct” and “human nature” either as the basis of an essentializing ontology or as an epistemological method for our understanding of the social world. The new mode of “historical philosophizing” that he calls for is one in which the need for absolute origins, which is what has characterized the history of Western metaphysics, is abandoned.73 Here, whatever “drives” or “instincts” are being identified as the productive sources of actions and contemporary phenomena are not conceived as irrevocable, fixed, and ultimate grounding “facts.” In Nietzsche’s eyes, this type of “de-contextualization” of human nature, which he attributes to Darwinism, rests on a radical oversimplification of our self-interpretation as a species: “Man discovers only very slowly the infinite complexity of the world. In the beginning, he imagines it extremely simple, that is to say as superficial as himself.”74 Against Darwin, Nietzsche insists that instincts have very little to contribute to our explanation of ultimate ends insofar as “instincts are precisely the result of infinitely

114

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

long processes.”75 If anything, “the word instinct is a facilitating short-cut that we allow ourselves to use whenever the effects regularly observed on organisms have not yet been attributed to their chemical and mechanical laws.”76 It is on this basis that Nietzsche wants to affirm the superiority of his will to power hypothesis over those of the Western metaphysical tradition while simultaneously insisting on the perspectival, context-specific nature of all accounts of reality. According to Nietzsche, the strength of his thesis lies in its ability to account for its own derivative character and to provide a holistic interpretation of the relational status of the world “from within” – that is, without indulging in “superfluous teleological principles.”77 By apprehending the character of the world as seen from within in this manner, Nietzsche posits the will as both a desire of and for power that can be found everywhere at all times. Note again the strong hypothetical character of this oft-cited formulation from Beyond Good and Evil: Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) … Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power ... then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else. –78 We have seen in chapter 1 that it is from Schopenhauer that Nietzsche first learned to think about the world in terms of “will,” conceived not as a faculty of individuals but as a universal cosmic power and motivating force of all experience and history. Unlike Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche’s claim that “life itself is Will to Power” is not that life is itself an expression of “will” but, rather, that the will to power is the will of life, the desire for growth and ever-greater abundance and strength: “The one who shot at truth with the words ‘will to existence’ did not hit it: this will – does not exist! For, what is not cannot will; but what is in existence, how

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

115

could this still will to exist! Only where life is, is there also will; but not will to life, instead – thus I teach you – will to power!”79 Nietzsche’s point here is that the drive for self-preservation, which is so central to our modern theories of politics and international relations, is only one of many possible consequences of the pursuit of power, for it is only in situations of weakness, distress, and despair that individuals and communities hold on to existence for existence’s sake and esteem life as an absolute good. In many instances, human beings appear to esteem certain things more highly than their own survival and are therefore prepared to risk it all for the feeling of power.80 As he argues in Daybreak: On great politics. – However much utility and vanity, those of individuals as of peoples, may play a part in great politics: the strongest tide which carries them forward is their need for the feeling of power, which from time to time streams up out of inexhaustible wells not only in the souls of princes and the powerful but not least in the lower orders of the people. There comes again and again the hour when the masses are ready to stake their life, their goods, their conscience, their virtue so as to acquire that higher enjoyment and as a victorious, capriciously tyrannical nation to rule over other nations (or to think it rules). Then the impulses to squander, sacrifice, hope, trust, to be over-daring and to fantasise spring up in such abundance that the ambitious or prudently calculating prince can let loose a war and cloak his crimes in the good conscience of his people.81 Taking aim at Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of evolution, Nietzsche argues that if life merely wanted adaptation, stability, and self-preservation, it would never have taken the risk of organic complexity, mobility, and conscience. It would have remained at the unicellular stage, where its forms were least likely to be destroyed by their environment.82 Against Herbert Spencer and his followers, who taught the “survival of the fittest” on the back of Hegelian notions of progress and development, Nietzsche affirms the contingency and non-teleological character of human survival.83 If human history teaches us anything, he argues polemically, it is that not the strongest but the weakest survive by means of their inventiveness and levelling, ascetic moral codes: “the slave has much more ‘spirit’ than the master.”84

116

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

Again, we must remind ourselves that the weak or “slave” type that Nietzsche attacks in those polemics is not necessarily a reference to those who have been dominated historically by the owners of the means of military and economic domination. Contrary to what a cursory reading might suggest, Nietzsche makes it clear on several occasions that, in the majority of cases, the lust for domination and control stems from the poorly concealed frustrations of the soul of a “slave”: “I do not speak for the weak who want to obey and fall with fists flying into slavery. But I found strength where we do not usually look for it, among simple men, gentle and considerate, with no inclination whatsoever for domination; and the desire to dominate often appeared to me as a sign of personal weakness: they fear their own slave consciousness; they drape it in a royal cloak and end up becoming slave to their partisans, to their reputation.”85 Read in this register, as I think it should be, the will to power is a complex attempt to account for the origins of the will to “appropriate, injure and overpower” not as the inevitable expression of the will as such but, rather, as a collateral of the pursuit of power born out of a reactive state of impotence: “The state in which we hurt others is … a sign that we are still lacking power.”86 This is why Nietzsche constantly insists on the centrality of force and subjugation in human history at the same time as he argues that, historically, the will to power has manifested itself predominantly as an expression of weakness rather than as strength: “As soon as the means of power become insufficient, processes of intimidation and terrorism begin to appear; one can say in this respect that all forms of public punishment indicate the failure of this radiant virtue which must necessarily emanate from the powerful.”87 Nietzsche finds that his German contemporaries are particularly prone to this conflation of genuine strength with the forceful subjugation of others.88 As he declares in a draft 1885 preface to his projected masterwork:

the will to power. A book for thinking, nothing else: it belongs to those for whom thinking is a delight, nothing else – That it is written in German is untimely, to say the least: I wish I had written it in French so that it might not appear to be a confirmation of the aspirations of the German Reich. The Germans of today are no thinkers any longer: something else delights and impresses them. The will to power as a principle might be intelligible to them. It is precisely among the Germans today that

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

117

people think less than anywhere else. But who knows? In two generations one will no longer require the sacrifice involved in any nationalistic squandering of power and in becoming stupid.89

a lt e r it y a n d t he i llusi ons o f c o n s e n s ua l rati onali ty Nietzsche had other good philosophical reasons to finally abandon the book project in 1888. As Julian Young argues, the idea of the will to power as a naturalistic metaphysical principle in which survival is not willed as an end in itself but as a means to the exercise of power in all its shapes and forms is “so obviously questionable in its universality that one doubts that Nietzsche took it very seriously.”90 Nietzsche’s understanding of Darwin was superficial, deficient in many respects, and rooted in wider misconceptions concerning the nature of evolution in the late nineteenth century.91 Gregory Moore has compellingly demonstrated that Nietzsche, on the whole, seemed much less concerned with the important nuances of Darwin’s scientific hypotheses than with articulating a conception of life that would counter the debilitating influence of “Darwinism” on contemporary understandings of culture, politics and society. In developing this “anti-Darwinian” account, Nietzsche was heavily inspired by works in biology that he read during the 1880s – especially studies by the German zoologist Wilhelm Roux, the Swiss botanist Carl Nägeli, and the more obscure Anglo-German zoologist William Rolph.92 Nietzsche took this enterprise in very many directions in his notebooks. Yet, in the end, the idea of the will to power as an endogenous, cosmological force operative in nature appears on only two occasions in his published texts (bge §36 and gm II §12) – and both have a strongly speculative character to them.93 Everywhere else in the published writings, Nietzsche uses the phrase “will to power” as an analytical device to expose the creative or reactive nature of particular psychologies of power and types of human agencies. In this more limited understanding, having a “strong” will to power means having the ability to convert and direct the energy of one’s most spontaneous instincts and compulsions into productive activities and cultural achievements – just as Nietzsche’s Greeks sublimated and channelled the crude, intoxicating energy of the Dionysian into tragic drama. Another recurring example in Nietzsche’s mature writings would be the capacity to resist our

118

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

inclination to seek an increase in our feeling of power by constituting what is strange or hostile as a means to secure the unity and essence of one’s identity: “imagine ‘the enemy’ as conceived of by the man of ressentiment – and here we have his deed, his creation: he has conceived of the ‘evil enemy,’ ‘the evil one’ as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the ‘good one’ – himself!”94 Against this tendency to apprehend otherness as a being or experience that takes its bearing from the self, Nietzsche wants us to appreciate the forces and subjectivities from which one is estranged as a productive relationship with alterity in its own right, if only because it forces uncomfortable reflections on the contradictions of one’s own sense of identity. Nietzsche speaks in similar terms of our ability to master and coordinate the drives and affects necessary for a life-affirming form of representative thinking. Note the affinity with Kant’s aesthetic notion of an “enlarged mentality”: To see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity” – the latter understood not as “contemplation [Anschauung] without interest” (which is, as such, a non-concept and an absurdity), but as having in our power the ability to engage and disengage our “pros” and “cons”: we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge ... There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of the thing, our “objectivity.” But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: well? would that not mean to castrate the intellect?95 This is the crux of Nietzsche’s will to power hypothesis as a principle of valuation. Since one’s meaning is necessarily involved with alterity and everything that one resists and struggles to overcome, the capacity to affirm life requires that this oppositional structure also be affirmed.96 As Laurence Hatab emphasizes, affirming life in its totality does not mean that I approve indiscriminately of everything and every perspectives in life but, rather, that I also affirm the forces and agencies that I find limiting, oppressive, and objectionable “as something to oppose and overcome.”97 By unifying the temporal

Of War, Peace, and the Will to Power

119

reality of the means of domination (military power, wealth, authority, class privileges) and the authenticity of “values” in the one notion of “power,” those who read Nietzsche’s will to power hypothesis as an affirmative apology for war and imperialism demean the will to power into precisely the type of politics that he seeks to undermine. For the whole point of Nietzsche’s critique is to show that the absolutist desire to subjugate through brute force and the Kantian desire to pacify through an illusory consensual rationality are not necessarily antithetical to one another but, rather, are two different variants of a reactive will to power that supresses rather than confronts the fears and uncertainties endemic to the agonistic character of the social world: “The categorical imperative is of the domain of blind military obedience, just as princes have cultivated it for centuries. For princes believe that security and order are increased when one person commands absolutely and the other obeys absolutely.”98 It is the capacity to face up to this philosophical and historical “reality” (rather than trying to preserve oneself from it) that links Nietzsche’s account of nihilism and the will to power with the political realism that he associates with Goethe’s alternative enlightenment99 and the teachings of Thucydides and Machiavelli in Twilight of the Idols.100 Against Kant’s critical philosophy and its Marxist rearticulation in the theory of ideology as “false consciousness,” Nietzsche wants to show that, since all knowledge is necessarily embroiled in relations of power and never the result of a dispassionate search for “truth,” no political force or class can ever have access to the “truth” of the social situation. By exposing the self-interested nature of all claims to the existence of an a priori social rationality, his philosophy breaks the dialectical link between enlightenment and revolution, forcing the acknowledgment that the results of emancipation can only ever be maintained through new lines of conflict and hierarchies of power. Whereas Kant had perceived a strong affinity between the secularization of political power, self-determination, and republicanism (and therefore believed modern politics was increasingly peaceful, rational, inclusive, and participatory), Nietzsche believed the process of liberal modernization had led straight to the cult of the nation-state that was about to consume the continent.

5

Into the Abyss Democracy, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Modern European Statehood In every age, democratism has been the form in which the organizing force manifests its decline ... For there to be institutions, there needs to be a type of will, instinct, imperative that is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to a responsibility that spans the centuries, to solidarity in the chain that links the generations, forwards and backwards ad infinitum ... The West in its entirety has lost the sort of instincts that give rise to institutions, that give rise to a future: it might well be that nothing rubs its “modern spirit” the wrong way more than this. People live for today, people live very fast, – people live very irresponsibly: and this is precisely what people call “freedom.” Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

When looking back at the international history of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche rarely missed an opportunity to mock the hypocrisy of a liberal modernity committed to world peace through gradual disarmament at the same time as universal suffrage was expanding the scale and intensity of dynastic antagonisms by turning every citizen into a soldier.1 In the production of the democratic subject, Nietzsche believed that modern political thought was eradicating the commitments and aspirations to human excellence that are necessary to develop vibrant communities with their diverse forms of life: “another human type becomes ever more disadvantaged and is finally made impossible; above all, the great ‘architects’: the strength to build is now paralysed; the courage to make far-reaching plans is discouraged;

Into the Abyss

121

the organizational geniuses become scarce – who still dares to undertake works that would require millennia to complete?”2 As the masses were entering the political realm, Nietzsche also saw that the rationalizing drive of liberal modernity had destroyed the religious foundations of social institutions while simultaneously undermining the secular basis of meaning in activities that are wilfully chosen. This had reduced the scope for individual autonomy and left the peoples of Europe with few democratic freedoms other than the freedom to consent to their servitude as mere instruments of History: “Externally: age of tremendous wars, upheavals, explosions. Internally: ever greater weakness of men, events as excitants.”3 The aim of this chapter is to elucidate this set of degenerative transformations that Nietzsche perceives in the political culture of the European society of states at the end of the nineteenth century. I begin with an exposition of the coercive mechanisms of rule that Nietzsche associates with the modern state in his writings from the late 1870s onwards, and then I move on to analyze his theses on the transformation of this “organization of violence” under the guidance of the new doctrines of popular sovereignty and national self-determination.

t h e m o d e r n s tate: “ c o l d e s t o f a l l c o ld monsters” As with his earlier account of the mythical Greek state and the German Kulturstaat, a great deal of what Nietzsche has to say about modern statecraft in his mature writings he would have learned from Burckhardt, whose lecture series on the relationship between the state, religion, and culture in European history he attended with great enthusiasm in 1870–71.4 The lectures in question drew heavily on Burckhardt’s earlier masterpiece The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).5 This is also a book that Nietzsche knew well and that he cited approvingly in his Untimely Meditations despite voicing reservations concerning the type of historical metanarratives characteristic of Burckhardt’s work.6 In the first part of the book, Burckhardt famously traces the emergence of the modern society of states to the politics of the Italian Renaissance. Drawing heavily on Machiavelli, Burckhardt argues that, while France and Britain centralized their monarchies in

122

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

the Middle Ages, Italy resisted control by either the Holy Roman Empire or the Papacy and instead became a volatile collection of micro-states. These small kingdoms displayed “the worst features of an unbridled egotism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture” in their dealings with one another.7 Yet out of this vicious power struggle there emerged a new conception of the state as “the outcome of reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art.” This is illustrated by the Venetian and Florentine use of what we would come to call “statistics” and by the “objective treatment of international affairs as being free from moral scruples.”8 According to Burckhardt, the rationalist egotism that led to the birth of this new art of statecraft soon spilled over into every aspect of Renaissance culture, facilitating the emergence of new, distinctively “modern” forms of individual subjectivities: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen to be clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment of the state and all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.9 With this bold statement, Burckhardt drew a more or less direct line between the Italian Renaissance and the absolutist pact by which European societies were pacified within the historical condition of the religious civil wars besetting the continent in the late medieval period. Absolutism had its ideational sources in the Reformation, which justified the independence of kings from papal authority and the duty of Christians to obey them. It is also closely associated with the emergence of what came to be known as the “Machiavellian” doctrine of raison d’état (reason of state), urging rulers to set their course of action independently of conventional Christian moral codes whenever state security and stability are at stake.10 Absolutism generated a characteristically modern international order that came into being around the mid- to late seventeenth century

Into the Abyss

123

and that was characterized in its ideal-typical political form by the reorganization of Europe’s public space into two separate domains: (1) a domain of political authority reserved for the sovereign and governed by the quest for state power and (2) a subordinate domain of “apolitical” subjects in which culture, morality, and commerce developed and were governed by principles of economic rationality and the expansion of the private conscience of the individual.11 Those political arrangements were very much coming to an end by the time Burckhardt and Nietzsche forged their friendship in Basel, dissolving under the pressures of secularization, democratization, and economic modernization. As Carl Schmitt argues in his study on Hobbes, by taking leave of Christian moral norms and subordinating all religious and rational claims of individual morality to political necessity, the absolutist state had created a foothold for a well-financed and intellectually influential bourgeois civil society to emerge and monopolize the activity of moral criticism for itself, slowly turning its critique against the authoritarian state form that had made the emergence of this civil society possible in the first place.12 In Nietzsche’s Germany, these contestations over changing conceptions of state practices had come to be closely associated with the emerging discourse of Realpolitik.13 The term Realpolitik was originally coined by the liberal reformer August Ludwig von Rochau (1810–1873). As he explained in a famous passage of his Grundsätzen der Realpolitik (1853), Realpolitik rests on the notion that “the study of the powers that shape, maintain and alter the state is the basis of all political insight; it leads to the understanding that the law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world.”14 Rochau saw Realpolitik as a form of constitutionalism designed to empower the bourgeoisie after the failed revolutions of 1848, giving liberals the means to pursue their cause in a world that remained unresponsive to liberal standards of justice and good political procedures. As the gains of the revolutions were being swept away by the rising tide of ethnic nationalism, class politics, and religious conflicts, Rochau urged his colleagues to educate themselves in the mechanisms of power that they had to harness if they were to keep their progressive ideals on the political agenda.15 Nietzsche had already made clear in “The Greek State” that he did not care much for the materialistic politics of the bourgeoisie.16 During the 1880s, however, he had become more concerned with the ways in which this Realpolitik discourse was being appropriated

124

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

by nationalist historians such as Heinrich von Treitschke, Johann Gustav Droysden, and Heinrich von Sybel in their opportunistic endorsement of Bismarck’s state-building enterprise.17 By pandering to the Protestant Church and Bismarck’s ruthless vision of statecraft, Treitschke and his colleagues had conflated the terms Realpolitik with Machtpolitik (power politics) to establish a Prussian imperial historiography based on foundational myths of Germanness and a highly selective, anti-French interpretation of the Wars of Liberation: “power makes people stupid … politics absorbs all the seriousness from really spiritual matters – ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,’ I am afraid that this was the end of German philosophy.”18 Nietzsche traces the origins of this degenerative objectification of state power to the late medieval period, putting a particular emphasis on the Lutheran Reformation. In his estimation, the true significance of the Reformation is not that it led to the formal separation of political and ecclesiastic powers but, rather, that it ultimately replaced the spiritual and universalist rule of the Roman Catholic Church with the materialistic and provincial rule of states: “A church is above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank to the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all cruder instruments of force; and on that score alone the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the state.”19 According to Nietzsche, the authority that the church derived from the devotion that the priestly caste inspired among the masses depended in great part on abstinence from sexual intercourse: “three quarters of the reverence of which the common people, especially the women among the common people, are capable, rests on the faith that a person who is an exception at this point will be an exception in other respects as well.”20 But Luther had no taste for the exceptional. He “surrendered the holy books to everyone” and gave women to the Protestant priest. In doing so, he deprived the priest of his spiritual authority and therefore had to also take from him the confessional – that important institution through which humans had for so long related to one another through the senses rather than reason: “With that development the Christian priest was, at bottom, abolished, for his most profound utility had always been that was a holy ear, a silent well, a grave for secrets.” Like Marx, Nietzsche reads these developments as the liberation of bourgeois class interests from theological and political illusions.21

Into the Abyss

125

For Nietzsche, however, this political-economic liberation is rooted in a more fundamental psycho-political liberation of ascetic herd instincts: “Everyone his own priest” – behind such formulas and their peasant cunning was hidden in Luther the abysmal hatred against “the higher human being” as conceived by the Church; he smashed an ideal that he could not attain, while he seemed to fight and abhor the degeneration of this ideal. Actually he, the impossible monk, pushed away the dominion of the homines religiosi [religious man], and thus he himself brought about within the ecclesiastic social order what in relation to the civil order he attacked so intolerantly – a “peasants” rebellion.22 As the state acquired primacy over the church and became the sole guardian of rights and public welfare, it usurped the proper function of society by imposing its own utilitarian ethos on all existing and new public institutions. In as much as it envisaged security and freedom from politics and religious fratricide as the ultimate moral good, Nietzsche sees that this Leviathanesque solution to the problem of order elevated individual self-preservation to the top of the hierarchy of human values. By “hanging a sword and a hundred cravings over them,” the state slowly undercut its subjects’ capacity to discriminate between normative ideals. Instead, it inculcated a new set of egoistic values geared towards the sustenance of the domestic peace and the strengthening of the state as some sort of suprapersonal structure, whose power can only be sustained by allowing it to expand continuously.23 According to Nietzsche, the democratic critique of hierarchy instantiated by the French Revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie merely accelerated this colonization of the political by the herd instinct of the Reformation: This is in fact the situation in Europe today; I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They do not know how to protect themselves from their bad consciences except by acting like executors of older or higher commands (from their ancestors, constitution, justice system, laws, or God himself) or even by borrowing herd maxims from the herd mentality, such as the “first servants of the people,” or the “instruments of the commonweal.” For his part, the herd man of today’s Europe gives himself the

126

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

appearance of being the only permissible type of man and glorifies those characteristics that make him tame, easy-going and useful to the herd as the true human virtues, namely: public spirit, goodwill, consideration, industry, moderation, modesty, clemency, and pity. But in those cases where people think they cannot do without a leader and bellwether, they keep trying to replace the commander with an agglomeration of clever herd men: this is the origin of all representative constitutions, for example.24 It is in this spirit that Nietzsche mocks Kant’s characterization of the “French Revolution as the transition from the inorganic to the organic form of the state.”25 Following Burckhardt, Nietzsche insists against Kant and other canons of modern political thought that neither the existence of the state nor its ability or right to wage war are conquered from the ontologically prior rights of an amalgamation of free and equal beings. Because it is ultimately society and the state that create the individual in the first place, the notion of the modern liberal state, which allegedly exists primarily to provide security to civil society, is just as misconceived as is the liberal individual understood as the unitary holder of “natural rights” in need of protection from other members of society or the state itself: Society first educates the single being, forms it into a half or whole individual, it is neither formed out of single beings nor out of contracts between them … The state therefore does not at its origins oppress individuals: these do not even exist! It makes the existence of humans at all possible, as herd animals; this is where our impulsions and our passions are taught to us: there is nothing originary about them! There is no “state of nature” for them! As parts of a whole we partake in the conditions of existence and functions of the whole and incorporate the experiences and judgements made in that process.26 Nietzsche thus dismisses the notion of a social contract as the basis for a normative interpretation of the modern state simply because contract theory presupposes precisely the type of docile, freethinking, and egoistic selves that it seeks to produce.27 Not unlike Marx, Nietzsche instead contemplates the origins of the modern state in terms of exchange relations of debts and credits among individuals and between individuals. For him, however, the apparent

Into the Abyss

127

primacy of economic exchange under conditions of modernity is the expression of a historically prior set of psychological transactions in which social creditors exchange the pleasure of inflicting pain for individual debtor’s transgressions of social norms: “Buying and selling, with their psychological trappings, are older even than the beginnings of any social form of organization or association: it is much more the case that the germinating sensation of barter, contract, debt, right, duty, compensation was simply transferred from the most rudimentary form of the legal rights of persons to the most crude and elementary social units (in their relations with similar units), together with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating.”28 Consistent with his earlier writings, Nietzsche maintains that man’s primitive past was never one of communal unity in which people equally shared in the control of their production but, rather, consisted of unmitigated conflict between groups and between individuals. The state emerged in this context as the representative of the dominant agencies to regulate exchange and simultaneously created society in the process: “Thus does the man of violence, of power, the original founder of states, act when he subjugates the weaker. His right to do so is the same as the state now relegates to itself; or rather, there exists no right that can prevent this from happening.”29 As Giorgio Colli and Mazzio Montinari point out in their commentary on Nietzsche’s notebooks, Nietzsche’s mature account of these coercive mechanisms is heavily inspired by Tolstoy’s My Religion (1884), which he read in French translation during the mid1880s.30 Following Tolstoy, Nietzsche contends that state institutions discipline and activate instinctual needs, desires, and fulfilments in its members. They turn individuals against themselves so as to make them partake in their own repression and the collective release of aggression. Without the “tremendous machine of the state,” no judge would be capable of sentencing a man to torture or death; no policeman would ever be willing to destroy a family in order to put a man in jail; no soldier could ever kill another man in cold blood for the glory of the nation: “Everything a man does in the service of the state is contrary to his nature. – in the same way, everything he learns with a view to future state service is contrary to his nature … The state as organized violence.”31 According to Nietzsche, this organization of violence combines a “division of responsibility” (so that “no one any longer possesses

128

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

the full responsibility”) and a “division of labor among the affects within society: so individuals and classes produce an incomplete, but for that reason more useful kind of soul.”32 The aim is to ensure that the individual acts “not as individuum [‘that which cannot be divided without destroying its essence’] but as dividuum [‘that which is composite and lacks an individual essence’].”33 At the aggregate level, this differentiating process generates a “de-responsibilized” herd-like mentality among large segments of the population. It renders acceptable acute distinctions of power in society that have their source in military organization and the establishment of the state’s monopolistic threat of the use of violence: “the state organizes immorality – internally: as police, penal law, classes, commerce, family; externally: as will to power, to war, to conquest, to revenge.”34 Nietzsche interprets this process as one of psychological transference designed to transmute the sometimes painful and unpleasant elements of our emotional conditions into the exhilaratingly pleasurable: “For example, when our obedience, our submission to the law, attain honor through the strength, power, self-overcoming they entail. As does our consideration for the community, the neighbor, the fatherland, our ‘humanization,’ our ‘altruism,’ ‘heroism.’”35 By transferring their selfishness and egotism to the collective, people get to discharge their repressed vitalist impulses and transvalue their basest instincts into what is now perceived as noble, patriotic, and selfless virtues: Basic principle: only individuals feel themselves responsible. Multiplicities are invented in order to do things for which the individuals lack courage. It is for just this reason that all communalities and societies are a hundred times more upright and instructive about the nature of man than is the individual, who is too weak to have the courage for his own desires … The study of society is so invaluable because man as society is much more naïve than man as a “unit.” “Society” has never regarded virtue as anything but a means to strength, power, and order.36

de m o c r acy a n d t h e n ew nati onali sm In line with his account of the will to truth and the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche maintains that the liberation of these mechanisms of rule from the structuring metaphysics of traditional religiosity does not

