c.10 Political & Social Readings

Kaufmann’s view of Nietzsche as an antipolitical existential thinker has been confirmed by those who feel that Nietzsche is, first and foremost, interested in heroic life and becoming an individual. On this reading, Nietzsche’s attacks on both state idolatry and liberalism are seen to stem from his antipolitical stance: his

Leitmotiv is identified as “anti-political individual seeking for self-perfection”⁸⁹⁹. In the same vein, Tarmo Kunnas has said that to politicize Nietzsche is to do “violence to his essence”. His antipolitics is, says Kunnas, no escapist aestheticism but a philosophically grounded sceptical position.⁹⁰⁰

However, Kaufmann’s influential reading has recently been described as “antiseptic”⁹⁰¹. Accordingly, his depoliticizing interpretation has been seen as “an attempt to sweeten and water down what Nietzsche thought” so that it amounts to both “prettification” and “trivialization”⁹⁰². Already in 1975, Tracy B.

Strong was claiming that interpretation must deal with “inconveniences” and resist the temptation to explain them away as rhetorical moves⁹⁰³. “Political” and “social” readings are typically both

antimetaphysical and anti-aesthetical, yet Strong has recently thematized the aesthetical dimension of Nietzschean politics⁹⁰⁴.

Bruce Detwiler’s Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (1990), too, underscores the political implications of Nietzsche’s insights as aesthetical by nature. Although Nietzsche cannot be interpreted as wishing to restore some ancient form of master rule, neither can one ignore his commitment to social inegality. It is this commitment that also ties his thought, inescapably, to domination.⁹⁰⁵ Karl Brose’s book on Nietzsche’s social thought appeared the same year but with different emphases. Among other things, Brose sought to demonstrate how especially the younger Nietzsche’s work goes against aristocraticism, while retaining its radicalism⁹⁰⁶.

The conflict between commentators is sometimes traced back to the original. Urs Marti crystallizes the principle difficulty like this: ”Whoever attends Nietzsche’s political thought will see him/herself

confronted with a contradiction that is hardly solvable; with the discrepancy between the necessarily cruel process of civilization, of raising [Züchtung] that degrades humans to objects, and the goal of that process, the emancipation of humans from the condescending morality of mores.”⁹⁰⁷ Alternatively, John Carroll’s reading could be seen as mediating between the social/political and the asocial/apolitical interpretations. His work concentrates on micropolitical “anarcho-psychology” that he sees as having grown from Nietzsche’s obsession with the concrete individual. The “anarcho-psychological” attitude became a socially and politically potent force.⁹⁰⁸ Yet, Mario Cassa has observed that it is very

questionable to hold that Nietzsche’s political philosophy is induced from his putative psychological, metaphysical or ontological base structure. Cassa claims that “the politico-social thematic derives from that ontology and psychology no more than, conversely, that ontology and psychology derive from the politico-social”⁹⁰⁹.

The fascist and national socialist use of Nietzsche may still have a role to play in this field. In William T.

Bluhm’s Theories of the Political System (1978), Nietzsche is presented as the nihilistic progenitor of

both existentialism and Nazism⁹¹⁰. In the East German Enzyklopädie zur bürgerlichen Philosophie im 19.

und 20. Jahrhundert (1988), Heinz Holz writes, under the title “Signs of Counter-Enlightenment”, about

“Nietzsche’s prefascist philosophy of life and power”. Holz claims that Nietzsche literature is tantamount to “modern counter-reason”, since ”[c]ontemporary adepts are reading Nietzsche not historico-critically, but as a guide to their own understanding of the world”.⁹¹¹

Marxist-Leninist interpretation sees, in Nietzsche, a combination of political naïvety and cunning. As Erhard Naake writes, in his dissertation Friedrich Nietzsches Verhältnis zu wichtigen sozialen und politischen Bewegungen seiner Zeit (1985), the knowledge Nietzsche operated with derived from

“reactionary ideologues, that is, from other publicists”. Naake says that Nietzsche was terrified by the thrust of mediocrity inherent in socialism, as he (mis)perceived it but that he was most worried “about the safeguarding of the privileges that he and his kind possessed.”⁹¹² Nietzsche’s neglect of, in particular, the economic dimension in social and political life, has been mentioned by others, too⁹¹³.

