As I keep mentioning, I’m teaching Nietzsche. Regarding which, I have a request of sorts to place before our knowledgeable commentariat (and I can’t stop the ignorant ones from chiming in as well, but that’s modern life.) I’m going to include a unit, near the start, in which I offer a sampling of diverse responses to/interpretations of the guy. I think most students come to Nietzsche with … notions. I am not concerned to dislodge all that, certainly not at the start, but I think it might be efficient to encourage explicitness about it, if possible. To that end, I’m going to offer a menu of options. Maybe the students will say: yeah, that’s kind of my impression of the guy, from what I’ve heard and read.
This morning I went quote hunting in Mencken, Russell and G.K. Chesterton (not because I seriously think my students are going to show up on day 1 a bunch of junior Chestertonian-Menckenite-Russell-heads, in need of de-programming. I just like this stuff.)
H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:
“Broadly speaking, they [Nietzsche’s ideas] stand in direct opposition to every dream that soothes the slumber of mankind in the mass, and therefore mankind in the mass must needs to suspicious of them, at least for years to come. They are pre-eminently for the man who is not of the mass, for the man whose head is lifted, however little, above the common level. They justify the success of that man, as Christianity justifies the failure of the man below.”
I could quote more Mencken, but let me proceed to Chesterton and Russell, who are hilariously arch and contemptuous. (I’m not planning to share all this with students, but some.)
Chesterton:
“Though Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat, they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed, embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it can hardly be denied, has Carlyle’s intellectual courage brought many at last.”
“Whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche; — these are the things about which we are actually fighting most.”
“Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this. But the old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more human than humanity itself. Nietzsche’s Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw’s sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, “He who has never hoped can never despair.” The Man-God of old answers from his awful hill, “Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?” A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more. And when Nietszche says, “A new commandment I give to you, ‘be hard,’“ he is really saying, “A new commandment I give to you, ‘be dead.’“ Sensibility is the definition of life.”
This next one is my fave:
“There is one rather interesting example of this state of things in which the weaker literature is really the stronger and the stronger the weaker. It is the case of what may be called, for the sake of an approximate description, the literature of aristocracy; or, if you prefer the description, the literature of snobbishness. Now if any one wishes to find a really effective and comprehensible and permanent case for aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him read, not the modern philosophical conservatives, not even Nietzsche, let him read the Bow Bells Novelettes. Of the case of Nietzsche I am confessedly more doubtful. Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical. Even here, however, the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical superiority, because it does attribute to the strong man those virtues which do commonly belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kindliness and a rather reckless benevolence, and a great dislike of hurting the weak. Nietzsche, on the other hand, attributes to the strong man that scorn against weakness which only exists among invalids. It is not, however, of the secondary merits of the great German philosopher, but of the primary merits of the Bow Bells Novelettes, that it is my present affair to speak. The picture of aristocracy in the popular sentimental novelette seems to me very satisfactory as a permanent political and philosophical guide. It may be inaccurate about details such as the title by which a baronet is addressed or the width of a mountain chasm which a baronet can conveniently leap, but it is not a bad description of the general idea and intention of aristocracy as they exist in human affairs. The essential dream of aristocracy is magnificence and valour; and if the Family Herald Supplement sometimes distorts or exaggerates these things, at least, it does not fall short in them. It never errs by making the mountain chasm too narrow or the title of the baronet insufficiently impressive.”
“We often hear it said, for instance, “What is right in one age is wrong in another.” This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.”
What do YOU think? Was Milton more puritanical than a pig is fat?
“It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism.”
“Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain. This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death. The sortie has failed. The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless — one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is — well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads. Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business of this book — the rough review of recent thought. After this I begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader, but which, at any rate, interests me. In front of me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning over for the purpose — a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility. By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon. They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum. For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it.”
“Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of aristocracy, sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental virtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere of aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, as despots and democracies have often done;”
“The ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer.”
Ooh, ooh, this next one is good:
“Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere—a very powerful description in the purely literary sense—of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche’s aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.”
OK, on to Bertrand Russell. All this is from the chapter on Nietzsche in his History of Western Philosophy.
His general outlook … remained very similar to that of Wagner in the Ring; Nietzsche’s superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek. This may seem odd, but that is not my fault. (760)
In spite of Nietzsche’s criticism of the romantics, his outlook owes much to them; it is that of aristocratic anarchism, like Byron’s, and one is not surprised to find him admiring Byron. He attempts to combine two sets of values which are not easily harmonized: on the one hand he likes ruthlessness, war, and aristocratic pride; on the other hand, he loves philosophy and literature and the arts, especially music. Historically, these values coexisted in the Renaissance; Pope Julius II, fighting for Bologna and employing Michelangelo, might be taken as the sort of man whom Nietzsche would wish to see in control of governments. (761)
[He] alludes habitually to ordinary human beings as the “bungled and botched,” and sees no objection to their suffering if it is necessary for the production of a great man. Thus the whole importance of the period from 1789 to 1815 is summed up in Napoleon: “The Revolution made Napoleon possible: that is its justification. We ought to desire the anarchical collapse of the whole of our civilzation if such a reward were to be its result. Napoleon made nationalism possible: that is the latter’s excuse.” Almost all of the higher hopes of this century, he says, are due to Napoleon. (762)
He is fond of expressing himself paradoxically and with a view to shocking conventional readers. He does this by employing the words “good” and “evil” with their ordinary connotations, and then saying that he prefers “evil” to “good.” His book, Beyond Good and Evil, really aims at changing the reader’s opinion as to what is good and what is evil, but professes, except at moments, to be praising what is “evil” and descrying what is “good.” (762)
True virtue, as opposed to the conventional sort, is not for all, but should remain the characteristic of an aristocratic minority. It is not profitable or prudent; it isolates its possessor from other men; it is hostile to order, and does harm to inferiors. It is necessary for higher men to make war upon the masses, and resist the democratic tendencies of the age, for in all directions mediocre people are joining hands to make themselves masters. (763)
He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated …He prophesied with a certain glee an era of great wars; one wonders whether he would have been happy if he had lived to see the fulfillment of his prophecy. (763)
There is a great deal in [him] that must be dismissed as merely megalomania. Speaking of Spinoza he says: “How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!” Exactly the same may be said of him, with less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. “Forget not thy whip”–but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks. (767)
He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear: I am afraid my neighbor may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him. If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly display the contempt for him which of cousre I feel. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His “noble” man – who is himself in day-dreams – is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: “I will do such things–what they are yet I know not – but they shall be the terror of the earth.” This is Nietzsche’s philosophy in a nutshell. (767)
It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an outcome of fear. Those who do not fear their neighbours see no necessity to tyrannize over them. Men who have conquered fear have not the frantic quality of Nietzsche’s “artist-tyrant” Nero’s who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of hte inevitable palace revolutions. I will not deny that, partly as a result of his teaching, the real world has become very like his nightmare, but that does not make it any the less horrible. (767-8)
There are two sorts of saints: the saint by nature, and the saint from fear. The saint by nature has a spontaneous love of mankind; he does good because to do so gives him happiness. The saint from fear, on the other hand, like the man who only abstains from theft because of the police, would be wicked if he were not restrained by the thought of hell-fire or of his neighbour’s vengeance. Nietzsche can only imagine the second sort of saint; he is so full of fear and hatred that spontaneous love of mankind seems to him impossible. He has never conceived of the man who, with all the fearlessness and stubborn pride of the superman, nevertheless does not inflict pain because he has no wish to do so. (768)
We must in the first place try to distinguish an aristocratic ethic from an aristocratic political theory. A believer in Bentham’s principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number has a democratic ethic, but he may think that the general happiness is best promoted by an aristocratic form of government. This is not Nietzsche’s position. He holds that the happiness of the common people is no part of the good, per se. All that is good or bad in itself exists only in the superior few; what happens to the rest is of no account.
The next question is: How are the superior few defined? In practice, they have usually been a conquering race or a hereditary aristocracy – and aristocracies have usually been, at least in theory, descendants of conquering races. I think Nietzsche would accept this definition. “No morality is possible without good birth,” he tells us. He says that the noble caste is always at first barbarian, but that every elevation of Man is due to aristocratic society.
It is not clear whether Nietzsche regards the superiority of the aristocrat as congenital or as due to education and environment. If the latter, it is difficult to defend the exclusion of others from advantages for which, ex hypothesi, they are equally qualified. I shall therefore assume that he regards conquering aristocracies and their descendants as biologically superior to their subjects, as men are superior to domestic animals, though in a lesser degree … More strength of will, more courage, more impulse towards power, less sympathy, less fear, and less gentleness. (769)
We can now state Nietzsche’s ethic. I think what follows is a fair analysis of it: Victors in war, and their descendants, are usually biologically superior to the vanquished. It is therefore desirable that they should hold all the power, and should manage affairs exclusively in their own interests.
There is here still the world “desirable” to be considered. What is “desirable” in Nietzsche’s philosophy., From the outsider’s point of view, what Nietzsche calls “desirable” is what Nietzsche desires. With this interpretation, Nietzsche’s doctrine might be stated more simply and honestly in one sentence: “I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici.” But this is not a philosophy; it is a biographical fact about a certain individual. The word “desirable” is not synonymous with “desired by me”; it has some claim, however shadowy, to legislative universality … What he can say, as an expansion of the word “desirable,” is this: “If men will read my words, a certain perentage of them will come to share my desires as regards the organization of society; these men, inspired by the energy and determination which my philosophy will give them, can preserve and restore aristocracy, with themselves as aristocrats or (like me) sycophants of aristocracy. In this way they will achieve a fuller life than they can have as servants of the people.” (769-70)
Must … drag … self … away from keyboard. Can’t just transcribe Russell’s whole damn chapter.
A few thoughts about Chesterton and Russell on Nietzsche. They are both English. They are very different from each other, in terms of their temperaments and intellectual styles, yet there are parallels when they draw a hostile bead on this target. They agree in dismissing Nietzsche as an imaginatively straitened, humorless, resentful, bloody-minded blockhead. They both grant him a certain style, strictly from the wrist down. He bothers them both. Neither of them is being fair or generous to his author (although you may disagree.) You will pardon me if I suspect incompleteness of Nietzsche scholarship on their parts. But I think it’s also true that if Nietzsche didn’t want readers to react this way, he should have rewritten some of that stuff before publishing it.
For classroom purposes, I’m planning to grant the likes of Chesterton and Russell a bare sufficiency of Nietzsche scholarship (for the sake of the argument) and ask: what bit set them off like that? And then: how much truth to the complaints? Useful to be very explicit about this stuff, even when I think these criticisms are pretty unfair.
I’ll give Nietzsche the last word for post purposes, but I do invite you all to provide fun quotes about Nietzsche from any old source that might be interesting.
“You should give heartfelt thanks for the goodwill apparent in any subtlety of interpretation. But as far as ‘good friends’ are concerned, they are always too easy-going and think that they have a right to be easy-going, just because they are friends. So it is best to grant them some leeway from the very start, and leave some latitude for misunderstandings: – and then you can even laugh. Or, alternatively, get rid of them altogether, these good friends, – and then laugh some more!” (BGE 27)
It’s hard to be sure what he means. He had hardly any friends, and – at the time – was subject to the opposite of a torrent of subtle readings and misreadings by strangers. But I like to think he would have said, of Russell and Chesterton: well, at least they care enough to write! I think the ‘good friends’ bit fits better, say, Nietzsche’s postmodern appropriators and mantle taker-uppers. They tend to leave Nietzsche behind in the process of taking him up. Maybe there’s not much harm, and some humor, in that. You tell me what you think.
{ 197 comments }
Bill Benzon 08.03.15 at 10:41 am
“Nietzsche and the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously the same fundamental character; they both worship the tall man with curling moustaches and herculean bodily power, and they both worship him in a manner which is somewhat feminine and hysterical.”
I should think it easy to provide illustrations from this. I’m sure there’s a Chuck Jones cartoon with a couple of these chaps, our you could just drawn them yourself. Get start on the Nietzsche Coloring Book.
Kevin Donoghue 08.03.15 at 11:06 am
If you’ve an online subscription to the NYRB you might find Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1970 essay has some of what you’re after. He foresaw Nietzsche being used to justify tighter immigration controls and suchlike: “Such minds may well turn to Nietzsche, reading him, not in the gentle adaptation, but for his bracing fierceness. There is much there for their comfort, not only in the general ethic, but also in specific applications. Nietzsche approves ‘Annihilation of decaying races.'”
Are there Nietzsche fans in right-wing parties these days?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1970/nov/05/the-gentle-nietzscheans/
Hickory Bow 08.03.15 at 11:17 am
Chesterton on Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Joan of Arc:
“”Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.”
Russell Arben Fox 08.03.15 at 11:26 am
Fabulous, John. Could you attach the citations to the Chesterton stuff here? I’ve never given him the attention that so many of many radical/traditional conservative friends long have, but anyone who can write contemptuously of “sophists like Burke and Nietzsche” is someone I want to read more of.
Robert 08.03.15 at 11:31 am
Consider Jack London’s novel Martin Eden. You’ll also get a lot about Herbert Spencer.
bob mcmanus 08.03.15 at 11:58 am
3: Heretics 1905, online at Gutenberg, link at Wiki
Louis Proyect 08.03.15 at 12:09 pm
Jeeves to Bertie Wooster: “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.â€
― P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves
AcademicLurker 08.03.15 at 12:14 pm
I look to Otto from A Fish Called Wanda as my definitive interpreter of Nietzsche.
Lee A. Arnold 08.03.15 at 12:26 pm
I think Russell had a view of Nietzsche closest to my own. Nietzsche is the emotional expression of the modern era at a certain stage, in all its confusion. That is why Nietzsche did not find a coherent system. And why he is still with us.
I think that the simplest way to describe Nietzsche might be to say that he provides various insights from a “bottom-upwards” procedure + using a philological perspective — and he tries them on, like different suits of clothes, in different sizes from essays to aphorisms.
As Russell wrote, this is very much in the spirit of the Romantics. But Russell isn’t deep enough here: the phrase “aristocratic anarchism” is superficial. Romanticism is said to be hard to define, but I don’t see why: it replaces “God the Absolute” with the “Artist as a God” — with a human striving upwards, to make the world anew. (And it, too, is still with us, though in a watered-down pop-culture version.)
But Romanticism was the reaction in Art. There was also new Science and Commerce. In each of them, individuals are to strive upward, making a momentous change in human affairs and in the received social psychology. If there could be a three-sided coin, these would be the sides. It’s the general thrust of the modern era, which inverted the vector of intentionality in the “chain of being” from top-downward to bottom-upward: i.e. from God the Absolute at the top, emanating downward to instruct all beings — to the new, precise inversion of that cosmic intentionality: starting from atoms and individuals at the bottom, joining and striving upward.
But upward, toward what? These are Nietzsche’s basic questions: “After we find that there is no God, what does it mean for the measure of human excellence?” and, “Is this gonna work, at all?”
