John S Moore

The return to the ancient Greeks is something Nietzsche, like many others before and some after him, long considered to be the special destiny of Germans. The aim may seem not altogether unreasonable, if ascribed to the perceived superiority of nineteenth century German scholarship rather than to racial qualities or some supposed metaphysical quality of the language. While the British may have thought of themselves as the true heirs of the ancient Greeks, following Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon sculptures, it was the Germans who were developing the scholarship. German philology apparently brought the prospect of understanding what the Greeks really were like. But between us and the ancient world stood 2000 years of God. The world before Judaism and Christianity entices as in many respects a happy time. In The Gay Science Nietzsche expresses the hope the Germans might live up to the original meaning of “Deutsche”, that is heathen, and consummate the work of Luther by becoming the first non Christian nation of modern Europe.

The proclamation that “God is dead” opens up the prospect of a return to antiquity. Nietzsche has much more in mind than the mere institution of atheism, which would not by itself open such a prospect of recreating such happiness. The return to a pagan sense of life is not so easily accomplished. To recover the joyousness and creative excellence of the Greek achievement. would seemingly involve a more detailed unravelling of assumptions. There is an image of Greek life as something supremely creative, excellent, and pleasurable. That Christianity had brought about a depression of the human spirit was hardly an original view. The suggestion would not have been strange to readers of Lecky’s History of Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 1869, translated and widely used as a textbook in German universities Also from the 1860s were Swinburne’s famous lines:-

“Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
“We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fulness of death.”

Many would acknowledge that Christianity’s victory had meant repression both intellectual and instinctual. The God it sets over us and claims to interpret owes much to Plato. Christianity, Nietzsche tells us in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, was Platonism for the masses. In some sense or other he thought Plato had taken a wrong turning. So much is clear. However, what exactly he might have meant by this has, like other parts of his philosophy, been subject to widely different interpretations. So what is his real objection to Plato’s thought, and what would he put in its place? Having unpicked the idea of God, to what could we revert? Should it be to something different in the way of metaphysics, or a far simpler return to roots? Heidegger appears to have understood going back to the Greeks in terms of a revival of pre-Socratic philosophy, seeing Nietzsche himself as a dead end, last of the heirs of Plato. Nevertheless it might seem that Heidegger himself owed a great deal to Nietzsche in formulating such an aim.

On another view there was indeed an understanding we can recapture, but it was rather Pindar than Parmenides, something like an identification with raw ambition. The competitive ideal of life extolled in Pindar was, according to Nietzsche, brought to a fuller development with Socrates. The glory of an Olympic victor pales before that of a conqueror of minds. Conscious will to power takes various forms; beyond the Pindaric hero there is Socrates. From the viewpoint of the enjoyment and the practice of power, the persuasion of others may well be a more satisfying exercise than the experience of a warlord. We are not to consider the power available to the barbarian to be so superior to that available to civilised men, though various purposes are served by the myths civilised men create about barbarians.

In Pindar a view of life as will to power and mutual striving is lyrically expressed. Nietzsche liked to see philosophy and its origin, certainly after Socrates, as rooted in this same approach to life. Accordingly we may include the formation of the God idea as the product and expression of this competitive will to power, rather than solely as a challenge and an alternative to that interpretation (which on another level it is). Its significance becomes clearer the more directly it is related to human ambition and mutual aggression.

In Daybreak Nietzsche asks rhetorically:- “He who does not hear the continual rejoicing which resounds through every speech and counter speech of a platonic dialogue, the rejoicing over the new invention of rational thinking, what does he understand of Plato, of the philosophy of antiquity?” With his portrayal of Socrates, Plato seems to have done more than almost anyone to promote the idea of philosophy as a matter of dispute and close argument. Tracing the origin of philosophy in mutual striving, we may look at the God idea under two opposed aspects. On the one hand it is an expression of creative power, traceable to Socrates’ and Plato’s solutions to various philosophical questions. The other face is the nihilistic slave God idea, God as an intolerable demand. This too has a platonic source. To Nietzsche it is the epitomisation of regrettable mental habits and practices which have become firmly established. It embodies one of the most effective weapons of moral coercion that it is possible to employ in the struggle of all against all.

Even professedly atheistic science is still in thrall to the Platonic/Christian God, in the form of an uncriticised idea of “moral truth” which “enchants and inspires” (see the preface to Daybreak).  In Gay Scioence§344, in a passage he reiterates in Genealogy of Morals he writes that:- 

“even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, the Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.- But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine anymore unless it were error, blindness, the lie- if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?-“

Notoriously there is a tyrannical strain in Plato which excites resistance. This is at its worst in Laws, supposedly his last book, where Socrates is not even mentioned. Many readers have deplored Plato’s totalitarianism and his justification of religious persecution. Plato puts across his objectives in terms of an interest of all, as if they derive from a unitary vision of truth, justice and freedom. Will to Power §972 refers to “e.g. Plato, when he convinced himself that the ‘good’ as he desired it was not the good of Plato but ‘the good in itself’, the eternal treasure that some man, named Plato, had chanced to discover on his way!!”
Among all perspectives his is presented as the only authenticating one, with its claim to ‘truth’. One demands that other people accept one’s own idea on the ground that it derives from ‘the ideal’ and thereby embodies truth, justice etc. We are tempted to blame Plato for not sticking to his own rational standard. Like an overmighty politician his ambition and intellectual strength lead him away from the aristocratic republic of free argument towards the establishment of a sort of personal despotism. He wishes to form humanity after his own image.

Nietzsche floated the presumably anachronistic suggestion that Plato came across the Jews in Egypt and learned something from them . The idea of the one right dogma slots in with Plato’s vision. Direct visionary intuition into truth has been identified as an oriental, that is an un-Greek idea. That was the pre philosophical way of getting wisdom. But here is something much more than a mere reversion to barbarism. The essence of the Platonic fallacy is in the nihilism which supports such a claim. Nihilism is described by Nietzsche as the idea that there is no truth. It may seem paradoxical to accuse Plato of this. But it is the absence of recognised truth on the ordinary everyday understanding that leaves the path open for dogmatic claims. If there is no truth, then anything can be truth.

Faced with the Babel presented by the innumerable different ideas of justice to be found in the world, we may seek some means of deciding what we are to go along with. Aiming to influence our decision are those who know exactly what they want and are determined the rest of us should accede to it. In their programme to persuade us, they seek first to undermine any appeal to objective fact, calculating that in such a climate they will be able to win because no one else will have any firm ground to stand on. Theirs is a God that embodies just this nihilistic will to authority. Told you can believe anything, why should you refuse to swallow this? There may be a suggestion that it rises superior out of chaos, that it embodies a quality of “sublimity”, sign and proof of its right to command us spiritually. But once we identify the refined weapons of the weak, the God of the dialecticians, designed specifically to take advantage of confusion, God himself comes across as a nihilistic idea.

It is this dogmatic demand, the weapon put into the service of claims that are often highly presumptuous and exceptionable, that is the biggest objection to Plato’s Ideal and the God that embodies it. There are people with an overwhelming desire that some demand be accepted, whether they speak for established power and authority, or for a passionate reforming ambition. In the modern world, both the latest policies of government and the shrill certainties of ressentiment may equally aspire to the universal moral authority formerly held by religion. Every rhetorical device may be employed to that end, all propaganda, all dialectical wiles. If there is no truth, how may such passion be resisted? Nietzsche has his own resentment, in that he abhors some of these claims, heartily despises the suggestion he must go along with their presumption. So wherein lies the remedy?

Against the God of monotheism we might want to consider possible alternative myths, different gods perhaps. Rather than the intolerant and oppressive God of the Jews and Christians, we might favour a more congenial one, such as, for example, the Gnostic God of the Pleroma that subsists above the mendacious and malignant Ialdabaoth worshipped by the ignorant. The quest for gnostic style liberation offers a myth that strikingly illuminates the human condition from the perspective of will to power. Itself claiming a good basis in Plato, such a doctrine might be taken as a Nietzschean value, even as the Nietzschean alternative or revaluation of values. But that would be to miss Nietzsche’s most original argument, his claim to expose the lies and falsifications in the position of his opponents.

Some might want to understand rejection of Plato in terms of a desire to return to the state of affairs before Plato wrote, as if Plato had never written. There is a crudely reactionary quality to such an unlikely programme. Before Plato the world was open to Plato, to close it against him would require a new doctrine. Suppose we decide his arguments were empty and those he attacked were right, to uphold such a view completely transforms the latter. Some treat Nietzsche as an anti-Plato, as well as an Antichrist, invoking him for a sort of multicultural pluralism. There is an obvious appeal to the young of an attack on father figure Plato, it speaks to the kind of desire young people have to legitimise all kinds of alternative perspectives. In support of this is the idea of the decline that takes place with age, and also that the passion of youth brings a potentially greater happiness than anything available later, even if it is hardly ever fulfilled.

Perspectivism, taken as a supposedly Nietzschean dogma to the effect that all perspectives are valid may appeal to some as an attractive alternative to God. Not only is there little basis for such a move beyond assertion, but validating everything is actually what is most to be avoided. Overemphasis on Nietzsche’s perspectivism, with its visual metaphor may suggest that he thinks different “looks” are all valid, and any number of different ones may be compatible. Yet commonly a position is far more than just a look, in that it involves demonstrably false claims. The will to power perspective candidly admits to roots in raw ambition and desire based on personal interest. It convicts other perspectives of falsification, targeting especially such as make appeal to an ideal standard of freedom, justice or truth. Nietzsche’s own perspective asserts itself as an interest but does not claim to be an interest of all. Concepts of justice and truth do not need such authentication, they are part of the context in which we all live. In a healthy state there is no opposition between desire and interest.

Perspectivism does not have to be taken as a way of authenticating all sorts of different views and opinions. In the chapter On those who are Sublime Zarathustra tells us that all life is a dispute about taste, and Nietzsche has no intention of letting us out of this. He has his own strong views for which he wishes to fight, and for positions which would negate his own, he aims to uncover their errors and deceptions. This does not suggest a project to reverse Plato, backtracking and trying an alternative set of presuppositions, rather to confront and argue him out.

The way to undo the corruption introduced by Plato does involve reaffirmation of a classical value. By analogy with athletic competition, Nietzsche upholds the ancient idea of life as conflict, as agon, which is to be erotically celebrated and enjoyed. Such is eristic, after the good Eris mentioned in Homer’s Contest. This is not just a proposed ideal, but something in which he is already completely immersed. He is engaged in continuous argument against his adversaries. This is still what he is doing when he turns savagely on Plato in Twilight of the Idols and accuses him of wrecking the splendid agonal culture. We can see how the openness of this competitive spirit is handicapped when all competition has to be mediated through some dogma, even should it be an attractive one. Nietzsche’s remedy is to express and communicate the objection, and discover specific errors involved in the nihilistic doctrine that there is no truth. He seeks out mistakes of psychology, definite tendencies to lie and mislead. Truth emerges in the objective facts that have been overlooked and which it is the most compelling interest of dissidence to uncover.

Nietzsche’s religious opinions have an evidently personal character. “if there were gods how could I endure not to be a god!” asks Zarathustra, “Hence there are no gods”. The origin of his objection to Plato is to be found in his own feeling, not from some insight or vision into an overall picture he claims the right to call “justice” or “the truth”. To say that what drives him is a biographical question, is by no means to invalidate or relativise his conclusions. It is in such competitive feeling and mutual resentment, that we can trace the origin of philosophy together with other creative achievement. Nietzsche’s interpretation of the tyrannical urge owed much to his experience of Wagner, whom he also described as a tyrant. He resents the coercive claim in a position that tries to rule out the possibility of his sort of protest.

In insisting on selfish motives, Nietzsche is not advocating crime, or trying to subvert society. Concepts of morality and justice may be explained in terms of desire and the conflict of interest, as forms of life, without need of philosophical authentication. In reducing everything to desire, he would deny that he is removing some linchpin of social order, an essential cement that holds off chaos. People dispute whether anyone really is guided and restrained by morality, or whether moral ideas are only the expression of desire and interest. Nietzsche’s view is that someone who argues for a moralistic view of life, as if only that can protect us against intolerable evil, is essentially to be thought of as expressing his ambition for his own ideas. Some criminals may be attracted to Nietzsche, but the picture of the will as basically a criminal will, is not one Nietzsche endorses.

It would be a grotesque simplification of the will to power doctrine to read it as asserting that everything a philosopher wants, he wants only because he wants to impose his power upon others. Everything is will to power, but the tyrannical urge is not universal. Pure tyranny is not even desirable from the viewpoint of the tyrant, the obvious lesson of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic. Desiring power one will need something over which to exercise it. Enjoyment of power does not necessarily entail the arbitrary character of the tyrant. Of course there are other factors in Plato and what he led to. In attributing the motive behind a thought as will to power, we bracket out all more detailed and specific descriptions of motivation. This is far from to deny the truth or meaningfulness of such descriptions. The claim is that the will to power perspective offers a way of uncovering psychological realities. In Plato’s case we see ambition in a raw and unmediated state. The reason why Plato wants so much of what he wants is to do with the unfettered nature of his desire. His philosophy is like an artistic creation. He lived early enough to play the artist tyrant, with a blank canvas.

Much of Plato’s philosophy has its origin in the shortcomings of the city state, in the frustration of the will that is experienced by those of original and independent mind. This would presumably apply to those committed to the Socratic programme of disputation faced with the doxa or opinion in which they are invited to acquiesce, for all its promise of power. The Socratic motive puts them at odds with the authority of the democracy, with its oppressive demand to submit to an ever changing doctrine. In the very rejection of current society, official reality, there is felt a need to insist upon a pure alternative idea, upon a reality which is outside and above the given doxa. In this move we may trace the origin of the whole religious history of the west. Here is the source of this idea of religious truth, which comes to be most tyrannically conceived. On the basis of this Platonic thought derives a long tradition of contemplative mysticism. We may see how deep study, like Heidegger’s, of a mystic like Meister Eckhart,  might well provoke intriguing speculations as to how it might all have been different.

In Human all too Human §261, Nietzsche wrote of the tyrannical urges of the Greeks. Every Greek, he suggested, desired to tyrannise over other people. Philosophers too desired this and this explains much in Plato. Only Solon said he despised individual tyranny, though he sublimated his tyranny as a lawgiver. Plato became frustrated and extremely embittered in old age, he says, as a result of the thwarting of his political ambition. We might see this as a limitation of the classical culture, and by extension of the renaissance that imitated it. Nietzsche admits to his own raw ambition rooted in personal factors. Inspired by this he challenges Plato and takes on his argument. For Plato himself the God idea would not be experienced as repressive, it was the perfect expression for his own despotic will. The nasty old men in Laws agree that no old person doubts the truth of religion. Against God Nietzsche pits the Ubermensch. We may see this as an attack not on Plato’s whole achievement but on what was tyrannical in him. We can hardly take a purely hostile attitudes to someone who has been so seminal and creative. We do not simply reject him to return to the chaos of opinion.

Plato’s tyrannical tendency is the source of much that is repellent, not just in Plato but in a great part of the tradition to which he gave rise. Nietzsche’s objection to it is not rooted in some abstract principle like a prohibition on tyrannising, but in the way it conflicts with his own feeling and ambition. His remedy is honesty about will to power. With the aristocratic republic of the intellect we set up barriers to dogmatic assertion being accepted as truth. These barriers are formed not by theories, but by truths in the most ordinary sense of the word. The assumption of spiritual authority represents denial of my own power and my own desire. To refute it I must insist upon that from which its proponents avert their eyes.

First Nietzsche needs to outline his desires and objectives, which is what he does in Zarathustra, his answer to the Bible. His programme for the reform of civilisation will follow Plato’s example and begin by trying to get people to share his own tastes and understanding, not from any virtuous principle of benevolence (still less malevolence), but from a most self-conscious will to power. In renouncing tyranny he is far from renouncing the aim of making others like himself. Of course he would like others to accept his objection to the God of the Jews and Christians. What he wants of people is ultimately reducible to his own desire.

This naturally relates to his own position in the world. Though opposing the claim of the old against the young and disdaining Plato’s old men, he would not give uncritical support to the demands of rebellious youth. For Nietzsche there is much to value and also much folly to deplore in the rebellion of the young. Extreme individualism may easily turn into its opposite. One suspects this is an issue of which Plato may have had some understanding, having once been himself the rebellious young man.. What happened in Athens prefigured what was to happen in other times and places. There are aspects of youthful energy Nietzsche would want to encourage as well as those he would want to resist or rechannel.

His aim is very far from that of wanting simply to undo Plato and happily acquiesce in every ugly form of city state decadence he had been concerned to overcome. In Plato there is much that is very attractive as well as what is hateful. Much of what he says is far from the mere will to triumph of a party, rather enriching human experience by opening new possibilities of understanding and enjoyment. We may identify what is hateful as something quite specific. This does not mean replacing Plato’s dogma by an alternative one that legitimises relativistic chaos. We need to concentrate specifically on the unacceptable claims it supports, always bearing in the back of the mind the objections one has to tendentious and coercive moral and political demands. A Nietzschean is most likely to feel a lot of sympathy for Plato’s frustration with the ruling power, while rejecting his solution. Nietzsche wants to fight Plato on his own ground, exposing the hidden dishonesties involved in the coercive societies of The Republic and The Laws.

In Plato’s Republic the sophist Thrasymachus paints a portrait of “the unjust man”. Readers of Nietzsche may be struck by a certain resemblance to the Ubermensch. While it may well be true, as Plato argues, that Thrasymachus is wrong, and has quite failed to draw a picture of the highest happiness, it is worth asking why anyone might ever have thought otherwise. He expresses a kind of taboo breaking resistance to coercive morality. Even the unjust man is a dimension of present desire. That is to say his desirability is the expression of present needs, and represents a particular perspective. On this interpretation Thrasymachus is resisting something. He expresses, if incompetently, a sort of Nietzschean protest. To the question why the amoral tyrant might appear to embody the highest happiness, we say it does insofar as there is something he has overcome that needs to be overcome. Thrasymachus makes a valid point as well as an invalid one. Reason =virtue =happiness is not a sound equation. In the identification of the Ubermensch as the summit of human achievement there is some truth to be discovered that counters and undermines the moralising pretensions of orthodox religion.

Evoking the Ubermensch, who is a sort of tyrant, does not entail prostration before his despotic authority. In some moods at least, Nietzsche is hopeful that times have changed since Plato’s day, and confident that the threat of tyranny is receding and enough allies may be found. In Human all Too Human I §261 he writes:-

“What took place with the ancient Greeks (that each great thinker, believing he possessed absolute truth, became a tyrant, so that Greek intellectual history has had the violent, rash and dangerous character evident in its political history) was not exhausted with them. Many similar things have come to pass right up to the most recent times, although gradually less often and hardly any longer with the Greek philosophers’ pure, naïve conscience. For the opposite doctrine and scepticism have, on the whole, too powerful and loud a voice. The period of the spiritual tyrant is over. In the domain of higher culture there will of course always have to be an authority, but from now on this authority lies in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit. Despite all spatial and political separation, they form a coherent society, whose members recognise and acknowledge one another whatever favourable or unfavourable estimations may circulate due to unfavourable public opinion and the judgements of the newspaper and magazine writers. The spiritual superiority which formerly caused division and enmity now tends to bind: How could individuals assert themselves and swim through life along their own way, against all currents, if they did not see their like living here and there under the same circumstances and grasp their hands in the struggle as much against the ochlocratic nature of superficial minds and superficial culture as against the occasional attempts to set up a tyranny with help of mass manipulation?”

Nietzsche’s argument is of course applicable to dogmatising interpretations of his own writings, and could even be turned against himself, if ever, relaxed from the competitive feeling that has driven him, he were tempted to play the tyrant on his own account.. Much of what he wrote can too easily be detached from the argumentative frame and used to construct new forms of dogmatism, which may be rich in possibilities but which arouse justifiable resentment for their arbitrary presumption. Reading him one may occasionally find it hard to resist the doubt that perhaps he really meant, as others would have it, the opposite of what we take him to have meant. In such a case his own argument can be employed against the confusion his words themselves induce. Certainly, by this standard, to present his ideas as philanthropy, to speak as if “the good” as he wanted it, was not Nietzsche’s good, but “the good in itself” (call it health or whatever), “the eternal treasure which a certain man of the name of Nietzsche had chanced to find on his way!!” must be misrepresentation. If the period of the spiritual tyrant really were at an end, such ways of thinking should have no future.

Bibliography

Works by Nietzsche
Human All Too Human trans. Faber and Lehmann (University of Nebraska: 1984)
Daybreak trans. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press 1982)
The Will to Power trans. 

Kaufmann & Hollingdale, (New York: Vintage 1968)
Twilight of the Idols trans. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin books 1968)
The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage 1967)
The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner trans. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1967)
Beyond Good and Evil trans. Cowan- (Chicago: 1955)
The Gay Science trans. Kaufmann- (New York: Vintage 1974)
The Portable Nietzsche selected and translated by Walter Kaufmann- (New York: Viking Press 1954)
Other Material
Lecky History of Morals form Augustus to Charlemagne (London: 1869)
Steiner George Heidegger (London: Fontana 1978)
Plato  The Collected Dialogues ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns, (Princeton: 1961)
Jonas Hans The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press 1958)
Kisiel The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time- (University of California Press 1995)
                                                                                                                         

This book aims to present a coherent and distinctive interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy and is critical of much current academic opinion. It consists of an introduction plus ten chapters, most of which are based on papers I presented at conferences between 1993 and 2010, on aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. I try to bring out how clearly his position differs from other possible standpoints, including those expressed by Richard Wagner, Charles Darwin, Max Nordau, Sigmund Freud and some of his followers. In later chapters I find my interpretation in conflict with various others which I argue against. I felt increasing frustration at the persistence of what struck me as plain misunderstandings, passing for legitimate interpretations, that should be easily put right. What began as just one view among others takes a more combative stance.

Published by New Generation Publishing, 2011
Purchase from Amazon here

Misreading Nietzsche
by
John S Moore

More than most philosophers, Nietzsche has been subjected to a variety of very different interpretations. There are deeply antagonistic views on what is essential in his work. Many people are inspired by him, and he is invoked in support of diametrically opposed political or philosophical beliefs. We may be thoroughly immersed in and familiar with his writings, yet fundamental questions still arise as to how well we understand him. Wherever we think we have grasped something important, there is as often than not an opposing interpretation. So we take sides. Reading Nietzsche, it is a common enough experience to come across passages which seem to support one’s adversaries, dismayingly sweeping the ground from one’s feet. A little reflection is usually enough to overcome the disturbance. When interpreting one takes serious notice only of what seems to oneself to be sensible and productive. The voices to which one responds vary according to such considerations as whether one rejects the possibility of metaphysics or embraces it, or whether one believes in the necessity for political revolution, or deplores the very suggestion. If you read him with sympathy, Nietzsche’s discoveries are likely to seem compatible with whatever philosophical ideas seem right to you. The way in which he is read suggests the way Christians read the scriptures. There are many mutually antagonistic readings. Out of any ten sentences, some are neutral, some may be attractive, some repellent. Reading him involves filtering. We pick out what is important. Others read the same passages in a completely different way. They select a part which to us seems banal or insignificant, and accuse us of neglecting what is most vital in him.

For such reasons it is not enough simply to quote or to cite him. He is not like Hegel or Kant, where meaning is often more obscure than ambiguous. He straddles some of the most fundamental disagreements between people. One needs to argue each position attributed to him on its own ground. Beyond a certain point, more detailed knowledge of what he wrote is not necessarily the path to greater understanding, though the filling out of the historical context is virtually limitless in its possibilities. It can be fascinating to explore the now forgotten writers he read, the nineteenth century philosophy in which he was immersed, together with the contemporary science, politics, and his own life history.

Many these days take his “perspectivism” as central to his achievement, taking his attack on Plato’s idea of the “unity of truth” as what is most important, marking a significant step forward in philosophy. Others for those for whom this attack is philosophically unimpressive, find other more congenial suggestions in his writings. Accepting Nietzsche, one will judge him compatible with whatever philosophy one finds acceptable. Further than that, he can even seem to contain in embryo the developed systems of later thinkers. Existentialists, and later postmodernists, have seen him as one of their own, even their first exponent. Alternatively one may be tempted to see him as anticipating later Wittgenstein if one is oneself a Wittgensteinian. There are lots of hints and suggestions in his writings. What he said, if we are attracted to it, we put into the context of whatever philosophical ideas we believe in. But there must be a limit to this. There is something that he really meant, and difficulties that arise with understanding what he was saying, that do not simply reduce to how we fit him into some other philosophy. What reform is he inviting us to accept? What does ‘will to power’ mean? It surely makes sense to look in him for that which is most original. If we discover in him powerful and coherent ideas that are found in no previous thinker, then perhaps we these may be identified as his true message. This must involve disregarding some of what Nietzsche himself counted important.

