Sneer way as you please. I could care less. Like I said, I didn’t read your book because I, from reviews, as a means of scouting out what might be worth reading, it seemed trite and uninteresting. Assertions of academic narcissism are par for the course here. (Really. I can’t comment unless I’ve read your book? I’ve read your comments here, which don’t give me much further confidence).

I don’t recall just how this thread ended up on Nietzsche. But the original post addressed some third-generation, third-rate Strauss-bot palavering on irrelevantly and incoherently about health care, because health must involve virtue, obviously, which requires discipline, ergo agonal competition, hence free markets, or something like that. It’s often said, correctly, that the American right is lost in “epistemic closure”. So just why are you addressing such dreck? Could it be because to do so is peculiarly self-confirming? Which amounts to a form of epistemic closure of your own. Which is a standard m.o. for some, though not all, of the principals here at CT. (Holbo is probably the worst offender). As well as amounting de facto to a boundary-patroling operation on the part of bourgeois liberals, for all the insistence on academic dulce et decorum.

PDG @ 177:

Like I said, I’m no expert, nor fan of Nietzsche and it’s been a long time since I directly read him, (though I recall liking “The Gay Science” best, after which he becomes increasingly tortuous and vitriolic). And much of what I might have to say is at second hand, filtered through other thinkers and others’ readings. But I tend to think of Nietzsche as the anti-Hegel, (no doubt following on Foucault), even if N. scarcely read any Hegel, who by then had fallen into neglect. But the historico-metaphysical teleology of “progress” based on “reason”, which Hegel first fully and supplely articulated, before passing it on to lesser hands, as the basis of much modern thought, seems one of N.’s prime objects of criticism.

But, since Hegel is only present by virtue of his absence there, as it were, I think the connection with Kant is key, (though I’m willing to be corrected by those more thoroughly verse and knowledgeable than I). It was Kant who rigorously established the independence, rationality and validity of judgments of aesthetic taste. And I take N.’s basic move to be to reduce all forms of judgment to judgments of aesthetic taste, (which, of course, is a highly problematic move). Following on that, I understand N. to be conducting a kind of parodic critique of Kant, blurting out all those half-truths that are repressed by the four-square Kantian conception of “Reason”. So in crudely schematic terms, “the will-to-power” = “the synthetic unity of apperception”, the “Uebermensch” = “the transcendental ego”, and “eternal recurrence” = “the categorical imperative” gone a bit beserk. (So, yes, anti-Kantian, but, hey!) The “death of God” refers not just to the declining credibility of religious belief, (which is already Kantian agnosticism), but rather to the loss of the forms of the ego which impose logical unity on the world, (of which the ultimate is “God”, hence the reference to Feuerbach, who I think was still current at the time). Which is still a very Kantian way of thinking.

I’m not saying that’s exactly right and there’s obviously much more to his corpus and thinking. Just that that’s the way, the thread, by which I would start to interpret him, bringing in the historicism, the evolutionary biology, the reaction to positivism, the Bildung-mania, etc. If I thought adding on just another Nietzsche interpretation and trying to straighten him out were within the scope of my abilities and the most urgent task.

@182:

McSubstance, indeed.

N is a satura lanx. To focus on one or two items on the tray is to miss the effect of the bounty itself: the poetics can’t be subordinated to content without creating monsters. Which is exactly what Levin does by invoking the last man trope.

For those who might be interested, a good little essay on Nietzshe’s poetics <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v035/35.1.more.html&quot; title="here".

183: Thanks! I guess I liked the intro (and went out & bought the book) because I’d been curious myself about the history of “conservative thought” – it’s fun to say that’s an oxymoron, but plainly there is such a thing.

Inspecting the comments section is like looking over the neighbors before you close on a new house.

For example, the halasz comment is like every comment he’s ever made. You could have cured cancer while rescuing an entire kindergarten class from a burning building, but if you misquoted one of halasz’s favored thinkers in the process, he would write 10,000 words on how you were the worst person in world history since Hitler.

I personally suspect whatever N. knew of Kant, he got from Schope’s appendix in World as Will & Representation. Possibly Young would tell me if I would get around to finishing his biography of N.