Into the Abyss

129

substantively transform the political and psychological foundations of the state but, in fact, exacerbates some of its most basic coercive, normalizing tendencies. In his earlier reflections on the mythical Greek state and the Bismarckian Kulturstaat, Nietzsche had already emphasized the intimate relationship between the advances of scientific rationalism and the emergence of insecurity as an object of knowledge and political control in the history of the modern state. What he argues in his mature writings is that democracy develops in this context as a process by which God’s ultimate responsibility for the government of men is slowly being transferred to society at the very same time as traditional narratives integrating this society are losing their credibility. So that far from simply producing security against the antagonization of religious modes of subjectivities, political modernity effects a disarticulation of the communal bond through which God progressively ceases to be the mediating agent of security between self and other. What emerges instead is a deeply atomizing system of security in which the nation-state asserts itself as the unmediated source of protection and reassurance from fears that it itself cultivates in the process of securing the essentiality of its own identity and political sovereignty.37 Nietzsche offers the most extensive discussion of those transformations in Human, All Too Human. There, Nietzsche reminds us that, long after the formal separation of church and state instituted by the Protestant Reformation and the rationalist tradition of raison d’état, myth, opinions, and religion remained an integral part – indeed, a condition of possibility – of the European order instituted in the early modern period. Of crucial importance in this respect was the notion of an absolute self-generating authority that precedes, brings into being, and orders the community from outside and above, and which grounded traditional norms of state sovereignty, non-interference, and warfare in the European state system: The power that lies in unity of popular sentiment, in the fact that everyone holds the same opinions and has the same objectives, is sealed and protected by religion, apart from in those rare cases in which a priesthood cannot agree with the authorities as to the price of its services and enters into conflict with them ... In this it has to be presupposed that the governing persons and classes are enlightened as to the advantages accruing to them from religion

130

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

and thus feel to a certain extent superior to it, inasmuch as they employ it as an instrument; which is why free-spiritedness has its origins here.38 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the progressive democratization of the public sphere had rendered this instrumentalization of religion for political ends increasingly difficult. For with the democratization of state sovereignty, the attitude towards religion “adopted by the government can only be the same as the one adopted towards it by the people; every dissemination of enlightenment must find its echo in their representatives.” Nietzsche thus anticipates that, as the state loses its capacity to profit from religion, the spiritual beliefs and commitments of the citizenry will diversify to the point where religion will have to be handed over “to the conscience and customs of every individual.”39 As he explains: “Subordination, which is so highly rated in the military and bureaucratic state, will soon become as unbelievable to us as the closed tactics of the Jesuits already are … It is bound to disappear because its foundation is disappearing: belief in unconditional authority, in definitive truth; even in military states it cannot be generated even by physical compulsion, for its origin is the inherited adoration of the princely as of something suprahuman.”40 Thus what Nietzsche perceives from the vantage point of the late nineteenth century is not just the erosion of the authority of the church and the princely dynasties. More fundamentally, it is the end of the phenomenon of authority as such as it had been experienced for centuries in Europe. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, both historically and phenomenologically, authority was a hierarchical social relation that ceased to exist in the Western world with the advent of modernity and that stood in contradistinction to both coercion through violence and persuasion through argumentation (which presupposes equality). Wherever there is authority: “the authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place.”41 Nietzsche argues along these lines that the transformation of subjectivity that made the objectification of state power possible under the doctrine of raison d’état had led to the recession of the regulative

Into the Abyss

131

role of custom and the emergence of reflexive individuals who no longer obey uncritically and without interests any form of command. The ever-increasing need to deploy laws and expand legal structures under conditions of modernity reflects this increasing failure to internalize norms. Modern state power needs legitimacy, and this legitimacy must increasingly be derived from rational rather than theological discourses. But whereas Kant envisaged reason as the tendency in all human thought towards greater unity, system, and necessity, Nietzsche sees reason as a source of fragmentation that renders the rule of the law and state institutions more arbitrary than ever: Arbitrary law necessary. – Jurists dispute as to whether the law that triumphs in a nation ought to be that which has been most thoroughly thought out or that which is easiest to understand. The former, the supreme model of which is the Roman, seems to the layman incomprehensible and consequently not an expression of his sense of law. Popular codes of law, for example the Germanic, have been crude, superstitious, illogical and in part stupid, but they corresponded to quite definite, inherited and indigenous custom and feelings. – Where, however, law is no longer tradition, as is the case with us, it can only be commanded, imposed by constraint; none of us any longer possesses a traditional sense of law, so we have to put up with arbitrary law, which is the expression of the necessity of the fact that there has to be law. The most logical is in this event the most acceptable, because it is the most impartial: even admitting that in every case the smallest unit of measurement in the relationship between crime and punishment is fixed arbitrarily.42 The political process that Nietzsche sketches out in Human, All Too Human follows the same “tragic” logic as his earlier account of the Socratic revolution in epistemology. The more successful the process of modernization, the more reason and individual consciousness expand, the less political subjects feel part of a meaningful whole that they are willing to defend with their own lives. As the citizen slowly turns into the private individual, the state ceases to be its own justification.43 Nietzsche’s conclusion is astonishingly prescient: Finally – one can say this with certainty – distrust of all government, insight into the uselessness and destructiveness of these

132

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

short-winded struggles will impel men to a quite novel resolve: the resolve to do away with the concept of the state, to the abolition of the distinction between private and public. Private companies will step by step absorb the business of the state: even the most resistant remainder of what was formerly the work of government (for example its activities designed to protect the private person from private person) will in the long run be taken care of by private contractors. Disregard for and the decline and death of the state, the liberation of the private person (I care not to say: of the individual), is the consequence of the democratic conception of the state; it is in this that its mission lies.44 In subsequent works, however, Nietzsche concludes that his predictions about the passing away of the modern state were premature. Here, he no longer talks of the “death of the state” at the hand of an ascendant bourgeoisie but of the “death of peoples” at the hand of a new, democratic nation-state that has stepped in to fill the metaphysical vacuum left by the eroding political-theology of its predecessor: “Having unlearned faith in that, one still follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and tasks.”45 As this statement indicates, Nietzsche’s interpretation of these transformations in conceptions and practices of statehood rests on his belief that most of his European contemporaries lacked the intellectual courage and self-discipline to live under the conditions of epistemological uncertainty generated by the death of God: “to the great majority it is not contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly without first becoming aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterwards.”46 Nietzsche also perceives a significant shift in the mechanisms purporting to “legitimize” state authority in this changing context. For under conditions of secularization and democratization, the state no longer derives its political authority from the authority ex nihilo of theological traditions and the continued presence of the past in the present but, rather, from the personal charisma of political leaders and the ideological projects with which the latter promise to shape the future. The state, in other words, continues to dominate and organize society. But the source of its authority ceases to be distinct from those who exercise that authority. It is no longer conditioned by the existence of a prior authorization relayed

Into the Abyss

133

by mediating institutions like the church, the commune, the corporation, and the family but, instead, emerges spontaneously out of the acts and leadership of those who rule the state.47 In Nietzsche’s eyes, the upshot of all this is that our ambitions for normative self-governance have made us more vulnerable to the mobilizing power of the state, not less, as Kant expected.48 As Mark Warren explains: “Because the loss of Christian-moral culture occurs without the formation of a sovereign self, the opportunity exists for the state … to exploit reflexive needs directly by providing a vicarious identity for the self in relation to the community.”49 This is why Nietzsche claims, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that the democratic nation-state “lies coldly” when it proclaims itself to “be” the people. The state first destroys local communities by sponsoring industrialism and cultivating impersonal market relations; then it reabsorbs the atomized masses into fabricated nationalist narratives that it legitimates by luring the educated elites with its patronage of the arts. In its attempt to reproduce the intimacy and trust-based character of face-to-face community relations at the macro level, the state insists on the organic and emotional comfort of kin-like relationships at the very moment that such relationships are disintegrating. Far from representing a unification of power and people, the democratic nation-state in fact denies the community any form of genuine unity and the individual any form of genuine individuality: “The state lies in all tongues of good and evil, and whatever it may tell you, it lies – and whatever it has, it has stolen.”50 As suggested earlier, those political transformations in Nietzsche’s Germany were intimately linked with the changing character and fortunes of German liberalism. Although it had been internally divided into moderate and more reformist tendencies, German liberalism until the late 1870s had acted as a united force on the political scene. After 1879, however, the liberal camp began to disintegrate as the leading factions of the upper-middle class (the haute bourgeoisie) moved the National Liberal Party to the right.51 Meanwhile, as Nietzsche had anticipated, the anti-Catholic policies that Bismarck pursued in the context of his Kulturkampf in the 1870s had the effect of strengthening rather than weakening the political influence of the church.52 Together with the rise of mass socialist parties, the emergence of Catholic parties capable of mobilizing large constituencies and forming alliances with traditional conservatives and disaffected liberals marked the end of liberalism’s hegemony in German civil society.53

134

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

In this new era of demagogic politics, the principle of national self-determination was gradually losing its force as an emancipatory ideal invoked against the rights and privileges of European monarchies. Instead, nationalism was increasingly being redeployed as a means to marginalize unpopular social groups and impose uniformity on ethnic minorities, through authoritarian educational policies, administrative measures and forced settlement policies. During the last years of his rule, Bismarck launched a series of harsh Germanization policies against the Poles in East Prussia, the Frenchspeaking population of Alsace Lorraine, and the Danes in Northern Schleswig. National Liberals embraced the interpretation of German nationality based on language and ethnicity and therefore offered support for these harsh illiberal measures. In turn, the stigmatization of Catholics, socialists, Jews, Slavs, and other minorities served as a potent vehicle for the construction of the “national interest” of a new German empire in which a new middle-class militarism was quickly gaining momentum.54 As Wolfgang Mommsen explains in his history of the period: “The concept of the nation was changing. It was not only losing much of its original emancipatory thrust … but was gradually acquiring new connotations of state power and, ultimately, of aggression.”55 Marxist analyses of nationalism have drawn attention to the fact that this growing sense of xenophobia, racism, and imperial jingoism during this tumultuous period was fuelled by material insecurities. These were generated by the economic downturns that followed the post-unification boom as well as by growing economic competition within an increasingly globalized economy. The dislocations generated by rapid modernization and the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society also added to these economic insecurities.56 Likewise, religiosity in Germany like elsewhere in Europe varied according to the economic and political interests of a diverse range of societal agents. Workers and peasants, whose situation was increasingly threatened by the internationalization and trans-nationalization of the economy, tended to be more religious than the educated classes and therefore more likely to fall for the political follies of the new nationalism.57 Nietzsche was well aware of all this. He clearly saw that it was the growing state bureaucracy, the “princely dynasties, and certain classes of business and society” who benefited from nationalism at the expense of the masses.58 But for him the fact that the masses responded so enthusiastically to

Into the Abyss

135

nationalist discourses at this particular moment in time could be explained neither by material factors as such nor by the appeal of nationalist ideologies in themselves. In Nietzsche’s understanding, it was the inability of the educated elites to confront the underlying conditions of cultural disorientation that facilitated the catalyzing of ressentiment into the aggressive, demagogic politics of the nationstate: “Your weariness serves the new idol.”59 In the mid-1840s, the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard had already condemned the nineteenth century as an era marked by a particular kind of “envy and abstract thought,” which he also called ressentiment and associated with the levelling, passionless, and creativity-stifling egalitarianism of the age.60 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche obviously have different assessments of the relationship between ressentiment and religious faith. Yet both share in the perception that ressentiment thrives on a structural contradiction vested in the process of liberal capitalist democratization, whereby instances of social injustices continue to be perceived (or indeed aggravated) in a normative environment that conceives of individuals as having the opportunity to fulfill their desires and expectations under the same social conditions. As Max Scheler explains, ressentiment is always strongest “where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with factual differences in power, property and education. While each has the ‘right’ to compare himself with everyone else, he cannot do so in fact.” This means that a “potent charge of ressentiment is accumulated by the very structure of society,” quite independently of the personality and experiences of the individual members of that society.61 In Nietzsche’s Germany, as in other European countries, this structural phenomenon was by no means confined to the proletariat. Artisans, small entrepreneurs, minor officials, and the lower middle classes were in fact more prone to ressentiment than the proletariat since they had less structural power.62 Anticipating Weber, Nietzsche also saw that, whereas the privileged classes under conditions of liberal modernization require legitimation, the subordinate social forces require increasing compensation for their servitude. But capitalism is unable to provide either. This is because capitalism rests on the cultivation of an abstract, materialistic utilitarianism that erodes all marks of distinction between leaders and led, and which subordinates all ethical considerations to the profit motive. Paired with the perceived absence of a clear relationship between success and worth,

136

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

and the ever-increasing proximity and visibility of competitive social forces, this disenchanted materialism had, at the end of the nineteenth century, become a major source of collective ressentiment.63 As Scheler emphasizes, Christianity in previous centuries had spared Europe from the ravages of ressentiment by giving meaning to perceptions of injustice. Religiosity allowed the individual to take part in a collective moral project that enabled him to appreciate and confer value upon his own very modest social existence. This sense of Christian resignation was itself facilitated by the existence of a relatively stable scale of values. But with the erosion of foundational forms of authority, and with the concomitant emergence of an ideal of progress that translates each new achievement into a mere “means to another receding end, virtually all scales of value have become transitory. The alternative is an attitude that belittles the qualities against which one has been compared, lowers all values to the level of one’s abilities, and seeks to construct an illusory scale of values in keeping with one’s wishes and goals.”64 German nationalism was able to tap into this process of social fragmentation by reassigning the pain that accompanies this sense of failure and embitterment onto external scapegoats. Throughout the 1880s, Bismarck made extensive use of nationalist rhetoric to sustain a whole range of antagonistic strategies designed to sublimate domestic conflict by cultivating what one historian called a “moral equivalent of war” in peacetime. This included war scares; colonial and imperialist agitation; the stigmatization of ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants, and socialists; as well as the political exploitation of sports and cultural achievements in the scientific, technological, and artistic domains. None of all this, of course, actually succeeded in eliminating the numerous lines of conflict dividing the country. But it gave a seductive plausibility to the notion of the German national interest.65 As we have seen in chapter 4, Kant’s enlightenment vision of the international was an attempt to address the contradiction between the universalism of the rights of man and the national basis upon which these rights were accommodated. He envisaged the reconciliation of unity and difference through the spread of the republican state form and the institutionalization of a basic cosmopolitan law that would allow linguistic and religious diversity to thrive in a balance of power between nation states.66 Writing a century later, Nietzsche sees how relocating sovereignty in the nation as a matter

Into the Abyss

137

of abstract principle instead led to the transformation of the institutional function of statehood in the eyes of the different nationalities. They ceased to see the state as a general provider of security and justice, and instead began to reappropriate its institutions as a means for the achievement of a particular people’s collective rights and welfare. Paradoxically, Nietzsche’s account suggests that it is precisely the perceived rationality of republican institutions and popular identification with them that can encourage the citizen to abandon his individuality to state-directed mobilizations of identity and difference through social stigmatization, foreign policy, and war. Hegel had also flagged this in his Philosophy of Right.67 From Nietzsche’s perspective, however, Hegelian philosophy had exacerbated the totalizing tendencies of the Kantian critique. As Adorno argues in Negative Dialectics (1966), German Idealism in practically all its variations had cultivated a self-deceptive feeling of power by tracing all that is unknown and unintelligible to something that is known, intelligible, “evil,” and morally antithetical to the (allegedly) rational structure of the world. In Nietzsche’s eyes, it was only a short distance between this interpretation of evil as the self’s unintelligible other to the demonization of political others in late nineteenth-century nationalism.68 As the democratization process gained momentum, states increasingly sought to secure their identity by apprehending all forms of ethnic, racial, and religious alterity through the prism of their own carefully curated myths, folklore, and “majority culture.” The more European nations interacted sociologically and economically, the less their politics seemed amenable to a common interpretation.69 This is because the disciplinary model that this politics imposed on the different peoples of Europe drew from a functionalist conception of life in which the expansion of culture was programmed to achieve the single aim of building up the state’s industrial and military capabilities relative to that of other states. Because the cultural scale of values that it nurtured did not stem from any real forms of life, Nietzsche saw this new state form as the institutional embodiment of the “will to death and nothingness” afflicting European societies at the turn of the century: Just look at how it lures them, the far-too-many! How it gulps and chews and ruminates them! It wants to give you everything, if you worship it, the new idol. Thus it buys the shining of your virtue and the look in your proud eyes. It wants to use you as

138

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

bait for the far-too-many! Indeed, a hellish piece of work was thus invented, a death-horse clattering in the regalia of divine honours! Indeed, a dying for the many was invented here, one that touts itself as living; truly, a hearty service to all preachers of death! State I call it, where all drinkers of poison, the good and the bad; state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad; state, where the slow suicide of everyone is called – “life.”70

6

Grosse Politik “The Time Is Coming When the Struggle for the Domination of the Earth Will Be Fought in the Name of Fundamental Philosophical Principles”

Nietzsche believed that the democratization of Europe was both inevitable and irreversible.1 In his less confrontational moments, he conceded that democracy was a prerequisite to preventing despotic concentrations of power and to arriving at a form of politics necessary for the development of the sovereign individual that he valued so much.2 However, he rejected any suggestion that the transition to democratic rule had significantly changed the basic psychological-ideological foundation of modern political institutions – especially in Germany, where parliament was elected by universal male suffrage but had in fact little control over government policy.3 Bismarck distrusted democracy and ruled through a strong, well-trained bureaucracy with power in the hands of a traditional aristocratic Junker elite, which consisted of the landed nobility in eastern Prussia. These arrangements not only helped keep social hierarchies in place (even if the numbers in each social group changed significantly) but also provided the necessary discipline to meet the fast-pace transformative demands of the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914). As Jan Patocˇka argues in his reflections on the wars of the twentieth century, “of all nations (excepting maybe the United States), imperial Germany was an entity which in spite of its traditional structures most closely approximated the reality of the new scientific-technological era.” Based on the contention that it merely reignited claims to the old empire through the new nationalism forged out of the military victory over France, its conservatism served to promote

140

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

obedience, organization, mechanization, and capitalist expansion in ways that inevitably conflicted with the existing international order: Germany’s internal opposition, the socialists, inevitably viewed their own country as the hunting ground of greedy capitalist magnates and later as a typical representative of world’s capitalist imperialism striving for control of all of the planet’s wealth and production forces. In reality, they cooperated in organizing a new society of labor, discipline, production and planned construction, every aspect of which led to releasing more and more stored energy. Long before the First World War, this Germany had started transforming Europe into an energy-producing factory.4 Nietzsche was keenly aware of this convergence of conservative and revolutionary energies in the politics and international relations of the late nineteenth century. He foresaw that the wars of the next two centuries would be broadly ideological in nature, with the future of the earth hanging in the balance.5 Although deeply anxious over the destructive potential of those events, Nietzsche nevertheless hoped that the centralizing mechanisms of this new planetary managerialism could eventually be harnessed by a new cultural aristocracy and redirected towards the creation of a more dignified post-national order. As he writes in a note from the early 1880s: “The great task and question is drawing near, irrefutably, hesitantly, terrifying like fate: how is the earth as a whole to be governed? And for what end ought humanity as a whole – and no longer a people, a race – to be educated and nurtured?”6 This last chapter seeks to elucidate Nietzsche’s speculative reflections on the agencies, structural forces, and processes upon which he based these transformative hopes. As we will see, Nietzsche’s reflections on the future of Europe contains some of his most liberating cosmopolitan pronouncements as well as some of his most disquietingly violent assertions. They begin to take shape in Human, All Too Human as he is contemplating more traditional questions of state legitimacy, class power, and European integration, and then evolve in a more exploratory direction throughout the 1880s as nationalist tensions across Europe continue to escalate. The closer we get to his final collapse in Turin in January 1889, the more brutal Nietzsche’s statements tend to become. Yet this escalation of hostilities is not a substantive departure from the essence of his earlier positions but,

Grosse Politik

141

rather, an intensification of the rhetoric expressing his message. It reflects the irreducibly political role that he comes to attribute to philosophy in helping to manage the process of disintegration that will avail Europe of the opportunity to undertake a transvaluation of values. For Nietzsche’s aim as a philosopher of the future is not only to destroy the ideological common sense sustaining historical power in place but also to affranchise Europe from the teleological illusions of progress that stand in the way of a life-affirming transformation of occidental humanity.

g e o p o l iti cs Consistent with his account of nihilism, Nietzsche’s considerations of the prospect for a European regeneration is an exploration of future possibilities derived from his interpretation of the death of God and a wide range of more concrete phenomena. These include technological and scientific development, economic modernization, population movement, and changing conceptions of space and territoriality associated with what we nowadays call “globalization.” Although this is rarely ever noted in the specialized literature, Nietzsche’s reflections on these matters overlap in important ways with the renewed interest at the time in the writings of Carl Ritter (1779–1859) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the two main pioneers of the discipline of geography.7 This heavily politicized revival of geography in Bismarckian Germany had counterparts in other European countries and in North America, and it would extend until well into the middle of the twentieth century to form the body of thought that has become known as “classical geopolitics.” In Germany as elsewhere, Geopolitik as a distinctive intellectual enterprise grew out of the anxieties and perceived opportunities generated by the advances of Darwinian biology and the natural sciences. It was also closely related to industrialization and attending changes in the transnational and international distributions of class and state power during the second half of the nineteenth century. The overwhelming majority of intellectuals who took part in those debates in Nietzsche’s lifetime and after came from the more conservative, nationalist end of the political spectrum. In anticipation of a major armed conflict over the redistribution of space in Europe and beyond, they saw this emerging intellectual-political enterprise as an attempt to measure and exploit the elements of human and

142

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

physical geography that make for state power. Some of the early representatives of these intellectual developments include Friedrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), Friedrich von Hellwald (1842–1892), Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930), Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), Emil Reich (1854–1910), and Halford Mackinder (1861–1947).8 Central to this emerging literature was the question of race, which Gobineau first theorized and put on the political agenda in his influential Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race in the 1850s.9 Whereas earlier conservatives had derived their attack on the Enlightenment from the wisdom of Christianity and traditions, Gobineau’s systematic emphasis on race was a deliberate effort to modernize the political theory of reaction by bringing it in line with the positivist scientism of the age. A close reader of Hegel, Gobineau approached human history in terms of one single universal scheme characterized by the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations, the fate of which he associated with racial composition. Developed over years of historical, anthropological, and ethnological studies, his main thesis rested on the completely unsubstantiated notion that races are intellectually, physically, and spiritually distinct, and that the “Aryan” (or Germanic) race was superior in intellect, beauty, and creative energy to all other races. The problem is that the civilizing process inevitably involved miscegenation with inferior breeds, leading, over the centuries, to a slow debilitation of the Aryan race, which Gobineau held responsible for the terminal decline of European civilization.10 Gobineau’s Essai had limited success in France but it predictably found a receptive audience in Germany, where it was championed by Wagner’s Bayreuth Circle of anti-Semitic nationalist intellectuals and the influential racialist historian Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Wagner’s son-in-law).11 Yet among the early contributors to these debates were also leading anarcho-socialist intellectuals such as Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who sought to mobilize geography as an emancipatory discipline that would unite the species beyond race, class, and ethnic nationalism. In The Earth and Its Inhabitants (19 vols. 1876–94), for example, Reclus anticipated a coalescing of humanity and the Earth in terms of a process by which nature was becoming self-conscious. He described this process as one in which humans would disavow all forms of domination and extend their altruistic

Grosse Politik

143

disposition beyond the family, the nation, and the species itself, leading to shared discoveries of more meaningful ways of collectively experiencing our planetary existence.12 Kropotkin articulated similar arguments against social Darwinism and its use as a rationalization for transnational capitalist exploitation during the 1880s and 1890s. But whereas most of his Marxist and anarcho-socialist colleagues emphasized the role of industrial workers in cultivating the conditions for this new planetary consciousness, Kropotkin emphasized local agricultural production and the decentralized organization of rural life. Having led several geographical expeditions to Siberia as a young man, he sought to expose the Hobbesian myth of a need for centralized government by drawing attention to the possibility and desirability of self-sufficiency under conditions of modernity.13 Nietzsche’s philosophy was at odds with all of these conflicting strands of geopolitical discourses. Yet his positions clearly reflect those debates and intersect with elements of both conservative and progressive lines of argument. For a start, Nietzsche shared the conviction of many contributors that the political future of Europe depended on rapidly changing demographic trends, the future of British hegemony, and the expansionist ambitions of Tsarist Russia – “that vast intermediary zone where Europe flows back into Asia.”14 Russia since the Russo-Persia Treaty of 1813 had been playing the “great game” with Britain over the control of India and Afghanistan, which, according to the emerging geopolitical wisdom of the time, held the keys to planetary domination. Nietzsche as a young teenager had been a close observer of the Crimean War of 1853–56. He re-enacted, analyzed, and debated the military strategy of the conflict with his friends, hoping for a Russian victory that would stop British expansionism in the region and alter the continental balance of power in favour of Prussia.15 Nietzsche remained hostile towards Britain all his life, insisting on the mediocrity of its utilitarian philosophy and parliamentary democracy. By the late 1870s, however, he had also grown deeply anxious over Russia’s designs for world order.16 In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche obliquely praises Bismarck for brokering a strategic truce between Britain and Russia at the Congress of Berlin (13 June–13 July 1878).17 The Congress had met to confirm the measures that had just avoided another war between the two empires. This was just after the Eastern Orthodox coalition led by Russia and composed of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro defeated the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War

144

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

of 1877–78.18 In a note from 1885, Nietzsche suggests that those apparent changes in the balance of power would force Continental Europe to “come to an understanding” with Britain, whose colonies were important trade partners for most European states.19 By then, Nietzsche had come to see Russia as a primed and disciplined military machine that could pounce on Europe at any moment. In Beyond Good and Evil, he argues that whether or not Russia would do so would depend on the tsar’s geopolitical ambitions in the East and on the ability of his worn-out autocratic regime to contain the domestic threat of revolution: “there, the will is waiting threateningly (uncertain whether as a will of negation or of affirmation), to be discharged (to borrow a favourite term from today’s physicists).”20 Although terrifying, Nietzsche speculates that the prospect of an armed conflict with Russia could well provide the muchneeded impetus for Europe to overcome its nationalist squabbles and become the unified great power that it has the potential to be: More than just Indian wars and Asian intrigues might be needed to relieve Europe of its greatest danger [Russia] – inner rebellions might be needed as well, the dispersion of the empire into small bodies, and, above all, the introduction of parliamentary nonsense, added to which would be the requirement that every man read his newspaper over breakfast. This is not something I am hoping for. I would prefer the opposite, – I mean the sort of increase in the threat Russia poses that would force Europe into choosing to become equally threatening and, specifically, to acquire a single will by means of a new caste that would rule over Europe, a long, terrible will of its own, that could give itself millennia-long goals: – so that the long, spun-out comedy of Europe’s petty provincialism and its dynastic as well as democratic fragmentation of the will could finally come to an end. The time for petty politics is over: the next century will bring the struggle for the domination of the earth – the compulsion to great politics.21 The other important development influencing Nietzsche’s reflections on these matters during the 1880s was the turn towards an official policy of German colonialism. Up until the early 1880s, Bismarck had considered the goal of acquiring colonies geopolitically disruptive, diplomatically distracting, and too expensive an investment for too little tangible gain. However, he eventually changed his