Right up till his last recorded writings, he was still concerned with arguments many might consider trivial or irrelevant. We may not think much of the physico-mathematical argument for eternal recurrence which there is a lot of evidence to suggest he took perfectly seriously . Other philosophical opinions some may see as unimpressive are the theory that representation involves falsification, or the idea that the human being is a battleground of instincts each with its own separate will to power. Some ideas we may not wish to respect, were perhaps very important to Nietzsche himself. So we will almost inevitably discard quite a bit of what he himself considered important. This does not mean that it is up to each of us to reject whatever we dislike. Whether or not will to power can be dismissed as an irrelevant concept is a most contentious issue. While some people treat even this as simply an extravagant hypothesis, for others it is a key concept and a most valuable contribution to human thought. I take the latter view. At the end of his career he identified will to power and transvaluation of values as the most important themes, the cornerstones of his achievement. These were the titles he chose for what was intended to be his masterpiece. Something may be made of this, which makes it a significant and not a trivial claim. I try to make sense of it, bearing in mind that the very attempt is controversial.

Even if we pass the first hurdle by settling on what is important, there are many more obstacles to be faced. Even among those who concede that transvaluation and will to power, are significant and valuable ideas, there is deep controversy as to what he meant, or could have meant by them. The idea that in seeing everything as will to power we are to take sides with one or other manifestation of power seems plausible, though some deny it. Nietzsche had strong opinions about many things, and people look in various different directions to find where to take sides, which creates endless argument. Related difficulties arise with the ideas about morality that we find in the Genealogy of Morals. What is Nietzsche advocating? Is he suggesting that we adopt master morality? Or instead that we reconcile ourselves to being something in between masters and slaves? And what should we take master morality as meaning?

It can seem a pressing issue to keep some kind of grip upon everyday moral judgements. We feel a need to repel the nazi interpretations that surround his reputation, together with a fascistic account of ‘nobility’ or ‘master morality’. It is not entirely a question of whether or not Nietzsche himself was some kind of proto fascist, more one of whether his ideas can be of any use to most of us today. Those to whom it is quite evident that they can, may yet feel forced onto the defensive when challenged.

There are those who see Nietzsche as holding that we are each some inextricable mixture of master and slave, that it is wrong to think he wants us to take the side of the master against the slave, that being all part slaves ourselves, our values will be partly slavish, and that is to be accepted . If we want to avoid the idea of identification with master morality on the grounds that that would be fascistic, this interpretation offers a way of doing so. But there are other readings of what is meant by master morality. Many would argue that he urges us to become masters, being masters relating to control we have over our own lives. Adopting master morality, does not involve acting like ancient Greek slave owners, because that is not what we are.

It seems to some that the mixture view, together with the fascist view to which it is a response, stems from a serious failure to grasp the whole meaning of the distinction Nietzsche is trying to make. It is not the case that my values have to be part slave values simply because I am part slave by descent, or that my power is subject to various limitations. My present will might have had all kinds of influences to bear on its formation, from the most reputable to the most base. Life is subject to a constant metamorphosis, such as springs from the constant battle between values. What comes into being has its own standards of strength and weakness, that are not tied to its origins. None of this means that morality of the weak is not to be deplored, it just relates such judgements to the existing individual. It is pointless to look for wrong turnings in history. Our feelings and desires are what they are, whatever their origins, and it is on that understanding that Nietzsche addresses his analysis.

Two papers at the ninth Nietzsche conference, ‘Nietzsche and Post Analytic Philosophy’, suggested different answers, to these difficulties. Schacht, drawing on Hegel, as well as on Wittgenstein, argued that we view morality in terms of ‘forms of life’ . We should see morality as enabling rather than prohibitive. As Nietzscheans we need have no problem with making moral judgements. We do not have to see morality as restraint on our power, rather it is part of our power, expression of the form of life that we are. As I understand this, we are no more nazis than we are burglars or serial killers. Fear of the police and concern for our own reputations are factors that come into play, and quite legitimate ones. So far so good, but what then is he against? Rather than attacking all morality, on this account Nietzsche is only attacking what is sick, the pathological forms of morality associated with slave values. This gives his thought the quality of something like a medical diagnosis. The guiding value behind it would therefore be some kind of benevolence. He would be like a physician. But then why, on his own principles, should he express such a benevolent value? And how would we justify our diagnosis of anyone else’s values as sick?

Staten prefers an impartial view of will to power, citing a passage from Ecce Homo describing an objectivity towards which Nietzsche claims to aspire. On this view Nietzsche is not taking any sides at all. He presents an impartial perspective that does not even make a truth claim. At least this avoids the suggestion that Nietzsche is largely the benevolent physician. However it seems to fly in the face of many of Nietzsche’s more committed remarks as well as what is usually taken to be the whole orientation of his thought.

Both these interpretations involve difficulties of their own, and are attempts to deal with difficulties to which there is a simple and straightforward solution. If it is supposed that Nietzsche is advocating some ideal, the question naturally arises as to where he gets it from, what is its justification, and how it can be made coherent. People go to quite some lengths to make sense of it. Where does it come from? From a love of health, or fairness, or what? There is no need to get tangled up in such questions.

One way to clarify what Nietzsche means, is to look at the motives that inspired his philosophy. While it may be difficult to get from purely descriptive language to value judgement, in Hume’s famous dichotomy, there is no such problem in deriving a value from a given desire, whatever its origin, a feeling in the real world, Nietzsche’s here and now. Nietzsche had many such desires and feelings. We do not have to choose which manifestation of will to power to commit ourselves to if the very origin of the idea lies in the attempt to justify an original attitude. We are led to his resentment. Lest anyone think that the idea of resentment is alien to his understanding of himself, take this passage from Twilight of the Idols:-
“All innovators of the spirit bear for a time the pallid, fatalistic sign of the Chandala on their brow: not because they are felt to be so but because they themselves feel the terrible chasm which divides them from all that is traditional and held in honour. Almost every genius knows as one phase of his development the ‘Catilinarian existence’ , a feeling of hatred, revengefulness and revolt against everything which already is, which is no longer becoming…” Expeditions of an Untimely Man, §45.

The emotional autobiography that is the key to much of his philosophy is to be found in Zarathustra. Here we can see the almost surreal intensity of feeling it took to produce an idea such as the Ubermensch. The Ubermensch is an expression of extreme desire that suggests megalomania. Such unlimited ambition is the Muse that inspired his thought, the emotional force that went into the creation of his philosophy. In this book he expressed his frustration at not being heard. To say this did not amount to resentment is surely stretching a point, whatever he said in Ecce Homo.

We need to grasp the confusion he is concerned to overcome, the demoralising and depressing ideas (egalitarian, relativistic etc) that he feels he is wearing down. Against these, he aims to uphold and restore his own will. He searches for arguments that can succeed in doing so. This restoration of depressed morale is one of the principal effects of his philosophy and explains why it appeals to people of views so divergent that they appear to have little to nothing in common. However, when we try to conceptualise this revitalising effect, we are easily thrown into perplexity. Does he want us to accept master morality as a way of restoring morale? If so what does this mean, how are we to understand it? Are we to become like ancient nobles? Alternatively are we to accept ordinary morality but only reject the ‘pathological’ versions? Or are we not to take sides at all? For those who take Nietzsche to be against all resentment, what about his own resentment, the hostility he expresses towards Wagner, Christianity, socialism etc? To some people he seems to be turning on himself. People take his attacks on resentment and construct moral theories according to which whatever springs from resentment is to be condemned. And being consistent they are prepared to convict him of inconsistency on these grounds. Such seems to follow from Deleuze’s famous reading.

The proposition that Nietzsche expects us to accept master morality is a good focal point on which converge the different ways in which he is understood or misread. What might he mean by this, given that it makes sense for us to accept it without abolishing all decent feelings, which he gives us to understand is not his intention? (TI)

From Nietzsche’s experience of emotional crisis came his most original philosophical insight. To access this, we need to be able to identify with his rage and resentment at being unheard. From his own reaction comes the conscious perspective of will to power. His claim is that this embodies truth to a greater extent than alternative perspectives. To a great extent this comes down to the concrete possibility of selfish, dissident, points of view, a fact which has identifiable empirical manifestations he is concerned to uncover.

We should look at his perspectivism, not as a metaphysical theory of truth, but as relating to his understanding of will to power. As a result of their different perspectives, their conflicting desires, ambitions, and the different ideas in their heads, different people assert very different things. Nietzsche’s own perspective he calls will to power. This perspective insists upon recognising the suppression of alternative possibilities that is involved in any change or assertion, and sees different viewpoints as striving with each other for mastery. Crucially, there are some perspectives with which this demonstrably conflicts. Insofar as Nietzsche can convict these of untruth, or falsification, his own perspective is vindicated. Insofar as it uncovers material facts which an opposing perspectives denies or conceals, his is a true perspective. To do this it is not necessary to have a metaphysical theory of truth, that might rather be an encumbrance. His concern is with truth in an ordinary, everyday sense, that can win general assent.

It might be objected that this account depends on an interpretation of will to power that does not command general acceptance. This interpretation is not something that has been devised to meet these specific difficulties. It appears to me to be the most natural and straightforward interpretation of will to power, which otherwise seems a random hypothesis which hardly bears the weight he puts upon it as his most important discovery. As metaphysical metaphor without truth claim the concept would be insufficient to defeat the democratic and relativist arguments that have such demoralising power.

In places Nietzsche does float an idea of will to power as mere interpretation. In BGE 22, for example, he writes:- “There may arise an interpreter who might so focus your eyes on the unexceptionality and unconditionality of all ‘will to power’ that almost every word that you now know, including the word ‘tyranny’ would finally become useless and sound like a weakening and palliative metaphor-as something too human. And yet he might end up by asserting about this world exactly what you assert, namely that it runs a ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ course-but not because it is ruled by laws, but because laws are absolutely lacking, because at each moment each power is ultimately self consistent. Let us admit that this too would be only an interpretation – and you will be eager enough to make this objection. Well so much the better!””
Some commentators make much of such metaphysical speculations but they are only one aspect of what he says about will to power. Whether or not we ourselves treat will to power primarily as a speculative hypothesis is not essential for Nietzsche to carry his point. Obviously there are aspects of pure hypothesis in the very many things he wrote upon the subject. On the view presented here Nietzsche’s theory is a perspective that claims truth. The truth comes from convicting an opposed perspective of error. The possibility of constructing a hypothesis itself contains a significant truth claim, in the very assertion of its meaningfulness. Before we are in a position to agree with Nietzsche’s philosophy, we are first asked to understand it, but this is a far from straightforward issue. It can seem that he has wilfully misunderstood, that there is even a conspiracy deliberately to misconstrue what he is saying, to deny the very meaningfulness of the points he is trying to make and to turn them into something else. It is as if some of his opponents feel that to concede meaningfulness is to concede his whole case. With those who take such a view there is a difficulty in communication, sometimes amounting to a dialogue of the deaf.

On the proposed interpretation, will to power is a perspective that definitely claims to be true. The problem is how best to describe the insight contained in this claim. Nietzsche’s resentment, his individualist prejudice are what gives him his motive. We may place the root of his philosophy in this, which we can see it as a form of Satanic rebellion. Here is the origin of the will to power doctrine, which insists upon the recognition of how much is at any time suppressed. It is important that his viewpoint is itself felt to be suppressed by prevailing views, and that in pointing this out he undermines the claims of that which suppresses him. To practice Nietzschean philosophy is to strive to expose the falsification that has been perpetrated. To tyrannise, he says, is, in a modern context, unhealthy. Healthy power subsists in the light of truth. But this standard of judgement can prevail only after the tyrannical ‘truth’, falsely so called, has been vanquished. Victory eventually comes as the reward of struggle. Nietzsche’s view of health and strength is something that is asserted from a particular perspective.

What he is primarily against is what threatens to demoralise him, what attacks his own particular will in an identifiably mendacious way. As to the question in what consists his will, his project, we may say it is to procure an existence in the world for his own ideas, ultimately his theory, which he identifies with his own will to power. He is attached to this as a scientist to his own discovery. His guiding motive can be taken as envy or resentment of what stands in his way. His frustration at the obstruction of his own will is a natural source of resentful feeling. With this comes all kinds of angry ambition. Before the perspective is established he has not established the ground to speak convincingly of truth or health.
Beginning from the perspective of my own will, I regard morality of the weak as pathological, not because it is sick, nor even because it is unfair, but because it is directed against myself and can be shown that it relies upon lies and falsification. One resents what frustrates the will, meaning one’s own will. What frustrates Nietzsche’s will he identifies as morality of the weak. This is objectionable to him but not because of a philanthropic motive which he does not necessarily possess.

Morality of the weak as he describes it may be something that is objectionable to strength everywhere. But his formulation of it is not welcome everywhere, even to what he would call strength. He does not speak words of encouragement to strength everywhere, but only to what is compatible with the particular formulation with which he identifies his cause. What he wants to promote is that theory, his own description of strength and weakness. His object is not so much to help or benefit other people. He may do that incidentally, but that is not where his real originality lies. The point lies in his particular understanding which relates to his own desires. The revaluation of values involved in accepting the will to power idea involves an interpretation of experience which demands acceptance whether one likes it or not. Nietzsche is not just fighting for strength against weakness, but for an interpretation of strength and a specific view of enlightenment. He is against what threatens him, and for his theory which overcomes it. This triumph brings him great joy and satisfaction.
In describing the falsification and demoralisation to which his own will has been subject, he claims to have uncovered a pattern and a model that can be seen as pervading all human life, even all nature. The significance of what he has overcome extends far beyond his personal situation. It claims clear relevance to the demoralisation other people experience in their own lives, a way in which they may describe it and overcome it. From it comes a new ideal of health based on fair combat. This follows from explicit acknowledgement of truth contained in the idea of ‘will to power’. His own experience with his own will is a paradigm of all human nature. He aims to make the rules of the game fair. By fair rules he believes he can defeat his opponents. This is a new standard, a new value. It originates in his own perspective, and his own ambition.

What he is essentially against he calls ‘morality of the weak’. also ‘decadence’, though this is a term with all sorts of meanings, even in his own mouth. He insists upon the intensity of his dislike for what he calls a revolting fact. He is for the exceptional individual, the free spirit, over the gregarious, and places great emphasis on this.
“Anti Darwin.- What surprises me most on making a general survey of the great destinies of man, is that I invariably see the reverse of what today Darwin and his school sees or will persist in seeing: selection in favour of the stronger, the better constituted, and the progress of the species. Precisely the reverse of this stares one in the face: the suppression of the lucky cases, the uselessness of the more highly constituted types, the inevitable mastery of the mediocre, and even of those who are below mediocrity. Unless we are shown some reason why man is an exception among living creatures, I incline to the view that Darwin’s school is everywhere at fault. That will to power, in which I perceive the ultimate reason and character of all change, explains why it is that selection is never in favour of the exceptions, and of the lucky cases: the strongest and happiest natures are weak when they are confronted with a majority ruled by gregarious instincts and the fear which possesses the weak. My general view of the world of values shows that in the highest values which now sway the destiny of man, the happy cases among men, the select specimens, do not prevail: but rather the decadent specimens, – perhaps there is nothing more interesting in the whole world than this unpleasant spectacle.
“Strange as it may seem, the strong have always to be upheld against the weak; and the well constituted against the ill constituted, the healthy against the sick and physiologically botched. If we drew our morals from reality, they would read thus: the mediocre are more valuable than the exceptional creatures, and the decadent than the mediocre, the will to nonentity prevails over the will to life, – and the general aim now is, in Christian, Buddhistic, Schopenhauerian phraseology. ‘It is better not to be than to be’.

I protest against this formulating of reality into a moral: and I loathe Christianity with a deadly loathing because it created sublime words and attitudes in order to deck a revolting truth with all the tawdriness of justice, virtue, and godliness….
“I see all philosophers and the whole of science on their knees before a reality which is the reverse of the struggle for life as Darwin and his school understood it,- that is to say, wherever I look, I see those prevailing and surviving, who throw doubt and suspicion upon life and the value of life.- The error of the Darwinian school became a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to make this mistake?” (Will to Power § 685)

The Nietzschean dissident wants to take over the existing order and reinterpret it. Whatever was of beauty and meaning in what he has rebelled against, he inherits, and nothing of value need be lost. Satan conquers Heaven, or in gnostic terms the Saviour overcomes the demiurge. Such philosophy can be properly grounded in resentment, which opens up as much opportunity as we could reasonably desire. In itself resentment is a neutral term that need have no pejorative implication. Like the Buddha Nietzsche begins with a perception of ‘this suffering’. We might call it his warlike impulse as he does himself, a sort of natural aggression.

Yet this interpretation as I have put it forward inspires contempt among some who feel it misses the depth that they perceive in Nietzsche. They call for a philosopher who creates out of abundance and strength, bringing a new faith , even a new religion. It is the reaction of the Catholic theologian to the pipsqueak who dares to despise his God. He in turn despises the basic Satanic resentment from which such rebellion springs. He sees it as a low destructive motive and calls for something richer and deeper.

Nietzsche’s thought is bound to create furious animosity when he attempts to show that other people’s most cherished beliefs are identifiable in the terms in which he describes them. It is only his perspective. His opponents will not see their own beliefs in that way. They are fully ready to impugn his own motives, as did Nordau in his notorious chapter on Nietzsche in Degeneration.

One point at issue is whether or not we go along with Nietzsche’s suggestion in Ecce Homo that his judgements and attitudes spring from a prior understanding of a concept of health, something that has been given to him in the way he describes in that book. One might raise the objection that Nietzsche explicitly denies the existence of resentment in himself. In Ecce Homo he claims to be free from all such low motives:-

“War is another matter. I am warlike by nature. Attacking is one of my instincts….the
aggressive pathos belongs just as necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancour
belong to weakness. Woman, for example is vengeful: that is due to her weakness, as
much as in her susceptibility to the distress of others” (EH Why I am so Wise §7)

Here Nietzsche’s denies resentment in himself and dignifies his hostile feelings by the name of ‘aggressive pathos’. Rather than taking this seriously, we may prefer to treat it as a Nietzschean joke. We find similar moves in other inflated egos like Aleister Crowley. Much of Ecce Homo gives the impression of a gratifying self image that suggests megalomania.

Nietzsche presents himself as the most noble and generous of beings. That is how we may all tend to see ourselves in our most elated moments. What you call my resentment, I call my aggressive pathos. Whether there is actually any failure of self knowledge here is an interesting question. The master defines what is noble, and it is whatever is like himself.

Depth belongs to youth, he says, clarity to maturity. Going by that, perhaps we should see his deepest work as the Birth of Tragedy. Here, the answers appeared to be given, detailed guidance as to what to think and feel, the revelation of the most profound spiritual truths. The later Nietzsche does not provide such answers. The possibility of happiness is presupposed, not something to be discovered only by philosophical effort. For philosophy to offer faith, is even a form of dishonesty.

From the viewpoint of youth age means decline. From the viewpoint of age youth is indefinite in its desires, and age’s capacity for enjoyment seems as intense, if not greater. The youth burns with a formless frustration. He desires passionately, but most desires are unattainable, and he responds to their thwarting with destructive anger. There is no solution but that of age, which is perceived as decline, because presented as an answer to youth it is completely inadequate, it seems like death. Youth can only see it as the response of decline in desire. To age it does not appear like this. Age has much more of life in memory. There is a sort of solution which has come, which is the result not just of decline in desire, but of growth, of the existence of more life. Youth sneers at the idea of ripeness or maturity. We all have an idea of the decline that takes place with age, and also an idea that the passion of youth brings a potentially greater happiness than anything available later, even if it is so rarely fulfilled. We speculate that perhaps the rock star achieves it, with his fame and wealth. But then this leads on to thoughts of what even he might be missing. Perhaps the warrior experiences even more joys than that. Perhaps the Ubermensch needs to be literally a predatory warrior.

Of course Nietzsche has much to say against resentment, and the attitudes that flow from it. From his conservative perspective, egalitarian resentment is a most unpleasant phenomenon. To him that is the feeling behind the Jacobin urge to equality, the abstract demand for a levelling so called justice, the idea of reform, revolution, modernisation, couched in a sort of pious rhetoric. From his own ‘healthy’ perspective the Jacobin ideal is suffused with hatred and resentment, while his own is not. Yet other people level exactly the same charges at him. From his perspective egalitarians are resentful, from theirs he is the one with the vicious motive. It is up to Nietzsche to establish the truth of his own perspective.
When the egalitarian lays claim to an ideal of abstract justice, to the Nietzschean that is a dishonest way of disguising destructive desire. But how are we to say what is the reality of feeling? Within this universe of discourse the ‘no facts, only interpretations’ maxim might seem more plausible than elsewhere. So how does he establish his perspective against other perspectives and where does he begin? If it is a truth, how does he establish it as such? Nietzsche resents an authority that seems to him arbitrary and unsound. He does not try to justify his opposition by invoking some abstract ideal of fairness, ghost of a dead God. What he resents he desires to overthrow. He does so by exposing the dishonesty on which it rests, its disregard for plain realities. He sees the dispute as symbolised by Rome versus Judea, with himself the representative of pagan Rome. Accept his view of reality, and to evade it becomes dishonest, self deceiving and the standard of an unhealthy attitude.

When we read what Nietzsche says about health, it is easy to get confused unless we distinguish different concepts he applies in different contexts. One is the ordinary idea of health based around the idea of a norm. Sometimes Nietzsche makes use of such a concept, but that is not to say that he concurs with the implied value judgement. It is a useful reference point. For him the ‘sick’ in this sense may have higher value than the ‘healthy’.

The concept of the Ubermensch, with his supreme intensity of desire suggests another possible ideal of health. Kaufmann’s argues of Nietzsche’s praise of Cesare Borgia that he represents health to Nietzsche. Such a principle undoubtedly does have a place in Nietzsche’s thought. But should we adopt such a value, we whose power and health may not make it convenient, as an ideal for ourselves? What sense is there in doing that against all our own interests?
Alternatively, and more sensibly, we find we pursue whatever is our will, in the context of the situation in which we find ourselves. Instead of yielding to masochistic adulation of the Ubermensch, like star struck groupies, we adopt master morality as a way of pursuing our own objectives. In the light of this we conceive a value of health, which involves submission to a standard of fair competition springing from a common acceptance of truth.

It is our own individual wills that we seek to satisfy. Against us is directed the weapon of the weak, slave morality. This appeals to certain groups who feel themselves excluded and weak often fearful and easily offended. The values of weakness are given an immense boost by the dominant religion, which has all kinds of historical prejudice in its favour. We object to this in the sense that we do not want to allow it to rule over us. We are against the alleged interests of the weak to the extent that we insist their values should not prevail over ours. We do not deceive ourselves with the pretence that our own values are necessarily in their interests. Our demand is to prevail over theirs, without necessarily feeling any animosity towards them, or wanting to deprive them of anything they currently have, even the doctrines that console them. Nietzsche offers us a language within which we may describe and achieve these objectives. As many of the concepts of ordinary language becomes problematic when subjected to philosophical scrutiny, even more so do Nietzsche’s. For various reasons, some innocent, some less so, the terms of his solution have been confused and obfuscated, so he is construed as asserting some very different things.

JSM 2000

© SRP Publications London 1996 – ISBN 1 871446 03 1 NIETZSCHE AND THE POSTMODERNISTS

by JOHN S MOORE

Not everyone is happy with the saying that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. What I feel as pressure to accept obnoxious opinions, is seen differently by those who insist that with fuller understanding my resistance would go, opening me to a happiness and fulfilment that would include and overcome whatever objections I may have. Hegel suggests this approach with his concept of ‘sublating’, that is transcending and including, ideas that are, on the face of it, in disagreement with him. Nietzsche’s concept of will to power offers a rational ground for repudiating such a promise of happiness. Identifying the demand to accept some external standard, presenting itself as truth, with someone else’s will to power, its aggressive pretensions are exposed.

Postmodernist theory may be taken as a range of ideas that includes French poststructuralism as well as Rorty’s ‘liberal ironism’. In the former aspect it comprises a body of argument that may well seem as complex and futile as the Hegelian dialectic. Like Sartre’s existentialism for a previous generation, an idea like deconstruction is something that may be picked up and enjoyed as a vital part of contemporary culture. For those used to an older philosophical tradition it can seem irrelevant, a practice it would be irritating to have to learn. For the unconvinced, postmodernist theory may seem as impenetrable as Hegel’s writings, and as tedious to read. In much the same way it can present itself as a way of defending objectionable principles. Nietzsche is regarded as one of its central inspirations, though on the view put forward here it is the antithesis of what he was trying to do.

We may think of Nietzsche’s primary concern as to rebut the demoralising pressure of what he called morality of the weak. Overcoming the resistance presented by such pressure is his constant aim, and the source of the strength and enjoyment he seeks. Demoralising ideas can be extremely pervasive and hard to escape, spoiling our happiness and inhibiting our desire. They come in such guises as equal rights doctrine, religion of pity, and erotic temptation. For Nietzsche to see his own beliefs as only another point of view, would render him defenceless in times of weakness and depression. To resist he needs to privilege his own position. We may see this as the purpose of the will to power doctrine, rooting his perspective in a claim to truth. While there have been various attempts to explain what kind of truth he has in mind, many commentators argue that he cannot succeed in this, and that the best he can do is to create an ‘illusion’, in which to look for happiness. I argue that such an idea is completely unstable as well as a radical misunderstanding.

