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Politics Notes Friedrich Nietzsche Notes

Friedrich Nietzsche Notes

Updated Friedrich Nietzsche Notes Notes

Friedrich Nietzsche Notes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Approximately 31 pages

This package contains (1) exam notes (2) an essay titled 'In what ways, if any, did Nietzsche offer a political philosophy of the modern state?' Style: The content always makes sense chronologically. The document is usually divided into two halves: historical facts and assessment of historians or political scientists. The first few pages are always the context of the main content, likely to be the decades preceding the period being studied. a timeline if relevant is always provided in the beginni...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Friedrich Nietzsche Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Characterisation of Nietzsche

Historiography of Nietzschean studies

  • Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist and Antichrist (1950) revived the reputation of Nietzsche, but the price paid is that he denied him of any interest in politics: ‘that the leitmotif Nietzsche's life and thought [was] the theme of the antipolitical individual who seeks self-perfection far from the modern world’. Both Ansell-Pearson and Drochon hold this view.

  • Bernard Williams, Alexander Nehamas and Brian Leiter are all influenced by his interpretation of Nietzsche.

    • Williams (in Shame and Necessity): 'he did not move to any view that offered a coherent politics. He himself provides no way of relating his ethical and psychological insights to an intelligible account of modern society'

    • Williams (in the unpublished) 'There are Many Kinds of Eyes': 'he had some political opinions, of an aristocratic character…he had not the faintest idea of the nature of a modern state. His general political conceptions, such as they were, were largely drawn from the ancient world and were not so much reactionary as archaic'

    • Leiter: Nietzsche is an 'esoteric moralist'

  • It is recently that studies of Nietzsche as a political thinker have emerged. Tracy B. Strong (1996) is very sceptical of the different (mis)appropriations of Nietzsche. ‘He is available, it seems, to everyone...Yet if everything is living, everything about Nietzsche also seems fragile.’

Political understanding of Nietzsche:

  • Ansell Pearson (2014): 'Nietzsche is a thinker preoccupied with the fate of politics in the modern world' and questions what it is to be human. From his preoccupation with the moral malaise in modern culture in the Birth of Tragedy, one can realise that Nietzsche is a 'political thinker first and foremost'

  • Hugo Drochon (2016): Nietzsche offered a highly intelligible account of politics by relating his cultural and psychological insights into how power should be organised in the modern state. Although he is first and foremost a write about culture, there is no separation between culture and politics for him.

  • Dombowsky: a critique of the Christian morality is necessarily a critique of politics because of ‘the fatality that has crept out of Christianity...into politics’ (AC)

Anti-political understanding of Nietzsche

  • Jurgen Habermas: accuses Nietzsche of romantic aesthetic nostalgia. He takes no heed of modernity and suffers from anachronism. He appears to make political action impossible. Strong thinks this critique is misplaced. Nietzsche disparages not politics but modernity. Nietzsche looks to the Greeks not to recreate their lives but to learn from them how society can persist.

  • Tracy B. Strong (1996):

    • Nietzsche obviously said things that matter politically, but his complex political thoughts are not of particular philosophical importance. E.g. democracy and herd mentality, and the lack of genuine political leaders in the modern political world. Famously in his last letter, written to Jakob Burckhardt, he proclaimed that that he was having Kaiser Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all the anti-Semites shot.

    • But undeniably, his political writings are more impoverished than his writings on other subjects e.g. morality, knowledge, social institutions etc.

    • Nietzsche wrote his books intending for readers to appropriate them, to read them in whatever way readers want to make of them.

      • Examples of traditions that appropriated Nietzsche: those who read him in Europe shortly after the onset of his insanity included Social Democrat Kurt Eisner. Those in 1960s and 70s found him a voice for liberation and for dismantling the moral and social structured disguised structures of dominations, just as they were drawn to other cultural critics such as Marx and Freud. Claimed also by those on the political right, incl French and American conservatism, and most prominently the Nazis.

      • To understand this, Strong argues that one must understand Nietzsche’s works as Greek tragedy. Each of Nietzsche’s texts works in two ways on its readers: the Apollonian way, letting the readers to find themselves in it, and the Dionysian way, let them find a way to subverse that identity. It seems that this kind of books cannot be written about politics. Nietzsche does not think that politics is capable of not only relying exclusively on the Apollonian.

    • However, the danger of appropriation is that if a text is appropriated, it ‘no longer troubles me...It gives me assurance, perhaps in the way that Scripture for some gave assurance when it had been assimilated. Such assurance, such once-and-for-all-ness must always be wrong, because it claims to be always right; and assurance, Nietzsche knew, is the basis of domination.’

  • Thomas Brobjer (1998):

    • He referred to himself as 'untimely' and in the second Untimely Meditation he claimed that ‘all modern philosophizing is political’ and this was something he wanted to avoid.

    • He told his free spirits: ‘You should have no interest in politics’ (KSA)

    • When one attempts to understand why he was critical of political ideology such as democracy and socialism, one is forced to leave the political realm.

    • The closest thing he has to a political vision of society is Manu’s caste society. In The Antichrist and the chapter 'The "Improvers" of Mankind' in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes Manu's society with much apparent appreciation.

      • ‘The order of castes, the supreme, the dominating law, is only the sanctioning of a natural order’ (AC)

      • ‘How paltry the 'New Testament' is compared with Manu, how ill it smells!’ (Twilight)

    • However, Nietzsche still does not wholly agree with it. The Manu society does not bring anything new--it does not create. It merely preserves.

      • In another section in AC, he clearly places Rome higher than Manu and claims that the Roman Empire constitute ‘the most grandiose form of organisation’

Underlying concern--nihilism

  • 'There might even be puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie...

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