For some of us Nietzsche may be passé. The new generations may find Nietzsche to be one of the pre-eminent philosophers of adolescent juvenilia, as we careen into an era when “software is eating the world”, and technology is sweeping up all connections of meanings into something else, again unknown. On the other hand, software is a fascinating mechanization of language itself, so it’s possible that Nietzsche will be sticking around for a while.
Note that Nietzsche is not the first “bottom-upward” philosopher. Modernism was already in full swing for at least 200 years by the time he arrived: that gives us his own historical-psychological value-added.
The ideas of atomism and infinity were already arising in general intellectual discourse by the end of the 16th century. A biography of Bruno makes it clear that some of it came out of the “art of memory” (see the great book by Frances Yates), by which Bruno arranged his thoughts and came to new connections, and insisted that this should be done in mathematics too; Bruno was read and remembered by Kepler and Galileo. Nietzsche wasn’t even the first to come at it from philology. In the 1720’s Vico used a philological method to systematize a complete social-psychology of the development of civilization from ancient times, coining the phrase “the true is the manufactured”.
There is no evidence that Nietzsche read Vico. Nor was there need to have read him, because by the second half of the 19th Century, the ideas of striving and emergence, of evolutionism, were natural and pervasive. But by then, Nietzsche would have a clearer view of the new sickness, war and horror, leading him to his need to shock via paradoxical statement and rejection of system, his flailing about for the “superior man” and for definitions that made sense, and perhaps leaving him bedridden in his own spiritual emergency.
engels 08.03.15 at 12:30 pm
Graffiti:
“God is dead–Nietzche”
& underneath:
“Nietzsche is dead–God”
Val 08.03.15 at 1:17 pm
Oh I really like this! As I’ve said before, I read a bit of Nietzsche as an 18 year old undergraduate, and was turned off forever, but this sounds like fun. ‘Kids are different today’, but still even if you just give them a bit of this, surely they’d enjoy it.
I don’t like Chesterton on the feminine hysteria – of course – but that bit about Milton and the fat pig is priceless. Your students must have fun.
(I actually studied history so Nietzsche was a bit optional for me anyway, but one of my kids majored in philosophy, I’m not sure if I mentioned that before. She was very good but didn’t continue to post graduate studies. I don’t think that was anything to do with the ‘climate’ – it may have had nothing to do with it – but a young woman in my German class, who is doing postgrad work in philosophy, was talking about it today, and it doesn’t sound good for women.
I know some people think I’m boring and obsessive, the way I go on about sexism and patriarchy, but this sort of thing is such a wicked waste. It’s such a waste to see these clever girls not being fully valued and encouraged, not being taught about feminist philosophy, or taught by women, etc – we should go on about it)
ZM 08.03.15 at 1:18 pm
Chesterton: “Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.â€
Holbo: “What do YOU think? Was Milton more puritanical than a pig is fat?”
Russell: “His general outlook … remained very similar to that of Wagner in the Ring; Nietzsche’s superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek. This may seem odd, but that is not my fault”
Well, as I have said I only read two of his books in high school, and bits and pieces since for essays on other things, yet I will continue my topic of Nietzsche and the pastoral-esque (pastoral-esque as it’s not quite pastoral this time).
I think that he knows Greek is rather than odd key to Nietzsche really, and also while “I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici” is not philosophy — it does bring out that he was not really part of a movement in his own time, if he had been part of a movement it might have tempered some of the worst aspects in his writing — although having said that a lot of the worst aspects seem to have been current in the German thought of the day.
And as well as lacking a movement he covers too much, both of these being reasons he is not any good for attentiveness to historical detail, which a movement would have given as detail would be currency and which sticking to one thing would have given by virtue of bounding the subject.
If he was better at detail and consistency then rather than the Florence of the Medicis his work is really better categorised into Renaissance traditions of folly and carnival and serio louder etc, where Milton is puritanical and the pig is holy. Even though he should have paid more attention to detail, I guess he did not have the advantage of so much scholarship and archival research as we do now more than a century later.
“In carnivalesque literature, the first letter to the Corinthians is quoted as often a s in the writings of the Neoplatonists. And the choice of the most favored quotes is nearly the same.:
Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (1.20)
And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are. (1.28)
If any among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool,that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. (3.18-19).”
(Jan Kott, The Bottom Translation)
dr ngo 08.03.15 at 1:40 pm
Nietzsche is Pietzsche
But Freud is Enjeud
Plume 08.03.15 at 1:56 pm
Not sure about all this talk of Nietzsche being an aristocrat. His parents were far from that level of society. Modest Middle class, basically. Nietzsche only imagined himself as one, though not in the monied or titled sense, but most likely just in the intellectual and artistic sense.
Ironically, it’s probably that much of this had to do with his own sense of deep resentment at his lot in life — kind of like the character in Hamsun’s Hunger . . . and, like Rilke, he had no claims to any form of aristocracy, but through his own intellectual efforts, managed to hobnob with them . . . . By no means as often as Rilke, of course, who mooched off nobility for much of his adult life, while writing some of the greatest poetry in the German language.
Rich Puchalsky 08.03.15 at 1:57 pm
Throw a little support to a fellow blogger — why not give them an excerpt from John Emerson’s The Sex Life of the 19th Century, chapter “Could Nietzsche have Married Jane Austen?”
Glen Tomkins 08.03.15 at 2:14 pm
Well, “Bin ich verstanden?” indeed.
James Wimberley 08.03.15 at 2:25 pm
” …And No One (Including Ladies!)”
I know you don’t mean it, but this is infelicitous. Unless you are Christian Morgenstern.
oldster 08.03.15 at 2:31 pm
“”He is fond of expressing himself paradoxically and with a view to shocking conventional readers. He does this by employing the words “good†and “evil†with their ordinary connotations, and then saying that he prefers “evil†to “good.†His book, Beyond Good and Evil, really aims at changing the reader’s opinion as to what is good and what is evil, but professes, except at moments, to be praising what is “evil†and descrying what is “good.†(762)
Two things:
1) “descrying” there is clearly a typo for “decrying”. Yes, “descrying” is a perfectly good English word that Russell might have used in some other context, but the contrast with “praising” makes it clear that “decrying” is what he wrote here.
2) This is a very bad summary of Nietzsche. Russell is entitled to his lack of sympathy, but not to a lack of accuracy.
James Wimberley 08.03.15 at 2:47 pm
Kevin Donoghue in #2: “Are there Nietzsche fans in right-wing parties these days?”
I know it’s dragging the tone of this aristo thread down, but you have to mention Ayn Rand here, as a disciple with known right-wing fans like Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan. Come to think of it, Chesterton could have summarized Rand’s oeuvre as “Nietszche rewritten as a wordier Bow Bells novelette.”
Glen Tomkins 08.03.15 at 2:53 pm
Actual irony cultivates the misunderstanding of everyone who isn’t putting a real effort into understanding. If this thread makes one thing clear, it’s that Nietzsche had a real green thumb.
Donald A. Coffin 08.03.15 at 2:59 pm
Unrelated to this thread, but something well worth knowing about…Existential Comics
http://existentialcomics.com/
John Holbo 08.03.15 at 2:59 pm
“I know you don’t mean it, but this is infelicitous.”
You can’t know I didn’t mean it, because you can’t know a falsehood! I meant it because it is infelicitious. (You think philosophers can’t make jokes about nothing? What better thing than that?)
Oldster, I agree it is all terribly inaccurate, but not uninteresting therefore.
Rich, thanks for that link to Emerson’s stuff. Of more utility than counter-earth matrimony are the associated, actual descriptions of N.
Russell, thanks! Um, I found all the references to various editions on my Kindle. How about this: you want to know where one is from, and Google lets you down, you email and I’ll tell you. Lots of free ebooks, and I also dipped into “In Defense of Sanity”, which is a great anthology. Buy it on Kindle and search N. Or email me.
http://www.amazon.com/In-Defense-Sanity-Essays-Chesterton/dp/1586174894
I would like to write a story, not about Nietzsche marrying Jane but about Nietzsche meeting G.K.. The joke would be this: they are so much alike and don’t notice it. They don’t even notice how much they look alike.
Plume 08.03.15 at 3:08 pm
Nietzsche, especially among French PoMod intellectuals (like Derrida and Foucault), was a darling of the (at least academic) left for a couple of decades. But in recent times, the current crop of leftist intellectuals has pretty much booted him to the curb. In general, Nietzsche is seen as a major supporter of steep hierarchies, which are supported majorly by the right. And more and more feminists are taking him to task for his rather boorish view of women — though, in the context of his own time, he was forward-thinking when it came to Lou Andreas-Salome. Not many 19th century male academics sought women as proteges, etc.
When I was reading a ton of the PoMods back in the 1990s, you couldn’t escape from Nietzsche. He was everywhere, and I read nearly all of his writings (and about his work) voraciously. But that started for me, really, in the previous decade, with the reading of William Barrett’s seminal intro to Existentialism, Irrational Man. Perhaps in Barrett’s own (unfortunate) political evolution one can gain more than just hints at the evolution of Nietzsche’s reception as well.
Plume 08.03.15 at 3:16 pm
John @21,
Speaking of stories. I think an interesting topic would be Lou Andreas-Salome’s enormous presence, as a very young woman, in Nietzsche’s life, and then in Rilke’s, as a mature woman . . . . The shift in her status within the matrix of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” From ephebe to “old master” in a sense. From the one battling with influence to the one in possession, etc.
bianca steele 08.03.15 at 3:31 pm
Plume,
Barrett’s book is trippy, especially the stuff about Gulliver and Hemingway heroes as existentialist. I haven’t been able to finish it, which I feel less bad about after encountering his book where he chooses Heidegger over Wittenstein because the latter is “all about the science and technology.”. He was exactly what H. hates and so his influence is dangerous and must (IIRC) be eradicated from society. I don’t know anything about Barrett’s politics.
William Berry 08.03.15 at 3:33 pm
@Plume:
Yes, N made up his Polish aristocratic ancestors; his real roots were bourgeois at best. He bragged that his ancestors once exercised the liberum veto; they were “overmen” before their time.
Anderson 08.03.15 at 4:17 pm
Russell is the most pernicious of the 3, because of all those who’ve cut their teeth on his History of Western Philosophy. His account of Hegel is not much better.
Anderson 08.03.15 at 4:22 pm
I think an interesting topic would be Lou Andreas-Salome’s enormous presence, as a very young woman, in Nietzsche’s life
Liliana Cavani made a movie about N/Salome/Ree, but I’m afraid to watch it.
Plume 08.03.15 at 4:31 pm
Bianca @24,
I think Barrett, in his use of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” is pretty good. I love the book. It was enormously important in my own intellectual development, post-university. Of course, going back to Nietzsche and his children, it’s all interpretation anyway. Perspectival, contingent (Rorty). Nothing wrong with finding it all nonsense, etc.
I also think he’s very good on Heidegger, but doesn’t “get” Wittgenstein. I think you’re referring to his The Illusion of Technique.
As for his politics — and I might have this all wrong — he made a similar political journey from left to right, common among a sub-set of the “New York Intellectuals.” Again, I’m going from memory here, and haven’t read him in twenty years.
AcademicLurker 08.03.15 at 4:32 pm
My vague memory of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is that he tended to make nearly all of German thought from the 17th century on sound a bit like one long preparation for national socialism. Sort of understandable given when he was writing, but still…
Do other people have that impressions? I read it years ago, so I might be misremembering.
Plume 08.03.15 at 4:38 pm
Anderson @27,
Thanks. I can understand your fears.
And Ree was probably much more boorish than Nietzsche.
There is that infamous photo about the three of them:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-salome188.jpg/401px-Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-salome188.jpg
Harold 08.03.15 at 4:41 pm
Nietzsche admired what he thought was the aristocratic ideal, but Bertrand Russell really was a titled aristocrat. (On the other hand, much of the aristocratic ideal was imparted to the aristocrats by their bourgeois tutors).
With all its faults, I would hate for people to stop reading the History of Western Philosophy.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned Russell’s imaginary debate between Nietzsche and Buddha, which impressed me deeply as a teenager (quoted for convenience from a random blog I know nothing about):
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/nietsche/russell.html
Plume 08.03.15 at 4:49 pm
John,
Not sure if you’ve already read him, by this book is really interesting on Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche. Which happened a lot. He was often in conflict with his own self.
Hatab, L. J. (1995). A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics. Chicago, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co..
Publisher link
Plume 08.03.15 at 4:55 pm
Harold @31,
Thanks for the link. In general, aristocrats tend to be “reactionary.” Many exceptions exist, of course, and Russell was one of them, as was Wittgenstein. Bleeding over into Corey Robin’s article a bit, here and on Salon, Kristin Ross’s recent book talks about another major exception, Prince Kropotkin . . .
I can’t remember Nietzsche talking about the Paris Commune, but I’m betting he wasn’t a fan. He should have been, though it would have been another example of Nietzsche contra Nietzsche.
Yan 08.03.15 at 5:08 pm
I don’t think addressing students’ preconceptions of Nietzsche is necessary anymore. I used to always start by asking them what they’d heard about Nietzsche, then giving a little spiel about how they should ignore everything they’ve heard.
Up until a few years ago, they’d come up with all the usual suspects: a proto-Nazi, a postmodern relativist who doesn’t believe in truth and hates science, thinks we should get rid of morality, etc.
But the last few years, they’ve come up with nothing. Few seem to have even heard of him, and none have any preconceptions about him. I’d say it will backfire, you’ll actually supply them with lenses of interpretation they’d be better of not having in the first place.
Yan 08.03.15 at 5:21 pm
Oh, and I’d recommend Julian Young’s excellent recent biography, which pretty much puts to rest the myth that Nietzsche was friendless or solitary. His travels for his health did, of course, make friendship difficult, but he had many deep, devoted, lifelong friendships that he sustained through correspondence, and he was, to the degree his poor health allowed, a pretty sociable guy. Also, he loved Christmas.
Plume 08.03.15 at 5:27 pm
Yan,
I’ve read bios by Kaufmann, Nehamas, Safransky, Hollingdale, and Chamberlain (concentrating on his last years). Do you think Young’s is superior to the above?
Bruce Wilder 08.03.15 at 5:27 pm
Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a long brief for the case that Russell was a much better writer than reader. If read with the understanding that that is its core “argument”, it can be valuable.
Plume 08.03.15 at 5:38 pm
Russell’s political stances are often overlooked, but shouldn’t be. It’s pretty clear that he veers far away from N in that realm.
Plan for Peace
Harold 08.03.15 at 5:50 pm
Plume @33 Bertrand Russell, himself an earl, was descended from the Dukes of Bedford. It is true that the Russell family had in the 1400s originally been wine merchants (before being ennobled by Henry Tudor), but Wittgenstein’s family was merely wealthy without ever having been aristocratic, as far as I know. The Russells, on the other hand, had been Whigs (liberals), in service to the government since the 1700s (Russell’s grandfather had been the model both for Plantaganet Palliser and also Prime Minister William Mildmay in Trollope’s Palliser novels). On the other hand, both Russell and Wittgenstein were of a class that could have afforded tutors (usually drawn from the middle classes).