Much is made of Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’, a philosophy explicitly held by Ortega y Gasset as well as Nietzsche’s contemporary at Basle, Professor Teichmueller, who coined the word, and whom Nietzsche would have read. Perspectivism was one of the ideas floated in Nietzsche’s writings. To treat it as his central insight diverges considerably from what earlier generations of readers took from his work. However, such an interpretation of Nietzsche has a respectable pedigree, and is found in the Jesuit historian of philosophy Fr. Copleston, who, conscious of the difficulties in the position, suggests Nietzsche’s real significance lies ‘in his existence and thought considered precisely as a dramatic expression of a lived spiritual crisis from which there is no issue in terms of his own philosophy’. 1

The dominant interpretation of Nietzsche is expressed by Alexander Nehamas, in the most influential book on Nietzsche to appear in recent years, ‘Nietzsche, A Life as Literature’, published in 1985. Central for him is Nietzsche’s remark that there are no facts only interpretations (Will to Power §481). From this it may seem to follow that truth cannot be asserted, though Nehamas claims to avoid this by arguing that some perspectives are better than others. Even with this qualification perspectivism would seem to cause problems of self reference, leading to self doubt and confusion. He sees Nietzsche’s answer to this as to ‘make his presence as an individual author unforgettable to his reader’, 2creating a fictional personality for himself, like a work of literature. His ideas about the hidden irony behind Nietzsche’s style are closely argued and ingenious but they raise the question of why if this was what Nietzsche really meant he did not make it explicit. Would he have a motive for concealing it? Nehamas might also be thought to underestimate the full paralysing potential of the relativism he aims to avoid.

Maudemarie Clark accuses Nehamas of failing to escape the trap of self reference 3. In ‘Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy’ 1990 she aims to restore truth to a more stable place in Nietzsche’s thought. She exposes the misuse of his early treatise ‘Of Truth and Lying’ by deconstructionists like De Man (who described the viciously regressive arguments he found in Nietzsche as ‘the very model of philosophical rigour’ 4). Taking issue with Nehamas, she argues that Nietzsche came to see the incoherence of some of his earlier, relativistic, observations on truth. She deliberately restricts herself to Nietzsche’s published works, ignoring the Nachlass on which Nehamas largely relied. Influenced by neo-pragmatists like Putnam and Rorty, she rehabilitates the idea of truth in Nietzsche with the help of modern epistemology. One possible objection is that to use contentious philosophical theories to explain Nietzsche’s meaning is not the best way of understanding a thinker always seeking the psychological roots of philosophical opinions and who sees them all in terms of a ruthless struggle for power.

Clark does not deny Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the idea that raises difficulties if the extreme nihilist, or postmodernist, view that there is no truth is to be avoided. Though it it is commonly asserted without argument that Nietzsche was a perspectivist, such a view is not unanimous. In a review published in 1992 of ‘Nietzsche as Postmodernist’, edited by Clayton Koelb, Robert C Holub writes:- ‘From at least Zarathustra on Nietzsche was a dogmatic philosopher, maintaining at least implicitly that some values were superior to others’ 5. He quotes Robert Solomon who argues that ‘the mature Nietzsche was not much of a perspectivist, not much of a pluralist and consequently not much of a postmodernist either’. Recently, Schacht has argued persuasively, from a reading of Nietzsche’s 1887 prefaces, that the talk of perspectives is concerned with achieving comprehension, rather than the dissolution of the notion of ‘truth’. 6

Arguments for the non existence of truth take place on an abstract level. Such postmodernist champions as De Man, Derrida, Deleuze, and in their different ways Foucault and Heidegger all throw into question many accepted concepts, including truth as ordinarily understood. Arguments are sought in Nietzsche’s own published writings. One source for the view that Nietzsche believes truth is in no way preferable to error is the section on Plato, ‘History of an Error’, in ‘Twilight of the Idols’ which concludes ‘We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps?..But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!’ 7. On the most natural reading, when he talks about Plato’s ‘real world’, we would not ascribe to him the paradoxical position of attacking truth in favour of error. The Socratic idea that knowledge = virtue = happiness, he earlier describes as the ‘bizarrest of equations’ 8. This so called truth is not truth at all, rather it is unjustified dogma, a tyrannical expression of Socrates’, and then Plato’s, own temperaments. The attack is on ‘truth’ in inverted commas, so called truth. Explicitly rejecting this interpretation writers like Deleuze treat him as attacking the very idea of truth itself.

Nietzsche is seen as the arch opponent of Socrates on precisely this issue. It is argued that Socrates introduced a standard of objectivity, which Plato developed and which Nietzsche wanted to replace with an alternative ideal. Nehamas summarises the position argued in his book as follows ‘Nietzsche presented a perspectivist approach, according to which his views were and should be understood to be only views of his own and not reflections of an objective reality.. an approach, that is, that was directly opposed to Socrates’ “dogmatist” effort to eliminate the personal element that coloured his own views and values’ 9. In ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ Nietzsche writes that Plato ‘stood truth on its head’. I would say that Nietzsche’s purpose was precisely to produce an argument that eliminated the personal element that dishonestly pervaded the so called objectivity of Socrates, Plato, Wagner, and so many others.

Perspectivists may conclude that Nietzsche is not concerned to dispute the claims to truth made by rationalist philosophers, such as Plato, or Hegel, but that finding them uncongenial he seeks refuge in ‘fiction’ or in undermining the concept of truth altogether. If on the other hand we see him as denying Plato’s claim to have discovered truth, then it is Plato who is the spinner of fictions, and resistance to his authority has, at least potentially, truth on its side. Scientific honesty emerges from a clash of wills, placing limits on the previously unhindered power of an intellectual despot, to establish ‘truth’ by virtue of his ‘wisdom’. Knowledge comes out of the competition between ideas, the revelation of perhaps ugly psychological truths, uncomfortable realities the despot needs to deny, and which his adversaries therefore have an interest in demonstrating.

Another source of controversy is Nietzsche’s questioning of the value of a will to truth, as in the opening sections of ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, and his linking it to the ascetic ideal in the third essay of ‘Genealogy of Morals’. That Nietzsche sees such a will as unnecessary to establish truth, need not entail the redundancy of the concept. He says that the will to truth is only a manifestation of the will to power. We no more need a will to truth than evolution needs a will to evolve in Darwin’s theory.

Clark rehabilitates a will to truth. She cannot accept the will to power as a general characterisation of the world, since this is something Nietzsche has explicitly ruled out in his attack on metaphysics. Accordingly she treats it like eternal recurrence as an ideal that does not pretend to truth:- ‘though he presents it as if it were true, …it is actually his “creation of the world”, a construction of the world from the viewpoint of his own ideal’ 10. She sees him as advocating a new will to truth on a basis of this, rather than the ascetic ideal. While rescuing Nietzsche from nihilism, this view does appear to downgrade the significance of a concept that he came to see as the keystone of his thought, as well as underlying his understanding of truth:- ‘..the “Will to truth” would have to be examined psychologically: it is not a moral power, but a form of the Will to Power’. (‘Will to Power’ §583).

Much recent interpretation sees him as rejecting both truth and a will to truth altogether. A case could be made for an antinomian interpretation of Nietzsche as the foundation of the post modern school. As Clayton Koelb puts it:- ‘..few would argue with the proposition that Nietzsche initiated many of the basic ideas which stand behind the broad concept of postmodernism as expounded by Lyotard and others’. 11

Postmodernist views are supported by the idea that by altogether destroying the concept of truth one promotes liberation. Nietzsche’s exposure of ‘power’ suggests to some that one idea is as good as another. Detach ‘power’ from the idea of ‘truth’, and we have a free for all in which it seems that anything goes, according to the liberating motto of the Assassins:- ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted’, quoted approvingly in ‘Genealogy of Morals’ 12. With a deconstructed Nietzsche every new idea claims equal rights for itself, not on the basis of an old uncertainty, but of a new Nietzschean assumption. Elsewhere Nietzsche suggests the Assassins’ motto is no more than a tonic for certain moods. Taken too seriously it is the very nihilism he was most concerned to surmount:-

‘A philosopher recuperates his strength in a way quite his own… he does it, for instance, with nihilism. The belief that there is no such thing as truth, the nihilistic belief, is a tremendous relaxation for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is unremittingly struggling with a host of hateful truths. For truth is ugly’. (‘Will to Power’ §598).

Total liberation of every viewpoint is a self referential paradox that advances us nowhere. Such paradoxes may strike us as an unanswerable objection to any form of relativism. This is not conclusive, however, for relativism retains a strong attraction for many people, and always finds defenders. One way forward is for each newly liberated discourse to see itself as a fulfilment of a value, in Nietzschean terms as a manifestation of power. However, with the abolition of truth the original underpinning of the Nietzschean position has been removed. There is no basis except inclination for preferring the Nietzschean valuation above any other. Then the original problem returns of how to repel obnoxious opinions. For what basis can be given for preferring inclination above whatever else makes a claim on us?

On Nietzschean principles, ideas are justified as will to power. The effect of denial of truth is to give a sense of justification parasitic on Nietzsche’s actual position, to any position whatever. The idea that truth is in no way preferable to error is obviously nonsensical in everyday life. A serious attempt to apply it would soon bring disaster. To take only the most modest example, it will not help you to catch a train if you cannot believe the times in the timetable are true. So are we to treat it as a philosophical paradox, on the level of Berkeley’s denial of matter? In that case this somewhat metaphysical concept that is being denied, would be irrelevant to the concept of truth applied in everyday life. Poellner in ‘Nietzsche and Metaphysics’, 1995, interprets Nietzsche as denying only the metaphysical concept of truth, something which does not affect everyday truth, though he admits inconsistencies 13. However, like adherents of the more radical thesis, he still regards this denial as causing problems for his assertions of psychological truths.

Grimm in ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge’ 1977, writes :’Truth like everything else is a function of power. I call something true if it increases my will to power…Conversely something is false if it decreases my will to power’ 14. If this really were Nietzsche’s main point it would either be an unsubstantiated dogma or a complex epistemological thesis needing a lot of philosophical elucidation.

I want to argue that the everyday concept is sufficient to carry Nietzsche’s point, and that those who would deny its application involve themselves in absurd paradoxes. Falsehood and ignorance are among the most basic concepts in everyday usage. Ideas are undermined when exposed as involving falsehood and ignorance, and it is hard to see how speculations about the non existence of truth can prevent this, unless among groups of people with no interest in undermining each other’s opinions.

Nietzsche’s assertion that there is a universal will to power is intended to be incompatible with certain positions that he opposes. From his viewpoint the claim made by these depends upon their concealing realities. It is not difficult to conceive the sort of realities that might be concealed. Someone may try to persuade us of the truth of his own opinions by concealing the possibility we have of taking an opposing position. He may deceive both us and himself about the massive suppression that would result from the consensus he proposes, as well as about the schadenfreude he would feel about this. There would be some raw facts here, whatever interpretations are put on them, and whatever lengths are taken to explain them away. The claim is that the interpretations brought about by the will to power perspective are more adequate to raw reality than any of its rivals.

For Nietzsche’s theory to have the universal significance that he intends, allowances sometimes have to be made for an apparent crudity of expression. However, this is not to say he only wants to be taken metaphorically. 15

‘Life itself is essential assimilation, injury, violation of he foreign and the weaker, suppression, hardness, the forcing of one’s own forms upon something else, ingestion, and – at least in its mildest form – exploitation. But why should we always use such words which were coined from time immemorial to reveal a calumniatory intention?….. “Exploitation”…..belongs to the nature of living things, it is a basic organic function, a consequence of the will to power which is the will to life. Admittedly this is a novelty as a theory- as a reality it is the basic fact underlying all history. Let us be honest with ourselves at least this far!’ (‘Beyond Good and Evil’ §259)

The will to power theory sees every state of affairs in terms of other possibilities which have been suppressed. Its import is primarily for human desires and beliefs. Every desire is in its full implications a desire for the overcoming and suppression of alternative views. What anyone desires is describable as power, because it excludes other things that are or may be desired by other people. Each viewpoint therefore expresses a desire for power. In willing what one wills one necessarily wills power. Power achieved involves trespass on other people’s desires for their own power. This is more of a logical than a directly psychological thesis, a conceptual framework which is held to reveal truths which are otherwise hidden. Concealment of suppressed possibility is the essential falsification of human nature, whether perpetrated by rancorous revolutionaries like St Paul or by spiritual tyrants like Plato and Wagner. Acknowledging the will to power is the way to dispel such error.

The extension of the theory from the human sphere to the whole of nature comes with reflections on our understanding of causation. This leads him to look for confirmation of his thesis in the fields of biology and physics.

‘From a psychological point of view the idea of cause is our feeling of power in the act of willing – our concept of effect is the superstition that this feeling of power is the force which moves things….

‘If we translate the notion cause back into the only sphere which is known to us, and out of which we have taken it, we cannot imagine any change in which the will to power is not inherent. We do not know how to account for any change which is not a trespassing [Ubergreifen] of one power on another’. (‘Will to Power’ §689). Instead of trespassing Kaufmann has ‘encroachment’. (See also ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ §36).

As a perspective this has to be universal and not admit of exceptions. It purports to have no interest in falsification, uncovering a range of psychological facts which other perspectives distort. This interpretation differs from that of Poellner, who sees the truth claim of will to power as relating to ‘cautious and qualified Cartesianism’ 16. He interprets the theory psychologically, as the hypothesis that, once self deception was dispelled, everyone would experience the sense of power in all their mental activity. He proposes a counterexample and concludes Nietzsche is wrong on straightforward empirical grounds.

On my view, the will to power theory is intended to be factually true, though not to be overthrown by single examples. Its truth is like that of the Copernican theory. Cosmology might be thought a field in which there are no facts but only interpretations. Geocentrism and heliocentrism are only perspectives on the same raw data. The former theory, however is now accounted false, having proved inadequate to the accumulating evidence. It broke down as it became ever more complicated, generating epicycles etc. to counter every new objection.

In trying to communicate these ideas we easily run into linguistic ambiguities. We want to differentiate Nietzsche’s point from anything that would be acceptable to our postmodernist opponent. What is said is easily misinterpreted. The idea of will to power is meant to rule out the demoralising claims of the morality of the weak. Although every position expresses will to power, not all are compatible with its recognition. As morality of the weak, Nietzsche would want to include a number of leftist, communist and feminist arguments which he hopes to undermine. Yet these very opinions might defend themselves on what are supposed to be Nietzsche’s principles. A feminist claiming to be oppressed by patriarchy could appeal to Nietzsche as some have done. Ofelia Schutte 17 is one example, much as she detests some of his attitudes, which she argues as inconsistent with his driving theme. Irigaray’s erotic fantasy 18 is another. One might speculate whether or not his male ego would have been gratified at the thought of the posthumous sexual attentions of postmodern womanhood, concerned to deconstruct part of his achievement.

The idea of universal will to power is clearly not intended to justify absolutely everybody in their beliefs. Nietzsche is most explicit about his own intolerance. ‘My taste is the opposite of a tolerant taste’, he writes in ‘Twilight of the Idols’ (‘What I Owe to the Ancients’ §1). It should be a platitude to say that an idea rooted in blindness to the will to power is not compatible with recognition of it. Acceptable diversity is not to be unlimited. How to limit it? By showing that of two perspectives, one is more compatible with reality. Nietzsche says this over and over again, but it is not sufficient to carry his point if one has been led by abstract arguments to believe there is no such thing as truth.

‘Nitmiur in vetitum: in this saying my philosophy will triumph one day for what one has forbidden so far as matter of principle has always been – truth alone’. (‘Ecce Homo’ p219)

‘In the knowledge of truth what matters is having it, not what made one seek it, or how one found it. If the free spirits are right, the bound spirits are wrong, whether or not the former came to truth out of immorality and the others have kept clinging to untruth out of morality.

‘Incidentally, it is not part of the nature of the free spirit that his views are more correct, but rather that he has released himself from tradition, be it successfully or unsuccessfully. Usually, however, he has truth, or at least the spirit of the search for truth on his side: he demands reasons, while others demand faith’. (‘Human all too Human’ §225)

There is a notorious problem with Nietzsche interpretation, in that he can be quoted, even more glaringly than the Bible, to make contradictory points. Even the selfsame passages constantly reappear in illustration of quite different theses. As a thought experiment, suppose we could by some form of necromancy invoke his spirit and ask him to settle our disputes and judge between different interpretations. Surely we could marshal evidence in support of what he would say, for all that the school of Derrida would regard his judgement as of no privileged status? Given the abiding interest of his writings we might expect that what he would say would be more interesting than the other interpretations. We have to be selective in what we treat as important in Nietzsche if we are to make anything coherent out of him. Perhaps the real point is what of interest and originality can be constructed out of him, taking account of his intentions and the time and place when he wrote. Solomon describes the question ‘is there a postmodernist Nietzsche? as neither interesting nor important 19. Schacht, as against the deconstructive view, commends a more traditional interpretation as ‘philosophically more fruitful’ 20.

We might interpret Derrida in ‘Spurs’ as arguing for a certain kind of impotence, Nietzsche’s inability to communicate his intention into his writing. According to Derrida ‘there is no such thing as the truth of Nietzsche or of Nietzsche’s text’ 21. He treats Nietzsche’s fragment ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’ as paradigmatic of his whole oeuvre in its obscurity and indeterminacy of meaning. Impotence as a state has its own conditions of being. It is closely connected to a successful state. Derrida helps to transfer the one into the other. Again he is like the irritating person in a debate who is always bringing up points of order.

Part of the purpose is to invoke Nietzsche in support of the kind of egalitarianism he was most concerned to resist. Doing away with a central standard of truth and rationality is a way of dispersing authority to whoever can lay hold of it, so promoting the power of the pundit, the guru, dogmatic, arbitrary authority. Where this conflicts immediately with one’s own independent ambition such power is felt as offensive and tyrannical. It is a tyranny of the weak, because it paralyses strength, the combative confidence of being able to win a fair argument if only all possible standards of fairness had not been removed. Such petty tyrants may claim to express freedom as loudly as any Hegelian. In this respect, as in others, postmodernism is the successor to Marxism.

To explain how postmodernism is objectionable is to show how its interpretation of Nietzsche is not just something less interesting than others which might be constructed, but something to be vigorously resisted, precisely the kind of idea he was determined to refute. This makes more insistent the question of why such deeply opposed positions should be be found in the same body of writing.

Having given the subject exhaustive consideration Nietzsche concludes (in ‘Nietzsche Contra Wagner’) that he and Wagner are antipodes. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s works are one of the most accessible sources for Wagner’s own ideas. Nietzsche is always measuring himself against Wagner. So Wagnerism, or its equivalent, is something people can pick up from Nietzsche. This is all the easier when they decline to take seriously Nietzsche’s objections, and therefore his distinction of his own position from Wagner’s. Sometimes people take from Nietzsche what what he regarded as Wagner’s ideas, which is to say they take from him what he saw as his own antipodes. Much the same could be said for his relation to Herbert Spencer. We see how close he can seem to ideas he attacks. He tried to show that his attack has some objective correlate, but if he was unsuccessful, it reduces to personal taste.

Some interpretations of Nietzsche bear more relation to Nietzsche’s Wagner than to Nietzsche himself. This could be said of the nazi Nietzsche, and the postmodernist Nietzsche which is partly descended from that, through ex nazis such as De Man 22 and Heidegger 23. Heroic triumphalism is already present in Wagner. To take away from Nietzsche what he saw as the critical, rational basis of his claim on us, treating him as an irrational prophet, or a mere artist or poet, is to turn him into an alternative Wagner. Making his message too abstract and making it too concrete are two sides of the same coin. Failing to identify the achievement he is really aiming for, his authority is attached to some specific cause, some definite doctrine favoured for extraneous reasons, usually one which enjoys enough worldly success to dispense with the support of closely reasoned argument.

Fascist and nazi interpretations of Nietzsche are less defensible than many people suppose. The Nietzschean who became a nazi was as much a dupe as was the conservative, the socialist, or the nationalist. A modern westerner with mainstream political opinions can read ‘The Genealogy of Morals’ in such a way as to strengthen him in his own, non fascist values. He reads Nietzsche as encouraging him to achieve what he wants, and a fascist state is not what he wants. It may be argued that to encourage individual desire will result in a lot of people wanting fascism, but other people have as much reason for disliking that system of government. It is not that one picks and chooses from Nietzsche, it is that the main thrust of his thought is not fascist at all and to think otherwise is to misunderstand him fundamentally.

What gives us inspiration, what charges the will, is not to determine its object. If there is pleasure in contemplating the orgies of the ancient world, the beyond good and evil of the Russian revolution 24, the cruelties of the Italian renaissance, even the terror regimes of modern dictators, it is in that it serves to free us from the false interpretations we are trying to get away from, the demoralising straightjacket of the here and now, the pretension to universality and finality that constrains and depresses. That such understanding should take us where we do not want to go is far from what he has in mind, wherever some of his own thought experiments may have taken him. Nietzsche is not for self destruction, or suicide (which cannot be said unequivocally of Deleuze, or Foucault, or Bataille).

Nor is there a conflict between what we want and what is good for us, unless we suffer from the kind of decadence which Nietzsche aims to cure with his ideas. Crucial to the mature Nietzsche is his explicit rejection of the antithesis of reason and instinct, the splitting of will or desire into a criminal part called will or desire and a rational component which restrains it. His original Dionysus/Apollo antithesis changed as the Dionysian absorbed the Apollonian 25. To confound his early and his late views can generate some interesting speculations, presumably not quite what he had in mind.

Staten, in ‘Nietzsche’s Voice’, 1990, accuses him of ‘tyrannophilia’, arguing that the dialectic of his position leads him to take up cruel attitudes. He suggests that the will to power implies sadism 26. In a slightly different vein, he finds in ‘Genealogy of Morals’ the exciting idea of a great will in which we might get caught up, some daemonic future will born of the ascetic impulse 27. It is a tribute to Nietzsche’s creative powers that he can conjure up and inspire fascinating forms of will (the myriad ‘interpretations’). His criticisms of Wagner, suggest he is far more concerned to resist such fascination, however exciting, than to yield to it. To take as essential to Nietzsche’s message the most shocking things he felt like saying, is to treat all those who found him compatible with their own liberalism as naive. Staten is saying Nietzsche ought to think and feel differently, if only he understood better. Yet many people accept Nietzsche without feeling a need to support slavery. They are happy to assimilate his views into their own opinions.

That Germans such as Thomas Mann and Heidegger considered Nietzsche dangerous should be hardly surprising, given the catastrophe of the nazi era. In that situation even love of country could be seen as an evil and destructive idea. Nietzschean immoralism might be thought positively wholesome in a stable cultural context, where it coincides with the love of liberty, and where accordingly, following John Stuart Mill’s doctrine, even the expression of outrageous opinions has a healthy effect on the whole. This has practical implications for the current enthusiasm for his philosophy in the post communist world, from the Czech Republic to China 28.

Trying to imagine a politics that does not employ morality of the weak we soon come to see that it is hardly reasonable to expect people to renounce such an effective weapon. We can at best hope to purge our own attitudes, whatever they are, of such poison. This could be done for many kinds of politics. We could easily conceive, for example, a proletarian trade unionist, whose socialism is in no conflict with his Nietzscheanism. Any opinion might have its its day of triumph, though some employ methods which may suggest to us they do not deserve one. Established power clashes with rebellious ambition. Perhaps here is the explanation for the observation that, as far as ‘the art of the possible’ goes, Nietzsche seems to be a mirror in which people only find themselves, what Tracy Strong calls ‘Nietzsche’s political misappropriation’ 29. Nietzsche is not especially concerned to tell people what they ought to want.

Whatever I want expresses my will to power, though to someone else it might suggest something negative. What ground can Nietzsche have for expecting others to share his own judgments? The dualism suggested by the conclusion to ‘Ecce Homo’ (‘Have I been understood?- Dionysus versus the Crucified’) leads to interpretations of Nietzsche as setting up a standard of judgement for all ideas. Schrift, for example, sees him as advocating ‘a standard (affirmation vs. negation) which could be used to adjudicate the multiplicity of interpretations occasioned by perspectivism’ 30. Perhaps Nietzsche would like to persuade us to reject what he is against by proving it fits into some generally undesirable category. Some beliefs may indeed be life denying, but the attempt to prove the objectivity of such valuations would be a hugely complicated task that could hardly avoid dishonest methods of argument. The same goes for his distinction between values that express declining and those that express ascending life. Nevertheless, if my view depends on concealing the nature of my desire then I am vulnerable.