Nietzsche’s political solutions seem not much happier to a number of commentators further from the bipolar tensions of the cold war. Johannes Weiß has tried to sum up Nietzsche’s vision of the ’great politics’ and its challenge to European reorganization in a tripartite presentation. First, there are purely pragmatic, especially economic, reasons to put the national state system to an end. Secondly, there is a spiritual predisposition for this unification. Thirdly, the goal of the European unity can only be governing the world. This is, says Weiß, what Nietzsche sees as dictated by contemporary nihilism for the political life. He emphasizes that Nietzsche held the social sciences as capable of nothing else than exemplifying this nihilistic situation.⁹¹⁴

One way to absorb Nietzsche into political and social debates is to pay attention to his critique of ideology. Karl Barth wrote more than fifty years ago that Nietzsche’s “philosophical work is, to a considerable extent, criticism” that can be understood as “showing that Christian morality and religion, the reason and the Western concept of spirit and, finally, theories of state, society and justice have a character of ideology”⁹¹⁵. Barth sees, as does Monika Funke in her Ideologiekritik und ihre Ideologie bei Nietzsche (1974), that Nietzsche runs the risk of falling prey to the ideological features of his own critique⁹¹⁶.

As it was the case in some “feminist” interpretations, there are commentators who attach Nietzsche’s views on political issues to his acquaintance with the Greeks⁹¹⁷. His elitism and the idea of a “warlike man in a culture producing state” cannot be, it is judged, apprehended otherwise.⁹¹⁸ Apart from them, it is Machiavelli who is often mentioned as Nietzsche’s point of departure: these two are said to have extracted the notion of human value from its dominating religious frame to be “redefined in

historico-political realm”⁹¹⁹. This turn may also justify comparisons to Hegel and Burckhardt⁹²⁰.

Bernard Yack, for hist part, says that, although they deny it, both Marx and Nietzsche start from the common 19th-century bias, the Kantian dilemma of an autonomous individual facing the natural necessity. As for Rousseau, the surmounting of the existing limits of social life was a key question for Marx and Nietzsche. According to Yack, this explains why their work, “the longing for the total revolution”, is spanned across the extremes of nostalgic and apocalyptic aspirations.⁹²¹

Sometimes, Leo Strauss is seen as Nietzsche’s heir, because the two men seem to have shared similar estimations of modernity’s crisis and its political consequences⁹²². Ansell-Pearson forcefully criticizes this pairing: ”Although Strauss could recognize the undoubted importance of Nietzsche’s diagnostic and prognostic statements and utterances, he could never fully come to grips with the challenge his thought poses to traditional conceptions of political philosophy.” Ansell-Pearson’s Nietzsche is “a critic of the type of political conservatism” that Strauss stands for and, moreover, “his own thinking represents an attempt to prepare the ground for a philosophical and political radicalism”.⁹²³

Ansell-Pearson has written perhaps more extensively than any other contemporary scholar on Nietzsche’s political philosophy, which, as he says, is for many others “a source of confusion and embarrassment”. According to him, Nietzsche’s “existential questions about human identity cannot be separated from an understanding of history (especially of morality), of culture, and of politics.

Nietzsche’s key problem is “how to ground and justify a common political life in the absence of the support traditionally provided by absolute, transhistorical moral and religious values.”⁹²⁴ Ansell-Pearson is convinced that Nietzsche should not be mistaken to offer “little more than an antipolitical conception of life or an aestheticization of politics” but, rather, he ought to be understood as making a challenging inquiry into “the value-basis on which social relationships are to be established and a common ethical and political identity created and constituted”.⁹²⁵

Despite his enthusiastic reappropriations of Nietzsche, Ansell-Pearson has expressed fundamental doubts concerning Nietzsche’s insights. He writes, for instance, that “[i]t is perhaps a great irony and tragedy -of Nietzsche’s attempt to suppress history in the name of a higher justice (the panoramic will to power) that it commits the same errors and follies of a monumentalistic reading of history which he warned against in his untimely meditation on history. [...] His vision of great politics, and of the cultivation of the overman, inspired not simply gifted egoists and great visionaries, but also the impotent and the

indolent.”⁹²⁶

Another way to sum up Nietzsche’s redefining of the nature of political philosophy is proposed by John

Rajchmann. He writes that whereas “classical political theory had asked how sovereignty is constituted from subjects”, Nietzsche “asks what the political consequences are of our being constituted as

subjects.” Rajchmann is mainly interested in Nietzsche’s model for the Foucaultian critical enterprise. As another basic characteristic of this model, he supplies the shift from providing “a philosophical

foundation for the political order” to analyzing “of those forms of self-government which have no foundation or are historically contingent”. Lastly, there is the transition from “a “scientific” analysis of political institutions” to an analysis of “the politics of true discourse about those institutions”.⁹²⁷

