But, Dad, don’t we eat the antelope?

It feels like maybe there is an allegory about Bush and Wolfowitz in there, somewhere, trying to get out.

This quote

The knightly-aristocratic value judgments presupposed a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health, together with that which serves to preserve it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and in general all that involves vigorous, free, joyful activity…

seems nothing less than a petitio principia … in what sense does war or even war gaming preserve health??? Why should these activities merit the descriptors ‘free’ and ‘joyous’ ??? Surely all of this is simply meant as a provocation, a rhetorical gesture to undermine a more ‘civilized’ picture of virtu … And surely Nietzsche’s fellow Basle academic, Jacob Burckhardt amply covered the histrorical desideratum set forth at the end of the above quoted essay both in talking about Renaisaance Italy, Constantine the Great, Classical Greece…Just shows how dated Tarantino is…

As for war preserving health, I would speculate that Nietzsche had in his mind’s eye, as a portrait of the health of the warrior class, what John Keegan describes, in the introduction to A History of Warfare, as the male counterpart to the female character that finds its fulfillment on the stage.

I think N. believes he’s telling us something that really happened. The “blond beast” is plausible enough; he’s the guy who finds nothing ironic in Peacock’s “War Song of Dinas Vawr”:

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it,

etc. Obviously, in societies like this, priest-types have arisen, at the sufferance of the barbarians; which is enough to get the ressentiment flowing. The rest follows in Disneyesque fashion.

The son *and* grandson of Lutheran ministers. As he says, “A Protestant minister is the grandfather of German philosophy.”

John, I’m sure you know what a geneological approach is about! I only worry about the best way to pass it to undergraduate students. I easily figure them draw the conclusion that, since Nietzsche’s genealogy is (a) historically inaccurate, (b) stock as an evocative myth, then it isn’t worth that much. As far as I can see, genealogies are tales, tales about the birth of concepts: you may have a lot of historical investigation in it (see Foucalt), pretty none (see Plato’s myths), or something in between, and that’s Nietzsche (or so I understand him, of course). I read the quotation of Nietzsche about “physiologists and doctors” as simply a call for more research: a Nietzsche being aware of the limits of his genealogies, and feeling the need to move to the kind of work that Foucault and others attempted (and still attempt) a century later… I remember this is more or less the position Nietzsche also had about Eternal Recurrence: he talked about it in myhtical terms, but spent a lot of time investigating scientific theories about the universe (I haven’t references at hand now, but I’m aware of a (scant) literature on “Nietzsche and science”). Not that I don’t understand how difficult is to put into this kind of things into a lecture…

The important point is the question, not the answer. After they read section III, simply ask them (not all at once):

1) Does he really believe his genealogy?
2) If he does believe it can he credibly assert that it is “true” given what he’s just argued about the nature of objectivity?
3) Then what’s the point of the genealogy in the first place?

If you’ve got decent students, you shouldn’t have to say very much for the rest of the class.

Although the idea is not mine – a colleague suggested it – I was able to use the first Matrix film quite effectively in teaching Genealogy of Morals. The catch is that your students really should have read some Hegel, and the essay question that went over well – whether Neo is a “Knight of Faith” or the “SIngle Stronger Species of Man” presupposes they’ve also read Fear and Trembling. I also don’t know how well this would work if the other movies.

“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies etc…”- A bit OT, but this line reminded me of the character of Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed”. The contrasting irony, if that’s what it is, is that Stavrogin is so replete with “power”, with supernal strength, that he is essentially paralyzed, incapable of acting, aimless. It’s the conniving scoundrel Piotr Verkhovensky, a kind of uebermenschlich Uriah Heep, who leads him on.

But the main question as to what Nietzsche believed/intended about his tales strikes me as slightly beside the point. I take the basic, “foundational” move by Nietzsche to be a thorough-going, radicalized aestheticism: that the world, existence, is to be “justified” solely as an aesthetic phenomemon. (This would also make the notion that psychological meanings are the “true” meaning a bit beside the point. It’s true that Nietzsche makes frequent resort to the psychological, but I think he uses the term rather like he uses the notion of physiology, as a contrastive place-holder, rather than a theoretical locus.) Nietzsche should be understood in relation to Kant, (and as an outrider to the contemporaneous rise of Neo-Kantianism/positivism.) His basic move is to reduce all judgments to judgments of taste. (Hence the strategic leverage gained for the ultra-pragmatic notion of “truth” as a useful or adaptive fiction. But useful for whom?) The kicker is that in removing the differentiated rational infra-structure that Kant constructed to justify the notion of the rationality of aesthetic judgments, judgments of taste themselves become unjustifiable, irrational: it is no longer possible to distinguish good taste from bad taste. (This, in the end, shows up in Nietzsche’s advocacy of active nihilism as the “solution” for the crisis of nihilsm: if it is, indeed, a solution, then there is not really a crisis, but if there is a crisis, the “solution” can amount only to its intensification.) The upshot is that Nietzshe’s peculiar cachet is to serve up all those half-truths that are repressed by the overweening, foursquare Kantian conception of Reason. (Roughly, the schema is that the “will-to-power” is the “synthetic unity of apperception” or transcendental synthesis, the Uebermensch is the transcendental ego, and eternal recurrence is the categorical imperative gone bezerk.) And, as Justice Holmes once said, half-truths are like half a brick- you can throw them farther.

