Nietzsche E-Book

Irving M. Zeitlin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this book Irving Zeitlin re-examines the work of this important philosopher and considers how we should assess Nietzsche's claims today.

Das E-Book Nietzsche wird angeboten von John Wiley & Sons und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
19th Century Philosophy, Philosophie, Philosophie des 19. Jhd., Philosophy

Leseprobe

NIETZSCHE

A Re-examination

IRVING M. ZEITLIN

Polity Press

Copyright © Irving M. Zeitlin 1994

The right of Irving M. Zeitlin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.

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Contents

Preface

1 Introduction

2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

3 Beyond Good and Evil

4 On the Genealogy of Morals: Ressentiment and the Inversion of Values

The Inversion of Values in Ancient Israel

5 The Inversion of Values in Ancient Greece

6 Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Ascetic Ideals

On the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals

7 Socrates and the Proto-Nietzscheans

8 An Excursus on Max Stirner – and Karl Marx

The Rebuttal of Marx and Engels

9 DarwincontraNietzsche

10 The Twilight of the Idols

11 The Anti-Christ

12 Dostoevsky’s Challenge

Crime and Punishment

The Brothers Karamazov

The Possessed

Epilogue: Thus Spoke the Prophets of Social Justice

Index

For Rebekka, Jacob, Kayla,Isaiah, and Albert

Preface

No thinker in the history of modern philosophy has launched as radical an assault upon Western values as has Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Therein lies his importance as a philosopher – in challenging the religio-moral and intellectual foundations of Western society. On the whole, his challenge may be characterized as negative and critical, in that it aims to tear down the old table of values. Nietzsche’s negative influence has left its mark not only on contemporary philosophy, social theory, literary criticism, and other academic areas, but on attitudes in everyday life as well.

What I have tried to accomplish in this book is a careful examination of Nietzsche’s writings with the aim of laying bare what I regard as the problems, ambiguities, and defects in his work. Nietzsche, as we shall see, rejects both reason and metaphysics, thus leaving only taste as the criterion by which to choose between moralities, socio-political systems, and other human products and values. For Nietzsche, there are only moralities but no Morality, no trans-historical or universal truths. And since Nietzsche views reason and dialectics as manifestations of the “slave morality,” and refuses to acknowledge the efficacy of reason in the pursuit of truth, the character of his utterances is essentially assertive. Nietzsche thus denies that a philosopher’s primary responsibility is to provide sound arguments for what he or she believes. Nietzsche admires and prefers the “master morality,” but this is, for him, a purely personal, “aesthetic” preference. Hence, the manifold and diverse values one finds in any complex society are, for Nietzsche, relative and ideological in the strict sense.

Although there may be some overlap with other studies in my exposition of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I believe my work also contains distinctive elements. For example, I give considerable attention to Nietzsche’s sociological or social-psychological theory of ressentiment and the inversion of values. Nietzsche himself provides only the briefest outline of this theory with regard to the two classical cases with which he is most concerned, the Jews and the Greeks. I therefore develop and apply his theory in chapters 4 and 5, clarifying his meaning and illustrating the sociological fruitfulness of the theory. However, I also hasten to remind the reader that the social origin of an idea or value has no necessary implications for its validity.

Another distinctive element may be found in the discussion of Socrates and the proto-Nietzscheans (chapter 7). As the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy was anticipated by Callicles and Thrasymachus, I thought it would be interesting to hear how Socrates grapples with their arguments based upon the state of nature. Similarly, the excursus on Max Stirner and Karl Marx (chapter 8) enables us to see how Marx – a materialist like Nietzsche – counters the views of the boldest of Nietzsche’s precursors in the modern era.

Like Callicles before him, Nietzsche bases his critique of democracy on what he perceives as the rule of nature in which the strong dominate the weak. He believed he was following Darwin in this respect but failed to realize that his understanding of Darwin’s theory was one-sided and erroneous. The consequences of Nietzsche’s error are discussed in “Darwin contra Nietzsche” (chapter 9).

Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900 — or for all practical purposes in 1890, since he spent the last ten years of his life totally incapacitated by his insanity. And although the issues he raised permits us to regard him as a twentieth-century philosopher, there is a sense in which his philosophy bears the stamp of the European nineteenth century – a century which, when compared with the twentieth, appears rather peaceful and civilized. If, therefore, Nietzsche had lived to see the totalitarian, genocidal regimes of the twentieth century, one wonders whether he would have proclaimed “God is dead!” as loudly and consistently as he did while ignoring the dangers of that proclamation. It was Dostoevsky who so brilliantly and dramatically addressed the question Nietzsche effectively ignored: “If God is dead, is everything permitted?” This is the subject-matter of what I call “Dostoevsky’s Challenge” (chapter 12).

Finally in the light of my criticisms of Nietzsche’s protagonist, Zarathustra, and the extreme poverty of his affirmations, I confront this spokesman for the “master morality,” this yearner for the coming of the superman, with the Hebrew prophets of social justice, the classical representatives of the “slave morality.” In that way we see clearly the choice that lies before us.

1

Introduction

The mature Nietzsche, as is well known, looked upon Christianity as a major source of the decadent and anti-life outlook of the West. Although we shall make no attempt to explain Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas psychologically, it is noteworthy that he had spent the first five-and-a-half years of his childhood in a parsonage, and his subsequent childhood years in a home characterized by the kind of piety one might expect from the nature of his family background.1 His father and his grandfathers on both sides had been Lutheran ministers, and indeed Nietzsche was the heir of a long line of Lutheran pastors reaching back to the early seventeenth century. Little wonder that early interpreters of Nietzsche rarely resisted the temptation of treating his mature philosophy simply as a violent repudiation of his religious upbringing. In any event, this upbringing together with his later theological studies imparted to him a firsthand knowledge of Scripture, both the Old and New Testaments.

Nietzsche ceased to be a believing Christian while still in his teens. In 1862, in an essay called “Fate and History,” he set down the grounds for his doubts, stating that history and science are the only reliable means of pursuing truth and knowledge. It was no later than that date that Nietzsche abandoned his faith and adopted an extreme skepticism in which he proposed that an openness to divergent views is itself desirable. “Strife,” he wrote, “is the perpetual food of the soul.”2 “Strife” is a translation of Kampf which alternates with Krieg and Streit, the German words Nietzsche employs throughout his mature writings to denote a state of active and aggressive struggle as opposed to peace and repose.

When Nietzsche enrolled in the university in Bonn, he eventually chose to study classical philology under the tutelage of the distinguished Friedrich Ritschl, who was greatly impressed with the young man’s brilliance. Yielding to the powerful convention among university students, Nietzsche joined a dueling fraternity and promptly acquired a dueling scar, the prestigious sign of noble manliness. Manliness presupposed another kind of experience: on a brief trip to Cologne, a cab driver brought the young Nietzsche to a brothel where it is almost certain he contracted syphilis, the cause of the insanity to which Nietzsche fell victim during the last ten years of his life.

It was during his stay at Bonn that Nietzsche abandoned the study of theology, a discipline, he decided, devoted to the investigation of a primitive superstition, namely Christianity. He now declared himself to be a “free thinker”; but, in contrast to his atheistic predecessors from the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Nietzsche held that “freedom” meant not only throwing off a yoke but taking on a new and heavier one in its place. He had no patience for the so-called “liberal-minded” unbeliever who thought he could deny the existence of a divine Lawgiver but nevertheless accept the validity of the Law handed down by human beings. Nietzsche now began to sense that, insofar as God had ceased to exist as a reality for humanity, life as such was deprived of its traditional meaning. In such circumstances, humanity was liable to disintegrate and degenerate under the impact of its basic meaninglessness.

Although Nietzsche distinguished himself early as a brilliant young philologist, he held a rather modest view of the importance of that subject and often even deprecated it as the study of dead books. That attitude turned him away from philology and toward philosophy, where he discovered Schopenhauer and was for a time dazzled by him. At about the same time (1866) Nietzsche read Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism, a work that influenced him profoundly, pushing him further in the direction of philosophical materialism. By now Nietzsche had left Bonn and followed Ritschl to Leipzig, where the young classical philologist so impressed Ritschl that the latter successfully recommended him for a vacant professorship at Basel University when Nietzsche was only 24 years of age. Ritschl then also expedited for Nietzsche his doctorate at Leipzig without an examination or any other formality. In November 1866 the University, at Ritschl’s urging, designated Diogenes Laertius as the subject for a philological essay contest, and the prize was awarded to Nietzsche.

