5
José Daniel Parra
Introduction
Nietzsche’s philosophy seeks to shape the future.1 It is a way of confronting the nihilistic historical impulse in contemporary Western culture, resulting from the desacralization of Judeo-Christian metaphysics at the hands of its progeny, modern science. It is “post-Abrahamic” for it encompasses a critique of monotheism in its different manifestations, presenting the notion of “eternal recurrence” as a form of overcoming the “spirit of revenge.” It is also a rejection of Hegel’s notion of the end of history as a final dialectical synthesis where Spirit has come to complete self-consciousness and man has reconciled himself with the rational, modern-state, in the best of possible worlds. On the contrary, Nietzsche claims the Hegelian end of history leads to cultural decadence which he depicts with the image of the “last man.” Nietzsche envisions a physicianship of culture that would procure the approximation of philosophical insight and political praxis by reshaping Platonic paideia.
Nietzsche attempts to induce modern libre penseurs to be skeptical of their skepticism.2 Nietzsche’s teaching is an enticement to self-examination, personal development, and spiritual self-overcoming. It is addressed to “free spirits”—“good Europeans” with the “will to free will”3 to shape and cultivate themselves, to form a new nobility that leads a life of experimentation, compassion, and care for the world that makes our existence possible. Nietzsche is not a philosopher of history because history is not over—rather, Nietzsche attempts to propose a historical prelude to a philosophy of the future. It is the task of free spirits to understand their historical condition and begin to give shape and substance to a world that, as yet, has no name.4
Beyond Platonism
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is a deconstructive, “No-saying, No-doing” work5 that deals with the nearest, the “timely.” It is a polemic, a fishhook meant to entice and challenge modern readers, skeptics suffering from “the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness.”6 This is a result of the overwhelming success of Platonism (i.e., the doctrinal, nonironic interpretation of Plato’s writings) in our spiritual history, becoming a popular prejudice through Christian doctrine.7 Platonism is a sophistic belief in a dualistic conception of reality. Nietzsche’s observation is that this cultural dichotomy has been in-bred into human beings in Western culture, providing them with a spiritual line of self-development (a what for, a purpose) at the expense of the “real.” Furthermore, not only Christianity but also Judaism and Islam, the two other Abrahamic monotheistic faiths can be conceived as theological manifestations of Platonism for the people.8 Their two-world distinction, Nietzsche claims, has been crafted and sociologically in-bred for the sake of consolation and political control of “masses” of human beings, making sense of their experience of injustice as results of Providential will that promises to provide atonement and retribution in the Messianic future or in the eschatological beyond.9
For Nietzsche the Judeo-Christian will to truth—or the ascetic cultivation of the virtue of honesty on the basis of this version of monotheistic cosmology— is the precursor of Western modern science. The practice of modern science has, in turn, undermined the very foundations of its own ontological source. This means, to use the dramatic expression of the Madman (der tolle Mensch) in The Gay Science that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”10 Now, if Platonism were refuted, we seem to be left with a degraded merely “mundane” reality that would not provide a source of meaning for men and women conceiving their distinct “human dignity” as derived from what is beyond the physical. To an enormous extent, Western culture has been shaped by the notion of individual responsibility as a consequence of our (metaphysical) free will. Particularly on the Augustinian version of free will, conceived as an emanation of the will of God in the human agent, which provides the metaphysical foundation for moral action among persons on the basis of a third, transcendent, and ultimate source.11 Moral action (and the avoidance of the cycle of vengeance) under these conditions follows from intrinsic habituated moral virtue reinforced by the fear of punishment or retribution and desire for “eternal life” after we “pass away.” But if metaphysics were untenable, then “becoming” would be sovereign, all concepts would be fluid—there would be no cardinal difference between man and animal. The immediate reaction following this line of logic leads, Nietzsche observes, to frustration and despair: nihilism.