Ansell-Pearson argues that Nietzsche’s reflections have important political implications, seeing ‘overcoming nihilism’ as a political task 31. He regards Nietzsche as raising the most basic questions about the foundation of society, questions which now have to be addressed. Against this view it might be said that it seems to presuppose the historical clean slate envisaged by some Chinese Emperor. My will does not depend on Nietzsche for its definition. While his ideas may help me to overcome obstacles to my desire, making me try to desire something else is an entirely different business, practical politics, which subsists in its own sphere in which many stronger interests operate than Nietzsche’s theories. Nietzsche was less concerned to introduce new motives than to reinterpret what is present.

‘Transvalue values- what does this mean? It implies that all spontaneous motives, all new, future, and stronger motives, are still extant; but that they now appear under false names and false valuations, and have not yet become conscious of themselves.

‘We ought to have the courage to become conscious, and to affirm all that which has been attained, to get rid of the humdrum character of old valuations, which makes us unworthy of the best and strongest things that we have achieved’. (Will to Power §1007).

It is said that people say morals are necessary when they mean only that the police are necessary. Though Nietzsche liked to think of his ideas as dynamite, they remain only arguments and hypotheses. If the moralistic interpretation is a misrepresentation of human motivation, then nearly all motives remain in place once it has been dispelled. Sometimes people write as if he was trying to be much more than a theorist, unravelling confusions, clarifying ideas and making them consistent. They see him as behaving as if politics, science, language, culture and all mundane life could hardly go on without him, treat him as a titan who wanted to make himself responsible for everything. Inevitably they conclude he was a failure, and that he must have been either mistaken or ironic when he spoke of his success. Also this licenses them to continue where he left off.

Nietzsche warns against such misunderstandings in the preface to ‘Ecce Homo’:- ‘Hear me! For I am such and such a person, Above all do not mistake me for someone else.

‘I am, for example, by no means a bogey or a moralistic monster……The last thing I should promise would be to “improve” mankind. No new idols are erected by me; let the old ones learn what feet of clay mean’.

As a prophet responsible for the future of civilisation was precisely how Wagner presented himself. Wagner’s success Nietzsche envied, but did not bid to imitate. He wanted some of that authority, but on a different basis, exposing all such claims for their intellectual dishonesty. The difference is between the desire to control the future and the aim to do something far more limited, yet also greater, because of the nature of scientific discovery. To reject Nietzsche’s claim is to see him as a dogmatist, with an ultimately arbitrary vision which he wants to impose on us. This makes him no different from his version of Wagner.

Gilles Deleuze’s influential ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ 1962 is open to such criticism. He offers a programme based on ideas culled from ‘Will to Power’, ‘Genealogy of Morals’ and ‘Zarathustra’. He makes what seems to be a metaphysics out of speculations about active and reactive forces. He advocates an objective, an ideal, of becoming purely ‘active’ force, which would be to surpass the human and become the creative energy of Dionysus. The dionysian state of play is something to be striven for, an ideal to be attained, rather than simply a sense of the joy that arises from satisfaction of one’s projects. On the opposing view, dionysian enjoyment is a piece of good fortune, perhaps the reward of successful activity, not a seductive promise that is held out.

Deleuze does not take much trouble to defend the position he outlines against outside attack. His theory of active and reactive forces is little more than hypothesis, inspired by some of Nietzsche’s wilder speculations as he searched for grounding for the will to power. It resembles Wagner more than Nietzsche in that it offers a programme for salvation, call it overcoming man, the human, or whatever, and in that it depends upon uncritical acceptance. Implicitly he would deny alien wills by insisting they are to find their freedom within his own contentious framework. This suggests fascism in some ways though not in its democratic sympathies.

Deleuze invites us to join a common project accepting certain Nietzschean interpretations as authoritative. If one accepted these, new possibilities would open up. One could build a culture, with the most exciting feelings given clear symbolic value. This supposedly Nietzschean type of culture, can be very emotionally alluring but it bears a closer relation to what Nietzsche objected to in Wagner, precisely this assumption of authority, something he must therefore decline himself.

Nietzsche believed he understood Wagner as well as anyone. His break with him may well have had personal roots. Perhaps he even felt inadequate, as Michael Tanner suggests 32, resenting, in a plain English sense of the word, Wagner’s power, and wanting to subvert its basis. But through pursuing his motive he makes a higher, more ambitious claim, to have discovered something. He is talented enough to have emulated Wagner, he believes he understands the psychology of redemption and salvation, with all the emotional excitement they can bring, and acceding to a mastery of his own, he could play the same game in a different field. He declines to do so, refusing to deceive and seduce.

The point of being a Nietzschean free spirit or a hyperborean aristocrat would be to pursue your own will. However there could obviously be cases where your will conflicts fundamentally with Nietzsche’s discovery, and the theoretical reorientation it was his life’s work to effect. On too abstract an interpretation of will to power, it is easy to argue that Nietzsche is saying nothing about the opinions you might hold. It can seem as if one may support any opinion by claiming it expresses will to power under threat from demoralising ideas. On this view everything is totally relativised to the individual. Then any post modernist frivolity would be acceptable. Against this, we might say that overcoming demoralising ideas, is not something entirely subjective, it cannot be meant to isolate the individual, confident in his own opinions. For some of these opinions must contradict each other. If I am to have confidence in myself, then someone whose self belief depends upon my not having confidence is to be demoralised, and this is not something entirely reciprocal. Equal validity for every opinion is precisely one of the demoralising ideas that would make what Nietzsche wants to say impossible.

In trying to understand Nietzsche, it is useful to focus on the power and strength of his original appeal, the depression he seems able to get us out of, the hope he holds out, and how one can invoke him to attack some other people’s sense of their own power. We can look at his motive, see what he wants, what his thought is trying to achieve. Much of the time he means to make an individualist point. As a source of inspiration, we can focus on what is really hateful in the demand to conform, that seems quite essential to some people, the desire to be part of a movement, gregarious enthusiasm.

We can relate him to others who expressed a similar motive. William Blake as inspired by Milton’s Satan is commonly recognised as one of Nietzsche’s precursors, though having no direct influence on him. Some of his ‘Proverbs of Hell’ were ‘among the bricks from which Nietzsche’s philosophy was to be builded’ 33. He railed against ‘One faith one god one law’. He denounced the spirit of conformism, which he found in the Christian God, Nobodaddy, the Ialdabaoth of the gnostics. Nietzsche praised the ‘fight against milleniums of Christian ecclesiastical pressure’ (which was the same as Plato’s authority) as creating in Europe ‘a magnificent tension of spirit such as had not existed anywhere before’ (‘Beyond Good and Evil’- preface). He described himself in ‘Ecce Homo’ as characterised by ‘the will to power as no man ever possessed it’ 34. A lot of people read Nietzsche and a lot of people feel inspired by him, but unless they sympathise with this satanic aggression they will not know what to make of him. They will respect points of view that are entirely alien to his own without appreciating his need to destroy and overthrow them. Tolerating and embracing all kinds of view that are remote from his own, he becomes hard to understand.

Nietzsche is for the individual against collective pressure to conform. In this special sense we might call his position individualist, and his opponent’s collectivist. This is far from tying his thought to some conceptual framework called ‘individualism’, itself only a counter in the universal battle of interests. The most fundamental point he was trying to make was to do with individual dissidence. If he seems to make an opposite point, then he has not managed to communicate what he wants to say. To say what his opinions and prejudices are upon this matter, is not to make him out a purely literary figure, to be heeded as a guru, take him or leave him. He is making a judgement about human nature, happiness and fulfilment, strength and weakness. This comes out of his essential aim to emancipate individual strength against the collective. This aim is the perspective that is claimed to be superior to others. If his words can be twisted to give them an opposite meaning from that intended, then they have not been fully successful in pinning down his meaning.

Of course one of the main themes of structuralist and post structuralist thinking, from Durkheim, through Levi-Strauss and Althusser, to Derrida and Foucault, has been to expose the concept of the individual as a historically contingent, and predominantly Anglo Saxon, aberration 35. In ‘Daybreak’ §132, Nietzsche dates a deplorable attack on the individual from the time of the French revolution:- ‘..the demand that the ego has to deny itself until, in the form of adaptation to the whole, it again acquires its firmly set circle of rights and duties – until it has become something quite novel and different. What is wanted – whether this is admitted or not – is nothing less than a fundamental remoulding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual..’ Whatever Nietzsche meant by his later questioning of concepts of self and individualism, it seems implausible that he would have retracted this.

The collectivist versus the individualist represent two opposed camps. Each desires to persuade the other. The one’s morale is incompatible with the other’s morale. In this clash of opinions it can well be that both sides pay homage to Nietzsche, claim to derive from his thought, both to understand and accept the will to power. If I am an individualist I would want to argue that the collectivist’s morale depends on a false premise. I might say that he denies my own feelings and wishes to suppress me. I only wish to suppress him, insofar as he desires to suppress me. I want to say the difference is that he desires to suppress me essentially. But this invites the reply ‘tu quoque’. How to get out of this paradox? He might feel his self respect demands a collectivist position. Can I say this is weakness?

We might try to define tyranny as a refusal to recognise other routes to the same goal, the demand for exclusivity of a point of view. The tyrant defines a route in such a way that it involves denying other individual routes. His route has logical possibility. What I do not accept is the tyrannical grip of certain positions, though I accept that someone can think them. The tyrant’s route may be so mapped out that to accept it means denying every other. He expects us to see the world only through his eyes. We might call this a route of wilful blindness. In his own perspectivism, Ortega y Gasset excluded only perspectives that claimed exclusivity.

If all opinions are motivated by a will to power, some are to be rejected because they deny this. But some claim to accept this truth, and are also to be rejected. What is it that is wrong in those cases? Shall we say that a rejected position fails to acknowledge will to power as it should be understood? What is fully accepting will to power and what is not accepting it? Admitting one’s own desire for power is a way in which one might hold virtually any opinion. But this does not exclude the possibility of an opinion being shown to be false.

‘The world is will to power and nothing besides’ (‘Will to Power’, last page §1067). The assertion of universal will to power is meant to be of assistance to individuals oppressed by tyrants, not to tyrants prevented from expressing their tyranny. The assertion that there is a will to power comes from one who does not possess authority. He aims to defeat and demoralise established views of the world by this assertion.

Our adversary would respond with the claim that with the will to power idea it is possible for him to raise his own morale. What we want to do with it is to overturn his self confidence, showing that as resting upon illusion concerning human nature. His doctrine is like a pretension to metaphysical truth, something he expects other people to accept, when they can see there are alternatives. To what we say he constructs another, more sophisticated alternative and argues that we are denying this. On top of all the existing ideas in the world he devises others to cope with every objection we put forward, interpretations that relate less and less to anything beyond themselves. All we can really maintain is that the perspective he creates will, with mounting evidence, ultimately break down as inadequate to reality, much as did the geocentric theory of the universe, for all its epicycles.

We dispute the idea of power by which he restores his morale. Perhaps his morale depends upon self deception about other people, or about human nature. Perhaps our original motive to expose this is that we envy and resent his authority because it is something we do not have, and we want to overthrow it. That this attitude is deplorable by no means follows from Nietzsche’s principles. We can see it as healthy ambition, the good Eris on which Nietzsche quotes Aristotle as quoting Hesiod in ‘Homer’s Contest’. We want to overthrow arbitrary authority and replace it by a view of universal will to power, which compels acceptance because expressing a better understanding of reality. Mutual envy and suspicion, rather than any high minded commitment, are what should prevent a move away from this. We deny the validity of any knowledge which does so deviate. Daniel Conway appears to hold that Nietzsche’s own envy and resentment vitiate his project 36. But unless they can be shown to involve self deception, it has not been established why this should be so. Such envy is the root of all philosophy, including sound Nietzsche interpretation. Without it is a complaisant acquiescence in received dogmas.

Who looks for guidance to Nietzsche, who can obtain it? Consider the person trying to realise his potential as a tyrant. What ever he has achieved, we can appreciate and recognise as successful will. In that sense it is workable and coherent. We have a description for everything he does and is likely to do. We can describe all his beliefs and feelings in our own terms. His own description we do not accept, because it it does not correspond to reality as we know it. He talks of something that we are trying to suppress. Suppose his desire were brought under our description, then we hope people would see through it.

Triumph comes with fulfilment of the will. Whatever will is formulated faces the resistance of all that is opposed to it. Nietzsche’s analysis does nothing to rule out the existence of even the most tyrannous, most deceitful will. If you are consciously trying to deceive me, then there is no philosophical problem. If you deceive yourself, and I show you that you are doing so, then I undermine you. Whether or not you are guilty of self deception comes down to what you want to think and what you want to do. Nietzsche regards the desire to cheat oneself as springing from weakness. Consider what is quite obviously a will to self deception, such as a will to believe in fairy stories, in happy endings. This will faces opposition. What are demoralising ideas in face of this?

One criticism of the somewhat logical interpretation of will to power presented here might be that people are looking to Nietzsche for a short cut, a simple demonstration of the truth of their own opinions. It may seem I want to argue that my own perverse and rebellious attitudes get support from logical factors, that the fact I can think them, their very possibility, demonstrates their reality. These could seem to be elementary logical fallacies, trying to prove something more than that something can be thought or felt. This would be a misunderstanding. The framework of possibility conceived in the will to power theory is not purely logical or linguistic, what goes beyond that is open to the impact of experience.

So we need to look more closely at what Nietzsche felt, and the possibilities he wanted to protect. His motive remained in an important respect the same as Schopenhauer’s. The will itself for Schopenhauer was what morality of the weak was for Nietzsche. Schopenhauer’s view of the will as essentially evil, and his consequent denunciation of life, expressed only a particular condition, what can be characterised as genius as bad temper. Schopenhauer’s life negation was a refusal of the paths to satisfaction that appear to be on offer, of the promise of happiness on other people’s terms. If life is what it means in Hegel’s all embracing philosophy, if affirmation means finding fulfilment in Hegel’s optimistic values, then he will negate. Making affirmation versus negation the central issue is to miss out the essential sympathy between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Going for affirmation at all costs, one fails to see the relative triviality of the difference between simply saying yes and saying no. It is more important not to be a slave than to say yes.

Love of life, desirable as it was, was not what Nietzsche considered his or anyone else’s primary motive force:- ‘Man has one terrible and fundamental wish; he desires power, and this impulse which is called freedom, must be the longest restrained’ (‘Will to Power’ §720).

According to Schopenhauer, the universal symbol of life affirmation is the phallus 37. The erotic sphere is one field in which an ideal of affirmation unanalysed in terms of power can be downright oppressive. One does not always want to affirm other people’s sexuality, especially where this conflicts with one’s own. Erotic desire is itself is a trap where it is harnessed to undesirable values. If the only promise of happiness on offer is sexual involvement with unacceptable people, then one feels entitled to refuse it, whatever the promise one might come to feel differently. The mature Nietzsche would say that, rather than rejecting affirmation, this is rejecting a demoralising idea. The affirmation one is looking for is of one’s own power.

In the battle against oppressive forces erotic pleasure can bring, while it lasts, the exhilaration of victory. This is a question on which Foucault, in his guise as genealogist, can be illuminating even for many out of sympathy with his more bizarre theories. In his ‘History of Sexuality’ he develops a Nietzschean view of sex as power, writing of the ars amatori found in other civilisations, as a form of affirmation that justified life in the face of death 38. Sex is a field in which a battle for power between different values rages fiercely. To interpret sex as the innermost expression of the personality, opens unsuspected freedom and opportunity. Within society much pressure is directed against this in the effort to reduce it to a single meaning, a pattern into which we are all expected to fit. Foucault’s work suggests how even modern doctrines of liberation can be seen in these terms.

Nietzsche might agree with Schopenhauer that normal life is largely a painful pressure, but for him this results from imprisonment in the thought patterns of so called modernity, rather than insight into to the nature of things. The attitudes characterised as philistinism, as well as explicit doctrines like utilitarianism and socialism, all purport to embody a form of rationality, which is felt as depressing insofar as it succeds in stifling our emotional resistance. ‘Modern pessimism is an expression of the uselessness only of the modern world, not of the world and existence as such’ (‘Will to Power’ §34). Contemplation of art offers a release from this pressure. Schopenhauer interpreted aesthetic pleasure as consisting in denial of the will. Already by the ‘Birth of Tragedy’, Nietzsche was becoming dubious of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical scheme 39, while retaining much of his psychology. The idea of aesthetic enjoyment as escape, whether renunciation of will, or, scrapping some of the Schopenhauerian metaphysics, simply as consoling retreat into illusion, is widely held to have underpinned the ‘modernist’ programme in twentieth century art and literature.

On clarifying his ideas, Nietzsche concluded that aesthetic enjoyment should be seen neither as renunciation nor as illusion, but in terms of overcoming. ‘..in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites..’ (‘Will to Power’ §803). To treat it as life negation is rationally defective and morally pernicious. Schopenhauer did not really negate life, but his philosophy led him to espouse dangerous ideas, like the overvaluation of pity (‘Twilight of the Idols’ pp 79-80). Artistic creation should retain its consoling function, but reinterpreted as affirmation, resistance, successful overcoming.

It is nevertheless necessary to defend any consolation against denial and attack, as against ever more sophisticated versions of the original philistinism. This means asserting the superiority of a particular perspective. One has to prove the reality of what boosts one’s own morale, to maintain the solidity of one’s own alternative enjoyment, against what one experiences a surrounding pressure to think. One wants to argue that the fact one can feel as one does proves the hostile view is incomplete, that it contains something false within it. When that prevails it suppresses alternative viewpoints, and its strength involves denying the fact that suppression has taken place.

The problem is when this argument is turned on its head, creating a kind of paradox, recalling similar ones about freedom. Our opponent, what of his perspective and its significance? The possibility he is concerned about is that of a total perspective that clashes with ours. On the level of will, of things wanted, it is a simple fact like all other simple facts. On that level it simply clashes with other wills. On the level of a total perspective, we can deny it. On the first level it is more evidence in support of our own position. On the level of something that makes a claim on us it is to be combatted. Distinguishing different logical levels offers a standard way out of paradoxes. In this case this approach is defensible, because it is a question of different meanings which need not be assimilated. Some perspectives are to be rejected because they clash with other perspectives. The opposed perspectives are to be brought down by bringing to light inescapable truths for which they do not sufficiently account.

Post modernists such as Deleuze draw inspiration from the concept of affirmation, amor fati, which was a prominent feature of Nietzsche’s later writings, as in the myth of the eternal recurrence. ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity”. (‘Ecce Homo’ p258). They may look to ‘Ecce Homo’, as a model for the life of the future. They respond to the playfulness, irresponsibility, such as also found earlier in the idea of Dionysus from ‘Birth of Tragedy’ onwards.

Art consoles, it also celebrates. There is a direct connection with sexuality. ‘Without a certain overheating of the sexual system a man like Raphael is unthinkable…..in all creative artists productiveness certainly ceases with sexual potency….a kind of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to their lives’. (Will to Power §800). In the post prandial, post coital state, once resistance has been overcome, then it is that joy overflows into an interest in all kinds of things. But there are still many things one would not want to celebrate, or conspire in celebrating. Nietzsche is not for will as such, not for the triumph and happiness of his enemies.

‘Our religion, morality and philosophy are decadent human institutions.

‘The counter agent: Art’ (‘Will to Power’ §794).

The relaxation of ‘Ecce Homo’, may be seen as enjoyment of power achieved, delight in every phenomenon. Zarathustra is unhappy for much of the book, expressing the tension in which his creator lived. Nietzsche himself was unhappy for much of his creative life because there was so much to resist. He looks for a particular triumph and wishes to stop the triumph of another. He was happy when conscious of resistance being overcome. The difference between much of ‘Zarathustra’ and ‘Ecce Homo’ is between Nietzsche striving and Nietzsche relaxed. The ‘Ecce Homo’ playfulness is not something meant to be recommended as a model for everybody whatever their circumstances, nor as a replacement for the idea of art as consolation. It came from what he saw as the accomplishment of his task, the refutation of ideas that had oppressed him. He had been faced with a number of intellectual problems, and he felt he had solved them to his satisfaction with his concepts of will to power and transvaluation of values. His own achievement, he felt, was magnificent, but these were personal demons he had fought. He bequeathed a new framework of ideas to mankind, but its claim was not to make people happier than the old one. It was that it was truer.

If we deny this, we might be tempted by Alan Schrift’s view that the French poststructuralists are indeed the ‘philosophers of the future’ to whom Nietzsche looked forward, ‘complementary voices in a chorus that calls for an end to the repression that has heretofore accompanied hierarchical, oppositional thinking’ 40.

What could it mean to say he looked forward to such people as his heirs, or that they could continue what he was trying to do? It suggests an image of him as some benevolent uncle delighting in all kinds of people pursuing their wills, or worse, as a patronising agony aunty, advising people how to have sex. Why should he have cared about the enjoyments of people whose aims and tastes hardly relate to his own? Because of his love for humanity? Or because they would be enjoying themselves in his name? Some see Nietzsche as wanting followers, and glorying in the influence he exerts upon culture. To make such superficial vanity his central aim detracts from the seriousness of his enterprise.

Extreme deprivation of the basic necessities of life could make aesthetic consolation in Schopenhauer’s sense scarcely workable. Likewise sufficient supplies of such crude objects of will as sex fame and money could make it unnecessary. If overcoming modernism involves the destruction of the escape into the aesthetic, then it appears to be a monstrous act of vandalism, the effort to bring about conformity, on a basis that is supposed to include (one might say sublate) Nietzsche’s insights. The motive of complete reconciliation to society, either one that is or one that could be, involves the attempted destruction of art’s capacity to offer an alternative. With denial of the problem to which the aesthetic was a solution, comes the deliberate elimination of the aesthetic, the attempt to assimilate it to other forms of experience. One is left with objectives such as sex fame and money. One may aim for these in accordance with whatever values one is given, and if one succeeds in obtaining them one may be happy. Such a scheme only makes sense insofar as it is successful, its satisfactions linked to a social norm, whatever its pretensions to pluralism. If this is postmodernism it has little to offer the more radically malcontented.

The result is as alien to Nietzsche’s original inspiration as anything could be. Obnoxious opinions have returned with a vengeance, foreclosing the possibility of any way out. We are back where we started. One would have to launch an assault on this all over again, but with a new weariness, because the old route out has failed, and we have come back full circle. We have returned to the affirmationism of Hegel, rather than Nietzsche, as well as to the same kind of motive that produced Hegel’s own philosophy. Postmodernism gives support for precisely what Schopenhauer (and Stirner, and Kierkegaard) hated so much, the claim to have absorbed and transcended all other positions.

‘Postmodernist theory’ embraces a number of diverse thinkers, but they have enough in common to permit a sympathetic commentator to dismiss the animosity between Foucault and Derrida, or Baudrillard and Deleuze, as ‘essentially faction fighting’ 41 It may be that one should not regret the demise of a modernist project which had long forsaken Nietzsche, while leaving behind such monuments as brutalist architecture. On the credit side, postmodernism is concerned to teach something of the variety of possible viewpoints, and to liberate us from the narrow constraints of time and place, as well as acknowledging the importance of Nietzsche. As Solomon observes:- Nietzsche envisioned a post modern culture….but ours is certainly not it..’ 42

An alternative to Derrida and co. is the traditional way of the magician and the theosophist, from Iamblichus to Aleister Crowley. The magician pursues what is most attractive in postmodernism, notably the empathic enjoyment of alien cultural values and the exploration of the spiritual treasures of untapped possibility. He seeks all hidden wisdom, strives to transcend the limits of culture and language, to experience the unsayable, to understand every state of mind. He pursues all these riches from an aristocratic, individualist standpoint. Postmodernists would say that as such he is still constrained by rigid presuppositons, therefore they themselves are the freest spirits. They may see themselves as mischievous little pucks, overthrowing the fixed, deconstructing patriarchy and the concept of the individual. Others see them as sterile dogmatists, backed up by a mass of pedantry, gregarious and mediocre. The traditional motives of the continental left, from Hegel to Sartre, have been joined to an irrationalism derived from the extreme right.

The French revolution and its aftermath, was a time when France expected the whole world to participate in its current political enthusiasms. Such attitudes were once comprehensively systematised and defended by Hegel. Nietzsche was not especially concerned to attack Hegel, he regarded him, prematurely as it turned out (think only of Fukuyama), as simply out of date 43. Schopenhauer’s criticisms were almost taken for granted, so he could afford to be generous. The ideology associated with ‘the New Nietzsche’ suggests a new cultural imperialism, in some ways repeating what went before, the emotions of 1968 replacing those of 1789. The appeal of much postmodernist theory is essentially in terms of this imperial, gregarious spirit, French trendiness, feelings that for some people are very enjoyable. It presents itself as liberation and intellectual adventure. For those who prefer to see it as self indulgence and intellectual masturbation, a careful reading of Nietzsche can supply ammunition.