Grosse Politik

145

mind and approved the formal acquisition of five new colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia between February 1884 and May 1885: Togoland, German Cameroon, German Southwest Africa, German New Guinea, and German East Africa. The main aim of this new policy was to protect trade, to guarantee access to raw materials and export markets, and to create opportunities for capital investment.22 Bismarck sought diplomatic recognition for this foreign policy turnaround by hosting and posturing as a key player at the Berlin West Africa conference of 1884–85, which formalized the so-called “Scramble for Africa” (1881–1914). The move was greeted with delight by nationalist intellectuals who, since the late 1870s, had been campaigning publicly for Germany to embrace its great power status on the world stage. In an influential 1879 article, with which Nietzsche would certainly have been familiar, Treitschke had painted an alarming picture of the conflicting strategic interests of Germany, Britain, Russia, France, and Austria. Emphasizing the growth of British naval power and the expansionist ambitions of Tsarist Russia, he called for a more authoritarian conception of the state matched by a more nationalist strain of patriotism that would help to foment popular support for colonialism and discriminatory measures against immigration.23 The term “great politics” (Grosse Politik) in those public debates was often used to praise the tactical manoeuvring with which the chancellor was manipulating the relationship between international relations and domestic politics in order to carve a place for the newly unified Germany on the world stage. As Peter Bergmann explains, in the German language, “the term has a familiar, majestic ring, one rooted in the then fashionable conviction of the primacy of foreign policy, of a higher form of politics specifically addressing European and world power conflicts in contradistinction to a presumably lesser form of politics dealing with internal matters.”24 For Nietzsche, however, there was nothing “great” about Bismarck’s foreign policy ambitions. If anything, it only demonstrated that European nationalisms were getting ever more insatiable with the irreversible advances of “globalization,” insisting on differences that were getting pettier and ever more insignificant as Europe and the world were becoming ever more interdependent: “This is the age of the masses: they lie prostrate in front of anything massive … They call a statesman ‘great’ if he builds them a new tower of Babel or some sort of monstrosity of empire and power – who cares if we are

146

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

more cautious and circumspect and keep holding on to our old belief that it takes a great thought to make a cause or action great.”25 Like many other critics and advocates of colonial expansion at the time, Nietzsche was acutely aware that the undignified “Scramble for Africa” was intimately linked to the continuing economic difficulties of the Reich.26 Although the economic depression of the 1870s had been overcome, neither the German nor world economy had returned to the standard of prosperity set between 1850 and 1873. Stagnation during the early 1880s was quickly followed by the recession of 1882 to 1886; and while liberal finance capitalism stood discredited by the crash of 1873, the new protectionist alliance between heavy industry and agrarian capitalists brought very little economic improvement and failed to attenuate class conflicts.27 Nietzsche could understand why so many of his contemporaries wanted to emigrate from Europe to other continents in order to escape the wretched condition of the European proletariat, insisting that no increase in wages or socialist revolution could alleviate the dehumanizing experience of being commodified and enslaved by the exploitative mechanisms of industrial society. Under these conditions, he argued, colonialism could potentially work as some sort of safety valve that would help to reduce social tensions in an increasingly over-populated Europe: To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! … In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: “better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me” ... The workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption … Outside of Europe the virtues of Europe will go

Grosse Politik

147

on their wanderings with these workers; and that which was at home beginning to degenerate into dangerous illhumour and inclination for crime will, once abroad, acquire a wild beautiful naturalness and be called heroism.28 Nietzsche’s scattered remarks on colonialism are not particularly well informed, reflecting the romantic fascination of the age for new beginnings, warmer climates, and vast open spaces yet unspoiled by the ravages of modern life.29 He himself briefly considered, during the summer of 1885, joining a Swiss colony in Mexico to meet the “climatic demands” of his poor health.30 For the same reasons, Nietzsche also briefly toyed with the idea of resettling in Nueva Germania with his sister.31 However, the thought of abandoning the rich cultural heritage of Europe to spend the rest of his life farming distant lands with Aryan missionaries like his brother-in-law put him off.32 For although Nietzsche did not object to colonialism per se, he was vehemently opposed to its nationalist and racist ideological motivations. To him, the fact that the European dynasties were suddenly scrambling to discharge their Christian duty to civilize Africa at the very same time as Christianity was disintegrating was symptomatic of the frustrated will to power of a continent in crisis. As the peoples of Europe were seeking refuge in nationalism and race, states were projecting themselves onto the international stage not to defend a new vision for a changing Europe but strictly to prevent being excluded from this new global politics without aim.33 What could pass for Realpolitik in this setting was not a prestige strategy or a pragmatic move to stem the tide of mass ideologies but, rather, a deliberate effort to avoid responsibility for articulating a common project that would guide European politics towards creative goals: “Let us hope that Europe will soon produce a great statesman, and that he who is praised as the ‘great realist’ in this petty age of plebeian myopia, will be revealed as small.”34 Beyond the more immediate risk of a large-scale military conflict, Nietzsche believed that the most insidious consequence of all this misdirected political energy was that it detracted from a desire for political unity that was already under way among many cultured Europeans: Thanks to the pathological manner in which nationalist nonsense has alienated and continues to alienate the peoples of Europe from each other; thanks as well to the short-sighted and

148

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

swift-handed politicians who have risen to the top with the help of this nonsense, and have no idea of the extent to which the politics of dissolution that they practice can only be entr’acte politics, – thanks to all this and to some things that are strictly unmentionable today, the most unambiguous signs declaring that Europe wants to be one are either overlooked or wilfully and mendaciously reinterpreted.35

towa r d s a n e w europe Nietzsche’s effort to imagine a cosmopolitan cultural unity that would transcend the chauvinistic politics of nationalism is expressed through the ideal of the “good European,” a close relative of the “free spirit,” the “sovereign individual,” and the “Übermensch” that Nietzsche counter-poses to the “ascetic priest,” the “last man,” and other such figureheads of European nihilism.36 The good European makes his first appearance in The Wanderer and His Shadow as the kind of higher ideal type of human being that we must create to ensure the “direction and supervision of the total culture of the earth.”37 Nietzsche often praises the ancient, aristocratic republicanism represented by Napoleon in this context, for Napoleon was the embodiment of an exceptional cultural synthesis that succeeded in transmuting the enormous charge of ressentiment released by the levelling violence of the French Revolution into a higher cosmopolitan project of European unification.38 More significantly, however, Nietzsche’s account of the good European is inspired by the historical experience of the Jews as a people whose abundance of spiritual power and resourcefulness could best function without national institutions.39 According to Nietzsche, the good European is good not because of his moral disposition but because of his preparedness to forsake the familiar narratives of patriotic attachments constitutive of his prevailing sense of identity.40 He is the wandering inheritor of the ever more rigorous will to truth who will transvalue the pessimism of the age by showing the way to a wide diversity of possibilities still opened to Europe: “this severity makes us good Europeans if anything does, and heirs to Europe’s most protracted and bravest self-overcoming!”41 There is little doubt that Nietzsche’s ideal of the good European is also heavily influenced by his own personal experience as an intellectual nomad. Nietzsche’s formal status after he officially emigrated

Grosse Politik

149

from Prussia to Switzerland to take up his professorship in Basel in 1869 had been that of a legally stateless person. Nietzsche had been granted a residence permit upon emigration and then a Swiss passport in 1876 that he carried with him until his final mental breakdown in 1889. However, the passport claimed neither that he had Swiss citizenship nor that he was a formal citizen of the Basel canton. After his health problems forced him to resign his chair at Basel Nietzsche used his small pension to travel south, living for a few months at a time in Turin, Venice, Sils Maria, Genoa, and other places where the climate was generally more hospitable to his condition.42 As Gary Shapiro argues: “Nietzsche’s mobile personal geography alerted him to the globalization of space and time through the consolidation of a striated perspective on the earth. He lived mindfully in a time increasingly dominated by techniques of measurement, transportation, and control of speeds and flows.”43 Nietzsche associates this epochal techno-scientific compression of space and time with the “age of the machine.”44 He sees it as one of the main subterranean forces pushing Europe towards new forms of amalgamated unity. As in Kant and Marx, this is not only because technology erodes territorial constraints on mobility but also because it introduces new functional imperatives into the fabric of national economies in ways that force the transnationalization of commercial transactions and the development of ever more inclusive socio-political projects: “Thanks to the sovereign imperatives of contemporary international relations and world commerce, which demand the supreme and continuous expansion of universal exchanges, our small and petty European states and ‘empires’ will soon become economically unviable.”45 But whereas both Kant and Marx believed that technology was a progressive force that could potentially save humanity by virtue of its alignment with the spread of the republican state form (Kant) and the interests of the working classes (in Marx), Nietzsche’s prognostic is a lot more ambivalent, insisting that the significance of technics for mankind will ultimately depend on our ability to subordinate it to a life-affirming “revaluation of values.”46 Consistent with his critique of modern Socratic-Kantian rationalism, Nietzsche understands that modern technology is not just a system of tools and material artefacts such as computing, communication, and transportation systems and machines. More fundamentally, technology is a “mechanistic” mode of thought driven by an anthropocentric metaphysics of control, production, and

150

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

distribution, and from the standpoint of which the world appears as a mere object for exploitation. This “essentially meaningless” standpoint rests on a misguided belief in a world that is assumed to have its counterpart in human thought and valuations: “That the only rightful interpretation of the world should be one to which you have a right; one by which one can do research and go on scientifically in your sense of the term (you really mean mechanistically?) – one that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, grasping, and nothing else.”47 Thus whereas the Greeks still saw techneˉ as the realization and fulfilling of nature’s potentialities, technology realizes distinctly human plans. It expresses the situation of modern man who is no longer at home in the world and must therefore conquer it. Nietzsche draws an explicit line of continuity with Christianity’s ascetic demonization of nature: Hubris today characterizes our whole attitude towards nature, our rape of nature with the help of machines and the completely unscrupulous inventiveness of technicians and engineers; hubris characterizes our attitude to God, or rather to some alleged spider of purpose and ethics lurking behind the great spider’s web of causality ... Hubris characterizes our attitude towards ourselves, – for we experiment on ourselves in a way we would never allow on animals, we merrily vivisect our souls out of curiosity: that is how much we care about the “salvation” of the soul!48 In more concrete terms, Nietzsche is critical of the technomechanistic worldview of the age because it tends to dehumanize social relations and transform labour and market relations into an “anonymous and impersonal slavery.” “In earlier times,” he argues, “all purchasing from artisans was a bestowing of a distinction on individuals, and the things with which we surrounded ourselves were the insignia of these distinctions: household furniture and clothing thus became symbols of mutual esteem and personal solidarity.”49 Many of Nietzsche’s post-romantic contemporaries also shared that position. However, what is significant for Nietzsche in this dehumanization of market exchange is the instrumentalization of life inherent in the logic of technological development. As he explains, despite being “itself a product of the highest intellectual energies, the machine sets in motion in those who serve it almost nothing but the lower, non-intellectual energies.” Although it productively

Grosse Politik

151

“releases a vast quantity of energy in general that would otherwise lie dormant,” technology does so without generating any incentive for individual and collective self-improvement.50 On the contrary, technology intensifies and accelerates the developmental logic of modernization to such a point that man as the main exploiter of resources himself becomes a key resource for exploitation: “Mankind mercilessly employs every individual as material for heating its great machines: but what then is the purpose of the machines if all individuals (that is to say mankind) are of no other use than as material for maintaining them? Machines that are an end in themselves – is that the umana commedia?”51 Reflecting on the advent and future of modern mass society, Nietzsche perceives that technology is the great centralizing reservoir of the nineteenth century: The machine as teacher – The machine of itself teaches the mutual cooperation of hordes of men in operations where each man has to do only one thing: it provides the model for the party apparatus and the conduct of warfare. On the other hand, it does not teach individual autocracy: it makes of many one machine and of every individual an instrument to one end. Its most generalized effect is to teach the utility of centralisation.52 Nietzsche does not engage in substantive political-economic analyses of the strong symbiosis that he identifies here between technology, capitalism, and war. Instead, what he wants to highlight is the ways in which the racial and cultural mixing generated by these processes ultimately run against the developments of nationalist historical narratives, transforming the modern nation-state into a ressentiment-catalyzing unit. This ressentiment is generated by the lag between the physiological evolution of Europeans and the search for national unity on the basis of obsolete political concepts and practices of government. As he explains: Trade and industry, the post and the book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid changing of home and scene, the nomadic life now lived by all who do not own land – these circumstances are necessarily bringing with them a weakening and finally an abolition of nations, at least the European: so that as a consequence of continual crossing a mixed race, that of European man, must come into being out of them. This goal

152

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

is at present being worked against, consciously or unconsciously, by the separation of nations through the production of national hostilities, yet this mixing will nonetheless go slowly forward in spite of that temporary counter-current ... It is not the interests of the many (the peoples), as is no doubt claimed, but above all the interests of certain princely dynasties and of certain classes of business and society, that impel to this nationalism; once one has recognized this fact, one should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply a good European and actively to work for the amalgamation of nations.53 Nietzsche also attributes an important ancillary role to socialism in paving the way for this amalgamation of nations. For although terrible for those who will come under the sway of this totalizing experiment, Nietzsche argues that socialism will at least “serve to teach, in a truly brutal and impressive fashion, what danger there lies in all accumulations of state power, and to that extent to implant mistrust of the state itself.”54 In The Wanderer and His Shadow, he even contemplates the possibility that the combination of democratization and socialist failure might lead to the formation of some sort of European league of nations based on the Swiss model of cantons. Nietzsche’s reflections anticipate Alexandre Kojève’s famous technocratic play on German philosophies of history: As socialism is a doctrine that the acquisition of property ought to be abolished, the people are as alienated from it as they could be: and once they have got the power of taxation into their hands through their great parliamentary majorities they will assail the capitalists, the merchants and the princes of the stock exchange with a progressive tax and slowly create in fact a middle class which will be in a position to forget socialism like an illness it has recovered from. – The practical outcome of this spreading democratization will first of all be a European league of nations within which each individual nation, delimited according to geographical fitness, will possess the status and rights of a canton: in this process the historical recollections of the former nations will be of little account, since the sense of reverence for such things will gradually be totally uprooted by the domination of the democratic principle, which thirsts for innovations and is greedy for experiments. The corrections of frontiers which prove necessary

Grosse Politik

153

will be so executed as to serve the interests of the large cantons and at the same time those of the whole union, but not to honour the memory of some grizzled past. The task of discovering the principles upon which these frontier corrections should be made will devolve upon future diplomats, who will have to be at once cultural scholars, agriculturalists and communications experts, and who will have behind them, not armies, but arguments and questions of utility. Only then will foreign policy be inseparably tied to domestic policy: whereas now the latter still has to run after its proud master and gather up in a pitiful little basket the stubble left behind after the former has reaped its harvest.55 For Nietzsche, however, this post-socialist scenario is not the “end of history” but only one of many possible transitory stages towards a much more fluid and amalgamated conception of European unity made possible by the rapid pace of techno-economic modernization and migration patterns.56 This more focused appreciation of demographic changes in Nietzsche’s writings reflects his increased interest in the literature on ethnography and human geography. Nietzsche would have been familiar with Gobineau’s Essai, but he did not share its essentialist conception of race and its apocalyptic vision of terminal civilizational decay.57 Nietzsche also read Hellwald’s influential Die Erde und ihre Völker (The Earth and Its Peoples [1877–78])58 during the summer of 1881 and apparently did not make too much of it.59 A book that seems to have impressed him more decisively is Ratzel’s AnthropoGeographie (1882),60 which he read, underlined, and annotated after picking up a copy in a bookshop in Munich in 1886.61 Ratzel conceived of human culture as naturally developing in close relationship with modes of spatial and geographic formation. His was an effort to develop a global human geography that would not be determined by the perspectives of national history writing. He did this by paying due attention to migration patterns, travels, climate and environmental changes, and other such phenomena that had shaped the process of state formation over the centuries. The ill-fated concept of the Lebensraum that he articulated in the late 1890s to convey key elements of this approach approximates what we might today call a geographical “habitat” or “milieu.” The Nazi appropriation of the concept during the 1930s was largely based on the work of Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), a Swedish political scientist and conservative

154

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

politician who studied with Ratzel in the 1880s. Kjellén coined the term Geopolitik in 1899 and also contributed to the development of the early, racialized concept of “biopolitics” through his organicist theory of the state published in 1917.62 Ratzel himself, however, was an opponent of racial determinism and anti-Semitic thinking. As a pioneer of ethnography, he insisted that the similarities between peoples were a lot more significant than the differences between them. Yet one thing Ratzel shared with Gobineau is the view that the most constant fact of human existence on earth is the movement of peoples, which has the tendency to make the human species ever more uniform and homogenous since mixing is an inevitable consequence of this movement. It is this argument that would have caught Nietzsche’s eyes when reading Anthropo-Geographie. As Gary Shapiro points out, Nietzsche’s important addition to Ratzel’s thesis is that this ongoing process of mixing gives rise to exceptional hybrids and not only amorphous, homogenized populations, rabbles, plebs, or mobs.63 According to Nietzsche, it is those nomadic hybrids who will cause difficulties for the reproduction of the nation-state in the near future: Behind all the moral and political foregrounds that are indicated by formulas like these, an immense physiological process is taking place and constantly gaining ground – the process of increasing similarity between Europeans, their growing detachment from the conditions under which climate- or class-bound races originate, their increasing independence from that determinate milieu where for centuries the same demands would be inscribed on the soul and the body – and so the slow approach of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of person who, physiologically speaking, is typified by a maximal degree of the art and force of adaptation ... The same new conditions that generally lead to a levelling and mediocritization of man – a useful, industrious, abundantly serviceable, and able herd animal man – are to the highest degree suitable for giving rise to exceptional people who possess the most dangerous and attractive qualities.64

n i e t z s c h e ’ s “ g r e at ” p h ilos ophi cal poli ti cs It is difficult not to read the events of the twentieth century back into this appropriation of the biopolitical language of the age. As we see in chapter 4, Nietzsche often experiments with fashionable

Grosse Politik

155

biologizing tropes in his later writings (especially in his notebooks) to reveal fertile tensions and misunderstandings between philosophy and the emerging biological disciplines, including eugenics. But he is too critical and independent a thinker to forge a serious alliance with such reductionist accounts of the complex relationship between nature and the problem of culture. Nevertheless, the increasingly shrill character of Nietzsche’s pronouncements on these matters from the mid-1880s onwards does indeed mark a significant shift in his attitude towards philosophy and its role in winning the hearts and minds of his fellow good Europeans. In Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science, Nietzsche generally argues for a patient and conscientious mode of philosophizing that can stimulate an appreciation of the plurality of the world in which we inevitably exists in relation with and distinction from others. He envisages this slow, solitary approach to individual and social improvement as a transitory expedient that will allow “free spirits” like himself to gather their strength and weather the storm of mass political ideologies, in expectation of a relatively distant future in which collective political action will again be possible.65 In Beyond Good and Evil and subsequent publications and notebooks, however, Nietzsche explicitly begins to move away from this contemplative strategy in favour of a much more polemical stance. He expresses this tactical surge through a sarcastic appropriation of the Bismarckian “great politics” formula of which he is otherwise contemptuous. Emphasizing the difference between the political significance of culture and the politics of the state, Nietzsche announces the advent of a new and truly “great politics” that will move beyond the “petty politics” of nationalism and economic redistribution to concern itself with the project of “breeding a new caste” that will lead the peoples of Europe into the coming struggle for the mastery of the world.66 According to Nietzsche, what makes this new politics truly “great” is neither the resources that are being mobilized for it nor the scale of the strategic objectives and territories that are at stakes but, rather, the fact that the outcome will determine whether the human species as a whole will be levelled downward or elevated to its highest possibility: I bring war. Not between peoples: I do not find words to express my contempt for the abominable politics of interests of the European dynasties, which makes a principle, indeed almost

156

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

a duty, out of the exasperation of the egoism and antagonistic vanities of the peoples. Not between classes. For we do not have superior classes, and consequently, no inferior ones either: those who, in today’s society, sit on top, are physiologically condemned and so impoverished in their instincts, they have become so uncertain, that they profess without scruples the principle opposite to a species of superior human beings. I bring war, a war that rages across all of the absurd coincidences that are people, class, race, profession, education, culture: a war as in between ascent and decline, between the will to live and the will to avenge oneself against life, between sincere and insidious dissimulation.67 Nietzsche’s war declaration reflects his insistence on the irreducibly political role that he now attributes to philosophy and intellectuals in managing the disintegration and subsequent reconstruction of European unity. In Russia and the German Nation (1853), the historian and philosopher Bruno Bauer suggests that there was nothing coincidental about the exhaustion of Western metaphysics and the ascendance of “a Russian nation to which, from the very beginning of its existence, the philosophic work of the West remained alien.” The nineteenth century was the century of “the social,” and governments who concerned themselves with economics, industrialism, and the conquest of nature were interested in scientists, engineers, and large-scale entrepreneurs – not philosophers.68 Nietzsche somewhat agreed with this assessment.69 However, in his eyes, the “German spirit” that Bauer glorified and contrasted with the mechanistic nature of Russian power rested on a gross overestimation of the achievements of German philosophy from Luther to Hegel. Not unlike Marx, Nietzsche believed that German philosophy so far had largely concerned itself with interpreting the world rather than with trying to change it.70 The death of God and the birth of the new global geopolitical age called for the rise of a new kind of hardened philosophers capable of reversing this state of affairs.71 Nietzsche’s move takes specific aim at the long-standing claim that politics and philosophy are parallel but ultimately incommensurable ways of being and finding meaning in the world. In the classic Platonic account of this conflict, the opposition between the philosopher and the city stems from the fact that thinking philosophically always requires one to step back from the phenomenal world of appearances in order to contemplate and grasp the nature of the

Grosse Politik

157

whole. This withdrawal stands in conflict with the proactive pursuit of glory and greatness in the political realm, which is defined and held together by opinions, conventions, and norms that the philosopher’s search for “truth” always threatens to undermine.72 This is the well-known story of the trial of Socrates, who stood before a jury of five hundred fellow Athenians accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth. Caught between his loyalty to philosophical truth and his political allegiance to the Athenian polis, Socrates gracefully accepted the death penalty. This is because, although he found the judgment and punishment unfair as a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, Socrates appreciated that he had implicitly agreed to live and die by the norms of the polis.73 Platonic political philosophy was partly a response to this tragic execution. It sought to make the world safe for philosophy by introducing various esoteric doctrines as a strategy of self-defence against the threat of political persecution. Esoteric writing would allow the philosopher to theorize about the conditions that would best suit the needs of the unfortunate human condition of infinite plurality while simultaneously pursuing philosophical truths “furtively” so as not to endanger the stability of the political community and attract unwanted attention to the subversive nature of their existence. In this account, esotericism became a common practice in the history of Western thought not because of an irresponsible lust for power but because of the philosopher’s quest to overcome the unreliability and danger of politics in the interest of pursuing something higher.74 Two thousand years later, Nietzsche still very much wants to defend the interest of philosophy against the contemporary threats of religious ressentiment and its modern political-ideological incarnations. Like Plato, Nietzsche believes that the antagonism between the city and the philosopher is timeless and universal, and that the interests of humanity in this conflict are aligned with the cosmopolitan disposition of philosophy. But Nietzsche disagrees about the timeless necessity of telling “noble lies” to protect the political community from the baleful consequences of the will to truth.75 As Laurence Lampert puts it, Nietzsche believes that “modern opinion necessitates what it also makes possible, the attempt to bring society’s opinion into accord with philosophy’s character, not by making society wise but by making its opinions reflect rather than contradict the truth.”76 Nietzsche’s strategy rests on a provocative distinction that he draws between what he calls “philosophical labourers” and

158

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

“genuine philosophers.” Philosophical labourers are professionals like Kant and Hegel who have internalized the dominant values and goals associated with modern science and who work tirelessly to perpetuate those ideals by pressing them “into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or politics (morality) or art.”77 By contrast, true philosophers “are commanders and legislators” who will provide Europe with the direction it lacks in this important transition period: “they say ‘That is how it should be!’ they are the ones who first determine the ‘where to?’ and ‘what for? of people, which puts at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all those who overwhelm the past.”78 These are the “extraordinary patrons of humanity” who promote the expansion of culture by refusing to validate the prevailing moral and aesthetic standards of the age, and reminding their contemporaries of how much more they could become.79 The intellectual profile of the legislating philosophers whose arrival Nietzsche eagerly anticipates is obviously autobiographical. The philosophy issued from the Enlightenment during the nineteenth century had worked under the assumption that science and technology could eventually marginalize physical and psychological suffering from modern life. Doctors discovered vaccination and general anaesthesia; pharmacologists discovered morphine; psychologists medicalized anxiety and proposed electrotherapy as management and cure; rights activists called for the abolition of slavery and torture; politicians introduced public insurance and welfare for the old, young, and unemployed; and so on.80 In Bismarckian Germany as elsewhere, this generalized desire to inoculate life against pain was being nationalized into collective identities and impossible demands for security from alien others, contributing to the “blood poisoning with which European peoples were now delimiting and barricading themselves against each other as if with quarantines.”81 Nietzsche’s legislating philosophers promised to put an end to this alienated quest for security by restoring the rhathymia (the state of being carefree and light-hearted) of the ancients: “their unconcern and scorn for safety, body, life, comfort, their shocking cheerfulness and depth of delight in all destruction, in all the debauches of victory and cruelty.”82 Like Zarathustra’s, their transformative agency rests on their ability to free Europe from its static conception of political time by forcing a choice between ascending or declining values. To the Kantian imperative “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time

Grosse Politik

159

will that it should become a universal law without contradiction,” legislating philosophers oppose their own criteria of conduct: “live your life in such a way that it makes you want to relive everything all over again; for you will relive no matter what!”83 This is the basic premise of the doctrine of the “eternal return of the same,” which crops up in various forms in Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings throughout the 1880s.84 Kant had in fact entertained a very similar thought in The Critique of Judgment. He quickly concluded that no one in his right mind would agree to “start life over under the same conditions.” Measured in terms of happiness, Kant argued, the “value of life falls below zero.”85 Like Voltaire before him, and Schopenhauer after him, Kant rejected all eudemonist forms of optimism according to which the sum of the pleasures in the life of an individual or humanity as a whole exceeds the sum of sufferings. But for Kant, a relative decrease in pleasure and happiness by no means diminished the value of human existence. This is because, in his view, the value of human existence did not reside in what actually happens to an individual but in what that individual does as a moral being. Kant understood morality in terms of a rational overcoming of the weak, sensorial aspects of our nature; and since this overcoming cannot but be a source of great pain, he saw that suffering was a condition of possibility for all historically decisive elevations of our nature. In Kant’s philosophy, it is only through the dignity that we acquire as bearers of the moral law that we can redeem an otherwise unbearable existence.86 Against such Christian pessimism, in which “what is” is always redeemed or justified with reference to some final intention, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return offers a view in which the ultimate purpose of existence is achieved in every moment. Nietzsche’s reasoning is that if I believe that I must relive again and again my existence according to the exact same course of life, I will transform myself and live every moment with the will to determine my infinite future. The “common man” committed to a reactive hatred of life will certainly collapse and self-destruct under the weight of this heaviest of thought. But the few who can love life to the point of embracing it in its entirety will assume proactive responsibility for the perfection of their infinite existence, cultivating their capacity to instil value and find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. Again here, affirming the eternal recurrence of all things does not mean indiscriminately approving of all things.87 For this would force

160

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

Nietzsche to say “Yes” to the normative and political conditions of nihilism that his philosophy so combatively seeks to overcome, leaving his good European unable to take a position and stand for or against anything at all.88 Eternal return is not a quietist encouragement to reconcile ourselves with the status quo but, rather, an effort to break existing patterns of everyday common sense by affirming the structure of opposition that constitutes one’s meaning and identity. Nietzsche wants his readers to change their ways of thinking precisely because he thinks that such a change would radically affect not just their perceptions of the world but also what they actually do in the world.89 This is the strategic function of his increasingly violent rhetoric during the 1880s. By systematically insisting on the worst aspects of existence and affirming its “eternal recurrence,” Nietzsche wants to encourage the fatigued and resentful to self-destruct: “Whoever can be crushed with the words ‘there is no redemption’ should disappear. I want to see wars, by means of which those who have the courage to live will chase out and eliminate those who are weary of the world … you must expel them … drive them to despair etc.”90 It is not difficult to see how brutal statements like these could be construed as preambles to the totalitarian biopolitics of the twentieth century. However, we must remind ourselves that the “degenerate and parasitical” Nietzsche seeks to eliminate does not refer to the most vulnerable and deprived of any given society but, rather, to everything that he identifies with the ascetic priest and its modern political ideological incarnations.91 The question of “breeding humanity to a higher level” he envisages in those violent statements is therefore not a question of providing some sort of dogmatic education that would reduce men to a function in a new totalitarian assemblage.92 On the contrary, breeding is about giving men the means to liberate themselves from all dependency on such Leviathanesque political constructions. This is the whole point of the Übermensch that, in this context, Nietzsche counter-poses to the herd mentality of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. As Tracy Strong emphasizes, the Übermensch is not “simply about some kind of superior being, different from the run-of-the-mill person. The question is, rather, why more of us are not more than we are, why we persist in mediocrity.”93 The problem is that what this “great politics” would actually look like in practice and in terms of institutional design is far from clear.