For Nietzsche, this is an outcome of a misconceived (dualistic) vision of the nature of things, an untruth that was, however, the constitutive sphere of our human horizon for millennia, but which as a result of the triumph of modern empirical science seems to no longer be believable. Western culture stands at crossroads between the overcoming of an overripe tradition and the sowing of a new horizon.12 In the words of Keith Ansell-Pearson: “But how is Christianity to be overcome? Nietzsche’s argument is that Christianity and morality, like all great things, overcome themselves.”13 Nietzsche’s affirmation attempts to repatriate the sacred back into the world, to embrace life as both eternally given and yet always masked to our awareness,14 concealing and revealing within itself the future that will become the past (and vice versa?) by means of us in the present moment.
Nietzsche’s teaching in Beyond Good and Evil is addressed to specific men and women who may have the insight and the endurance, to attempt to understand and experience the “nature of things” as will to power by means of self-examination. This, he tells us, is very dangerous: “in the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, all that is rare for the rare.—”.15 Nietzsche’s task is to elicit new, genuine spiritual directions, a “new heart” that may justify human action in times of cultural anxiety and confusion.16
Askesis: Toward a morality for free spirits
A Nietzschean understanding of askesis (self-shaping as spiritual exercises17) implies a constant process of self-examination. It is an exercise of discipline following a particular line of willing to enact a chosen outcome. It is a spiritual “tyranny” over oneself substantiated by the joyous willingness to cultivate one’s strength, seeking to experience the freedom of mastery. Moral codes, by the same token but on a large scale, are limitations set upon peoples in order to make possible for individuals to relate meaningfully with one another, to have the conditions for a shared communal life, to shape and limit the one-dimensional laisser-aller that would lead to anomie and social disarray.
Nietzsche elucidates the significance of moral codes making a parallel with syntactic norms. As he puts it one “just [has to] think of the coercion every language has employed up till now in achieving its strength and freedom—the coercion of metre, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm.”18 Language is an artifice. So are orthography, calligraphy, semantics, syntax. However, these are constrains that also provide parameters without which no meaningful self-expression or communication would be possible—including the critique of the medium. The same allusion is pertinent, according to Nietzsche, to all human action. Anarchic laisser-aller in reality is unfreedom, for it curtails the “subtlety, daring, dance, and perfect sureness, whether it be in ideas, or in governance, or in oratory and rhetoric, in the arts as well as in manners,” that follows from the willingness to achieve excellence in a given activity or endeavor.
Nietzsche, however, criticizes Kant’s morality of the categorical imperative for positing morality as normatively given. Nietzsche understands the fundamental role of morality for the sake of human preservation and self-overcoming, but he is cautious not to take it for granted. It is something that has to be carefully inculcated through character-formation particularly in early education. For Nietzsche, every morality is a piece of “tyranny” against “nature,” but also against “reason”; however, such tyranny is both natural and reasonable in the case of the human species given its spiritual and creative condition, and the high degree of disciplinae voluntatis it requires to unfold.19 As the new unidirectional line of obedience, Nietzsche puts forward a noncategorical imperative, “thou shalt obey, obey somebody, and for a long time: or else you will perish and lose your last remnant of self-respect.”20 Nietzsche is addressing the “free spirits” as guardians of culture to be aware of the responsibility the species, “the whole animal human” has to be the guarantor of the continuation of life, together with the planet that, as far as we know, makes its appearance and manifestation possible.
Christian morality, according to Nietzsche, has bred the European spirit to be “strong, ruthlessly curious, and beautifully nimble”21 and in that sense, he is thankful for the possibility of self-enhancement this sacred line of willing has provided humankind. However, at our historical juncture, Nietzsche proposes to embrace a different train of obedience, one that involves a consciously created morality based on “epistemic” knowledge of nature and compassion. Knowledge of nature is essential for the exploration of what constitutes the realm of “natural kinds,” and therefore what can be created through “social kinds” grounded in but not determined by natural possibility. Compassion, according to Nietzsche, seems to be distinct from pity which he likens to passive-aggressive revenge.22 Nietzsche finds pity undesirable, softly cruel, ignoble.23 For Nietzsche, there is a fundamental distinction between the pity of the utilitarians that seeks to do away with suffering as the panacea to solve the problem of human alienation, and the compassion of the noble mind, which has respect for the contours of human emotion, and acknowledges the spiritual potential of “intentional suffering” as a delicate venue for soul-craft and self-overcoming.