The Leipzig years (1865–9) also witnessed the emergence in Nietzsche’s writings of at least two notable ideas which eventually contributed to the formation of his mature views. Following an intensive study of Homer and Hesiod and the role of the mythical “contest” in Greek culture, Nietzsche began to recognize just how central the concept of agon, or competition, was in the development of Greek culture.

Nietzsche remained at Basel for 10 years and when he left in 1879, at the age of 34, he had never been away from the classroom environment for more than a few months at a time. It was during the Basel years that he had met Richard Wagner, whom he idolized for a time as a creative genius of the “higher type.” The notion of a “higher type” becomes in due course a chief element of Nietzsche’s theory that Christianity and other ascetic, repressive, and enervating facets of Western culture cater to the weak and mediocre, thus obstructing the emergence of “higher specimens”. For Nietzsche, the primary aim of a healthy and robust culture ought to be the fostering and nurturing of higher specimens of all sorts, an aim to which all else ought to be subordinated. It seems that what at first impressed Nietzsche most about Wagner, besides his bold experimentalism in music, was that he appeared to be the precise opposite of the bourgeois man for whom Nietzsche had acquired so much disdain. Wagner was a cultural rebel, an out-and-out Bohemian. As R. J. Hollingdale has observed, “From Tannhäuser onwards his operas reveal an unmixed contempt for normal standards of behavior and there is no Wagnerian hero who does not flout them.”3

Wagner himself also broke standards, most notably in his outlandish and conspicuous dress and in his Bayreuth project, which was widely regarded as the undertaking of a megalomaniac for whom the existing opera houses were inferior and inadequate. Nietzsche’s temporary intoxication with Wagner was strengthened by their joint admiration of Schopenhauer; but when Nietzsche broke away from Wagner in 1876 he also parted ways with the philosopher. Hollingdale has suggested that the fundamental difference between Nietzsche’s mature theory and that of Schopenhauer is that Nietzsche had by this time rejected metaphysics in all its forms; but one needs to add that Schopenhauer’s “will to live” is the precise opposite of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Schopenhauer had proposed that the cause of suffering is intensity of will; the less we will, the less we shall suffer. He reaches this notion through love, which is always sympathy for the pain of others. Inspired by the Nirvana myth, Schopenhauer notes that sympathy can go so far as to take on the suffering of the whole world. In the good man, however, knowledge of the whole quiets all volition, and his will turns away from life and denies his own nature. The good man will practice complete chastity, voluntary poverty, fasting, and self-torment. Nietzsche, in contrast, rejects and despises asceticism. Nietzsche now saw himself as a fully consistent materialist whose “will to power” was an induction from observed phenomena, not a metaphysical postulate. Hollingdale acknowledges, however, that Nietzsche occasionally speaks of the “will to power” and the “eternal recurrence” as if these concepts were ultimate realities, a problem to which we shall return. On the whole, however, it is true that Nietzsche’s thought-experiments in the form of aphorisms are secular. The most famous formulation of his “this-worldly” orientation is, of course, “God is dead.” This is intended to include everything that has ever been subsumed in the concept of “God”: other worlds, ultimate realities, “things in themselves,” and valetudinarian “wills to live” of the kind Schopenhauer had proposed.

It was during his Leipzig and Basel years that Nietzsche had occupied himself with the peripheral figures of Schopenhauer and Wagner, whose thoughts belong, strictly speaking, to the nineteenth century. Nietzsche’s mature thought, in contrast, is in the mainstream of Western philosophy; and though he died in the year 1900, he must be considered a twentieth-century philosopher because he raises key issues with which every thinking person ought to be concerned, the decline and loss of faith and the moral crisis that this implies. As Nietzsche’s mature philosophy bears no trace of the influence of either Wagner or Schopenhauer, we can turn our attention to the several problem areas with which Nietzsche was preoccupied and which formed the central questions he addressed in his mature works: the nature of the Greek foundations of Western society, the “inversion of values”, the nature and consequences of the Christian faith, and the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. In the present Introduction, we shall merely touch upon these problem areas, reserving for the body of this work a fuller exposition of Nietzsche’s views and a critical response to them.