NOTES

1 Copleston:- A History of Philosophy vol 7 part II. p194

2 Nehamas p4-5

3 Clark p155-158

4 De Man:- Allegories of Reading. p116

5 Holub:- article in Postmodernist Culture. Jan 1992

6 Schacht Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy Cambridge companion to Nietzsche ch 5

7 Twilight of the Idols p41

8 Twilight of the Idols p33

9 Nehamas:- from abstract to paper presented to 5th annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, University of Herts. 1995

10 Clark p242

11 Koelb p5

12 Genealogy of Morals 3 §24

13 Poellner p110

14 Grimm:- p19

15 As is, e.g., the view of Ofelia Schutte, ch 4, pp76-104.

16 Poellner p228

17 Schutte:- Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks

18 Irigaray:- A Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

19 Koelb p293

20 Schacht:- article on Nietzsche in Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy

21 Derrida:- Spurs p 53

22 See Hamacher, Hertz and Keenan:- Responses, De Man’s Wartime Journalism Lincoln 1988

23 Ott Hugo:- Martin Heidegger, a Political Life

24 see Rosenthal:- Nietzsche and Soviet Culture

25 see Kaufmann:- Nietzsche, Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist p245

26 Staten pp86-107

27 Staten p 50

28 Graham Parkes:- Nietzsche in East Asian Thought:- The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, chapter 11

29 Tracy Strong:- Nietzsche’s Political Misappropriation, ibid chapter 4

30 Schrift:- In Cambridge companion to Nietzsche p345

31 Ansell-Pearson:- Nietzsche as a Political Thinker

32 Tanner p21

33 Grierson:- A Critical History of English Poetry p296

34 Ecce Homo p275

35 Harland:- Superstructuralism pp9-10

36 Conway:- in The Fate of the New Nietzsche ed Ansell-Pearson & Caygill, p68

37 Schopenhauer:- World as Will and Representation I p330 II p513

38 Foucault:- History of Sexuality vol 1 p57-8

39 Staten p192

40 Schrift:- in Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche p345

41 Harland p176

42 Koelb p281

43 see Joyful wisdom §357

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and articles on Nietzsche

Ansell-Pearson & Caygill (ed):- The Fate of the New Nietzsche. Aldershot, 1993
Ansell-Pearson:- An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker, the Perfect Nihilist. Cambridge, 1994
Clark:- Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge, 1990
Copleston:- A History of Philosophy vol 7. New York, 1965
De Man:- Allegories of Reading. Yale, 1979
Deleuze:- Nietzsche and Philosophy. trans Hugh Tomlinson New York 1983
Derrida:- Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. trans Barbara Harlow, Chicago, 1979
Grimm:- Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge. New York & Berlin, 1977
Holub:- Review of Nietzsche as Postmodernist. Postmodern Culture, Jan 1992
Irigaray:- A Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. New York, 1991
Kaufmann:- Nietzsche Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist. Princeton, 1974
Koelb (ed):- Nietzsche as Postmodernist, Essays Pro and Contra. Albany, 1990
Magnus and Higgins (ed):- The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge, 1996
Nehamas:- Nietzsche a Life as Literature. Cambridge Mass. 1985
Poellner:- Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Cambridge, 1995
Rorty:- Contingency Irony Solidarity. Cambridge 1989
Rosenthal (ed):- Nietzsche and Soviet Culture. Cambridge, 1994
Schacht:- Nietzsche. London, 1983
Schrift:- Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation. New York, 1990
Staten:- Nietzsche’s Voice. Cornell, 1990
Stern:- Nietzsche. Glasgow, 1971
Tanner:- Nietzsche Oxford, 1993

Books by Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. trans Golffing, New York, 1956
Untimely Meditations trans. Hollingdale, Cambridge, 1983
Human All too Human. trans Faber and Lehman, Lincoln, 1984
Human All too Human vol 2 trans Cohn, Edinburgh and London, 1911
Daybreak. trans Hollingdale, Cambridge, 1982
The Joyful Wisdom. trans Thomas Common, New York 1960
Thus Spoke Zarathustra trans Hollingdale, Harmondsworth (Penguin), 1961
Thus Spake Zarathustra trans Tille & Bozman, London, 1933
Beyond Good and Evil trans Cowan, Chicago, 1955
Twilight of the Idols and Antichrist. trans Hollingdale, Harmondsworth (Penguin), 1968
The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. trans Kaufmann, New York, 1967
On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. trans Kaufmann, New York, 1969
The Will to Power. trans Kaufmann & Hollingdale, New York, 1968
The Will to Power. trans Ludovici 2 vols. Edinburgh and London, 1909-1910
The Portable Nietzsche. Trans Kaufmann, New York, 1954

OTHER MATERIAL

Audi (ed):- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge 1996
De Man:- Wartime Journalism. Ed Hamacher Hertz & Keenan Lincoln 1988
Foucault:- A History of Sexuality vol 1 trans Hurley Harmondsworth (Penguin) 1990
Grierson:- A Critical History of English Poetry London 1947
Harland:- Superstructuralism. London, 1987
Newman:- The Life of Wagner vol 4 new York 1946
Ott:- Martin Heidegger, a Political Life. London 1993
Schopenhauer:- The World as Will and Representation. trans Payne New York 1966

This paper was presented to the Nietzsche and Naturalism Conference, Cardiff University September 20th 2010

 Master Morality and Ugly Truths – John S Moore

From some points of view there are many kinds of morality. For example there are pharisaic morality, and Little Jack Horner morality, our tartufferies, as Nietzsche sometimes calls them. How are these to be classified? Are they master or slave? In addition there are several varieties of morality of the weak. Not everywhere does Nietzsche polarise all morality into master versus slave. In places he distinguishes other forms of morality of the weak, such that of the canaille, or that of the herd.

But from the viewpoint presented in the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals, the choice is simply between master or slave, serving yourself or serving others. Slave morality is indeed something it will be possible for you to choose. You may decide to take all your values from others, submitting to the rules that have been derived from their interests. Or you may choose to be in charge of yourself, to pursue what is clearly your own will. There can be no compromise, no hybrid. Conflicting principles on this level would simply mean confusion.

I begin by discussing a type of interpretation which I believe to be wrong. I have put this together from various sources but it represents a view which seems to have wide currency. Then I attempt to point out its flaws. The focus is on the Genealogy of Morals, particularly the first essay, but very similar disputes arise about other texts.

In this interpretation the argument of the Genealogy is taken as an attack on morality, rather than as a criticism of a particular type and interpretation of morality. Nietzsche�s object is seen as the reconstruction of morality from first principles. For this thesis the suggestion that his criticism leaves much morality intact is irrelevant and therefore disregarded. Arguments for the derivation of ordinary morality from egoistic motives are not considered.

It is said that he has shown, perhaps convincingly, a lot of negative consequences of morality to do with ugliness and unhealthiness. He has not, however, it is contended, given a clear idea of the superior values he wants to see, but hints at how they need to be created.

His critique, it is said, has the effect of undermining all moral judgements, so fomenting a state of moral nihilism, from which he means to rescue us by the creation of new values. It is maintained that he is proposing a new idea of a good beyond ressentiment and rooted in life affirmation.

“for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment“- that is a not untypical view taken from the publicity for a book comparing Nietzsche and Levinas.

Such interpreters go to complex and quite humourless lengths to imagine what such an act might be. They write about the aspiration to total life affirmation, and draw much on the ideal of eternal recurrence.

It gets even more complicated when they want to continue with their moral judgements after Nietzsche has shown the origins of some of them in ressentiment. They are concerned to preserve not only their desires and valuations but also their current ways of thinking and feeling about them, while absorbing, or believing they have absorbed, Nietzsche�s criticism. There are complex tasks for philosophers here, much scope for virtuoso solutions in trying to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable.

It must be conceded there are sentences in Nietzsche�s books which may on first reading appear to support this interpretation. As well as his central argument, whatever we take it to be, there is much rhetoric, persuasive, poetic and ironic, some of which may be mistaken for his core message. Read differently, adjusting the weight put on certain statements, much of it can be taken as supporting a somewhat different interpretation. It must be admitted that he can appear full of paradoxes.

Nietzsche addresses an appeal to current prejudices. Some arguments for the desirability of a change appeal to the old values, rather than expressing directly the logic of that change. The argument is for a choice between slave and master values. How can we evaluate the value of a value except by a value? Nietzsche gives us his own noble values and wants us to prefer them.

Some of his rhetoric is concerned with ideas of health. He does describe a state of affairs he thinks would be healthier. We are nevertheless missing his point if we set this up as a standard in criticism of our own as distinct from other people�s desires, as if morality has to be in conflict with desire, or as if we need to be told what to desire or aim for. The healthiness of the nobles he depicts is a recommendation, for us, his readers as we are at present, still half bewitched by slave values, not the principle behind the change.

In places there is indeed the suggestion that all morality will be put in doubt. This could be seen as a historical prediction, incidental to his main argument. Or it may even be loose speaking. At the end of the third essay Nietzsche does talk of the disappearance of ethics, and at the end of the second of what sounds like the need for a redeemer to show the way, and this is his Zarathustra. He is John the Baptist to Zarathustra�s Jesus.

In Ecce Homo he does describe the Genealogy as preliminary studies to the transvaluation to be tackled in his forthcoming book. However this can be understood in different ways.

How ought we to imagine the situation once the battle has ended with a favourable outcome? When he writes of the creation of new values, what does that mean? Is he talking about new cultural opportunities or is he describing the solution to everything? Whatever he means by the creation of new values, it cannot be the solution to the problem of the disappearance of morality. More probably he is talking about art, the culture of the future, new aesthetic values, all the work that would need to be done. With the abolition of the ascetic ideal new concepts and principles will be discovered to give meaning to our suffering.

On this interpretation I am criticising Nietzsche�s basic problem is understood as that of nihilism resulting from the rejection of Christian morality. If the solution to that is to set up a new standard, with prohibitions on resentment and life negation, what would this be but a ‘new idol’?

Objections 

In the preface to Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes �Above all do not mistake me for someone else. I am, for example, by no means a bogey or a moralistic monster�..No new idols are erected by me; let the old ones learn what feet of clay mean.�

It seems that Nietzsche anticipated some of the misinterpretation to which he would be subject.

When he says �No new idols erected by me� we should take it he means to deify neither truth, nor affirmation, nor freedom from resentment.

Readers of Nietzsche differ much on how much weight to attach to this warning.

Those whose interpretation makes him into a moralistic monster happily disregard it. 

Nietzsche is loaded with a number of arbitrary makeshift principles invoked to make sense of his argument. Each of these would be in need of justification. I pick out four.

1. Nietzsche overthrows morality. 

The first is the idea that Nietzsche overthrows morality. This goes against his explicit stated intention. Even if it were true it would need to be shown how what he does say should have this effect. The question is not resolved simply by quoting what he says, since different meanings can be read into his words, but also what makes sense.

To analyse morality into will to power is not to overthrow it. If my own moral values are understood as springing from my own will to power that is not in itself an objection to them. Why should it be? The eighteenth century derived morality from self interest. That was not generally understood as destroying morality. Even if we think the interpretation is mistaken, then it would just be a wrong analysis. Undermining one way of understanding morality is hardly to destroy such a firmly rooted human practice.

What is overthrown is only the form of morality that depends upon what we can show to be dishonesty about itself and its motives. If, for example it has been shown that vengeance and hatred are the real motives inspiring some judgment, and it is essential to that judgement that this inspiration be denied, then the judgment loses its hold on us. That is surely obvious. However, if that kind of judgement is all we are able to understand as morality, then we are quite out of sympathy with Nietzsche.

Much remains. Rather than needing to be reconstructed from first principles morality grows out of normal human interaction. If one has no morality one steals from one�s friends. Much of the Genealogy is about keeping promises and justice. When its argument is taken as an attack on morality, rather than as a criticism of a particular type and interpretation of morality, the idea that Nietzsche’s criticism would leave much morality intact is just disregarded. But Nietzsche himself says famously that he is not writing beyond good and bad.

Superior values are given from the start, they are what Nietzsche calls master morality. Missing a central point, as is so common in Nietzsche interpretation, many modern commentators are led into convoluted, tedious and mind numbing speculations. (Or brilliant and original flights of imaginative exegesis according to taste.)

2. We must get rid of resentment 

This is sometimes held to be the cornerstone of Nietzsche�s reconstructive project.

When it comes to the objective of getting rid of resentment more questions are raised than are answered. Resentment, what exactly is it? What is the objection to it?

A resentful person will denigrate the standards by which he does not measure up. Often this may be harmless enough, and neutralised by normal human competition. We may for example identify resentment in the journalist who wants to blur the distinction between journalism and fine literature. Resentment is objectionable when it distorts truth that we want to assert. That is all. We may think of it as setting up false idols as an obstruction to what we want to think and feel. I don�t want to be constrained unnecessarily by someone else�s feeling. It appears that Wagner resented Brahms, and Nietzsche may even have resented Wagner to some degree.

What distinguishes nasty malevolence, from healthy aggression? Nietzsche speaks of reactive forces, meaning primarily malevolence and hatred. We may easily feel the same class based contempt for this sort of thing, as we do for the attitudes and opinions conveyed in a type of popular newspaper, which we presumably consider to be, in Nietzsche�s language, base, plebeian and low minded. We discern ressentiment in the punitive predilections of the masses, cynically exploited by democratic politicians. Depending on our political preferences we may also deplore as ressentiment the levelling objectives of the socialist, or the programmes of the aggressive feminist, and the frustrated nationalist. Impotent old age resents and tries to restrain the freedom and vigour of youth.

So apparently there is healthy aggression and nasty resentment. It may be proposed that we are to object to aggression or resentment which is lying and untruthful, but has it been established what truth is in this area? How are we to tell subjectively what is good resentment and what bad? It is all very well to talk about the difference between active and reactive forces. How are we to know whether the aggression we feel is reactive or not? And why should we be so concerned about truthfulness?

Any prohibition on resentment would need to avoid prohibiting the good Eris, the healthy aggression upon which Nietzsche sets such high value.

In his autobiography he explicitly denies the existence of resentment in himself. In Why I am so Wise �6 he claims to be free from all such low motives

Having done this he dignifies his hostile feelings by the name of ‘aggressive pathos’. Rather than taking this entirely seriously, we may prefer to treat it as a Nietzschean joke. Nietzsche presents himself as the most noble and generous of beings. That is how we may all tend to see ourselves in our most elated moments. What you call my resentment, I call my aggressive pathos. Whether there is actually any failure of self knowledge here is an interesting question. The master defines what is noble, and it is whatever is like himself.

3. The foundation of the new values is life affirmation 

This is another misconception. Nietzsche�s first principle is will to power, not life affirmation. The idea of transvaluation is linked to this. He is for competitive drive, Eris, struggle, not some ideal by which to judge others. He is far from proposing an ideal to which we must subordinate everything and derive all morality.

Life affirmation is the anticipated by-product of accepting will to power and renouncing the ascetic ideal. To aim for it directly would be like aiming directly for happiness, which Nietzsche, following conventional wisdom, though with a characteristically perverse twist, would see as counterproductive. As Zarathustra says in Of Old and New law Tables.

“For enjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things. Neither like to be
sought for. One should have them,- but one should rather seek for guilt and
pain!“

Actively seeking guilt, isn’t that a strange precept? What can he mean?

4. Understanding morality as will to power means nihilism 

This is another makeshift and arbitrary idea. Once again not only does it contradict what Nietzsche explicitly says, but it would need to be justified and explained.

Alasdair Macintyre, who has been described as a Nietzschean, appears to be saying (in After Virtue) that Nietzsche abandons morality in attributing it to will to power. Macintyre writes about a moral crisis that is certainly not the one Nietzsche is concerned about. In the first essay there is no suggestion of moral nihilism. What Nietzsche means by nihilism is differently defined. Nihilism is a word used quite loosely and in different senses. In the Genealogy he describes it as the desire for nothingness, extinction. For him slave morality is itself nihilistic for its tendency to promote this.

Get rid of slave morality, and there remains non-slave morality, which if we have followed Nietzsche�s argument we may adopt and interpret in terms of our own will to power. This will be master morality.

It is simply not true that Nietzsche fails to give examples of how this can work. He shows justice as originating in a conscious will to power. In the second essay he describes how malevolence and hatred were normal, and contributed to the foundation of many of our institutions. He attacks D�hring�s theory of vengeance as the source of justice. Instead he explains justice as springing from an aggressive will to overcome, imposing a pattern that surmounts vengeance.

 Wherever justice is practiced and maintained we see a stronger power intent on finding means to regulate the senseless raging of rancour among its weaker subordinates.

We can say he admires Rome not for its brutality but for its justice and humanity. It is Rome he praises, not the blond Teutonic beast. He says we should look for the spirit behind the fragments it has left behind. These are master values, his antithesis to the priestly impulse.

Every vestige of them�. is a sheer delight provided we are able to read this spirit behind the writing. 

He describes the autonomous individual as the summit of social evolution. If we place ourselves at the terminal point of this great process, where society and custom finally reveal their true aim, we shall find the ripest fruit of that tree to be the sovereign individual, equal only to himself, all moral custom left far behind. These are the strong, who hate being organised, for whom as he writes:- it is as natural to disaggregate as for the weak to congregate. Even on this central Nietzschean principle though he is not obviously consistent. For elsewhere, like a good Prussian, he extols conscription.

Truth

A natural question arises. If everything is will to power what can be special about admitting to it? To what exactly can we be committing ourselves? Even though every position does involves will to power, conscious recognition of it does offer a distinctive perspective, which excludes many others. The contention is that only this perspective is capable of fully confronting and sustaining truth. Other positions deny their own roots in will to power. It is highly questionable how much a choice of slave morality could be compatible with honesty of any kind. Schopenhauerian negation is dubiously honest.

He reminds us that Schopenhauer�s philosophy was the product of a young man of twenty six, with the powerful frustrated urges characteristic of that phase of life, and that Schopenhauer himself derived great satisfaction from his philosophy and its propagation.

But why should we care about or be constrained by truth? Why not dispense with truth altogether in the pursuit of your will?

The answer to this is that as sovereign individual you belong to the solitary species, and are therefore weak when faced with the combined strength of the individually weak, that is the herd. Your greatest strength is in the insistence upon what to others are ugly truths. These are uncomfortable facts that are inescapable realities. They are hailed at the end of the very first section of the essay and their existence is certainly to be borne in mind throughout the book. Ugly truths derail alternative perspectives. Positions incompatible with the will to power perspective may be held but not without demonstrable error.

Thinking of the motive to establish the kind of ugly truths that Nietzsche has in mind we can make little sense of it if we take the idea of truth as an �ideal� behind a cooperative enterprise. There would be no motive to explore or reveal them, so they would be unlikely to be revealed. So how do ugly truths ever get to be established? If they were merely unpleasant why not leave them forever unsaid? What is the interest in discovering an ugly truth? There are many more convenient facts out there on which scholars may choose to expend their energies.

In the third essay, concluding what may seem the extreme and rather one-sided attack on ascetic priests, he attacks scholars for their attachment to an ideal of truth. Yet this cannot be taken as contradicting the opening of the book where he has invoked ugly truths, which he insists do exist.

They are invoked in support of master morality. Ugly truths include unpleasant revelations about human nature, including the truth behind certain stereotypes that it seems only decent to deny. It appears that the motive to uncover such truths is not so much a delight in ugliness as individualistic will to power, conscious of the war of all against all. This is more than just the desire to establish master morality. These truths have not been discovered specifically to defeat the opposition.

Defence

What defence could be made of slave morality against Nietzsche�s objections? If everyone forgot about ethics and just did what they pleased what difference would it make? Zarathustra has told us that some people say morals are necessary when they mean only that the police are necessary.

It is usually argued that slave morality is necessary to restrain the cruelty of the strong. Are we then the weak who need to be defended against that? Morality of the weak scarcely even succeeds in restraining cruelty. There are better tools for doing that if that is what we want. Its principal effect has been to satisfy feelings of vengeance in the hope of bringing excluded groups to power. Without it nothing of value need be lost.

Slave morality appeals not only to fear, but to the powerless. But Nietzsche�s readers are presumably not the powerless. Perhaps for some of them conventional values serve a function in cementing a hierarchy. They are an orthodoxy, as were once the dogmas of religion, and it may be in your interest to observe them on pain of social ostracism. You may even be able to exploit them in service of your own ambition. Face this and admit it, if only to yourself, and you are not observing slave morality.

Take them seriously and you should recognise that in their origin and essence slave values are addressed to fear, but not your own apprehensions; for those they are not a remedy. A stronger and more significant inspiration than fear is the hatred and resentment felt by the low. Only your pity might offer an honourable motive for deferring to that and that would be irrational. This would be pity for the frustration and suffering of the resentful weak, which threatens to unman you. Even less honourable motives are hypocrisy and sycophancy, the need for respectability.

Pity and disgust, he maintains, are the effect of slave values on the noble minded individual. He writes of this as a mixture of loathing and pity for mankind. If this seems extreme and excessive it expresses something of the misery of demoralisation. Pity in this sense has the effect of turning you against your own will and desires, renunciation, even of your own beliefs as to what is right. The logical conclusion of that is self hatred and desire for extinction, what Nietzsche does call nihilism.

Nietzsche�s response to the fear argument is this appeal to the herd:- 

Who would not a thousand times prefer fear when it is accompanied with admiration to security accompanied by the loathsome sight of perversion, dwarfishness and degeneracy?

This might be taken in an unfortunate political sense. It sounds like he is asking us whether we would happily cripple our masters. Leaving aside the question of how effective such measures might be in actually reducing oppression, we may feel some reservations here. Would we really rather fear where we can also admire? One thinks of fascism or rule by Russian gangsters. It is too spectator orientated.

Presumably this is not how the masters, or we as masters, would look at the matter. We are not faced with the question of whether we should prefer to admire and fear or simply despise. As autonomous sovereign individuals we have our own projects with our enmities and alliances and do not need to be told what we ought or ought not desire. Nevertheless we are vulnerable to the threat of demoralisation from slave morality. Slave morality is oppressive and depressing and our object is to refute it, defeating all the wiles with which it endeavours to insert itself in our minds and souls. This, not moral nihilism, is the fundamental problem that drives Nietzsche�s investigation.

Those who identify their interests with the herd are also expected to follow his reasoning. However comfortable they may find their current ways of thinking presumably they do not want to live in illusion. The slaves may be beyond redemption, but their principal weapon is to be decommissioned.

The Genealogy of Morals. 

Nietzsche makes clear that the discussion of historical reality which he says he began in Human all too Human takes second place to the value of moral judgments, which it is his primary concern to assess. He writes of a slave revolt in morals which originated with the priests, and achieved final victory in our own times. Yet this does not mean that master morality has disappeared from our culture. In many quarters the battle is still going on. The victory has been ideological, something like the triumph of a religious orthodoxy, It is not the case that the other values have been annihilated, anymore than sin and heresy have been abolished in Christian countries. All the best minds are divided, he says.

For his readers, who follow his argument, there is either master or slave, no hybrid. The conflict has raged for millennia, he says. His concern with the value of moral judgements is with how they look from the point of view of nineteenth century enlightenment, not, for example, from that of those who believe moral injunctions are the commandments of God. How they actually feel to those who embrace them is of secondary significance. Thus his history of the ascetic ideal may make it sound worse than it was.

The difference between the two forms of morality is not a simple question of the different objects that are valued or not (like how you rate unselfishness) but of the source of those values. Do they come from within yourself, identifiable as your own will, or do they come from some external ideal to which you submit yourself? All have will to power but there is a slavish way of exercising it which is involved in falsehood and illusion. Even with inhibiting morality you pursue your own will, it is just that then your will is divided against itself.

One may attack unselfishness on utilitarian grounds. This would not be the revolution he has in mind. Even to commend that for its utility would be to invoke the old values.

He writes that:-

The noble minded spontaneously creates the conception of the good and later derives from it the concept of the bad

Such noble mindedness is still entirely possible. There was evolution from the blond beast to Romans, and in this place Nietzsche is not talking about sublimation. That the original form of master morality was barbaric, does not mean that the will of civilised men must be insipid by comparison, at least not for this argument.

Selfishness of will to power

The counter movement from slave back to master morality is not a question of choosing different objects of desire. Any generous or charitable motive may be retained. There is no necessary diminution of goodwill.

Nevertheless in the light of all possibilities that have been suppressed conscious will to power manifests as selfishness, just as honest speaking can come across as brutality. In the ordinary sense it need not be selfish at all. Any reasonable objective can be interpreted in terms of serving your own will to power. The opposite perspective of universalised idealism always involves illusion. Clearly these universalistic ideals may be formulated, but they conflict with those ugly truths which it is our business and ambition to establish.

Made his case?

Surely Nietzsche has made his case? What rational opposition could there be to his ideas about morality? Should not anyone with a pretence to enlightenment accept them? Nevertheless there is much resistance. In principle the change over should be straightforward. Nothing important need be lost. Why then do many find his revaluation so hard to follow or accept? Despite the difficulty some have in accepting revaluation there should be nothing to fear. There is no requirement to renounce decent feelings, or any rational motive, only illusion.

Some of the problem seems to be with abandoning a settled pattern of thought. This is often a personal and psychological difficulty rather than strictly intellectual.