One thing is clear: Nietzsche is not romanticizing destitution, or the spectacle of the “perennially depraved and downtrodden who lie around us everywhere.” He puts forward an understanding of compassion that sees pleasure and pain as some of many emotional consequences, side effects, of more fundamental, more profound states of mind.24 He embraces the “deep suffering that makes us noble [that] . . . separates,”25 as an experience of human self-creation from a soul undergoing the “coexistence of clearmindedness and intoxication,” following an informed awareness of the spectacle of what is. Nietzsche’s “accursed ipssisimosity” involves an acknowledgment of the profundity of the suffering that fosters insight26 (one of his four cardinal virtues), that makes possible the order of rank among human and nonhuman types, but which he fears may be lost due to man’s conquering of nature, aiming at the abolition of suffering and beneficent kinds of inequality, which seems to have no assignable limits in contemporary Western culture. And yet suffering and inequality well understood—the pathos of distance—are the fundamental prerequisites for the self-overcoming of man.27 Nietzsche’s morality of the noble reenacts an order of rank along the lines of Aeschylian “learning through suffering.” A shared human feeling or pathos can be explained or communicated on the basis of common experience. Now, when it comes to experiences that are not widely shared, or that are especially demanding or perhaps unique, communication becomes less commonsensical, potentially leading to meditative silence only broken by compassionate pedagogical communication: “whoever is a teacher through and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his students—even himself.28
Pathos is what men (and all other sentient beings) have emotionally in common—therefore, pathos of distance suggests a quantitative, not a qualitative distinction. Though its manifestations and intensities may vary, it points to a passive experience, not an action: pathos is something by which we are struck fatefully, like madness, anger, fear, rejection, or love.29 The notion of sympathy, for instance, entails an understanding that a feeling of another is also part of what I have or may undergo, thus an identification of self with other becomes possible at an instinctive level, so to speak. Meaningful communication, as well as sound political deliberation depends on shared experiences. Recall Machiavelli’s claim that there are two fundamental human types—characterized by distinct humors that urge a few to rule, and that make the majority desire not to be ruled.30 Is communication possible between these two distinct “natural” factions? Machiavelli’s observation seems to reflect Nietzsche’s dichotomy between master and slave moralities, though, as Nietzsche puts it, both human kinds are animated by the same will to power with varying strengths, repressions, and intensities.
Now, in modern democratic times:
There [still] are master morality and slave morality—I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other—even in the same human beings, within a single soul.31
Nietzschean compassion sees the importance of the suffering “that has created all human greatness to date,”32 as a spiritual work on oneself, a delicate act of “self-remembering” from unconscious tension, reaction, and emotional association to ever subtler forms of attention. He is definitely not exhorting flagellation. Nietzsche disapproves of modern moralists who want to abolish suffering: he looks down on their pity as hypocritical suffering with, that instead of healing the malaise unconsciously reproduces misfortune in the observer.
Nietzsche wants to stimulate the creative unfolding of natural energy—testing how much insight into your inner forces you are able to endure while still retaining sway over your person. The Apollonian principium individuationis is challenged, tested, and recaptured, in a “dialectical dance” with Dionysian provocation.33 This primordial understanding of fueling life opposes the tepid modern consensus on “compassion” so called, it is against the dissipation of pain into moderate pleasures, and as such, appears to be immoral.34
Sympathy is a virtue of the noble. The noble person is ready to give more than is owed. Nietzsche attempts to envision pain in a spiritual manner: the modern quest for the abolition of suffering entails not only a mistaken but a dangerous conception of “compassion” that could have the consequence of turning us all into predictable automata35. For the noble person fitting tension offers access to a spiritual reservoir 36 that embodies “heights of the soul from which vantage point even tragedy ceases to have a tragic effect.”37 Nietzsche further elaborates this experience on the basis of the notion of eternal recurrence.
Eternal recurrence: “But thus I willed it!”