By the time Nietzsche had carefully read and pondered The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, the validity of Darwin’s theory appeared to him to have been demonstrated. Nietzsche accepted the fundamentals of the Darwinian thesis that humanity had evolved from earlier animal forms in a purely naturalistic manner, through chance and accident. Earlier evolutionary theories had still left open the possibility of a “purpose” in evolution; but Darwin had mobilized massive evidence in support of his view that “higher” animals and humans could have come into being entirely by fortuitous variations in individuals. Before Darwin had presented his convincing hypothesis, it was not too difficult to discern some directing agency in the unfolding of natural and, for some, even historical events. After Darwin, however, that became increasingly difficult. The need for a conscious, creative principle, force, or being seemed unnecessary, since what had formerly appeared as order could now be explained as random change. Hence, for Nietzsche, natural selection was a process free of metaphysical implication. Nietzsche now denied the existence of order in the universe, with the possible exception of the astral constellation in which we live, where a temporary order made possible the formation of organic nature. “The entire character of the world,” he wrote, “is … in all eternity chaos, not in the sense of an absence of necessity, but of an absence of order, arrangement [Gliederung], form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other terms there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. … Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses” (The Gay Science, aphorism 109).4 It is in this general context that we encounter the first occurrence of Nietzsche’s most famous epigram: “God is dead: but given the way of humanity, his shadow will remain on the walls of caves for thousands of years. And we – we still have to conquer his shadow as well” (108).

Nietzsche’s view of the world as chaotic was certainly reinforced by his reading of Darwin, and the chaotic nature of the universe remained a basic element of his philosophical outlook. The Darwinian theory complemented and confirmed a view of reality which Nietzsche had already begun to form in his youth. From the time of his reading of F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism, Nietzsche had come to regard all metaphysical ideas as mere ideas and nothing more. There was no such thing as a supersensible reality with which humans could somehow get in touch; and if earlier conceptions of biological evolution had still allowed for the role of a divine agency in earthly matters, Darwin had put an end to that once and for all. A conscious, directing agency was an unnecessary hypothesis.

For Nietzsche, then, the logical consequences of Darwin’s theory were no less than revolutionary: God was no more than an idea in the minds of human beings. Any “higher” attributes one may discern in human beings are, in reality, attributes which they had acquired in the course of their descent from other animals. Human beings possessed no means of communicating with any so-called transcendental power, and they were no different, fundamentally, from any other creature. And if God was a mere idea, then it certainly could not give meaning to the universe. Darwinism therefore implied for Nietzsche that the planet Earth was devoid of any transcendental meaning. Nietzsche thus regarded his own era as “nihilistic”: all traditional values and meanings had ceased to make sense, and philosophy was in a state of crisis, faced as it was with an inherently meaningless universe. The various solutions offered from the time of Plato were inadequate.

Nietzsche’s intimate knowledge of Greek culture helped him develop at least one idea with which to begin his project of providing secular guidelines for a new and meaningful outlook in life. From the time of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, he continued to propose that Greek cultural development, the Greek creative genius, was bound up with the Apollinian-Dionysian duality, involving perpetual strife between the two principles. The driving force behind the culture of Hellas was the contest, agon, the striving to surpass. The creative force is passion, but a passion harnessed and directed. Dionysus is the explosive, ungoverned force of creation while Apollo is the power that governs him. Is there then a vital connection, Nietzsche now asked himself, between the Darwinian view of intraspecies behavior and the genius of the Greeks? Interpreting Darwin in his own distinctive way, Nietzsche proposed that human qualities are of a twofold character, manifesting, to be sure, a capacity for high and noble powers, but also for cruel, murderous, and destructive ones. The Greeks certainly demonstrated a capacity for brutality, and yet they were also creative and humane; they were the inventors of philosophy, science, and drama. The Greeks were not simply beautiful and creative children, as some earlier scholars had portrayed them; they were a cruel, savage, and warlike people who constructed an extraordinarily valuable culture by governing and redirecting their passions and impulses. In this light it is clear that it was not Wagner and Schopenhauer but Darwin and the Greeks who were the starting point of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche also examines the role of Socrates, who is driven neither by Dionysus nor Apollo, but by something “new” – reason and dialectics – which represses the Dionysian passions and gradually causes the deterioration of Greek art and drama. In his first book, as in his later works, one discerns in Nietzsche a highly critical attitude towards the Platonic Socrates. This is a problem to which we shall need to return.