Grosse Politik

161

Nietzsche briefly sketches out different possibilities in his notebooks, but these often contradict one another; and the reader will search in vain for clues as to how to interpret different propositions “correctly” or decide on which should be focused on and which disregarded.94 In some notes, Nietzsche appears to suggest that the legislating philosophers channelling this great politics of culture will have to get directly involved in questions of rule and government.95 In others, he seems to suggest (in ways that resemble Plato’s Republic) that philosophers will remain in the shadow of those who rule in order to educate the future masters to educate themselves.96 In yet others, he hints at a mixture of both positions.97 As Herman Siemens argues in a survey of Nietzsche’s late notebooks, the fact that Nietzsche constantly moves back and forth between multiple variations of these different positions “falsifies any attempt to ascribe a coherent, settled political vision” to his reflections on the future of Europe and world politics.98 This is disappointing given the uncompromising radicalism of Nietzsche’s attacks on the existing order. Yet if Nietzsche’s intimations of what a reintegrated Europe might look like remain frustratingly vague, it is not only because of his dismissive attitude towards social engineering but also because the higher culture that he hopes to see emerge can only be defined by the will of its creators. As Georges Bataille argues, Nietzsche’s good European is a free spirit and “one cannot define what is free. Nothing is more vain than to assign and limit what is not in existence: one must will the future and to will the future is to acknowledge its right not to be limited by the past.”99 Although Nietzsche shared with Kant a deep desire to safeguard and cultivate the cosmopolitan cultural heritage of Europe against the destructive politics of the modern nation-state, his message for the good Europeans stopped short of embracing the idea of a federation of democratic states because he understood too well that this federalist vision would forever be marked by its historical conditions of emergence.100 If anything, what Nietzsche’s fragmented reflections on the future of Europe teach us is that we cannot “solve” the problem of political violence simply by appending cosmopolitan institutions to a Eurocentric “international society” whose normative fabric remains so deeply constituted by the politics and metaphysics of the sovereign nation-state. Nietzsche’s lesson is not as original today as it was then, but it remains as prescient as ever. By trying to reconcile the transformative project of cosmopolitanism with the

162

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

framework of the nation-state, the law of nations, and an idealized idea of Europe from which the latter are derived, contemporary liberal cosmopolitanism often ends up rationalizing rather than confronting the structuring exclusions on which these are based.101 This is why, for Nietzsche, any serious plan for an institutional transformation of the international had to start with a radical transformation of the modalities of interaction between individuals and between individuals and their world. Rather than providing his readers with a theoretical blueprint or an ideological manifesto to institutionalize a set of substantive criteria according to which they should try to live their lives, Nietzsche sought to cultivate in them an alternative disposition towards the human condition that would enable them to embrace their own socially and geographically situated forms of existence more affirmatively. Whereas so many of his progressive contemporaries saw peace, justice, and equal rights as the most pressing task of humanity, Nietzsche saw the greatest task of humanity as one of deliverance from the ressentiment of slave morality and its source – revenge.102 As Heidegger argues in What is Called Thinking? (1954), Nietzsche’s thoughts on war and peace were a bridge beyond man himself: It focuses on a spirit which, being the freedom from revenge, is prior to all mere fraternization, but also to any mere desire to mete out punishment, to all peace efforts and all warmongering – prior to that other spirit which would establish and secure peace, pax, by pacts. The space of this freedom from revenge is prior to all pacifisms, and equally to all power politics. It is prior to all weak do-nothingism and shirking of sacrifice, and to blind activity for its own sake. The space of freedom from revenge is where Nietzsche sees the superman’s essential nature. That is the space toward which he who crosses over is moving – the superman – “Ceasar with the soul of the Christ.”103 It is in this strange way that Nietzsche’s philosophy somewhat reunites with Kant and the tradition of thought issued from the Enlightenment. When Nietzsche railed against rationalism he did not support irrationalism in the sense that he maintained that thought must give way to unconscious forces. More like Freud, Nietzsche maintained that consciousness had to free the affects. When Nietzsche embraced the language of warfare and brutality

Grosse Politik

163

he did so thinking that, once men were able to free themselves from slave morality instincts and from all repressions of destructive affects, then these affects would lose their violent character. Instead of the man of ressentiment, who is bad since he cannot embrace his destructive affects, there would come into being the sovereign individual who would be neither good nor evil since there would no longer be anything to repress: And perhaps there will come a great day on which a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development of military discipline and thinking, and accustomed to making the heaviest sacrifices on behalf of these things, will cry of its own free will: “we shall shatter the sword” – and demolish its entire military machine down to its last foundations. To disarm while being the best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility – that is the means of real peace, which must always rest on a disposition for peace: whereas the so-called armed peace such as now parades about in every country is a disposition to fractiousness which trusts neither itself nor its neighbour and fails to lay down its arms half out of hatred, half out of fear. Better to perish than to hate and fear, and twofold better to perish than to make oneself hated and feared – this must one day become the supreme maxim of every individual state!104

Conclusion I know my lot. One day my name will be connected with the memory of something tremendous, – a crisis such as the earth has never seen, the deepest collision of conscience, a decision made against everything that has been believed, demanded, held sacred so far. I am not a human being, I am dynamite. – And yet I am not remotely the religion-founding type – religions are the business of the rabble … I do not want any “true believers,” I think I am too malicious to believe in myself, I never speak to the masses … I have a real fear that someday people will consider me holy ... I do not want to be a saint, I would rather be a buffoon .. Perhaps I am a buffoon ... Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Kant pinned his hopes for the progressive elimination of political violence on a program of public enlightenment, in which the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics and the instrumental-private use of reason would eventually be overcome by the critical-public use of reason. His was an effort to demonstrate that it is perfectly rational to hope that modern politics and international relations will assimilate themselves to a reason that will unite human societies into ever more inclusive and peaceful forms of communities as our species becomes more educated. By contrast, Nietzsche’s critique suggests that conflict and its degeneration into violence arises not solely as a result of ignorance, economic deprivation, or excesses of “Dionysian” passions but also out of antagonisms fostered by the increased acquisition of knowledge, which continuously intensifies the degree of differentiation and potential for disagreement and negative identification between individuals, groups, states, and communities of all kinds.1 Although limited from a historical sociological perspective, the association between the decline of Christianity and the decay of the

Conclusion

165

modern European society of states that Nietzsche perceives and analyzes in this context anticipates many essential features of the crisis of legitimacy that became so central to the politics and international relations of the twentieth century and beyond. Through his critique of nationalism, mass democracy, and ideologies of social engineering, Nietzsche highlights the conditions under which the quest for individual and collective self-determination turns into unremitting social and political competition, providing valuable resources to think critically about the troubled relationship between politics and culture in a rationalizing world order. As we have seen in different contexts throughout this study, one of the main lessons Nietzsche sought to impart to his European audience in this respect is that primordial and often destructive forces are constitutive of what it is to be human, that our enjoyment of these forces is genuine, and that our inclination to suppress, ignore, or even project these affects onto others is just another way of eventually allowing them to express themselves with more ferocity.2 Whereas many saw “progress” in the rationalization of European societies, Nietzsche saw the nihilistic destruction of genuine alterity through the insidious interplay of two totalizing tendencies: (1) a tendency to level all socio-cultural differences in favour of universalist categories that foster dependency and submission by dint of relentless social integration and, (2) a tendency to create new collective markers of difference that disempower, marginalize, and exclude those who resist or remain unresponsive to dominant narratives and mechanisms of integration. In this malignant synergy, Nietzsche perceived a dark subterranean lineage between the contradictions of Enlightenment thought and ever-increasing popular demand for the continuous expansion of modern regimes of security, along with their xenophobic and racializing ideological appendages. This particular aspect of Nietzsche’s legacy had a tremendous impact on the political theory of the twentieth century. Freud, Adorno, Marcuse, Spengler, Jünger, Marcuse, Arendt, Kojève, Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and many others have assimilated it into their own intellectual framework in pursuit of often very different political ends. In international political theory as well, much of what has come to be understood as the realist “tragic vision of politics” rests on different iterations of this tension Nietzsche emphasizes between the identity-conferring nature of politics and the knowledge that political action is prone to failure because it can never measure up

166

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

to the complex diversity and unpredictability of human relations.3 But it is also important to acknowledge the limits of this rapprochement between Nietzsche and twentieth-century realism. Without underestimating the variety within the modern realist tradition, it is safe to say that most of its protagonists refused to appropriate Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality as a resource for reconstructing it.4 As Joshua Foa Dienstag points out, despite being deeply critical of progressive philosophies of history, Weber, Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and practically all later representatives of this tradition also continued “to hold out the hope of a form of theoretical, if not practical, mastery of the situation of international affairs.”5 Although the mode of argumentation differs depending on the methodological disposition of the author, this hope rests on the not-so-tragic assumption that if the deep, permanent origins of tragic conflict were acknowledged, social agents could perhaps avoid making the same errors of judgment when caught in similar ethico-political dilemmas in the future.6 Nietzsche’s emphasis on the temporality and systematic discontinuity of becoming as the main source of disorder does not allow for such hopes. For him, tragedy is not intended to teach us some kind of moral lesson about the hubris of political ambitions. Nor is it meant to work as a kind of catharsis by purifying violent emotions through their energetic discharge, as in the Aristotelian version of tragedy.7 Tragedies do not condemn passion but embrace it. As exemplified by the myth of Prometheus, Nietzsche sees the inescapable demise of the tragic hero as a source of great pain but also as the test through which the hero proves his nobility by confronting and affirming his own downfall.8 By associating self-improvement with adversity, alterity, and the perspectival character of knowledge, Nietzsche wants to explore the possibility of a politics in which the acknowledgment (rather than the denial) of the transient and agonistic nature of all identities can become the basis for solidarity and the undertaking of collective endeavours. The main problem, according to Nietzsche’s own critique of Western civilization, is that, historically, the ascetic ideal has been all too effective in its project of disempowerment to allow for a reform of modern public institutions that could accommodate a rearticulation of the political along these lines. As Nietzsche emphasizes in Twilight of the Idols, those who wish to recover ancient institutional blueprints and models of citizenship in order to reverse or counter the debilitating consequences of modernity (as he himself did in his

Conclusion

167

early writings) underestimate the extent to which human beings have been transformed by modern thought and regimes of power: “Our institutions are no good any more: people are unanimous on this count. But this is our fault, not the fault of the institutions. After we lose all the instincts that give rise to institutions, we lose the institutions themselves because we are not suited to them anymore.”9 Under those conditions, Nietzsche concludes that cultural transformation must necessarily precede political transformation. For only when the hegemony of the repressed, herd-like subject of modernity is overcome will it be possible to envisage the emergence of human beings fit to assume the responsibility for the government of the earth: A word in the conservative’s ear. – What people did not used to know, what people these days do know, can know – , a regressive development or turnaround in any way, shape, or form is absolutely impossible ... there are parties even today that dream about a world of crabs, where everything walks backwards. But no one is free to be a crab. It is no use: we have to go forwards, and I mean step by step further into decadence (– this is my definition of modern “progress” . . .). You can inhibit this development and even dam up the degeneration through inhibition, gather it together, make it more violent and sudden: but that is all you can do.10 Much of the controversy concerning Nietzsche’s legacy as a political thinker revolves around the critical revaluation of values upon which he based his hopes for an energetic renewal of the elites that will pursue this project of cultural transformation. Although this is often overlooked in the existing literature, Nietzsche’s critique is not just a claim about the hollowing out of Platonic-Judeo-Christian values but also an assertion about the temporality and instability of the subject position of value attribution.11 Unlike in the Platonic conception of the good, which cannot be clearly seen or explained but which, once recognized, draws us to it independently of our interests and desires, values must force themselves in. They only exist as acts of valuation posited from an infinite possibility of evaluative positions by individuals who must constantly bring the influence of their valuations to bear.12 As Carl Schmitt emphasizes in The Tyranny of Values (1959), Nietzsche’s political challenge to modern thought

168

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

thus stems not only from his exposition of the metaphysical void out of which values are posited (the death of God) but also from the antagonistic disposition that is intrinsic to the radical subjectivism of value setting: No one can escape the immanent logic of value thinking ... [T]he validity [of values] must be constantly actualized, that means: made valid, if it is not to be dissolved in mere appearance ... Virtues one exercises; norms one applies; commands are fulfilled; but values are set down and imposed … No one can value without devaluing, raising in value, and valuazing [sic] [verwerten]. Whoever sets values has thereby set himself against non-values. The boundless tolerance and neutrality of the arbitrarily exchangeable standpoints and viewpoints immediately turns over into its opposite, into enmity, as soon as it becomes a concretely serious matter of enactment and making valid. The compulsion to validity of value is irresistible, and the strife of those who value, de-value, raise in value, and valuize [Verwerter], is unavoidable.13 The point here is not to endorse the concept of the political that Schmitt channels in this statement but, rather, to question Nietzsche’s hopes to overcome nihilism through a rethinking of what it means for individuals and communities to create, defend, and preserve values in the late-modern world. For whether values are posited from the standpoint of the ascetic priest, the great artist, or the legislating philosopher, the fact remains that to conceive of meaning and our deepest aspirations and apprehensions in the language of “values” inevitably implies that we are less and less gripped by shared concerns, that fewer and fewer norms and public symbols can elicit a stirring commitment from us. This situation has arguably been made a lot worse in recent decades by the extraordinary expansion of technology, new means of communication, social networks, and the internet, which together generate countless new opportunities and desires to take position. By modifying the possibilities offered to human societies, technology also forces a redistribution of priorities and a redefinition of what is legal and desirable, prompting new normative debates and conflicts over values at all levels of human interaction. This has intensified the relativization and decline of institutional authority that Nietzsche diagnosed in the late nineteenth century and has rendered shared references, criteria, and modalities

Conclusion

169

of judgment ever more precarious, continuously expanding the depth and number of axiological antagonisms. As The Economist reported amidst the fury of the Iraq War in 2004, insofar as political pundits, journalists, party activists, and online cultural warriors all share an interest in narratives of division rather than of unity, the political elites and the media in our contemporary democracies tend to exaggerate the extent to which this “politics of values” actually divides the polity. Yet the reason this is the case is that those who feel strongly about values are increasingly the only ones motivated enough to play a sustained proactive role in the political arena.14 It is in this context that Heidegger’s controversial critique of Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians continues to resonate, despite the inadequacies of many of its interpretative claims.15 Without going into the fine details of his interpretation of metaphysics, Heidegger’s assessment rests on his association of subjectivism with technological thinking and the phenomenon of modern physics and mathematics insofar as subjectivism conceives of reality as a series of categories that the human subject deliberately constructs and meaningfully projects onto the world. In doing so, argues Heidegger, subjectivism “forgets” that beings always reveal themselves to us as meaningful before we make any value judgments about them: “In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation.”16 Heidegger thus rejects the subjectivist language of values because he sees it as a way of “presencing” and “enframing” things before us as if we ourselves had put them there as “ready-to-hand” for our own appraisal and manipulative purposes.17 As he explains in his “Letter on Humanism” (1947), to assign value to something is to rob it of its worth insofar as “what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it is valued positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid – solely as the objects of its doing.”18 According to Heidegger, it is the dominance in modern man of an assertive will to set in place, steer, and control all entities according to

170

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

our own needs and techno-scientific ways of engaging with the world that is responsible for the loss of meaning that Nietzsche associates with the militarization of international politics in his prognosis for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: “Nihilism is not only the process of devaluing the highest values, nor is it simply the withdrawal of these values. The very positing of these values in the world is already nihilism.”19 In Heidegger’s understanding, Nietzsche’s entanglement “in the confusion of the representation of values” means that “he never reached the genuine centre of philosophy.”20 This led him to conclude that the overcoming of nihilism rested on the cultivation of a new ideal of man capable of creating his own reality by stamping it on the world on the basis of a new and adequate understanding that we finally have of ourselves as will to power. In Nietzsche’s eyes, or so Heidegger argues, the will to power as the “principle for the positing of values was new because it was for the first time achieved knowingly out of the knowledge of its own premises.”21 However, in reality, Nietzsche’s formulation of the crisis of nihilism as a state in which we have lost our values and posit new ones was not the final transfiguration of Western metaphysics but the historical fulfilment of its worst anthropocentric tendencies: “Nihilism as the world-historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn into the power realm of the modern age.”22 Heidegger’s critique draws attention to important blind spots in Nietzsche’s enterprise. But it also elides many nuances and subtleties in the substance and rhetorical modalities of Nietzsche’s positions, not least because it relies heavily (and very selectively) on The Will to Power as the alleged outline of Nietzsche’s intended main work.23 Heidegger is generally correct when he argues that Nietzsche’s appropriation of the nineteenth-century language of values remained within the framework of traditional metaphysical categories that he never really managed to shake off completely. However, Nietzsche’s critique undermined these categories to such an extent that it can hardly be reduced to a restorative radicalization of the Western tradition into a world-conquering subjectivism.24 After all, the whole point of Nietzsche’s insistence on the aesthetic dimension of valuation is to ease the desire for control that he identifies with the Kantian need to secure the universal validity of our moral judgments. The consequence of Nietzsche’s critique is to show the irrational, dehumanizing premises of this deep and obsessive fear that ethical life is impossible without appealing to the alleged

Conclusion

171

existence of intersubjectively authoritative standards of rational discourse. Far from simply putting man where God used to be (as Heidegger claimed), Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual who posits his own values is an effort to transfigure the feeling of moral guilt cultivated by Christianity into a feeling of responsibility towards the world that we share with others. It does this precisely by emphasizing the impossibility and danger of addressing ethical questions as matters that can be treated or resolved “outside” politics. Nevertheless, the “great politics” that Nietzsche announces in this context as a means to break modernity’s cycles of insecurity, guilt, and revenge remains fraught with disconcerting tensions and ambiguities. Here, again, the difficulty lies at the intersection of the analytical and prescriptive dimensions of Nietzsche’s diagnostic. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism involves the need to articulate new aristocratic values through a combination of reflexive self-examination, philosophical legislation, and political power. On the other hand, he insists that the politics of this revaluation of values can neither be based on divine authority nor “legitimated” through metaphysical-moral conceptions of rights and social justice since those are part of what needs overcoming if we are to move forward and cultivate a superior form of humanity. As we have seen, the tragic pathos that Nietzsche prescribes to confront this impasse rests on the agent’s ability to bear suffering and its willingness to participate in the suffering of others. Nietzsche repeatedly insists that this joyful act of destruction is driven by a future-oriented desire for creation and novelty, and is therefore antithetical to the vengeful desire to destroy associated with the ressentiment-driven politics of Christianity and modern political ideologies. But given that the only criterion for distinguishing between desirable and undesirable destruction seems to be his highly subjective notion of life-affirming creativity, one is left wondering how these extraordinary agents of change will cultivate aristocratic greatness without at the same time giving rise to a politics of ressentiment among those who cannot live up to the tragic demands of Nietzsche’s vision.25 Ultimately, the problem with this notion of life-affirming creativity is not only that it is opened to a wide variety of interpretations but also that it appeals to nature (life) as a source of philosophical and normative legislation at the same time as it paints a powerful picture of nature as being completely oblivious to whatever ethical concerns we may have as human beings. Leo Strauss draws attention

172

Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace

to this slippage in his study of Beyond Good and Evil (1973).26 As Daniel Conway puts it in a more recent text: “Even if we are willing to grant that sustained empirical observation supports his claim that human societies ‘naturally’ tend toward pyramidal organization, it does not follow that such organizations are therefore preferable – especially if Nature is indifferent to human flourishing.”27 This is where Nietzsche’s politics of creative destruction and limited violence begins to look very much like the politics of control and ameliorative violence that his own critique of metaphysics seeks to overcome. By exposing the origins of values and denying all exclusivity to metaphysical, moral, or religious values, Nietzsche opened the possibility for a psychological and more sociological understanding of man. However, his failure to develop a substantive sociological account of how power is exercised collectively under conditions of industrial capitalism and mass democracy confers a dangerously demagogic dimension to his critique of Western civilisation. As Adorno argues, Nietzsche’s desire to affirm life against the caging dialectical negativity of German Idealism led him to the implausible position of calling for a revaluation of values without ever seriously addressing the experience of political alienation intrinsic to the question of metaphysical ressentiment in the nineteenth century: “it is as if his critique of bourgeois civilisation did not bear within itself the violence of its own historical and social facticity.”28 This may have prevented him from having to make concessions to the existing social order, but it also rendered his Kulturkritik easily amenable to political misuse by “conservative revolutionaries” across Europe who shared his revulsion for the effete, abstract existence of Kant’s last man. Whereas Nietzsche had sought to counter decline with aristocratic alternatives to the levelling forces of democracy and the machine, his twentieth-century epigones sought to identify a new tragic heroism growing out of the technological frenzy of the emerging mass society itself.29 One could quite plausibly argue with Leo Strauss and other critics that Nietzsche should have formulated his critique “more responsibly,” paying more careful attention to the tone and character of his rhetoric to avoid misunderstandings concerning the intentions and aspirations of his tirades against the politics of the age.30 The difficulty with such retrospective assessments, however, is that they acknowledge the force of Nietzsche’s critique while simultaneously wanting to do away with the subversive, experimental approach to

Conclusion

173

knowledge that made it possible in the first place. As Stefan Zweig argues in a brilliant 1925 analysis of the European mindset of the nineteenth century, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and practically all philosophers who appropriated and extended Kant’s legacy into the nineteenth century had cultivated a “monogamous” relationship with knowledge. What attracted them to philosophy “was a desire for order … which was typical of the easy-going German nature, objective and professional, tending to discipline the mind and to establish a well-ordered architectonic of existence. They loved truth honourably, faithfully, durably.” Nietzsche’s philosophy was a revolt against this desire to settle down with truth. His attitude towards knowledge was driven by a restless and irascible passion that was never consumed or satisfied with any answers, findings, or results, and which he often nourished impatiently by exploiting misunderstandings and exposing the instability of the allegedly settled norms of philosophical and scientific discourses.31 This is in great part what made Nietzsche’s philosophy so unique and irreconcilable with any political positions on offer at the end of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche understood the risks, and he was more than willing to take those risks in order to expose the multiple forms of violence underpinning modern society. This was his own very distinctive contribution to the Kantian project of furthering the intellectual maturity of the species by inspiring it to develop a higher consciousness of itself.