Eternal recurrence is a spiritual reflection of love of self (amor fati) expanded as love of the whole. It is the manner through which the individual sees himself as embodying the Spirit’s unfolding (coming from the past, extending itself into the future through him in the present moment) and as such directs the individual to redeem humanity’s past through his way of living in the now. It embraces “the ideal of the most audacious, lively, and world affirming human being, one who has learned not only to accept and bear that which has been and is, but also wants to have it over again, just as it was and is.”38
This insight however, entails according to Nietzsche “the greatest weight” for us spiritually fatigued modern humans. Nietzsche urges us to ponder on the following:
This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence . . . If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?39
Nietzsche envisions eternal recurrence as a therapeutic, meditative notion (a poetic image if you will, expressing a philosophical idea) that could help postdualistic humans avoid the cycle of vengeance without appealing to compensation in an afterlife. Eternal recurrence is a nondualistic notion meant to replace heaven and hell. It also implies a “pagan” conception of “nature” that is cyclical, thus beginningless and endless, encompassing origin and purpose in the whole.40 Eternal recurrence is a pharmakon, and thus depending on its dosage can be either poison or remedy in the healing of our historicist “consuming feverishness.”41 The notion of eternal recurrence could help temper the apocalyptic visions prophesied by the Abrahamic faiths, which now as a result of modern science have the means to bring about Armageddon: “I do not say this because I want it to happen—the opposite would be rather more after my heart . . . [but] the time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to large-scale politics.”42
To respond to this pressing reality, Nietzsche urges “good Europeans” to “acquire one will” by means of a new natural aristocracy. This will require a careful preparation, a combination of manly, zetetic, “German” hard skepticism, with French noblesse, psychological nuance and inventiveness, a synthesis of north and south that once gave rise to Napoleon.43 In this light, Nietzsche expects the coming to the fore of world-historical individuals44—men with the soul of “Caesar with the heart of Christ”45—leaders that particularly in times of crisis will have to rise through the ranks in democratic political culture.
At this juncture, Nietzsche returns to the perennial Platonic theme of education in philosophical and political guardianship. Platonic-Nietzschean education requires careful character-formation as preparation for mature science or philosophy “the most spiritual will to power” to eventually ground both statecraft and individual self-overcoming. Nietzsche’s re-shaping of Platonic paideia responds to a major political challenge of our time—the problem of planetary rule.46 Nietzsche’s political philosophy links “Athens” and “Jerusalem-Rome”: therefore philosophy, religion, and empire take a distinct role in his thinking.47 Nietzsche claims that without the “Roman Caesars and Roman society Christianity would have never come to power.”48 Is a united Europe a political prelude to a religion of the future? The relation between democracy, empire, and the problem of tyranny has long been a theme of exploration in Platonic political philosophy.49 Nietzsche seems to follow Plato in his understanding that both philosophy and tyranny are the consequence of “unnecessary desires” such as the erotic love of universal wisdom and the erotic love of universal political rule, both of which can potentially thrive under democratic freedoms.50 For Nietzsche, the fundamental political predicament takes place in the difficult relation between philosophy and religion for ultimate authority in the guidance of world culture. The history of Hellenic Athens and imperial Rome points out that democratic rights are the result of political “realism”: the people attain civic rights in exchange for their exertions in imperial expansion or contention. The multicultural affirmation of different traditions under democratic “imperial” tolerance and procedural law paradoxically creates the conditions for the rise of “primitive” religious and philosophical groupings (sects), whose eventual missionary aim will be to enlarge and impose a new universal line of willing on future generations. Nietzsche notes that the tolerance made possible by a powerful successful culture can become indolent relativism.51 The decline of a coherent set of cultural institutions opens up the possibility for various public interpretations of natural, human and even divine right.52
In this “spiritual crisis” the philosophers of the future, “commanders” and “legislators” need to be prepared to perform their task of creation of values and the careful elaboration of horizons for the nurturing and protection of the “plant man.” They embody, Nietzsche tells us, the highest responsibility for “their ‘knowing’ is creating.”53 The philosopher has been also of necessity a man of the future, step-son of his time, always in contradiction to his today, thus he is akin but different from the wise man in the Hegelian conception.54 But the philosophers of the future are not to be confused with present day free spirits—afflicted misfits, burdened men confronted with rules they no longer believe in; the free spirits are free from the philosophy of the past (Judeo-Christian Platonism) but are not yet philosophers of the future: thus they are in a period of transition55 and experimentation about Post-Christian “forms of time.” The free minds may be “freer” than the philosophers of the future. The free spirits portrayed by Nietzsche seem to be sensible, solitary, vulnerable, confused, dangerous, but also noble, and always brave, daring: young Raskolnikovs undergoing the present drama of the Spirit in their own psyche.