If for Nietzsche the universe was chaos and the traditional metaphysical meanings imposed on that chaos were useless for the provision of meaning, then what was needed was a new, secular, and truly convincing organization of the chaos. One of his chief early ideas in this regard seems to be Apollo’s victory over, or control of, Dionysus. In his mature philosophy, however, Nietzsche attempts to go beyond this, and his organizing of the chaos leads to the chapter on “self-overcoming” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where the central Nietzschean idea “will to power” is first described:

And life itself told me this secret: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. … There is much that life admires more than life itself; but out of that very admiration speaks the will to power.“ That is what life once taught me; and with that I shall yet solve the riddle of your heart, you who are wisest . …

And whoever would be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be a destroyer who breaks values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but that is creative.

The single goal of humanity must be the creation of its highest specimens, the superman (Übermensch). Zarathustra spoke thus to the people:

Iteach you the superman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?. … The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will assert: the superman shall be the meaning of the earth! I urge you my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and believe not those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers they are, whether they know it or not. (Part I, 3)

Nietzsche never defines the term “power,” nor does he let us know, precisely, the nature of the superman’s mission. At times self-mastery appears to be simply the means of achieving the highest aesthetic goals; but at other times self-mastery appears to be political – the means by which the “higher types” will dominate the “herd.” Does Nietzsche write from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, as some scholars have argued, or from a political standpoint as well? And if from the latter, has he faced the Hobbesian problem of what occurs when two or more individuals desire the same apparent good, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy? These questions will demand our attention in the following chapters.

Meanwhile, however, we need to say a word about Nietzsche’s style of thinking and writing. Nietzsche was a “peripatetic” philosopher, though not in the sense of having been a disciple of Aristotle, whom he nevertheless admired greatly. Nietzsche was peripatetic in the literal sense of the word, since most of his work was not only thought but written down in small notebooks during his long walks in solitude. On such occasions he might even have thought aloud with accompanying gestures. This strong habit of his certainly helps us understand why virtually all of his writings take the form of aphorisms, some longer than others – perhaps a few pages – but most of them short paragraphs or even sentences. But there is another more deliberate reason for Nietzsche’s employment of aphorisms. Since he viewed the system-building philosophies of the past as defective, he regarded his own task differently. The point was not to erect a new system – a futile enterprise in all circumstances – but to expose the flaws of the old and propose a few affirmative guidelines in the form of thought-experiments. The aphoristic “method” certainly served Nietzsche well in expressing his ideas succinctly and epigrammatically. But there is also a disadvantage to this method, as is illustrated, for example, in his aphorism on Aristotle. He salutes and honors him, but alleges that the great philosopher of antiquity had not only failed to hit the nail on the head but missed the nail itself when he indicated the ultimate end of Greek tragedy. Just look at the Greek tragic poets, says Nietzsche, and it will be easy to see what it was that most stimulated their industry, inventiveness, and competition: “certainly not the attempt to overawe the audience with sentiments. The Athenian frequented the theater in order to hear beautiful speeches. And beautiful speeches were what concerned Sophocles: pardon the heresy” (The Gay Science, 80). In thus expressing his differences with Aristotle, Nietzsche merely makes an assertion, but presents no argument, analysis, or evidence. This is fairly typical of Nietzsche’s presentation of his ideas.