Notes

i nt roduct i o n 1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, [1832] 1989), 213. 2 ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 14 [40], 238; trans. wp , I, § 53, 33. 3 Nietzsche would have been perplexed by debates that are still going on in certain corners of Anglo-American academia over whether or not he has a politics or can be considered a bona fide political thinker. See, for instance, Martha Nussbaum, “Is Nietzsche a Political Thinker?,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5, 1 (1997): 1–13; Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), 292–7; Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 10–11. Hugo Drochon’s otherwise excellent Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2016) is also framed as an attempt to answer this question. For a more subtle and nuanced intervention in these debates, see Tasmin Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 2007). 4 ksa (Nachlass 1885-1887) XII 2 [127], 125-7; trans. wp , I, §1, 7. 5 ksa (Nachlass 1885-1887) XII 9 [35], 350; trans. wp , I, §2, 37. 6 eh , “Why I Am Destiny,” §1, 144. 7 See, for example, Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1950); Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche: The Last Anti-Political German (Bloomington and Annapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987); Nussbaum, “Is Nietzsche”; Thomas H. Brobjer, “The Absence of Political Ideals in Nietzsche’s Writings,” Nietzsche-Studien 27, 1 (1998): 300–19; Alexander Nehamas,

176

8

9 10

11

12

Notes to pages 6–7

Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press, 2002); Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality. Nietzsche was prejudiced against women. I use gender-specific language throughout the book simply because interpreting his philosophy in gender-neutral language risks concealing his own biases and shortcomings in this respect. On Nietzsche’s views on women, see Julian Young, “Nietzsche and Women,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. John Richardson and Ken Gemes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46–62. See also Ofelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Debra B. Bergoffen, “Engaging Nietzsche’s Women: Ofelia Schutte and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,” Hypatia 19, 3 (2004): 157–68. Georg Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1977), §32, 18–19. See, for instance, Nicholas J. Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order (London: Routledge, 2000), 9, 201–2; Ulrik Enemark Petersen, “Breathing Nietzsche’s Air: New Reflections on Morgenthau’s Concepts of Power and Human Nature,” Alternatives 24, 1 (1999): 83–118; Guilherme Marques Pedro, Reinhold Niebuhr and International Relations Theory: Realism beyond Thomas Hobbes (London: Routledge, 2018), 90–118. The one remarkable exception is Stefan Elbe’s Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003). Other, shorter contributions include James Der Derian, “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx and Nietzsche,” in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschultz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 24–45; Paul Saurette, “‘I Mistrust All Systematizers and Avoid Them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory,” Millennium 25, 1 (1996): 1–28; J. Peter Burgess, “Value, Security and Temporality in Nietzsche’s Critique of Modernity,” Sociological Review 60, 4 (2012): 696–714. Michael Dillon’s The Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1997) also draws on Nietzsche. The work of war scholar Christopher Coker also has a strong Nietzschean slant to it. See, for instance, Christopher Coker, Humane Warfare (London: Routledge, 2001); ibid., War and the 20th Century: The Impact of War on the Modern Consciousness (London: Brassey’s, 1999). Key studies include Tracy B. Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1975] 2000); Schutte, Beyond Nihilism; Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the

Notes to pages 7–8

13

14

15

16

177

Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990); Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 1991); Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); David Owen, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (London: Sage, 1995); Lawrence J. Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (Chicago: Open Court, 1995); Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996); Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Don Dombowsky, Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics (London: Palgrave, 2004); Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism; Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Ethics and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Two recent texts that pay more attention to this aspect of Nietzsche’s oeuvre from different perspective are Gary Shapiro’s Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Drochon’s Nietzsche’s Great Politics. Russian literary critic Ilya Ehrenburg and British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn are generally credited with coning the phrase “long nineteenth century” to refer to the notion that the period between 1789 and 1914 reflects the development of a sequence of ideas that are characteristic of and essential to an understanding of the nineteenth century. See Gasan Gusejnov, “Long Centuries,” Times Literary Supplement, 29 April 2011, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/long-centuries/. For a good discussion of some of the main controversies covering the period between the mid-1890s and the mid-1950s, see Karl Löwith, “Appendix: On the History of Interpretation of Nietzsche 1894–1954,” in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Return of the Same (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 195–230. See also Ashley Woodward, ed., Interpreting Nietzsche: Reception and Influence (London: Continuum, 2011). See Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsche between Alfred Bäumler and Georg Lucács,” in Reading Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982): 141–69; Carol Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Christian Niemeyer, Nietzsche verstehen: Eine Gebrauchsanweisung (Darmstadt: Lanbert-Schneider-Verlag, 2011). See also Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley ca : University of California Press, 1994).

178

Notes to pages 8–9

17 The colony still exists today as a district of the San Pedro department. 18 See, for instance, Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1918] 2011); Oswald Spengler, “Nietzsche and His Century. An address delivered at the Nietzsche Archive to mark Nietzsche’s eightieth birthday, Weimar, 15 October 1924,” reprinted in Prussian Socialism and Socialism and Other Essays (London: Black House Publishing, 2018), 151–61; Ernst Jünger, “Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis,” in Sämtliche Werke. 10 Bände, vol. 5. (Stuttgart: Klett, 1960–65): 11–108. 19 Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931); Heinrich Härtle, Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Franz Eher-Zentralverlag der nsdap , 1937); Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (London: Black Kite Publishing, [1930] 2017); Friedrich Nietzsche (Munich: Franz Eher-Zentralverlag der nsdap , 1944). On Nietzsche and fascism, see Kurt Rudolf Fischer, “Nazism as Nietzschean Experiment,” Nietzsche-Studien 16, (1977): 116–22; Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). 20 See, for instance, Philip H. Fogel, “Nietzsche and the Present War,” Sewanee Revie 23, 4 (1915): 449–57; Canon E. Mclure, Germany’s War Inspirers: Nietzsche and Treitschke (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1915). See also Eric Voegelin, “Nietzsche, the Crisis and the War,” Journal of Politics 6, 2 (1944): 201; Nicholas Martin, “‘Fighting a Philosophy’: The Figure of Nietzsche in British Propaganda of the First World War,” Modern Language Review 98, 2 (2003): 367–80. 21 A major turning point in the English-speaking world in this respect was the publication of Kaufmann’s Nietzsche and the subsequent translation of Karl Jaspers’s Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, [1936] 1965). 22 Pablo D’Iorio, Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento: Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit, trans. Sylvia Mae Gorelick (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: University Press, 2000); Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Notes to pages 9–15

179

23 Georg Simmel, “Kant und Nietzsche,” Frankfurter’s Zeitung und Handelsblatt 5, 6 (1 January 1906): 1–2, http://socio.ch/sim/ verschiedenes/1906/nietzsche_kant.htm; ibid., Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, [1907] 1991). 24 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols., trans. David Farell Krell (New York: Harper One, [1961] 1991); Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la Philosophie (Paris: puf , [1962] 2010). 25 Deleuze, Nietzsche, 59. 26 Olivier Reboul, Nietzsche: Critique de Kant (Paris: puf , 1974); Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche’s Overcoming of Kant’s Metaphysics: From Tragedy to Nihilism,” Nietzsche-Studien 16, 1 (1987): 310–39; Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Michael Steven Green, Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundation of His Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert Zimmerman, The Kantianism of Hegel and Nietzsche: Renovation in NineteenthCentury German Philosophy (Lewiston, ny : Edwin Mellen Press, 2005); Babette Babich and David Alison, eds., Nietzsche and Kant: New Nietzsche Studies (special issue) 9, 1–2 (2013–14): 1–166; Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey, eds., Nietzsche’s Engagement with Kant and the Kantian Legacy, 3 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 27 In doing so, I am pursuing lines of investigations opened by a small number of scholars over the past three decades or so. I am thinking specifically of Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 42–75; David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–32; and Tracy B. Strong’s Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–90. 28 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), https://www.oed.com/ oed2/00158178. 29 For good overviews, see Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt, eds., Nietzsche and Power Politics (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008); Keith Ansell-Pearson, ed., Nietzsche and Political Thought (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Manuel Knoll and Barry Stocker, eds., Nietzsche as Political Philosopher (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).

180

Notes to pages 16–18

30 Tracy B. Strong, “The Political Misappropriation of Nietzsche,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71–89. 31 For overviews, see Thomas, R. Hinton, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy; Kelly Pearsall and Marilyn Olive, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Nietzsche (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche and Asian Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Carol Diethe, The A to Z of Nietzscheanism (Lanham, md : Scarecrow Press, 2010); Woodward, Interpreting Nietzsche. 32 Voegelin, “Nietzsche, the Crisis and the War,” 201. 33 For a discussion, see Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 21–6. 34 D’Iorio, Nietzsche’s Journey, 49; Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search, 2. 35 On the controversy concerning the use and abuse of the Nachlass, see Bernd Magnus, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the Übermensch,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 24, 1 (1986): 79–98; Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Unpublished Writings from 1885 to 1888; or Textual Criticism and the Will to Power,” in Whitlock, Reading Nietzsche, 80–102; Thomas H. Borbjer, “Nietzsche’s Magnus Opus,” History of European Ideas 32, 3 (2012): 278–94.

c ha p t e r o n e 1 Paul Bishop, ed., Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition (Rochester, ny : Camden House, 2004); Anthony K. Jensen and Helmut Heit, eds., Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 2 Philology, traditionally, is the study of Ancient literature and language as used in Ancient literature, mainly Greek and Roman. 3 Ritschl’s letter of recommendation is reprinted in translation in Walter Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 7. 4 On Nietzsche and Wagner, see Mark Berry, “Nietzsche and Wagner,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 97–120. Good biographies of Nietzsche in the English language include R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1965] 1999); Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (London: Granta Books, 2003); Curtis Cate, Friedrich

Notes to pages 18–22

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

181

Nietzsche: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 2003); Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (London: Faber and Faber, 2018). Peter Bergmann’s Nietzsche, “the Last Anti-Political German” (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987) is also rich in biographical insights. M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 62. S. William Halperin, “The Origins of the Franco-Prussian War Revisited: Bismarck and the Hohenzollern Candidature to the Spanish Throne,” Journal of Modern History 45, 1 (1973): 83–91; David Wetzel, A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Josef Becker, “The Franco-Prussian Conflict of 1870 and Bismarck’s Concept of a ‘Provoked Defensive War’: A Response to David Wetzel,” Central European History 41, 1 (2008): 93–109. Frédérick Nolte, L’Europe militaire et diplomatique au dix-neuvième siècle 1815–1884, vol. 2 (Paris: E. Plon- Nourrit et Cie, 1884), 526–7. Nietzsche also shared Bismarck’s anxieties concerning socialism and parliamentary democracy. See Bergmann, Nietzsche, 30–58; Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 69–74. Letter to Erwin Rohde, 19 July 1870, http://www.nietzschesource.org/ #eKGWB/BVN-1870,86, trans. sl , 67. Letter to Franziska Nietzsche, 16 July 1870, http://www.nietzschesource. org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,87. Letter to Sophie Ritschl, 20 July 1870, http://www.nietzschesource. org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,88. Letter to Wilhelm Vischer, 8 August 1870, http://www.nietzschesource. org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,89. Letter to Franziska Nietzsche, 29 August 1870, http://www. nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,95, trans. sl , 67–8. Letter to Richard Wagner, 11 September 1870, http://www. nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,100, trans. sl , 68–9. bt , “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” 3. See also eh , “The Birth of Tragedy,” §1, 108. Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 139. “I am greatly worried about the immediate cultural future ... Confidentially, I regard Prussia now as a power which is highly dangerous to culture ... Sometimes it is difficult but we must be philosophers enough to keep lucid in the general frenzy – so that the thief may not break in and

182

18 19 20 21 22

23

24

25

26 27

28

Notes to pages 22–4

steal or diminish that which, to my way of thinking, stands in no conceivable relation to the biggest military events, or even to feelings of national exaltation.” Letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 7 November 1870, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,107, trans. sl , 70–1, n. 43. Letter to Franziska and Elizabeth Nietzsche, 12 December 1870, http:// www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,112. See, especially, um , I, “David Strauss, the Confessor and Writer,” §1, 3. David Burnham and Martin Jesinghausen, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (London: Continuum, 2010), 8. bt , “Foreword,” 13–14. See Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and the Ethical Life (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001); David Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Bildung refers to the German tradition of self-cultivation, linking education with philosophy in a process of intellectual maturation and cosmopolitan human development. Eliza M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1935] 2012); Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1949] 1987); Wolfgang Leppmann, Winckelmann (London: Gollancz, 1971). Brian Vick, “Greek Origins and Organic Metaphors: Ideals of Cultural Autonomy in Neo-Humanist Germany from Winckelmann to Curtius,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, 3 (2002): 483–500; Christian J. Emden, “History, Memory, and the Invention of Antiquity: Notes on the ‘Classical Tradition,’” in Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World since 1500, ed. Christian J. Emden and David Midgley (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), 39–67. Lucian Goldmann, Immanuel Kant (London: Verso, [1971] 2011), 33. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, [1818/1844] 1969), 321–13. Thomas E. Wiley, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860–1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978); Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Notes to page 25

29

30

31

32 33

183

Press, 1984), 66–108; Klaus Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Frederick Beiser, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Albert Friedrich Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Importance, trans. E. Chester Thomas (New York: Arno Press, [1866] 1925). As he declared in a letter to his friend Hermann Mushacke in November 1866 after reading Lange’s book for the first time (he read it again in 1868 and 1873): “Lange’s History of Materialism is without a doubt the most significant philosophical work to appear in the last decade … Kant, Schopenhauer and this book by Lange – I do not need anything else.” http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1866,526. See also his letter to Carl von Gersdorff, late August 1866, http://www.nietzschesource. org/#eKGWB/BVN-1866,517. On Nietzsche and Lange, see Jörg Salaquarda, “Nietzsche und Lange,” Nietzsche-Studien 7, 1, (1978): 236– 60; George Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: de Gruyer, 1983); John T. Wilcox, “The Birth of Nietzsche Out of the Spirit of Lange,” International Studies in Philosophy 21, 2 (1989): 81–9; Keith Ansell-Pearson, “The Question of F.A. Lange’s Influence on Nietzsche: A Critique of Recent Research from the Standpoint of the Dionysian,” Nietzsche-Studien 17, 1 (1988): 539–54. See also Claudia Crawford, The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988); Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 20–33. Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, vols. 3–4, Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie (Mannheim: Basserman’sche Verlag, 1860). Friedrich Überweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie von Thales bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin: E.S. Mittler und Sohn, 1866). On those readings and influences, see Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 36–40; R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundation of His Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 13–20; Tom Bailey, “After Kant: Green and Hill on Nietzsche’s Kantianism,” Nietzsche-Studien 35, 1 (2006): 228–62. See also Giuliano Campioni, Paolo D’Iorio, Maria Cristina Fornari, Francesco Fronterotta,

184

34

35 36

37 38 39

40

41

42

Notes to pages 25–7

Andrea Orsucci, eds., Nietzsche’s persönliche Bibliotek (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 2003). The main evidence suggesting a close reading of the Critique of Judgment is the “Zur Teleologie” (On Teleology) notes in kgw (1868) I.4., 548–78, which contains several page references to Kant’s work. Nietzsche first reveals his dissertation plans in a letter to Paul Deussen dated end of April/beginning of May 1868, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/ BVN-1868,568. See also Sebastian Gardner, “Nietzsche on Kant and Teleology in 1868: ‘Life’ Is Something Entirely Dark,” Inquiry 62, 1 (2019): 23–48; Hill, Nietzsche’s Critique, 81–93. See Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, 38–40 and 129–30, notes 86–92; Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques, 20, notes 28–31. Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1993), 199; Brobjer, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, 36. See also Andreas Urs Sommer, “What Nietzsche Did and Did Not Read,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 25–48. Olivier Reboul, Nietzsche: Critique de Kant (Paris: puf , 1974), 7. Nietzsche’s Critiques, 20. Nietzsche had a clean copy made from his notes with the intention of publication, but he never completed the study. The notes were written around 1873. For a useful discussion, see Marianne Gowan, “Introduction”, in ptag , 1–21. The Philosopher’s Book refers to a series of short unfinished essays on pre-Platonic Greek philosophy that Nietzsche intended to develop into a major theoretical and historical statement with contemporary implications. The essays were mostly written around 1872 and 1873, but Nietzsche also went back to the project in 1875. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Amherst, ny : Humanity Books, 1979). See also Karl Schlechta, Friedrich Nietzsche, von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens (Stuttgart-Bad: Cannstatt, 1962), xxii–xxvi. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” (1784) in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60. “The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous.” Ibid., 54.

Notes to pages 27–32

185

43 Ibid. 44 On the question of totality in Kant’s critical philosophy, see Goldmann, Kant, 50–7. 45 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1781] 1998); Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Andrews Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1788] 1997); Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, [1790] 1987). For good expository overviews linking Kant’s critical philosophy with his political and international political thought, see Karl Jaspers, Kant (London: Harcourt Brace and Co., [1957] 1982); Pierre Hassner, “Immanuel Kant,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 581–620; Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Sean Molloy, Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2017). 46 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Preface to the Second Edition,” 113. 47 For a short, helpful summary of those metaphysical distinctions in Kant, which Nietzsche would have read attentively, see Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 1, 417–25. 48 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett [1785] 1993), 30. 49 Molloy, Kant’s International Relations, 18. 50 Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” (1797) in Kant: Political Writings, 137. 51 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” (1795) in Kant: Political Writings,, 93–130. 52 On this particular aspect of Kant’s thought, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1980). See also Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, [1918] 1981), 271–360; Paul Guyer, “Bridging the Gulf: Kant’s Project in the third Critique,” in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 423–40; Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 53 Ibid., 82. 54 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §91, 362. 55 Ibid., “Introduction,” 9–38. 56 Ibid., §70, 266–8.

186

Notes to pages 32–7

57 Ibid., §75, 280–3. 58 Ibid., 280: “There is clearly a big difference between saying that certain things of nature, or even all of nature, could be produced only by a cause that follows intentions in determining itself to action, and saying that the peculiar character of my cognitive powers is such that the only way I can judge [how] those things are possible and produced is by conceiving, [to account] for this production, a cause that acts according to intentions, and hence a being that produces [things] in a way analogous to the causality of an understanding.” 59 Ibid., §20–2, 87–90. 60 Ibid., §9, 61–4. 61 Ibid., §40, 160. 62 Ibid., §17, 79–84. 63 Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Timothy M. Costelloe, ed., The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 64 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §23, 99. 65 Ibid., §25, 103. 66 Ibid., §28, 120-1. 67 Ibid., §29, 135-6. 68 Ibid., §83, 317-321. See also “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” (1786), and “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant: Political Writings. 69 Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwells Publishing, 1990); Paul Crowther, The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 70 For an interesting comparative study, see Heinrich von Staden, “Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art and Literature,” Daedalus 105, 1 (1976): 79–96. 71 Jacob J. Bachofen, “Mother Right,” in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. R Mannheim (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, [1861] 1967); Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, trans. S. Stern (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, [1899] 1999). On the intellectual friendship between the three thinkers, see Lionel Gossmann, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 72 Dale Wilkerson, Nietzsche and the Greeks (London: Continuum, 2006);

Notes to pages 37–40

73 74

75 76

77

78 79 80 81

187

Jessica N. Berries, “Nietzsche and the Greeks,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. John Richardson and Ken Gemes (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 83–107; James I. Porter, “Nietzsche’s Untimely Antiquity,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern, 49–71. See also Bishop, Nietzsche and Antiquity; Jenkens and Heit, Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity. bt , §7, 40. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §87, 336–47; “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” in Kant: Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1791] 1996), 19–38. bt , §3, 23–4. On Schopenhauer’s important influence on Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Grace Neal Dolson, “The Influence of Schopenhauer upon Friedrich Nietzsche,” Philosophical Review 10, 3 (1901): 241–50; Christopher Janaway, ed., Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Ivan Soll, “Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s ‘Great Teacher’ and ‘Antipode,’” in Oxford Handbook, ed. Richardson and Gemes, 160–84; Robert Wicks, “Schopenhauer: Nietzsche’s Antithesis and Source of Inspiration,” in The New Cambridge Companion, ed. Tom Stern, 72–96. See also Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. Helmuth Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, [1907] 1986). hkg , III, 297–8; trans. Christopher Janaway, “Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator,” in Willing and Nothingness, ed. Janaway, 16. See also um , III, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” For a sympathetic exposition, see Julian Young, Schopenhauer (London: Routledge, 2005). Schopenhauer, World as Will, vol. 1, 321–3. Ibid., vol. 2, 605. Especially in the myth of the daemon Silenus, who was captured and forced by King Midas to reveal his wisdom on what is best for human beings: “Stiff and unmoving, the daemon remains silent until, forced by the King to speak, he finally breaks out in shrill laughter and says: ‘Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.’” bt , §3, 23.

188 82 83

84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99

Notes to pages 40–6

ptag ; ppp . ptag ,

52–3. On Nietzsche and Heraclitus, see Eugene Fink, Nietzsche’s Philosophy (London: Continuum, [1970] 2003), 1–27; Artur Przybyslawski, “Nietzsche Contra Heraclitus,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 23 (2002): 88–95. ppp , 62. bt , §7, 40. um , IV, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” §4, 213. Plato, The Republic, ed. G.R.F Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [ca. 380 bc ] 2000), 313–45. Stefanie Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). bt , §18, 87. Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques, 80–116. See the insightful cluster of notes titled “On Schopenhauer” in kgw (1867–68) I.4, 421–7; trans. EN, 1–8. kgw (1868) I.4, 565. Cited in Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques, 92. ksa (Nachlass 1869–74) VII 19 [104], 453–4; trans. EN, 124. Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche’s Overcoming,” 318–27. ksa (Nachlass 1869–74) VII 19 [34], 426–7; trans. EN, 102. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, the Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Seán Hand (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, [1987] 1991); Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Jeffrey Church, “Two Concepts of Culture in the Early Nietzsche,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, 3 (2011): 327–49; Andrew Huddleston, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). um , III, “Schopenhauer”, §3, 136–46. Ibid., II, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” §10, 123. hc , 174; um , III, “Schopenhauer,” §5, 158; ksa (Nachlass 1869–74) VII 19 [41], 432.

c h a p t e r t wo Note to the epigraph: ksa (Nachlass 1875–79) VIII 5 [146], 78-9. 1 Ibid. (Nachlass 1869–74) VI 3 [51], 74. As he explains in amo , §218, 264: “When we speak of the Greeks we involuntarily speak of today and yesterday: their familiar history is a polished mirror that always radiates

Notes to pages 47–9

2 3

4

5

6 7

189

something that is not in the mirror itself … the Greeks make it easier for modern man to communicate much that is delicate and hard to communicate.” Tracy Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, [1975] 2000), 136–8. For good detailed commentaries on the many intersecting lines of arguments in this complex work, see Robert E. McGuinn, “Culture as Prophylactic: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as Culture Criticism,” Nietzsche-Studien 4 (1975): 75–138; M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Sallis, Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991); James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 2000); David Burnham and Martin Jesinghausen, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (London: Continuum, 2010); Paul Raimond Daniels, Nietzsche and the Birth of Tragedy (London: Routledge, 2013). Eugene Fink, Nietzsche’s Philosophy (London: Continuum, [1970] 2003), 23. As we have seen in chapter 1, Nietzsche by the late 1860s had already grown critical of Schopenhauer’s neo-Kantian formula. See kgw (1867–68) I.4, 421–7. Nietzsche would later express embarrassment at his failure to have developed an original and more suitable formula of his own to convey his message at the time: “I wonder if the reader understands which task I was already daring to undertake with this book? I now regret very much that I did not yet have the courage (or immodesty?) at that time to permit myself a language of my very own for such personal views and acts of daring, labouring instead to express strange and new evaluations in Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulations, things which fundamentally ran counter to both the spirit and taste of Kant and Schopenhauer.” bt , “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §6, 10. “It is the will of Apollo to bring rest and calm to individual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them, and by reminding them constantly, with his demands for self-knowledge and measure, that these are the most sacred laws in the world.” bt , §9, 50–1. bt , §1, 16–17. As Keith Ansell-Pearson argues, the fact that Nietzsche continues to draw upon the formula and identifies the Dionysian with the thing-in-itself in The Birth of Tragedy is less to do with metaphysics than with the historical-cultural context of the 1870s. For what the Dionysian seeks to convey in The Birth of Tragedy is the condition of radical ethical heteronomy that Nietzsche associates with our primordial condition of constant

190

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

Notes to pages 49–56

becoming and that has been concealed in the history of Western metaphysics by the fragmented, individualistic moral-scientific view of modern culture. One should therefore not be surprised that Nietzsche often “refers to the Dionysian as the thing-in-itself for it is precisely the Dionysian that is today unknown. The Dionysian refers to nothing otherworldly; it is nothing that lies in a Beyond, in an inaccessible noumenal reality. On the contrary, the Dionysian is radically of this world.” Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche’s Overcoming of Kant’s Metaphysics: From Tragedy to Nihilism,” Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 324–5. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, [1818] 1969), 416. bt , §1, 18. Ibid., §3, 22. On this point, see Laurence J. Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (Chicago: Open Court, 1990), 47–68. hc , 175. Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 126–7. bt , §12, 61. Ibid., §1, 17. Ibid., §2, 20–1. Ibid., §1, 18. Ibid., §7, 39. Ibid., 40; §16, 80. Ibid., §17, 81. Ibid., §7, 40. Ibid., §21, 101–2. Ibid., 103. Ibid., §5, 33. um , IV, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” §4, 212–13. bt , §7, 39 Ibid., §8, 43-4. Silk and Stern, Nietzsche, 297–331. bt , §7, 36–7. bt , §7, 40. The Tuileries were destroyed by fire, but news agencies reported that the Louvre had been destroyed as well. The Louvre was saved from fire at the very last minute. Letter to Gersdorff, 21 June 1871, http://www.nietzschesource.org/ #eKGWB/BVN-1871,140, trans., sl , 80–1.

Notes to pages 56–9

191

33 On Nietzsche’s unpublished essay, see Martin Ruehl, “Politea 1871: Nietzsche ‘Contra’ Wagner on the Greek State,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 79 (2003): 61–86; Jeffrey Church, “Nietzsche’s Early Perfectionism: A Cultural Reading of ‘The Greek State,’” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 46, 2 (2015): 248–60. See also Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 71–8; Michel Haar, “The Institution and Destitution of the Political According to Nietzsche,” New Nietzsche Studies 2, 1–2 (1997): 6–11. 34 bt , §18, 85–8. 35 Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 6, The Artwork of the Future, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Whitefish, mt : Kessinger Publishing, [1895] 2010). The essay was originally published in 1849. See also his Art and Revolution, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Whitefish, mt: Kessinger Publishing, [1849] 2010). 36 gs t, 166–7. See also bt , §18, 86–7. 37 For different assessments, see James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181–256; Tracy B. Strong, Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–90; Jeffrey Church, “The Justification of Existence: Nietzsche on the Beauty of Exemplary Lives,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 46, 3 (2015): 289–307. 38 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, [1790] 1987), §46, 174-5. 39 gs t, 214; um , II, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” §9, 111. Nietzsche speaks in similar terms of the example set by the tragic hero in bt , §9, 46–51, and the role of the philosopher who “legislates greatness” for the community in ptag , 43. 40 Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), 9. See also Daniel Came, “The Aesthetic Justification of Existence,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2006), 41–57; Jeffrey Church, “Two Concepts of Culture in the Early Nietzsche,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, 3 (2001): 327–49; Andrew Huddleston, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 41 bge , §257, 151. 42 pb, §33, 10; §46, 16. See also Breazeale, “Introduction,” xxiii–xxvii. 43 ksa (Nachlass, 1869–74) VII 30 [8], 733–4, trans. “Philosophy in Hard Times,” in pt , §78, 120–1.