Modern academics, scholars and atheistic enlighteners are not the ones to be entrusted with transvaluation. This includes most scholars of Nietzsche.

Some commentators appear to identify the values peculiar to their own class with the whole of morality. The eighteenth century philosophical egoism that won Nietzsche�s qualified praise was bourgeois in origin, opposed to the aristocratic ideals which were still a significant social force. The life of the modern academic is constrained by social considerations, often including a degree of political correctness that may be hard to bypass.

It is important to remember that Nietzsche is not a team player. Any established untruth is objectionable not for idealistic reasons, but because it gives an authority which may be contested. Many interpreters of Nietzsche are team
players, and try to understand him in those terms, making much heavy weather of what may be understood much more straightforwardly. Nietzsche calls on the scholars to respect ugly truth though they are unlikely to discover it.

For those in the English tradition who interpreted morality in terms of self interest, he expresses the confessedly unlikely hope:-

that these microscopic examiners of the soul may be really courageous, magnanimous and proud animals who know how to contain their emotions and have trained themselves to subordinate all wishful thinking to the truth- any truth- even a homespun, severe, ugly, obnoxious, un-Christian, unmoral truth. For such truths do exist.

The sovereign individual fighting for himself, keen to propagate his own ideas and creative efforts discovers them in the pursuit of his own personal ambitions. The examples held up to us are Nietzsche himself and his fictional alter ego Zarathustra, who is so ambitious he aspires to be a god.

He finds them by bloody minded perversity, refusing to acquiesce in unjustified authority in which he has no share. No unsubstantiated demand can be allowed to stand in the path of his ambition. For him will to power is not something to be treated as an item of faith, it is a practice, an aggression, understood in a particular way. This is the good Eris, agon, ruthless competition between ideas. Ugly truth so discovered brings certainty that sustains master morality against attempts to undermine it. Anti-Nietzschean perspectives must fall before it, undoubtedly including the Aristotelian/Aquinean consensus Macintyre proposes as an alternative to will to power.

We may understand Nietzschean enlightenment as the disabling of certain weapons, comprising what we call the morality of the weak, which are currently employed in the war of all against all. He does this by trying to show their clear incompatibility with demonstrable matters of fact. Beyond that we pursue our own personal and political objectives in the light of our own interests and desires. My politics is part of my strength.

To deny that Nietzsche means to guide us more closely than that is hardly to deny that he has standards of his own, only that they directly follow from his rejection of slave morality. The foundation of morality is will to power, and that it remains. Recognition of that gives an adequate foundation for our own values. The specific foundation of Nietzsche’s own values is the interest of the solitary species, to which he belongs, against the pressure of the herd. He fights for this by demonstrating truth, which supporters of the opposing values are concerned to deny. He does not need to be saved from nihilism by the establishment of a new faith to underpin all his ambitions. Naturally there will be more new values as the consequences of transvaluation, meaning acknowledgement of universal will to power, make themselves felt throughout the culture.

This paper was presented to the conference on “Nietzsche, Culture and Society” at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, January 13th-14th, 2006

Peoples and Fatherlands – John S Moore

Some of the views expressed in the well known chapter On Peoples and Fatherlands in Beyond Good and Evil can seem much cruder than we have the right to expect from Nietzsche in his published work.

The main theme of the chapter is presented as the overcoming of narrow nationalistic perspectives, to develop what he calls good Europeanism. He himself expresses some of the former. Since he admits to being still to some extent under the spell of an old jingoism, we are presumably to conclude that much of what he says he does not mean, or that at least it is not to be taken entirely at face value. As he proceeds he confesses that he has not always freed himself from patriotic enthusiasm.

More than most in Nietzsche this chapter needs to be read esoterically. He says things here which unfortunately can pass for his considered judgments Accordingly they have often been taken uncritically as pronouncements of Nietzschean wisdom. The whole book is often read as just a collection of aphorisms in which Nietzsche gives us his various opinions on all manner of subjects, just like Zarathustra. Yet if we take everything in this chapter at face value, much of what Nietzsche says conflicts glaringly with what he says elsewhere, even in the same book.

Understanding what he is and is not saying would be clear progress. This is important because it bears on his considered opinion, not only of the English, but more importantly on the history and significance of philosophy.

What precisely is the importance of this book? Nietzsche gives us a

strong hint in his preface.

“Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers,

insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women?

That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which

they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very

improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?“

Perhaps more than any other of his books , Beyond Good and Evil is where he takes an oblique approach to his end. He wants to break the hold of obstinately rooted preconceptions. To reach the truth, he elegantly implies in this passage, it is counterproductive to be too crudely explicit. So much of what he says in the book apparently springs from interested motives which we are to take as different ‘perspectives’.

The chapter Peoples and Fatherlands �� 240-256 in Beyond Good and Evil is devoted to Good Europeanism. By Good Europeanism he is not here thinking primarily of a political project like the European Union or even Napoleonic empire. More interesting is the project of developing a cultural perspective that includes and transcends others that are quite passionately held.  This is his focus, which he describes as the breeding of a new ruling caste for Europe�. The question is of how such people are to think, the answers to which remain of interest even if the language  of breeding rulers has lost most of its appeal. As to moving beyond Europeanism to some kind of global outlook, that is not something he envisages. He is not looking that far ahead, though there is no reason to think he would have favoured it.  Nor does the fact that he stops at Europeanism mean he is at this point advocating some form of greater European nationalism racially hostile to the world outside. His limited focus is sufficiently absorbing in itself.

After the first section on Wagner�s Meistersingers, with various reflections on the German soul, he writes that we allow ourselves occasional patriotic drivel and that he has himself just given an example of it. Here’s �241:-

�We `good Europeans’: we too have our hours when we permit ourselves a
warm hearted patriotism, a lapse and regression into old loves and
narrownesses ; I have just given an example of it, hours of
national ebullition, of patriotic palpitations and floods of various outmoded
feelings. More ponderous spirits than we may have done with what in
our case is confined to a few hours and is then over only after a
longer period: one takes half a year, another half a life, according
to the speed and power with which he digests it and of his
`metabolism’. Indeed, I can imagine dull, sluggish races which, even
in our fast moving Europe, would need half a century to overcome such
atavistic attacks of patriotism and cleaving to one’s native soil and
to be restored to reason, I mean to `good Europeanism’.�

�Warm hearted patriotism� is Helen Zimmern�s translation of the German �herzhafte Vaterl�nderei�. Marianne Cowan has �cordial patriotic drivel�, the  lapse into which, I would suggest, is how we should see Nietzsche�s praise of Hegel and Kant in this chapter, definitely an aberration in the light of what he writes elsewhere. Of course it is widely accepted that Nietzsche constantly contradicts himself. But if he is doing this here it is particularly glaring. These remarks on philosophy occur in his section on the English at � 252:-

.

“It was against Hume that Kant rose up; it was Locke of whom Schelling
had a right to say: �je m�prise Locke’; in their struggle against the
English-mechanistic stultification of the world, Hegel and
Schopenhauer were (with Goethe) of one accord: those two hostile
brother geniuses who strove apart towards the antithetical poles of
the German spirit and in doing so wronged one another as only brothers
wrong one another.”

This is so out of character with what he writes elsewhere that it is surely not to be taken entirely at face value. It is not exactly irony, more
a sort of self indulgence. In this passage there is a strong implication that Kant was right to rise up. He was the beginning of the movement that makes Hegel and Schopenhauer �brother geniuses in philosophy�, a description we can be sure Schopenhauer at least would have found revolting. The premise can only be some form of jingoistic feeling.

In rising up against Hume and his irreligious philosophy, Kant followed in the footsteps of Hamaan and other pietists[i]. Would Nietzsche really want to associate himself with people like that? Kant objected to Hume’s critical scepticism on more than purely theoretical grounds, it represented a world view which he found distressing and objectionable. Nietzsche�s obvious sympathies for Lange�s History of Materialism, which he used for his history of philosophy suggest he would not share this attitude.

Compare with what he writes about Kant elsewhere.

Kant’s ‘depth’ is derided in Ecce Homo  (� Case of Wagner)[ii]

In Will to Power � 101 (Spring-Fall 1887)

�Kant: makes the epistemological scepticism of the English possible for
Germans:

Kant: inferior in his psychology and knowledge of human nature; way
off when it comes to great historical values (French Revolution); a
moral fanatic a la Rousseau; a subterranean Christianity in his
values; a dogmatist through and through, but ponderously sick of this
inclination, to such an extent that he wished to tyrannize it, but
also weary right away of scepticism; not yet touched by the slightest
breath of cosmopolitan taste and the beauty of antiquity–a delayer
and mediator, nothing original (just as Leibniz mediated and built a
bridge between mechanism and spiritualism, as Goethe did between the
taste of the eighteenth century and that of the “historical sense”
(which is essentially a sense for the exotic), as German music did
between French and Italian music, as Charlemagne did between imperium
Romanum and nationalism–delayers par excellence.)�

Even in BGE itself �11:-

‘It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to
divert attention from the actual influence which Kant exercised on
German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value which
he set upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his Table of
Categories; with it in his hand he said: “This is the most difficult
thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.” Let us
only understand this “could be” He was proud of having discovered a
new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori:
Granting that he deceived himself in this matter; the development and
rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his
pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover
if possible something – at all events “new faculties” – of which to be
still prouder!�

Nietzsche goes on to jeer at this German philosophy as containing a lot of empty verbiage invented to counter the �omnipresent sensualism� of the previous century.

In Antichrist ��10-11. the denigration goes to an extreme:-.

�The success of Kant is merely a theological success;� Kant became an idiot.–And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopher–still passes today! �

Already in Daybreak he foreshadows, if in more temperate language, his later attack[iii]. If it be thought that the sentiments of Peoples and Fatherlands represents a transitional phase in Nietzsche�s thought then hardly any of it is to be taken in the least bit seriously, all superseded in the fierce thunderings of his final works. We do not have to go so far as that.

For a clue of how to read him look at the sentence immediately preceding the BGE section on the English where his praise of Kant appears:-:-

“But here it is fitting that I should break off my cheerful Germanomaniac address: for already I am touching on what is to me serious, on the `European problem’ as I understand it, on the breeding of a new ruling caste for Europe.”

�Cheerful Germanomaniac address� is Hollingdale�s translation of �heitere Deutschth�melei�.  Instead of ‘address’ Marianne Cowan’s translation has ‘twaddle‘. Helen Zimmern has ‘My festal discourse and my sprightly Teutonomania‘.[iv] The Teutonomania is not exactly patriotic drivel, indeed much of it is very anti-German but it still shows a quality of breezy generalisation that can be quite irritating

So as far as this point, at least on one translation, he admits that he has been twaddling. That is how he tells us to take much of what he has just been writing. Only if we believe that Nietzsche never writes with his tongue in his cheek can we take what immediately follows completely at face value. For rather than moving on directly to discussion of the good European he launches into an attack on the English in the same rough manner.

It would seem a natural conclusion from the preceding that this would not be meant entirely seriously. However, his anti-English sentiments are so refreshing to some people that they are just what they want to hear.

Oscar Levy wrote in his preface to Daybreak, (where the anti-Englishness is actually quite tame).

First of all, of course, there stands in the way the terrible abuse which Nietzsche has poured upon the heads of the innocent Britishers. While France and the Latin countries, while the Orient and India, are within the range of his sympathies, this most outspoken of all philosophers, this prophet and poet-philosopher, cannot find words enough to express his disgust at the illogical, plebeian, shallow, utilitarian Englishman. It must certainly be disagreeable to be treated like this, especially when one has a fairly good opinion of one’s self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? Did Nietzsche, perchance, spare the Germans? And aren’t you accustomed to criticism on the part of German philosophers? Is it not the ancient and time-honoured privilege of the whole range of them from Leibnitz to Hegel � even of German poets, like Goethe and Heine � to call you bad names and to use unkind language towards you? Has there not always been among the few thinking heads in Germany a silent consent and an open contempt for you and your ways; the sort of contempt you yourselves have for the even more Anglo-Saxon culture of the Americans?

But Nietzsche himself implies that in upholding German profundity against English shallowness in On Peoples and Fatherlands he is giving way to a measure of patriotic drivel, which is one variety of twaddle..

Someone might try to save his remarks on Kant with the suggestion that however low he regards Kant, his view of English philosophy must be even lower. But then in what respect precisely might it be lower? Hardly clarity or depth surely? Of course there is some truth in his attack on the English, but he adds to it with a German jingoism which is not his usual manner. If he is right to speak of a plebeianism of modern ideas which started in England[v], he is surely wrong if he attributes that to racial factors, rather than intellectual and sociological ones. Would he want to claim that the Celts (mixed with the English) are so inferior to the Slavs (mixed with the Germans)?

In �244 he suggests the German profundity is little more than a confidence trick �

“I meant to say: whatever ‘German profundity’ may be; and when we are
quite by ourselves we shall perhaps permit ourselves to laugh at it,
we would do well to hold its appearance and good name in respect
henceforth too and not to sell former old reputation as the profound
nation too cheaply for Prussian ‘dash’ and Berlin wit and sand. It is
clever for a people to be considered, to get itself considered,
profound, clumsy, good natured honest, not clever: it might even be
profound!”

Early in the long �251 (his �sprightly Teutonomania�) he makes an apology:-

“If a people is suffering and wants to suffer from nationalistic
nervous fever and political ambition, it must be expected that all
sorts of clouds and disturbances; in short, little attacks of
stupidity; will pass over its spirit into the bargain:…. May it be
forgiven me that I too, during a daring brief sojourn in a highly
infected area, did not remain wholly free of the disease and began,
like the rest of the world, to entertain ideas about things that were
none of my business: first symptom of the political infection.”

It is obvious, one would think, that he is not calling for one national or ethnic perspective to prevail over the others, certainly not the German not the French, nor the Jewish. The English perspective was so triumphant at the time it was something of which no conscious person could fail to be aware. It might therefore have been expected the English spirit was robust enough to take his excoriations without suffering too much hurt thereby. Although many of Nietzsche�s criticisms of the English are fair enough, from a different national perspective they will appear slightly differently.

Different nationalities, ethnic groups, even classes and sexes, have somewhat different perspectives on the same material. Although Nietzsche was a German and his prejudices were therefore those of a German, he is far from asserting the superiority of those or that point of view. An English nationalist outlook should not on his principles have any less claim to validity. Here is a quote from a biography of the English Nietzschean politician Enoch Powell[vi].

�Enoch Powell used his knowledge of German history and culture to debunk the notion that the war was against the Nazi party not against the German people as a whole. The party, he said, identified with some of the strongest traits of that people, �anti-semitism, the faith in the hero leader, the application of Darwinian �survival of the fittest� to foreign politics, the admiration of force and power for their own sake, and above all the readiness to sacrifice the present and the real for future and the abstract.. Nothing he said could be less like the English cast of mind, if an anthology were made of reference to England in the best German prose and poetry of the nineteenth century the dominant note of the extracts would be contempt�.�[vii]

Nietzsche�s praise of France was a deliberate provocation in the light of German feelings following the Franco-Prussian war. Of course we would expect him to feel a strong affinity for the Paris of immoralism and decadence, and there may be a touch of the disingenuous in the praise he does give.

 What he says about the Jews is also crude, reflecting much mere prejudice. Of their success he writes that it is:-

 �thanks above all to a resolute faith that need not be ashamed in the face of modern
ideas.” Beyond Good and Evil �251

Taken at face value, and in an obvious meaning, this is a bizarre statement, though gratifying to many Jewish people, as well as offensive to the anti-Semites he was personally concerned to upset.. This too fits in with the thesis that in Of People’s and Fatherlands, he is playing around with stereotypes and prejudices that are all meant to be overcome in the new synthesis[viii] of the Good European.

If he seriously thought that pre-modern Judaism had nothing to be ashamed of in the face of modern ideas that was an eccentric opinion. But it seems a large part of his aim here was to be provocative. He comes close to giving a Jewish perspective. Of course it is not only in BGE that he reveals his penchant for crude stereotyping. In Antichrist he writes:-

 “The Jews are the very opposite of decadents:”

The implication is that one is or is not a decadent in virtue of one’s beliefs and opinions. So to avoid decadence should one copy the Jews? But didn’t the Christians do that? And is not a large part of what makes a Christian a decadent his dishonesty about motives? The idea that the Jew can be dishonest while not being decadent has the effect of turning him into something not to be judged by the same standards as the rest of us.

As he wrote in Antichrist �9

“Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have
almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of
self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any
way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence of theologians is
felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts “true” and
“false” are forced to change places: what ever is most damaging to
life is there called “true,” and whatever exalts it, intensifies it,
approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called
“false.”..”

Yet as he writes in � 24:-

“The Jews are the very opposite of decadents: they have simply been
forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill
approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed
to put themselves at the head of all decadent movements (–for
example, the Christianity of Paul–), and so make of them something
stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life.”

“Very opposite” was Mencken. Kaufmann has “The Jews are the antithesis
of all decadents:” The German original  has �Die Juden sind das Gegenst�ck aller d�cadents�.

Significantly Hollingdale’s translation has “The Jews are the counterparts of decadents“. “Counterparts� is different from “very opposite” and does not raise the problem discussed in so acute a form. Even if we are take Hollingdale as inaccurate in his translation he put his finger on a key difficulty or inconsistency. ‘The antithesis of decadence’ i.e. health, as advocated by Nietzsche, surely has to be connected with
truthfulness. Otherwise relativism would just make complete havoc of all the distinctions he wants to make. Any idea might serve someone’s ambition, power and ascending life.

Convicting his opponents of dishonesty, lies and self deception is a pervasive theme throughout Nietzsche�s work. According to him, the utilitarian, the Kantian, the Hegelian, the egalitarian, do not simply differ from him by their different philosophical premises. They are involved in errors about human nature, history etc and these can be shown.

Looking for the contemporary significance of Nietzsche�s observations,  we look to the virtues and qualities of the Good European, who is to be formed from a mixture of different strains. The Good European, and perhaps we might say by extension the good African or good American, is to think beyond good and evil, and is anti Christian in the special sense, which is to say. not as a Jew or a Muslim might be anti-Christian.

In Nietzsche�s writing it is the exoteric aspect that contains the potentially dangerous and irresponsible thoughts. As he writes in BGE � 30:-

Our highest insights must – and should – sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them. The difference between the exoteric and the esoteric, formerly known to philosophers – among the Indians as among the Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever one believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights – does not so much consist in this, that the exoteric approach comes from outside and sees, estimates, measures, and judges from the outside, not the inside: what is much more essential is that the exoteric approach sees things from below, the esoteric looks down from above.

 In saying there is an esoteric reading I am not saying simply that Nietzsche�s key concepts have to be taken in the context of what he is really attacking. However that is perfectly true, and it is important to understand it first. To discover how he should be read we have to understand what he is against. So first I shall say something about his attack on Christianity and on pity. He has quite specific targets.

As several commentators have argued[ix], Nietzsche�s remarks on Christianity, like those on Jews. need to be taken in the context of his present political concerns, as responses to particular modern tendencies and ideas. It is still the same today, mutatis mutandis, when Christianity often appears to be represented by the sanctimony and highly selective moral indignation of sections of the popular press, with the insinuation that anyone who dissents from this faith of the humble is some kind of arrogant bully. This is the Christian prejudice that is exploited by democratic governments. In Britain today it is typified by the alliance between Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch.

To see Christianity as Nietzsche does as against the strong, means to see it as a value directed against one�s own will in favour of those whose will is radically different and see themselves as weak in relation to you. This is the impulse we can identify as the essential originality of Christianity. Other aspects, like philanthropy, or spirituality, are far from unique to it. The corruption comes when goodness and spirituality are identified with surrender to this impulse. That was the revolutionary impulse against the Roman Empire, it is to be discovered in the torments of Catholic mystics, in some forms of protestant guilt and joylessness, and significantly in the moralistic impulses deeply involved in much modern democracy and socialism. To identify something else with Christianity and defend the latter for essentially political reasons, involves, he insists, a serious lapse from intellectual integrity.

Seeing what is objectionable in Christianity is to see Christianity as an attack on the will. To understand this it is necessary to conceive your own will as under attack in the supposed interests  of those you would consider inferior to yourself. It is to imagine yourself subject to an assault on the strong on behalf of the weak. By  your strength, you are to understand everything you value and consider  good, including your kindness and benevolence. If you are happy to mortify your own will by acceding to this attack then we may take it you are a good Christian. If you call something else Christian then it might be objected that we are only arguing about words. But words are vital here. Unless we identify this decadent  principle and root it out, it will continue to infect our culture. To those who insist on identifying Christianity with worthwhile values like benevolence or noblesse oblige we can say that if we are clear what we want, we need not take on the rest of the Christian baggage.  If we want a measure of benevolence we do not have to link it to the decadent value we would be far better off without, and which is inextricably tied to the idea of Christianity..

In his objection to pity, Nietzsche is not as such condemning concern for the unfortunate or to charitable giving. He shows the way in which compassion and eudaemonism may come across as harmful and repressive values. To attack these values he denounces pity. Yet it is easy to see how his attack can badly misfire. We think of  the SS for a modern example of men deliberately cultivating pitilessness as part of a peculiar zeitgeist. So some critics conclude that he ought to have been more responsible, and perhaps not spoken against pity or Christianity in the way he did.. But that would have been to betray the basic principles of his thinking, leaving all sorts of negative and demoralising forces in place. You put ideas in your head to restore your morale. Everything Nietzsche says he means to say. To water it down would have been pointless. He is not solely concerned with being correctly understood. He wants to encourage creative freedom, so you may say what you feel without censorship. The wisdom he does give immunises against the worst consequences of that.

This is the effect of the transvaluation that comes with his demolition of nihilism.. Nihilism, literally belief in nothing, can be taken as the idea that there is no truth,[x] more specifically the idea that there is no standard by which we can judge between different perspectives, beliefs, value judgments etc. This can be initially exhilarating because it enables us to believe what we like. Its further effect will tend to be depressing and worse, as it prevents us from resisting whatever values, doctrines, perspectives etc threaten to impose themselves on us, The problem then presents itself as of how to resist demoralising and depressing ideas.. The need to escape depressing and demoralising ideas comes to be experienced as an acute personal problem, expressed in terms of the need to overcome nihilism. So it is no longer a mere intellectual problem but is felt in terms of a personal crisis.

Nietzsche�s will to power theory is not a mere recycling of earlier rhetoric. For him it is a discovery because it offers a solution to this problem of nihilism. For this there is no parallel in earlier writers. In the first place it is a perspective that he adopts. Every belief, value, perspective etc is seen as involved in a struggle for dominance against others, and that includes his own, i.e. that of will to power itself. Thus any perspective involves the suppression of alternative perspectives. It is found that the will to power perspective conflicts with other perspectives. For example it involves presenting for our consideration points of view the very possibility of which many people would like to deny. Whether such a possibility is accepted or denied may be argued to be a non factual question dependant on assumptions which govern the perspective and are in principle untestable. But part of Nietzsche�s case is that factual questions are involved, propositions that are true or false in a quite ordinary sense[xi]. There are facts which are revealed from the will to power perspective and hidden from contrary perspectives. Once shown these would be nevertheless be true from whatever perspective is adopted.

To read him esoterically means more than simply paying attention to the context of what he is against. Beyond this there is in his writing something much lazier, a letting go, laissez faire, trust in the invisible hand, loosening of control. Many commentators fail to allow sufficiently for the importance of the factor of laisser aller in Nietzsche�s thought. The ingredients that go up to make the good European do not require training in some new mode of thought. Indeed they are a lot of old prejudices, often lazy and self indulgent thoughts. It is an essential part of his thesis that this need not be harmful. Much of Nietzsche�s philosophy is about thinking whatever you like. The chaos to which such permissiveness might be expected to lead is prevented, not by any form of censorship, but by exposing the lies and falsifications in which a great many currently accepted attitudes and opinions are inextricably implicated. This leaves much conflict that will go on just as it always has. Different egoisms will balance and cancel each other, much as they do already, but without the distorting effect of slave morality. He is far from intending all the perspectives he adopts to override all others.

As for the national characters he identifies, as partial viewpoints they are ingredients in the future that is to be built. We might well think of them in terms of a dialectical synthesis, but not of the Hegelian variety, something more like that expressed by the sixteenth century mystic Jacob Boehme. As William Blake said in Boehmean mode:- �Without contraries is no progression�. This I would suggest, is how we should view Nietzsche�s national stereotypes, English, German, French, Jewish, they are like four of Boehme�s seven qualities of God, struggling against each other in a fruitful antagonism. Whatever Nietzsche says here, immersed for the moment in his own character as a German, others have their own points of view and can speak up for themselves as he well knows and undoubtedly welcomes.

If the interpretation I have put forward here is wrong, and Nietzsche means everything he says to be taken at face value, then not only has he produced much  remarkably crude and unworthy generalisation, but it is hard what to make of the perspectivist attitude he apparently espouses in the preface and elsewhere in the book.

References

Books by Nietzsche

The Antichrist. trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann. 1968 New York: Viking Press,.