However, another type of criticism goes to the very heart of Nietzsche’s philosophical outlook. For Nietzsche, there are moralities, but no Morality. His sociological conception of the origin of morality is strikingly similar to that of Emile Durkheim. For Nietzsche, to behave morally is to obey a certain code. Morality is custom. In Human, All too Human (96), for example, Nietzsche asserts that to be moral, virtuous, or ethical means to obey a long-established tradition or law. It is immaterial whether one obeys readily or reluctantly; it is sufficient that one obeys. The “good” are those who follow the customs readily, as if by nature; the “evil,” those who resist custom and tradition for whatever reason. In Assorted Opinions and Maxims (89) Nietzsche maintains that custom is, in essence, that which is good for the community. In a formulation from which Durkheim would not have dissented, Nietzsche writes:

The origin of custom may be traced to two ideas: “the community is worth more than the individual” and “a long-lasting advantage is to be preferred over a fleeting one”; from which the conclusion is drawn that the long-lasting advantage of the community must take unconditional precedence over the advantage of the individual …

The problem with such formulations is that they tend to justify whatever constraints a given society imposes on its individuals. This sociologistic conception of things refuses to recognize trans-historical or trans-cultural criteria by which to evaluate the customs and political practices of a given society. And in the absence of such criteria one is left with a moral relativism which renders one intellectually defenseless against, for example, the oppressive and murderous tyrannies with which we are so familiar from the history of the twentieth century. Whether Nietzsche dealt adequately with the dangers of relativism is a central question that will occupy us throughout this re-examination of his works.

It appears that by the time he completed Die Morgenröte (The Dawn or Daybreak) (1881) Nietzsche got no farther than trying to show that the so-called “higher qualities” of humans – those for which a transcendental origin had been traditionally claimed – were simply the transformation of “lower” qualities, those which humans have in common with the animals. It was therefore the “will to power” which appeared to offer the widest scope for human development. This suggests that by the time of The Dawn Nietzsche had not advanced beyond the notion that morality emerged from the desire for power and the fear of disobedience, a quasi-Hobbesian idea. All actions, says Nietzsche, may be traced back to evaluations which we have adopted.

Why do we adopt them? From fear – that is to say, we regard it more advisable to pretend they are our own, and accustom ourselves to this pretense, so that at last it becomes our nature. (The Dawn, 104)

If we ask how we became so fluent in the imitation of the feelings of others, there is no doubt about the answer: man, as the most fainthearted of all creatures due to his delicate and fragile nature, has in his faintheartedness the masterful teacher of that empathy, that quick grasp of the feelings of another human being (and of animals). (The Dawn, 142)

Behind the fundamental principle of the current moral fashion: “moral actions are actions performed out of sympathy for others,” I see the social effect of faintheartedness hiding behind an intellectual mask: human weakness and timidity desire, above all, that all the dangers which life once posed should be removed from it … (174)

My rights … are that part of my power which others have not merely yielded to me, but which they want me to hold on to. How do these others arrive at that? First, through their good sense, fear, and caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their own rights); or in that they recognize that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any reduction of our power a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be incapable of forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power … That is how rights originate – in recognized and guaranteed degrees of power. When power-relationships undergo any significant change, rights disappear and new ones are created – as is shown in the continual disappearance and reappearance of rights among nations. … If our power appears to be profoundly shaken and shattered, our rights cease to exist: conversely, if we have become very much more powerful, the rights of others, that we have previously conceded them, cease to exist for us. (112)

This aphorism is little more than a reworking of Hobbes’s proposition that the international arena is in a “state of nature,” in a “war of each against all,” for the fundamental reason that it lacks a Leviathan. Even the striving for distinction

is the striving for domination over another individual, though it be a very indirect domination … (113)

We see, then, that Nietzsche’s view of morality, as derived from power, owes a great deal to Hobbes. There is, however, a very important difference between Hobbes and Nietzsche, a difference related to our earlier observation that the primary responsibility of a philosopher is to give good reasons for what he believes. Although Nietzsche is zealous in his determination to expunge all metaphysics from his rethinking of things, his central notion of a “will to power” is more in the nature of an ambiguous metaphysical postulate than a rationally and empirically grounded proposition. Hobbes, in contrast, not only defines power as an individual’s “present means to obtain some future apparent good,” he also provides reasons for his view that there exists in all individuals a natural and restless desire for power that ceases only in death. Indeed, Hobbes explains why individuals pursue more and more power: not only because they hope for a greater delight that increments of power will bring them, but also because they cannot secure the power they already have without acquiring more.