What is noble?
The future morality of the noble acknowledges the exuberant innocence of becoming, of life—which is a woman. As such, Nietzsche suggests to envision and approach it—her—not as “physical or cosmic necessity but as a lover’s necessity, erotic necessity”56. Likewise with “truth”: for “supposing truth is a woman—what then?” Could truth and life be jealous of one another? And in that case: would religious monotheism57 as well as philosophical dogmatism preclude “bigamy”? However this may be, Nietzsche envisions an eroticism of a new world affirmation—embracing and overcoming the negation of Platonism—so as to “come to terms with and learn to get along with everything that was and is [which] . . . means no longer to take revenge on the world or to seek deliverance from the world.”58 Nietzschean political philosophy incorporates spiritedness as the force behind the self-overcoming of life together with the pedagogical magnetism of ta erotika in the declaration of a transfigured cultural agon of life-affirming practices. Now, given his enthusiastic rhetoric, it seems fitting to pose the question: is Nietzsche a romantic? I would like to propose he is not. Nietzsche makes a distinction between shapeless fantasy and the manifestation of what is. For Nietzsche, the fundamental fact is will to power59—the hypokeimenon or groundless ground of every living “thing,” which, although open to the process of self-overcoming within holistic recurrence, cannot be imagined away.
Nietzschean free spirits face now the need to live by new virtues: the sublation of Platonism implies that it’s domesticating four cardinal virtues (plus the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity), now have to be conceived in terms of the present unfolding of the Spirit. In this nonfinal period of transition courage becomes the primary virtue, followed by insight, sympathy (giving more than is due), and solitude.60 Nietzschean therapy for contemporary culture sheds light on the present need to repatriate the sacred back into life, and thus, to conceive of ways of living shaped by the incorporation of both cyclical, erotic, eternal recurrence and linear, spirited, willful self-overcoming. The aim is individual autonomy as amor fati, that is, the conscious realization of one’s genuine vocation—not “missing yourself” and thus being mindful of “becoming who you are.”61
Refounding the Platonic academy: Prelude to a philosophy of the future
Nietzsche’s re-constructive critique of Platonism begins with a historical return to the sources of our tradition. Nietzsche distinguishes Plato from “Platonism” implying that nihilism is not a unique contemporary event, but exemplifies a disintegration of cultural standards, a spiritual crisis of which Plato, for his own time, had also been a diagnostician. Hence the model of the “Platonic academy” is a permanent idea for reeducation toward philosophical living. Nietzsche, much like Plato’s Socrates,62 does not aim to perform the role of prophet in the market place (pace Zarathustra), but rather seeks to be an educator of educators, a “genius of the heart” who’s highest task is to encourage the gifted young into “becoming who they are.” Nietzsche’s writings propose the education of a new spiritual nobility that may, in private at first,63 cultivate and reeducate itself for the task of creating and experimenting with future “lines of willing.” Thus, like Plato, Nietzsche’s teaching attempts to infuse philosophical light into “political” practice. It is a kind of “liberal education” in the ample sense of the term.
The idea of reviving some version of the Platonic academy is not new in Western history. It was a touchstone of Renaissance culture led by figures such as Gemistius Plethon (1355–1464), Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), among others. Ficino’s villa in Florence, under the auspices of Lorenzo de´ Medici, served as a place of learning that gathered and influenced some of the greatest figures of Renaissance culture “including Leone Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano, Christoforo Landino, Pico della Mirandola, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Albrecht Dürer.”64 In the same light, Nietzsche, perhaps inspired by the lived presence and scholarship of Jacob Burckhardt,65 envisions with a high degree of both seriousness and self-irony, a new “postmodern” Renaissance of culture in the realm of future possibility: “supposing that someone believed that it would require no more than a hundred men educated and actively working in a new spirit to do away with the bogus form of culture . . . how greatly it would strengthen him to realize that the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of just such a band of a hundred men.” Nietzsche, however, immediately takes this lofty analogy with a grain of salt: “and yet—to learn something straightaway from this example—how inexact, fluid and provisional that comparison would be!”66 Creative vision goes beyond antiquarian romanticism.