So the question as to whether Nietzsche’s histoiography or genealogy is to be taken in an empirical/literal or a mythic/heuristic sense seems to me to be not so much unanswerable, whether on his terms or one’s own, as misplaced. Does one believe in works of art? Are they true or false? (Genuine would be the Nietzschean test of value, n’est ce pas?) The final irony regarding Nietzsche’s foregrounding and (over-)generalization of the transformative power of art is that perhaps nothing is more born of impotence and impotent than art itself.

The formal and sober tone of Nietzsche’s final philological query- it was, after all, his professional discipline, on which he staked his methodical claim to being “scientific”- suggests to me that, after all that precedes it, it was intended ironically.

The personal analogy that I have always used for the “blond beast” is Karl Malone.

He is, in many ways, a violent player (I know there have been a couple of players that have been hit with his elbows, knocked out, and missed several games with concussions — but the only one I remember is David Robinson 5 or 6 years ago) but he’s never struck me as cruel or sadistic. He plays the game a certain way and plays that way against everyone he faces. He certainly doesn’t fear competition and has been good friends with some of his toughest competitors.

He’s prone to tantrums and outbursts in the press, but doesn’t seem to hold grudges (see the history of his relationship with Jazz owner Larry Miller).

He comes across as a figure of enormous physical power who acts and suffers neither guilt nor the need to bully as a way to continually assert his power.

Perhaps Shaq would be a better analogy for a contemporary student, but he strikes me as being more manipulative. I think of Karl Malone as more of a pure case.

Thinking about it, the life of Lee Kuan Yew and the historical development of Singapore offers ample illustrations of Nietszchean themes which is presumably why he’s on the syllabus.

John Holbo ( actually, anybody with the answer ),

Could you remind me why, if the knights are stronger than the priests, the priests won? How could the priests get a handle on the knights if they’re really knightly?

Doesn’t Nietzsche’s tale of the clash between the priestly and military sub-castes have to do with a problem with his main philological hypothesis of the first section, namely, that moral terms derive etymologically from political terms? Potential counterexample: purity. What does purity have to do with power? Speculative answer: Nietzsche hypothesizes a clash between the priestly and military sub-castes of the nobility. Once this clash arises, the priests begin explicitly to distinguish themselves from the warriors by adopting the rituals of purity–only eating certain foods, only sleeping with “clean” women, etc. So talk of “purity” did have a political significance after all, and the alleged counterexample is no counterexample at all. Given that the historical speculation that Nietzsche is engaged in is in defense of his philology, it strikes me that it has everything to do with his suggestion about a prize essay. As to its speculative nature, it is less fictional history than it is inference to the best explanation.

I don’t know, asking questions like “What did Nietzshe really think?” is a bit like asking historical counterfactual “What if?” questions.

Sometimes when the question is specific and well formulated, when a good deal of primary material exists and when the answerer has a thorough knowledge of the subject this type of inquiry can be taken semi-seriously (“Would slavery have survived in the South if not for the Civil War?” – “What precisely did Marx mean by capital”). But a lot of the time there isn’t much that can be said except that the guy’s dead and we can’t ask for a clerification.
(or for the historical what if: “What would’ve happened if Hitler died at age 2?”)
Even if, I don’t think your average undergrad knows enough Nietzshe to be able to answer that question.
Why not ask them if THEY think it literal or allegorical? Ask for historical/mythical examples and counterexamples.

Anderson:

I did not say that Nietzsche amounted to a typical late 19th century aesthete, privileging the special sphere of art and the “beautiful” above all else, but, to the contrary, that he made a radicalizing move, displacing a basically aesthetic normativity on to the whole, or, better, all, of existence as such, (in both the existential and positivist senses of existence.) Obviously then, there is no longer any sense of privileging art and the beautiful, nor merely of emphasizing the separateness and hence amorality of their criteria, let alone of leveraging them into Flaubert’s ambition to be a “great demoralizer”, -(no doubt, a source of Nietzsche’s identification of aestheticism with decadence.) Rather I take Nietzsche’s self-designation as an “immoralist” to indicate he intends his position to have a distinctively ethical,- (not to say, evangelical),- cast.