192 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

Notes to pages 60–3

Ibid., 7 [23], 142. See also 30 [7], 732–3. gs t, 170. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 170. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling (London: Swann Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), 76. gs t, 171. Ibid. Ibid., 170–1. Ibid., 166. ae , Lecture III, 48. Nietzsche in those lectures is more specifically concerned with the absorption of Bildung into state mechanisms of political domination. Bildung refers to the German tradition of self-cultivation, linking education with philosophy in a process of intellectual maturation and cosmopolitan human development. Ibid., Lecture I, 15. Ibid., 17. Ibid., Lecture III, 52. ti , “What the Germans Lack,” §4, 188–9. Nietzsche’s most beautiful formulation of this argument appears in hah , I §481, 177–8: “Just as the greatest cost to a people involved in war and preparation for war is not the expense of the war or the interruption to trade and commerce, nor the maintenance of standing armies – however great these expenses may be now that eight states of Europe expend between two and three milliards annually on it – but the cost involved in the removal year in, year out of an extraordinary number of its efficient and industrious men from their proper professions and occupations so that they may become soldiers: so a people which sets about practising great politics and ensuring to itself a decisive voice among the most powerful states does not incur the highest costs where these are usually thought to lie. It is true that from this moment on a host of the most prominent talents are continually sacrificed on the ‘altar of the fatherland’ or of the national thirst for honour, whereas previously other spheres of activity were open to these talents now devoured by politics. But aside from these public hecatombs, and at bottom much more horrible, there occurs a spectacle played out continually in a hundred thousand simultaneous acts: every efficient, industrious, intelligent, energetic man belonging to such a people lusting after political laurels is dominated by this lust and no longer belongs wholly to his own domain, as he formerly did: questions and cares of the public weal, renewed every day, devour a daily tribute from the capital in every

Notes to pages 64–6

58 59 60 61 62

63

64 65

193

citizen’s head and heart: the sum total of all these sacrifices and costs in individual energy and work is so tremendous that the political emergence of a people almost necessarily draws after it a spiritual impoverishment and enfeeblement and a diminution of the capacity for undertakings demanding great concentration and application. Finally one may ask: is all this inflorescence and pomp of the whole (which is, after all, apparent only in the fear of other states for the new colossus and in the more favourable terms for trade and travel extorted from them) worth it, if all the nobler, tenderer, more spiritual plants and growths in which its soil was previously so rich have to be sacrificed to this coarse and gaudy over of the nation?” ksa (Nachlass, 1875–79) VIII 6 [30], 110, trans. “The Struggle between Science and Wisdom,” §197, in pt , 137. Ibid., 5 [91], 64, trans. “We Philologists,” §122–3, in pt , 161–2. Ibid., 6 [30], 110, trans. “The Struggle between Science and Wisdom,” §197, in pt , 137. hc , 178–9. Herman W. Siemens, “Reassessing Radical Democratic Theory,” in Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 90–1. Ibid. Nietzsche insists on this point in his exposition of Heraclitus’s doctrine of the “unity of the opposites” in ptg , 55: “It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism, the idea that strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws. Only a Greek was capable of finding such an idea to be the fundament of a cosmology; it is Hesiod’s good Eris transformed into the cosmic principle; it is the contest-idea of the Greek individual and the Greek state, taken from the Gymnasium and the palaestra, from the artist’s agon, from the contest between political parties and between cities – all transformed into universal application so that now the wheels of the cosmos turn on it. Just as the Greek individual fought as though he alone were right and an infinitely sure measure of judicial opinion were determining the trend of victory at any given moment, so the qualities wrestle with one another, in accordance with inviolable laws and standards that are immanent in the struggle. The things in whose definiteness and endurance narrow human minds, like animal minds, believe, have no real existence. They are but the flash and spark of drawn swords, the quick radiance of victory in the struggle of opposites.” bt , §9, 46–51. Ibid., §21, 98–9.

194 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

74

75 76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84

85

Notes to pages 66–71

Ibid., §12–14, 59–71. Ibid., §15, 75. Ibid., §14, 69–70. See also §23,108–9. Ibid., §18, 87. Ibid., §15, 75. “Will that ‘transformation’ lead to ever new configurations of genius and especially of the music-making Socrates?” Ibid., §15, 75. See also §18, 87; §19, 89–95. Ibid., §20, 97. Key interventions are collected in Karlfried Gründer, ed., Der Streit um Nietzsches Geburt der Tragödie (Hildesheim: Olms, 1989). For discussions of the contemporary reception, see Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, 90–107; James Whitman, “Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition of German Classical Philology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47, 3 (1986): 453–68; James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 2000); Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 150–5. um , II, “The Uses,” §10, 70–1. On the political mobilization of myth, see Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150–5. “For the idea of freedom is inscrutable and thereby precludes all positive exhibition whatever.” Kant, Critique of Judgment, §29, 135. See especially bt , §25, 115–6. See the insightful discussion in Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 194–201. On this point, see Dana Villa, “How Nietzschean Was Arendt?,” in Nietzsche and Power Politics, ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008), 395–409. Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction, 78. See also Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 1988), 226–45. Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1937] 1968), 94–5. bt , “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §6, 10. Ibid.. Ibid., §1, 4. In the 1886 preface to amo , 209, Nietzsche explains that he had already stopped “believing” in Schopenhauer by the time he wrote his third Untimely Meditation (“Schopenhauer as Educator”) in 1873. bt , “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §5, 8–9. See also ksa (Nachlass

Notes to pages 71–3

195

1885–87) XII 9 [84], 378; (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 15 [10], 408–9. On the complexities of Nietzsche’s mature assessment of Schopenhauer, see Daniel Came, “The Justification of Existence,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Ansell-Pearson, 41–57. 86 gs , V, §346, 204. 87 ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 9 [107], 396–7, trans. wp , I, §37, 24. See also 10 [192], 571. 88 gs , V, §346, 204

c h a p t e r t h re e

1 2

3

4

5

6

Note to the epigraph: ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [411], 189; trans. wp , Preface §2, 3. Ibid. (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 12 [57], 586. R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundation of His Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19–20. According to Hill’s survey of Nietzsche’s corpus, there are 36 references to Kant in Nietzsche’s works between 1865 and 1869; 78 between 1870 and 1874; 14 between 1875 and 1879; 89 between 1880 and 1884; and 164 between 1885 and 1889. On the intellectual-conceptual history of nihilism, see Michael Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995); Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Stephen Wagner Cho, “Before Nietzsche: Nihilism as a Critique of German Idealism,” Graduate Philosophy Faculty Journal 18, 1 (1995): 204–33. See also Karen Leslie Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism (Albany: State University of New York, 1992); Bülent Diken, Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2009); Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Jacobi to Fichte,” in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 124. See also StefanSebastian Mafte, “‘Nothingness or a God’: Nihilism, Enlightenment and ‘Natural Reason’ in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Works,” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 5, 2 (2013): 279–97. These articles were later collected and published in Paul Bourget, Essais de Psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Lemerre,1885). I am citing from the preface of this third edition, xix. ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 2 [127], 125–7, trans. wp , I, §1, 7. Influential studies specifically dedicated to Nietzsche’s philosophical account of nihilism include Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead,’” in Off

196

7 8 9 10

11

Notes to pages 74–5

the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1943] 2002), 157–99; Richard Schacht, “Nietzsche and Nihilism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11, (1973): 66–90; Lawrence J. Hatab, “Nietzsche, Nihilism and Meaning,” Personalist Forum 3, 2 (1987): 91–111; Elisabeth Kuhn, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philosophie des Europäischen Nihilismus (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992); Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge ma : Harvard University Press, 2006). See also Jeffrey Metzger, ed., Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future (London: Continuum, 2009). gs , V, §343, 199. Again, most notably in Nietzsche’s account of the myth of the daemon Silenus. Elisabeth Kuhn, “Nietzsche’s Quelle des Nihilismus-Begriffs,” NietzscheStudien 13, 84 (1984): 262–3. Nietzsche expresses his admiration for Bourget in a letter written from Nice to Resa von Schirnhofer on 11 March 1885, www.nietzschesource. org/eKGWB/NF-1884,33. The first study documenting Bourget’s influence on Nietzsche is Wilhelm Weigand, Friedrich Nietzsche: Ein psychologischer Versuch (Munich: Lukaschik, 1893). See also Charles Andler, Nietzsche: Sa vie et son oeuvre, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 418; Jean Granier, Le Problème de la Vérité dans la Philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 284–326. Letter to Franz Overbeck, 23 February 1887, http://www.nietzsche source.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1887,804, trans. sl , 237. See also ti , “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §45, 219; and his letters to Heinrich Köselitz, 7 March 1887, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN1887,814, and Georg Brandes, 20 November 1888, http://www. nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1888,1151. Nietzsche subsequently read The House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Demons, The Landlady, and possibly The Idiots. For good discussions of the texts Nietzsche read and his engagement with Dostoevsky more generally, see Janko Jarvin, “A Note on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky,” Russian Review 28, 2 (1969): 160–70; C.A. Miller, “Nietzsche’s ‘Discovery’ of Dostoevsky,” Nietzsche-Studien 2, 1 (1973): 202–57; Paolo Stellino, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: On the Verge of Nihilism (Berne: Peter Lang, 2015); Jeff Love and Jeffrey Metzer, eds., Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy (Evanstaon, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 2016); Michael Allen Gillespie, Nietzsche’s Final Teaching (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017), 27–39, 143–60.

Notes to pages 75–6

197

12 For a classic statement, see Karl Heinzen, “Der Mord,” Die-Evolution, February-March 1849. See also Daniel Bessner and Michael Stauch, “Karl Heinzen and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Terror,” Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence 22, 2 (2010): 143–76. 13 James Joll, The Anarchists (Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press, 1979); Olivier Hubac-Occhipinti, “Anarchist Terrorists of the Nineteenth Century,” in The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda, ed. Gérard Chalian and Arnaud Blin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 113–31; Richard Beth Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 14 The First International was an international organization aiming at uniting a wide variety of left-wing socialist, communist, and anarchist groups and trade unions to fight the class struggle. It was founded in London in 1864 and dissolved in 1876 following strong disagreements between Marxist and anarchist groups within the organization. See Wolfgang Eckhardt, The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association (London: PM Press, 2016). 15 Karl Marx, “After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin”; Friedrich Engels, “Versus the Anarchists.” Both in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed., Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W Norton and Co., 1978). 16 Mikhail Bakunin, “Marxism, Freedom and the State”; “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State”; “God and the State.” All in Selected Writings from Mikhail Bakunin (Athens, ga : Red and Black Publishing 2010). See also Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom Press, 1946). 17 Bakunin, “God and the State,” 71. 18 ksa (Nachlass 1869–74) VII 26 [14], 580–1. 19 Thomas Brobjer’s survey of Nietzsche’s private library suggests that Nietzsche appears to have familiarized himself with this literature in 1876–77: “Marx is referred to in at least eleven books, by nine different authors, that Nietzsche read or possessed. In six of them he is discussed and quoted extensively, and in one of them Nietzsche has underlined Marx’s name.” The authors in question are Dühring, Bebel, Lange, Meysenbug, Frantz, Jörg, Schäffle, Frary, and Jacoby. Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 70. See also Thomas Borbjer, “Nietzsche’s Knowledge of Marx and Marxism,” Nietzsche-Studien 31 (2002): 298–313; ibid., “Nietzsche’s Knowledge, Reading, and Critique of Political Economy,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 18 (1999): 56–70.

198

Notes to pages 76–7

20 Nietzsche here no longer speaks of the shameful virtues of ancient slavery but rails against the dehumanizing vulgarity of industrial capitalist exploitation, warning against an escalation of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence that will eclipse the worst excesses of the French Revolution. hah , §473, 173–4. He further develops this line of argumentation in ws , §285–6, 382. While insisting on the need to keep “open all the paths to the accumulation of moderate wealth through work,” Nietzsche calls for direct state intervention in the economy to impose limitations on the satisfaction of greed and the excessive and “unearned” accumulation of riches: “we must remove from the hands of private individuals and companies all those branches of trade and transportation favourable to the accumulation of great wealth, thus especially the trade in money – and regard those who possess too much as being as great a danger to society as those who possess nothing.” Nietzsche also argues in favour of progressive labour policies that will guarantee basic security and protection to the workforce against the worst dehumanizing consequences of industrialism. He concludes: “The exploitation of the worker was, it has now been realized, a piece of stupidity, an exhausting of the soil at the expense of the future, an imperilling of society. Now we already have almost a state of war: and the cost of keeping the peace, of concluding treaties and acquiring trust, will henceforth in any event be very great, because the folly of the exploiters was very great and of long duration.” 21 Sergey Nechayev, The Revolutionary Catechism, 1869, https://www. marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm. Bakunin is often credited as the co-author of the Revolutionary Catechism with Nechayev, but the evidence for co-authorship remains contested. Although Bakunin certainly contributed intellectually to its preparation, the extent to which he actually participated in its composition is not completely clear. What we know for sure is that both men collaborated on the composition of various other pamphlets written to mobilize support for the revolution in Russia during the period between March and August 1869, and that Bakunin during that period was deeply impressed with the extent of Nechayev’s commitment to the revolutionary cause. As Paul Avrich reports, Bakunin wrote to James Guillaume (another leading figure of the anarchist faction of the International Workers Association) soon after his first meeting with Nechayev to share his enthusiasm about his new protégé: “I have here with me one of those young fanatics who know no doubts, who fear nothing, and who realize that many of them will perish at the hands of the government but who nevertheless have decided that

Notes to page 77

22

23

24

25

26

199

they will not relent until the people rise. They are magnificent, these young fanatics, believers without God, heroes without rhetoric.” Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1990), 36. The relationship between the two men quickly deteriorated after the summer, and Bakunin sought to dissociate himself from the fanatical ascetism of Nechayev and the Catechism more than a year before it was first published in the Government Herald in July 1871. For an insightful discussion, see Philip Pomper, “Bakunin, Nechayev, and the ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’: The Case for Joint Authorship,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 10, 4 (1976): 535–51. Nietzsche knew that Nechayev and his Narodnaya Volya organization were the main inspiration for Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, one of the nihilistic terrorists in Dostoevsky’s Demons. ksa (Nachlass1887–89) XIII, 11 [331–4], 141–4. Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Wolfgang J, Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: Macmillan, 1982), 201–29. As Nikolaï Morozov argued in another famous pamphlet from the early 1880s: “Terroristic struggle is equally possible under the absolute force or under the constitutional brutal force, in Russia as well as in Germany. Brutal force and despotism are always concentrated either in a few or more often in one ruling person (Bismarck, Napoleon) and stop with his failure of death. Such people should be destroyed in the very beginning of their careers, be they chosen by an army or plebiscite. The wide and easy road opened in the country for ambitious people trying to strengthen their power on the remains of national freedoms should be made hopeless and dangerous by anti-government terrorists.” Nikolaï Morozov, “The Terrorist Struggle” (1880), reprinted in Voices of Terror: Manifestos, Writings, Manuals of Al Qaeda, Hamas and Other Terrorists Around the World and Throughout the Ages, ed. Walter Lacquer (New York: Reed Press, 2004), 79. On Nietzsche and anarchism, see Hinter Thomas, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 48–62; John Moore and Spencer Sunshine, eds., I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Saul Newman, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event 4, 3 (2000), http://muse.jhu. edu/article/32594. bge , §202, 90.

200

Notes to pages 78–80

27 “Bakunin, who out of hatred for the present wants to destroy history and the past. Now, to be sure, in order to eradicate the entire past it also would be necessary to eradicate human beings: but he only wants to destroy prior cultivation, our intellectual inheritance in its entirety. The new generation is supposed to discover its own culture: Human beings are worthy only of the art that they themselves create.” ksa (Nachlass 1869–74) VII 26 [14], 580-1, trans. uw , 151–2. 28 gm , III, §26, 116. 29 hah , §45, 36–3; bge , §260, 153–6; gm , I, §10, 20. 30 gs , V, §347, 205–6. See also bge , §202, 90; ac , §58, 60–1. 31 For an insightful analysis of those links between slave morality and nihilism in Nietzsche’s mature writings, see Tracy B. Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, [1975] 2000), 237–59. 32 gm , I, §10, 20. 33 gs , V, §347, 205. 34 “The socialist movements are now more welcome than fear-inspiring to the dynastic governments, because through them the latter can get into their hands the right and the weapons for taking the exceptional measures with which they are able to strike at the figures that really fill them with terror, the democrats and anti-dynasts. – For all that such governments publicly hate they now have a secret inclination and affinity: they are obliged to veil their soul.” amo , §316, 284. On the exceptional measures that Nietzsche is referring to here, see Andrew R. Carlson, “Anarchism and Individual Terror in the German Empire, 1870–90,” in Social Protest, ed. Mommsen and Hirschfeld, 175–200. 35 See Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 161–91. 36 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M.J. Gregor (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, [1785] 1997), 41–2. 37 Hermann Lotze, Logic in Three Books, of Thought, of Investigation, and of Knowledge, trans. B. Bosanquet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1843] 1884). 38 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1781] 1998), “Preface to the second edition,” 117. 39 Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 21. 40 gs , IV, §335, 188–9. See also d, “Preface,” §3, 3; ksa (Nachlass 1885–887) XII 7 [4], 265.

Notes to pages 81–6 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

201

(Nachlass 1885–87) XII 9 [38], 352, trans. wp , III, §507, 275–6. See also gs , V, §345, 202–3. ti , “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” §2, 168. bge , §4, 7. gm , “Preface,” §6, 7–8. See also bge , §186, 76. For a good analysis of this key move, see David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault (London: Routledge, 1994), 17–32. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [99], 49, trans. wp , I, §12, 13–14. Ibid. (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 9 [60], 366, trans. wp , III, §585, 318. Ibid., 5 [71], 212, trans. wp , I, §55, 35. On this point, see Granier, Le Problème de la Vérité, 238–9. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [99], 46, trans. wp , I, §12, 12. Ibid. [411], 190, trans. wp , “Preface,” §4, 4. ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 8 [2], 327, trans. wp , III, §579, 310-11. See especially ti and A. See also ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 17 [4], 523. ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 5 [71], 211–12, trans. wp , I §5, 10. Ibid., 9 [3], 340–1, trans. wp , I, §101, 64. gm , III, §25, 115–16. See also AC, §10, 9. gm , III, §25, 115–16. See also ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 5 [71], 211-2, trans. wp , I, §5, 10. gs , III, §125, 119–20; tsz , Part I, “Prologue,” §2, 4–5. On the death of God and its place in Nietzsche’s account of nihilism, see Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word”; Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Return of the Same (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 36–54; René Girard, “The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche,” in Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard, ed. Paul Dumouchel (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 1988); Robert Pippin, “Nietzsche and the Melancholy of Modernity,” Social Research 66, 2 (1999): 495–520; Robert R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studied in Hegel and Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). gs , V, §343, 199. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [99], 48, trans. wp , I, §12, 12. ksa (Nachlass 1885-1887) XII 2 [127], 125-7; trans. wp , I, §1, 7. gs , V, §347, 205-6. ksa (Nachlass 1885-1887) XII 2 [127], 125-7; trans. wp , I, §1, 7. Ibid. [119], 56–7. Ibid. (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 5 [71], 214–15, trans. wp , I, §55, 36–7. ksa

202

Notes to pages 87–9

65 Neurosis often generates a need for sedatives, pills, alcohol, tobacco, food, and so on. See, especially, Sigmund Freund, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description Anxiety Neurosis,” in On Psychopathology, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, [1895] 1987), 31–65; Alfred Adler, The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, vol. 1, The Neurotic Character, trans. Cees Cohen (Chicago: Alfred Adler Institute, [1907] 2005); Carl Gustav Jung, The Psychological Types, trans. H.G Baynes (London: Routledge, [1921] 1971). Nietzsche’s analysis also anticipates important aspects of what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “anomie” in On Suicide (London: Penguin, [1897] 2006), a trail-blazing study on the social conditions contributing to self-harm and suicide. Anomic societies can produce a wide variety of pathological psychological states among many of its members, including a sense of futility, inertia, lack of purpose, emotional apathy, anxiety, and despair. 66 ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 10 [42], 476, trans. wp , I, §28, 19. 67 Ibid., 7 [8], 292–3, trans. wp , I, §8, 11. 68 Ibid., 9 [35], 351, trans. wp , I, §23, 17–18. See also tsz , “Prologue,” §5, 9–11; gm , “Preface,” §5, 6–7. 69 Ibid., trans. wp , I, §22, 17. 70 gs , V, §370, 236. 71 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 29. 72 ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [123], 59–60, trans. wp , I, §24, 18. 73 For useful discussions of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, see Rüdiger Bittner, “Ressentiment,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 127–38; Bernard Reginster, “Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, 2 (1997): 281–305. See also Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis A. Coser (New York: Free Press, [1915] 1961); Marc Ferro, Resentment in History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, trans. Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Sjoerd van Tuinen, ed., The Polemics of Ressentiment: Variations on Nietzsche (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). See also Elisabetta Brighi, “The Globalisation of Resentment,” Millennium: Journal of international Studies 44, 2, (2016): 411–32. 74 On the concept of resentment in the Scottish Enlightenment, see Neil Hargraves, “Resentment and History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Cromohs: Cyber Review of Modern Historiography 14 (2009): 1–21;

Notes to pages 89–93

75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89

203

Michael S. Pritchard, “Justice and Resentment in Hume, Reid, and Smith,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 6, 1 (2008): 59–70. See also Bernardino Fantini, Dolores Martín Moruno, and Javier Moscoso, eds., On Resentment: Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). gm , I, §13, 26 Ibid., III, §15, 93–4. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” (1920), reprinted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003): 43–103. See also Civilization and Its Discontent (London: Penguin, [1930] 1994). On Nietzsche and Freud, see Richard Waugaman, “The Intellectual Relationship between Nietzsche and Freud,” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 36, 4 (1973): 458–67; Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche (London: Continuum, [1980] 2006); Ken Gemes, “Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 38, 1 (2009): 38–59; Eva Cybulska, “Freud’s Burden of Debt to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer,” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 15, 2 (2015): 1–15. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 87–9. gm , III, §11, 85. hl, §1, 62. gm , I, §10, 21 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la Philosophie (Paris: puf , 2010, [1962]), 111. Scheler, Ressentiment, 6. Ibid., 5. eh , “Why I Am So Wise?,” §6, 80. Reginster, “Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation,” 290. As Pierre Bourdieu argues: “Ressentiment is a submissive revolt. Disappointment, by the ambition it betrays, constitutes an admission of gratitude. Conservatism was never mistaken about this: it knows enough to see there the highest tribute rendered to the social order, that of vexation and frustrated ambition; just as it knows how to detect the truth of more than one juvenile revolt in the trajectory which leads from the rebellious bohemianism of adolescence to disillusioned conservatism or to reactionary fanaticism in maturity.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 1992), 18. gm , I, §7-10, 16-21. Ibid., III, §18, 100.

204

Notes to pages 93–8

90 Ibid., I, §7, 17. See also bge , §46, 44. For a good discussion, see Robert Solomon, “One Hundred Years of Ressentiment,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. Schacht, 95–126; Strong, Nietzsche, 186–217; Christa Davis Acampora, “Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: Moral Injury and Transformation,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 222–46. 91 bge , §202, 90. 92 Reginster, “Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation,” 285. 93 bge , §257, 151-2, and §260, 153-4. See also gm , I, §5, 14; tsz , Part I, “On the New Idol,” 35. 94 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotions, 32–3. See also Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late-Modernity (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1995). 95 gm , III §15, 93. 96 gs , I, §13, 38. 97 gm , III, §28, 120. See also §20, 104. 98 gm , III, §3, 109. See also ac , §43, 39-40. 99 gs , V, §370, 235. 100 Ibid., §347, 206. 101 Ibid., 203. 102 gs , III, §125, 120. See also V, §343, 199. 103 bt , “An Attempt,” §1, 4. 104 tsz , I, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 3–15. 105 ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 12 [9], 577. 106 Ibid. (1887-1889) XIII 11 [411], trans. wp , “Preface,” §3, 3. Nietzsche also sometimes refers to this “perfected” or “completed” form of nihilism as “Dionysian,” “ecstatic,” or “classical” nihilism. 107 ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 9 [60], 366, trans. wp , III, §585, 318.

c h a p t e r fo u r Note to the epigraph: ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 4 [202], 150. 1 Ibid., (1875–79) VIII 23 [63], 425. 2 ws , §181, 353-4. 3 d, I, §23, 19; III, §189, 110–11; IV, §356, 166. 4 gs , I, §13, 38. 5 tsz , I, “On a Thousand and One Goals,” 42–44; II, “On SelfOvercoming,” 88–90; “On Redemption,” 109–12. 6 ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 39 [1], 619.