The Antichrist. tr. Hollingdale 1968 Harmondsworth (Penguin),

The Antichrist. Tr. H L Mencken 1923 New York : Knopf, .

Beyond Good and Evil. trans. Walter Kaufmann. 1966 New York: Random House,.

Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Marianne Cowan, 1955 Chicago  Gateway

Beyond Good and Evil, Trans Hollingdale, 1973 Harmondsworth Penguin

Beyond Good and Evil, Tr Marion Faber 1998 Oxford: Oxford University Press

Daybreak trans Hollingdale 1982 Cambridge University Press

The  Dawn of Day  Tr. by J. M. Kennedy. 1911 Edinburgh : Foulis, .(preface by Oscar Levy)

The Genealogy of Morals tr Francis Golffing New York Doubleday 1956

The Genealogy of Morals tr Walter Kaufmann New York Random House 1967

The Case of Wagner, translated Walter Kaufmann, 1967 New York Vintage books

The Will to Power. trans Kaufmann & Hollingdale, 1968  London  Weidenfield and Nicolson
The Will to Power. trans Ludovici 2 vols. 1909-1910 Foulis Edinburgh and London

Other material

Heffer Simon -Like the Roman- the Life of Enoch Powell Weidenfield and Nicolson London 1998

Santaniello Weaver , Nietzsche, God and the Jews � Albany SUNY 1994

Boehme Jakob The Aurora tr. John Sparrow London Watkins 1914

[i]  For Hamann see Isaiah Berlin:- The Magus of the North, J G Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism London : J. Murray, 1993.

[ii]  � �Have the Germans produced even one book that has depth? They lack even the idea of depth in a book. I have met scholars who considered Kant deep. At the Prussian court I fear Herr von Treitschke is considered deep�.

.

[iii] See e.g.  �197 �German hostility to the enlightenment�

[iv] Marion Faber has merely �cheerful Germanizing�.

[v] See GM I �4 , (in Golffing�s translation)  talking of  Buckle:- �Here we see the plebeian bias of the modern mind, [Kaufmann has �spirit�} which stems from England, erupt once again on its native soil with all the violence of a muddy volcano and all the vulgar and overstated eloquence characteristic of volcanoes.�

[vi] See Heffer, eg  p 409:- interviewed in 1966 for the Sunday Express �Powell recited his main influences, Housman, Carlyle, Nietzsche�.

[vii]  Simon Heffer – p 60

[viii] Synthesis is Nietzsche�s own term. Here is � 256:- In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century the general tendency of the mysterious workings of their souls has really been to prepare the way to this new synthesis [neuen Synthesis] and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds, or in hours of weakness, in old age perhaps, were they among the `men of the fatherland’ ‑ they were only taking a rest from themselves when they became `patriots’.

[ix] �I argue that Nietzsche�s stances towards Judeo-Christianity while complex are coherent, and are best interpreted in the context of the theological and political categories that existed in Germany�. Weaver Santaniello, Nietzsche, God and the Jews � SUNY 1994

[x]

‘A philosopher recuperates his strength in a way quite his own… he does it, for instance, with nihilism. The belief that there is no such thing as truth, the nihilistic belief, is a tremendous relaxation for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is unremittingly struggling with a host of hateful truths. For truth is ugly’. (Will to Power �598).

[xi] That is irrespective of whatever philosophical theory of truth is employed to explain it.

This paper was presented to the sixth annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society September 1996

Nietzsche contra Psychoanalysis by John S Moore

In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud writes of society as binding people together by means of Eros, so stimulating a lot of aggressive urges which are denied satisfaction, and which therefore turn against the self in the form of guilt, which makes for unhappiness. Despite resemblances to ideas floated in the Genealogy of Morals, this position is crucially different from Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power. In his mature philosophy, Nietzsche’s interest was focussed not so much upon direct speculations about happiness and how to achieve it, as upon the threat faced to the individual from demoralising ideas. This sets him against the pessimism of Freud’s view.

Freud can be so initially plausible, that it is not immediately easy to see how he is wrong. His writing has the appearance of sound science, or at least of something that might be true. Nietzsche would not wish to reject whatever can be established as scientific reality. However the scientific nature of Freud’s work has been seriously impugned. Some would hold with Frank Cioffi that Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Freud’s methods of argument offer a conclusive refutation. Recently attention has focussed on Freud’s heavy use of cocaine throughout his career. Elizabeth Thornton sees his theories as a mixture of what was even at the time obsolete medicine, and something approaching cocaine psychosis.

Whatever his scientific credentials his writing remains in many ways deeply interesting and attractive. Works like Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism offer substantial intellectual meat which again can seem like an extension of Nietzsche’s speculations, even if we feel with Wittgenstein that Freud shows a fascinating cleverness rather than wisdom. However our enthusiasm can wane when confronted with some of the authority he still continues to exert, and with some of the consequences of his ideas. If his genius was essentially for persuasion and propaganda, then he is fair game for people with objectives of their own.

Few who read the Interpretation of Dreams to the end would deny that it is a work of genius. As a scientific explanation of dreaming, Freud produces a convincing hypothesis, both coordinating earlier thought and accounting for a range of undoubted facts. He reminds us of almost forgotten things, like childhood anxiety dreams. Wish fulfilment is a very plausible motive, unravelling the connections between what he calls the dream thought and the dream work. This can seem a great intuitive leap, like Newton or Darwin. It lends itself to exploration and development. Unconscious wishes from infancy are like a magical clue to the real sources of satisfaction, suggesting deep insight into what we really are, what we really want. Instead of what one normally wants, one may come to want this infantile satisfaction. Some credit Freud with devising a mythology; it is like a version of the fall of man with a programme for restoring Adam to Paradise.

Normally childhood sexuality would seem trivial and unsatisfying from an adult viewpoint. Unless there is some access to these childish wishes, some way of identifying with them, the therapy could not work. So we have the idea that the infantile concerns are both present and accessible. An unconscious wish is something that could become conscious, almost by definition. So his explanation of dreaming holds out a promise of a certain kind of satisfaction, an immersion in a certain kind of hope.

Much of the charm of Freud’s basic idea is in its orientation to the future. It hints that real fulfilment lies in these unconscious drives, rooted in early infancy. So the business of achieving life satisfaction is something deeply uncompetitive, even solipsistic. Its power as a programme is dependent upon belief, like a meditation. It works if and only if you believe it. That is part of its neatness, even if its actual record is disappointing.

Freud claimed to have been in important respects anticipated, though not influenced, by Nietzsche. He said he was surprised when first reading Nietzsche how much he fitted with his own discoveries. However, psychoanalytic thought has often developed in directions deeply and explicitly hostile to him. An instructive example is the work of a modern Freudian, Daniel Pick, author of the books Faces of Degeneration and The War Machine.

Psychoanalysis is here applied to areas of the history of ideas, loosely relating respectively to concepts of degeneration and nineteenth and early twentieth century thought on war. Pick’s approach is so disapproving that one can get the impression of reading heresiology, recalling something like the Church Father Irenaueus on the gnostics. He avoids a straightforward attack on the ideas he appears to dislike. He tries to get behind them, treating them not as defensible positions but as expressions of fear and weakness. Many of his assumptions are by no means explicit, but it is possible to extract an argument that is coherent and interesting.

The implicit moral drawn is of appalling danger. For Nietzsche himself he expresses aversion as a sayer of terrible things. So many tempting lines of thought, including, but not especially Nietzsche, led to disaster, namely holocaust and war. Nonetheless their potent attraction is something he wants to recognise and to provide for. His solution again is not explicit, but not hard to grasp. Exploring the lure of rage and hatred in the psychoanalytic session, is a way of realising the attraction while neutralising the danger.

In Faces of Degeneration he writes:-

‘My attention has been drawn to the drama of a felt historical & historiographical powerlessness. Degeneration functioned at once as a means, never wholly successful, of containing, covering over, mastering, profound political confusion & disorientation’. p237

Such statements can be intimidating & impressive. He writes with an air of great confidence, though he leaves many questions open. There is an underlying suggestion that political disorientation is a step on the road to Auschwitz. So what exactly for him is sound political understanding? He hints at an allegiance, one he does not presumably feel a need to argue, perhaps his underlying premise is that it is outside the scope of argument.

The book reads like an attack on all kinds of loosely connected ideas centred around the degeneration (Entartung in German) which pervaded nineteenth century psychiatry and featured significantly in Nietzsche’s work as well as that of his opponent Nordau. Such ideas appear throughout the political spectrum, so he talks of a ‘discourse of degeneration’ that cuts across left & right. This discourse he presents largely as an expression of insecurities & anxieties. The concept of degeneration is extended to take in such things as the crowd theory of Gustav Le Bon, which has little connection with the psychiatric concept originated by Morel. The psychoanalytic perspective consists in looking for unconscious motives. This he presents as an advance on nineteenth century positivistic approaches to the history of ideas, which tried to recapture the author’s intentions.

‘This study is indebted to, & in part dependant on, a culture of psychoanalysis which in crucial respects has helped us move beyond the languages of nineteenth century positivism, & a history of ideas concerned only to reconstruct authorial intentions’. p230

To someone inspired by Nietzsche, whose friends are mostly sort of ex hippies, this ‘culture of psychoanalysis’ suggests a strange and somewhat precious way of being. It offers a way of bypassing Nietzsche’s interpretation of life as a conflict of wills.

What he says about unconscious motives behind Lombroso’s ideas on hereditary criminality, certain perceived difficulties with extreme rural backwardness following the risorgimento, is interesting, and arguably advances historical knowledge. If this is the unconscious, then it is a useful enough conception. But there is danger in a spurious perspective that refuses to encounter ideas on their own level, and claims to refute by means of the unconscious motive.

Whether bringing the Freudian philosophy into the history of ideas, really amounts to an improvement is at least questionable. We are not obliged to accept that Freud has significantly advanced human knowledge. It may be thought there is something about the whole psychoanalytic approach that weakens, sickens, and depresses. This perspective does not engage in a full frontal attack, it gets behind ideas, explains them away, seeing an idea not as expression of will to power, but as weakness. To say a belief or a cause is the expression of powerlessness & misunderstanding treats it as wrong without confronting it on its own ground, independently assuming the truth of an opposing idea. Psychoanalysis is used as a way of undermining your confidence in your ideas. It is a kind of interesting illness, well defended against other ways of being.

Pick writes:- “One weakness of the Foucaultian power/knowledge model which informs much recent discussion of the human sciences, from anthropology to criminology to medical psychiatry is that by focussing on the presumed strategic effects of certain shifts in the perception of, say, crime, madness, race & sexuality, it often underplays the internal textual struggle, the work of representation needed to achieve the illusion of unity, of singular power & mastery. One needs to address simultaneously the ‘force’ of a felt crisis of powerlessness in certain texts & ideologies, the complex transformation of social anxiety & political fear into seemingly self possessed imperious & ‘imperialist’ discourse”.

THE WAR MACHINE

In his second book, The War Machine, subtitled ‘the rationalisation of slaughter in the modern world‘, some of what he is doing becomes clearer. One may be initially impressed by the erudition, & a scrupulous concern to avoid judgements.

He sets out ‘to explore a world of representations which sets in play a “common sense” & a debate about wars, states, & states of mind, which is still very much contemporary for us, or at least upon which we still draw’ (p. 18). He examines a variety of writings, from the 1830s to the 1930s, loosely linked by the theme of war. He ranges among philosophers, social scientists, journalists, popular fiction, war propaganda. Much of what he finds are commonplaces that could come from almost any period. More interesting to a historian is some that was unique to the period leading up to the war, the idea of an unstoppable rush towards war. He explores the idea of the First World War as a disaster expressing forces beyond conscious control, many of which he finds in the ideas & opinions of the writers of which he treats. Accordingly he presents much of the culture of a century ago, including some of the considered thought of the most eminent writers of their day, essentially as unhealthy delusions, though not in so many words. He sees a problem of why so many people sought to justify war.

“….my principle concern lies in the interrelations & reverberations between these writings; the aim is indeed to convey the reader into a kind of echo chamber of historical thought on war”.

The writers mentioned, each have very different things to say. Spencer’s anti militarism comes in for as much implicit disapproval as von Treitschke’s nationalistic bellicosity; in common is the implied wrongheadedness many of their assumptions, which are treated as rationalisations. This wrongheadedness is not made explicit. The impression meant to be given is that we are placed in a complex discourse, looking to see what illumination any of these might throw on our subject. They seem like heresies in that they all contain partial truths but “we are all guilty”. There are ideas that both contain a measure of illumination, & are themselves a part of the problem. There is the aim of involving us in the discourse. He is not doing just bare history, or historiography. This is material for present discussion, how to think & write about war.

The fragmentary nature of many of these ideas as he presents them, means there is no space to criticise them in detail. So they come across as a disconnected assemblage of hypotheses, which are either attractive or repellent. Where there is no prima facie scientific basis for rejection, then it can look as if we are free to adopt whatever we find attractive.

Pick evidently has firm opinions about what ideas ought not to prevail. If so many ideas are wrong, others must be right, so we would like to know precisely what for him these sound ideas are, & what is the rational basis for preferring them, perhaps against our immediate inclinations.

Much of the material treated might be criticised as pseudo science, basing elaborate structures of supposed truth on seriously inadequate foundations, such as the science of eugenics, & racist theories. However this objection is only as powerful as it might be if what has replaced these ideas is clearly much sounder. It is not difficult to expose as pseudo science, a whole range of politically incorrect ideas from the past, nationalist, elitist, anti feminist, racist, militaristic, illiberal. But that can hardly be the real objection. Are such attitudes rooted in any more false science than the ideas he favours, like the equality of sexes & races & cultures? Is it demonstrated that equal rights beliefs produce less false science than elitist principles? If they do, what is the explanation for it?

That the objectionable ideas, elitist, nationalist or militarist, are contrary to the principles of the modern, if not the 19th century, left, should be incidental, unless it has to be assumed in advance that we share those principles. The argument mostly implicit is the danger. Thought about war could be one of the factors that led to war. Avoidance of war is presumably a reasonable aim most of us would share. The implication is that these ways of thinking led to war, & some to Auschwitz. This gives a rationale for censorship and political correctness. Such an argument should be fairly applied. One could easily propose equivalent arguments to serve opposite political ends. One might mention the fashionable Marxism Pol Pot and the other Khmer Rouge leaders picked up in Paris in the sixties. Egalitarian doctrines, not to mention dreams of collective prosperity & happiness, led to Stalin’s massacres. One could easily descend to yah boo politics. The only important question is whether such ideas still present a danger.

Pick concentrates on the irrationality of the 1st world war, scarcely touching other ways of looking at it. He does not bother to refute arguments for the rationality of the struggle. He does not treat of the seriousness of the experience of total war, of the threat of foreign invasion & its reality, of fight for survival.

Without in any way committing ourselves, we can try to look honestly at other possible interpretations. On an alternative interpretation of the very same material, before 1914 there was cultural instability in Europe, with all kinds of conflicting programmes. In retrospect one may identify with some & despise others. The conflict really was fought out, whether or not it should have been. The war against Germany was completely won, not finally in 1918, but in 1945.

On such a view, contrary to Pick’s insinuation, most of his research is irrelevant to present conditions, at least in the sense he claims for it. He says that he aims ‘to call into question some of the cliches of our current discourse, the platitudes which still have their purchase today, their numbing & exonerating effect’ & that ‘Many of the writings surveyed here have profound resonances – much to say to us about war & peace’. But this loses some of its force if no comparable danger exists today. If the war was a battle for domination on the part of the upstart German culture, & as such a struggle for the future of civilisation, then the revelation of the holocaust destroyed the German bid most effectively, once & for all, whatever conflicts & divisions remain within our society.

To treat the explicit issues inspiring the 1st world war as unworthy of serious consideration, is to refuse to play, but the game went on nonetheless, & historical conditions changed. Whether or not we see the war as irrational, real alternatives were fought over, & ultimately resolved. This can apply even on a pacifist view, whether we consider the aims of politicians or the feelings of those who fought.

In consequence interest in these ideas is not perilous, they are not to be handled only at arm’s length, delving endlessly into basic assumptions in the effort to see how such contamination could ever have arisen. We can look squarely at the free speculations of an earlier era. We can even consider the supposed moral benefits of war, an idea virtually as old as civilisation, discussing this interesting opinion for what it is worth. If we reject it we should be able to put up an honest argument against it.

This looking for unconscious motives is the same method of not confronting causes head on. He emasculates many of the causes people have felt to be most important. Nationalistic ideas & sentiments he will only treat as symptoms. He even alludes to Moore & Russell’s attack on Hegelianism, the fountainhead of a great philosophical movement, virtually as if this was part of some xenophobic syndrome, & they ought to have accepted Hegel:- ‘Hegel it was feared had polluted England. He was a philosophical force to be monitored, mopped up & sluiced away……..the continuing critique of, & anxiety about, the pernicious effects of German idealism, culminating in Moore & Russell’s restoration of empiricism’ (p. 133).

Evidently he favours Hegel whom he treats less as a symptom than a source of illumination. Hegel, he writes ‘explained’ that war ‘is a means of binding the nation & starkly separating inner & outer, sameness & difference’ (p. 133). Of course his real hero is Freud, who may well qualify as a pseudo scientist. He refers to Eysenck’s attack on Freud, which he evidently resents. His defence of the latter involves treating Eysenck as a case study, pointing out his use of warlike metaphors. Presumably what pleasure I feel in the assault I am preparing on Pick’s ideas, would be taken as bearing out some of his thesis. Freud’s thought is to him of a different order from most of the other writers he discusses. ‘Psychoanalysis cannot rightly be viewed as the mere recapitulation of earlier thought on war’, he writes (p.265). That may be, but what is to give it its privileged status?

Between the heresies he depicts & his solutions, or explanations, what is the dividing line? What makes Freud & Hegel acceptable when so many other writers are patronised or effectively condemned? It is admitted that Freud is at times racist, & at times praises war. Obviously Freud is involved in whatever guilt attaches to such attitudes.

Presented with the question of what we are to think in terms of psychoanalytic thought on war, we may feel as if we have stumbled where we do not belong, like atheists at a Catholic convention. Though he says he has no thesis he begins from Freud. The very intractability & difficulty of the problem suggests the need for a form of censorship. In a way that recalls the doctrine of original sin, Freud & Hegel themselves are not exempt from evil. He does not claim they are exempt, & this is part of the point he is trying to make.

The danger of certain lines of thought is that they can lead to catastrophe, yet their very attraction suggests they particularly express human instinct. Also most significantly he presents the idea that war actually offers release for aggressive drives, that find expression as an unconscious will to war. The lure of destructive ideas is something he wants to recognise. So psychoanalysis, in offering a form of therapy, also offers understanding. It says the psyche has such and such a character. Exploring the lure of rage and hatred in the psychoanalytic session, carries with it all the pride of hidden knowledge as well as the promise of catharsis. Suppose this knowledge is all illusion, expressing only the will to power of some particular group? Then the practice may amount to an extreme form of decadent self indulgence.

We can now see precisely the use to which he puts this Freudian concept of the death instinct. It is that there is a temptation in all these dangerous ideas, tempting precisely because they are dangerous. Therefore they are supposed to reveal something intrinsic to the human mind. Rather than taking them at face value, and trying to refute them, accepting that some causes flourish and others fail, they are seen as something to be managed like wild beasts that must be kept under restraint. The psychoanalytic perspective is claimed to reveal this destructive war machine, the motives that drive it, the ideas that lead to it and are part of it. These are conceived as expressions of desire. The tendency to form and favour such ideas is seen as something deep in human nature. This is the self destructive flaw in man.

What plausibility this view possesses may be something to do with the way he presents the ideas, like a collection of disconnected hypotheses. In this way they can appear as dangerous temptations, appealing to destructive and aggressive impulses. But how can individual aggression create something like war? There is a problem of how individual hostility can find satisfaction in going to war, in being conscripted, bullied by sergeant majors, and all that involves. This is presumably susceptible of a Freudian explanation.

The ‘war machine’ hypothesis is not something defended, it is like a mosaic put together from other people’s ideas. Some people thought there was this deranged machine, so he builds up this viewpoint. It acquires a huge moral claim because of its suggested application to some present threat of nuclear disaster. The hypothesis he has built up is a fact, in the sense that it is a possible construction of the facts. The Freudian pessimism is a hypothesis to explain the existence of this hypothesis.

From the belief that thought has this dangerous character, we seem to be led into a form of irrationalism, the principle that we are not to question some authority because to do so might have catastrophic consequences. This is to articulate a new form of pessimism to compare with Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann in the nineteenth century, one appropriate to our own age, with its characteristic concerns and dogmas. Theoretically one might imagine such a philosophy could become fashionable and find artistic expression. It is much more intellectualised than simple political correctness, which can seem merely frustrating in its crude moralism. Such articulation is a creative achievement, a successful effort of will, it suggests its opposite, much as Nietzsche’s philosophy was originally suggested by reflections on Schopenhauer. It can seem self refuting in its very rationality. If after Nietzsche pessimism was to be a whip to beat shallow optimists, perhaps a new pessimism could provide a new whip.

Pick goes far beyond Freud’s death instinct hypothesis. His view is not simply that there is a drive to self destruction, but that even our efforts to understand our predicament are driven on a dangerous and self destructive course. The ideas we are attracted to are poisonous. We cannot trust our intuition, because we are inspired by a self destructive aggression, all the criminal and murderous urges that Freud finds in us. So we have to find an outlet for these, neutralise them, and on Freud’s own principles this is to be on the analysts couch, where you chat away about all kinds of atrocious feelings that must never be allowed practical expression. The incorrect idea is therefore something like a murderous desire.

Against the Nietzschean point that most states of affairs involve the triumph of some cause, he would hold that his perspective is deeper. Unless we feel that our desires are dangerous, we have not understood, have not made contact with the forces that really move us. Self indulgence and censorship go together, for society as well as for the individual. This has consequences for how much freepiritedness we should be wiling to accept. If thought were as uninhibited as it was in turn of the century Vienna, if we were as thoughtful and clever as 100 years ago, if we had a really brilliant intellectual and artistic culture, would that tend to generate war? Presumably, if we were to think in all the old patterns, but there is hardly any reason to imagine we would do that.

Censoring out the dangerous, we are apparently to accept politically correct ideas which may not fit well with our instincts and desires, but where are these to come from? One suspects the source may be Marx, but again this is not explicit. Pick’s perspective of ‘powerlessness’ could easily be turned on himself. In any idea, there is possible weakness & possible strength, hope of success or fear of defeat. Using much the same material the most diverse points can be made. With the same perspective and the same material, we could easily produce alternative speculations of our own, undermining Pick’s own values. Or is he underpinned by the power and strength of a coherent Marxism?

From a more Nietzschean viewpoint, arguments from dead controversies acquire a fresh kind of usefulness. There is a way of writing intellectual history which makes a central issue out of the rebellious demand for intellectual and spiritual freedom, a cause the value of which there are powerful interests to deny. With a motive to upset an actual or proposed consensus, itself likely to be the expression of the massed prejudices of comfortable mediocrity, there is liberation in exploring all dissident views. They can be allies in the fight against coercive dogma, against insidious efforts to win our assent to judgements which do not stand close logical examination. If once they seemed natural, & now they seem unnatural, that reflects our new situation, & is a large part of their interest for us. They need not be dangerous in the sense of leading us where we do not want to go. Knowing where we stand & what we want, committed to humane principles and the retention of our democratic freedoms, we can look without danger.

NORDAU

There are parallels between Pick’s own theme and some of the writers he warns about, notably Nietzsche’s vitriolic early opponent Max Nordau. In his book Degeneration, Nordau attacks culture he asserts to be degenerate, sometimes ideas which consciously perceive themselves as decadent, proudly carrying the label. Pick’s target is the ideas of degeneration themselves, both scientific theories & art which embodies them. In both cases there is perceived to be something attractive about such ideas, they have a lure, which both writers attribute to a kind of weakness, or powerlessness; degeneracy to Nordau, with all the threat to life and society envisaged by contemporary medical science; disorientation and political confusion, to Pick.

Nordau’s way of dismissing unsympathetic cultural phenomena expresses an attitude which is not without appeal even today, & which can tempt when applied to ideas we dislike. Some might want for example to apply it to much modern French philosophy.

The immediate objection to degeneration theory is the oppressive use to which it may be put, the prohibitionist mentality it promotes. Nordau induces anxiety with his physiological determinism, presenting the source of our values as something we may not even understand. This can obviously be depressing. Likewise Freud’s concept of the neurotic can sometimes come across as a value judgement directed at a discontent one disapproves of, dismissing what is conscious and explicit.

Why is it thought important to discuss or teach these things? Nordau because he seems to see them as deluding a generation. Pick perhaps because he sees them as exerting a continuing temptation, to be dealt with psychoanalytically. Some ideas being dangerous, & having dangerous consequences are also illuminating. Nordau’s degenerate ideas also have a lure, as does Wagner’s ‘corrupt civilisation’.