Mark Warren is another major contributor to the contemporary Anglo-American research on the political impact of Nietzsche’s thought. In a paper from 1985, he outlined the typical image of the political

Nietzsche as follows: ”His experiment deepened rather than resolved the crisis because it glorified the powers of the individual qua individual, affirmed a creativity conceived without social and political limits, and thus produced politics without care.” In contrast, his own point of departure was to look for

Nietzsche’s significance “not in his political explanations, speculations, or ideals but, rather, in the way his philosophy penetrates the way in which political philosophy traditionally has constituted these three conceptual domains.” In this respect, Nietzsche’s lack of understanding for markets and bureaucracies and his correlative stress on the cultural and the physiological did not water down his philosophy of power, although they prevented him from grasping the dynamics of modern society.⁹²⁸

Later, in reacting to a polemical critique Warren gives his reply to the type of accusations I referred to as

“sweetening” Nietzsche’s thought: ”One of the hazards of the Nietzsche industry is that it attracts those who believe one has not really penetrated the authentic Nietzsche until he is made as terrifying as possible.”⁹²⁹ Warren holds that Nietzsche’s “philosophy of power is politically relevant, but also politically indeterminate”: the philosopher failed to give his thought plausible “political identity”. Yet, Warren insists that one should learn many lessons from Nietzsche, because his thinking involves profound insights and fresh initiatives in the direction of societal intersubjectivity and egalitarism, in addition to those in the more familiarly “Nietzschean” direction of individuality and pluralism.⁹³⁰

Nietzsche’s social philosophy has interested commentators from early on. Von Winterfeld’s assessment, from 1909, centers on Nietzsche’s standpoint of viewing humankind dualistically. This thinking in terms of “the higher” and “the lower”, as von Winterfeld writes, can “blind a little” or go “a little too far”. The worth of the mass goes unnoticed and Nietzsche is about to strive “for too pure a split” and, hence, open the possibility for “a certain injustice and cruelty”.⁹³¹

Tönnies and Simmel (the latter is von Winterfeld’s main inspiration) were not the only sociologists who paid attention to Nietzsche. It has been said that Max Weber formalized and solidified Nietzsche’s critical

insights concerning the Western secularization and specialization⁹³². In Weber’s own writings, one finds few but arguably crucial references to Nietzsche. In a letter from 1907, Weber says that what is most sustainable in Nietzsche is his differentiation of the noble morality, whereas the “biological ornaments” he adds “around the core of his thoroughly moralistic teaching” represent the worst⁹³³. More importantly, Weber’s Wahrheit und Demokratie in Deutschland (1917) includes an open praise for Nietzsche’s Genealogie and his idea of religion’s basis in class relations. He sees in Nietzsche’s work the first thematization of the role of suffering in religious morality. Weber considers Nietzsche’s ’resentment’ to be a “psychologically significant discovery” that has its applications in social ethics. Yet, he doubts the fruitfulness of a generalized notion of ’ascesis’.⁹³⁴

These observations can be heard as an echo in the criticisms V. J. McGill makes against Russell’s political philosophy: ”Russell’s theory of social mechanics is obliged to explain why the same instinct impels some men and some societies to seek Power, and others, to escape from it.” McGill points to the

“much more resourceful” Nietzsche whose “interpretation of the Christian stress on loving kindness and humility as a disguised and inverted striving for Power, although certainly one-sided, is at least an attempt to meet the difference.”⁹³⁵ In contemporary discussion, Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner has attended to Nietzsche’s contributions to a sociology of the ’body’⁹³⁶. Lars-Henrik Schmidt has also been interested in situating Nietzsche within the confines of sociology for the principle reason of acquiring a viable metacritical viewpoint to that field of study⁹³⁷. Nietzsche’s crucial role in inspiring Foucault’s later philosophy of power draws him often to the focus in today’s social and political debates⁹³⁸.

Recently, Martha Nussbaum has expressed the view that, “[i]n political thought, [...] let us simply forget about Nietzsche, except to argue against his baneful influence”. Her stance has direct bearings on the feminist readings, too, since Nussbaum holds that Nietzsche’s writing on “women and the family”

amounts to nothing “more than the silly posturings of an inexperienced vain adolescent male”. The

“liberal Enlightenment thinkers that Nietzsche found so boring” are the ones to whose arguments one ought to turn to, while letting Nietzsche’s contributions to moral psychology to save their grace.⁹³⁹