Yan 08.03.15 at 5:51 pm
Plume, I haven’t read Safanski or Chamberlain, but I do think it’s better than the others. I think the interpretation is superior and a bit less contentious than Kaufmann or Nehamas’s interesting but eccentric readings, and it’s much more exhaustive than Hollingdale. It’s also a nice balance of biography and detailed, insightful discussion of his works in relation to his life. As with any intellectual biography, there’s room for debate about the philosophical interpretation, but I think it’s a pretty solid take by anyone’s measure, especially when dealing with someone as overinterpretable as Nietzsche.
dr ngo 08.03.15 at 5:57 pm
Yan@34: I started teaching courses on the Vietnam War around 1978, soon after the war ended. My pedagogical approach was intended to be: “You think the VN War was like this, but it was actually like that.” Wrong. Most of my students – and this was a first-rate university – didn’t really think anything about the VN War, except that something had happened in their lifetimes and it wasn’t covered in their HS classes.
So a better beginning would have been: “Once upon a time there was a place called Vietnam . . . “
Anderson 08.03.15 at 6:48 pm
“With all its faults, I would hate for people to stop reading the History of Western Philosophy.”
Oh, it’s good on anyone Russell cared about. And I still enjoy his malicious little table of correspondences between Marxism & Christianity.
geo 08.03.15 at 7:09 pm
My $.02: http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1986/08/nietzsche-life-as-literature-b/print/.
Kevin R. 08.03.15 at 7:40 pm
As far as incomplete Nietzsche scholarship goes, I do believe he credits Napoleon’s mother’s “force of will” for Napoleon as well.
You might find this interesting, too: Rousseau says in the Social Contract (1762): “I have a feeling that some day that little island [Corsica] will astonish Europe.”
Napoleon was of course, born in Corsica just seven years later. Rousseau was speaking of the island’s legal climate and liberty (and he was later invited to draft a constitution for it) but I like to think that Rousseau had Napoleon in mind.
bob mcmanus 08.03.15 at 7:51 pm
43:Very good, I may look for the Nehamas, tho I tire of Nietzsche.
This Monday’s Holboism interests me rather, because of a weekend reading Seneca, in the pathology, the symptom, the meaning of…Chesterton.
Seneca. Montaigne? Tolstoy? Twain? Those immensely popular, even powerful public voices of moderation, sanity, reasonableness, compassion, generosity, just slightly witty gadflies nibbling without breaking the skin, those who promote a quietist placidity that allows the aristocracy and imperialists to rape and pillage and plunder without fear of domestic unrest and rebellion. Did Chesterton single-handedly prevent a British social revolution? He did his part.
The real aristocrats (and their courtiers) don’t proclaim their egoism very loudly; they of course kneel humbly in the pews every sunday, praying for second sons in India, planning the fox hunt.
We need to look for our current equivalents of Seneca and Chesterton in our second Gilded Age, our post-modern Empire. Jon Stewart?
Bruce Wilder 08.03.15 at 7:57 pm
Harold @ 39
The Whig pedigree of the Russell family traces back to the 17th century. The family fortune was founded on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when a John Russell advised Henry VIII and Edward VI, and received Tavistock and what is now Covent Garden, as well as the Earldom, for his troubles. The 5th Earl married Anne Carr, notorious for having been born in the Tower, while her parents were held for poisoning Thomas Overbury. Anne brought the family much of the London real estate the family developed as Bloomsbury, and the marriage of the Earl’s son to the heir of the Earl of Southampton brought much of the rest.
The 5th Earl was a member of the Parliamentary Peace Party that attempted to make nice with Charles I. Though always a communicant of the Established Church, he had decidedly Presbyterian sympathies and came to represent the Dissenter interest during the Restoration, making him a natural ally of Ashley Cooper. He was created Duke after the Glorious Revolution.
The 5th Earl’s third son, also William Russell, was a prominent exponent of Country Party views, and was executed for his part in the Rye House Plot. The martyred third son married a Wriothesley, descended from Thomas Cromwell’s oddly named protege (Call me, “Risley”), fathering the second Duke before his losing his head. Lady Rachel Wriothesley Russell, a talented writer and daughter of the Tory Lord High Treasurer in the Clarendon Ministry, played a leading part in constructing the trial of her husband (during which she acted as his secretary, no defense counsel being permitted at the time in a treason case), multiple pleas for clemency (including a fantastically dramatic scene in which she fell begging in tears at the feet of the King) and eventual execution by the hapless Jack Ketch (who wrote an apology for botching it; botching it was a habit — apologizing unusual) into a Whig Passion Play, which did much to elevate the dignity of the Whig cause in the popular imagination.
Bertrand Russell’s title traces to a creation for the mid-19th century Prime Minister.
Harold 08.03.15 at 8:20 pm
@45, Goodness. Very interesting. His HWP is very hard on the Romantics (Byron, Rousseau, etc.), but I think this was because he was very much a Romantic himself at heart. As Emerson (himself of the middle class) said, “For what is the oath of gentle blood and knighthood? What but to protect the weak and lowly against the strong oppressor?”
And wasn’t Nietzsche’s last sane act to throw his arms around the neck of a horse to protect it from being beaten?
john c. halasz 08.03.15 at 8:25 pm
ge @ 43:
Excellent and very well written. Now could you explain to me why you don’t understand what existence is or means?
Anderson 08.03.15 at 8:40 pm
Nehamas calls Nietzsche a “miserable little man,” which is both wrong and unbelievably condescending.
SusanC 08.03.15 at 8:47 pm
Your students might be more likely to have heard of Nietzsche via film or literature:
– A Fish Called Wanda
– Little Miss Sunshine
– True Detective (I can’t remember if Nietzsche is explicitly named in True Detective, r if you have to get the allusions).
Nietzsche is also alluded to in the works of William Burroughs, I think.
William Timberman 08.03.15 at 8:50 pm
I don’t fault Russell or Chesterton for missing those aspects of Nietzsche’s thought which a still confident English Civilization was not disposed to see, but I do fault John Holbo for trying to start another brawl in the CT comments threads. The appreciation by geo ought to restore some sanity, if sanity’s actually what’s wanted.
Meanwhile…. Was Mencken ever more than a (very) witty curmudgeon, do you think? When I first read him years ago, I occasionally felt like leaping up and cheering, but I was a lot younger then, and was being drug up in the USA, where at the time anticommunism was the national religion, and juvenile delinquency the scourge of all things sacred. Nowadays, I tend to think of him as a sort of erudite Donald Trump, but I suspect that such a judgment is as flawed as Russell’s was of Nietzsche. If so, I apologize, but someone else will have to correct me — I’m not about to go back and read through his stuff again. (So many texts, so little time.)
john c. halasz 08.03.15 at 9:13 pm
Anderson @48:
Nietzsche was in poor health from the beginning. An academic prodigy, receiving a chair in classical philology at 24, he was pensioned off at just 26 due to ill health. (His pastor father had dies when he was 4 or 5 with “water on the brain”, so it’s likely his ailments, including excruciating headaches, were congenital, contrary to the legend of a youthful contraction of syphilus). Not to indulge too much in the biographical fallacy, but those references to eliminating invalids and paeans to unabashed health weren’t proto-Nazi ideology, but self-referential irony. (For that matter, his notorious misogyny might owe something to the example of his sister). So his insistence on unrationalized suffering and willed happiness were very much lived experience for him. It’s had to imagine that he really was happy, rather than overcompensating for his actual miseries. The “little man” part might be a bit off, but it seems to be a rhetorical counterweight to the “great man” conception.
john c. halasz 08.03.15 at 9:21 pm
“had”- the Boston spelling.
geo 08.03.15 at 9:23 pm
jch@47: I don’t remember. Could I possibly have been pulling your leg?
Bruce Baugh 08.03.15 at 9:39 pm
I first read some of Nietzsche at 20, and was not a fan. This year I’ve been re-reading some, and reading commentary, and at 49 I find myself more congenial to some aspects of his thought, but not in ways he might appreciate. I’ve got this necessary interest in dealing with life when you’re stuck with suffering you can’t fix, and while not attracted to suicide in any active way, you find the existentialist idea of a duty to survive so you can keep confronting the absurd a pretty bullshit kind of alternative. A bunch of Nietzsche’s work reminds me of Philip Dick’s fiction and exegesis, raising up an idea enough to scrutinize thoroughly, seeing where it doesn’t hold up, tearing down, and building again. The desiring to keep searching holds up better than any particular bit searched at.
john c. halasz 08.03.15 at 9:49 pm
geo @53:
No, it wasn’t said to me and I was a bit flabbergasted by the remark, prolly about 6 months ago. I teased you about it once before, but I don’t think I responded to it at the time. (What was I supposed to do? Link to Wikipedia on “existential quantification”?) I just took it as part of your self-sufficient Rortyianism.
TheSophist 08.03.15 at 9:53 pm
Might we perhaps slightly amend one of the greatest of all internet witticisms:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Thus Spake Zarathustra. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
Lee A. Arnold 08.03.15 at 10:02 pm
Finnegans Wake calls it “Also Spuke Zerothruster”.
engels 08.03.15 at 10:16 pm
“puts to rest the myth that Nietzsche was friendless or solitary”
I know jack shit about Nietzsche but in general the recent fixation with dispelling any possible myths that the great figures of modernism were anything other than well-liked and well-adjusted burghers and salarymen vaguely pisses me off (I’m reminded of something I read in the NYRB a few years ago by Zadie Smith about how productive and happy Kafka was at his insurance company desk job…) Nothing against Young whom I haven’t read and doubtless knows whereof he speaks…
Bruce Baugh 08.03.15 at 10:34 pm
Engels: I grew up as a young reader getting stories about weirdo authors of various sorts, and doted on them. Then I’ve spent my whole adult life around professional writers, and I find that…they are nearly all pretty normal people. Those with families tend to love them, and are generally okay parents or better, with kids who tend to turn out well. Those without are reasonably social, and tend to be interested in more than just the things they write about. I think that demonstrating how unlike Romantic fantasies of the tormented genius a lot of talented people are, including the visionary geniuses, is a very worthwhile thing.
Not at the expense of the truth, of course, but then a lot of the myths of the weirdo weren’t grounded in the truth in the first place.
novakant 08.03.15 at 11:06 pm
Liliana Cavani made a movie about N/Salome/Ree, but I’m afraid to watch it.
:)
Regarding Russell’s History of Western Philosophy it’s the worst book on philosophy (it’s obviously not a philosophical book) I’ve ever read, full of, slander downright falsehoods and failures on the part of the author to even try to understand basic concepts outside his tiny walled garden. I think it’s possibly a dangerous book because it reinforces the silly continental/analytical distinction and due to its enduring popularity will have a detrimental influence on the reading lists a lot of bright people.
Generally I think “histories of philosophy” are a bit of a silly undertaking because there is no point in discussing philosophy in chronological order and mixing it with biography.
John 08.03.15 at 11:14 pm
From the wrist down…
I don’t know what this means. Can someone explain?
John Holbo 08.04.15 at 1:25 am
“From the wrist down…
I don’t know what this means. Can someone explain?”
He has verbal facility. He can put words together stylishly but he’s got no thoughts.
bianca steele 08.04.15 at 1:31 am
At least give him the elbow.
Byatt’s Babel Tower has an epigraph from N., and apparently he is mentioned 13 times, though it’s likely your students haven’t read her.
bianca steele 08.04.15 at 1:37 am
Babel Tower, I’ve always thought, contained a delightful picture, objectively correlated, of an Internet troll. Incidentally. I’d forgotten he was a troll who preached Nietzsche.
oldster 08.04.15 at 2:05 am
#64: that’s a gloss, JH, and good of you to offer it, but I thought #63 asked for an *explanation*.
I.e., not just “what did you mean by that,” but “why would you use that string of words to mean *that*?” What other image are you leveraging from? What other wrist-related (or hand-related) idiom or image are you referring to?
If you had said, e.g. “from the neck down,” then this would tap into the popular model whereby thoughts occur in the head. So, “from the neck down” would mean, “without thoughts.” But…wrists? Can someone explain?
bianca steele 08.04.15 at 2:06 am
And concerning film, don’t forget “Rope”.
JanieM 08.04.15 at 2:31 am
@oldster — I was picturing a hand writing fluently, copiously, facilely — without being connected to a brain.
Of course, JH can speak for himself. :-)
John Holbo 08.04.15 at 2:46 am
“wrists?”
Wrists are used to write. From the neck down would be consistent with writing from the heart. Russell and Chesterton would, I think, wish to deny Nietzsche even that privilege, on the ground that he not only lacked a brain – like the scarecrow – but also a heart – like the tin woodsman – and courage – like the lion. All he had was an empty style. (I don’t buy it, myself, of course.)
floopmeister 08.04.15 at 3:21 am
I read down to comment 68 and only then found Bianca Steele who mentioned Rope by Hitchcock. It’s the perfect exposition of a particular ‘view’ of Nietzsche (@ around the 8 minute mark).
bianca steele 08.04.15 at 3:24 am
John, do you ever ask students for their preconceptions about Chesterton? I usually skim those extracts at best, but the bit about Tibet is really viciously devastating and will probably go over well.
js. 08.04.15 at 3:40 am
The thing about Rope though, amazing film that it is, is that it would be an utter waste if you showed it—or a part of it—and all you talked about was something or other about Nietzsche.
Anderson 08.04.15 at 3:48 am
62: your view on Russell is harsher than mine but likelier correct.
But this: “because there is no point in discussing philosophy in chronological order and mixing it with biography.”
Philosophy doesn’t have a history?
The lives of philosophers are irrelevant to their thoughts?
Really? How did we jump out of our skins like that?
Anderson 08.04.15 at 3:50 am
48: well, yes. And Flannery O’Connor suffered from lupus before it killed her, but that doesn’t make her a “miserable little woman.” Does it?
tony lynch 08.04.15 at 3:56 am
Bernard Williams – Introduction to The Gay Science.
“Nietzsche has been thought by some people to have had a brutal and ruthless attitude to the world; sometimes, perhaps, he wished that he had. But in fact, one personal feature which, together with his illness and loneliness, contributed to his outlook was a hyper-sensitivity to suffering. It was linked to a total refusal to forget, not only the existence of suffering, but the fact that suffering was necessary to everything he and anyone valued.”
john c. halasz 08.04.15 at 4:01 am
@75:
Maybe just all the more desperate and “pious”.
garymar 08.04.15 at 4:05 am
Graffiti comment from engels 08.03.15 @ 12:30 pm
“God is dead–Nietzcheâ€
“Nietzsche is dead–Godâ€
Then of course there’s Kaufmann note in one of his translations:
“Someone below that wrote: ‘Some are born posthumously’â€
I saw a graffiti in the men’s room of the Michigan Union that went:
Descartes: to exist is to be
Sartre: to exist is to do
Sinatra: do be do be doo…
John Holbo 08.04.15 at 4:28 am
“John, do you ever ask students for their preconceptions about Chesterton?”
I’m pretty sure they’ve never even heard of him, unless I mention him. But, in explaining to them why Nietzsche thought Napoleon was a ‘superman’ in his sense, I’m going to tell them they can just read Chesterton’s “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”. It’s all there. Every bit of it. Chesterton was an orthodox Nietzschean, to his very bones; he just didn’t know what one of those was.