Anyway, my point is that your take on the master/slave thing sounds much more Hegelian than Nietzschean. (And I think you have “seduce” and “enslave” backwards.)

… Prof. Robin, I made the for-me-unusual move of buying your book in hardcover, and while I wouldn’t call it a “shallow, low-grade polemic,” I thought the introduction was (1) the best part and (2) should’ve been a book by itself. May we hope to see anything like that from you in future?

That’s a very, uh, Hegelian Nietzsche you’ve got there.

So, ya know, maybe “effective reading” should precede “effective writing”.

I read through this thread and thought it would be a sheer train-wreck once again. But instead, some knowledgeable commenters offered quite effective rejoinders and rebuttals to your misprisions. The only thing I thought might need adding was that Nietzsche was quite centrally responding to and diagnosing the crisis in modern historical consciousness, which involves not just the relativity of historical “values”, but the selection and transmission of any such “values” to an unknown, but impending future. Such that traditions can no longer be reliably “conserved”, but their “values” are necessarily being “transvalued”, if they are to have any future effectivity at all. Which point both renders moot any notion that N. was simply a conservative, let alone a “reactionary”, and seems to be lacking from from your own conceptual equipment.

But now that you got me on the soapbox, I’ll add another basic point, (though it’s been years since I’ve read any N. and I never was a big fan, so I don’t have chapter and verse at my finger tips). Nietzsche originated a novel form of “genealogical” criticism, exposing the roots of domination behind all forms of “morality”. All “higher” civilizations have depended on the expropriation of material surpluses from laboring masses, “slaves”, though there is nothing new about that observation. What he did add though is that hitherto all such civilizations have depended on the organization and imposition of the illusion or fiction of a “transcendent” world, which modernity was rendering increasingly untenable. And N. emphatically intends to unmask such illusions, which are equally those of tradition and those of “progress”. So whether his critique and unmasking of domination and its motives is “Enlightenment” or “Counter-Enlightenment” is ambiguous, but neither “conservative”, nor “reactionary”. Nor is it clearly a justification of the “necessity” of such domination, except as an “aesthetic phenomenon”. In fact, “slave morality” and “master morality” are ironically entwined, and mutually undermining: “slaves” enslave their masters, just as much as “masters” seduce their slaves. And both are caught up in the fiction of a “transcendent” world, such that it is likely N. is endorsing neither “morality”, but an entirely different conception of “mastery”. And really the only thing that modernity adds to the reality of domination and exploitation is industrial production and modern technology, which enables the easing of their conditions without eliminating them. Of course, technological development is not the same as human progress and can serve equally well as means of destruction and oppression as means of melioration or emancipation, not to mention the ways that technological proliferation can inhumanly disrupt basic forms of human sociality. So facile assumptions about progress, which is only blocked off by reactionaries, just fail to meet the challenge involved.

Besides which N. expresses himself by means of irony, paradox and parody, (including likely self-parody), so citing him to “prove” a point is a risky business. And trying to iron out what he says in systematic terms is a tricky endeavor, given that one of his core objectives is a critique of philosophical systemization. Not to mention that the fellow who first declared that everything was a matter of interpretation,- (well, together with C.S. Peirce, simultaneous independent discovery once again),- has invited a thousand and one interpretations, which might make one wary of simplified reductions. Such as assuming that one is dealing with just another version of Carlyle to fit him into one’s own self-justifying schema.

Now it might be fair to say the Nietzsche’s thinking, in its context of origin and in its direct posthumous fame and reception, (with gymnasium boys marching off to the front with “Zarathustra” packed in their rucksacks, etc.), has a right-wing cast, if not exactly a typically conservative one, let alone “reactionary”. But what’s the relevance of that nowadays? (Once again, a question of “effective history”). It scarcely has any resonance or affinity with what passes for “conservatism” on the American right nowadays, unless one is as literal-minded and obtuse as those folks so often are. Indeed, genuine American conservatives seem to be a scarce breed nowadays. What is one to make of “conservatives” who conserve absolutely nothing? What is one to make of the rampant confabulation that now prevails in right-wing American ideological circles? I dunno. Maybe Nietzsche might provide some helpful insight on that though.

Now, would you like to say something substantive?