But the basic point I was making is that once one makes such a thorough-going, “aestheticizing” move, standard philosophical/cognitive questions about truth or belief- “games of truth and falsehood”, Foucault would say- and the supposed (relativistic) paradoxes involved don’t quite apply with full force. The opposition between empirical reality and myth, so natural to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, is shifted. Hence, the effort to extort “psychological” truth from Nietzsche’s tales and deliverances amounts to an attempt to reduce him to terms he treats with parodic irony. (His “aestheticism” is supremely a subjectivism, but it is precisely not psychologistic: “transvaluations” are distinctive acts, not expressions of laws or tendencies.) But the attempt to portray him as a myth-monger is even worse, as in his early 20th century reception, whether aesthticized or politicized, that viewed the deliberate creation of myths as necessary to the restoration of “meaning”. The whole point of Nietzschean “genealogy” is that a recursion or return to an “origin”, an “organic” whole, a state in which human beings could be unproblematically “at home”, is an impossiblity. No such thing could escape the “play” and conflict of “forces”. “Genealogy” amounts to an excavation of a present, not a rooting in a past. (Did not Nietzsche speak of a “cause-finding superstition”?) In this, for all his antiquarian tones, he remains most modern.

Still, the effort to rationally understand Nietzsche’s work, even given is anti-Platonic, anti-systematic position, can not be foresworn in favor of an idolatry of the work. The recognition of his generalized deployment of a basically aestheitic normativity, (which had its roots in a collapsed, but still aestheticized German Idealism), I would maintain is essential to that effort. Otherwise, the “Dionysian” becomes a willful embrace of chaos,- (the deepest fear of the Kantian mind),- and the “will-to-power” becomes a celebration of unchecked violence and brute domination. Was not one of Nietzsche’s standard rhetorical moves the deliberately ironical invitation to such misunderstanding, through the deployment of a naturalistic vocabulary? If Nietsche’s thought amounts to a species of counter-Enlightenment criticism, it is staged on thoroughly Enlightened premises.

Rather than asking Prof. Holbo’s misplaced question as to what exactly Nietzsche actually believed, let alone presuming to answer it, it would be better to ask the properly Nietzschean question as to what in our beliefs is and remains genuine. In this age of (once again) triumphant delusion, Nietzsche remains our uncanniest guest.

Good old Nietzsche – playing Procrustes and conveniently ignoring the whole IE business of the Ksatriyas and the Brahmans being one and the same, and the historical unity between priestly and kingly/warrior classes throughout the ancient world, and the developing ethics which are embodied in the angst of the Mahabharata and the ease with which warrior-princes segue into becoming ascetic mystics throughout the Eurasian tradition…

Something Nietzsche really has little excuse for, because all this comparative mythology/language/culture stuff was getting going back then – *and* popular, in a pop-culture way, too. Yes, it brought us the Lemurians and the Thetans and assorted New Agey weirdnesses – but it also brought us The Golden Bough and on a wider scale, the idea that things we think are unique about Christianity and/or Western Cultureâ„¢ really aren’t.

Anderson: I did not say that Nietzsche amounted to a typical late 19th century aesthete, privileging the special sphere of art and the “beautiful” above all else, but, to the contrary, that he made a radicalizing move, displacing a basically aesthetic normativity on to the whole, or, better, all, of existence as such, (in both the existential and positivist senses of existence.)

Oops. Never thought you said N. was a typical anything. I thought you wrote that N. held that the world, existence, is to be “justified” solely as an aesthetic phenomemon. Oh, wait, that is what you wrote.

Regardless, I take your 2d comment as a withdrawal or refinement of the word “justified.”

Of course, you may have been right the first time, and N. may never have abandoned his effort to “justify” existence aesthetically. Which makes him a decadent by his own description–in fact he alludes to this sometimes, though I think in the context of “boy, did I ever used to be a decadent/nihilist, but I’m so much better now!” It would be very Nietzschean to be skeptical of this rhetoric of recovery, particularly when it requires so many repetitions.

Not sure that the concept of “literal truth” makes much sense when reading Nietzsche. Weber got it right, IMHO: “empirics” in a post-Enlightenment world is a form of disciplined fact-creation based on ex ante value-commitments that can’t be justified rationally or evaluated “scientifically.” [Pragmatically, now, there’s a different question altogether.] So although asking whether Nietzsche thinks that his story is “literally true” is a good way of getting students into a serious discussion about genealogy, I would be very wary of trying to answer that question in any definitive way.

Also, I’d be very careful treating the first essay of GM in isolation. After all, as the book goes on, the priests are revealed to be a) the coocoon of the philosophers; b) the introduction of the most productive tension in human life, the one that makes man an interesting animal; and arguably c) the necessary step to the production of the higher man and the saving of the will (“the human being would rather will nothingness than not will” — although this translation misses the verbal parallel in the German between “Nichts” (“nothingness”) and “nicht wollen” (“not will”)…ah well).

Punchline: you’re right that the Grand Vizier isn’t “evil” in anything like a Disney sense, but he doesn’t “win” either. He’s neither good nor evil; pardon the Nietzschean cleverness, but in historical perspective he’s “beyond good and evil.” He’s just another cog in a vast historical machine that has no meaning except that which we choose to impose on it in retrospect. What’s interesting here is the imposition of meaning, and in that respect I think that the best use of The Lion King would be to see the film itself as an exercise of the priestly will-to-power in taming the savage beast — the Circle of Life as the Spirit of Gravity, so to speak, and Simba’s kid as the Last Man (blink. blink.).

Or show them the whole Matrix trilogy and ask them whether Agent Smith is evil.