Anderson 08.04.15 at 4:29 am
76: true I think. He expressly criticizes pity because “suffering with” the wretched of the earth would overwhelm him. A feeling I can appreciate just scrolling through Facebook.
John Holbo 08.04.15 at 4:40 am
Thanks for the suggestions, by the way. Some of these are quite helpful.
bad Jim 08.04.15 at 7:17 am
As one of the ignorant commenters whose coming was foretold (having only read Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil) might I suggest Shaw’s “Man and Superman”? The extract “Don Juan in Hell” is delicious.
The Apollonian/Dionysian distinction, from “The Birth of Tragedy”, came up in college literature courses. It fitted oddly with the Freudian implements in my mental toolbox and remains with them, disregarded and gathering fragments of moths.
It ought to be emphasized that Nietzsche was one of the first to write against anti-semitism, and it’s horrifying to realize that he wound up in the care of his evil sister Elizabeth.
Eric Scharf 08.04.15 at 9:03 am
These quotes are wonderful, and thanks for the cites. The passage about Nietzsche’s fastidiousness reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft and his horror of New York.
I imagine today’s students have probably heard of Ayn Rand.
casmilus 08.04.15 at 10:51 am
If you like posh Englishmen being disdainful about FN, try Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller “Rogue Male” (later filmed with Peter O’Toole).
The narrator, an English gent, has failed in his attempt to shoot a Nameless European Dictator, and has been pursued back to Blighty, where his pursuer Quive-Smith has him holed up in a burrow. “Quive-Smith began talking about the Will To Power. I could have told him natural leaders don’t need one. He wouldn’t have understood.”
There was also a put-down by C.R.W.Nevinson or one of the other early Vorticists, but I’ll have to look that up later on. Wyndham Lewis had a dig in the introduction to the 1918 edition of “Tarr” as well.
Of course all these men are reacting against self-proclaimed “Nietzscheans”, rather than the man himself.
casmilus 08.04.15 at 10:54 am
Chesterton has a small following today amongst the Rod Dreher crowd, “distributism” and all that as the third way instead of capitalism or socialism.
casmilus 08.04.15 at 11:11 am
SusanC @51
Jim Morrison of The Doors also praised FN and L-F Celine.
I thought “True Detective” was influenced by Thomas Ligotti rather than Freddy.
bianca steele 08.04.15 at 11:55 am
js., True, on the other hand, now that I think of it, I think I took a course where the Leopold-Loeb case was used to talk about the U.S. reception of N. John’s students might like “It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university,” from Darrow’s defense.
novakant 08.04.15 at 12:25 pm
Philosophy doesn’t have a history?
The lives of philosophers are irrelevant to their thoughts?
Yes, it does, but it certainly doesn’t have a history like the natural sciences marked by continuous progress. Also I was talking about actual books that try to give you a “history of philosophy” and to me they are all failures for the above mentioned and other reasons. You need to get the ideas right first, then you can talk about the sources and influences and then maybe a little bit about the lives of the philosophers – in the histories I’ve read it’s the other way around: they thus perpetuate a lot of gossip and also platitudes which are often just plain wrong, but impressionable young readers will stick to them for life unless they dig deeper, which is rare.
I’d be grateful if anyone has suggestions regarding good “history of philosophy” books that are actually enlightening – I know some good ones about certain periods and movements (German Idealism / Deconstruction) but not about the history of philosophy as whole.
bob mcmanus 08.04.15 at 12:59 pm
88: Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophy, but it is a doorstopper and Collins is a radical social constructivist. However, I think the compare and contrast he does with Islamic, Indian, Chinese etc is very useful.
bob mcmanus 08.04.15 at 1:04 pm
I guess Copleston remains the standard bookshelf. His was one of my favorite books about Nietzsche that I liked as a pup, Jesuit or not, I thought he got it.
P.M.Lawrence 08.04.15 at 1:31 pm
Here be typos, e.g. “descrying” (for “decrying”), “cousre” (for “course”), “Nero’s” (for “Neros”), the odd punctuation “.,”, “perentage” (for “percentage”), etc.
“Must … drag … self … away from keyboard. Can’t just transcribe Russell’s whole damn chapter.” I think you just proved your point; as these typos all – or at any rate, all those I noticed – fall in the Russell excerpts, I suspect that fatigue must have set in. These excerpts have certainly been edited somewhere along the line, as they follow U.S. conventions about placing final commas and full stops within rather than after quotations (though, curiously, at least one semi-colon has escaped this fate).
John 08.04.15 at 1:49 pm
“Wrists are used to write…”
Got it.
I wasn’t sure if the phrase was in common usage, or else an allusion to some Nietzschean aphorism I was unaware of, and all I could come up with: Mene Mene Tekel. Chesterton might have found offensive that particular comparison.
I then thought that there was a joke involving a corruption of “from the waist down” that I was missing. With the mention of his wrists and the possible suggestion of his sex organs, I thought there was maybe a masturbation pun, i.e. N’s style is self-gratifying. Overthinking the Holboisms.
Anarcissie 08.04.15 at 1:53 pm
‘History of philosophy’ implies that there is something called ‘Philosophy’ that had ever gotten anywhere.
As for ‘refuting’ Nietzsche, it’s like ‘refuting’ William Blake.
Plume 08.04.15 at 2:12 pm
This painting is before Nietzsche’s time, but I’ve always seen it as embodying both the protagonist of Zarathustra, and Nietzsche himself.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg
Caspar David Friedrich: The wanderer above the sea of fog
gianni 08.04.15 at 2:38 pm
Plume – in fact a reproduction of that painting graces the cover of at least one of N.’s books printed at a major publishing house.
Plume 08.04.15 at 2:41 pm
gianni,
Thanks. Goes to show ya. Nothing new under the sun. Or the clouds.
;>)
LFC 08.04.15 at 2:42 pm
from Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), p.182 (italics in original):
casmilus 08.04.15 at 2:48 pm
There certainly is “something called philosophy”, to at least the same extent that there is something called “political science”. And you don’t need to assume it made any progress in order to write its history. Not all histories are narratives of progress. Lysenkoism has a history, even though it began in misconception and ended in failure.
gianni 08.04.15 at 3:07 pm
Anyone have recommendations towards some good secondary literature on N.? Between the postmodernists and those writing about him in the mid 20th c., I feel like all of the Nietzsche interpretation I have picked up is distracted with motivations other than accuracy & insight.
A dedicated book would be nice, not something like Irrational Man. I think someone upthread was recommending Nehamas? Any others?
TMD 08.04.15 at 3:15 pm
Existential comics was mentioned above, but one in particular is particularly apposite (“The Most Ubermensch Man in the World”): http://existentialcomics.com/comic/75
TMD 08.04.15 at 3:31 pm
“in particular is particularly apposite” – gah. I’m clearly not very übermensch today.
Plume 08.04.15 at 3:44 pm
Gianni,
Yes, I read Nehamas when it came out and really liked it. Well worth a look. I also recommended Lawrence Hatab upthread. Another good read.
I also really liked To Nietzsche: Dionysus, I Love You! Ariadne, by Claudia Crawford. But I imagine it’s not for everyone. If memory serves, she draws from a wide range of sources, including feminist theory of N. Sarah Kofman and Luce Irigary, especially. The latter’s Marine Lover — again, if memory serves — is a departure point. Have read that work and Kofman’s Nietzsche and Metaphor, and remember finding both of them interesting. But, again, they’re not for everyone.
Salem 08.04.15 at 4:01 pm
“Reading Nietzsche is like drinking cognac — a sip is good, but you don’t want to drink the whole bottle.” – John Searle
bob mcmanus 08.04.15 at 4:06 pm
I feel like all of the Nietzsche interpretation I have picked up is distracted with motivations other than accuracy & insight.
On your way to becoming a Nietzschean. Ain’t nothing but biases, and that includes anything I would recommend. So choose one of your own biases or affects, find a Nietzschean who supports it,
another that refutes it, and try to use Nietzsche instrumentally,to the degree your chosen interlocutors permit ituntil your opponents are whimpering in submission.Anderson 08.04.15 at 4:28 pm
“Anyone have recommendations towards some good secondary literature on N.?”
If you want something outside the continental tradition, Maudmarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy was I think something of a groundbreaker in taking him seriously from a loosely “analytic” perspective. And despite the author’s failings of character, Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality sure seemed to me to get a lot right.
Plume 08.04.15 at 4:36 pm
Some more titles coming back to me from long, long ago.
Keith M. May’s Nietzsche and Modern Literature is really good. Can’t find it in its original publisher’s catalog, so it may be out of print. I found it at my university’s library back in the 90s.
Here’s the Amazon blurb:
geo 08.04.15 at 4:41 pm
bad Jim @82 mentioned “Don Juan in Hell” from Shaw’s Man and Superman — excellent suggestion. Even more Nietzschean is that play’s epilogue, “The Revolutionist’s Handbook”: http://www.bartleby.com/157/5.html.
John Kozak 08.04.15 at 5:22 pm
Other Nietzsche in cinema: “Baby Face” with Barbara Stanwyck, in which she plays a cheerily amoral seductress, dripping with will-to-power.
And “Blazing Saddles”…
Yan 08.04.15 at 6:08 pm
There’s been a lot of great new secondary literature on Nietzsche in the last ten years.
I think the best would be John Richardson (Nietzsche’s System, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism) and Bernard Reginster’s Nietzsche and the Affirmation of Life. But a good place to start is in one of the many recent collections of essays, such as Richardson’s edited volumes in the Oxford Readings and Oxford Handbook series, and Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. They’ll give you a sense of the wide variety of very serious and careful work being done these days.
Someone mentioned Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter’s books. It’s true they are groundbreaking in that they opened up the field to a more analytic approach and were a refreshing change from the po-mo’s. And they’re both worth reading. But I find both highly overrated. The younger generation that paved the way for are doing much better, more interesting stuff.
Yan 08.04.15 at 6:12 pm
For older stuff, some have recommended both Hatab’s Nietzschean Defense of Democracy and Nehamas’s Life as Literature, and they’re well worth reading.
Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche is quite good, as is Richard Schacht’s. Simon May’s Nietzsche’s Ethics and Peter Poellner’s Nietzsche and Metaphysics, too.
But as I said, there’s been an explosion of great stuff in the last 10 years, so I’d recommend starting there.
bob mcmanus 08.04.15 at 6:41 pm
there’s been an explosion of great stuff in the last 10 years
I know, and the guy didn’t want 10 books, so I recommend he narrow it by a specific interest. “Nietzsche and Peanuts” or something.
2) Eurocentrism, anyone? Will the racism ever end? My current reading: Tosaka Jun, great tween war Heideggerian, some 5 books published about in the last 5 years or so. Read sum Neets, go to a philo cocktail party and everybody will have a take; read Tosaka and you will have no one to talk to and can do serious drinking. Just saying.
bob mcmanus 08.04.15 at 6:50 pm
Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche is quite good
Benjamin Noys rips it to shreds, and shows it wicked. I got quotes.
The current Nietzsche boomlet is exactly a symptom of affirmationist personalized neoliberalism, is anti-socialist, and should be avoided.
novakant 08.04.15 at 7:13 pm
thanks, Bob McM, also Anderson, Plume and Yan on N. – very interesting
I have Safranski’s Nietzsche book on my shelf, read his Schopenhauer bio, his writing is a bit muddy for my liking, but he tends to know his stuff
Yan 08.04.15 at 7:27 pm
“Benjamin Noys rips it to shreds, and shows it wicked. I got quotes.”
What’s his criticism? Deleuze’s take on Nietzsche is the only one of any worth among the late Frenchies. You can quibble with any interpretation, and Deleuze surely does turn every historical figure into himself, but I think it’s very true to Nietzsche in spirit, if not the letter.
I don’t know Noys, but given that he’s a professor of “critical theory” (as if that were a discipline not a short lived inconsistent historical movement) and teaches continental “theory” as if that were a thing (literary theory: a thing, philosophy: a thing, the combination: not a thing), I can’t help being doubtful about his knowledge of philosophy or Nietzsche.
“The current Nietzsche boomlet is exactly a symptom of affirmationist personalized neoliberalism, is anti-socialist, and should be avoided.”
Translation, please of “affirmationalist personalized”.
And some specifics for this very eccentric charge: which authors? Which specific interpretive claims? Anti-socialist seems strange (Leiter, for example, for the many things that’s wrong with him, is surely not an anti-socialist).
What’s neoliberal about Richardson or Reginster? How is that even a relevant category for, for example, Richardson’s writing about ontology?
If you want neoliberal, the po-mo’s are the real neoliberal Nietzscheans. For example:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/
ragweed 08.04.15 at 7:36 pm
@70 – I have a hobby of collecting old writing instruments, which runs into handwriting and penmanship. In the 19th and early 20th century, good penmanship rules generally instructed one to write from the shoulder, rather than the wrist. A wrist-writer was a euphemism for someone with bad handwriting. So someone writing from the wrist down is not only mindless but a sloppy hand as well.
Yan 08.04.15 at 7:38 pm
“2) Eurocentrism, anyone? Will the racism ever end? My current reading: Tosaka Jun”
Gianni’s request seemed to be for straightforward interpretative works. The Kyoto school, (like Deleuze, admittedly, as well as the pomos and critical theorists) don’t really fit the bill, since they’re main goal isn’t really to understand N, but to work with and through him on their way somewhere else.
But, if we’re going into neo-Nietzscheans rather than just Nietzsche scholars, Keiji Nishitani’s great.
Lee A. Arnold 08.04.15 at 7:39 pm
Kubrick used the fanfare from R. Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” to herald the alien evolution in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
grouchomatic 08.04.15 at 7:49 pm
You might consider showing the Ferris wheel scene from “The Third Man.” Harry Lime’s monologue sums up the popular conception of the Nietszchean worldview, even if Lime never mentions Nietszche explicitly.
Harold 08.04.15 at 8:06 pm
Was Paul de Man a Nietzschean?
bob mcmanus 08.04.15 at 8:27 pm
Actually I turned against Nietzsche fairly recently, with a single paragraph from Lukacs Destruction of Reason I think, and a more sustained critique by Domenico Losurdo. I won’t support Corey Robin’s use of Nietzsche, which is for his own agenda, but I have read some of his allies.
Benjamin Noys, The Persistance of the Negative critiques Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, Negri, and Badiou, in an attack on “affirmationism” and accelerationism and left-libertarianism. I have read similar stuff by the tiqqun crowd in attacks on Hardt & Negri, in criticism of Dumenil & Levy.
Just a taste of Noys:
Consolidation of social hierarchies in the name of “Affirmative” or “positive” difference. Noys is more careful than I would be, and AFAICT doesn’t much mention feminist theory in the entire book. Kinda fun that way.
Lee A. Arnold 08.04.15 at 8:28 pm
Godard’s 1969 film “Le Gai savoir” is named after “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”.
I haven’t seen that one, but from that period I have seen Godard’s “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” and “Weekend”, great films which I highly recommend. And it now strikes me, they are about as Nietzschean as it gets.