Nietzsche makes a claim for “active contemplation” manifested in “examined” practices. He poses the question: what obstacles would have to be removed so that above all the philosopher’s example should produce its full effect, so that the philosopher should again educate philosophers?67 Genuine culture procures action and struggle in the production of “genius” or true “authenticity.” This may take place in two stages: (1). Master-pupil relationship for the transmission of “dispositional knowledge,” and (2). Pedagogical praxis: “thought of a distant future and a possible revolution in education” through new kinds of institutions.68 Education involves two types of tendencies: focus/specialization and harmonious development.69 Can both be reconciled? Nietzsche’s own condition, unfortunately, could not balance his powerful, epoch-making insights, with a ripe philosophical way of life. Here the Socratic way of living, as depicted by Plato and Xenophon, could provide a model of such “complementary man.” Nietzsche’s love-hate relationship with Socrates has a quite ambivalent character. It manifests deep skepticism of the “sophistic” side of Socrates that undermined tragic wisdom for ironic dialectical aporia, demanding that noble “instinctive” action be analyzed in the human all too human terms of craftsmanship and utility. On the other hand, Nietzsche is fascinated by the erotic counter-side of Socrates70: the pedagogical, seductive, “musical” dimension that, magnetically, drew toward him some of the most beautiful youths in classical Athens. But was the Socratic “elenctic mask” independent of his psychological finesse and erotic nature? However this may be, Nietzsche acknowledges the necessity of a master-apprentice propaedeutic for the “turning around”71 toward philosophical insight and disposition:
I see above me something higher and more human than I am; let everyone help me to attain it, as I will help everyone who knows and suffers as I do: so that at last the man may appear who feels himself perfect and boundless in knowledge and love, perception and power, and who in his completeness is at one with nature, the judge and evaluator of things. It is hard to create in anyone this condition of intrepid self-knowledge because it is impossible to teach love; for it is love alone that can bestow on the soul, not only a clear, discriminating and self-contemptuous view of self, but also the desire to look beyond itself and to seek with all its might for a higher self as yet still concealed from it. Thus only he who has attached his heart to some great man receives thereby the first consecration to culture.72
Nietzsche’s radically individualistic thought would be very skeptical of the potential reinstauration of dogmatism from his philosophy.73 A Platonic-Nietzchean academy would be a learning place for spiritual healing and communal tasks crafted for the sake of “self-remembering,” soul-care, and soul-craft—but always providing spaces for intimate, nonintrusive solitude.74 Solitary decantation can be balanced by a relearning of the value of friendship,75 grounded, at first, on the common search for the self-overcoming of psychic nihilism. For “free spirits,” Nietzsche’s teaching takes the model of friendship from the dynamics in the Epicurean garden76; but his task for the “philosophers of the future” goes beyond Epicurean consolation and retreat: they will assume principles for “extra-moral” transformation in the far future.77 Such philosophers of the future are to combine intellectual probity, cheerfulness, and the victory-loving desire to conquer the highest tasks. Nietzsche is a “pied piper of philosophy”—philosophy now understood as unconditional love to shape and tend to life’s odyssey.
Notes and references
1 The expression comes from Horst Hutter Shaping the Future: Nietzsche´s New Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (New York: Lexington, 2006). I would like to dedicate this chapter to Professor Hutter, with gratitude.
2 KSA 5, 60–63; BGE 44.
3 Nietzsche’s conception of the will is akin to Schopenhauer’s will as vital impulse—though, for Nietzsche, the will is the representation in the world. Contrary to the Augustinian conception of the will (voluntas) which is assimilated to the will of God, and thus to faith in a realm beyond material causality, Nietzsche conceives the will as will to power (BGE 13), as nondualistic force (dynamis), swarm of diverse drives composing all living things, spiritedness striving toward differentiated kinds of self-enhancement and self-overcoming.