Notes to pages 98–9

205

7 Ibid. (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 18 [17], 537–8. For insightful discussions, see Bernd Magnus, “The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power,” in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 218–36; Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Unpublished Writings from 1885 to 1888; or Textual Criticism and the Will to Power,” in Reading Nietzsche, trans. Greg Whitlock (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 80–102; Thomas H. Borbjer, “Nietzsche’s Magnus Opus,” History of European Ideas 32, 3 (2012): 278–94. 8 gm , III, §26, 118. See also ksa (Nachlass 1884–1885) XI 39 [1], 619. 9 ksa (Nachlass 1887–1889) XIII 11 [411], 190, trans. wp , Preface, §4, 3-4. 10 The philosophical literature engaging with the concept and its place in Nietzsche’s thought is considerably large. Studies that have influenced my own interpretation include Jean Granier, Le problème de la vérité dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 369–462; Wolfgang MüllerLauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1971] 1999); Tracy B. Strong, Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, [1975] 2000), 218–59; Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London and New York: Routledge, 1983), 187–266; Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge ma : Harvard University Press, 2006), 103–47; James I. Porter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will to Power,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Wile-Blackwell, 2009), 548–64; Laurence J. Hatab, “The Will to Power,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 329–50. See also Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, [1993] 1996). 11 See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin [1918/1922] 1928); ibid., Man and Technics (London: Artkos [1931] 2015); ibid., “Nietzsche and his Century. An address delivered at the Nietzsche Archive to mark Nietzsche’s eightieth birthday, Weimar 15 October 1924,” in Prussian Socialism and Socialism and Other Essays (London: Black House Publishing, 2018), 151–61. 12 Oswald Spengler, “Is World Peace Possible?,” (1936), reprinted in Prussian Socialism, 267–8. 13 Other influential texts here would include Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1932]

206

14

15 16

17 18

Notes to page 99

2017); Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931); Heinrich Härtle, Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Franz Eher-Zentralverlag der nsdap , 1937); Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (London: Black Kite Publishing, [1930] 2017); Friedrich Nietzsche (Munich: Franz Eher-Zentralverlag der nsdap, 1944). The case of Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is more complex, but it also belongs to this dark episode of German history. See, especially, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farell Krell (New York: Harper One, [1961] 1991). Leon Trotsky, “On the Philosophy of the Overman.” This text was originally published in the Russian paper Vostochnoye Obozrenie, nos. 284, 286, 287, 289, on 22, 24, 25, 30 December 1900. Available in English translation at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1900/12/ nietzsche.htm. Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason (London: Aakar Books, [1962] 2016). Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (London: Latimer House, 1947), 165. See also Politics among Nations, 4th ed. (New York: Knopf, [1948] 1967), 31–6. On Nietzsche’s influence on Morgenthau, see Ulrik Enemark Petersen, “Breathing Nietzsche’s Air: New Reflections on Morgenthau’s Concepts of Power and Human Nature,” Alternatives 24, 1 (1999): 83–118; Christopher Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 94–103. Reinhold Niebuhr’s appropriation of Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power in The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (Louisville and London: Westminster John Know Press, [1939/43] 1996) can also be interpreted in this context. For a helpful commentary, see Guilherme Marques Pedro, Reinhold Niebuhr and International Relations Theory: Realism beyond Thomas Hobbes (London: Routledge, 2018), esp. 90–118. See also Mark F.W. Lovatt, Confronting the Will-to-Power: A Reconsideration of the Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2001). See Carol Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). According to a recent history of German philosophy, for example, “Nietzsche bears the main intellectual responsibility for the German adventure of crushing the Christian order of values and the creation of an alternative value system that dripped with the desire to kill, and then for the worldwide spread of a vulgarly pretentious relativism that since 1989 had often paralyzed those who have thrown off Marxism.” Vittorio Hösle, A Short History of German Philosophy (Princeton, nj : Princeton

Notes to pages 100–5

19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

207

University Press, 2013/17), 158. See also Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), 443–7; Arno Meyer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Verso, 2010 [1981]), 292–3. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [1795]), 103. Immanuel Kant, “Appendix from the Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), in ibid., 191. Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 123. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), in Kant, ed. H.S. Reiss, 42. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, [1790] 1987), §83, 317–21. Ibid., 320. gs , “Preface to the Second Edition,” §2, 5. um , I, “David Strauss: The Confessor and Writer,” §7, 31. Nietzsche is more unequivocal in his later writings: “The fatality of human existence cannot be extricated from the fatality of everything that was and will be. People are not the products of some special design, will, or purpose, they do not represent an attempt to achieve an ‘ideal of humanity,’ ‘ideal of happiness,’ or ‘ideal of morality,” – it is absurd to want to devolve human existence onto some purpose or another. We have invented the concept of ‘purpose’: there are no purposes in reality.” ti , “The Four Great Errors,” §8, 182. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la Philosophie (Paris: puf , 2010, [1962]), 104. d, “Preface,” §3, 3. See also bge , §11, 12–13. d, “Preface,” §3, 3. See also gs , IV, §335,188–9; ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 7 [4], 265. ksa (Nachlass 1887–1889) XIII 11 [310], 131, trans. wp , II, §387, 208. tsz , I, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” §6, 23. Kant, “Appendix from The Critique of Pure Reason,” 191. Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This may Be True in Theory But Does Not Apply to Practice,’” in Kant, Political Writings, 74. tsz , I, “On the Way of the Creator,” §19, 46. See also David Owen, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (London: Sage, 1995), 132–8; Herman Siemens, “Nietzsche contra Liberalism on Freedom,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 437–53. bge , §225, 116. As Nietzsche declares in ti , IX, §38, 213–14: “Liberal institutions stop being liberal as soon as they have been attained: after

208

36 37 38

39

40 41

42 43 44

45

46

Notes to pages 106–7

that, nothing damages freedom more terribly or more thoroughly than liberal institutions. Of course people know what these institutions do: they undermine the will to power, they set to work levelling mountains and valleys and call this morality, they make things small, cowardly, and enjoyable, – they represent the continual triumph of herd animals ... As long as they are still being fought for these same institutions have entirely different effects and are actually powerful promoters of freedom.” gm , II, §6, 41. bt , “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §5, 9. gm , II §12, 50–2. See also Martin Saar, “Forces and Powers in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” in Nietzsche and Power Politics, ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 453–70; Paul Patton, “Nietzsche on Rights, Power and the Feeling of Power,” in ibid., 471–90. On this point, see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press, 1993), 42–75; Bernard Reginster, “Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, 2 (1997): 281–305; Christa Davis Acampora, “Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: Moral Injury and Transformation,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 222–46. d, II, §103, 60. See also bge , §202, 90; gm , III, §8, 78; a, §13, 11. Richard Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays (Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 2006). ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 11 [140], 492. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 40–1. Babette Babich, “Nietzsche’s Critique: Reading Kant’s Critical Philosophy,” in Nietzsche and the Philosophers, ed. Mark Conard (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2016), 179–80. “And just as he will necessarily respect his peers the strong and the reliable (those with the prerogative to promise) … so he will necessarily be ready to kick the febrile whippets who promise without that prerogative, and will save the rod for the liar who breaks his word in the very moment it passes his lips.” gm , II, §2, 37. Ibid., §1, 35.

Notes to pages 107–12

209

47 Ibid., 36. 48 gm , II, §2, 36; d, I, §9, 10–12; §14, 13–16; §16, 15. 49 gm , II, §3, 39. 50 hah , §96, 51. 51 gm , II, §3, 39. 52 Ibid., §2, 36–7. 53 ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 3 [162], 100. 54 a, §11, 9–10. 55 On the Nietzsche-Kant lineage and the will to power, see Deleuze, Nietzsche; Olivier Reboul, Critique de Kant (Paris: puf , 1974), 93–108; David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault (London: Routledge, 1994), 27–32; Tsarina Doyle, Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of the Will to Power: The Possibility of Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 101–41. 56 bge , §36, 35–6. 57 Owen, Maturity, 30–1. 58 ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 2 [151], 140. 59 Ibid., 9, [91], p. 385, trans. LN, 155. 60 Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche. 61 ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 6 [441], 312. 62 Ibid. (Nachlass 1885-1887) XII 2 [87], 104–5, trans. LN, 76. On this point, see C. Aydin, “Nietzsche on Reality as Will to Power: Toward an ‘Organization-Struggle’ Model,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 33, 1, (2007): 25–48. 63 bge , §259, 152–3. 64 On this point, see Michel Haar, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretations, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge ma : mit Press, 1985), 8–12. 65 “Every animal, including the bête philosophe, instinctively strives for an optimum of favourable conditions in which to fully release his power and achieve his maximum power-sensation; every animal abhors equally instinctively, with an acute sense of smell that is ‘higher than all reason,’ any kind of disturbance and hindrance that blocks or could block his path to the optimum.” gm , III, §7, 76. 66 bge , §22, 22. 67 ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 2 [150–1], 140, trans. wp , III, §556, 302. See also bge , §15, 16; ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 14 [153], 336–8. 68 See, for example, ti , “What I Owe the Ancients,” §2, 225. 69 ti , “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” 171.

210 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84

85 86 87 88

89

Notes to pages 113–17

(Nachlass 1884–5) XI 40 [53], 654, trans. David B. Allison as it appears in Jean Granier, “Nietzsche’s Conception of Chaos,” in New Nietzsche, ed. Alison, 136. ti , “Reason in Philosophy,” §2, 165–6; gs , V, §372, 237. ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 36 [36], 565–6; ibid., (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 2 [91], 106, and [102], 112; bge , §10, 11, and §34, 34–5. hah , §2, pp. 12–3. ksa (Nachlass 1869–74) VII 19 [118], 457. Ibid. [132], 461. ksa (Nachlass 1875–79) VIII 23 [9], 405-6. See also d, II, §119, 74-6; ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 34 [82] 445. bge , §13, 15. See also ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 2 [63], 89. Ibid., §36, 35–6. tsz , II, “On Self-Overcoming,” 90. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 14 [121], 300–1; ti , “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §14, 199. d, III, §189, 110. See also gs , V, §349, 207–8; bge , §13, 15. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 14 [123], 303–5, and [133], 315–17; ibid. (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 7 [25], 304–5. See also bge , §253, 144–5. gm , II, §12, 52. Spencer’s intellectual relationship to Darwin and Darwinism was more complex than Nietzsche and many of his contemporaries understood it at the time. His explanation of evolution as extending into the realms of society and culture was more directly influenced by that of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). gs , V, §357, 218. See also ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 14 [123], 303–5; ibid. (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 7 [9], 294–7; ti , “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §14, 199. ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 6 [206], 252. See also tsz , I, “On the New Idol,” 35; ibid., IV, “Conversation with the King,” 198. gs , I, §13, 39. ksa (Nachlass 1882–84) X 7[180], 300–1. “Germans believe that power must express itself through hardness and cruelty, and so they submit willingly and with admiration ... They do not easily believe that there could ever be strength in kindness and silence.” ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 7 [195], 357. Cited and translated in Walter Kauffmann’s “Editor’s Introduction,” wp , xxii–xxiii. ksa

Notes to pages 117–19

211

90 Julian Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), 99. 91 Although Nietzsche read extensively on Darwin and post-Darwinian theories of evolution, scholars have so far found no compelling evidence that he ever read any of Darwin’s main works. See, especially, MüllerLauter, Nietzsche, 161–82; Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 85–122; Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Catherine Wilson, “Darwin and Nietzsche: Selection, Evolution and Morality,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44, 2 (2013): 354–70. See also the essays collected in Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer, eds., Nietzsche and Science (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004). 92 Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. On Nietzsche and Roux, see also Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche, 161–82. 93 Young, Death of God, 105. See also Magnus, “Use and Abuse of The Will to Power”; Linda L. Williams, “Will to Power in Nietzsche Published Works and the Nachlass,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57, 3 (1996): 447–63. 94 gm , I, § 10, 21. See also ti , “Morality as Anti-Nature,” §1, 171–2; ibid., “What the German Lacks,” §1-4, 186–9. On this particular aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, see Debra Bergoffen, “On Nietzsche and the Enemy: Nietzsche’s New Politics,” in Nietzsche and Power Politics, ed. Siemens and Roodt, 491–509. 95 gm , III, §12, 87. 96 tsz , II, “On Self-Overcoming,” 88-90. 97 Hatab, “Will to Power,” 346. 98 ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 3 [162], 100. 99 Unlike Kant, who preached the “separation of reason, sensibility, feeling and will, … Goethe disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself ... In the middle of an age inclinced to unreality, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said yes to everything related to him, – his greatest experience was of that ens realissimum that went by the name of Napoleon.” ti , “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §49, 222. 100 “Thucydides, and perhaps Machiavelli’s Principe, are most closely related to me in terms of their unconditional will not to be fooled and to see reason in reality, – not in ‘reason,’ and even less in ‘morality’ … He

212

Notes to pages 120–1

[Thucydides] represents the most perfect expression of the sophists’ culture, by which I mean realists’ culture; this invaluable movement right in the middle of the hoax of morals and ideals that was being perpetrated on all sides by the Socratic schools … In the end, what divides natures like Thucydides from natures like Plato is courage in the face of reality: Plato is a coward in the face of reality, – consequently, he escapes into the ideal.” ti , “What I Owe the Ancients,” §2, 225. See also hah , I, §92, 49; d, §168, 169. On Nietzsche and Thucydides, see Raymond Geuss, “Thucydides, Nietzsche and Williams,” in Outside Ethics (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 2001), 219–33; John Zumbrunnen, “‘Courage in the Face of Reality’: Nietzsche’s Admiration for Thucydides,” Polity 35, 2 (2002): 237–63; Scott Jenkins, “What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides?,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42 (Autumn 2011): 32–50.

c ha p t e r f i ve Note to the epigraph: a, §39, 214–15. 1 “All the better if we could dispense with war. I would have a much better use for the 12 billion that armed peace costs to Europe each year; for there are other means to honour physiology than with military hospitals.” ksa (Nachlass 1887–89), XIII 25 [1], 646. See also ws , §284, 380–1. 2 gs ,V, §356, 216. 3 ksa (Nachlass 1882–84), X 24[25], 659; trans. wp , I, §130, 79–80. 4 Letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 7 November 1870, http://www. nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1870,107; letter to Erwin Rohde, 27 November 1870, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN1870,110. Burckhardt’s lectures were published posthumously for the first time in 1905 and translated into English in 1944 as Force and Freedom in History, trans. J.H. Nichols (Whitefish, mt : Literary Licensing, 2011). On Burkhardt’s influence on Nietzsche and his reflections on the state, see Lionel Gossmann, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Tasmin Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 2007), 12–35; Nikola Regent, “A ‘Wondrous Echo’: Burckhardt, Renaissance and Nietzsche’s Political Thought,” in Nietzsche and Power Politics, ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008), 629–66. For different interpretations of Nietzsche’s conception of the modern state, see Lester H. Hunt, “Politics and Anti-Politics: Nietzsche’s View of the State,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 2 (1985): 453–68; Michel Haar, “The

Notes to pages 121–4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14

15

16 17

213

Institution and Destitution of the Political According to Nietzsche,” New Nietzsche Studies 2, 1–2 (1997): 11–21; Daniel Conway, “The Birth of the State,” in Nietzsche and Power Politics, in ed. Siemens and Roodt, 37–67; Hugo Drochon, “Nietzsche Theorist of the State?,” History of Political Thought 38, 2 (2017): 323–44; Christian J. Emden, “Political Realism Naturalized: Nietzsche on the State, Morality, and Human Nature,” in Nietzsche as Political Philosopher, ed. Manuel Knoll and Barry Stocker (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017): 313–44. See also Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85–9. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance Italy, trans. S. Middlemore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1860] 1990). um , II, “The Uses and Advantages of History for Life,” §3, 73. Burckhardt, Civilization, 20. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 98. See also Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, 22–3. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison D’État and its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, ct : Yale University Press, [1924] 2017). Reinhardt Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 1987 [1954]), 15–22. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, ct : Greenwood, [1938] 1996). See also Koselleck, Critique, 23–52; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, [1962] 1992). On Nietzsche and Realpolitik, see Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, 12–35. August Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätzen der Realpolitik angewendet auf die Staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands (Stuttgart: Verlag von Karl Göpel, 1859), 185. James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 79–124. See also John Bew, Realpolitik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 17–64. gs t, 170–1. gm , III, §19, 103; bge , §251, 141–2; gs , V §357, 217. See also Charles H. Metz, “The Politics of Conflict: Heinrich von Treitschke and the Idea of Realpolitik,” History of Political Thought 3, 2 (1982): 269–84; Otto

214

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Notes to pages 124–9

Pflanze, “Bismarck’s Realpolitik,” in Imperial Germany, ed. James Sheehan (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976). ti , “What the Germans Lack,” §I, 186. See also bge , §244, 136–7. gs , V, §358, 222–3. Ibid.. hah , §476, 175–6. gs , V, §358, 222–3. tsz , I, “On the New Idol,” 23. bge , §199, 86–7. See also hah , I, §453, 166; D, IV, §112, 66–7. a, §11, 10. See also ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 7 [4], 266–7. ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 11 [182], 511. See also gm , II, §17, 58–9. For an insightful reading of Nietzsche’s critique of social contract theory, see Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also David Owens, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason (London: Sage, 2009); Laurence J. Hatab, “Breaking the Contract Theory: The Individual and the Law in Nietzsche’s Genealogy,” in Nietzsche and Power Politics, ed. Siemens and Roodt, 169–90. gm , II, §8, 45–6. hah , §99, 53. See also gm , II, §17, 58–9. ksa (Kommentar zu Band 1–13) 11[252], 754. See Léon Tolstoï, Ma Religion (Paris: Fischbacher, 1885), 49. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [252], 97, trans. wp , III, §718, 383. Ibid. (Nachlass 1885-1888) XII 10 [8], 458, trans. wp , III §719, 383. hah , §57, 41–2. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [407], 187, trans. wp , III, §717, 382–3. Ibid. (Nachlass 1885–87) XII, 10 [10], 459, trans. wp , IV, §889, 474–5. Ibid. (Nachlass 1887-89) XIII 14 [196], 381, trans. wp , III, §716, 382. See also bge , §201, 88. Good studies on the security politics of modern democracy and secularization, which either borrow from or resonate with Nietzsche’s diagnoses, include Marcel Gauchet, L’Avènement de la démocratie. Tome 1 and 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origins and Destiny of Community (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 2009); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Michael Dillon, The Politics of Security (London: Routledge: 1996); Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Luca Mavelli, “Security and

Notes to pages 130–4

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53

54 55 56

57

215

Secularization in International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations 18, 1 (2012): 177–99. hah , §472, 170–1. Ibid., 171–2. Ibid., §441, 162. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, [1958] 1993), 93. hah , §459, 167–8. See also ti , “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §39, 214–15. In this context, see also Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism. Ibid., §441, 162. Ibid., §472, 172. ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) 9 [43], 355, trans. wp , I, §20, 16. See also gs , I, §I, 28–9. gs , I, §2, 30. hah , §472, 170–3; tsz , I, “On the New Idol,” 34–6. On this specific point, see Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, 137–52. Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge ma : mit Press, 1988), 220. tsz , I, “On the New Idol,” §13, 34–5. See also Stefan Elbe, Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), 41–64; and Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 286–316. Wolfgang Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867-1918: Politics, Culture and Society in an Authoritarian State (London: Arnold, 1997), 65-6; Katharine Anne Lerman, “Bismarckian Germany,” in Imperial Germany 1871-1918, ed. James Retallack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3-38; David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 17-9. ksa (Nachlass 1869-1874) VII 32 [80], 784. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 17-9. Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 42–3. Ibid., 63–4. See also Stefan Berger, Germany: Inventing the Nation (London: Hodder Arnold, 2001), 77–110. For a useful overview, see John Scharzmantel, “Rethinking Marxism and Nationalism in an Age of Globalization,” Rethinking Marxism 24, 1 (2012): 144–61. Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 208.

216

Notes to pages 134–8

58 hah , §475, 174. 59 tsz , I, “The New Idol,” 35. 60 Søren Kierkegaard, The Age of Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 23–4. Nietzsche knew of Kierkegaard and may have read him, but he does not discuss his works anywhere. In a letter to Georg Brandes dated 19 February 1888, http:// www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1888,997, Nietzsche writes: “During my next journey to Germany I plan to study the psychological problem of Kierkegaard, also to renew my acquaintance with your earlier writings. This will be, in the best sense of the word, useful to me - and will serve to ‘bring home’ to me the severity and arrogance of my own judgments.” Trans. sl , 285. 61 Max Scheler, On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing, ed. Harold J. Bershady (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1912] 1992), 120. 62 Ibid. 63 gs , I, §40, 56–7. For an insightful analysis of Nietzsche’s influence on Weber’s mature sociology in this context, see Bryan Turner, “Max Weber and the Spirit of Resentment: The Nietzsche Legacy,” Journal of Classical Sociology 11, 1 (2011): 79. 64 Ibid. 65 Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 67. 66 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1795] 2004), 113–14. 67 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Rights, trans. H.B. Nisbet, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1821] 1991), §5, 38–9. On this specific point see also Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007), 29–38. 68 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. A.B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, [1966] 2004), 22–3. See also Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 241–2; Robert R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33–47; Susan Nieman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 57–112. 69 gs , V, §377, 24. See also amo , §284, 380. 70 tsz , I, “The New Idol,” 35.

Notes to pages 139–43

217

chapter six 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11

12

13

ws , §275, 376; ti , §43, 217. See also ksa (Nachlass 1884–5) XI 26 [352], 242–3; ibid. (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 2 [13], 71–4. ws , §289, 383. “That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels. – Have things really got less perilous because the wellbeing of the nation now rides in this vehicle?” ws , §293, 384. Jan Patocˇka, “Wars of the Twentieth Century, and the Twentieth Century as War,”’ in Heretical Essays (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, [1975] 1996),193. ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 11 [273], 546, from which the subtitle of the present chapter is taken. ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 37 [8], 580. Gary Shapiro’s Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016) is one of the very few studies emphasizing this contextual lineage. See also Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178. For insightful overviews, see Michael Heffernan, “Fin de Siècle, Fin du Monde: On the Origins of European Geopolitics,” in Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, ed. Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (London: Routledge, 2000), 27–51; Jeremy Black, Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 2015), 108–50. Arthur de Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race, trans. Adrian Collins (London: William Heinemann, [1853–55] 1915). Ibid., 31. See Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: The Political and Social Thought of Count Gobineau (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970); Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), 46–75. Élisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: The Universal Geography, 19 vols. (London: J S Virtue and Co., 1876–94). For an insightful overview, see John P. Clark and Camille Martin, eds., Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus (Oxford: Lexington, 2004). Peter Kropotkin, “What Geography Ought to Be,” The Nineteenth Century 18 (1885): 940–56. On this specific theme in Kropotkin, see

218

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27

28 29

30

Notes to pages 143–7

B. Galois, “Ideology and the Idea of Nature: The Case of Peter Kropotkin,” Antipode 8, 3 (1976): 1–16. bge , §208, 161. Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York: Free Press, 1992), 42–3. bge , §228, 118–20. hah , §475, 174–5. William Norton Medlicott, The Congress of Berlin and After: A Diplomatic History of the Near Eastern Settlement, 1878–1880 (London: Cass, 1963); M. Yakan Havuz and Peter Sluglett, eds., War and Diplomacy: The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the Treaty of Berlin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011). ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI, 37 [9], 583–4. bge , §208, 161. Ibid., 101–2. See also ti , “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §39, 214. A.J.P. Taylor, Germany’s First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck’s European Policy (New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1970); Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Heinrich Von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” Preußische Jahrbücher 44 (1879): 559–76. On the wider political and geopolitical context, see Stefan Berger, Germany: Inventing the Nation (London: Hodder Arnold, 2001), 77–110. Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche: The Last Anti-Political German (Bloomington and Annapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 162–3. bge , §241, 132. d, III, §189, 110. Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 3, The Period of Fortification, 1880–1898 (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1990), 143–4. d, III, §206, 206–7. See Robert C. Holub, “Nietzsche’s Colonial Imagination: Nueva Germania, Good Europeanism, and Great Politics,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Suzanne Zantop (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 33–49; Bergmann, Nietzsche, 162–3. Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, 19 February 1883, www.nietzschesource.org/ eKGWB/BVN-1883,381.

Notes to pages 147–8

219

31 See his letters to Franz Overbeck, 2 July 1885, www.nietzschesource.org/ eKGWB/BVN-1885,609, and 6 October 1885, www.nietzschesource.org/ eKGWB/BVN-1885,632. 32 Letter to Franziska Nietzsche, 1 May 1885, www.nietzschesource.org/ eKGWB/BVN-1885,604. 33 Nietzsche’s diagnostic of the international relations of the late nineteenth century anticipate many aspects of Zaki Laïdi’s interpretation of the metaphysical vacuum underpinning the debate over globalization after the end of the Cold War. See Zaki Laïdi, A World without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics, trans. June Burnham and Jenny Coulon (London: Routledge, [1994] 1998). 34 ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 30 [1], 353. 35 bge , §256, 148. 36 See especially bge , §241, 132; gs , V, §377, 241. On Nietzsche and “good Europeanism,” see Graham Parkes, “Wanderers in the Shadow of Nihilism: Nietzsche’s Good Europeans,” History of European Ideas 16, 4–6 (1993): 585–90; Nicholas Martin, “‘We Good Europeans’: Nietzsche’s New Europe in Beyond Good and Evil,” History of European Ideas 20, 1–3 (1995): 141–4; Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task (New Haven, ct : Yale University Press, 2001), 245–61; Stefan Elbe, Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), 65–108; Christian J. Emden, “The Uneasy European: Nietzsche, Nationalism and the Idea of Europe,” Journal of European Studies 38, 1 (2008): 27–51; Gary Shapiro, “Beyond Peoples and Fatherlands: Nietzsche’s Geophilosophy and the Direction of the Earth,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 35–6 (2008): 9-27; Daniel Conway, “Whither the ‘Good Europeans’? Nietzsche’s New World Order,” South Central Review 26, 3 (2009): 40–60. 37 ws , §87, 332. 38 “And who knows whether this piece of antiquity’s essence will finally again become master of the national movement, and whether it must not make itself the heir and protractor in an affirmative sense of Napoleon – who wanted one Europe, as is known, and wanted it as mistress of the earth.” gs , V, §362, 227. See also gm , I, §16, 33. 39 hah , §475, 174; bge , §256, 148. Nietzsche abhorred anti-Semitism. However, his discourse on the European Jews is by no means free of problematic assumptions and political ambiguities. See Jacob Golomb, ed., Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (London: Routledge, 1997); Yirmayahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park, pa : Penn State Press, 1998).