AB 08.04.15 at 8:42 pm
There’s a large-scale choral work by Delius, “A Mass of Life,” with text from Zarathustra. And also some lines of Zarathustra in Mahler’s 3rd Symphony.
William Berry 08.04.15 at 8:53 pm
gianni @95:
It’s on the cover of the (Penguin?) paperback of Ecce Homo.
William Berry 08.04.15 at 9:03 pm
Also, too, perhaps out-of-date (and probably a bit too Nietzsche-philic) compared to most of the other suggestions, but Kaufman’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ is accessible and well-written. Kaufmann is also a good translator and interpreter of Freud, and draws comparisons between the two, fwiw.
Harold 08.04.15 at 9:08 pm
Was F. R. Leavis, champion of D.H. Lawrence, and life-affirmingness, a Nietzschean?
bob mcmanus 08.04.15 at 9:23 pm
121: I’m at a loss when the most famous Western Maoist, at his radical peak, is said to have made “Nietzschean” films.
Anderson 08.04.15 at 9:29 pm
Was Paul de Man a Nietzschean?
Only in the general sense that deconstruction owes something to Nietzsche.
.. And I’m with Bob on Godard. I’ve seen both those Godards, albeit only once each, and I have no idea what’s Nietzschean about them, other than perhaps a certain playfulness. Godard seems to have some sort of Marxist/nihilist thing going. If that’s Maoism, then okay.
The grand unification theory for the critical types used to be synthesizing Nietzsche & Marx. Doubt it has been done, not sure anyone cares any more.
Yan 08.04.15 at 9:34 pm
The Noys passage is a bit hard to follow out of context, but it seems to me to have little bearing on Nietzsche. People like Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, Negri, and Badiou may think they’re Nietzscheans, but if the Noys passage correctly describes them, I’d say they couldn’t be more wrong.
For example, far from positing “agency in terms of a ‘residual’ or ‘surplus’ moment that escapes the crushing logic of social processes,” Nietzsche rejects agency altogether. There simply is no subject other than biological and psychological processes, independent agency is sheer illusion.
Far from “afï¬rmative conceptions of the subject and subjectivity” or “inflation of the powers of the subject,” Nietzsche’s conception of the subject is that of an accidental after effect of the interplay of drives, a product not a cause, a random and accidental multiplicity of forces that can sometimes produces the illusion of unity.
At the end of the day, I don’t understand the criticism of “affirmation” at all (“consolidation of social hierarchies in the name of afï¬rmative difference.”). First, I don’t know what “affirmative difference” is referring to, and how broadly it’s meant. Is it because Nietzsche complains about the normalizing effects of morality? Is it because he insists on “love of fate”?
Second, how does valorizing difference lead to consolidation of hierarchies? Does every affirmation of difference do this? Which kinds, and why should we believe that’s the kind of valorization of difference Nietzsche practices–as opposed to, say, Deleuze, or Derrida, or some other fashionable Frenchie.
I don’t know many of the figures Noys is apparently critiquing, but it sounds more like Foucault to me. And while it does highlight everything that’s wrong with Foucault (see my Jacobin link in the previous post, for example), fortunately, Nietzsche is not Foucault.
I’m less sure it’s accurate about Deleuze, but at least see that it’s arguable. I agree that Deleuze, like Foucault, lends himself (even if his thought doesn’t lead with necessity) to questionable politics (see the article about the Israeli army’s use of Deleuze in the above link).
But again, that’s not Nietzsche. And it seems really argumentatively dubious for Noys to lump such an eccentric and disparate group together in his critique. Not unlike the absurdity of saying about the very philosophically diverse views of recent Nietzsche scholars (who completely disagree about core issues in Nietzsche interpretation) that they are all “anti-socialist” or “neoliberal”–a claim absurd on its face.
Dean C. Rowan 08.05.15 at 2:06 am
Paul de Man was no more a Nietzschean than he was a Keatsian. He read and probed the works of both, but why should we assume he subscribed to what he found there? Real Nietzsche scholars abhor the chapters in Allegories of Reading devoted to Nietzsche, and good for them. But de Man isn’t, wasn’t, and never pretended to be a philosopher. He was a reader. Different job description.
LFC 08.05.15 at 2:59 am
Anderson
The grand unification theory for the critical types used to be synthesizing Nietzsche & Marx. Doubt it has been done, not sure anyone cares any more.
What about Freud and Marx? (see Marcuse)
One of the last chaps., or maybe it’s the last chap., in Manuel & Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, is on ‘Freudo-Marxism’ (I think that’s their designation, too lazy to check).
john c. halasz 08.05.15 at 3:16 am
Anderson @127:
“The Dialectic of Enlightenment” was extensively, if implicitly patterned after “The Genealogy of Morals”. That doesn’t make it a synthesis though.
William Berry 08.05.15 at 3:20 am
@LFC:
I thought of mentioning the Freud-Marx thing, but you beat me to it.
A synthesis of the determinisms, historical and psychological, makes a kind of sense.
M+N is a little harder to see, except for, maybe, a relativistic epistemology of some kind. Derrida discusses Nietzsche’s epistemology in some detail in Of Grammatology; elsewhere, he writes a good deal about early Marx (The German Ideology?), but I don’t recall how he relates the two.
Anyway, it’s been years since I read OG. I have slept, a lot, since then.
engels 08.05.15 at 9:03 am
@127 Brian Leiter will come down off his mountain with one some day
An American Anthropologist in Germany 08.05.15 at 9:29 am
You didn’t ask, but if you want recommendations for sympathetic and intellectually compelling readings of Nietzsche, my top recommendation would be Alexander Nehemas’s book. Other good ones (which are superseded by Nehemas, in my view) include Deleuze’s book, Sarah Kaufman, and Heidegger. Of these probably only Nehemas is suitable for undergraduates, at least if it’s an intro course. The others would be fine for an advanced seminar. Walter Kaufman’s introductions are also very readable and do a good job of rebutting all the most common and crude Nietzsche stereotypes (i.e. that he was a nationalist, that he lionized the blond beast).
An American Anthropologist in Germany 08.05.15 at 10:38 am
… as for that, the subtlest diss of Niezsche is the title of Arthur Danto’s book, “Nietzsche as Philosopher.”
casmilus 08.05.15 at 11:43 am
The old vorticist I was trying to think of was T.E.Hulme rather than Nevinson. What I wanted is quoted here:
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/importanceoftehulme-kimball-3385
“Hulme’s pugnacious style made him particularly effective on the attack. “A Tory Philosophy†is in part a brief for what he calls the “classic†world view, a view that, suspicious of claims to moral progress, emphasizes order, discipline, and tradition. Hulme realizes that such prescriptions were not new, but he is careful to distinguish his own brand of classicism from others he regards as spurious. Here, for example, is what he has to say about Nietzsche:
“Most people have been in the habit of associating these kinds of views with Nietzsche. It is true that they do occur in him, but he made them so frightfully vulgar that no classic would acknowledge them. In him you have the spectacle of a romantic seizing on the classic point of view because it attracted him purely as a theory, and who, being a romantic, in taking up this theory, passed his slimy fingers over every detail of it. Everything loses its value. The same idea of the necessary hierarchy of classes, with their varying capacities and duties, gets turned into the romantic nonsense of the two kinds of morality, the slave and the master morality, and every other element of the classic position gets transmuted in a similar way into something ridiculous.””
Corey Robin 08.05.15 at 12:07 pm
At 34, Plume asked about Nietzsche’s response to the Commune. Let’s just say he was not happy. Fearing that the Louvre had been burned to the ground by the Communards (it hadn’t), he wrote, “The reports of the past few days have been so awful that my state of mind is altogether intolerable. What does it mean to be a scholar in the face of such earthquakes of culture!… It is the worst day of my life. ” And after the Commune was crushed, he wrote, “Hope is possible again! Our German mission isn’t over yet! I’m in better spirit than ever, for not yet everything has capitulated to Franco-Jewish levelling and “elegance”, and to the greedy instincts of Jetztzeit (“now-time”). There is still bravery, and it’s a German bravery that has something else to it than the élan of our lamentable neighbors. Over and above the war between nations, that international hydra which suddenly raised its fearsome heads has alarmed us by heralding quite different battles to come.” That last sentence is a reference to how the Franco-Prussian War, which Nietzsche supported wholeheartedly, had occasioned the outbreak of the Commune. He’s suggesting that in the future, there may be wars between states but “over and above” those wars will be the war against “that international hydra” of proletarian socialism which has now “suddenly raised its fearsome heads.”
Lee A. Arnold 08.05.15 at 12:47 pm
Bob McManus #126: “…the most famous Western Maoist, at his radical peak…”
Godard got into his Maoist period afterward, in the films immediately following “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” and “Weekend”, and I don’t think that it applies here.
Plume 08.05.15 at 3:00 pm
Corey @137, thanks.
That radically lowers my estimation of Nietzsche, and I was already deeply conflicted about him, despite all my years reading him with fascination and horror.
It’s kind of a new litmus test for me. One’s view of the Paris Commune.
Not on the same scale of tragedy, of course, but I had a similar litmus test for one’s view of the Occupy Movement. Those who followed the “official line,” or the Fox line, which are surprisingly in sync all too often . . . . that it was just a bunch of spoiled brats, who need to shut up and get jobs . . . that they were all no good DFHs — that view immediately provokes scorn.
Or, going back further, one’s views on Kent State. A parent of a friend in high school thought it was all justified, and that “the kids had it coming to them.” I was appalled hearing that then. It seems even worse now, forty some years later.
Corey Robin 08.05.15 at 3:49 pm
Plume: Very few folks agreed with me in my account of Nietzsche in this piece from a few years ago, but you might be interested in it, as it gives further context for his comments on the Commune.
http://www.thenation.com/article/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek/
Harold 08.05.15 at 4:21 pm
Thanks Corey, for this. It shows that Bertrand Russell was on to something in his estimation of Nietzsche. Russell, in his chapter on Schopenhauer, remarked that it is useful to look at the biography of philosophers because if their actions directly contradicted their writing, one might reasonable conclude their writings could not have been altogether sincere. At the time he wrote these words about the Commune both Nietzsche and his correspondent, his best friend, the Baron von Gersdorff, were disciples of Schopenhauer, as it happens.
On the other hand, Nietzsche’s thought may have developed (did develop) since then, since he repudiated Schopenhauer and is said to have defended Judaism (or aspects thereof). Still, if nothing else, it shows what kind of thought and discourse was acceptable and commonplace among the German aristocracy at the time of Nietzsche’s youth — and later too, no doubt.
casmilus 08.05.15 at 4:53 pm
Since France declared war on Prussia, it would be difficult for a German to express a negative view about the war without being outrageously unpatriotic, defeatist or treasonous.
Freddy took a negative view of the 1789 revolution as well, in BGAE.
Harold 08.05.15 at 5:08 pm
Not much of a fan of Chesterton, but recently (two years ago) watched the 1950s movie “Father Brown,” with Alec Guinness, Peter Finch, and Joan Greenwood, and it occurs to me that the theme of this movie could be considered rather Nietzschean, at least in the popular sense. In that the villain, the cat burglar Flambeau, is a rather super-man like figure — an aristocrat, art lover , opposed to society, considering himself “beyond good and evil”. In the end Father Brown bypasses the law, persuades Flambeau to give up his art collection (as I recall) so everyone could see it — to the general benefit of humanity, and thus, the movie’s ending is a victory for Christianity and its democratizing tendencies — if you will. On the other hand, Flambeau, on being received into the Church, escapes earthly punishment and Father Brown (or his creator — or the screenwriter/director) shows a gleeful contempt for the state and the law. Instead of going to jail, Flambeau becomes the husband (or is received into the society) of a wealthy heiress. I found this movie amusing, since I am a fan of the actors, and beautifully photographed, but when I watched it a second time, I couldn’t help thinking that it was made at the height of the Cold War, and Church and CIA at this time were sheltering thousands of Nazis SS, on the grounds that they had all converted to Catholicism, or were Catholics, or something, and were needed to fight Communism, regardless of what crimes they might have previously committed.
Plume 08.05.15 at 5:25 pm
Corey, very good article. Have you considered turning it into a book?
The idea of “morality” through choice of Iphone or Samsung Android strikes me as most perverse. It also strikes me as an awful lot of bother — the Austrians’ books, essays and the like — to go through just to arrive at what is all too obvious:
They shill for the rich, on behalf of the rich, by putting pretty philosophical clothes on the stuffed pig of mindless consumerism. It’s intellectual justification for brainwashing shoppers and deluding them that they have “choices” and “freedom.” Our “freedom” then becomes a choice between masters. Who do we serve? There is no choice to not serve.
But, back to Nietzsche. I get that he saw there can’t be a high without a low. But for someone so brilliant in so many ways, he was truly blind to the logic of his own love of “excellence.” How much more of it could we produce if it weren’t so limited to people who can already afford it? How much more of it could we produce if no human being was allowed to be left behind, ever, and that 100% of us had the same access to the highest quality education, environment, nutrition, health care and so on?
Social Democracy is basically a (poor) compromise between the real left and the right. It says we will do just enough so that most people can’t drown, but we won’t consider fixing the problem of obscenely unequal access to all the things required for “a good life.” We won’t do what is necessary to make sure everyone — as in, absolutely everyone — has the best possible shot at reaching their fullest potential. As we should. That would take the abandonment, once and for all, of the ridiculous entrance fee at the door of life. That would take the radical destruction of a truly despicable reality: That our life’s chances are over-determined by the amount of money we have.
Nietzsche should have known better. The production of excellence is not zero-sum. But our particular political economy is. Our particular political economy does require masters and slaves, winners and losers, the privileged and the defeated. It requires the destruction of many to achieve “greatness” for a few. But if we did things a different way, if we fully eliminated the cost of getting inside the door, we could flip that script. No masters and slaves required. We’d all be co-owners of the means of production and finally achieve real personal autonomy during our own lifetime.
Plume 08.05.15 at 5:26 pm
Quick thought. I had read Nietzsche elsewhere condemning German culture. My memory is that he did so often and generally praised the French over his own home boys.
Your article shows another side to him, and another case of Nietzsche contra Nietzsche. Much appreciated.
bekabot 08.05.15 at 6:30 pm
“Was Milton more puritanical than a pig is fat?”
Milton was puritanical in a way which is different from the way a pig is fat. A pig is fat by nature* but Milton was puritanical by design.
*Nature which may be exaggerated by industry but which starts out as nature.
Yan 08.05.15 at 8:16 pm
Nietzsche’s politics don’t undermine his philosophical quality. There are philosophically sophisticated reasons for holding boneheaded, even repugnant political views. And there are unsophisticated, boneheaded, and even repugnant reasons for holding good political views. For example, those who judge philosophy by politics might well have good politics, but be unsophisticated and likely boneheaded.
Nietzsche’s worst political sentiments–including his envy of political aristocracy (as opposed to “spiritual”), his worship of “genius” and “excellence” (though he never uses that Aristotelian language), his belief that excellence is zero sum–is primarily characteristic of his early work. The departure of his later work from the earlier is pretty deep, philosophically, even if some surface views stay similar.