These themes are Biblical. What the Bible understood by sin and lewdness has a notorious attraction. Reading the Bible it is easy to side with the enemies of God. Such perversity gives a way of relating to new ideas as well as old ones. From the decadent movement of the 1890s to the pop art of the 1960s, artists have explored the allure of the negative and threatening, teaching us how to enjoy what we would normally repudiate.

Parallels have been made between Freud and Wagner, Wagner and Hegel. Adapting Pick’s metaphor, we can think in terms of an echo chamber of temptation and decadence. Wagner, writes of resisting the lure of corrupt civilisation, itself rather like an Old Testament value, Nietzsche of Wagner’s seductive decadence. Nordau writes luridly and excitingly on the fascination of Nietzsche’s degenerate and dangerous ideas, Pick decries the harmfulness of Nordau’s degeneration concept. This paper attempts a Nietzschean critique of Pick’s own decadence, his morality of the weak, his interesting sickness. From the Nietzschean angle, we see that he has built up something like a new priestly corruption. We can identify the workings of his own will to power.

All these ideas of decadence have something in common. All deplore the entertaining of beliefs and sentiments that are harmful to the subject and/or the society he lives in. Each writer has a different view of what there is to be feared. Several different layers persist in Nietzsche, who largely accepts the science of his time. Sociological, physiological, racial and political concepts of decadence all appear in his writings. Nietzsche may be prepared to accept these concepts, but they are not what primarily worries him. Pursuing his own chains of thought he sometimes outgrows and overcomes them.

DECADENCE

Psychoanalysis does not present itself to itself as a form of depravity, but on a medical model, as a movement towards understanding & liberation. It usually comes across as virtuous and humourless. However, if we reject its claim to put us uniquely in touch with truth, we look differently on what it offers its devotees. Even we expose it as based on pure illusion, that does not destroy its interest, though we would be unlikely to want to undergo the treatment. Phrases like the prostitution of friendship have been applied to it. Nietzsche condemns ‘introspection’, or ‘navel gazing’ as ‘a degenerate form of the psychologist’s genius’ (Will to Power �426), that suggests Pascal. Pschyoanalysis is more reminiscent of Baudelaire, offering enjoyment of perverse emotions, combined with all the pride of secret knowledge. It has been pointed out that Freud developed his ideas in the age of Beardsley, when art and literature were pervaded by perverse erotic symbolism, especially in Vienna. Salvador Dali, himself saturated in Nietzsche as a young man, used psychoanalysis for his own brand of decadent affirmation, restoring the humour and scrapping the morality. Orthodox psychoanalysis is still very moralistic. Although it uncovers all the grossest selfishness, which it claims to underlie all our actions, it regards this as a force itself opposed to society & the individual. It considers restraint to be very necessary, though it ‘liberates’ the most anti social instincts.

For Nietzsche, the mind is not self destructive except among decadent people. However there is a challenge presented by these pessimistic ideas. It is a demoralising suggestion, something to be refuted, that greater happiness lies with error. Nietzsche promises a pleasure that will be in no way less than that offered by the negative and decadent ideas he attacks. He desires to account for and harness what is exciting in them, without yielding to the sickness. He is clear about what is to be avoided. As he writes in Twilight p 34. ‘To have to combat one’s instincts, that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness & instinct are one.

He is referring to Socrates, of whom he wrote a few lines previously:- p32- ‘His case was after all only the extreme case, only the most obvious instance of what had at that time begun to be the universal exigency: that no one was any longer master of himself, that the instincts were becoming mutually antagonistic.

NIETZSCHE

Keeping in mind the ambiguities of the terms involved, we may try to identify Nietzsche’s most interesting, most considered position on decadence. One point is that we need not worry about degeneracy or mediocrity as such. On his model of individual health ‘happiness and instinct are one’. Whatever we are we express a will to power. Whether or not this matches some external standard is hardly important. The threat we face is from demoralising ideas, morality of the weak, which is the way that decadence can infect the healthy part of the organism.

Ideas are not to cure a physiologically based decadence, which may even be hereditary. However they are vital in protecting against other ideas embodying morality of the weak. The interests of the individual and society do not have to coincide, nor do the decadence of society and that of the individual mutually imply each other. But when the instincts conflict, that is a recipe for frustration and disaster. Morality of the weak insists that there is a conflict, that the instincts are dangerous and have to be restrained. It promotes conflict by creating a confusing antithesis between happiness and knowledge. Freud’s position does this by invoking the dangerousness, and hence the fear, of the uninhibited instinct.

If the right ideas rule, ideas meant to be encapsulated in the will to power concept, then the exercise of decadent impulses will do little harm. The decadent individual will not be able to impose his own valuation. Decadence is natural, a form of defecation. Nietzsche’s argument is directed against the morality of the weak, the demoralising idea, pessimistic ideas. Otherwise we leave well alone and what is healthy will flourish. He writes:- ‘Decadence itself is not a thing that can be withstood. It is absolutely necessary and is proper to all ages & all peoples. That which must be withstood, & by all means in our power, is the spreading of the contagion among sound parts of the organism’ (Will to Power �41).

In this there is no mystery, no pseudo science. To secure against the contagion there is no need to exterminate or sterilise. Not only can we not be sure of the real causes of decadence, the chances are the wrong people will be in charge of any eugenic programme, which would certainly be dangerous. Comparable perils may be thought to face the modern world with genetic engineering. The tyranny of the weak over the strong is the thing to be feared, not the existence of decadence in the physiological sense. New power brings new possibilities for the weak and mediocre to mould the destiny of humanity with their censorship and prohibitions.

Some decadence is past cure. We permit it to exist but not to flourish to the extent of allowing its perspective to prevail over our own. We assert that to be a false perspective. If you are decadent you live in your own way. You may still contribute to the culture, perhaps uniquely. You may have one exceptional talent. Even if you reproduce, your genes may do some good, for all anyone knows. That which is destined to die will do so. But if out of your resentment you develop a perspective of so called knowledge, setting up your decadent existence as an ideal for all, identifying it with happiness, this is something that has to be argued down. We say it expresses a clear untruth that can be demonstrated as such.

Decadence has other manifestations, apart from a straight clash between instinct and self preservation. Self deception is one, obviously as involving some kind of division of aims, an unwillingness to face the truth. Part of the decadence Nietzsche identifies in Wagner, consists in the desire to dogmatise, or ‘tyrannise’ as he puts it. Presumably this is because of the dishonesty that this must involve, signalling weakness and self deception as compared with the openness of frank disputation. In Zarathustra he writes that neither a slave mor a tyrant is capable of friendship. Insofar as psychoanalysis shows intolerance and dogmatism this may suggest similar criticisms

THE PRIDE OF KNOWLEDGE

Looking closer at the falsification that has been perpetrated we can see that Pick’s doctrine is not even the pessimism that it seems to be, any more than was Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It contains its own triumphalism and quite ruthless will to power. Like Wagner’s ambition it conceals what it is, which is another of Nietzsche’s marks of decadence, presumably as meaning dishonesty, weakness and inner conflict. The use of argumentum ad hominem is surely permissible in this case. Pick is the great nephew of Melanie Klein, acutely conscious of his ancestral heritage, Jewish, Central European, psychoanalytic.

He does clearly have a cause, he has values that he cherishes, cultural axes to grind. One of these is cosmopolitanism. He may see the dispute between Britain & Germany as insignificant, he might not think much of English freedom, but that is not to say he does not have opinions, even a chauvinism, of his own, even that he does not identify with something quite precise on any map of pre-war European attitudes. This is something much more deep rooted than a mere revulsion from the holocaust. He is not totally against war, he wants to promote a Freudian way of looking at it. At one point he considers what to him is evidently a strange question:- ‘Could war sometimes be justified?’, like to defeat nazism, That he is opposed to various nationalisms from this position is understandable, but he does not squarely admit this.

The ideal he espouses involves the pride of this knowledge. It seems to involve exploring the lure of all kinds of ‘perverse’ desires, allowing them, cultivating them, in the belief that you are exploring the innermost recesses of the psyche. This is not the principle that what does not destroy me makes me stronger. The way in which he promotes his ideas suggests priestly corruption, not just the pride of knowledge but the desire to impose that on everyone else.

It is hard to believe that these ideas, however original, will have much of a future. Though this subtle, dishonest will to power, this partly articulated philosophy is in many ways intriguing, from an orthodox historian’s viewpoint it is misconceived. Ingenious as it is it is hard to imagine it exerting any significant influence. Perhaps Freud will go quite out of fashion. Perhaps it is an irrelevant byway, an ideological cul de sac. But Pick deserves at least a footnote in the history of modern irrationalism.

William James’s essay The Moral Equivalent of War, published in 1910, is a key text for The War Machine. Pick says it should be read as a useful preface to Freud on war. James envisaged a more or less socialist future, which he admits would be intolerably stifling unless balanced by something more exciting. Rather than such spontaneous solutions as drug culture and football hooliganism, what he proposes sounds more like conscription, outward bound projects and boot camps. ‘With its quasi Nietzschean contempt for femininity, impotence, softness and peace, the ‘socialist’ and ‘pacifist’ James wants to transpose all that is good about war into the economy of a permanent peace’. Nietzsche was not especially keen on the struggle for existence. The predicted socialist future may well be boring but that would not be because of the achievement of economic security. That should release the energies of mankind for use in the struggle of all against all, which is the real point of existence. World weariness would result from the dominance of negative ideas which have not been overcome.

An ideal of uncovering the truth, always under attack from special motives, should provide a sufficient cause. Other people’s ideals and values exert an uncomfortable, sometimes an intolerable, pressure. The true joy of life is overcoming them by demonstrating the falsity of the principles on which they rest. That should offer an inspiring enough programme for a long time to come.

This paper was presented to the fourth annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society April 1994

Degeneration, Nordau and Nietzsche by John S Moore

Max Nordau’s book “Degeneration”, published in 1892, expressed attitudes which are still widely entertained if less clearly articulated. It is an intemperate attack on much of the culture of the later nineteenth century. With Nordau, as with John Carey in our own day, conventional attitudes lash out against the criticisms various intellectuals have directed at them. To Nordau, not only did Baudelaire show “all the mental stigmata of degeneration during the whole of his life”, but Rossetti and Verlaine are imbeciles, Swinburne is a criminal, Wagner a “crazed graphomaniac”. Still today much of the denounced culture is deeply attractive and satisfying. By the extremity of his opposition Nordau, like the Christian preacher attacking sin, makes it sound even more interesting.

He quotes Morel, who first “clearly grasped and formulated” the concept “which obtains throughout the science of mental diseases”. “…the clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard it as a morbid deviation from an original type. This deviation even if, at the outset, it was ever so slight, contained transmissible elements of such a nature that anyone bearing in him the germs becomes more and more incapable of fulfilling his functions in the world; and mental progress, already checked in his own person, finds itself menaced also in his descendants”.

In his section on “Egomania” Nordau showed himself one of the most vituperative of Nietzsche’s early critics. He expressed in a particularly vivid and extreme form objections which have often been levelled over the past hundred years. He cites medical authorities on the mental disorder underlying each of Nietzsche’s ideas. He writes of his “contradiction mania”, and dismisses all his thought as symptoms of insanity. To Nordau, strongly committed to a belief in altruism, an egoistic philosophy had to be a perverse and retrograde error. “As the formation of an ‘I’ of an individuality clearly conscious of its separate existence, is the highest achievement of living matter, so the highest degree of development of the ‘I’ consists in embodying in itself the ‘not I’, in comprehending the world, in conquering egoism, and in establishing close relations with other beings, things and phenomena. Auguste Comte, and after him Herbert Spencer, have named this stage altruism, from the Italian word ‘altrui’, others”. (p262). Believing this, he reserves his harshest language for Nietzsche and his followers.

“This unhappy lunatic has been put forward as a ‘philosopher’, and his drivel put forward as a ‘system’ – this man whose scribbling is one single loud divagation, in whose writings madness shrieks out from every line!” (p472).

“Nietzsche is a sufferer from Sadism in its most pronounced form, only with him it is confined to the intellectual sphere alone and is satisfied by ideal debauchery”. (p451)

“It (Nietzsche’s originality) consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought”. (p446)

Even were it granted that a mania for contradiction was indeed the motive that inspired Nietzsche, we may still think that after received opinion has been so contradicted it should be difficult even for his enemies to return to a spirit of uncritical assertion. To retain credibility the Christian, the socialist, the utilitarian, the ethical humanist, surely have to reply to his arguments. Nietzsche challenges rationalist pretensions, from utilitarianism onwards. What he calls the decadence of modern culture he argues as resting on unjustified assertions. Taking his central teaching as the will to power, we can see his own claim as resting not on perverse and unfounded assertion, but on rational argument. Even a mania for contradiction might serve the useful purpose of exposing all questionable assumptions.

“In the knowledge of truth what matters is having it, not what made one seek it, or how one found it. If the free spirits are right, the bound spirits are wrong, whether or not the former came to truth out of immorality and the others have kept clinging to untruth out of morality.

“Incidentally, it is not part of the nature of the free spirit that his views are more correct, but rather that he has released himself from tradition, be it successfully or unsuccessfully. Usually, however, he has truth, or at least the spirit of the search for truth on his side: he demands reasons, while others demand faith”. Human all too Human 225 (tr. Faber and Lehman)

A culture that bases itself on faith, or dogmatic assertion, is to be seen as anti philosophical, though it may well have its own forms of wisdom. Dogmatism can play a productive part in law, morality, religion, culture in general. Dogmatic hypothesis is important from a creative viewpoint, but vulnerable to rational criticism. Enemies of the classical culture Nietzsche admires have sometimes been led to attack the reasoning faculty, as if only faith can provide a sound basis for life. Nordau, on the other hand, sees Nietzsche as a dogmatist, and himself as thoroughly scientific. Medical materialism was the central plank of his thought, underlying his view of optimism and pessimism and the dismissal of all objections. His dogmas expressed the popular positivism of his age.

Many artists and writers at this time were reacting against this, feeling culture and society to be increasingly pervaded and dominated by crude popular tastes and ideas which though personally rejected retained great power to depress and demoralise. In a society felt to be decadent in the sense of being demoralised by such values, rather than trying to restore aristocracy, or romantically pining for past eras, they tried to create another perspective in the world as art, a mental space free from the oppressive doctrine.

Nordau charges such dissidents with degeneracy, putting forward an ideal of health that invokes Comte and Spencer, but above all Lombroso, with his theory of the hereditary criminal. The effect is to identify health with acceptance of his own assertedly rational doctrine. Obviously those who have not heard of it cannot be covered, but for those who have it is to work as dogma. Those who would dispute with him he would consign to a lunatic asylum. He refutes pessimism thus:- “In a sound organism, possessing a high capacity for adaptation, those appetites only obtain development, the satisfaction of which is possible – at least to a certain degree – and is accompanied by no bad consequences for the individual. In such a life pleasure consequently prevails decidedly over pain, and he looks upon existence, not as an evil, but as a great good. In the organism deranged by disease degenerate appetites exist which cannot be satisfied, or of which the gratification injures or destroys the individual, or the degenerate organism is too weak, or too inapt to gratify the legitimate impulses. In his life pain necessarily predominates, and he looks upon existence as an evil. My interpretation of life is nearly related to the well known theory of eudaemonism, but it is founded on a biological not a metaphysical basis. It explains optimism and pessimism simply as as an adequate or inadequate vitality, as the existence or absence of adaptability, as health or illness.” p150

This reads like a caricature of certain things Nietzsche himself says on the subject. The concept of biological degeneration is one that occurs in his own writings. He sometimes writes of declining and ascending life as though they were hard categories. He draws on Lombroso on the hereditary criminal, and also flirts with Lamarck. He reflects the science of his own time, and some of the things he says are associated with his own particular teaching only because people no longer read the other writers of the day.

In Human All too Human he justifies a certain degeneration in terms of its possible usefulness to society.

“Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss, without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better…it is precisely the weaker nature, as the more delicate and free, that makes progress possible at all”. (Human all too Human � 224

As his thought developed he came to think of decadence primarily as morality of the weak, enfeebling and obstructing the independent will. Social usefulness is not the criterion for assessing the success of the free spirit.

“….how far is a man disposed to be solitary or gregarious? in the latter case, his value consists in those qualities which secure the survival of his tribe or his type; in the former case his qualities are those which distinguish him from others, which isolate and defend him, and make his solitude possible ……………the concept of degeneration in both cases: the approximation of the qualities of the herd to those of solitary creatures, and vice versa.- in short when they begin to resemble each other. This concept of degeneration is beyond the sphere of moral judgements”. Will to Power II translated Ludovici T.N.Foulis 1910 p 320 �886

Nordau is obviously vulnerable to those who follow his own principle and search for some mental disease that caricatures all his own attitudes. One immediately thinks of what he himself called persecution mania. His vision of a degenerate future has a paranoid quality: – “Mystics, but especially ego maniacs and filthy pseudo realists, are enemies to society of the direst kind. Society must unconditionally defend itself against them. Whoever believes with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity, in which it alone can exist, prosper, and continue to develop itself to higher destinies, whoever looks upon civilisation as a good, having value and deserving to be defended, must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti social vermin”. (p557)

He sneers at bad writers, rubbing salt into the wound by saying the failed writer should become a waiter or a shoemaker and find his happiness there. His horror about degeneration relates to his Lamarckism. A Darwinian is prepared to be prodigal of waste. Out of a hundred artists, perhaps one is successful and happy. The rest may be miserable because they are frustrated, but the consolation is that nature can well afford it. Where evolution depends on will to adapt, on the other hand, a perverse or ineffective will threatens the race.

Nordau’s values are those of the prohibitionist, holding that it is possible to lay down a pattern of happiness to which we have the right to expect people to adapt. “Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress, and whoever worships his ‘I’ is an enemy to society. Society has for its first premise neighbourly love and capacity for self sacrifice; and progress is the effect of an ever more rigorous subjugation of the beast in man, of an ever tenser self restraint, an ever keener sense of duty and responsibility”. (last page)

From the viewpoint of Nietzsche’s solitary species, the evil of prohibition is in its restriction on the individual, a point that precedes any judgement about the good of society. In defence of freedom we can emphasise the value of alienation.

Nordau is scathing about Tolstoy’s attribution of the happiness of peasants to their religious faith. His view of health bypasses the question of precisely what ideas we should have in our minds to secure happiness. If with Nietzsche we see the oppressiveness and bad taste of certain cultures as deriving from ideas, to expect someone who dissents from the dominant ideas to adapt and conform is to compound the oppression.

On the will to power theory, happiness is not reducible to health. Where Nordau’s values operate they express somebody’s power. Oppressive power can create frustrated desire and consequent unhappiness. Nordau’s ideal of adaptation can be seen to involve a kind of plebeian morality. Adapt, conform, adjust desires to those reasonably satisfiable. If an end to discontent means an end to art, so much the worse for art. Nordau looks forward happily to the prospect of a world without literature.

Nordau, as much as Nietzsche, asks to be accepted even by those who find his views repellent. Whatever the motives that inspire Nordau and Nietzsche, each position claims authority over those who do not share the same motive.

Nietzsche’s original motivation, whatever it was, whether we see it as psychological perversity springing from mental disorder, or the need to defend an economically privileged status, as Marxists would have it, or resentment of the current order, and desire for power, leads him to make certain distinctions. He forms certain projects, and revels in irreligion and immoralism. The conventional view of such activity is very negative. He is immediately threatened with an extremely hostile judgement. How is he to say this judgement is not to be made?

To identify with his aims in the sense of activating his peculiar anxiety gives a general entree into his world of ideas. From his point of view Nordau’s views are an obvious threat. For all their absurdity, they make it easy to dismiss whatever he has to say, and uphold the negative judgement it was his whole purpose to overcome.

Nietzsche’s motive contrasts with a number of other hypothetical motives. It contrasts, for example, with motives that spring from hatred of a bullying father, resentment of unsatisfying labour, or fear of racial persecution. But even if you share his motive, and therefore find his ideas acceptable, the objection arises that with different premises, different opinions result, whatever the emotional disposition. Change the premises and even your feelings will change. This suggests the following hypothesis:- that you will think like Nietzsche if you accept his premises, and that these have authority over the opposing premises. The proposal that his premises are wrong, with its demoralising suggestion, confronts him with the assaults of an extremely threatening and potentially paralysing morality of the weak. How Nietzsche feels, and how his opponents feel becomes incidental to the basic argument between them.

Nietzsche’s describes himself as driven by a “the will to power as no man ever possessed it”. (Ecce Homo BT �4).

His own outlook he understands as expression of his will to power, and this conflicts with other wills, in opposition to his. So his must stake a claim to authority. This is its truth claim, clearly incompatible with nihilism, understood as the doctrine that there is no truth. Nihilism suggests a culture of hypothesis, as if there is no anchor, no defence against what has been chosen to be the most attractive hypothesis.

It is in pursuing his will that he discovers and isolates the principle he calls the morality of the weak, which may be “slave values” or those of the herd or the mediocre. These are ideas the aim of which is to weaken him in the pursuit of his desires.

The desire to be a philosopher is an aggressive, combative motive without which established views would not be challenged. Such had been utterly explicit in Stirner, with his frank avowal of his guiding desire to provide for his thoughts an existence in the world. Nordau describes Nietzsche’s individualism as no more than a reproduction of Stirner’s negligible philosophy. Allowing for the difference between an economic and a medical model, the materialism of Nordau bears some resemblance to that of Marx, his attack on Nietzsche to that on Stirner in Marx’s German Ideology’.

Some commentators say Nietzsche should not have placed so much importance on the will to power, seeing a humbler role for his thought than he himself intended. With this concept he makes his bid for domination, to shatter the parameters and transvalue values. He wants to take up space occupied by others. Theoretically people could be left to think exactly as they do. The desire that they should think differently is a desire for mental domination. The more explicit this desire to change minds, the stronger the impulse to dominate. It both leads to and is sustained by a claim to new sources of knowledge. To open a new field of knowledge is to destroy a previous state of licence, introducing intolerance of what was once tolerated.

From this viewpoint, orthodoxy is experienced as a felt pressure to think and feel other than one does, including arguments in its favour which are supposed to convince. Nietzsche’s whole philosophy is a defence of his right to think and feel as he does. He challenges to a battle on basic assumptions. The idea that these are not to be challenged, not a legitimate case for a power struggle, has to be refuted. Nietzsche describes Wagner’s tyrannical urge as unhealthy, thereby implying that he does not understand his own ambition as expressing itself in the same tyrannical way. He sees in Wagner a will to deceive, which is dishonest and thereby decadent. If he himself is not decadent it is inasmuch as he is content with an open expression of desire, without a will to deceive, or to be deceived.

Nietzsche did not find such honesty in Socrates, for all his concern to argue out basic assumptions. Nietzsche says that as Socrates was a typical decadent, his programme for overcoming decadence could not have succeeded. What does he mean by this? It has something to do with all the monstrous impulses that Socrates admittted he had to control. Did such a nature lead to a desire to tyrannise like Wagner? In Socrates own day he was a pioneer, so “reason” to a great extent meant just his own authority, and his conclusions may appear dogmatic to us. Nietzsche hoped to do better than Socrates. He saw his own strength, in the expression of his own views, as facing a threat from demoralising ideas. This applied to his anti Christianity, his anti egalitarianism, his affirmationism, and his opposition to the lure of Wagner and other fashionable ideas. Such decadence it was his task to defeat.

However we conceive his own motive for espousing the values he does, the will to power theory is an attempt to state the premise that lies behind them, such that acceptance of that should be sufficient to secure acceptance of his general position. The theory is a conception of possibility which expresses disagreement as a conflict of power. The all pervasive nature of such power relations, lead him to speak of a will to power. He holds that all human beings are all the time motivated by this. He extends it to the whole of nature, so that just as Darwin sees each life form as engaged in a struggle to survive, so Nietzsche sees it as engaged in a struggle for power.

He has to refute the charge that that his is only a perspective, that is to say an arbitrary hypothesis or an appealing piece of rhetoric. Against the persuasive power of consensus, the emotional pull of some conformist dogma, he opposes a coldly rational scheme. If his scheme were merely “possible” it could have no hold on us. Nordau’s position would be as acceptable as his own, and that conception of social hygiene would be an adequate reason for ignoring or suppressing ideas and practices that conflict with it. Nietzsche needs to be able to claim to be something more than one voice among many. In opposing established views, he makes a clear claim to authority. He would maintain that his is, more than simply a plausible way of looking at the world, the only one that strictly accords with reality. If successful, his claim has huge repercussions. Before it could be decided whether or not the will to power theory is right, each step in his argument needed to be made as clear as possible. Once this had been done, then it would be available for anyone to apply.

If his claim is valid, no alternative position should be acceptable. To reject will to power would not be to reject some abstract argument, but to ignore a demonstrable fragment of ordinary reality. Given this requirement, the factual content of the theory needed to be brought out fully. Much of the effort he spent on the concept of the will to power was in the attempt to construct an argument that achieved this.