220 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56

57

Notes to pages 148–53

(Nachlass 1884–85) XI, 31 [10], 362–3. III §27, 119. See also ws , §87, 332; gs , IV §297, 169, and V, §357, 219. See David Farrell Krell, The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Words and Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Shapiro, Nietzsche’s Earth, 73. ws , §278, 378. ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 37 [9], 583–4. ac , §13, 11. gs , V, §373, 238–9. gm , III, §9, 82. ws , §288, 383. Ibid., §220, 366–7. hah , §585,188–9. ws , §218, 366. Nietzsche’s fragmented diagnostic anticipates the dystopian account of technology developed by other German thinkers during the interwar and post-Second World War periods. See especially Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, [1932] 2017); Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbook [1954] 1977), 3–35. hah , §475, 174–5. Ibid., §473, 173-4. ws , §292, 383–4. Kojève’s “end of history” thesis is weaved into the narrative of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Basic Books, [1947] 1969). For an extension and more concrete political application of his arguments, see his “Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy,” Policy Review 123 ([1945] 2004): 3–40. As he remarks sarcastically in a fragment from the early 1880s, those who “call the unification of Germany a ‘great idea’ are the same type of person who will one day be enthusiastic about the united states of Europe: it is the even ‘greater idea.’” ksa (Nachlass 1875–79) VIII 19 [74], 347–8. ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 25 [462], 136. For an insightful discussion, see Nicholas Martin, “Breeding Greeks: Nietzsche, Gobineau and Classical Theories of Race,” in Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester, ny : Camden House, 2004), 40–53. ksa

gm ,

Notes to pages 153–5

221

58 Friedrich von Hellwald, Die Erde und ihre Völker: Ein Geographisches Hausbuch (Stuttgart: Verlag von W. Spemann, 1877–78). 59 Emden, Nietzsche and the Politics of History, 178. Franz Overbeck sent a copy from the university library in Basel to the Swiss village of Sils Maria where Nietzsche retreated for the summer. See letter to Franz Overbeck, 8 July 1881, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1881,123. 60 Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropo-Geographie (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorn, 1882). 61 See letter to Franz Overbeck, 14 July 1886, http://www.nietzschesource. org/#eKGWB/BVN-1886,720. On Nietzsche and Ratzel, see Stephan Günzel, “Nietzsche’s Geophilosophie,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 25 (2003): 103–16; Geophilosophie: Nietzsches philosophische Geographie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001); Shapiro, Nietzsche’s Earth, 84, 94–5. 62 On Kjellén and biopolitics, see Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 9–10. For an interesting discussion of the relationship between geography, biology, and politics in German politics and philosophy during this period, see Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2012), 137–58.  63 Shapiro, Nietzsche’s Earth, 94–5. 64 bge , §242, 133–4. 65 As he writes in ws , §229, 368: “We withdraw into concealment: but not out of any kind of personal ill-humour, as though the political and social situation of the present day were not good enough for us, but because through our withdrawal we want to economize and assemble forces of which culture will later have great need, and more so if this present remains this present and as such fulfils its task. We are accumulating capital and seeking to make it secure: but, as in times of great peril, to do that we have to bury it.” See also hah , §438, 161–2 in this context. On this more contemplative phase in Nietzsche, see Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, [1954] 1994), 359–60; Horst Hutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham, md : Lexington Books, 2006); Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 66 bge §208, 101–2; eh , “Why I Am a Destiny,” §1, 144; ksa (Nachlass 1887–89), XIII 25 [1], 637–47. See also Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (Tucson: University of

222

67 68

69 70 71 72

73

74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81

Notes to pages 156–8

Arizona Press, [1936] 1965), 249–86; Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 2016), 153–79. ksa (Nachlass 1887–89), XIII 25 [1], 637. See also eh , “The Birth of Tragedy,” §4, 110. Bruno Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum (Charlottenburg: Bauer, 1853). Cited in Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, [1941] 1964), 107. bge , §208, 99–102. bge , §211, 105; ti , “What the Germans Lack,” §1–7, 186–91. gs , V, §377, 241. See also ti , §43, 217. On this theme, contrast Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?” (1955), in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 9–55; with Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 1968), 17–40. Plato, “Socrates’s Apology,” in Plato and Aristophanes: Four Texts on Socrates, ed. Thomas West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press, 1984), 16–23. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, [1952], 1988). bge , §208, 101–2. Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 168. bge , §211,105. As Nietzsche argues in um , III, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” §3, 137: “Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief.” He was “cautious, subservient and, in his attitude to the state, without greatness: so that, if university philosophy should ever be called to account, he at any rate could not justify it.” bge , §211, 106. Ibid., §212, 106. Roselyn Rey, The History of Pain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 132–260; Andrew Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Olivier Walusinski, “Neurology and Neurologists during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871,” in Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, ed. L. Tatu and J. Bogousslavsky (Basel: S. Karger ag , 2016), 77–92; Ernst Jünger , On Pain, trans. David C. Durst (New York: Telos, [1934] 2008). gs , V, §377, 242. See also ws , §284, 380.

Notes to pages 158–60 82 83 84

85 86 87

88

89 90

91

92 93

223

gm , I, §11, 23. Nietzsche refers specifically to Pericles’ admiration for the Athenians in his Funeral Oration. ksa (Nachlass 1880–82) IX 11 [163], 505. See especially gs , IV, §341, 194–5; tsz , III, “On the Vision and the Riddle,” 123–7; and ibid., “The Convalescent” 173–8; bge , §56, 50–1. On Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return see Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Return of the Same, trans. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1978] 1997); Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Micheal Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, [1993] 1996), 113–30; Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence (New York and London: Routledge 2005). See also Michael Allen Gillespie, Nietzsche’s Final Teaching (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, [1790] 1987), §83, 321n. Ibid., §84–7, 322–42. Laurence J. Hatab, “The Will to Power,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 346–7. “As for us, we are no sceptics – we still believe in a hierarchy of men and problems, and we look forward to a time when this order of rank will be reaffirmed over today’s plebeian society.” ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 35 [43], 529. ksa (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 27 [80], 295. Ibid., 25 [290], 85. Nietzsche links the strategy to his account of perfect/ ecstatic nihilism in another fragment from the same period: “A pessimistic teaching and way of thinking, an ecstatic nihilism, can under certain conditions be indispensable precisely to the philosopher – as a mighty pressure and hammer with which he breaks and removes degenerate and decaying races to make way for a new order of life, or to implant into that which is degenerate and desires to die a longing for the end.” Ibid., 35 [82], 547, trans. wp , IV, §1055, 544. See also eh , “The Birth of Tragedy,” §4, 110. “There remains the possibility here that humanity is not what is in degeneration, only that parasitical type of human, priests, who, with their morality, have lied themselves into the position of determining values, – who see Christian morality as their means of wielding power.” eh , “Why I Am Destiny,” §7, 149. eh , “The Birth of Tragedy,” §4, 110. Tracy B. Strong, Politics without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 86.

224

Notes to pages 161–5

94 For different and often diverging assessments of Nietzsche’s pronouncements on this particular matter, see Jaspers, Nietzsche, 272–86; Haar, “Institution and Destitution,” 21–33; Yannis Constantinides, “Nietzsche législateur,” in Lectures de Nietzsche, ed. Jean-François Balaudé and Patrick Wotling (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000), 208–82; Herman W. Siemens, “Yes, No, Maybe So … Nietzsche’s Equivocations on the Relation between Democracy and ‘Grosse Politik,’” in Nietzsche and Power Politics, ed. Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt (Berlin and New York: De Gruyer, 2008), 231–68; Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, 160–79; Gillespie, Nietzsche’s Final Teaching, 161–77. See also Henning Ottmann, Philosophie und Politik bei Nietzsche (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 239–92. 95 ksa (Nachlass 1885–87) XII 2 [57], 87-8; ibid., (Nachlass 1887–89), XIII 25 [1], 637–8. 96 ksa (Nachlass 1884–1885) XI 35 [47], 533–4; ibid., (Nachlass 1884–85) XII 2 [57], 87–8. 97 ksa (Nachlass 1882–84) X 7 [21], 244–5; ibid., (Nachlass 1884–85) XI 26 [173], 19. 98 Siemens, “Yes, No, Maybe So,” 242. 99 Georges Batailles, Sur Nietzsche. Volonté de chance, in Oeuvres Complètes vol. 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 185. 100 ksa (Nachlass 1875–79) VIII 19 [74], 347–8. 101 For a more recent set of variations on this theme, see James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol.2, Imperialism and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 102 tsz , II, §7, 77. 103 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper Collins, [1954] 2004), 88. 104 ws , §284, 380–1.

c o nc l usio n Note to the epigraph: eh , “Why I Am Destiny,” §1, 143–4. 1 On this point see Joshua F. Dienstag’s insightful “Pessimistic Realism and Realistic Pessimism,” in Political Thought and International Relations, ed. Duncan Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 167–70. 2 As Theodor Adorno so nicely puts it in Negative Dialectics, trans. A.B. Ashton (London and New York: Routledge, [1966] 2004), 22–3: “The system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself trans-figured, has its primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species. Predators

Notes to page 166

3

4

5 6

7

225

get hungry, but pouncing on their prey is difficult and often dangerous; additional impulses may be needed for the beast to dare it. These impulses and the unpleasantness of hunger fuse into rage at the victim, a rage whose expression in turn serves the end of frightening and paralyzing the victim. In the advance to humanity this is rationalized by projection ... The sublimation of this anthropological schema extends all the way to epistemology. Idealism – most explicitly Fichte – gives unconscious sway to the ideology that the not-I, l’autrui, and finally all that reminds us of nature is inferior, so the unity of the self-preserving thought may devour it without misgivings ... The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism. It disfigures even Kant’s humanism and refutes the aura of higher and nobler things in which he knew how to garb it … The august inexorability of the moral law was this kind of rationalized rage at non-identity … Nietzsche’s liberating act, a true turning point of Western thought and merely usurped by others later, was to put such mysteries into words. A mind that discards rationalization – its own spell – ceases by its self-reflection to be the radical evil that irks it in another.” For different accounts of this tragic vision within the discipline of international relations, see Toni Erskine and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Tragedy and International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2012). See also see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001); Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Vassilios Paipais, “Necessary Fiction: Realism’s Tragic Theology,” International Politics 50, 6 (2013): 846–62. Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau are obvious cases in point. As William Scheuerman emphasizes: “Despite Morgenthau’s occasional references to Nietzsche, he followed the theologically minded (and Augustinian) Niebuhr in offering what was ultimately a traditionalistic embrace of Judeo-Christian religious ideas, the best of which were preserved by the ‘nonutilitarian ethical standards of Western civilization’ – standards, by the way, which he anxiously interpreted as undergoing disintegration and decay.” William Scheuerman, “The Realist Revival in Political Philosophy, or: Why New Is Not Always Improved,” International Politics 50, 6 (2013): 808. Dienstag, “Pessimistic Realism,” 173. On this point, see Nicholas Rengger, “Tragedy or Scepticism? Defending the Anti-Pelegian Mind in World Politics,” in Tragedy and International Relations, ed. Erskine and Lebow, 53–62. bt , §22, 104–8. See also eh , “The Birth of Tragedy,” §3, 109–10.

226

Notes to pages 166–9

8 This is why he can appreciate historical figures of extraordinary political will like Napoleon, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, and Cesare Borgias without necessarily approving of their tyrannical politics. As Paul E. Kirkland argues, Nietzsche’s praises for these historical figures “may include admiration of their realistic recognition of decay and their capacities to take advantage of the situation, but all of them are for him, ultimately, tragic figures.” Paul E. Kirkland, “Nietzsche’s Tragic Realism,” Review of Politics 72, 1 (2010): 71. 9 ti , §39, 214. 10 gs , V, §377, 241. See also ti , §43, 217. 11 On this point more generally, see J. Peter Burgess, “Value, Security and Temporality in Nietzsche’s Critique of Modernity,” Sociological Review 60, 4 (2012): 696–714. 12 “The standpoint of ‘value’ is the standpoint of conditions of preservation and enhancement for complex forms of relative life-duration within the flux of becoming. There are no durable ultimate units, no atoms, no monads: here, too, ‘beings’ are only introduced by us (from perspective grounds of practicality and utility).” ksa (Nachlass 1887–89) XIII 11 [73], 36, trans. wp , III, §715, 380–1. 13 Carl Schmitt, “The Tyranny of Values: Reflections of a Jurist on Value Philosophy,” in The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, ed. Russell A. Berman and Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, trans. S.G. Zeitlin (New York: Telos, 2019), 31, 35. 14 Economist, “The Politics of Values,” 7 October 2004, http://www. economist.com/node/3258082. 15 See, especially, Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead,’” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1950] 2002), 157–99; Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farell Krell (New York: Harper One, [1961] 1991). On Heidegger’s tumultuous engagement with Nietzsche, see Michael Allen Gillespie, “Review: Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” Political Theory 15, 3 (1987): 424–35; Will McNeill, “Traces of Discordance: Heidegger-Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Sedgwick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 123–42; Hans Sluga, “Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 102–20; Louis P. Leblond, Heidegger and Nietzsche: Overcoming Metaphysics (London: Continuum, 2010); Don Dombowsky, “‘The Last Metaphysician’: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s Politics,” European Legacy 23, 6 (2018): 1–15. See also Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed.

Notes to pages 169–71

16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23

24

25

227

Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, [1984] 1995), 96–127. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1927]), 190–1. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbook [1954] 1977), 3–35. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 2002 [1947]), 251. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4, 44. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, ct : Yale University Press, [1953] 2000), 222. Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word,” 173. Ibid., 163–4. Heidegger quotes approvingly from Ernst Jünger’s On Pain (1934) to that effect: “Today we see the valleys and fields filled with military camps, deployments, and exercises. We see the states more threatening and armed than ever, poised toward power expansion in every minute respect, commanding ranks and arsenals whose purpose is clear. We also see the individual entering ever more clearly into that state in which he can be sacrificed without reservations. With this in view, the question arises whether we are witnessing the opening of the spectacle in which life appears as the will to power, and as nothing else.” Martin Heidegger, “On Ernst Jünger I” (1939-40), in The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal, trans. Jerome Veith (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 205. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, 7–11; ibid., “Nietzsche’s Word,” 174. That the will to power was the fundamental principle of Nietzsche’s entire philosophy is a belief that Heidegger shared with official Nazi interpretations, despite being in disagreement with the racist-biological premises of those interpretations. Heidegger remained ignorant of the fraudulent character of the book The Will to Power until the late 1950s, after which he began to take a more deferential approach to Nietzsche’s oeuvre. On this point, see the insightful appendix in Jean Granier, Le problème de la vérité dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 611–28. See also Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Micheal Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, [1993] 1996), 1–36. Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1986] 2004), 195; Keith AnsellPearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 201.

228

Notes to page 172

26 Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 3, 2 (1973): 97–113. 27 Daniel Conway, Nietzsche and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996), 46–7. 28 Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Hans Georg Gadamer, “Nietzsche et Nous,” interview roundtable reprinted in H.G. Gadamer, Nietzsche L’Antipode: Le Drame de Zarathoustra (Paris: Allia, 2007), 56. 29 On Nietzsche and the intellectuals of the “conservative revolution” see Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (London: Palgrave, 1996), 29-58; Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 86-307. See also Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932 (Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerck-Verlag, 1950); Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993). It is in this same mendacious spirit that a resurgent far-right today can claim Nietzsche’s legacy to pursue its attack on globalization and the ever-increasing conditions of cultural hybridity that his “good Europeans” valued so much. Like ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other genocidal forces who wreaked havoc in the Balkans, Central Africa and elsewhere during the 1990s, what the protagonists of this “new” nationalist-populist international cannot find in our twentyfirst century reality is the clear territorial, religious and political demarcations between cultures upon which their nostalgic fantasies of an uncorrupted, authentic cultural identity is predicated. Whether it is about preserving the absolutism of moral codes against the presence of religious or ethnic others on the “homeland,” or about preventing native traditions and languages from being compromised by the proximity of other ways of life and the incursion of foreign symbols, their ressentiment follows from an incapacity to maintain the integrity of a cultural good that has never existed in such a reified form – and that cannot possibly exists in this world. For different assessments of this contemporary far-right appropriation of Nietzsche see Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, “Radical Conservatism and Global Order: International Theory and the New Right,” International Theory 10, no. 3 (2018): 285-313; Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Hugo Drochon, “Why Nietzsche Has Once Again Become an Inspiration to the Far-Right,” New Statesman, 29 August, 2018, https://www.newstatesman. com/2018/08/why-nietzsche-has-once-again-become-inspiration-far-right.

Notes to pages 172–3

229

30 Leo Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?” (1955), in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 9–55. See also Berel Lang, “Misinterpretation as the Author’s Responsibility (Nietzsche’s Fascism, for Instance),” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 2002), 47-65. 31 Stefan Zweig, The Struggle with the Daemon Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, trans. Edan and Cedan Paul (London: Pushkin Press, [1925] 2012), 262–3.

Index

absolutism, 122–3 Adorno, 137, 172 aesthetic experience, 41–2; judgement, 32–3, 36; theory of tragedy, 48–54 aesthetics, 23, 34, 36–7, 45, 47, 50–1, 54, 58, 68, 70, 101, 118, 158, 170 agency, 30, 73, 78, 105, 110, 117, 121, 126, 130, 158; creative, 45, 82; moral, 36, 106 ancient Greece, 37–8, 40–1, 45–6, 56, 63, 150; Greek culture, 22–3, 37, 41, 47, 50, 94 anti-Semitism, 8, 142, 219n39 anxiety, 83, 89 Apollo, 48–50, 53–4, 66 Arendt, 130 Aristotle, 166 art, 22–3, 42, 56–7 asceticism, 53, 87, 90, 92–4, 115, 125, 128, 160, 165 authority, 123–4, 129–30, 132, 136, 168, 171 Bachofen, 37 Bakunin, 75–7

balance of power, 63, 136, 144 Bataille, 161 Bauer, 156 being, 49, 83, 112, 169 biopolitics, 154–5, 160 Bismarck, 19, 63, 124, 133–4, 136, 139, 144, 155 body, 105, 110–11, 113 Bourget, 73–4 Buckhardt, 37, 121–3, 126 capitalism, 13, 57, 135, 139, 146, 151, 172, 198n20 categorical imperative, 29, 109, 119, 158 Christianity, 4–5, 37, 44, 50, 73–4, 82, 84–5, 92, 95–6, 104, 124, 133, 136, 142, 147, 150, 159, 164, 171. See also God civil society, 100, 123, 126 Clausewitz, 4 colonialism, 144–7 Copernicus, 28, 84–5 cosmopolitanism, 100, 102, 136, 148, 157, 161–2 culture, 44–5, 55, 59–65, 69, 123, 137, 151, 155

232

Index

Darwin, 43, 85, 104, 113, 115, 117, 211n91 Darwinism, 142–3 Deleuze, 9, 91 democracy, 7, 57, 62, 64, 120, 125, 128–30, 133, 144, 172 democratization, 130, 132, 135, 137, 139, 152 Descartes, 84 Dionysus, 48–55, 66, 68–9, 102, 117, 164, 189n7 Dostoyevsky, 73–5, 78, 95 Durkheim, 69 education, 62–3; moral, 108 end of history, 153 Engels, 60 enlightenment, 24, 27, 30–1, 82, 103, 106, 119, 130, 136, 158, 164, 165 Enlightenment, 9, 13-14, 26–7, 61, 142, 158, 162, 165 epistemology, 12, 14, 27, 29, 42, 71, 80–1, 97, 104, 113, 131–2 eternal return of the same, 159–60 Euripides, 66 experience, 27–8, 31–5, 48, 74, 80–1, 101, 104, 106, 114, 118. See also knowledge forgetting, 90–1, 107–9 freedom, 35, 57–8, 65, 69, 100–2, 105, 121, 125, 162 French Revolution, 61, 125–6, 148 Freud, 89–90, 162 genius, 58 Geopolitik, 3, 141, 154 German Hellenism, 23

German liberalism, 133 Gersdorff, 55 Gobineau, 142, 153–4 God, 31, 36–7, 80, 84–7, 129; death of, 85, 94–6, 132, 141, 150, 156, 168, 171. See also Christianity Goethe, 119 Grosse Politik, 145, 224n94 Grote, 55 Hamlet, 53 Hegel, 6, 36, 52, 60, 63, 79, 137, 142, 158 Heidegger, 83, 162, 169–171 Hellwald, 153 Heraclitus, 40–1, 110, 193n63 heteronomy, 27 Hobbes, 60, 123 Homer, 49 hubris, 150 Humboldt, 141 Hume, 29 imperialism, 99, 119, 140 institutions, 12, 48, 55, 62, 77, 101, 120–1, 125, 127, 136–7, 139, 167, 208n35 international relations, 4, 7, 29–30, 86, 89, 98, 100, 102, 115, 140, 145, 149, 164–5 international society, 161 Jacobi, 73 Jenisch, 73 Jesuits, 130 Jews, 148 judgement, 31–2, 43, 58, 80–1, 169 justice, 6, 77, 111, 137, 162, 171

Index Kaiserreich, 19, 22, 48 Kant, 8, 24–38, 42–4, 52, 57–8, 67–8, 70–4, 79–84, 97, 99–109, 112, 117, 119, 126, 131, 133, 136–7, 149, 158–9, 161–2, 170, 173 Kierkegaard, 135 kingdom of ends, 101, 104 Kjellén, 153 knowledge, 44, 46, 52, 73, 80–1, 113, 118–19, 129, 164, 166, 168, 173 Kojève, 152 Kropotkin, 142–3 Kulturstaat, 121, 129 Lange, 25 law, 27, 30, 100–1, 103–6, 112, 128, 131, 136; international, 100; moral, 35, 55, 101, 103, 107, 159; of nations, 60, 162; natural, 77 Lebensraum, 153 Leibniz, 49 Leviathan, 125 Lotze, 79 Luther, 124–5 Machiavelli, 119, 121 Machtpolitik, 124 Marcuse, 69 Marx, 36, 57, 60, 69, 75–6, 79, 85, 124, 126, 149, 156, 197n19 Marxism, 134, 143 Mérimée, 74 metaphysics, 27, 80, 83–4, 87, 104–6, 109–11, 113–14, 117, 128, 161, 170, 172, 189n7 modernity, 5–6, 11, 15, 19, 23, 48,

233

67, 99, 120–1, 127, 129–31, 166–7, 171 moral imperative, 80, 109 morality, 80, 86, 106, 111, 123, 125, 133, 166; ascetic, 106–7, 115; of custom, 107–8 Morgenthau, 99, 165 Mosengel, 21 Müller-Lauter, 110 Napoleon, 19–20, 147 nationalism, 133–6, 142, 145, 147–8, 152, 155, 165 nature, 28, 32, 34, 45, 101–2, 103, 142, 150, 155, 171; human nature, 102, 113, 153; state of nature, 60, 111, 126 Nazism, 8–9, 153 Nechayev, 76, 198n21 neo-Platonic, 70 Niebuhr, 166 Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, 78, 93, 111, 114, 144, 155, 172; Daybreak, 97, 106, 115, 155; Genealogy of Morality, 78, 89, 92, 94, 98, 106; Human, All Too Human, 76, 78, 129, 131, 140, 143, 155; Philosopher’s Book, 44; The Birth of Tragedy, 10–11, 18–19, 21–2, 40, 46–56, 62, 65, 67–9, 74, 97; The Gay Science, 71–2, 103, 155; The Greek State, 56, 59, 61, 123; The Wanderer and His Shadow, 148, 152; The Will to Power, 98, 170; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 96–7, 133; Twilight of the Idols, 119, 166; Untimely Meditations, 103, 121 Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 8

234

Index

nihilism, 4, 11–13, 71–6, 82–3, 85–8, 95–6, 119, 140, 147, 160, 168, 170–1 Obereit, 73 Oedipus, 65 ontology, 4, 12, 48, 78–9, 83, 103, 113, 126 pathos of distance, 59 peace, 101–3, 105, 119, 125, 162–3 pessimism of strength, 95 Petty, 79 philosophy, 103, 156, 170 Plato, 26, 42, 66, 83–4, 157, 161, 167 political realism, 119 political violence, 4, 12, 75, 77, 79, 127, 161 politics, 5–7, 10–11, 29–30, 41, 100, 106, 115, 119, 124, 140, 147, 155–7, 166, 171; and nihilism, 61, 72, 74, 76, 78, 86, 89, 95, 97; of tragedy, 54–5, 57–9, 61, 64, 69, 70, 96, 131 positivism, 142 power, 60, 94, 97, 99, 106, 110, 114, 116–17, 119, 123, 128–30, 139 pre-Platonics, 40 pre-Socratics, 42 Prometheus, 65, 166 race, 142, 147, 151 racism, 8, 147, 227n23 raison d’état, 121, 129–30 rationalization, 120–1, 165 Ratzel, 153–4 Realpolitik, 123–4, 147

reason, 28–30, 44, 45, 67, 104, 110, 112, 131; practical, 29, 31, 79–80, 100, 104; theoretical, 100 Reclus, 142 Reformation, 124–5, 129 Renaissance, 121–2 republicanism, 30, 119, 147, 149 ressentiment, 88–96, 103, 106, 118, 135–6, 147, 151, 157, 162–3, 171–2, 203n87. See also asceticism, slave morality revaluation of values, 96, 106, 127, 148, 167, 171–2 revolution, 76–7, 119, 144, 146 Rhode, 68 Ricardo, 79 rights, 100, 126–7, 134–7, 152, 162, 171 Ritschl, 18 Ritter, 141 Rochau, 123 Sartre, 83 scepticism, 27 Scheler, 91 Schiller, 52, 56 Schlegel, 52, 55, 73 Schmitt, 123, 167–8 Schopenhauer, 9, 24, 26, 38–41, 43, 45, 48–51, 70–1, 75, 110, 114, 189n4 science, 43–4, 82, 84, 103, 141, 158. See also technology secularization, 14, 119, 132 security, 6–7, 14, 49, 60, 86, 102, 119, 122, 125–6, 129, 137, 158, 165; ontological, 104 self-determination, 24, 119, 121, 134, 165

Index Simmel, 69 slave morality, 78, 93, 115–16, 162–3 Smith, 79 social contract, 30 social engineering, 161, 165 socialism, 152 society, 11, 57–61, 64, 128–9, 132–5, 151, 173, 146; of states, 7, 121, 165 Socrates, 47, 66, 67, 97, 131, 157 Socratic enlightenment, 42, 66–7; rationalism, 56, 83, 149 sovereignty, 14, 121, 129–30, 136 Spencer, 115 Spengler, 98 state, 59–62, 75, 99–100, 102–3, 119, 121–33, 136–7, 152, 154, 161 Strauss, 171–2 subjectivism, 58, 169–70 subjectivity, 50, 118, 121, 130 sublime, 34, 42, 52 suffering, 22, 38–9, 41, 49–50, 53, 65, 67, 70–1, 78, 83–4, 88–9, 94–5, 158–9, 171 superman. See Übermensch

truth, 5, 27, 42, 80–2, 86. See also will to truth Turgenev, 73–4

technology, 149–51, 158, 168–9, 172, 220n62 teleology, 30, 32, 43, 103, 114, 141, 184n34 terrorism, 75, 83, 93, 116 Thucydides, 119 Tolstoy, 127 tragedy, 23, 36, 40–1, 47, 65–71, 166. See also politics of tragedy transvaluation. See revaluation Treitschke, 145

Zarathustra, 96–8, 158

235

Übermensch, 96, 147, 160, 162 values, 13, 74, 79, 81–4, 96, 125, 136–7, 167–8 violence, 57, 71, 78, 88–9, 94, 98, 107–8, 121, 126–7, 158, 160, 162–3, 172 Wagner, 14, 47, 56, 67, 68–9, 76, 142 war, 30, 36, 39–40, 50, 60–2, 99–103, 119, 126, 128, 136–7, 141, 147, 151, 155–6 Weber, 69, 135, 166 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, 68 will, 39, 41, 48, 90, 95, 116, 137 will to life, 38, 115 will to power, 4, 93, 97–9, 109– 114, 116–17, 119, 170 will to truth, 80, 84–5, 97, 128, 148, 157 Winckelmann, 23 women, 176n8