His political sense was ruined by his early influences: romanticism, Schopenhauer, Emerson. By the very end he was only starting to truly outgrow them. But all of his mature philosophy strains against them, and he doesn’t in the late work successfully preserve his elitism and aristocratism consistently or well.
If he’d had another 20 years, I think his own line of philosophical thinking would have forced him to the opposite pole.
The synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx would have happened, and it’s Nietzsche who would have accomplished it. It’s there to be found, should anyone care to look closely.
But, hey. It’s easier to casually dismiss entire philosophical lives with cheap political litmus tests. Never send in schoolmarms and moralists to do a philosopher’s work.
Jim Harrison 08.05.15 at 8:45 pm
Small experiment: see if you can find your old copy of the Genealogy of Morals, the one with the underlinings and now indecipherable marginalia, and read the sentences you didn’t highlight in day glow orange. That way you’ll begin to discover the Nietzschean unconscious, the parts of his thought that nobody hears because they aren’t what they expect, what they’d like to read, or what fits in with the usual narratives of political and philosophical history. (The methodology of the experiment is based on some remarks Nietzsche made in Ecce Homo.)
Corey Robin 08.05.15 at 9:21 pm
Casmilus at 142: “Since France declared war on Prussia, it would be difficult for a German to express a negative view about the war without being outrageously unpatriotic, defeatist or treasonous.”
Um, Nietzsche went considerably beyond that (and remember, he wasn’t living in German-controlled territory then; he was living in Switzerland). From the article I linked to above: “Initially ambivalent about the war, Nietzsche quickly became a partisan of the German cause. ‘It’s about our culture!’ he wrote to his mother. ‘And for that no sacrifice is too great! This damned French tiger.’ He signed up to serve as a medical orderly; Cosima [Wagner] tried to persuade him to stay put in Basel, recommending that he send cigarettes to the front instead. But Nietzsche was adamant. In August 1870, he left for Bavaria with his sister Elisabeth, riding the rails and singing songs. He got his training, headed to the battlefield, and in no time contracted dysentery and diphtheria. He lasted a month.”
Harold 08.05.15 at 9:39 pm
There were leftists who came to Marx via Nietsche, apparently.
Corey Robin 08.05.15 at 9:46 pm
147: I think it’s pretty clear in his later work — I’m on vacation so don’t have any of his books on me, but take a look at the chapter “What is Noble?” (I think that’s what it’s titled) in Beyond Good and Evil — that he continues to believe that social domination, classes of rulers and ruled, are the foundation of cultural and artistic depth. I don’t think his argument is zero-sum, that for some to be great, some must be small. His argument is more interesting than that. It’s that in order for there to be aesthetic and cultural depth in a society, there must be social depth. One cannot create works of aesthetic profundity if there is not social profundity. And the only society he can imagine social profundity in is one where there is tremendous vertical differentiation — the “pathos of distance” — between top and bottom, where the top governs the bottom. Nietzsche’s philosophical parameters change a lot throughout his writing life, but one of the most consistent strains in his writing is this commitment to political domination (there is a brief middle period, around the writing of Human, All Too Human, when he flirts with some democratic sensibilities, as I recall, but that’s brief, all too brief.)
Lee A. Arnold 08.05.15 at 10:54 pm
All of Nietzsche is available free online in many formats at both Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg.
b9n10nt 08.05.15 at 11:59 pm
@ 149.
And his experience as a medic leaves him w PTSD and leads him to “serious doubts as to whether Prussia’s emergence as the preeminent power in continental Europe is good either for Prussia or Europe” -Julian Young _A Philosophical Biography_
Re: “pathos of distance”, it’s interesting to me that, according to Young’s summary of The Birth of Tragedy, the highest aesthetic experience achieves a “collecting” or unifying of the forces within the psyche (rational and a-rational) and without (audience and performer), which then creates a unifying social mythos that gives meaning to the Volk. What is praised is organic unity, not social fragmentation. And as is common to conservative apologia, the top doesn’t only govern but also serves the bottom. However, given his radical break with other aspects of elite domination (Church and State, the accepted delineation of Good and Evil, etc…) we are invited to consider that Nietzche’s vision, to the extent it translated into a contemporary political program, simply doesn’t graft easily onto our normal political discourse.
I say put him in the Religion and Self-help section, and definitely do not file him in Politics, History, or Current Events.
PJW 08.06.15 at 3:09 am
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
john c. halasz 08.06.15 at 6:55 am
Since there are so many adventitious opinions and wrong understandings here IMHO,- (though N. was a past master at cultivating misunderstandings)- I’m not about to try and swim against the tide. I, at least, know roughly how these comment threads work and I’m not expert on anything, (other than my own bowel movements). But an interesting exercise would be to compare the work of Nietzsche with that of C.S. Peirce, since they were both very prescient thinkers and approximate contemporaries and drew on some of the same sources.
Lee A. Arnold 08.06.15 at 11:09 am
Yan #147: “Nietzsche’s politics don’t undermine his philosophical quality… His political sense was ruined by his early influences: romanticism, Schopenhauer, Emerson. By the very end he was only starting to truly outgrow them… The synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx would have happened… It’s easier to casually dismiss entire philosophical lives with cheap political litmus tests.”
Well that covers a lot of ground, but let me take a shot at it.
My own adventitious opinion has always been that “individualism” is really a form of romanticism, so it’s difficult to find anyone in contemporary thought who has outgrown it, or wants to. That’s ALSO my cheap litmus test for clear thinking: We may think we’re post-modern, or even further along the trail of “posts” than that, but no, we’re playing with words — and we ain’t really even post-romantic. It’s also my highly Nietzschean style of trolling, not least, self-trolling. But hey, why not — it’s usually true, and it always works.
Then, there’s the question of how much longer the ruling classes can remain in control of societies. I think this question arose at the very moment that God was found dead, or at least terribly wanting in the brains dept., and the answer is really a question of technology and science, and the ruling class is going to lose, despite its own best efforts — although it’s been a long and horrifying 250 years, I’ll always grant you that.
So then, what remains for Nietzsche, who came along in media res? What defines “Nietzschean”, if we discard aristocracy, the Ãœbermenschen, and eternal recurrence? If we discard this constant peripheral effluvium of the 19th Century (and the 18th, and the 20th), this constant need of almost all the thinkers to define their end goal? Ans.: Extreme unease, and lots of fertile dipolar structuralist-style analyses, leading to more extremely uncomfortable questions. It’s the title-cards coming midway through “Weekend”, advertising it in media res as “a film in the process of making itself” and as “a film lost in the cosmos”. It’s the same thing that is remaindered in Marx, if we discard the ascension into pure communism. So there’s one synthesis: take away their end states, and they’re all the same individual. We haven’t gone beyond them — we are them.
engels 08.06.15 at 11:58 am
https://youtu.be/FujhZoAg2-I
bianca steele 08.06.15 at 12:16 pm
A thought related to something else I’ve been thinking about: Does N. originate the idea that the person who looks stronger, more attractive, more vibrant is the person who should be most respected, in the moral sense?
bianca steele 08.06.15 at 1:18 pm
john halasz @155
There’s something along those lines in Charles Larmore’s “Nietzsche and the Will to Truth” collected in The Autonomy of Morality. (The original is in German.)
Yan 08.06.15 at 3:02 pm
Corey @151
“he continues to believe that social domination, classes of rulers and ruled, are the foundation of cultural and artistic depth…one of the most consistent strains in his writing is this commitment to political domination.”
That was once the common, seemingly obvious view, but as early as Kaufmann, who pointed out that N is much more interested in self-mastery and self-overcoming, spiritual domination rather than political, scholars began to question it. In the last 20 years, it’s become subject to so much criticism, its probably the minority view among Nietzsche experts. The literature is long, but see, for example, H.W. Siemens, David Owen, Alan Schrift, Lawrence Hatab, and Maudemarie Clark.
Indeed, probably the most influential recent work on Nietzsche’s politics, Tamsin’s Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism concludes that he has *no* political philosophy to speak of, much less an aristocratic one commonly attributed to him.
Since the literature is sizable, I’ll give an oversimplified version of the case for rejecting the political/aristocratic/domination reading: in almost every passage supporting it, the context and choice of wording qualifies the claims in a way that suggests cultural elitism, not political elitism, and spiritual power not political power.
Some examples. Beyond Good and Evil 257: “Every enhancement in the type “man” up to this point has been the work of an aristocratic society.” But he specifies that an aristocratic society is one that “believes in a long scale of rank” (believes, not politically enforces) and exhibits the “pathos of distance” (feeling of distance, not actual distance). He says it “needs slavery” but goes out of his way to add “in some sense or another.” The belief in rank doesn’t require continued political inequality but, he’s clear, historically “grows out of it.” The passage is, in his words, a “history of the *origins* of aristocratic society,” not its eternal form, explaining how “every higher culture on earth has *started*,” not how it must remain.
In other words, the passage is about aristocratism of values, spiritual elitism, not an endorsement of political aristocracy.
Or consider 258, where he says that an aristocratic society “with good conscience accepts the sacrifice of an enormous number of people, who for its sake must be oppressed and reduced to incomplete men, slaves, and instruments of work.” Surely this is a political claim, right? The slaves and instruments he refers to are a political underclass?
Well, in one sense, yes: the political underclass of incomplete men that’s perfectly compatible with non-aristocratic, pseudo-democratic societies like our own. How many people have been reduced to instruments for people like you and I to enjoy white collar middle class life?
But ultimately, no. It’s not about politics. Who is he referring to? In the same book, he gives a specific example: you and me, people on blogs like this one. One form of reduction of subhumans necessary to support aristocratic culture is academics, the production of scholarly oxen: “It may be that the education of a real philosopher requires that he himself has stood for a while on all of those steps where his servants, the scientific labourers in philosophy, remain – and must remain.”
Yan 08.06.15 at 3:26 pm
Lee @156
Nietzsche’s mature work is characterized precisely by his turn *against* both romanticism and individualism (and if he’d live long enough, he’d definitely be anti-postmodernist). To be sure, since his early work is steeped in them, he doesn’t completely free himself. But I do think his late work is in spirit and in goal accurately described as an attack above all on individualism, and with it romanticism. He was well on his way to surmounting his individualist roots, at least.
This has been lost largely thanks to his influence on the existentialists, which led to many reading him retroactively as an existentialist (Kaufmann, for example). But the primary critical target of the late work is the self, the ego, agency, and free will. There are no individuals for the late Nietzsche, so he cannot be celebrating individuals.
“What defines ‘Nietzschean’, if we discard aristocracy, the Ãœbermenschen, and eternal recurrence?”
Well, the overman and eternal return are really only found in a few brief passages, mostly only in Zarathustra, so they never should have defined it. But I don’t think we can discard aristocratism, we just have to recognize Nietzsche isn’t interested in political aristocracy except in its *past* historical role in creating spiritual aristocratism, a cultural aristocracy of values. In the present, that political origin is no longer necessary and even a hindrance. (For example, to the degree that an economic elite runs our democracy, it promotes not cultural excellence but the death of culture.)
Some characteristic passages from Twilight of the Idols:
Reason in Philosophy 5 (so long, romanticism!):
“Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.”
Four Great Errors 8 (so much for the “overman”!):
“The fatality of his existence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. No one is the result of his own intention, his own will or purpose; no one is part of an experiment to achieve an “ideal person” or an “ideal of happiness” or an “ideal of morality.” It is absurd to wish to devolve one’s essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of “end”: in reality there is no end…There is nothing apart from the whole!”
And one of my favorite shockers, in praise of Goethe:
“Goethe was a convinced realist…such a liberated spirit stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, with faith in the fact that only what is individual is reprehensible, that everything is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he no longer denies.”
Yan 08.06.15 at 3:32 pm
Jim @148:
” you’ll begin to discover the Nietzschean unconscious, the parts of his thought that nobody hears because they aren’t what they expect, what they’d like to read, or what fits in with the usual narratives of political and philosophical history.”
Agreed, the Genealogy is one of the most surprising texts when you force yourself to read it against the grain of your expectations. Though I wouldn’t call it the Nietzschean “unconscious,” since I think Nietzsche very intentionally wrote it that way: intentionally making it say what we don’t expect it to say, and intentionally doing it in a way that traps us into reading too much into it.
If anything the Genealogy reveals *our* unconscious, because we’re so quick and insistent on it saying horrible things we then condemn!
My favorite thing about it is that if you look carefully, he has painstakingly avoided all normative language. In the letter of the text, it’s pure description, never actually endorsing or condemning! Yet it reads like a rant and is subtitled “a polemic”!
Corey Robin 08.06.15 at 4:02 pm
Yan: I think the confusion here lies in what we mean by politics. Nietzsche, we can all agree, was contemptuous of how politics had come to be practiced, the narrow instrumentalism of the state securing the interests of the bourgeoisie. That was part of his great disappointment with Bismarck. However, Nietzsche was in fact quite taken with the idea of “great politics.” Now what he meant by that is tricky, but I think a critical component of great politics was for him the act of founding (Machiavelli he says somewhere is “perfection in politics” or something like that; in part b/c Machiavelli was a theoretician of the founder as the creator of new horizons, of new modes and orders), particularly the founding of new values. In Ecce Homo, written nearly at the end of his sane life, he writes — a propos of why he is a destiny — “Only since I came on the scene has there been great politics on this earth.” Again, what he’s doing — as so many great political theorists do — is to recast the scene and setting of where power and politics happens. For Marx, it was in the capitalist economy; for Nietzsche, it was in the cultural realm. But to assume that that cultural realm involved no traditional apparatus of politics — no violence, no power, no rule — is to divest Nietzsche of all his emphasis on the delicate interdependence of power and culture. His concern is that as political dominion is challenged by all the forces of egalitarianism in modern society, the basis for cultural depth is undermined. That basis must be created in a new key, by creating a new aristocracy with a new title to rule. The creator of that aristocracy and its underlying schemes of value: he is a great political actor.
We’re all aware of Kaufmann’s critique. It’s undergone many challenges. And there other contemporary scholars like Bruce Detwiler or Don Dombowsky who offer
more political interpretations in line with my own.
Plume 08.06.15 at 4:32 pm
Corey @163,
I think you’re correct in breaking it down along those lines. The cultural is the heart of Nietzsche’s critique. His revulsion at the thought of the Louvre being endangered by the Communards is a great example of that. He wasn’t necessarily appalled at the idea of of them controlling the city, per se, if I read you correctly. It was the threat of annihilation of cultural monuments that shook him up. As Kristin Ross explains, the news from Paris was so incredibly censored, he couldn’t have known how important “culture” was to the Communards. If he had, he may well have backed them. They seemed to place a far greater (and more inclusive) value on the Arts and intellectual pursuits than the Versailles crowd, or pretty much any previous French governments. And, of course, many a great French artist was either an active member, a supporter or an exile once the slaughter took place.
Ironically (and logically), the elevation of Arts and Letters went hand in hand with the elevation of participatory democracy. I haven’t read Hatab’s book for well over a decade, but seem to remember him making the case for democracy on similar grounds. That Nietzsche should have supported democracy for a host of reasons, one of them being the elevation and expansion of culture.