4 KSA 5, 237; BGE, 295.
5 KSA 6, 350; EH “Beyond”, sec. 1.
6 KSA 5, 138; BGE, 208.
7 KSA 5, 12; BGE, Preface.
8 KSA 5, 111–4; BGE, 190–1.
9 KSA 5, 208–12; BGE, 260.
10 KSA 3, 481; GS, 125. Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. and ed. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), p. 133, analyzes this image from Christian confessional religion to nineteenth-century positivism. Haar notes that “the centuries-old religious practice of the examination of conscience gave birth to a spirit of scientific scruple, which itself engendered a methodological atheism, forbidding appeals to ‘hidden causes’ to explain phenomena, requiring adherence to facts.” For an exploration of this theme in terms of the death of the “Godhead,” see Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead”, in The Question Concerning Technology, translated and with an introduction by William Lowitt (New York: Harper, 1977), pp. 53–112, together with Nietzsche Vol. I. Trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper, 1984), especially pp. 156–7.
11 KSA 5, 70–1; BGE, 50.
12 KSA 5, 237–9; BGE, 295.
13 Keith Ansell-Pearson An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University of Press, 1999), pp. 142.
14 KSA 5, 57; BGE 40.Consider the notion of “panentheism” as the identity of identity and nonidentity, a qualified nondualism, in Tom Darby The Feast: Meditations on Politics and Time (Toronto: Toronto University of Press, 1990), p. 75, footnote 54.
15 KSA 5, 60; BGE, 43.
16 KSA 5, 207–8; BGE, 259. For an analysis of the different accounts of nihilism as a spiritual crisis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Franco Volpi, Il Nichilismo (Roma: Laterza, 2004).
17 My rendition of philosophical askesis is informed by Pierre Hadot Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique. Préface d’Arnold I. Davidson (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), as well as Horst Hutter Shaping the Future, pp. 2–25; 65; 176; 182–6; 192–93, with “Philosophie et religions comme gymnastiques de la volonté dans la pensée Nietzschéenne,” Conjonctures, (2008), No.45/46, Été-Automne, 2008, pp. 89–120. For an important complementary position in favor of the ontological dimension of philosophy, see Waller Newell, Tyranny: A New Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 8–9.
18 KSA 5, 108: BGE, 188.
19 KSA 2, 371; WP, 132.
20 KSA 5, 110; BGE, 188.
21 KSA 5, 109; BGE, 188.
22 KSA 4, 45–7; Z I “On the Pale Criminal.”
23 KSA 5, 47–8; BGE, 29.
24 Consider Plato Gorgias 497a-b.
25 KSA 5, 225; BGE, 270.
26 “Like the sick man, the religious man is projected onto the vital plane that shows him the fundamental data of human existence, that is, solitude, danger, hostility of the surrounding world. But the primitive magician, the medicine man, or the shaman is not only a sick man; he is, above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself” thus learning by pathic experience and informed practice how to guide and heal others in the community. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University of Press, 1964). pp. 27; 314.
27 KSA 5, 208–12; 175–8; BGE 260, 239.
28 KSA 5, 85; BGE 63.
29 C.f. Plato Gorgias 481b10-d3.
30 Machiavelli Prince Ch. IX.
31 KSA 5, 208; BGE, 260. In connection to this point cf. volume two of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. For a contrast between Tocqueville and Nietzsche on the democratic soul, see Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy and the American Future (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 87–101.
32 KSA 5, 161; BGE, 225.
33 KSA 1, 25–38; BT, sections 1–3.
34 KSA 5, 162; BGE 226.
35 WP, 866.
36 Cf. the ‘‘bow image’’ in BGE, Preface; KSA 5, 12–13.
37 KSA 5, 48; BGE, 30.
38 KSA 5, 75; BGE, 56.
39 KSA 3, 570; GS, 341.
40 Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara Sessions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
41 From this perspective, monotheistic culture can be conceived as a world-shaping monumental effort to counter the fatalism of pagan astrological “idolatry” through the psycho-political gymnastics of willing of community-forming religion. This linear-historical remedy for fatalism seems to have become excessive in contemporary Western culture, however, and needs now a counter corrective in the form of “Dionysian” holistic constitution that may give roundedness to natural destiny, to soothe the emancipatory drive of “Apollonian” linear, individual, and historical agency. (BT, Sections 9–12). See Roy Bhaskar, From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul (London: Routledge, 2000). Ronald Beiner Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 371–94.