There are, then, utterances in The Dawn which suggest that Nietzsche had, in effect, reduced morality to power-relations. He reminds us, in that respect, of two proto-Nietzscheans with whom Socrates had to contend, Callicles and Thrasymachus, who had asserted that “might is right.” We shall examine those dialogues later to see how Socrates sought to refute that assertion. But there are other statements in The Dawn indicating that Nietzsche held implicit standards, though he refused to call them moral. Nietzsche denies both morality and immorality. He does not deny

that countless people feel themselves to be immoral, but that there is any true reason so to feel. Understandably, I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and opposed, or that many actions called moral ought to be done and promoted – but I think that the former should be avoided and the latter promoted for other reasons than hitherto. (103)

But, alas, Nietzsche not only fails to inform us which actions should be opposed and which promoted, he also fails to tell us what his “other reasons than hitherto” are. Does he have standards or criteria for making the distinction? Or is he saying that desirable and undesirable actions are merely a matter of taste – his taste? And yet, there is at least one aphorism in The Dawn strongly suggesting that Nietzsche did in fact hold certain ideals and standards which, he believed, were “in accordance with the commandments of reason”:

There are today among the various nations of Europe perhaps ten to twenty million people who no longer “believe in God” – is it too much to demand that they should give a sign to one another? Once they have thus come to recognize one another, they will also have made themselves known to others – they will at once become a power in Europe and, happily, a power between the nations! Between the classes! Between rich and poor! Between rulers and subjects! Between the most unpeaceful and the most peaceful people. (96)

If we take this statement at face value, it is truly remarkable for what it reveals about Nietzsche’s vision, at least at this stage of his thinking. It reveals, first of all, that peace between the nations and classes was for Nietzsche an ideal or a good that one ought to try to achieve. But if Nietzsche denies morality and immorality, as he claims, how would he justify the pursuit of this ideal? Where nations and rich and poor are concerned, this ideal is, after all, as old as the vision of Isaiah and the other Hebrew prophets of the eighth century BC. But if, as we shall see, Nietzsche regards much of what we find in the Jewish and Christian traditions as a “slave morality,” a morality, indeed, which needs to be supplanted by the vision of Zarathustra, he can scarcely ground his ideal in those traditions. And if the actions he advocates in pursuit of his ideal are to be promoted “for other reasons than hitherto,” why does he refrain from telling us what those reasons are?

But Nietzsche’s statement is remarkable for another reason. That Nietzsche should have rested his hopes for the future of Europe on the millions of people who no longer “believe in God” strikes one as the height of naïveté. Presumably Nietzsche was referring to the large numbers of Europeans who attended church irregularly or not at all, who perhaps preferred civil marriage ceremonies to church weddings, who refrained from baptizing their children, and so forth. In a word, Nietzsche had in mind the secular atmosphere of much of Western Europe’s urban social life. If there were, in fact, millions of such people, one cannot doubt that most of them were decent individuals who would have approved of Nietzsche’s ideal of peace. But there are at least two observations which need to be made about Nietzsche’s ideal, the first being that secularism, materialism, and atheism are not prerequisites for human decency. For, as Dostoevsky so powerfully demonstrated in his great novels, it is quite possible for someone who has lost his faith to believe – as did Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment – that if God is dead, everything is permitted. The danger of this kind of moral nihilism Nietzsche nowhere takes into consideration. The history of twentieth-century Europe has demonstrated that the most militantly atheistic regimes were also the most tyrannical and murderous. Because Dostoevsky anticipates Nietzsche in dealing with the decline of the Christian faith, and confronts the resulting danger of moral nihilism directly, a later chapter is devoted to that issue.