In short, I think Nietzsche’s idea of “great politics” was all about making great culture. It was never about physical empire, but a sort of European union of the Arts, etc. Being a “good European” for him was international, cosmopolitan, without borders. That Nietzsche syncs with my own views, though I would rather see a borderless Republic of the Arts/Letters.
William Berry 08.06.15 at 4:42 pm
@Yan: “But he specifies that an aristocratic society is one that “believes in a long scale of rank†(believes, not politically enforces) . . .”
Way to tip the old hand there!
What a society “believes” are known as its cultural norms. Cultural norms are, well, you know, enforced.
So, yes; that is a distinctly political statement.
Apologetics for N’s elitist authoritarianism are so goddamned tiresome.
I suppose it isn’t ironic, really, that many of N’s admirers like him for precisely that proudly unapologetic elitist* tendency.
*Which, again, whether one likes it or not, translates, in all times and all places, to politics.
Yan 08.06.15 at 5:11 pm
Corey, I think I can–apart from quibbles over a word or two–agree with everything you say in that post.
But it feels like a bait and switch: your post is not, in spirit, the same more overtly political/aristocratic reading that you and others have endorsed above. Your post’s interpretation has a degree of care, complexity, and nuance that, for example, your Nation article did not. So it seems to be two similar views of differing degrees, allowing you to switch to the more defensible one as necessary.
In any case, I don’t think most of the people above interpreting Nietzsche as a political aristocrat mean, as Nietzsche does and you point out, “the founding of new values.” And while Nietzsche surely doesn’t divorce cultural and political power, and doesn’t exclude the possibility of using political means to promote such values (surprisingly, he doesn’t even exclude the positive use of the church to do it!), that he is not anti-political doesn’t prove that he’s in any strong sense political.
I mentioned Kaufmann only for scale. All of the other people I mention have written about this in the last 10-15 years. I’d strongly recommend looking them up.
A good starting place is this 2002 issue of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_nietzsche_studies/toc/nie24.1.html.
And this 2008 collection: http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/176017.
Maudemarie Clark also has a brand new book on Nietzsche and politics, which I haven’t read yet, but I’m sure also talks about this. Her article “N’s Anti-Democratic Rhetoric” is also an important one: http://philpapers.org/rec/CLANAR
Detwiler’s book is 25 years old, and very view people agree with him. If we’re going back that far, I think Mark Warren’s book on N’s politics is far superior.
Domboswky’s a great guy, but his views are iconoclastic, to say the least. Both examples support the point that your view is the minority one among the experts.
On “great politics”, I highly recommend H.W. (Herman) Siemens’ article, “Umwertung”: http://philpapers.org/rec/SIEUNW.
His article “N’s Critique of Democracy” is also excellent: http://philpapers.org/rec/SIENCO
Note that the key passage on “great politics” in Ecce Homo connects it to “geisterkrieg”–politics is “great” precisely to the degree it is about spirit, not about physical power.
Yan 08.06.15 at 5:24 pm
William @165,
I could be wrong, but I’m telling you that this is the dominant view among Nietzsche scholars, and it’s a view based in very careful, close analyses of all of his texts taken as a developing historical whole. You might have the humility to at least treat it as serious opposing point of view, rather than casually dismissing it as apologetics.
“What a society “believes†are known as its cultural norms. Cultural norms are, well, you know, enforced.”
But surely you agree there’s a difference between political and non-political forms of “enforcement”! Which salad fork you use isn’t “politics”–or not “politics” in the same sense as whether your government is a monarchy, right?
The whole point here, as Corey’s post makes clear, is that the disagreement is about *degree*. The fascist reading reads Nietzsche as political to a high degree, the dominant view of the last 10 years of experts is that he is political to a very low degree.
If you equate “morality”, “values”, and “politics”, then yes, he’s political. But you can’t then use that to read him as a proto-fascist or arch-conservative, because, funny, they tend to exhibit less attenuated forms of “politics.”
geo 08.06.15 at 6:44 pm
An erudite and exhilarating thread. Does anything remotely resembling a policy follow from Nietzsche’s beliefs, on any interpretation of them? If there were an Ubermensch Party, what would its program be? (Besides, of course, outlawing cruelty to animals.)
Yan 08.06.15 at 7:39 pm
Corey @163,
I’ve replied but for some reason my post still hasn’t gone through moderation…
William Berry 08.06.15 at 8:42 pm
@Yan:
Well, I’ll just say that (as a Marxian, of sorts) my idea of politics might be a good deal more expansive than yours, and I’ll just leave it there.
b9n10nt 08.06.15 at 10:43 pm
@ geo: does Bayreuth count?
Corey Robin 08.07.15 at 3:31 am
Yan at 166: “Your view is the minority one among the experts.”
Wouldn’t be the first time. Needless to say, not a terribly interesting argument, to my mind, against my position.
Yan 08.07.15 at 4:38 am
Corey,
Of course I didn’t claim that was an argument. I pointed it out simply to emphasize that your position is controversial and can’t be treated, as many in the thread have treated it, as obvious and not in need of examination or defense. I think that’s a perfectly fair and necessary point to make, especially when historically that interpretation was taken for granted as too obvious to defend for so very long.
I did offer some brief arguments–oversimplified as I admitted–which I don’t think you’ve fully engaged or answered, and I did offer many suggestions of good Nietzsche scholars, collections, and articles that offer plenty of “interesting” arguments. So, if you’re sincerely interested in interesting arguments, I hope you’ll have a look at them. Nietzsche is large. He contains multitudes, not all of them enemies. It’s a shame to deprive yourself of many of them.
William @170,
As a whole-hearted Marxian myself, I draw a very strong line between morality and politics. Morality deals with imaginary causes and effects, politics deals with real ones. That’s why I’m not frightened of Nietzsche’s aristocratic values. Read the Genealogy with a Marxian eye, and not reading into the normative language he tries to trick us into (“Go nobles! Bad slaves!”), and you’ll be surprised how closely it mirrors historical materialism. Ideas don’t create moralities, social conditions do. And moralities don’t create politics, but the reverse.
john c. halasz 08.07.15 at 5:34 am
O.K. I will enter the lists with the full force of my ignorance. Keep in mind that I read Nietzsche mostly maybe 30 years ago (in English translation, of course), and I’ve never been a fan-boy and I only read a selection, – (I never bothered with “Zarathustra” and IMHO “The Gay Science” is his best, most balanced work, after which he becomes too exacerbated and vitriolic),- and I haven’t keep up with the academic scholarship, (since why would I?).
But this is pure Kant:
“Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.†Everywhere “being†is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.â€
Which is how I tend to frame an understanding of Nietzsche, with his scatter-shot style. The “death of God” isn’t just about the declining credibility of religious belief/tradition, which was an intellectual commonplace by the time N. was born. It’s about the forms of unity that the ego imposes upon the world, assumed within a post-Kantian framework, for which “God” is the ultimate term.
Nietzsche’s basic move was to reduce all Kantian judgments to judgments of taste. (This is a deeply problematical move, since once one removes the “rational” infrastructure that can distinguish between different forms of judgment, whereby aesthetic judgments can be differentiated and recognized as supportable, though not definitively decidable, then it becomes effectively impossible to distinguish between “good” and “bad” taste, and one might end up endorsing the latter).
But once that move is made, an interesting perspective results, not just mere aestheticism, but a generalization of aestheticism to the world at large. That is part of why N. styled himself an “immoralist”, rather than just, as was fashionable, an amoral aesthete. He meant to lend to his generalized aestheticism an ethical import. But more importantly, it enabled him to forge a completely novel mode of parodic critique. Since parody is mimetic, reproducing its “object”, before it is anything else at all, N.’s tone and irony is often hard to pin down, inviting the very “objections” that it is highlighting and exposing. (This is part of the reason why attempting to construe N. as a systematic thinker is so wrong-headed. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity” or some such quote. Of course, since its ancient Greek inception, philosophical thinking has always had a quasi-systematic implicature, otherwise what’s the point? But equally, it has always had an aporetic character. And N. is an originator of a systematic critique of systematic thinking, which itself emerged as a requirement only in the 18th century. Again he is parodying any such notion).
So the correlations are plain: the “will-to-power” = transcendental synthesis, (however aestheticized), the “Uebermensch” = the transcendental ego, and “eternal recurrence” = the categorical imperative gone haywire. That “man must be overcome” in the Uebermensch is actually the plain implication of the attainment objectivity and (noumenal) morality via the imposition of the transcendental ego over the empirical one, (with its “pathological” motives). At once a logical implication and a parody of Kantian “Reason”. N. was specializing in all those half-truths that the four-square Kantian conception was suppressing or repressing. Hence the polemical, ad homimen cast of his thinking. (And as Oliver W. Holmes Jr. once remarked, a half-truth is like half-a-brick: one can throw it farther). What’s more, the biologism/historicism/psychologism that N. draws on, as post-Kantian developments in modern scientific understandings precisely are those elements that couldn’t be integrated into the Kantian conception of science/causality. (Hence N. speaks of the “cause finding superstition”).
One last point with respect to Kant. If one digs into Kant, where the forms of intuition and categories of understanding must be synthesized with the sensuous manifold to produce an orderly intelligible experience of the world, one comes to see that the possibility of chaos, of the sensuous overwhelming the intelligible, amounts to his deepest fear, even dread. Hence when N. counsels “embracing the chaos within”, an ethics of self-mastery, he’s almost directly addressing Kant, while imitating him as well..
Mind, I’m not saying that that’s all there is to Nietzsche or that I’m providing any exhaustive interpretation. Just a useful framework for corralling his far-flung utterances. (Specifically, one might want to look into his substitution of logical contradiction/opposition with tropes of tension/conflict).
Now to get to the “political” stuff. I think it’s bootless to read those “pronouncements” about great future upheavals, warring spirits, great politics, und so weiter, without tying them to the basic “prophesy” about “European nihilism”. (It’s the “uncanniest of guests” because it won’t go away. Henceforth it would always accompany our projective constructions as a permanent possibility, as not a “transvaluation of values”, but as the collapse of values). Now I personally think that N.’s contrast between reactive and active nihilism suffers from something of the same aporetic problem as that between good and bad taste. But objections to N.’s “aristocraticism”, “elitism”, “ultra-individualism”, and “demand for hierarchy” are mis-construals. Obviously, N. doesn’t think that the demands of self-mastery in the coming times of upheaval could be met by most human beings. But that would apply to traditional elites or aristocrats just as much as the “common run”. And, of course, the “power” that is exhalted is creative capacity (in the face of adversity), which most people will lack in varying degrees. “Rank order” refers less to social hierarchies than to the creation of new values, (though N. might have thought social hierarchies of various sorts an enabling condition). But most of all, what is the stance of N. towards his own work and utterance? “Master morality” and “slave morality”aren’t separate syndromes. Rather they are cross-implicated and mutually undermining. (Read those passages of mock-admiration for the will-to-power of priests). And N. is completely alert to the cross-dependency between culture and social power (or barbarism). Is his position an exposure of social domination or an endorsement of it? I think he subtlely stands aside the issue. Is he a reactionary, counter-Enlightenment thinker, as Corey Robins would wish, or is he enlightening about the “mechanisms” of social domination, including those promulgated by the Enlightenment itself? Is N. an ultra-individualistic elitist who slanders democratic egalitarianism or is he a critic of the fake individualism of the “last man”, which leaves most people invalids, half-formed beings, prone to worshiping power?
Y’all be the judge. I’ve just laid a shit-pile here.
Corey Robin 08.07.15 at 5:41 am
“especially when historically that interpretation was taken for granted as too obvious to defend for so very long.”
Actually, my position on Nietzsche was not *historically* taken for granted. It was perhaps the dominant position for a very brief period around World War II (Craine Brinton’s book was the exemplar, and it was published in 1942.) Prior to the advent of Nazism, there was lots of interest in and celebration of Nietzsche by anarchists and socialists in Europe and the States that didn’t emphasize these political aristocratic dimensions of N at all. In any event, I’d say the Nietzsche-as-ultra-conservative interpretation only dominated from about 1940 to 1950, when Kaufmann’s book came out. Since then, it has been your position — Nietzsche as apolitical or anti-political (which has taken a wide variety of forms) — that has been the conventional wisdom.
I haven’t engaged with your position because I so completely read the texts differently from you that there doesn’t seem much point. I’ll just take the quickest example. You focus on the first paragraph in the chapter What is Noble? in BGE. You say that when he claims aristocratic societies “believe” in a long scale of rank that means they aren’t about politically enforcing that scale. I don’t read it that way at all: he’s talking about the deepest ideological commitment to rank, a commitment that he believes is demonstrated by action, not mere words. That action is political enforcement (that’s why he is so critical of the French aristocracy on the eve of the Revolution in the next couple of paragraphs; they had grown “corrupt,” he says, because they had “abdicated their lordly privileges.” Their cession of rule, to becoming a mere function of the monarchy, was indicative of their flagging belief in themselves and their rule as the ultimate signification of that society. Their actions, in other words, demonstrated their beliefs. Beliefs are expressed via action.)
You say, the “pathos of distance†is about a “feeling of distance, not actual distance.” Yet in the very passage where he introduces that phrase, this is what he says: “Without the PATHOS OF DISTANCE, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance—that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type “man,” the continued “self-surmounting of man,” to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense.”
I think it’s first of all very clear that the pathos of distance is, for Nietzsche, a moral or cultural reflection of actual social distance, of relations of domination and rule. I know you want to say it’s a social distance that existed in the past, but I see no warrant for that claim. He is saying that the pathos of distance depends upon social distance, actual distance, and that the more mysterious distance within the self — the search for higher, rarer, more comprehensive states — could not arise without that pathos of distance. In recent times, he says, that more mysterious distance has dwindled, as has the pathos of distance. Why? Because the material relations of mastery — of aristocratic and lordly rule — have dwindled. If the aristocracy as political form were merely a theory of origins, and not also an account of present reality, you wouldn’t expect to see the dwindling of spiritual aristocracy once the political form has disappeared. But N says the two go together. Because he sees a causal, material relationship between the two.
When you’re responding to me, you oddly want to claim, against my interpretation, a radical separation in Nietzsche between thought and deed, culture and power, spiritual and material, claiming that he’s interested only in “spiritual” matters, apart from politics and power. But then in response to other commenters you want to claim that Nietzsche believes that “ideas don’t create moralities, social conditions do. And moralities don’t create politics, but the reverse.” So which is it?
This is just a small example of how differently we read the texts. I don’t see much warrant, as I say, for your interpretations. What’s more, I think they’re contradicted by other assertions you make elsewhere.
Just in case you were wondering why I haven’t taken too much time to engage with what you’ve said.
Oh, and I guess I don’t take too kindly to being patronized with admonitions to read a literature that I’m more than familiar with or cliches about Nietzsche containing multitudes. Or to unsubstantiated assertions that I’m engaged in a strategic bait and switch (my Nation piece makes it quite clear that I think of Nietzsche as a believer in political actors as founders of new values — that’s the whole point of my connection to Hayek).
john c. halasz 08.07.15 at 5:49 am
Oh, one last point I forget to mention. All that talk in Nietzsche about “command and obedience”. Is that just an endorsement of the status quo or is he just training dogs? Or is he highlighting a basic issue that cuts across domains? Gregory Bateson remarked that every statement is at once a report and a command. (That might be an inadequate formulation for a number of reasons, but the basic intuition is correct). So what is the basis of “authority”? Consult your super-ego, or your neighborhood psychic or your psychotherapist, or do whatever you want.
bianca steele 08.07.15 at 12:17 pm
there was lots of interest in and celebration of Nietzsche by anarchists and socialists
The same probably true of Mencken.
Yan 08.07.15 at 3:20 pm
“You say, the “pathos of distance†is about a “feeling of distance, not actual distance.†Yet in the very passage where he introduces that phrase, this is what he says:”
As I emphasized, he’s telling a historical narrative, so, yes, it *begins* with and *out of* actual distance. But his language is very clear that he’s describing the early stage, the *origin.* My point was that we have to distinguish the descriptive and normative elements of the passage. The descriptive part tells a history: a happened (political rank), causing b (feeling of distance toward others), leading to c (feeling of distance to oneself, self-overcoming, spiritual power as self-mastery).
The normative element is very clear: he favors c. That doesn’t mean he is endorsing the whole history. Indeed, in a number of places he makes clear that this history (like that of the nobles overthrow by the slave) is irreversible, whether we like it or not.
“When you’re responding to me, you oddly want to claim, against my interpretation, a radical separation in Nietzsche between thought and deed, culture and power, spiritual and material, claiming that he’s interested only in “spiritual†matters, apart from politics and power.”
No, I said: “Though Nietzsche surely doesn’t divorce cultural and political power, and doesn’t exclude the possibility of using political means to promote such values.”
“your position — Nietzsche as apolitical or anti-political”
No, I said: “that he is not anti-political doesn’t prove that he’s in any strong sense political.”
“Just in case you were wondering why I haven’t taken too much time to engage with what you’ve said.”
Got it. Don’t engage views that are obviously wrong because they’re obviously wrong. Then faux-kindly condescendingly call this “reading texts differently” rather than disagreeing about what the texts mean. I see why you’re in poli sci, not philosophy.
“Oh, and I guess I don’t take too kindly to being patronized with admonitions to read a literature that I’m more than familiar with or cliches about Nietzsche containing multitudes.”
Not meant to patronize or imply you don’t know the literature in general, but to direct your attention to the specific bits of the literature that challenge what you’ve said, in case you were unfamiliar with some particular authors or works, or had reasons for not discussing them. None of us know absolutely all the literature, after all.
On the other hand, it seems patronizing to the many scholars I’ve mentioned that you pronounce authoritatively on their territory while not acknowledging their work to the contrary and, even when I raise the topic of their work, not acknowledging, discussing, or showing any curiosity about them. When students ask me why philosophers disregard Ayn Rand or Sam Harris, my answer is: because they mostly disregard us.
Perhaps we not only reads text differently, but have completely different views about argumentation. So I suppose I should follow your example and disengage.
I do think you’re missing out though, in taking such a strong political line and reading Nietzsche through it. I enjoy his work so much, and see so much potential ammunition for leftist thought, that I want to share it and promote and defend it so others can enjoy mining his undiscovered depths, too. I don’t think that’s patronizing.
Yan 08.07.15 at 4:19 pm
geo @168
“Does anything remotely resembling a policy follow from Nietzsche’s beliefs, on any interpretation of them? If there were an Ubermensch Party, what would its program be? (Besides, of course, outlawing cruelty to animals.)”
I suspect not. Maybe the first rule of übermensch club is that there is no übermensch club. If we try to specify the content of Nietzsche’s values, they’re vague and amorphous enough to be mean anything, and so are pretty empty: be courageous, intellectually honest, be noble, affirm existence and fate, be war-loving, provided it’s with equal opponents, avoid too much pity, and so on.
I doubt he’d outlaw animal cruelty. True, Nietzsche was deeply sensitive to human and animal suffering, but he saw this as a failing, as an obstacle to his life’s work. In that sense, it’s fitting that his dramatic surrender to his sense of compassion, the Turin horse, coincided with the end of his writing life. He seems to think affirming suffering on a very primary, insurmountable level, as essentially part of organic life, is important–to affirm life as “tragic”. So I suspect he’d see the concern for animal suffering not as wrong per se, but as symptomatic of an inability to affirm life completely, to accept its essential nature.
I think Nietzsche’s program has to do more with form rather than content, and it’s primarily negative rather than positive. He doesn’t care what values we have, but whether those values are primarily based in self-affirmation rather than other-negation, aimed at the enhancement of a form of life rather than at the diminishing of some other form of life.
It’s possible, maybe even common, for people who hold identical values in content to have different forms of value, because they hold them for different reasons. To take an example of religious values, someone might believe in an afterlife out of despair for this one, resentment of the superior happiness of others, while another might believe in an afterlife out of excess happiness and gratitude. The same belief and the value attached to it would be slavish in form in one case, noble in the other.
Clearly that would make a normative policy, which specifies content, specific moral rules, values, laws, etc, more difficult, since the same value could be good or bad depending on who holds it and how it’s held.
But, and here is where his interest in values doesn’t exclude an interest in politics, we might imagine Nietzsche trying to determine which political and cultural conditions are most likely to produce the right form of values, making that a political program. This is where Nietzsche flirts with the strong political reading, nostalgically wishing for a politically unified aristocratic Europe. But for the most part he treats this as fantasy, an impossible reversal of history (“forward into decadence” is his motto).
He doesn’t solve this: his recommendations are negative. If we get rid of slavish values, we cultivate noble types. But he has the resources to solve it.
First, consider that he suggests that the post-aristocratic instability of power in democratic Europe is conducive to better human types, comparing it to hothouse plants struggling with each other to climb higher into the light (see Hatab’s book for this potential). So, a case can be made that he has philosophical reasons, unrecognized, for celebrating the end of aristocratic politics as a condition for noble types and values.
Second, since the hothouse plants analogy could lead to a neoliberal program, remember that in reality such conditions always devolve into rigid power hierarchies. Then look to the Genealogy. In its simplest form it says: every people initially creates a self-affirming noble morality, the collision of peoples creates domination and radical inequality, causing the creation of slavish values, which are structured around the abolition of noble values.
Now, doesn’t that tell us very clearly what the conditions for a program for eliminating slavish values is? The program, which Nietzsche would never want to acknowledge, is simply: the elimination of domination and radical inequality.
Is it an accident that Nietzsche’s primary target is Marx’s opiate of the people?
Yan 08.07.15 at 4:45 pm
b9n10nt @171
“does Bayreuth count?”
Only for the early Nietzsche, long before he wrote two books against Wagner. I suspect you could derive some sort of political program from “Schopenhauer as Educator.”
geo 08.07.15 at 6:48 pm
Yan @179: Now, doesn’t that tell us very clearly what the conditions for a program for eliminating slavish values is? The program, which Nietzsche would never want to acknowledge, is simply: the elimination of domination and radical inequality.
This should win the 2015 Holbothustra Prize for outrageously ingenious interpretations of Nietzsche. I like it.
Could it be, then, that the best literary instantiation so far of Nietzsche’s ideal is William Morris’s News from Nowhere? No domination, no radical inequality, no bureaucracy, no greed, no drudgery, no ugliness, no ostentation, no repression, no shame. Plenty of unavoidable pain and suffering, disappointed ambition and unrequited love, but no taint of the ignoble anywhere.
b9n10nt 08.07.15 at 8:01 pm
@180
…but Bayreuth in a more abstract sense? I.e. does N. ever repudiate (rather than turn his focus from) his promotion of a unifying aesthetic experience that forges, for a people, a life-affirming myth?
[side issue] Isn’t the “What Would X Do?” question a relic of an age that believed in egoic essentialism? Maybe it’s rather boorish to go around saying “there was no Nietzche. And even “his” arguments and ideas have a specific social context that make any supposed timeless engagement with them suspect”. Boorish, but basically correct, and this helps us be honest about what we’re trying to achieve (rather than hiding being a flattering dogmatism of truth-telling).
geo 08.07.15 at 10:13 pm
b9: Not boorish; on the contrary, hyper-sophisticated. And not “basically correct,” but correct at the outer limits. “Egoic essentialism,” like Newtonian physics, is “basically correct,” i.e., correct to a great many decimal places. For all practical purposes, not requiring near-infinite precision, it makes just as good sense to ask “What would George Eliot have done?” or “What would John Stuart Mill have done?” or “What would D.H. Lawrence have done?” as it does to use classical physics to build a house.
john c. halasz 08.08.15 at 1:07 am
Somebody should write an essay: “The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche”. (I mean, now that s/he is a thoroughly tamed and domesticated animal, academically speaking, rather than a feral species).
b9n10nt 08.08.15 at 1:34 am
@ 183
Can we recognize a pattern of an individual’s artistic program that presents itself as intuitively true? Yes, but how real is it.? Can we predict from it? I think we are likely to overlook countervailing moments, explain away divergent drives supporting similar arguments and expressions, and overlay a presupposition of progress (late N. was the “real”, “culminating” N., for instance)
At a moment of inspiration and a culmination of intense study, Stravinsky is a revolutionary. He would have needed to create something, today, that didn’t exist and scandalized his predecessors. He would be a Phillip Glass circa 1965. But at another moment, he’s writing film scores. He would be Neil Diamond circa 1975.
Now, you’re physics analogy is illuminating. Certain personality traits are deeply embedded and, minus a Phineas Gage-like trauma, we can predict from them. Nietzche would not today be in retail. But in the realm of imaginative world-building?
If there was not something vital or necessary about the political implications of N’s recurring philosophy, we have to keep to the null hypothesis: it’s unclear. We’re in the realm of “extraordinary claims require…” Thus Cory Robin’s argument about N is suspect.
Yuck…I’m confusing N as person and N as philosophy here in the argument I think, but what-the-heck-I’m-pressing subm…
js. 08.08.15 at 5:03 am
Oh hey! A whole Godard discussion happened here and I missed it! To clear up matters: LAA is right that Weekend and 2 or 3 Things are not well described as part of JLG’s Maoist phase. Le Gai Savoir probably, Tout Va Bien, One Plus One, etc. definitely—but mostly, The “Maoist phase” is post-Weekend.
Still, I’m not getting why Weekend or 2 or 3 Things would be described as Nietzschean. I mean, I guess anything can get described as “Nietzschean”, but if I had to pick a 60s Godard film (and we’re very much in the land of tenuous connections here), I would probably go with Breathless or A Band Apart—a lot more fun and playful, less angry or nihilistic or whatever than Weekend, and less umm… theoretical(?) than 2 or 3 Things.
Harold 08.08.15 at 5:29 am
Don’t forget Edward G. Robinson, spectacularly miscast as Jack London’s blond, handsome, a-moral Norwegian would-be superman Wolf Larsen in the Hollywood film of “The Sea Wolf” (1941). The novel is said to have been expressly written in opposition to Nietzsche, but I don’t know …
Interestingly, there was a German TV mini-series of the novel in 1972, not an East German production as far as I can tell, though London, who reads better in translation probably, was very popular in the Soviet Union.
Harold 08.08.15 at 2:34 pm
The murderers Leopold and Loeb adopted what they understood to be “Nietzsche’s philosophy” (mixed with Herbert Spencer and Darwin), having learned about it from reading Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, which they construed as a celebration rather than an attack. Jack London himself was known to his friends by the nickname Wolf and had wolf memorabilia all over his house perhaps this was a reflection of Call of the Wild as much as his fictional creation of captain Wolf “man is a wolf to man” Larsen.
Harold 08.08.15 at 2:40 pm
Rockwell Kent thought Nietzsche didn’t go far enough:
bianca steele 08.08.15 at 2:54 pm
@188
There’s a portrait of London in Joyce Carol Oates’ novel The Accursed that, if accurate, would raise questions about how critical London’ version of N. is likely to be. On the other hand the narrator is so unreliable that it probably isn’t accurate, though it’s interesting.
William Berry 08.08.15 at 3:54 pm
“Nietz[s]che would not today be in retail.”
In this economy, he wouldn’t?
I can’t see him getting a job as a professor of classical philology; I can, with a little effort, picture him as a Wal-Mart stock-boy or a T.J. Maxx clerk.
b9n10nt 08.08.15 at 5:08 pm
Nah. If N.worked behind the register he’d be fired once the townies learned they could take advantage of The Eternal Return.
bob mcmanus 08.08.15 at 5:31 pm
186: Aren’t we forgetting one of my favorites: La Chinoise? Which as far as I can tell was made before Weekend
In any case, I think the at least implicit commitment to radical politics shows up in the work of 1967 (segment:Far From Vietnam) and just becomes explicit as an abandonment of mainstream movie making in 1968 and DV. I would say Made in USA and Pierrot la Fou show tendencies toward left radicalism.
I shouldn’t have to grab a biography to find the critical turning point at which JG becomes really really left.
(PS: This could be more interesting, the Deleuze book on Nietzsche came out in 1962, was far from obscure, and supports a more left reading of Nietzsche and a more Maoist form of Marxism. At a time when (after?) the French communists were splitting over Algeria, etc. Althusser’s two books, crypto-Maoist, came out in 1965.
I have no good idea how involved Godard was, or what he read.)
Yan 08.08.15 at 5:41 pm
“I can, with a little effort, picture him as a Wal-Mart stock-boy or a T.J. Maxx clerk.”
I like to imagine him working at Hot Topic.
” the Deleuze book on Nietzsche came out in 1962, was far from obscure, and supports a more left reading of Nietzsche and a more Maoist form of Marxism.”
Godard always struck me as the kind of guy who’d stay abreast of any fashionable intellectual and artistic currents, and I’ve always had the impression that Nietzsche was pretty fashionable in France in the late 60s. Doesn’t either Deleuze or Foucault say somewhere that in those days the holy trinity was Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche? So I’d be surprised if Godard hadn’t absorbed some Nietzsche.
La Chinoise, by the way: so great.
And that Mao-mao song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72mi6yWpoYA
Yan 08.08.15 at 5:46 pm
Also, Barbara Stanwyck, I love you. But did you have to promote the fascist reading of Will to Power in Babyface?
js. 08.08.15 at 5:51 pm
Agreed. La Chinoise is great, and it’s actually why I thought to add “mostly” in “but mostly, The “Maoist phase†is post-Weekend.” The standard line is that the Maoist phase is post-Weekend (unqualifiedly), but La Chinoise should probably be counted, and it might be the best of that lot, though I also really really like Tout Va Bien.
To be clear, I am not making a point about Godard’s biography, and I think you’re right that left-radicalism shows up in his work prior to ’68. This is just a point about how the films are generally classified, and with some justification. “The Maoist phase” signals a radical break in the style of filmmaking just as much as it does an explicit embrace of a certain politics.
Harold 08.08.15 at 5:54 pm
Be all that you can be!
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