42 KSA 5, 140; BGE, 208.
43 KSA 5, 140, 199; BGE, 209, 254.
44 Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 29–32.
45 WP, 983.
46 On this point consider the Strauss-Kojève debate in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2000), together with George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), pp. 81–109. For contemporary analyses, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979); John G. Ruggie “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity,” World Politics 35 (1983): 261–85; Christian Reus-Smit “The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions,” International Organization 51 (1997): 555–89; Alexander Wendt Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Louis Pauly and Edgar Grande, eds, Complex Sovereignty: Reconstituting Political Authority in the 21st Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
47 Consider KSA 5, 79–81; BGE, 61.
48 WP, 874.
49 Plato Republic, 562a7–9.
50 WP, 128, 131; KSA 5, 182–3; BGE, 242.
51 WP, 130.
52 For a discussion about the problem of religious exaltation and the deliberate creation of the modern State as a situated remedy for the “theologico-political problem” of sixteenth-century Europe, see Pierre Manent. An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3–9. See also Michael Allen Gillespie The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago University Chicago Press, 2009).
53 KSA 5, 145; BGE, 211.
54 See Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, trans Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), Preface, sec. 5, together with Alexandre Kojève Introduction to Reading of Hegel, trans Nichols (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University of Press, 1969), Ch. 4, pp. 75–99. The classical study exploring the intellectual-historical situation surrounding the Nietzschean friend-enemy connection with Hegelianism is Karl Lowith´s From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David Green (New York: Anchor Books, 1967).
55 KSA 3, 628–31; GS, 377. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, sec. 11, together with Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil”, in Laurence Lampert Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), pp. 188–205.
56 Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 119.
57 Cf. Jan Assman, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
58 Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of This Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 118. Consider also Leo Strauss Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965), p. 15, towards the end.
59 KSA 5, 22, 27; BGE, 9, 13.
60 KSA 5, 232; BGE, 284.
61 For a discussion on the “sovereign individual” in Nietzsche, see Richard J. White Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 75. White’s text, however, lacks an analysis of the political implications of Nietzsche’s insights on this regard; for a thoughtful study of a Nietzschean political philosophy, see Keith Ansell-Pearson Nietzsche contra Rousseau: A Study of Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For an intriguing allegory see Plato Phaedrus 245c-250b.
62 On Nietzsche as Socratic educator, see Ernst Bertram Nietzsche: Essai de Mythologie, Préface de Pierre Hadot (Paris: Editions du Felin, 1990), pp. 385–418.
63 Consider KSA 5, 233–4; BGE 288–9, together with Plato Republic 496d.
64 Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, pp. 81–92.
65 “The question as to whether or not a real friendship evolved between Nietzsche and Burckhardt has a significance that exceeds the merely biographical sphere.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Vols I and II, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper, 1984), p. 8. Heidegger also quotes Nietzsche’s letter to Overbeck dated 7 April 1884: “For the past few months I have been preoccupied with ‘world history,’ enchanted by it in spite of many hair-raising results. Did I ever show you Burckhardt’s letter, the one which led me by the nose to ‘world history’?” Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 12.
66 HL, sec. 2.
67 SE, sec. 7.
68 SE, sec. 7; KSA 6, 298–301; EH, “Why I write such Good Books,” sec. 1
69 A Nietzschean education in harmonious development would involve not only intellectual cultivation, but also individual considerations regarding “nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness—[aspects which] are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far. Precisely here one must begin to relearn.” KSA 6, 295; EH, “Why I am so Clever”, sec. 10. Hutter Shaping the Future, pp. 145–77.
70 Cf. Bertram Nietzsche: Essai de Mythologie, pp. 386–98.
71 Plato Republic 518d3-7.
72 SE, sec. 6.
73 Nevertheless consider KSA 79–81; BGE, 61.
74 Hutter, Shaping the Future, pp. 47–74.
75 Ibid., pp. 75–106.
76 Cf. KSA 5, 225–6; BGE, 270.
77 KSA 50–51, 144–5; BGE 32 with 211.Tracy B. Strong Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 293.
Translations used
Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Intro. by Peter Gay, Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
The Gay Science. Trans. with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.