In The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), one finds in embryo several of Nietzsche’s chief ideas: the “will to power,” the “higher type” or the “superman,” and the “eternal recurrence.” “The strongest and most evil spirits,” writes Nietzsche,

have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they reignited the passions that were falling asleep – every ordered society puts the passions to sleep – and they reawakened again and again the meaning of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they forced men to pit opinion against opinion, ideal against ideal. In most cases [they accomplished this] by force of arms, by destroying boundary markers, by violating pieties – but also by means of new religions and moralities. (The Gay Science, 4)

In this collection of aphorisms we hear once again that there are only “moralities,” but no Morality as yet. As “Morality,” so-called, has been deprived of its transcendental origin and sanction, it can have no everlasting and universal worth. To regain such worth it must emerge as the consequence of “necessity” felt by those who frame it. And who are the future framers? In one of his most militantly rhetorical statements Nietzsche writes:

I welcome all signs that a more manly, warlike age is about to dawn, which will restore honor to courage above all. Then that age will pave the way for one yet higher, and it will gather the strength that the higher age will find necessary – the age that will carry heroism into the pursuit of knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To that end we now need many valiant human beings … who are determined to seek in all things what must be overcome in them. … For, believe me, the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and enjoyment, is to live dangerously! (The Gay Science, 283)

The war metaphors which recur frequently in Nietzsche’s writings have harmed his reputation. But Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale have sought to defend him, arguing that the war rhetoric simply expresses the same idea he had held as a schoolboy, inspired by Heraclitus’ doctrine that strife is a necessary component of the creative process.

And as a result of the careful and detailed research of those scholars, the following characteristics of Nietzsche’s outlook and conduct are beyond doubt. He was neither a racist nor a German nationalist. On the contrary, in both his published writings and his notes he attacks antisemitism several times, and goes out of his way to praise Jews, Judaism, and the Hebrew Bible. Thanks to Kaufmann’s work we now understand clearly how the blatant distortions of Nietzsche’s work came about. During the years of Nietzsche’s insanity and incapacity, and after his death, his sister Elizabeth became the executor of Nietzsche’s Literary estate. Together with her husband, a notorious Jew-hater named Bernhard Förster, Elizabeth “edited” and tampered with Nietzsche’s writings, interpreting his “will to power” and his war rhetoric in such a manner as to make of him a proto-Nazi theorist. Kaufmann and Hollingdale therefore suggest that while Nietzsche’s words may have been unwisely chosen and lend themselves to distortion, his real meaning is that the “new” philosopher of the higher type must not only be a thinker but a “warrior” as well, aggressively living his philosophy and showing the way. Nevertheless, as we shall see in due course, the fact that Nietzsche’s examples of “higher types” are so often individuals like Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia, and Napoleon, raises serious doubts whether he merely had philosophers in mind.

In The Gay Science, then, we find the earliest formulations of Nietzsche’s mature ideas. These include that of “eternal recurrence,” which addresses the question of how one would respond to a demonic edict. Nietzsche makes his point by asking how we would feel if one day or night a demon were to intrude upon us and dictate that the life we have so far lived we must live innumerable times more, with nothing new in it; that we must relive not only every joy but every pain, every thought, every event small or great, all in the same succession and sequence, as the eternal hourglass of existence turns over and over, and us with it. How would we respond to such an edict? Would we cast ourselves down wailing, gnashing our teeth and cursing the demon who delivered that edict? Or would we experience this event as a great moment, and respond in delight that we have never heard anything more divine? Would such an edict crush us, or bring us great joy?

It is highly probable that Nietzsche believed literally in the eternal recurrence of events throughout the universe. If he did, and if this rather crudely mechanistic notion has any philosophical significance at all, the message seems to be this: one should strive to live one’s life in a manner so as to welcome such an edict. If, however, “eternal recurrence” is inexorably cyclical as Nietzsche apparently believes, does this concept contradict other key Nietzschean ideas? We shall need to return to this question since the notion of the “eternal recurrence” recurs frequently in Nietzsche’s later writings.

NOTES

1 See Walter Kaufmann,Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1974); and R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy